Archives for category: Common Core

From Angie Sullivan, a teacher in Nevada:

I’m a union girl. But I know that my union is huge and has become part of the privatizing problem – looking for money from big business and supporting politicians who take it too.

So I lobby them too.

Common Core is not supported by this member.

With everything going on in my state of Nevada – NEA spends money and gives us a grant to implement common core standards?

NEA likes to say that our “members” support common core. Really? In Nevada only half our teachers vote in elections but somehow NEA was able to poll us and determined we support common core? That is a lie.

The representative assembly considered this and while common core passed – this was NOT an issue for many states YET. Most representatives sat out and did not vote for or against – I was watching. States like California voted heavily NO. This was not an overwhelming mandate from the body to support. A third of the room stood against. Those of us oppressed by the system that no one paid us any money to implement said no. I had no voice at any level about common core. This was not democratically implemented.

Common core was developed by big business. They want all states to have the same standards – not to improve education – but to improve profit for themselves. Bill Gates will sell national software. Pearson will dominate our market with national programs and textbooks. The companies will no longer have to tailor Nevada products to Nevada. This is a national standard to create a national unified market so that corporations can make money.

And testing. Common core is great for test makers correct? We have a computer … so we must create systems to collect and compare data about our kids on a national level?

No one asked me what it is like filling out a report card with 128 standards.

No one considered developmental appropriateness for five year olds when creating the standards.

No one considered the diversity that is in my classroom when developing the standards.

No one asked me.

So don’t imply that I support such a system because I see it for what it is. It is no good for my students in poverty in urban Nevada. It doesn’t support language learners. It raises the bar? Not really. It does imply that every student in America fits into a cookie cutter.

I believe my union is selling out students and teachers on this issue instead of doing what is right. Authentic learning is more than a score.

We will regret this – just as we regret No Child Left Behind – which my union implied I supported too. It will oppress us. It will encourage more tests and scores and failures. It will measure teachers and compare us until we fail too. This will promote an elite agenda … doing very little and most likely harm the kids I serve and love.

No money or support – just churn- and failing kids left in the wake?

Unfunded mandates sold to us by big money and implemented without teacher voice or additional pay – sound familiar?

We have seen this before and the big question is … who is making money because we will be hard pressed to say it helped Vegas kids.

O God hear the words of my mouth, let my union be advocates and not waste our spare resources in directions that do not help our children.

Angie.

Categories Common Core

Los Angeles Baffled About How to Pay for iPads in Future

By dianeravitch

November 7, 2013 //

Los Angeles negotiated a sweet deal for Apple, promising to buy an iPad for every student at a cost that will eventually total at least $1 billion.

Forget the fact that the iPads are financed in large part by borrowing money from a 25-year construction bond issue, and that many schools will not get the repairs and upgrades they need.

Forget the fact that the iPads are loaded with Pearson content that is not yet complete.

Forget the fact that Los Angeles agreed to pay more for the iPads than their retail cost.

Forget the fact that the iPads will be obsolete in three years and the Pearson content is licensed for only three years.

Here is the question: How will Los Angeles pay for new iPads in three years? How can it afford to pay for the iPads it just agreed to buy? How will Los Angeles pay to repair its crumbling schools? Where will it find the money to reduce class sizes, some of which are staggering?

And behind it all is a lingering question: If the Common Core testing must be done online, and if every district in California is required to buy computers and establish the necessary bandwidth for Common Core testing, how many billions of dollars will be spent nationally to pay the cost of Common Core testing? If Los Angeles spent $1 billion, what will it cost for the nation?

One begins to understand why the tech corporations are so enthusiastic about Common Core.

Categories Common Core, Los Angeles

Bill Gates’ Utopian Vision for Your Child

By dianeravitch

November 6, 2013 //

115

Bill Gates has plans for your child. He wants to know everything he can about your child so he can customize and personalize the deliverables.

A teacher in California told me that his principal enthusiastically signed up for the Gates plan. Here is the survey that every teacher was asked to complete. Where do you think this is going? Is this utopia or dystopia?

**********************HERE IS THE CONTENTS WHEN CLICKING THE LINK:

ORIGINAL Survey Option E: Teacher Survey

We believe in the promise of personalization to dramatically improve student learning. In the future, each student’s learning experience – what she learns, and how, when, and where she learns it – will be tailored to her individual developmental needs, skills, and interests. This is a fundamental shift from the way that students learn today, and as such, we believe that for personalization to truly transform student learning, schools will likely look dramatically different than they do today. Our current efforts support districts and partner organizations in building system-level capacity to design, launch and scale school models that embrace this bold vision of personalized learning.

