The new website where teachers and parents can comment on the new tests has registered 150,000 hits in the 2 or 3 days since it was launched, according to Susan Ochshorn of ECE Policy Matters.

A great place to hear from teachers.

Categories Common Core, Parents, Resistance, Teachers, Testing

61 Comments Post your own or leave a trackback: Trackback URL

LLC1923 says:

April 4, 2014 at 11:20 pm

Todd Farley, Making the Grades: My Misadventures in the Standardized Testing Industry, pg. 242

“If I had to take any standardized test today that was important to my future and would be assessed by the scoring processes I have long been part of, I promise you I would protest; I would fight; I would sue; I would go on a hunger strike or march on Washington. I might even punch somone in the nose, but I would never allow that massive and ridiculous business to have any say in my future without battling it to the bitter, bitter end.”

Reply
- Bob Shepherd says:
  
  April 4, 2014 at 11:54 pm
  
  Amen
  
  Reply
tutucker says:

April 4, 2014 at 11:32 pm

I’m struggling with this new site. I’ve seen the letter presenting it, and the creators seem to support the testing. I also took the survey, and it was biased in favor of testing. I have a lot of concerns with this site.

Reply
- chemtchr says:
  
  April 5, 2014 at 12:05 am
  
  tutucker, Anthony Cody and Julian Vasquez Heilig are on the board. As I said earlier, I would trust either of them with my life if we were in Paris in 1944, and the site certainly isn’t going to bite anybody who post comments, one way or the other.
  
  I think we’re making a wise decision to participate in an open forum like this. It’s making a big impact on news services, and that may be because of the wide affiliations of the board. And, if somebody sold this idea to Pearson as a great public relations move, I would assume they’ve been fired by now.
  
  Reply
  - Bob Shepherd says:
    
    April 5, 2014 at 12:18 am
    
    agreed
  - tutucker says:
    
    April 5, 2014 at 12:37 am
    
    I’m not stating that there are people on the board that aren’t solid, good people. I also trust the people you mention, chemtchr.
    I’m not questioning them. I’m questioning the people of this site.
    I have seen the letter sent out with it and it has nothing to do with getting rid of the standardizing of our schools. When I took the survey, it was about making these high stakes test better and not getting rid of this harmful system all together.
    
    I wonder the purpose of the creator of this site? Do they want a seat at the testing company table? And why? We never seem to win when we’re at the table.
    
    And people like Anthony Cody and Julian Vasquez Heilig are on the ground everyday fighting for our public schools, but some on this board haven’t been vocal in this fight at all. I mean no disrespect to them. But I struggle with this site.
    
    And this is why I’m in this fight. . .
    
    I’m not in it to bandage it. I’m fighting for our children and still don’t know what the purpose of this page is for?
- chemtchr says:
  
  April 5, 2014 at 8:25 am
  
  Well, tutucker, you’re right that weasels and moles are trying to use it to claim they are taking a stand against Common Core, while they do the opposite. Randi Weingarten tweeted last night:
  
  Retweeted by John Kuhn
  Randi Weingarten ‏@rweingarten 13h
  Powerful stories and ideas from educators on #CCSS. We need to involve teachers in implementation, improvement http://testingtalk.org/
  
  So, after the spectacular success of the parent opt out movement in NY this week, and with the NYSED convention going on at this very moment, she’s out there wanting to “involve” teachers in the IMPLEMENTATION of the Common Core.
  
  Thus, she uses her union office to set teachers up against parents, as defenders of corporate education control.
  
  Reply
  - Bob Shepherd says:
    
    April 5, 2014 at 12:56 pm
    
    We need to involve teachers in implementation, improvement
    
    OMG
    
    That’s really sickening
  - tutucker says:
    
    April 5, 2014 at 8:26 pm
    
    You realize that this seems to be Lucy Caulkin’s agenda too in this new site as well.
Bob Shepherd says:

April 4, 2014 at 11:36 pm

Hundreds and hundreds of educators are getting on this site and telling the truth about these tests, that they are laughably bad, that they are invalid, that they are abusive.

I, too, had a lot of concerns about this site when it went up because I saw the names of a lot of people who have been collaborators with Education Deform among its creators.

But the site is performing a great service.

The ed deformers met in a backroom and cooked up the standards, VAM, and these egregious tests.

Now, the people will speak.

And it’s not going to be pretty.

