Pick up your ax! Cutting to the (COMMON) CORE

A great serpent crawled into America’s classroom while trusting parents told themselves that others knew what was best. 

Under the guise of raising educational standards and grooming more competitive citizens, we have all watched our schools become charmless institutions, obsessed with a merciless quest for higher test scores and verifiable teacher accountability. But after decades of this relentless and unwinnable racket, grades and morale are worse than ever. And now finally we have a tangible antagonist to point at and vent our frustration on, something called “Common Core.”

Glenn Beck recently hosted a simulcast in theaters across the United States where he amassed a variety of activists from all over the country, ready to organize and strategize, under the slogan, “We will not conform.” Intended to be the launching of a nationwide campaign to make Common Core a blip in history, ax-bearers gathered in theaters from coast to coast, ready to challenge the monolithic American educational beanstalk. Beck and Michelle Malkin and others shared their frustrations and victories fighting the latest tangible threat to what is left of the America we once knew- a threat to the most basic and essential asset for a free and thinking people; Education.

Known as Common Core in most states, Texas opted to concoct its own educational Leviathan. Its name is not important, but the organized genius behind it is.

Whatever you call it, it is a cunning racket of educational improvement orchestrated by haughty supervisors, who never allow for much success. They have made their jobs secure by constantly raising the rigor and keeping satisfactory improvement just out of reach. This merciless raising of standards has been justified because some countries supposedly have better scores than the United States. So Common Core or its equivalent have made a nightmare out of our educational system, and state after state has seen recent citizen-led  backlashes against it. People all over the country are starting to realize that the people they trusted were not only unworthy, they were greedy and corrupt, and they do not have our children’s best interests in mind.

Some school districts have become rife with blame and suspicion, and educators have been harassed or fired because of unsatisfactory test scores. The children watch and suffer in silence as their favorite teacher is humiliated, their best friend held back, or a whole school is put on notice. Failure has become the great enemy and the inevitable obstacle for many. All of this so some folks in Austin can boast that they are preparing another generation for the world market. But the real market is right there in their offices, as multi-million dollar deals are made around expensive and experimental educational strategies. The educators, consultants and publishers have become a wealthy quagmire of self-dealing bureaucrats.

The Beck simulcast revealed some interesting perceptions; there is a lot of money and influence at stake. It will not be wrestled away without a fight.  The same people who designed the curriculum and the texts also designed the tests. Strangely, students are actually evaluated on what they did not know, not what they had been taught! A certain amount of failure keeps everyone on their toes… and re-testing and re-re-testing has become an expected part of the process. And the testing is not cheap. These publishers lined their pockets with our money while our children suffered the worst theories ever conceived in education. And the scores and the results are a travesty.

There is much work to be done to correct decades of abuse and misdirection in our education system. Parents must get involved with what their kids are doing at school. It is important they keep evidence of examples of bad educational policies. No more benefit of the doubt. Towns must take back their schools. The educational Gestapo in Austin must be put out of business. The TEA must be re-invented to reflect our values and designed to nurture and not to torture. And it starts with making our senators and legislators know that we are aware, we are mad, and we are going to do whatever it takes to take back control of our schools.

Note: For more on how these devastating policies affect Navasota Schools, click below.

http://russellcushman.blogspot.com/2014/04/tears-and-fears-at-navasota-isd-cry-for.html

A Tale From Between the Cracks... ART IN KINDERGARTEN

Very early I learned to mix colors to make my own flesh tones...

 

I don’t remember much before Kindergarten. As best I can tell, I was a pretty dopey little kid and no one expected much out of me. I had been born premature, nearsighted and left-handed, and it was much easier and fruitful to obsess over my older brother Ralph. So he got double the pressure and I got a similar measure of indulgence. So, Kindergarten was a big shock and an unforgettable nightmare. My parents had not spent much time preparing me for reading or writing. I’m not sure if they even knew I was a lefty. Had they expected more, they might have dismissed all of those scribblings and creations that came out of my room, and made me learn the alphabet. They were just glad I showed aptitude for something. But it was a big clue that I was a horse of a different color.

Even by Kindergarten, I knew that I loved art. I loved it because, quite simply, it was my one strength. There are two telling memories that have survived that first year of public education. And the ironies make them worth telling.

We were fifty or more, and they were two. White haired and grizzled Kindergarten teachers; nearing retirement, jaded, opinionated, perhaps a little burned out. I am being kind. 

Besides the usual memories of stale graham crackers, jungle gyms, and Skip to My Lou, My Darling, the outstanding times for me were when it was coloring time. Or better yet, Clay Time. Whenever they passed out the clay, that was when I came alive. Eventually all the kids at the table learned to just hand it down to me. I would swiftly manufacture all kinds of animals and figures on demand, cranking out a whole rodeo, or Civil War battlefield, or a farm scene. Early in life I learned to use my talent to please others, and in the process find self worth. 

Sometimes the teachers would catch the kids passing me the clay, and forbid sharing... What they said next sounded kind of funny. Something to the effect of “Children, I see you giving your clay to others, don’t let them take your clay, keep your clay to yourself.” They just passed it under the table, their eyes big with expectation. Everything was great until they began to fight over some super dinosaur I had just created or whatever something was new. My table always seemed to cause the most trouble.

And then there was the time we were handed Santa Claus faces to color. It was Christmas time of course, and everyone was excited about the coming holiday break, and presents and, you know, all of the intoxicating elements that come with Santa Claus. When I went to color mine, there were no flesh color crayons left. I knew already how to mix pigments to get the desired hue, so a I began to dig for the ingredients to make a flesh color. In the attitude of Christmas cheer, I allowed lesser colorers the easy route, and I eagerly entered the road less traveled. 

I closed my eyes and thought of skin. I looked at the other kids. I looked at the teachers, pictures on the wall. It was obvious. To this day, as an artist, I still use the same mixture to achieve flesh tones. And much to your dismay, and certainly my teachers, you start with orange. A little sienna into a mid tone orange makes a great, rich, tanned skin tone.

I carefully outlined Santa, that was the style you know, but with brown. The girls all had to outline everything. And they decided the acceptable artistic style. I shaded in the lines, everything in its place, very neat... and colored Santa’s face a brownish orange. It was the only one like it, and compared to all of the bland flesh tone Santas, he stood out, and was decidedly different. 

Little could I have known, that my Santa’s facial hue would have compared well next to the Sunblum Santa made famous at that time by Coca Cola. It occurred to me that day that the flesh tone crayon was ridiculous. Nobody is really that color, except maybe band aids and the old or infirm. 

But that did not stop one of my teachers, who out of respect for teachers everywhere, shall remain nameless. She snatched up my coloring job and brandished it like a Comanche warrior would a fresh scalp...

“Children... Everyone look this way... What’s wrong with this picture? Everyone, look at this! What has this person done wrong? Everyone knows, all of you know, Santa is not ORANGE! Now, Ralph, do another one and color it correctly.”

Never, as my father always observed, was I caught without an excuse... I shrugged in embarrassment and explained there were no more flesh crayolas...

I was grateful that being so old, and confused, she called me by my father’s name, for she had taught him thirty years before. If she were alive today, I might send her some samples of my works, my accomplishments, and all of my orange people... But, she died a long time ago. Sad to say, that is about all I remember about my first school days. 

It was a lonely time. The world was telling me I was different, wrong headed, counter-cultural. The next few years of school would only re-enforce this message. I shudder to think of all of the impressionable little ones that did not fare as well as me.