This is worth reading: Borrowed from a fellow parent who is also concerned with Common Core: Commissioner King, Assemblyman Morelle My name is Teddi Urriola. I am a mom, a tax payer and a teacher. I live in Webster, NY and I am here to express my concerns with the Common Core State Standards in New York. Mark Twain once said, It is easier to fool a person than to convince them that they have been fooled. Mr. Commissioner you, and NYSED, the Board of Regents, Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, Bill and Melinda Gates and all the other million dollar reformers had the easy job and you get an A for your foolery. I guess now it is up to us, those of us here today to start doing the convincing and convincing we will do, because we are here because we care about our children and that is not going to go away. The very concept of this reform agenda has been predicated on a lie. It is a manufactured crisis created from manipulated data. We are not failing. Our systems, our teachers, and our children are not failing and the un-manipulated data prove that. As you very well know, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is a test that has been used for the past 40 years to measure trends in education. It shows that our gains over this time period have been steady and increasing in both Math and ELA, with the greatest gains in Math. The scores on the NAEP show that over 70% of the students are what would be considered solid C and above students. They know the basics they are succeeding at readin and writin and rithmetic. This is the exact opposite of the scores on your untested, unreliable and invalid tests this past spring. You and your reformer friends talk about how our students compare Internationally. When you compare apples to apples, our students are still at the top of the game. In 2013 researchers from the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) cautioned not to use the results of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) to infer that one countrys public education system is better than anothers. There is considerable research that shows when United States test results are examined in the light of many variables including population variances, economic impacts of poverty and differing graduation ages across the test sample of countries that we are performing at the top of the international education field. In fact we need to be careful that these results indicate the US system is not just creating better test takers at the expense of better innovators. Lets look at some specific numbers for measures of creativity internationally. * The US generated 121,026 utility patents in 2012. The nearest competitor was Japan with 50, 677. * In the field of Nobel Prizes, 915 prizes have been issued since 1901. Nobel Laureates born in the US represent 262 of those awards. The next most awarded country is the United Kingdom. India and China have ONLY received 9 and 11 respectively. * The number of scientific papers published is another leading indicator of scientific creativity and innovation. US scientists rank first in the world with 3, 049, 662 papers in 2011. The world wide citations of their works in other papers is 48, 862, 100. far surpassing the nearest competitor, China, with only 836, 255 published works. Mr. Commissioner, you and the reformers have falsely created this crisis in education with manipulated data. You ask the parents of students in Brighton, in Pittsford, in Webster and other schools across the state whether they think their schools have educated their children and I guarantee you that they will say yes. College and career ready? Your rallying call?? My own 2 sons are recent graduates of Webster Schools, where they were consistently on the High Honor Roll. They are currently a Senior at American University in DC and a sophomore at the University at Buffalo and both have been on the Deans List with Distinction every semester. College and Career ready?? I think most would agree that this rallying cry is also a fallacy. Abraham Lincoln stated You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time. Stop trying to fool us. We will not be misled. We know what we are speaking about. Listen or resign.
Posted on: Thu, 07 Nov 2013 19:45:19 +0000
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