The extraordinarily ill-conceived tests will kill ed deform. When the villagers get a load of these new tests, that’s when they will grab their pitchforks and shovels and track the education deformers to their lairs.

We unto the collaborators with deform when that happens.

Reply
- Bob Shepherd says:
  
  April 4, 2014 at 11:37 pm
  
  cx: Woe unto the collaborators with ed deform when that happens
  
  Reply
  - Duane Swacker says:
    
    April 5, 2014 at 7:42 am
    
    You mean collaborators like:
    
    Going Along to Get Along (GAGA): Nefarious practice of most educators who implement the edudeformers agenda even though the educators know that those educational malpractices will cause harm to the students and defile the teaching and learning process. The members of the GAGA gang are destined to be greeted by the Karmic Gods of Retribution upon their passing from this realm.
    
    Karmic Gods of Retribution: Those ethereal beings specifically evolved to construct the 21st level in Dante’s Hell. The 21st level signifies the combination of the 4th (greed), 8th (fraud) and 9th (treachery) levels into one mega level reserved especially for the edudeformers and those, who, knowing the negative consequences of the edudeformers agenda, willing implemented it so as to go along to get along. The Karmic Gods of Retribution also personally escort these poor souls, upon their physical death, to the 21st level unless they enlighten themselves, a la one D. Ravitch, to the evil and harm they have caused so many innocent children, and repent and fight against their former fellow deformers. There the edudeformers and GAGAers will lie down on a floor of smashed and broken ipads and ebooks curled in a fetal position alternately sucking their thumbs to the bones while listening to two words-Educational Excellence-repeated without pause for eternity.
Bob Shepherd says:

April 4, 2014 at 11:39 pm

Who will be the first–the hero superintendents and principals who will say, “No. I will not subject my children to this. I have a responsibility to them and to their parents”?

One here. Another there.

And soon, the whole country will follow suit.

And this monster, Son of NCLB, will be slain.

Reply
- Duane Swacker says:
  
  April 5, 2014 at 7:45 am
  
  I know of no administrator who have done so. Even the most vocal like Kuhn haven’t refused to institute these educational malpractices.
  
  Don’t hold your breath Robert, we need your insights and postings!
  
  Reply
  - Bob Shepherd says:
    
    April 5, 2014 at 12:58 pm
    
    Duane, some principals and teachers in Brooklyn just held a very, very public protest of these tests in front of their schools. Diane has posted material from several heroic refusenik principals and superintendents
  - Duane Swacker says:
    
    April 5, 2014 at 4:01 pm
    
    Bob,
    
    Have they told/ordered their staff to not give the tests?? And then send them back unopened, better yet opened with a few somehow missing?
  - Bob Shepherd says:
    
    April 5, 2014 at 4:06 pm
    
    with a few somehow missing
    
    lol
John Young says:

April 4, 2014 at 11:42 pm

Reblogged this on Transparent Christina.

Reply
Bob Shepherd says:

April 4, 2014 at 11:51 pm

“My goal is to help educators be part of the process of making better tests.”

Lucy, please.

No more standardized summative tests.

Put a stake in Son of NCLB.

Tests should cover the curriculum. They should be formative and disappear into instruction. They should be opportunities for authentic performance and creation.

Enough of the bullet-list-based Powerpointing of U.S. education. Enough of the extrinsic punishment and reward system.

Kill the beast.

Reply
Jon Awbrey says:

April 5, 2014 at 12:10 am

Yeah, but a lot of those hits are probably Robo-Agents of Pearson trying to mount a Denial-Of-Service attack …

Reply
- chemtchr says:
  
  April 5, 2014 at 9:29 am
  
  Some participants seem to have set this site up as a backfire to preserve Common Core from teacher outrage in the current imposition, so it can be rolled out again later. It has crossed my mind that Corporate Education Control may wish to expunge it from the record by now.
  
  backfire – a fire that is set intentionally in order to slow an approaching forest fire or grassfire by clearing a burned area in its path.
  
  The wind has shifted, and their backfires are advancing toward them.
  
  Reply
  - Bob Shepherd says:
    
    April 6, 2014 at 9:23 pm
    
    It really does seem that that is what is happening there, chemtchr. I think that some of these folks were so out of touch that they had no idea how strongly negative the actual reaction to these tests is around around the country. They believe the nonsense about 75 percent of teachers supporting the amateurish CC$$, for example. Some seem to be in shock. Some keep dropping notes into the threads thanking rare commenters for making “positive” suggestions for improvement
Bob Shepherd says:

April 5, 2014 at 12:12 am

Imagine this:

Here at our school, we don’t test, not in any traditional sense.

