Common Core, Barbies and All Core Disciplines Getting African Studies

"Afro-centric" is the word being used for a Common Core curriculum for K-10th that has been a closely guarded secret until now, and still secret is where will the Afro-centric studies be taught, other than Chicago Public schools? At least one of the resources for student study are startling, as you'll see below. Almost as startling is New York State's statement about testing materials that include iconic kid-friendly ads. Feminists and the Left hate Barbie but she is showing up on tests, along with a specific root beer, and Life Savers which everyone knows causes cavities and obesity, Nike, Apple products and perhaps others.

Disclaimer: The Daily Caller is reporting the "closely guarded copy. of the curriculum." I haven't seen proof of it but The Daily Caller News Foundation says they have a copy.

The Afro-Centric Curriculum:

Do you remember Barack Obama once plugged thousands of educational dollars into improving black Chicago student's understanding of African "Rites of Passage?" It was a "movement" back them.  The "movement" driven by a young Barack Obama and a younger Bill Ayers with "terrorist" already on his resumé, was so important that The Chicago Algebra Project for Hispanics was turned down for a grant to favor the "Chicago African Village." What Hispanic child needs algebra anyway, but every child of African lineage needs to know what inspired the puberty rights found in African societies.

Common Core-aligned materials in Chicago Public Schools link to TheAfrican.com. To get to the heart of publisher "Malachi's" message, he once wrote as a black nationalist under the name of 'Grisso,' but now has had a change of philosophy and says he does not "disclaim or repudiate the truths of black nationalism...." but today Malachi describes himself as:

...an African of the Diaspora, brought to the Western Hemisphere as the result of the horrors of the Middle Passage and slavery, I am an Israelite, of the literal seed of the patriarch, Jacob, the father of the Israelites spoken of in the Holy Bible. That book contains Our Story, and those who today call themselves Jews are not Israelites of the physical seed of Jacob, but rather are impostors; see Revelation 2:9, 3:9; Daniel 11:14.* 

As I read through TheAfrican.com, not knowing how much emphasis will be placed on Malachi's "teaching," I can see another way in which America and Christianity will begin yet another fundamental transformation under the Obama administration. Will James Cone and Black Liberation Theology be a part of the study, or maybe Malachi already is?

The study is known as Interdisciplinary African and African American Studies (IAAAS), and is "designed to integrate African and African American Studies ACROSS ALL CORE DISCIPLINES over the course of the academic year. [all emphasis mine]

HB 2859..."every public elementary school and high school in Illinois include in its curriculum a unit of instruction studying the events of Black History..."

In the IAAAS, it is accepted that "culture and identity influence" who children are. It isn't enough to be in America and be American.

Almost every page, if not every page, states that the IAAAS is Common Core aligned, so here's the question: Surely, students must be tested on these years-long 'standards,' because Common Core is nothing if not 'standards,' so how does a child in Tulsa, Oklahoma pass this part of the testing?

Barbie and Root Beer in Testing Materials:

There have been volumes of discussion about Pearson Educators and their for-profit publishing venture, giving them heavy-duty control of America's young minds. With the arrival of Barbie on the scene, we see them freely strutting their version of the "free market."

“‘Why are they trying to sell me something during the test?’” Long Island mother Deborah Poppe quoted her son as saying, according to Fox News. “He’s bright enough to realize that it was almost like a commercial.”

Poppe said her eighth-grade son was talking about a question about a busboy who didn’t clean up a root beer spill. It wasn’t just any root beer, though. No sir! It was Mug Root Beer, a registered trademark of PepsiCo (current market cap: $129.7 billion).

Another question about the value of taking risks featured the now-hackneyed Nike slogan “Just Do It.”

“I’m sure they could have used a historical figure who took risks and invented things,” observed displeased dad Sam Pirozzolo, also of Staten Island, according to the Daily Mail. “I’m sure they could have found something other than Nike to express their point.”

Pirozzolo has a child in fifth grade.

Nike, one of America’s best known and most heavily advertised companies, boasts a current market cap of $65.01 billion.

A number of baffled and angry New York teachers have anonymously complained about the branding and much else on blogs and websites.

See if you can detect the absurdity of New York's statement regarding advertising in their testing materials: 

“There are no product placement deals between us, Pearson or anyone else,” Tom Dunn, an Education Department spokesman, told Fox News. “No deals. No money. We use authentic texts. If the author chose to use a brand name in the original, we don’t edit.” Source: Daily Caller

And you are the sucker who believed Common Core is state-led? No, I know you did not, because my readers always have their eyes open, ears hearing and brains working without a halo of weed vapor. 

Another Daily Caller article shows just how "AWFUL" standardized testing is in New York:

A third-grade teacher writing in Slate only as Anonymous ripped the grueling multi-day test for being a useless exercise in process of elimination that cannot be expected to make sense to a typical third-grade kid.

Instead of a question like: “What caused the character to (insert action here) in the middle of the story?” (which, mind you, is hard enough for an 8-year-old to identify as it is), there were questions like: “In Line 8 of Paragraph 4, the character says … and in Line 17 of Paragraph 5, the character does … Which of the following lines from Paragraph 7 best supports the character’s actions?” This, followed by four choices of lines from Paragraph 7 that could all, arguably, show motivation for the character’s actions…
As Anonymous notes, teachers are forbidden from exposing the low-quality test material—produced, teachers say, by educational publishing behemoth Pearson...
Students [4th grade] spent so much time trying to decipher strangely worded questions, only to discover that two answer choices sort of fit what the question was sort of asking,” she said.

While the multiple-choice questions were awful, a set of “vague and unreasonably difficult” questions requiring written responses caused even more misery.

The Oxford African Studies Center recommends their study materials for middle school and high school teachers -- studies with specific emphasis on the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. The Center suggests how teachers should think about the subject and how to structure lessons, and recommends this NPR video which, in my opinion, is not suitable for middle-schoolers, or even early high-schoolers. We think Chicago's murder rate is abhorrently high now. Wait until the IAAAS plays-out.

Under Common Core, we are told there will be no remedial courses as a student enters college or university, meaning all students will be capable of learning to read. Can't wait to see how that happens. Why hasn't that been happening for the last forty years? I believe the answer is that failing a student at the appropriate time -- when he/she moves to the next grade and should be able to read, but cannot, is no longer an option.

Posted by Maggie @ Maggie's Notebook