Archives for category: Common Core
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Teacher: Beware EngageNY Curriculum: It’s No Good!

By dianeravitch
July 22, 2015 //
60

A reader reports on first-hand experience with Néw York’s EngageNY curriculum for Common Core:

“As a 2nd grade teacher with nearly 20 years teaching experience, I cannot express how disturbing it is to be forced to use the EngageNY materials every day. It goes against everything we know works effectively to engage and educate our students. As professionals originally hired for our creativity, enthusiasm, and dedication – these materials do everything possible to kill those qualities in each of us.

“We were told from day one that we were to use the program “with fidelity.” It was obvious that no one had actually reviewed the materials (probably due to the fact that many of the modules hadn’t even been completed yet when districts adopted them) or had asked teachers to take a look at what we were being given ahead of time. We also were not given any training – the boxes were just delivered just a few days before the school year began. As the year progressed and it became increasingly evident that there were multiple errors and/or no way to implement all of the many components scheduled in a day with the time allotted, we were then told to “use common sense.” We were not exactly sure what that meant as we were still expected to follow the program and would be evaluated on our use of it as well.

“Last year we entered our second year with EngageNY. Having been through it once, we are still identifying more and more errors and, most importantly, developmentally inappropriate material that we are expected to present to our students. Mid-year we were told that we would finally have a day to meet with a representative to do some training. All we had ever requested was that someone come in to our school and demonstrate exactly HOW all of the materials were to be used in a given lesson. Please just SHOW US! – we asked over and over. That would never happen. However, during our “training” (which was essentially just a sales presentation showing us each component), again we asked how it would be possible to fit all of these things that were dictated in a lesson into our limited time each day. The representative did finally admit that there really couldn’t be any at to fit 2 1/2 hours worth of lessons in an hour or 1 1/2 hour period.

“We, teachers and students, are being set up to fail. It is so sad to think that I hear teachers talk about “the good old days” when we used to be able to create fun and engaging activities that students enjoyed and we loved teaching! I am sorry that this has been a bit long-winded (and I could go on and on with more about this), but I haven’t had an opportunity to share this with any teachers outside of my own district. It is both comforting (and discouraging) to know that there are others experiencing the same things around the country. I hope that we can come together and fight for what we know is right for our students!”

Categories Common Core, Curriculum, New York

New Jersey Math Professor Critiques the Common Core Math Standards

By dianeravitch
July 20, 2015 //
35

Joseph G. Rosenstein, a distinguished professor of mathematics at Rutgers University, is mightily disappointed in the Common Core math standards. Professor Rosenstein has spent the past 30 years focused on K-12 mathematics education. He helped to write state standards over the past 20 years. He believed that New Jersey had excellent math standards. But in the pursuit of Race to the Top funding, New Jersey adopted the Common Core standards and junked its own successful ones. He believes the CC math standards are deeply flawed.

 

He writes:

 

What are some of those inadequacies? One is the assumption that all students should learn the material that is typically in an Algebra II course. When that proposal was first raised by the commissioner of education in 2008, I wrote an article for the Star Ledger that was given the title “Algebra II + all high schoolers = overkill.”

 

I also testified on that issue to the Joint Education Committee of the New Jersey State Legislature and asked them if they were able to calculate 64 to the two-thirds power, a typical Algebra II question. It became clear to them that such topics are not for all students, and the proposal to require all students to take Algebra II was rejected.

 

Yet a number of political organizations continue to argue that Algebra II is necessary for career readiness for all students. It isn’t. For those students who hope to choose an education and career path that includes science and technology, it is essential, but for those not going in those directions, it is simply unnecessary.

 

Unfortunately, the Common Core mathematics standards is based on the false assumption that all students should learn much of what is found in an Algebra II course. And that assumption has implications all the way down to the early grades, where it is manifested in what one educator called “a fanatical focus on fractions” in the Common Core mathematics standards.

 

A second inadequacy of the Common Core mathematics standards is that they essentially banish statistics, probability, and discrete mathematics to the later grades; these are topics that should be woven throughout the curriculum and all grade levels

 

Students in elementary school should be drawing bar graphs based on their everyday experiences, should be conducting experiments involving coin-tossing, should be discovering and generating patterns, and should be following and writing directions for carrying out simple tasks (like walking from their classrooms to the school office). And students in middle school should be building their understanding of statistics, probability, and discrete mathematics based on their previous activities.

 

Activities like those are in the previous New Jersey mathematics standards, and the modeling and reasoning and problem solving they entail likely contributed to the success of New Jersey students on the NAEP. (Full disclosure: I have written a textbook entitled “Problem Solving and Reasoning with Discrete Mathematics.”)

 

Such activities were banished from the Common Core standards because of the mistaken belief that elementary school mathematics should be directed exclusively toward success in algebra and eventually calculus.

 

Categories Common Core, New Jersey

Gerri K. Songer Explains Why Common Core Tests Are Actually Harmful to Students

By dianeravitch
July 20, 2015 //
41

Gerri K. Songer, a literacy specialist in Illinois, here explains what is wrong with the Common Core tests:

 

 

 

I was asked by my EA President and the Superintendent of IL HS Township Dist. 214 to review Smarter Balanced, ACT, SAT, and PARCC. The following is a portion of my review:

 

“In terms of text complexity, ACT, SAT, and PARCC all use excessively high level text. PARCC is by far the worst assessment for many reasons, some of them including the use of multiple passages between which comparisons and contrasts are made; finite detail-oriented questions; and multi-step cognitive analysis. Yet, the ACT disseminated last March resembled PARCC in reading and mathematics, with the exception of multiple passage comparison/contrast. If the agenda of both ACT and SAT is to become more like PARCC, then one, in essence, wouldn’t be any better than another.

 

I’m still going through the SAT materials, so I’m not able to make any conclusions about this assessment yet. I don’t see anything strikingly different in Smarter Balanced, other than the listening portion of this assessment. Like PARCC, it contains multi-passage comparison/contrast, but at least the text used in these comparisons is shorter. Text is still excessively high. One significant difference ACT has over other assessments is the use of the following scaffolding: http://www.act.org/standard/planact/english/index.html This format is easier for teachers to work with, and it helps them target individual skills on which to focus in different level courses and grade levels.

 

There is no research I have come across that supports the use of archaic vocabulary used in primary source documents such as the Declaration of Independence to “level the playing field” in terms of comprehension. In fact, research supports the opposite. The single most important component of reading comprehension is background knowledge. Even when students cannot understand vocabulary terms used in a reading passage, they can still glean meaning from text using context to compensate for words they don’t understand.

 

Using archaic vocabulary only favors high achieving, high socio-economic students who have the fortitude and patience to weed through confusing, complex, and unfamiliar text. To understand this from the students’ point of view, I have to ask myself, how intelligent would I appear if I were assessed using text written in Spanish? I know some Spanish, but I’m not fluent in it, and such an assessment certainly wouldn’t appropriately or adequately assess my ability to compare, contrast, synthesize, apply, etc., information for purpose of extracting meaning.

 

Not only do these assessments not assess what they claim to assess, but I’m also convinced, based on brain research, they are actually harmful to students. The brain only has so much neural support. If the brain is trained through repetition to narrow this neural support to a specific region of the brain, then neural activity will supply less support, or perhaps no longer support, other very important areas of the brain, specifically those areas allowing for the ability to think conceptually and creatively.

 

Ray Charles was born with sight, but lost his sight early on in his childhood. Once he lost his sight, his senses of hearing and touch became more acute. This happened because neural activity once supporting sight was redirected to support other senses – hearing and touch. Without sight, there was no need for neural activity in this region of the brain, so neurons travelled to other areas that did need support. Fortunately, genius for Ray Charles evolved through his auditory modality in the form of musical, artistic expression.

 

It is exceedingly concerning that our assessment practices could likely be obstructing the natural development of human thought processes, and my heartfelt message is that this isn’t a question of what test is better or worse – this is an issue of morality and calls for careful consideration as to what we as educators are doing to our students in our effort to neatly package their performance into statistical boxes that are misleading, at best, and that lie, at worst. We are using quantitative assessment to evaluate qualitative data – it simply cannot be done. We, as mature adults, are far more advanced than what our cognitive abilities indicated as adolescents.

 

Unfortunately, government is dictating educational practice, but perhaps it’s time to evaluate the government’s ability to determine what sound educational practice is. The original intent behind the use of standardized assessment was a noble one, but it has spun out of control, and current research suggests it may actually be detrimental to student learning and damaging to the neurology of the brain.

 

My best advice is to “take the path less traveled by;” Robert Frost claims it “made all the difference.”

 

I’ve always believed students were the educators top priority, even if this means making very difficult decisions with which many may disagree. Funding is not a priority if it comes at the expense of our students’ well-being. They are in our care, and we, as adults and as educators, are supposed to know and do what is “educationally” sound for them.

