Reply to Common Core - It's always about the money, follow the money and you find the truth

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Reply to "Common Core - It's always about the money, follow the money and you find the truth"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Surprised by this as McKinsey usually does good work. Standards are not a problem. Common tests across the nation to give comparative data is not a problem. The problem is that the execution and development of these has been a total failure.

Systems like MCPS made the whole situation worse by combining ineptitude, political desires to hide the achievement gap by lowering standards, and obsession over test scores to create the awful 2.0. If this wasn't bad enough, they screwed up the implementation and its a mess across the county.

I am surprised that the DOE has allowed Pearson to take advantage of dumb school systems like MCPS. Its understandable that Pearson as a company copyrights everything and wants to resell it. They can do this. However, if a school system agrees to these rules then they are IMO violating FERPA by restricting access to student educational records to protect the agreement with the company.

FERPA basically protects a student's right to have any material that constitutes an educational record. While the DOE has supported exceptions for things like copies of SAT tests, the Pearson model takes this so much further for basically everything in the curriculum. Students in MCPS do get back their quizzes, tests, or exams. [b]Teachers can not make Pearson materials available to parents.[/b] It places a burden on teachers to come up with alternatives to provide anything that goes home. [/quote]

What do you mean by this -- teachers can't make Pearson materials available to parents?  If your child completed a worksheet or test with his/her name on it, then it's an educational record subject to FERPA, whether or not Pearson created it.  The school might not send it home, and instead require you to come to school to see it, and/or require you to sign a non-disclosure form.  Schools even have to do this for major standardized tests (whether created by Pearson or whoever) like the MSA, etc.

If you're talking about curriculum materials created by Pearson, then that's true, curriculum materials aren't subject to FERPA because they're not attached to any one student, so they're not educational records.  And, I think that's a really big problem because parents don't actually know what their student is doing.  [/quote]

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