I want to give context so that you can fully appreciate the letter’s significance.
Darling-Hammond, of Stanford University, is on the list of “Top Ten Scariest People in Education Reform” for good reasons. She works for private organizations that crush Constitutional control of education; she promotes and writes books about socialist redistribution of wealth, and she plays key roles in the Obama administration’s fed ed goals. She’s been an advisor and/or board member for:
Dr. Thompson pointed out to his Facebook friends that Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond has been very busily publishing this month.
Her sudden articles in the Huffington Post, The Hill, Stanford University, NEA, ECE and elsewhere show that now, while Congress heatedly debates the ESEA/No Child Left Behind disaster, she’s desperate to persuade Congress to use Common Core and its tests as “an engine to drive better educational practice.”
Darling-Hammond paints a pretty, distracting frame around her ugly baby, the Common Core. She pretends that the whole reason parents are pushing back is only high stakes testing and she mentions nothing else that parents are screeching about. Apparently to her, the Constitution has nothing to do with it; experimentation on children has nothing to do with it; data mining has nothing to do with it; unpiloted and shaky standards have nothing to do with it; validity-report-lacking tests have nothing to do with it. She keeps the “conversation” on the clearly obvious: that basing teachers’ entire value on a test students take is stupid; that stressing those test results rather than a child’s whole education is even more stupid. (Yes, the sky is blue and the grass is green.)
But what she’s really pushing for is NOT what parents want. In “The Hill” blog post, she pressed for federal enforcement of Common Core tests: “urge the federal government to make sure districts provide annual assessments of student progress, while allowing states to develop systems of assessment”. She added, “The Feds should continue to require states to flag districts that require improvement” and “the Feds need to treat accountability as an ongoing process…”
Her article in HuffPo praises California for allocating $1.25 BILLION for Common Core and for eliminating “all the old tests while bringing in new and better Common Core assessments” and concludes: “the Common Core standards in California are an engine to drive better educational practice“.
Her strategy seems to be to get readers to start nodding with her about the high stakes tests, and then forget to stop nodding when she crosses the line and promotes a unicorn: a gentler, kinder version of the same darn Common Core tests. She uses the term “we agreed” seven times to make her point in one article, as she claims that reformers from a wide spectrum of political camps agree with her. Dr. Darling-Hammond, please know the wide spectrum of political camps is loaded with those who disagree with you. Case in point: Dr. Thompson (an Obama voter in the last election) and me (long ago lovingly and correctly labeled a “right wing nut case” –by Dr. Thompson.)
Dr. Thompson put it this way to his Facebook friends tonight:
“Advocacy should never be used as a means to effect change in ethics,” –but because Darling-Hammond is doing so– “it makes it real easy for small-town Utah doctors like myself who do not hold positions of import at Stanford University to effectively ‘slam’ the Dr. Hammonds of the world… Not once did she mention the words ‘valid testing‘. Parents are, and always must be, the resident experts of their own children. I will always challenge those in positions of power who use pseudo science to back their claims. It is an affront to my profession.”
Then he posted his pointed letter to Dr. Darling-Hammond.
May his letter go far and wide. May Darling-Hammond enjoy the mountains of money she’s made $erving the institution$ that aim to $tandardize education and data so that they can control citizens more effectively. –And may Congress see right through her words.
Congress just might.
This month we saw Senator Vitter’s Local Control of Education Act pass the U.S. Senate. (Read it here.) It doesn’t end Common Core, but it spanks the Department of Education for ramming it down our throats, and prevents conditional-on-common-standards-grants.
We also saw key members of the Senate and the House sign powerful letters (here’s the other) that demand an end to the funding and pushing of Common Core.
Tonight, Utah’s Governor Gary Herbert will take questions on KBYU TV. The public may submit questions via Twitter, Facebook, phone or email. askeleven@byu.edu is the email address. Click here for additional ways to submit questions.
Feel free to use my questions in your own words if you like.
1. Will you veto SB 235 the school turnaround bill now that you’ve received so much input, including official open letters asking you to do so from the unanimous boards of some Utah school districts, from the UEA and from Utahns Against Common Core? Why or why not?
2. We know that your initiative, Prosperity 2020 is aimed at improving the economy of Utah. Can you explain how it differs from China’s economic centralization of schools linked with the economy?
3. Why are you supporting the ban on citizens being allowed to burn wood in the their homes?
4. What influence do Utah citizens have in the National Governor’s Association; in other words, how does the Governor’s membership in NGA benefit Utah citizens’ constitutional rights to local autonomy?
5. Last year, you led a study of the new national standards used in Utah known as Common Core; critics said your study failed to address the governance and local control of the standards. Would you be willing to revisit this issue in more depth? Why or why not?
6. What is Utah’s State Longitudinal Database System, and how does it benefit individuals and families?
7. Some parents are calling for an opt out for the State Longitudinal Database System. Would you support giving parents this liberty? Why or why not?
8. Would you consider following the example of many other states in eliminating the income tax? Why or why not?
A few days ago, fifth grader Aaron Bencomo spoke to the Arizona Senate, explaining in his own words, using his own experience to express how bad the Common Core is. He quoted the Declaration of Independence. He talked about the pursuit of happiness. He described the “one size does not fit all,” boring, wasteful reviews of last year’s math in this year’s math. He talked about not every child being the same, but being treated as if they were the same, under Common Core. His speech was a beautiful example of how even a little child can be an agent for freedom and truth. Watch from minute 1:20 to 4:05.
Children do have great power.
Aaron is not the first child to speak out powerfully against the Common Core agenda’s destruction of individual freedoms. Teenager Patrick Richardson of Arkansas spoke out. Ethan Young of Tennessee spoke out. Sydney Lane of Connecticut spoke out. Please watch and share these videos if you haven’t already!
Freedom of speech is, of course, closely tied to freedom of religion; both are versions of free exercise of conscience and of free thought.
Inspired by Dallin Oaks’ article in this month’s Ensign Magazine, I reminded my children this week that they are not government employees living under rules that constrain religious speech in a school setting. In other words, children may say, write, report, and share their faith in God freely, including in a public school if they want to.
Elder Dallin Oaks reminded us that freedom of religion is not limited to the inside of a church. He wrote: “…oppose government officials and public policy advocates who suggest that the free exercise of religion is limited to “freedom of worship.” In the United States, for example, the guarantee of “free exercise” protects the right to come out of our private settings, including churches, synagogues, and mosques, to act upon our beliefs, subject only to the legitimate government powers necessary to protect public health, safety, and welfare. Free exercise surely protects religious citizens in acting upon their beliefs in public policy debates...“
I also reminded my children of a well-loved story in the Book of Mormon about the “Army of Helaman.” In the story, adults with histories of evil had made promises not to take up their swords to kill again, but their innocent children were under no such obligation; when attacked by an enemy, the boys took up their swords and defended their own lives and the lives of their families. God preserved those young men, and helped their families, through them. (See Alma 56-58)
I tell my children never to assume they are under the same obligation as their public school teachers are. Children can speak positively about their religion. Children have great freedom of speech. If they feel they want to, they should speak and write about their beliefs, including belief in Constitutional liberty, and belief in God, wherever they are.
He was right when he said that it’s educational malpractice to use a beta-test to judge students and teachers and schools.
He was right in saying that it’s unethical to test students in January and February on content that hasn’t even been introduced for that school year yet.
But why was there no mention of privacy –or of parental rights to informed consent? Why is that not part of his stop-SAGE argument? Why is the senator pushing back against SAGE/Common Core tests now, when he never has done so before? He could have helped pass Rep. Anderegg’s student data privacy bill, two years in a row. He could have done so much to protect our children. He did not. The student data privacy bill is, once again, two years in a row, utterly dead in the water.
I do suspect, because of Stephenson’s infatuation with all things technological, that Stephenson is using the anti-SAGE argument to lead listeners toward acceptance of something just as sinister or worse: curriculum-integrated tests, also known as “stealth assessments”.
That’s what’s coming next. And stealth will hurt, not help, the fight for parental rights and student privacy rights.
A resolution just passed the Utah House of Representatives along these stealth assessment lines, called HCR7. The visible intentions of HCR7 are great: to reduce the amount of time wasted on testing and reducing test anxiety; to expand the amount of time spent teaching and learning instead of test-prepping. Its sponsor, Rep. Poulson, explained in a KSL quote: “my family were small farmers and cattlemen, and I know just from that experience that if you spend all of your time weighing and measuring, and not feeding, it causes problems.”
Agreed! Education for a child’s benefit should be its own end, not just a stepping stone toward the Capital T Tests.
But, but, but.
See line 66. It wants to “maximize the integration of testing into an aligned curriculum“. How?
The school system just hides the factthat a test is happening from its students.
The techno-curriculum can suck out a constant stream of personal data from the student’s technology use. Assignments, projects, and even games can constantly upload academic and nonacademic data about the child, all day every day, into the State Longitudinal Database Systems —and into the hands of third-party technology vendors.
As Dr. Thompson has pointed out, stealth can be honorable and valuable in a private, parentally consented-to, setting: when a parent asks a trained child psychologist to help heal a hurt child, he/she can analyze a child’s drawings, how a child plays with toys, or how he organizes objects, etc.
