Changes Coming to Tennessee’s Standards Review and Textbook Adoption Timeline

A bill that would extend the textbook review and adoption period from 73 months to 97 months moved out of the Senate Education Committee and its counterpart will be heard on Tuesday morning in the House Education Instruction Subcommittee. The proposed measure, SB0421, would also impact the review period of state standards for English language arts, mathematics, science, and social studies. It is a change that comes from State Senator Jon Lundberg (R-Bristol), at the urging of the Tennessee State Board of Education (SBE).

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Biden Education Secretary Miguel Cardona Blames Abysmal U.S. Student National Test Scores on Trump

The Biden education department announced Thursday that U.S. students’ plummeting scores in reading and math during the COVID-19 pandemic is all due to former President Donald Trump.

“Today’s data confirm the significant impact the prior Administration’s mismanagement of the pandemic has had on our children’s progress and academic wellbeing,” said Biden Education Secretary Miguel Cardona Thursday, following the report that U.S. students showed their steepest decline in decades in math and reading scores during the COVID school shutdowns.

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Former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos Now Says Department Should Not Exist

Betsy DeVos, who led the U.S. Department of Education under former President Donald Trump, now says the department should no longer exist, an assertion many Trump voters urged him to work to make a reality during his 2016 campaign.

“I personally think the Department of Education should not exist,” DeVos said Saturday during a Moms for Liberty education summit in Tampa, Florida.

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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis Exposes John Cornyn-Sponsored Civics Bill Expanding Critical Race Theory in Public Schools

A bill that would actually allow Critical Race Theory (CRT) to be pushed on every public school in the country has finally been exposed for what it is by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R).

In a statement June 30, DeSantis’ office released the positive results of Florida’s 2022 civics assessments since a major update to the state’s civics standards emphasizing the exceptional nature of the American founding and Constitution.

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Florida Rejects 41 Percent of Submitted Math Books over CRT, Other Issues

The Florida Department of Education is rejecting more than 40% of the mathematics textbooks submitted to be used in the upcoming school year, citing critical race theory, Common Core and other language included in them that violate the state’s new standards.

“Reasons for rejecting textbooks included references to Critical Race Theory (CRT), inclusions of Common Core, and the unsolicited addition of Social Emotional Learning (SEL) in mathematics,” the department said in a news release.

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Commentary: The Last Time Bill Gates Helped America Was Common Core

Twenty years ago, No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the legislation intended to save American children from stupidity and the “soft bigotry of low expectations,” became law. Ten years later, Common Core came to the fore. They both failed. Like all liberal ideas, they started with good intentions and government intervention and ended in cheating, lying, and wasted taxpayer money.

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$20 Million Literacy Program Endorsed by Common Core Set to be Implemented in Tennessee before 2021 legislative session

Tennessee House Republicans have said childhood literacy is a top priority for 2021, but one literacy initiative endorsed by a drafter of Common Core standards and designed to encourage 40 school districts to comply with state standards is on track to be implemented before lawmakers return to Nashville.

The Tennessee Department of Education’s (TDOE) Comprehensive Literacy State Development program is designed to raise literacy achievement in 40 lower performing school districts.

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The Tennessee Star Report: Noah Tyler of Classic Learning Test Talks About Their Alternative to the ‘Progressive’ Influenced SAT and ACT Standardized Testing

Live from music row on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 am to 8:00 am – Leahy spoke to Chief Strategy Officer Noah Tyler from Classic Learning Test about their new approach to standardized testing.

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Moderator of the Nashville Mayoral Debate Asks the Wrong Question About How to Improve Public Schools

On Tuesday’s Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 am to 8:00 am – Leahy talked about the recent mayoral debate in Nashville and how moderator Rhori Johnson asked a completely irrelevant question to both candidates who responded with non-answers and dodged the real issues facing public education in Davidson County schools.

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EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: Trump Campaign Says Anti-ICE Politicians ‘Aiding and Abetting’ Drug Dealers and Human Traffickers

CINCINNATI, Ohio – President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence came to Cincinnati, Ohio’s U.S. Bank Arena Thursday evening. Trump campaign Director of Communications Tim Murtaugh spoke exclusively with The Ohio Star before the event about anti-ICE politicians and President Trump’s support of replacing federal Common Core with state and local control.

