Common Core 3rd Grade Benchmarks for Citizenship. And You Still Believe the Standards Don't Drive the Curriculum?

The new definition of being a "good citizen"? Common Core 3rd grade standards benchmarks to promote the "common good". 

What is your definition of a good citizen?

Let's travel back in time and revisit the 1954 World Book Encyclopedia's definition of citizenship:

Citizenship carries both rights and duties.  Each citizen owes allegiance, or loyalty, to his country.  It is his duty to obey the law, vote for officers, pay taxes for the support of government, and give military service in the defense of the country.  In turn, the country owes protection and gives privileges to each of its citizens.

Citizenship dealt with relationship between the individual and the government.

Fast forward to 2012.

What is the current definition of a good citizen?  Look at this public school 3rd grade worksheet (below) on citizenship,  the vocabulary words used and the new meaning of being a good citizen.  It has moved from the relationship between the individual and the government to the relationship between individuals and the good of the community. 

(From the teacher providing this information: this is curriculum from a school in Ohio)

Questions:

• When did becoming a good citizen (obeying the law, voting, paying taxes, serving in the military) change into being a "good person"?  Do you have to have good character to be a good citizen to follow the law or vote?  
• Does a "weak" sense of justice make one less of a good citizen?  Whose/what sense of justice should a good citizen follow: a specific group or his/her own sense of what is right and wrong?  Is speaking up for people who have trouble speaking up for themselves a citizenship issue or a moral issue?
• Who/what agency decides exactly what is the "good of the community"?  What happens if the "good of the community" tramples on individual rights?  Is lack of cooperation then a mark of a bad citizen?
• Is the boycotting of a company to support another's agenda a good citizenship move if the company is then forced to layoff employees and those employees have to go on public assistance?  Does a boycott really make life better for everyone or select groups?  Is a boycott a citizenship duty or a moral decision in protesting a company's decisions/operating method?  Is learning how to boycott and petition a good benchmark of being a good citizen?   Whose benchmark is boycotting and petitioning, the school's or the consortia's?
• Are there different levels of heroes?  Is a person more heroic who risks his/her life vs a person who protests a perceived injustice?
• Do good citizens really make life better for everyone?  Is that the role of a "good" citizen or a "good" person?  Are the lines between political relationships (individual and government responsibilities/duties) and moral responsibilities (traditionally defined by religious institutions) being erased and redefined as a legal responsibility to a collective community?  Who/what is defining these responsibilities to a collective community?

Do you have examples of what students are learning today in public schools about citizenship?  If you ask your administration about CCSS and it insists the standards are not driving curriculum, ask to see worksheets and benchmarks on citizenship.  See how they align with each other or not.  You'll have your answer.

Reforms No Silver Bullet For Education

Reuters reporter Stephanie Simon reviewed Jeb Bush's education reform efforts in Florida and found no silver bullet among them. These reforms; charter schools, literacy requirements for 3rd graders, intense focus on reading, cyber classes, and vouchers, were instituted during his tenure as governor, and did initially show improvements in student scores and graduation rates. But, as they say, time will tell, and time has told the public that these gains were generally short lived.

"After the dramatic jump of the Bush years, Florida test scores edged up in 2009 and then dropped, with low-income students falling further behind. State data shows huge numbers of high school graduates still needing remedial help in math and reading."

It must not be forgotten that all of the things they tried in Florida came with a price tag. While property values were high and the state's economy was doing well, it was easy to push things like reading coaches and teacher bonuses for Advanced Placement scores through the legislature. For other states looking to adopt those measures now, the extreme cost is prohibitive.

"States adopting the policies now, in a time of austerity, tend to leave out the costly support systems. That has stirred protests from school superintendents, school board members, teachers unions and parents who see the policies as punitive, humiliating and too narrowly focused on a single test as a measure of success."

The long term value of their efforts is also falling into question as students who were held back in 3rd grade because they could not pass the reading proficiency requirement, who received a lot of extra attention to help them do so the following year, showed no advantage over other students by the time they got to high school. In addition, according to an annual report required by the state, those students who received vouchers and used them to go to private schools did no better at reading or math than their peers in public schools.

Even with all this intense focus on improving student performance in Florida, Missouri students still receive higher ACT scores than Florida students which is significant since our states fairly closely match in the percentage of students who take the test.

Bush's foundation For Excellence in Education is in high gear drafting legislation, editing bills line by line and sending in experts to testify in various states like Maine, New Mexico and Florida. Reuters points out that "Bush foundation donors include family philanthropies, such as those established by Microsoft founder Bill Gates and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Corporate donors include Connections Education, a division of global publishing giant Pearson; Amplify, the education division of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp; and K12, a publicly traded company that runs online schools."

His critics say these corporate associations diminish any bragging rights he might have to tout Florida's improvements. Bush says that any individual failings in programs by these companies should be noted and those programs dropped. Goody. But we have decades of teaching experience in this country to tell us what works and what doesn't. We shouldn't have to wait for the free market to catch up on this learning curve, meanwhile wasting money and minds.

Anyone out there looking for or touting a silver bullet for the things that ail our public schools is going to be disappointed. The Bush Foundation has not found it, no matter what they say. The best that can be done is for control of education to be returned to the most local level possible so each school can work out its own formula for success.

On Data Driven Pronouncements: "They Were Wrong, it was Possible".

Data is King...or is it?

Watch the video below about a physically challenged Vietnam vet and his quest to remake his life despite doctors' findings based on his medical data.  Frame the video in terms of educational data driven sets determining a student's place in society.  Imagine a student struggling educationally in the place of the vet as you watch what he goes through to improve his situation.  The doctors told him he would never walk again without braces.  Expand the scenario.  A teacher looks at a data set and determines this student is not really doing well in class: 

• Maybe this student has a different learning style than how the teacher must teach.  
• Maybe this student needs more time to complete assignments.  
• Maybe this student needs checking for understanding the facts (not the process) before he/she can master a math problem.  

Haven't we all known students (or been one of these students) who don't "fit the common mold" of educational expectations?  Why will Common Core standards help these students and do you believe amassing voluminous amount of data on children will improve their education?  When will the teachers have time to teach if they are continually sifting through data?

According to the education reformers global plan to create a managed workforce based on data, "data is king" and will predict your student's placement into society.  This vet's future was determined by his physical data.  But something interesting happens to the vet.  He decided his life was not data driven.

Listen to Arthur's statement at 3:12.

From the youtube description:

His story is proof, that we cannot place limits on what we are capable of doing, because we often do not know our own potential. Neither Arthur, nor Dallas knew what he would go on to accomplish, but this video speaks for itself. In less than a year, Arthur completely transformed his life. If only he had known what he was capable of, 15 years earlier.

Do not waste any time thinking you are stuck - you can take control over your life, and change it faster than you might think.

Hopefully this story can inspire you to follow your dreams - whatever they may be.

One last thought: Not only do we often do not know our own potential, neither can data sets designed to track students cradle to grave predict human potential.

A Primer on Standards Based Grading

Want to watch a teacher's blood pressure rise right before your eyes? Ask them what they think of Standards Based Grading.

This is one of the zombies of education reform. It never really seems to die and keeps coming back to eat your brain.  Some schools are trying to adopt it now as it is expected to be used in Common Core Assessments. For those who are unfamiliar with SBG, here are the basics.

Numerical ratings are used rather than letter grades/percents. There are four ratings:

1--Beginning
2--Acquiring the skills/concepts
3--Meeting standard
4--Exceeding standard

Most of us would immediately make the leap to 4=A, 3=B, 2=C and 1=D (note that there is no F as there is no zero in SBG.) But this would be an incorrect assumption on our part. A teacher using standards based grading would not grade a test on which the student scored 34 correct out of 40 total questions as a 3, or 29/40 a 2. A rubric or chart of goals for the test is developed which gives the teacher far more leeway in assigning a grade. This rubric may contain, for example: did the child show improvement over previous tests; did the student use the full amount of time alloted?The teacher could say that 30/40 correct answers shows sufficient mastery of the standard. In college, we called this grading on a curve. In this way, Meeting The Standard becomes highly subjective.

Another aspect of SBG is the focus on getting the right answer. On this surface this appears to be a very logical, even admirable, goal for schooling. But it opens the door for all kinds of gaming of the system. If the focus is for the child to get the right answer with few or no constraints, then tests can be retaken over and over, help can be offered during testing, homework deadlines can be extended or even done away with. After all, the goal is for the child to demonstrate mastery of the material, not be subjected to some random condition like time limits.

Despite all those who say our students are getting dumber, their response to SBG shows exactly the opposite. Why study for a test when you can retake it numerous times until you get a score you like (or the teacher changes the rubric and pronounces you Meeting The Standard?) Why turn in homework when you cannot get a zero for failing to do so? With no means to assess your level of understanding, no low number can be averaged in with your grades. Students figure this out fairly quickly and adjust their behavior to maximize their benefit.

