Superintendents and Legislators – Beware the SBAC Tsunami that is coming!
An open letter to Superintendents and Legislators 7/10/2015;
For more than a year and a half public education advocates in Connecticut have been delivering the message that the Common Core Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) test is unfair, inappropriate, discriminatory and fundamentally flawed. The Common Core SBAC test is DESIGNED to fail the vast majority of public school students. It is a product of the education reform industry who are dead-set on convincing policy makers and the public that our nation’s public education system is broken, that our public school teachers are bad and that the answer is more standardized testing and diverting scarce public funds to charter schools and other privatization efforts.
Rather then fight back, far to many politicians and school administrators climbed on board the education reform initiatives that undermining public education today.
In Connecticut, the SBAC disaster was slowed by a handful of dedicated and committed public school superintendents who recognized that parents had the fundamental and inalienable right to opt their children out of the destructive SBAC test, but the majority of local education leaders (and elected officials) kowtowed to the Malloy administration and engaged in an immoral and unethical effort to mislead parents into believing that schools had “do degrees of freedom” on the SBAC testing issue.
We all know that defense was nothing short of an outright lie.
Now the results of the 2015 SBAC tests are coming in and students, parents, teachers and the public will finally see for themselves just how unfair and discriminatory the SBAC testing scam really is.
The Common Core testing is unfair to all public schools students, but it is particularly damaging to students who come from poorer families, those that have English language challenges and those who require special education services.
As the following Wait, What? blog post reports, Washington State, another SBAC testing ground, has already released their early results and 7 in 10 high school juniors have been deemed failures according to the SBAC math test.
Although the Connecticut State Department of Education continues to claim that the SBAC results are not yet available, the news from other SBAC states is that preliminary information has been handed over to the states and, as the corporate education reform industry always intended, the vast majority of public school students have been deemed failures.
So a warning to Connecticut’s superintendents and other school administrators. Whether you have been given the results or are still waiting for them to be handed over, beware of the Tsunami that is coming…
We all know that while the state has a significant achievement gap due to poverty, language barriers and unmet special education needs, our public schools are not broken and our children and teachers are not failures.
Strategies exist to close the achievement gap, but the State of Connecticut and its leaders have simply refused to address the core issues that would improve academic achievement in any meaningful way.
And Connecticut’s parents will not forget that Superintendents and Legislators - Beware the SBAC Tsunami that is coming! - Wait What?:
