Will Parents Awake To The Truth About Common Core Standards

Above is interview with Elois Zeanah, Pres of Alabama Federation of Republican Women, Lou Campomenosi of Campaign on Common Sense, and Texas education activist Peyton Wolcott as they share the lates in the fight for children's education in their states.  A must hear as there are those who wish to control the minds of the children as they know that will control America's future--get on board and learn for your children's sake.

Be sure to visit this webpage to view great info on it and start with this page on the cost--it will shock you as well as your state that has bought into it.

Here are some things top analysts have shared that must be considered and weighed about the common core states standards:

Besides NO parental, local, state control over what and how students are
taught here are three other compelling reasons against CCS

• TOO MUCH MONEY:  CCS will cost states hundreds of millions of dollars to implement in the near future.

• TOO MUCH LOSS OF STATE SOVEREIGNTY TO THE FEDS: Why be like Esau and

give away our birthright for a bowl of porridge?

• TOO MUCH UNKNOWN, TOO MANY QUESTIONS: What's in the test? Who owns the

curriculum? What vendors will profit from such a huge program?




National standards lead to national curriculum -- will we always be 100%
happy with the political ideas of the person living in the White House?
Teacher's salaries will be tied to test scores.
A national database with student/teacher personal information will be
shared not just in Alabama & US but internationally.
Why commit to buy a car you don't know the color, make and style of --
much less how reliable it is?

Who started this--those with money and an agenda because they thought we were fast asleep..read the story

Action Steps To Defend Against National Take-over of Education

ACTION STEPS: Please ask your Congressional House members to defund Common Core Standards and Race to the Top -- $900 Million in FY 2012.  The House has the authority to do this because they are the branch of government that appropriates funds.

Obama plans for these $900 Million CCS/RTTT federal dollars to go directly to local school districts.  Because superintendents are so desperate to obtain funding, they most assuredly would grab their share of the $900 Million without counting the real cost -- (1) the loss of any local control whatsoever over the day-to-day curriculum and (2) the sure-and-certain indoctrination of every public school child into the Obama administration’s social justice agenda.

 

“Do Not ‘Read Their Lips’ -- National Curriculum Is Upon Us”

by Donna Garner

5.26.11

As you read yesterday’s Education Week article posted further on down the page, please bear this in mind:  Whatever the Obama administration says with their lips is the exact opposite from what they are actually doing. 

Therefore, when Sect. of Education Arne Duncan said at yesterday’s NCEE meeting, "We have not and will not prescribe a national curriculum…it would be against the law to prescribe national curriculum,” we know that that is exactly what the Obama administration is doing.  In fact they are.  Common Core Standards and Race to the Top are nothing but a national curriculum which is absolutely against the law.

For more information, please go to my 5.16.11 article entitled “Rising Chorus of Voices Against Federal Takeover of U. S. Public Schools” --

http://www.educationnews.org/commentaries/insights_on_education/156088.html

Donna Garner

Wgarner1@hot.rr.com

================================

5.4.11 -- EducationWeek

“Arne Duncan: We Will Not Prescribe a National Curriculum
By Catherine Gewertz on May 24, 2011 1:57 PM  

http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/curriculum/2011/05/arne_duncan_on_national_curric.html?cmp=ENL-EU-NEWS2

We've been telling you a good deal lately about the arguments over the role of the federal government in promoting common standards and in funding the development of curriculum and assessments for those standards. (If you've been napping, see here for a refresher.)

Until now, we've had only occasional words on this from federal officials (see U.S. Ed Department spokesman Peter Cunningham's comments last week). Most of the volleying on the federalism issue has come from advocates and policy wonks. Today, however, we've got weigh-ins from Rep. John Kline, the chairman of the House Education and the Workforce Committee, and from Education Secretary Arne Duncan.

Kline's comments came during an appearance today on Bill Bennett's radio show, as my colleague Alyson Klein reports over at Politics K-12. During the 13-minute interview, the Minnesota Republican said he thought the federal government was using its Race to the Top program to "push" a "national curriculum." (RTT, you remember, gave states points for adopting the common standards and is also providing funding for state consortia to develop tests and curriculum materials for those standards.)

"My concern is if you look at what the administration is doing with Race to the Top and so forth, on the one hand they will say they want this bottom up, and yet it's all stick and carrot with Race to the Top," Kline said.

"You do what the secretary thinks is a good thing to do and you get rewarded, and if you don't, you get punished. ... That's the line we're talking about, where you get the federal government starting to push a national curriculum, or insisting on one, and as you know, that's been against the law, and I think correctly so. We don't want the secretary of education to decide what the curriculum is in every school in America..."

Duncan weighed in on the topic this morning as well. At a forum hosted by the National Center on Education and the Economy, Duncan was discussing lessons that can be learned from higher-performing countries, and he mentioned national standards and curriculum. But he said: "We have not and will not prescribe a national curriculum. I want to repeat that." This remark prompted laughter from the audience, my colleague Stephen Sawchuk, who attended the forum, reports. Duncan also said it would be against the law to prescribe national curriculum. (A webcast of the symposium is here.)

How, might you ask, could this debate affect the holding-together of the common-core movement? Good question. Worth watching.

States Beginning To Figure Out They Will Be Left Holding The Bag With National Assessments They Can't Afford to Implement--Will Governors Be Seeing Wisconsin's Woes In Their Own States Soon?

“The Other Shoe Drops:  National Testmakers Worried”

by Donna Garner

4.12.11

Summary of worries revealed in this Education Week article (posted below):

1.  High expectations for these national assessments may outpace the ability of states to pay for the technology required to administer them.

2.  Both of the consortia have to provide -- for each tested grade level and course -- benchmark assessments (a.k.a., periodic, formative) and summative assessments (a.k.a. finals).

3.  The consortia are worried that the tight timelines set by the feds won’t allow for well-done piloting of the assessments.

4.  Both consotia have to create formative and summative assessments that are of equal content and difficulty and which can be taken by all types of students.

5.  The national assessments were originally intended to save states money, but the federal grants contain no money for administering the assessments. 

6.  States are beginning to figure this out and are worried they will be left with national assessments they cannot afford to implement.

Donna Garner

Wgarner1@hot.rr.com

=================================

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2011/04/12/28aera.h30.html?tkn=UPOFcmH8A3r0yI7V24Ln%2FSE7SKR6Bu7TcRC8&cmp=clp-edweek

Published Online: April 12, 2011

Includes correction(s): April 12, 2011

Experts See Hurdles Ahead for Common Core Tests

By Sarah D. Sparks

As America’s “next-generation” assessments for common core academic subjects begin to take shape through two state consortia projects, researchers and test developers alike are beginning to worry that expectations for the tests may outpace states’ technology and budgets.

Michigan and Louisiana education officials and leaders of the two consortia tasked with developing the new assessments—the 25-state SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortium, or SBAC, and the 26-state Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC—discussed challenges to the tests at a panel here at the annual meeting of the National Council on Measurement in Education.

The panel was organized by the Council of Chief State School Officers, one of two Washington-based group that spearheaded efforts to create new common standards for college and career readiness, now adopted by 44 states and the District of Columbia.

The tests are expected to roll out in 2014, and “the amount of innovation we’ll be able to carry off in that amount of time is not going to be that much,” warned Joseph Willhoft, the executive director of the SMARTER Balanced Consortium. “There’s an expectation that out of the gate this [assessment] is going to be so game-changing, and maybe after four or five years it will be game-changing, but not immediately.”

Both consortia received grants through the federal Race to the Top Assessment competition created in the federal economic-stimulus law to develop new tests based on the common standards. Each consortium must develop computer-based tests for each tested grade level and subject, as well as optional interim benchmarking tests to allow teachers to monitor how students progress and change instruction accordingly.

Both groups are developing both the end-of-year summative tests that can be used by any state in the country, and the ancillary benchmark tests that teachers or principals can use to track the progress of individual students or groups throughout the year.

The SMARTER Balanced Consortium’s tests are intended to go beyond simply moving questions from a paper to a computer screen, to adapt the difficulty of each question as students progress on the test. Ideally, individual test items will be tagged with the accommodations allowed for students who require them based on a disability or limited English proficiency, according to Laura M. Slover, the senior vice president of the Washington-based Achieve, Inc., which is helping develop assessments for PARCC.

Yet all of that is still in the works.

“One of the biggest problems I’ve seen with state assessments and national assessments is they are typically not done on a budget and a timeline that allow people to go out and do the pilot testing and tryouts that you would like,” said Mark D. Reckase, a professor of measurement and quantitative methods at the University of Michigan. “I’ve looked at the timelines for this, and they are fast; there will be incredible pressure to just get it done.”

Moreover, making sure the tests will serve their intended accountability use has become trickier in the wake of high-profile, test-based teacher evaluations, such as that done in Los Angeles last fall. “If we are trying to look in a crystal ball about educator evaluation … That is likely to be the most difficult use of any data we put out and therefore requires the most thought and care in designing the models,” said Joseph Martineau, the director of educational assessment and accountability for the Michigan Department of Education, part of the SBAC.

PARCC plans to train thousands of teachers both in how the assessments will work and how the resulting data can be used for accountability or classroom instruction, said Ms. Slover. “One of the purposes [of the consortia project] was to really change assessment, both the way it’s done and the way it’s experienced by the students and teachers in the classroom,” Ms. Slover said. “As we think about how to transform the test to make it more useable for teachers, teachers have to embrace it and think it’s something being done for them and with them—and not to them.”

Mr. Reckase warned that mistrust of the new tests during the transition could cause delays. “There’s a tendency to want redundant systems, computerized and paper-and-pencil, … but that causes a whole other set of problems because now you have to make sure the two tests are equivalent and ensure they work for all students.”

Betting on Technology

Ms. Slover said the consortia are “betting heavily” that emerging technology will help them create tests that can balance accountability on multiple levels—from annual student achievement reporting to ancillary data used to evaluate programs and curricula—with formative test information to help teachers tweak instruction for different students throughout the year. “One cannot be done at the expense of the other, so balancing those is critical, and then you add the cost factor into that,” she said. “Innovation in technology happens at lightning speed, so we are betting heavily on the fact that in four years there will be a new way of doing things, that iPads will be easily accessible or that handheld devices will be very affordable and will change the way we do testing in our schools.

“But we’re betting on that, and it does worry me,” she said. “I think technology is not really fully embedded in the world of classrooms at this point.”

Even among classrooms with computer and Internet access, state officials agreed there are few brick-and-mortar schools that fully integrate technology into instruction, which may make it harder for students to adapt to taking tests via computer.

Changes Difficult

Scott Norton, Louisiana’s assistant state superintendent for student and school performance, said states must be careful to get the tests right in the first shot. While jointly developing tests was intended to save states money, the grants do not include money for administering the new assessments long-term, and it will be harder to make adjustments to the tests once they are completed, because so many states will need to sign off on changes.

“The cost makes me the most anxious,” Mr. Norton said. “In today’s world if we have a [testing] cost problem, we own that: We can print on lighter paper or something. I’m not sure that holds up when we don’t own it alone. If we get into a test we can’t afford, we’re really left holding the bag.”

Vol. 30, Issue 28



Here's a Way Congress Can Save Money and Improve Education

“Congressmen: A Great Place To Cut Funding -- National Assessments”

by Donna Garner

4.9.11

Almost daily I continue to submit my requests to Congress, asking them to cut the federal funding of Common Core Standards, Race to the Top, and the national assessments.  

Besides the obvious -- that CCS/RTTT is a federal takeover of the public schools and lies way outside the provisions of the U. S. Constitution -- American taxpayers simply cannot afford it. 

Besides the cost of states’ dumping their own textbooks, standards, and tests in order to implement the Common Core Standards, the cost of the national assessments alone would be horrendous!

An education technology expert whose name I shall keep confidential explained to me how expensive the national assessments would actually be, and the costs would fall squarely on the shoulders of local taxpayers.

To take the national assessments, every student in a school (K-12) would be required to have his own individual technology device because the multi-media, interactive assessments are to be given online; and students would continually be taking formative assessments (a.k.a., periodic, benchmarked) throughout the entire school year.

The USAC Universal Service Fund, which is presently tacked onto the price of all of our cell phones and home phone bills, already supplies Internet Access (IA) at a reduced fee for every public school and library in the country.

The USAC spends $2.5 Billion each year just on telecom, IA, and building infrastructure to these schools and libraries. Therefore, the costs are very substantial already. 

Recently the federal government put $10 Million into a pilot project to give Internet Access (IA) to individual school students.  The federal funding for this pilot project, which provides only the IA, was eaten up almost instantly by just a few school districts. 

For us to understand the scope of the problem, we must realize that states such as Texas have 1,237 separate public school districts and charters, 8,435 campuses, and over 4.8 million students.  California has 1050 districts.  The nation has over 35,000 districts.  

Unfortunately, there is not a cost-effective way to deliver IA to every public school student without their also paying a $30 a month IA fee along with the cost of the technology device.  In fact, the cost of the device itself is becoming incidental to the monthly fees over which AT&T, Verizon, and other companies are salivating.

This is similar to companies giving a free cell phone to a customer if he signs up for the two-year plan; the companies know the monthly fees will more than make up for the cost of the devices themselves. 

As people in the telecommunications industry consider the money to be made under the Common Core Standards, Race to the Top, and the national assessments, talks have begun surfacing about building mesh networks around the public schools. This would allow Internet Access (IA) to everyone living around the schools (the outliers), and they could use the same IA that the feds through the USAC fees are currently purchasing at the school sites.   The “gotcha” is that the outliers would be required to pay the monthly technology usage fees. 

A huge fiscal problem is that building out these mesh networks around all the public schools in America would cost billions, and the USAC fees would not pay for this part.  

It is easy to see why AT&T, Verizon, Microsoft, Cisco, and Dell are all planning on benefitting from the implementation of the Common Core Standards, Race to the Top, and the national assessments. [From the very first moment that Obama came into the White House, Bill Gates has been using his moneybags to promote CCS/RTTT.)  

As usual, it would be the taxpayers who would have to foot the bill for these national assessments and the technology infrastructure required.  

ACTION STEP:

Please contact your Congressmen and ask them to cut immediately the funding for the Common Core Standards, Race to the Top, and the national assessments.

Donna Garner

Wgarner1@hot.rr.com

=======================================

As a follow-up to this Education Week Teacher article (posted below), please read my March 18, 2011, article entitled “Taxpayers, Grab Your Wallets.” 

http://www.navigator-news.com/component/content/article/3-local/251-taxpayers-grab-your-wallets

======================================

http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2011/04/high_tech_testing_on_the_way_a.html

High Tech Testing on the Way: a 21st Century Boondoggle?

Excerpts from this article:

by Stephen Krashen and Susan Ohanian

When the plans to create Common Core Standards were announced, Secretary Duncan told us that it would be accompanied by assessments to enforce the standards. We were also told that developing standards would be relatively inexpensive, but developing assessments, by contrast, will be a "very heavy lift financially" (USA Today, June 14, 2009).

It is gradually becoming clear that the lift will be extremely heavy. The new tests will be computer-based, administered online, and "will make widespread use of smart technology. They will provide students with realistic, complex performance tasks, immediate feedback, computer adaptive testing, and incorporate accommodations for a range of students" (Duncan, 2010). Duncan noted that "with the benefit of technology, assessment questions can incorporate audio and video. Problems can be situated in real-world environments, where students perform tasks or include multi-stage scenarios and extended essays."

An example:
The National Education Technology Plan 2010 (U.S. Department of Education; Office of Educational Technology) describes one kind of testing that is being developed, testing that takes place "in the course of learning" (xvii) and that tries to find out what students are thinking while doing projects:

As students work, the system can capture their inputs and collect evidence of their problem-solving sequences, knowledge, and strategy use, as reflected by the information each student selects or inputs, the number of attempts the student makes, the number of hints and type of feedback given, and the time allocation across parts of the problem.

(pages 29-30: "Assessing during online learning").

Aside from the mind-control aspect of this kind of testing, how much will it cost, in addition to the cost of developing, testing and revising the new tests?

If we are going to have computer-based tests, and if they are to be delivered to students via the internet, the first requirement is that all students need to be connected to the internet. A recent article in the New York Times gives us some idea of what will be involved. The article begins by noting that money is scarce these days:

Despite sharp drops in state aid, New York City's Department of Education plans to increase its technology spending, including $542 million next year alone that will primarily pay for wiring and other behind-the-wall upgrades to city schools ... and $315 million for additional schools by 2014...

(New York Times, "In city schools, tech spending to rise despite cuts," March 30, 2011)

Buried deep the article is a statement by "city officials" that the huge expenditures for technology are primarily to make it possible for students to take computerized national standardized tests.

We can expect this to happen nation-wide. If the New York figure is extrapolated to the entire country, the cost to connect all children to the internet will be at least 50 times the cost of connecting New York City alone, or $25 billion (New York City enrolls one million students, the USA as a whole, over 60 million). This is only to connect students to the internet. The whistles and bells needed to do "computer adaptive testing" with audio and video will cost more.

Technology, of course, continues to develop all the time, and consumers have repeatedly demonstrated their willingness to discard the old and embrace the new, even at considerable expense. We can expect that after every student is connected, sooner or later the set-up will become obsolete and need to be replaced, either in part or totally. The schools, we predict, will cheerfully pay up, eager for the "newest" technology, and the computer companies will cheerfully accept their money.

The billions spent so that students can take national tests will have a huge payoff for the entire computer industry in other ways. This was enthusiastically announced by Education Secretary Duncan's Chief of Staff and former CEO of the New Schools Venture Fund, Joanne Weiss. Weiss noted that because all students will have internet access in order to be tested, technology companies can now profit from one giant national market for all their educational products:

The development of common standards and shared assessments radically alters the market for innovation in curriculum development, professional development, and formative assessments. Previously, these markets operated on a state-by-state basis, and often on a district-by-district basis. But the adoption of common standards and shared assessments means that education entrepreneurs will enjoy national markets where the best products can be taken to scale

(Weiss, 2011)…

Of course, the administration has argued that these will be new and better tests, more sensitive to growth in learning, able to chart student progress through the year, and able to probe real learning, not just memorization. Before unleashing these "improved" tests on the country, however, there should be rigorous investigation, rigorous studies to show that these measures are worth the investment. Right now, the corporations and politicians insist that we take on faith the claim that these tests are good for students. Such claims exhibit a profound lack of accountability…

The Department of Education plans to use American students as experimental subjects to try out an extremely expensive, time-consuming and dubious testing program that will engulf classrooms. If it fails, the effect on students will be devastating, with schools robbed of money, and a generation of students poorly educated, teacher professionalism subsumed by data management, and schools robbed of funds for anything but technology repair. But the testing and technology companies will win, profiting regardless of the success or failure of their products and always ready to convince us that the next versions will be better…

Dr. Stephen Krashen is a professor emeritus at the University of Southern California. He has written numerous books on his research into literacy and language acquisition. In recent years he has emerged as a persistent voice pointing towards the basic steps we should take to build literacy and strong academic skills for our students.