The difference is informed consent.
The governmental-corporate machine is suggesting that legislatures force schools to adopt compulsory testing embedded in school curriculum and activities, allowing student data collection to be pulled without informed consent.
Do we want our students to be tested and analyzed and tracked like guinea pigs all day, year after year— not by teachers, but by third party vendors and the government?
Stealth testing, or “integrated testing” removes the possibility for parental opt-outs. I’m not for that. Are you?
Why doesn’t anyone seem to care? I repeat: two years in a row Rep. Jake Anderegg’s student data protection bill has gone unpassed. I cannot understand the legislature’s apathy about privacy rights and the lack of valiant protection of children’s privacy in this data-binging day and age.
I don’t get it. Someone, tell me why this is not important in a supposedly child-friendly state. It is known all over the planet that private data is the new gold, the new oil. Knowledge about individuals is power over them. When someone knows extremely detailed information about individuals, they can can persuade them, influence them, guide them, help them –and control them. Children’s privacy, their data, is gold to corporations and governments. Yet they are notbeing protected. Our legislators don’t think it’s important enough. We can pass bills about every petty thing you can imagine, but we can’t protect our kids from having their gold robbed every single day. I can’t believe it’s just neglect and busy-ness. I think it’s greed-based.
Don’t believe it? Study what the feds have done in recent years to destroy student privacy. Search Utah code for any mention of students having rights to their own data, or ownership of it; search in vain for any punishment when data is collected without parental consent by schools or third party vendors. See corporations salivating over taken student data –collected without parental consent by every state’s “State Longitudinal Database System”.
Watch the Datapalooza event where the same type of talk is going on– absolutely no discussion of parental rights, of privacy rights, of the morality of picking up academic and nonacademic personal information about another person without his/her consent nor parental consent: https://youtu.be/Lr7Z7ysDluQ
Our elected representatives, from Governor Herbert through Howard Stephenson through Marie Poulson through our state school board, are not demonstrating any respect for parental consent. By their inaction, they are violating our children’s data privacy.
Utah is volunteering to give away our gold, our children’s private data– out of naiivete, greed, or tragically misplaced “trust”.
There is only one solution that I can see: parents, we are the only ones who really care. WE CAN SPEAK UP.
We can protect our children by pressuring our elected representatives at the senate, house and state school board. We can tell elected representatives that our children need and deserve proper data privacy protection. Tell them that FERPA is broken and we need local protection. Tell them we will not tolerate embedded tests in the daily curriculum and technologies that our children use.
Demand the dignity of privacy for your child. Say NO to “integrated curriculum and testing”– stealth assessment. Put these words in your elected representatives’ inboxes and messaging systems and twitter feeds and ears. Don’t let it rest. Be a pest. Silence is acquiescence.
Children and their private data are not “stakeholder” owned inventory. Children are not “human capital” to be tracked and directed by the government. My child is mine. He/she has a mission unrelated to fattening up the workforce or serving Prosperity 2020. I do not think the legislature comprehends that fact.
Maybe I am not barking loudly enough. Maybe a hundred thousand parents need to be barking.
I’ll repaste the elected representatives’ email information here.
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Write to the Utah State School Board: Board@schools.utah.gov
Last year, on behalf of Early Life Child Psychology and Education Center, Dr. Gary Thompson offered $100,000.00 to the Utah State Office of Education (USOE) for validity reports for Utah’s SAGE Common Core test.
He made the offer after Associate Superintendent Judy Park made a public statement regarding the validity of SAGE which Dr. Thompson knew to be false. He knew that test makers such as American Institutes for Research (AIR) or Pearson routinely provide validity reports to psychologists in the private sector, because by law and ethics, they know the tests can’t be used otherwise.
Dr. Thompson gave the USOE a 24-hour deadline to forward to his clinic some certified copies of industry-standard validity reports prepared by AIR. Such reports would show the test’s construct validity, criterion validity, content validity, concurrent validity, and predictive validity.
In exchange for copies of the reports, Early Life Corp would donate $50,000.00 to a public school of USOE’s choice, plus an additional $50,000.00 to the 2014-15 Utah Public School Teacher of the Year. He sent the offer directly to Dr. Judy Park and to some of the Utah State School Board members; he also posted the offer on his personal Facebook page, the clinic’s Facebook page, and on the Utahns Against Common Core Facebook page.
The offer was quickly big news among those who follow the Common Core Initiative’s unfolding saga nationwide. Six clinicians and partners of Early Life, including the CEO who happens to be Dr. Thompson’s wife, were not happy about the offer. That night was a sleepless one for them and Dr. Thompson was consigned to the couch for the night by the CEO. Still, Dr. Thompson slept like a baby. Why?
Here’s a little bit of history:
Right after his appearance on the Glenn Beck TV show, where Dr. Thompson had exposed the Common Core/SAGE test’s assault on student privacy and its unanswered validity questions, Dr. Thompson had been summoned to the offices of then-Superintendent Dr. Martell Menlove and Associate Superintendent Brenda Hales. He accepted the invitation, bringing along his clinic’s lawyer and his best friend, Edward D. Flint.
During the two and a half hour meeting, Dr. Thompson and Ed Flint first sat and listened to “Brenda Hales’ hour-long lecture about ‘the Standards'”. Dr. Thompson finally explained, when she was finished speaking, that academic standards were not Thompson/Flint’s area of expertise and that the subject was of no interest to them on any level.
Next, Menlove/Hales listened to Thompson/Flint. The doctor and the lawyer explained the fundamentals of test validity issues and data gathering, and expressed their concerns about privacy and testing issues, laying out a careful analysis of how easily potential violations could occur under Common Core’s tests.
Menlove/Hales dismissed their concerns as “conspiracy theories” and requested that Thompson/Flint “stop bringing fear into our community via social media”. Thompson and Flint promised to cease speaking of their concerns if Menlove and Hales would agree to contact AIR to provide documentation that the concerns were unwarranted.
Dr. Menlove agreed.
Weeks later, still having seen no validity reports, Dr. Thompson finally received a phone call –from a parent, who had noticed an AIR letter posted on the USOE webpage. The letter was directed to Dr. Menlove from AIR Vice President Jon Cohen; it purported to address the concerns of Mr. Flint and Dr. Thompson, using their names.
AIR Vice President Jon Cohen failed to actually respond to the pointed, specific concerns that had been submitted in writing to Dr. Menlove. (Read those here.)
What he did do is attempt to give AIR a pat on the back by sharing a link to what was meant to go to a national nonprofit disabilities organization, one that would vouch for the test verbally (not with any validity studies or reports). Yet –incredibly– when one click’s on the AIR Vice President’s link, one is linked to a vacation spot on Catalina Island.
It’s been two years since AIR’s defense of validity letter was posted on the USOE website, and still no correction has been made.
Why haven’t the newspapers reported that the validity of Utah’s SAGE test is proved with a link to a Catalina Island website? This singular error (I’m assuming, hoping it was an error) and it’s now two-year uncorrected status speaks tragic volumes about the lack of professionalism of the SAGE, the USOE and the AIR Corporation. (AIR has received at least $39 million so far for its testing service, from Utah taxpayers.)
Dr. Thompson was not amused by AIR’s error. He shared this story in multiple, filmed presentations in four different states. Audiences and parents were stunned.
This is news. Why is it not in the papers? When AIR had the perfect opportunity to silence “misinformed” critics by putting the issue to rest with actual validity tests, the company produced no reports of any tests, just a short letter that said nothing.
Multiple calls to Dr. Menlove’s office and to his personal cell phone were never returned. Months later both Dr. Menlove and Brenda Hales abruptly resigned with no explanations given.
It had become clear to Dr. Thompson that the SAGE test was designed to assess both academic and psychological constructs. Dr. Thompson knew from his direct doctoral residency experience and from his academic training in assessment that no test of this kind had ever been devised in the history of clinical psychology. With knowledge of the extreme experimental nature of the test it was his logical assumption that AIR’s efforts were devoted to the construction of the test and could not have concurrently designed an entirely new method of measuring validity; providing validity reports is a time-consuming and extremely expensive task. (He notes that AIR and other Common Core test makers must have been thrilled to oblige when “client” Secretary Arne Duncan gave them the opportunity to devise a huge test without requiring the normally expensive and very time-consuming validity tests.)
It’s common knowledge, thanks to the USOE, that AIR was the only company that was federally approved; thus, the only company Utah could have chosen once it dumped its SBAC membership. The USOE has explained, “AIR is currently the only vendor who produces a summative adaptive assessment that has received federal approval.”
No one really knows– outside of the few AIR psychometricians and V.P. Jon Cohen– exactly what the Utah SAGE test (which is now also used outside Utah) measures. After two years of studying the issue, Dr. Thompson surmises that AIR has devised one of the most complex, accurate measures of personality characteristics ever made. Dr. Thompson believes that behavioral testing was AIR’s contractual goal and that SAGE reached that goal.
Support for Dr. Thompson’s conclusion is easy to find. As one example, scan the federal report entitled “Promoting Grit, Tenacity and Perserverance“. It openly promotes schools’ collection of students’ psychological and belief-based data via behavioral assessment. (See page 44 to view biometric data collection device photos: student mood meters, posture analysis seats, wireless skin conductance sensors, etc.) Utah’s own documents, such as the grant application for the State Longitudinal Database System, reveal that noncognitive assessment, including psychometric census-taking of Utah students, were part of the state’s agreement with the federal government even before the Common Core Initiative had come to our state.
As for the SAGE test’s academics, Dr. Thompson points out that barring independent, peer-reviewed documentation, it is not possible to honestly claim that SAGE measures what it claims to measure– academics– in a valid manner. Dr. Thompson puts it this way: “There is no way in hell that the AIR-produced SAGE/Common Core test measures academic achievement in a valid manner, and quite probably, does not measure academics at all.”
Dr. Gary Thompson and his family
Postscript: For more opt-out-of-SAGE-tests motivation please read the testimonies of parents who served on Utah’s SAGE “validation committee”. They read the SAGE questions last year and are now speaking out.
The State School Board of Utah meets tomorrow and will discuss SB 235 (bad bill) and HB 360 (great bill). They apparently want the good one vetoed. Too much liberty for teachers; too much distance between Utah and Common Core. It’s an open meeting; come and see.
The board doesn’t like this freedom-saving bill. But the Utah legislature did like it; HB 360 passed both houses and should be signed into law by the governor next week. Unless he vetoes, swayed by the school board…
Please email them: Board@schools.utah.gov
Dear State School Board,
I want to give input on two bills that you will be recommending for veto or signing to our governor.
HB 360 is a good bill for teachers’ autonomy, parental input and local control. Please do not ask for a veto. This is a good, constitutional bill. Parents and teachers want autonomy and this bill creates space for it. I see no reason to veto this bill. If this board does recommend a veto, I would like to know why each board member voted as he/she did on the issue.
SB 235, on the other hand, is a terrible bill that punishes schools with unvalid labels of “failing” based on the controversial SAGE tests and on an unfair bell curve, so that some are forced to failregardless; it punishes schools with high parental opt-out ratesand falsely labels them “failing” and then it forces these “failing” schools to take an “expert” to create “turnaround” that will likely be based on the Obama/Gates Turnaround Model.
For detailed, annotated research on SB 235, see two articles:
Please write or call! This is still America and not every legislator is bought by lobby money. Some actually do listen to constituents.We should act –even if we act alone. If we each act on conscience, rather than failing to act, for fear of failure, we might be winning many more battles.
A war over children’s lives and schooling and privacy rights is being waged, far under the radar of most people’s daily lives– but even those who know it’s going on, often fail to act. Keep acting, even if it appears there is no hope. Please join me if you can.
–And by the way, there is real hope!
The powerful Utah Educators’ Association (UEA) was also opposed to SB 235. So were key Utah Democrats. Some of the conservatives who actually voted for SB 235 now regret it.
Many people have written to the governor on this issue, pleading for a veto.
HB 360 already successfully PASSED both legislative houses, so it has the support of our elected reps. There’s no reason anyone would want it vetoed, that I can see, except if they are being paid (in money or in power) by “the machine”.
I sometimes think that we would be better off if we had an obvious wolf for a Governor.
If we had an obvious wolf, people would be paying very close attention to what he was doing. But Governor Herbert uses conservative language while he passes rascally progressive bills and initiatives and blocks conservative ones.
Most of Utah pays no real attention. Many assume that the conservative-sounding speech they heard him make on the campaign trail matches his actions today.
But this is not the case. He’s a key member of the Common Core creation team at NGA/CCSSO and he’s a proud promoter of Prosperity 2020, the cradle-to-workforce program that puts the economy first (not children) and puts businesses, not moms, dads and teachers, in positions of power over schools. He is not about to fight his own machine. The only thing he might fear is losing re-election. This is why I have a little bit of faith that letters asking him to veto SB 235 and asking him to pass HB 360, might, in great numbers, have influence on him –only for his re-election hopes. If he does just the opposite of what we are asking, and passes SB 235 and vetoes HB 360, let’s at least not let him do it too quietly and without pushback. We still have about a week until it’s too late to veto or to pass these bills into law.
The Salt Lake Tribune reported that tonight, Utah lawmakers passed a bill that “will assign rewards and consequences to Utah schools based on the state’s controversial school grading system. Schools who improve their grades will get funding and salary bonuses, while struggling schools will have the option of getting mentoring from school turnaround experts.”
Am I the only one reading this as: Utah adopted Obama’s School Turnaround model?
There is in fact an Obama-led, federal school turnaround model. There’s the federal “Office of School Turnaround” where states are assigned program officers. There’s a blue team and a green team.
In the chart where Utah’s listed for turnaround (see below) the Utah program officer is not yet named. It says, “To Be Determined.” The feds hadn’t assigned us a program officer before today.
They surely will now.
There’s also a federal Center on School Turnaround (CST) that’s so much more than an office in D.C. It’s a whole ” federal network of 22 Comprehensive Centers” that boasts ” 15 Regional Comprehensive Centers… and 7 national Content Centers.” The federal CST condescends to report that states are allowed to play a role in their own school turnaround. But not the leading role; that’s for the feds and the Comprehensive Centers. In a report titled “The State Role in School Turnaround” we learn that some of CST’s goals are to change states’ laws and to micromanage turnaround efforts. In their words:
“The Center on School Turnaround’s four objectives:
Create a Pro-Turnaround Statutory and Regulatory Environment
Administer and Manage Turnaround Efforts Effectively”
The passage of SB 235 is just one example of this ongoing series of terrible mistakes that cement our actions in line with the federal will.
The new Utah law calls for “turnaround experts” to improve low labeled schools using one driving method: tests. Schools will be labeled by student performance on Common Core/SAGE tests as low- or high-performing. Then some will be assigned a “turnaround expert” to raise Common Core test scores.
That famous turnaround group, the Center for American Progress, brazenly “disagrees that school improvement should be left entirely to states” and the Center has written that: “the United States will have to largely abandon the beloved emblem of American education: local control… new authority will have to come at the expense of local control… local control is the source of many of the nation’s problems related to education.”
I am not screaming out loud because I’m saving my screams until this next paragraph:
This week, the Tribune reported that longtime Utah State School Board member Leslie Castle “expressed frustration with the political rhetoric that pits states’ rights against the federal government. She… urged her colleagues to refrain from statements critical of federal overreach.
‘I am not going to be voting in favor of anything that plays to this nonsense that somehow our relationship with the federal government is crazy and something we’re trying to get out of,’ she said.” -Read the rest here.
In the Utah turnaround law, the phrase “credible track record” is used to establish the person who will “fix” Utah’s low-labeled schools. “Credible track record” is an odd choice of words because in the post-2010 altered education world of Common Core, there has been no track record required of education reformers. There were exactly zero validity studies and no empirical evidence to accompany the Common Core standards and tests. If you didn’t know that validity and piloting were missing, read what academics and scientists have been shouting from the rooftops about the nonvalid, utterly empty track record of Common Core tests and standards: Dr. Christopher Tienken‘s and Dr. Sandra Stotsky’s and Dr. Gary Thompson‘s and Dr. Yong Zhao’s writings are good places to start.
Utah’s new law on school turnaround says that the experts who will turn around low-labeled schools must be: “experts identified by the board under Section 53A-1-1206“. They must “have a credible track record of improving student academic achievement…as measured by statewide assessments;(b) have experience designing, implementing, and evaluating data-driven instructional systems… have experience coaching public school administrators and teachers on designingdata-driven school improvement plans…”
Original source documents arm honest people who want to know the truth about Common Core to take back the reins of control.
This is important because proponents are increasing false advertisements about Common Core. They’re also hiding the Common Core Inititative under different names, such as “Utah Core” or “Indiana Core“. Unfortunately, well intentioned people whom we trust to tell us the truth often simply don’t know the whole story. It is up to us to find out for ourselves.
Please go go directly to source documents to fact-check claims being made by proponents of Common Core.
(This slightly updated syllabus was shared in a previous post.It is republished today because Alisa, Renee and I are speaking in Vernal tonight and we want to point our Vernal friends to solid information. If anyone wants to come to the meeting tonight, you are welcome. There is, of course, no charge and the event begins at 7:00.)
Link to tonight’s Vernal, Utah, meeting: 204 E 100 N, Vernal, UT 84078 (435) 789-0091
A Source-Focused Analysis of the Common Core Initiative
The General Educational Provisions Act – This law prohibits the federal government from directing or supervising education: “No provision of any applicable program shall be construed to authorize any department, agency, officer, or employee of the United States to exercise any direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum, program of instruction, administration, or personnel of any educational institution, school, or school system…” The Dept. of Education, by forming multipleofficial partnerships with corporate America, has gotten away with breaking this law.
U.S. Constitution – Amendment 10 – “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.” The disregard by the Dept. of Education for the authority and diversity of individual states’ educational pathways must be stopped.
The No Child Left Behind Waiver– This shows the 15% cap the federal government put on top of the copyrighted, unamendable (by states) common standards. So states are allowed to add frosting and sprinkles to state standards, but they have no say in what goes into the cake itself.
The lawsuit against the Department of Education– The Electronic Privacy Information Center has sued the DOE for destroying the previously data-privacy protective federal FERPA. The lawsuit explains that parental consent is a best practice, not a mandate, prior to data sharing; it shows that terms were redefined, that personally identifiable information, including biometrics, can be shared, and that agencies have legal access to private data of students.
The copyright on Common Core held by CCSSO/NGA – The fact that there are “terms of use” and a copyright shows that we have no real control over the standards which are written behind closed doors in D.C. Notice that no one outside CCSSO/NGA may claim to have helped write the standards.
The report entitled “For Each And Every Child” from the Equity and Excellence Commission – This report was commissioned by Obama. It reveals that forced redistribution of wealth is a main reason for the national education system.
The Cooperative Agreement between the Dept. of Education and the testing consortia – Even though Utah escaped the SBAC and is not bound by the Cooperative Agreement directly, Utah’s current testing group, A.I.R., is partnered with SBAC. This document shows clearly the mandates for synchronizing tests and sharing student data to mesh testing companies with federal aims and agents. Its only claim to binding authority is money.
The speeches of Secretary Arne Duncan on education – He states that Common Standards were Obama’s idea and that the federal government is moving to play a larger role in education. Also, the speeches of President Obama on education – Obama’s top 4 education goals: control data, common standards, teachers, and to take over low-performing schools.
The speeches of the CEA of Pearson Ed, Sir Michael Barber – Barber wants every school on the globe to have the exact same academic standards and to underpin every standard with environmental propaganda. He also pushes for global data and stresses the term “sustainable reform” which he calls “irreversible reform”.
The speeches and actions of the main funder of Common Core, Bill Gates – He’s funded Common Core almost completely on his own; he’s partnered with Pearson; he says “we won’t know it works until all the tests and curriculum aligns with the standards” and he’s writing curriculum for his “uniform customer base” –all children and all schools.
The speeches of David Coleman, a noneducator, the architect of the Common Core ELA standards and now promoted to College Board President -He mocks narrative writing, he’s diminished the percentage of classic literature that’s allowable in the standards. He’s not been elected, he’s never taught school, yet he’s almost singlehandedly altered the quality and liberty of classrooms. As he’s now the College Board President, he’s aligning the SAT to his version of standards.
The Dept. of Ed report: Promoting Grit, Tenacity and Perserverance– behavioral indicators are sought by the federal government. They may include monitoring children using cameras, posture chairs, and bracelets. (see graphic, mid-report.)
Federal data collection websites such as the EdFacts Exchange, the Common Education Data Standards, the National Data Collection Model, and the Data Quality Campaign, sites because three of these four ask us to give personally identifiable information on students, from our state database. -The first link shows what we already give to the federal government; the others show what the federal government is requesting that we share, which includes intimate, personally identifiable information. See Common Core creators’ data management branch, EIMAC of CCSSO, with its stated mission to disaggregate student data. The EIMAC/CCSSO link also shows the official partnership of the federal government with corporate Common Core.
The Official Common Core Standards – English and Math standards. Here you will see Common Core calling itself a “living work” meaning that what Common Core is today, will not remain. There is no amendment process for states to have a voice in altering the commonly held standards because they’re under private copyright. See a recommended reading list in Appendix B that includes “The Bluest Eye,” a pornographic novel.
See academic testimonies of the official Common Core validation committee members who refused to sign off on the legitimacy of the standards; other professors have also testified that Common Core hurts legitimate college readiness. See in contrast the motive of Common Core promoters such as Marc Tucker of the Center for American Progress who report that “the United States will have to largely abandon the beloved emblem of American education: local control. …[N]ew authority will have to come at the expense of local control.”
Common Educational Data Standards – The same private groups (NGA/CCSSO) that created Common Core have also created Common Educational Data Standards, so that student data mining and citizen tracking is interoperable and easy. Coupled with the breakdown of family privacy law (federal FERPA, altered by the Dept. of Education) we see that children’s data lacks proper protections, and that students are being used as compulsory, unpaid research objects.
Follow the money trails – Study what advocacy and development of common standards Bill Gates has paid for; see how his unelected philanthropy affects education and its governance, and see how his partnerships with Pearson, with the United Nations and others monopolize the U.S. and global education markets, excluding voters as public-private partnerships make decisions, instead of voters or elected representatives such as school boards or legislators making decisions.
Last week bipartisan grassroots Americans saw a miracle.
