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Category Archives: Issues in education (public & home)

Multiple choice testing and dual enrollment can be education fake-outs

An article yesterday in The Chronicle of Higher Education is a warning to not take for granted that children are actually learning in dual-enrollment programs, and especially not when multiple choice tests are the primary measure of student comprehension.

. . . The student explained that my class is not compatible with her “learning method.” She said that she prefers “that multiplying method, you know, where there are letters, A, B, C.”

I said, “You mean, multiple choice?”

“Yes, that’s the one,” she said. “That’s the method where I learn best. I’m good at figuring out which letters aren’t the right ones.”

Parents may feel confident that their children are receiving a top-notch education if they are participating in a dual-enrollment program. And if children have learned to game standardized testing, their scores might not reflect that their education experience is woefully inadequate.

The apparent efficiency of multiple choice tests is deceptive. There is no actual demonstration of comprehension or the ability to apply the concepts covered in class. The dependence on standardized testing as a measure of student progress is troubling for a number of reasons. Teachers need to use other methods to accurately assess comprehension, and parents must get involved if necessary changes are going to be made.

Other methods may be more time consuming or expensive, but if the goal of education is that students learn and are also able to display understanding and acquired skills, then our educational institution’s actions should reflect that.

The apparent efficiency of dual enrollment can also be deceptive if the classes are not actually college level. In Texas, community colleges can “certify high-school teachers to be community-college teachers and then anoint their classes with college credit. This solves problems with high-school budgets and the high school/college transition. College is now high school.”

It is now, and ever shall be, the responsibility of parents and students to constantly evaluate the quality of education they are receiving. Schools and colleges are often preoccupied with untangling red tape and jumping through federal hoops, so it is nearly inevitable that students will be the ones who suffer from educational neglect.

One of the most important rules learned in Geometry is to never assume anything based on how it looks or what we are lead to believe. This is especially true about education, both high school and college. Don’t be afraid to ask questions and compare materials, or find others ways to asses your child’s comprehension to get the most of your education dollars and ensure the student’s future success.

Got kids? File your yearly report.

30 May

The post title reads: “HSLDA Jubilant That Iowa Homeschool Parents Won’t Be Required to Teach Their Kids”.

Right. Because that was the goal- the freedom of homeschoolers to not actually homeschool.

If we are going to go there, then to be fair we should look at every facet of parenting. After all, parents who care about their children shouldn’t be concerned about a little red tape, and they should understand how necessary government oversight is to ensure that every child is safe and well and educated. Even one instance of parental neglect in any area is one too many, and government has the power to protect every child from ignorance, hunger, violence, and let’s face it- government knows what is best for each individual child.

Thus, all parents should report regularly to their family physician to prove that they are caring for their children properly. Menu plans and exercise schedules should be filed each year, and a yearly examination should be mandatory. These reports will be filed with the state. They will also be public record, by the way.

What’s that you say? Privacy rights? What are you trying to hide?!?

Children should be evaluated by therapists as well, because their emotional well-being is just as important as their physical health. Or do you not think children’s mental health is important?

Families live in apartments, condos, and houses, even RVs- so these dwelling places must also be inspected for safety, and should meet federal standards of a ‘nurturing environment’.

No one who really cares about kids should protest these measures. Anyone who does obviously wants parents to not be required to feed, clothe, educate, or otherwise care for their children. Without state oversight, parents can feed their kids anything- Fruit Loops, Twinkies, Cheetos. . . Kids will be sitting in front of televisions getting fat, and parents will be out partying until all hours without any shred of concern that their kids are safe, healthy, or getting enough sleep.

This makes home education a really bad idea. Parents teaching their own kids? Are you serious? They might want their kids to be religious! Or follow in some other heinous family tradition like medicine or law enforcement! They might celebrate Thanksgiving- which we all know is a holiday dedicated to the eating of helpless animals in celebration of mass genocide. It’s a sham! It’s a sham with yams! It’s a yam sham! (quote from BTVS)

This all makes sense because we know for a fact that abuse never, EVER happens in public or private schools. These are sacred institutions dedicated to the care and nurturing of other people’s children. Teachers are all qualified (we know this because they are certified by the state) and they know exactly what each child needs. They have so much more invested than parents, and would not be involved in covering up child sexual molestation. They also encourage children to think for themselves and do not promote any particular ideology. They have proven to be 100% effective in producing well-educated and responsible citizens. The playing field is perfectly level, and no child is ever left behind.

Come to think of it, why not have parents meet standards for certification and receive a license to bear children? That way we can keep imbeciles from reproducing, and we can guarantee that every child will be safe and loved and educated. There will nothing but love and daisies and puppies for everyone!

