Well, no, he couldn’t, not really.
I’m talking about Bobbie Jindal, and I’m of the opinion that there never was any there, there. But up until his never-to-be-forgotten impression of Kenneth the Page the usual suspects spent a lot of bytes talking up this New Republican™ epitome of competence, intelligence and non-old-white-maleness.
Not anymore, of course, for an over-rich list of reasons, not the least of which is that after spending several years in close proximity, those who know him best, his constituents, have come to loathe him.
Still, give the man credit. He’s hit bottom, but does he give up? No! Not Bobby Jindal. Now’s the time he grabs a shovel.
His latest? This [via Think Progress, a few days ago, actually,* h/t Brad Delong]:
Louisiana’s state school superintendent John White supports Common Core, an effort to foster interstate consistency in education standards. So does the state board of education. So does the state legislature, for that matter, which passed a law in 2012 enabling the state to opt in to Common Core standards. Indeed, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) actively pushed for this 2012 law, which he signed. Recently, however, Jindal decided that he actually opposes Common Core…**
So Jindal has turned to what has become the lastrefuge for conservative officials and activists who can’t get what they want through a legitimate lawmaking process. He’s suing the Obama Administration in federal court. [links in the original]
OK, so far, not impressive. This is garden variety stuff: the ability to forget in an instant any previous held position is part of any ambitious Republican’s mental toolkit.
But Jindal, famously (once) one of the “smart” ones** goes for All-Star goofery with the reasoning underpinning his suit:
The crux of Jindal’s lawsuit, however, is that the grant programs that reward participation in Common Core somehow violate the Constitution and federal law because they force Louisiana to enter into an entirely voluntary program that it did, in fact, enter into voluntarily.
Yup. That’s it. Bobbie Jindal haz a sad ’cause that nasty Kenyan Socialist Mooslim™ allowed him to choose to do — or not do — something he once thought he wanted to do, but doesn’t anymore.
Now that’s professional-grade horse shit — and, in what should give anyone, ever, considering pulling the elephant lever in any election for the foreseeable future — this, my friends, is a once seriously considered contender for the GOP invite to the big dance in 2016.
*So I’m slow. Sue me. Use Bobbie J.’s lawyer.
**I’m not even remotely convinced by the common core, myself (I guess I read too much Diane Ravitch). But that’s not the point, is it. I didn’t go haring after federal cash to implement in my living room, no did I?
Image: Anonymous, Netherlands The Laughing Jester, 15th C.
Another Holocene Human (now with new computer)
Still no contenders for Louisiana’s crown as America’s Dumbest and Most Violent state.
Another Holocene Human (now with new computer)
Ironically, Texas still has the blue ribbon for worst health coverage of children, and MS leads a small pack including Alabama and Texas for worst statistics on development measures, like, oh, infant mortality and other kind of ‘separate the 3rd world from the developing world’ stats.
But Florida has Florida Man so there is that.
KG
decades ago, like during the Reagan administration, one of the states sued the federal government because federal funds for highways were tied to either speed limits or seat belt laws. the federal courts, all the way up to the Supremes, told the state involved that it could choose not to take the federal funds and have whatever local laws it wanted but that there was nothing that prevented the federal government from having strings attached to funds. i’m guessing that case will be cited a lot in this case.
ETA: it may have been the DUI level that was challenged
Tone In DC
Piyush Jindal is no better than Darrell “Burning Down the Car” Issa or Jan Breuer.
His lawsuit ought to be thrown out with maximum alacrity, as well as contemptuous laughter. Orly “Oleaginous Taint” Taitz thinks that suit is frivolous.
Alex S.
Jindal is the villager’s idea of what a presidential candidate sounds like.
Cervantes
@KG:
Minimum legal drinking age.
The case was South Dakota v. Dole, 483 US 203 (1987).
Howard Beale IV
Oh, FFS-rewind back to the 1992 Louisiana Governor’s race and look who was running-an ex KKK Grand Wizard and a misogynistic felonious ex-governor. Hell, Louisiana makes Illinois and Rhode Island look like models of good government.
gvg
I am not that happy with common core myself but I think LA could opt back out IF they were willing to do without the Federal funds they got for opting in AND both the elected legislature at the theoritical time this happens and the govenor voted to opt back out. All states have some procedure for revoking laws which involve both the Legislative and Executive branches of said states having a say. But Jindal alone can’t change. A law suit is silly.