Kids learn things, and as they learn, they stop from time to time and take stock of what they have accomplished, of what they know and understand and can do. As they learn, there are many, many opportunities for them to do that kind of thing and to get feedback. I guess you could call what we do “testing,” but it disappears into and is seamless with instruction.

And, of course, our kids create things–poems and proofs, websites and booklets, speeches and press releases, computer programs and graphic designs. They argue with one another in Socratic seminars. They do projects. Amazing projects.

Our philosophy is, “We don’t care what score you get on some stupid test. We care whether you can write the code, design the page, calculate the course to sail bring that boat safely into harbor, teach that story, adapt that scene from that novel into a screenplay.”

I guess you can call that testing.

We don’t. We call it getting things done.

If a kid can write the HTML to create that webpage, I suppose that the creation of that webpage was a test, of sorts.

But why use such antiquated concepts and terminology?

The idiots wedded to backward, demotivating extrinsic punishment and reward models of education are the ones who talk about testing and measurement and data-based decision making and all that crap.

Sorry, we’re too busy learning stuff to bother. We’re too busy keeping up with our intrinsically motivated students to waste time on that stuff.

We’re too busy reading books to read your test prep and to take your tests.

Sorry. Sell your 19th-century factory model of education elsewhere.

Go sell that crap to Arne and Michelle. They don’t have much experience as educators. They might be gullible enough to take you seriously.

Reply
tutucker says:

April 5, 2014 at 12:42 am

This is a blog worth checking out too.
http://skrashen.blogspot.com/2014/04/testing-talk-weapon-of-mass-distraction.html?showComment=1396490026071

Reply
- Duane Swacker says:
  
  April 5, 2014 at 7:56 am
  
  And Krashen is quite correct in his observations.
  
  Reply
  - chemtchr says:
    
    April 5, 2014 at 3:53 pm
    
    I saw your comment about the GAGA’s, Duane. In my building, we’re moving toward resistance, and many have graduated to WAGA’s.
    
    They went along to get along, and the slope got more slippery, and they slid into the crap, and now how can they get any traction?
    
    When Monday comes, we go to work. I launch a new unit and try to carry on with a vulnerable and ambitious club project my students have undertaken. Our hearts and minds will be intensely engaged with the actual kids in the room with us. They’re beset on all sides, but they’re so young and game, and it seems like I can always raise their hopes one more time but what if that fails? Some rise up safe and secure, others, not so much.
    
    And nothing, NOTHING anybody has said on any side is any help whatsoever with that. I feel alone and sick of this whole thing.
  - Duane Swacker says:
    
    April 5, 2014 at 4:07 pm
    
    chemtchr,
    
    “And nothing, NOTHING anybody has said on any side is any help whatsoever with that.”
    
    I’m not quite sure what the “that” is referring to. Is it that some students don’t “rise up safe and secure”, that they are “beset on all sides” or perhaps that it is getting harder and harder to “raise their hopes” (perhaps over something you don’t believe in and believe is harmful to the teaching and learning process. Or some combination of the above?
    Thanks,
    Duane
  - chemtchr says:
    
    April 5, 2014 at 7:28 pm
    
    Very few colleagues actually undertook any teaching practices they considered harmful, inside their own classes. They didn’t resist publicly, or stand up and challenge bad policy at faculty meetings, but they taught like real teachers, because they are.
    
    I’m not actually better than them because I stood up and spoke out, I think, and neither are you. They teach. I teach, thou teachest, he and she teach, (it doesn’t teach, but the district keeps buying it anyway). We teach, y’all teach, and they teach.
    
    The kids put it together as best they can, and set out toward their own lives, so often with insufficient patrimony to sustain them.
    
    The politics is a secondary question for kids, and what we all need come Monday (and every day) is some breathing room to center on the core mission.
  - Peggy says:
    
    April 5, 2014 at 11:40 pm
    
    Come Monday to be able to go back into my room and teach is all I am asking. However, the monster of the, Kid of NCLB has now deemed my school a “focused” school and we have to “prepare” for the dreaded State visit where some retired teachers are getting paid to come to our school for 3 days and obliterate all we do. We have to spend HOURS creating 6 binders that “reflect” our school’s work and PROVE that we instruct via DATA results. So much emphasis on DATA that teaching is forgotten. It’s not just the tests. It’s an over emphasis on Data that is killing our teaching. Good teachers collect data every minute of the day and adjust accordingly. Can’t put that on paper.
  - chemtchr says:
    
    April 6, 2014 at 4:22 am
    
    You’re right, Peggy. We have to fight while we teach as best we can. I’ve been trying to teach while I fought as best I could.
    
