Please know states are all REBRANDING COMMON CORE ----not changing the policy goals-----when we have captured executives as Governor and Mayor----we are going to MOVE FORWARD WITH ONE WORLD ONE GLOBAL COMMONER CORE.
“What they’re trying to do is pull the wool over the eyes of regular parents who are not as engaged,” said Higginbotham, who is home-schooling three of her children to avoid the Common Core. “They’re trying to say these are Florida standards when they’re not.”
Education
Some states rebrand controversial Common Core education standards
Florida Gov. Rick Scott talks to a group of students before he outlines his education budget recommendations on Jan. 27 during a stop in Delray Beach, Fla. He wants more money for public schools in the coming year, but he's not asking for as big of an increase as he did last year. (J Pat Carter/AP)
By Lyndsey Layton January 30, 2014 Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R) used an executive order to strip the name “Common Core” from the state’s new math and reading standards for public schools. In the Hawkeye State, the same standards are now called “The Iowa Core.” And in Florida, lawmakers want to delete “Common Core” from official documents and replace it with the cheerier-sounding “Next Generation Sunshine State Standards.”
In the face of growing opposition to the Common Core State Standards — a set of K-12 educational guidelines adopted by most of the country — officials in a handful of states are worried that the brand is already tainted. They’re keeping the standards but slapping on fresh names they hope will have greater public appeal.
At a recent meeting of the Council of Chief State School Officers, one of the organizations that helped create the standards, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee (R) urged state education leaders to ditch the “Common Core” name, noting that it had become “toxic.”
“Rebrand it, refocus it, but don’t retreat,” said Huckabee, now the host of a Fox News talk show and a supporter of the standards.
The changes are largely superficial, giving new labels to national standards that are taking hold in classrooms across the country. But the desire to market them differently shows how precarious the push for the Common Core has grown, even though the standards were established by state officials with bipartisan support and quickly earned widespread approval, including the endorsement of the Obama administration.
Supporters say the standards emphasize critical thinking and analytical skills, as opposed to rote learning, and will enable American students to better compete in the global marketplace.
But the wholesale changes in K-12 education that have come with the standards have provoked a raft of critics. Opponents include tea party activists who say the Common Core standards amount to a federal takeover of local education and progressives who bristle at the emphasis on testing and the role of the Gates Foundation, which has funded the development and promotion of the standards. Some academics say the math and reading standards are too weak; others say they are too demanding, particularly for young students.
Across the country, teachers are struggling to revamp their lessons; states are hastily working to adopt standardized tests tailored to the Common Core; and parents are left to wonder about all the changes taking place in the classroom.
Now, with new names, the idea that the standards are “common” might not be apparent.
“You got a whole bunch of politicians, increasingly cross-pressured between activists who don’t want this and the obvious imperative that we have to improve our public schools,” said Andrew Rotherham, a former Clinton White House aide and a co-founder of Bellwether Education, a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving education for low-income students. “The anti-Common Core folks clearly have the momentum right now, so politicians are trying to figure out ways to address the politics of this without tossing it out the window.”
In each case, the new name is designed to impart a local flavor to the standards. One of the main criticisms of the Common Core is that national standards are replacing homegrown benchmarks.
“Here’s what we’re going to ensure: These are Florida standards,” Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) told a gathering of state GOP officials this month. “They’re not some national standards; they’re going to be Florida standards. This is our state. We’re not going to have the federal government telling us how to do our education system.”
Also this month, South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R), who is facing reelection, told a gathering of Republican women: “We don’t ever want to educate South Carolina children like they educate California children. We want to educate South Carolina children on South Carolina standards, not anyone else’s standards.”
Christopher Johnson, a branding expert, doubts that new names will quell opposition to the Common Core.
“It’s something that might be politically expedient in the short term,” said Johnson, who writes the Name Inspector blog. “They might succeed in bamboozling people who are opposed to the idea of nationwide standards by giving them local names. . . . But I think it’s skirting around the issue.”
Sponsored by a group of governors and state education officials — with the endorsement of the federal government and funding from the Gates Foundation — the Common Core standards are designed to prepare students for careers or college at a time when many high school graduates lack the necessary skills. Recent studies have found that as many as 40 percent of first-time undergraduates need at least one remedial course in English or math when they arrive at college.
In a country with a long tradition of local control over education, the Common Core standards are a sharp departure. They mark the first time that nearly every state has agreed to a common set of skills and knowledge.
Forty-five states and the District of Columbia have fully adopted the standards, which are being implemented in classrooms across the country. Maryland is one of the states that have adopted the standards, while Virginia is one of the few that have not. The Common Core standards are not a curriculum; it is up to each state to decide what and how to teach.
The goal is for all students to possess certain “common” skills by the end of each grade so that a first-grader in Maryland will acquire the same skills as a first-grader in Maine or Montana. New standardized tests, which all participating states will be giving by next school year, are intended to offer a way to compare student performance across state lines so that parents, students and public officials can better measure how their school systems are performing relative to the rest of the country.
The pushback in Florida illustrates how quickly opposition developed. The state adopted the standards in 2010, in no small part because of the influence of former governor Jeb Bush (R), one of the nation’s most outspoken champions of the Common Core. Florida became a leader in the effort by two groups of states to develop tests aligned with the standards — work funded by the Obama administration — and Florida classrooms have already made the shift to the new benchmarks.
But Bush’s successor, Scott, has faced growing pressure from conservatives within his party to abandon the standards. In November, Scott, who is facing reelection this year, pulled Florida from the group of states writing the Common Core tests. He said Florida will prepare its own tests instead. Then he directed state education officials to hold hearings on the standards and suggest revisions.
Florida’s Education Department recently unveiled 98 proposed changes to the way the state will implement the Common Core standards, such as requiring that cursive writing be taught in elementary school. Most of the changes appear to be on the margins, leaving the standards largely intact.
State Rep. Janet Adkins (R), who chairs a K-12 subcommittee in the Florida House of Representatives, proposed deleting “Common Core” from official references to the standards. She said she wants to drop “Common Core” because it refers only to math and reading standards and the state also has requirements for science, social studies, fine arts and other subjects.
“We simply are saying we don’t need to have a different name for a subset for our standards,” Adkins said. “We will refer to all our standards under one name.”
She declined to say whether she thinks the Common Core standards are good for Florida students, but she did say the revisions proposed by state education officials will be an improvement.
Debbie Higginbotham, a Jacksonville mother of six and co-founder of Florida Parents Against Common Core, said no amount of rebranding will ease her concerns.
“What they’re trying to do is pull the wool over the eyes of regular parents who are not as engaged,” said Higginbotham, who is home-schooling three of her children to avoid the Common Core. “They’re trying to say these are Florida standards when they’re not.”
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The article just posted gave this reason below for Common Core----it's just about standardizing curricula in Maryland with that in California----WELL, NO THAT IS NOT THE GOAL OF GLOBAL COMMON CORE-----the goal is to set a standard of teaching and lesson content that is the same in classrooms globally and to tie testing and evaluations to tracking students vocationally so global corporations can pick and choose which 3% of global citizens will be tracked into higher income jobs and the rest of global 99% be that $3-6 a day or UNEMPLOYABLE. Remember, those higher level jobs will only pay $20-30 a day in ONE WORLD ONE WAGE GLOBAL CORPORATE SOCIALISM-----but parents made desperate to keep children out of global factory labor pool or to be employed at all are pushed to pay for more and more and more for-profit after school programs ---or to get into just the right private school----this is what global neo-liberal education did overseas in Asia and it has nothing to do with our Western democratic freedom and liberty being a CITIZEN education.
'The goal is for all students to possess certain “common” skills by the end of each grade so that a first-grader in Maryland will acquire the same skills as a first-grader in Maine or Montana'.
Baltimore is ground zero for GREAT SCHOOLS----all our schools are tagged with this global Wall Street education rating corporation that simply folds our schools into a national for-profit model that is also folded into that global for-profit model and as this article states ---
IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH QUALITY----AS WITH EVERYTHING TIED TO GLOBAL WALL STREET THIS RATING SYSTEM IS FILLED WITH FRAUD AND CORRUPTION brought to use by CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA-----NOW TRUMP.
I noticed after I blogged against GREAT SCHOOLS identifying it as a global Wall Street for-profit education rating system Baltimore City Schools took GREAT SCHOOLS off all its banners----Johns Hopkins is GREAT SCHOOLS.
Why You Should Pay Zero Attention to the GreatSchools Rating System
August 31, 2016 by Libby Anne
I wrote yesterday about choosing a school in a segregated world. In response to some of the comments I received on that post, I want to take a moment to look more fully at school rating systems. While some states create their own school ratings (based on various factors), I’ve also seen many parents rely on the ratings available at the GreatSchools website, which bills itself as “the leading national nonprofit empowering parents to unlock educational opportunities for their child.” While I will be looking at the GreatSchools rating system specifically, but much of my criticism likely applies to various state rating systems as well.
What is the GreatSchools rating system based on? I’ll tell you. Test scores. That’s all--test scores. We know that student performance correlates strongly with students’ demographic factors—family income, race, level of parents’ education. This means that the GreatSchools rating system only provides information about the demographics of the students who attend this schools, and literally nothing about the quality of instruction, the school atmosphere, or, well, anything else.
I once spoke with a homeschool mother who had considered putting her children in public school after moving to another area of the country. She told me she had decided against doing so after looking up the GreatSchools rating. And that was it. She didn’t visit the school. She didn’t look at parent or student reviews of the schools. All she looked at was the GreatSchools rating, and all the GreatSchools rating was based on was test scores, and all those test scores tell us about is the demographics of the students, and—what do you know—the schools in that area were heavily Hispanic. What this means—yes—is that whether she realized it or not, she decided not to put her children in the local public schools because those schools weren’t white.
I am beyond appalled at GreatSchools’ rating system. That they can bill themselves as “the leading national nonprofit empowering parents to unlock educational opportunities for their child” while giving parents information that conflates race and class with school quality without telling parents this is what they are doing is utterly abhorent. Parents trust GreatSchools even as the nonprofit tells them which schools are good and which are bad based on the color of students’ skin and the amount of money in their parents’ bank accounts. This is completely and totally despicable. If I had stronger words to use here, I would. That this can go on in this day and age should be universally horrifying.
But wait—can’t test scores tell us at least a little bit? After all, students at a predominantly poor brown school with a vibrant school culture and dedicated teachers and staff will likely score better than students at a predominantly poor brown school with low expectations and a high turnover rate for teachers and staff. Similarly, student performance at non-poor white schools will likely vary depending on the responsiveness of the administration, the turnover rate among the staff, and the school atmosphere that is created. This is true! However, given the strength of demographic factors in shaping student outcomes, student scores are almost certainly still going to be higher at a stagnant non-poor white school than at a vibrant poor brown school, and as a result, the stagnant school will receive a higher GreatSchools rating than the vibrant school.
Let me give you an example. In one metropolitan area I looked at, there is a vibrant maths and sciences magnet high school in the city. This school is attended almost entirely by minorities, mostly black and Hispanic, and has an impeccable reputation with the students, the parents, and the community. But you know what? That school’s math and science scores are still far lower than those in high schools in the white suburbs. Does that mean those white suburban high schools are better schools than the predominantly poor brown magnet high school in the city? Not necessarily! All it tells us is that the students in the white suburban high schools they are whiter and wealthier than those at the innovative STEM magnet high school. And yet, it means that the poor brown magnet high school has a low GreatSchools rating while the white suburban high schools have high ratings.
When my daughter started kindergarten, she attended a elementary school with test scores far lower than those at the “good” schools in town. In fact, I learned right before she started school that 10% of the students were homeless in any given year, and the poverty rate was so high that all students were given access to the free lunch program. My daughter thrived, and I fell in love with the school. I could not have asked for better. When we moved, I used the demographic information the GreatSchools website provides, but I completely ignored test scores and rating system. We visited several elementary schools in person, and chose one that with both diversity and a positive and supportive school atmosphere. We couldn’t be happier with this school! Well guess what? I just checked, and this school has the lowest test scores of any elementary school in the district (and the highest minority population and highest student poverty rate). If I’d made made my decision based on the GreatSchools rating system, our family would have missed out on finding this gem.
What would a better rating system look like? At a minimum, a better rating system would correct for student’s demographic characteristics. In other words, a better rating system—one not based on students’ race and class, as this one is—would ask which schools perform better than would be expected given the students’ family income, race, and level of parent’ education. By this metric, a vibrant poor brown school would receive a higher rating than a stagnant non-poor white school. An even better rating system would find a way to factor in parents’ and students’ satisfaction with the schools. Do the parents feel the atmosphere is supportive? Do the students like to be there? Do parents feel their children are challenged? Do students feel that their teachers care about them? Is the administration responsive?
GreatSchools planning to improve its rating system by incorporating more data (and has done so with a handful of states already). However, the additional data they’re incorporating—college readiness and student growth—leaves much to be desired. A predominantly poor brown high school that prepares a higher proportion of its students for college than expected given its demographic factors is still not going to hit the college readiness marks white suburban high schools hit.
It’s possible that factoring in student growth may add nuance to the picture ratings tell, but student growth may also be a factor of demographic change—as an area becomes more poor and more brown, you would expect to see the school’s scores to fall, and vice versa if an area is gentrifying. This would be a reflection not of school quality but of students’ demographic factors. In addition, because achievement gaps widen over time, we know that white students on average currently achieve more student growth, meaning that student growth, too, correlates with race (and potentially other demographic factors).
Is there a reason GreatSchools is so resistant to factoring in student race and economic factors? It’s not that it doesn’t have that data—it does, and lists it on its website on each school’s profile. All it would have to do is create algorithms that factor that information in—that say, given the students’ race and the number of poor students, are these test scores above or below what we would expect? Factoring in parent and student reviews would be more difficult, of course. The GreatSchools website does have a “community rating” based on reviews left by users, but this system is far from scientific—some schools have only a few reviews while others have far many, and it’s unclear whether an individual need be affiliated with a school at all to leave a review.
In the end, the GreatSchools rating system is worse than worthless. The system lets parents think they’re learning about school quality when all they’re actually being told is the school’s demographic factors, and by doing so misleads parents who simply want the best for their children into contributing to school segregation. I’m not saying that every school is perfect. There are schools that have mismanaged administrations and high teacher turnover, punitive prison-like school atmospheres and a lack of expectations. There are also schools burdened by chronic lack of funding. But you cannot use a school’s demographic factors as a stand-in for this. There are white suburban schools where children feel squeezed or invisible, and poor brown schools that go out of their way to foster individual student success and effort.
