It's also entirely unfair (though legal through an Obama administration law rewrite) to collect this data on minors without parent consent, which is what is happening. People should be allowed to choose whether to share their personal information. 

The RNC actually put out a statement condemning Common Core about a month ago, and that has been pretty significant in getting Republicans to start moving against CC. Indiana Gov. Mike Pence just signed a bill putting a pause on CC while we hold public hearings and conduct a cost analysis, and that's also having an effect. 

But, yes, the Rs deserve some chastisement for supporting this from the beginning. Stop being the party of "better-managed big government."
--Joy

Also, "state-led" is basically a deception. See my longer piece about this. State leaders did not write the standards. Five people with no K-12 teaching or standards-writing experience did. And the feds were involved with money from the beginning. Common Core has roots in Goals 2000 and America 2000, the Brookings Institution says. 

Also, we can have a debate about nonfiction vs. fiction's places in classrooms (which debate Common Core banned the public from having until after it had been imposed on their children), but there is no credible research to show that "informational text" increases student achievement. There is ample evidence that challenging literature does. 

The short response to those who believe the Hirsch conservatives is that the Common Core in no way actually mandates a content-rich curriculum. Alas. It is actually full of vague mandates that could be (and are) applied to any curriculum. The great majority of "professional development" and buzzwords teachers are hearing is directly contrary to Hirsch's research and advocacy, as he himself has admitted to me. 

Second, while National Governors Association sounds nice, it's actually a nonprofit lobbying group that gets significant special interest and federal funding. NGA also has refused to release anything governors agreed to, if they did, and which governors those were. Also, governors are not dictators. They can't just set education policy for states and the nation, even if they want to. The standards were written in a black box despite public funding and impact. There's more, but I'm just responding to what folks are saying in this thread now.

Jim, Jim, Jim. Don't you remember? There is no debate. There are no books to burn. It's all an illusion. 

Happy mother's day! We want to make sure there are fewer mothers in the future. No offense to anyone with a mother.

I find it helpful for people like us, who often read the posts several days or hours later, to find the ones other people have responded to without having to scroll through several member feed pages. 

This already partially happens--the federal student loan default rate is extremely high, according to independent estimates (the feds won't release the number themselves, which indicates again how awful it is). We could combine this with your idea by just being transparent about the fact that taxpayers eat hundreds of thousands in student loans every year, while at the same time weaning schools and students off the taxpayer...teat.

The best two arguments I have heard in favor of cursive are a) It gives young people an ability to create at thing of real beauty, which for elementary kids usually doesn't happen elsewhere and b) it creates an incredible amount of precision and self-discipline, which everyone could stand to have more of. 

It doesn't take that long to learn, and it's not hard. I plan to teach it to my kids as an elective. 

Also, here's a consideration: It's a form of rudeness to write things to people they can hardly read. Cursive tends to be more legible than print.

I'm also concerned about governments collecting dossiers on people that include psychological characteristics. The is a constitutional democracy. We control the government. It shouldn't be managing and massaging us. 

Perhaps the real problem is that people generally both don't see government skeptically but benignly, and also generally don't have a wall between private and public. Again, see Facebook.

--Joy

Given Internet hackers and giant groups like Wikipedia's response to attempts to control the net last time, I think such a thing would take longer than you think.

Also, the government already manages the internet and clunks it up by using people who pay for it to subsidize people who don't through E-Rate and other programs. Same as with cell phones. 

Thoughtful comments, Dave. I wouldn't say price is a problem, because the elite schools essentially pay all of college for poor students. They go out of their way to recruit such kids, too. I would almost call it a paternalistic necessity.

But I think it's pretty clearly false that elite colleges are "better" than a smart course of study at a bread and butter state university. Networking, perhaps. But that's available at state schools, too, and the networks there are also strong. School culture? Pretty elitist and technocrat, and full of other kids whose parents and trust funds are paying their way. 

Maybe working class and poor kids anticipate that sort of culture and wouldn't feel comfortable in it. Or maybe they don't have time to waste on elite bread and circus schools full of Sex Week and other non-substantive delights. 

This is a big problem for me, too, and has been for a long time because I'm a really fast reader. Nathaniel is a slow reader, which means he gets through less material but remembers it far better. 

I have started limiting my connectivity when I'm trying to focus: No email, no Twitter, during some work tasks and almost all of my non-work life (although I do confess to checking Twitter and RSS feeds while waiting in line and so forth). It's helping, but I need more. 

In college, I used to read everything twice to help me remember it for papers and exams. That helped, too. Also, I've noticed that reading offline--in hard copy--helps me slow down. So I'm old fashioned and prefer paper. But so do K-12 kids in school--they still overwhelmingly want paper textbooks.

In short: Slow thinking, like slow food. Especially hard with kids.

--Joy

Also, folks, we've got only two kids right now, so none of your Ransoms are ours. The Lewis Space Trilogy was, of course, and inspiration. Ransom's an old name that used to be more common.

My goal is four kids by 30. We'll see how that goes. 

Have any of you also read Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, by Bryan Caplan? His argument is that if you are going to at least have a child or two, you might as well have a bushel of them. He uses genetic studies to show that kids are basically going to be like their parents, so says you can lay off having to worry about and micromanage them, which makes kids less annoying. And having a few extra, he shows, is good for society.

It's kind of the utilitarian argument. For me, the biggest reason to have kids is my own experience not wanting them and having them make me a better person in ways I would never had understood pre-kids. 

I have actually followed Joel Kotkin's work for some time, and he's no fly-by-journalist. If you re-read the article, you will see the hookah bar trope is a way to put faces on the statistics he describes. 

Also, I have lots of peers who express exactly the same sentiments. I can't claim I've sampled the U.S. young woman population accurately, but there's more to it than a hookah bar.

You can read more of Kotkin's thought-provoking demographic work at New Geography.

Dave, I think your post underscores that societal cognitive dissonance is often willful. We can't believe the truth because it shows we don't care about the truth. 

--Joy