For the 2009-10 school year South Carolina instituted a new state-wide test that supplanted the PACT. Developing the PACT cost five and a half million dollars; we can assume developing the PASS was likewise costly.
Now the state must drop the PASS by the 2014-15 school year, due to the adoption of the Common Core Standards. That means that the now obsolete PASS will have cost a million per year to develop. Did you ever sense that the developers of such tests are like pigs at the trough?
Another "homegrown" test for the Common Core Standards will surely cost as much to develop as the PACT did. Why would the state even consider developing its own when others are already in the works. Let's be comparable for a change!
Despite worries about giving up control of curriculum, Common Core Standards make sense. It's the CORE, stupid. South Carolina can add whatever it wants to supplement the core, as undoubtedly other states will do. The days are gone when all students stayed in the same school system or even in the same state for K-12. Not having a Common Core hurts them.
Tuesday, August 02, 2011
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3 comments:
Speaking of pigs at the trough, Super Nancy McGinley and her Board Chairman Chris Fraser are trying to sell the idea of a $1,000,000 teacher evaluation development project. It would replace the current evaluation process that CCSD principals and associate superintendents have somehow forgotten to use. The super isn't evaluating principals and principals aren't evaluating teachers. So what makes us believe if we spend a million bucks on developing a new evaluation method they won't leave that one on the shelf as well?
Janet Rose doesn't care, she's retired and expects to win the contract as an outside contractor. It's her idea anyway. She's entitled to it. Just ask her friend Nancy.
Can you say "conflict of interest"?
I support the concept of common core curriculum but our state's requirement that students have 24 credits to graduate undercuts that idea. Sometime after 1970 SC went from 16 units to 24 units but the academic courses required to be part of the mix somehow only got diluted. It's crazy that GA and NC high school students graduate with fewer credits than SC graduates, yet they are admitted to SC colleges and universities with the same standing. Requiring 24 units to graduate without linking the content of the education to anything of substance makes the SC requirement look like an attempt at providing job security for a lot of unnecessary public school employees. PASS, PACT, 24 units to graduate....its all about the money and very little about improving content.
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