Entries by Mercedes Schneider

BREAKING NEWS: Louisiana Governor Jindal Drops Common Core

Jindal just finished a press conference. His words, summarized: PARCC selection did not comply with La state law requiring a bidding process– this voids PARCC agreement. Jindal has asked for a financial audit of PARCC spending and an open, competitive bidding process for assessment. He said that suspending PARCC is what he was able to do immediately via executive order. […]

Why Would WaPo Wait Three Months to Release a Bill Gates Interview?

On Saturday, June 7, 2014, Lyndsey Layton of the Washington Post published this article based on a 28-minute interview she had with billionaire Common Core State Standards (CCSS) funder, Bill Gates. In the interview, Gates spills quite a bit of “insider information,” not the least of which is that in the summer of 2008, then-Council of Chief State […]

Memorial Day 2014: Honoring My Daddy

On this Memorial Day, I would like to feature my father, Michael Louis Schneider, Jr. (October 31, 1918 – May 10, 1980), who served in the Third Army, Seventy-first Division, from 1943 to 1946. Michael L. Schneider, Jr., circa 1943. He was around 25 years old at the time. I think he was really handsome.  Daddy did not […]

National Council on Teacher Quality Gets Caught in a Data Collecting Lie

The National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) will be “grading” university-level, traditional teacher training programs again soon. Last year, 2013, they released this report on June 18. They “grade” in a superficial manner, relying upon program artifacts to form skewed judgments– judgments that they publish in US News and World Report and that are meant to damage the credibility of […]

Behind the Scenes on the Chicago Teachers Union Anti-Common Core Resolution

On May 7, 2014, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) passed a resolution against the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). That evening, I wrote this post and included my own experience and conversations on Lewis’ position on CCSS. In the post, I figuratively note that this is now a battle between Lewis and American Federation of Teachers (AFT) […]

inBloom, BloomBoard, and the Undeniable, Corporate Reform “Need” for Student Data

On April 21, 2014, the Gates-funded data warehouse inBloom publicized that it was shutting down. The New York Times called it a “setback for the nearly $8 billion prekindergarten through 12th-grade education technology software market.” InBloom CEO Iwan Streichenberger calls it “a real missed opportunity for teachers and school districts seeking to improve student learning.” I’m sorry, but making […]

A Valuable Research Tool: The “Way Back Machine”

In exposing corporate reformers at their game, I have found that information sometimes “conveniently” disappears from websites once such information is publicized in a less-than-complimentary blog post. There is a way to view web pages that have been removed or otherwise altered: The “Way Back Machine”: https://archive.org/web/web.php The “Way Back Machine” is a search engine of […]

My Easter Post

Today is Easter, the Christian celebration of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, Who claimed to be the Messiah prophesied in the Old Testament. George Frideric Handel wrote about Him in the famous musical composition, Messiah, first performed on Easter Sunday in the Musick Hall in Dublin on April 13, 1742. I believe Jesus is the Messiah. On September 13, 1981, […]

Louisiana: Can the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education Save Superintendent John White? I’m Thinking – No

John White’s job is on the line, and the primarily-purchased Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) is standing behind its Common Core State Standards (CCSS)- and Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC)-promoting talking head. For White’s annual evaluation, BESE gave him a 3 out of 4. I’m thinking White’s BESE […]

Fordham Institute: Selling Common Core in States with Better Standards

This post is about the for-profit “reform”-promoting think tank, the Fordham Institute. The Fordham Institute likes to grade. Mind you, Fordham doesn’t bother to grade itself. But it does promote the grading of teacher training programs via an entity it birthed in 2001, the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ), and it also promotes the grading of teachers using […]

Arne Duncan Plays the Common Core Distancing Game

On April 2, 2014, Louisiana has witnessed the lame demonstration of “Common Core distancing” from the governor (Bobby Jindal) who signed the state onto “the standards” (CCSS) in 2009– before they were written. In 2010, US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan accepted Louisiana’s CCSS MOU (memorandum of understanding) despite the majority of Louisiana school districts rejecting the idea. Like Jindal, […]

The Three Louisiana Common Core Development “Teachers” Work for the DOE

This is the story of two press releases and three Louisiana “mystery” teachers involved in “developing” CCSS. The first is the July 2009 National Governors Association (NGA) press release for the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) English Language Arts (ELA) and mathematics work groups– the “inner circle” that is the only group identified as “developing” CCSS based […]

Question: Which Louisiana Teachers Wrote Common Core?

When I debated Stephanie Deselles of the Council for a Better Louisiana (CABL) in November 2013, she mentioned “three Louisiana teachers” who were involved in writing the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). Never mind that “three” is an embarrassingly low number. Deselles provided no names. During testimony on the writing of CCSS and its test, the Partnership […]

The Common Core License: Open to Alteration by “Inner Circle” of Owners!

The so-called Common Core State Standards (CCSS) are being billed as “Preparing America’s Students for Success“; as “important for your child”; indeed, as The American Education Solution: The Common Core is a set of high-quality academic standards in mathematics and English language arts/literacy (ELA). These learning goals outline what a student should know and be able to do at the […]