In other words we have a working system he can’t use because he doesn’t have the votes or support. He wants his own way, but he is only 1 person and the govenor is not the king of the state. He might also not have the money to pay back.
Shakezula
More job-making activities by the party of fiscal ‘sponsitility. You need to find a painting of some powerful goon stepping on a rake to represent GOP clownshoeing.
In other news, the Noozemacks feed states that the GOP has a $6 million plan for women and minorities. I assume nets, tranquilizer guns and shackles are involved so naturally I am VERY nervous.
KG
@Cervantes: ah, that’s right… couldn’t remember off the top of my head.
Trollhattan
@Shakezula:
Do they at least say, “six-milllllyun dollllars” in a Dr. Evil voice? That’s Koch between-the-sofa-cushions money right there.
Roger Moore
@Tone In DC:
That is hitting bottom.
tratclif
Hm. Right now, two of the Newmax headlines on BJ are “asdasda” and “test.” Looks like the quality of Newsmax’s reporting is getting much better.
Mnemosyne
IIRC, the Republican governors who rejected high-speed rail tried to get hold of the federal matching funds to use them for other purposes, but they were (rightly) told to pound sand.
gbear
Is Louisiana still dealing with the brain-eating amoeba in their drinking water?
Groucho48
I don’t understand the dislike for Common Core. It’s just a set of guidelines for what kids should know each grade level. Every school district in the country is completely free to come up with whatever methods they want to reach those goals.
And, while I’m not a teacher, I have skimmed through the guidelines and they seem pretty basic and reasonable to me. Kindergartners should be able to make piles of objects that have the same number of objects in them. 1st graders should be able to do single digit addition. Stuff like that. At upper grades, critical thinking comes into play more and more, which is one of the reasons conservatives don’t like it. But, seems like a good thing to me.
PurpleGirl
@Groucho48: Common Core is the big ebil Federal gubbermint telling the states what their schools should do. States rights. Being a voluntary program doesn’t matter, it’s still big ebil gubbermint.
Trollhattan
@gbear:
Like…how could they ever tell, man?!?
Was delighted to read that West Nile virus concentrations are at an alltime high in California. Hooray for us.
FlyingToaster
@Tom Levenson: I’d argue with Diane Ravitch that the Common Core Standards are just fine, if used as a rating system for grade-level curriculum materials.
But for the current grift textbooks-n-testing, well, it’s totally whack. My nephews in public school think their teachers are insane; it’s not the teachers, it’s the mandate.
My daughter’s school opened their middle school yesterday; they’re using the Common Core Standards to jump-start their curriculum, but by no means are they locked into any particular protocol. And they’ll never do standardized testing.
Kay
@Groucho48:
Reasonable people (so not the Tea Party or Bobby Jindal, who is just full of shit) don’t object to the standards, mostly. They object to how the standards were adopted by the states with very little debate- process- but mostly they object to the testing.
There are two “consortiums” that develop and conduct the testing, Smarter Balanced and PARCC. It’s (mostly) western states in Smarter Balanced and eastern and midwestern states in PARCC. They “field tested” the tests last year. They are conducted on computers (although there’s a transitional paper option) and public schools had to put all that in place. It’s a huge job. They also had to train teachers and inform parents, because the tests are much more difficult. Only 30% of NY students were ranked “proficient” in the first year of testing, last year.
That’s a huge failure rate, which was not at all surprising because the tests are much more difficult than the tests you and I took, and NY set the “cut scores” really high. Still, if you’re a parent and you don’t know what the hell is going on (and a lot of them didn’t- the CC proponents did a lousy job informing people) it looks as though your (formerly) passing or average student-kid is now failing.
I talked to one of my son’s teachers and she likes the new standards but she says the tests are too long and complicated to administer. They begin in third grade and little kids are sitting for these tests for hours. She thought they should have phased it in one grade at a time. Start with third graders first and then add the next third grade class, etc. to give schools time to get a handle on it and do it WELL instead of FAST.
Also, the Obama Administration made the mistake of adopting what I think is a ridiculous teacher measurement metric that is based on test scores. Common Core, the Common Core tests, and the teacher measurement get lumped in together.
You could like ‘the Common Core” and hate the testing and hate the ridiculous “high stakes” they insist on attaching to test scores. I’m in that camp.
Tom Levenson
@Kay:
Me too. My son is just starting high school — and thankfully, our district is reasonably sane in the way it handles testing. But reasonably sane in the context of what they must do is still not great.
schrodinger's cat
@Kay: Did you see the NYT magazine story about the Eva Moskowitz? The first few paragraphs seem like a tongue bath for EM.
Tone In DC
Wait a minute.
Given, it’s far too easy to make light of Taitz’ moniker.
Still. You’ve seen this blog’s vitriol.
I figure that line is nowhere near as low as a few of the comments that some folks have turned loose over the last few months, weeks, or even days.
Just sayin’.
Iowa Old Lady
My DIL is a first grade teacher in Illinois, so she’s familiar with the primary grade requirements there, and she has no objections either.
She’s far more stressed out by the national move to blame everything on teachers.
madmommy
I have lived in Louisiana for far too long now. Being stuck here for the foreseeable future (7 years till the youngest graduates HS) is depressing beyond reason. Listening to people bitching about CC standards makes me want to shake them till their teeth rattle. It has nothing to do with the standards themselves, but rather the big evil government monolith “forcing” the standards. Jindal is going big on charters, and there have already been a few scandals regarding schools that are nothing more than a room with TV’s, tables, chairs and DVD players. All lessons are taught via video. No accountability, no standards, nothing. I’ve got a serious beef with the over-reliance of testing to the detriment of actual learning, but making sure kids in 5th grade in California are learning the same things as kids in 5th grade in Michigan or Florida would be a logical thing to any thinking person. Sadly, this is Louisiana. There aren’t that many of those here, and none of them hold power in state government. I’ve been telling my kids for a while that as soon as they have their diploma to get the hell out of this god-forsaken shithole of a state and never look back. My eldest will graduate in 4 years. He’s extremely geekish and is taking gifted classes. He already has plans to go to school up north in the hopes of meeting a nice Canadian girl so he can move there. My born-and-bred Louisiana husband is not happy about this at all, but my boy has already figured out if he goes to college here chances are good he will end up with a Louisiana girl and she will never leave. For some strange reason I cannot fathom getting Louisiana people to leave this state is nearly impossible. Yeah, the food is good, and so’s the music but factor in a rapidly disappearing coast, increasing severity of storms, mosquitoes big enough to carry off small children and the blazing stupidity of state government and it really doesn’t seem a fair trade-off.
Matt McIrvin
Yeah, the left’s objectors to Common Core are mostly really opposed to the whole ed-reform culture of endless high-stakes standardized testing, declaring public schools as “failed” and siphoning public funds to charter-school companies. Obama bought into that to a far greater degree than he ought to have, but the standards themselves are not bad at all.
The right’s objectors to Common Core are usually using it as a way to identify Obama with their longstanding cultural anxieties about hippies putting weird hippie stuff in their children’s education.
Mnemosyne
@Kay:
I’m assuming one of the ways they sold Common Core to people was with the sensible notion that kids should all have the same basic knowledge in the same grades, but then they threw the testing requirements on top of it.
Kay
@Tom Levenson:
I’m on my fourth middle schooler, and this child happens to be pretty stoic and cheerful. He likes school and he does well on tests. Still, I think it’s hardest on the middle schoolers, because they didn’t have this approach when they were younger, they’re so vulnerable and tentative about their ability at that age and they’re not as sophisticated as high schoolers (to understand what’s going on).
I feel sorry for him. His school didn’t participate in the field testing last year and I’ve looked at the sample questions. He has no idea what’s gonna hit him this spring. I think he’ll be okay mostly because he’s even-tempered and easy-going, he has a sense of humor, and our teachers are really trying to make it less awful. My eldest son would have freaked. This one will probably be okay.
