Thursday, November 7, 2019

Common Core Graduates Are The Worst Prepared For College

By Professor Doom


     I feel like plucking some low-hanging fruit today, and so let's take a look at Common Core. I've written of it before, how it ignores science, how it's just another excuse to inject more indoctrination into our schools, and how by changing the approach to how mathematics is learned, will further separate the children from their parents, since the latter won't have a clue how to help their kids with homework using the convoluted new methods.

     Predicting the failure of Common Core is about as easy as predicting Epstein's "suicide" in prison, but now we get to see how well the "new ways of knowing" methods of Common Core are working, but it's now been 4 years since this idiotic idea was proposed--enough time for a kid go through all of high school, using Common Core as preparation for college.

      My own eyeballs tell me something's gone wrong. Even though the endless cancer treatments make it impossible for me to teach a real class, I still do much free tutoring for the department. The advanced students fresh out of high school can no longer handle fractions unless they have a calculator to do it for them, and the non-advanced students can't handle fractions even with a calculator. This is just one example of how Common Core has gone a full step lower--before Common Core, the advanced students could add fractions without $50 of electronics to help, for example. And of course, as soon as a kind of fraction pops up which the calculator can't handle, it's mental lockdown time for the students. Even arithmetic like "15 divided by 5" has the "A" students needing a calculator now.

     But that's my own eyeballs. How about something less anecdotal?

First Common Core High School Grads Worst-Prepared For College In 15 Years


      I remind the gentle reader that the whole reason Common Core was slammed down the throats of our kids was because it was going to help them prepare for college, the ultimate goal (or so we're told repeatedly) of our public school system.

Further, the class of 2019, the first to experience all four high school years under Common Core, is the worst-prepared for college in 15 years, according to a new report.


     While the above might lead the casual reader to think that things were way better 15 years ago, there's a factor here which causes confusion: how well a student is prepared is determined by "standardized" tests. Every decade or so, the standards on those tests are lowered, or at least dramatically changed. Anyone who compares tests of today to tests of, say, a century ago can quickly see something has gone horribly wrong in our education system, as it's very clear the capabilities of our young humans have dropped off very sharply--top students of today would horribly the older tests.

      And so comparing student performance on tests of today to even a mere 15 years ago just isn't an "apples to apples" comparison. Still, just looking at the last few years of steady drops tells the tale. The people pushing Common Core needn't worry much, as I'm sure those standardized tests will change soon, so that Common Core will look better.

       The gentle reader's grandchildren, assuming they'll even be capable of reading, will absolutely marvel at material that kids today could do, but I digress.

“Students in the U.S. made significant progress in math and reading achievement on NAEP from 1990 until 2015, when the first major dip in achievement scores occurred,” reported U.S. News and World Report. Perhaps not coincidentally, 2015 is the year states were required by the Obama administration to have fully phased in Common Core.


            I can't answer in detail about the NAEP test, but much like with Epstein's "suicide," I predict with confidence that it'll be changed soon and scores will start heading up again.

As Common Core was moving into schools, 69 percent of school principals said they also thought it would improve student achievement. All of these “experts” were wrong, wrong, wrong.


      The article lists many of those experts, but much like with the principals listed above, none of the "experts" actually teach human beings. All the experts who teach human beings (which strike me as the ones you should ask about matters involving teaching human beings) that I'm aware of, including myself,  determined Common Core would fail, and it's not difficult to specifically identify why (as I discussed in four connected posts).

        It's so weird how the people accept lies being poured into their ears, even when those lies harm their children. Granted, I shouldn't throw stones, considering how many lies of cancer doctors I've accepted.

On the same day the NAEP results were released, the college testing organization ACT released a report showing that the high school class of 2019’s college preparedness in English and math is at seniors’ lowest levels in 15 years. These students are the first to have completed all four high school years under Common Core.


     Looks like they'll have to change the ACT, too. I should point out, it isn't just high school where we're seeing disaster, it's throughout the system. Again, no surprise, and I again remind we were promised that Common Core would really improve things.

“Readiness levels in English, reading, math, and science have all decreased since 2015, with English and math seeing the largest decline,” the report noted. Student achievement declined on ACT’s measures among U.S. students of all races except for Asian-Americans, whose achievement increased.


