As we noted several months ago, Glenn Beck has transformed his The Blaze network into a public policy organization dedicated to fighting the implementation of Common Core because he is convinced that it is going to lead to a 1984-like learning environment where students are strapped to computers and monitored at all times.
Leading this effort has been none other than David Barton, who, after hosting another gathering of anti-Common Core actvists and state legislators at Beck’s headquarters, sat in for Beck on his television program on Friday for a hour-long program dedicated to Common Core and who, during his opening monologue, played this misleadingly edited video of an educator supposedly saying that, under Common Core, it doesn’t matter if students think that 3 x 4 = 11 so long as they can explain how they arrived at that answer (skip ahead to 7:30 mark):
Following the clip, Barton said it showed that education under Common Core is not about “getting right answers,” which is fundamentally false, and Barton knows it.
As we pointed out earlier this month, this video has been misleadingly edited, since the speaker is cut off after supposedly saying that getting the wrong answer is not important when the full video shows that she then goes on to say that any student who answered that 3 x 4 = 11 would be wrong and would be corrected.
In fact, Beck’s own The Blaze network debunked the very clip that Barton played on the program last Monday:
The truncated clip features August’s statement: “But even under the new Common Core if even if they said 3 x 4 was 11, if they were able to explain their reasoning and explain how they came up with their answer, really in words and oral explanations and they showed it in a picture but they just got the final number wrong? We’re more focusing on the how and the why.”
An audience member then asks whether students will be corrected for giving the wrong answer.
“Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. We want our students to compute correctly. But the emphasis is really moving more towards the explanation, and the how, and the why, and can I really talk through the procedures that I went through to get this answer — and not just knowing that it’s 12, but why is it 12? How do I know that?” August replies.
A fuller video of the forum, however, reveals that August said first students should certainly know that 3 x 4 equals 12.
This is now the third time that we have found something debunked by The Blaze being repeated on Beck’s shows as statement of fact.
Maybe the people at The Blaze who help put together Beck’s programming ought to start reading their own reporting.
