Another Brick in the Wall: Why the Common Core Won't Give No Education

I just submitted this piece for the January issue of The Lincoln Eagle in Kingston, NY.

Another Brick in the Wall: Why the Common Core Won't Give No Education

Mitchell Langbert, Ph.D.

In the early 2000s the Bush administration adopted the No Child Left behind Act (NCLBA), which established state-and-standards-based testing.  The approach failed, and for years educators, especially in inner cities, complained about teaching to the test. 

The National Governors Association's Center for Best Practices (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), two private, not-for-profit organizations, have, with Bill Gates's $147 million and President Obama's multibillion dollar grant support, introduced a solution to NCLBA's failure:  a more standardized and more centralized testing system with higher-level standards. It is called the Common Core State Standards Initiative.

Libertarian conservatives are suspicious of the common core's increased centralization.   Dean Kalahar of the conservative American Thinker blog, for example, claims that the common core will encourage textbook manufacturers to introduce Bill Ayer's ideology about race, class, and gender. 

It was, however, President George Bush who encouraged standardization of curricula and testing through his NCLBA.  As Diane Ravitch wrote in her 2004 book The Language Police, political correctness began decades ago; textbooks have been politically correct and watered down for years.  

There are three common core debates.  The first is educational.  It pits advocates of higher-level standards against advocates of easier and more specific ones.  Mothers in the Hudson Valley have vehemently complained about the difficulty of the new standards. In contrast, neoconservative City Journal columnist Sol Stern and liberal former New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein hail the more difficult common core standards.   

The second is the political debate between advocates of decentralization and centralization.   Stern and Klein claim that the common core results from healthy federalism because 46 states have adopted it voluntarily (four have not adopted it), but many are skeptical that $4 billion in federal grant money amounts to a true division of powers.  The Tenth Amendment does not say that powers that the United States can buy are delegated to it by the Constitution.  

The third debate concerns Bill Gates's economic power.  Blogger Mercedes Schneider notes that in addition to $147 million that the Gates Foundation paid to the NGA, CCSSO, and the Student Achievement Partners (SAP) consulting firm that led the drafting of the common core, his foundation has paid more than $10 million to education think tanks.  The common core reflects one of the most expensive exercises of lobbying influence in the nation's history. 

Moreover, textbook firms that produce both the standards-linked textbooks and the tests that the states will administer will benefit financially.  The lead authors, David Coleman and Jason Zimba, are linked to McGraw Hill through their sale of their business, Grow Network.  Their SAP seeks paid consulting work with schools that aim to implement the common core.  That is on top of grant money it has already received from the Gates Foundation.

Despite Bill Gates's fascination with testing, there is little evidence that it works.  In offering rationales for the common core, NGA, CCSSO, and SAP claim that national competitiveness depends on students' test performance.  For instance, Jason Zimba claims that the common core offers a way to improve American students' scores on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests.

Two professors, Christopher Tienken of Seton Hall and Michael Apple of the University of Wisconsin, question testing. In their views it will not improve outcomes.  

Professor Tienken notes that economic well-being and poverty have stronger correlations with student performance than does any other variable.  Moreover, there are biases that invalidate international tests. In America virtually all students take the tests, but in other countries only select students do.  For instance, "Switzerland included only students in 15 of 26 cantons, representing their highest performing regions."  Tienken adds that in spite of these biases, taken alone, American white students ranked 2nd out of 29 countries in reading, 7th out of 30 in math, and 4th out of 30 in science. 

Gates, Zimba, and other centralizers claim that centralization of control will increase objective test scores, resulting in increased national competitiveness. Tienken shows that their claim is false.  There is no link between having centralized educational standards and having a competitive economy.
  

Professor Michael Apple of the University of Wisconsin has written a book, Democratic Schools, in which he argues for decentralization and local control.  In an interview, Professor Apple pointed out that the common core is a response to the NCLBA.  He says that on paper the common core encourages a more creative curriculum and establishes higher-level testing standards than did the NCLBA.  In practice, it falters for the same reasons the NCLBA did:  The test tail wags the teacher dog. Because poorer children have less preparation, their teachers will continue to spend more time teaching to the test than will teachers of affluent children. Their writing will suffer, and they will suffer on the job market.   

Professor Apple advocates empowering teachers and encouraging their creativity. The opposite is occurring now:  "The job of teaching has gotten worse. The average teacher's work week is 58 hours. The common core could have offered a better curriculum, but the teachers don't have the time to put it into practice.  The result is a focus on accountability and a lack of focus on higher-level skills like writing.  Although the states do not say that the teachers' performance will be appraised by test scores, the administrators don't have time to handle performance appraisal any other way."

