Contact information for superintendents as well as UPK officers for all NYS school districts.
Valerie Strauss runs a quick analysis of the recent EdNext poll regarding support for Common Core. Guess what? It's down from last year - consistently across the board. Parents, teachers, republicans, democrats - support is dropping. Meanwhile, alternative education (homeschool and similar programs) is up.
Meanwhile, Peter Greene offers a deeper analysis from the perspective of the teaching profession, including counts of how many truly understand what CCSS really is. Greene correctly points out that democrats will be the number one group to educate, and that parents generally support their children's own teachers, even if they believe there is a problem in the profession as a whole.
http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2014/08/survey-shows-ccss-support-plummeting.html
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This is a shared post, written by Sandra M. Smith, and is not intended to criticize one position or another. If Common Core is defeated, it will be by people from both ends of the political spectrum. Ms. Smith would like to help you create the necessary bridge and make your points successfully with a Democratic, liberal, or progressive audience. And it always helps to know your audience!
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1. Don't open with the Federal take-over. Democrats trust the Federal government. They are not passionate about states' rights. (Also, Federal = Obama, so they will assume you only oppose CC because you hate Obama and tune you out.)
2. Focus on the Standards. Tell them about the cookie cutter approach. Kids won't be allowed to be different. There will be no excelling. Help for those with special needs will be greatly reduced.
3. Focus on psychological damage to young children due to the fact that they are incapable of abstract thought. There were no early educators or child development experts involved. Kids are made to feel dumb. They will hate school. Their self esteem will be destroyed. Curriculum is too hard (unnecessarily complicated while skipping learning rote skills they need for a foundation) for little ones. It's too dumbed down for the older grades. Pathways to good universities from public schools will be eliminated.
4. Focus on profits to be made by large corporations, in covert ways, off of children. There was big financial backing by Pearson and Gates. Now kids all need new textbooks and computers. Go figure! We could use our school money MUCH better than that. There is very little additional funding for the mandates, not nearly enough.
5. Teacher autonomy and creativity will be stifled. Too much emphasis will be put on even more testing, which steals away time from authentic learning. With teacher pay tied to test results, they will be forced to focus too much on these tests.
6. This will create a two-tiered education system, for those who can afford private school and those who can't.
7. These impossible tests set up schools to fail and then they are open to be taken over by for-profit charter schools, which are not publicly accountable and force parents to comply with their rules or kick them out.
8. Student data will be tracked and submitted to a national database. This was required for RTTT consideration. (Be careful here about sounding too wacky.) Children will be identified in grades 5-8 (right?) and steered toward the careers the computer adaptive tests and personality assessments and questionnaires have led them to.
9. Parental power is being stripped away. Parents used to have to approve of releasing their children's data. FERPA was amended by Executive Order in 2012 to allow children's data to be released to third party vendors without parents' knowledge or permission. Questionnaires are being given to children to find out what is going on at home. Kids are honest and trusting and overshare. This is not just an invasion of privacy for family, but all of the above will follow your child from preschool through age 20 (or beyond). It can impact future employment and university admission. Children's criminal records are sealed due to kids making mistakes, but any mistakes will follow these kids into adulthood, potentially forever. It is NOT hard to access the data. It's just a one-page form.
10. (Now you can say...) The states were tricked into signing up for Common Core when they applied for $4.35 billion in Race to the Top grants. CA got $0. This will cost us $1.6 billion to implement. 14 or more states want out and are fighting it. CA is late to the game, as other states have implemented faster than we have. NY is having extremely wide-spread dissent about CC because they are a couple of years ahead of us.
11. (Now you can say...) The Constitution says it is up to each state to control education. The Federal government has been trying to centrally control education for decades. It started in the early 90's with Bush and No Child Left Behind. Now it's Common Core, which goes into full effect next year. NCLB required 100% of kids be proficient by 2014, which seemed light years into the future. Now that it's here, the way is paved for another program since it's an impossible goal to meet. This has been done by BOTH parties. Big government teamed up with big money corporations to privatize education. They did it while no one was paying attention. Now kids are complaining and hating school and none of the work makes any sense, so parents are starting to look into it. It's going to be an uphill battle but we can beat it together. There are people working on both sides of the aisle to beat this. What does that tell you? It's big and it's important.
12. You may hear CA was 48th in the nation academically. That is by a warped measuring stick. California had some of the HIGHEST standards in the nation. (CC lowers our standards.) When our children scored a 60% on our standards, they were ranked behind kids who scored 70% on an extremely easy test in another state. Remember, states had different standards before this nationalized curriculum. Ranking from state to state was meaningless. Ranking the standards is more meaningful and ours were some of the highest in the nation. Even the Fordham institute said so, and they're in with Gates on the CC agenda.
13. Standardized tests do not measure success, innovation or intelligence. Why do students come from all over the world to attend our colleges? Why does the US hold the most patents of any country in the world? Why do we develop groundbreaking pharmaceuticals faster than other countries? Why do other countries copy virtually everything we do? Because we are awesome! This fear that we are not globally competitive has been fabricated.
14. No Agenda 21. Ever. No Communism. No Nazis. Period.
We need everyone on board. Assuming we all hold the same values can sometimes accidentally end a good conversation before it starts. I hope this helps.
NYS schools administering the PARCC field tests in the spring of 2014. document via NYstoptesting.com Opt Out. Boycott. Refuse. If your school is on the list contact your school board and administration.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/206494593/PARCC-Field-Test-NY-schools-2014
From the article: "Know the law: Which special education services are children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADD/ADHD) entitled to?"
This is a great starter for a parent or guardian looking to advocate for his/her child after a recent diagnosis. Get the facts.
http://www.additudemag.com/adhd/article/8946.html
As a helpful addendum, here is a list of NYS school districts, sorted by county, and including superintendent name, phone number, and email address. If you are not familiar with your school's superintendent, you can look them up here. You can also call to get a correct street address. Happy letter writing!
Common Core Fact Sheet, compiled by Sandra Stotsky. Dr Stotsky is one of the ELA experts who were asked to sign off on the Common Core standards when they were written. She refused to do so.
http://pioneerinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/Common-Core-Fact-Sheet_new.pdf
From the article: "It’s not just Louis C.K. and Stephen Colbert who are confused about the Common Core. Get the facts here."
Our take: This is a mostly-good and very logical, non-emotional review of the key elements of common core. There is at least one logical falsity, which we commented upon, but it represents a largely apolitical analysis, so it makes a good send for your friends of the opposite political persuasion.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/ed/2014/05/27/307755798/the-common-core-faq
One of the earliest rounds of New York business leaders trying to determine the best education for NY’s children, this appointed commission (chaired by Richard Parsons) met in 2012 and produced this report in 2013.
http://www.governor.ny.gov/assets/documents/EducationReformCommissionReport.pdf
Many of the current New York reforms being implemented by the Regents can be found in this report...