Per email from PoliticoMA…
BALLOT QUESTION BONANZA —
Secretary of State William Galvin‘s office announced on Friday that seven of the 11 ballot question petitioners that filed signature papers with his office two weeks ago had officially gathered more than 64,750 signatures – bringing them one step closer to the voters in 2016 (or in one case, 2018).
WHAT MADE THE CUT —
— Relative to Ending Common Core Education Standards: 76,016 signatures
— An Act Relative to Expanded Gaming: 74,521 signatures
— The Regulation and Taxation of Marijuana Act: 70,739 signatures (Campaign to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol)
— The Massachusetts Fair Health Care Pricing Act: 68,755 signatures
— An Act to Prevent Cruelty to Farm Animals: 95,817 signatures
— An Act to Allow Fair Access to Public Charter Schools: 70,716 signatures
— For the 2018 ballot: An Amendment to the Constitution to Provide Resources for Education and Transportation through an additional tax of incomes in excess of One Million Dollars: 92,617 signatures
WHAT DIDN’T —
— Constitutional Amendment Regarding the Public Funding of Abortion (for 2018 ballot)
— Ending Marijuana Prohibitions for Persons 21 of Age or Older (Bay State Repeal)
— Law Relative to Animal Shelter Record Keeping
— Law Relative to the Reduction of Euthanasia in Animal Shelters
WHAT’S NEXT —
The Legislature has until May 3 to take action on the proposed laws. If nothing happens, petitioners must gather another 10,792 signatures by July 6 to make it to the statewide ballot.
The so-called millionaires tax constitutional amendment must be acted on by two joint sessions of the Legislature before reaching the 2018 ballot.
What are the additional consequences of pulling out of CC? I am especially interested in hearing from the teachers on that one. Otherwise, the rest seem largely sensible, though I agree with Bob Neer that passing sensible policy is sorta what a legislature is supposed to do…
I was in traffic for an interview with the SoE on the Rooney/Braude show, and it sounded like they couldn’t decide between MCAS and PARCC, and so they chose both, with the result that even more education days will be lost to testing and test prep. His spin was a bit different, but that was the gist of it.
you can only change the state standards. And there are significant consequences to doing that. I find this initiative unclear or odd on a couple of levels:
1. Section 1 rescinds not a state law, but a decision of the MA BESE –
an appointed committee. Presumably this is ok with the Secretary of State since he let the initiative move forward, but I’ve never heard of a ballot initiative that changed a bureaucratic regulation instead of a law.
2. The impact of the adjustments Section 1 makes to MGL 69 are not clear. What does it mean to say that the curriculum frameworks in Math and ELA in effect on July 20, 2010 are restored?
The differences between the two ELA standards can be found in a crosswalk here: http://www.doe.mass.edu/candi/commoncore/0111ELAanalysis.pdf but what the practical (i.e. classroom) effect is of rolling back the standards to the earlier version is not clear to me.
Presumably the intent of the ballot initiative is that the examinations testing performance against the standards would also be somehow rolled back, but there is no provision in the initiative for that. This raises the question of what would happen if the standards changed, but the test used to evaluate student performance did not.
Effectively, districts that wanted good scores on the standardized test would still utilize the newer frameworks that MCAS 2.0 will be aligned to. This question also points to the elephant in the room for this initiative – if districts do actually re-align to the older standards, they would have purchase new textbooks aligned to the older standards and re-work classroom lessons to match those standards. For Chelmsford, the cost of changing to textbooks aligned to the Common Core standards was in the hundreds of thousands of dollars (spread over several years) and the work of aligning classroom teaching to incorporate those new texts and standards was arguably similar.
No financial support for such a change is provided by the initiative – it is an unfunded mandate.
3. Sections 2 and 3 appear to initiate a new round of updating
standards. This will cost money at the state level, then once the new standards have been drawn up, every district will have to go through the purchase of textbooks and alignment of lessons yet again. Then whatever test is used to assess performance will need to be re-written to align to the new standards.
