A Parrot, Tooth, Tiger and Mule Went to Sign a Petition

"The 2nd number from eighteen, fourteen, twenty six, one and 29 is?

Three, 17 and nine: the 1st number is? "
White House nonsense

These are several of the questions I failed THIS time trying to sign in to sign a petition. I wish I'd kept the questions last three times as it never devolved to ones I could answer and several I sent out to math minds that told me to stop sending them this nonsense. It may well be that folks trying to sign the petition just gave up. I think so.

The first one today asked me how many appendages, then listed tiger (or elephant I forget), tooth, arm, then two other equally bizarre things.  I got it wrong.
And after ten or more of these answered one satisfactorially.
It was exactly what Common Core promises to do.
The irony in this I cannot adequately convey.

Everyone knows tooth counts as, what, zero?

Here is the petition:

We petition the Obama administration to:

Direct the Department of Education & Congress to Remove Annual Standardized Testing Mandates of NCLB and RttT

A President initiated both mandates. Now we call on the President to end the part that harms children.
Ending the controversial annual standardized testing is the first step toward ending the damage done by No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top.
No other country puts students through this incessant testing.
Let the long-established National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results continue to provide a national picture of student academic progress.
Each state will determine the proper role of standardized testing to meet their needs.

Many of us looked to Susan Ohanian, who at one time trained teachers in my District in math, who is promoting signing that petition above,  to understand what was going on with the changes under NCLB, and in my case, even before when the standards seemed to be elevating to holy grail.
Her website is a careful record of every article that ever was about these changes. Facts, carefully culled and saved. You could not find anything like it for free anywhere. If you want to research ed. changes, her site has the documents. You can see what happened to public ed. there.

As a teacher I know something else about Susan Ohanian, she wrote you back and took your classroom observations to heart. She befriended teachers like me and held our hands through dark days. It really did put things happening to me in context early on-like in 2004 when I first thought to write.  Her books on the destruction of Kinder, the corporate take over and so on were excellent, her background as an extraordinary teacher and writer -just defined teacher-leadership. So here we see a person that stood up because she felt she had to. If Susan Ohanian recommends signing a petition-it's a very good thing to put your name on- even if the White House appears to want to keep you from that with bizarre got ya questions. And, again, I regret not copying the truly odd ones I've gotten so far to show what I mean.

Long before ANY of these voices that now call for change rang out Susan Ohanian wrote and published to bring teacher voice to terrible things afoot.She inspired me to write.  I still find rereading her books an excellent thing to do- including ones pre-NCLB on math replacement units, I have one where you see what was going on on a certain date that I still use as a daily activity. And the cool thing is she didn't need an epiphany-didn't work on one side and then see the light. She got it all along. Just reading her book on the destruction of kindergarten has sustained me.

Sign the petition, a mere 4,000 makes it look like a movement is dead.