Deliberately deceiving the public on Common Core
On Nov. 17, 2015, the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education voted not to move forward with the PARCC test (a national Common Core-based test) and instead to adopt a “hybrid” test called MCAS 2.0. Although it was widely reported that Massachusetts had dumped Common Core, the move by the Board was, in fact, a deliberate effort to make the public believe that the state had scrapped the controversial national standards in favor of the state’s own superior pre-Common Core standards.
Nobody – not the Board, the Commissioner, nor the Secretary of Education – mentioned that the hybrid test will have to be based on Common Core because of the Board’s 2010 vote to dump the state’s own standards in mathematics and English Language Arts and make Common Core’s standards the state’s official standards in these two subjects.
Reporters in the Bay State and across the country all seemed to assume that because PARCC was abandoned, so was Common Core. But in a blog on Dec. 1, 2015, Michael Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, admitted that what had happened was not a significant substantive change, but rather a “rebranding for political purposes.” So far, the media have not sought to explain how they were all deceived in November by the vote, or how many citizens have been deceived by their own public officials, not only in Massachusetts but elsewhere as well.
Although the states that adopted Common Core’s standards did so legally (usually by a vote of their state boards of education), many state policymakers deliberately minimized public awareness and discussion of the standards’ academic deficits in order to ensure their passage and continue their use.
Sometimes state officials chose to deceive the public in outright defiance of the expressed will of the legislature to revise or eliminate Common Core’s standards. (This was the case in South Carolina, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and New Jersey.)
Although “rebranding” is the generic name of the strategy, the specific mechanisms used by state departments of education to ensure they maintain Common Core or Common Core-aligned standards has differed from state to state.
The following are a list of just some of the popular ploys that have been used to deceive the public:
— Changing the test’s name: Many states, like Massachusetts, have renamed their Common Core-based tests in order to make parents and legislators in the state think that they are getting something
- See more at: http://newbostonpost.com/2016/01/08/deliberately-deceiving-the-public-on-common-core/#sthash.j6hrUaBV.dpuf
