BATs Teachers Congress 2015 by Marla Kilfoyle - GoFundMe

BATs Teachers Congress 2015 by Marla Kilfoyle - GoFundMe:

BATs Teachers Congress 2015

The Badass Teachers Association is an education activist group of 53,000.  The Badass Teachers Association was created to give voice to every teacher who refuses to be blamed for the failure of our society to erase poverty and inequality through education. BAT members refuse to accept assessments, tests and evaluations created and imposed by corporate driven entities that have contempt for authentic teaching and learning.  Last year we held a successful rally in front of the USDOE with over 38 states present.  This year, we want to hold a Teachers Congress to create resolutions and actions to defeat the privatization agenda of the 1%.  We hope to have teacher, student, and parent delegates attend this Congress to give their voice to the resolutions and actions that will define BATs as they go into the 2015 school year.  We are honored  to celebrate with Jesse "The Walking Man" Turner as he walks again from Connecticut to D.C.   to protest the education malpractice that is demoralizing parents, teachers, and turning our children into human capital.    We hope to use the donations for:
1.  Our Congress Venue at the Holiday Inn
2.  To continue to fund our website
3. To fund the BAT Student in Need Book Scholarship (which was launched this year and we hope to extend).

Click Here to go to BATs Teachers Congress 2015 by Marla Kilfoyle - GoFundMe:

What Would Matt Damon's Mom Say? | BustED Pencils

What Would Matt Damon's Mom Say? | BustED Pencils:

WHAT WOULD MATT DAMON’S MOM SAY?

Question:  What would Matt Damon’s mom say and who cares?  Answer:  We all should!

Matt Damon’s mom, also known as Dr. Nancy Carlsson-Paige, is an early childhood scholar who knows what she’s talking about when it comes to education.  Yes, Matt–her son–is an awesome actor with a lot to say about education, but let’s face it, he’s just another celebrity with an opinion.  If you’re looking for expert analysis concerning public education policy then “Mom Knows Best.”  Especially Matt Damon’s mom!

Below are extended clips with Matt’s MOM–Dr. Nancy Carlsson-Paige.

WWMDS – 2/26/15(2/26/2015)-What is this Common Core stuff?  Where did it come from and who actually produced the standards? Listen to Nancy for this primer on the Common Core State Standards.

WWMDMS – 12/1/14(12/1/2014)-This week Nancy comments on Arne Duncan’s inability and lack of qualifications to be Secretary of Education.

Rahm Emanuel Seemed Unstoppable—Until He Ticked Off Chicago’s Teachers | #Chuy2015

Rahm Emanuel Seemed Unstoppable—Until He Ticked Off Chicago’s Teachers | The Nation:

Rahm Emanuel Seemed Unstoppable—Until He Ticked Off Chicago’s Teachers

John Nichols on February 25, 2015 - 12:16 PM ET

Chicago mayoral candidate, Cook County Commissioner Jesus "Chuy" Garcia (AP Photo/M. Spencer Green)

Rahm Emanuel had everything going for him in his race for a second term as mayor of Chicago.

He was the incumbent in a city that tends to keep its mayors—sometimes for decades.

He had the endorsements of the city’s major daily newspapers—and a constant media presence in the form of more than $7 million in TV ads.

He had a twelve-to-one fundraising advantage against his closest competitor—and his campaign treasury was constantly being refueled by wealthy out-of-town donors and corporate special-interest groups.

He had the endorsement of his former boss, President Obama, who recorded campaign commercials for Emanuel and who jetted into Chicago just days before Tuesday’s election and appeared at the mayor’s side.

Emanuel had everything—except a sufficient number of votes to avoid an April 7 runoff election that will now become a referendum on policies that have been so friendly to corporate elites that the incumbent has been dubbed “Mayor 1%.”

Emanuel needed another percentage to avoid the runoff—50 percent plus one vote. Under Chicago’s system, all candidates for mayor and for aldermanic seats run on a nonpartisan ballot. If any candidate gets more than 50 percent, she or he is elected outright. If no one gets over 50 percent, the top two finishers in the initial election face one another in a runoff.

A lot of the betting in Chicago was that Emanuel would get his 50-plus-one.

But when the votes were counted, all bets were off.

Emanuel finished first, with 45 percent. But that was far short of the “50-plus-1” mark, so far that the Chicago Sun Times termed the result “a huge embarrassment” for the former White House aide and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chair who many see as the most politically-connected mayor in the United States.

Cook County Commissioner Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, the candidate of progressive labor groups such as the Chicago Teachers Union and the defender of public education and public services that have been threatened by Emanuel’s “pay-to-play” politics and municipal neoliberalism, finished a solid second with 34 percent. And the rest of the vote went to critics of the mayor: progressive Alderman Bob Fioretti, businessman Willie Wilson and William “Dock” Walls III, a former aide to the late progressive Mayor Harold Washington.

“Political dynamics change as Emanuel, Garcia move into runoff campaign,” Wednesday morning’s Chicago Tribune headline declared. The featured photo was not of a triumphant Rahm running a victory lap but of “Chuy” Garcia surrounded by a multiracial, multi-ethnic circle of activists raising clenched fists of labor and community solidarity.

Though his is still an uphill run, it was Garcia who took the victory lap.

“So, nobody thought we’d be here tonight. They wrote us off. They said we didn’t have a chance,” he told the cheering crowd on election night. “They said we didn’t have any money while they spent millions attacking us. Well, we’re still standing. We’re still running and we’re gonna win.”

Garcia explained his unexpectedly strong showing—with numbers well above what polls had predicted—in the progressive populist language of his campaign. “Today, we the people have spoken.” he declared. “Not the people with the money and the power and the connections. Not the giant corporations. The big-money special interests. The hedge funds and Hollywood celebrities who poured tens of millions of dollars into the mayor’s campaign. They all had their say. They’ve had their say for too long. But today, the rest of us had something to say.”

Across the country, progressives rook notice, and started talking about Chicago in the way they did New York during the early stages of that city’s 2013 mayoral race—when it started to look like Bill de Blasio might have a chance.

“The next six weeks in Chicago will be the biggest fight of 2015 between the power of people and the power of big money,” declared Dan Cantor, the national director of the Working Families Party. “The good guys won round one. Forcing Mayor 1% into a run-off is a remarkable achievement. Along with the run-off, the progressive caucus on the Council is poised to make gains. Chicago is showing signs of the progressive wave that has washed over cities across America.”

How did it happen?

How did Rahm Emanuel, who was elected without a runoff four years ago, win too few votes to Rahm Emanuel Seemed Unstoppable—Until He Ticked Off Chicago’s Teachers | The Nation:

Click here to go to Jesus "Chuy" Garcia for Mayor of Chicago  Website

#Chuy2015

Big Education Ape: Chicago Inc. Rahm Emanuel Dances for Corporate Money - Vote for Chuy!!! http://bit.ly/1AaLZT1

Amid Federal Corruption Probe, Andrew Cuomo Administration Purges State Government Emails:

Amid Federal Corruption Probe, Andrew Cuomo Administration Purges State Government Emails

By  David Sirota @davidsirota d.sirota@ibtimes.com 
Matthew Cunningham-Cook @mattcunninghamc m.cunninghamcook@ibtimes.com on February 26 2015 8:52 AM EST

Govs. Andrew Cuomo of New York and Chris Christie of New Jersey (not pictured) vetoed a bill that would bring improvements to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Courtesy/Reuters

Earlier this month, New Yorkers watched an inferno tear through a warehouse full of old government records from the bygone paper era. Many probably felt relief in thinking that such records are now often digitized and therefore not at risk of being accidentally incinerated. Yet as Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration is showing this week, many records are vulnerable to another form of destruction: deliberate deletion.

In a memo obtained by Capital New York, Cuomo officials announced that mass purging of email records is beginning across several state government agencies. The timing of the announcement, which followed through on a 2013 proposal, is worth noting: The large-scale destruction of state documents will be happening in the middle of a sprawling federal investigation of public corruption in Albany. That investigation has been looking at state legislators and the Cuomo administration.

Cuomo’s move to purge state emails follows a similar move he made as state Attorney General. International Business Times confirmed that in 2007, he put in place a mass deletion policy for emails in the New York Attorney General’s office that were more than 90 days old, making it difficult for the public to know how -- or whether -- his office investigated bank fraud in the lead-up to the financial crisis of 2008. In the Cuomo administration’s announcement this week, the governor's chief information officer, Maggie Miller, justified the new email purge as a cost-saving measure aimed at “making government work better.”

But former prosecutors and open-government advocates interviewed by IBTimes say the move seems designed to hide information.

“The government belongs to the people and the government has to be transparent,” said Hal Hardin, a former judge and U.S. Attorney who famously investigated Gov. Ray Blanton of Tennessee. “Citizens ought to be able to know what our government is doing. The average email generated by a government owned by the people should be available to the people.”

