Thread: "Common Core" And The All-Too-Common Tendencies Of Heavy-Handed Government

The next generation’s education…

Posted by Michael Becker on Dec 1, 2013

I’ve been accused, more than once, of being hard on America’s teachers.

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Just for the record, and so we’re clear up front, I think America’s public school teachers are:

• Under-educated – a degree in education is not sufficient to qualify a person to empty trash cans;
• Under-worked – teaching public school is a part-time job;
• Dramatically over-paid – unionized public school teachers in Chicago, for instance, cost the city nearly $100,000 and Chicago’s HS “graduates” read, typically, at 6th grade level.

Now that that is out of the way, before you put out a contract on me, watch this gem. It was shot by a student at a suburban high school in Washington State. A suburban school. One with motivated students and classy parents who are certainly involved in their children’s lives and their education. Not one of those ghetto schools.

video at link below

Oh, and Common Core is nothing more than a project by progressive foundations and the US Department of Education to turn schools into the equivalent of reeducation camps for kids. Maybe we’ll be calling “schools” “pre-education camps” in the near future.

NOW, if you’d like to argue, please feel free to comment, I will respond.

Read more at http://joeforamerica.com/2013/12/nex...0hzatmty7lH.99

Common Core scandal: Medical and disciplinary reports on children hacked

Posted by EAGNEWS on Dec 3, 2013

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. – As the Florida Department of Education, Governor Rick Scott, former Governor Jeb Bush and key Florida legislators move forward to implement Common Core State Standards in the sunshine state a database in Long Island’s Sachem School District is compromised.

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Nancy Smith from Sunshine State News reports, “On Long Island earlier this month a hacker apparently was able to access records in the Sachem School District and leak personal student data to a web forum. The records included medical and disciplinary reports.” According to The Journal News, in Westchester, Rockland, Putnam counties, N.Y., the database uploads to Web Cloud run by inBloom, a nonprofit group funded by the Gates Foundation and supported by Amazon.

“Surprisingly, the breach didn’t come as a great shock to the community. Even before it transpired, parents and teachers were concerned about data collection and the potential of sharing it or stealing it,” writes Smith. Also reported in The Journal News, “More than 20 districts in the Lower Hudson Valley have pulled out of New York’s participation in the federal Race to the Top initiative, hoping that doing so will allow them to withhold certain data. Since the state has said that this strategy will not work, districts are now writing to inBloom directly and requesting that their student records be deleted.”
Governor Scott has raised concerns about the data mining portion of Common Core but has not supported legislation to either delay or stop its implementation in Florida. Florida Representative Debbie Mayfield (R-FL District 54) has introduced HB 25 to delay implementation until the costs and impact of Common Core can be determined.

Dr. Karen Effrem, President of Education Liberty Watch and a co-founder of the Florida Stop Common Core Coalition, and Randy Osborne, Director of Education for Heartland Research and the Florida Eagle Forum, did a Policy Analysis of Common Core in Florida. Effrem and Osborne state, “The Common Core standards, along with the aligned curriculum and the mining of nearly 400 data points reveal that the goal of the standards is not simply to improve academic achievement but also to instill federally determined attitudes and mindsets in students including political and religious beliefs. According to the US Department of Education, this will be carefully regulated through the extensive data-mining of both students and teachers using devices such as ‘facial expression cameras,’ ‘posture analysis seats,’ ‘a pressure mouse,’ and ‘wireless skin conductance sensors’ as well as the use of the actual assessments. The federal government asserts that to secure their definition of improving the quality of education, a student’s right to privacy may be sacrificed.”

Commenting on the Sachem School District data compromise Effrem states, “A number of standards will be used for the psychological training of children starting at a young age … One of the main goals for uniform national assessments is for the federal government to have access to highly personal individual student data. It isn’t just teachers and school officials who can request and get students’ records. It’s also ‘a contractor, consultant, volunteer, or other party to whom an agency or institution has outsourced institutional services or functions … Common Core completely strips the child of privacy.”

Dr. Effrem writes, “The utter failure of proponents of Common Core to make rational arguments about this imposed system of inferior, psychosocial workforce training standards, national tests and data collection has stimulated them to lash out to mock and marginalize anyone who opposes it. U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has joined former Governor Jeb Bush and Senate President Don Gaetzin now bipartisan sneering derision of parental and citizen concerns. Duncan created a firestorm on Friday (11/15) with his mocking, racist attack on mothers that oppose Common Core: ‘It’s fascinating to me that some of the pushback is coming from, sort of, white suburban moms who — all of a sudden — their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought they were, and that’s pretty scary. You’ve bet your house and where you live and everything on, ‘My child’s going to be prepared.’ That can be a punch in the gut.’” Duncan has since issued an apology for his remarks.