The purpose of this survey is to understand the teacher perspective on the personalized learning activities happening in schools, including current instructional practices, PD, supports, etc. Further, this survey aims to gauge the level of interest for teachers to implement personalized learning in their classrooms. For this survey, personalized learning is defined as follows: Learning experiences for all students are tailored to their individual developmental needs, skills and interest. Personalized learning can, and should, include the following supporting elements: learner profiles, personal learning paths, individual mastery, and flexible learning environment. These attributes can be further defined as follows:

• Learner profiles: Captures individual skills, gaps, strengths, weaknesses, interests & aspirations of each student

• Personal learning paths: Each student has learning goals & objectives. Learning experiences are diverse and matched to the individual needs of students

• Individual mastery: Continually assesses student progress against clearly defined standards & goals. Students advance based on demonstrated mastery

• Flexible learning environments: Multiple instructional delivery approaches that continuously optimize available resources in support of student learning

While we believe that true personalized learning requires much more than the mere adoption and use of new technologies, we are optimistic about blended instruction – instructional design and delivery that incorporates the use of new technologies alongside traditional instruction – as a means of personalizing learning. As such, we are interested in hearing about your use of technology as part of your personalized learning efforts and implementation.

***************HERE IS THE FIRST PART OF THE SURVEY************

1. What is the name of your school?

2. What level is your school? Elementary School

Middle School

Grades K-8

Grades 6-12

High School

Other (please specify)

3. What grade level(s) do you teach?
K

Other (please specify)

Categories Common Core, Data and Data Mining, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Privacy and Privacy Rights

St.Tammany Parish in Louisiana Drops Out of CCSS

By dianeravitch

November 6, 2013 //

St. Tammany Parish is one of the state of Louisiana’s high-performing districts. Its board passed a far-reaching resolution declaring that it was dropping out of the Common Core standards and would not administer the PARCC assessments. Its resolution explained why it was not willing to participate in this disruption to its schools:

It objects to federal control of its curriculum;

The CCSS were written and implemented too quickly, without due deliberation;

Compliance with CCSS and PARCC involves huge expenses, in relation to equipment, upgrades, time, and effort;

It objects to the data-sharing agreements that are associated with CCSS;

It sees CCSS and PARCC as an unfunded mandate.

For these and other reasons, the school board said “no thanks.”

Categories Common Core

Academic Standards and a Boy with Autism

By dianeravitch

November 5, 2013 //

This is a letter written by a mother in Louisiana. She sent it out widely.

“Academic Standards and Individualized Education Programs”

How are schools supposed to get every student to meet the same academic standards and meet the individualized education programs (IEP) for children with disabilities — both are required by federal law?

The following is a letter written from the heart of a mom with a son with autism.
It is not meant to expose any teacher or district. On the contrary, both are working hard to support the student. It is simply written to express an opinion of the situation we are all in at this time.

Dear “Is Anybody Listening?,”

Several weeks ago I sat down with my son’s teacher and listened to her tell me what her priorities are for him for this year. She revealed that she is largely focused on reading comprehension and, to a lesser extent, writing. It is indisputable that those are areas of high need for him. But what she had forgotten and said very little about, until I mentioned it, was language and social interaction. I could see a light bulb go off in her head. Suddenly she understood. Yes, of course, I must work on those too. Then I saw something else. It was something I can only describe as concern, although an insufficient descriptor. She started talking about all of the third grade standards. She handed me copies of the standards which she had already printed out, tucked safely inside page protectors. The teacher began to ponder, how will I address the core deficits of his disability in the midst of teaching the standards? Oh, maybe there would be a few minutes during group work or perhaps during a pull out session, but there’s so much to work on academically…

We are over half way through the first nine weeks and, although every member of his team is working hard, Jackson is so lost. He’s lost in a sea of standards and expectations for him to think critically and explain every answer. It takes much more than raising the bar or saying you believe students with disabilities can achieve for them to actually achieve. You see, he has only answered a why question a handful of times in his life. Now he’s asked why, how and explain your answer all day long. What do you think is going to happen when you test and assess him? He is going to fail. It will look as though he cannot and has not achieved.

Let me tell you what he has done, though. Jackson had been permitted to isolate himself from all the children on the school playground for the last 2 years. We were less than one week into the school year and Jackson was no longer standing next to the wall, far away from his peers. He was under a tree next to the playground. Fast forward a few more weeks and he has played on the equipment a few times, but more spectacularly, he is engaging and playing a game of “I see you” with a little girl in his class. She enjoys him. She likes him. He likes her. They play together for a few minutes every day. No standardized assessment he will take this year or any year will reflect that progress. No teacher or related service provider will be rewarded for their role in facilitating this achievement. After all, it’s not one of the standards. It’s not on “the test.”

As an advocate, some days are very challenging when both working and living in the disability world. There are no breaks. There is no escape. I sit in rooms with educational leaders who make statements about the 43% (of students with disabilities who passed the tests last year) and then I come home to the sweetest little boy who falls in the 57%. A boy who has an amazing ability to tolerate the world around him, but who no longer wants to go to school. How will it get any better? When will it get any better? It only seems like we’re heading in the opposite direction of improving outcomes for kids like Jackson.

