Common Core

Quoted directly from Stacie’s website. (These are also the themes and contents of news articles about her speeches and interviews.)

Local elections — where politics matters the most of all. While the race for president, and maybe certain races in the Senate and House, dominate the news, the fact is that all politics is local and that your local government is the one that affects your life the most. It’s local government that arranges for your basic services, such as water and sewer, trash, and all the utilities.

Fortunately for us, both men have a long record. Gary Schmidt has been an outspoken conservative on every issue for several decades. Like me, Gary Schmidt is a Goldwater / Reagan / Trump Republican. On the other hand, the NPRI rated incumbent state senator Ben Kieckhefer as the most liberal Republican over four sessions of the legislature.

Kristin Cable, Eagle Valley Middle School; Shanell Cavener, Carson High School and Wendy Petty, Carson Middle School, were honored last week as Outstanding Math Educators by the Northern Nevada Mathematics Council.

Candidates for Carson City Mayor and State Assembly District 40 addressed a nearly full house of voters at the Brewery Arts Center Performance Hall Wednesday night during a candidate forum sponsored by the Carson City Chamber of Commerce.

The candidates participated in a structured debate moderated by Nevada Appeal Editor Adam Trumble.

As a group, they were asked questions on specific topics and each given two minutes to provide a response.

Tuesday the Executive Board voted to remove Assemblyman PK O'Neill from the Carson City Republican Party. There has been much press and he has a very good writer who accentuates his few highly selective non-controversial votes while in the legislature and ignores the bulk of his decisions. Obviously our action is not due to his non-challenging votes but rather his many dubious ones. He does not acknowledge his campaign promises. He does not discuss attending a CCRP meeting at which he asked for our direction on this tax issue.

Kindergarten students at Empire Elementary School were treated Thursday by a visit from educators with KNPB Channel 5 in Reno. The visit was part of KNPB’s Ready To Learn workshops, which bring special learning topics into classrooms around the Reno-Sparks and Carson City areas.

Thursday's guest educators taught students about the forces of motion, KNPB Ready To Learn Facilitator Joy Foremaster said.

LAS VEGAS (AP) - Nevada was confident enough in the partial student results from its Common Core-aligned state test that it released them this week, even though 7 of 10 students weren't tested because of computer glitches.

The elections in November 2014 were a great surprise to many and shock to some. The people swept all Democrats out of the state-wide offices, reversed the majorities in both houses of the Legislature, and by a 4-to-1 margin defeated the "margin" tax. We the Republican base were looking forward to restoring long-overdue sanity at the State level.

Well, as Nevadans, we are collectively now stuck with a new tax. It's name? Commerce Tax. (A Clever disguise for the recently defeated Gross Margin Tax?) Up until a few days ago, it was believed that this wouldn't pass. I have yet to see any real media explanation of the details, so, after reading the text of the bill enough times (SB483), while my head is still spinning, I will attempt to give you a little more of the picture.

Republican leaders say some bills advancing conservative priorities are not expected to live past a legislative deadline this week. Assembly Majority Leader Paul Anderson said Tuesday that bills to repeal Common Core education standards and ......

The curriculum to implement Common Core is so confusing that parents can’t even help their elementary school-age children do their homework, a state lawmaker said Wednesday in support of a bill to repeal the controversial educational standards in Nevada....

A group of Nevada Republicans are leading the charge to repeal the state's Common Core K-12 education standards. Assemblyman Brent Jones is the primary bill sponsor of AB 303 and will present the bill Wednesday before ......

As state lawmakers begin to consider education reforms, inlcuding both a reaffirmation (by the governor) and rejection (by Tea Party lawmakers) of education standards, Common Core backers will start a media campaign later this week.
The first ad will start on radio and feature Reagan-era Education S...

A Carson City rally on behalf of Rise Up America, will be held on Saturday, March 28, 2015 from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the Nevada Legislature Building on South Carson Street.

The event is being coordinated by P.J. Degross of Carson City, who was the admininstrator for Overpasses for America and GRAA. This year’s event is part of a national protest movement hosted by Overpasses and joined by many other groups. Many states are having city wide rallies the entire weekend, said Degross.

Assemblymen PK O'Neill kicked off his tenure as Carson City's elected representative in the State Assembly by sponsoring a 'symposium' on the Nevada Academic Content Standards (NACS) for English Language Arts and Mathematics.

What happened at the Common Core Forum in Carson City on 1/13/15

The ground rules agreed to by both sides for the two forums: two people would participate on each side of the issue. The pro side would contain two policy makers from either the Nevada Department of Education (NDE) or the Nevada State Board of Education; the con side would contain Drs. Stotsky and Milgram. Drs. Stotsky and Milgram were the only two members of Common Core’s Validation Committee who are content area specialists and who have also written high K-12 standards.

In a previous CarsonNow comment, Carson GOP Chair Maurice White called for Dr. Steve Canavero of the Nevada Department of Education to "be immediately dismissed for his public disrespectful conduct."

Now Peter Hennessey is calling James Milgram and Sandra Stotsky "widely known and respected experts on eduction standards."