And now we will return to our regularly scheduled sanity. Thank you.

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Posted by Susan Raber on May 30, 2013 in Issues in education (public & home), Thinking skills

Tags: current-events, government regulation, homeschool laws, homeschooling, public education

Carnival of Homeschooling at the NerdFamily Blog

15 May

Pay a visit to a pro-nerd family of pro-family nerds at the NerdFamily Blog, and check out all the posts about homeschooling the news, as well as the nuts-and-bolts of home education.

If you are considering homeschooling, or getting ready to plan next year, a homeschool carnival is a great way to explore a wide variety of homeschool related subjects, as well as the tremendous diversity of homeschool families.

The Carnival of Homeschooling is a weekly homeschooling blog carnival, an opportunity to learn from and be encouraged by fellow homeschoolers. Would you like to participate in the Carnival? Check out the submission instruction page at Why Homeschool.

Common Core Standards: Public Education’s Vampire

17 Apr

We homeschoolers may occasionally congratulate ourselves that we don’t have to jump through the same hoops as our public school counterparts, but with Common Core, that independence could go away with the flick of a politician’s pen.

“So what?” you might think. “Common Core is just an outline of what-kids-need-to-know-when, and there’s nothing new about that.”

Newsflash- the Common Core is not just about general standards, but embedded pedagogy, which is fancy-schmancy talk for the fact that these standards are quite often specific to content, method, and timing.

For instance, at Diary of a Public School Teacher, the author describes a personal epiphany at a meeting about how to implement Common Core Standards-

“. . .what jolted me out of my state of emotional apathy was when the presenter began showing, and reading, to us the slide on what type of writing we are expected to cover in certain grades. Our presenter said, ” If you notice, it’s only 20% Narrative in the 5th grade. That’s because in the real world, in a college and career ready world, students write using argumentative and informational essays.”

What grade level was that? Sounds like a course of study for a high school student, right?

No- this standard is for 5th grade students.

This standard, among others, is 100% Guaranteed to Suck the Life Out of Learning. Also includes a warranty against the utilization of the expertise and creativity of teachers, possibly resulting in an exodus of talent from our schools, and discouraging potential teachers from following this career path.

The specificity of the above writing guideline neglects children who are better served by developing their writing skills at this stage of learning by using narrative and creative writing formats. It also completely ignores, as the blog author Lisa Mims points out, that some folks actually make a nice living in careers based on their skills in narrative writing.

And still you are wondering what this has to do with homeschooling.

I believe:

We are all stakeholders in public education. We pay taxes to support it, so we should take interest in what is happening.
The future of our country also rests on the shoulders of upcoming generations, so we have a vested interest in making sure that all children have the opportunity to receive an adequate education.
Laws and standards regarding education will eventually trickle down to homeschoolers. The right to homeschool without interference was hard won, but vigilance is the price of freedom.

If you want to know what to do about this, here’s my suggestion:

Call, write, or email your state senators and ask them to end federal funding Common Core Standards. Tell them that the federal government should not use taxpayer dollars to bribe and extort states into adopting national standards and curriculum. Control over our education system should be returned to local schools, teachers, and parents.

Senator Grassley (R-Iowa) has written a letter to the Senate Appropriations Committee for his fellow Senators to sign- encourage them to join with Senator Grassley in fighting the wholesale adoption of Common Core.

Visit this page to find the contact information for your senators.

Common Core Standards, in my words

27 Mar

I think it is fair to say that many who are talking about the Common Core Standards haven’t actually read them. As with most things published by government entities, the Common Core Standards are a pile of jargon, guaranteed to induce drowsiness if not an actual coma. I can say this because I have actually read them. ALL of them.

Don’t try this at home without coffee and chocolate.

Why create Common Core Standards? The concern is that kids across the country are learning different things at different times. We can’t have that. Children must be smooshed into cookie cutter clones of mediocrity. There will be NO individuality allowed, no room to grow and develop at a natural, healthy pace. We obviously can’t trust teachers to do their jobs without micromanaging their classrooms, and we certainly can’t trust parents. Parents, even those who graduated from a government school, can’t possibly know what it takes to teach a child basic skills and to function in society. Plus, if we let parents raise their children, kids might turn out differently. Again, this is A Big No-No.

Just wait a second – I get it. We want every child to have the same opportunities. It seems to make sense that every school in the country would have the same course of study and the same curriculum. Families move from one district to another, and from one state to another. When this happens, a common standard would allow kids to move more seamlessly from school to school. Standardized tests would have more meaning because we’ve standardized the material, the teacher, the classroom, and the students. We’re just being practical, right? To compete globally, it makes sense that we don’t have 50 different sets of standards for the students in our country.