A new Facebook group, Moms Against Duncan (MAD), has almost 1600 members since then and the comments on Twitter have been overwhelmingly critical. Conservative columnists and liberal moms have joined together in righteous anger against these thoughtless remarks.

History tells us the larger the Common Core database becomes the more likely it will be target by those who would do children harm. Will Governor Scott and the proponents of Common Core listen to moms and take heed? Time will tell.

Authored by Dr. Richard Swier - Watchdog.org

Read more at http://joeforamerica.com/2013/12/com...kMsx1GWQkmG.99

Common Core creates educational ‘iron cage’

Posted by EAGNEWS on Dec 3, 2013

STEUBENVILLE, Ohio – Many parents are feeling powerless in resisting the implementation of Common Core in Catholic schools, according to a recent article in Crisis Magazine by Anne Hendershott, a professor of sociology at Franciscan University of Steubenville.

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Hendershott recalls sociologist Max Weber’s warnings from the early 1900s, where he described a dystopian future where a “caste of functionaries and civil servants monopolize power over the lives of citizens.” The resulting bureaucracies “would concentrate large amounts of power in a small number of people—creating a technically ordered, rigid, dehumanized society—eventually trapping all individuals in systems based on efficiency, rational calculation and control.” As he termed it, society would become an “iron cage.”

This disturbing scenario sounds all too familiar to Hendershott when it comes to Common Core whose goals differ greatly from the goals traditionally held by Catholic schools. As Cardinal Newman Society president Patrick Reilly recently pointed out, Catholic schools are meant to “nurture students’ souls and teach them the critical skills needed to maintain a vibrant culture.”

Parents are organizing against Common Core by “forming Facebook groups, creating advocacy organizations, contacting their parish priest, their bishop, and their diocesan school superintendents,” but their voices don’t seem to be heard against the “bureaucracy in Catholic K-12 education,” according to Hendershott’s Crisis column…

The National Catholic Education Association (NCEA) has tried to reassure parents that Common Core is not a curriculum, but Hendershott points out that “standards drive curriculum.”

In fact, Catholic Education Daily recently revealed in anarticle that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has spent more than $10 million to create Common Core-compliant curricula, and that this demonstrates “the foundation’s intent to reach far beyond broad educational standards…to remake America’s schools.”

Hendershott argues that the “first educators” of children—the parents—should be heard. Instead, parents are batting against their own Catholic school leaders. She stated:

[The parents] might have expected a bureaucratic response from the federal government, but few would have expected such inflexibility from their own Catholic school leaders. Now, as the nation is moving to a predictable, efficient, and reliable form of delivering educational “products” through the federalization of K-12 education, we can expect—as Weber promised us—that such extreme rationality may result in the “disenchantment” of our Catholic schools also.

Franciscan University of Steubenville, where Anne Hendershott is a professor, is recommended in The Newman Guide for its strong Catholic identity.

Authored by Kelly Conroy
Originally published by Catholic Education Daily, an online publication of The Cardinal Newman Society.

Read more at http://joeforamerica.com/2013/12/com...gDP10e1HY44.99

Watchdog Networks


Yikes. Common Core is even going to shake up how your kids' teachers hand out grades.


Common Core even affects letter grades


watchdog.org
By Joy Pullmann | The Heartland Institute National curriculum requirements are influencing schools across the country i

Common Core even affects letter grades

By Admin / December 3, 2013

By Joy Pullmann | The Heartland Institute
National curriculum requirements are influencing schools across the country in myriad ways, big and small.

One not-so-obvious change is that Common Core standards can influence how teachers grade student work.
Common Core's effects are long-reaching -- including confusing teachers and alienating parents.

Common Core’s effects are long-reaching — including confusing teachers and alienating parents.

Teachers have used standards-based grading almost as long as U.S. schools have been required to conform to centrally determined standards — about 20 years.

But the practice, in which teachers give students not the familiar A-F letter grades or 0-100 percentile grades — but numbers or letters like 1 through 4 or S, M, P — has ticked upwards since 46 states adopted national standards in 2010, said Ken O’Connor, a Canadian consultant who has worked with hundreds of schools across North America.

