Parents hate to see their kids treated like Borg robots in a Star Trek movie while forced to fit into the government’s definition of equal and successful. Surprise! Surprise! Parents want their kids to develop as individuals each prepared to follow his own dreams.
In a video on Common Core, New York State PTA Education Coordinator Bob Aloise supported calling Child Protective Services and charging parents with “educational neglect” for opting-out their kids from the curricula or testing.
Despite outrageous threats and insults, parents across the U.S. are expressing disgust with the one-size-fits all, turn-my-child-into-a-robot form of standards imposed by Common Core.
Courageous parents must reject the threats spewed as their kids opt-out of curricula shaped by Common Core Standards and skip high-stakes testing.
Since a grassroots effort seems to be the only way to stop this insane governmental overreach, parents across the U.S. are creating support groups to fight the intrusion by a dictatorial federal government.
Citizens are angry that state legislators, superintendents, state and local school boards have no voice in a national educational system.
These state levels of government will become irrelevant rubber stamps for future federal policies. Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin and school Superintendent Janet Barresi are not the only leaders who believe that Common Core will radically transform education into a nationally-controlled system.
When 80% of the parents opted-out of high-stakes testing, Julie Zuckerman, principal of the Castle Bridge School in New York, canceled the tests because there wouldn’t be enough test scores available to provide meaningful data.
While children are in tears, participating in self-mutilation, and learning to hate school because the tests are unreasonably long and the questions are needlessly confusing, parents in Denver, Chicago, Portland, and Providence are taking their kids out of the high-stakes testing in record numbers. Texas cut the number of students taking standardized tests in half.
Administrators of the New York Springville-Griffith Institute Central School District are concerned about the impact that 64 students who have refused the tests will have on district outcomes. The more people know about these tests and the curriculum the more determined they are to remove it from their schools.
Parent groups are forming to assist with exercising the opt-out option. Parents, Grandparents, Aunts, Uncles, and taxpayers refuse to become accomplices to federal programs which typically destroy students’ love for learning, their curiosity, grit, tenacity, and perseverance.
Common Core is a clone of other federal programs that have failed children and damaged our educational system. Behavior Modification under Benjamin Bloom and B.F. Skinner and Outcome Based Education were Common Core by other names.
Destruction of a child’s love of learning while creating an academically ignorant population is a typical result of federal government overreach. Students and parents are tired of the politicization that results from nationalized education and the rift that has been created between citizens and their local schools. Parents are revolting against the federal government using their tax dollars and local schools to undermine their child’s future. They resent a governmental label of “success” or “failure” stamped upon their children.
Exercising local control of schools and demanding that state autonomy be returned to education are tools available to parents. Opting-out is one approach in that tool box.
Another is students dressing like Zombies with blood rolling down their morbidly-painted faces to protest the long hours of testing and the loaded questions that would determine whether or not they graduate.
Any testing method that destroys incentives for learning also destroys the value of reasonable assessments of student achievement.
Quality assessments allow teachers, students, and parents to know exactly where the child is academically. Individual needs of the student can be identified by a quality, unobtrusive test. Armed with this knowledge, educators can shape an educational experience that meets the specific needs and interest of each child. When testing is effective, students are eager to use that information to set personal educational goals. When a test is fair, fact based and reasonably long, teachers and students can determine the degree of success both had during any given school year. This form of testing motivates students and teachers.
Classroom teachers alert to the needs of each student are in the best position to meet those needs and to nurture the healthy educational development of each child. Federal employees are too far away from reality to recognize it, to understand it, or to deal with it effectively. Their efforts have been failing children for decades.