What tips would I give if you’re thinking about buying into a neighborhood and want to make sure the schools are good? First, remember that attending a school with both race and class diversity benefits non-poor white children, too. Look at the school’s demographic factors (available on the GreatSchools website). Second, read parent and student reviews (also on the GreatSchools website). See if you can find other parent or student reviews elsewhere online. Third, visit the schools, talk to the staff, learn about how the school is run. Watch the children and the teachers. Do the children seem glad to be there? Do the teachers seem to care? If possible, speak with some of the parents. If you can’t do this, you could still call the office.
Note that none of this involves asking about the school’s reputation from afar. I’ve had numerous individuals, mostly white, express surprise at the school we chose for our daughter. That school? The one with all the poor brown kids? The one with the low test scores? Why yes! That school also happens to be one of the most supportive, innovative, inclusive schools I’ve ever encountered. Doing these things also does not involve paying any attention at all to test scores (or the GreatSchools rating system). Reading parent and student reviews and visiting the school should give you an idea of whether students there are supported, challenged, and inspired.
If you really must look at test scores? Make sure that you compare the scores to other schools with similar racial and economic demographics. That (and that alone) will make your assessment more accurate than that provided at GreatSchools.
_____________________________________________
What we see is PLAYING RACE AND CLASS------global Wall Street does not see race and class it sees 99% of all global citizens enslaved.
This will be how this global education policy is SOLD-----US citizens will fight to be in communities with higher scores even as these scores are biased and juked just to bring you to that neighborhood-----they are meaningless and will broaden and strengthen RACE AND CLASS factioning-----for no reason.
Baltimore is again ground zero for both GREAT SCHOOLS AND ZILLOW-----if we Google education or schools these are the first articles we will see every time and to get to any other information is getting HARDER AND HARDER.
Global Wall Street targets US cities not only because public schools and communities have been allowed to decay and citizens are desperate for good schools----but it is because US cities are deemed FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES ergo they are being staged for ONE WORLD ONE GOVERNANCE ONE GLOBAL COMMONER CORE.
Education
Educational Redlining: How Zillow’s School Ratings Help Segregate Communities
The school rankings system used by the real estate giant spreads dangerous half-truths about neighborhood schools.
By Jan Resseger / janresseger
December 2, 2015
Heights Community Congress has just released Educational Redlining: How Zillow and GreatSchools Profit from Suspect School Ratings and Harm Communities, a report on the practice by Zillow, the real estate website, and GreatSchools to guide home buyers to choose communities according to color-coded school ratings posted online. Heights Community Congress (HCC), founded in 1972, is Greater Cleveland, Ohio’s oldest fair housing enforcement organization. For over four decades HCC has been conducting audits of the real estate industry to expose and discourage racial steering and disparate treatment of African American and white home seekers. This blog covered HCC’s preliminary work on educational redlining here.
Ralph Day, author of HCC’s report, explains that GreatSchools, launched by the venture capital group, NewSchools Venture Fund, “arbitrarily divides schools into three categories—green, yellow, and red.” In most states GreatSchools’ ratings merely represent the aggregate standardized test scores of each school’s students. Day continues: “The act of coloring red whole communities of schools is an alarming reminder of mortgage redlining of recent past, which was declared illegal with the passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968. Anecdotal evidence suggests that many home seekers automatically exclude whole communities with ‘red’ labeled schools from their search. And Zillow in its book (Zillow Talk) exacerbates this trend by cheerfully steering home buyers into the highest rated (highest income) GreatSchools areas they can afford.”
Day summarizes GreatSchools’ methodology: “In most states, GreatSchools rates schools on their standardized test scores alone. Schools of the same grade levels are ordered within their state from high scores to low. Then a school’s rank is converted to a number 1 through 10, where 10 means the school is in the top 10 percent, 1 the lowest 10 percent, 5 and 6 about in the middle, and so on.” Day continues: “In the past, mortgage redlining was practiced to systematically withhold financing from certain communities that lenders chose for disinvestment… Educational redlining recycles this pernicious idea by taking aim at schools, and discouraging home buyers from purchasing homes in moderate income communities. Because school test scores have repeatedly been shown to highly correlate with a community’s socio-economic status, and GreatSchools ratings draw heavily on test scores, the effect of coloring certain schools red is to disinvest in moderate income communities by discouraging home buyers… This ignores the obvious, that many dimensions contribute to school quality, and… metrics can only begin to describe it.” And, according to Day, “GreatSchools makes money by licensing its ratings to third parties like Zillow. It also apparently makes money by linking its viewers to Zillow.”
What do the ratings miss? “GreatSchools’ ratings are simplistic. They are almost useless for determining a school’s overall quality or its suitability for a particular child. They do not begin to capture a school’s activities and specializations that matter to children and parents. Furthermore, by focusing only on the average score, GreatSchools obscures the fact that a group of students may be doing very well, another group may be greatly improving (high value added), or that students in a specialized subject area are quite strong.”
Zillow’s invitation to home seekers that they look to buy in a school district with a “green” rating and avoid schools rated “red” surely exacerbates growing residential segregation by income across America’s metropolitan areas, a trend documented by Stanford University sociologist Sean Reardon. Reardon has shown that the proportion of families in major metropolitan areas living in either very poor or very affluent neighborhoods increased from 15 percent in 1970 to 33 percent by 2009, and the proportion of families living in middle income neighborhoods declined from 65 percent in 1970 to 42 percent in 2009.
Heights Community Congress declares: “HCC realizes that the best defense against misinformation is an educated public… HCC believes that GreatSchools, its supporting foundations, and Zillow have a civic responsibility to refrain from actions that harm communities… GreatSchools must abandon the use of red, yellow, green colors… Zillow must clearly disclose how the ratings are calculated and what they mean… Zillow must state that there is no such thing as a single measure of school quality… Zillow must stop making judgments about school systems and drawing comparisons among school districts, actions that are inappropriate for a real estate business with no experience or expertise in education.”
In a speech at the Cleveland City Club last February, Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute explained how—because test scores reflect primarily the aggregate economic level of the families in a community—rating and ranking schools drives segregation by income. Rothstein speaks of the “A” through “F” letter grades that are frequently these days assigned to schools as they are rated and compared. The “A” through “F” school “grades” function similarly to the red, yellow and green rankings used by GreatSchools and Zillow: “These rating systems really just describe the social class of the students in the schools. And the high ratings don’t necessarily mean they’re better schools. Many of these schools that are rated ‘A’ because they happen to have a lot of middle class children with highly educated parents may add less value to their students than schools rated ‘F,’ where parents may be working the kind of contingent schedules I described earlier. Those ‘F’ schools may actually be better schools in terms of what they add to students than the ‘A’ schools, but most people don’t understand that. And so if you label schools with ‘A’-‘F’ ratings, people who attend a ‘C’ school, which may be integrated, are going to want to move their children to an ‘A’ school. This will increase the segregation of schools by convincing people that these ‘A’-‘F’ ratings accurately reflect the quality of the school.”
I urge you to read and consider HCC’s new report on educational redlining. Think about the report in the context of demographic trends you can observe across a metropolitan area with which you are familiar.
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Here we see in Maryland how a Republican Governor Larry Hogan poses conservative with education policy while appointing A BUSH ADMINISTRATION person to our state education association. Now, Bush was ground zero for all Race to the Top/Common Core policies---global Wall Street with Bill Gates et al wrote these global corporate education policies during BUSH ERA-----these are all right wing corporate policies ---who hates Common Core, testing and evaluation, taking personal data and selling it? RIGHT WING REPUBLICAN VOTERS as well as Democrats. Hogan won as Trump won---he was installed in a very rigged Governor's race in 2014.