I’m also dreading the headlines – “Nations Public Schools Fail!” because the scores are gonna drop like a rock. You know there won’t be any nuance or understanding. It will be full-on public school bashing, and people our age will compare these tests to the easy-peasy Iowa tests we took.
I get tired of both the public school bashing and the “kids are dumber!” narrative. It’s bullshit. I’m 50 and I went to a public school. I was there. I took those standardized tests. We weren’t doing anything more “rigorous” than kids do now, and we sure weren’t any “smarter”.
Josie
@Kay: Also, it’s not just testing. There are bench mark tests. teaching how to take tests, practice tests, rallies for taking tests, ad nauseum. I worked with a bird sanctuary last year that helped teach elementary kids life science, and the teachers said there was no longer time to do any hands on activities and projects because of all the nonsense involved with testing. The kids were totally stressed out by the whole thing.
gelfling545
@Groucho48: It should in principle be a good thing. The devil is, as for most things, in the details. For example: most of my granddaughter’s text books (in 10th grade) have New York Edition printed on the cover. This would be to distinguish them from those for states such as LA or TX whose ideas of what should be taught in, say, science or social studies might be different. If Common Core is going to mean the melding of Texas ideas & NY ideas that is going to be to the detriment of students in NY. Also, how will compliance be determined & just how rigid will the framework be? How much flexibility will teachers have in adapting the curriculum for, say, special needs students or those not English proficient?Those are just a few of many concerns. It could be fine or it could be a mess. Given the way things have gone with federal incursions into education have gone over, well, a really long time, I’d bet on mess. And oh, yes probably more testing.
Matt McIrvin
…and, yes, my daughter is going to take the PARCC test this year and she’s already anxious about it.
Kay
@Mnemosyne:
I don’t think you can separate the testing from the standards, because they sold the testing as crucial to the standards. The tests are different. They want extended responses. Our teachers tell them “write long!” You really have to think, and there’s a lot of flipping back and forth from the text to the question because you have to back up your answers with references to the text. That’s a lot to handle for a kid in 4th grade. They have to be able to manipulate the testing program, use the “tools” (text boxes, flip back and forth, etc) and sit for hours for what is a really demanding test which if they set the cut scores like NY did, 70% of them will fail. That’s pretty brutal to throw at them all at once.
Fair Economist
I agree there’s too much testing involved in Common Core, but when I saw the presentation his 7th grade math teacher gave on how she planned to teach math this year, based on the Common Core, I was *excited*. The plan is to go much more in depth on some subjects (in particular fractions/ratios/proportionality), to teach principles and not just techniques, and to connect it to word problems and even real-world activities (specifically, cooking). That is *exactly* what my son needs. He learns rules for handling ratios and fractions but he just memorizes them without learning what they actually mean, and he forgets them withing 3 weeks of last use.
I think the Common Core people did some serious work and research on how children learn and I think it’s really going to help.
madmommy
@Kay:
This is a feature, not a bug. Set the tests up so the kids fail, trumpet the “FAILING SCHOOLS!!!1!” meme, funnel funding away from public education and into charter schools. Lather, rinse, repeat. I actually had someone tell me that they pulled their children from public school and put them into private and now they are learning “Christian” math. WTH does that even mean?
Kay
@Josie:
True, Ohio’s love of testing will involve buying every one of the pre-tests and post-tests and what have you.
My son did the pilot for the science test last year. They crack me up because they don’t buy all our bullshit. He’s breezy, that sort of person. He came home and told me “we were the guinea pigs!”, just stating a fact, which policymakers had vehemently denied for 6 months. “They are NOT guinea pigs! They are our precious children!”
Yeah. He’s not buying that. He knows what’s what :)
Come on. They’re testing a test on them, and they’re insisting it somehow benefits them! It does not, and he knows it. He’s not an idiot.
Mnemosyne
@Kay:
Let me rephrase: I think that having a Common Core type of nationwide curriculum is a good idea. I think the testing regimen sucks. Cynically, I think that the people selling this took a good idea (having a Common Core) and wrapped it up into the testing that they really wanted to do.
Josie
@Mnemosyne: You have hit the nail exactly on the head. There is money to be made from testing materials and charter schools. Always follow the money.
