Commentary

How to Fool the Public, One Education Test At A Time

How to Fool the Public, One Education Test At A Time

Sandra Stotsky

What do you call the seller if you label new English Language Arts test items as more rigorous than those on the original tests with the same name and then sell another state these new English Language Arts test items knowing that parents there expect the original test items, not those wrongly described as "more rigorous"?

That's the situation in Rhode Island, which is adopting/buying from Massachusetts educational test items based on Common Core's standards called PARCC (which stands for Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers). Only many people in Rhode Island don't know that, because the new Rhode Island test is named after MCAS (short for Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System), a pre-Common Core test that had more rigorous English Language Arts standards than the current ELA PARCC tests.

In New Hampshire, A Battle Over Homeschooling Rights
Commentary

In New Hampshire, A Battle Over Homeschooling Rights

Kerry McDonald

Homeschooling has been legally recognized in all 50 states as a viable education choice for families since 1993, but the battle to protect homeschooling rights is far from over. All too frequently, state legislators, local policymakers, and school district officials create new roadblocks for homeschooling parents, challenging their right to educate their children as they choose.

In some cases, these roadblocks include urging homeschooling parents to comply with school district policies or demanding reports and assessments that go beyond what state homeschooling laws dictate. In other cases, these barriers include curriculum stipulations, grade-level assumptions, and even standardized testing that force homeschooling families to mirror a public schooling curriculum with which they may disagree. In many instances, the requirements for homeschooling families are much more restrictive than the requirements for private and parochial schools.

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