This is in response to a Bangor Daily News article printed in the Sun Journal, “Standardized test gets pushback” (March 2).
Finally, parents and students are finding out the dangers of the Common Core national standards’ scheme since this is the year when standard assessments hit the fan.
The testing seems to have more to do with teacher evaluation and school funding than benefiting the students. Teachers’ evaluations are tied to students’ test results and they could lose their jobs. Schools will lose federal funding if too many students opt out of the standard assessment. Then there is Pearson, the world’s largest educational publishing company, that will make money on tests, books and teaching materials.
The goal of Common Core is to run a centralized top-down national education scheme that supposedly makes children “college- and career-ready,” based on standards that were not researched-based, internationally benchmarked, rigorous or validated by educational experts.
The one-size-fits-all approach, where every child in America will read the same books and learn at the same rate, does not respect human individuality and does not accommodate different learning styles. This assembly-line approach locks up uniformity and ignores diversity of thought and critical thinking.
In my opinion, the students are being put into boxes, tethered to a computer that will mold them into the perfect, efficient, obedient worker.
Wait until people discover the massive student-level data being collected while testing. That’s a topic for another day.
Diana Holcomb, Norway
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