Common Core Crack-Up

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in education continue to crumble when they encounter reality. “Not a single junior at Seattle’s Nathan Hale High School showed up to take this spring’s Smarter Balanced tests (SBAC—one version of the COMMON Core standardized tests), according to a school district spokeswoman,” according to the editors at Rethinking Schools.  “Earlier this year, a group of teachers, administrators, parents and students had agreed to boycott the standardized tests, but Seattle Public Schools Superintendent Larry Nyland threatened teachers with the loss of their teachers’ licenses if they didn’t administer the test.”

“Under this pressure, the school’s leaders sent an email to families saying they would give the test after all. But the 280 juniors opted out anyway.”

“The CCSS are just the largest scale test-prep guide ever created,” veteran English teacher Peter Greene alleged in an article which appeared in that same Summer 2015 issue of Rethinking Schools. “The CCSS tell us what we need to cover for the test, and the test tells us how well we covered it.”

“If there were no test, the CCSS would not matter. The CCSS are also, of course, about making money. No Child Left Behind (NCLB) also wanted to bust into the big piggy bank that is public school funding, but NCLB was a big, blunt hammer; CCSS is a more sophisticated machine with many interlocking parts.”

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