Wednesday, May 28, 2014

The Weekly Update: More on the Common Core, push back and opting out of high stakes testing, the FTC steps in to protect student privacy, a gag order on teachers and more | Seattle Education

The Weekly Update: More on the Common Core, push back and opting out of high stakes testing, the FTC steps in to protect student privacy, a gag order on teachers and more | Seattle Education:



The Weekly Update: More on the Common Core, push back and opting out of high stakes testing, the FTC steps in to protect student privacy, a gag order on teachers and more

Let’s start off with this gem:
A beloved annual kindergarten show at a New York school was canceled this week by administrators in an apparent effort to prepare the five-year-olds for college, probably by teaching them that you can’t trust anyone.
Administrators at the Harley Avenue Primary School in Elwood, New York, recently sent out a series of letters alerting parents that the annual song-and-dance show their children had been preparing for wasn’t good enough for their looming college applications.
“The reason for eliminating the Kindergarten show is simple. We are responsible for preparing children for college and career with valuable lifelong skills,” the letter says.
The administrators further explain that the five-year-olds would be better off learning to become “strong readers, writers, coworkers, and problem solvers,” all of which, ironically, are skills required to put on a show.
Yep, that’s education today.
Besides cancelling kindergarten performances and placing children in front of computers instead to take their tests, a lot has been happening in the wide world of education.
CCS in a nutshell
We’ll start in Chicago: