Sunday, May 23, 2010

More on Federal Take Over of Education

http://www.educationnews.org/educationnewstoday/90895.html

Pearson, the largest educational publishing company in the world, has released its Common Core State Standards for Literacy and for Mathematics package. This basically amounts to a national curriculum. Will Pearson get the lucrative national test contract?

“Do You Believe Us Now?” by Donna Garner
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(includes this)
There is nothing in the text of the ARRA [Stimulus package], or in the portions of the two other statutes to which it points (the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and the America Competes Act), that authorizes, requires, or even suggests that states competing for funds would need to adopt common state standards, create more charter schools, evaluate teachers and principals based on gains in student achievement, emphasize the preparation of students for careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, or restructure the lowest 5 percent of their schools.

Yet the grant program the administration designed to implement the provisions of the ARRA, the U.S. Department of Education’s Race to the Top initiative, included each of these policy priorities, and states had no chance of winning unless their applications were built around them…

Based on the ARRA itself, I don’t think Congress intended to give Secretary Duncan the carte blanche he took…

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Pearson can't get anything right. They make more money making sure kids stay stupid.

Anonymous said...

Gates is in with Pearson and Arne Duncan.

Anonymous said...

I like the ednews website - good call - I think irritated voters are seeing through the deception - the tea bag party is a conservative liberal party about as close to living with fascism as I care to get. Within both parties, you have socialists at either end mass promoting the same ineffective agendas that can't be implemented.