Take the Zero's Aren't Permitted (ZAP) program being used in the Rockwood School District in at least one middle school. The result has been a precipitous decline in students having homework ready to turn in. Those who don't have it by class time are allowed to complete the homework during lunch, under administrative supervision, which the kids gladly do because it means more time to play at home. It means additional staff responsibility to oversee these kids at lunch, but I guess that's all fine so long as we know they are learning, even if it is just learning to work the system.

Deadlines are just so old school. One high school teacher was called on the carpet for expecting students to turn in assignments by specified deadlines. The teacher was told that, with standards based grading, as with things in the real world, there are no deadlines. It didn't set well with the administrator when the teacher responded by saying that if there are no deadlines in the real world it will be okay if she didn't submit her grades by the established deadline.

This appears to be Outcome Based Education come back for another bite at our brains. The focus is on getting the right answer. How students get their answer is of no concern. Just this fall, a math teacher, was called on the carpet and told he couldn't require students to show their work. He had been very specific in example and direction on showing work when they were working with the order of operations. The administrator told him that with standards based grading we only care what students get as an answer, not how they get the answer. If a student gets something wrong, that teacher is left to guess at where the problem lies. The student concludes they "just don't get it" when perhaps a little tweaking or filling in of a small gap in understanding is all that is needed. The focus on getting the right answer is an all or nothing game.

As a teacher using SBG you have the benefit of being able to use a complex rubric which could allow you to score students higher than their actual percentage on a given test, which makes the student and parents happy. However, you also have students who are retaking any number of tests from any point in your curriculum throughout the semester. Keeping track of that is a nightmare. On the one hand it may seem logical to say that a teacher must continue to work on student mastery before moving on to higher level concepts, but this system does little to help the teacher or student accomplish this. While it is difficult to teach more advanced math concepts until the student has mastery of the basic math facts, applying zero pressure to learn those math facts within a specified time limit makes moving on to the more advanced concepts almost impossible.

Additionally, teachers could have two and three times the number of papers to grade as they have to allow students to redo writing assignments that do not show them meeting the standard. There is little a teacher can do when students, who aren't comprehending the concept she/he is teaching, are not learning to master it by doing work at home. The teacher's job is to make that magic happen in the classroom.

Add to this computerized grading systems that weren't set up to recognize a 2 or a 3 causing uninformed parents to flood the teacher with panicked phone calls and you have the makings of an early retirement incentive for some teachers. Eventually parents will be trained to accept 3's and 4's and will be lulled into thinking this means their child is performing well and learning a lot. They won't see that their child got 20/40 questions right. How many of us see our kids tests come home from school any more? That would just be confusing for us because their score for that 20 correct answers could be a 3.

I was going to write a nice conclusion here, but maybe I'll do that later. It's not like there's a deadline or anything.

Understand this about Education Reform: "The state’s claim to godhood does not make it so"

 “Any state, any entity, any ideology that fails to recognize the worth, the dignity, the rights of man that state is obsolete.” 

-Rod Serling 

Daniel Taylor in Old-Thinker News has written a thought provoking article about education and how individuals can fight against governmental control in  The Best Kept Open Secret of Our Time: Individuals Have Power.  Note that Mr. Taylor is only 23 years old and understands the political (and educational) winds at an young age.

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“…Preserve what little independence, strength, and originality is left to the individual… raise him up vis-a-vis society: these seem to me the the primary goals of lawmakers in the age upon which we are just now embarking.” – Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1835

“If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” – President Barack Obama, July 13, 2012

The age in which we live is an age of ever increasing tyranny over the mind, body and spirit of humanity. The individual human being is not to be trusted. The schools in which he is raised denies his parents the ability to decide what he eats while conditional self esteem is instilled until satisfaction and fulfillment only come with the praise of authority.

At its very beginning America was filled with individuals who sought to escape this grip of despotism. Hereditary titles and tyranny no longer held individuals in artificial societal cages, and people seeking a new life were bound only by limits to endurance and willpower. Intelligence, self respect and character were qualities that anyone could acquire, rising in the ranks of society.

