Scott Marion makes his living off of the over testing of our children in public schools.  His recent letter endorsing Gov. Hassan should come as no surprise since under her tenure, schools are becoming even more damaged by the over-testing with flawed assessments.  Below is a reply to Marion’s letter

With permission to post from the author………….

Don’t label those who oppose Common Core 

Oct. 24 — To the Editor:

Scott Marion’s recent condescending letter to the editor chastising the Herald reporter about her article on the Common Core event in Maine is not surprising. He wrote another letter in which he praises Maggie Hassan for supporting the new “rigorous” standards and attacks Walt Havenstein and his “tea party supporters” as being opposed to high standards.

Mr. Marion should stop trying to label those who oppose Common Core. There are concerned citizens from across the political spectrum who oppose these arguably unproven standards and the excessive high-stakes testing that is associated with them. Perhaps people are concerned about these standards because of faults in the standards themselves and the fact that they are, in many respects, developmentally inappropriate. Can Mr. Marion provide any evidence that these standards will do what they propose or is this just another experiment on our children?

The opposition consists mostly of parents, teachers and teachers unions who are concerned about what is best for their kids. Parents were not informed of or included in the process to adopt Common Core. Teachers are being unfairly evaluated with these inappropriate and invalid assessments and are spending so much of their classroom time and resources preparing children for tests rather than teaching.

The big proponents of Common Core are the Federal Department of Education; Bill Gates and the organizations that received money from him to support it; Pearson, a multi billion dollar global testing and textbook company, that received the $1billion dollar contract for the PARCC assessment; and other corporations who want a piece of the public education pie.

So it is not surprising that Scott Marion would defend Common Core and these high-stakes tests since he works for the National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment, Inc. which “works with states and other educational agencies to design and implement effective assessment and accountability policies and programs”.

Angela Pont

Portsmouth