State Commissioner John White says Louisiana will NOT drop Common Core or the PARCC tests.
John Whiite issued this statement:
Jun 18, 2014
BATON ROUGE, La. – The state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) and the Louisiana Department of Education today reaffirmed that the state will implement the Common Core State Standards, as well as grade 3-8 test forms and questions developed by states within the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Career (PARCC) for the 2014-2015 school year. The Department will deliver and score the grade 3-8 tests using the state’s currently active contract for grade 3-8 testing, awarded through the state procurement process.
In 2010, after a public review process, BESE adopted the Common Core State Standards as minimum expectations for reading, writing, and mathematics. The Governor, the BESE President, and the State Superintendent then signed a commitment to developing test forms and questions that would allow the state’s performance to be measured in comparison with other states. Nearly 45,000 Louisiana students tried out the resulting PARCC forms and questions in March and April of 2014.
The plan to continue implementation fulfills BESE’s legal role and obligations. Under the Louisiana State Constitution, BESE “shall supervise and control the public elementary and secondary schools and special schools under its jurisdiction and shall have budgetary responsibility for all funds appropriated or allocated by the state for those schools, all as provided by law.”
State law requires that “[t]he state Department of Education shall, with the approval of the State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, as part of the Louisiana Competency-Based Education Program, develop and establish statewide content standards for required subjects to be taught in the public elementary and secondary schools of this state.”
Regarding the implementation of the Common Core State Standards and the PARCC tests, state law mandates that “[b]eginning with the 2014-2015 school year, standards-based assessments shall be based on nationally recognized content standards.” State law also mandates that “[t]he rigor of each standard-based test, at a minimum, shall be comparable to national achievement tests” and “student achievement standards shall be set with reference to test scores of the same grade levels nationally.” The plan reaffirmed by BESE and the Department today meets with these legal requirements.
“For years, the law has required that BESE measure literacy and math achievement,” said BESE President Chas Roemer. “Four years ago, our board committed to measuring learning in comparison with states across the country, and two years ago the Legislature put this plan into the law. BESE is continuing to implement that law.”
“State and federal law have long required that Louisiana measure literacy and math performance through standards and annual tests,” said State Superintendent John White. “By using test forms and questions that make results comparable among states, we are following the Legislature’s mandate that we not only measure but also compete.”
For further information on Louisiana’s plan to raise expectations and compete with other states, click here.
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Now they sound like NC.
We will flunk our 3rd graders! We will not flunk our 3rd graders! We believe in this benchmark. Actually, we like this one. No, how about this one!
So what/whom do we believe? http://gov.louisiana.gov/index.cfm?md=newsroom&tmp=detail&articleID=4583
Thanks for sharing this, it was an interesting read. It seems that Jindal is doing some multiple fence sitting here, both in adopting the language and position of those lamenting “federal intrusion” and in fighting that “federal” set of standards and brand of testing and while taking the imaginary high ground of doing the exact same thing at the state level. I guess this is what choice looks like to governors, slapping their own states label on what the feds have been made to push by the testing industrial complex. This is the fall back position of the reformers testing industrial complex, relabel, rebrand and continue to sell the same old product.
Let’s see how the public reacts when they find out the total cost of PARCC and all the computers purchased to take the blasted test.
Wow! An actual duel for state control between Jindal and White. This could be extraordinary.
Bobby Jindal is just going to have to fire John White….couldn’t happen to a better guy.
If Jindal is really against Common Core and it’s related testing, he needs to replace John White. Actions speak louder than words.
I agree totally. White needs to be replaced.
My guess is the next step will be Jindal pressuring his governor appointees on BESE to force White’s hand. He will also call in favors for those who used his money to get elected to the board. These are the same ones he needed for the supermajority to get White hired- now he will need them to over rule his golden boy.
It’s time to watch Louisiana politics get ugly.
That is in the works and it will happen.
I’m guessing that John White is getting bigger kickbacks under the table from his TFA backers promoting CC and PARCC than from Jindal’s.
This is exactly what is happening in New Mexico. Governor Martinez and Secretary of Education Designee Skandera do not care what the legislators nor the people of New Mexico want. They are going dictatorially force Common Core, PARCC, unproven Teacher and Administrator evaluations, and School Grading down the throats of our Teachers, Administrators, Students, and Parents regardless of the financial costs, impacts on the kids now and in the future, and then walk off into the sunset to leave the mess for someone else to clean up. Governor Martinez has refused to fire Skandera who to this day, after three and half years, has not been confirmed as the illegitimate Secretary of Education for this state. Skandera will not leave this state until Martinez is replaced by the voters.
This is all smoke and mirrors on the part of Jindal and White. I don’t believe this so called disagreement is real for a single second. They have both worn out their welcomes in LA and are posturing for their next gigs as corrupt shills. Jindal, in spite of being one of the enduring poster boys for the party of stupid still has presidential fantasies while White is looking forward to scamming his next partner in the Lemon Dance of failed education leadership. This alleged fight isn’t even close to being worth the effort of breaking out the popcorn and a comfy chair.
It’s for real Jon. And I celebrated this first part of the show last night.
To continue, Jindal decides to sit on the edge of the fence with the Teaparty by opposing the common core, and after Cantor’s loss probably thinks himself smart even though the only salient issue in Cantors failed re-election bid was voter turnout and the way it went in Brat’s favor due to right wing talk radio support. Jindal also is likely looking to position himself in the vanguard of the CCSS rebranding effort and by doing so appeal to the reformers and their cash and political support machines. He may gum the reformers hand for appearance’s sake but will never bite it. White is just along for the ride of he who appointed him and gets to look tough and implacable against the broad based CCSS push back, a resume line for his future aspirations. Perhaps he’s eying Rhee’s or a Rhee type job since her personal brand has gone toxic of late, who knows?
It has been conjectured that Paul Pastorek will hire White in a charter promotional gig. My favorite part of Jindal’s move is his auditing of LDOE. That should get White to move on really quickly, possible towing a ball and chain.
I wish Ohio public schools hadn’t gone along with the Common Core. I don’t believe the Kasich Administration or the Obama Administration are good faith, sincere partners for public school success.
I wish they had gotten some assurances that they would be treated fairly or at least had an advocate at the table.
Public schools have gotten consistently screwed over the last decade and a half, and I honestly wonder when they should just start advocating on their own behalf and not looking to federal or state politicians as partners. If this doesn’t go well, I know who will take the hit, and it ain’t gonna be the prestigious and powerful people who came up with it.
I’m dreading watching it happen, again, after watching it happen with NCLB. I think public schools have to get much, much more aggressive as far as negotiating these deals. They’re getting screwed over and over again. I just know it will happen with this.
This is the link that Jax Rabbit shared. I’m reposting it as it’s worth reading. It suggests that Jindal is merely doing the CCSS/testing anti-federal rebrand dance in the Teaparty style. http://gov.louisiana.gov/index.cfm?md=newsroom&tmp=detail&articleID=4583
Good cop, bad cop! Jindal needs the conservatives to back him, so that he can get in federal office. Yesterday, at the BESE board meeting, John White was called a thief and a liar, so he needs Jindal’s backing right now.
They both want Race to the Top funds, which are stipulated to Common Core, PARCC, alternative certification programs, Value Added Model evaluations for teachers, etc.
This sort of spat about the Common Core that is currently raging in Louisiana is entirely unbecoming of public officials.
Standards should be voluntary, recommended guidelines for educators. Professionals–those who actually know something about teaching and learning in the various domains within the various subject areas–scholars, researchers, curriculum developers, and classroom practitioners–should put forward recommended guidelines, learning progressions, frameworks, suggestions for pedagogical approaches, lesson plant templates, and so on. These should be vigorously researched, discussed, and debated, on an ongoing basis, by the community educators in the various subject areas. Any OFFICIALLY ADOPTED, MANDATORY RULES OF THE ROAD should be not a long list of specific grade-level “standards” but, rather, A BROAD FRAMEWORK that allows for ongoing testing and refinement and that provides the degrees of freedom within which innovative curricula and pedagogical strategies appropriate to particular subject matter and particular students can be developed.
It’s a terrible mistake to submit such matters to the vicissitudes of political winds. And it’s a mistake to be too directive and so to stifle innovation.
What might such a broad framework look like? Well, we already have one in the CCSS for ELA.
The Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts recommended several broad “instructional shifts.” These are
1. Emphasis on both substantive informational and literary texts.
2. Building knowledge in the subject areas through reading and writing about content (in science, history, and technical subjects).
3. Reading at each grade level texts of a complexity such that at the end of the K-12 sequence, students will be ready to read college-level texts, and use of scaffolding to make on-level texts accessible.
4. Close reading of texts to inform evidence-based discussion and writing about texts, with decreased emphasis on extra-textual material–background information, for example.
5. Writing using evidence from sources to inform and to make arguments.
6. Building general and subject-specific academic vocabulary (which can most effectively be done by reading, discussing, and writing about related texts–ones dealing with like subject matter at increasing levels of complexity).
