From FreedomProject Media:
Apparently, North Dakota’s education establishment thinks North Dakotans and their legislators are stupid, gullible, or both. But in fairness, they are not alone — state and federal officials all over America have been trying to dupe those they misrule into believing the toxic “Common Core” scheme was history. It’s not. In fact, it is as firmly entrenched as ever.
Facing a grassroots uprising over the dumbed-down national “education” standards pushed on to states by bribes and bullying from the Obama administration, North Dakota Department of Public Instruction (DPI) and their cohorts simply decided to re-brand the scheme. Now, instead of “Common Core,” the state has adopted “new” “North Dakota” standards. Unfortunately, though, they are essentially indistinguishable.
Among my chief content concerns, for example, is the education establishment’s absurd insistence on having children memorize so-called “sight words.” Basically, instead of actually reading a word by sounding it out phonetically, the children are expected to memorize “whole words” as if they were Chinese characters.
Reading expert Sam Blumenfeld, with whom I co-authored a book, dedicated many decades of his life to exposing this quackery, referring to “sight words” as “Thalidomide” for the brain. In short, he discovered what Boston schoolmasters had first exposed in the mid-1800s when the scheme was developed and rolled out there: the “whole word” method is a sure way to mass produce illiterates, regardless of what the education establishment has to say about it.
Under Common Core, students start memorizing sight words in Kindergarten. The relevant standard, CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RF.K.3.c, says: “Read common high-frequency words by sight (e.g., the, of, to, you, she, my, is, are, do, does).” Under the deceptively named “North Dakota English Language Arts and Literacy Content Standards” released this year, the relevant Kindergarten standard, NDCS.ELA-Literacy.RF.3.d, says: “Read common high-frequency words by sight. (e.g., the, of, to, you, she, my, is, are, do, does).”
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