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Does your education department try to manipulate the public with false information and one-sided viewpoints?
They then are not on the up and up.
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Does your education department try to sneak things past you without you knowing?
They then are not on the up and up.
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Does your education department try to bypass your legislative process?
They then are not on the up and up..
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Does your education department establish rules and regulations with no public input or discussion, or does it appoint boards of people it holds close and keep out people with differing opinions?
They then are not on the up and up…
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Does your education department try to make you think things are really bad, but there is no evidence supporting them other than what they make up?
They then are not on the up and up….
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Does your education department cater to business while demeaning teachers, parents, and students?
They then are not on the up and up…. There are no businesses operating out of those undersized school desks in any of our classrooms. They have no part in the decisions being made by our school officials.
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If your education department does any of these, rest assured,
They are not on the up and up…. Something is wrong…. All of these things are non-democratic. Your education department is running a totalitarian operation in your state which is unconstitutional…
Think about it… If you were running an operation that would benefit the entire state, wouldn’t you want people to know? Of course. You would sell it, and sell it, and sell it, and sell it, and the people would buy it, and buy it, and buy it, and everybody would be on the same page.
But when you have to sneak things through as the only way to get it done, telling just a few people while leaving the rest in complete darkness… well, why ARE you sneaking something through except for the fact that it is bad overall and couldn’t get the votes required to make it into policy? If something is that bad, why then, do we need it?
Remember this.
As you view the results posted saying how Common Core has improved our teaching over the past year between the first taking and second taking of the tests…. these tests are graded on a curve…
One cannot compare one year’s test to another because the curve is set each new year to show a different result..
In plain language, this means the level of proficiency is NOT set by the number of right answers…. but is set by how your right number of answers compare to everyone else…
I have seen nothing regarding the cut scores setting remaining consistent between 2015 and 2016. Being changed by the committee overseeing them, results in better scores (although we can see they were not set much better)…
This was predicted when we first debated Common Core and the Smarter Balanced. It has now come to pass.
Secondly.
If this overall program were working, we should have seen far greater positive results than what we did. There are political reasons as well as financial reasons for this slow improvement… (If you show too much improvement too fast, no one will invest to gain greater improvement..)
Showing one or two percentages of people doing better is not glowing results. Not after two full years of teaching to the test…
The real result is how these same children will do on the next NAEP, the nation’s report card. Overall in both Delaware and the nation, ever since Common Core was affected, those scores (which since the 80’s had always climbed), have gone down…
If you brag about increased Smarter Scores, yet your real report card score goes down, you are no better than those teachers denigrated as passing people into the next grade who failed to meet the expectation…
In conclusion, all of this is completely meaningless. The scores show us nothing for they are arbitrarily made up. The tests show us nothing because they too are made up. The grading shows us nothing because it is made up… Only the NAEP shows us anything now, because it is a test not curved which has been consistent for years… If it shows improvement then this program is indeed working; if it doesn’t, then we need to pull the plug and return to what once worked so well.
What we DO have (since these tests do not show us anything) is a big waste of money… Make that a huge waste of money…. Money that could have been spent on???
Something like an 11:1 student teacher ratio in all schools over 50% poverty levels….
So do not be persuaded by appeals that improvement is at hand.. For the data included has some rather darkening and troubling implications… The Science and Social Studies DCAS scores have dropped consistently since Common Core was invented and put into practice…
Our Delaware kids ARE becoming dumber and dumber..Our solitary focus on math and ENGLISH has eclipsed time for civics and science. Everyone knows how to understand and speak English, even if they don’t know what an indecent participle is. But science and social studies are the determiner of an ignorant society or a knowledgeable one.. Delaware is becoming more and more ignorant the more we embrace Common Core… readily seen because those two scores are not arbitrarily set on a curve; they are based on the number of right and wrong answers. More Delawareans are getting the answers wrong consistently every year since Common Core was enacted.
So let’s grade Markell’s administration….
Our English(reading) scores have gone down over his administrations (due to test change).
Our Math scores have gone down over his administration (due to test change).
Our Social Studies scores have gone down over his administration.
Our Science scores have gone down over his administration….
Our NAEP scores have gone down over his administration….
How can that be called a success?