    You think “education spring”, you hope for maybe some ducks and bunnies.
- chemtchr says:
  
  April 5, 2014 at 8:38 am
  
  I admire Krashen a lot, and am hoping he’ll address the new Common Core attack on ELL students, a new CCSS aligned travesty called WIDA.
  
  Strategically, though, he’s wrong in this case. Here is the response Cody made to him:
  
  “Anthony CodyApril 2, 2014 at 6:53 PM
  If the comments were filtered or restricted to picayune criticisms of the content of the tests I would agree with you. However, the content and substance of the posts really speaks volumes, and the effect of reading post after post, documenting the myriad problems, not only with these specific tests, but with standardized testing in general, is profound. I hope you will take a second look, and I hope people on our side of the debate will take advantage of this opportunity to document in detail the travesty under way.”
  
  Reply
Bob Shepherd says:

April 5, 2014 at 12:50 am

So, what are teachers, principals, and parents saying about these tests on TestingTalk.org?

The titles of their posts will give you an idea:

Authentic literature?
Test Designers should be ashamed
Parents – Sleeping Giant
When the tests don’t help kids
The Emotionall Fallout
Show Us the Tests!
Time to say No
Totally Disheartened
Horrendous
No educationally sound purpose
What is truly being tested?
What are you assessing
Proud of my kids, sick over their stress
Pearson has done it again
Pilot tests were not appropriate for students’ age levels
Who is this for???
Sending my child to private school until the dust settles
Stop the Madness
Disheartened and disgusted
Why did I come home and find my son beating a bush with a stick?
Students in tears
Assessment or hazing?
Developmentally inappropriate tests!
Trouble with testing
I am broken-hearted and angrey
No time for close reading.
The real cost of PARCC/Common Core
Follow the money
Opt out
At a loss
Opt out of SBAC test
Awful multiple-choice questions
MC Questions Tough
Difficult tools
Confusing Long Response Question
Directions are confusing
A travesty: Anxiety, not education
Smart Kid Hates Curriculum
Not a fan

Reply
- Nimbus says:
  
  April 5, 2014 at 6:55 am
  
  That is quite a list. It was also fascinating to read the thread about how the state-promoted modules from engageNY did not prepare students for these tests. Teachers in many districts were forced by administrators to use them verbatim. Now that is a story I’d like the MSM to pursue.
  
  Reply
  - NY teacher says:
    
    April 5, 2014 at 9:44 am
    
    It would be a very difficult story to appreciate if you have not lived it.
    Unfortunately many non-educators would see it as just one more example of whining teachers making more excuses for their perceived incompetence. These CCSS assessments are test-prep-proof because they are devoid of content and do not test teachable, concrete skills. As long as they remain vague, abstract, convoluted, syntactic nightmares, and way too long, we teachers should simply go back to basics and let the chips fall where they will. Once VAM related evaluations are defeated in court the toxic atmosphere we work under will be lifted..
  - NY teacher says:
    
    April 5, 2014 at 9:51 am
    
    Three days of testing and not one test item related to content knowledge, beyond the vague concepts of setting, author intent, or tone. How is that possible? A kid can go through all of this and we still don’t know if they can distinguish between nouns, verbs, or adjectives.
    Similes v metaphors? Really?
  - Bob Shepherd says:
    
    April 5, 2014 at 12:48 pm
    
    NY: exactly. It’s a travesty.
CitizensArrest says:

April 5, 2014 at 1:39 am

The results will be interesting and mostly ignored. Last time I checked the site after giving my input, a rather large majority of the comments were anti-testing, and the pro testing ones were transparently formulaic. This is another effort we have to make even if it too is marginalized due to the pro testing side of the coin not getting the answers they wanted in spite of the mild but obvious pro testing bias on the site. With Anthony and Julian on the job, we will get things we can use against high stakes testing unless the pro testing folks buy “likes” from some click farm. I find it curious that testing companies now seek input when we’ve seen objections raised in the past about bad questions or test design that reached a wider audience but resulted in no changes to the test. I don’t think the Pro testing side will get anything new from this in terms info for opposition research, and I do think we will have yet another example of our positions being proved correct.

