10:45 AM - Black Educator

EuroCentric Education Gets a Common Core Boost

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Submitted by fairtest on September 10, 2012??

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NOTE: FOR A PRINT FORMATED PDF COPY OF THIS FACT SHEET CLICK HERE.

Under No Child Left Behind, states set standards and developed assessments. NCLB?s failure to spur achievement or close achievement gaps led to unproven claims that national or ?common? standards were the missing piece of the education puzzle. With millions in federal Race to the Top money and NCLB ?waivers? as incentives, all but a few states have adopted the Common Core standards. Two multi-state consortia?the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) and the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC)?won federal grants to develop tests to measure the new standards. These tests will be in full use in the 2014-15 school year. Since most states have joined a consortium, it is important to understand what the new exams will mean for our schoolchildren.

More grades will be tested, with more testing per grade. NCLB triggered an unprecedented testing explosion (Guisbond, et al., 2012). The Common Core will compound the problem. SBAC (2012) and PARCC (2012) will continue mandatory annual English/language arts (ELA) and math testing in grades 3-8. In high school, SBAC includes mandatory reading and math testing in 11th grade, while PARCC?s plan is for three years of testing in ELA and math. PARCC also requires high schoolers to take a speaking and listening test. For kindergarten through second grade, PARCC adds voluntary ?formative? tests. Both consortia call for two required exams annually, and both encourage states to use consortium interim tests two to three times each year. Preschool testing will come from the U.S. Department of Education?s early childhood version of Race to the Top (U.S. DOE, 2012). As with NCLB, federal mandates create a market for interim tests to prep students for high-stakes exams.

Lured by federal funds, states agreed to buy ?pigs in a poke.? The new tests do not yet exist except for a few carefully selected sample items, so it is not possible to judge their quality. Nevertheless, states are committing large sums of taxpayer money for the equivalent of ?vaporware??much hype, little substance. New drugs must be carefully tested before release lest they do more harm than good. Yet, these new measures are being pushed through with at most one year of trials. There?s no guarantee that they will function as advertised and many reasons to believe they will not.

The new exams are a mixed bag, only marginally better than current tests. The new tests will only assess a narrow slice of what students need to know and be able to do.? Mostly administered by computer, the proposed tests will remain largely multiple-choice. Some questions will require written responses, as many states already require, and there will be one performance task. The performance tasks may be well designed, and these items may better assess critical thinking, but many will be ?beatable? through coaching. Most prototype items, however, look like current standardized tests (PARCC, 2012; SBAC, 2012). For example, some math questions are simple computation tasks buried in complex ?word problems.? Measurement experts fear it will be extremely difficult to write thousands of higher quality items before 2014-15. Samples also suggest the exams may be more difficult than current state tests. But harder is not always better. It is also not clear what the ?passing? scores will be or who will set them.

High-stakes misuses of test scores remain unchanged, extending the damaging effects of NCLB. Under Race to the Top and NCLB waiver rules, states must use exam results to evaluate both schools and teachers. As a result, the Common Core tests will still control, distort and corrupt the curriculum. Researchers and testing experts have shown the negative consequences of using student exam results to evaluate teachers (Baker, et al., 2009; FairTest, 2011). Under NCLB, control over teaching and learning largely passed from local districts to the federal government. Under the new tests, parents, communities and even states will lose even more power. In addition, many states and districts are likely to misuse the new tests as a high school graduation or grade promotion requirement. The negative consequences land most heavily on low-income students, those of color or with a disability, and English language learners (FairTest, 2012).

Companies with poor track records will design, administer and score Common Core exams. The same old firms, including Pearson, Educational Testing Service and CTB/McGraw-Hill, will produce the tests. These corporations have long histories of mistakes and incompetence. The multi-national conglomerate Pearson, for example, has been responsible for poor-quality items, scoring errors, computer system crashes and missed deadlines. Despite these failures, Pearson is sharing $23 million in contracts to design the first 18,000 items in the PARCC?s test bank (Gewertz, 2012).

Poor districts will have to cut instructional staff and other basic services to divert money to testing. The move to new standards and tests sets the stage for a huge transfer of resources from cash-strapped schools to testing companies (Samtani, 2012). Federal grants will cover initial test production, but funding for continued development and administration, including scoring, is uncertain. In addition, many schools lack the necessary computer infrastructure (Herbert, 2012). States and districts will have to invest in expensive new equipment, wiring and broadband. Costs will greatly exceed benefits. This money would be better spent on educational essentials such as teachers and books.

Enormous amounts of time will be wasted.? Too few computers are available in many schools. To accommodate all students, testing will have to go on for weeks. This will cause even more disruption as classes are put on hold to allow test-taking. Computer labs will be unavailable for teaching and learning. Test prep will remain a huge time-waster, likely eating up even more learning time than it now does.

America?s children, teachers, parents, communities and the nation deserve better. High-quality assessment can improve teaching and learning and provide useful information about schools. Examples of better assessments include well-designed formative assessments (FairTest, 2006), performance assessments that are part of the curriculum (New York Performance Standards Consortium), and portfolios or Learning Records (FairTest, 2007) of actual student work. Schools can be evaluated using multiple sources of evidence that includes limited, low-stakes testing, school quality reviews, and samples of ongoing student work (Neill, 2010).

References
Baker, E., et al. 2009. "Problems with the Use of Student Test Scores to Evaluate Teachers," Economic Policy Institute Briefing Paper, http://epi.3cdn.net/b9667271ee6c154195_t9m6iij8k.pdf
FairTest, 2006. ?The Value of Formative Assessment.? http://www.fairtest.org/value-formative-assessment
FairTest, 2007. ?The Learning Record.? http://www.fairtest.org/learning-record
FairTest. 2011. ?Flawed Massachusetts Teacher Evaluation Proposal Risks Further Damage to Teaching and Learning.? http://www.fairtest.org/flawed-ma-teacher-evaluation-proposal-report-home
FairTest, 2012. ?How Standardized Testing Damages Education.? http://www.fairtest.org/how-standardized-testing-damages-education-pdf
Gewertz, C. 2012. ?Questions Dog Design of Tests,? Education Week. http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2012/07/31/37act.h31.html
Guisbond, L., Neill, M., and Schaeffer, R. 2012. NCLB?s Lost Decade for Educational Progress: What Can We Learn from this Policy Failure? (Boston: FairTest), http://www.fairtest.org/NCLB-lost-decade-report-home.
Herbert, M. July/August 2012. ?Common Core Testing Online Without Constant Connectivity?? District Administration. http://www.districtadministration.com/article/common-core-testing-online...
Neill, M. June 18, 2010. ?A Better Way to Assess Students and Evaluate Schools,? Education Week. http://www.fairtest.org/better-way-assess-students-and-evaluate-schools
New York Performance Standards Consortium. http://performanceassessment.org
Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers. Item and Task Prototypes. 2012. http://www.parcconline.org/samples/item-task-prototypes#6.
Samtani, H. 2012. ?Common Core Standards Boon to E-Learning Industry,? Schoolbook. The New York Times. http://www.schoolbook.org/2012/08/03/common-core-standards-boon-to-e-lea...
Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium. A Summary of Core Components. 2012. http://www.smarterbalanced.org/resources-events/publications-resources/p....
U.S. Department of Education. 2012. Race to the Top -- Early Learning Challenge. http://www2.ed.gov/programs/racetothetop-earlylearningchallenge/index.html.

Source: http://blackeducator.blogspot.com/2013/01/eurocentric-education-gets-common-core.html

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Movie Review: With Sex and Gory Violence, Hansel & Gretel: Witch ...

Location

Wide Release

Dates

Opens Jan. 25

Clearly straining to distant itself from its children?s story origins, Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters layers on the ultra-bloody violence, nudity, and even jarringly out-of-place F-bombs.

After a quick prologue re-imagining the familiar fairytale about two kids taken prisoner by a witch who lives in a house made of candy, the story jumps ahead many years to find Hansel (Jeremy Renner) and Gretel (Gemma Arterton) have gone pro with their evil-slaying talents.?They?re hired to dispatch the nasty creatures who stole a dozen children from?a medieval village, and they come to learn a secret about their own past (a secret the screenplay telegraphs well in advance) in the process.

