Curriculum Establishes School to Work/Career Tracking
"When training beats education, civilization dies." - C.S. Lewis
According to proponents, the purpose of the Common Core Standards is to ensure that students are "college and career ready." The question that must be asked are for what kind of college and what kind of career will our students be prepared under this new standards and testing regime?
We have already shown that expert opinion rates the standards at about a sixth to eighth level and that "college" ready means for a non-selective two year community college instead of a selective four-year university. There is a major shift in emphasis from a broad based academic education that prepares students to maintain our liberties and to take on any career to one that is narrowly focused on job skills.
President Obama demonstrated this shift in the purpose of education in his State of the Union address:
Let's also make sure that a high school diploma puts our kids on a path to a good job. Right now, countries like Germany focus on graduating their high school students with the equivalent of a technical degree from one of our community colleges, so those German kids, they're ready for a job when they graduate high school...........Tonight, I'm announcing a new challenge, to redesign America's high schools so they better equip graduates for the demands of a high-tech economy. And we'll reward schools that develop new partnerships with colleges and employers, and create classes that focus on science, technology, engineering and math, the skills today's employers are looking for to fill the jobs that are there right now and will be there in the future.
This is a reflection of the same philosophy stated by Marc Tucker, President of the Center for Education and the Economy, in his now infamous letter to Bill and Hillary Clinton, sent right after the 1992 election, where he said that his education and workforce vision for America was "...to remold the entire American system" into "a seamless web that literally extends from cradle to grave and is the same system for everyone" that would be coordinated by "a system of labor market boards at the local, state and federal levels" where curriculum and "job matching" will be handled by counselors "accessing the integrated computer-based program."
If you look at the various components of the Common Core standards, testing, and data collection system, it appears that Mr. Tucker's vision is coming to fruition
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