Friday, June 7, 2013

Common Core: Who Benefits?

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The question Indiana Taxpayers need to ask the Indiana General Assembly's Education Study Committee after the 2013 ISTEP testing debacle is this: Was the 95 million spent on McGraw-Hill and the inordinate amount of time taken away from children's meaningful learning experience in the classroom worth it? Now, the Common Core State Standards are under consideration for adoption and with them, even more intensive high stakes testing, data collection and data driven learning experience. 

Since the Stock Market Crash of 2008, standardized high stakes testing of children, data driven learning experience and subsequent test prep activity has increased while school budgets and learning opportunities devoted to creativity has decreased. 

Who benefits from the rigor mortis of the Common Core? This effort to further impose a rigid set of narrowed, mechanized, standardized, educational content on children, assessed through high stakes testing will result in teachers acting on behalf of standardized test publishing companies to standardize human potential. 

Just what I want my child to have, a common, generalized, anesthetic, short answer learning experience rammed down her throat at the expense of under funded schools and economically depressed communities. 

Since 1983 the ginned up premise that public education has been failing, we have seen exorbitant amounts of money spent on high stakes standardized testing with the promise that this would cure the educational and economic ills of America. The reality is something else.

The promise that the top down initiated Common Core is a good thing will make children better educated and college ready is an empty promise. Show me the evidence.

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