It?s slightly amusing to see H&G employ such anachronistic devices as a primitive record player, a hand-cranked heart defibrillator, and insulin shots (Hansel is diabetic thanks to all the candy the evil witch forced him to eat as a kid) in the course of their quest. But when the big showdown comes, and our heroes are simply able to mow down a coven of witches with a Gatling gun, where?s the magic in that?

Source: http://frontrow.dmagazine.com/2013/01/movie-review-with-sex-and-gory-violence-hansel-gretel-witch-hunters-is-a-kiddie-story-with-adult-pretensions/

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Court Rules Obama Picks Are Illegal (WSJ)

Share With Friends: | | Politics - Top Stories News, RSS Feeds and Widgets via Feedzilla.

Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/279517483?client_source=feed&format=rss

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Nano-Sponge Cleans Up Water Runoff

We?ve all seen the oily rainbow sheen in parking lot puddles after a storm. But it?s easy to forget what happens next: That oil finds its way to a storm drainage system, where it?s likely to be flushed untreated into local waterways, and could carry with it pesticides, household chemicals, PCBs, and nutrients that cause algae blooms.

"Stormwater runoff is one of the biggest problems in America in terms of water pollution," says Paul Edmiston, a chemist with ABSMaterials who won a 2011 PopMech Breakthrough Award for Osorb, a nanoparticle product that soaks up non-polar molecules and can remove 90 to 100 percent of water pollutants. (You can watch the video of Edmiston emptying a bottle of motor oil into a glass of water, shaking in the white powder, and then drinking it up.) Edmiston and ABSMaterials have announced they are now using Osorb to clean up storm water runoff at the College of Wooster in Ohio.

Wooster contracted the ABSMaterials team to set up bioswales, drainage ditches that use plants to slow the movement of water, across the campus? agricultural fields and parking lots. These bioswales will also contain a small percentage of Osorb mixed in with the soil and plants. The Osorb grabs the pollutants in the runoff, then releases them slowly so that the soil microbes and plants can biodegrade the chemicals without being poisoned.

Edmiston estimates that one 20-foot by 5-foot Osorb bioswale plot can reduce the runoff from a 30,000 square foot parking lot by 516,000 gallons of water per year, and could treat up to 1 million gallons per month. The output is clean water that seeps into the ground, and Edmiston says the plants seem to like growing in the Osorb-soil.

His team has already been testing a plot at the College of Wooster, and is now working to expanding to treat runoff from the campus? 20 acres of parking lots and other areas where drainage is a problem. Ohio State and Purdue universities are also considering installing Osorb-enhanced bioswales.

"We can?t build a pipe to every parking lot and agricultural field, but if we can take a small amount of space and turn it into green infrastructure, we can treat the water on-site and percolate it into groundwater cleanly," Edmiston says.

Source: http://www.popularmechanics.com/how-to/blog/nano-sponge-cleans-up-water-runoff-15016242?src=rss

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Trial of China's Bo Xilai opens next week, says Beijing-backed paper

BEIJING (Reuters) - China's disgraced former senior politician, Bo Xilai, will go on trial next week, a Beijing-backed Hong Kong newspaper said on Friday, in what would be the final act of a drama that has shaken the ruling Communist Party.

Bo, once a contender for the top leadership in the world's second-largest economy, was ousted in China's biggest political scandal in two decades last year following his wife's murder of a British businessman, Neil Heywood.

The mainland China-run Ta Kung Pao newspaper said on its website that Bo's trial would start on Monday in the southern city of Guiyang and last three days. It cited "well-informed Beijing sources", but gave no details.

One of Bo's lawyers, Li Guifang, declined to comment when reached by telephone. Reuters was unable to reach his second lawyer, Wang Zhaofeng, despite repeated telephone calls.

A court official in Guiyang who gave his family name as Li said he had not heard anything about the case.

"The case has not yet even been put forward for prosecution," he added.

A source with direct knowledge of the case told Reuters he "had not heard" that the trial would begin next week.

China's Foreign Ministry, typically the only government department which regularly fields questions from foreign reporters, said questions about Bo's trial should be referred to the "relevant authorities" and declined further comment.

Telephone calls to the Central Committee for Discipline Inspection, the party's top corruption fighting body, went unanswered. The number for the Justice Ministry's spokesman's office was disconnected.

