Why are we paying our teacher’s more to dumb down our children?

Rotten to the Core: Obama’s War on Academic Standards
In practice, Common Core’s dubious “college- and career”-ready standards undermine local control of education, usurp state autonomy over curricular materials, and foist untested, mediocre and incoherent pedagogical theories on America’s schoolchildren.
http://michellemalkin.com/2013/01/23/rotten-to-the-core-obamas-war-on-academic-standards-part-1/

Race to the Top or Race to the Bottom? Read an email here from Jamie Gass of the Pioneer Institute in Boston explaining how MA got duped into adopting Common Core Standards. Diane Ravitch has also publicly voiced her opposition to Common Core since the time of this post.

Excerpt: Gass is especially angry that the CC standards replaced the proven and excellent Massachusetts standards. His letter is below.
http://dianeravitch.net/2012/07/22/the-conservative-case-against-the-common-core-standards/

How did Medford become one of the 30 communities using their children as guinea pigs for the unproven and discredited Common Core Standards via Race to the Top?

The ELA Common Core standards require that by graduation 70% of the books read by students be nonfiction. Suggested texts include “FedViews” by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, the EPA’s “Recommended Levels of Insulation,” and “Invasive Plant Inventory” by California’s Invasive Plant Council.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/335520/goodbye-liberal-arts-betsy-woodruff#

If anyone thinks the medford public school system offers a great education to its children you are delusional...the system is overwhelmrd with inexperienced , unqualified teachers and disgruntled. Lazy older teachers. Many try, many don't. Add in the many diverse cultures and you get a stagnant learning machine. Look at the scores. Look at the kids who go on to decent colleges. Anybody can go to community college for 2 classes. Many of these kids can barely read. This is just the way it is..not an attack on teachers. It's probably like that with the fire and police department. Unqualified people permeating our public sector.

While one can be critical of the common core standards, they are intended as a minimum set of standards and most teachers include depth and topics which go well beyond the core.

I have to indulge in a bit of snarkiness and point out that in MO's comment of 8:56am there should be no apostrophe in the word "teachers". Perhaps a bit of attention to grammar and proofreading, which are included in the Common Core, would be useful here.

The 2% pay raises are cost of living increases. They're intended to roughly maintain the standard of living of the teachers as is and keep up with the rate of inflation - or at least keep up as much as the district is able to. Given the rate at which healthcare costs rise, even with those raises, the standard of living of a teacher at a particular step may actually fall.

The Common Core is injecting an agenda.

An English curriculum overloaded with advocacy journalism or with “informational” articles chosen for their topical and/or political nature should raise serious concerns among parents, school leaders, and policymakers.
http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2012/12/questionable-quality-of-the-common-core-english-language-arts-standards

Obama empowered humanist Linda Darling-Hammond to complete the federal takeover of the public schools by authorizing her to help develop the Common Core national tests (assessments).

Linda Darling-Hammond’s own approach to education failed. The Stanford New Charter School she founded in California closed because of low test scores and lack of improvement.

Linda Darling-Hammond wants Common Core assessments to rely heavily on the same group learning and discovery methods that caused her own charter school to fail.

She also writes for CSCOPE!

How about the invasive data collection required under Common Core?

inBloom, Inc, the Gates-funded organization, is being paid to hold and share student (and teacher) personally-identifiable data with for-profit vendors. However, most people don't know how personal and confidential this data is.
InBloom, Inc. has a sample "sandbox" segment on their web page meant "for developers" to show them what data will be made available to them to build their software "tools" around.
Under the “medium” data set, we find that student names, addresses, emails, latitude and longitude of their homes and schools, phone numbers, test scores, grades, race, economic status, photos, detailed disciplinary records, special education services and medical conditions are all included.
Check out the screen shots below to see more.
http://www.missourieducationwatchdog.com/2013/03/inbloom-student-and-teacher-data-mining.html

Where does our Administration, School Committee, and PTO stand on this?

On February 7, 2013, the Massachusetts ACLU, Campaign for Commercial-Free Childhood, Citizens for Public Schools and Massachusetts PTA wrote a joint letter to the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education about the release of students’ personally identifiable information to the Gates-sponsored inBloom, Inc..
New York and Massachusetts are two of nine states that have agreed to share confidential student and teacher data in Phase I with the “Shared Learning Collaborative” or SLC, a project of the Gates Foundation, who will turn over this info to inBloom, Inc.
http://www.classsizematters.org/ma-privacy-and-advocacy-groups-write-letter-about-student-privacy-to-ma-bese/

Nine states have sent dossiers on students —including names, Social Security numbers, hobbies, addresses, test scores, attendance, career goals, and attitudes about school —to a public-private database, according to Reuters. Standardized tests are beginning to incorporate psychological and behavioral assessment. Every state is also building databases to collect and share such information among agencies and companies, and the U.S. Department of Education has recently reinterpreted federal privacy laws so that schools and governments don’t have to tell parents their kids’ information has been shared.
http://washingtonexaminer.com/education-dept.-helps-leak-students-personal-data/article/2525112

Terrorist Professor Bill Ayers and Obama’s Federal School Curriculum

In the tradition of John Dewey, multiple “perspectives” and “critical thinking” are emphasized over the accumulation of “facts.” Common Core advertises itself as promoting “skills,” rather than content. The skills, though, do not promise to make students more knowledgeable about literature or history, but to make them “critical thinkers” in the tradition of the radical curriculum writers who are selectively critical of the U.S. and the West.
http://www.aim.org/special-report/terrorist-professor-bill-ayers-and-obamas-federal-school-curriculum/