Ghost Breitbart Worried About Marxist Math

OMG, as if it weren't bad enough that Barack Obama is using the Common Core educational standards to decree that all schoolbooks will praise him and that 3 X 4 = 11, now the genius researchers at Dead Breitbart's Center for Duct-Taping Random Facts Together have discovered the secret agenda of the new standards: to sneak Marxist indoctrination into math classes. Which only stands to reason, since everything else in Common Core is aimed at teaching children to embrace socialism and death panels. 

Here is the dealio, according to Breitbartlet writer Dr. Susan Berry: there actually is a group called "Radical Math" which bills itself as

"a resource for educators interested in integrating issues of social and economic justice into their math classes and curriculum.”

It is a real website with actual teaching guides and suggestions for lessons, and it's clearly a high priority for the academic leftists who are running educational policy these days, as indicated by the fact that its last updates were in 2007. But you'd have to do more than read the Breitbart piece to notice, so hey, Clear And Present Danger! Won't someone think of the children?

Ah, but while that particular website seems obscure and not especially active, the push to radicalize children through numbers is obviously still very much alive, Berry reveals, because the group was founded by a guy named Jonathan Osler, and he is an actively radical teacher! Osler, she says,

teaches math and community organizing at a Coalition of Essential Schools (CES) high school in Brooklyn, New York.

Or at least, according to his LinkedIn profile, he did teach at El Puente Academy for Peace and Justice in Brooklyn, from 2001 to 2007. He's been in the Bay Area since 2007, working as a teacher, assistant principal, and principal. So far, this is looking like a pretty airtight case against Barack Obama's very real radical math curriculum. There are commies under every log table.

OK, so now, the next step in the ol' chain of evidence:

The CES reform movement, whose purpose is to indoctrinate students with a Marxist-Communist political and social ideology, had been supported and expanded through the efforts of President Obama and his fellow community organizer Bill Ayers when both worked on the board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge in the 1990s.

Of course, the primary proof that CES schools are "Marxist" is an article on a wingnut website asserting that CES is deeply linked with Bill Ayers, the go-to boogeyman for Obama scare stories. You won't find anything on the CES website about Marxism or revolution or communism, but that's just proof of how well they hide their radicalism. For godssake, just look at the terrifying radical principles at work in these schools:

1. Learning to use one's mind well

2. Less is More, depth over coverage

3. Goals apply to all students

4. Personalization

5. Student-as-worker, teacher-as-coach

6. Demonstration of mastery

7. A tone of decency and trust

8. Commitment to the entire school

9. Resources dedicated to teaching and learning

10. Democracy and equity (this principle was added later, in the mid-nineties)

So yeah, pretty scary stuff there. Oh, but "equity" can only mean forced redistribution of wealth at gunpoint, so there's that.

Once you turn CES schools into a Marxist revolutionary cell, there's all sorts of "proof" of connections to Obama and Common Core, since CES grew out of the ideas of Ted Sizer, an enormously influential education reformer who has posthumously become a communist largely because wingnuts say he was. And he worked with lots and lots of people, many of whom are big in education circles, and are indeed working on Common Core and with the Department of Education.

We aren't actually going to go much further into Berry's little guilt-by association fantasia, largely because she dun goofed at her very first step, which was suggesting that the lesson plans at that "Radical Math" website are absolutely, positively going to be incorporated into Common Core standards. She manages to find a couple of other loose connections -- for instance, Radical Math actually did establish a Conference in 2007 called Creating Balance in an Unjust World, and it will be holding a conference in Los Angeles this weekend. Also, at least one of the people organizing this year's conference is on the staff of the Stanford group that is designing assessments for Common Core. Wow, that's pretty astonishing -- people working in education actually go to a bunch of different meetings? Egad, the links go straight to Moscow, or maybe Beijing, or wherever the World Communist Conspiracy hangs out these days.

Not that any of Berry's dubious research needs to actually check out -- she had them drooling at the word "Marxist."

[ Big Government via a tip from Wonkette Operative Chascates]

 Follow Doktor Zoom on Twitter. He once bought a roll of Bounty paper towels, so has known associations with the Koch brothers.