It is becoming increasingly clearer that the main groups oppressing parents, local school boards, and local teacher unions with Common Core-based standards and tests (regardless of what they are actually called) are state boards of education and state departments of education.
One of the major problems that the adoption of Common Core’s standards has led to is excessive testing—at all grade levels from kindergarten on—sometimes more than one test per grade level.
Many governors are drawing from a large bag of tricks to confuse and deceive parents worried about the Common Core standards, their implementation, and the tests based on them. Most parents’ major, if not only, concern is the academic
There seems to be some confusion in state departments of education about what that copyright on Common Core’s standards actually means. Some staffers seem to think it means that the standards revision committees, set in motion by a governor’s executive
Last week, I participated in a hearing for a Georgia House study committee regarding HR 550, which created the state House Study Committee on the Role of Federal Government in Education. The purpose of the committee was to study “the
The Gates Foundation has been very busy trying to figure out ways for governors, state boards, and commissioners of education to pretend they are giving up Common Core’s standards or tests, while ensuring these states still have warmed-over versions in
States and local school districts can develop their own non-Common Core standards by following the steps below: 1. Vote for Chair of Steering Committee: The Steering Committee in charge of the project (i.e., in charge of the two standards development
1. Focus of Accountability: Schools or Teachers Under No Child Left Behind (NCLB), schools and school districts were held accountable based on student scores. Under Common Core/Race to the Top (CC/RttT), teachers are to be held accountable based on varying
Both Republican and Democratic governors need to know that minority parents with children in the public schools express similar concerns to those of non-minority parents. They, too, don’t understand why Common Core seems to assume that all children will benefit
Despite the billions of dollars showered on our schools, American public education is poor to mediocre and likely to remain so. Only 7% of our grade 8 students reach the advanced level in mathematics (on TIMSS tests), suggesting why little
The burning education issue facing most states at the moment is which tests should they give their K-12 students next year to satisfy the conditions of their waivers from the United States Department of Education (USED) or the commitments they
Oklahoma is the most recent state to try to eliminate the Common Core standards. Many Oklahomans deserve credit for the bill Gov. Mary Fallin (R) may sign this week. The truth, however, is there will be no end to the Gates
This year’s college graduation exercises have seen an unusually high number of speakers who either were disinvited or withdrew after protests. The political issues differed from college to college. Brandeis disinvited defender of women’s rights Ayaan Hirsi Ali because she
As I indicated in my article last week, I sent Governor Pence (R) of Indiana a report on April 8, 2014 containing the suggestions of four Indiana high school English teachers and over 20 literary scholars for improving Common Core’s
Two years ago I crafted an updated set of English language arts standards based on the set I helped develop in Massachusetts in 1997. This set of standards, copyright-free and cost-free, has been available for districts and states to use
Writing at National Review Online, American Enterprise Institute’s Rick Hess and Mike McShane make the complaint that critics of Common Core have not come up with the next steps to “repeal and replace” for states that want to restore academic
A move is afoot to get Americans to see local school boards as a major obstacle to effective school reform. What is the overt charge against them? That low achievers or minority groups get the short end of the stick and languish,
States that want to opt out of the Common Core Learning Standards (CCLS) and/or the tests aligned to or based on its standards are being threatened by a toothless tiger that doesn’t want the states to know the tiger has