Kevin reports that Sokola and Jacques put up a bill that postpones the Education Funding Improvement till effectively legislature is over. (Senate CCR 56)
Why?
Here is what the old bill said…
This was one of the major sticking points last year if you will remember, because several people would not originally vote for the original bill’s date of June 30th 2016 because that was “bad” government… So it was changed to get passage votes… and now it has been changed back.
This original bill was forced on an runaway Educational lobby that really did not want it. It’s purpose was to propose legislation to change how schools were to be funded. it was also a foil being used to blunt the passage of Opt Out and opponents to the charter takeover of city schools.
The charter proponents are very scared that exposing the reality of how the funding of charters does immense detriment to the rest of public education, might wake up some legislators and the Delawarean public. They want this hidden.
Hence, the two legislators who are completely owned by corporate educational big money, Earl Jacques and Dave Sokola, wind up being the only sponsors of these two bills:
The first bill requiring the report by the end of March, and the second pushing it to June 30th.
Legislature ends on 6/30/2016. This report is due on 6/30/2016. There will be no time to debate or even look at what was proposed.
That is the bill’s intent.
Whenever anything comes up due on the last day of legislature, we can be assured that someone is trying to sneak something in, the majority of Delawareans don’t want…
What the original bill was intended to accomplish was a way to shift more funding to poorer state school districts. it sounds good in principle.
But if one takes the actual record of deals stuck in the middle of the night by this administration, deals such as Fisker, Bloom Energy, TDC, Kinder Morgan, and Race To The Top, with 5 straight losses it does not look good for the sixth.
Anything other than a late night end-run-sneak, was no reason to pass this bill…
It is past time to hold accountable, those who are accountable for Delaware’s Educational fiasco.
Our legislators at least for now, seem to be failing miserably at doing so.
| Many of you are being told the school taxes you pay are for nothing. Though you pay taxes to your school district, none of that money comes back to you in any form.
That was the line-up leading to 1776 when our taxes were going to Britain. It is the line-up in this anti-school campaign. It is a disruption campaign by special interests. And I am confident that once more—in 2016—democracy in taxation will win. Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to the need of society to levy them. If you need to levy taxes, you do so. If you don’t, you refrain from levying them…. Before the Republican-caused Recession in 2008, Christina School District fought the corporate war (Joe Wise/Broad Institute) and that war put Christina $17 million dollars in the hole. We borrowed to pay off that war. Then, as now, the designated levies set decent levels of sufficient taxes to eventually pay off the entire debt and maintain those schools. Those taxes had been levied according to the value of ones property which for the most part, is based on the owner’s ability to pay. But the opposing top-down run Republican Party players do not believe in that principle. There is a reason. They have political debts to those who sat at their elbows. Across the entire Federal government’s spectrum to pay those political debts, they reduced the taxes of their friends in the higher brackets and left the national debt to be paid by later generations. Because they evaded their obligation, because they regarded the political debt as more important than the national debt, the Repression of 2009 which they started, gave us a seventeen-trillion-dollar handicap on us and our children. Now let’s keep this little drama straight. The actors are the same. But the act is different. Today their role calls for stage tears about paying pennies more to fund the necessary function of schools. But in the days of George W. Bush, they played a completely different part. The moral of their play is clear. They got out from under taxes then, they would get out from under taxes now—if their friends could get back into power now and if they could get back to the driver’s seat. But neither you nor they, think that we are going to allow them back in and so they apply their efforts to defeating necessary referendums which we need to continue schooling our next generation. As before the Republican Recession of 2009, we have again attempted to create a tax structure to yield revenues appropriately adequate to pay the cost of this war against ignorance of our children in this current generation, as well as the next. New or increased taxes ARE needed to enable us to provide the most basic service. Christina, one of the most efficiently run districts in the nation, is struggling with a poverty inherent in its population. Educational recovery is with us, but funds are not. Federal revenues are decreasing; State revenues are decreasing; emergency expenditures are increasing. A balanced budget is outlayed every year. This year another one is on the way. Does that sound like bankruptcy or moral decay to you? Why this increase in this district’s assessment of revenues? Because the very large property owners who lease or rent out the majority of the land in Newark and Bear, now earn more money and now spend more money. Though they are asked to pay more money in taxes, they have