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December 24, 2013

Laura Waters

your copy of New Jersey Family, available all over central and south Jersey. I’ve got a piece in the January issue called “Inside NJ’s Classrooms: The Two Big Changes Coming to Our Public Schools.”

Laura Waters

3 Comments

kallikak, December 26, 2013 @ 4:36 pm Reply

A reader of your piece might conclude that NJ didn't have well-thought-out standards before Common Core and this resulted in achievement gaps between high- and low-income areas.

Really. The Core Curriculum Content Standards are/were fine and the quite noticeable achievement gaps are not attributable to either them, sub-standard testing protocols, teacher tenure or LIFO.

PARCC is a bonanza for Pearson—which is not liable for any sort of performance guaranty in terms of utility—and this season's hula hoop for the rest of us.
Thomas Kay, January 1, 2014 @ 7:35 pm Reply

A reader of your piece might also conclude that the majority of NJ schools classrooms actually house rows of desks with a teacher standing in front, stating an informational fact or a math algorithm to be repeated or practiced by the students, individually, at their desks. They might also think that NJ teachers do not constantly seek and implement innovative ways in which to best teach our children that are creative, interactive, productive, and effective.

Are you also suggesting that implementation of the Common Core and PARCC will provide the magic cure to close the achievement gaps for our impoverished districts and that it's been a lack of appropriate standards in our high-performing state that has been the cause?

Wow.
kallikak, January 2, 2014 @ 2:49 pm Reply

Yup. That's what she's saying.

What she's not addressing is how much time will now be consumed by test prep and actual test-taking.

Not to mention the 'infrastructure enhancements' necessary simply to offer the tests in the first place.

This will be a real turn-around moment, however—for Pearson!