Posted on 02/22/2013 3:04:25 PM PST by lyby
MONTGOMERY, Alabama -- State Republicans are pushing back against national curriculum standards with proposed legislation that would repeal part of the state's existing curriculum and seek to block federal policy makers from student and teacher data. Identical bills introduced last week in the House and Senate would overturn the State Board of Education’s adoption of Common Core State Standards developed by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers...
State Republicans have criticized the standards as a precursor to a federal takeover of K-12 education since the Obama administration announced in 2009 that states competing for certain U.S. Department of Education grants would be scored, in part, on whether they adopted the common core...
The proposed legislation would also forbid the state from spending any money on a Statewide Longitudinal Tracking System, a program incentivized by USDE grants and intended to enhance the ability of states to manage and analyze education data, including individual student records...
The resolution notes the state-led collaboration effort “occurred without federal funding, influence or input.”
(Excerpt) Read more at blog.al.com ...
In response to the bills, State Superintendent of Education Thomas Bice said he was "quite concerned" during a board meeting last week.
"We’ll work closely with the sponsors to try to conform and pull people together to focus on what the real problems are, not necessarily what the standards are," he said.
Bice identified the problem as "the overreach from those beyond our borders."
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I concur with Dr. Bice's statement, IF he means what I believe: GET THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT OUT OF OUR BUSINESS.
The Alabama College and Career Ready Standards, as well as the Common Core State Standards, are only academic standards for each grade in math and English. Neither set of standards mandates any type of data collection.
Alabama’s College and Career Ready Standards are academic standards that say nothing about collection of student or teacher data or information. Regardless, all student and teacher data is already protected by FERPA.
And, frankly, as a 7th grade public school teacher, I find the “new” math standards to be rigorous and require students to THINK!
Superintendent Bice and our Legislature are on the right side.
The Common Core Standards are part of the Plummet to the Bottom, errr I mean Race to the Top, obama educational package. With RttT, schools are required to follow the Common Core and report data to the gubmint. I don’t know if Alabama has accepted RttT, but the state can still use the Common Core without accepting it. If Alabama did accept RttT, you will be enting student data into gubmint databases.
The Common Core Standards are part of the Plummet to the Bottom, errr I mean Race to the Top, obama educational package. With RttT, schools are required to follow the Common Core and report data to the gubmint. I don’t know if Alabama has accepted RttT, but the state can still use the Common Core without accepting it. If Alabama did accept RttT, you will be enting student data into gubmint databases.
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What is “RttT”? I am not familiar with that acronym.
RttT is for Race to the Top, the program I mentioned at the beginning of my post. It is NCLB on steroids.
Just spoke with a colleague... her take is the $$$$ required to implement. What a shame... I have been saying, how can we implement a new curriculum without teachers being trained. I can do the math, but what about the teachers of earlier-grade students. A lot of skills have been “moved down”, and my concern is those teachers do not have the math background/training to teach these skills. BTW, every year I battle - at 7th grade - students who still have not mastered basic multiplication facts, long division with whole numbers and decimals, and have not a clue about fractions!
I teach high school English and social studies. You would not believe how many of my students can’t even read. We have a whole-word reading program in our elementary system and the kids do fairly well until middle school. That’s when we stop requiring them to memorize whole words. Since they have few phonics skills, they remain at a fifth grade reading level. The elementary teachers outnumber the high school teachers, so we will never get rid of the program. Among other things, the entire program is scripted for the teachers. Teachers don’t have to plan anything.
Scripted... That’s what Saxon Math is all about! Which is why some school systems choose it - no planning for teachers AND no thinking required. BS. I believe in teaching students to think about the math and how we can apply it to solve problems. I tell them, “whatever we learned yesterday, we have to know today because we will use it tomorrow!”
If you would like to, private message me so we can commiserate.
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