Simplify -- Here's a new standard for education: The basics

There is a difference between academics and opinions from "experts" and practical, common sense advice that gets you somewhere.

The first is a collection of hot air, hard-to-understand pronouncements and gobbledygook even the writers don't understand and can't define or explain.

The other is what you want to have to get the goal accomplished -- a clear, defined path that tells people what the basic goals are and how to get there.

And it starts with the basics.

Therein lies the problem with Common Core.

It is not that it is a bad thing to set standards for what children can learn and how they are going to learn it. (Because no matter what any of the talking heads tell you, the Common Core standards also required a certain type of teaching. Otherwise, there is no way to meet the standard.)

Read it and you will see that this group of contributors who were asked to create this standard managed to take what should have been a set of simple goals and turn it into one of the most hard-to-decipher guides possible.

It is doubtful that anyone other than a handful of academics and perhaps a few people who helped write the complicated verbiage that accompanies these "standards" even really understands what they mean.

And by the way, there were all sorts of people who "contributed" to this effort, including those who perhaps might have had a bit of a hidden agenda, and others who simply did not have the practical knowledge necessary to set a course structure that was not a mass of paperwork.

So here is the bottom line, in our opinion, on where the next discussion of standards should begin in North Carolina.

How about reading, writing and arithmetic, with a little history, science and reality mixed in.

Let's worry about vocabulary, grammar and communication skills again. Let's make sure that writing is a part of every child's education and that reading is Job 1.

Let's demand that homework is done and that help is available for the students who need it.

Let's not worry about whether a student "sees himself" in the literature. Let's just get him or her to read it -- and not just the newfangled, multi-cultural stuff, but the classics from which the new has evolved.

Yes, it still matters if a child reads the American and British authors whose works have been part of the curriculum for decades.

And in our classrooms, let's encourage creativity, but also show children how to take the bits and pieces that they have learned and to synthesize them into a breadth of knowledge.

(Oops, we got caught up in the fancy talk, too.)

Translated: Let's just teach them how to think and to communicate what they have learned.

So, see, it is not so hard.

There do not have to be pages of instructions, paragraphs of over-written jargon or hours of paperwork for already over-burdened teachers and administrators to have a standard.

It is about simply reinforcing the lessons many of us learned at our parents' knees -- and helping others understand the importance of those skills and goals.

One of the biggest problems when government gets involved in anything is the bureaucratic gunk it creates.

So let's junk the gunk and start over -- the right way.

Published in Editorials on July 17, 2014 12:15 PM