PLEASE attend the State BOE Meeting on Tuesday, July 9th at 10am –
120 SE 10th Ave, Topeka, KS
View the July agenda here.
View the June meeting here.
The meeting begins at 10am, but you will need to arrive early if you want to sign-up to speak for 3 minutes in the Citizen Open Forum. The Citizen Open Forum begins at 10:30am.
***If you will not be able to attend in person, but would like to submit a written statement to the BOE to read and have put in the meeting file, please message us and we can have you email it to us to print and present. Last month we had 10 written statements to present the BOE.***
We encourage you to attend, and request that Kansas be removed from the
Smarter Balanced Assessments (SBAC) or the ACT Assessments.
There are concerns among Kansas superintendents and local school boards:
– The cost of implementing these national assessments is 2 to 5 times more than the cost for Kansas University to administer the English and Math assessments.
– Smarter Balanced (SBAC) assessments are also estimated to take up to 8 hours to complete.
– There have been serious computer failures and issues with these pilot tests this past Spring.
At the June meeting, after the public comments were completed, the State Board heard a presentation on Smarter Balanced (SBAC) and ACT Common Core tests. At least four of the 10 State Board members voiced concerns about the costs of both national tests, and the loss of student, parent and teacher privacy if these tests are given to Kansas students.
There are efforts being made in other states to do the same. In fact, Oklahoma just announced it would be leaving PARCC on Monday. Alabama, Georgia, Utah, Pennsylvania and now Oklahoma have decided not to force their students to take either the Smarter Balanced (SBAC) or PARCC national tests. They are joined by Texas, Virginia, Alaska, Nebraska and Minnesota. There are similar efforts to stop this waste of time and taxpayer money in Ohio, Michigan, Indiana and Kentucky.
If the Board will vote this month to stay with the Kansas University assessments of English and Math:
– It will save millions of dollars which local school boards can keep in Kansas classrooms rather than purchase expensive technology.
– The risk of sending “student-level data” and “individual” data on every Kansas principal and teacher to the Federal government is far too great for the State Board to force our schools to give these tests.
Kansans Against Common Core 