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Friday, April 18, 2014

HOW SCHOLASTIC MAGAZINE CHANNELS BILL GATES | DCGEducator: Doing The Right Thing

HOW SCHOLASTIC MAGAZINE CHANNELS BILL GATES | DCGEducator: Doing The Right Thing:



HOW SCHOLASTIC MAGAZINE CHANNELS BILL GATES

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 Reading between Scholastic’s lines is easy. All you have to do is a “close read”. So lets do that together, shall we? You can find the article by clicking the link. 
Of course, following CC procedure, we will take excerpts and close read them to get to the hidden agendas. 
My comments to the author are Italicized. 
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“The Common Core State Standards Initiative is one of the biggest educational reforms in decades, and its goals are lofty. Is lofty synonymous with good?Lofty according to whom? Can lofty be construed as unreachable, especially when age and cognitive development are factored in? 
The sweeping new set of educational benchmarks for kindergarten through high school not only aim to prepare students for college — they’re designed to turn them into big thinkers who can compete in the global job market.
Was education not designed to do that prior to CCSS? What global market is this competition for? Are they competing for jobs and college acceptance in Singapore? Why hasn’t Finland (whose students rate higher than ours when you don’t count poverty as a variable) bought into this concept? 
Another driving force behind the state-led initiative: a belief that having a common set of standards — and a more streamlined testing process — will help raise the quality of public education for all American kids.”
Streamlined? Where is the evidence that more testing is streamlining a process of evaluation? What ever happened to “authentic assessment”? Why, exactly, is streamlining a good thing? 
“We wanted to take a deep breath and find out exactly how teachers feel about HOW SCHOLASTIC MAGAZINE CHANNELS BILL GATES | DCGEducator: Doing The Right Thing: