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Daily Stormer
November 23, 2015
Literally, everything that Barack Obama has done to this country has been like a rape.
Common Core is just another disaster to add to the pile.
The Massachusetts State Board of Education has voted to forego Common Core testing in favor of redesigning its own state exam, an influential move from a national education leader that may hasten the end of a national high-stakes testing era, while challenging education experts to come up with a better alternative.
Under intense pressure from both the right and left of the political spectrum, states have been practically tripping over each other to drop the controversial tests: Parents complained they were too hard, conservatives alleged they represented a federal takeover, and teachers’ unions decried test score-based teacher evaluations. Only 20 states, plus the District of Columbia, are currently scheduled to continue with PARCC or Smarter Balanced tests aligned with Common Core standards.
But Massachusetts, the education “miracle state” – whose students have for a decade topped the National Assessment for Educational Progress (audit tests often called “the nation’s report card”) – was considered a crucial supporter for Common Core tests and now, a crucial breakaway.
It was Mitchell Chester, commissioner of elementary and secondary education in Massachusetts, who helped develop Common Core aligned tests, according to The New York Times. Mr. Chester reasoned that as states adopted the Common Core standards, based on recommendations from a governors-appointed board of experts, it only made sense to compare students’ progress nationwide with national tests.
While the federal government did not design the Common Core, the Obama administration did incentivize states to implement their standards by using scores from those tests to award Race to the Top funding and No Child Left Behind waivers, requirements many states-rights advocates and teacher unions bitterly opposed.
But the goal of clear state-to-state comparisons fell out of sight as individual states began tweaking the language used to report results. A score that counted as “approaching expectations” in one part of the country might be labeled “proficient” somewhere else – the same state-to-state differences Common Core creators had hoped to fix.
“It may be a little too premature to declare it a failure,” Massachusetts Secretary of Education James A. Peyser said in an October interview with The New York Times, “but for sure it’s in retreat.”
Even the Obama administration, which has continued the Bush strategy of insisting on higher educational standards through carrot-and-stick measures as a way to improve performance overall, and close the achievement gap between white students and their minority classmates, has admitted that the last two decades of heavy testing is too much.
In October, soon after Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced his upcoming resignation, the White House promised to ask Congress to limit test-taking to 2 percent of instructional time.
In the nation’s largest cities, students take an average of eight standardized test per year. There is little evidence to show that the tests have inspired immediate, measurable learning gains.
But some educators have urged patience, reminding testing skeptics that even in Massachusetts, educational turnaround has been nearly 20 years in the making.
“If we revert back to the old standards, all this work will have been for naught,” Revere. Mass., Superintendent Dianne Kelly told The New York Times.
This whole Common Core thing has really been unbelievable.
Here’s a quick video going over some of it.
