BarryBobPosthole
05-06-2014, 09:58 AM
Was wondering what is going in in your states with Common Core testing in public schools. In Oklahoma its made for some VERY strange bedfellows at least politically. Common Core standards and the plan were developed by the National Governors Association while Oklahoma's very Republican governor was the chairman, adopted enthusiastically by our very republican and conservative legislature, and now is pretty much universally hated as a 'Obama plan' foisted on the state by the federal government. Not quite sure how that happened but the Tea Party here seems convinced that any standards that aren't home grown are BAD. There really isn't a role for the federal government in common core testing at least as its done in Oklahoma. The state contracts with a private company, that of course always does things better than the government could ever do, and that private company creates and administers the testing. If students can't pass the test they don't advance to the next grade until they can, regardless of what the teacher, parents, and school administration thinks or knows about that student. The test is the decider, to use a term coined by the NCLB champion. The state signed a $34 million dollar contract with McGraw Hill and this year the testing had to be suspended due to problems that MH had with their automated system. Interesting nobody called for a repeal because the website didn't work.
There's a lot of flaws in Common Core but some sort of testing needs to be administered to find out how effective our schools are at education. We know how well they do at baseball and football, they get tested every season. But education in my state is upside down, not because of a lack of standards but because of a lack of funding and a coherent plan. We act as if we live in a state where every child needs to go to college, which is the first big lie in public education. We need as much emphasis on vocational education in Oklahoma as we do on academic education. Not every kid is college material and not every kid WANTS to go to college. We need vocational programs that TEACH. and we need different methods of measuring the education received from those programs. Skilled workers are every bit as important to our future as science and technology people. We need a bottom up revision to our education system and we need to prioritize and fund the right things. Simply creating high standards is about one tenth of the overall list of things we need to do to 'fix' our education system here in Oklahoma. there is $7 billion in out state budget for education this year, another flat budget year and its been seven years since our teachers got a raise. what do we do? We criticize teachers and set up a testing system that makes it the teacher's fault when their students don't pass it at the rate we think they should. And when our teachers went to the capitol this year to make their voices heard, not about raises for themselves, but about appropriately funding our public schools, most of the legislature didn't go the office that day and the ones that did were openly critical of the teachers for taking a day off (they didn't) from teaching.
We're in a real quandary here. Its a mess and our kids are the ones who are suffering for it. the best and brightest of our state leave for Texas or other parts of the country just as soon as they are able. The best teachers can go to any of our neighboring states and get better pay and most of them do. And here we sit and worry about what role the feds might have had in the whole mess when they haven't had any, at least since NCLB was enacted. We got bigger things to worry about.
Anyway, that's dismal and dire, but it is what it is here. Hopefully we'll elect a governor with some sense and a legislature that isn't looking for any excuse to bash Washington to get themselves reelected.
BKB
There's a lot of flaws in Common Core but some sort of testing needs to be administered to find out how effective our schools are at education. We know how well they do at baseball and football, they get tested every season. But education in my state is upside down, not because of a lack of standards but because of a lack of funding and a coherent plan. We act as if we live in a state where every child needs to go to college, which is the first big lie in public education. We need as much emphasis on vocational education in Oklahoma as we do on academic education. Not every kid is college material and not every kid WANTS to go to college. We need vocational programs that TEACH. and we need different methods of measuring the education received from those programs. Skilled workers are every bit as important to our future as science and technology people. We need a bottom up revision to our education system and we need to prioritize and fund the right things. Simply creating high standards is about one tenth of the overall list of things we need to do to 'fix' our education system here in Oklahoma. there is $7 billion in out state budget for education this year, another flat budget year and its been seven years since our teachers got a raise. what do we do? We criticize teachers and set up a testing system that makes it the teacher's fault when their students don't pass it at the rate we think they should. And when our teachers went to the capitol this year to make their voices heard, not about raises for themselves, but about appropriately funding our public schools, most of the legislature didn't go the office that day and the ones that did were openly critical of the teachers for taking a day off (they didn't) from teaching.
We're in a real quandary here. Its a mess and our kids are the ones who are suffering for it. the best and brightest of our state leave for Texas or other parts of the country just as soon as they are able. The best teachers can go to any of our neighboring states and get better pay and most of them do. And here we sit and worry about what role the feds might have had in the whole mess when they haven't had any, at least since NCLB was enacted. We got bigger things to worry about.
Anyway, that's dismal and dire, but it is what it is here. Hopefully we'll elect a governor with some sense and a legislature that isn't looking for any excuse to bash Washington to get themselves reelected.
BKB