However, in a society that often claims to value individuality, diversity, and sings “You Are So Beautiful to Me” and “You are Perfect” at the top of our lungs, we sure are spending a lot of time and money-making sure that no one is unique, and we are doing it in the name of ‘unity’ and ‘equity’. No wonder kids are confused.

Common Core Standards currently include new guidelines for Mathematics and Language Arts. This begs the question – What was so different about what each state was teaching their students that we need to spend billions of dollars rewriting standards and curricula? Were there classrooms where kids were learning 2+2=5? That it’s ok to end a sentence with a preposition?

The lions, the tigers, the bears. Oh my.

So. . . what are the Common Core Standards? Simply put, they are to serve as clear-cut goals for every classroom in America to follow so that students are ready to enter college after graduation or get a job.

Uhmmm. . . what have schools been doing for the last 100 years? Thumb wrestling?

The Common Core Standards are a masterful statement of the obvious. First grade Language Arts standards for reading literature include such priceless gems as:

Ask and answer questions about key details in a text.
Retell stories, including key details, and demonstrate understanding of their central message or lesson.
Describe characters, settings, and major events in a story, using key details.

WOW! Why hadn’t we thought of that before? It’s AMAZING!

I know, I know- I’m typing with my sarcasm hand again.

Who created these standards? Basically, the National Governors Association and Council of Chief State School Officers. Why are they the best people to create and spearhead this effort? Your guess is as good as mine. I’m still trying to figure out why Lay’s has a Chicken and Waffle Potato Chip. What I do know is that these groups have no legislative power or special qualifications for writing national educational standards. They are Washington D.C. based trade associations. I suspect it is a ploy in order to be able to say that these aren’t federal standards.

“Can you say plausible deniability, boys and girls?”

The NGA and CCAAO also received the cooperation of The National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, and the National Council of Teachers of English.

And we are supposed to believe that the federal government was not involved in designing the CCS? I haven’t mentioned yet that The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has poured millions into Achieve and the Common Core. This sounds very philanthropic. But if you look at the Common Core closely, and the technology that will be needed to administer it, Microsoft and other ‘donating’ businesses will more than make their money back. It’s an investment all right, but one that will pay off for the Gates, not for our nation’s students.

We are told that each state is individually signing on for this, with the federal government simply offering incentives to those states who cooperate, such as NCLB waivers and Race to the Top funds. So . . they are just standing back and handing out lollipops to all the good little states who comply, while withholding federal support from schools who don’t. This way the federal government can claim that they are not mandating standards.

All these funds are taxpayer dollars, by the way, that leave our hands, our school districts, and our states, and flow into the federal government’s coffers to then be given to those who bend over to polish the Obama Administration’s shoes. Nice work if you can get it, eh?

What you need to know is that many states signed on before they had even seen the Common Core Standards. Some essential components of the standards, such as national testing, have still not been completed. Why are states adopting an expensive overhaul of the education system when they have not even examined what they are buying? Did I mention that they are using taxpayer dollars for all this?

How are the Common Core Standards different from current and previous standards? They are basically the same, or lower than current standards. They claim to have used the “highest state standards” in the U.S., as well as being influenced by the standards of other “high performing countries around the world”.

I think the technical term I’m looking for here is “hogwash”.

When we use the term ‘standards’, we think we are talking about general concepts connected to a timeline. We assume schools and teachers will have flexibility in how they utilize the Common Core Standards, and that they can still choose their own curriculum and resources for their classes. However, once adopted, teachers and schools are not allowed to change any standard, or add more than a small amount of material to the standards. The Common Core Standards are owned and copyrighted by the National Governors Association and Council of Chief State School Officers. Those who write the rules run the show, and the NGA and CCSSO will now be in charge of our children’s education.

Don’t forget that textbook publishing is a billion dollar industry, and the CCS will drive publishers to create new nationally accepted textbooks which schools will then be coerced into buying. With taxpayer dollars.

What does all this mean to us as parents?

It means that Common Core Standards is just another bad idea in the long, sad history of bad ideas. It isn’t the magic bullet, the genie’s lamp, or your fairy godmother. It is an experiment, with our nation’s children as guinea pigs. It is going to cost billions in taxpayer funds to implement, and those with the most control will NOT be the local school board or the state in which you live. A testing system is still in the process of being created, and will require schools to invest in computers, technicians, and regular upgrades (say, who owns Microsoft again?). A national database with your child’s personal information on it will be available to anyone who claims to have an ‘educational’ interest, because this is a really big pie with many sticky fingers in it.

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