Gates Says It Still Supports CCSS, But No New CCSS Grants Yet in 2016
On May 23, 2016, Gates Foundation CEO Susan Desmond-Hellman broadcast the Gates intention of pushing onward with trying to implement the Common Core State Standards (CCSS).
Pennsylvania teacher and blogger Peter Greene offers some insightful and entertaining commentary on Desmond-Hellman’s Gates-behalf declaration of fidelity toward pushing CCSS down the throat of the American public school classroom.
One stat that Desmond-Hellman cites is as follows:
For too many students today, the bridge to a prosperous and fulfilling life is obstructed and uncertain. In 2015, the ACT Condition of Career and College Readiness study revealed that only 40 percent of students met three of the four college-readiness standards across English, reading, math, and science. And performance was much lower for students of color.
The problems with narrowing educational (human?) value into “college readiness” aside, even ACT is clear that it has not scrapped its own definitions of “college and career readiness” in order to unquestioningly align with CCSS:
The finding that ACT Aspire assessments adequately assess many but not all of the priority content reflected in the Common Core standards is not surprising. Unlike other assessments included in the study, ACT Aspire is not and was never intended to measure all of the CCSS. Rather, ACT Aspire is designed to measure the skills and knowledge most important in preparing students for college and career readiness. This is a significant philosophical and design difference between ACT Aspire and other next generation assessments. ACT has made the choices we have to align with college and career readiness standards, rather than specifically to the Common Core, and we intend to keep it that way. [Emphasis added.]
Desmond-Hellman’s tossing out the “40 percent” ACT stat only shows that as CEO ofthe major CCSS funding source, she did not do her homework on ACT and just assumed that ACT’s usage of the term “college and career ready” must mean that ACT is lock-step, CCSS aligned–which really shows that the term “college and career ready” has lost its usefulness and should be scrapped.
But here is a more important and amazing issue in light of Desmond-Hellman’s Gates Says It Still Supports CCSS, But No New CCSS Grants Yet in 2016 | deutsch29:
