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Common Core Standards
Video of the Common Core State Standards Initiative National Forum
presentation Dec 2, 2009 in DC.
The PowerPoint presentation and recording of the event is now available here.
Watch & Listen.
December 29, 2009
Red Flags, National PTA, and Common Core Standards
“Some general and well written articles have been published recently with serious concerns about the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI), a federal push to nationalize mathematics and reading standards in American public schools.* Other, more specific, articles have focused on the National PTA’s involvement. These reports should send an alarming signal to parents, educators and legislators as that group ‘positions itself as a key player at the front line of education reform” with regards to the CCSSI’.”
>>read more>>
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December 11, 2009
Alternative Needed to Common Core Standards
“The new consortium would endeavor to create better and more rigorous academic standards than those of the CCSSI. These alternative standards will be truly internationally benchmarked. With over twenty per cent of the American population, such a consortium of states would easily qualify as “significant” as well. Such states might even be joined by other states that do not want to embrace the intellectually impoverished and internationally uncompetitive Common Core standards.”
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January 6, 2009
Racing to National Tests
"While everyone in educatorland obsesses over the $4 billion competition among the states for Race to the Top (RTT) funding, the Education Department (ED) is readying a separate competition for less than one-tenth as much money that may nonetheless prove far more consequential for American education over the long term. I am referring to the upcoming announcement of how $350 million will be meted out to “consortia of states” to develop “common assessments” that are aligned with 'common standards.' "
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January 14, 2010
FIRST, DO NO HARM
“We Americans have had an allergy to tackling the content problem at any level—ignoring the fact that somebody (mainly textbook makers) must always be dictating content in the schools, even if it is trivial, fragmented, skills-based content. If the crafters of our standards don’t encourage or require content coherence and cumulativeness (just to name two necessary elements), they will have failed the most basic requirement of this task: First, do no harm. And they will have done little to improve the unacceptable stasis in American education.”
>>read more>>
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January 14, 2010
U.S. COMMON-STANDARDS PUSH BARES UNSETTLED ISSUES
“Elected officials and educators have been talking about establishing national, or common, academic standards for at least a half-century.....Some regard nationwide standards as a threat to the United States’ federal system and the widely supported principle of state and local control over curriculum.”
>>read more>>
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January 22, 2010
OBAMA IS BRIBING STATES TO ACCEPT NATIONAL CURRICULUM
“School reformers have cheered the Obama administration for using RttT to pressure states to be more receptive to independently managed charter schools and use student test scores in evaluating teachers. But if the feds are calling the shots via standards-setting and enforcement, charter schools will be accountable not to local parents but to Washington power brokers, and teachers will teach to tests manipulated by national special interests and be held accountable for results having nothing to do with academic excellence.”
>>read more>>
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January 31, 2010
EDUCATION’S ‘CORE’
“No one will object if Massachusetts adopts new standards as good as the ones it now has. But draft Common Core standards for English and mathematics released Jan. 13 are unacceptably inferior - not for any “dumbing down,” but because they are incoherent and unusable by real teachers.”
>>read more>>
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February 6, 2010
CRITICS: STANDARDS PUSH THREATENS ED GAINS
“Caught between wanting to participate in the process {of helping with national standards} while protecting the high benchmarks already set for Massachusetts students, education officials insist they will settle for nothing less than the rigorous curriculum already in place. Critics, however, worry that the state could find itself pressured by the lure of federal grants and other incentives to adopt the new standards and undermine nearly two decades of achievements that have lead to national and international accolades.”
>>read more>>
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