Reading through the comments on the National Governor's Association (NGA) Report on Public Feedback on Common Core Standards (2010) you would never know the public would like to see a well-rounded curriculum, less testing and assessment in math and reading, and age level appropriate curriculum that doesn't include standardized testing.
Despite repeated concerns about these and other issues in the report, however, these concerns are being ignored by policy makers and legislators.
In fact, the concluding paragraph of the Governor Association's document states, "The feedback is, overall, very good news for the standards developers." Hmmm..and who might that be? It certainly isn't good news for the teachers and the students.
So why are the Common Core and the associated ed policy being instituted from the top down in public schools across the country? Why is the Common Core focus required in poor, minority communities where the failed policies of no child left untested has resulted in more devastation as public schools struggle to survive because of unequal and unacceptable levels of funding and yet are subjected to more mandates to pass tests?
Professor Bruce Baker explains in very simple, easy to understand language, why none of this makes any sense.
Professor Bruce Baker, Rutgers University
Collectively what we have here is a massive effort on the one hand, to require traditional public school districts to adopt a common curriculum and ultimately to adopt common assessments for evaluating student success on that curriculum and then force those districts to evaluate, retain and/or dismiss their teachers based on student assessment data, while on the other hand, expanding publicly financed subsidies for more children to attend schools that would not be required to do these things (in many cases, for example, relieving charter schools from teacher evaluation requirements).
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