Peter Greene reviews a statement from the Center for American Progress saying that there is a gender gap and the Common Core is sure to close it. How do they know? They don’t, but no reason not to continue the game of making sweeping claims. Who can disprove what cannot be proved? Next they will say Common Core cures the common cold. Can you prove that it doesn’t?
Greene writes:
“That’s it. That’s the whole argument. CCSS will raise everybody’s standards, so women (and, I guess, students of color) will just automatically be raised up to the level of white guys. Of course, that effect would theoretically work with literally any educational standards at all– so why didn’t the states (particularly those with super high standards rated by Fordham Institution as better than CCSS) already wipe out their own gender gaps? And how can rigorous education wipe out the pay gap when the pay gap, as CAP just said, is controlled for occupation? Will lady engineers suddenly be paid more because they have a Common Core seal of approval stamped upon them?
“This has to be one of the laziest arguments I have ever seen for pretty much anything. I guess it’s good that they didn’t print a special CCSS edition in pink for girls, but the implication that girls have been doing poorly because, well, it’s just that nobody asked them to do better– it’s somehow insulting to everybody. If CAP is going to try to score social justice points, they’re going to have to do much better than this.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I see the Corporate Corpse is going to be recycling all their old Virginia Slims ads.
Just another RED HERRING. The yahoos are good at kicking up RED HERRINGS to divert our attention and USE PROPAGANDA on everyone.
I am just SICK of the lunacy, but then I am not one of the OLIGARCHY. I am way down on the money scale, and I mean way down.
Raising the bar, not raising pay. Rigor for all of those lazy undemanding “girlie” teachers. Nothing soft and diffuse like “influencing” students for a lifetime–gotta IMPACT them now, AYP.
Then it stands to reason that every single elite private school in the nation would naturally want to IMMEDIATELY switch the curriculum to Common Core to solve the gender gap because we know the income divide still exists whether rich or poor! There will be evidence of course- after following common core” the CEOS of two comparable companies (one headed by a female and one from a male and of course with pedigree education credentials) will “certainly” EARN THE SAME PAY. Hmmmm… not likely to happen anytime soon… the equal pay or elite schools torturing their students with common core!
How about:
Meeting the federally mandated Common Core goals will make you famous, rich, successful, immortal, a sexy vampire, etc. Heck, Madison Avenue does that for every product that comes off an assembly line be it perfume, a dress, toothpaste or a car.
For instance, drive a Corvette wearing our brand of underwear and/or bra, and Victoria Secret Models will beg you for attention and are a woman, name the hunk you think is the biggest hunk on the big screen, and he will become your slave.
Most Americans are well trained to fall for this line.
The boob tube works its wonders, eh Lloyd!?!?!
The stupid tube does just that. It also changed America for the worst after World War II. The American culture we live in today is not the culture that fought World War II and Korea. It is another culture, totally different.
When we were raising our daughter, the TV was turned off six days a week—we didn’t even watch films on VHS or DVDs, and we controlled what we watched for an hour or two on the seventh day. Her main source of entertainment was to read a book and she read many.
Now that our daughter is out of college and working full time in the health care industry with a good salary and great benefits, we do watch films and documentaries on DVDs but keep to the one-or-two hours a week of actually watching broadcast TV shows that come with those commercial breaks, so we have missed most of the political crap that floods the media during elections and the political junk mail, gets shredded everyday without bothering to read that often misleading and lying crap.
If I want to know something about a candidate, I turn to sites like Vote Smart and do some research on them—and finding any truth is not that easy for some candidates who seem to deliberately hide what their real agenda is. Rule of thumb: don’t vote for those types.
In China, most of the people who listen to the state owned and controlled media know they are being lied to and usually think the opposite is true when there is a controversial topic being reported to them through Xinhua. But in the U.S. we have far too many gullible people who listen to the corporate crap the media feeds them and they believe it.
The only difference beyond that is that in China, there are no national elections outside of the 80 million who belong to the CCP, and in the U.S. every adult citizen is allowed to vote with few exceptions.
“College majors are segregated by gender. Female students are still more likely than male students to major in the social science and health care fields, while men are more likely than women to major in science, math, engineering, and computer and information sciences.”
In Center for American Progress-world, “health care fields” don’t require any science or math. They’ve now narrowed “science” to mean “engineering”, I guess, if they’ve excluded “health care fields” from the “science” category.
It’s funny, because I remember this exact same discussion from the 1980s. The only people who had any value or anything worthwhile to contribute were engineers. All other work was banished to the “soft” category, less rigorous, not as worthy of respect.
Why can’t they just sell Common Core on the merits? Sell THE THING itself. Try that. See if that works.
at the end of the CAP article they post these names: I hope that some people reading here will also call one of them… “To speak with our experts on this topic, please contact:
Print: Allison Preiss (economy, education, poverty)
202.478.6331 or apreiss@americanprogress.org
Print: Tom Caiazza (foreign policy, health care, energy and environment, LGBT issues, gun-violence prevention)
202.481.7141 or tcaiazza@americanprogress.org
Print: Chelsea Kiene (women’s issues, Legal Progress, Half in Ten Education Fund)
202.478.5328 or ckiene@americanprogress.org
Spanish-language and ethnic media: Tanya Arditi (immigration, race and ethnicity)
202.741.6258 or tarditi@americanprogress.org