Legislator Joe McNamara called for statewide adoption of the Common Core.
http://www.golocalprov.com/live/rep-joe-mcnamara-absenteeism-standards-live
Hello, Rip Van Winkle!
Rhode Island won Race to the Top funding eight years years ago and agreed to adopt the Common Core then.
Did they or didn’t they?
Has the CC been forgotten so soon? Lost? Strayed?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Will any teachers union ever actually step up and challenge a Democrat that is either clueless about or hostile to public education? Will any of them give notice to say, Cory Booker, that his views are unacceptable?
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Oh that we would start hearing union leadership across the nation stepping up to PUBLICLY call out not only the game but each and every one of its players.
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He’s a retired educator! (But in office since 1994.)
Lol on Rip Van Winkle!
(What’d Gates give him?)
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He’s a retired educator! (But in office since 1994.)
Yes. He is out of the loop but still thinks the Common Core is what kids should know. I suggest that first up, he take the CC test himself, and perhaps make public his record of absences from the legislature.
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He should make public the absences from his mind, too.
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Clever quip, Poet.
When Diane’s readers are reminded that the PR of the richest 0.1% aimed at destroying public education still finds shelter in corners of state government, we need a laugh.
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I wonder if this legislator has information about the relationship between the between the “chronic absence” rate, which appears to be less than the mobility rate?
The Kids Count data comes from diffeent sources and not all of it is up to date. https://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/tables/2876-student-mobility-rate?loc=41&loct=2#detailed/2/any/false/870,573,869,36,868,867,133,38,35,18/any/5956
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I will make the assumption that they took the numbers of formal withdrawals and divided it by the number of children enrolled to arrive at that figure. My experience is that the same children move multiple times, which suggests that about ten percent of our population is not really stable enough to stay in one place, presumably for economic reasons.
Can you comment as to whether my interpretation of these figures is accurate?
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Can not confirm, but the logic sounds right. I taught in Miami Dade County where enrollments soared during the winter and by Spring were much lower. There are many reasons for mobility, but stability and adequacy of family income and health are surely factors that affect where children attend school and with what degree of regularity
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Maybe Legislator Joe McNamara wants the Common Core enshrined in the state’s Constitution and/or the Bible.
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Mr. Mc Namara: where in America is Common Core actually working?
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This IS the key question. Six+ years of CC stds/instr/testing and what do the cheerleaders have to say now? A generation of critical thinkers and 21st century problem solvers? More ready for college than ever? Wowing their employers in every career imaginable? Or did we waste those billions of dollars and billions of teacher hours and billions of student hours just to say we found a bunch of poor kids who do poorly on standardized tests?
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Common Core is working to line the pockets of its promoters who are paid by Gates. The paycheck to New York state school bureaucrats from Gates was $225,000. The Ravitch blog wrote about it recently.
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Gates, Coleman, Zimba and others never defined what they meant by working — other than test score increases, that is. And by the latter gauge, Common Core and their other education stuff (as Gates called it) ain’t working.
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The Common Core is working to make public schools look inadequate. These tests have never been validated. States should refuse to subject their students to these useless, expensive tests. These tests are doing nothing for students other than making them a target of privatization.
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In the meanwhile, https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-made-dollar35m-selling-real-estate-in-2018-forbes
This is just sick. Are they drunk?
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McNamara probably meets with Booker-buddy Gov. Raimondo to hear the hedge fund spin.
He’s a clueless bloke who doesn’t know Gates and his Microsoft co-founder spent $1/2 million to defeat the reelection Washington state judges who rendered verdicts favorable to public schools.
McNamara doesn’t know standardization from Common Core makes the business product- for-profit, schools-in-a-box (investors include Bill Gates and Mark Z-berg)- a better deal for the richest 0.1%.
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If McNamara reads this Ravitch post and the comments, he should inform himself that the falsely identified “liberal”, Gates-funded Center for American Progress (Podesta and Neera Tanden’s organization), is staffed by TFA’ers* and former Jeb Bush school privatizers.
TFA is viewed as anti-union.
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I taught in public schools in RI for 35 years and taught pre-service secondary and elementary teachers for 13 years. RI was one of the first “Race to the Top” states in their adoption of the Common Core State Standards. If one goes to the RI Dept of Education web site (ride.ri.gov) and selects Instruction & Assessment, one finds a link to both the Common Core State Standards and to the Initiatives that RI is implementing to educate people about CCSS. I do not know this representative McNamara as I live in a different town, but as a “retired educator” and as the Chair of the House Health, Education and Welfare Committee, he should know this. That he doesn’t just provides more evidence that the General Assembly in RI is clueless and will do anything for money. I suggest he educate himself and go to the RIDE website and chat with the Commissioner of Education, the one and only Dr. Ken Wagner.
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