As we showed Republican pols in states across US are pretending to end Common Core by rebranding---and they are trying to appear tough on HIGH-STAKES TESTING when all they are doing is ending old-school standardized tests as was expected while installing Race to the Top testing and evaluations.
Below we see Hogan's appointee SMARICK tied to BELLWETHER EDUCATION PARTNERS ------a corporation funded by BILL GATES AND EDUCATION PRIVATIZATION FOUNDATIONS.
Who hates corporate charters ---RIGHT WING REPUBLICAN VOTERS and Democrats because they want community charters with parent and student voices and corporate charters end all control by citizens and create what is called SCHOOL CHOICE---again made to sound populist when the goal is having that CORPORATE CAMPUS SCHOOL CHOOSE WHO THEY WANT TO ACCEPT AS A STUDENT. All of this violates every Federal and US Constitutional law and right regarding education precedence for over a century====MOVING FORWARD IGNORES US FEDERAL, STATE, AND LOCAL CONSTITUTIONS AND LAWS----
Bellwether Education Partners, Inc.
Date: November 2013
Purpose: to support CoreSpring, an initiative to build a bank of shared Common Core aligned formative item and assessment resources that assure improved discoverability, availability and interoperability
Amount: $1,981,978
Term: 24
Topic: College Ready
Program: United States
Grantee Location: Sudbury, Massachusetts
Grantee Website: http://bellwethereducation.org/
CORE SPRING in this article is what we know comes next----what was sold as populist lesson writing with teachers and administrators writing lessons will quickly morph into more and more global 1% lesson-writers
Andrew Smarick elected president of Maryland State Board of Education
Andrew Smarick is the newly elected president of the Maryland State Board of Education
Liz BowieContact Reporter
Education policy wonk Andy Smarick voted as Maryland's state school board president.Andrew Smarick, a longtime education policy expert who has worked on the national and state level, was elected president of the Maryland State Board of Education Tuesday.
Smarick, who was appointed as a member of the school board a year ago by Gov. Larry Hogan, works as a partner at Bellwether Education Partners, a national nonprofit. He was formerly an education official at the U.S. Department of Education under President George W. Bush.
Smarick is also a prolific tweeter and has nearly 15,000 followers.
The school board votes each year on who will be its president and vice-president. The vote is usually decided in private session and then formally taken in public.The election of Smarick was unanimous. School board members are volunteers appointed to the board by the governor.
The school board also made S. James Gates Jr, a prominent theoretical physicist and long time board member, vice-president. Gates is a physics professor at the University of Maryland College Park. He was awarded the National Medal of Science in 2013.
The two new leaders have been outspoken members of the board.
______________________________________
We are now seeing what has existed overseas these few decades as global education corporations brought back to US are now building these same global K-12 structures tied to all Foreign Economic Zones in the US -----break down one of the best in WORLD HISTORY PUBLIC EDUCATION SYSTEMS and create DARK AGES job training structures.........
CORE SPRING in this article is what we know comes next----what was sold as populist lesson writing with teachers and administrators writing lessons will quickly morph into more and more global 1% lesson-writers only........
Production Manager
CoreSpring - New York, NY - Full time
As Production Manager at CoreSpring, you'll be responsible for all aspects of the design, development, and maintenance of the digital collections--shared and private bank of technology enhanced questions that educators may use to build high quality assessments like weekly quizzes, homework, admit and exit tickets, and checks for understanding. At CoreSpring, we're devoted to making great stuff that improves teaching and learning for educators, students, and parents. The team is a mix of learning experts, software engineers, UX pros, and content experts who love what we do and where we do it (we work out of a great space in New York’s Lower East Side).
Oh, but all this is still our local teachers and administrators writing lessons for our students----there is no intent to capture all information globally say COMMONER CORE GLOBAL 1%!
Below is a YOU TUBE VIDEO showing how teachers are using this education product tied to COMMON CORE-----now call me biased to centuries of being a classroom teacher----but what we see here is a dumbing down of our teachers----they are creating EDUCATION TECHS----who simply learn to scroll down and choose options in advancing a set of procedures ---then doing what THE PROGRAM tells them in regards to interacting with students. Our teachers who are now a majority TEACH FOR AMERICA---VISTA having no real education training come into classrooms DEPENDING ON THESE PROGRAMS----this is how global Wall Street ends all ability of 99% OF WE THE PEOPLE to be our own educators.
This is how we know a REPUBLICAN LARRY HOGAN AND HIS LT GOVERNOR---are MOVING FORWARD the same Race to the Top/Common Core policies.
This is how we know a REPUBLICAN LARRY HOGAN AND HIS LT GOVERNOR---are MOVING FORWARD the same Race to the Top/Common Core policies.
SEE HOW THESE GROUPS ARE ALL ALIGNED IN CREATING DIS-INFORMATION ON PUBLIC POLICY
Maryland State Education Association
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Write to Your Legislators
When Congress passed the Every Student Succeeds Act to replace the failed No Child Left Behind, it gave states the power to overhaul how they measure school success and practice school accountability. It represents a once in a decade opportunity for Maryland to emphasize test scores less and incentivize schools to focus more on things like school climate, class and caseload size, and offering a broad, challenging curriculum.
But there’s also the very real danger that Gov. Hogan and his State Board of Education will use the new power to double down on using test scores to identify public schools as failing so they can convert them into charters schools or close them down in favor of private school vouchers. We need the General Assembly to pass the Protect Our Schools Act of 2017, which prevents Hogan and the State Board from pursuing their radical privatization agenda while also significantly dialing back the overbearing focus in our schools on standardized test scores.
Please urge your legislators to support HB 978/SB 871, the Protect Our Schools Act of 2017.
Fill out the form below to email your legislators with your personal story of how important it is to reduce the emphasis on testing and prevent Betsy DeVos-style privatization efforts in Maryland.
There was never any intent of left social education policies like class size---environment, case load, and broad curriculum -----
CoreSpring Formative Assessment
CoreSpringOrg
Published on Apr 9, 2013CoreSpring Formative Assessment is a tool that turns shared item banking and formative assessment upside down.
Get Quality Content
Educators spend too much time creating items and assessments, while content from crowdsourced and unvetted banks often don't pay off. With CoreSpring Formative Assessment, educators can search CoreSpring's shared bank of items sourced from trusted providers. CoreSpring items are stored using a common template so that educators can find and compare content using important criteria (e.g., aligned standards, Bloom's Taxonomy, key skills, and demonstrated knowledge). CoreSpring uses innovate item types that allow for practice of important college and career-ready skills.
Eliminate the Clunk
CoreSpring Formative Assessment doesn't require bubble sheets, scanners, cameras, or other contraptions typically used to capture and score responses, all that's needed is a browser-capable device. Items are "played" in CoreSpring's item player, much like a YouTube video is displayed in Facebook, and as soon as a student responds to an assessment question, the response is scored, stored, and ready for immediate review.
Inform Instruction
When monitoring results in CoreSpring Formative Assessment, educators can conduct preliminary item analysis to understand student outcomes more clearly. For example, educators can review aggregate information such as the "top 5 common incorrect answers" or individual student work, with just a click.
