For those of you who might have been living in a cave for the months since November, the Senate has confirmed controversial Secretary of Education nominee Betsy DeVos. So concerned were we here at ROPE - along with THOUSANDS of grassroots mom and dad education activists who have been fighting Common Core across the nation - that we wrote a letter to the President in November. You can read it here to follow our concerns. |
“The scores assigned to represent proficiency levels…do not seem to correspond to any recognizable metric”. This goes to the necessity for a study to be replicable. If a study cannot be replicated, it can’t be reliable. In this case it was impossible for the authors to decide how the categories of Proficiency Levels were determined because there was “no clear justification” for why these categories were assigned. This alone should be the nail in the coffin of this A-F system as categories used to assign specific value are apparently arbitrary.
In addition, the “basis for letter grade conversion is undocumented”. How is it that an “A” is designated as having the Performance Index Range of 90-120, but all other letter designations merit a 10 point range? Again the sense of arbitrariness challenges the concept of validity.
Proficiency Levels (Limited Knowledge, Satisfactory, Proficient and Advanced) are introduced into the metric to allow parents to make assumptions about student academic Growth within the school. Proficiency Levels are assigned a numerical value and the subsequent changes in numerical value determine the degree of student academic Growth. Because of the way Proficiency Levels are assigned in the rubric, there is no way to determine student grown within a proficiency level - “no change and negative change are accorded the same zero point value”.
Students could go from the top of the Advanced category to the bottom, or from the bottom of the Limited Knowledge category to the top, yet no change would be reflected in the actual letter designation for the school. Not only that, but because academic growth and proficiency levels are non-linear in nature, there can be no extrapolation from individual student to school or even classroom. There is no way to make scientific conclusions about data that have no real cause and effect relationship.
Since this is a very small category, small sample size can introduce bias that may not be able to be corrected away by calculating a confidence interval, making the measure unreliable.
Attendance alone determines this component in elementary schools. This component is a full third of the entire rubric, yet there is absolutely no scientific study which shows that students learn simply by benefit of being present in a school. How is this measure relevant?
So, the government LIES about the way things are in order to FOOL legislators and the public into the "FACT" that there's an EMERGENCY at hand and therefore dispense with much of the hard earned cash and liberty of the citizenry in order to "fix it"! When caught at their game, they simply 'spin' it ("Whether it’s 50 percent, 80 percent, or 100 percent of schools being incorrectly labeled as failing, one thing is clear: No Child Left Behind is broken,” he said. “That’s why we’re moving forward with giving states flexibility from the law in exchange for reforms that drive student success.") to fit their agenda!
As one of the kvetchers, I'll have to call you out on this classic "straw man" argument, I'm afraid.
By pointing to the Common Core as the ONLY way to prevent American education from going the way of the Euro, you've painted yourself into a corner.
This is a Constitutional issue issue whether you like it or not Checker.
While I appreciate that many of you education reformers like to see all roads as a means to an end, there's a silly little thing called the "Constitution" that provides our Country the map on which to draw those roads. The federal government has no business collecting taxes from Americans to fund a Department of Education at the federal level. Once it did, it degenerated into a "carrot and stick" enforcer where, if a state wanted money (obviously, the state's fault for not funding it's own budget - where have we heard that before?), the 'enforcer' could use that carrot to lure them in close enough to thwack them in the head with the stick of "here's what I want you to do now".
I used to hate taking money from my parents when I was in college. I ALWAYS knew that somehow, some way, I would be told how to spend it if I did, and we rarely saw eye-to-eye on the issue. (FYI, in this parable, we see the Federal government as the parents, and the states as the college student.)
I realize you support the Common Core, but the manner in which you do it is so, well, elitist. YOU know what's better for the states than the states themselves (or the parents of the kids in the schools in the states). YOU have the key to creating capable American citizenry through YOUR plan to tie them all together through a COMMON (which also means ORDINARY, by the way - and COMMUNAL and I've had enough of that with OWS thank you very much) standard.
Well, guess what? Your state may want something ordinary that fits all American students (like an oversize - or undersize - sweater, depending upon WHO you are as an INDIVIDUAL), but I don't really want my kids to be communal, or ordinary. I want them to be exceptional individuals who understand that the Constitution is a set of laws and once you break one, you tend to break a lot, and that tends to skew the course of government and nations....hmmmmm nothing like that going on in America right now so what am I worried about?
Despite America’s romantic attachment to “local control of public education,” the reality is that the way it works today offers a worst-of-both-worlds scenario. On the one hand, district-level power constrains individual schools; its standardizing, bureaucratic, and political force ties the hands of principals, stopping them from doing what’s best for their pupils with regard to budget, staffing, and curriculum. On the other, local control isn’t strong enough to clear the obstacles that state and federal governments place before reform-minded board members and superintendents in the relatively few locales where these can even be observed.