so much more money left for themselves and their families… For the average property owner we they can expect minimal increases. Only those who OWN property will pay the increase… Those who own bigger properties will see a small increase; this is a small referendum. Those who own small properties will probably not even notice unless they actually look to compare one year to the next. Those who pay rent, and that is many of you reading this, will pay nothing. That means that less than 11% percent of the heads of Christina’s families will pay $50 dollars more than they did; and more than 89 percent will, if they pay at all, see increases between 0 and 50 dollars. If you want the answer to this talk about high taxes under this current school board administration—there it is. Taxes are higher for those who can afford to pay high taxes. They are minimal for those who can afford to pay less. That is getting back again to the American principle—taxation according to ability to pay. You would think, to hear some people talk, that those good people who live at the top of our economic pyramid are being taxed into rags and tatters. What is the fact? The fact is that they are much farther away from the poorhouse than they were in 2009. You and I know that as a matter of personal observation. A number of my friends who belong in these very high upper brackets have suggested to me, more in sorrow than in anger, that if this levy is passed, they will have to move to some other Nation because of our high property taxes here. I shall miss them very much but if they go they will soon come back. For a year or two of paying taxes in any other country in the world will make them yearn once more for the good old taxes of the U.S.A. We have the lowest taxes anywhere on our wealthy. Far too low if you ask me. One more word on recent history. Not only did this district inherited from the current state Administration, the full cost for imposing an expensive governor’s testing regime into every school, a mistake which placed a revenue burden on providing lower-income economic families living in this district with the very basics of education, but it has also been fraught with an unfair burdens by the governor and DOE, designed not to improve the quality of student’s knowledge, but to flip it over to a zone primarily ripe for the influx of schools FOR-PROFIT. Christina’s local operating tax receipts are reduced by payments to Charter Schools and to other districts providing educational services to resident students. Local revenues provide 41% of the district’s budget. Before the Republican caused recession of 2008-9, fifty-eight per cent out of every dollar of the districts cost came from the state as per our General Assembly. That is now down to 51%… In order to make the top echelon and friends of the Republican Party pay less in state income taxes as the economy recovers, you, the lower level citizens are now being asked to pay more just to maintain the minimum level of expense…. Before asking you to pay more, the district has cut all fat out of their budget. Christina has 98% of all salaried dollars directly impacting students either in the building or transportation. It is running two principals short. It has the lowest level of administrators to student in the nation. Due to last year’s defeat by special interests, 90 teachers were cut and average class sizes swelled from 20 to 30 per room. This year we had to find new revenues to meet the immediate educational requirements. This new tax increase is merely an extension of the old property tax law and a plugging-up of the loopholes in it, loopholes which could be used only by men of very large incomes. I want to say a word to you average homeowners who are being flooded by propaganda about this tax—propaganda, incidentally, paid for by your money. It is being disseminated by those who have used corporations in the past to build up their own economic power, who seek by holding back your vote to raise the levels, to keep down their taxes. It is a fact that 89 percent of all those assessed will suffer less then a 50 dollar increase. Some none. Some a dollar. Some two. Some more. It is a fact that the new revenue only returns the district back to the basest minimum required level necessary for complying with the standards of education set by the state and Federal government. What we are concerned with primarily is principle, and the principle of this law, taxing local property to fund their local schools, is sound. If in its application imperfections are discovered, and they have been over time, they must be corrected for the good of American taxpayers and America’s students. I am certain that the average of our citizenship is not taken in by the amazing amount of tax misinformation which has been turned loose in this political campaign. People tell you the district is top heavy. But stop, look and listen. You will find what the propagandists do not tell you: is that this district is the most efficient in the nation. You will find that this district loses $20 million per year in payments to Charter Schools. Though the allowance of Charter-Schools is bad policy, unfortunately special interests have kept them still legal. That cost has to be made up. You will find this district is forced to jump thorough more hoops required by the DOE than any district outside of East Los Angeles. You will be surprised at the unbelievable pressure put on it to fail, just so private for-profit companies can swoop in and collect all the money you currently pay, without giving back different