Last night I attended the Alpine School District meeting hosted by the school administration to discuss the new education school system. The room was filled to capacity with over 200 people, I’m thinking. The first hour was filled with an administrator giving a presentation about the new education system. With my wonderful eyesight, I couldn’t see the text on the screen so I can’t give information about it other than the things I heard.
Here are some notes that I took for as much as I could catch from what was said: I tried to write down information is accurately as I could. I apologize. I did not get the names of the administrators who gave the presentation and answered the questions. There were a lot of parents eager to ask question and some of them were quite ‘warm’ against the implementation of Common Core.
SAGE: was built for Utah and appears to be Utah’s version of Common Core.
CRT: means Critical Referenced Tests.
Sage is replacing a program called Utips:
– It contains resource libraries and operational field tests.
– It’s not expected to be complete until the spring of 2014. It will measure student achievements.
A I R: is an assessment company that offers adaptive testing for all levels of technology. It should work for schools that have advanced technology, as well as those that don’t.
The education will concentrate upon language, arts and math.
Utah opted out to test human scores (not sure what I was trying to write down here).
There are four levels of assessment, such as low achiever mid-low achiever mid high achiever and high achiever (they use different terms of what I’m using.)
Webinars will be available to the public, but they are not available right now. The website should be ConnectSchools.Utah.gov.aaci (I’m not sure if that’s accurate.)
Information for the tests will first be created by volunteer teachers, who are certified in their field of teaching. That resource will not be able to provide the entire list of questions, so additional material will be provided by questions gathered from other states and the third source will be from the A I R organization and their collection of questions.
A board a 15 parents will be used to look at the contents of the tests to find if they are satisfactory. Five board members will be determined by the state Congress. Five additional parents will be selected by the state representatives and the final five will be determined by the Utah State school Board.
There’s were a lot of parents in the room, and they expressed a lot of concerns. The administration seemed to be surprised by people’s response. One parent expressed concerns about how multiplication is being handled as well as decimal points are being handled in the new math.
Parents are concerned with student data being collected and being forwarded to the federal government or maybe even being distributed elsewhere. Already, her son, who is a junior, has received two advertisements in the mail, encouraging him to rent a tux for a school dance. She wonders how these businesses have learned that her student is of the age of a junior. An additional concern is with the rampant security breaches by hackers, the collection of student information could be easily hacked and the information abused.
Parents are concerned about what information is being shared with the federal government. The administrator said that all the information is forwarded is not specific to the name of the student. It does contain a parent’s financial information, if a student has a disability, and their gender, etc., but not their names.
Parents want the opportunity to opt out of this version of Common Core. My perception is that the administration is surprised by this request and it appears that this request is a new concept for them. The administrator says that he’ll look into it.
Parents expressed curiosity as to why Utips was abandoned for this new system and why it just wasn’t updated?
A number of parents are concerned that the PTA will be the people to determine what is accepted or not. As the PTA has accepted a lot of money from sources supporting Common Core, some parents feel this is a conflict of interests.
When asked who is writing the question for the tests. The administrator said that blueprint is the format of the questions and A IR is being hired to help provide questions.
Blueprint will be put up online for review.
When parents said they wanted to have access to the analytics of their student tests, the administration said this was not possible due to security of the information. Many parents did not receive this information well.
It was about 2 ½ hours into the meeting and I had to leave for my next appointment, so I was unable to document the list of additional questions given by parents.
I hope this information is of use.
For anyone else who attended the meeting, please feel free to add your perceptions and things you learned.
