The Momma Bears are one of the potent forces that will drive the corporate-style reformers out of business.
You see, the Momma Bears are not in it for the money or the fame or the power or the control.
They are Mamma Bears, and they don’t back down. They protect their cubs.
They don’t particularly care whether Arne Duncan calls them names or whether the Governor likes them.
They are in it for their children, and (as we say in the South) they ain’t giving up or going away.
In this post, they single out a teacher who told parents the truth about what the state was doing to their children.
They know this teacher is on their side and on the side of their children. He wants to teach, not test. Imagine that!
Who imposed all this testing on these kids? They know:
You can thank these people for this asinine TVAAS evaluation system:
- TN Board of Education (appointed by Gov. Haslam)
- TN Commissioner Kevin Huffman (appointed by Gov. Haslam)
- Governor Haslam (who sent his kids to private schools that didn’t excessively test or rate teachers by test scores)
- William Sanders (the statistician who came up with this awful system to rate agricultural growth and somehow it is now it is being used to abuse teachers)
The Mamma Bears know that all this testing doesn’t help their children.
They know that it helps Pearson!
If their child fails, guess what they get? More testing!
These are smart Mamma Bears. They will be there after the name Bill Haslam and Kevin Huffman are long forgotten.
You see, there is justice in the world.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I certainly did not develop a passionate concern about public education until I became a mother. It is true. . .mama bears will stand up for their cubs!!!
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Thanks for the national attention!
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from NY….Keep it going! WE are all in this together.
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“You see, there is justice in the world.”
🙂
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This is awesome.
Opt out.
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Mama Bears Stand Up and Defend their Cubs!!
They are Fiercely Protective!
Great Post!!
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Maybe we need Granddaddy Bears, too! I want my granddaughter to get a real education, not test prep and scared, robot teachers. I wonder if Tennesseans have had enough, and people of varying political views will successfully create an opt out movement throughout the state. If there is no test data, Huffman/Haslam’s grand destruction ends.
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The Momma Bears are heroes, and are doing an excellent job spreading the word here! Yes, we also need Daddy Bears, Grandparent Bears, Retired Teacher Bears….I could go on and on!
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We need to remember, after all the hippies and college kids were protesting the Viet Nam war, it was mothers against the war that ultimately led to the end. Go MOMS!!
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It’s Gold-Rhee-Locks and the angry bears . . . . . .
“And so, boys and girls, little Michelle ran as fast as she could from the den of several hundred thousand bears as their fangs beared no mercy for this wicked little girl who had no business breaking into their home and breaking their children’s beds, chairs, and spirits . . . . That, boys and girls, will teach harmful and mean people to never stick their naughty propaganda into that which is familiar, traditional, inclusive, and proven time after time . . . . “
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Whoa! The Momma Bears have found out this, which might be the smoking gun on third party data collection:
“GAGGLE:
Another thing Momma Bears needs to warn you about is something called “Gaggle.” In some districts, students in TN are required to sign up for a Gaggle account. This sounds like a neat program for safe online learning, but it gets a bit suspicious when they won’t allow parents to have their child’s password to see what is going on. Even creepier, Gaggle has a “Human Monitoring Service.” Its website says that Gaggle’s HMS team has “uncovered bullying, drug use, threats of school violence, teen depression, suicidal intentions, and abusive domestic situations.” So, strangers are snooping on our children’s private information, but parents can’t see it? Unless a formal Law Enforcement Request is made, HMS data will be released only to the district contacts, and not parents.”
Here’s the link:
https://www.gaggle.net/overview/
And the collection of data for mining is well underway:
“THE PLAN PRE-TEST ASSESSMENT:
The PLAN PRE-TEST is given to 10th graders in TN to predict how they will do on the all-important ACT college entrance exam. These are definitely NOT anonymous. When students take this PLAN test, they are asked about an hour’s worth of demographic questions. Parents aren’t allowed to see those questions, but our children told us there are questions about: religious denomination, class schedule, address, GPA, Honors, if your parents are divorced, who do you live with, ethnicity/race, etc. Like the computerized climate surveys above, students could not skip questions they didn’t want to answer. Not only are there personal questions, districts can also develop up to 30 local questions to add to the demographic survey part.” See more here:
http://www.mommabears.org/1/post/2014/01/not-with-my-kids-you-dont.html
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Oh – and Pearson bought up ADHD Testing Company BioBehavioral Diagnostics (http://www.pearsoned.com/pearson-acquires-adhd-testing-company-biobehavioral-diagnostics/#.Uw_AhSjWaRJ ). Link also courtesy of the Momma Bears. They are awesome!
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Value Added worked well in agriculture where all the variables were known and were relatively few in number as well as being easy to accurately measure. Value Added should very definitely have STAYED there. Sanders was not aware of the fact that just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. I’d like to know what lead him to believe that he could identify, let alone capture correctly, all of the variables that have to do with learning and teaching, what lead him to delude himself into thinking he could apply a system that processes a few simple variables to one many many orders of magnitude more complex where so much was obviously inscrutable to him.
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