I think the only people spouting that line are alarmists and extremists. Browsing the comments on this story—and having sat in on PTA forums, board meetings, and been an active participant in discussions about, around, and consequent of the CCSS and standardized exams in schools and colleges for the better part of the…

Yeah, works for papers, too. A good system is adaptable and scalable, right?

Student performance on these Common Core Standard Exams are not used to actively evaluate students; they are teacher-efficacy tools that measure how capable students are of using the skills they’re supposed to have learned.

If your child is in grades 3-8, the CCSS Exams should not be a part of their final evaluation. Ask about it.

When 50% of your annual professional review is based on your students’ performance on the standardized exams, you’d better believe there’s more than enough motivation (temptation?) for teachers to over-teach to the test. That’s the new law of the land in NY. 50%.

These tests have nothing to do with grade-passage or college acceptance. They’re not used to determine student placement, grade point average, or anything like that. The CCSS are used to determine teacher and school efficacy by “measuring” how well a student can apply the skills they’re supposed to have learned.

If there’s a problem with the tests or the method by which they are administered, let’s talk about that. But this growing notion that you should just opt your kids out of the tests without replacing them with some other form of measurement is ridiculous.

The specific battery of standardized tests at question in this article do not in any way affect student grades, evaluation, or placement. The Common Core Exams, as they stand, are used to determine teacher efficacy and “student growth” along the “spiral of increasing complexity.” The point of these exams is to…

Each of the questions on these tests costs thousands of dollars to “develop.” Think about that. And they change every year.

1. Boycotting the test does NOTHING but hurt your kid. I understand wanting to make a point, calling up your local gov’t and raising hell will get you further.

The problem isn’t that rote-learning is being tested: it’s that it’s the only component used in governmental assessment of student learning (which determines school ratings and teacher efficacy). If, as you say, creative thinking and association and other sorts of learning are equally important, then you should…

TL;DR: The Common Core State Standards (the tests in question re: the article) are skills-based, not content-based, so an exhaustive multiple-choice is inappropriate because it does not effectively analyze the skills capacity expected of students. The solution may be a better test—but not “standardized” as we…

They’re absolutely a crap idea. Who the hell judges something as complex as learning (or teaching!) by the capacity of an individual to answer a long, dreary, multiple-choice exam. The variability in test scores is known to vary in statistically significant ways depending on a variety of socieo/emotional variables—so…

Don’t even get me started, bro

My system is to read the introduction and first chapter, the last chapter, and then anything in the middle that interests me or that I’m unfamiliar with. I learned that in one of my graduate teacher courses, where the technical texts are almost never strictly written to your situation, so the best bet is to pick,…

I don’t know if you’re a teacher, but the standards are being raised in New York. The eighth-grade ELA test was estimated today as rating a second-year college level by the specialists in the building this morning. The standards are getting more and more strict, with less and less funding/time/support to actually…

Teacher here. Yes. Students should opt out. In fact, I think that everyone should opt out, in as large a number as can be realized, as a form of passive protest against recklessly-integrated, poorly-designed, over-concealed “measures” of teacher efficacy and student learning.

The school’s website lists a bevy of “email us!” encouragements—no school-level, administration, or even secretarial emails are available that I could find. However, he comes right up on a LinkedIn search! Maybe try to email him through there.

“...the principal, Patrick Taylor, told the honors student that if she were to show up in clothing meant only for men (always and forever) that faculty would “refuse to work the prom.”

“That shart shall not pass.”