If Professor Tienken is right, the arguments for both the NCLBA and the common core are unfounded. The ideals of education and democracy have been sacrificed for a pseudoscientific testing system that happens to tickle Bill Gates's fancy.  The end result is a betrayal of what education should be.  

Conservatives, libertarians, liberals, and social democrats should question the claims of standardizers and centralizers.  The best education requires on-the-spot imagination that cannot be captured with a test. 

Gold Hits Record High

The Street.com reports that gold hit a record high (in nominal dollars) at $1258.30 per ounce.  I view this as a speculative market driven by fear of global monetary collapse and short term investors.  I doubled my gold holding on the hunch that the bubble will continue for at least a few weeks although the market could collapse at any time.  Nevertheless, "expert" gold investors  on Kitco often quote an old saying "sell in May and go away" until the fall. But here it is mid-June and the gold market is breaking new highs.  This seems to be a very strong bull market.

As I noted a few days ago, other commodities are not bubbling like gold.  Silver has its advocates and it went up more than two percent today, but it is not moving as fast as gold.  Nor is there inflation.  According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics there was 0.2% deflation in May although prices increased 2.0 percent year over year.  These numbers are likely understated as the CPI statistics are biased against inflation to minimize social security increases.

There is reason to fear monetary collapse.  The debt that the US government is issuing will need to be repaid. If interest rates rise, then the repayments will become burdensome.  That will put pressure on the Fed to continue inflating.  If it does, foreign bond holders may sell, which would stimulate further inflation.

Modest commodity price increases in other areas suggest that other commodities may be better long term holdings than gold.   The DBA, DBC and SLV, agricultural, commodity and silver indexes, may be less speculative and require less buying and selling.  El Dorado Gold, which I sold at about 17 is now at 18 and going strong.

I don't invest more in gold than I can afford to lose half  in the short term.   In the long term gold will likely go up.  It does not seem that the centralized money supply is a system that will last.  Throughout history monetary collapse has been accompanied by inflation.  Another alternative would be the bankruptcy of the federal government. 

Americans should fear any impetus toward global centralization of the money supply.  Much as the Greek economy has dogged Germany do we really want to deal with Venezuela's economic problems, as bad as America's are?

Bill Gates and Depopulation

On a tangentially related front, there is a video circulating that has Bill Gates saying that he would like to depopulate the world. Gates holds that vaccines will cause lower population. "If you reduce childhood deaths population growth goes down."  However, the fixation on population control is like marijuana (so they say)--it leads to stronger stuff.  When the vaccines are distributed, then restrictions on human reproduction are sure to follow. The video below argues that vaccines are not enough to reduce infant mortality in the Third World.  Undrinkable water, for example, causes a large share of deaths.  So why use vaccines to reduce population? And if vaccines fail to reduce population, what do Bill Gates and the UN next have up their sleeve?

The depopulation issue seems to be related to the monetary issue. Just as government mismanagement leads the greedy government officials to call for more power, so the mismanagement of public health leads to ever greater calls for repression by health officials.  Both lead to increasing centralization. 

Greedy Socialist Billionaires Aim to Ruin Your Life

A reader recommended this Commieblaster.com video.  It overdoes the conspiracy slant.  Historians have long noticed that big business in America has always been sympathetic to Marxism.  The footage of Bill Gates is priceless.  His left-wing sympathies are no surprise. What better tool to shore up a mediocre firm like Microsoft than to illegalize your competition, making your own business the legal norm? 

Americans are foolish to be taken in by the likes of Soros, Gates, et al.  To the extent that they have, the quality of life in America has declined sharply over my lifetime (the past 56 years) and will decline even more sharply.

To counter the propaganda Americans must take back control of the schools and abolish the Federal Reserve Bank. Without the massive Fed subsidies that large scale business receives, the scale of American industry would be far smaller in general and the effectiveness of the greedy big business socialist left's tactics would be significantly reduced or even eliminated. Among the wealthy described in the video, at least half, Buffett, Soros, Rockefeller (as far as the current Rockefeller trust, not the original fortune) and Bloomberg, for instance, owe the bulk of their wealth to the Federal Reserve Bank, not to a market economy. 

