Common Core One Size Fits All, Good For Bill Gates

Billionaire Bill Gates

[From article]
He is talking about standardization. He is talking about a tidier assembly line. (But nobody ever said that democracy is supposed to be tidy. Dictatorship is tidy.)
Bill Gates brought a programmer’s sensibility to education. There is a maximally efficient way to design a piece of software. So let’s do that, and stop all this other nonsense. Bad plan, even with the best of intentions.
[. . .]
There seems to be a belief in magic. Outline impressive goals (“internationally benchmarked,” no less) in a technical, officious way, and every kid will automatically soar to high levels. But why would that happen? Teachers still have to teach, and students still have to learn the information, fact by fact. But our Education Establishment hates all those traditional practices. It’s so much simpler to proclaim that henceforth all children will be college- and career-ready. Presto! That was easy.
Bill Gates and Common Core are obsessed with arranging things in standardized patterns, coast to coast. So we must have standards that will somehow apply to everyone. Then we need identical curricula, and we’ll need identical tests.
[. . .]




If you want to let Bill Gates off the hook, say this: he trusted the wrong people and their bad ideas. The very same people who had dumbed down the schools were now being asked to create a reform program. Oh, really? How could that possibly work? Typically, these people were socialists. They wanted leveling, and they worked relentlessly to get it.
[. . .]
If Bill Gates had turned away from the Education Establishment and its dysfunctional ideas, maybe he could’ve worked a miracle. But the boss educators would never allow that. So they made a sweet deal. Gates would get a huge, tidy market for his wares. The education professors would get more dictatorial power.
[. . .]
All that Common Core was going to do was give the same people more power so no one could get out from under their thumbs.
[. . .]
But never mind how much Gates makes. We wouldn't mind if the children were being well-educated. But he was in cahoots with people who had never been primarily interested in making children well-educated. The goal, ever since the time of John Dewey, was to make children cooperative, largely incapable of independent thought, and easy to govern.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/03/common_core_anatomy_of_a_failure.html

March 30, 2014
Common Core: Anatomy of a Failure
By Bruce Deitrick Price