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My favorite, re: President Obama's proposed tobacco tax to fund preschool:
"Houses the idea safely in the ‘this will never be agreed to’ cabin."We need that cabin in my district.
On when ESEA reauthorization will take place:
"Never. It’s now a moth in amber–preserved in perpetuity. They ought to send it to the national archives and put it under glass."On PARCC and SBAC: right track or wrong track?
"At this point, there is zero leadership on this at ED, and zero interest on the Hill."
"As many predicted, this is turning out to be one of the greatest boondoggles of all time."On Randi Weingarten's proposed moratorium on high-stakes testing:
"It is the beginning of the end for both. States are going to start running for the door. To many reasons to get out. The Administration ultimately spends ~$350 million for something states didn’t want and the market took care of."
"Smarter Balanced is headed in the wrong direction educationally; PARCC is headed in the right direction but is afflicted with grievous problems of organization, management and delivery."
“The Common Core is having a PR problem, very generally.”
“They were artificial constructs that didn’t have any actual support behind them other than a way to spend money. It would have made more sense to give the money to states and encourage them to build their own consortia so that they actually wanted to participate and be part of it.”
“Over the last 60 days, the entire CCSS architecture has gotten wobbly. Anything is possible now. Opponents smell blood in the water.”And Arne Duncan, unbeloved:
“The centrist, compromise position will become ‘delayed.’ Those who support it will go out of their way to show they are not ditching accountability.”
“Arne Duncan has blinders on and thinks that he is the nation’s superintendent, chief school board, and principal for every school. He doesn’t understand or accept criticism, and doesn’t see how poorly this is going. States will freak out when they see the assessments and their cut scores and will do everything and anything to back away from this land mine as quickly as possible.”I wonder what nuggets I'll find in the report from April 2013.
2 comments:
"My favorite, re: President Obama's proposed tobacco tax to fund preschool."
Seriously? I'm not sure I know any smokers right now (if they are, they're sneaky about it), but I know LOTS of preschoolers. Thinking you can even put a dent in the preschool bill with tobacco taxes is nuts.
Some thought that CCSS would be a vehicle for setting higher expectations in the lower grades. That failed. PARCC's top PLD level 5 is called "distinguished" and that translates into only the probability of passing a college algebra course. PARCC specifically does NOT address STEM in K-6. It institutionalizes a STEM curriculum gap. It's been there all along with reform math, but now it's carved in stone.
ACT and the College Board now have the sticky problem of connecting the low expectations of K-6 with what parents would like to see for ACT and SAT scores in high school. This is because they want to feed at the CCSS trough. It doesn't look good if the College Board is thinking about something like AP Algebra. I'm sure that they will hide the nonlinearity in their testing scores by making it look linear. Some will make the transition with help at home or with tutors and educators will (still) not want to know how their best students got there. It must be good breakfasts, turning off the TV, and modeling an interest in education.
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