City on a Hill Radio Show - City On A Hill Blogs

Everywhere they are looking for a way to fix education. The new movie Waiting For Superman hopes to give America the answer. It addresses the problem of teachers who performs so badly and who can not be removed from their positions. Some would have us to opt for a new kind of schools --Charter schools.

The annual cost for inmate is more than double what is spent on a student in public schcol. Congress passed the No Child Left Behind act, and eight years later 70 percent of eighth graders could not read at grade level. So Hollywood in its wonderful ability to play on our mind is going to convince us that the CCSSI-Common Core States Standards Initiative that the Gates Foundation started--(which will nationalize education) is the way to do it. It will save our children.

I hope and pray parents will listen to interviews with Professors Jim Milgram and Sandra Stotsky (both with impeccable backgrounds as experts in education) both on National Validation Committee on the common core standards and who tells us what happens when the best intentions is married with politics and other motives. Professor Jim Milgram, Math Professor from Stanford cites in this interview:

He sees problems with fluency or automaticity(you want to learn a technique for adding, subtracting to multiply and dividing so well lthat you don't have time to think about it.) There are two different fluency standards at each grade level in these new core standards.
One is what they call self-constructed algorithms which could be anything including wrong and other is for the standard algorithms. My first objection was that I can't imagine the degree of confusion that students are going to have having to learn to complete fluency (they're often non-sensical algorithms) and then a year or so later having to learn the fluency of the standard algorithms. Inconsistent, there's a bunch of that in there-both in algorithms for ordinary arithmetic and equally as bad for fractions. If you can't have fractions you can't develop Algebra. Algebra really depends on what kids learn in fractions. When they move from ordinary arithmetic to arithemtic of fractions--everythings they see there is duplicated as basically the same in the Algebra. So if they get the fractions right the Algebra should be very simple if they don't get fractions right the Algebra may be in fact be impossible.
There has been research done and we know it in math committee itself we understand better what most of these things mean that we did 100 years ago when the original designs were developed. It is possible to take that knowledge and improve instruction but that is something that is done in high achieving countries such as the east Asian countries in particular but is something that is intensely resisted by the education committee in this country.

In light of just that can we really expect this to save America's children? Food for thought-the CCSSI

-hear complete interview--click on this link--click on the POD icon in gray at beginning of description.

Also hear more interviews and share before America is brainwashed and the truth hidden when Hollywood covers the issues as they truly can with so much glimmer and glitz. Hope adults can see through it more than our kids can.

America doesn't have to wait--the answer is here (click on link). It worked so well that one of Europe's social scientist remarked "... and there can be no greater proof of its utility, and of its conformity to human nature, than that its influence is most powerfully felt over the most enlightened and free nation of the earth."