CoreSpring Formative Assessment lets educators, students, and parents understand how learning is progressing so that it can be tailored to address individual needs.
“What they’re trying to do is pull the wool over the eyes of regular parents who are not as engaged,” said Higginbotham, who is home-schooling three of her children to avoid the Common Core. “They’re trying to say these are Florida standards when they’re not.”
Education
Some states rebrand controversial Common Core education standards
Florida Gov. Rick Scott talks to a group of students before he outlines his education budget recommendations on Jan. 27 during a stop in Delray Beach, Fla. He wants more money for public schools in the coming year, but he's not asking for as big of an increase as he did last year. (J Pat Carter/AP)
By Lyndsey Layton January 30, 2014 Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R) used an executive order to strip the name “Common Core” from the state’s new math and reading standards for public schools. In the Hawkeye State, the same standards are now called “The Iowa Core.” And in Florida, lawmakers want to delete “Common Core” from official documents and replace it with the cheerier-sounding “Next Generation Sunshine State Standards.”
In the face of growing opposition to the Common Core State Standards — a set of K-12 educational guidelines adopted by most of the country — officials in a handful of states are worried that the brand is already tainted. They’re keeping the standards but slapping on fresh names they hope will have greater public appeal.
At a recent meeting of the Council of Chief State School Officers, one of the organizations that helped create the standards, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee (R) urged state education leaders to ditch the “Common Core” name, noting that it had become “toxic.”
“Rebrand it, refocus it, but don’t retreat,” said Huckabee, now the host of a Fox News talk show and a supporter of the standards.
The changes are largely superficial, giving new labels to national standards that are taking hold in classrooms across the country. But the desire to market them differently shows how precarious the push for the Common Core has grown, even though the standards were established by state officials with bipartisan support and quickly earned widespread approval, including the endorsement of the Obama administration.
Supporters say the standards emphasize critical thinking and analytical skills, as opposed to rote learning, and will enable American students to better compete in the global marketplace.
But the wholesale changes in K-12 education that have come with the standards have provoked a raft of critics. Opponents include tea party activists who say the Common Core standards amount to a federal takeover of local education and progressives who bristle at the emphasis on testing and the role of the Gates Foundation, which has funded the development and promotion of the standards. Some academics say the math and reading standards are too weak; others say they are too demanding, particularly for young students.
Across the country, teachers are struggling to revamp their lessons; states are hastily working to adopt standardized tests tailored to the Common Core; and parents are left to wonder about all the changes taking place in the classroom.
Now, with new names, the idea that the standards are “common” might not be apparent.
“You got a whole bunch of politicians, increasingly cross-pressured between activists who don’t want this and the obvious imperative that we have to improve our public schools,” said Andrew Rotherham, a former Clinton White House aide and a co-founder of Bellwether Education, a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving education for low-income students. “The anti-Common Core folks clearly have the momentum right now, so politicians are trying to figure out ways to address the politics of this without tossing it out the window.”
In each case, the new name is designed to impart a local flavor to the standards. One of the main criticisms of the Common Core is that national standards are replacing homegrown benchmarks.
“Here’s what we’re going to ensure: These are Florida standards,” Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) told a gathering of state GOP officials this month. “They’re not some national standards; they’re going to be Florida standards. This is our state. We’re not going to have the federal government telling us how to do our education system.”
Also this month, South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R), who is facing reelection, told a gathering of Republican women: “We don’t ever want to educate South Carolina children like they educate California children. We want to educate South Carolina children on South Carolina standards, not anyone else’s standards.”
Christopher Johnson, a branding expert, doubts that new names will quell opposition to the Common Core.
“It’s something that might be politically expedient in the short term,” said Johnson, who writes the Name Inspector blog. “They might succeed in bamboozling people who are opposed to the idea of nationwide standards by giving them local names. . . . But I think it’s skirting around the issue.”
Sponsored by a group of governors and state education officials — with the endorsement of the federal government and funding from the Gates Foundation — the Common Core standards are designed to prepare students for careers or college at a time when many high school graduates lack the necessary skills. Recent studies have found that as many as 40 percent of first-time undergraduates need at least one remedial course in English or math when they arrive at college.
In a country with a long tradition of local control over education, the Common Core standards are a sharp departure. They mark the first time that nearly every state has agreed to a common set of skills and knowledge.
Forty-five states and the District of Columbia have fully adopted the standards, which are being implemented in classrooms across the country. Maryland is one of the states that have adopted the standards, while Virginia is one of the few that have not. The Common Core standards are not a curriculum; it is up to each state to decide what and how to teach.
The goal is for all students to possess certain “common” skills by the end of each grade so that a first-grader in Maryland will acquire the same skills as a first-grader in Maine or Montana. New standardized tests, which all participating states will be giving by next school year, are intended to offer a way to compare student performance across state lines so that parents, students and public officials can better measure how their school systems are performing relative to the rest of the country.
The pushback in Florida illustrates how quickly opposition developed. The state adopted the standards in 2010, in no small part because of the influence of former governor Jeb Bush (R), one of the nation’s most outspoken champions of the Common Core. Florida became a leader in the effort by two groups of states to develop tests aligned with the standards — work funded by the Obama administration — and Florida classrooms have already made the shift to the new benchmarks.
But Bush’s successor, Scott, has faced growing pressure from conservatives within his party to abandon the standards. In November, Scott, who is facing reelection this year, pulled Florida from the group of states writing the Common Core tests. He said Florida will prepare its own tests instead. Then he directed state education officials to hold hearings on the standards and suggest revisions.
Florida’s Education Department recently unveiled 98 proposed changes to the way the state will implement the Common Core standards, such as requiring that cursive writing be taught in elementary school. Most of the changes appear to be on the margins, leaving the standards largely intact.
State Rep. Janet Adkins (R), who chairs a K-12 subcommittee in the Florida House of Representatives, proposed deleting “Common Core” from official references to the standards. She said she wants to drop “Common Core” because it refers only to math and reading standards and the state also has requirements for science, social studies, fine arts and other subjects.
“We simply are saying we don’t need to have a different name for a subset for our standards,” Adkins said. “We will refer to all our standards under one name.”
She declined to say whether she thinks the Common Core standards are good for Florida students, but she did say the revisions proposed by state education officials will be an improvement.
Debbie Higginbotham, a Jacksonville mother of six and co-founder of Florida Parents Against Common Core, said no amount of rebranding will ease her concerns.
“What they’re trying to do is pull the wool over the eyes of regular parents who are not as engaged,” said Higginbotham, who is home-schooling three of her children to avoid the Common Core. “They’re trying to say these are Florida standards when they’re not.”
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The article just posted gave this reason below for Common Core----it's just about standardizing curricula in Maryland with that in California----WELL, NO THAT IS NOT THE GOAL OF GLOBAL COMMON CORE-----the goal is to set a standard of teaching and lesson content that is the same in classrooms globally and to tie testing and evaluations to tracking students vocationally so global corporations can pick and choose which 3% of global citizens will be tracked into higher income jobs and the rest of global 99% be that $3-6 a day or UNEMPLOYABLE. Remember, those higher level jobs will only pay $20-30 a day in ONE WORLD ONE WAGE GLOBAL CORPORATE SOCIALISM-----but parents made desperate to keep children out of global factory labor pool or to be employed at all are pushed to pay for more and more and more for-profit after school programs ---or to get into just the right private school----this is what global neo-liberal education did overseas in Asia and it has nothing to do with our Western democratic freedom and liberty being a CITIZEN education.