Melanie Sloan, a former Clinton Justice Department official, said the timing of the move raises significant legal questions.

“This is potentially obstruction of justice,” she told IBTimes. “The only reason that the government destroys records is so no one can question what it is doing, and no one can unearth information about improper conduct. There’s no reason for New York not to preserve this information.”

Sloan said U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, who is spearheading the Albany probe, could issue a letter to Cuomo ordering him to preserve all documents that could be relevant to the public corruption investigation. In May 2014, Bharara issued such a letter to state legislators. Bharara’s office declined to comment when asked by IBTimes if it had now issued a similar directive to Cuomo.

John Kaehny, the head of a coalition of transparency group called Reinvent Albany, said the purge order may be designed to circumvent obstruction of justice statutes that are designed to prevent deliberate document destruction.

“[The policy] may mean that you could never be accused of obstructing justice or destroying evidence because you could claim that the machine automatically deleted it,” he told IBTimes. “It creates a loophole and opportunity to destroy embarrassing emails.”

The technological mechanics of the Cuomo administration’s email purge remain murky. According to a document from New York’s Office of Information Technology Services, the state’s new Microsoft Office 365 system purges deleted mail after 90 days and makes sure that mail “cannot be recovered.” The document says that all mail -- whether manually deleted or not -- “will be subject to the 90 day retention policy.”

When Cuomo officials in 2013 announced the state government’s move to the Microsoft Office system, Amid Federal Corruption Probe, Andrew Cuomo Administration Purges State Government Emails:

This so-called “Student Success” Act should be named the “Student Regress” Act #NOonHR5

Today, I spoke against House Republicans moving forward with a misguided education bill that shrinks school funding and threatens protections for disadvantaged students. This so-called “Student Success” Act should be named the “Student Regress” Act or the “How Little Can We Do” Act. There is broad agreement that No Child Left Behind must be reformed, but the many groups who are truly committed to quality education have urged a no vote on this sorry bill, including--LULAC, the NAACP, NCLR, and the National Education Association.

Tell Congress: Vote NO on H.R. 5 – The Student Success Act

 #NOonHR5

#STOPHR5 #NOonHR5 US Representatives on Twitter Find your Member Hit them with a Vote No on HR5 Tweet http://bit.ly/17s6O1b

Tell Congress: Vote NO on H.R. 5 – The Student Success Act

Ethnic Studies Now Sacramento City Unified School District - Ethnic Studies Now

Ethnic Studies Now Petition (SCUSD) - Ethnic Studies Now:

ETHNIC STUDIES NOW PETITION (SCUSD)

 Why Ethnic Studies?

We, the undersigned, support the effort to construct and implement an ethnic studies class as a high school graduation requirement in the Sacramento City Unified School District.

Sacramento, CA is the 2^nd most ethnically diverse city in the United States (US Census Bureau, 2015). Our school district is a beautiful mirror of our population; our students are 37% Hispanic or Latino, 17.4% Asian, 18% African American, 19% white, and 5.3% of students are two or more ethnicities. In our district, residents speak over 44 languages and 38% do not speak English at home (SCUSD, 2015).

We need a high school curriculum that reflects the diversity of all students.  Despite our numbers, only 1 out of 13 high schools within our district offers ethnic studies.  Because over 80% of our school district populations are students of color, we need to offer a course that includes and investigates these rich histories and lived experiences.

By having an ethnic studies course, our hope is that all students will learn to respect, accept, and love themselves.  We want all students to think critically about the importance of their race, ethnicity, location, and identity as it exists in history and in the present.  We believe that ethnic studies courses can offer important narratives that are missing from the euro-centric lens that history is often shown through.  We want to empower our students to learn more about themselves and their communities, build empathy and unity with other ethnic groups, and push for social justice.

Who's signing Ethnic Studies Now Petition (SCUSD) - Ethnic Studies Now:

Getting Clear on Opt Out/Refusal of Tests: An Act of Civil Disobedience - UNITED OPT OUT: The Movement to End Corporate Education Reform

Getting Clear on Opt Out/Refusal of Tests: An Act of Civil Disobedience - UNITED OPT OUT: The Movement to End Corporate Education Reform:



Getting Clear on Opt Out/Refusal of Tests: An Act of Civil Disobedience 

 Now that Opt Out/Refusal is increasing with speed across the nation suddenly there are attorneys available and organizations available to research opt out and get the legal mumbo jumbo clear for all the parents, teachers and students.

