Sandra Stotsky: Don't Let Yourself Be Bullied By State Education Officials

Jessica Bakeman at Capital NY:

ALBANY—A former Massachusetts state education official who has emerged as a national critic of the Common Core standards told parent-lobbyists at the Capitol on Tuesday that they should fight for their rights and empower their older children as activists.

Sandra Stotsky, who helped developed Massachusetts' academic standards when she served as association commissioner of education in that state, traveled to Albany as part of a national tour to state capitols to denounce the Common Core. She spoke at a lobby day for parents who are pushing lawmakers to abandon the standards.

“Parents have the right to do what they feel is best for their children, and they have been bullied by state officials,” Stotsky said to the parents, who wore T-shirts declaring themselves as “Common Core warriors.”

“Parents have the right to keep their kids home when they're sick,” continued Stotsky, who is a professor at the University of Arkansas. “And they can simply keep them home on days when there are state-sponsored tests.”

Stotsky also attacked the Common Core:


She also encouraged the parents to engage their children in the fight against the Common Core.

“You need to start now recruiting your own secondary-level kids, so they understand how the Common Core standards are going to cheat them out of the education they should be having, which they may be having already in their communities, but which will gradually disappear in the next few years,” Stotsky said. “Unless there are changes made in the high school curriculum in both English and math, your children … are going to be the victims of Common Core. That's the experimentation that needs to stop.”

The harm that is being done to children by the educrats and the wealthy funders that back them must be stopped.

The Endless Testing regime that forces children to engage in two forms of schooling - test prep and test-taking - must stop.

The Common Core agenda that strips children of the joy of learning and turn school into soul-sapping drudgery must stop.

The Danielson rubric that forces teachers to teach one way or be declared "ineffective" must be discarded as an evaluation tool.

And we must stop being afraid of both the politicians and the state educrat bullies who push these reforms on children, parents, teachers and schools.

They are deliberately harming your children while keeping their own children away from the CCSS/APPR mess by sending them to private schools or Montessori schools.

The education revolution - both parent-driven and teacher-driven - is gaining momentum and growing all across this nation.

Let it grow far and wide and take the Common Core experiment, along with the ancillary testing, data tracking and evaluation reforms that have gone with it, and dump it into the trash bin of history where it belongs