Here's your outrageous answer. No. Now my turn. Was Hitler really an Aryan and why did most of the top leading SS officers commit suicide?

To me this is like saying they were sneaky in teaching that a balanced diet without junk food is good for your health, without even telling me about it. I like junk food (Taco Bell, Diet Dew, etc), and I'm really hoping it turns out they're not that bad for you. So I want them to teach both sides: what the evidence shows and what we wish the evidence showed.

Then why did they hold an assembly for the entire student body without informing parents? This was a speaker who went school to school in the entire district with no opposition to his/their point of view on the matter. Had both my kids not mentioned it to me I would never have known that it happened. I offered to present the opposing view, they refused "Too late, he can't make it back" they told me.

Like the handouts, why hide it?

That's frustrating their teaching outright lies. I believe the parents have more power, though, if they teach critical thinking early.

The "think about it thing" just sounds like laziness. We've all seen laziness on the job. I'd rather they not learn about that by observing teachers, but it's not that shocking.

Since climate change is one the biggest threats to our future, it seems fine that they tell the students about it early and often. I don't see the "opposing viewpoints" thing since not all topics have opposing viewpoints. Science by its nature invites new evidence contrary to current models. We don't need to provide a declaimer for every scientific fact taught saying science is subject to change based on data. A better approach is to show the scientific theories that appeared right and turned out to be completely wrong. It's also good to show how our human foibles will trick us into getting results we want or consistent with a hypothesis we want to prove. When literally tens of trillions of dollars of economic activity are tied to burning things, there's a strong desire to understate the future costs of CO2 emissions. We can't draw in any conclusions from that. We just keep our critical thinking skills on, esp about claims we have a strong desire about.

I don't think the outrage is manufacture or toward testing, I think its toward content being taught and tested. I personally have witnessed lies being taught from two social studies teachers in grade school and later high school. Handouts with course material being given and collected at the end of class with outright LIES on them, Just last week my daughter (presidents list student, already receiving college invites since later in her sophomore year) had issues in trigonometry, asked her teacher to clarify and was told to "think about it for a while." I've had schools give assembly speeches touting global warming and what we can do to prevent it WITHOUT notifying parents AND without opposing viewpoints. Everything being taught now is toward the tests..and if whats being presented are from tests then whats being taught is ominously incorrect and designed to dumb-down our kids.

I never understood the blanket opposition to tests from teachers. They say teachers will teach to the test, students will be stressed, and the tests won't be perfect. This is true of the PE license exam and the Bar Exam. We still do testing. I suspect the teachers unions are responsible for some of the testing opposition. IMHO we need some objective way to measure what people are learning. Then we can do a patchwork of online courses and in-person instruction using methods that are shown scientifically to work. We wouldn't have to stop subjective evaluation or put total faith in the test. It would be just be one more measurement tool.

I am not knowledgeable about whether CC does a good job doing this. I suspect it's a mediocre minimum standard consistent with what we usually see from a gov't program. I will be learning about it if the kids use public school next year. One of the biggest reasons I'm considering public school is when we asked another school how they evaluate progress, they didn't have a clear answer. The public school had answer that sounded bureaucratic, but at least it was an answer. The other options are either too far or are hippies we've sued.

The manufactured outrage, which I don't think is related to my personal experiences this far, would be comical if it didn't highlight a larger problem of the role of gov't and the problem of politics.

The push for Common Core was coordinated with just a few publishers who publish the vast majority of the curriculum where these assignments have been found. Although districts may be tailoring and dovetailing certain assignments in the way you describe, the vast majority is boiler plated to achieve the standardized results they are looking for in the first place. Where there once were many options now they are honing things down to these few-after all they are teaching to test. Everything is now about the testing-that seems to be what upsets the teachers the most-not the assignments themselves. It's the parents who are cluing into the assignments.

It's a Madison saying. :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sifting_and...

Wow. Point for fancy talk

I agree. The pursuit of truth requires sifting and winnowing.

The fact that Bill Ayers was there at the gestation of what eventually became Common Core, and was a speaker at its launch to the public, should tell us something. The fact Bill Gates stands to makes big bucks on Common Core, via software says a lot also.
What is called "critical thinking" does not necessarily in any way equate to reasoned objective thinking. That is merely one more education buzz word. It means nothing, but it implies brainwashing - training students to accept liberal ideas. Every example I have viewed or read about Common Core have screamed, "Dumb Down" - and that it will. No more English Lit., nor true history, crazy math ideas. Who are all these silent teachers who accepted such a assignment as okay? Have all of them lost the ability to think for themselves? One retired math teacher, speaking of Common Core, said, "It's crazy, that's all that can be said."