Warren Buffett Attacks Middle Class Businessmen and Farmers

On February 14, 2001 BBC News reported that:

"A group of the United States' most wealthy citizens have urged Congress to reject a plan by the new Bush administration to phase out taxes on estates and gifts by 2009...A petition, to appear in the New York Times on Sunday, is being organised by William Gates Sr, father of Microsoft chairman Bill Gates...Around 120 rich Americans, including billionaire investors George Soros and Warren Buffett, support the petition...Mr Buffett, who himself did not sign the petition because he thought it did not go far enough, said that repealing the estate tax would be a "terrible mistake."

Fox News reports today that Buffett:

"told the Senate Finance Committee on Wednesday that Congress should keep the estate tax rather than repeal it and help a few rich Americans like him."

When you think about it, it makes sense for America's wealthiest citizens to support the estate tax since it doesn't affect them. There has been an estate tax in effect for nearly 100 years, yet America's wealthiest families have mostly avoided it. In fact, virtually nothing in the tax code is as it seems. The tax code is full of exceptions, regulations, exceptions to the exceptions and regulations that regulate the exceptions to the exceptions.

In contrast, wealthy but middle class businessmen and farmers worth $3 or $4 million have trouble affording legal talent to lobby for or find the exceptions. Not so the Rockefellers. The Gates-Buffett pro-inheritance tax movement is an effort by the very wealthy to attack and impoverish the upper middle class.

Farmers and small businessmen may find that they lack the cash to pay an inheritance tax. Owners of expensive Manhattan apartments may have to throw their less lucky children onto the street because the parents fear that they will not have the cash to cover the inheritance tax on the apartment.

It is logical for the super-rich to favor the inheritance tax because the inheritance tax has never prevented them from establishing trusts. Many of the signers of the Gates petition may do so when the glare of the news media is turned away.

Moreover, cronyism and nepotism, the hiring of friends and relatives as opposed to the best qualified candidate, is morally indefensible. Yet, Buffett has appointed one of his children to run Berkshire Hathaway. The not-so-wealthy can't afford to appoint their children to a corporate sinecure.

The opposition of the super-rich to inheritance is hypocritical for another reason. If the state did not interfere with the money supply and the economy, an inheritance tax would not be so big a problem because asset values would be lower. But it is because the Fed inflates the money supply, artificially depressing interest rates, that illiquid estates are problematic. Apartments and houses that have been in families for generations must be liquidated. Small businesses must be broken up.

Were the Fed to allow interest rates to float to a market level, rates would rise. This would be fair because interest is just the price of money. We do not subsidize the price of shoes to benefit shoe retailers or of cars to benefit car retailers. Why do we need to depress the price of money, interest, to protect stock market investors, Wall Street and commercial bankers? Can't these guys create value in a free market?

Higher, market-responsive interest rates would depress the stock market and make the super-rich less rich. Moreover higher rates would stop inflation from elevating asset values. Thus, farmers' land and New Yorkers' apartments would become less unrealistically expensive.

Messrs. Buffett, Soros and Gates do not lobby for market-driven interest rates. Instead, Messrs. Buffett, Soros and Gates argue for tax code provisions which everyone knows are complex, often unnecessarily complex, frequently dodged and subject to manipulation by the very wealthy. Hence, we must suspect that Messrs. Buffett, Soros and Gates are insincere. If they were concerned about income inequality, they would speak out for market-neutral interest rates, not for complicated enhancements to the byzantine tax code.

Although financiers like Buffett, Soros, Gates et al. have above-average intelligence, this may not be true of all who have built successful businesses. Some may have average intelligence. Their children may also have average intelligence. Why should the hard work of the parents be forfeited? In contrast, because of income taxation, government regulation, licensure and inflation, success in today's world increasingly (and unfairly) depends on the ability to gain entry to Ivy League colleges and obtain a job on Wall Street, as has been the case with Messrs. Buffett and Soros. Mr. Gates attended an Ivy League college but did not work on Wall Street. If the children of Ivy League graduates are more likely to be able to attend Ivy League colleges because of inherited genetic endowment, then they benefit by inheritance tax. They benefit because small owners are forced to sell their family businesses to large businesses such as those that Messrs. Buffett and Soros own. The low interest rates benefit them; and the emphasis on academic scores tends to benefit them. In contrast, the hard working farmer sees the state violently rip his life's work from his children. But this is fine with Mr. Buffett because Berkshire Hathaway is ready to buy at bargain basement prices.

Frankly, I see little moral or respectable in the anti-inheritance or pro-inheritance tax position. Buffett's position is vicious. If the super-rich want to give their money to charity, they have every right to do so. But shouldn't the hard working upper middle class be permitted to shield their children from the rapacity of the marketplace? Or must their children be subjected to the inflationary stealing of a new generation of financial manipulators and beneficiaries of government intervention?