So, this is the deal:  We at United Opt Out have been working with opt out/refusal for four years now. And there are many parents across the nation who have been refusing these tests for much longer than UOO has been in existence. At UOO, we have worked our hardest, for free, to put together a guide per state to support parents as they move forward with refusing the tests – and this year, in particular, is a crucial year to opt out or refuse the tests. The national Common Core tests that are being implemented this year are the trigger for a landslide of opportunities to privatize public schools across the nation.

If we refuse to take the tests, therefore refuse to hand over student data, we create a situation in which corporations cannot profit and in which states have no data to shut down public schools.

These tests are designed to fail approximately 70% of America’s children. We must refuse these tests.

That being said, it’s fascinating to us at UOO, to watch everyone point out the “legalities” of opt out just in time for testing – and specifically in the year 2014 -2015 when testing drives the privatization plans at fast speed. We are not sheeple. We will not read these reports and policy papers,  nod in meek acceptance, and move forward with opt out only if the legal mumbo jumbo allows it.

These legalities mean nothing. In other words, we will continue to refuse the tests.

Opt out is an act of civil disobedience. It is an act of civil disobedience that is necessary in the face of unjust immoral laws.

We at UOO have always believed that the guides offer a base – a place to start for parents and students who plan to opt out. We recognize that opt out is not “legal” in most states in terms of education statutes. The Education Commission for States is happy to inform you of the legalities. But everyone is a little too late to the opt out party. It’s a done deal and here to stay. And we are certain that more folks will suddenly find the funding to address opt out/refusal in the upcoming months as the testing revolt continues and the masses come forward to say,

We are done. We are done allowing the federal government mandates and the corporate cronies to destroy our public schools and make billions of dollars on the backs of our children, our teachers and our public school communities. We are done watching our teachers and children attempt to survive in a fear-based high stakes testing environment where policies are designed to fail everyone. We are done watching our teachers commit educational malpractice against their will. We are done watching school funding support testing, test prep, technology for testing, infrastructure for technology, and staffing – for more testing. We are done watching public schools feed our children tests while denying children small class sizes, librarians, libraries, teachers with actual teaching degrees, nurses, counselors, art, music, PE, recess, books, resources for classrooms, quality school buildings and more. We are done watching our children suffer from poverty while funding continues to feed the corporate beast instead of creating school communities with wrap around services to support our children and communities in need. We are done watching politicians use student test scores as a measurement of student, teacher and school success or failure – as these scores mean nothing. Our children are so much more than a test score. We are done watching children with special needs, children with anxiety disorders and other emotional stresses, and English Language Learners suffer under these mandates.

We will opt out as an act of civil disobedience until the mandates and policies change to allow public schools to thrive while protecting our children from the effects of poverty.

While attorneys busy themselves writing policy papers about opt out legalities,  while federal and state mandates busy districts Getting Clear on Opt Out/Refusal of Tests: An Act of Civil Disobedience - UNITED OPT OUT: The Movement to End Corporate Education Reform:

NCLB Goes to College By Way of "Outcome Based Funding" - Living in Dialogue

NCLB Goes to College By Way of "Outcome Based Funding" - Living in Dialogue:



NCLB Goes to College By Way of "Outcome Based Funding"

 By Anthony Cody.

Wisconsin governor Scott Walker made headlines recently when he tried to change the mission of the state university system there, removing the “search for truth.” In its place, the university’s mission was changed to “meet the state’s workforce needs.” This blatant attack on the higher mission of our universities was turned back. But Scott Walker’s vision may well be achieved in less dramatic fashion through something called “Outcome Based Funding,” now being promoted by the Gates Foundation and the Obama administration.

The Gates Foundation has sponsored a new report that concludes that higher education will improve with a heavy focus on outcomes, and that government funding should be tied to these outcomes, similar to No Child Left Behind. And the colleges that will be hardest hit, just as with NCLB, will be those attended by African Americans and those in poverty.

The report titled “Driving Better Outcomes,” available here, was written by HCM Strategists. I want to describe the substance of the report, but first it is worth noting the way a Gates Foundation insider described their process in supporting reports of this sort. In an interview with researchers Sarah Reckhow and Megan Tomkins-Stange, a Gates informant, said this:

It’s within [a] sort of fairly narrow orbit that you manufacture the [research] reports. You hire somebody to write a report. There’s going to be a commission, there’s going to be a lot of research, there’s going to be a lot of vetting and so forth and so on, but you pretty much know what the report is going to say before you go through the exercise.

Working from what we know about the Gates Foundation framework, we can guess the imperatives at work. Lower costs, increase top down management through standardization and tests, and serve corporate employers. Here are the specific grants HCM Strategists has received:

In 2012 HCM Strategists got a grant for $800,460, “to lead an effort designed to assess the empirical and political feasibility of ways federal student aid investments could incent higher completion and attainment of high-value credentials.” In 2013, they got an additional $461,480 in order to “to identify high leverage strategies for reducing cost to students in higher education institutions”.

Now on to the content of the report.

The report opens with this paragraph, as an overview and background:

Tying funding to successful outcomes is a concept with inherent appeal, particularly so when tight budgets demand heightened efficiency and impact for each dollar. Today’s fiscal climate and economic need for expanded postsecondary access and completion have fueled a resurgence of interest in and state action regarding performance funding policies, which tie a portion of state appropriations to metrics that gauge institutional performance on various indicators.

This sort of boilerplate statement has become the background to assumptions driving educational policy. The essence of this statement is “we have to provide more value to employers at a lower cost.” Before we go NCLB Goes to College By Way of "Outcome Based Funding" - Living in Dialogue:

Common Core Staircase | WagTheDog

Common Core Staircase | WagTheDog:

Common Core Staircase

The CCSSO and NGA clearly have high hopes and great expectations for their Common Core staircase…

The Common Core is a set of high-quality academic standards in mathematics and English language arts/literacy (ELA). These learning goals outline what a student should know and be able to do at the end of each grade. The standards were created to ensure that all students graduate from high school with the skills and knowledge necessary to succeed in college, career, and life, regardless of where they live.

~About the Common Core State Standards

Rather than focusing solely on the skills of reading and writing, the ELA/literacy standards highlight the growing complexity of the texts students must read to be ready for the demands of college, career, and life. The standards call for a staircase of increasing complexity so that all students are ready for the demands of college- and career-level reading no later than the end of high school.

~Key Shifts in English Language Arts

The Common Core is a standard staircase , with a standard slope, a standard number of steps, each rising a standard distance, and it is designed to challenge the climbing skills of “standard” students.

Unfortunately the Common Core implementation kit that has been distributed to the States does not appear to include contingency plans and directions for assembling and installing the stairs for use by students who do not climb and learn in a standardized way.

Since the CCSS are a cumulative K-12 program that functions like a ladder or staircase of learning, they must be taught in sequence as acquisition of each new skill is dependent on mastery of skills learned during the prior school year. 

With each school year students acquire new knowledge and understandings based on the “step” of learning the previous school year.

If students are to climb the Common Core staircase or ladder successfully, they must Common Core Staircase | WagTheDog:

Urban School Solutions Won’t Be Easy – Or Cheap | Oklahoma Observer

Urban School Solutions Won’t Be Easy – Or Cheap | Oklahoma Observer:

URBAN SCHOOL SOLUTIONS WON’T BE EASY – OR CHEAP

1 COMMENT

 26 FEB 2015   POSTED BY AHAMILTON

BY JOHN THOMPSON

I strongly support the work of the Center for Civil Rights Remedies to close the racial “discipline gap.” I want to be clear in my agreement with “Are We Closing the School Discipline Gap?” by Daniel Losen, et al.

Although I intensively studied nearly 15 years of Oklahoma City suspension data, and taught at the state’s lowest performing high school, I am surprised that in the two years after I left the classroom that the Oklahoma City Public Schools became “one of the top ten highest-suspending districts at the secondary level for all students, and is the highest suspending district in the nation for black secondary students.” Moreover, between 2010 and 2012, “overall suspension rates at the high school level also increased from 24.7% to 45.2% during the same period.”

The latest database shows that at the secondary school level, OKCPS “suspension rates for black students climbed dramatically from 36.3% to 64.2%.” [I have my own theories on why, at a time when education funding was dramatically cut, the rate ballooned, but I will limit myself to what I witnessed and studied.]

I support the efforts of Losen and the Center for Civil Rights Remedies. Students can’t learn if they are not in class and we need to invest in Restorative Justice, and other alternatives to suspensions. Neither do I claim that educators are blameless or that we don’t need to invest heavily in professional development. I just worry that systems will, once again, take the cheap and easy approach of claiming that better classroom instruction is enough to reduce suspensions.

For that reason, I will recount some of my experiences. I am not offering excuses for schools or blaming the problem solely on the history of out-of-school oppression. I’m merely placing today’s problems in a context.

