Posted on 12/07/2020 8:59:59 AM PST by Kaslin
Four to six months ahead of possible testing times, the test's commissioner pre-emptively canceled this only way to measure the effect of varying school shutdown regulations across state lines.
A federal agency is canceling congressionally mandated nationwide tests scheduled for 2021, ending the only way to reliably measure the effect of different school shutdowns across state lines until approximately 2023, the agency’s commissioner announced the day before Thanksgiving.
“The change in operations and lack of access to students to be assessed means that NAEP will not be able to produce estimates of what students know and can do that would be comparable to either past or future national or state estimates,” said James Woodworth, the commissioner of the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, in a Nov. 25 statement.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress is a biannual test in reading and math that Congress requires states to participate in to get federal K-12 funding. Because states water down their tests to hide how poorly many American children are educated, and NAEP uses higher standards separated from politically manipulated policies such as teacher evaluations, it is considered the nation’s “gold standard” test. It has operated since 1969, and its next test window is early 2021.
Usually the test results fully come out in the calendar year after they are collected, meaning the postponement likely eliminates this important window into national achievement until 2022. That’s three years of hiding the truth about how governors have damaged American kids and our nation’s future while foreign competitors have kept their children in school because COVID is a low risk for young people.
On July 31, the NAEP’s governing board passed a resolution urging the commissioner to carry out the tests as legally mandated. It noted “in a time of such unprecedented disruption to education and assessment, there is a need to collect reliable and valid data to understand and compare student achievement across the nation, states, select large urban districts, and various student subgroups to support effective policy, research, and resource allocation.” It also noted that NCES had developed plans to safely administer the tests, and Congress was considering additional funding to make that possible.
U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has continued to require states to follow the law and administer their own annual tests. Yet she wrote in a Nov. 24 letter to Congress that she directed NAEP to cancel the 2021 tests as a consequence of governor and schools’ decisions to create chaotic schooling environments that complicate testing.
“The 2021 NAEP tests would have shed light on the significant learning loss following the school closures last spring and the widespread failure to reopen schools this fall,” DeVos wrote. “While the data would have been helpful, the much more valuable and actionable measures of learning loss will be the annual assessments required of states by the Every Student Succeeds Act. I strongly believe that states should implement their own assessments on schedule in spring 2021, given that they do not face the same constraints as NAEP and have ample time to plan for successful test administration tailored to their unique circumstances.”
In addition to participating in the biannual NAEP, federal law requires states to administer their own tests annually as a condition of receiving federal funds. Woodworth noted that states will still be conducting their own tests this coming spring, asserting that is safer than having NAEP personnel do it.
He made no mention of having considered ways to still achieve the law’s objective of transparency in exchange for public funding for education by measures such as asking states to build NAEP questions into state assessments, having local teachers proctor their own classes for the NAEP tests, or using remote proctoring, which is common in higher education.
Historically, Republicans have made deals with Democrats to increase federal funding for K-12 in exchange for so-called “accountability” measures, most of which are tied to tests. With no consistent and reliable test results for nearing a decade now — testing was also both disrupted and rendered less useful with the massive Common Core overhaul President Obama forced on the nation — Democrats once again continue to achieve their objectives while requiring Republicans to forfeit theirs.
It’s long past time for Republicans to stop playing this game and release states from federal education meddling. It only works as a ratchet to the left. If states and federal agencies can ignore federal law “because pandemic,” and the Obama administration could ignore the law “because ‘progress,'” states can ignore federal education law because the U.S. Department of Education is unconstitutional.
Like it or not, they are putting education back in the hands of the parents. It is up to the parents to ensure their kids are getting an education and not just goofing around all day.
Fortunately we have tools like https://www.khanacademy.org/
So their is no excuse.
All the indoctrination that didn’t happen is gonna sure hurt those kids.
Yeah, this has been disasteous for schoolkids. In particular, many blacks and hispanics are simply not participating in “online learning,” despite many jurisdictions spending millions to provide free devices. And the learning-disabled are even worse off. This whole WuFlu hysteria has been a cluster-F, with no end in sight.
Perfect. The Chinese endorse this.
Imagine how isolation is affecting our children. It's bad enough if you have a sibling or two to interact with. For only children it can be excruciating. Solitary confinement is rough on hardened criminals, it must be much worse for innocent children!
We flattened the curve, but the left wasn't satisfied.
We've flattened our children, and they still aren't satisfied.
Or as Livius adds:That can't be good...But all the “public service” ad pitches for masks, isolation, etc. are that if somebody else gets “the virus,” it’s your fault. Children particularly are made to feel like radioactive waste, and to regard everybody else - especially all other children - as equal threats. They will indeed have a sense of diminished self-worth all of their lives. Especially for breaking out and doing normal kid things like laughing, jumping around - in other words, innocent fun and human expression. That won’t permitted in our future Marxist paradise.
By the mid seventies it became clear that something other than education was being conducted in most American classrooms.
Which by the way was about the time that the leftist draft dodging education majors flowed into the school systems...
Gramcian path
The trade-off will be kids less prepared for the real world with regards to earning a living and more reliant on government. The left always seems to be playing with the house money. They win no matter what happens.
this covid will show that those who work hard or are genuinely bright will do okay....those who typically struggle will struggle even more and then it will be blamed on that terrible racism...because shutdown affects only them don’t you see...
This ping list is for the other articles of interest to homeschoolers about education and public school. This can occasionally be a fairly high volume list. Articles pinged to the Another Reason to Homeschool List will be given the keyword of ARTH. (If I remember. If I forget, please feel free to add it yourself)
The main Homeschool Ping List handles the homeschool-specific articles. I hold both the Homeschool Ping List and the Another Reason to Homeschool Ping list. Please freepmail me to let me know if you would like to be added to or removed from either list, or both.