Now, it is certainly the case that knowledgeable educators can disagree about these general guidelines. We have seen, for example, a great deal of debate on the following issues:
1. Whether it is appropriate to shift our focus, in English classes, toward increased emphasis on nonliterary texts and decreased emphasis on literary texts.
2. Whether English teachers are properly trained to oversee subject area reading (e.g., to choose appropriate readings in science, history, and technical subjects).
3. Whether it is appropriate, with readers not working a grade level, to subject them to texts of grade-level complexity, whether scaffolding is always sufficient to make a given text accessible to a given student, and what kind of scaffolding is necessary.
4. Whether the New Critical approach of treating the text as an isolated artifact (a world unto itself) is appropriate and the extent to which it is necessary, as an aid to comprehension and interpretation, to create motivation to engage with a text, and to establish the significance of a text, to treat extra-textual material–such as the biographical, historical, or sociopolitical context of a text.
5. Whether writing programs should be narrowly focused on constructing evidence-based arguments or should cover other types of writing as well (e.g., as much as 80 percent of all writing done in the real world is narrative fiction or narrative nonfiction, and narration is one of the primary means by which humans make sense of the world, so shouldn’t it receive major focus? And what of writing exercises devoted to other matters besides construction of arguments–to stylistics, for example?)
6. Whether the specific recommendations for vocabulary work in the new standards (study of roots and affixes, instruction in types of context clues, instruction in word origins, etc.) are effective in achieving the goal of developing general and subject-specific academic vocabulary.
As controversial as these “instructional shifts” are, they, in themselves, provide a broad framework within which one can have enormous flexibility to innovate in curricula and in pedagogical approaches.
Many substantive issues arise, however, in the translation of these general instructional guidelines into grade-level “standards.” Here are a two of the big ones:
1. Educational publishers have a tendency to take the specific standards as the curriculum and to build lessons that focus not on the texts themselves and what they are saying but on the standards per se. This is pedagogically unsound and undermines the PURPOSE of reading and writing by treating by not treating whatever is being said by texts as the primary focus of lessons but, rather, treating texts as mere interchangeable vehicles for exercising some skill described by a standard.
2. The standards tend to be vague, abstract descriptions of explicit outcomes related to general skills, and as such a) ignore attainment of declarative knowledge in the subject areas, b) are too vaguely formulated and insufficiently operationalized to allow for valid assessment, and c) preclude other, better approaches to achieving the overall goals than those that happened to have been imagined by the standards authors–including approaches appropriate to particular students who, after all, differ.
I think that we should all be able to agree that it does no one any good to have have this matter of standards become highly politicized and for the standards that teachers and students will be using be a matter of who happens to hold power this carnival season.
For the foregoing reasons, I think it would be extraordinarily wise to DECLARE A TRUCE in the “standards wars,” the terms of which would be the following:
1. We would all agree to follow the general guidelines instantiated in those “instructional shifts,” recognizing that those will be subjected to vigorous debate over the coming years and that at some time in the future, a national forum will be held to revisit them. In other words, these OVERALL GOALS would become the mandated national material, subject to modification in the future.
2. The specific grade-level standards would become VOLUNTARY, and all teachers, curriculum coordinators, and curriculum developers would be ENCOURAGED to work with them–adapting, modifying, replacing, extending, or transcending them where they see fit in order better to achieve the general goals of the instructional shifts. A national portal would be created for posting of lesson modules, suggested learning progressions, lesson plan templates, alternative standards for particular domains and particular student populations, and so on, in keeping with the instructional shifts, or general goals, as alternatives to the specific grade-level standards of the CCSS. These would include any alternatives developed by particular districts, states, and organizations (such as the NCTE).
3. Summative standardized testing based upon the general goals (rather than on the specific standards) would become ONE OPTION that students and teachers could choose to use to demonstrate achievement, and other options–in particular, performative assessment portfolios–would be made available as an alternative. In other words, individual students would be able to opt to demonstrate proficiency via one of the new national exams as one among various alternatives for demonstrating achievement.
Clearly, the current situation–all this heat without light–is unsustainable and counterproductive. No one is well served by all this petty wrangling–by the “standards wars.”
And that is why I have suggested this alternative, which has as a major merit that the work that has been done to date under the CCSS aegis would not have been in vain but would become one of a number of options for particular schools, teachers, and students going forward.
I don’t know about all of you, but I am tired of this civil war over the new standards. Thus my suggested compromise.
As Rodney King said, “”Can we all get along?”