Kay
@Fair Economist:
I like the standards, I like the “close reading” and our school was already doing the math you’re talking about. My basic problem is one of trust. I don’t trust education reformers, generally. I’m not at all convinced they’re interested in supporting public schools. It’s a shame, but there it is. I don’t think they’ve earned trust. They strike me as reckless people who follow a lot of fads and are way too enamored of CEO’s and “market-based” solutions.
If you asked me whether I trust the local teachers or Arne Duncan it’s just no contest. The teachers. In a heartbeat.
Kay
@Mnemosyne:
It’s funny because I get a better “vibe” from Smarter Balanced. I recognize I cannot rely on my “vibe” but they strike me as less horrible and venal and commercial. If I have to pick a giant and mysterious “testing consortium” I woulda gone with Smarter Balanced.
I of course am in a “PAARC state”.
The amount of money they’re going to spend on this makes my palms sweat. I hope like hell it isn’t a fucking fiasco, because public schools are strapped for money. They don’t have any extra around to conduct giant, failed experiments.
Roger Moore
@Tone In DC:
No. I meant that Jindal has hit rock bottom when he’s launching a suit so ridiculous even Orly “Vexatious Litigator” Taitz is calling it frivolous.
Tone In DC
@madmommy:
To quote my second most favorite president, I feel your pain. I understand the sentiment of wanting to Get The Hell Out. From many places, including my own small Southern town. This place, in some ways, was past crazy for all of Bush/Cheney’s eight years of misrule. It was pretty much insane trying to work and live around here. In one or two facets of existence, it still is.
You mention the blazing stupidity of the state government. I’ve got a feeling some of those folks in Baton Rouge were imported from Richmond and Annapolis.
Hope that things turn out well for you and yours.
Tone In DC
@Roger Moore:
My mistake. I’m glad to be wrong about what I thought you meant.
Piyush is a desperate man.
Almost as desperate as Herman Cain, Allen West and Nikki Haley.
Kay
@madmommy:
Do you believe Jindal believes all the states rights stuff? I don’t. He hired John White, and White has backed each and every Jindal “reform”. RttT wasn’t enough money to be “coercive”. It just wasn’t. They got 200 million divided between 6 states in the first round. That’s just not a lot of money in terms of an overall ed budget.
I think it’s just complete bullshit. Jindal has to kowtow to the Tea Party and White has a role to play, that of “opposing” Jindal while retaining the Common Core.
Jindal supported CC then and he supports it now. This strikes me as pure political posturing.
Roger Moore
@Tone In DC:
Could be my bad writing; it’s always hard to tell which end deserves more blame in that kind of miscommunication.
madmommy
@Kay:
Jindal is delusional. He thinks that if he just keeps toeing that party line then one day he will get a chance at the brass ring. He doesn’t realize he’s just a token brown the GOP can trot out to say “see, we’re not racist!” I’ve talked to the teachers at my kids schools and they don’t know how he’s going to pull this off given he’s up against the state BOE and the Superintendent. Then there is the matter of the money that was taken and spent. As you mentioned earlier, it’s not like they have an unending pile of cash they can tap to pay it back.
Unlike a lot of other states, the Catholic church here has a huge hold on education. You can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a Catholic school, co-ed or same sex. It’s not unusual for kids to start out in public school but go to Catholic HS. Usually the one their parents graduated from, because tradition! Back in the dark ages when I was in school a Catholic education was quite good. Not so much any more, at least around here.
Roger Moore
@Kay:
It’s not pure political posturing. He appears to have hired an outside law firm (Faircloth, Melton & Keiser) to handle the litigation, so there’s quite likely some grift involved as well.
Trollhattan
@madmommy:
Q: If God is all-powerful, can He create a rock so heavy that He cannot lift it? Solve for the rock’s mass in base-six.
Hal
Isn’t the basis of Jindal’s popularity that the GOP thought the root of Obama’s success was that he was seen as a smart brown guy with a funny name? In the same way McCain figured Palin would attract Hillary supporters because she was a woman. The one smart thing Peggy noonan ever said was that Republicans suck at identity politics.
Trollhattan
@Hal:
.Guessing she wrote that before ten a.m.
Morbo
Oh hey, speaking of contenders, exciting Rand Paul news!