Rebecca Ellis
Mandeville, Louisiana
504-261-342
ellis.rebecca@gmail.com”

Categories Common Core, Special Education

Jamie Gass: Is Common Core Legal?

By dianeravitch

November 4, 2013 //

Jamie Gass, who directs the conservative Pioneer Institute in Boston, is a historian and a determined critic of Common Core. While most conservatives support Common Core (Jeb Bush, Bobby Jindal, Mitch Daniels, Tony Bennett, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce), Gass opposes Common Core and the testing because–among other reasons– he thinks that both are a violation of federal law. Read his latest column here.

Categories Common Core

Montessori Teacher to John King: Montessori Is Not About Testing and Common Core

By dianeravitch

November 3, 2013 //

I received an email from a Montessori teacher in Wisconsin. She asked me to publish this so that Dr. John King, State Commissioner of Education in New York, understands that the Montessori school to which he sends his own children does not have a philosophy aligned with what he proposes for Other People’s Children.

Dear Diane,

John King keeps on saying that Common Core is a lot like Montessori education. I am an upper-level teacher (1st-6th grade) at a private Montessori school in Kenosha, Wisconsin. I have read the CC standards and researched it. Many of our parents are teachers in the public school district and I discuss CC with them. I am reading your book and I can tell you that Common Core is nothing like the Montessori method. There are many differences, but I’ve limited my explanation to how we view homework and assessment in the Montessori classroom. This is also how I explain the differences to parents.

One of the current trends in education, to increase “academic rigor,” has resulted in elementary students receiving more homework on a daily basis. So why do Montessori students receive very little homework? While many schools and teachers feel pressure to assign daily homework, research shows this is actually causing children more harm than good. The harm includes loss of family time, limiting time for unstructured play and exercise, restricting the time that children have to pursue their own interests and self-learning, and most importantly, it kills off a love of learning. Children need to go outside and play. So what is our goal in Montessori schools? It is to help the parents raise a well-rounded, happy person with a healthy dose of curiosity and an everlasting interest in our world.How do we assess the students in the elementary classroom if we don’t give tests? First, let me clarify a common misconception about tests. In a conventional classroom, many of the assessments that students take are standardized tests. The results of these tests are received months after the test is given and are not used by the teacher to determine lesson planning for each student. Teacher-made-tests provide immediate results that are used for grades, but the results usually do not influence the lesson plans for each individual child. In the upper-level classroom, we continually evaluate the progress of each child through observation and discussion: observation of the written portion of the assignment, observation of the student at work, and discussion of the work with each student. We record the progress of each student, with the goal that the student is working at his or her best potential and has mastered the concepts. In order to achieve that goal, we often need to review, re-explain, alter assignments, or choose a material that will show the concept from a different perspective based on the needs of each individual student.

Maria Montessori said that “Before elaborating any system of education, we must therefore create a favorable environment that will encourage the flowering of a child’s natural gifts. All that is needed is to remove the obstacles.” There are many obstacles which may cause a student to struggle but the most common causes are fear and maturity, two factors that greatly determine a person’s ability or inability to learn but are rarely ever considered as relevant to education. In a Montessori classroom, we try to create an atmosphere where it is safe to make a mistake and trial and error is the norm, thus reducing the amount of fear and anxiety. The varied rates of maturity are reflected in the three year time spans of 3-6, 6-9, and 9-12. Montessori teachers evaluate the work habits that enable lifelong learning, independence, responsibility, and kindness.

On my evaluation form, I also include if the student is working for his or her own enjoyment. I must say that my students love coming to school everyday and it is hard for me to get them to leave at the end of the day. Parents have told me that their first graders are sad when it is the weekend because they can’t go to school. Montessori classrooms create a setting for children that is very natural to them and encourages learning, discovery, and creativity. It highly respects and values each child. That is the education that John King’s children are receiving.

Marianne Giannis

Categories Common Core, Education Reform, Testing

A High-Stakes Exam for the People of Indiana

By dianeravitch

November 2, 2013 //

Cindi Pastore created this multiple-choice exam for the people of Infiana.

It illustrates the current crazy situation there. Glenda Ritz won a startling upset victory last fall, winning more votes than Governor Pence. Yet Governor Pence has worked unceasingly to dilute Ritz’s authority and render her powerless to carry out her official duties. He and the unelected state board are thwarting her so they can continue to privatize education in the state of Indiana.

Here is the test:

An Eight Question High Stakes Test for Governor Pence, Brian Bosma, David Long, and Members of the State Board of Education

1. Who was elected by an overwhelming majority (roughly 1,300,000) of the voters (many of whom crossed their party lines) of this state to be the Indiana Superintendent of Public Schools?