The rightwing Thomas B. Fordham Institute has rejected Florida’s effort to replace the Common Core standards, which were wholly funded by the Gates Foundation. When the Common Core was released a decade ago, Gates paid millions to Fordham to evaluate them.
Politico Morning Education reports:
GATES FOUNDATION-BACKED INSTITUTE CALLS FLORIDA’S NEW K-12 STANDARDS ‘WEAK’: The Fordham Institute said the state’s Benchmarks for Excellent Student Thinking standards, which came from a push from Gov. Ron DeSantis to replace Common Core and to set a national example, are in need of “significant and immediate revisions.” The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, a supporter of Common Core, backs the institute.
— “As for other states, they should indeed look for model standards, but they won’t find them in Florida,” wrote Fordham Institute President Michael Petrilli and Amber Northern, senior vice president of research. The study also says Florida leaders are unlikely to reexamine the new standards “anytime soon.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Indiana keeps looking for the ideal standardized test. They’ll never find it. The ‘damage control’ legislation has already passed. What a crock of _________.
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Student test scores drop in new ILEARN exam
Brynna Sentel
TheStatehouseFile.com Aug 26, 2019
INDIANAPOLIS – The results of the ILEARN state standardized test have so shocked government leaders that they already are performing damage control.
Gov. Eric Holcomb called on the Indiana General Assembly Monday to enact legislation that would spare schools and students from being evaluated on the standardized test results for at least another year.
ILEARN, the Indiana Learning Evaluation Assessment Readiness Network test which is a shorter rebranded version of the ISTEP+ test, was administered to Indiana schools during the 2018-19 school year to students in the third to eighth grades. The results won’t be released to the public until Sept. 4.
But they won’t be the kind of report card to boast about.
“The results will show a decrease compared to the previously administered ISTEP+ test,” Holcomb said in a statement. “Since this is the first year of the ILEARN assessment, I will ask Superintendent (of Public Instruction) Jennifer McCormick to support my request that the General Assembly take action to hold schools harmless so the test scores do not have an adverse impact on teacher evaluations and schools’ letter grades for the 2018-19 school year.”
McCormick later issued a statement saying that “we are proposing legislative action addressing the negative impact on educators, schools, districts and communities.”…
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The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has enlisted the Fordham to shore up the so-called Common Core State Standards, paid for the Gates Foundation (The so-called refers to the fact that these were not state standards, but marketed as if they were.)
The Fordham’s report, “The State of the Sunshine State’s Standards: The Florida B.E.S.T. Edition” (Benchmarks for Excellent Student Thinking), has enlisted academics to rate Florida’s standards using rubrics that are not very different from the rubrics in EdReports, also funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
In the Fordham’s report, academic specialists in math and ELA were enlisted to use a variant of the rubric-based rating scheme and criteria developed to rate instructional materials for EdReports. In both of these endeavors, strict compliance with the CCSS is rated, down to the level of checking Florida’s ELA standards for “text complexity.”
In the Florida report, the Math standards were evaluated in two categories: Content (focus, coherence, and rigor) and Communication (clarity, specificity, and access). The ELA standards were evaluated by the same criteria. Full compliance with the Common Core was demanded throughout the ratings, including attention to “text complexity–quantitative and qualitative” (11 mentions).
The ELA evaluation includes this criterion “The standards connect to content standards in other disciplines such as art, science, and social studies.” Not a single evaluator in the Florida report is clearly qualified to speak on the content standards in any of these disciplines.