Reply
- Bob Shepherd says:
  
  April 5, 2014 at 3:00 am
  
  Whatever the outcome from this site, it provides a model for effective resistance to deform generally, going forward.
  
  Reply
- tutucker says:
  
  April 5, 2014 at 8:34 pm
  
  I’m not convinced a seat at the table will help us. I’m not into creating better tests for a horribly flawed system in the first place.
  I’m not convinced I want Lucy Calkins as our spokesperson at that table. If you don’t follow her prescribed program, you don’t get to be in her group. I’m not sure she trusts teachers to be professionals.
  I don’t think this site helps us at all, but instead prolongs the fight against the corporate take over of our public schools.
  Do most of those on the committee believe that the system is flawed? And it serves a neoliberal/free market purpose? All of the sudden we are making ground on fighting this corporate take over by opting out and then this site comes out??
  Makes me wonder. .
  
  Reply
  - chemtchr says:
    
    April 6, 2014 at 4:16 am
    
    tutucker, you are so right. See my new comment at the bottom. These people took money to engage teachers in writing the “next generation” PARCC tests. See my new comment at the bottom.
    
    Eye Popping.
  - Bob Shepherd says:
    
    April 6, 2014 at 9:31 pm
    
    Here’s the note that I left on TestingTalk.org:
    
    Testing should be of the curriculum, not of abstracted skills.
    It should disappear into learning and doing. As an embedded, integral part of a learning process, it should be specific, brief, and formative. As doing, it should be concrete accomplishment. Don’t tell me how well this person did on the test on his or her knowledge of HTML and JAVA. Show me the web page she developed. Show me the code she wrote.
    
    Isolated summative testing for testing’s sake belongs to an extrinsic punishment and reward approach to education that is inherently demotivating. It’s abusive and backward.
    
    It is not by means of invariant standards and invariant standardized testing that we recognize the unique potentials of students and develop intrinsically motivated learners along unique pathways appropriate to their unique interests and abilities so that they can be prepared for the unique places that they will make for themselves in a complex, diverse, pluralistic society.
    
    The last thing we need is factory schools attempting to mill students to spec in accordance with an invariant bullet list of hackneyed, backward, pedestrian, unimaginative, puerile “standards,” like the CC$$, prepared by amateurs.
    
    It is time for people to stop collaborating and resist. We all know that these completely unnatural, completely inauthentic summative testing situations make impossible the very approaches to exploring and creating texts that we encourage our students to take. What is done on these tests is not anything that any of us would call reading and writing. Let’s stop pretending that that is OK. It is not OK. These tests are obscenities. And so are the invariant and amateurish and prescientific CC$$ in ELA. We need to stop saying, let’s try to improve them. The Education Deformers have herded us all into this ghetto. Are we to spend our time here discussing how we might get them to treat us a little more kindly? Are we to petition for larger daily bread rations? Or are we going to resist? There are more of us than there are of them. It’s time to say no to Education Deform. Those of you who created this invaluable site have spent lifetimes thinking about these matters. You all know better than to continue encouraging this stuff. Encouraging acceptance of these amateurish, invariant standards and of these tests just hastens the metathesis of the Education Deform cancer throughout our K-12 system. You are leaders. Lead. You have done so by creating this site. Do so by speaking out, unequivocally. Stop the tests. Stop the abuse. Encourage voluntary, competing guidelines instead of invariant standards issued by CCCCMiniTru.
    
    Do not collaborate with the Vichy regime that has taken over our schools. Push back against the CC$$, Son of NCLB, NCLB Fright Night II: The Nightmare Is Nationalized. Push back against the establishment of a Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth. Push back against the Powerpointing of U.S. education via bullet lists of invariant standards. Demand open-sourced, voluntary, competing standards, frameworks, guidelines, lesson templates, and learning progressions put forward by independent scholars, researchers, curriculum developers, and practitioners on an open wiki. Allow teachers to take back education from the plutocrats and the politicians and the sycophants and toadies among Educrats who serve them. Demand time for teachers to submit their own practice to continual reflection and refinement via Lesson Study. Real continuous improvement in education will come from the bottom up, from empowered, autonomous teachers. Real improvement flows from the bottom up. You know what flows from the top down. You are seeing that in the responses on these pages. Stop the testing. It is child abuse
Conny Jensen says:

April 5, 2014 at 2:11 am

Imagine if all those who visit the website Testing Talk, would also sign the White House petition to stop standardized testing!