The nationwide shift to Common Core has meant more interest in standards-based grading in middle and high schools and in states requiring similar approaches, he said. Many also relate the practice to “proficiency-based grading.”

This year in Oregon, and by 2016 in Maine, new laws require teachers to assess students according to state standards, which is the idea behind standards-based grading.

“There definitely is, as far as I can see, momentum gathering,” O’Connor said.

Source: Standards-based education
No Child Left Behind’s requirement since 2001 that states test students according to set standards led to a rising interest in standards-based grading, said Tammy Heflebower, vice president of the Marzano Research Laboratory, a nationally-known organization promoting standards-based instruction.

“I’ve seen (standards-based grading) be on a natural trajectory over the last seven, eight, maybe 10 years,” she said. “But now Common Core is going to help focus us because we have a common metric by which to measure kids … I would anticipate a resurgence of interest because we’re going to look at competency over point-grabbing, so to speak.”

As schools adopt standards-based grading, whether to tie instruction more closely to Common Core or for other benefits proponents claim, some parents and teachers are not impressed. They say the grading scale is confusing and grants too much authority to those outside classrooms.

Objective or subjective?
In standards-based grading, teachers rate students on specific skills, and often give several different ratings per assignment if it measures several skills. In Florida’s Clay County, for example, teachers label student work “mastery,” “progressing,” or “insufficient progress.” Report cards look different, too — they’re typically longer and more detailed.

“In a pure standards-based system you would have only two levels: proficient and not proficient,” O’Connor said. “The symbolic representations — A-F, percentages — they’re artificial constructs that very often are only identified in symbolic terms. A is 90 to 100, B is 80 to 89. That doesn’t mean anything because … if it’s an easy test on an easy skill, a high score may mean a low level of performance.”

He said a central goal of standards-based grading is to relate grades and teacher comments directly to the learning outcomes states demand, making grades more objective, based on outside criteria rather than teacher judgment.

“When I went to school 25 years ago, teachers decided what they taught, how they taught it and how to grade it,” Heflebower said. “The standards movement has helped make more consistent what we teach (from) teacher to teacher, school to school, across a state.”
Some teachers like the idea, and some don’t.

When Tracie Happel’s school district in southwestern Wisconsin began phasing in Common Core, it also decided teachers would use standards-based grading. The second-grade teacher joined the committee that designed the new system. New quarterly report cards were initially eight pages long, but the committee pared that down to one double-sided page. Now K-8 students are graded M for mastery, P for progression and L for learning.

“Kids were more excited when I told them they got an A-plus, or a B. They know that’s pretty good,” Happel said. “But when you give them a P or M they don’t know what that means.”

While her committee was excited about the change — “We’re so in the 20th century!” Happel mocked — the rest of the teachers in her grade level were not.

“They said, ‘Why are we doing this? How am I going to grade that? How do I know what an M is?’” Happel said. “Some just said ‘I’m converting them to percentages’ … I think people grade based on feeling and keeping score.”

It was different for Patricia Scriffiny, a 20-year Colorado high school math teacher. Before she switched to standards-based grading nine years ago, “I had some students, they tended to be mostly girls, who would work very hard, do every scrap of extra credit, and fail miserably on tests. ”

“They really weren’t learning, but they were being compliant,” Scriffiny said. “Students who were more likely to be boys would fall apart on student-management issues like staying organized and turning in homework. They would just sort of disappear, get Ds or Fs, and quit engaging because they were learning the math but their grade never reflected their learning.”

She said shifting her methods is the only thing that has kept her a teacher. Now, rather than traditional percentile grades, she crafts and grades assignments according to specific learning objectives from Common Core standards and Advanced Placement curriculum.

Teacher autonomy, input key
One of Scriffiny’s colleagues, however, feels exactly the opposite.

“She’s like, ‘If I was mandated to do that I would retire,’” Scriffiny says. “If teachers are told, ‘You’re going to do this’ and they don’t understand why, that tends not to work very well.”

