High-Stakes Testing Is Coming:
SO LEARN!
This is the elder President Bush (George H. W.) in 1991 who had gathered together 49 governors and some of the most powerful corporate CEOs to try to use fear as a way of motivating students and teachers to work harder and achieve more. They believed that students were lazy and unchallenged by the existing standards and teachers weren’t working hard enough.
They raised standards but it didn’t have much impact until the second President Bush (George W.) got elected in 2000 and convinced the Democratic Congress to pass the No Child Left Behind law.
This empowered the federal government to be in charge of education and it mandated that the states administer annual tests in math and reading. The tests are high-stakes (you flunked, you’re fired, close the school) that meant the higher standards now came with sticks to flog students, teachers, and schools.
And how are we doing with higher standards, now called Common CoreState national Standards (CCSS)? They are not state standards because Bill Gates spent over $300 million to develop them and promote their acceptance.
President Obama’s secretary of education, Arne Duncan, helped by shoving the CCSS down the throats of 44 states. Duncan also used over $300 million of taxpayers’ money to have two consortia develop two national tests.
These policies are part of what is called the corporate education reform agenda, the most radical and large scale experiment ever perpetrated on 50 million American children. And how have we been doing with Bush’s No Child Left Behind, Gates’ Common Core standards, and Obama’s and Duncan’s Race to the Top, and the PARCC and SB tests?
There has been no significant improvement in 12th grade student math achievement as measured by standardized tests, and there had been a serious decline in reading.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also known as “the nation’s report card,” revealed that the 2015 12th grade math scores Badass Teachers Association:
