Got a report over the weekend that the Utah GOP just adopted a resolution against the Common Core State Standards. To read it, go to this link and scroll down the page a bit to read:
“Utah GOP Anti-Common Core Resolution PASSES”
The Utah resolution is heavily researched and referenced. It is very interesting reading for anyone regardless of political affiliation.
Bluegrass Institute president Jim Waters joined a panel discussion about how much progress was really made toward public pension reform during the 2013 Kentucky General Assembly.
(click on the image below to view the video)
Read more about solutions to Kentucky’s public pension crisis.
We’ve been writing about Kentucky Commissioner of Education Terry Holliday’s recently posted blog item about:
“…a lot of misinformation being pushed by folks who are not supportive of more rigorous standards for students….”
I’ve already posted two blogs under the “What’s the Real CCSS Story” title with a discussion about why it is wrong to say those against Common Core State Standards (CCSS) are against better education and a discussion about who really created those standards.
Now, I want to discuss Dr. Holliday’s assertion that:
“Another myth that seems to be circulating is that the standards were developed in secret.”
Unfortunately, the CCSS were indeed developed in a mostly secret process. There is no myth here.
To begin, two non-governmental organizations, the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) and the National Governors Association (NGA), created the CCSS. As private organizations, neither group is subject to any routine governmental transparency requirements such as open meeting laws or open records requests.
There was no legal requirement for the NGA/CCSSO’s CCSS development process to maintain publicly available meeting minutes or any other records subject to public access.
The real work of assembling the CCSS was conducted in “work groups.” I guess the commissioner never saw this 2009 press release from the NGA which clearly states:
“The Work Group’s deliberations will be confidential throughout the process.”
Thus, the real CCSS work was intentionally conducted under a “confidential” process. The people running the show admit that in their own press release. By the way, my print edition of Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary and Thesaurus, © 2006, lists “secret” as a definition for “confidential.” This on line Merriam-Webster resource echoes that definition.
The facts are that the only public activity during the NGA/CCSSO’s CCSS creation process included a few, limited, public comment periods.
However the CCSS work groups acted upon those public comments in secret. There is no way to know if the public’s inputs ever got any serious consideration. Were the public’s comments accepted or rejected in an intelligently conducted, unbiased manner? Who knows?
Now, if Kentucky’s new standards had been developed here in Kentucky by groups working under the direction of the Kentucky Department of Education and the Council of Postsecondary Education – as Senate Bill 1 from the 2009 Regular Legislative Session called for – the process would have been subject to Kentucky’s governmental transparency laws. Meetings of Kentucky-run working groups would have been open to the public, and Kentucky-run work group meeting minutes would be available under the state’s open records laws.
None of that routine public transparency was available in the NGA/CCSSO process.
In summation, compared to the transparency required for governmental meetings and records availability, the CCSS effort was most definitely conducted largely in secret. Even the NGA’s own press release says so.
The state’s public pension crisis takes center stage on statewide television tonight! Bluegrass Institute president Jim Waters will appear as part of a panel on KET’s Kentucky Tonight discussing how much, if any, progress was made toward repairing Kentucky’s damaged and woefully underfunded public pension system.
Joining Jim on the panel will be Bryan Sunderland, senior vice president of public affairs for the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce, Sharron Oxendine, president of the state teachers union and a member of the Kentucky Public Pension Coalition, and Jason Bailey, director of the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy.
So, how can you help?
1 – Tune in and watch at 8 p.m. ET on KET
2 – Call in to the show 1.800.494.7605
3 – Tweet @KYTonightKET, @BIPPS, and use #KYpensiondebt to comment on the show on Twitter!
4 – Email the show for questions and comments: kytonight@ket.org
5 – Share this with your friends on Facebook and encourage them to watch!
It is important that our state legislators are exposed to the right solutions to address the $34 billion unfunded liability enabled by a neglectful General Assembly. This year, The Bluegrass Institute released Future Shock Solutions: 16 steps to treat Kentucky’s public pension ailment which lists specific actions the state legislature can take to get the system back on track.
For instance:
Read more solutions here.
Reacting to growing nationwide pushback on Common Core State Standards (CCSS), Kentucky Commissioner of Education Terry Holliday recently posted an item in his Doc. H’s Blog dealing with what he claims is:
“…a lot of misinformation being pushed by folks who are not supportive of more rigorous standards for students….”
In Part 1 of this blog series, I dealt with the silly assertion that those who oppose CCSS are all against higher education standards. Now, let’s talk about the Commissioner’s allegation that:
“These standards were developed by teachers, college professors, and national education organizations.”
The truth is the public has no way to know who REALLY created CCSS, what the real creators’ qualifications are, and if the CCSS fairly represent what Kentucky’s educators wanted from Senate Bill 1.
However, after examining two lists here and here that supposedly show the members of various CCSS work groups, I must note that all of the listed teachers, professors and national education organization members didn’t come from Kentucky – not a single one, as far as I can tell.
But, did the people on these lists REALLY create CCSS?
We know that the CCSS were created under the auspices of the National Governors’ Association (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), two private groups not subject to any sunshine laws such as the federal Freedom of Information Act or Kentucky’s own open meetings and open records laws. In fact, a July 1, 2009 press release from the NGA discusses the formation of the work groups that would create the CCSS. That press release admits:
“The Work Group’s deliberations will be confidential throughout the process.”
This secretive process used to create the CCSS is VERY different from the one actually contemplated in SB-1, which required the creation – not just adoption – of Kentucky’s new standards to be overseen by the Kentucky Department of Education and the Council on Postsecondary Education. Both of those Kentucky public organizations ARE subject to transparency rules and are far more accessible to Kentucky’s educators and citizens.
Furthermore, these Kentucky public education organizations certainly would have included KENTUCKY teachers and KENTUCKY college professors in any work they had performed.
By the way, the NGA’s press release also contains this very interesting comment:
“Additionally, CCSSO and the NGA Center have selected an independent facilitator and an independent writer as well as resource advisors to support each content area work group throughout the standards development process.”
That could have rendered the CCSS work group meetings wide open to manipulation by a well known process known as the Delphi Technique.
Since the NGA/CCSSO work group meetings were all kept secret, the public will probably never know if well-meaning educators on the work groups got Delphied during CCSS development. In fact – if this happened – many of the participants could still be unaware they were “Delphied” without their knowledge. After all, that is the whole purpose of this manipulative, group-think approach – fool the group into thinking they developed what was actually from someone else’s pre-ordained agenda.
So, we really don’t know who created CCSS. Was it really done by teachers, etc.? I honestly don’t know, and neither do you. But, it sure doesn’t look like whoever did it came from Kentucky.
Reacting to growing nationwide pushback on Common Core State Standards (CCSS), Kentucky Commissioner of Education Terry Holliday recently posted an item in his Doc. H’s Blog dealing with what he claims is:
“…a lot of misinformation being pushed by folks who are not supportive of more rigorous standards for students that will enable our high school graduates to compete on an international level and also achieve readiness for college and careers.”
Unfortunately, Holliday’s blog is mostly a bunch of straw man arguments that don’t jibe with reality. So, a bit of what Paul Harvey used to call “The Rest of the Story” seems in order, because the CCSS actually do have a LOT of baggage.
For starters, you deserve to know that five of the 29 members of the final CCSS Validation Committee refused to sign the report (compare signers’ list near back of report to members listed near front of this report).
One of those who refused to sign off on the CCSS is Dr. Sandra Stotsky, currently a professor at the University of Arkansas. She formerly was an associate commissioner in the Massachusetts Department of Education. In that position Stotsky oversaw the implementation of Massachusetts’ superb K to 12 education standards early in this century. They were far better than the CCSS and probably should have become the CCSS. In fact in 2011 testing with the National Assessment of Educational Progress, Massachusetts scored at the top in both fourth and eighth grade in both math and reading, a remarkable feat (Determined with NAEP Data Explorer).
Simply put, Stotsky knows real, high quality education standards!
So, consider a few of the many comments in her letter explaining why she would not sign off on CCSS:
• “In my judgment, Common Core’s standards for grades 6-12 do not reflect the core knowledge needed for authentic college-level work and do not frame the literary and cultural knowledge one would expect of graduates from an American high school.”
• “The ‘college and career readiness standards’ that govern all grade-level standards have no discernable academic level; for the most part, they are simply a set of poorly written, confusing, content-empty, and culture-free generic skills with no internally valid organization of their own.”
• “The two English-speaking areas for which I could find assessment material (British Columbia and Ireland) have far more demanding requirements for college readiness.”
• “Based on my experience in the Massachusetts Department of Education from 1999-2003, where I was in charge of the development or revision of Massachusetts K-12 standards in all major subjects, and on my extensive experience in local government on a variety of committees for different boards, my judgment is that almost every aspect of the process in which Common Core’s standards were developed profoundly violated almost all civically appropriate procedures for the development of what would become a major public document.”
• “Common Core’s standards are an unsound basis for the development of common assessments.”
By the way, Stotsky’s letter somehow never made it into the final report of the CCSS Validation Committee. Neither did another non-signer’s letter from Prof. Jim Milgram. That raises more interesting questions that touch on why Stotsky says the CCSS process, “violated almost all civically appropriate procedures for the development of what would become a major public document.” In most work of this type, letters of dissent are ROUTINELY included in appendices to the report.
I think that about covers the myth that anyone against CCSS is against higher standards. The truth is plenty of real experts in education standards don’t believe CCSS pass muster. I’ll have more in future blogs.
Education Week’s State Edwatch Blog just picked up on the major story we have been covering on the problems with Kentucky’s high school end-of-course exams.
As we reported last week here, here and here, the Kentucky Department of Education (KDE) has run into major problems with the state’s high school end-of-course testing program.
One major problem is the computer servers from ACT’s Vantage testing system became overloaded and crashed when students from Kentucky, Ohio and Alabama simultaneously tried to access tests on line.
Following a week of unsuccessful fixes, KDE News Release 13-049 admits the department has thrown in the towel and cancelled all attempts at on line end-of-course test administration for 2013.
KDE says paper and pencil testing packages for end-of-course tests are being distributed now, but the printed materials may not reach all of the approximately 60 percent of Kentucky high schools that formerly planned to test on line before May 13, 2013.
The on line testing failure thoroughly disrupts KDE’s plans to require counting end-of-course test results in each student’s final grade in English II, Algebra II, biology and US History classes. The news release says incorporation of all end-of-course results is now totally optional at local school district discretion.
This adds to other, very different, testing woes revealed by the Bluegrass Institute last week concerning the quiet collapse early this year of the constructed-response questions (sometimes called written answer questions or open-response questions) in the same end-of-course exams.
It looks like the massive school test cheating scandal in Atlanta, Georgia could get pushed aside by an even messier affair that seems to be unraveling in Columbus, Ohio.
The Columbus Dispatch reports in an article datelined May 3, 2013 that, under police escort, the state auditor’s office entered numerous high schools in that community to serve dozens of warrants to seize large quantities of student records.
According to the news article, the auditor has already uncovered evidence that:
“Columbus school administrators ‘scrubbed’ low-performing students from the rolls to make schools and the district look better.”
That would inflate school averages on state tests, of course.
The next phase of this extensive audit is now focused on what seems to be massive alterations of student grades to boost high school graduation rates.
The newspaper reports that in 2010-11:
“School employees made more than 311,000 grade changes during that school year. The district, which is Ohio’s largest, has about 50,000 students.”
That averages out to over six grade changes per student in just one year! Wow!
Meanwhile, we know the Kentucky Department of Education instituted a forensics program to check for problems with our state testing. So far, there has been no announcement of whether our program is running clean or also has issues. Let’s hope Kentucky’s teachers have not bitten from the same apple that is apparently on the menu in Atlanta and Columbus.
While I don’t believe in trial by the press, it’s possible that Atlanta may soon be able to say, “Thank goodness for Columbus!”
Sometimes the truth IS scary.
A recent call to action by the Bluegrass Institute drew some fire because some believed that we did not tell the whole story about legislators who voted against HB 299. In fact, we were accused of fear mongering.
The truth is, Kentucky’s public pension crisis is worthy of fear as it is endangering the financial viability of our state.
The author of the critique had this to say:
Sure, the legislature is to blame for sweetening its own pension deals. But that’s not all legislators. It’s primarily leaders and those scheming the system to make a mountain of cash.
The Bluegrass revisionist history crew apparently doesn’t want the general public to know that many legislators have voted against sweetening their pensions. That bunch is also set on making sure the public doesn’t find out that each year for the last four years? The State Senate has passed legislation to stop these messes.
The Bluegrass Institute doesn’t bother to mention legislators like Senator Jimmy Higdon, who has stood firmly against this mess. Or that in 2010 he introduced legislation that would have gutted House Bill 299 – but the House refused to vote on it.
While it is true that some legislators voted against HB 299 in 2005 the following facts remain:
This list of all votes for/against 2005′s HB 299 was published in the Bluegrass Institute’s 2012 Future Shock report. See any names you recognize? Many of these folks are still in office. Notice how several state senators didn’t even do their job by failing even to cast a vote. [Read more...]
