We Need Plug and Play Students; We Need Common Core State Standards

Let’s face it folks; education is for the elites in this nation. First, the children of elite families (the best!) go to the elite high schools so they can go to Ivy League universities and become corporate lawyers, politicians and MBAs. Perhaps these top tier students, top tier due to genetic superiority, will become doctors if they aren’t that ambitious. Whatever the case, education should primarily be tailored to the needs of the upper classes.

On the other hand, the education of the proletariat should create a docile, capitulating population that believes in the American dream, doesn’t question unregulated capitalism, dreams for unattainable upward mobility and lacks critical thinking skills that might lead these students to question their status on the lower rungs of society. Their education should snuff out questions about why some people have so much wealth but don’t seem to work as hard as those in factories, retail outlets, restaurants or where ever prols are to be found working for their next meal. In fact, education should highlight the triumphs of the well-healed to instill a sense of awe of the industrial titans that made and continue to make America great. Most of all, education should ignore the struggles and triumphs of the working classes.

We need to dismantle all ethnics studies programs, for that leads to pride and individuality. And the arts have got to go, for the arts teach individual expression. No, math and English, and a few labor skills must fill the curriculum to the exclusion of useless and dangerously foreign and liberal ideas such as history and geography. That’s why we need to continue the push for national standards, the Common Core State Standards (CCSS).

Despite what anti-American education critic Alfie Kohn says, uniformity is excellence. We want Katy Perry and Justin Bieber to play songs we have heard before, but with different titles. We can’t wait for the next Star Wars film; the theme of good versus evil never tires. In the same way, we want every student to excel in math and English and learn it that same way and with the same materials. By standardizing education, we will also avoid the mistakes of creativity and insight.

We want plug and play students, students that can fit into whatever job the corporate machine needs to fulfill the orders for their masters. We also need compliant, unquestioning consumers. If we drill students all over our great nation with the same material, everything will be fine and America will remain strong.

The only way this will happen is if school districts implement the Common Core State Standards. Don’t worry folks, the core standards are NOT national standards, but good luck getting sufficient funding for your schools if you don’t use them. It’s up to you, your choice, really. Take the money and standardize, or go your own way.

Communist Academic Alfie Kohn, the man who wants to commit class warfare on wealthy school districts, also says that uniformity in education promoted by CCSS does not promote equity. Really? Well, Professor Sandra Stotsky clearly says that we can equalize education, and this uniformity will create mediocrity. We need Common Core State Standards to ensure this mediocrity.

If the children of the proletariat are mediocre, they are less likely rise up against the classes that dominate the nations resources and monopolize opportunity and political power. A mediocre class of citizens will guarantee our dominant place in society. And CCSS will create a set of workers that are shovel ready, plug and play.

Professor Bruce Fuller of U.C. Berkeley puts a positive spin on this. He says that CCSS leaves out humanistic liberal learning. He says it will take the curiosity out of the children. What a wondrous success! A curious, liberally learning student is a dangerous student. The more we can routinize pedagogy, keep it from being unpredictable and scary, the better.

Common Core State Standards will also help the economy. As fewer books are being sold, McGraw-Hill, Pierson, Houghton Mifflin and others can make millions off of tests aligned to the new CCSS. New tests will have to be developed, at a price, as the standards change over the years. Moreover, because the standards haven’t been field-tested to see if they are valid or work in the class room, new tests will have to be created as the standards are “improved” from year to year. Why test the standards before implementing them nation-wide? It’s only children’s futures, poor children, that we are experimenting with.

Fortunately, test publishers know that CCSS is a good thing, and they are willing to rake in millions of dollars to prove it. Schoolteacher Chasidy Miroff notes… "The creators of the Common Core standards have now taken jobs with testing companies which stand to make millions of dollars developing tests based on the standards they created." Good old U.S. ingenuity can take a common good, education, and turn it into a gold mine.

The testing and materials involved in CCSS will also drain schools resources, so those poor, uppity schools will be less likely to cause problems for the elite power structure, like Mayor Emanuel’s political machine in Chicago. As they say, it’s better to lay off thousands of teachers than to fail to test one student.

Another great thing about CCSS is that we don’t rely on other nations by trying to “benchmark” the standards to some European or Asian idea of what a good education consists of. We can go it alone with our military, so we can go it alone in education too. Moreover, and best of all, these educational standards weren’t created with the pesky interference from classroom educators. They would just muddle up the debate on standards with questions regarding reliability, verifiability, and other such nonsense.

Please support the implementation of Common Core State Standards before people realize they might not be a good thing. Your masters are counting on it.

Educationally Yours,
Tex Shelters