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Sandra Stotsky

Education
August 18, 2015

How Massachusetts Promoted Achievement Before Common Core & PARCC

Before the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) officially decides to adopt PARCC’s testing system in place of the testing system that the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) developed in the 1990s and early 2000s, local school committees,...
Education
June 16, 2015

Why Massachusetts Should Abandon the PARCC Tests & Common Core

It is difficult to find any public analysis and comments by teachers, parents, researchers, or literary scholars on PARCC’s “practice” and “sample” test items for English language arts for grades 3-11.   Taking the bull by the horns, that is what I...
Education
January 23, 2015

Is it Time to Rethink State Boards of Education?

Some political officials (Governor Sandoval of Nevada) and self-described policy wonks (Fordham Institute staff) are calling into question the usefulness of locally elected local school boards.  Governor Sandoval suggested replacing them with governor-appointed boards, while Fordham has argued for years against locally...
Education
January 9, 2015

Don’t Waste the Crisis over Common Core

The entire Common Core project is rapidly going south, and within two years may be no more than a dim memory of a nightmare in the minds of a growing army of angry parents and teachers from coast to coast. Before this...
Education
December 28, 2014

Steps for States to Follow to Replace Common Core

To help out governors and state legislatures that really want to get state-tailored standards close to the quality of the pre-2010 Massachusetts and California standards–or the Indiana 2006 standards–I have provided an outline of the steps or procedures a state legislature could...
Education
December 26, 2014

Common Core’s standards can be replaced by first-rate standards overnight

In a funny story in the Washington Post on December 24, 2014, Mike Petrilli and Michael Brickman (experts on nothing at all) claim that it will not be easy to replace Common Core’s standards with something better. They even go so far...
Education
December 26, 2014

How to Make Common Core Useful?

What could be done to make the idea of a common core across 50 states make sense in this country?  I finally have come up with what could be the solution that Governor Huckabee simply missed.  We need to relabel them high...
Education
December 23, 2014

How to Maintain the Massachusetts “Education Miracle”

Not by using Common Core-based standards and tests, for sure, or anything that looks like them. The English language arts and mathematics standards dumped by the Governor Patrick-appointed Board of Elementary and Secondary Education in July 2010 are nothing like Common Core’s...
Education
November 3, 2014

How Colleges Are Dumbing Our Kids Down, Too, and What We Can Do About It

It’s not just Common Core’s standards and the curriculum teachers are putting into place to address those standards that are dumbing our kids down.  Our colleges are contributing in their own way to the problem by the books they assign incoming freshmen...
Education
October 6, 2014

Those Mathematical Societies That Supposedly Endorsed Common Core’s Standards Didn’t

Stanford University mathematics professor R. James Milgram included an informative e-mail in his packet of information for state legislators when he testified at a hearing on Common Core in Milledgeville, Georgia on September 24, 2014. The e-mail explains why presidents of many...