Jenny Larson’s Minnesota school district recently moved into standards-based grading along with Common Core. The high school English teacher complained publicly in school board meetings about three aspects:

• The district attempted to tell teachers they could not assign a zero for work students didn’t turn in. Teachers could only grade what work students did turn in. So many students stopped turning in work. The district also said teachers couldn’t penalize students for late work, so a third of Larson’s AP class turned in everything right at the end of the semester, leaving her with hundreds of pages to grade in just a few days.
• The district told teachers to stop including behavior in student grades. “My colleagues in [physical] ed had a big problem with that,” she said. “It should be part of the standard because sportsmanship is one of the rules for professional sports.”
• The district decided that the work students did in class throughout the year could only be worth 20 percent of the final grade. So, Larson says, many of her students decided such work didn’t matter much, “not realizing there’s a payoff for that” because regular practice improves performance on big items like tests and papers, she noted.

After the first year and many complaints, the district changed its grading policies for the first two items, allowing teachers to give students a “drop-dead date” for assignments and a failing grade for assignments they didn’t turn in.

Practically, also, the new system is more complex and time-consuming.

“When I’m scoring a 60-question literary terms test, I have to translate that into a number: four, three, two, one, zero. I write down the number they get — 57, 44 — and then translate that into four, three, two, one,” she said. “And I also want them to know how close they came, so I have to enter both of those in my gradebook … If we have six different things we’re measuring in a paper, I have to enter each separately or figure out how to average them, so it’s taking twice as long. And I’m more prone to error, too, especially with a ten-point quiz. Ten would be [graded] a four, but sometimes I don’t enter four so I have to double-check.”

Two years into the practice, after lots of rethinking and explaining to students and parents, Larson says she generally likes standards-based grading. Her district, like many, translates their 0-4 scale into A-F grades and the standard grade point averages for high school transcripts.

“We don’t have extra credit,” she said. “Students would say, ‘In junior high I was getting a C or D and doing all these extra credit things to get a B,’ and here they actually have to work. I also like to give them assignments related to a standard. It removes the idea from students that they are getting busy work—it makes it very purposeful.”

What about the parents?
A main reason Happel dislikes standards-based grading is its propensity to alienate parents from their kids’ education.

“It’s too detailed and parents don’t know what it means,” she said. “And parents say ‘How come my child doesn’t get an M (for mastered)?’ So then you have to bring out evidence of how the child is doing. And in the state of Wisconsin everyone passes. We’ve been told you can’t give an M unless you can absolutely prove it, so no one ever gets an M.”

Parents often require lots of explanation if teachers and schools switch to the system, Scriffiny said.

“I’ve had every reaction on the spectrum you can imagine,” Scriffiny says, “but I’ve had parents come in and say ‘This makes more sense to me because this is how I’m evaluated at work.’ The ones who fight it the most are the parents of honors kids. They’re the ones who are good at playing school, aren’t they? They’re very good at jumping through hoops.”

James Wilson is a parent and teacher near Puget Sound. He also has overseen curriculum for the Georgia department of education and been a principal of several schools. His daughter’s school district uses standards-based grading, and he has been required to use it as a teacher.
“As parents, we hate it,” he said. “It tells us nothing other than our schools have implemented another screwball idea.”

Depending on the district, often most of a child’s grade under standards-based grading will come from large assignments like tests, with the remaining 10 to 20 percent coming from daily work, he said.

“The kids understand and they work it, and they say, “Hey, why should I do this, it doesn’t count for anything,’” he said. “So as a result they don’t do the practice that they really need to do to perform well on the assessments when it does count."

Districts also typically convert standards-based grades into A-F grades or a 4.0-based system for a transcript, since colleges are used to those grading scales, which to Wilson makes the entire enterprise seem a waste of time. He says he’s seen no evidence the approach improves student learning, and it seems more of a fad that administrators pass around at conferences.

‘Infinite part of what we do’
Wilson’s larger problem with standards-based grading is philosophical: “We’ve moved away from content knowledge to wanting process.”

“You’re taking standard C, whatever standard C is, and you’re focusing on that to give a kid a rating … it cuts out providing kids with the greater liberal arts education,” he said. “You focus on such a minute part of something that is so much larger … and you realize the kid can do this and it looks like the kid is doing well but they really can’t do anything with the larger subject area.”

Because she decided to use this kind of grading on her own, Scriffiny said she’s had many conversations with colleagues about what it means to evaluate student work. Teachers’ beliefs about human nature and how to mold young people’s character influence their grading, she said.

Some of her colleagues believe kids should be penalized for late or poor work, because the real world often won’t give them second chances. Scriffiny said kids need to learn the power of forgiveness, and their ability to change labels others have given.