results. You will find these propagandists are not up-front with the truth. You will find they are purposefully trying to discredit your district’s schools to purposefully deflate your property values so they can buy you out when you leave for a song. . They are against good schools for we all know, good schools inflate property values… Hence backers of the Republican Party at its very top, have something to do with defeating this referendum. Whether in Greenville, Kent, or Sussex County, far from the actual district itself, they have flooded your zip codes with false and misleading propaganda (often with made-up names invoking “Liberty”), both in print and robo-calls calling for the defeat of the referenda. If it fails, it WILL make it easier for them to take over your schools and pocket your property tax money in the process. .. These referenda are at the request of those local districts for whom the local revenue burden has become too heavy. Voters upon looking clearly at the costs of either a YEA or NAY action, should assumed the cost of paying small amounts in the immediate future, outweigh the entire district’s financial collapse, outweigh its inability to fulfill their function,and outweigh the plummeting property values of everyone affected. For the most part, the overwhelming majority of small time business men are like the rest of us. All of us whether we earn wages, run farms or run businesses are in one sense business men. All we seek and all they seek is a fair assessment based on the greater good for the greater number—fair play on the part of our Government in levying taxes and fair play on the part of our Government in protecting our children against financial abuses by those with large pocketbooks.. It is the special privileged who have no concern for your children, your property values, your well being. It is the special privileged who are behind this propaganda to scare you into playing right into their hands. Like Mr. Potter in It’s A Wonderful Life, they keep their heads while you lose yours.. Once more this year we must choose between true democracy in taxation versus capitulating to the special interests in taxation. Are you willing to turn the control of your school’s taxes back to special privilege? I know the American answer to that question. Your emails, mailboxes, and texts may be loaded with suggestions of fear, and your party’s official line of communication may be filled with propaganda. But the American people will be neither bluffed nor bludgeoned. The seeds of fear cannot bear fruit in the polling booth. Inside the polling booth every American man and woman stands as the equal of every other American man and woman. There they have no superiors. There they have no masters save their own minds and consciences. There they are sovereign American citizens. There on March 23rd they will not fear to exercise the sovereignty.of the American People over special interests. |
Christian Hudson at 30045 (Eagles Crest Road, Milton, Delaware 19968; (302) 729-2178; info@FirstStateLiberty.org) is responsible for the robo calls now dialing off hate-lists compiled out of zip codes undergoing the Chrisina Referendum.
If you go to the beach, the above property is that old airport that has always been just north of Lewes…
If you’ve been here very long you may remember it as the location when as a child you looked out your window and saw this….
It was also one of the early fields featuring Pumpkin Chunking….
Today it is headquarter for Hudson Management, a wide ranging assortment of investments scattered across the winds, some of whose seeds have drifted close to home. Some of which include the wooden Fairfield Inn, Rehoboth Beach, Sam Yoder and Sons, Village of Five Points. Other investments include:
- 300MW Wind Farm and Solar project in northern Ontario, Canada (under development)
- 150 unit ocean-front luxury residential development in San Juanillo, Costa Rica
- Video commerce network- TV Page in San Diego, CA
- Leading digital news and information network in Dallas, TX
- Self-storage investment firm with 12 locations in the US, and 2 locations in Ontario, Canada
As would any investor, zeal against taxation would become a cause celebre because taxes sap some of the return off investments… And Christian Hudson has almost zealfully crusaded against any form of taxation….
Any form of taxation…. as would any zealot I could imagine.
Here is one of his ads on removing all taxes. Here are his ideas of cutting the state budget instead of raising taxes. Here is why they are against “smart” growth, advocating for its opposite instead. Here is him as a plaintiff trying to remove Delaware from the Regional Gas Initiative.
Those of us who have sparred with Christian Hudson across DelawarePolitics.net and Delawareright.com are familiar with his single-mindedness whenever anything interferes with the personal accumulation of money. Nothing wrong with that; were I raised differently it would make sense to me too.
But why would someone with no bone to pick in Lewes (Milton), employee his Robo-tax-cop machine to bother people in a district far-far away?
The first and simple reason: it costs nothing for him to do so.. The apparatus is set up; calls are free; and all it takes is 5 minutes to leave a greeting on tape, and then off to the Sussex Country Republican Convention while voters in Christina drop what they are doing when the phone rings, rush to their phones, only to hear a taped message telling them their taxes (but not their time) are wasted and they need to vote no on the upcoming increase….
