CCSS Tests: KIds Need a Three Year Moratorium From Penalties For Many Good Reasons #TEACH13
On Monday, July 22, I appeared as a guest of AFT TEACH 2013′s town hall on Common Core State Standards. To give you an idea of the ambivalence with which CCSS is met by both teacher and parents, the title of the town hall was “Common Core: The Good, The Bad, The Promise, and the Politics.”
I mostly discussed the politics, jumping off from the points I made in my San Jose Mercury News op-ed.
I’m genuinely interested in reeling back the school day from incessant test prep and and narrow, stunted material. I love project-based learning and the opportunities for students to design and direct inquiry. But those things are found in California’s two-headed Curriculum Support and Reform Act of 2011, and could be equally attributed to the P21 aspects as the CCSS aspects of the law.
I made sure to point out that though the CCSS are supposed to be national in scope, there is considerable variation in how they’re being implemented in all 50 states. One example: California’s Governor Brown has signaled that he is explicitly against “testing mania” and has in the past turned down a bill calculating Academic Performance Index using an increased number of standardized tests, likening the process as