      It's an interesting result about the Asians, but I suspect there's a reason for this. Recall that one of the main goals for Common Core was to make it impossible, or at least very difficult, for the parents to help their children. Without this help, children will struggle. But the Asians? Children of new immigrants especially have been unable to go to their parents for help, because the parents came from a radically different system already. So their scores weren't going to be as negatively impacted as the "non Asian" students, and the improvement isn't all that much, really.

It is thus still the case, as it was when the Coleman Report was released 53 years ago, that U.S. public schools do not lift children above the conditions of their home lives.


      I cite the above to again reinforce the point: if the children can't get help from their parents, they will not get help from the schools. We've known this for at least half a century, and still our government works tirelessly to separate the kids from parents at every opportunity.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com








7 comments:

  1. The New Math was designed to be impossible to use easily. Everyone now uses calculators so who cares, is the idea today! I remember 60 + years ago, doing math calculations on the school black boards when in grade school. This is very annoying and runs alongside the deterioration in constructing difficult sentences since the death of sentence diagrams.

    I loved doing sentence diagrams even in grade school! I earned awards in competitions deconstructing sentence structures. I found it to be tons of fun and loved doing it. All of that is now a lost art! I will note you, Professor, write paragraphs properly. This. makes you pure evil to the far leftist lunatics infesting our schools today.

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    1. I fully agree with you, Elaine. Commie Core has produced the worst students in the basics of reading, writing and math, as well as geography and history. Its graduates aren't prepared for higher education (colleges and universities) or higher-paying jobs .. The only jobs these Commie Core graduates would be menial jobs such as flipping burgers in fast-food restaurants such as McDonald's, Burger King, etc. They wouldn't qualify for any high-paying jobs of any kind.

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  2. Rats, I made some tiny mistakes above, drank my evening beer and all that fun stuff. I salute you, Professor Doom, with a toke of good beer.

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  3. I'm a 60s HS graduate. Not only did we not have calculators, we weren't allowed to use slide rules during exams. Back in the 80s, my daughter asked me for help with a math problem. It was new math (don't know which version) using "sets" and something else. I couldn't, for the life of me, understand what she was talking about. After about 5 minutes, I picked up the text book, read the question, and told her the answer, saying I have no idea how she was going to get there. She asked me how I came to the answer, and I told her. She replied wow, is that ever easy.
    Math comes from the same part of the brain as language. We learn language by repetition, until patterns are recognized. The notion that repetition of arithmetic/math is bad and doesn't help, is ridiculous. I've seen many kids that can't count by numbers beyond 5, and some that struggle below that. Early in grade school, we learned counting to 100 by every number up to 20. Sooner or later, we recognized the numbers that overlapped.
    I really feel sorry for kids these days.

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  4. The People's Democratic Republic of Maryland was one of the testing grounds, and an early adopter. They picked up Common Core into elementary education a dozen years ago. It really screwed up my son. He didn't understand math at all until middle school. (And we couldn't help him. "That's not how teacher said to do it, Dad!") The middle school curriculum was still based on the older ways. It took him (and most of his peers) a half a year to catch up to how math actually worked.

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  5. From a Texas certified HS math teacher as well as certified guidance counselor who also home schooled my two children (one a Texas A & M graduate): Common Core Math is "2 + 2 = 5" (that is, Orwellian).

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  6. Yep, the first two years of a four year college is getting the majority of students up to speed from where they should have been after completing their high school courses.
    Why? Because it makes the college education system more money in this regard,
    After two years of college, a student has paid for the education they should have earned while in high school.
    After four years of college they have what would be equal to an Associate of Arts at a community college.
    And, after six years the Masters degree is equivalent to a Bachelors.
    So, now the colleges have six years of paid tuition and the graduate may now be looking to earn a doctorate for even more money paid.
    Of course now, this may not be true for all colleges, but I'm pretty sure it is the case for regional colleges that offer to accept transfer degrees from community colleges. That's how I went through college.
    Oh, well... we'll just get the Taxpayers to guarantee the student loans and the Bankers and Colleges can reap the benefits.
    Unfortunately, the economic system will grind down as graduates with huge student loan debts will be unable to buy the consumer goods offered to them, and then America will experience a really painful economic depression.

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