Simple answer.
Homeschool and then you won't have to worry about how public schools screw your kids over and sacrifice their education and values and have them spying on you and reporting back to the teacher on things like how many people were in your home for Thanksgiving or Christmas.
The children are the cultural Marxists’ future. Have been for many decades.
Our children have been specifically targeted a century by our pubic schools, news, media, churches and now social media.
We had John Dewey’s early 1900’s Progressive (Marxist) anti-home schooling influence, followed by The Frankfurt School’s mid-1900’s social Marxist plan for children, then Hollywood’s 1950’s communist influences, then NEA’s No God push in our schools.
Then, the 1960’s CPUSA push of college youts for war protests, drug use and wanton fornication, then the 1980’s sitcoms ridiculing parents, then the 1990’s queer push, then the 2000’s self-esteem facade.
Now, MSM, SJW groups and social media are pushing "social justice" and stirring them to riot and destroy -- the anarchy needed before stepping in as heros to "save America".
FR: Never Accept the Premise of Your Opponent’s Argument
Why is the unconstitutionally big federal government sticking its big nose in the affairs of the sovereign states in the first place?
Patriots are reminded that President Thomas Jefferson had clarified in a State of the Union address that the states would first have to amend the Constitution to give the feds the specific power to dictate policy, regulate, and tax and spend for INTRAstate schooling purposes, something that the states have never done.
"Article IV, Section 4: The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government [emphasis added], and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence."
"10th Amendment: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
"On a few articles of more general and necessary use, the suppression in due season will doubtless be right, but the great mass of the articles on which impost is paid is foreign luxuries, purchased by those only who are rich enough to afford themselves the use of them. Their patriotism would certainly prefer its continuance and application to the great purposes of the public education, roads, rivers, canals, and such other objects of public improvement as it may be thought proper to add to the constitutional enumeration of federal powers [emphases added].” —Thomas Jefferson : Sixth Annual Message to Congress
“Congress is not empowered to tax for those purposes which are within the exclusive province of the States.” Justice John Marshall, Gibbons v. Ogden, 1824.
”[...] the care of the property, the liberty, and the life of the citizen, under the solemn sanction of an oath imposed by your Federal Constitution, is in the States, and not in the Federal Government [emphases added].” —Rep. John Bingham, Congressional Globe, 1866. (See about middle of 3rd column.)
"It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous State may, if its citizens choose [emphasis added], serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.” —Justice Brandeis, Laboratories of democracy.
”From the accepted doctrine that the United States is a government of delegated powers, it follows that those not expressly granted, or reasonably to be implied from such as are conferred, are reserved to the states, or to the people. To forestall any suggestion to the contrary, the Tenth Amendment was adopted. The same proposition, otherwise stated, is that powers not granted are prohibited [emphasis added].” —United States v. Butler, 1936.
"The smart crooks long ago figured out that getting themselves elected to federal office to make unconstitutional tax laws to fill their pockets is a much easier way to make a living than robbing banks." —me
"Federal career lawmakers probably laugh all the way to the bank to deposit bribes for putting loopholes for the rich and corporations in tax appropriations laws, Congress actually not having the express constitutional authority to make most appropriations laws where domestic policy is concerned. Such laws are based on stolen state powers and uniquely associated stolen state revenues." —me
Patriots, until the states wake up and repeal the ill-conceived, mob rule 17th Amendment, you desperately need to stop voting for federal senators who evidently don’t know the federal government’s constitutionally limited powers any better than you do.
Patriots need to work with your likewise constitutionally clueless state lawmakers to support PDJT in putting a stop to unconstitutional federal taxes, taxes that the corrupt, post-17th Amendment ratification Congress cannot justify under its constitutional, Article I, Section 8-limited powers.
Once unconstitutional federal taxes are stopped then the states will ultimately find a tsunami of new revenues that they can use to improve their schools.
Because the schools were doing such a great job educating kids anyway. /s
Only disastrous for school kids whose parents depend on the school system to raise their children.
It is a Backwards world now, Conservative news sites are now for skill testing that includes reading comprehensions questions about My Two Daddies and global warming.
Can’t argue the antecedents of the socialism march beginings but it certainly didn’t become pervasive across all public education systems until the teachers were allowed to unionize.
“... it certainly didn’t become pervasive across all public education systems until the teachers were allowed to unionize.”
The NEA existed in the 1940’s as a craft union, helping to find work for teachers. In 1941 it bought the rights to The American Citizens Handbook, a patriotically pro-American and pro-God book with many scriptural passages. Info link below.
In the late 1940’s The Frankfurt School emigrated to America from Germany. They were cultural Marxists and began infiltrating U.S. education, using Columbia University as their HQ and spreading to teaching colleges from there, then into pubic schools, unions, Hollywood and the D’rat party.
They gained much ground by the late 1950’s, like a virulent cancer. In the 1960’s, with aid from CPUSA, they pushed already-indoctrinated college kids hard. The NEA stopped printing The American Citizens Handbook in 1969, and dumped the 10,00 or so remaining books in a New York landfill.
http://www.shipofstate.com/books/AmericanCitizensHandbook/AmericanCitizensHandbook.htm
You can remove me from the ping list. If I’ve learned anything from covid, its that I can’t homeschool.
Sure.
When I was a kid, we took the Iowa test of basic skills.
I don’t think the fedgov had mandated school testing back then.
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