Education-Common Core Is Expensive. California 1 BILLION DOLLAR bill

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WhatInThe

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What happened to the states taking back the education stuff and getting rid of some of this central (federal) meddling with the schools. It doesn't matter what political party it may be, just get the H--- out of education and go back to local and state control of things once again.
 
No wonder it's so expensive apparently there is a lot of electronic data to be stored and analyzed beyond grades and some teacher observations.

http://www.wnd.com/2014/05/education-no-its-about-data-mining/

Also, apparently there has been mention of the tech or computers required for some common core activities. Some software and tech is the same professional marketers use. Some of the cell phone companies in particular had to stop using it because of customer complaints of privacy intrusions.
 
George Bush and his no child left behind?
He thinks that all kids will finish life in the top ten......................... Wrong..........
 
Falcon, I think you are right. Maybe they should go back to the way schools were run when I was a kid. We could determine early on, what we called Junior High back then, if we wanted crafts and skills or go to precollege courses for our goals and class schedules. I took precollege and had Latin courses, wow. After I got out of the military I did go to college. But also raising a family and moving from one part of the US to another for many years. Over all that time, my college courses changed as our technology kept changing. All told, I got to within a semester or so of actually graduating. But by then I was retired and working at WalMart as a greeter. I probably should have taken the trades courses. A class mate of mine went that route and in a few years after graduating from high school he took a chance and went into a machine shop as the owner. It paid off as he eventually had lots of pocket money from his business and pleasure. Oh well, he just did not have enough education like I did.
 
We've had a national testing program (Naplan) for quite a few years now, testing numeracy, literacy and writing skills in years 3,5,7 and 9. It's not much use as a diagnostic teaching tool because it occurs too late in the school year to be of any help to the teachers, who by then already know which kids are having trouble in these areas.

For about the last 4 years the results for each school have been published on the net and parents and others tend to judge schools by the complicated statistics - graphs and bands - which is unrealistic given that the students are only asked 30 multiple choice questions for numeracy and the same for literacy.

Even worse, the teachers are now under such pressure to deliver results that they spend excessive amounts of time teaching the tests rather than really educating their students in the broadest sense.

Our newspapers are forbidden to use the test data to produce league tables of top schools but that doesn't stop parents deciding a school is doing really well based on the colours used to shade the scores. Green (above average) is better than red. I noted that a fundamentalist Christian school near us, with very few students and half the teaching staff unqualified, seemed to score very highly on literacy. I'm not surprised because they spend most of their day isolated in booths reading from an imported 'christian' curriculum and answering comprehension questions. Then they learn the answers by rote without any discussion. This is not enough to build a balanced education for the 21st century but if all you are looking at is the scores, then it looks pretty good.

One aspect of the tests that is reasonably good is the tracking from year 3 to year 5 and also from year 7 to year 9. You can see if a particular school is "value adding" to a particular cohort. Again it depends on whether the tests are actually a good measure of progress.

Our tests are done on paper using a pencil and are marked electronically. I'm not sure what it costs but if all you are spending money on is an expensive test program, without the resources being made available to overcome educational deficits, then the money is being wasted.
 
Coomon Core is under serious attack in many parts of the country and, like Obamacare, may need some serious tweaking to be sustainable...
 
We have a national curriculum being rolled out. It is a good thing unless it becomes a political football. Before this moving from state to state put lots of kids at a disadvantage, especially children of the military.
 
Now who determines what is so important that all must learn it over other ideas of what might be important and needed. Seems like it could be something that could be used to twist an idea into top, or bottom, idea for the country. I would think the randomness of state controlled education would more likely teach all to think for themselves rather than to mimic a federally run thought pattern.

Important items like maths, science, languages, could be good for all. Do they leave national politics and sports out of these teaching patterns they are trying to develop?
 
Standardization is necessary to a large extent so that the country can move forward economically, culturally, and patriotically...
 
Standardization of what? Text books? Tests? Topics? Subjects? Presentations? Far too much like putting education into a box, never to be disturbed again because of rules. Keep big government out of our lives and allow freedom to change education as change is wanted or needed. It seems like our education system has failed and fallen in recent years, why box it into a federal system now?

One thing for sure is we don't want to make it more complex and expensive as that means lots of small towns and rural areas will not be able to follow with the new electronic testing and teaching. Do we need to always bus the students for hours each day to get them into costly teaching and testing areas. So far our results with the newer teaching ways has been a failure in practice.
 
There has always been standardization from history to math that has enabled this country to maintain its position as leader of the free world. The problem has been for a long time the lack of success in inner city schools. Billions have been spent on programs to solve this problem to no avail: Head Start, No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and now, Common Core...
 
But as I remember it, each school district would buy their texts for whom they considered to be best for the teachers or the budgets. There were no national specified books that I remember. This program being discussed seems to be trying to get some federal group responsible for all parts of the US. Such a disaster in the making this is going to end up being. We need to get rid of all this federal stuff and giver each state the responsibility as it should be by the way the US came together.

I have no idea of any standardized texts in the schools I attended or where my kids went to school. You could see the texts my kids used, cross over to a different district, or type of school, and their texts could be different. It seemed like different school districts would have their idea of 'best' books to put in the schools. Change from public schools to private schools or church schools and the texts would change. We certainly do not want to stop innovation in our education systems by following some one eyed federal selections for everyone.
 

[h=5]Mia Love
[/h]2 hrs ·




I’ve been working on a bill with Joe Wilson. Here's a little information about it:
H.R. 524 – Local Control of Education Act
Introduced in the House on January 26, 2015
Mia Love, cosponsor
... Summary: This legislation will restore local control of education by prohibiting the federal government from mandating that states adopt a specific curriculum or set of academic standards, such as Common Core. It will also prohibit the federal government from using grants or waivers to mandate or incentivize states into adopting Common Core, thus ensuring that local control is left to the states. For states that already adopted Common Core, it would ensure that any previous requirements for waivers would be void and the Secretary of Education would be prohibited from requiring states to agree to any new conditions in order to keep their existing waiver.
This legislation helps to counteract the unprecedented federal overreach of the last several years into instructional content, academic standards, and assessments.
 
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