Many of us had been under the impression that the goal of the Common Core standards was to improve the quality of teaching and learning in the nation’s schools.
As someone who spent years advocating for national standards–but has been agnostic about the new Common Core standards–it was always my hope that improving education would be, should be the goal. At least that was my hope when I worked in the US Department of Education in 1991-93 and expended a few million dollars so that teachers’ groups could write voluntary national standards in the arts, history, civics, science, foreign language, physical education, and economics (the math teachers had already written their own standards).
Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute has a completely different understanding of the Common Core. As he explains it, “reformers” expect that the Common Core standards will reveal to suburban parents just how awful their public schools are. This will set off the “reformers’” long-hoped for stampede for privatization among the smug and satisfied denizens of the nation’s suburbs.
Imagine the possibilities as everyone discovers their local school is failing and runs to the exits, demanding charters and vouchers.
Farewell, public education. Hello, free market.
Even Rick Hess has his doubts about this scenario.
Well, straight from the (somewhat reality-based, skeptical) horse’s mouth: the Common Core is little more than a vehicle for destabilizing and privatizing the public schools (and making money along the way).
The initial beachhead for the privatizers has been the urban public school systems, but there has never been any question that they want to sink their fangs into every school in the country, if they can. David “Nobody gives a sh&$ what you think” Coleman helped create a perfect Trojan Horse for further depredations against the public schools, but unfortunately many teachers still need to be educated about the dangers it poses.
What does research show? What does it not show? There are schools in Ohio that are already evaluating teachers by test scores, thanks to their participation in Race to the Top. Teachers who, in the past, have had good test scores, now have lower test scores. Much of the reason is because they are being forced to all teach the same way. Teachers are not allowed to use their own knowledge base or experience and do what is right for kids. They are assessing kids weekly, spending much needed instructional time collecting data that gives them information they already know. It is the teacher’s fault the scores have gone down, in spite of the fact that they are allotted less teaching time. The students who are suffering the most are the middle kids, the ones who will be the workforce of the future. There is one school district in a small city in northwest Ohio that actually forces it’s teachers to have blocks of time called “No New Instruction”. This is a time when special needs students are pulled from the class for extra support. The classroom teachers are not allowed to teach anything new during this 15 minute-1 hour time block(depending on the building). They can review, or give additional help to students during this time only. So why have the test scores of the middle students gone down? For a district that likes to think of itself on the cutting edge of data collection, is it really that hard to figure out why test scores have gone down?
What they need is a control group. Let a group of teachers teach the way they know works, with more instructional time and less assessing. Let them use the expertise they have accumulated over the years, and give their students the help they need and deserve, without outside interference.This includes administrative interference at the district level, as well as state and federal interference. Allow these teachers to order the materials they know will work, even if they aren’t from Pearson. And see what happens.
What is actually happening in our schools, the way teachers are being forced to teach to the Pearson tests, is dumbing down our future workforce. It is not the schools, but the asinine mandates, that are causing the lower scores.
Nancy… Ohio needs to look at the Michigan model. Our achievement results are not so good… but our teachers have some great evaluations! Thanks to the absence of objective achievement data in evalutions, 97% are considered effective, or highly effective.
http://www.freep.com/article/20121129/NEWS06/311290189/Grading-teachers-proves-difficult-Staffs-at-some-of-state-s-worst-schools-get-gushing-reviews
The free market is always good. Look at Fed Ex and UPS vs. the US Postal service. People should not be afraid of the free market in education. It can only help raise the bar for everyone, which is a good thing. People will still go to the public schools mostly because they are free. But healthy competition is good for all.
The Post Office? You mean that venerable institution that can get a letter from Nowhere, North Dakota to Somewhere, South Carolina for 45 cents (and could probably do it cheaper than that if Congress didn’t keep handicapping them by, say, forcing them to fully fund their pensions for the next hundred years)?
And by FedEx and UPS, I assume you mean those companies that charge upwards of $10 to move a package just within the downtown Chicago metro area? In fact, having a messenger deliver a package within an hour is about half the cost of having UPS or FedEx do it overnight.
And how exactly are charter schools – private schools funded with public dollars – examples of the “always good” free market?
Yes, “The free market is always good,” and Adam and Eve gamboled with dinosaurs in the Garden of Eden.
Yep, always good!
Enron
WorldCom
Tyco
Paramalat
Arthur Anderson
Bear Sterns
endless charter school scandals
etc
etc
Thank god for the always good, never wrong, no regulation required, invisible hand of the free market!
Out here in rural Missouri, UPS & FedEx use the USPS to deliver the smaller packages.
ok…..to get a box to my daughter in Hawaii was $65.00 by post office and over $200 by either Fedex or ups…..yes…..competition is awesome!
What else could you possibly expect from anyone from the American Enterprise Institute? Doesn’t the word Enterprise say it all? They are total far right wing ideologues who believe in privatizing and corporatizing everything. Basically Fascists by definition. People need to wake up to what is really going on here. The exact plan that started in Austria in 1919 to make a fascist state until today is in operation here. Read “Hapsburgs to Hitler” which is that story. It was published in 1948, is by Gulick and published by both the Oxford and Berkeley Press.
The point Hess makes is that identified in Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism when he states that:
“reformers” expect that the Common Core standards will reveal to suburban parents just how awful their public schools are. This will set off the “reformers’” long-hoped for stampede for privatization among the smug and satisfied denizens of the nation’s suburbs.
Klein noted that this will accomplish the trinity these “Reformers” are seeking: “All these incarnations share a commitment of the policy trinity – the elimination of the public sphere, total liberation for corporations and skeletal social spending.” She continues: “Far from freeing the market from the state, these political and corporate elites have simply merged, trading favors to secure the right to appropriate precious resources previously held in the public domain.” As such, education is that precious resource these corporations seek to exploit, little different from coal, oil or water, but one which until now has remained relatively free from this level of exploitation.
She also noted that “The ultimate goal for the corporations at the center of the complex is to bring the model of for-profit government, which advances so rapidly in extraordinary circumstances, into the ordinary and day-to-day functioning of the state – in effect to privatize the government.”
It is this privatization that both Hess and Diane Ravitch are speaking up against, but it is but the final move in a far more complex and dangerous corporate take-over of not just the public schools, but of our democracy itself!
I totally agree.
If any others have not yet read Ms Klein’s work, do so!
Actually, Hess is not opposed to privatization. I think he is concerned that Common Core will turn out to be another pipe dream that fails to woo suburban parents away from their local public schools. He supports for-profit schools, among other forms of privatization.
Thank you so much for passing along this link. Fascinating, indeed, and very, very disturbing.
I have a lot of respect for Diane Ravitch, but I also see so many educational leaders and union leaders scared of “educational reformers.” I’m not sure who they identify as an educational reformer, but it’s my hope that more teachers will be sitting at the table to reform education rather than resisting change and what I have seen in some instances as a holistic approach.