'The goal is for all students to possess certain “common” skills by the end of each grade so that a first-grader in Maryland will acquire the same skills as a first-grader in Maine or Montana'.
Baltimore is ground zero for GREAT SCHOOLS----all our schools are tagged with this global Wall Street education rating corporation that simply folds our schools into a national for-profit model that is also folded into that global for-profit model and as this article states ---
IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH QUALITY----AS WITH EVERYTHING TIED TO GLOBAL WALL STREET THIS RATING SYSTEM IS FILLED WITH FRAUD AND CORRUPTION brought to use by CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA-----NOW TRUMP.
I noticed after I blogged against GREAT SCHOOLS identifying it as a global Wall Street for-profit education rating system Baltimore City Schools took GREAT SCHOOLS off all its banners----Johns Hopkins is GREAT SCHOOLS.
Why You Should Pay Zero Attention to the GreatSchools Rating System
August 31, 2016 by Libby Anne
I wrote yesterday about choosing a school in a segregated world. In response to some of the comments I received on that post, I want to take a moment to look more fully at school rating systems. While some states create their own school ratings (based on various factors), I’ve also seen many parents rely on the ratings available at the GreatSchools website, which bills itself as “the leading national nonprofit empowering parents to unlock educational opportunities for their child.” While I will be looking at the GreatSchools rating system specifically, but much of my criticism likely applies to various state rating systems as well.
What is the GreatSchools rating system based on? I’ll tell you. Test scores. That’s all--test scores. We know that student performance correlates strongly with students’ demographic factors—family income, race, level of parents’ education. This means that the GreatSchools rating system only provides information about the demographics of the students who attend this schools, and literally nothing about the quality of instruction, the school atmosphere, or, well, anything else.
I once spoke with a homeschool mother who had considered putting her children in public school after moving to another area of the country. She told me she had decided against doing so after looking up the GreatSchools rating. And that was it. She didn’t visit the school. She didn’t look at parent or student reviews of the schools. All she looked at was the GreatSchools rating, and all the GreatSchools rating was based on was test scores, and all those test scores tell us about is the demographics of the students, and—what do you know—the schools in that area were heavily Hispanic. What this means—yes—is that whether she realized it or not, she decided not to put her children in the local public schools because those schools weren’t white.
I am beyond appalled at GreatSchools’ rating system. That they can bill themselves as “the leading national nonprofit empowering parents to unlock educational opportunities for their child” while giving parents information that conflates race and class with school quality without telling parents this is what they are doing is utterly abhorent. Parents trust GreatSchools even as the nonprofit tells them which schools are good and which are bad based on the color of students’ skin and the amount of money in their parents’ bank accounts. This is completely and totally despicable. If I had stronger words to use here, I would. That this can go on in this day and age should be universally horrifying.
But wait—can’t test scores tell us at least a little bit? After all, students at a predominantly poor brown school with a vibrant school culture and dedicated teachers and staff will likely score better than students at a predominantly poor brown school with low expectations and a high turnover rate for teachers and staff. Similarly, student performance at non-poor white schools will likely vary depending on the responsiveness of the administration, the turnover rate among the staff, and the school atmosphere that is created. This is true! However, given the strength of demographic factors in shaping student outcomes, student scores are almost certainly still going to be higher at a stagnant non-poor white school than at a vibrant poor brown school, and as a result, the stagnant school will receive a higher GreatSchools rating than the vibrant school.
Let me give you an example. In one metropolitan area I looked at, there is a vibrant maths and sciences magnet high school in the city. This school is attended almost entirely by minorities, mostly black and Hispanic, and has an impeccable reputation with the students, the parents, and the community. But you know what? That school’s math and science scores are still far lower than those in high schools in the white suburbs. Does that mean those white suburban high schools are better schools than the predominantly poor brown magnet high school in the city? Not necessarily! All it tells us is that the students in the white suburban high schools they are whiter and wealthier than those at the innovative STEM magnet high school. And yet, it means that the poor brown magnet high school has a low GreatSchools rating while the white suburban high schools have high ratings.
When my daughter started kindergarten, she attended a elementary school with test scores far lower than those at the “good” schools in town. In fact, I learned right before she started school that 10% of the students were homeless in any given year, and the poverty rate was so high that all students were given access to the free lunch program. My daughter thrived, and I fell in love with the school. I could not have asked for better. When we moved, I used the demographic information the GreatSchools website provides, but I completely ignored test scores and rating system. We visited several elementary schools in person, and chose one that with both diversity and a positive and supportive school atmosphere. We couldn’t be happier with this school! Well guess what? I just checked, and this school has the lowest test scores of any elementary school in the district (and the highest minority population and highest student poverty rate). If I’d made made my decision based on the GreatSchools rating system, our family would have missed out on finding this gem.
What would a better rating system look like? At a minimum, a better rating system would correct for student’s demographic characteristics. In other words, a better rating system—one not based on students’ race and class, as this one is—would ask which schools perform better than would be expected given the students’ family income, race, and level of parent’ education. By this metric, a vibrant poor brown school would receive a higher rating than a stagnant non-poor white school. An even better rating system would find a way to factor in parents’ and students’ satisfaction with the schools. Do the parents feel the atmosphere is supportive? Do the students like to be there? Do parents feel their children are challenged? Do students feel that their teachers care about them? Is the administration responsive?
GreatSchools planning to improve its rating system by incorporating more data (and has done so with a handful of states already). However, the additional data they’re incorporating—college readiness and student growth—leaves much to be desired. A predominantly poor brown high school that prepares a higher proportion of its students for college than expected given its demographic factors is still not going to hit the college readiness marks white suburban high schools hit.
It’s possible that factoring in student growth may add nuance to the picture ratings tell, but student growth may also be a factor of demographic change—as an area becomes more poor and more brown, you would expect to see the school’s scores to fall, and vice versa if an area is gentrifying. This would be a reflection not of school quality but of students’ demographic factors. In addition, because achievement gaps widen over time, we know that white students on average currently achieve more student growth, meaning that student growth, too, correlates with race (and potentially other demographic factors).
Is there a reason GreatSchools is so resistant to factoring in student race and economic factors? It’s not that it doesn’t have that data—it does, and lists it on its website on each school’s profile. All it would have to do is create algorithms that factor that information in—that say, given the students’ race and the number of poor students, are these test scores above or below what we would expect? Factoring in parent and student reviews would be more difficult, of course. The GreatSchools website does have a “community rating” based on reviews left by users, but this system is far from scientific—some schools have only a few reviews while others have far many, and it’s unclear whether an individual need be affiliated with a school at all to leave a review.
In the end, the GreatSchools rating system is worse than worthless. The system lets parents think they’re learning about school quality when all they’re actually being told is the school’s demographic factors, and by doing so misleads parents who simply want the best for their children into contributing to school segregation. I’m not saying that every school is perfect. There are schools that have mismanaged administrations and high teacher turnover, punitive prison-like school atmospheres and a lack of expectations. There are also schools burdened by chronic lack of funding. But you cannot use a school’s demographic factors as a stand-in for this. There are white suburban schools where children feel squeezed or invisible, and poor brown schools that go out of their way to foster individual student success and effort.
