"You can't really compare these directly, because they're not just slightly different tests, they're dramatically different tests," said Shael Polakow-Suransky, the city's chief academic officer. "It's going to be difficult to make close comparisons with old state exams."
Ah, but you'll still try and close schools based on these scores, yes?
I mean, there's no moratorium on school closures in place despite the difficulty in making comparisons between the old tests and the new tests, is there?
Which means Shael and his Tweedies want the public to see the test scores one way when it comes to the mayor and the central office staff and a completely different way when it comes to teachers and schools.
Gotta love the contradictions you have to swallow to be a true believer reformer.
Oh, no, the teachers will be shown no mercy.
ReplyDeleteWatch the Tweedies and their compliant, complicit media lackies eat up the education reformers that schools are bad, they must be shut, teachers are bad, they must be fired. The tabloids will just eat this up and demand that names be named, just as they did a couple of years ago. I predict that it will get ugly, very ugly.
The question is will parents and teachers exercise critical thinking as the Common Core Standards demand? We should recognize that there are deep pedagogical flaws in the standards that will impact upon children's educations as well as the freedom of teachers to teach in a way that lets teachers teach in accordance with their own subject area content. Give us back our old NYSED standards!
I've covered how the Standards represent Gates and other foundations' prerogatives and how he circumvented standard constitutional small r republican procedure in my post, "The Common Core and Gates' Education Commercialization Complex".
You may be right, but it would be a pretty difficult maneuver for Bloomberg to try and use these scores as proof positive for why tens of thousands of teachers need to be fired and hundreds more schools closed and not have somebody ask, "Okay, but haven't you been running the school system for the last 12 years? Isn't this your fault"
DeleteThen again, as you note, the compliant, complicit media may be too worried they'll have to work for Bloomberg (or Murdoch, Zuckerman, Bezos, et al.) someday to ever ask those questions.