“When hereditary wealth, class privilege  and prerogatives of birth no longer exist and each person draws his strength only from himself, it becomes clear that… anything that serves to fortify, expand, or adorn the intellect immediately takes on great value.” – Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1835

Elites recognized this new reality in America and actively sought to regulate the power and potential of individuals. Tools of control that worked under tyrannical forms of government were rendered useless. New, perhaps more subtle means of control needed to be devised. The state’s war against the individual expanded across all spectrum’s of society as the growing web of governmental rules and regulation made individuals timid and dependent.

“As Americans we are justly proud that we have no hereditary titles, but each man is measured by his own personal worth… yet we would not have you imagine that we underestimate the value of a respectable lineage, but it is better to be the originator of a great family than to be the degenerate descendant of one.” - How to get on in the World, 1895

The schooling system in particular has been formed with the specific purpose of reducing the individual’s willpower and self respect, producing willing servants of the state. Charlotte Iserbyt, former head of policy at the Department of Education, documents this fact in her book ”Deliberate Dumbing Down of America.” The Rockefeller’s General Education Board proudly announced in its 1906 “Occasional letter number 1″ that,

“In our dreams…people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present educational conventions [intellectual and character education]… We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, educators, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have ample supply.”

An 1895 book titled “How to Get on in the World” reflects the once common knowledge that excessive intervention and regulation in young people’s development will hinder growth. Self-respect, one of the foundations for intellectual growth, cannot be cultivated in this environment.

“The growth of these qualities may be encouraged by accustoming young people to rely upon their own resources, leaving them to enjoy as much freedom of action in early life as is practicable. Too much guidance and restraint hinder the formation of habits of self-help.”

This type of education is completely alien to a society grown accustom to modern schooling; Especially when mothers are questioned by social services and even jailed for allowing their children to play in their own yard unsupervised.

When psychopathic individuals inject themselves into positions of power, they need to recruit fellow deviants or face the scrutiny of decent human beings. The tipping point of pure corruption happens when good people are forced out of the system due to a crisis of conscience or by brute force.

Here’s the key: Corrupt power is housed on a pile of sand; vulnerable on all sides. When the power centers of our society are rotting out, we can build ourselves and our families on a firm foundation. You may feel powerless when looking at the global scene, but the influence you have on yourself and the people in your immediate circle is without question. You have power and immense untapped ability.

The state’s claim to godhood does not make it so. It will try to make you feel small. If you didn’t have incredible potential, the establishment would not have taken measures to stifle your growth.

Scene from "The Twilight Zone"

The Obsolete Man

Fr. Simeon Daly: A Song of Thanks to Teacher Sister Mary

 


Blessings to everyone this Thanksgiving.  Below is a beautiful song of thanks to a special teacher/friend sung by a monk from St. Meinrad Archabbey....a song never to be sung to a computer or data system by a grateful student.   This song represents everything teaching is all about.  It's not about data driven results as much as it is as the giving of knowledge to another person and igniting the light of understanding.  

The song is for all the mentors we've had during our lives.  It's one of the sweetest and kindest tributes you may ever hear.



From youtube:  and "Someone was There"  by Fr. Simeon Daly, OSB:


Though not a musician, Fr. Simeon Daly, a Benedictine monk of Saint Meinrad Archabbey in Indiana, plays a song that pays special tribute to a music teacher. Dale Gonyea composed and performed the song for his school music teacher, Sr. Mary, on the 50th anniversary of her being a religious sister in 1984. To read the story of Fr. Simeon and Sr. Mary's friendship, visit http://www.fathersimeon.com/stories.asp?sid=86.

ALEC Bails on Opposing Common Core

Ed Week reported that ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council) has voted not to adopt the resolution opposing the Common Core State Standards.

The latest news is that on Nov. 19, after several discussions over the past year and at least one postponed vote, ALEC's legislative board of directors has voted  not to adopt the resolution opposing the Common Core, the group announced in an email. ALEC stated that it will remain "neutral" on the common core, "but will continue to oppose any efforts by the federal government to mandate curriculum."

Given that each state is in a slightly different position with Common Core, (what role they play in the consortia, by what mechanism they agreed to adopt Common Core Standards, how much superintendents bought in to implementation etc.) it is not completely surprising that ALEC could not find common ground among legislators as to what position to take.

They do seem to have brushed aside the  biggest point for opposition,

On one side of the debate that went back and forth at ALEC were officials like Indiana Superintendent of Schools Tony Bennett and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Republicans who said the standards are not a federal K-12 takeover but an important way for schools to raise the bar for students. On the other side were policy mavens at places like the Pioneer Institute, the Boston-based think tank, who said that in addition to the political problems the common core posed, the standards themselves did not deliver as advertised in areas like college readiness. As you might expect, the Pioneer Institute was very keen on emphasizing the idea that Bennett's support for the common core was a big contributor to his defeat in the Nov. 6 election, when he lost to Democrat Glenda Ritz.