Reformers tend to blame teachers’ “Low Expectations” for chronic disorder. But I was punched twice before clocking in for my first day in a neighborhood school. The assailants in the two-on-one gang-related fight I broke up were sent off, without consequences, by an overburdened assistant principal.

When I entered the classroom as a 39-year-old rookie, I already had nearly a decade of wonderful experiences nurturing poor children of color. Some of my first freshmen students and I had spent the summer in a camp for low-income kids. As always, the rural white people who ran the camp spoke effusively about the self-control and wonderful manners of the campers, who often were out of control in school. When I saw the deplorable behavior of so many of my young friends as they walked into the school, I realized that a situation this surprising and acute must be the legacy of a decades-long history. Teens, who were so responsible on the job or in church, would not be behaving this way unless it was the result of a complex and engrained set of dynamics.

In a system that only invested $1,875 per student, the job of principals was to “just keep the plate spinning until June.” It was understood that violence could only be shunted off to the edges of the school property. A decade later, No Child Left Behind [NCLB] helped increase funding, but the new resources were directed towards tested subjects, meaning that students and teachers didn’t see a meaningful increase in spending that would have made a real difference.

Much of our problem is that when teachers call for “discipline,” non-educators hear a request for punishment. Teachers tend to be so frustrated with the lack of disciplinary consequences that our complaints sound like demands for “law and order.” We cannot punish our way to safe and orderly schools. But neither can we continue to turn a blind eye to behavior that undermines instruction and teaches children the worst possible lessons about functioning in the adult world.

I was often told that students behaved well for me because I had earned their respect. Since those observations were meant as a compliment, my response took administrators aback. “That’s the problem,” I would say, teachers shouldn’t have to go to such extraordinary lengths to prove themselves to their students.

The Center for Civil Rights Remedies reports on the disparate suspensions of Oklahoma City Urban School Solutions Won’t Be Easy – Or Cheap | Oklahoma Observer:

Poor students need more help – not more standardized tests | The Sacramento Bee The Sacramento Bee

Poor students need more help – not more standardized tests | The Sacramento Bee The Sacramento Bee:



Poor students need more help – not more standardized tests 

Parents Can Opt Out United Opt Out National

Click Here to go to United Opt Out National: 

Click Here to go to the Website- United Opt Out Team

 As a teacher of more than 20 years at an inner-city high school in Los Angeles, I saw the value of federal dollars sent to our local public schools through the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. In fact, millions of America’s poorest schoolchildren depend on the Title 1 funding that was established in the law as part of the landmark 1965 “War on Poverty” legislation.

In Los Angeles, Title 1 funding allowed us to buy paper, pens and pencils that, while taken for granted in many communities, were a luxury for children and parents living in poverty. It also allowed us to hire instructional aides and provide programs that gave thousands of students the help they needed to succeed in school and prepare for college.

Congress must now decide whether to reauthorize the act, and whether to continue with the high-stakes testing mandates adopted as part of President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind and President Barack Obama’s Race to the Top.

Unfortunately, the focus of the education law to address poverty has been fundamentally changed. Under the Bush and Obama administrations, this essential federal money became leverage for adopting the standardized testing that has distorted public education at every level. It is no surprise that many in the education community are questioning the value of reauthorizing the act if it means more years of using test scores to decide the fate of students, teachers, schools and districts.

The issue for educators and parents is not about the value of testing per se but rather how these tests are used. Testing is essential in assessing student progress and is one tool, among many, in determining whether a young person has understood key concepts and information to move to the next level of instruction.

But No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top have turned public schools into testing factories. The overarching concern for raising test scores on standardized tests has become the engine driving the academic program to the exclusion of all else. A great deal of time is now spent on test preparation and testing while enrichment courses and programs that were once a staple of a well-rounded academic program have been eliminated.

Many elementary school children, who once relished learning and playing with their friends, are finding every excuse to avoid the monotony and fear of hours of testing. Secondary students are saddled with hours of often mind-numbing homework that have questionable academic value. Reading for pleasure, playing catch with Dad or just relaxing at home after a full day of schoolwork have become relics of a bygone era.

The alarm that educators raised 15 years ago about the overemphasis on testing has now spread across the country. Many parents are choosing to have their children “opt out” of high-stakes exams. According to a recent Gallup/PDK poll, 68 percent of parents and 54 percent of the generalPoor students need more help – not more standardized tests | The Sacramento Bee The Sacramento Bee:

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/opinion/op-ed/soapbox/article11177228.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/opinion/op-ed/soapbox/article11177228.html#storylink=cpy