This article in The Economist recounts the anxiety and confusion surrounding the adoption of the Common Core. Officials say it is a great thing, but parents are not so sure.
He writes:
“Why has New York decided to subject students to these exams well before the standards have been fully implemented in the classrooms? (Most states are holding off until 2015.) My daughter is a strong math student, and loves taking tests, but when she was given a practice test over the winter holiday that contained high-level work with fractions, division with three-digit numbers and even a dab of algebra, her eyes grew wide. Nothing like this had ever appeared in a lesson in her third-grade classroom. Her teacher has been scrambling to teach these concepts over the past few weeks to get the 8-year-olds ready, but it’s bound to be too little, too late. The teachers are not at fault: much of the content on the practice exams was a surprise to them as well. With school ratings and teacher evaluations hinging on the results, everyone has an investment in this perverse and premature exercise.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“Which raises the question: why now? Why has New York decided to subject students to these exams well before the standards have been fully implemented in the classrooms?”
Even if one were to accept the standards themselves, and the testing regime, there is simply no good answer to this question. Absolutely idiotic.
So they can close more schools and turn them over to the charter chain gangs…..this is a real estate plan cooked up by billionaires and their servants. All schools are now failing…the more the merrier.
If you really want to get depressed or enraged, I recommend reading the comments below the article lined above.
The answer is simple. They want base line data. They do not care about the children, they just want to collect data. That is all.
A money-grubbing scheme for the test-&-textbook companies who own our public oaficials.
If students fail the tests, there will be an accelerated push to get Common Core materials in the classroom.
Voila!
InBloom and Mudoch’s tablets will be at the ready to deliver ColemanCore in an instant.
Creepy ….I can’t get their evil faces out of my head..see here:
It is spooky. Have you seen this screen shot from the inBloom promotional video? This is how they view our kids: https://sites.google.com/site/schoolbelongstothechildren/
I feel a photoshop job coming on..with kids whose last names are Duncan, Obama, Gates, Rhee, Bloomturd…the whole gang.
We need to play us some Fugees up in here.
“Ready or not. . .here I come! You can’t hide. Gonna find you. . .and make you want me. . . you can’t run away from these styles I got . . .and anywhere you go my whole crew’s gonna know. . . Gonna find you and make you want me.”
I think I’ll begin compiling a sound track for all this education drama around the country. At least that would add something positive to the frustrations.
There is a song that fits every situation, no matter how remote the original intention of the song.
Give a Damn-Spanky and Our Gang: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57eqhOqy18c
Spanky & Our Gang
Give A Damn lyrics
Songwriters: STUART SCHARF, ROBERT DOROUGH
If you’d take the train with me
Uptown, thru the misery
Of ghetto streets in morning light,
It’s always night.
Take a window seat, put down your Times,
You can read between the lines,
Just meet the faces that you meet
Beyond the window’s pane.
Chorus:
And it might begin to teach you
How to give a damn about your fellow man.
And it might begin to teach you
How to give a damn about your fellow man.
Or put your girl to sleep sometime
With rats instead of nursery rhymes,
With hunger and your other children
By her side,
And wonder if you’ll share your bed
With something else which must be fed,
For fear may lie beside you
Or it may sleep down the hall.
[Chorus]
Come and see how well despair
Is seasoned by the stif’ling air,
See your ghetto in the good old
Sizzling summertime.
Suppose the streets were all on fire
The flames like tempers leaping higher
Suppose you’d lived there all your life,
D’you think that you would mind?
And it might begin to reach you
Why I give a damn about my fellow man;
And it might begin to teach you
How to give a damn about your fellow man
Reconize it as child abuse! Would you throw a child on the deep end of a pool before she could swim?
When I was a 3rd grader I was learned multiplication, and then in 4th grade I learned division. This was the stand back in the 1980’s, and our kids seemed much happier. This is insane! Maybe we should lock our kids in the closet, until the testing crazy is over!
Ideally the first day of kindergarten, they should make them take the SAT. Then they need to yell at them like Lou Gossett Jr. in An Officer and a Gentleman, “why don’t you quit now!” Don’t let them get to big for their britches.
The point is to make the kids fail. The kids fail, the schools are seen as failing, and then the parents want charter schools, get it? It’s funny how you discuss the common core like it is a serious effort for more rigor, etc. It was designed specifically so that most kids would fail and then the schools (and teachers) could be labeled as failing. The quicker they roll out the tests with the less preparation, the better it is for those who made these tests. Remember, they don’t want too many kids to pass these things.
It is a “serious effort for more rigor”. . . RIGOR MORTIS
John, this was the plan the entire time. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2012/12/07/americas-next-education-crisis-and-who-benefits/
The fix is in… Very, very sad that children and teachers are being used/abused. I never thought I’d have these words come out of my mouth but, I would homeschool my children if they were in k-12 today.
I do not even recognize the USA. During the Bush administration I felt embarrassed being an American. Today, I do not even recognize this Country. We are the WEALTHIEST NATION on the planet! And what are we best in? – childhood poverty, imprisoning people, most obese people, highest divorce rate and the highest rate of both illicit and prescription drug use. Should we all be chanting USA,USA…
http://radicalscholarship.wordpress.com/2013/04/18/open-letter-to-political-leaders-action-not-tributes-and-rhetoric/
All I want to chant is WTF, WTF…..
Please write to Arne: arne.duncan@ed.gov
You can write a million letters to Duncan or Obama. It doesn’t matter. He was put where is he is to break the schools for the corporate elite. It seems ironic, but that is his job. He takes orders from above. He doesn’t give a damn how many letters or protests there are. He is being paid to break the public schools. He has no free choice about any of this.
from the smartest economist I know– follow me here– I this helps explain the motivation for the Chaos Theoy in such full bloom in our education policy circles
When Professor John Hardman Moore taught me the lesson of Emile Dupuit’s astute observation of the French rail system in 1849, I realised how peripheral all other classes had been:
“It is not because of the few thousand francs which would have to be spent to put a roof over the third-class carriage or to upholster the third-class seats that some company or other has open carriages with wooden benches … What the company is trying to do is prevent the passengers who can pay the second-class fare from traveling third class; it hits the poor, not because it wants to hurt them, but to frighten the rich … And it is again for the same reason that the companies, having proved almost cruel to the third-class passengers and mean to the second-class ones, become lavish in dealing with first-class customers. Having refused the poor what is necessary, they give the rich what is superfluous”.
more: http://bit.ly/9OhJpV
somehow I think this might have something to do with why the powers that be are doing their damnedest to ruin public education in this country
And they can do it . . . there’s a lot of money riding on it
A word of caution: we all need to be aware of just what CCSS are and are not, where they came from, how they’re being implemented/imposed, and also how some right-wing anti-public-schools individuals and groups are rallying against CCSS for reasons antithetical to the goals of the pro-public-education movement. We can’t be bandwagon jumpers and be effective as a movement of thoughtful, determined, pro-all-children, pro-public-education parents/students/teachers, IMO.