For whether your taxes are or not wasted, here is a first rate breakdown of their funding… Basically Christina District is one of the most efficient districts in the entire NATION and if it weren’t for the abject poverty endemic in both Wilmington and the Route 40 Corridor, they would be considered one of the best districts in the United States… For the real fact is, those who are paying school property taxes across that small swath of state, are carrying the bulk of the weight for up to 90% of its students…. The real fact is that all the bad press being used to smear that district, is strictly because of the poverty that district bears; from the DOE website, we see one student in every two lives in families making less than $16,000 a year. Here is a quick succession of charts from the above Delaware-Liberal article.
Over 98% of all salaries go directly to people in the buildings or bus drivers. From a quick search over multiple educational funding sources, that seems to be the highest of any United States of American school district….
When you don’t vote FOR a Christina referendum…. you are voting to kick children in the teeth… Those lies of being too top heavy may apply to other districts INCLUDING CAPE HENOPLEN WHICH ENCOMPASSES CHRISTIAN HUDSON’S DISTRICT, but it does not apply to what is probably the most efficient school district in the entire nation:… Christina.
Of course. We understand there may be personal legitimate reasons, (such as living on limited pension income that is being too-quickly drained by ever-increasing corporate fees), which could push you not to want even one more dollar of money taken from you which you can’t spend on absolutely necessities. It’s just like there are reasons you don’t always put money in the collection plate as it’s passed by you in your church. You are entitled to vote and that is why we put it up to a vote. But be advised. Outside influences spreading mis-truths to achieve a certain outcome from which they are completely insulated, such as Christian Hudson and everyone who votes his way solely on ideologically grounds…. are putting loaded guns to the heads of children and pulling the triggers, especially in a place where one out of every two children comes from an under-$16,000 income family.
Just thought you all should know that…..
I only looked at this because I saw Mike Ramone’s high school picture…. Amazingly he has changed so little.
But the more I read, the more I saw obfuscation. So here I am to point it out.
Of Delaware public high school graduates entering an in-state college or university, 42 percent will begin their post-secondary education behind their peers, according to the state’s 2016 College Success Report released today….
You may first exclaim: “oh, that’s terrible.” But is it? For you see Delaware has far more of its high school graduates going to college than do many of its peers. So if you open doors to everyone and have programs enabling everyone to attend, aren’t you going to be bringing in a considerable segment of population who wouldn’t go to college otherwise?
Of course… and primarily these will be those who originally didn’t plan on going to college and prepare for it, but changed their mind due to the abounding opportunities.
And what is nice is that WE DO HAVE remedial courses. In the past, even at highly selective colleges who competed over those receiving 1400 and over on the SAT (2 part). the drop out rate was 1 in 4 for the first year alone. That was average… Many college freshman orientations began with these words…. “Look to the person on your left, now on your right, in front of you, and behind you. Odds are one of them won’t be here by next semester……”
But today we are beating those odds by offering remedial classes. Which from society’s point of having better educated citizens, IS a good thing…
Nearly 60% of Delaware’s high school graduates enroll in college the following year. Nearly 60% of Delawares college graduates get their diploma in 4 years. Twenty-four more percent of each class, graduates by 6 years for a total graduation of 73.6%……
We ARE, number 1.
As backup corroboration, let’s look at Massachusetts. The Massachusetts’s miracle is often touted by reformers as the results they are trying to achieve.
Massachusetts has as slightly higher high-school-to-college enrollment rate than Delaware. 42.2% versus Delaware’s 39.1%. As one would expect by watering down the talent entering college from the public school system, there would be a weaker rate of completion….
So where as we might want to improve for improvement’s sake, we should beware and not trust anyone who tries to use this data to make changes to what is working so remarkably well.
And what is the exact level at which these reports cite as crossing from success to failure? If you look at each school’s report enclosed in the state report, you can see the designation listed as such:
So you see: almost 50 percent of our students entering college do so without one remedial course. In days of old, 25% of those who today are remedialized, would quit in their first semester; the other 25% would have struggled and continued… it was sink or swim; there were no remedial classes then. You either made the grade, or you didn’t. With what we clearly know is poverty’s influence on ones educational ability, having a very high participation rate coupled with a very high remedial rate and finishing with a very high college graduation rate because of it, is the best any state can do to make sure as many of its children as possible receive a college diploma….