“I feel like a priest,” she said. “People I’ve just met tell me these horrible experiences they’ve had with math teachers. How you value people, it’s an infinite part of what we do. It’s visceral…. Sometimes the powers that be forget that. They think it’s just an instructional strategy, no big deal, we can just change it.”

Joy Pullman is a research fellow of The Heartland Institute and managing editor of School Reform News. Contact her at jpullmann@heartland.org.

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At question: Huckabee’s common conservative core

Posted by Mike DeVine on Dec 3, 2013 in Education


Why are self-described conservatives having a discussion about federal government-run reforms in any area of American life, much less Common Core education reform?
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Didn’t we learn enough from President Jimmy Carter’s (Medicaid-like) Education Department-bribery of state officials with federal dollars to replace reading, writing and arithmetic with amorphous “diversity”, trashing of American values with multiculturalism and “tolerance” only for low grades and expectations? President Ronald Reagan desperately wanted to de-fund and eliminate Carter’s meddlesome intrusion into parents’, localities’ and states’ most intrinsic rights under the Ninth and Tenth Amendments but was “only” able to topple inflation and the Evil Soviet Communist empire. And didn’t we learn from the good intentions of President George W. Bush’s fight against the “soft bigotry of low expectations” that more children get left behind even when the federal government tries to hold itself accountable? Obviously.

We share fellow conservatives’ desire to raise education standards in an America so dumbed-down that, arguably for the first time in its history, it re-elected a Chief Executive that left most of us worse off economically than we were four years earlier. Yet:

As conservative opposition to the national K-12 education standards known as Common Core continues to grow, a leading figure in the Republican Party is lending his voice in support of the system. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who ran for his party’s presidential nomination in 2008, penned a letter Tuesday to lawmakers in Oklahoma, urging them to stick by the standards even as Michigan, Indiana and other states have backed away from them.
“It’s disturbing to me there have been criticisms of these standards directed by other conservatives,” he said. “I’ve heard the argument these standards ‘threaten local control’ of what’s being taught in Oklahoma classrooms. Speaking from one conservative to another, let me assure you this simply is not true … They’re not something to be afraid of; indeed they are something to embrace.”
The standards have come under increasing fire from conservatives who see them as a de facto federal takeover of education. While the Obama administration didn’t have a hand in writing Common Core, it has pushed states to adopt the standards by tying its ” Race to the Top’ grant money and other perks to their implementation. Common Core doesn’t establish a national curriculum but instead lays out specific facts and concepts students are expected to master at the end of each grade level, with the ultimate goal of increasing college and career readiness among American young people.

So far, only Indiana has adopted Common Core while Michigan and North Carolina are backing away from their initial interest. And no wonder, when President Obama has decided it’s the ”right thing to do.” Not sure if he’s yet promised that if you like your school you can keep it, period; but why, after turning over 1/6th of the economy and our very health to federal government minders would we surrender the right to educate our children, in any way, to Washington, D.C.?

The federal government of the United States was totally un-involved in education as We the People of thirteen colonies threw off the British Empire, established the greatest standard of living for its people in the history of the world, set the world standard in science, and defeated Nazism and Communism.

Mike Huckabee and others should understand that the quickest path to once again be that exceptional America is for Thomas Jefferson’s vision of states as “laboratories of democracy” to once again be unleashed with a common core of independence and innovation rather than that the latest once-size-fits-all-solution from “experts” be foisted upon parents and their student-children.

Next thing you know kids in high school will be passing out in the afternoon from arugula-heavy meals prescribed by First Lady Michelle Obama. Oh yeah, that already happened. Mr. Huckabee, congrats on the epic weight loss, but we don’t need no stinkin’ arugula or Common Core!

Mike DeVine‘s Right.com @ Joe For America.com
“One man with courage makes a majority.” – Andrew Jackson


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Common Core: Schools Threaten CPS Visits If Kids Don’t Show For Testing

Posted by: Allison Martinez Posted date: December 03, 2013

Last week at a meeting on Common Core, New York State PTA Education Coordinator Bob Aloise gave a presentation to parents regarding Common Core and associated Testing. He said that a school district may call child protective services if a parent refuses to allow a child to take the state assessments on the grounds of “educational neglect.”



What kind of parent-teacher organization has the PTA become?

