Public comments will be right after their lunch break, assuming about 1:00. Then the vote on the Science Standards as part of their CONSENT Agenda!!!

Also, heads up on parking. There is another big event, Great Start Collaborative Star Power. Lansing will be crowded! Plan ahead.

Michigan has little recourse in changing their own standards. And teachers are given little choice in the matter already, so the change to the Common Core is nothing new for me or them. Take high school world history as one of many examples. There isn’t enough time in the year to teach everything that’s in there effectively. When the MME comes around, teachers aren’t given any useful data other than a score report that tells them the majority of their students missed six world history questions out of ten. They aren’t told in the reports which content expectations to which they align, and therefore have to play a guessing game which sets their students and them up for failure. They have no recourse for that. SBAC may be still be developing the assessment to test the Common Core, but the data they’re going to provide is far more useful, and since educator evaluations include standardized testing data, many of the teachers I work with are excited for the change. They feel that’s a much better way to evaluate than a report that simply states “you missed 6/10 and you’re going to be called ineffective.” If you can magically fix THAT problem you’ll have my undying support.

Alicia already pointed out that there is not enough resources available at MDE to adequately address our own standards, and she is absolutely correct. If they woke up tomorrow and found a pot of money, and decided to scrap the GLCE/HSCE and start anew, there still would be minimal involvement from the teachers in the field in the process. I’m pulling on past precedence here.

I made only one real comment about big government, and in reading back, I fail to see the inconsistency. I pointed out that I too, as a rule, dislike big government. I agreed with you that there were carrots dangled to encourage the implementation of the Common Core initially, and that that may not have been the best way of going about implementing them, but they’re here and they’re working so for once, something decent came out of having a “big government”.