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/direct-department-education-congress-remove-annual-standardized-testing-mandates-nclb-and-rttt/1lSSvnYK

Reply
- Bob Shepherd says:
  
  April 5, 2014 at 3:01 am
  
  I signed this. I hope others here will do so as well.
  
  Reply
  - Laura H. Chapman says:
    
    April 5, 2014 at 1:57 pm
    
    I did, and I think that path holds promise for media attention.
Bob Shepherd says:

April 5, 2014 at 3:42 am

The undead son of NCLB . . .

NCLB Fright Night II: The Nightmare Is Nationalized

Starring PARCC (spell that backward) and SBAC. Collectively, the Common Core College and Career Ready Assessment Program, or C.C.C.C.R.A.P.

Thrills! Chills! Rigor!

Preview audiences are unanimous: It’s a horror show the like of which you have never before seen!

Coming to a school near you.

Reply
- NY teacher says:
  
  April 5, 2014 at 9:46 am
  
  Send lawyers, guns, and money – the CCRAP has hit the fan.
  
  Reply
Peggy Robertson says:

April 5, 2014 at 11:02 am

I oppose this site with every bone in my body. It is a distraction.

Participation in the TestingTalk website is all to push toward this goal – Lucy states, ““My goal is to help educators be part of the process of making better tests.” MAKING BETTER TESTS. http://www.ecepolicymatters.com/archives/2126

Eye on the ball. We do not need better tests. Refuse them.

Reply
- NY teacher says:
  
  April 5, 2014 at 11:15 am
  
  I have noticed a number of shill-like comments.
  
  Reply
  - Bob Shepherd says:
    
    April 5, 2014 at 12:55 pm
    
    A lot of the folks on that list of creators of the site are big-time collaborators. Some turned on a dime and became huge supporters of standardized testing after having spent years denouncing it the moment they saw from whence the great river of green was flowing. Sickening. Quite a few have written books about unpacking or unwrapping the amateurish CC$$. So, the list looked Vichy and fishy to me.
    
    But the fact is, the site is serving a great purpose. And perhaps a few of the collaborators in the group are learning something here. Perhaps they are learning how precarious the position of a collaborator is, how quickly this could all turn, how quickly they could be in the dock with their opinion pieces about how summative assessment really is a good idea after all being read aloud to them.
  - chemtchr says:
    
    April 5, 2014 at 1:52 pm
    
    Vichy-fishy indeed. I was thinking exactly in those terms. If you aren’t actually in a front-line school, you probably underestimate the element of fear involved in fighting back. Mid-career teachers who could lose their livelihood in a heartbeat, are sitting there in front of a smug public administrator/collaborator whose career rise is founded on enforcing the regime.
    
    Don’t take the shills too lightly, colleagues, but do stand up.
  - NY teacher says:
    
    April 6, 2014 at 2:32 am
    
    Good to see BS posting there.
- Bob Shepherd says:
  
  April 5, 2014 at 12:50 pm
  
  I know. Reading that made me sick. I thought, “This is one of our nation’s leading literacy gurus speaking. Yikes.
  
  No more standardized summative tests.
  
  Put a stake in Son of NCLB.
  
  Tests should cover the curriculum. They should be formative and disappear into instruction. They should be opportunities for authentic performance and creation.
  
  Enough of the bullet-list-based Powerpointing of U.S. education. Enough of the extrinsic punishment and reward system.
  
  Kill the beast.
  
  Reply
- chemtchr says:
  
  April 5, 2014 at 1:38 pm
  
  I viscerally agree with you, Peggy. It is the shills I’m opposing when I ask people to please, PLEASE continue to log on and drown their distraction in truth. If teachers can find any place to get the real story out, we’ll build a document to help bury corporate education control forever.
  
  You organizers and coaches should help us engage the collaborators by name, across the social media, using the trove of denunciations that has flooded the testingtalk site. The Common Core and its PARCC are now publicly exposed, and we who have seen inside its guts have an online resource to cite, as we fight it down in our workplaces, among our colleagues, and in our communities.
  
  I will use explicit quotes Monday morning, at my public school, to defend my students from incoherent new assessment rubrics, for instance.
  
