As parents of gifted kids realize the one-size-fits-all approach of common core may be harming their children's education, others are also becoming aware that common core is sub-optimal, and proposing different directions.

Some stories in the news:

1. Growing number of parents "opt out" of tests that they say damage their kids
Cleveland dot com
February 15, 2015
Patrick O'Donnell, The Plain Dealer

2. Jindahl rails against common core
CNN
February 05, 2015
Jeremy Diamond
Jindahl has offered several ideas for education reform:
Jindahl emphasizes teacher tenure, school choice in sweeping education reform
The Daily Signal
February 09, 2015
Ken McIntyre

3. Award winning teacher Stacie Starr quits, cites common core as reason.
Elyria High's Stacie Starr announces resignation
The Chronicle-Telegram
February 10, 2015
Lisa Roberson

Thanks for posting. I've been keeping up with the pros and cons and how it's affecting this year's education for my DS.

Flip-flop. Jindal was for it before he was against it.

Indeed. Some may say that based on what information was available at the time, I was once for it, as well. Live and learn... ?

Standardized testing is now underway.

Common Core Testing Trouble: Computer problems, student protests more
Valerie Strauss
Washington Post
March 2, 2015

I don't see how the testing issues are anything but loosely related to Common Core. I'm not aware that anywhere in the CCSS it says that students must be evaluated with these tests; though having uniform standards makes it easier to engage in uniform testing, it is neither required, nor a new issue. The testing has been going on since NCLB.

Moreoever, I don't think the CCSS require any particular impact on gifted education. They simply show what children should have learned BY the end of a grade; not what they must learn IN that grade. This situation is no different then before the CCSS, when most states already had their own standards but nobody ever heard about them on the news. Districts having chosen to claim the CCSS requires them to squelch gifted education on account of the CCSS are either acting in ignorance or because they have a new excuse to do what they wanted to do anyway.

The CCSS is absolutely tied to testing. It's a talking point to say that the two are separate. Reformers are trying to distance themselves from PARCC because the test is so flawed and the over testing is causing national protests.

The testing has become ridiculously burdensome (and outrageously expensive). Here is an example of why it is a problem:
Right now high school kids are enrolled in AP classes. These classes are accelerated and move quickly. The AP exams are in April. The testing will be going on in March and April. The teachers won't be able to instruct the students during testing so the students have to teach themselves at home in order to be prepared for the AP exams. They also have other homework and extracurriculars.

The CCSS are now more involved (and require different methodology) so teachers take longer to meet the minimum standards. This slows the pace not just day to day but year to year. Parents have to be really savy to know how to work the system to keep their children accelerated. It can be done, but it's exhausting. This is why it hurts bright students. It's definitely a top down approach to close the achievement gap.

Yes, the two are separate. The standards were developed as benchmarks saying, "Here's what a group of experts, aided by dozens of people and thousands of comments, agree on what kids should know BY THE END of a certain grade."

The tests are made by Big Ed companies trying to increase their profits, and they exist because some non-experts decided that bubble test are America's solution to a poor education system. The same companies write bad textbooks that were one inspiration for the Common Core.

The people who led the Common Core effort were well aware of the shortcomings of the textbooks and the fact that teacher education is flawed.

The standards are good. They're what we need. But they've been politicized by a number of different special interest groups and undermined by a decision to let Pearson et al. write bad tests.

The standards are no more tied to testing than geometry or US History is tied to testing.

Personally, I'm incredibly frustrated that Americans are so easily swayed by the lies and distortions.

Regarding textbooks:
The common core official website (corestandards.org) indicates that textbook developers have been provided with "Publisher's Criteria" for English Language Arts and Literacy, and also for Math.

Regarding standardized testing:
The common core official website states -
and Statements such as these, along with the statements about more students achieving "college and career readiness" under common core seem to indicate:
1) the developers of the common core standards anticipated development of common-core specific standardized testing,
2) the developers of the common core standards endorse the use of these standards-based assessments to measure progress in achieving the common core standards throughout the school year.

Regarding gifted kids:
The common core official website directs interested parties to the website commoncoreworks.org for additional information. This website contains "Parent Roadmaps" containing detailed, grade-specific expectations and progressions for the common core ELA & math. Parents could utilize these documents to compare their gifted child's demonstrated skills with the grade-specific expectations.

Regarding assessment, they are absolutely separate things. I agree that PARCC testing seems to have some serious flaws, and that a computerized testing system brings up a lot of technical and practical concerns. But PARCC testing is a choice made by certain states. NY common core testing, while certainly not perfect, is not online or computerized (at least not in our district), does not use only multiple choice (indeed, there is a lot of writing required) and is not done here for the high school courses (read- those with AP exams) until June. There are problems with that timeline, as well, but not the time conflicts pointed out by those protesting the PARCC tests.

When the common core official website indicates that common core standards were reviewed and found to be a solid basis for development of standards-based assessments, in what way do you find the standardized testing to be unrelated to common core standards? Where do you get your information from?

Do you find evidence in the text of the official common core website which indicates that...
1) the creation of standards-based assessments was not anticipated and planned for when common core standards were developed?
2) the creation of standards-based assessments is beyond the intended uses/purposes of the common core standards?
3) the common core standards developers decry the administration of standards-based assessments for students?

By contrast, this post upthread shows evidence from the text that...
1) standards-based assessments were anticipated by the developers of common core standards,
2) the standards were found to be a solid basis for developing the standards-based assessments,
3) the availability and use of standards-based assessments as a measuring tool is a benefit.

Without the development of the common core standards, the vast standards-based assessments would not exist. The development of the common core standards drove the development of the standards-based assessment tools; they are not unrelated.

The tests aren't tied to the Common Core because it's possible to throw out the tests without throwing out the standards.

But the CC is politicized, which means that logical arguments are irrelevant.

So we agree on opting out of the standardized testing!

Louisiana did a pilot PARCC test with about 50,000 students last year. No major technical glitches. Nearly 80% of students participating preferred the PARCC to the paper test it replaces (LEAP).

I think this statement made the point about the PARCC opt-out movement quite eloquently:


I recommend the entire editorial (the impacts on students with disabilities might be of special interest to some parents here), particularly since it's coming from a right-leaning state, whose governor has just anointed himself the champion of the anti-CC movement... and he's getting almost no support from his own state, having already been resoundingly rejected by his own education department and the right-dominated legislature.

So, he's taking his argument to the people, asking parents to opt out. So far, the people are rejecting that call, too:

My son is in a Title 1 school and what we find is that the teachers are forced to spend so much time bringing the kids up to the reading/writing/math standards (for kindergarten!) that they simply don't have the time or energy to differentiate for the gifted kids.

We've also run into the attitude that "DS has already met the standard, so he's fine." This attitude does not serve the gifted kids well. When the focus of a school is (or has to be) on achieving certain standards--as opposed to fostering the intellectual growth of all students--then I would guess that gifted students are likely to suffer the consequences.

Now anecdotes are not data, and common core may not say anything specifically about gifted education, but school resources tend to be finite over the short term. When a school is forced to divert resources towards achieving a new goal, something will likely have to be cut back. And we seem to be seeing firsthand some effects of common core in a resource-limited school.

(That doesn't mean the cutback is the fault of Common Core, but it does mean that somewhere, someone failed to develop an implementation plan that ensured the needs of all students would continue to be met.)

Right, but the part you're missing is that standards already existed before the common core. EVERY STATE already HAD standards. And most (maybe all) of them already had standardized tests supposedly based on their standards. There's nothing new about having standards or tests based on them. The only new thing here is that most states are now using the same standards instead of making up their own, and using the same tests instead of making up their own. ALL this stuff already existed before the Common Core hit the news. You already had "one size fits all" standards, except in some states they were low standards, and in some states they were high standards, and in every state they had different names and different tests. The common core standards aren't the problem.

If you throw out common core, then what do you have? "[Your State Name Here] State Standards" instead. If you google that phrase, you'll be able to find the standards your state was previously using, back before politicians decided to start making politics about them.

If you throw out the common core, you have 50 different sets of standards instead of 1 shared set. You have companies publishing 50 different sets of curriculum. You have 50 different standardized tests with 50 different names. You have some states that are winners with good standards, and some that are losers with poor standards. But standards and standard-based tests won't cease to exist. That just won't happen. It wasn't how things worked before the common core hit the news, and it isn't what will happen if politicians playing politics destroy it.

Many have said that the frequency and duration of standardized testing has increased, teaching to the test has increased. This becomes a kind of censorship as it fosters a belief that if it's not on the test students don't need to know it.

I'd argue that this has more to do with the politics around teacher evaluations than common core standards. Many states have decided that they "need" to use standardized test results to evaluate schools and individual teachers, and have linked money and job security of teachers to the results of the tests. Politicians want to reduce student learning to neat little numbers, and standardized tests make that easy. Our state (Washington) is in trouble with the feds this year for NOT trying teacher evaluations to standardized testing. (
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/24/washington-no-child-left-_n_5207245.html)

National standards make the proliferation of national standardized tests easy.

In what way are multi-state standardized tests worse than state-specific standardized tests?

A few of the reasons why many find the nationalized standardized tests more objectionable than the earlier hodge-podge of individual State tests have been recently mentioned in this thread:
1) Many have said that the frequency and duration of standardized testing has increased, teaching to the test has increased. This becomes a kind of censorship as it fosters a belief that if it's not on the test students don't need to know it.
2)... reduce student learning to neat little numbers, and standardized tests make that easy.
3) use for teacher evaluations
4) involvement of "the feds" (Education is a State issue, not a Federal issue.)

A different form of the question you posed might be:
In what way are nationalized standardized tests more valuable than state-specific standardized tests? A clarifying question might be - "More valuable to whom?"

Another form of the question you posed might be:
What makes nationalized standardized tests worth all the money being spent on them?

Yet another form of the question might be:
From the perspective of student learning, does a change in assessments yield the greatest return on investment when subject to cost/benefit analysis?

Worded another way:
Are there other educational programs or other educational reforms which would yield greater benefits, for this amount of investment?
For example, on many forums, parents discuss the lack of appropriate gifted programming, and in doing so do not seem to propose a change in standardized tests as any part of a solution.

Which is another way of asking:
What specific educational problem is nationalized standardized testing addressing/fixing?

More about standardized testing in this article -

Why reports of progress on No Child Left Behind rewrite may not be a good sign
March 12, 2015
Valerie Strauss
Washington Post

What do you see?
1) Less local control?
2) Continued federal encroachment into education? (Powers over education not granted to the federal government by the constitution, therefore reserved to the States or to individuals themselves.)

How might this impact gifted students?

Orwellian Nightmare Unleashed on Schoolkids

Has anyone seen this article?

I'm wondering if the Apps mentioned will be something that will be beneficial in identifying kids who hide their abilities.

(I'm especially curious about (former) Gov. Kitzhaber's task force because we are in Oregon and don't have the greatest services for gifted!)

Okay, this last one is kind of funny to me, actually, as the first app listed in the article is something I've actually used, in an earlier version. It's not something you can automatically set up to observe all the students. You need an actual human being to operate it, and you can only watch one kid at a time (and a reference child). It's just a convenience tool. I do exactly the same thing using a stopwatch and a pencil and paper. Plus my brain, for calculating percentage of time on-task/off-task, etc.

Most of these apps are behavioral in nature, and intended for use with individual children who have already been referred for some kind of behavioral or social skills challenge. It's highly unlikely that anyone is using them broadly, or without some level of parental consent, as they are way too labor-intensive to implement on random children.

In terms of identifying children who hide their abilities, adaptive software probably has a better chance of doing that. E.g., Scholastics SRI reading comprehension, properly used NWEA MAP (although we've extensively discussed some of their limitations elsewhere), and the like.

Thanks for that insight, aeh. I thought the article sounded alarmist, but did wonder about the extent of app use and whether or not qualified professionals would be called to analyze any data collected on a child. I certainly would not want a teacher doing an "armchair" analysis on my kid that would result in data sent out without my permission.

Pearson monitoring social media for security breaches during PARCC testing
Valerie Strauss
March 14, 2015
Washington Post

It seems that one day after school, a student posted a tweet which referenced a test item... this was picked up by Pearson monitoring social media and referred to the state's Department of Education.

What agreements are proactively in place to alert students not to reference test items when they talk about their day?

Last year, my child had to sign a strictly worded agreement not to talk about test items. Let's emphasize the word CHILD here. She was 10.

I don't like the secrecy here. The testing is so silly anyway. My kid has had 8 standardized tests so far this year. What's the point? Not a single thing has changed based on testing.

Something has changed: data has been gathered and stored. This data may have various uses going forward. Several planed uses have already been announced, but once the data is amassed, it may be used in any number of unforeseen ways as well.

Collected performance data from standardized tests may be used to evaluate teachers. The data may be given or sold to various researchers. It may be used to limit opportunities in high-performing areas in order to achieve uniform outcomes desired by common core. The data may be used against your child in future attempts at advanced education and/or career choices and/or specific jobs.

A general sketch of data collection requirements may be seen at the links in this old post.

Families have reported difficulty in accessing and correcting/amending their children's data. Inability of parents to see and/or correct the data stored on their children has been covered in several news stories, including
1) http://www.foxnews.com/us/2014/05/13/price-for-nevada-dad-to-see-state-school-files-on-children-10g/
2) http://nevadajournal.com/2014/04/24/dad-told-seeing-states-records-his-kids-will-cost-him-10-grand/.

I think it would be great if lots of standardized test scores were available to employers when job applicants gave them permission. College largely serves to certify a certain level of IQ and academic achievement. If this could be done with standardized tests, young people could save tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars and start their careers after high school.

Some may say this presumes the higher scores would be deemed more desirable. Meanwhile powers-that-be may tend to seek and employ those who would be willing followers and not heir apparent to their own leadership position.

Some may say that it would be important for the job applicant to first be aware of the scores themselves, and have a degree of confidence that the data is accurate.

Congratulations to me. I have been offered a position as a professional scorer by Pearson
The Washington Post
April 14, 2015
By Valerie Strauss

Who is scoring the PARCC exams? This article shares the hiring experience of one applicant.