Why I can’t ‘in good conscience’ leave my kids in public school

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Valerie Strauss:

Lynne Rigby and her husband Brad live outside of Orlando, Florida, with their five children who have attended a Seminole County public elementary school. Rigby, a former public school teacher and photographer, wrote a letter to state and local officials explaining why, with great sadness, she and her husband are pulling their children out of public schools. No longer, she says, can she accept the effect that high-stakes standardized testing and other school reform measures are having on her children. She posted the letter on her blog so that her friends could see it, and she has gotten a much bigger response than she expected.

The letter is addressed to Florida Gov. Rick Scott,  Seminole County Schools Superintendent Walt Griffin, state Sen. David Simmons,  , state Rep. Karen Castor Dentel, Bear Lake Elementary School Principal Alex Agosto, and Bear Lake Assistant Principal Virginia Brouillard.

There are some abbreviations in the letter that you may not recognize: VPK is voluntary prekindergarten; FCAT is the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Tests, the state-mandated exams that have been used for years for “accountability” purposes in school districts across the state but which are being replaced by a new test aligned to new Florida standards and being designed by the American Institutes for Research, or AIR. The new Florida Standards in math and Language Arts were approved earlier this year after the state pulled out of the Common Core State Standards initiative and devised their own, which actually look a great deal like the Core. EOCs are end-of-course exams. SCPS is Seminole County Public Schools.

Dear Governor Scott, Mr. Griffin, Mrs. Stewart, David Simmons, Karen Castor Dentel, Mr. Agosto and Mrs. Brouillard and Seminole County School Board Members,

I am a parent of five children in Seminole County Schools aged 4 (VPK) to 16. My husband and I are deeply embedded in this community. We are both successful products of Lake Brantley High School and the middle schools that fed into it. I graduated from the University of Georgia in 1995 and came back to Seminole to teach Kindergarten at Pinecrest and Wekiva; he is currently the pitching coach for the Lake Brantley varsity baseball team. Our ties run deep. We stayed here so our kids would be blessed with a similar educational experience and opportunities.

This year has been completely disheartening for us.  You see, I’ve been okay with FCAT…show what you know, I get it….some sort of accountability. That was until this year. My third grade son, Jackson, the fourth of my four boys has had mostly As, a scattering of Bs through his Bear Lake career, much like his brothers. However, he has had the Discovery Education tests added to his school year. I saw his score on DE in first grade and it was scary low, in the 20s. But he had 1s and his teacher said that she knows him and he was doing fine with nothing to worry about. Same thing in 2nd grade, though, knowing that FCAT was looming, I began to panic a bit.  We read out loud together each night through the summer, talked about the books as we read and I believed that that would pay off on the first DE test of 3rd grade because he was doing really well.  I was wrong. His first DE test was similar to others but now his teachers start panicking because their pay depends on it. He is sent to remedial LEAP and ultimately a math pullout group. All the while, he has mostly As and a few Bs.

Disconnect. That’s the word that plays over in my head. How can he do all his homework on his own, rarely asking a question, never, ever struggling with any topic and get such a low percentile on a test? Then, an epiphany. What is this test? What is the validity of this test? How does it relate to our curriculum? That’s something I’ve never considered. I’ve always walked the “company” line. I am looking at a print out of Jackson’s answers (B, A, A, C, D, etc) and the correct answers (C, D, A, C, B) and what does that tell me? Nothing. It tells me nothing. I can’t see the test to see what he’s done wrong, to see if the questions are worded well, to see why he’s doing poorly. He’s being pulled out of normal classes for remediation because of this DE test, but he has all As and Bs! He’s excelling from a curriculum standpoint, so I, as a teacher, don’t even know how to help him at home. We did FCAT practice tests at home, something I’ve never done with my older boys who had the same grades but no DE. Shouldn’t I, as a 40 year old mom with an education degree, whose current job is to write instructional lessons for adults, be able to take a test for 8 and 9 year olds in a matter of minutes without thought or “oh, wait, that’s not right?!” moments? Yes, I should, but that was not the case. If I can defend how two answers are correct on a question, then the test is flawed.

Jackson’s brothers had 4s and 5s on all their FCATs, perhaps a 3 thrown in here and there.  All of which I accepted without hesitation. FCAT was no big deal in our house. They’re smart boys, we are involved parents, they have no stress, their lives are good. But now I pause. Did Carson not make it into GEMS because of an inverse operation problem that my mother-in-law, the former LBHS Pre-Calculus teacher, said was flawed on the 3rd grade test? The problem that my husband, a Georgia Tech graduate, said that there had to be a typo because the right answer wasn’t there? On a THIRD grade problem? Suddenly I want to see my kids tests, see where they went wrong, see what they did right, but parents aren’t afforded that option and neither are teachers. If the test is truly a good indicator of student ability, then the parents and teachers should be able to see the actual test and the student work to help the students moving forward?

Fine. FCAT is over. It’s no longer an issue. But the “AIR” test is coming. What will that bring? Who knows? The teachers don’t, the administrators don’t, so the kids and parents surely don’t know.  Oh wait, the state of Utah knows because the state of Florida paid the state of Utah $5.5 million to field test the test. Who’s writing it? And just as important, who is grading it?  The educational grapevine says that 5th graders will have 14 hours of testing. Fourteen. That makes me cringe. If you told me that I had to take 14 hours of testing in a two week period, I’d shut down. And you want to do that to my 10/11 year old?  The mama bear in me starts to come out. That is not developmentally appropriate. Period. It’s no different than expecting and demanding all children to walk at 10 months; some might be able to do it, but a lot, if not most, will not have the developmental skills to do so successfully.  The MCAT is approximately five hours and ten minutes to get into medical school. And the state of Florida thinks it’s okay to subject our small children to fourteen hours stressful and strenuous testing? Free response sounds great when you say it fast, but that means that someone or something has to grade that test.  A teacher, paid a minimal amount, and a computer will be grading the free response test. If there’s a discrepancy, the computer grade takes precedent. Not my child’s teacher who knows him and sees him everyday, but a non-human that is looking for scripted answers?

This brings us to the elephant in the room. Common Core or The Florida Standards which are aligned to Common Core. The materials remain the same. Jackson has the same text books as his cousin in California. I’ve done my research, I’m an over-researcher by nature. And again, it all sounds great when you say it fast. It is nice that kids can move on a Friday from New Jersey and go to school in California the following Monday and pick up right where they left off.  It sounds awesome when you say that kids are on the same page and we’ll be developing critical thinkers; they will rise to the challenge of more difficult standards.  And every kid will be career and college ready at the end of high school and all on the same page? SIGN ME UP.

Sure. Walk that political line. It’s rhetoric. It sounds fantastic when you gloss over it like that. But let’s really look at our implementation of Common Core. I’ve seen it first hand with my third grader this year and to a lesser extent with my older kids.  Let’s take Jackson, his first and second grade lessons were based on the older curriculum.  This year a new curriculum is thrown in, teach it with “fidelity” Seminole County tells them – that means that they used only the Pearson materials (you know, the Pearson that has spent nearly $4.4 million in lobbying in recent years) and only Pearson materials, for the first 12 weeks of the school year.  And get this, then we’ll use the FCAT 2.0 which is aligned with the former standards to decide if this group of third graders is worthy of fourth grade placement.

Jackson had a passage on a weekly comprehension and vocabulary test that was horribly written. The material was about professional athletes, which is relevant to him since his dad played Major League Baseball. The syntax, however, was a disaster. I typed the whole thing into a grade and reading level decoder and it averaged at 10th grade with all its indicators. For my 8 year old. In fact, I gave it to my “gifted” 10th grader to read and he looked at it for a minute and tossed it aside because he didn’t want to have to really think for the 3rd grade work. To the other extreme, Jackson then has “feel” and other long e spelling words in late winter/early spring, along with vocabulary like “sports” and “basketball” which is in stark contrast to the 10th grade passage about professional sports in October! There is no rhyme or reason to the materials and curriculum. It’s a joke, a joke being played on our kids. On MY KID, I’m not cool with that.

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Remember the movie, Blade Runner?
The replica police had sets of questions to determine if someone was a replicant or not.
This Common Core and all the other new testings seem more designed to test if the student will toe the PC line more than be intelligent.
I think the parents are correct when they note that there might be two answers that were justifiable.
BUT, only one of those two would be PC.
So, the students are being corralled through the chute into a whole new style of reaching conclusions.
Santana was right: those who refuse to study history are doomed to repeat mistakes of history.
These ”tests” are insuring we have new adults with no idea how to even recognize mistakes of history.

The Government is involved and well, THAT can never ever, ever, ever be good….

Common Core is eradicating Common Sense…things that ‘make sense’ and the obvious.

When parents around the country, those who thankfully are paying close attention to their children’s education…have complained in opposition to the School Boards about “Common Core” being implemented in their schools and school districts….some of those same Boards of Education choose to become sneaky and to appear to be appeasing to those complaining parents… are still implementing the same Common Core program/testing but under a ‘different name’ …. parents are in a fight for their kids education with sneaky stuff like this going on…Governing bodies and our Government surely thinks everyone is Stupid or they are trying very very very hard to MAKE them and our Children that way…

We need a strong leader in our Government to once and for all eradicate the U.S. Department of Education from our Federal Government and put it back to the States.
The liberal indoctrination of our children is killing this country.

I have viewed some of the tests that are given to classes under “Common Core” have talked with parents as well.

One thing I continually hear from talking to parents, and what I read about is that their children (before Common Core implementation) were getting A’s and B’s and actually doing very well in all subjects.

Now I hear the same kids are getting D’s and F’s in the same subjects? That they are basically being indoctrinated re-taught to think about the same problems (math for instance) in a very ’round about’ way as opposed to the ‘common sense’ way. And, that common sense answers are no longer the ‘right’ answer to problems. But, they must answer how “Common Core” dictates the answer ‘should be’ no wiggle room..

I do not envy the parents and I do feel they have every right to be concerned about Common Core…Common Core sounds like some evil Government experiment on thought control and our kids are the ‘subjects’.

If ‘Common Core’ is suppose to put every child on the ‘same level’ ….and, the average to smart children are no longer able to answer/figure out simple questions in math or math problems in a manner that is common (common sense/analytical) to get the correct (or at one time correct answer)….

….how does this help a child who is below average?? Especially if an already above average child cannot come to the conclusion that ‘Common Core’ ‘dictates’?