What tips would I give if you’re thinking about buying into a neighborhood and want to make sure the schools are good? First, remember that attending a school with both race and class diversity benefits non-poor white children, too. Look at the school’s demographic factors (available on the GreatSchools website). Second, read parent and student reviews (also on the GreatSchools website). See if you can find other parent or student reviews elsewhere online. Third, visit the schools, talk to the staff, learn about how the school is run. Watch the children and the teachers. Do the children seem glad to be there? Do the teachers seem to care? If possible, speak with some of the parents. If you can’t do this, you could still call the office.
Note that none of this involves asking about the school’s reputation from afar. I’ve had numerous individuals, mostly white, express surprise at the school we chose for our daughter. That school? The one with all the poor brown kids? The one with the low test scores? Why yes! That school also happens to be one of the most supportive, innovative, inclusive schools I’ve ever encountered. Doing these things also does not involve paying any attention at all to test scores (or the GreatSchools rating system). Reading parent and student reviews and visiting the school should give you an idea of whether students there are supported, challenged, and inspired.
If you really must look at test scores? Make sure that you compare the scores to other schools with similar racial and economic demographics. That (and that alone) will make your assessment more accurate than that provided at GreatSchools.
_____________________________________________
What we see is PLAYING RACE AND CLASS------global Wall Street does not see race and class it sees 99% of all global citizens enslaved.
This will be how this global education policy is SOLD-----US citizens will fight to be in communities with higher scores even as these scores are biased and juked just to bring you to that neighborhood-----they are meaningless and will broaden and strengthen RACE AND CLASS factioning-----for no reason.
Baltimore is again ground zero for both GREAT SCHOOLS AND ZILLOW-----if we Google education or schools these are the first articles we will see every time and to get to any other information is getting HARDER AND HARDER.
Global Wall Street targets US cities not only because public schools and communities have been allowed to decay and citizens are desperate for good schools----but it is because US cities are deemed FOREIGN ECONOMIC ZONES ergo they are being staged for ONE WORLD ONE GOVERNANCE ONE GLOBAL COMMONER CORE.
Education
Educational Redlining: How Zillow’s School Ratings Help Segregate Communities
The school rankings system used by the real estate giant spreads dangerous half-truths about neighborhood schools.
By Jan Resseger / janresseger
December 2, 2015
Heights Community Congress has just released Educational Redlining: How Zillow and GreatSchools Profit from Suspect School Ratings and Harm Communities, a report on the practice by Zillow, the real estate website, and GreatSchools to guide home buyers to choose communities according to color-coded school ratings posted online. Heights Community Congress (HCC), founded in 1972, is Greater Cleveland, Ohio’s oldest fair housing enforcement organization. For over four decades HCC has been conducting audits of the real estate industry to expose and discourage racial steering and disparate treatment of African American and white home seekers. This blog covered HCC’s preliminary work on educational redlining here.
Ralph Day, author of HCC’s report, explains that GreatSchools, launched by the venture capital group, NewSchools Venture Fund, “arbitrarily divides schools into three categories—green, yellow, and red.” In most states GreatSchools’ ratings merely represent the aggregate standardized test scores of each school’s students. Day continues: “The act of coloring red whole communities of schools is an alarming reminder of mortgage redlining of recent past, which was declared illegal with the passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968. Anecdotal evidence suggests that many home seekers automatically exclude whole communities with ‘red’ labeled schools from their search. And Zillow in its book (Zillow Talk) exacerbates this trend by cheerfully steering home buyers into the highest rated (highest income) GreatSchools areas they can afford.”
Day summarizes GreatSchools’ methodology: “In most states, GreatSchools rates schools on their standardized test scores alone. Schools of the same grade levels are ordered within their state from high scores to low. Then a school’s rank is converted to a number 1 through 10, where 10 means the school is in the top 10 percent, 1 the lowest 10 percent, 5 and 6 about in the middle, and so on.” Day continues: “In the past, mortgage redlining was practiced to systematically withhold financing from certain communities that lenders chose for disinvestment… Educational redlining recycles this pernicious idea by taking aim at schools, and discouraging home buyers from purchasing homes in moderate income communities. Because school test scores have repeatedly been shown to highly correlate with a community’s socio-economic status, and GreatSchools ratings draw heavily on test scores, the effect of coloring certain schools red is to disinvest in moderate income communities by discouraging home buyers… This ignores the obvious, that many dimensions contribute to school quality, and… metrics can only begin to describe it.” And, according to Day, “GreatSchools makes money by licensing its ratings to third parties like Zillow. It also apparently makes money by linking its viewers to Zillow.”
What do the ratings miss? “GreatSchools’ ratings are simplistic. They are almost useless for determining a school’s overall quality or its suitability for a particular child. They do not begin to capture a school’s activities and specializations that matter to children and parents. Furthermore, by focusing only on the average score, GreatSchools obscures the fact that a group of students may be doing very well, another group may be greatly improving (high value added), or that students in a specialized subject area are quite strong.”
Zillow’s invitation to home seekers that they look to buy in a school district with a “green” rating and avoid schools rated “red” surely exacerbates growing residential segregation by income across America’s metropolitan areas, a trend documented by Stanford University sociologist Sean Reardon. Reardon has shown that the proportion of families in major metropolitan areas living in either very poor or very affluent neighborhoods increased from 15 percent in 1970 to 33 percent by 2009, and the proportion of families living in middle income neighborhoods declined from 65 percent in 1970 to 42 percent in 2009.
Heights Community Congress declares: “HCC realizes that the best defense against misinformation is an educated public… HCC believes that GreatSchools, its supporting foundations, and Zillow have a civic responsibility to refrain from actions that harm communities… GreatSchools must abandon the use of red, yellow, green colors… Zillow must clearly disclose how the ratings are calculated and what they mean… Zillow must state that there is no such thing as a single measure of school quality… Zillow must stop making judgments about school systems and drawing comparisons among school districts, actions that are inappropriate for a real estate business with no experience or expertise in education.”
In a speech at the Cleveland City Club last February, Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute explained how—because test scores reflect primarily the aggregate economic level of the families in a community—rating and ranking schools drives segregation by income. Rothstein speaks of the “A” through “F” letter grades that are frequently these days assigned to schools as they are rated and compared. The “A” through “F” school “grades” function similarly to the red, yellow and green rankings used by GreatSchools and Zillow: “These rating systems really just describe the social class of the students in the schools. And the high ratings don’t necessarily mean they’re better schools. Many of these schools that are rated ‘A’ because they happen to have a lot of middle class children with highly educated parents may add less value to their students than schools rated ‘F,’ where parents may be working the kind of contingent schedules I described earlier. Those ‘F’ schools may actually be better schools in terms of what they add to students than the ‘A’ schools, but most people don’t understand that. And so if you label schools with ‘A’-‘F’ ratings, people who attend a ‘C’ school, which may be integrated, are going to want to move their children to an ‘A’ school. This will increase the segregation of schools by convincing people that these ‘A’-‘F’ ratings accurately reflect the quality of the school.”
I urge you to read and consider HCC’s new report on educational redlining. Think about the report in the context of demographic trends you can observe across a metropolitan area with which you are familiar.
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Here we see in Maryland how a Republican Governor Larry Hogan poses conservative with education policy while appointing A BUSH ADMINISTRATION person to our state education association. Now, Bush was ground zero for all Race to the Top/Common Core policies---global Wall Street with Bill Gates et al wrote these global corporate education policies during BUSH ERA-----these are all right wing corporate policies ---who hates Common Core, testing and evaluation, taking personal data and selling it? RIGHT WING REPUBLICAN VOTERS as well as Democrats. Hogan won as Trump won---he was installed in a very rigged Governor's race in 2014.