John Revolta
@madmommy: 4 billion years= 6 days.
Easy peasy!
Kay
@Roger Moore:
Well, RttT had all kinds of mandates, and one of them was to use this ridiculous measure created by a Harvard economist to measure the “value” teachers add. Obama and Duncan fell head over heels in love with it, and so did every conservative governor. The theory is they can measure the worth of a teacher using this formula that is grounded in test scores.
Jindal loves that Obama mandate. That was part of the conditions for RttT too.
This is happening in Ohio, too. The Tea Party legislators are battling the GOP legislators on “Common Core”. Neither cares a whit about public schools and would just as soon issue everyone a voucher, but all of a sudden they’re concerned about “one size fits all standards” in “our” public schools. It’s comical to watch. Pure political theater. This is the most attention public schools have gotten from conservatives in this state for the last 15 years!
Infamous Heel-Filcher
Reading enough of Diane Ravitch ought to convince any critically-thinking person that there’s really no coherent case against the Common Core, seeing as her objections to it change weekly and never seem to make any more sense.
Compare this to her anti-testing stance, which is coherent and consistent, and you’ll see what I mean.
jl
A serious problem with Jindal, in addition to looking like he might be pretty smart but then saying stuff that almost any old person can see is crazy, is that it is hardtounnertan…. whathesayin’…. haflathtime.
He could use a speech coach. But, I want his political prospects always tampedownasmchasprssble….. soihopehedon….. getun.
CONGRATULATIONS!
@madmommy: This is a thing. We have a person running for the local school board who is running on “an objection to the teaching of Common Core mathematics standards”. I knew this person had to be a fundamentalist asshole and sure enough, on cursory examination, Christian math is a thing. Set theory and infinity are at least two of their pet peeves. I didn’t investigate further because I don’t care about the beliefs of stupid people.
But yeah, Jesus math is a thing. These people should all be deported and dumped on an island somewhere, they fuck up everything they touch and we cannot have nice things because of them.
ETA: I bet they add algebra to the list the day someone points out to them that we got it from the Muslims.
SFAW
@Trollhattan:
Whoa – for a second there, I thought you meant base six-six-six. Which is probably not “Christian” math.
SFAW
@CONGRATULATIONS!:
I know just the place. It’s somewhere off the coastline of the Sea of Tranquility.
Mnemosyne
@Infamous Heel-Filcher:
From what Kay is saying, Ravitch’s main beef may be the testing component, but it’s hard to separate the testing from the actual curriculum. They’re conjoined twins at this point.
SFAW
@CONGRATULATIONS!:
You forgot
Polandchess and algorithms!They’re not stupid! They’re just “differently clued.”
No. You’re right. They’re stupid.
SFAW
@Morbo:
OK, I probably should know, but I don’t – who’s muskrat-head posing with?
Bill Arnold
@madmommy:
I just spent 15 minutes doing google searches on this, jaw dropped most of the time. The closest seems to be
The Christian Approach to Teaching Elementary Math
Also this set of excerpts from a pre-calc text book is amazing. The textbook apparently drops into little religious lessons when a trigger word (e.g . “inclination”) appears in the math part of the text.
Bill Arnold
@SFAW:
Also base 6 is arguably against the will of God, since He gave each of us (or nearly all of us) 10 fingers.
(Don’t have a clue whether or not counting in binary on fingers (and toes) is against the will of god too.)
Cervantes
@KG: Just a detail, that’s all.
Cervantes
@tratclif: Next stop Pulitzer!
Kay
@Mnemosyne:
Ravich is sort of interesting, because she began as a conservative and that (IMO) still informs some of her opinions. She’s not really “partisan” in the political sense but I think she looks at the relationship between the federal government and the states in a Right-leaning way, and that’s why she has broader objections to the Common Core, more than testing. She flat -out opposes it. She wouldn’t say that essential “conservatism” is why she objects to it, but I’m saying it. She focuses a lot on the process in the same way that (sane) conservative lawyers do, where they have a strong sense that certain things are “reserved” to the states.
I don’t know how in the hell she ever supported NCLB, but she seems to have done so. Maybe that’s it too. She was burned once so she’s wary of Big Programs.
