Tag Archives: KEA

Is It Time To #OptOut In North Carolina?

Posted on April 26, 2015 by A.P. Dillon

In New York, 190,836 students opted out of the state’s Common Core ELA aligned test.

The Opt Out rate at Nathan Hale High school in Seattle, Washington for the SBAC test was 100%.
The entire 11th grade glass didn’t show up.

There is test dumping going on In Jeb Bush’s Florida. Miami-Dade, which is the fourth largest school district in the nation, has just announced cutting the state assessments to the bone, including end of grade assessments or EOG’s in elementary schools.

So where is North Carolina in the Opt Out Movement? Do Parents know the EOG is Common Core aligned?

KEEP READING — SEE WHAT IS HAPPENING IN OUR STATE ON TESTING Continue reading →

Posted in A.P. Dillon (LL1885), Common Core, EDUCATION, NC Board Of Education, Testing | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Health Form Created By NC DPI, DHHS Goes ‘Far beyond’ What NC Law Requires

Posted on April 7, 2015 by A.P. Dillon

As previously mentioned on this blog, Parents with children entering North Carolina Public Schools for Kindergarten (as well as those entering schools for the first time for any grade) in the state will be required to fill out an invasive “health assessment” form.

Currently, House Bill 13 proposes to make this health assessment part of a child’s permanent record. It will be included in the state longitudinal database system, of which another bill (HB 401) will make that data accessible by multiple state agencies.

Lindalyn Kakadelis, over at John Locke, has posted an an article talking about this exact health assessment. In her article, she chronicles how her own daughter went to enroll her child into Kindergarten and had to deal with this form.

KEEP READING… Continue reading →

Posted in A.P. Dillon (LL1885), EDUCATION, NC DPI, NCGA, Parental Rights | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

What they’re saying about Education in NC (WE 2/7/15)

Posted on February 7, 2015 by A.P. Dillon

This is some of what they’re saying about education in North Carolina for week ending 2/7/15. See the Common Core Weekend Reads on Sunday for Common Core Specific news. Continue reading →

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An NC Look At Malkin Article ‘Look Who Is Data Mining Your Toddlers’

Posted on October 11, 2014 by A.P. Dillon

Michelle Malkin has an important article out on data mining and how it is being done on our littlest citizens. The article covers a group called TS Gold (Teaching Strategies Gold). North Carolina uses TS Gold.

NC Uses TS Gold => Look who’s data-mining your toddlers http://t.co/Ch172cSEJm #nced #stopcommoncore

— LL1885 – A.P. Dillon (@LadyLiberty1885) October 10, 2014

Malkin writes that TS Gold is an assessment tool tracking our littlest learners and is expanding through Third grade, with the bonus of capturing behavioral data:

KEEP READING… Continue reading →

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Your Kindergartener Has Become A Guinea Pig

Posted on June 27, 2014 by A.P. Dillon

ACT, the same group that does the college entrance exam and of which I wrote about their multi-grade job assessments that begin in 8th grade apparently will be developing assessments for Kindergarteners. Via Huffington Post:

WASHINGTON — A new digital tool to test academic and behavioral skills will target students starting in kindergarten.

ACT, the organization that developed the ACT college-entrance exam, will start testing the tool in the fall. It will be available to schools starting in 2014.The tool tracks students’ career interests, academic performance and progress toward goals. It’s designed to follow students from kindergarten through high school.

Jon Erickson, president of ACT’s education division, said the goal is to identify and address gaps in skills needed for college and the workforce. The assessment combines traditional testing with teacher-led projects to generate an instant, digital score.

It’s a multimillion dollar project, ACT officials said, but will be affordable and easily accessible.

Schools won’t be compelled to use the new tool, but Erickson said he anticipates that entire states or groups of states will choose to utilize it. The tool can be customized to include state-specific benchmarks and other performance measures.

In the testing and educrat world, where data is God, it seems perfectly normal to start testing, poking and prodding a child of 5. Most 30-year-olds don’t know what they want to do for a career, here we are testing 5 year olds like they hold the key to cracking future job selection. Pidgeon-holing our kids. That’s what we’re ultimately doing here.

Here are a few reminders related to this turn of events with ACT. Continue reading →

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The Assessment Of Your Kindergartener

Posted on June 13, 2014 by A.P. Dillon

Common Core has been consuming a lot of my time lately on the blog, but a reader dropped something in my inbox I had not looked into before: The North Carolina Read To Achieve Kindergarten Entry Process. It is also known as the KEA, or Kindergarten Entry Assessment.

It would appear from my research that the North Carolina’s Department of Public Instruction’s (NC DPI) plans to fully implement the KEA in the 2014-2015 school year.

View the KEA document at NC DPI here or on my Scribd repository here.
Visit the NC DPI Read to Achieve page here.
This program stems from the Race To The Top – Early Learning Challenge (RTT-ELC) grant. This grant, like the Race to The Top grant tied to Common Core, was also funded by the Obama administration’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), otherwise known as the ‘Stimulus’. North Carolina won $69.9 million from this grant in 2011: Continue reading →

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