This is not the first time a threat like this has been issued. In an email in the last school year, an Oceanside Union Free School principal told a parent who wanted to keep her child home during the testing period that,

“If without medical justification, Joseph is absent from school on any day during the Assessment period, the District will deem this absence as unexcused. Further, if you keep Joseph home from school during the Assessment period, without medical verification, it is within the District’s discretion to deem these absences as indicia of educational neglect, which would leave the District little choice but to contact Child Protective Services (“CPS”).”

Of course, these are the threats that can be documented. There are dozens of other reports that are not as clearly documented. But when states have to send child protection services to enforce testing, one has to wonder what kind of chapter our nation has entered.
These reports are not on a tin-foil web page or a personal blog, but on Ed Week. Ed Week is a website that caters to the
education profession and is generally regarded as a having a strong pro-common core bias. Peter DeWitt writes,

Over the 19 years I have been in education, I have seen CPS visit students who were being neglected, sexually and physically abused, or living in deplorable conditions. CPS has more important work to do then maintain Martial Law on parents who opt their children out of testing. Unfortunately, there have been situations where principals have threatened to call CPS on parents who choose to opt out their children out of testing….

We have indeed lost common sense when it comes to education if school leaders threaten to call CPS.

Education martial law is an apt description of the matter. To use child protective services if a family fails to comply is not acceptable in a free society. Child protective services should not be used for political agendas. It should be used for legitimate cases of abuse and neglect. To use them as gestapo agents for the school district creates a climate of fear and mistrust between the government, schools, and the families.
If for some reason you can’t home school your child, then get active in the local PTA and help families opt out of Common Core testing. Write your legislators to stop common core. For parents interested in the opt-out-of-testing movement, unitedoptout.com has information by state level.


Allison Martinez

Allison Martinez writes as the “Arctic Conservative” lives in northern Alaska. An economist by training, AC lives as an economic refugee on the edge of the country.
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http://freepatriot.org/2013/12/03/co...-show-testing/


Their aim is no longer for our children!! Well past time to home school!!!!!!

Common Core supporters to White House: Please shut up

Posted by EAGNEWS on Dec 7, 2013

WASHINGTON, D.C. – It was supposed to be easier than this.

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The powers behind Common Core thought they could overhaul the nation’s education system while no one was watching – during the chaotic aftermath of 2008’s Great Recession – and that when Americans finally discovered the change a few years later, they’d meekly fall in line and accept it.
That’s not happening.
It turns out that average Americans don’t like the fact their children’s education is getting a total makeover and they didn’t have any say in the matter. A growing number of these disgruntled Americans are raising hob with their local lawmakers to stop Common Core.
Supporters realize their experiment is in trouble. They also understand the Obama administration’s warm embrace of Common Core only adds to fears that the whole thing is a backdoor attempt to federalize public education.
That’s why some supporters are asking, in the nicest way possible, for the administration to stop talking about Common Core.
“I think it’s time for the Obama administration and (U.S. Education Secretary) Arne Duncan to take a back seat,” Michael Brickman, national policy director at the pro-Common Core Thomas B. Fordham Institute, told The Washington Times.
“They’ve tried to jump in and cheerlead. It’s time for the states to tell the administration that ‘we’ve got it from here,’” Brickman added. “They think it’s a good idea, but it’s not their place or any administration’s place to be pushing states on this. It’s something that started as a state initiative and it should continue to be a state initiative.”
Brickman is half-right. The Obama White House has been using the old “carrot and stick” routine to get states to adopt Common Core – ranging from offers of extra K-12 funding (Race to the Top) to the avoidance of federal penalties (No Child Left Behind waivers).
The aforementioned Duncan has also used ridicule to pressure state officials into action. Duncan’s recurring message to them has been that only members of the “black helicopter” crowd oppose Common Core. (The dozens and dozens of well-regarded academics and scholars who have spoken out against the learning standards would disagree with that characterization.)
But Brickman is flat-out wrong when he says Common Core is state led. It’s been extensively documented that this experiment is the work of two private organizations – the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers – and their allies on various state school boards, most of whom have zero name recognition among voters.
Mississippi, for example, adopted Common Core solely on the approval of the state’s nine unelected board of education members.
Even American Federation of Teachers President Rhonda “Randi” Weingarten – a Common Core supporter – acknowledges the top-down nature in which the standards were imposed on the states.
“The public wasn’t involved. Parents weren’t involved. The districts weren’t involved,” Weingarten admitted to reporters this week.
Even if Common Core supporters convince Obama administration members to button their lips, the damage has been done. One Indiana lawmaker recently noted that Common Core has become almost as politically toxic as the new health care law.
That’s not to say that Common Core is going to be repealed. But it’s not the sure bet it appeared to be just a year or two ago.

Read more at http://joeforamerica.com/2013/12/com...q1p6WK1lysV.99

Joe the Plumber


We need strong voices to come out against common core and just as importantly we need to dismantle and de-fund the Dept of mis-education...



Huckabee now opposes Common Core, but what of DOE?



joeforamerica.com
JoeForAmerica took FNC host and former Arkansas governor and GOP presidential candidate, Mike Hickabee to task early last week for seeming to support Common Core writ large when he stated in a letter to Oklahoma lawmakers that they should stick by its higher standards:

Huckabee now opposes Common Core, but what of DOE?

Posted by Joe For America on Dec 9, 2013

Healthy debate within the conservative movement occurs, and often produces results. Democrats should try it sometimes.

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Mike Huckabee is now singing conservative’s anti-Common Core song.
JoeForAmerica took FNC host and former Arkansas governor and GOP presidential candidate, Mike Huckabee to task early last week for seeming to support Common Core writ large when he stated in a letter to Oklahoma lawmakers that they should stick by its higher standards:

“It’s disturbing to me there have been criticisms of these standards directed by other conservatives,” he said. “I’ve heard the argument these standards ‘threaten local control’ of what’s being taught in Oklahoma classrooms. Speaking from one conservative to another, let me assure you this simply is not true … They’re not something to be afraid of; indeed they are something to embrace.”

But later in the week, in the opening monologue for his eponomously-titled television show he backtracked from “what Common Core has evolved into:

We applaud Governor Huckabee’s eschewing of federal government involvement while supporting higher standards and accountability in edication at the state and local level. The first step towards that goal for national conservatives and Republican politicians in Washington, D.C. should be to vigorously push to abolish the federal Department of Education.
By all means, conservatives should be for voluntary sharing of good ideas for better educating the next generation, but we should have learned from President George W. Bush’s signature No Child Left Behind legislation that, like Obamacare, we can’t fix the inevitable failure of big government with bigger government.

Read more at http://joeforamerica.com/2013/12/huc...0IdrbBUhz8K.99

You mean he was for it before he wasn't????? DUHHHHHH All of a sudden he sees the error of his ways!!!!!! No leadership from any of these jack asses..It is not only about data mining it is brainwashing your children with the ideology they choose to use to indoctrinate your children..and it is all about control of you and yours from the cradle to the grave...Be smart be aware and Wake up America..

We need strong voices to come out against common core and just as importantly we need to dismantle and de-fund the Dept of mis-education...

Say YEA!! It appears their plan is on hold for right now....Be smart, Be Aware and Wake up America...

Public School Assignment: Think Like a Nazi

Students in some Albany High School English classes were asked this week as part of a persuasive writing assignment to make an abhorrent argument: “You must argue that Jews are evil, and use solid rationale from government propaganda to convince me of your loyalty to the Third Reich!”


Published on Dec 9, 2013
Students in some Albany High School English classes were asked this week as part of a persuasive writing assignment to make an abhorrent argument: "You must argue that Jews are evil, and use solid rationale from government propaganda to convince me of your loyalty to the Third Reich!"
Students were asked to watch and read Nazi propaganda, then pretend their teacher was a Nazi government official who needed to be convinced of their loyalty. In five paragraphs, they were required to prove that Jews were the source of Germany's problems.
The exercise was intended to challenge students to formulate a persuasive argument and was given to three classes, Albany Superintendent Marguerite Vanden Wyngaard said. She said the assignment should have been worded differently.
"I would apologize to our families," she said. "I don't believe there was malice or intent to cause any insensitivities to our families of Jewish faith."
One-third of the students refused to complete the assignment, she said.
Vanden Wyngaard said the exercise reflects the type of writing expected of students under the new Common Core curriculum, the tough new academic standards that require more sophisticated writing. Such assignments attempt to connect English with history and social studies.

http://www.timesunion.com/local/artic...

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Pass this along: A school district took the first step to reject Common Core rules.

Think this could start a national movement?