If a piece of the puzzle doesn't fit, jam it in, or alter the piece, or alter the puzzle. And dammit! I'm Jewish and I never got a piece of the action. You'd think a bright guy like me would get at least a small cut. I guess, being an Objectivist, I'm not quite Jewish enough.

The only answer here is to privatize all schools. Competition for student dollars is the only element that is guaranteed to improve schools in the long term.
Every resident of the United States is paying property tax at some level. This concept removes the necessity of the Dream Act as residents are actually paying for this service.
If (I cringe at this shortcoming) the government were to convert property tax $'s into school vouchers and voucher holders could choose to spend those vouchers where they felt best served, the left would eventually go away. Schools competing for students would mean that they would actually have to produce results to keep the cash flowing in. Clearly what is posited as education in government controlled secondary schools is nothing if not abject failure even utilizing their dumbed down scoring system.
The same concept should be applied to colleges and universities unless they're fully unfunded by government.
This would gradually bring balance back to the curriculum and to those who deliver it.

Call it balance for the brainwashing.

Factual history has no need of critical thought. Sure you can critically think through the why's and how come's but the atrocities cannot be disputed or denied.

No, you don't understand, all those other things did happen, just the stuff that "supposedly" happened to the Jews was made up by of course the international Jewish conspiracy to cover up their controlling the banking industry and international finance so they could steal organs from aryan children. .........by the way...being facetious here to make a point.

I am reminded of the stories about how George Bush was the single most stupid person in the world, yet he and his oil buddies were supposedly manipulating the economy this way and that. This sort of cognitive dissidence is the same sort the is required to believe on the one hand that "international Jewery" controls the wold of finance and at the same time there are pogroms and the holocaust. I guess that is why there is such a desire to deny the holocaust as it would take an enormous cognitive dissidence to explain it otherwise.

Sure it must've been a hoax. Those people going around with number tattoos on their arms -- they must have done it to themselves. The pictures of those thousands of emaciated dead bodies being bulldozed into a pit, obviously Photoshopped (oh, wait, Photoshop wasn't invented yet, oh well..). All those ovens charged with xyklon gas must have had some other purpose, and all those eye-witnesses must have been myopic. We'll just have to look into the mysterious disappearance of the Kulaks, the Jews, The gypsies, the millions of Chinese, and the recipients of Pol Pot's largesse. Perhaps they moved on to an alternate universe.

Hmmm, history...? Denial of history causes history to repeat itself. Was there really a WWII (that's WW and a "Two" not an "eleven"), or a Civil War or were they just a hoax?

No doubt; but then they are just as guilty as those who give the orders. That excuse didn't work too well for the Nazis; why is this any different? The teachers that are marching to the drum beat are destroying the next generations. They have to bear the responsibility.

Hitler was considered a radical before he won power through a splintered election where the National Socialists happened to come out on top.

I think teachers are flooded with students in their classrooms (some who don't speak English), handcuffed by policies that prevent their control of their classrooms, and threatened with lawsuits or loss of job if they step out of line. In that environment its easier to follow a blueprint safely than it is to do your own thing and risk your paycheck.

I'm just surprised they can't find something better to be outraged about.

If there are an army of people reviewing everything I ever wrote, they'd probably be able to find something that sounds more outrageous.

I only read articles about Common Core for laughs. The punchline is the juxtaposition of the overwrought headlines with mundane school worksheet questions that are about the most boring and ordinary thing on earth.

Anybody can post or blog just about anything on the web. Some content is quite compelling--especially if its well written and cites a bunch of references--and can be very misleading--if not dead wrong. Many times it is picked up and "edited" to suit the re-posters point of view (cf., the Bundy clip.) Its especially scary that so many major newspapers and magazines are now concentrated in the hands of agenda-driven owners. People tend to follow blogs and subscribe to sites that reflect their own views while eschewing those which do not. Its a chore for even experienced researchers to sort out the truth. So the sooner kids are taught how to sort out the wheat from the chaff, the better. Yes, kids are going to challenge their peers, their teachers and their parents--and that's a good thing. It keeps us all learning.

Is this question actually part of CC? Or is it just that CC emphasizes critical thinking and some school district picked a curriculum with critical thinking that happened to have this question in it? Then people get paid to express fake outrage for political reasons struggle to associate it with CC, saying "it was born of the CC standards" requiring critical thinking.

I'm not saying that's what happened, but the articles doesn't explain the connection. It just expresses general outrage.

who is writing this BS?!