Quoted from bumblethru

Thanks for the links Joeboxer. While i was looking at them i came across this video. I watched it....and it's all greek to me! Guess you have to be a teacher to understand. Like what's 'module'?



http://www.engageny.org/resource/video-debrief-k-5-math-transition-and-implementation-panel

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New York should pull out of flawed Common Core
Sunday, February 9, 2014
By Tricia Farmer/For The Sunday Gazette  


I was recently interviewed by a reporter regarding my reaction to State Education Commissioner John King’s intention of making adjustments to Common Core rather than delaying its implementation. The first question I was asked was how my children scored on the standardized test.

The reporter was probably hoping to incorporate the opinion of one of U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s so-called white suburban moms who were angry with the Common Core tests because their children were not as bright as they thought.

My children, however, scored quite well on last year’s standardized test. The point that I would have liked to make was that there are some very real concerns with the standards themselves and not just their implementation.

I believe it is essential for all to educate themselves on the standards and the issues attached to the adoption of these standards under the Race to the Top Initiative.

Commissioner King says that the Common Core standards are widely agreed upon. He bases this assumption on the fact that 45 states have adopted them. But what is interesting to note is that the majority of states, including New York, agreed to adopt the standards before they were even written in order to receive Race to the Top funds.

They were sold as a higher set of standards, more “rigorous,” to ensure that our children are college- and career-ready and able to compete globally. What cash-strapped school district is going to say, “No thank you, we don’t want higher standards, we don’t want your money?”

So school boards across the state, across the country, signed on, sight unseen. It was not until school districts began implementing the standards that they could see what was actually in them. Sound familiar?

As it turns out, Common Core was not developed by educators. Neither of its chief standards writers, David Coleman and Jason Zimba, has ever taught in K-12, nor published anything on curriculum and instruction. Nonprofits coordinated the creation of Common Core and they were mostly funded by the federal government and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The nonprofits include the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, both trade associations made up of lobbyists and partially funded by the federal government. These two groups commissioned Achieve, Inc. to do the detail work.

Since Common Core was created by nonprofits, everything was done behind closed doors and without public view or comment.

There was a validation committee to review the standards, but unfortunately the only two content experts on the committee refused to sign off on the standards, claiming they were both flawed and lacking.

Sandra Stotsky, who is credited with developing one of the country’s strongest sets of academic standards for K-12 students while serving as senior associate commissioner in the Massachusetts Department of Education, reviewed the English Language Arts standards. She claims that Common Core actually reduces opportunities for students to develop critical thinking and that most of Common Core’s college-readiness and grade-level standards in ELA are empty skills.

James Milgram, professor of mathematics at Stanford University, reviewed the math standards. He states that they were written in a “real hurry,” taking between nine and 10 months, with little to no communication among the writers for three separate groups, K-5, 6-8 and high school. He told various legislative committees that “our students will be more than two years behind international expectations by grade 7.”

When asked if Common Core standards would prepare our students for STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields, Zimba, the chief drafter of the math standards, replied, “Not only not for STEM, it’s also not for selective colleges.”

Since these standards were written from the top down, there was not much consideration for the development of our youngest students. Perhaps this is where the “rigor” is placed and inappropriately so.

In March 2010, the Alliance for Childhood issued a Joint Statement of Early Childhood Health and Education Professionals on the Common Core Standards Initiative. Hundreds of leading educators and health professionals expressed grave concerns over these standards for students in K-3, stating “the proposed standards conflict with compelling new research in cognitive science, neuroscience, child development, and early childhood education about how young children learn, what they need to learn, and how best to teach them in kindergarten and the early grades.”

These concerns went unaddressed by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers.

Aside from these very troubling concerns with the Common Core standards are the issues attached to the adoption of them. Commissioner King states that the standards are separate from the testing. But that is not true. Common Core is a two-part process, according to the agreement the governors signed. The first part is the standards. The second part is testing.

New York state agreed to adopt PARCC (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers), which is a national testing consortium. PARCC will serve to drastically increase the emphasis on standardized testing.

Maryland has implemented PARCC this year and is facing a $100 million shortfall to accommodate for the new Common Core tests, and total testing time has increased between 73 percent and 102 percent for grades 3-8.

There is also a second part to the testing, in which New York state has agreed to provide very detailed student level data on each child. In 2012, the federal government changed the student privacy laws to allow the state to share any information they have about our children without parental knowledge or consent.

The government model calls for more than 400 data points to be collected on each child and shared with whomever they deem appropriate. New York has agreed to send all personally identifiable data to a third party company called inBloom, and all data is scheduled to be uploaded to the Cloud in April.

This information not only calls for academic records but personal information such as family income, voting status, disciplinary records, IP address, bus stop times, disabilities — and the list goes on.

Many believe that the solution to the Common Core crisis is simply to delay its implementation. However, with a deeper look into the standards themselves and the issues they create, I believe the only solution is for New York state to completely withdraw from Race to the Top.

It is under this initiative that we agreed to adopt not only these questionable standards but everything else that is attached to them. If we withdraw from Race to the Top, there is nothing to stop our schools from implementing those higher standards that they deem to be appropriate.

On the other hand, if we do not withdraw completely we are restricted to adhering to the good, the bad and the ugly that is Common Core.

Tricia Farmer lives in Burnt Hills and is a member of BH-BL and Capital District Parents Concerned over Common Core. The Gazette encourages readers to submit material on local issues for the Sunday Opinion section.

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But what is interesting to note is that the majority of states, including New York, agreed to adopt the standards before they were even written in order to receive Race to the Top funds.

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Common Core means more gov’t control


I agree with Tricia Farmer’s Feb. 9 Viewpoint, “New York should pull out of flawed Common Core,” but from a different vantage point.
   First, education is not a power delegated to the federal government by the Constitution, but is the role of the states. There is no exception for the feds to promote Common Core or even to have a Department of Education.
   In arguing for ratification of the Constitution by the states that had recently thrown off the yoke of King George III, James Madison in Federalist 45 says, “The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government, are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the state governments are numerous and indefinite.”
   But federal power has grown progressively at the expense of the states. One way this has been done, and is now being done to promote Common Core, is to dangle money in front of the states, which will fawningly give away power for a piece of the action.
   Secondly, if Common Core is as flawed as Farmer says it is, then we’ll have foisted a gigantic blunder on our youth far more widespread than such failed experiments as the new math or the look-say reading method. Free enterprise and school choice in education with local experimentation would do more to improve education than an additional layer of bureaucracy that imposes uniformity as if it were a virtue in itself.
   Such educational uniformity made sense for totalitarian nations such as Nazi Germany or the former Soviet Union as a means to stifle dissent and control their citizens. But how many of us would entrust the federal government with programming the minds and hearts of our children and grandchildren? But that’s what Common Core does.

   ERIC RETZLAFF
   Rotterdam

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HUMANS APPEAR PROGRAMMED TO OBEY ROBOTS, STUDIES SUGGEST

robot_traffic_cop_congo (1)

Two 8-foot robots recently began directing traffic in the capital city of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kinshasa. The automatons are little more than traffic lights dressed up as campy 1960s robots—and yet, drivers obey them more readily than the humans previously directing traffic there.

Maybe it’s because the robots are bigger than the average traffic cop. Maybe it’s their fearsome metallic glint. Or maybe it’s because, in addition to their LED signals and stilted hand waving, they have multiple cameras recording ne’er-do-wells.

“If a driver says that it is not going to respect the robot because it’s just a machine the robot is going to take that, and there will be a ticket for him,” Isaie Therese, the engineer behind the bots, told CCTV Africa.

The Congolese bots provide a fascinating glimpse into human-robot interaction. It’s a rather surprising observation that humans so readily obey robots, even very simple ones, in certain situations. But the observation isn’t merely anecdotal—there’s research on the subject. (Hat tip to Motherboard for pointing out a fascinating study for us robot geeks.)