Stating that the standards are merely a tool for schools to raise the bar contains many underlying assumptions that most opponents of Common Core would not agree with.

The first is that there is a widespread educational crisis in all 50 states that requires immediate remediation. The truth is the majority of schools still turn out high functioning graduates. One need merely look at the increasing enrollment at our top colleges for proof. Unless the likes of Harvard, MIT and Princeton have dropped their standards, we are not doing a horrible job with k-12. We have pockets of underperformance who aren't cutting it with the current standards. Turning those schools on their heads with a completely new set of standards for the teachers to master while requiring these poorer districts to find the funding for the hardware necessary to administer the assessments hardly seems like a recipe for success.

The second is that outside intervention is the only way states would raise the academic bar. The picture it paints is a bunch of State Education Boards wringing their hands and saying, "We give up. If only someone would just tell us what a good set of standards looks like because we have no idea how to find or develop one ourselves." Does anyone remember a line of state superintendents lined up outside the DoEd demanding help with their standards?

The third assumption is that the standards are the only thing objectionable about Common Core. A key component of the standards is the State Longitudinal Data System (SLDS) which will collect data on every student enrolled in a public school. It has been said by some that the CCSS were merely a mechanism to get the SLDS instituted and standardized in each state. Again, I don't recall congressional hearings wherein the states demanded that the federal government find some way to track several hundred data points on their citizens.


ALEC stated that their failure to pass a resolution against Common Core is by no means a statement in support of them. This decision merely highlights the limitations of ALEC. It's voting members are state legislators, who "of course have to think about polls as well as white papers." Work will need to be done individually in the states to address Common Core. And so it is.

Now Common Core is not only "State Led" it's Also "Teacher Designed"

Common Core explained:  Common Sense not allowed.

Comments today are reprinted with permission from Barry Garelick.  

Garelick has written extensively about math education in various publications including Education Next, Educational Leadership, and Education News. He is currently doing student teaching at a junior high school in the central coast area of California, and plans to teach math as his second career. He recently retired from the federal government.

He writes:

Stockton CA school district talks about Common Core. 

Here are some gems:

"Most significantly, Stockton Unified Assistant Superintendent Kirk Nicholas said, under the new approach student success will be measured less by their ability to recite facts than by how effective they are at demonstrating their understanding of what they have learned. Nicholas gave the example of a rubber band resting on a table. Whereas now a student would be asked to identify the object as a rubber band, a student in 2014-15 would be asked to shoot it into the wind, shoot it with the wind to his back, and analyze the results."

So it's all about "understanding". The problem is, what level of understanding is required for what grade levels? And does a student need to be able to explain why the invert and multiply rule for dividing fractions works, and show why? And if a student can't explain, but knows he must use fractional division (and can do so) to figure out how many 2/3 oz servings of yogurt are in a 2 oz container of yogurt, is that student deemed to "not understand" fractional division?

Oh, and there's this also:

"The Leadership and Learning Center will serve as a consultant in a process Nicholas and Superintendent Steve Lowder say will be driven by teachers. Lowder said Stockton Unified is 'changing from a top-down model to a directive, and the teachers designing the plan.'

" 'It's about honoring teachers making decisions in the classroom about student achievement,' Lowder added. 'We believe in teachers.' "

Great. So does this mean if a teacher wants to use direct instruction rather than inquiry-based, and whole class instruction rather than groups, they will be allowed to do so?

 

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Garelick raises good points:

 

• Common Core deals with "understanding" rather than facts
• Common Core is being touted as being "teacher led" (does this remind you of CCSS originally being sold as "state led")
• Student achievement on standardized testing is the ultimate goal, rather than student learning
• Assessments/standards are designed for "collaborative" learning, meaning direct instruction will be largely non-existent

How much will these privately crafted common core standards cost for local district implementation?  

 

The school board unanimously approved a contract, not to exceed $280,000, with the Colorado-based Leadership and Learning Center to help the district get ready. 

It's just one of many education reform companies cashing in on Common Core contracts from local districts forced to comply with these top down mandates taxpayers are now to believe are "teacher designed".   

YOLO Applied in Standardized Testing. The TOWANDA Moment in Education?