4. Finally Section 4 insists that all of the questions, constructed responses, and essays used in the test to be released before the beginning of the subsequent school year. I don’t understand yet what the point of this section is, but if the intent is to have the results of the tests released, this would be a dramatic shortening of the current turnaround time.
Therefore a law can easily be passed, either by the legislature or the people, that has the effect of overriding a regulation.
The Board voted to test our students with something that is not PARCC. The Commissioner calls it “MCAS 2.0”.
What that is, we don’t know. They don’t know. They do know that the PARCC is such an obviously invalid, time-consuming train wreck that Massachusetts is joining dozens of states pulling out of that effort. However, since our governor and education officials are committed to testing our students a lot, they will be tested with this new thing. What that is, how or if it will help, doesn’t matter.
So basically, students will continue to be over-tested, but with what or what good it will do is a question mark.
Since it’s shameful how much progressives have dropped the ball on education policy in the last two decades. The choice between the status quo and more charters is a really shitty one.
…but as to the comment that goes with it – HECK NO!
To replace the legislature with 100 randomly chosen people. In general, 27th Middlesex gets a lot of weird nonbinding questions. I live in the 34th Middlesex, which is split between Somerville and Medford, so ours are typically more mundane.
Probably wouldn’t pass constitutional muster. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a non-binding question on any ballot I have cast. I assume the law allowing them universally applies, but I guess some districts just are more active than others in that regard.
So if there’s anything you want on the ballot in your district next year, have at it.
The questions always take the form, “Shall the (senator or representative) from this district be instructed to vote in favor of
legislation (describe the legislation you wish to be enacted)?”
More info on page 15 of this guide: https://www.sec.state.ma.us/ele/elepdf/State-Ballot-Question-Petitions-08-2015.pdf
So we would have two sets of tests and two standards for students to have to abide by? No more cursive, no more poetry, and soon no more art, fiction, or music in schools. Just non stop testing. And most STEAM teachers I know aren’t really convinced we are investing in that side of education eitherm
My niece is wicked smaht and getting great grades at Regis, and was in the top of her class at Marlboro High. But I am shocked she matriculated without learning how to cite, how to write a persuasive or argumentative paper on a current events issue, or how to structure a longer than 5 paragraph paper. She is a great writer on her own, but boy did she need advice in those other areas. I’ve only been out of high school for 10 years, it can’t have gotten that much worse since I left, can it?
That’s why everyone is complaining.
and I say that as someone who was raised and educated by a public school Mom who stimulated a lifelong love of learning in me.
To illustrate the dumbing down of America consider this. Recently, when high school graduates where asked what century the American Civil War was fought in less than half correctly answered the 19th century. That scared the hell out of me not just because I was a history major but because it was a canary in the coal mine. It reflected a cultural collective amnesia that allows demagogues like Trump to manipulate and exploit the ignorant for their own nefarious purposes.
In the words of H.G. WELLS : ” Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.”
Fred Rich LaRiccia
I got out of bed on the wrong side today. 🙂
Fred Rich LaRiccia
Republicans?
This has been another edition of simple answers to simple questions!
Good one merrimackguy … (giggle giggle giggle)
for the dumbing down of our country — Fascists.
Fascism has been defined as the control of government by crony capitalism driven by right-wing ideology and bellicose nationalism.
On April 9, 1944 Vice President Henry Wallace was quoted thus in the New York Times:
” The really dangerous American fascist…is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence.
His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power…
They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest.
This final objective, toward which all their deceit is directed, is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjugation.”
When I saw Trump at a rally recently the prophesy of Sinclair Lewis sent shivers up and down my spine : ” Fascism will come wrapped in a flag and carrying a Bible.”
Fred Rich LaRiccia
I’ll make certain to vote against the fascists in the next school board election.
But be assured that things have not changed that much at CRLS – students are still required to cite (though not always administrators but that is a different story), they write persuasive or argumentative papers, and papers over 5 paragraphs. In English, they do not read as many books per class as I recall from my high school years (high school class of ’71) but they go in depth.
CRLS was and remains a great school. I am a little more worried about CPS handling the demographic changes of the city and how that will play itself out with the elementary and new middle schools.
Fred Rich LaRiccia