A quagmire has surfaced throughout our educational system due to one underlying factor, “Mistrust”. When there is “mistrust”, I can assure you there will be too many hands in the pot. When there are too many hands in the pot, very little learning takes place and educational objectives are unaccomplished.
Our instructors in public schools are micromanaged to the umpteen degree. And as a result, the focus on accountability has taken precedence over the main objective, “Teachers Teaching” and “Students Learning”. The emphasis for recreating the wheel on the “latest” methods for instruction occurs so often that it leaves instructors “spinning” without knowing which direction to follow. In the case of implementing the Common Core Standards for math and english, the problem is that the testing incorporates material and language of different world cultures which American students are unfamiliar. Our nation and culture is unique becoming powerful for the freedoms granted in the Bill of Rights by our constitution. The objective of the Common Core Standards is to infiltrate liberal thinking through selective material in the guise of international competitiveness. Instead of our younger students mastering basics in English and mathematics, they will be more competent in a politically driven, mufti-cultured world view. In order to determine that the common core -world view objectives are implemented it requires extensive testing and money by the states for the collection of data – targeting teacher cooperation rather than student learning. From the top there are administrators who tie the hands of good teachers by insisting on their latest methods and agendas. They have to come up with new methods simply for the sake of validating their position. Then they produce more record keeping to make sure instructors are following their methods. They in a sense continue to “throw out the baby along with the bathwater”. By insisting that everyone get on the same page with their specialized teaching methods they create a mountainous obstacle to the “art of teaching”. The reason it does not work is the fact that micromanagement encumbers the competent, conscientious instructor in struggling to work around an array of obstacles in order to teach. Competent, dedicated teachers are leaving education to pursue other careers; not because they don’t love teaching, but rather because they do. With talents and abilities tied behind their back while performing futile, arduous tasks unrelated to education, they become overwhelmingly frustrated, disillusioned, and burned out. Somehow we need to get back to weeding out federal government control and get back to the “KISS” principle before the whole institution results in politically- correct uneducated children.