Susan Ohanian, a longtime teacher, has written 25 books on education, including When Childhood Collides with NCLB and co-authorship of Why Is Corporate America Bashing Our Public Schools? Since the passage of NCLB, she has run a website of resistance, www.susanohanian.org, which received the NCTE George Orwell Award for Distinguished Contribution to Honesty and Clarity in Public language. She is a fellow at National Education Policy Center and an editor at Substancenews.net…

Donna Garner

Wgarner1@hot.rr.com



Latest on Obama and Education--Perspectives From Donna Garner

Audio Link

Hear insight from former teacher (now activist) Donna Garner on what is going with our children's education throughout the nation.  Get update on the latest about the common core states standards and what you can do in the fight for good education for your children.  With the men such as Kevin Jennings (founder of GLSEN) that Obama's administration has chosen to head our children's education--all parent must be very concerned and become involved.  First--get yourself and everyone you know armed with the truth and then fight for your children's future is at stake by making sure Congress hears from you!

Finding The Way Back Through The Heart For The Miley Cyrus Of This World

We win some--we lose some.  This week's loss for children in Alabama with the adoption of the common core standards opened the door to taking stock at what's happening in America.   It has been said by none other than the very wise President Abe Lincoln "the philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next."  Indeed there is a war for control of the school room for it will direct the future of America.

America even during these worrisome times is looked upon by the world as the land where dreams can come true.  As in the beginning, there were dreams from parents to have a better world for their most precious possession--their children in this land full of promise.  

Today in America we see teens clothed in splendor yet lacking in wisdom and true joy.  They seek to fill the pain within as material comforts have made them and their parents forget where true comfort and joy come from. The Bible says the beginning of wisdom is the "fear" or awe of the Lord.  The Bible is a guide--it was in the beginning of this nation and it still is today.  But today unlike then, it's wisdom is no longer welcomed in the training of the children.  And so hard as they try the bureaucrats can't help but fail year after year, programs after programs.  

Alas, the latest one--common core standards is the tallest order of all--"if only we in Washington can direct them all--we will teach all the children to learn alike."  It reminds me of the builders of the towers of Babel.  The Bible says unless the Lord be in it they build in vain.  And the building up of children through the Department of Education is very lacking indeed and the more money they throw at it--the worse it gets.

One does not have to go far to see where the next generation is headed, like in Miley Cyrus who I saw tonight, the idol of many children of today.  Miley is lost and is not looking in the right direction.  Her parents too have lost their footings and can't find their own way.

But Miley has something priceless in her corner--an older generation--a  loving Grandma that tried to teach her when she was little that Jesus lives within her heart.  I believe this and her Grandma's prayers to the Almighty God can make all the difference and help the Mileys of this world find their way someday.  Hopefully the parents will find Him and their way back too. 

So, chin up for the likes of me and you, who cares about the future generation, let's get back to work and it begins on our knees.  George Washington did it--a long long time ago.  And heaven smiled and miracles after miracles happened.  We need them today--please let's all help and lift up this nation, our children to our merciful God in prayer.

Psalm 18:2,3

The LORD is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer;
         My God, my strength, in whom I will trust; 
         My shield and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold.
 I will call upon the LORD, who is worthy to be praised;
         So shall I be saved from my enemies.

Judge Roy Moore on the Unconstitutionality of the Common Core Standards, the UN CRC, the Iowa Judges and Betty Peters on Education

Hear conversation between Betty Peters and Judge Roy Moore on the constitutionality of the Common Core States Standards.  Judge Roy Moore, former Chief Justice of the Alabama State Supreme Court, give his perspectives:

"I think a lot of these things sounds good...seem logical when you think about them but basically it's government interfering with our education... using national money in large scale to influence the education of our children....

There's nothing in the constitution of the United States that allows the federal government to do this...we shouldn't have these programs."