Officials reached by telephone in Guiyang said they were unaware of the case.

Bo, a former commerce minister, turned the sprawling, haze-covered southwestern municipality of Chongqing into a showcase for his mix of populist policies and bold spending plans that won support from leftists yearning for a charismatic leader.

Bo, 63, was widely seen as pursuing a powerful spot on the party's elite inner core before his career unraveled after his former police chief, Wang Lijun, fled to a U.S. consulate for more than 24 hours in February and alleged that Bo's wife, Gu Kailai, had murdered Heywood with poison.

Both Wang and Gu have since been jailed and Bo expelled from the party, accused of corruption and of bending the law to hush up the killing.

Formal charges against Bo have yet to be made public.

Wang Yuncai, one of the lawyers for Wang Lijun, said it was quite possible the court case could open on Monday, though she said she did not know for certain.

"It's already been in the hands of the prosecutors for a long time, so it's quite possible," she said by telephone.

"Judging from the Wang Lijun case, that would mean a verdict within a week of the court hearing."

The two Wangs are not related.

Li Zhuang, a Beijing lawyer who opposed Wang Lijun and Bo for mounting a sweeping crackdown on foes in the name of fighting organized crime, said he also thought it was possible for a Monday hearing.

"I would only say it's possible, though not totally certain," Li said.

China has thrown a veil of official secrecy over Bo's fate, with the latest brief announcement earlier this month simply confirming that he had been handed over to the courts.

That has prompted a wave of rumors, mostly spread by overseas Chinese websites, about when and where the trial will be.

(Reporting by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Jeremy Laurence)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/trial-chinas-bo-xilai-opens-next-week-says-053235688.html

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Pope tweets shout-out for WDC anti-abortion rally

VATICAN CITY (AP) ? Pope Benedict XVI is giving a shout-out to an anti-abortion rally in Washington, tweeting that politicians should protect the unborn and "promote a culture of life."

Benedict sent the message Friday as thousands of people gathered at the National Mall and in front of the U.S. Supreme Court to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the landmark court decision that created a constitutional, nationwide right to abortion.

Tweeting in nine languages, Benedict wrote: "I join all those marching for life from afar, and pray that political leaders will protect the unborn and promote a culture of life."

Catholic Church teaching holds that life begins at conception.

Benedict has garnered some 2.5 million Twitter followers in the six weeks since he launched his account.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/pope-tweets-shout-wdc-anti-abortion-rally-135535927.html

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Deciding On a Budget for Your Web Design and Build | Business 2 ...

Finding an exact cost for web design and build isn?t as straightforward as you think it would be. Yes, many web design agencies have prices on their website but there are lots of discussions over this as the cost you see will more than likely just be a fraction of what it will really cost.

When deciding on a budget for your web design and build it?s very important to break it down in to parts so you can see exactly what you will be spending. Here are the parts that you should always take in to consideration before choosing a web design agency to complete your custom website?

1) First of all, simply write down the figure of your budget.

2) Next, understand exactly what it is you need and want. Write it down on paper and consider the costs for each.

3) Have a search online for your competitors and see what their websites are like. How is the design quality and content? Take notes and try to think of a plan of action that will allow you to compete against them effectively while keeping within your budget.

4) Every website needs a domain name and hosting, so have a think about which company you would like to use to host your website. There are plenty available so it shouldn?t be too hard. Some web design agencies may even offer a domain name and hosting with their packages.

5) Think about what graphics you would like on your website. The more graphics you have, the more expensive it will be, so if you?re on a tight budget, try to keep it minimal here. If you have some graphic design skills then that is great as you will be able to do some of the work yourself to save on costs.

5) Finally, have a think about how powerful your brand is and if you reckon it?s powerful enough to bring in a lot of money then it may be worth stretching your budget a bit further. Think of it as an investment and if you feel that you will be guaranteed your money back then what have you got to lose?

So there you have the steps that you should take before making any decisions. You may even want to go over these points with the web development agency you are interested in and they should be able to help you with costs.

By Sarah-Jayne Culver; a Search Consultant at http://www.fdcstudio.co.uk/ providing Digital Marketing Services throughout the UK.

Source: http://www.business2community.com/online-marketing/deciding-on-a-budget-for-your-web-design-and-build-0385737

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