This is ironic. Michigan wants to drop the Common Core standards and substitute the Massachusetts standards that were dropped by Massachusetts to make way for the Common Core standards!
A bill is moving through the Michigan legislature to do exactly that. Michigan has had a groundswell of opposition to the Common Core standards, like most other states. Their solution is to take the standards of the nation’s highest performing state, Massachusetts, and make them specific to Michigan.
Meanwhile, in Massachusetts, those standards were jettisoned because the state won a Race to the Top Grant and agreed to adopt the Commin Core. As it happens, the Massachusetts state Commissioner of Education is Mitchell Chester, who was until recently, the chair of the PARCC testing consortium. So naturally he wanted his state to drop the MCAS and use PARCC.
When PARCC started, underwritten by the US Department of Education, 24 states and DC joined its consortium. Now it is down to 6 states and DC. Massachusetts is using a hybrid: part PARCC and part MCAS.
What a fine mess!
When will states figure out that an effective reform strategy is far more complicated than standards, testing, and accountability. When Massachusetts adopted its standards, it invested new resources and increased equitable spending. It expanded pre-k and raised standards for new teachers.
There is still much to be done in Massachusetts. But it is important to remember that it achieved good results by sensible improvements in schools, not by closing schools, firing teachers and principals or mass privatization (until recently, Massachusetts had only 25 charter schools in the state).
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Yet Pearson clings to high stakes testing like a drowning man to a life vest. They’re not backing off, if anything they’re gonna double down.
Bet: within the first three years of adoption, should Michigan go through with this, there will be state residents and/or “outside agitators” of the conservative kind, who will be screaming bloody blue murder at the anti-American, anti-Christian, Communist underpinnings of the new standards, which will be decried as an attempt to “dumb down” our children and make them hate America.
“. . . an attempt to “dumb down” our children and make them hate America.”
Isn’t that what all the commie union thug teachers do now???
“Musical Standards”
Musical standards,
That’s the game
One state drops
And others claim
Common Core
Is passed around
Just before
It hits the ground
It doesn’t matter to me which set of standards they adopt because they didn’t do anything to “support” the standards anyway.
As far as I’m concerned all this hoopla was about putting in a more difficult test.
Mission Accomplished! They could have done it a lot cheaper by just raising the cut score 20%.
Chiara: just raising the cut score?
Where’s the $tudent $ucce$$ in that?
And as for your first sentence: next thing you know you’ll be arguing that if you want to get good “outputs” like Lakeside School [Bill Gates and his children] then public schools should be getting all the “inputs” that support schools like Lakeside where the heavyweights of corporate education reform send THEIR OWN CHILDREN.
Then where’s the advantage for the children of the leaders of the “new civil rights movement of our time” when they have to compete on more equal terms with OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN?
I swear, sometimes I think you are for a “better education for all”…
😎
P.S. And right you are!
I have a question about standards in general. Why do they cram so many math standards into 2 years in middle school? it’s literally 12 or 13 areas that would be an entire separate course. It seems like more every year. These kids must be bewildered- it’s everything from statistics to geometry to algebra.
It’s a mile wide and an inch deep. And we wonder why the kids are lacking basic skills when they get to high school.
For that matter, why do they think they have to teach kindergartners and pre-kindergartners as though they were going to college next year? Instead of letting them play (and put on plays, for that matter) and learn with age-appropriate, hands-on learning.
Why do they want to regiment so much education, treating children like mere cogs in a wheel, down-sizing subjects like art, music, PE, and even the reading of literature and poetry in Language Arts classes? All the while, they are teaching to and preparing for the meaningless standardized tests.
They seem to want to deliberately set the standards so that public schools will fail so that they can be closed and converted to charter schools, while at the same time, in those charter schools, getting rid of the more difficult to teach and more expensive students, and throwing them back into the increasingly under-resourced public schools.
Zorba,
There’s a reason elementary school is called ELEMENTary school. Kids are supposed to be learning the elements –the building blocks –not constructing grand cathedrals yet. That’s the problem with Common Core’s addlebrained backward planning: kindergartners will construct successful cathedrals 10% of the time; first graders will construct successful cathedrals 20% of the time; etc. Superficially sensible, but idiotic if you know anything about how the brain actually develops. The standards should read, “Elementary students will not be attempting to construct any cathedrals at all. They will be quarrying stones instead.” I.e. memorizing times tables, drilling division problems, learning grammar well, etc.
Around and around,
Where will they go?
It doesn’t really matter..,
Just follow the cash flow.
Broad is confused,
As Gates doubles town,
pushing common core
through a bought off corporate clown.
Michigan moves forward
While Massachusetts falls aback…
Thus a corporate horse race
led by an uneducated hack.
Walton reaches for the check book,
As Bloomberg grabs the mike,
To tell our children’s parents and teachers
To go and take a hike.
Don’t mess with our profits and gains,
A venture billionaire complains.
Continuing to destroy our children’s lives,
As long as blood money continues to arrive.
Another presidential election looms
As the candidates strut their poise,
But no word on the dark art of deform,
Aimed at our girls and boys.
The American people have had enough
of this privatization charade,
The elected officials who bought in to the stuff…
An “F” as their final grade.
http://superintendentlps.blogspot.com/2016/04/there-has-to-be-better-way.html?m=1
Great Superintendent essay. Tests are not a accurate assessment of a student or district. Multiple factors determine success and SBAC computer adaptive tests are not the answer.
When Massachusetts adopted its standards, it invested new resources and increased equitable spending. It expanded pre-k and raised standards for new teachers.
from my recollection there were funds that were forthcoming in 1993 when the “ed reform” was passed by the legislature; In 1993 I would agree “new resources” were forthcoming at that time… others could tell about the situation today (I am not aware of any new resources that came along with the NCLB/ implementation. Race to the Top funds in my opinion did not help us in providing improved programs in the schools but they did build up a larger testing department at DESE ) . The recession of 2007-2008 took its toll on all the local budgets. those who are still working in the profession could possibly update (I retired from full time work in education before the recession and went into fund raising for the women and children’s homeless shelter as there was a desperate need at that time ) . FUNDING MODEL Massachusetts’ current state aid formula — known as “Chapter 70” — was established in 1993 as part of the state’s Education Reform Act (Ed Reform), and underwent its last major revision in 2007 in an attempt to better calculate education costs and the tax capacity of school districts.48 The education formula strives to allocate state aid in an equitable fashionby:49 Creating a minimum required funding level for all districts. A district’s minimumrequirement is driven by its “foundation budget,” calculated by considering thespecific needs of its student population (e.g. the number of low-income students); Requiring communities to contribute revenue based on their local tax-raisingcapacity; and Providing aid to fill the gap between a district’s foundation budget and its requiredlocal contribution.
Steve B. Please don’t confuse this for Michigan moving forward. Our legislature is like the proverbial “roomful of chimps with typewriters, eventually they will type out a classic (and are too ignorant to know they have done so).” They are ruled by whomever is signing their next job contracts. No concern for the state, its citizens, or it schools.
Never has a reform been so poorly premised and so poorly designed as this wretched Common Core.
It is the ugly handiwork of witless wizards and monied megalomaniacs who would find it an impossible task to locate a light-switch in a classroom.
Common Core was devised by the clueless, championed by the mindless, and now defended by the brainless.
~ Denis Ian ~
“championed by the mindless”
Apt description of the so-called journalists who helped advertise these snake-oil solutions. The bulk of the blame goes to the media who enabled this fraud to be perpetrated on 50 million students and their parents.