End justifies means in public system
Statewide testing aligned with Common Core begins this spring. The testing will be conducted even though the state admits it has no idea what constitutes a proficient score.
It has been several years since Common Core was adopted, and our educational “experts” still haven’t figured out what success looks like. The old benchmark, the Academic Performance Index (API) scores, are reportedly going to be suspended for a second year in a row — probably because all this Common Core nonsense would send those scores further in the tank.
Parents should know that federal officials are probably going to give California schools a pass on meeting the performance mandates required by No Child Left Behind. Government schools can’t even meet the watered-down standards they created in order to persuade you to believe that their socialistic educational experiments actually work.
There is an “old” assessment system to measure student performance called STAR — the Standardized Testing and Reporting system. Before STAR (1998) there was HSCE (1994-98), before that CLAS (1990-94), before that CAP, and I am sure I have missed a few others. All these testing systems must not have shown the progressives in a positive light, so the tests keep getting replaced. Now we have the CAASPP, the California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress.
Last year, the state “set aside” the CAASP test scores for accountability purposes. The state feared a large portion of students would fail to pass it. Again, my guess is their fear is based on all the Common Core experimentation going on in the classroom. The state is probably going to give government schools a pass on this test again in 2015-16.
It looks to me like the government school system is failing your children. It is hiding its failures by changing tests, evading accountability by not setting test standards, and setting aside test scores that would embarrass them.
I think the delay in setting standards for the Common Core testing is calculated. After the progressives see how your kids test on the new standards, they will set the passing level low enough to allow most of the students to “feel successful.” Then they will claim their latest educational experimentation is not a failure like the rest of them have been.
I find these practices to be purposefully deceptive, and therefore unethical.
Progressives don’t seem to have a problem with deceiving people they see as intellectual inferiors. They think they know what is best for everyone and will go to great lengths to impose their values on others. Their “end justifies the means” philosophy makes deception a perfectly acceptable tool to use against parents if it allows them to advance their progressive agenda in the government schools. Some examples: teaching kids they are descendants of animals and disallowing all evidence to the contrary, promoting the global warming hoax and disallowing all evidence to the contrary, and letting a boy use the girls’ bathroom if he is “gender confused.” Their most effective tool, and the tool that is at the heart of all the examples above, has been the hoax of moral neutrality that they actively peddle in a scheme to discard Judeo-Christian values.
Government schools are better at socialist/globalist indoctrination than they are at teaching basic academic skills. Decades of lower academic test scores and polls that show families are losing their children to humanistic cultural influences support this idea. The concepts of right and wrong have been replaced with immoderation and tolerance for everything except Judeo-Christian values.
A few good school board members or a few good teachers can’t fix a government school system that doesn’t believe it needs fixing. Parents might want to reconsider private education options.
J. Dyer is a Ramona resident.