The Common Core standards have arrived.
Some love them. Some hate them.
It’s time for a debate.
Marc Tucker thinks they are necessary and appropriate in an age of globalized commerce.
Yong Zhao thinks they will standardize minds and crush creativity, which is needed in an age of globalization.
What do you think?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Yong Zhao is correct and creative.
The Common Core is not a person or energy that has the ability to standardize minds and crush creativity. What matters deeply is the pedagogy – the teacher(s) – how common core becomes part of the teaching/learning ecosystem in a district, school, students’ personal learning environment. This is the result of human beings’ competencies and capacities with laser focus on learners, how they learn, thrive, create and achieve. It’s easy to criticize standards, expectations and stuff coming out of state/federal offices. The real work, the tough stuff, is engaging the realities and integrating them with the universal skills crucial for this and the next century.
I do not see how you can put your faith in CCSS that have never been vetted. How do you know that these standards are “crucial for this and the next century” ? Is it because the CCSS “experts” said so? Is there a crystal ball I don’t know about?
One of the definitions of “standard” is “the grade of beef immediately below good.” That seems more than appropo in this climate where teachers are treated as “pieces of meat,” and students are being consumed in the efforts of reformers to find the exact science that will measure human potential. It’s a fool’s game. Standardization is playing to the middle, the average. It seems sad to me that like Diana Moon Glampers’ efforts, education has become about handicapping our students and our teachers, indeed our entire education system.
Since its inception this blog has hosted many thoughtful and thought-provoking comments. Every once in a while one comment or observation will stand out from the rest.
In this case I don’t presume to speak for anyone else on this blog, only for myself. This posting is exceptional. I don’t know how to express how much I appreciate you sharing this in this venue except to say: I feel very strongly it would have been a privilege to have worked with a teacher who thinks like you.
And to lighten the mood a bit, given what you are going through: in the words of the macaronic or mock-Latin aphorism, “illegitimi non carborundum” —don’t let the bastards get you down!
🙂
It’s ironic to me that I just taught Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron,” and am finishing Animal Farm today. I believe Carl Jung called this “synchronicity”? 🙂
Karzy TA, they can’t take take anything away from me. I appreciate the “chin up” though 🙂 Thank you.
A friend told me last night that he hoped I wouldn’t look back on all this with any regrets. I told him that I’ve done and said nothing I regret. I’ve spoken honestly about my concerns for three years now, ever since this CCSS mess came down the pike. It is not my fault that they refuse to hear me. Ironically also, my principal aasked me what I thought about my “improvment plan.” It was only when I tried to answer her that she “bowed up” at me. Doublespeak? Heck, those nine dogs WERE effective.
But don’t traditional geographically zoned schools have to play to the middle, the average? Don’t they have to be all things to all students?
I think there are ways to differentiate in public schools that do not include playing to the middle of the population, and thereby depriving the top and bottom groups. I know it’s a “dirty word,” but “tracking” provides opportunities for kids at all levels to be successful. Don’t hit me 🙂
I don’t hit anyone, and in any case I agree that students need to have access to classes that are appropriate to their needs. That is why I am in favor of allowing them to choose from classes offered outside of the assigned building, not just from those classes offered inside the building.
The Common Core and your post, Teaching in an Age of Injustice, are related. Why can’t educators realize the obvious? The Common Core is the reason Ms. Highfill can no longer teach using the effective methods which have earned her the distinguished record she holds. A one size fits all centralized curriculum and assessments will eradicate the ability of teachers to practice their craft. Administrators who continue to push this untested curriculum on its schools are committing education malpractice. Teachers must unite and expose the Common Core for what is, before it is too late.
Bingo, Erin.
IMO there doesn’t seem to be any question that CCSS will “reform” education in a positive manner for students, taxpayers, teachers, administrators. For those wanting to make a profit using taxpayer money, it’s a goldmine.
Given private schools will never implement these standards nor the testing diet our public school children are fed, I am quite sure the name Common was no accident…common standards for the common people.
Good one!
Private schools are implementing the standards, especially if they receive voucher money.
http://truthinamericaneducation.com/common-core-state-standards/private-schools-take-a-look-at-louisiana/
We are seeing Catholic schools adopting CCSS curriculum as well here in MO.
The Catholic school where I currently teach is paying careful attention to CCSS. They feel like they need to mirror the public schools to some extent in order to keep current. I would argue that this is a good point at which to diverge.
The standards [sic] don’t bear up under close examination. The ELA standards [sic], in particular, are so poorly conceived that they come close to being self-parodying. I find myself wondering why there is not a rising chorus of derision directed at the new standards [sic] by English teachers.
If we had standards like these for teaching physics, those standards would be calling on students a) to demonstrate the role of phlogiston in combustion, b) to describe how moving bodies come to rest when they use up their motive force, c) to explain why the luminiferous aether is needed for the propagation of waves, and d) to analyze various material bodies into their constituent elements–earth, water, fire, and air.
