A comment on the blog:
“Elementary schools should be “incubators” for holistic development for children. That is the only way our country can be strong.
“Instead, our elementary schools have become “chambers of horror” for children. Eight year olds being tortured with 8 hours of testing insanity. One would think that Dick Cheney designed Common Core.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Diane, if you read about Dick Chaney’s school career – he was not a good student, flunked out of college a couple of times, got numerous draft deferments and ended up in the White House. His wife had the brains in the family. He was in charge of meanness, which would have helped in the development of the CCSS.
Poor Dick, he was not college and career ready at the time.
In his Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein makes the point that if there were a verb with the meaning “to believe falsely,” it would have no useable first-person singular present tense form. He’s making the point that it’s a contradiction to say that one holds a false belief, for if you believe something, you do not think it false. This is a version of the so-called “liar’s paradox.” However, Wittgenstein is not quite right that such a verb could not be used in the first-person singular present tense.
Let’s suppose that there were such a verb, say, “to cheney,” meaning, “to believe falsely.” One could without self-contradiction use the verb in sentences like, “There are doubtless some things that I cheney, but I don’t know what they are.”
“There are doubtless some things that I cheney, but I don’t know what they are.”
But Dick Cheney does!!!
So very sad to read this, but I afraid it’s true.
If Halliburton owned Pearson, he would have developed the Common Core years ago. Remember his wife’s response to the Social Studies standards?
The comment is very reminiscent of the things Albert Einstein said about his own school days in Germany (except he didn’t mention Dick Cheney, at least not by name)
He hated the focus on memorization and testing at the expense of imagination, creativity and inspiration which he considered far more important.
“A student is not a container you have to fill but a torch you have to light up.”
“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”
But what did he know, right?
Just a crazy physicist with a warped sense of reality.
“Just a crazy physicist with a warped sense of reality.”
Or perhaps with a real sense of the warped!