As we showed Republican pols in states across US are pretending to end Common Core by rebranding---and they are trying to appear tough on HIGH-STAKES TESTING when all they are doing is ending old-school standardized tests as was expected while installing Race to the Top testing and evaluations.
Below we see Hogan's appointee SMARICK tied to BELLWETHER EDUCATION PARTNERS ------a corporation funded by BILL GATES AND EDUCATION PRIVATIZATION FOUNDATIONS.
Who hates corporate charters ---RIGHT WING REPUBLICAN VOTERS and Democrats because they want community charters with parent and student voices and corporate charters end all control by citizens and create what is called SCHOOL CHOICE---again made to sound populist when the goal is having that CORPORATE CAMPUS SCHOOL CHOOSE WHO THEY WANT TO ACCEPT AS A STUDENT. All of this violates every Federal and US Constitutional law and right regarding education precedence for over a century====MOVING FORWARD IGNORES US FEDERAL, STATE, AND LOCAL CONSTITUTIONS AND LAWS----
Bellwether Education Partners, Inc.
Date: November 2013
Purpose: to support CoreSpring, an initiative to build a bank of shared Common Core aligned formative item and assessment resources that assure improved discoverability, availability and interoperability
Amount: $1,981,978
Term: 24
Topic: College Ready
Program: United States
Grantee Location: Sudbury, Massachusetts
Grantee Website: http://bellwethereducation.org/
CORE SPRING in this article is what we know comes next----what was sold as populist lesson writing with teachers and administrators writing lessons will quickly morph into more and more global 1% lesson-writers
Andrew Smarick elected president of Maryland State Board of Education
Andrew Smarick is the newly elected president of the Maryland State Board of Education
Liz BowieContact Reporter
Education policy wonk Andy Smarick voted as Maryland's state school board president.Andrew Smarick, a longtime education policy expert who has worked on the national and state level, was elected president of the Maryland State Board of Education Tuesday.
Smarick, who was appointed as a member of the school board a year ago by Gov. Larry Hogan, works as a partner at Bellwether Education Partners, a national nonprofit. He was formerly an education official at the U.S. Department of Education under President George W. Bush.
Smarick is also a prolific tweeter and has nearly 15,000 followers.
The school board votes each year on who will be its president and vice-president. The vote is usually decided in private session and then formally taken in public.The election of Smarick was unanimous. School board members are volunteers appointed to the board by the governor.
The school board also made S. James Gates Jr, a prominent theoretical physicist and long time board member, vice-president. Gates is a physics professor at the University of Maryland College Park. He was awarded the National Medal of Science in 2013.
The two new leaders have been outspoken members of the board.
______________________________________
We are now seeing what has existed overseas these few decades as global education corporations brought back to US are now building these same global K-12 structures tied to all Foreign Economic Zones in the US -----break down one of the best in WORLD HISTORY PUBLIC EDUCATION SYSTEMS and create DARK AGES job training structures.........
CORE SPRING in this article is what we know comes next----what was sold as populist lesson writing with teachers and administrators writing lessons will quickly morph into more and more global 1% lesson-writers only........
Production Manager
CoreSpring - New York, NY - Full time
As Production Manager at CoreSpring, you'll be responsible for all aspects of the design, development, and maintenance of the digital collections--shared and private bank of technology enhanced questions that educators may use to build high quality assessments like weekly quizzes, homework, admit and exit tickets, and checks for understanding. At CoreSpring, we're devoted to making great stuff that improves teaching and learning for educators, students, and parents. The team is a mix of learning experts, software engineers, UX pros, and content experts who love what we do and where we do it (we work out of a great space in New York’s Lower East Side).
Oh, but all this is still our local teachers and administrators writing lessons for our students----there is no intent to capture all information globally say COMMONER CORE GLOBAL 1%!
Below is a YOU TUBE VIDEO showing how teachers are using this education product tied to COMMON CORE-----now call me biased to centuries of being a classroom teacher----but what we see here is a dumbing down of our teachers----they are creating EDUCATION TECHS----who simply learn to scroll down and choose options in advancing a set of procedures ---then doing what THE PROGRAM tells them in regards to interacting with students. Our teachers who are now a majority TEACH FOR AMERICA---VISTA having no real education training come into classrooms DEPENDING ON THESE PROGRAMS----this is how global Wall Street ends all ability of 99% OF WE THE PEOPLE to be our own educators.
This is how we know a REPUBLICAN LARRY HOGAN AND HIS LT GOVERNOR---are MOVING FORWARD the same Race to the Top/Common Core policies.
This is how we know a REPUBLICAN LARRY HOGAN AND HIS LT GOVERNOR---are MOVING FORWARD the same Race to the Top/Common Core policies.
SEE HOW THESE GROUPS ARE ALL ALIGNED IN CREATING DIS-INFORMATION ON PUBLIC POLICY
Maryland State Education Association
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Write to Your Legislators
When Congress passed the Every Student Succeeds Act to replace the failed No Child Left Behind, it gave states the power to overhaul how they measure school success and practice school accountability. It represents a once in a decade opportunity for Maryland to emphasize test scores less and incentivize schools to focus more on things like school climate, class and caseload size, and offering a broad, challenging curriculum.
But there’s also the very real danger that Gov. Hogan and his State Board of Education will use the new power to double down on using test scores to identify public schools as failing so they can convert them into charters schools or close them down in favor of private school vouchers. We need the General Assembly to pass the Protect Our Schools Act of 2017, which prevents Hogan and the State Board from pursuing their radical privatization agenda while also significantly dialing back the overbearing focus in our schools on standardized test scores.
Please urge your legislators to support HB 978/SB 871, the Protect Our Schools Act of 2017.
Fill out the form below to email your legislators with your personal story of how important it is to reduce the emphasis on testing and prevent Betsy DeVos-style privatization efforts in Maryland.
There was never any intent of left social education policies like class size---environment, case load, and broad curriculum -----
CoreSpring Formative Assessment
CoreSpringOrg
Published on Apr 9, 2013CoreSpring Formative Assessment is a tool that turns shared item banking and formative assessment upside down.
Get Quality Content
Educators spend too much time creating items and assessments, while content from crowdsourced and unvetted banks often don't pay off. With CoreSpring Formative Assessment, educators can search CoreSpring's shared bank of items sourced from trusted providers. CoreSpring items are stored using a common template so that educators can find and compare content using important criteria (e.g., aligned standards, Bloom's Taxonomy, key skills, and demonstrated knowledge). CoreSpring uses innovate item types that allow for practice of important college and career-ready skills.
Eliminate the Clunk
CoreSpring Formative Assessment doesn't require bubble sheets, scanners, cameras, or other contraptions typically used to capture and score responses, all that's needed is a browser-capable device. Items are "played" in CoreSpring's item player, much like a YouTube video is displayed in Facebook, and as soon as a student responds to an assessment question, the response is scored, stored, and ready for immediate review.
Inform Instruction
When monitoring results in CoreSpring Formative Assessment, educators can conduct preliminary item analysis to understand student outcomes more clearly. For example, educators can review aggregate information such as the "top 5 common incorrect answers" or individual student work, with just a click.
CoreSpring Formative Assessment lets educators, students, and parents understand how learning is progressing so that it can be tailored to address individual needs.
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