The Network for Public Education supports opting out of Common Core tests.
“The Network for Public Education stands in full support of parents, students and educators who choose to teach and learn about the reality of high stakes tests, opt out of high stakes tests, speak out against high stakes tests and who refuse to give those tests to students.
“Right now, in communities from the highest need to the most affluent, students, parents and educators are being punished for the courageous act of informing others about available options to opt out of high stakes tests and acting upon those options. These reprisals, often for merely learning and teaching about students’ rights, violate basic human rights and common decency.
“There is no evidence that these tests contribute to the quality of education, or help close the “achievement gap.” Since NCLB, these tests have hindered, not helped, school improvement efforts. The…
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booklady
March 13, 2015 at 15:12
March 13 Bob Braun’s Ledger reports Pearson “monitoring” social media, reports breach re student twitter, to NJ DOE.
His blog site is temporarily overloaded.
booklady
March 13, 2015 at 21:18
The post now appears on Bob Braun’s Ledger Facebook. Pearson called NJ DoE–who called district test coordinator 10 pm re alert. NJ DoE wanted high school to discipline student who’d tweeted re PARCC test after 3 pm dismissal.
Lloyd Lofthouse
March 14, 2015 at 08:13
With the erosion of Pearson’s profits through the Common Core agenda, it looks like they are getting desperate to censor resistance to their goal to convert the entire U.S. public education system to one of testing insanity even to the point of testing preschoolers to determine college and career readiness through bubble tests and not real teaching and learning.
In December 2014, PBS reported that of the 45 states in America that had signed up blindly to join the Common Core in 2010 consortium before there was Common Core standards or tests, fourteen had dropped out (I think the number is higher today). And as testing starts this year, the number of students to be tested—through the Pearson promoted by propaganda and bribes through state and federal lobbyists—was 15 million out of more than 49 million students attending U.S. Public schools.
I wonder how many people would buy a car before it was designed—just with a name, concept and sales pitch—long beforethe first one came off the assembly line.
There is also a lot of pressure on the states through a form of blackmail from the federal Department of Education that refuses to give states federal funds for their public schools if they don’t do what the Common Core agenda calls for—-testing, testing, and more testing, and then using the results of those tests to rank (ONLY) public school teachers and public schools and then fire teachers and close schools base don thsoe tests results while labeling students as failures if the test results (from shoddy tests that are often confusing and full of errors) say the child isn’t college and career ready even as early as five years old.
Meanwhile the Economic Policy Institute reports that these types of tests, even if they are error free and not confusing, only measure about 1 to 14% of why a child learns what he/she learns and remembers becasue there are so many other factors involved in a child learning and remembering what is taught. Parents and home envinroment are the largest factor at more than 60%, and we’ve known that since the 1966 Coleman Report that no other study has proven wrong in 49 years. In fact, every follow up study that had challenged the results of the Coleman Report have only supported its conclusions.
http://www.archives.nysed.gov/edpolicy/research/res_essay_johnson_cole.shtml
Then there is the 1990 Sandia Report out of New Mexico that refuted the claims made by A Nation at Risk, and the test based reformers have ignored the Sandia Report totally.
http://www.edutopia.org/landmark-education-report-nation-risk
Of course, Pearson isn’t the only fraud in school reform. There’s also the private sector for profit (no matter how you look at it) corporate Charter industry that makes more profits only if it teaches more children. And several studies out of Stanford have reported that corporate Charters are mostly worse than or equal to the public schools they are replacing and a more recent study in Ohio reported that only 10% of corporate Charter school classrooms were equal to or better than the public schools they were replacing.