U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan and his pro-Common Core cohorts have a serious problem on their hands in New York where a growing number of parents are opting their children out of Common Core-aligned standardized testing.
So many students are opting out of the tests that some school districts are seeing their assessment participation rate drop below 95 percent as required under the federal government’s No Child Left Behind law. A low participation rate in back-to-back years causes the federal government to classify a district as not making “adequate yearly progress.” That status would force local school leaders to create an “improvement plan” and could lead to the loss of federal grants, reports Syracuse.com.
In other words, the federal government will attempt to cause bureaucratic headaches and financial problems for uncooperative school districts.
The standardized tests are important to the Common Core experiment because they’ll provide education researchers and technology experts with the apples-to-apples data they need to unlock the “science” of teaching and learning. Without that data, Common Core is only a set of nationalized learning standards of dubious quality.
In most political showdowns, penalties from the D.C. overlords would be enough to scare the peasants into submission.
But Common Core isn’t just another political issue.
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