(We could drastically cut our remedial rate in one year by not offering remedial courses at all in our colleges) From cross referencing the charts, it is obvious some poorer states do this.
Embedded in the state report, I see this brand new trend developing… Here it is, in this sentence…
POLYTECH Principal Jason Peel credited the dedication of his school’s math teachers, who have “embraced Common Core and the need for more rigorous math instruction.”
At the end of that sentence….I said: “You got some brown stuff on your lip, there buddy; better wipe it off!” Then I looked at what he continued to say…..
The school stopped offering pure remedial math in ninth grade and instead enrolled the students in Algebra I with an extra period of supports. Year-long geometry and Algebra II courses were created for struggling students with extra support classes (double periods). Enrichment period supports also were instituted during the day for struggling math students, Peel said.
Wait! That‘s not Common Core!… This crap is Common Core!…. That is what we call “Good Teaching”!…
What was just said in list form:
- School provided extra levels of supports in grade nine.
- Created year long courses in Geometry and Algebra II for struggling students with extra supports (double periods)..
- Extra enrichment period supports also were instituted during the day for struggling math students
None of that is Common Core. Instead, it is the opposite which is:
- Applying additional resources (time and money) to struggling students.
- Applying additional resources (time and money) to struggling students.
- Applying additional resources (time and money) to struggling students…
Which is exactly the kavipsian solution to solving educational’s woes once listed here three years ago…
- It involves closer one on one teaching, the opposite of original Common Core.
- It involves smaller groups. the opposite of original Common Core.
- It involves dedicated human teaching professionals to provide follow-up, and less computerized babysitting than the original Common Core.
- It involves hiring more teachers; not less than the original Common Core.
- It involves providing more time and resources to failing students than did Common Core. (Remember Dave Coleman saying too much attention was baby-ing our teeny little children?)
So we’ve gone so far that public Common Core supporters (which one has to be in this day of Stasi DOE secret police) have no idea of what Common Core is… or was.
Which means, we won. That was a nice caveat to see..
That said, in each school’s report the goals continue…. (keep in mind Common Core math curriculum STOPPED at Algebra 1 in 8th Grade; one of the points tipping many of us educated souls to work energetically towards its defeat)…
4 Key (post Common Core) Recommendations to Eliminate Remediation:
# 1: Provide targeted interventions prior to 11th grade for students not meeting college-readiness benchmarks. Recommendation
#2: Prepare students to enter the 12th grade ready to succeed in Pre-Calculus or Calculus.Recommendation
# 3: Prepare students to enter the 12th grade ready to succeed in college-level English.Recommendation
# 4: Design an accessible and equitable K-12 system that ensures all students can succeed in college-level courses by 12th grade. Recommendation.
I’m loving being right. Goodbye old Common Core. Hello Common Core which requires smaller class sizes. one on one interaction with professional teachers, and classes that are challenging because the material is challenging, not because someone tried to make it sound as pompous and confusing as possible….
We more than ever need a new test (not the Smarter Balanced) which adequately tests this new version of “Common Core” and not one that twists the English language into a Gordian Knot. We need a test that matches the results we actually are in the process of achieving on the ground through direct human intervention and additional financial resources; not one which discredits all students, teachers and support systems just to make it easier to allow executives manipulation of evidence to allow easier execution of personal vendettas.
Which is all the Smarter Balance is…..
It is pretty simple. It is how people learn…
The way our thoughts are gathered is like a crystal of sugar in a solution of sugar water. A molecule touches another in close proximity and they join. Together they touch molecules closest, and they join too. Knowledge like sugar crystallization, forms from a center point outward. One molecule on one side of the jar does not join with a molecule from the other side of the jar.
Often we can cause sugar to return to solidity in solution by putting an object into the solution which initiates this process. Several molecules adhere to the surface object and the crystallization begins.
We learn the same way. We take what we know, and add to it. We don’t learn foreign languages as our first language for example. We learn objects in one language and that becomes our central core or language template… Then we can catalog another tongue by learning how their words and structure compare to our words and structure…
Across America, today’s learning process has become scattered. We are required to put so many tiny pieces of a smörgåsbord’s item on a sampling plate, that it becomes very hard for the child to describe what the food would look like in its natural form… All he ever sees is tiny bite sized pieces… Describe a roast beef you ask them… It’s small, about a half inch square, it’s meat, and is chewy, and has juice that squirts out when you chomp down on it… Is that big thing at the end of the table a Roast Beef? Oh, no… they respond.