 

We make mistakes, we learn from them, and then we adjust accordingly. We aren’t perfect, but when there is strong evidence indicating our assessment practices are very likely damaging to the natural development of neural activity in the human brain, we should stop what we are doing until this evidence is analyzed through appropriate research. My bet is this could be as simple as speaking with doctors specializing in the neurology of the brain.”

Categories Common Core, Testing

EngageNY=Lock-Step Teaching=Dumbing Down Our Kids

By dianeravitch
July 19, 2015 //
38

This post is a description of EngageNY, the scripted curriculum written for use in New York state and now migrating to other states. Ken Wagner, former deputy commissioner of the New York State Education Department, now Rhode Island state superintendent, promises to import them to Rhode Island. New York’s new state commissioner says she used the New York curriculum with great success in Florida. Read this post and decide for yourself. Be sure to read the comments.

Here is a sample:

The same people who gave us standardized testing have now given us standardized teaching, which goes directly to the information a student can get, how the student gets it, and what the student is supposed to get out of each and every class minute. It is 19th-century educational lockstep, pushed by the White House and institutionalized by the New York governor’s office.

If standardized testing dumbed down school and teacher evaluation, standardized teaching takes it a step further: It dumbs down the kids.

The project is called “Engage New York.” It does anything but.

If, say, you are a teacher of 11th-grade English in Buffalo, you get, every 10 weeks, a thick three-ring binder with instructions on what you are to do in every class. The copy I have of one of these runs 587 pages. The volume is excruciatingly boring to read. (I cheated: I skimmed most of the pages.) I cannot imagine what it is like to be a creative and imaginative teacher hamstrung by it. Worse: I cannot imagine what it must be like to be a student in classes that now have to be taught by teachers forced to deliver this drivel or be fired.

The book is divided into teaching “modules,” which list what questions the teachers should ask, what answers they should get, and how they should respond to them. They list what words students should learn each day.

There are regular pages headed “Unit-at-a-Glance Calendar,” telling the teacher the specific lines and paragraphs to be covered in each class. There are pages listing “Activity” items for each class; each named activity includes the percentage of class time to be devoted to it. One, for example has “Activity 1: Introduction of Lesson Agenda. 5%”; Activity 2: Homework Accountability. 10%”; “Activity 3: Masterful Reading. 5%”; “Activity 4: Hamlet Act 1.2, Lines 900-110 Reading and Discussion, 60%.”

Day after day of this, class after class, minute by minute.

The questions the teachers are ordered to ask are often so banal they read like a Monty Python parody. Here is an example. The teacher is told to ask the question, “What information do you gather from the full title of the play: The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark?” (All teacher questions are in bold type.)

Permissible student answers are:

—The play is about a person named Hamlet.

—This is a tragic or sad play.

—Hamlet is a prince.

—This play likely takes place in Denmark.

This is drivel. The book is full of things like that. It is also full of misinformation.

Categories Common Core, Curriculum, New York

Senate’s “Every Child Achieves Act” Passes by 81-17

By dianeravitch
July 16, 2015 //
48

Minutes ago, a bipartisan majority of the Senate approved the Every Child Achieves Act, which is the bill forged by Senators Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn) and Patty Murray (D-WA). This is the long-overdue reauthorization of No Child Left Behind, the legislation passed by Congress in 2001 and signed into law on January 8, 2002. The underlying legislation is the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, whose purpose was to authorize federal aid to education targeted to schools that enrolled significant numbers of children living in poverty. The original bill was about equity, not testing and accountability.

 

The Senate bill retains annual testing, but removes federal sanctions attached to test results. Any rewards or sanctions attached to test scores will be left to states. The Senate rejected private school vouchers; nine Republican Senators joined with Democrats to defeat the voucher proposal. The bill also strengthens current prohibitions against the Secretary of Education dictating specific curriculum, standards, and tests to states, as well as barring the Secretary from tying test scores to teacher evaluations. The bill repudiates the punitive measures of of NCLB and RTTT.

 

The House of Representatives has already passed its own bill, called the Student Success Act. A conference committee representing both houses will meet to iron out their differences and craft a bill that will then be presented for a vote in both houses.

 

As I get additional details, I will post them.

