Common Core Standards: A Costly and Ineffective Prescription for Schools

(SNIP) (for my complete article, link here:
http://texshelters.hubpages.com/hub/Common-Core-Standards-A-Costly-and-Ineffective-Prescription-for-Schools )



While the standards may have been a “collaborative effort” between governors and “Chief School Officers”, current teachers, students and parents who will be effected by these standards were not consulted. Moreover, the “business leaders” come from companies that will benefit financially from more testing and selling of Common Core normed textbooks.
An alliance of corporations, CEOs and politicians have been working to strong arm states into using national common core standards. So far they have succeeded.
Source: http://truthout.org

The public has been convinced by educational “reformers” like Michelle Rhee and Arne Duncan, politicians like Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and President Obama and think-tanks like ALEC that are populated by people in the publishing industry and D.C. politicians that teachers are the problem and that testing is the solution. They have added Common Core Standards to the prescription from the false diagnosis.

Reformers use a false benchmark of student progress, standardize tests, and diagnose the problem as being certain schools and teachers. However, research bears out that the problem of student achievement is clearly income inequality in our nation; students in families with lower income on average do worse on high stakes tests. But addressing the structural problem of income inequality in our nation is much harder than blaming teachers and giving tests.

So reformers take an inaccurate diagnosis and prescribe a solution to it, more testing and new and improved standards, the Common Core. That would be like a doctor telling a patient their problem is their heart when actually the patient is hungry and just needs more food. So the doctors give them expensive surgery and drugs. Meanwhile, the patient is starving.
Common Core has not been field tested. We don’t know if it can accurately predict success in college or not. “No one can explain why all 8-year-old students in America should be tested to see if they are on a path for college. As for careers, most of them probably want to be cowboys or police officers or astronauts.” (Daily News) But these standards are to be used for both elementary and secondary education.

Common Core Standards have not been bench-marked to international standards as claimed. Arizonans Against Common Core, in fact, demonstrate the opposite, “Common Core's 'college readiness' standards for English language arts and reading do not aim for a level of achievement that signifies readiness for authentic college-level work. They point to no more than readiness for a high school diploma (and possibly not even that, depending on where the cut score is set). Despite claims to the contrary, they are not internationally benchmarked.”
(SNIP)


To read the complete article, go here:
http://texshelters.hubpages.com/hub/Common-Core-Standards-A-Costly-and-Ineffective-Prescription-for-Schools