This school district is rejecting Common Core.
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By Ryan Ekvall | Watchdog.org – The Germantown school board says it can do better for students th







Wisconsin school district moving away from Common Core State Standards

By Ryan Ekvall / December 12, 2013



By Ryan Ekvall | Wisconsin Reporter
MADISON, Wis. – The Germantown school board says it can do better for students than the Common Core State Standards.
The board voted unanimously Tuesday to begin developing its own Germantown Model of Standards for Academic Achievement in January. Germantown is now the first district in the state to formally move away from Common Core, but school board members in other districts could follow.
PLAN B: The Germantown school board went with ‘plan B’ to move away from Common Core. ‘Plan C’ was the district’s assessment of sticking with those standards.source: Germantown school board agenda Dec 9

“We don’t want to be a mediocre district,” school board vice president Sarah Larson told Wisconsin Reporter. “We want to be a premiere district in Wisconsin.”
The district is already one of the highest performing districts in the state. US News & World Report ranked Germantown High School sixth in Wisconsin and in the top 5 percent of high schools nationally. District Administrator Jeff Holmes said sticking to the Common Core would take the district down a road of mediocrity.
But the school district won’t completely discard Common Core. That’s due in part to mandatory standardized testing aligned to the national standards, and teacher effectiveness and school report cards tied to student scores on those tests. Those tests are scheduled to be fully implemented in the 2014-15 school year.
Instead, the school district will use Common Core as a “reference point,” something the district can build on in some respects and ignore in others.
“If we could go back in time (and not adopt CCSS) it would be wonderful,” Holmes said. “But you don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. You have to be prudent. It has to be rationally thought out.”
The new district standards, he said, would result from collaboration between district administrators, school board members, teachers, parents, community members and even students.
Holmes said “everything is on the table.” The board might pick and choose some individual standards from the Common Core, other established more rigorous standards or develop their own to make a set of standards unique to Germantown. The process could take more than a year. In the meantime, the school district will continue to use Common Core as it has since the 2011 school year.
“Common Core is highly structured with the assumption that every kid is going to learn at the same pace,” Holmes said. “To me I see a
Germantown Superintendent Jeff Holmes said Common Core offers more of the same in education.

grand opportunity to be mindful of all the things around us. It’s an opportunity to move into a modern learning organization, to move away from a 19th century factory model.”
Curriculum director Brenda O’Brien said the focus to this point has been around what children should learn, as opposed to the process of how they learn. The school district will focus more on the process of learning in its curriculum, while developing more rigorous academic standards.
So what does all this look like in practice?
O’Brien gave the example of students with special needs having Individualized Education Programs – an educational plan tailored to the individual student with his or her learning disability, keeping the student’s strengths and weaknesses in mind. The IEP lays out where the student is now and sets educational goals for the year.
“We want to make something like that available to many students without placing labels on them; to make learning individualized,” she said. “We want to look at ‘How do we create an educational system for students so that it is personalized for them so they are successful?”
“I think it is a paradigm shift,” she said. “It is thinking about ‘What does education mean in the 21st century?’ We can’t continue with the way that education has been done over the past hundred years.”
She called the process the “Germantown way.”
While a recently released survey of district administrators showed most of them support the Common Core, other school board members have expressed concern about the standards, particularly in regard to local control and academic rigor.
Dan Rossmiller, executive director at the Wisconsin Association of School Boards, said he expects “vigorous debate” between school board delegates at the association’s annual conference in January about the position the lobby takes on Common Core.
“A number of school board members have raised questions and expressed concerns to me (about Common Core),” he said. “I think the general direction they would like to go is to have more rigorous standards than what they perceive the Common Core standards to be.”
No other school board to this point has gone as far as Germantown, but some of that may be due to the assessments and teacher evaluations tied to Common Core — agreements Wisconsin made with the federal government to get a No Child Left Behind waiver.
“The whole thing gets a little bit messy,” Rossmiller said. “The question, ‘Exactly what does all of this entail if you try to unravel Common Core?’ is probably what’s preventing more if it.”
But Holmes sees Germantown’s move as leading the way for other districts who aren’t satisfied with more of the same in education.
“I see this as a grand opportunity to be a leader in an organization that is looking to become highly relevant in the modern world. I believe this means more local control will be in place, and nobody cares more about our kids than the people in the community,” he said.
“Hopefully others see what we’re doing as a model,” he said. “People do have the prerogative to change their minds. If you see a better path, why not take it?”
Contact Ryan Ekvall at rekvall@watchdog.org, by phone at 608-609-6823 or on Twitter @Nockian

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