Regardless of whether you are a Catholic educator, a classical educator or both, standardized testing has an influence on what you do. Even if your school never mentions the SATs or ACTs in any classes, your students have to concern themselves with these tests for their collegiate aspirations. While some colleges have adopted test optional … Read more
Despite recent defense rallies by Bill Gates, wars are raging against the embattled Common Core State Standard Initiative, now implemented in 44 states and the District of Columbia. Though criticisms can be leveled at the lack of evidence that the Common Core will lead onward into a brave new world of education, the overarching problem … Read more
The other night I testified (via telephone) before the Alaska state legislature, on the standards their public schools are adopting for classes in English. I’d read the standards but didn’t have them in front of me, so I was taken aback when one of the representatives plucked a directive out of all the verbiage and … Read more
In several recent articles at Crisis and elsewhere, I’ve been arguing that Catholic schools should reject the Common Corpse, the newest form of an old and largely successful campaign to banish good and great poems and stories from our classrooms. I’ve been charged with exaggeration. Surely things cannot be that bad. The sky still stretches … Read more
Every week it seems I receive three or four letters from people who are establishing new schools or reforming old ones. These letters are most encouraging, and all of the writers, without exception, are dedicated to restoring what is called a “classical” education. Sometimes that implies the study of the true classics, the literature of … Read more
Zeal for a national curriculum is not new, nor is the appearance of an entire well-financed educational bureaucracy obsessed with finding (and controlling) methods to justify its educational schemes. The educational sorcerers may feel that they have conjured up some novel idea in the Common Core Initiative. They have not, anymore than Alfred Bosworth discovered … Read more
Sometimes the best thing you can do to a school is to raze it. The pipes leak, there’s mold in the ceiling panels, rats are nesting behind the wainscot, and a strange black stain has appeared under the basement floor near the oil line. It isn’t worth repairing. It might have been worth repairing, if … Read more
Many years ago, a prominent man wrote to one of his favorite authors about his latest book. This man had been a soldier, a hunter, an athlete, an historian, and a social reformer, and was now employed in a post of some significant responsibility. He had many children, and was by all accounts a bluff … Read more
WHETHER COMMON CORE EDUCATION IS CONTRARY TO CLASSICAL EDUCATION Objection 1. It would seem that the Common Core State Standards Initiative is not contrary to classical education. For, as the classical education movement is aimed at broad-based learning, Common Core education provides standards that are broadly applied across the country to prepare students with twenty-first … Read more
A young man and woman arrive at the office of the town clerk to procure a marriage license. They’re all smiles, until the secretary hands them a document to sign, wherein they read this remarkable sentence: “The State, conceding to the parents the making of their children’s bodies, asserts its primacy in the making of … Read more
Newburgh New York school district yanked a ninth grade book considered by teachers to be “pornographic.” An Arizona mother launched an avalanche of protest that forced Arizona schools to pull an eleventh grade book that portrays teens in a sado-masochistic relationship. A Catholic school superintendent admits there were two first grade books about families—that included … Read more
The philosophy in the school room in one generation will become the philosophy of government in the next. — Abraham Lincoln [A]t the request of educators I wrote the World Core Curriculum, the product of the United Nations, the meta-organism of human and planetary evolution. — Robert Muller, former U.N. Assistant Secretary General The education … Read more
I’ve donned my boots and leggings, and done what I had no desire to do. I am examining, with tedious scrutiny, the so-called Common Core Curriculum for literature and English, a new’n’improved set of standards for reading and writing in our schools from kindergarten to twelfth grade. I have read the essays, written by students, … Read more
Just as Sister Carol Keehan and her Catholic Health Association helped to shepherd the passage of the Affordable Care Act—replete with federal funding for abortion—in the early days of the Obama administration, Sr. Dale McDonald and her “Gold and Platinum textbook partners” affiliated with the National Catholic Educational Association (NCEA), are now helping President Obama … Read more
Is Common Core compatible with Catholic education? Are the concerns being expressed by parents across America just the unfounded worries of the uninformed, or are there real problems with the implementation of Common Core in our Catholic schools? To answer these questions, it is necessary to look beyond the particulars of the Common Core and … Read more
A day after the New York Times reported that a group of more than 100 Catholic scholars had asked the nation’s Catholic bishops to repudiate the Common Core guidelines, the Cardinal Newman Society reported that the National Catholic Educational Association (NCEA)—a Washington, DC lobbying group for Catholic education—had accepted more than $100,000 from the Bill … Read more
“Common Core is a state-led initiative.” This sentence is among the most repeated pitch lines of those selling Common Core. It is an effective sales pitch, but is it true? The answer lies in the maze of money and regulation tying federal and state departments of education together. Let’s start with the money. The money … Read more
Writing in the early 1900s, sociologist Max Weber depicted the coming modern world as an “iron cage” in which a caste of functionaries and civil servants monopolize power over the lives of citizens. He warned that the emerging bureaucracies would concentrate large amounts of power in a small number of people—creating a technically ordered, rigid, … Read more
One of the biggest marketing disasters in modern times was the roll-out of “New Coke” back in 1985. Based on its fears of being overtaken by Pepsi and the misleading research of “the Pepsi challenge” (wherein consumers seemed to prefer the sweeter taste of Pepsi to Coke), Coke changed its classic formula to be more … Read more
Look at today’s newspapers and you will see that Americans are poised to fundamentally reform two huge sectors of our lives. The headlines on page one will tell you about the healthcare sector. Our government is even “closed” due to the fight over implementing “Obamacare.” That’s one. Look at one of the inside pages and … Read more