 

Speaking for the Network for Public Education, I will say that we are pleased to see a decisive rejection of federal micromanagement of curriculum, standards, and assessments, as well as the prohibition of federal imposition of particular modes of evaluating teachers. We oppose annual student testing; no high-performing nation in the world administers annual tests, and there is no good reason for us to do so. We reject the claim that children who are not subjected to annual standardized tests suffer harm or will be neglected. We believe that the standardized tests are shallow and have a disparate impact on children who are Black and Brown, children with disabilities, and children who are English language learners. We believe such tests degrade the quality of education and unfairly stigmatize children as “failures.” We also regret this bill’s financial support for charter schools, which on average do not perform as well as public schools, and in many jurisdictions, perform far worse than public schools. We would have preferred a bill that outlawed the allocation of federal funds to for-profit K-12 schools and that abandoned time-wasting annual testing.

 

Nonetheless, we support the Senate bill because it draws a close to the punitive methods of NCLB and RTTT. It is an important step forward for children, teachers, and public education. The battle over “reform” now shifts to the states, but we welcome an era in which the voices of parents, educators, and students can mobilize to influence policies in their communities and states. We believe that grassroots groups have a better chance of being heard locally than in Washington, D.C., where Beltway insiders think they speak for the public. We will continue to organize and carry our fight for better education to every state.

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Education Industry, Education Reform, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Network for Public Education, Privatization, Race to the Top, Standardized Testing, Teacher Evaluations

Pennsylvania Test Scores Plummet

By dianeravitch
July 16, 2015 //
26

Pennsylvania’s test scores dropped again. Rigor!

The curriculum is developmentally inappropriate, the tests are two grade levels above grade level. Class sizes are growing because of budget cuts. Money has been sucked out of public schools to fund privately managed charters.

Rigor was designed to fail more students and pave the way for privatization. It is working.

Categories Common Core, Pennsylvania, Privacy and Privacy Rights, Standardized Testing

D.C. Math Teacher: Common Core Tests Hurt My Students.

By dianeravitch
July 13, 2015 //
16

Joseph Herbert teaches math at Wilson High School in the District of Columbia. In this post, he explains how PARCC, the Common Core test, hurt his students. He supports the Common Core but not the tests.

He writes that the current “reforms” are deeply flawed.

“The problem is two-fold: (1) the data collected do not reliably give us the information that reformers claim they do, and (2) the over-emphasis on testing is sucking the life and joy out of school, interfering significantly with actual teaching and learning, and narrowing the curriculum.”

VAM, he says, is unreliable and invalid, as is the data it produces.

Students lost many weeks of instructional time because of testing:

“Our freshmen and sophomores took over seven hours worth of PARCC tests in the month of March alone. Furthermore, they had a second round of PARCC tests in May followed shortly thereafter by final exams in June. Ultimately, these children had three out of the last four months of school dominated by tests.

“Previously, all students took the paper-and-pencil DC-CAS standardized test at the same time, and instruction was disrupted for about a week. With the new PARCC test, there was a much more protracted disruption to instruction. The PARCC test is administered online, but Wilson simply does not have the technological infrastructure to test large numbers of students simultaneously. Without the necessary IT infrastructure we were forced to test small groups of students on a rotating basis.

“As a result, we spent over three weeks administering the first round of PARCC tests alone. Students were forced to miss class to test while their classes went on, causing them to lose valuable instructional time.”

He does not blame the Common Core standards. He blames PARCC. To those who think we need annual testing, he points out that NAEP reports the gaps every two years, without the intrusiveness of PARCC.

He writes:

“Ultimately, we have to ask ourselves what kind of experience we want our children to have in school. I believe that kids learn more when they’re excited to come to school. I believe they learn more when they have meaningful and thoughtful questions to ask and answer. I believe math can and should be fun.

“I believe that if we want to stem the tide of DC’s dropout crisis, school should be a worthwhile place to attend, not a miserable experience of test taking.

“I believe that if we want to close the achievement gap, we need to have an open and honest conversation about what students need from school, what they want from school, and how we can get data on student performance without perversely affecting their school experience.

“Most of all, I believe that school is a place for profound growth and learning. Anything that detracts from or actively impedes that must go.”

Categories Common Core, Standardized Testing

Mercedes Schneider: Arne Duncan’s Children Were Never Exposed to Common Core

By dianeravitch
July 13, 2015 //
23

Mercedes Schneider reports that Arne Duncan sent his children to public schools in Arlington, Virginia, but Virginia never adopted the Common Core standards.

Now, as we know, his children will attend the University of Chicago Lab school, a progressive school that does not use the Common Core standards.

If the CCSS are imperative for America’s children, why has Duncan avoided placing his children in schools where they would encounter them? Doesn’t he want to know how they are doing compared to children in other states? Doesn’t he want them to be college-and-career-ready? Doesn’t he want them to be prepared for global competition?

It doesn’t make sense.

Categories Common Core, Duncan, Arne

Jeff Bryant: Washington Post Was Wrong about Arne: He Has Destroyed Trust in the Federal Role in Education

By dianeravitch
July 13, 2015 //
17

Jeff Bryant, Director of the Education Opportunity Network, faults Lyndsey Layton’s sympathetic portrayal of Arne Duncan. She portrays him as someone who is a good listener, a big-hearted fellow who won wide acceptance for charter schools, test-based evaluation of teachers, and the Common Core. Bryant says she got the story wrong. He says that reporters for the big national newspapers think that if they interview people in think tanks inside the Beltway, they have the real story. In fact, people inside the Beltway think tanks live in an echo chamber, almost completely detached from the rest of America and the consequences of the policies they promote.

Bryant says Layton got it wrong: Arne is not a good listener; in fact, he never listens to anyone unless they agree with him. Most Americans still don’t know what charter schools are. Test-based teacher evaluation has been a flop, and increasing numbers of states are dropping the Common Core and/or the tests that Arne paid $360 million for.

The most notable result of Arne’s stewardship of the U.S. Department of Education is that both parties have agreed to legislation that would neuter future Secretaries of Education and strip them of the power to punish schools, districts, and states. This is not exactly a resounding endorsement of his leadership. You might say that it is a bipartisan repudiation of it.

Bryant is quietly furious. He cites Arne’s “white suburban moms” quote about the anti-testing revolt in New York. He did not mention Arne’s infamous claim that Hurricane Katrina was the best thing that ever happened to New Orleans’ public schools: It wiped out the public schools, created a pretext to fire 7,500 mostly African American teachers, eliminated the teachers’ union, and turned New Orleans into a privatized district. Nor did he mention Arne’s other memorable quote, that he wants to be able to look into the eyes of a second-grader and know that he or she is college-bound. When you see the kind of absurd comments that he is apt to make off-the-cuff, you can understand why he sticks with talking points and a tight script.

Duncan’s policies failed because he never listened to critics. He listened, or appeared to, then ignored whatever he may have heard. As Bryant writes, “Every time experienced educators challenged Duncan to question his agenda and reconsider policy directions, he responded by … continuing down the same course.”

The worst legacy of Duncan’s tenure is that Congress is determined to limit the role of the federal government in the future and to forfeit the good things that the federal government has done in the past.

He writes:

What’s particularly unfortunate about that policy direction is that the federal government historically has had a mostly positive influence in public schools. As the article reminds us, what we now call NCLB was “initially passed in 1965 as the Elementary and Secondary Education Act,” a law that “was originally designed to protect the nation’s neediest students, and that the federal government must play a significant enforcement role to ensure that poor students, racial minorities and students with disabilities all receive an equal education.”

Because of that act, millions upon millions of impoverished children have had resources funneled to their schools through programs like Title I. Students who do not speak English as their first language have had funds sent to their schools to pay for specialists. Students who have physical disabilities, social-emotional problems and trouble with their learning and intellectual development have had more access to education opportunities and better supports in their schools. More girls and young women have been provided opportunities to play sports and experience a full curriculum.

Sure, this federal mission has not always been fully funded or adequately implemented. But that was the goal, and it was the goal NCLB took our attention away from and the goal this blundering oaf of a secretary refused to take up as his primary job, even though everyone outside his inner circle clamored he do so.

So the biggest tragedy of Arne Duncan is not only the millions of students and families ill-served under his tenure but the millions that will likely be ill-served in the future because it looks like his self-righteous, narrow-minded zeal will leave the federal government’s role in education marginalized for the immediate and foreseeable future.

Categories Charter Schools, Common Core, Standardized Testing, Teacher Evaluations, U.S. Department of Education

Pioneer Institute Calls on Mass. Commissioner to Step Away from PARCC Decision

By dianeravitch
July 10, 2015 //
31

The Pioneer Institute is a conservative think tank in Boston. Unlike most conservative think tanks, it opposes the Common Core and the associated testing. This week, Pioneer called on State Commissioner if Education Mitchell Chester to recuse himself from deciding whether Massachusetts should keep its MCAS state tests or drop them for PARCC. Chester is chairman of the PARCC board. Pioneer says he has a conflict of interest. Seems obvious, no?