We learn incrementally on what we already know… which makes it hard to teach people who really don’t know anything, something.
When you take children from their environment and put them into someone else’s environment, they are going to take what they know and carry it to that environment, because it makes them comfortable and feels more like home.. They bring drugs, violence, more drugs, and more violence because in that environment, they control the dynamics and it is not as intimidating or scary anymore.
You break that by having children go to school in their own neighborhood. Now because they are “black” we have imposed legal restrictions on allowing them to be treated as children. Restrictions that did not apply when Poles lived in that neighborhood.. Restrictions that did not apply when Italians lived in that neighborhood… Restrictions that did not apply when Irish lived in that neighborhood…. The only difference between the violence and crime then,… versus now? Is that the NRA didn’t supply them with handguns back then.. Rifles were hard to get as well. But you had switch blades.. brass knuckles… billy clubs…. baseball bats… and instead of heroin… you had boot-licker alcohol often made with methyl alcohol instead of ethyl..
But we taught those Poles in their Polish neighborhood… And Italians. And Irish.. Are they incapable of getting good jobs today? No. They are highly capable today as White Anglo Saxon Protestants of filling in for an employer. So will our blacks be if we let them go to school in their own neighborhood.
Because of their familiarity with the neighborhood, and close proximity to all they know, learning will process faster (as long as the disruptions are removed), just as were Polish, Italian, and Irish disruptions removed probably in the exact same percentages…
How it went wrong… Let us take Glasgow High School. It once had a bad reputation. All would agree that Glasgow’s problems were imported from the city. All of Glasgow’s problems..were imported.. from the city. The drug conduit was established. Lots of money available in the suburbs led to a high demand for recreational drugs whose economy depended on individuals shuttling the contraband and payments up and down the 95 corridor. The net result was violence which like Wilmington today, is 97% cause by fights over economic turf…..
The greater legal issues created inaction by administrators. They could not be seen to have a mostly white staff discipline and suspend only blacks because flat out, that appeared racist… and so you did not effectively make positive change. You discussed, tried to look tough in case anyone was watching through the door, and then you let them go right back into their old environment with absolutely no real consequence….
Only after one time of showing the entire school you would back down to black thuggery, the entire control over discipline in that school broke down.
This would not happen in an all black school. It does not happen in an all black school. If a black principal in an all black school, suspends an person who is all black,,, it is not racist. It is disciplining a thug so the rest of the children can learn… Which we all agree is what needs to happen… 99% of our children enter the school system excited to learn… when you let 1% stop that process, the entire school becomes disillusioned and soon, no one else wants to learn either.
We’ve always had reports of immigrant bashing… gangs of one white subgroup would maraud against gangs of another white subgroup. I’m sure it happened in the Roman Times as well. But when you had Polish schools in Polish districts, you had Polish discipline in Polish districts, and for the most part, you had normal schools even though they were in impoverished neighborhoods just as are black schools now….
Imagine though, if you had Italians going to school with all Irish teachers, or Polish children going to school with Italian teachers… When one of those children misbehaved and were disciplined, would not wars erupt? Absolutely….
So we need to get over the idea that all black schools in black neighborhoods is a bad thing… It isn’t… Disrupting a child’s learning process by flipping the familiarity of their environment upside down, however is a bad thing…. I’m sure every parent of 30 to 24 year olds today remembers the trauma and learning problems that occurred when Christina District sent its suburban white children up the 95 corridor into the black neighborhoods surrounding Bancroft, Bayard, and Pyle, I believe…
Familiarity is necessary for learning. And what we are most familiar with as young children is our home. If we can count on that being unchanging, then as students we are free to have much more time to actually focus on what we are in school for… learning….
And when it becomes perfectly clear, that the sole reason blacks are in that all black school run by all black highly trained professionally trained educators….. is to learn… and that no unruly student is going to disrupt that process…. then we will have turned the corner.
(Anthology courtesy of John Young; printed by Exceptional Delaware.)
