Our Michelle is a true American hero... As always, she writes Truth!

Home-school your babies... 17 years I will NEVER regret... and scholarships to East´s great private, mostly conservative, colleges...

You´ll notice they all send their kids to private schools that don´t suffer the same failings as what they impose on the rest of us.

"Fairness" in education: the redistribution of stupidity.
Once you grant Democrats "good intentions" it´s unavoidable and inevitable.

An ignorant population is easier to control and manipulate. The left has been doing this for a few generations now, but they need to ramp up their efforts because they are still meeting too much resistance from the few TRULY educated who also still know how to use real critical thinking and common sense.

The problem is al these indoctrinated robots they´re cranking don´t have real world intellect and they´ll hit a brick wall in their early 20´s.They hide in their basements and get stoned,hoping they wake up smart enough one day to get a job.

They´ll vote for easy street but that´s unsustainable for the country and Obama is a liar and deceiver with his crap about "investing" in education.These kids in college,enjoying their free ride right now are going to be straddled the rest of their life with college debt.

The incentives are reversed. If you had debt forgiveness if you land a job in the private sector we wouldn´t have all these crap "studies" courses.

Sounds like more "Peace in our time" to me.

It has been this way for 20 years; this is nothing new. Sadly, it has always been wrong-headed. Math education was taken over by the education majors rather than the math majors. The conceptual approach is great for the 5% for whom math feels like a ´natural´ language. However, it is nothing but confusion for the 95% who truly need to learn the drills before examining the concepts.

A great many of the children in schools today aren´t interested in learning. Their parents often don´t care if the child is learning.

What they do care about is material things. Brand-name clothing, iPhones, iPods to listen to music, and just about any sort of thing to AVOID doing work. Their "gods" are those who have hit it big in music and those who have achieved fame in the media, but who have really not done much to deserve it.

So many are averse to actually doing academic things and the teachers are burdened with all sorts of "social" tasks and pressures that take the focus off of students learning.

On the other end of the spectrum, you have parents who hover menacingly over their kids and do the work for them, or that teacher will pay.... Standardized tests have created false security when we find that fewer and fewer can actually do the work some politician said they should do on ever-rising scales.

There seem to be few consequences when the constant repackaging of curriculum fails, such as "Common Core". We have dummed down our society so much that hard work is not celebrated as much as being popular.

Cuomo jumped on this band wagon to get Barry stash. Students in NY were becoming dumber and dumber before; now they´ll reach the plateau of the dumbest.

As usual, if you want to find out who’s behind a dirty deed, you follow the money:

“…there are organizations that have reasons to work for lower and less-demanding standards, specifically teachers unions and professional teacher organizations. While they may not admit it, they have a vested interest in lowering the accountability bar for their members. ...This will be done in the name of ´critical thinking´ and ´21st-century´ skills, and in faraway Washington, D.C., well beyond the reach of parents…”

And if you want to find out where the “progressive reformers” running the last mighty monopoly of the 21st Century—public education—are drawing their ideas from, why here you go:

“The critical-theory philosophical frame traces its roots to the Frankfurt School of Critical Social Theory that attempted to amend Marxist theory for applicability in 20th-century Germany.”

It’s time to end the strangle-hold teacher unions have on our children and bust up the Big Education racket.

The U.S. Constitution leaves the responsibility for public K-12 education with the states. The federal government provides less than 10% of all elementary and secondary funding. The rest comes from state and local government revenues.

Yet national “progressive” education reformers have managed to leverage the federal government’s 10% contribution into a controlling interest in Public Education Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of the National Education Association.

It’s time to stop the tail from wagging the dog and insist that our public schools stop being used as glorified day care centers for busy parents and indoctrination centers promoting already-tried-and-failed “progressive” ideologies.

Poster #8 has obviously been touched by reality - I appreciate that post.

Teachers are not behind the Common Core. Teachers did not "invent" this idea. Politicians did. Republican governors are behind it, among others.

Most teachers want to remain employed. They have very little power over the formal curriculum in any school district.

These reform movements are driven in large part by administrators´ greed for federal money. Get the feds out of local education. Teachers will still face the same problems they do today but the pretense of solving these problems with wasteful initiatives such as Race to the Top and No Child Left Behind will be a welcome relief. And the unions won´t have federal slush funds to fight for, either.
Ramona (the Pest)

When CRT and "White Priviledge" now being taught in schools, colleges and churches become mainstream cirriculum the Republic is finished. We are headed in that direction and I see no effort to stop the teaching that all white males are racists and source of all the problems in the world today.

Math has traditionally been taught to make children hate math. A decade of arithmetic is a guaranteed turn-off. Rote learning is not learning at all, at its *best* it is just a shortcut time-saver. Learning to derive is the true path to mastery.

It was rote memorization that failed Governor Perry. If he had worked up from principles and been able to derive his answers, he could have remembered his three departments and even given the motivation for closing them.

And on motivation, Malkin misidentifies the cart and horse - if the motivation for a method is absent until the students have memorized the method, they literally have no motivation to learn it. Adding a lack of motivation to drilling four operations over a decade equals zero.

This is by design. We spend $300 billion a year on *interest*. A mathematically literate population would never stand for that. Mathematically literate legislators would laugh off Keynes. And a mathematically literate columnist would not blindly worship motivation-free rote memorization.

Kids - if (or is it "since?") your math teacher is stupid, there are Wolfram Mathworld and the Khan Academy. Hell, even Wackypedia is pretty good on math - what are they gonna do, make a left-wing crackpot proof?

Agree somewhat with #13, that kids are actually motivated to hate math. #8 is right that most kids are taught by an education major, not a math major. At my daughter´s very small elementary school, I was taken aback by the principal´s comment that she chose to teach math because she wasn´t ever very good at it, but she wanted others to not to be miserable in math class. Moved the daughter´s to private school after that.