This article in The Hechinger Report says that the opt out movement will win some concessions. Policymakers in their cocoons inside the Beltway are not (yet) worried by the parent-led movement. They hope that if they ignore it long enough, it will go away.
But at the state level, the opt out movement looks threatening. Some states are rebranding the Common Core, dropping out of PARCC or SBAC, looking for other ways to respond to angry constituents.
If the Opt out movement spreads to other states and continues to grow, it will be a huge blow to those in D.C. who like to impose their ideas on other people’s children. Even inside the Beltway, they might have to listen to the voices of the people.
Remember the Lincoln line (Gettysburg Address) about a government “of the people, by the people, for the people.” He did not mean “of the billionaires, by the bureaucrats, and for the corporations”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
As PARCC or SBAC are used as a high school graduation requirement, have they yet denied graduation to a large group of students in any state? Sure you can say some large percentage failed a test in a lower grade, so what. Tell the parents of five or ten thousand students in a state that they failed one of these tests and can’t graduate. Lawmakers will find no peace.
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Agreed. They haven’t told anyone how they plan to use these scores as to STUDENTS, and that’s the real question.
We were actually assured the tests were not “high stakes for students”. If they renege on that parents should be angry. That means we were deliberately misled by everyone from the federal government on down.
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Exactly. This is something Arne has not had to experience and will not have to experience. He would learn something about “lying” at that point.
Arne and fellow travelers seemed to think that education was about competing for Harvard and Yale and American productivity. Parents think it is about developing their child.
And funny how in spite of our public schools, Americans have been developing just fine compared to other countries.
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Anything that scares corporate owned politicians can’t be all bad.
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I remember another Lincoln quote about how you can’t fool all the people all the time. Rational people are slow to rebel, but the pendulum is swinging back.
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An absolutely terrifying prospect for politicians:
When people whose children “failed” a high-stakes standardized test that was designed, pretested and rigorously tailored to ensure a certain failure rate—
And those same people and their neighbors and friends then hound the politicians: “What have you been doing, by omission or commission, that led to this dismal state of affairs?”
The R word. Responsibility. The last thing almost any politician wants to hear.
Or their rheephormster patrons and allies.
😎
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Great sendup of Lincoln’s quote. To stop the disastrous private war on public education, no force is more valuable now than a growing opt-out movement. It has the potential to end the looting of public districts and the takeover to the school day with commercial testing. Growing opt-out counts more now than ever because state govts. and billionaire cronies have met an opposition they cannot yet overwhelm.
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I could not agree more! From your mouth to God’s ear. Let’s hope this looting ends.
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The Teachers’ Corporate NGO, formerly the teachers union, is on the run with Bill Gates.
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“Remember the Lincoln line (Gettysburg Address) about a government “of the people, by the people, for the people.” He did not mean “of the billionaires, by the bureaucrats, and for the corporations” ”
Hoorah! Someone lend this line to Bernie Sanders!
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Did anyone notice the L. A. charter’s complaints that L. A. magnets outperformed them because they enroll more higher income children? I thought this was about NO EXCUSES. They certainly did not want to hear about that as they creamed the better students and higher low-income children from the public school.
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A recentt message from the Pope about the Union’s Common Core Curriculum with Bill Gates and the Clinton Foundation:
“And in this regard I would like to express my rejection of any kind of educational experimentation with children. We cannot experiment with children and young people. The horrors of the manipulation of education that we experienced in the great genocidal dictatorships of the twentieth century have not disappeared; they have retained a current relevance under various guises and proposals and, with the pretense of modernity, push children and young people to walk on the dictatorial path of “only one form of thought”.”
Pope Francis
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Would the Pope’s statement
‘The horrors of the manipulation of education that we experienced in the great genocidal dictatorships of the twentieth century have not disappeared; they have retained a current relevance”
be a case of “Godwin’s law”?
Or “God wins law?”
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Keep up the great work.
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Diane,
“of the billionaires, by the bureaucrats, and for the corporations”
Your sense of humor twinned with your indignation has been showing these days. I like it!
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I really wish there was more talk about testing and testing prep materials–and Common Core as separate issues. I just reread all of Arizona’s standards which I think are challenging, yet can be interpreted and taught in developmentally appropriate ways at each level if a teacher is not ramrodded through the standards with materials that “cover” topics too quickly in order to be “ready” for the next “benchmark” test which is used to prepare students for the big one, whatever that is. Oddly worded questions and weird ways of presenting concepts, in both tests and teaching materials forced on teachers by companies that think their tests and materials are aligned to the standards are what really make people think Common Core is bad. That’s what parents are seeing and passing around on social media. If teachers and schools could just use the Common Core as a guide, assess students with their own measures and a single standardized test designed to tell teachers, schools and parents where students are succeeding and where they are having difficulties, they could make decisions about how to improve student learning. Teachers will use the standards if they are trained well enough and thoroughly understand them. Teachers cannot make a child learn something if the child is not ready and, for this reason, a child’s results on a test are not a direct measure of how well a teacher is teaching. But a teacher can use a test to determine where to place his energy to help a child make improvements. Teaching materials should continue to be chosen at the district level by its teachers and administrators most important of all, the pacing should be left to the teacher in the classroom.
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The people who created Common Core and “sold” it to the states never intended the standards and testing to be “separate issues’. In fact, they counted on just the opposite being the case: that they would be inextricably intertwined.
Common Core creator David Coleman (in 2011)
“the great rule that I think is a statement of reality, though not a pretty one, which is teachers will teach towards the test. There is no force strong enough on this earth to prevent that. There is no amount of hand-waving, there‟s no amount of saying, “They teach to the standards, not the test; we don‟t do that here.” Whatever. The truth is – and if I misrepresent you, you are welcome to take the mic back. But the truth is teachers do. Tests exert an enormous effect on instructional practice, direct and indirect, and it‟s hence our obligation to make tests that are worthy of that kind of attention.’
Companies like Pearson which make the tests and texts and other curriculum materials that are “aligned with” the standards also count on the standards and the tests being inseparable.
It’s not clear why teachers and the public should consider the standards and tests “separate” or even “separable’ when the responsible parties and the parties that stand to make a profit never have, never will and bank on just the opposite.
As Bill Gates (who underwrote Common Core development and marketing) said, the desired state is to align everything (tests and curriculum) with the standards in order to “create powerful markets” (in 2009):
“When the tests are aligned to the common standards, the curriculum will line up as well—and that will unleash powerful market forces in the service of better teaching”
The idea that “if only we could separate the standards from the tests, everything would be great’ is little more than a pipe dream. It’s simply not going to happen. The ones in control don’t want it to happen and won’t let it happen. There is too much money (billions o f dollars) at stake.
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Reblogged this on The Withering Apple and commented:
INDEED IT IS!
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