This is good news, however, your help is needed. Please repost to reach as many Georgia residents as possible. Education Committee vote is Wednesday, this week, March 12th. URGENT REQUEST TO ALL GEORGIA RESIDENTS! This Action Alert from Eagle Forum contains links with GA House Education Committee Members phones and emails, along with a template to send an email through their platform. SB 167 will be voted on by Ed Committee Wednesday. We need your help to get it out of committee and onto the House for a Floor vote. capwiz/eagleforum/issues/alert/?alertid=63124876 KUDOS TO GEORGIAS TANYA DITTY AND JANE ROBBINS!!! Georgia Takes Action Against Common Core with Passage of Senate Bill 167!!! Parents, and Concerned Americans, For The Sake of Our Children, Contact All Representatives to the Georgia House, Now. Ask Them to Vote for the passage of SB147! Send Copies of This to Your States Senators and House Representatives. Now, is The Time, Folks! Get Involved! Share This Information! Take Action! Thank You! In God We Trust!!! Nancy Bell Utley (Copied from link below) Local Education Posted: 10:34 a.m. Sunday, March 9, 2014 Get Schooled Rotten to the Core: Stop federal dictates on Georgia education By Maureen Downey Tanya Ditty is state director of Concerned Women for America of Georgia. Jane Robbins is a senior fellow with the American Principles in Action. Together, they call for passage of Senate Bill 167, now under review in the House Education Commitee and due for a vote there Wednesday. (You can read a counterpoint to this essay here.) By Tanya Ditty and Jane Robbins With the Senate passage of SB 167, Georgia scored a victory against CommonCore for parents and students. This is the strongest anti-national standards legislation to make it out of a legislative chamber in the nation. It is fitting that since Georgia claims credit for moving the nation into this mess, Georgia should take responsibility to lead us out. The essential problem with CommonCore is that it embraces and exacerbates everything that has damaged public education over the last 40 to 50 years. Why should we believe that doing more of what failed in the past will succeed in the future? First, CommonCore increases the centralization and loss of local control that have damaged education. It places control over the standards into the hands of not just distant, unresponsive governments, but of unaccountable private interests in Washington. One of these private interests is the Gates Foundation, which has spent hundreds of millions of dollars promoting CommonCore. Much of that went to the CommonCore owners, the National Governors Association and Council of Chief State School Officers. Millions more went to other organizations to buy their support, such as the Chamber of Commerce (which has been earning its Gates money in Georgia). The federal government then enforced CommonCore by offering stimulus money to states that would adopt it. For Georgia, the lure of $400 million --- a mere $100 million a year in an annual education budget of over $13 billion (state and local taxes) --- took precedence over maintaining state sovereignty and local accountability in education. These standards will drive curriculum; thats the point of standards. As Bill Gates declared, Identifying common standards is not enough. ... When the tests are aligned to the common standards, the curriculum will line up as well. While local school systems will continue to choose their own textbooks, the right to choose one CommonCore textbook over another CommonCore textbook is hardly meaningful control over curriculum. Nor will teachers be as free to teach with proven methods. CommonCore dictates that English teachers spend less than half their time on literature and the majority on nonfiction informational texts that supposedly will prepare students for jobs. However, all research evidence supports our own common sense --- that students will be better educated by studying Milton and Dickens than reading EPA regulations. Math teachers must similarly adopt ineffective, developmentally inappropriate teaching techniques. The math standards delay teaching the standard algorithms --- the way math has always been learned --- in favor of cumbersome, confusing alternative approaches. These CommonCore approaches are exactly the opposite of those used by top-performing countries. CommonCore is admittedly not designed to prepare students for science, technology, engineering, math or selective universities. This is because it places Algebra I in high school, much later than top-scoring countries do. Students on the regular CommonCore track wont be able to reach calculus in high school, which is necessary for entry into selective technology-based universities such as Georgia Tech. In fact, CommonCore truncates even the Algebra II course and includes almost no trigonometry or pre-calculus. Federal statistics show that less than 40 percent of students who stop with Algebra II will ever earn a bachelors degree. Consider the track record of the groups behind this scheme. CommonCore co-creator Achieve Inc. is known for its previous American Diploma Project --- a failure. The federal government is known for the U.S. Department of Education, America 2000, Goals 2000 and No Child Left Behind --- all failures. The Gates Foundation poured millions into its Small Schools Initiative --- a failure. SB 167 is the first reassertion of Georgia authority over educational standards and testing since CommonCore was adopted. This carefully crafted bill which, contrary to ridiculous rumors, does not affect tests such as SAT or AP, allows local districts to exit CommonCore and protects students from data mining. If the House passes SB 167 intact, Georgias parents and educators will do a far better job on Georgia standards than did the billionaire boys club. Previous Posts SAT makes essay optional, returns to 1600 scale and looks more like Common Core m.ajc/weblogs/get-schooled/2014/mar/09/rotten-core-stop-federal-dicates-georgia-education/
Posted on: Mon, 10 Mar 2014 08:17:08 +0000
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