I support Carroll County school board candidates George Harmening, Bud Nason and Jim Roenick, the only candidates willing to work to rid the destructive Common Core national standards from our schools.
Here and around the country, as the bitter fruits of the untested, flawed Common Core have become evident, more teachers, school systems, parents and children have expressed distress, anger and frustration over their detrimental impact. Support for Common Core among teachers dropped from 76 percent in 2013 to 46 percent in 2014.
Maryland teachers are joined by innumerable others with concerns. New York state's United Teachers' Board of Directors unanimously passed a resolution withdrawing its support for the standards as implemented and interpreted there until major course corrections are made. After years of strong backing, the American Federation of Teachers Union will give its members grants to critique the academic standards - or to write replacement standards.
South Carolina, Oklahoma, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Tennessee have joined a national movement opting out of Common Core, developed without local parent, teacher or school board input.
A retired, licensed mental health care provider, I note the warnings of child psychologists concerning Common Core. Dr. Gary Thompson stated, "There are kids/teens (as well as adults like myself) who will never master [Common Core's] 'symbolic processing' of numbers and math concepts." He regards such as "cognitive child abuse."
Dr Joan Landes stated, "Common Core standards are not only developmentally inappropriate for youngsters, they focus on a very limited range of learning modalities (neo-cortical left-brain areas) thus limiting future abilities to learn much more complex subjects. The Common Core developers entirely missed the point of early/young childhood education when they focus on either the acquisition of facts (losing the opportunity to develop other areas of the brain to enhance future learning capabilities) or by making demands for abstract reasoning before developmentally ready (which will create myriad behavioral, emotional and learning problems). It is a grave mistake to force youngsters to limit their brain activities to narrow interests, thus diminishing future originality and future ability to learn."
Dr. Megan Koschnick criticized Common Core's standards for K-3 as "age and developmentally inappropriate… that can cause major stress for the child because they are not prepared for this level of education. The Core standards will cause suffering, not learning, for many, many young children."
Vote Harmening, Nason and Roenick to restore traditional education.
Vince Perticone
Taneytown
