The Outcome Based Goal of Public Education & The Judiciary Has Been Realized: CITIZENS DON’T MATTER – Missouri Education Watchdog

The Outcome Based Goal of Public Education & The Judiciary Has Been Realized: CITIZENS DON’T MATTER – Missouri Education Watchdog:

The Outcome Based Goal of Public Education & The Judiciary Has Been Realized: CITIZENS DON’T MATTER

Why did a Gates supported NGO (Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education) oppose a citizen’s petition to allow those citizens to determine their state’s educational policies?

The only remedy to yet another blatant public education takeover (allowed by the judiciary) to special interests is to take your child out of public school.  The judiciary has adopted the tactics of the education reformers (NGOs) and the Federal Department of Education: it has ignored the right of citizen redress of government/NGO unaccountability.  A Massachusetts citizens’ petition, to decide whether to keep Common Core or revert to the state’s own educational standards, was set aside on a technicality by Chief Justice Margot Botsford.  Sandra Stotsky writes in Our judiciary failed our public schools – and our democracy:

Last week, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts stopped voters from weighing in on a citizen-backed initiative to repeal Common Core.

In her opinion, Chief Justice Margot Botsford blocked on a technicality the petition to let voters decide whether to keep Common Core or revert to the state’s own educational standards. Her reasoning? The measure, she wrote, was unconstitutional because the portion of the ballot question that required the state to release used test items is unrelated to the transparency of state tests.

Got that? Justice Botsford thinks that release of used test items is unrelated to the transparency of state tests and standards as a matter of coherent public policy.

The petition had been approved by the Attorney General’s office and the arguments raised by the judge run contrary to past educational practice in Massachusetts:

It was an oddly-reasoned decision since any classroom teacher in Massachusetts could have told her that the annual release of all used MCAS test items in the Bay State, from 1998 to 2007, was clearly related to the transparency of the state tests and very useful to classroom teachers. Among other things, the information allowed teachers to find out exactly what students in their classes did or did not do well and to improve their teaching skills for the next year’s cohort of students.

Botsford could have asked test experts as well. Any test expert would also have told her that the transparency of an assessment begins with an examination of the test items on it, followed up first by the names and positions of the experts who vetted the items on all tests at each grade level, and then by information on how the pass/fail scores for each performance level were determined, and the names and The Outcome Based Goal of Public Education & The Judiciary Has Been Realized: CITIZENS DON’T MATTER – Missouri Education Watchdog: