My public comment today at the State School Board Meeting: Two years ago I considered myself a regular mom happily volunteering in the school and “raising nerds” as my husband and I regularly joked because we’ve always focused on the academic side of education. It is important to me. It wasn’t in my life plan to be here today. There are a million other things I’d rather do but can’t sit idly by and watch local control slip away. I don’t appreciate my tax dollars being spent trying to sell Common Core to me. You can’t talk AT the public. You must talk WITH us. We MUST open up an honest open dialogue about the Common Core Reform Agenda. This IS NOT just standards and it never was. This is an entire education reform package. The standards tie everything together with the testing and data collection enforcing compliance. You and I, we have a lot more in common than you may think but we can’t find common ground if we don’t even have a dialogue. None of us are saying we can’t get out, we know we can and that’s why we say to you. WE WANT OUT!!! We can do better! There are solutions. Over 120 UT professors of math, science and engineering signed a petition stating that they would like to pick up standards SUCH AS California’s who Fordham said “are excellent in every respect.” We must retain freedom and excellence in our children’s education. Parents and teachers must have the freedom to work together to set the very best educational pathway for the children not what will be best for the economy, businesses, testing companies. We must do what is best for the children. Blanketing untested and unproven reforms across the Nation is certainly not in the best interest of the children. This common core nonsense is creating a Monopoly, not just a monopoly of curriculum but a monopoly of thought where this one idea is being sold as the answer to all problems in education and the solution for all children. You and I both know that each child is an individual who learns and thinks differently from the student sitting next to him. It is a blatant lie to state that these are minimum standards. They never were. The 15% guide has been in every document I’ve read since 2009 and it is in the waiver. You’re worried about delegating your constitutional authority to higher ed but that’s exactly what you’ve done with Common Core which we don’t own. They are NOT UT’s. UT can and must be a leader. Let’s not settle for A- WE MUST DO BETTER.
Posted on: Fri, 02 Aug 2013 21:37:05 +0000
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