The academics who participated in shaping the Florida report, and the Forham, are engaged in a publicity stunt for the Gates Foundation. Like EdReports, the Florida report is not much more than a method of marketing an idea dear to the heart of Gates: That strict criteria for compliance with the CCSS are essential, and the CCSS are as close to perfection as you can get. In fact, the initial sense of “strict compliance” in EdReports was conveyed to reviewers as a “drop-dead criterion” meaning don’t waste time evaluating the materials on any other criteria unless the first one is met. You can find the EdReports rating criteria here: https://www.edreports.org/reports/rubrics-evidence
Nowhere in the Florida report (or in EdReports) is there any recognition that the validity of rubric-based ratings has been questioned. Gates loves ratings, pseudo measurements, whether of standards, or instructional materials, or of “teacher quality” as defined by Danielson or Marzano. This a good reference is you are interested in the problem of “rubrics.” http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.915.6317&rep=rep1&type=pdf
The Florida report should be viewed as a publicity stunt with the Fordham a willing participant in recycling the very old and dubious idea that the CCSS are some sort of gold standard. They are not, and not by a long shot.
See the Florida Report here. https://www.politico.com/states/f/?id=00000172-99c4-d4f1-adf3-99d4be030000
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I find it hard to imagine any set of stds/ aligned assessments that bear even a remote resemblance to CCSS/ PAARC-SBAC would pass any litmus test related to actual teaching/ learning. The US pro-stdzn crowd love to say, look at the [higher-scoring-on-PISA] countries, they have natl stds! Have those folks ever examined even one of those country’s natl curriculum frameworks? There is no resemblance.
Bill/Melinda are not stupid, & had plenty of yrs to research what goes on elsewhere during the Achieve Inc yrs right up thro peddling CCSS to natl govrs. The obvious conclusion to anyone who cares to do their hw is, they targeted a different animal: stds that would be a boondoggle for their corp products. Hell you don’t even have to do the hw to predict that outcome. (Again, that song “Only In America” runs thro my head.)
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If you read SLAYING GOLIATH, you will see that the woman who ran Race to the Top wrote that the purpose of national standards was to create a national market for vendors.
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oh, that is a depressing reminder
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Indiana had to scrap the results of this newest attempt to find the perfect standardized test. Too many children failed to pass. [I posted a different article and it went into moderation and then disappeared.]
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ILEARN scores are back and fewer than half of Indiana’s students passed. Here’s what’s next.
Published Sept. 4, 2019
Fewer than half of Hoosier students are on track to graduate high school ready for college or a career, according to ILEARN standardized test results.
Fewer than half of Hoosier students are on track to graduate high school ready for college or a career, according to the state’s controversial new standardized test known as ILEARN.
The results, made public Wednesday, are not necessarily a surprise — teachers, parents and lawmakers have been sounding the alarm for more than a week — but they raise tough questions about how well Indiana schools are preparing students.
The new test, a replacement for the much-maligned ISTEP exam, was administered for the first time in the spring of 2018 to all Indiana students in grades 3 through 8.
ILEARN scores 2019: How schools around Indiana performed
Statewide, 47.8% of students were rated proficient on math and 47.9% on English. On last year’s ISTEP exam, passing rates for math and English were 58.9% and 64.6%, respectively…
Check out this story on indystar.com: https://www.indystar.com/story/news/education/2019/09/04/indiana-education-schools-ilearn-assessment-test-scores-fewer-half-pass-fail/2197850001/
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Why do I doubt the ability of any test to predict college readiness? Am I just a cynic?
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Fordham whined that the Florida BEST standards for ELA were generally praiseworthy except for a couple of truly inane reasons. Florida does not have English teachers using interdisciplinary reading selections. In other words, the math textbook is to be read in the math class, not in the English class. English teachers don’t teach coding. Duh. Common Core has English teachers teaching with anything but meaningful literature. Also, the Florida standards do not address listening to multimedia presentations. In other words, Power Point presentations and YouTube videos are not required for English classes. Too bad, Microsoft and Google. Too bad, Billy Gates. You don’t get to burn books and force everyone to use instead your worthless products.
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Bill and Melinda both need to take very basic English and science courses because neither of them has any clue about either.
Bill , the college dropout, never learned what science is about and Melinda, a computer “science” (sic) and economics major, also never learned.
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The Gatesbot is in need of significant and immediate revisions to its operating system which was produced by Microsoft and is therefore very buggy.
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The word “standards” is a meaningless pile of stuff.
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Quote of the day.
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