Tag Archives: NC DPI

GUEST POST: HomeSchoolers Warning About Common Core

Posted on June 18, 2014 by A.P. Dillon

The following is a Guest post by a concerned parent and citizen of NC from the Homeschooling community.

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As a concerned parent, I have been asked to share with you some of my findings in looking into Common Core Standards’ web in NC’s education. Below is just a small amount of what I’ve learned.

Beware the dressing up of a sow!

What do I mean?! Charter schools, since the cap has been lifted, are sprouting up and taking advantage of the Common Core Standards. Continue reading →

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Education Simplification Amendment Is Overdue

Posted on June 12, 2014 by A.P. Dillon

The NC State Superintendent has had a lot of freedom to put North Carolina on the hook for big future spending and in obligating our state to activities that one can arguably say would fall in the category of a power overreach.

Just take the one example of Common Core. Dr. Atkinson, along with Governor Perdue, committed North Carolina to the Common Core before the standards were even published via North Carolina’s Race To The Top Application. That very act alone deserves scrutiny and an investigation, but to date, nothing has been done. Bluntly put, these two pretty much just got away with it. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Or it goes to India.

In the same vein, the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) has grown every year, nearly unchecked. Educrat bloat, bureaucracy and layer upon layer of ‘new positions’ that rationalize other ‘new positions’ has been the result. That growth has a long list of high salaries attached to it as well.

I pulled down the salary information for DPI last Fall and found that 45 people there made more than a base salary of $100,000. ….

KEEP READING Continue reading →

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North Carolina and The Shared Learning Collaborative

Posted on June 9, 2014 by A.P. Dillon

In my article earlier today, I linked to an article by Mercedes Schneider which had a familiar talking point in it. A talking point we’ve heard come out of the mouths of NC Chamber members and legislators who are their allies in forcing Common Core down the throats of NC parents and kids.
At the end of my earlier article, I mentioned that I didn’t even touch on the second half of Schneider’s article which dealt with the Shared Learning Collaborative (SLC) and the sharing of unprecedented student information. This article is the follow-up.

Schneider talks about their state superintendent and his pressuring of Governor Jindal to keep the Core and the PARCC assessments. This combination would result in an unprecedented amount of data collection on students as well as subsequent sharing. Here is the relevant section:

KEEP READING… Continue reading →

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As Predicted, Teacher Pay Raise Still Not Enough

Posted on May 30, 2014 by A.P. Dillon

We knew the NCAE would have a problem with a historic level of raises for teachers.

#NCAE: Treat us like professionals. #NCGA: Here’s a performance-based 4-yr contract + bonus. #NCAE: ……. You hate teachers! #NCpol

— Pete Kaliner (@PeteKaliner) May 29, 2014

State Superintendent and CCSSO President-elect, Dr. Atkinson throws in her two cents. Yes, it’s not enough for her either. Apparently, not enough blood came out of the stone. A $5,309 average raise is just not enough — Atkinson wants MOAR! Everything should be fixed all at once… but the real axe being ground here is that the Dept. of Public Instruction (DPI) is going to get slashed by 30%.
GOOD — now that is something long overdue for a department that wields far too much power and has added pricey staff at an alarming rate.
From the press release at Department of Public Instruction, emphasis added: Continue reading →

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NC Schools ‘Tools For Learning’

Posted on April 12, 2014 by A.P. Dillon

With the rise of technology in the classroom, the use of cell phones and other internet related device use, kid are exposed to all kinds of information. Some very useful and some… well, not so much. In fact, the ability for kids to roam to inappropriate materials in the digital age both at home and at school is a real concern for parents.

After a few tweets about NC Resources, I did some digging. Well, there’s a whole set of online documents in a ‘live binder’ out there on the interwebs. Parent should go explore this live binder for NC Public Schools. The Web Resources A-Z located in the NCDPI Information Technology Toolkit caught my eye, mainly because I’d never seen it before. Why isn’t this made more prominent so parents can view it?

The majority of these web links are good or useful applications, but there were a few that were not. One suggested sketchy one is Dipity, which is an internet meme timelines site. Dipity is not somewhere I would let my kid wander. Just a few examples below – NSFW language warning: Continue reading →

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