LIES
• Test scores show we perform poorly.
• America performs poorly compared to international students (other nations do not test poverty).
• Schools are failing.
• Teachers are lazy.
• Teachers are incompetent.
• Lack of Grit is an obstacle to success.
• Lack of Rigor causes failure.
Truths…..
• Policies of merit pay and bonuses are creating turnover not stabilizing it.
• The constant shifts in staff based on test score accountability create understandable teacher inertia to meaningful policy change.
• Our schools have been subject to veritable unending policy change since 1983 (Nation at Risk).
• Testing is misused to label and destroy the profession of teaching.
• Testing is used to inappropriately measure schools of education (SB51).
• Testing is used to label schools and fuel a choice law that shifts funds and creates economic chaos in our schools.
• Property tax funding base is unstable.
• Special education is dramatically underfunded and frequently violated ….School boards can help, but honestly are largely an exercise in petty ego wrapped up in pseudo-authority.
With what we currently know about the Smarter Balanced Assessments, it puts the rule of law in danger. IF we take the Smarter Balanced Assessment, here is what the current law says will happen to our children……
(d) The assessments required in subsections (b) and (c) of this section shall measure:
(1) Student performance as required by any federal mandate; and
(2) For grades 3 through 8, the academic progress of individual students.
Pay particular attention to (2). Then tell me how the lower score of the Smarter Balanced Assessment fits the tenor of the law above, since it rates children on this test with a completely different one last year… How can you determine the academic progress of students who scored well on the DCAS in 2014 and completely fail the poorly executed Smarter Balanced Assessment this year(2015)?
Obviously… there is zero accountability on progress made by any of these children this year.,… Which, ironically, breaks the law above…. Some lawyer should have caught this long ago… but I guess the assumption was that test would be so similar passing one would be like passing the other…. Not so. 70% passed the old test… 70% will fail the new test. We will at the end of this summer, have no clue how well any of these children learned over the 2014-2015 year….. (based on these tests; hopefully the classrooms still functioned regularly).
This shows exactly how Common Core damages education… How much time was wasted preparing precisely for these tests that will be meaningless; time which could have been better spent teaching older curriculums that even parents could understand?
Next:
An estimated number of up to 70% of Delaware’s students will show up in the fall and be told they have to repeat the last grade they thought they just finished…. 70%….
How can that be? How can we promote only 30% of our students, hold back 70% and still take in a new crop of student at the bottom… Where do we put all of them?
Since this is impossible. we are going to break the law… We really have no choice… The law says they shall not advance, but we have no choice but otherwise, and the law is thereby broken…
Same argument holds here as well. The law will be broken.
Now… here is the joke:
So we are going to hold them back one year for failing the test, but then promote them anyway the second year if they still have not passed the test…. Meaning that classes will still have people who can’t grasp the subject now but who are just one year older than they would be otherwise. So…. what’s the point of taking the test?
So what happens to all these failing kids? Glad you asked.
- an individual improvement plan (153 (d) (1) a)
- an individual improvement plan (153 (d) (2) a)
- an individual improvement plan (153 (d) (3) a)
- an individual improvement plan (153 (d) (6) a)
For every failure there is the option to enroll in a private individual improvement plan, paid for by the parents of the student…. It is all about money…. $$$…
How much is it worth to you to have your child keep up with his class and not be held back? $100? $200? $500? $1000? If you are indigent, you can even get a government secured loans to cover all education expenses. The quasi- governmental institution pays the vendor, and over time you pay back the institution… All loans secured by your tax refund if you ever renege.
Free public school is free no more…
That is why your child is taking this horrible test and as all smart people have been saying, will fail and you the parent, will still pay lots for them to graduate on time.
Thereby, for the quick fix, we need this following bill put on the table….
This act removes Subchapter Three of Chapter One of Title 14, in it’s entirety. (The numbers for all subsequent ones shall be move up by one)
We can add a new bill later… But this piece is so huge, so corrupt, so full of holes, it is better to remove it completely and continue forward with something brand new next year…..
vimeo.com/120619448
Do not let your child take this test.…. Wilmington City Council should actively encourage all residents to opt their children out of this test…. Every other governing community in this state should follow suit! it is about the children… Seriously, why should they be sacrificed to corporate profits?
kavips 