Nao robot sitting beside a human researcher.
Nao robot sitting beside a human researcher.

Last year, scientists at the University of Manitoba observed a group of 27 volunteers pressured to work on a docket of mundane tasks by either a 27-year-old human actor in a lab coat or an Aldeberan Nao robot—both called “Jim.”

Ever since the infamous and ethically questionable 1971 Stanford Prison Experiments—wherein participants assigned roles of guards and prisoners demonstrated just how situational human morality can be—similar behavioral work has been rare and fraught.

Even so, if carefully conducted with the participants’ well-being in mind, such studies can provide valuable behavioral insights. The results of the Stanford study are still taught over 40 years later.

In this case, the researchers gave participants a moderately uncomfortable situation, told them they were free to quit at any time, and briefed them immediately following the test.

Each participant was paid C$10 to change file extensions from .jpg to .png as part of a “machine learning” experiment. To heighten their discomfort and the sense the task was endless, the workload began with a small batch of 10 files but grew each time the participant completed the assigned files (ultimately reaching a batch of 5,000).

Each time a participant protested, he was urged on by either the human or robot. The human proved the more convincing authority figure, but the robot was far from feckless.

10 of 13 participants said they viewed the robot as a legitimate authority, though they couldn’t explain why. Several people tried to strike up a conversation, and one showed remorse when the robot said it was ending the experiment and notifying the lead researcher, exclaiming, “No! Don’t tell him that! Jim, I didn’t mean that….I’m sorry.”

Participant obedience may have been directed more at the human pulling the strings than the robot itself.
Participant obedience may have been directed more at the human pulling the strings than the robot itself.

The researchers write that the novelty of the robot’s design may have detracted from its perceived authority. And involving humans in the robot part of the experiment may have led participants to defer their feeling of responsibility from robot to human.

None of the participants, for example, listed pressure from the robot as a reason for their obedience. Instead, they cited factors like interest in future tasks, trusting the robot had been programmed by a qualified human researcher, and a feeling of obligation to the lead human scientist.

Despite these caveats, the researchers write, the fact remains that, “A small, child-like humanoid robot had enough authority to pressure 46% of participants to rename files for 80 minutes, even after indicating they wanted to quit.”

And in what may be the most disturbing result, a number of the participants expressed concern the robot might be broken or malfunctioning—yet they didn’t stop working. “They followed a possibly “broken” robot to do something they would rather not do.”

Few studies exist outside the University of Manitoba paper, however, the scientists do note there is past research that appears to corroborate their findings.

“In the single previous case that uses a deterrent (embarrassment), the results are striking: a robot can push people to do embarrassing acts such as removing their clothing or putting a thermometer in their rectum.”

Of course, two studies, one with just 27 people, and an anecdotal example (the Congolese bots) don’t prove humans will dutifully yield the planet when the robots revolt.

How much of the behavior is due to fear or respect of the humans behind the scenes? If the Congelese bots were simply traffic lights and cameras, would folks still readily obey them? Maybe the drivers know human cops can be argued with, ignored, or corrupted, but a machine (humanoid or not) won’t be similarly manipulated.

More study would be worthwhile, the University of Manitoba researchers argue. Human-robot interaction will grow in coming years, particularly in healthcare and the military. A greater body of behavioral research can inform future designs and potentially prevent harmful obedience. (Or, we might add, promote healthy disobedience.)

Quoted from DemocraticVoiceOfReason

Common Core is not completely a new idea.  100 years ago, some states had a common curriculum or at least a common state test to graduate with a high school diploma.  
There are positives and negatives with Common Core.  The biggest problem is that it assumes that all students should be preparing for college.  The other is that this new approach threw out the "no child left behind" emphasis on learning BASICS like reading, writing and arithmetic.

Quoted from senders

to get workers into the factories and that were mildly complacent and 'happy with their place'....giving all blessing to god
for their good fortune....

Quoted from DemocraticVoiceOfReason

No doubt -- you and the other nayboobs would prefer to do away with public education all together -- and then the entire country could be as ignorant as you folks are.