That wolf in sheep’s clothing, the (supposed) shoo-in bill called federal HR5 or The Student Success Act, which was to reauthorize No Child Left Behind/ESEA, wasthrown aside by Congress instead of becoming law. Thanks to a bipartisan effort by grassroots citizens and vigilant Congressmen who studied the language inside the bill’s 600+ pages –not just buying Speaker Boehner’s gilded talking points— the dangers of HR5 surfaced into Congressional consciousness.
A whirlwind of amendment-writing began on both sides of the aisle. By the time Congress gave up on trying to pass HR5 last week, there were so many amendments from both Democratic and Republican members of Congress that everybody seemed to dislike the bill and Obama was threatening to veto.
That was a very unexpected turn of events. –But proper! Emmett McGroarty of American Principles in Action summarized the problems of NCLB and HR5: “HR5 demonstrates a profound misunderstanding of the Constitution and our constitutional structure. Although it relieves the states from some NCLB burdens, it then adds others and overall sets the stage for an expanded federal footprint in our lives.”
Additionally, a powerful open letter from a bipartisan group ofover 2,000 educational researchers (See letter here) last month informed Congress that “testing should not be driving reform.”
The 2000 educational researchers who signed last month’s letter saw as harmful the federal aim “to use students’ test scores as a lever to drive educational improvement.” They explained: “This use of testing is ill-advised because… it has demonstrably failed to achieve its intended goal and has potent negative, unintended consequences.” Under No Child Left Behind/ESEA, they said, the federal government had trusted “an unproven but ambitious belief that if we test children and hold educators responsible for improving test scores we would have almost everyone scoring as “proficient” by 2014.” The researchers said: “there is no evidence that any test score increases represent the broader learning increases… While testing advocates proclaim that testing drives student learning, they resist evidence-based explanations for why, after two decades of test-driven accountability, these reforms have yielded such unimpressive results.”
For many, the bottom line problem with both ESEA and HR5 was the ongoing, evidence-less promotion of student high-stakes testing as the solution for education problems. For others, the bottom line problem (in HR5) was language implying conditionality of parental rights, possible waiving of states’ rights, and federal/state intrusion into private schools, particularly into private schools’ free exercise of religious freedom.
With so many heavy, bipartisan issues rolled into ESEA, we can expect that the upcoming bipartisan version of the bill will be plagued with the same struggles we saw in last week’s HR5. These must be identified and fought:
#1 Clarity problems: deliberately lengthy language that scatters definitions across hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pages and convoluted language that confuses most readers;
#2 A continued push for testing and data mining that pushes away from local (school or district) accountability toward centralized power; multi-state alignment (de facto national) high stakes testing and data collection that enriches corporations partnered with or funded by Bill Gates/Microsoft and Pearson.
#3 A push for centralization of power –with the elites comprised of corporate and governmental partnerships to exclude voters, teachers, parents and duly elected representatives;
#4 No privacy protections beyond the lame and wilted FERPA for our children; instead, increased data collecting powers to corporate-governmental partnerships;
#5 A continued push for more unelected boards to have increased control of greater numbers of schools via charter school expansions;
#6 A continued push for federal-corporate intrusion into private schools;
#7 A continued bartering for parental and states’ rights in trade for federal money;
#8 An assumption of federal-corporate “research” authority –devoid of parental consent and devoid of evidence-based, peer-reviewed validity;
#9 Expansion of centralized authority over specified groups, such as “migratory students” or “Alaskan Natives”; in sum:
#10 A continued disregard for Constitutional rights.
Please watch not only the ESEA/NCLB reauthorization, but also the S.227 SETRA bill. They go hand in hand.
Federal SETRA hurts student data privacy, allows emotional testing in increased student data mining, and reassigns grant-making (funding) control to REL regions, not states. Read SETRA bill text here.
It appeared to me that HR5 got away with its marketing (saying it was restoring local control) because it transmitted federally-desired, test-driven reforms and other expansions to state authority and to state enforcement, perhaps to appease local control activists. But this was just passing the abuse baton. I imagine the corporate-regional power grabbers singing the “Na-nee-na-nee-boo-boo” song: “You don’t get the steering wheel. Constitution Constasmooshen. Who’s got your taxes?”
(Important note: in the coming SETRA bill, fund-approving power is siphoned past the states to REL regional authorities, making Constitutional state-rights less and less relevant.)
These power-reassignments are not appealing to those who want true local control.
Pray that our Congressmen find time, energy and wisdom to see through it all and that they will have the courage to protect children’s rights, teacher’s rights, voters’ rights, and parent’s rights.
COMMON CORE 