The Law: “What Difference Does it Make”? Are the Elites Wanting to Restructure Public Education?
Just who decides the role of SEAs? Elites or state legislatures?
Many of you know Fordham Institute’s stance on Common Core. It loves it. Loves it, loves it, loves it. Michael Petrilli and Michael Brickman of Fordham have flown all the way from Washington DC to appear in legislative hearings to tell us how desperately Missouri needs the Common Core standards because they are so much better than what we had previously and they are extremely worried about Missouri student achievement.
Fordham has supported common standards for quite some time. It was involved with Achieve (on which Governor Jay Nixon is a Board member) and the American Diploma Project since the early 2000′s working on common standards:
Achieve, Education Trust and Fordham launched ADP to help states restore the diploma’s value by anchoring high school graduation standards to those of jobs and colleges. Toward that end, ADP has moved beyond the kinds of standards that reflect experts’ consensus view of what is desirable for students to learn, to expectations linked directly to the essential demands faced by students preparing for college, work and citizenship.
The project found an unprecedented convergence between the knowledge and skills employers seek in new workers and those that college faculty expect of entering students. Both groups expect that high school graduates can complete a significant research report and apply the higher-level math concepts historically taught in Algebra II, for example.
The ADP benchmarks are ambitious. In math, they reflect content from Algebra I and II, Geometry, Data Analysis and Statistics. In English, they demand strong communication skills, as well as the analytic and reasoning skills typically associated with today’s advanced and The Law: “What Difference Does it Make”? Are the Elites Wanting to Restructure Public Education? | Missouri Education Watchdog: