Jeb Bush, like the rest of his family, is a neoconservative (neocon), a former liberal turned conservative. But, like them, still has progressive leanings. One of them is a firm belief that government should own and control education. No it shouldn't.
Government is force. It has nothing to offer citizens except the management of force (and the threat of using it). When government controls education it will control what is taught and how it is taught and this will be forced onto teachers and students, and parents.
Don't fall for the notion that parents have elected representatives to appeal to. Those representatives are also part of the government that thinks it knows what is best for your kids better than you do. Yes there has been an increase in parents loudly protesting aspects of Progressive Education and even Common Core. But this only gets the powers that be to back off a little bit and only temporarily. The real backing off is to be done by the parents.
On April 13 213 Melissa Harris Perry on the Huffy Post said "we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to their communities." Please understand what this means: parents are not part of the community! Got that?
So what does this have to do with Mr. Bush? Ms Jacques informs us that since Jeb Bush is a staunch supporter for the Common Core education standards we should look past that fact because he has done well supporting education in Florida.
"Bush's willingness to embrace the best options to improve learning are a refreshing departure from the Obama administration's playbook, which has tried to squelch true school choice programs."
Evidently, Jeb Bush does not consider auctioning off schools to unregulated private enterprise or even nonprofits where, like IT products (smart phones and such), quality constantly goes up and costs go down, to be one of his 'best options.'
One of the arguments used to maintain government control over our children's minds is the notion that schools must be accountable. But please notice that this accountability is to be directed to government bureaucrats not parents. This is based on the premise that the parents are not competent to determine if their kids can read, write, do basic math and learn history and science and that only government has such wisdom.
The theme of this oped is that even though "Jeb Bush hasn't made it official that he's a 2016 presidential candidate..." we should overlook his Common Core boo boo and consider him for 2016. No we shouldn't.
1 comment:
Though I haven't looked at it closely, some teachers in my kids school have been using common-core lessons on a test/experimental basis, and I have seen a few examples. I have not seen any evidence that common-core is worse than the existing curriculum.
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