Scrap CCSS and see if we can develop flexible standards that have real purpose in student lives–and standards that can be assessed by means other than numeric ones. The standards need to be simple and able to take into account differing needs of different people in varied situations. They need to be meaningful in how they are assessed. And they need to be agreed upon by the American people, not rolled out upon them.
Education “reformers,” in an attempt to save the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), are now attempting to decouple “standards” and “high-stakes testing.” In an op-ed in The New York Times today, for example, David Kirp, who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, writes:
Although the Obama administration didn’t craft the standards, it weighed in heavily, using some of the $4.35 billion from the Race to the Top program to encourage states to adopt not only the Common Core (in itself, a good thing) but also frequent, high-stakes testing (which is deeply unpopular). The mishandled rollout turned a conversation about pedagogy into an ideological and partisan debate over high-stakes testing. The misconception that standards and testing are identical has become widespread.
Well, no. CCSS is not, “in itself, a good thing” and it was not the “rollout” that attached it to testing. David Coleman, the creator of CCSS, after all…
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Crazy Normal - the Classroom Exposé 