learning disabled

As a parent who has educated and raised three children to be happy, productive, responsible contributors to the American way of life I have to take issue with the Common Core Standards that educators across the nation are beginning to adopt without using any real critical thinking on their part. For one thing I know that given an opportunity the average teacher will resort to pre-printed, pre-designed educational materials rather than use their own critical thinking to develop a lesson plan that actually instructs the students they teach in how to become well rounded adults. I make this point because it lies at the heart of the reason I educated my three children in private schools even though I was a property owner who paid thousands of dollars in property taxes to support public education, I knew that the only chance my children had of getting a good education was to pay double and send them to private schools. At that time there was no such thing as a “Charter school” or “school vouchers” that returns a portion of the money set aside by government to the parent so they can make their own school choices without paying double the amount of other taxpayers whose kids went to public schools. But that didn’t matter to me, my kids education was all I cared about and at that time I had plenty of reason to be concerned because public education in America has been on a downhill slide for a long time.

I thought I had it tough when my kids were in school and the new wave for education was to teach reading by the use of “whole word recognition” instead of phonics. My oldest boy was failing miserably in 1st grade because of this new standard of teaching and the school systems solution was to label him as a child with special educational needs. They refused to teach phonics in any capacity in spite of the fact that phonics had produced tens of millions of well educated students in America for well over a hundred years. The local school systems solution was to label him as learning disabled and get Federal money to provide him with special education. I fought them because once a label is applied to a student they have to live with it for their entire education and my kid was just in 1st grade. I lost that battle after sitting through multiple IEP meetings designed to justify the Federal funds request the school system succeeded and they got their extra money and continued to teach whole word recognition to my son but this time they separated him from the class and treated him like a dummy. My solution was to hire a tutor and buy a program called “hooked on phonics” and use it to teach all my children how to become better readers instead of leaving it up to the school district to decide their fate. To make a long story short my son returned to school in the 2nd grade after a summer of learning how to read with phonics and soon rose to be the best reader in his class although his “special education” designation remains to this day (he is 28 and serves in the US Navy onboard a submarine as an electronic warfare/ship to ship communications specialist).

Why, you might be wondering, did I go to the trouble of telling this story about one of my kids educational experience and what does it have to do with Common Core? There are few responsibilities a parent has that are more important than the raising of children to be normal, healthy, happy and productive adults. The Public Education school system in America has been working harder and harder every year to undermine the best efforts of parents to accomplish this task and Common Core is the best most recent example of how organized educators have become in their efforts to teach their ideals to our children and they intentionally teach methodology, history, reading, writing and arithmetic in ways that serve little to no useful purpose in a child’s education. Often times the things being taught will work against the child as they proceed throughout their life. That is why you should read this article  about how Common Core is being used to teach children that the Holocaust was a hoax and maybe you’ll get a better understanding of the kind of perversion being forced upon parents of school age children in America through a National program called Common Core.

One final note regarding the article referenced above, notice the copy of the students essay at the end of the article. This was written by an 8th grade student and their penmanship is worse than a 3rd grader from the days when I was in school. Now days, dare I say that a 3rd grade student or an 8th grade student for that matter, can hardly write intelligibly and writing skills are getting worse at all levels of public education.