On January 13, 2015, a symposium on Common Core was held in the Legislature Building. The participants were Professors James Milgram and Sandra Stotsky, both widely known and respected experts on eduction standards, who have actually participated in the development and validation of not only Common Core but also other standards before and since. The other side was represented by Steve Canavero of the Nevada Department of Education and Allan Grossman from the Washoe County School District.

Peter Hennessey, Ann Bedarski, Sandra Stotsky, James Milgram and the other anti-Common Core activists in attendance at PK O'Neill's symposium Tuesday night were there to stage a demonstration against the K-12 standards, which, it should be remembered, were adopted unanimously by the state board of education four years ago and enthusiastically signed off on by the Governor Gibbons.

This is a reply to my old friend Rich Dunn and to his posting, "All we got out of the Common Core 'symposium' was a one-sided presentation."

Wow, what a great spin. Once again we see a typically objective piece of reporting from a typically objective source. We can agree on one thing; it was a fiasco -- for the NDE.

Fortunately, there are others who have reported on this event, and their reports are on-line.

http://missourieducationwatchdog.com/nevada-more-misinformation-mayhem-f...

The January 13th Common Core "symposium" at the legislature didn't go off quite as advertised. The announcement posted by organizer Ann Bedarski on the Nevada Trends website listed the Department of Education participants as:

JUDY OSGOOD, Public Information Officer, Nevada Department of Educa_on
STEVE CANAVERO, Deputy Superintendent of Student Achievement, NDE
AMY SALGO, Teacher Ambassador, NDE

Newly elected Assemblyman Phillip "PK" O’Neill, R-Carson City, will host a forum Tuesday in Carson City at the Legislative Building for lawmakers and citizens. The forum is being led by opponents of Common Core State Standards.

Citizens for Sound Academic Standards welcomes the public to participate in the program which it says it will present both sides of the issue. The Common Core State Standards Initiative is an educational initiative in the United States that details what K-12 students should know in English language arts and mathematics at the end of each grade.

It’s National Rubber Ducky Day! I have no idea how that is relevant to anything, but now I've got the ‘Rubber Ducky’ song from Sesame Street in my head. It’s also Stephen Foster Memorial Day, so feel free to sing ‘Camptown Races’, one of the prolific song-writer’s most famous songs, instead. Keep the musical theme going today with the Carson Feet Warmers during lunch and the Mile High Jazz Band playing this evening, both at Comma Coffee.

Dr. Sandra Stotsky, Endowed Chair in Teacher Quality at the University of Arkansas’s Department of Education Reform and Chair of the Sadlier Mathematics Advisory Board, along with Dr. James Milgram, Emeritus Professor at Stanford University’s Department of Mathematics, will be speaking about why Common Core is not good for our children or our country, at events in Carson City, Fallon and Reno, on January 13th and 14th.

We are very fortunate to have Dr. Sandra Stotsky and Dr. James Milgram, the most qualified people on the Common Core Validation Committee, coming to northern Nevada for three public events.

They were the only two people on the committee who are content area specialists and who have written high K-12 standards; Dr. Stotsky English Lanugage Arts Massachusetts, Dr. Milgram math California.

The two of them plus three others on the committee would not sign off on Common Core. Both Stotsky and Milgram are for national standards but they both oppose Common Core.

Rich Dunn's reply, with a title addressed personally to me, illustrates the deep, irreconcilable mental and psychological divide between the two Parties, and the pavlovian response so typical of Democrats -- attack the messenger, not the message. What makes it especially funny is that the best argument for the Democrats to vote for their candidate in AD40 was that he had been a good... Republican...? It's a free country and you can call yourself whatever you want, just as the people are free to see you for who you are.

And so the people have spoken yesterday.

Peter Hennessey seems to have trouble with the word Democratic. Sadly he's not alone in that. It's an affliction that's been going around on the extreme right since the days of Joseph McCarthy. Please note that I'm talking about the extreme right, not the Republican party of the past, which once had a perfectly sane and civic-minded mainstream. I was a registered Republican myself for 34 years, but never had any trouble understanding that Democrat is a noun and Democratic is an adjective. I only have a bachelor's degree, but have no trouble distinguishing between nouns and adjectives.

I recently received an overly large mailer from PK O'Neill, a candidate for Assembly District 40. What he says is disturbing. He pontificates without solutions. He seems more concerned with cliches than real issues.

PK is not alone when making political claims. For another example, see Maizie Harris Jesse's letter “Candidates need to research lt.gov.job duties” in 17 October Nevada Appeal.

PK on the Public Employees' Retirement System (PERS)

Common Core is the latest loop in the death spiral of American education since the first “progressive” reforms a hundred years ago. The more “reforms,” the worse our schools.

You protest and you protest, but the educrat establishment ignores everything you say if you don’t agree with them and their “experts.”

Common Core is not on the ballot. Nevertheless yes, you can:

1. Stay up to date with your child’s homework and progress in school. Look at what they are taught in school.

2. Talk to other parents. Compare notes, share experiences.