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Commentary: One Hundred Years of Teaching Children Lies About America

by George Rasley   “Every child in America entering school at the age of five is mentally ill because he comes to school with certain allegiances to our founding fathers, toward our elected officials, toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural being, and toward the sovereignty of this nation as a separate entity. It’s up to you as teachers to make all these sick children well by creating the international child of the future.”    Chester M. Pierce, Harvard psychiatrist, speaking as an expert in public education at the 1973 International Education Seminar. Dishonesty is one of the Left’s most significant vulnerabilities, but it also the source of much of the Left’s power. And the Left’s anti-American propaganda is having a big impact. According to a McLaughlin poll following the recent State of the Union, nearly ​90 percent​ of self-identified liberal Republicans; ​85 percent​ of wealthy; ​66 percent​ of 18-29 year olds, and ​64 percent​ of active duty military believe America is the source of most of the world’s ills: political, economic, and environmental. How did we get to a place where 64 percent of the men and women defending our country believe it is the source of most of…

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Florida Governor Ron DeSantis Issues Order to Get Rid of Common Core

by Neetu Chandak   Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis announced Thursday he will get rid of Common Core in the state and wants to have parents and teachers help implement a revised set of standards in 2020. “Common Core has failed teachers, parents, and our children,” DeSantis wrote on Twitter Thursday. “That’s why I am issuing an Executive Order to eliminate Common Core in Florida. We will streamline standardized testing, make civics a priority in schools and increase the literacy rate.” Common Core has failed teachers, parents, and our children. That’s why I am issuing an Executive Order to eliminate Common Core in Florida. We will streamline standardized testing, make civics a priority in schools and increase the literacy rate. pic.twitter.com/dp5mnabiit — Ron DeSantis (@RonDeSantis) January 31, 2019 Common Core aimed to establish high academic standards in K-12 English and math. Critics of Common Core said it was too rigid, confusing teaching methods for parents and takes away control from locals, according to Fox 13. DeSantis wants to implement a new plan, with the input of parents and teachers, in 2020. “I told you I was going to do something about this,” DeSantis said at a press conference, WFTV reported.…

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Steve Gill Commentary: Why are Public School Teachers Avoiding Public Schools for Their Own Children?

Would you eat at a restaurant that the cooks and wait staff avoided themselves? Wouldn’t that tell you everything you needed to know about the quality of the food they were serving? Likewise, as public school teachers send their own children to private schools at about TWICE the rate of the general public, and at an even HIGHER rate in our urban centers, doesn’t that tell us more about the quality of our schools than a huge stack of glossy, bureaucrat-generated reports about test scores? A survey conducted by EducationNext in 2015 found that 20% of public school teachers had sent their own children to private schools at some point compared to 13% of non-teachers. Those figures don’t include public school teachers who live in another county or district to avoid the schools where they teach. In 2004, an even more comprehensive national study by the Fordham Institute revealed even more disturbing figures. According to that survey, more than 1 in 5 public school teachers sent their children to private schools, which is consistent with the EducationNext study. Nationally, 11% of non-teachers made that same choice. But the Fordham Institute dug more deeply into the choices being made by parents…

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Ohio School Voucher Program Doubles as More Public Schools Fail to Make The Grade

After a staggering number of Ohio public schools failed to make the grade, the state’s voucher and charter school system is poised for tremendous expansion. In Ohio, if the public school test scores of a student’s home district fall below a certain level, calculated by the Ohio Department of Education, a number of the students are automatically granted vouchers to attend private school and charter schools are permitted to establish themselves. This is intended to both give children from every country access to quality schools and alleviate the student burden on the lagging school.  The public schools performed so poorly that charter schools will have 600 times more areas to expand into, and student access to vouchers will more than double. Teacher unions and many in the progressive activist community have aggressively opposed both school voucher programs and charter schools. They argue that these programs siphon off funding from the already financially strained school system. In addition, a number of private schools in Ohio were founded as religious institutions. While none can legally force children to engage in religious activity against their will, progressives maintain that as they are still religiously-oriented, it is a violation of the ‘separation church and state.’ Ironically, it was an…

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Senator Lamar Alexander Commentary: Key Education Decisions Should Be Made in States, Schools and Homes – Not Washington

Lamar Alexander

by Senator Lamar Alexander   When I wrote the law fixing No Child Left Behind, I was thinking about Tennessee teachers like Candace Hines, who teaches kindergarten in Memphis. Earlier this year, Candace wrote that the new law “empowers Tennessee with the responsibility to decide how to close achievement gaps, improve schools and make sure that all our children succeed.” No Child Left Behind let Washington make decisions about Tennessee’s classrooms— and it created a national school board. My goal was to return decisions about how best to educate our children to the people closest to our students—to Tennessee teachers like Candace, our local school boards, and our state—and to end the national school board. When I was running for Senate in 2014, Tennesseans all across the state would tell me that Congress needed to end the Common Core mandate, and a year later I passed a law to do exactly that.  If you’re wondering why parents and teachers don’t worry about Washington meddling with state standards anymore, it’s because the new law explicitly prohibits Washington from mandating or even incentivizing Common Core or any other specific state standards. It is up to states to decide their academic standards. Another…

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States Are Leaving Common Core in Droves

by Jude Schwalbach   After less than 10 years in the classroom, Common Core could soon be on its way out. The Obama administration introduced Common Core in 2010, imposing burdensome new standards and tests in an attempt to create uniform educational content across the nation. Despite loud objections from parents, teachers, school leaders, and state officials, 46 states ultimately adopted the standards due to a combination of funding carrots and regulatory sticks. But over the past few years, states have begun to reclaim their authority to set educational standards. Approximately a quarter of participating states have either downgraded their participation or withdrawn completely from the two new testing consortia introduced by Common Core. One of those consortia—the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Career—once had 20 state participants but now has fewer than four. Florida, for instance, an early adopter of Common Core, withdrew from the test consortium after finding that, among other issues, testing would occur over a 20-day period. Maryland became the most recent state to roll back Common Core testing when officials there found that it overburdened teachers and didn’t help families. How exactly? As The Baltimore Sun noted, it required schools to “clear their schedules for several weeks each spring, disrupting…

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Tennessee General Assembly Inaction Raises Questions About Legal Authority of State Textbook Commission Actions

The commission that will be recommending new social studies textbooks for Tennessee students is operating with a majority of its members unconfirmed by the legislature or still serving after their terms have expired. The 10-member Tennessee State Textbook and Instructional Materials Quality Commission currently has only four positions that do not require immediate legislative action due to expired terms, two of them appointed by House Speaker Beth Harwell. Three other members who have not been approved by the General Assembly apparently voted in commission meetings last year. The Department of Education and the Governor’s office declined to comment on the current state of the commission. This year the commission is tasked with approving the state’s new social studies textbook with their next meeting set for March 19. The commission is comprised of three appointees each from the Governor, the Lt. Governor and the Speaker of the House which must be approved by the General Assembly, and one designee from the Commissioner of the Department of Education. Before Sen. Mike Bell (R-Cleveland) sponsored Senate Bill 1602 in 2014, the commission included the commissioner of education and nine members appointed by the governor. The change in appointing powers assumed the General Assembly…

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Gubernatorial Candidates Randy Boyd and Karl Dean Will Fight for Votes of Political Moderates

Tennessee Star

  Four months into his 2015 appointment as the new Commissioner of Economic and Community Development, and two years before he announced his run for governor, Randy Boyd told his hometown weekly that, “I’m probably the most hated, disrespected, untolerated political entity in existence… I’m a moderate.” Former Nashville Mayor Karl Dean, the first declared gubernatorial Democrat candidate also describes himself as a moderate and recognizes that he will need “moderate Republican votes” in order to win. Both candidates say education and economics are the top priorities, both say they are business-friendly and both shower admiration on Haslam’s leadership. For voters, however, even those who identify as “moderate” or “independent,” it will be difficult to distinguish between Boyd and Dean, except perhaps for choosing whether to vote in the Republican or Democrat primary. Political analysts suggest that states with open primaries like Tennessee, work to the advantage of moderate candidates. Both candidates have been married to the same partner for a long time and while Boyd made his fortune by copying a similar commercially available product, Dean married into his wealth.  His wife Delta Anne Davis, is an heir to the millions her uncle Joe C. Davis made through the coal…

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