Shocker - Common Core not giving good outcomes

[bluebooger]

You hit the nail on the head... which is why I'm a big fan of Jean Piaget. If you introduce kids to concepts too early it will hurt them and they will be discouraged. 

In my very humble opinion, kids in middle school and the first 2 years of high school should be focusing on high yield, memorizable stuff. They should be learning how to take notes. They should be learning how to read a paragraph or book and strain out the high yield info. They should have the multiplication table memorized up to 15.
There is also another factor here... Chinese parents have a different way with their children and they don't let up until the learning is learned. American kids are very soft (I'm sorry but it what I've observed). 
American kids have many things to distract them, video games, television, Netflix, and other non sense. This is why GM and Ford have stopped making sedans in this country, and why Honda and Toyota have crushed the United States. We cry about our border, but how can we protect the border when we can't even place our kids in these high level jobs? CEOs are having to get kids from India and China and Japan. It's not just because their labor is cheaper, ITS BECAUSE THEY PASS CALCULUS IN THE 10TH GRADE WHILE OUR KIDS ARE ON THE XBOX. We play too much with our kids' education, then blame others for coming here and taking jobs that our kids couldn't do if you held a gun to their heads. We yell at our kids for results, but we don't sit with them and tutor them. I wrote another post somewhere on this forum about seeing the CULTURE of education when I walk into the home of one of my Japanese, Chinese or indian friends' home. How can we compete with that?

As you can obviously see, my family is not from the US, but the weakness of the educational system is very apparent by foreigners who have a few years of grade school in other countries. Now they're talking about privatizing our schools, and making profits off the back of American children? This country is losing a war by putting all of it's resources in the wrong type of weapons. More money for bombs, military budget, etc... but not wanting to spend more money to reinforce our most powerful weapon, the minds of our children. I'm sorry this became political, I really am.

here in NYC we've got the mayor trying to get rid of gifted high schools because the schools don't reflect the population of NYC students -- they don't have enough spanish and african american students 

and if the schools are kept then they need to get rid of standardized tests for admission and come up with a different admission criteria (like top 10% from each middle school)

the Asian parents are going nuts because this new policy will keep many of the highest scoring asian students out of the gifted schools 

the dept of ed is holding meetings to discuss the issue , but the schedule the meetings far away from asian neighborhoods, and in small rooms and provide no translators for the parents

even some minority leaders are against the idea -- they want minority kinds IN gifted programs -- they don't want the gifted programs down away with