  I can’t tell whether anybody else has replied to Randi Weingarten’s explicit tweet yesterday, which exposes exactly how she is trying to use the site to enable the CCSS. John Kuhn retweeted it this morning without comment:
  
  Retweeted by John Kuhn
  Randi Weingarten ‏@rweingarten 13h
  Powerful stories and ideas from educators on #CCSS. We need to involve teachers in implementation, improvement http://testingtalk.org/
  
  Reply
- Laura H. Chapman says:
  
  April 5, 2014 at 2:03 pm
  
  I concur. I regret that some people whom I respect lent their name to a project with some key players in the effort to micromanage the work of teachers. Have you seen the Marzano portfolio of such tools?
  
  Reply
  - NY teacher says:
    
    April 6, 2014 at 2:34 am
    
    Marzano, the miracle tool that can evaluate the AP calculus teacher and the kindergarten art teacher using the exact same rubric.
  - Bob Shepherd says:
    
    April 7, 2014 at 12:00 am
    
    NY teacher, that is very, very well said!
Susan says:

April 5, 2014 at 9:49 pm

Utah High School Student Captures Screen Shots of the Anti-Book Common Core Test

Utah High School Student Captures Screen Shots of the Anti-Book Common Core Test

“A Utah High School student took the Common Core (SAGE) test this week. Seeing objectionable issues in that test, she thought her mother should know. The student took screen shots using her cell phone and sent them to her mother. Her mother passed them along to us.

The question given in this test asks whether book literacy is inferior to the playing of video games. Read it. Most of the passages that students must refer to, claim that literature is inferior, that it forces passivity or discriminates, while video games teach students how to be leaders.”

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chemtchr says:

April 6, 2014 at 4:13 am

Oh, well, this explains everything. It’s a press release from the NEA website dated Jan 07, 2014. I didn’t even know it. Thanks to Susan OHanian.

“The Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust today announced two grants totaling more than $1.6 million to the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) and the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (Smarter Balanced) to engage the nation’s two largest teachers’ unions in the development and implementation of Common Core State Standards-aligned end-of-year testing for K-12 students across most of the nation.”

“These grants fund the first formal partnerships between the two common assessment consortia and the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), which together represent the majority of the U.S. teaching workforce.”

That explains Randi, and these other players, too. ARE YOU READING THIS, DIANE?
Randi and Dennis took money to fund a formal partnership between our unions and the Pearson testing consortia.

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- dianeravitch says:
  
  April 6, 2014 at 7:00 am
  
  Chemtchr, I know the unions have taken money both to support the Common Core and the assessments. I won’t stop hoping for their redemption as they see that the CCSS testing is the linchpin of the test-based teacher evaluation system, that the tests are the same-old but designed to fail kids and hurt their members. Ultimately the unions are accountable to their members, not Bill Gates or the dead Helmsleys.
  
  Reply
  - NY teacher says:
    
    April 6, 2014 at 7:42 am
    
    Direct from NYSUT:
    
    NEW YORK April 5, 2014 — Delegates to New York State United Teachers’ 42nd Representative Assembly today voted “no confidence” in the policies of State Education Commissioner John King Jr. and called for his immediate removal by the Board of Regents.
    
    In a unanimous voice vote, the nearly 3,000 delegates also formally withdrew the union’s support for the Common Core standards as interpreted and implemented in New York state and, in a separate resolution, supported the rights of parents and guardians to opt their children out of high-stakes tests.
    
    “There is a revolution under way. Parents and teachers, standing together on behalf of what’s best for students, have made it clear that ‘enough is enough,'” said NYSUT President Richard C. Iannuzzi. “We have had it with top-down decision-making that ignores the voices of parents and teachers, and we’ve had it with a broken ideology that values obsessive testing and data collection over teaching and learning and meeting the needs of the whole child.”
    
    NYSUT Vice President Maria Neira said, “NYSUT and our members have consistently done everything to convince SED to avoid the train wreck they have engineered. For three years, SED and the Regents have repeatedly rejected every significant recommendation teachers and parents made to correct the huge problems with Common Core and the Regents reform agenda.” She added, “Our message is loud and clear: Commissioner King has got to go.”
  - Bob Shepherd says:
    
    April 6, 2014 at 9:35 pm
    
    I too hold out hope, Diane. The CCSS were part of a long-term plan to reduce the teacher force through increased reliance on standards-tagged software, to turn teachers into facilitators of tablet-based, Internet-based teaching by machine. I think that the unions haven’t understood what the real game plan is here.