Article Ten of the Bill of Rights to the US Constitution states, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
This means that the federal government is not supposed to interfere in the educational affairs of any state. Yet since 1965, the federal government has heaped educational mandate upon mandate on the states through the strings attached to federal funding. The creation of the Department of Education in 1979 has not improved education but has eroded local control.
Scholastic Aptitude Test scores peaked in the mid 1960s and have declined ever since 1965, coincidentally when federal aid to local schools first started. We cannot infer causality, but it is clear federal aid did not help.
Public schools function best when they are truly run locally.
“I plead with all you well-intentioned but definitely misguided administrators, teachers, and politicians. Raise your heads out of the dust and realize that America is great because America bucked against the status quo.”
A native of Ghana, Alma Ohene-Opare, explains the over-controlling education system of his former country, and urges the USA not to repeat those mistakes.
Read his article, posted by Eagle Forum, linked here.
Isn’t it enough that the SAT, ACT, and the GRE are aligned with the Common Core? The Washington Post writes that now even Girl Scout badges are aligned with the Common Core.
All aspects of society– from birth to preschool to K-12 education to college and jobs–are intended to be aligned. “Seamless” is the term. Please realize, “seamless” is NOT a good thing. Read the article by Valerie Strauss of the Washington Post.
Some students taking Utah’s SAGE assessment this spring experienced what they described as “weird” colors and sounds while taking the math assessment. SAGE is Utah’s new computer adaptive assessment. From interviews with students, it seems that not every student took the version of the assessment that subjected students to the weird colors and strange voices. Some students appeared to be taking a different version.
Washington State also has a computer adaptive assessment. Washington’s assessments are being developed by the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC), one of the two assessment consortia for the Common Core. It is not known yet whether the Washington state assessment resembles the Utah SAGE assessment.
Parents, if your child took the Common Core Assessments this year, please ask him or her to tell you about it. If your child had a similar anxiety-producing experience, please contact the person who produced the video below, and also contact us. Our e-mail is cure@curewashington.org. A sample opt-out form can be found along the top bar of our website.
Please watch the entire video.
Click to download a sample Opt-out form which you can adjust to fit your situation.
Even the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction acknowledges that you may opt out your child from assessments. See the third question on their assessment information page.
Also, read the commentary from our friends at “Stop Common Core in Washington State”.
The Seattle School District has been uploading personal information to the data storage company ConnectEDU for the past three years. Now ConnectEDU is going bankrupt and the company is refusing to delete the personal data as stated in their contract with the Seattle School District. Read the article.
Increasing amounts of personal data are being collected on all public school students. The data collection is underway in government-funded preschools and even earlier. We encourage parents to be assertive about protecting the private information of their children. In this age of computers, this data can be stored indefinitely and can be hacked, misused, shared, or sold. Please be vigilant.
On March 24, 2014, Indiana’s Governor Pence signed SB 91 into law replacing the Common Core State Standards with its own Indiana Standards. So what’s the problem?
Somehow, they ended up with new standards that were almost the same as the recently rejected standards.
Indiana wanted to keep their federal waiver from the No Child Left Behind Act’s onerous mandates. To do this, they had to develop “college and career readiness” standards which met the federal guidelines, that is, they had to use the same blueprint to build their Indiana Standards as the blueprint for the Common Core.
Read the article.
The Federal Department of Education has sent a letter to Washington’s Superintendent of Public Instruction removing Washington State’s waiver from some of the No Child Left Behind’s costly requirements……Federal funding for education is like a drug. Let us clear our minds of the notion that federal money is something we absolutely need and remember that before 1965 schools functioned well without it. […]
The data tech company inBloom was started with seed money from the Gates Foundation. The company’s plan was to collect student data from various sources, store them in the “cloud” and allow the data to be accessed for various educational purposes. Faced with parent concerns and with recent data protection legislation from the New York […]
Kindergarten used to be where youngsters did finger-painting and made shapes out of clay. Children learned valuable lessons about being polite, sharing, and taking turns. They learned to be creative, musical, and artistic.
Today, the goal of education including preschool is to prepare children for the workforce–to make them college and career ready. A Washington Post article by Valerie Strauss reports that a New York school has cancelled a kindergarten show so that there is more time for college and career training. Read the article.
In December 2013, a KUOW story revealed that the Washington State Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction had signed an agreement to share student data with the Seattle Times and the Associated Press–without notification to parents or students. Not even Seattle Public Schools officials knew about this agreement. Read more…