Palin opts out of test standard for education
PLANNING: Alaska is one of only four states not to join effort
Gov. Sarah Palin's decision to opt out of an effort to write nationwide education standards in reading and math has some Alaska educators cheering and others dismayed.
Palin on Sunday rejected what nearly all other states have accepted and said Alaska has chosen to "monitor but not yet actively participate" in the process of standardizing K-12 education.
Forty-six states have signed on to the initiative to devise standards for reading and math testing that would let the performance of students in one state be compared with those in another.
The effort is in its development stages, with state and federal education officials, and others, trying to agree on what the core standards should be. Agreeing to adopt the standards is a step for later. Besides Alaska, the other states that have turned away from the effort are Missouri, South Carolina and Texas.
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Palin is taking the wait-and-see stance and not eliminating the option of adopting the standards later. "If this initiative produces useful results, Alaska will remain free to incorporate them in our own standards," she wrote.
Read the rest here.
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Governor Sarah Palin knows more about the educational difficulties in Alaska than any D.C. politician, with the exceptions of Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and Rep. Don Young (R-AK).
The remote villages - ninety percent of which are off of the road grid, such as it is - are inacessible except by air. Our Bush communities, in many cases, are like a third world country, including the poverty & lack of many basic resources like running water.
It's difficult, if not impossible, to attract educators to a place with only a couple of dozen children, hundreds of miles from the nearest road, and with no formal school building. Alaska's policy-makers are charged with whatever measures may be necessary to provide a decent education to those who need it. That wasn't supposed to include the U.S. Congress!
Gov. Palin has chosen once again to assert Alaska's sovereignty, and I salute her for taking this stand.
Psalm 22:27-28: “All the ends of the world shall remember and turn to the Lord, and all the kindreds of the nations shall worship before thee. For the kingdom is the Lord's, and he ruleth among the nations.”
5 comments:
Yep - just as I figured. She knows what she's doing.
I find it hilarious that the libs all want to "standardize" schools now, when all along they've been ranting and raving about schools not being flexible enough to educate their "brilliant" children properly. It's too funny.
I think the biggest problem when you try to standardize things is the overall standard is lowered to meet everyones needs. Good for the Gov.
I said it before: when you dumb things down to the lowest common denominator, it insults the smarter students, and provides no incentive for ANYONE to excel.
The fact that the standards to which these states will be held have not yet been written and still they willingly go along to get the $$$ speaks volumes. That Gov. Palin will not buy a pig in a poke...and perhaps lock her constituants into having to fund programs in the future...speaks even louder.
And what's with the idea that in anything more than reading, 'riting and 'rithmatic students should be standardized? What happened to all that diversity of living experiences the left is always boasting about? Think a kid in Miami will have the same experiences as one from Boston, San Diego or Fairbanks? If the federal standardized tests include anything more than the three Rs those who put them together should be tarred and feathered.
And I taught school for 32 years. (Science and Computers)
Joated: well said!
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