Missouri Governor Signs Bill to Review Common Core

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

1. Dawn Hoagland says:

   July 14, 2014 at 10:16 pm

   The fight against the Common Core may turn out to be a ruse used to obfuscate the issue. As much as I would love to see the CC thrown out of every state, I am afraid it is not actually going anywhere unless we address ESEA first.

   With RTTT, states got ESEA waivers to get out of the idiotic NCLB mandates that were impossible to meet (100% of students proficient in reading and math by 2014 and adequate yearly progress made every single year meaning an increase in grades even for students achieving 99% already.) ESEA needs to be completely revamped. NCLB needs to be repealed not waived. Congress is about to pull a fast one by changing the definition of Title I funding to “academically disadvantaged” so that it can include everyone instead of just free and reduced lunch students. The money will follow the students right into charter schools.

   The clever plan to standardize the standards was actually passed by individual states or state boards of education. This removed the legal violation of the federal government directing and supervising curriculum which is against federal law. In summary, once your state accepts the Common Core Standards, power is removed from your neighborhood school and the teacher in the classroom. Common Core removes the old system based on content and replaces it with individual Common Core Standards that each individual student must meet and every individual teacher must teach. The Common Core lowers the bar of academics with a “dumbing down” approach in order for all children to meet them. Feedback loop control is initiated to force compliance on the school, the teacher, the student with data tracking creating a Total Quality Managed system. Individual educations plans, career pathways, small letter iep’s, whatever you want to call forcing the individual student to comply to ONLY the Common Core, will be developed for EACH and every student creating a system of interventions if the student does NOT meet each standard through federal Special Ed funds, IDEA. HR 5 and SB1094 refer to the interventions as “Specialized Student Support.”

   HR 5, the Dollar and the Force Behind the Common Core. SB 1094 Out of Committee:
   The legislation passed by the Republican held House of Representatives sold our country out with this piece of legislation. The funding, Title I, “follows the child.” What does this mean? This means that the money will fund each student wherever they want to go to school. This funding bypasses the state government and the local district. Interesting enough, the amendments attached by key Republican Congressmen, and a few other Democrats, have an assortment of issues that contribute to ensuring that representative government is erased.

   In Summary: Creating Choice, Diminishing Public Schools, Grooming Charter Schools:
   Under the House Bill, HR 5, a student is “given” Title I federal dollars to go to the school of their choice. Which school will they go to? The public school across the district? across the state? to a private school? Catholic school? Homeschool? across state lines? Your tax money is traveling everywhere blurring tax bases. What will this do to your local school district? What will this do to a locally elected school board who will no longer have control over the tax base with students moving everywhere? The funds must be divided to each student in an equitable way.

   Under the Senate Bill, SB 1094, funding establishes or expands inter- or intradistrict public school choice programs that follow the child starting at birth to age 21, mandates workforce skills, and testing across ALL domains, attitudes and values included. It also establishes a NATIONAL SCHOOL BOARD. (This bill does not extend the choice funds to private schools, Senators Tim Scott (R-S.C.) and Paul Rand (R-Ky.) amendment to allow Title I dollars to follow a student to any school, public or private, was defeated.) The meshing of the two bills gives us the entire agenda. The writing is on the wall.

   Eventually, there will no longer be “better” schools, only equal schools. It is only fair, there shouldn’t be wealthy school districts and poor school districts. Right? This ensures that your local school district will struggle. If a local district survives, they must be in-tune and in compliance with the common core agenda with perhaps minor functions like hiring, firing, maintenance of buildings, and managing federal accountability guidelines. Many states have already gone to court over equitable school finance and alternatives to property taxes. The trend is a regional tax base, pooling tax money, and this legislation lays the groundwork to do just that. Schools will close because of less funding to operate, and so called “academic bankruptcy” for not meeting standards. This also sets the stage for charter school take over, which is a public school without an elected board. Local and state representative government will continue to be gradually diminished. Follow the money.
   http://www.chartertruth.com/anita-hoge.html

   LikeLike

   Reply
2. Duane Swacker says:

   July 15, 2014 at 5:25 am

   So, here in the Show Me State, it’s just going to be another set of educational malpractices, oops, I mean standards and standardized testing. It doesn’t matter if the Feds or the state sets them, those educational malpractices still have all the epistemological and ontological errors and fallacies that render the whole process COMPLETELY INVALID and the usage of any results, especially to grade/evaluate students, teachers and schools COMPLETELY UNETHICAL.

   LikeLike

   Reply
3. Duane Swacker says:

   July 15, 2014 at 5:33 am

   Lest you think that these malpractices are valid and ethical I point you to Noel Wilson’s never refuted nor rebutted “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700 Read it and understand why these malpractices are abominations and harm many students.

   Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)

   1. A description of a quality can only be partially quantified. Quantity is almost always a very small aspect of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category only by a part of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as unidimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing the descriptive information about said interactions is inadequate, insufficient and inferior to the point of invalidity and unacceptability.

   2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).

   3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.

   4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”

   In other word all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.

   5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations
   attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. And a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.

   6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.

   7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”

   In other words it attempts to measure “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?

   My answer is NO!!!!!

   One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:

   “So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”

   In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
   By Duane E. Swacker

   LikeLike

   Reply
4. Jen B says:

   July 15, 2014 at 1:52 pm

   You are correct as long as NCLB exists and States need to get waivers from it then the problem of compliance with Federal Mandates will continue. But all of the verious drafts of a new ESEA that I have seen floating around out there are all much worse incarnations than even NCLB, they are all ALEC-written and contain even more federal regulation and less state control than ever.

   Right now we essentially have no ESEA. The one we have (NCLB) is the law of the land, but every state is “waived” out of it, and being told to do things that are outside the scope of the ESEA, things that are not per law at all, but totally made up off the cuff. It’s lawless.

   LikeLike

   Reply