Here is Pioneer’s statement:

“Education Commissioner Mitchell Chester Should Recuse Himself from the Upcoming Decision on PARCC and MCAS

“BOSTON – Commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education Mitchell Chester, who later this year will make a recommendation to the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (the board) about whether to replace MCAS tests with those developed by the Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC), chairs PARCC’s governing board.

“Pioneer Institute calls on Chester to recuse himself from the MCAS/PARCC decision process for the following reasons:

“1. As commissioner of the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (the department), Chester serves as secretary to the board of education and oversees the state agency and hearing process for choosing between MCAS and PARCC. The agency he heads gathers the information on which the policy decision will be made and conducts the internal evaluation. Commissioner Chester ultimately makes a recommendation to the board about which test to choose.

“This is clearly a conflict of interest. Taking this matter out of the context of education makes the point perhaps more evident. Imagine that the general manager of the MBTA also chaired the board of Keolis or Massachusetts Bay Commuter Railroad when the two companies were competing for the $2.6 billion contract to operate the T’s commuter rail system. Such a conflict of interest would never have been tolerated, yet this is precisely the situation given the commissioner’s leadership role at the PARCC.

“2. In its role managing a series of five statewide public hearings that are currently underway on whether the board should officially adopt PARCC and abandon MCAS, the department chooses who to invite to deliver expert testimony. The invited experts speak first and are allowed more time than members of the general public. Thus far, in the first four hearings, a strong majority of the invited experts have been supporters of PARCC.

“3. Commissioner Chester has also formed a team of Massachusetts/PARCC Educator Leader Fellows within the department. According to a memo Chester sent to district and charter school leaders, the PARCC fellows, who receive a stipend, should be “excited about the content of the Common Core State Standards” and “already engaged in leadership work around them.” The department has no MCAS fellows.

“4. The commissioner’s interactions with local education leaders have led many to believe that the decision to abandon MCAS has already been made. Brookline Superintendent and Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents President William Lupini, in a 2014 letter to the town’s school committee, flatly stated that “MCAS will be phased out in favor of either PARCC or another new ‘next generation’ assessment after the 2015 test administration.” (No other “next generation” test or MCAS 2.0 is under development or consideration.)

“5. Given that the PARCC consortium originally included 26 participating states and Washington, DC, but now includes only seven and DC, there is enormous pressure on the commissioner, as the chairman of PARCC, to ensure that the testing consortium does not lose any more states. This is especially so after a spring during which numerous states declined further participation in PARCC; just last week one of the few large states remaining in the consortium (Ohio) left the consortium.

“The financial viability of PARCC is in great part a function of the number of students it services. When PARCC included 26 states and DC, it could plan its pricing strategy on the basis of serving over 25 million (of the over 31 million) public school students enrolled in those jurisdictions. With the loss of Ohio, PARCC has been reduced to serving just over 5 million. Additional consortium states, most immediately Arkansas, are actively working toward similar departures. Massachusetts’ almost one million public school students are of considerable concern to the consortium’s financial viability, therefore creating an untenable ethical position for the Commissioner.

“Sadly, the larger process of choosing between Massachusetts’ previous academic standards and Common Core, which led to the current MCAS/PARCC issue, is already one that has been rife with at least the appearance of conflict of interest. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has invested hundreds of millions of dollars to develop and then to market Common Core. Oddly, Commissioner Chester relied on three studies conducted by Gates-funded entities, directly or indirectly, to inform his 2010 recommendation that the board of education adopt Common Core. A 2010 WCVB-TV 5 investigation found that Chester and other department personnel accepted $15,000 in luxury travel and accommodations from Common Core supporters prior to the board’s adoption of the Common Core.

“As a gubernatorial candidate in 2010, Governor Baker opposed Common Core and PARCC. In March of this year, he criticized the MCAS/PARCC process and earlier procedures that resulted in the adoption of Common Core, telling the State House News Service, “I think it’s an embarrassment that a state that spent two years giving educators, families, parents, administrators and others an opportunity to comment and engage around the assessment system that eventually became MCAS basically gave nobody a voice or an opportunity to engage in a discussion at all before we went ahead and executed on Common Core and PARCC.”

“Such practices need to end, and the public’s trust in the department’s ability to manage a publicly impartial, transparent and accountable process needs to be restored. The first step is for Commissioner Chester, who chairs PARCC’s governing board, to recuse himself from the upcoming policy decision about whether to replace MCAS with the PARCC test.

“In cases where there are several apparent conflicts of interest, recusals are an appropriate administrative response meant to uphold the public trust.”

Categories Common Core, Massachusetts, Standardized Testing
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