Protesting against standardized tests that have nothing to do with individual student progress is a start.   Don't be a widget in the managed workforce plan.

A student filled out a bubble sheet to standardized answers so the blocks read YOLO:  "You Only Live Once".  The student apparently was maxed out with the incessant testing mandated in common core and other governmental directives designed to track students.

The Washington Post's Adam Heenan reports in Time on testing: 738 minutes in 3 weeks:

I laughed at what the student had created, mostly because the “YOLO” script was evenly distributed across the length of the bubble sheet, demonstrating the student’s skill in measurement and design. But of course it isn’t funny. In my school, in just three weeks’ time, I have calculated that we spent 738 minutes (12 hours and 18 minutes) on preparing for and administering standardized tests. Our students are experiencing testing fatigue, which makes the results from each successive exam they take more invalid and the data about student learning more inaccurate. I can’t blame this student for speaking out against the excessive use of testing throughout our schools.

But the one-day, once-every-few-years standardized testing experience they remember is a far cry from the pervasive, high-stakes phenomenon testing has become. In order to make better policy choices about how we spend our precious education resources, the public needs to know just how much time and money has been spent on high-stakes testing in the No Child Left Behind era. This is why I and others have pushed for a full audit of the time and money that has been spent on all of this testing and test-prep, a call now supported by both the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers.

 This year alone, my colleagues and I have devoted a significant chunk of the additional time we were supposed to have for teaching and collaborating to testing. By mid-October, our school had already sacrificed a week’s worth of teaching and learning time for Chicago’s standardized beginning-of-the-year exams for students in their regular classes, to be repeated for the middle-of-the-year and end-of-the-year exams as well. There have been two days of “testing schedules,” where teachers and students in grades 9, 10 and 11 have had to sacrifice instructional time for EPAS exams (the system of grade-aligned tests from ACT). We have devoted our own time to looking at the data, and common planning time to talking about looking at the data and learning the tests’ gibberish language of “RIT Bands,” “cut scores,” “BOYs, MOYs, and EOYs,” none of which translate to classroom practice. It seems like every single professional conversation we have is not talking about students, but rather about the tests others create.

 And because the stakes of these tests are so high, even the allegedly “optional” tests and interventions become—culturally, if not officially— mandatory. Officials higher up on the school district chain of command constantly warn those of us down below that “we must get our test scores up,” that “our school has been on probation way too long,” and that test-driven sanctions like closure or turnaround are constant threats. Because test scores are being misused as evidence that schools and the people in them—including administrators, teachers, students and even the lunch lady—are failures in teaching and learning, administrators and teachers succumb to the pressure to focus ever more closely on testing.

Read more here.  

Parents, here's an idea.  If your student is to take a test that only measures subgroup scoring such as Annual Yearly Progress (AYP) reports and not an end of a course test that measures and scores individual knowledge and achievement levels, have him/her be a bit creative and use his/her skills in "measurement and design".  Ask your teachers why certain tests are being administered to your child.  Opt out of those assessments not directly assessing your child's knowledge and progress.

Fight back against this incessant testing imposed by private corporations (held unaccountable to taxpayers) on your public school.

Read more about standardized testing from fairtest.org. 


The new cry for education should be "YOLO".  Remember "TOWANDA" in Fried Green Tomatoes?  Students and parents, regain your power in your educational opportunities.  Whether you ascribe to YOLO or TOWANDA, don't be a pawn in this educational reform that is nothing else but a plan for a managed workforce.  These tests/assessments have nothing to do with education.

 

College Graduates Find Jobs!

A representative list of jobs college graduates are landing in New Orleans.  Wonder if these jobs require college degrees in New Jersey?

What types of jobs are college graduates finding these days in New Orleans? Peter Schiff interviews recent graduates about their jobs and college debt.

Is a college degree worth the cost?  Those pedicab drivers on Bourbon Street sure have a great education.  A great job?  Not so much.

From the Schiff Report:

President Obama promotes the myth that everyone must go to college. That if you don't go, your life will be ruined -- that you will end up waiting tables, or trapped in some other mundane occupation. The truth is, even with a college degree, you may still end up waiting tables, you'll just begin your "career" four or five years later, tens of thousands of dollars in debt.

Here is an example of some of the plumb jobs college grads were able to land during the Obama administration. Not just liberal arts majors mind you, but graduates with degrees in mathematics, robotics, neuroscience, engineering, accounting, business administration, economics, biology, communications, graphic design, marketing, and linguistics.

Read more here.