I don’t agree with her on everything, but I enjoy reading her partly because she’s fearless and very blunt. A lot of times women have to be more conciliatory than that, or they think they have to be. She has that nice “I no longer give a shit who I offend” attitude that certain older women sometimes have. It’s a kind of confidence.
Cervantes
@Hal:
You have got to be joking.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)
Bobby Jindal is a perfect example that there’s no difference between a stupid person and a smart person that spends all of his time pandering to stupid people.
Infamous Heel-Filcher
I know what you mean, but I have to disagree. Testing is far deeper rooted than any particular set of standards, and Ravitch is far more likely to kill CCSS and leave the insane testing regime intact than she is to successfully fight both.
Which is doubly frustrating, because I think if you asked her to rank possible outcomes, I think she’d say that the best possible outcome would be the defeat of both a national set of standards and high-stakes testing, but if she had to choose one to defeat, it would be testing. But her actions are having the opposite effect.
Kay
@Infamous Heel-Filcher:
I disagree with that. I think the anti-testing people have been really effective, as a grassroots effort. I think they have a movement, and it’s separate from Ravitch.
They’re having an impact. Gates has backed down, and so has Duncan. Charlie Crist is now RUNNING on “too much testing” in Jeb Bush’s Florida and Charlie Crist is like a political thermometer. He’s hearing that from enough parents for him to think it’s an effective attack on Scott. He’s a good politician.
It’s parents. Everyone in media (not you) wants to set this up as “teachers unions versus reformers” but the anti-testing push is coming from parents. I think it’s organic and quite real. Ravitch is part of it, but she isn’t driving it.
madmommy
The amount of testing is off-the-charts insane. It is so stressful for the kids! From the first day of school they are inundated with what they need to pass the tests. Then testing gets closer and the pressure ramps up. Here in Louisiana it is called LEAP, and the big years are 4th, 8th and 12th grade. You don’t pass, you don’t move on no matter what grades you’ve made all year. If you’re a kid who doesn’t do well on bubble tests, you’re screwed. If you’re a kid who has developmental issues, you’re screwed. My eldest worked himself into a state before he took the LEAP in 4th-he was sure he was going to fail even though he’d never gotten lower than a B on any test or paper all year long. He’s now in gifted and though he has less anxiety than he did, he still worries every year until the letter comes over the summer saying he passed. My youngest had a profound speech delay causing delays in everything else. He’s been in school since he was 3 1/2 (2 years of pre-K, 2 years of K, then 1st-4th grade) last year was the first year he didn’t have any special ed help. In all of those years he took the standardized test for that grade level with only minimal changes to accommodate his learning issues. He took the LEAP last year and passed by the skin of his teeth, thank god. He’s already mad at me for holding him back in kinder, even though everyone involved felt it was best. I hate that they are only taught to the tests, with little to no critical thinking involved. They just have information shoved into them so they can regurgitate it back onto the tests with very little of it sinking in or making sense. The teachers hate it too, but their jobs depend on the kids test scores. It’s beyond frustrating!
The Fat Kate Middleton
@madmommy: Yours is the kind of story that breaks my heart. As a retired teacher, I can’t decide if I’m glad to be out of the game, or want to jump back in and fight for children like your son and my Aspergers grandson.
Groucho48
It’s easy to see why the right is against common core. Federal program. Critical thinking. De-emphasizing American Exceptional-ism. The money seems more likely to go to testing companies favored by the administration rather than to their cronies.
For the left, it seems that the main complaints are things associated with but not part of Common Core. Massive tresting. Teacher performance connected to testing results. Arne Duncan!!!
I would like to think we can find workarounds for all those problems. But, it’s such a politicized issue now that it might not be possible.
Liberal candidate, Zephyr Teachout, opposing Cuomo for NYS Governor, stated on Inside Albany tonight that she was firmly against Common Core. Turns out that what she was against was its ties to teacher evaluations and that she had seen some shoddy implementations. The host tried to clarify those points and Teachout did pull back a bit, but, I think she did mainly to be polite.
fuster
perhaps Jindal’s dog will sue him for being offered treats for good behavior and demand that the practice be found violative of his Constitutional right to poop on the rug.