These substandards (lets call them what they are) reflect NOTHING of what we have learned in the past forty years about language acquisition. They make use of a prescientific and thoroughly discredited model of English grammar. They continually make assumptions about writers, readers, and literature that were rejected by all serious students of literature a hundred years ago. They completely ignore essential, fundamental aspects of elementary literary studies. They alternate between statements so broad and vague as to be meaningless and statements so specific and arbitrary that one continually asks, reading this or that substandard, why this, and why at this grade level? They are shot through with nonsequiturs and vast lacunae. They encourage stupid, thoughtless teaching of writing in three (and only three) distinct “modes” at EVERY GRADE LEVEL (God save us from the resultant five-paragraph themes) and do almost nothing to familiarize students with the vast, useful repertoire of rhetorical strategies and specific structural models that constitute expertise in writing and are the working writer’s quotidian tools. They demonstrate little understanding on the part of their authors of the fundamentals of critical approaches to literature and make no attempt to call upon teachers to present these in any sort of systematic, taxonomic, cumulative manner. They refer, vaguely, to critical thinking and speaking and listening well but entail no models or processes (none, at all) for developing specific expertise in the skills required for either.
I could say more, but I’ll spare you.
One comes away from a reading of these substandards certain that no competent linguist, literary scholar, student of rhetoric, or expert on the cognitive science of learning was involved in their creation. Who put these together? A committee of retired plumbers and cosmeticians, perhaps, calling upon vague memories of middle-school English as it was taught to them in rural Arkansas sixty years ago. No, not even that. The teachers in those one-room schoolhouses knew more, clearly, about their subjects than do the authors of the new, improved, universal substandards.
And the worst of it is that these substandards will be confused with curriculum maps. Administrators and teachers will start at the top and work down them, teaching isolated lessons on substandard RL.1.a, substandard RL.1.b, substandard RL 1.c, and so on. THE MAP, as crude, as inaccurate, as incomplete, as poorly drawn as it is (hic sunt dracones), WILL BECOME THE TERRITORY. All creative teaching, all engaging and valuable curricula will be replaced by bite-sized lessons on this skill and that skill. And the consequences of that entirely predictable course are themselves entirely predictable. In a few years, politicians will be calling for the really new, really improved universal standards that will, this time, be the real magical philosopher’s stone for transmuting lead into gold, not the fake one used last time around. And, if you will pardon the mixed metaphor, they will find some hacks, well, to hack those new standards [sic] together.
Good I’m glad I’m not the only one who sees this as mumbo jumbo doublespeak. Talk about a Potemkin village if there ever was one. From a product design standpoint, this is a giant pile of garbage.
Just to show how hard it is to design the simplest thing to be understandable, like a map of train stations on one line: http://crosscut.com/2013/01/09/seattle/112373/sea-seatac-train-link-light-rail-sound-transit/.
If common core is as important as it should be, it should have been the work of thousands of people, and vetted by hundreds of universities and the national science foundation.
Who vetted this thing? Oh yeah, a bunch of politicians.
AMEN! So TRUE.
I don’t believe the CC standards in and of themselves should be judged in this way. We need to focus on the fact that they are as yet untested/unused in a widely diverse population, and that the increase in testing, programmed material, online learning, etc. etc. will increase exponentially. Two questions: Is this a good thing or not? What are the alternatives?
I think the really bright kids tend to disregard the standards anyway, so — Common Core, something else…
I believe in moderation is key in every aspect of life. There needs to be space in any curriculum to think outside the box. Students and teachers should be freely and genuinely supported in their efforts. Instead, in too many instances, they are losing their careers.
Education has become a greedy business run by those who have never set foot in a classroom. Lack of discipline in schools, teachers forced to teach only to the test by using a a flawed, sometimes developmentally-inappropriate Common Core curriculum, ridiculous amounts of redundant, unnecessary paperwork for teachers, administrators, superintendents, and politicians all cowing to the lure of RTTT funding. It’s no longer about educating students to be critical thinkers. It is all about data, testing and satisfying federal and state’s mandates. It’s sad that we have a legislature that doesn’t care to know what the public wants, but is ONLY interested in what the special interests want. And sadder still, that the average American trusts those in charge to be “doing the right thing, just because they usually DID years ago. Ethics in America seem to be disappearing, from the top down.
Any social experiment that wants everyone to learn via a common core should frighten all of us.
This is a deeply moving and insightful piece:
I highly recommend it to all following this thread.
There are some bright spots in the new standards. For those, one has to look to the small print and outside the standards themselves to the publishers’ guidance issued by the Common Core State Standards Initiative. There we find the creators of the standards calling for related readings that build knowledge about particular topics within and and across grade levels. There we find them saying that skills instructions should be incidental, done on an as needed basis in response to work toward substantive ends intrinsically worth pursuing. But sadly, that’s not how the standards will be implemented. We are already seeing the emergence of products (especially online products) that treat the CCSS one at a time, in isolated lessons using low-quality readings cooked for the purpose of illustrating particular concepts. Ms. Brehl is right, I think, in saying that the most pressing issue is not the low quality of the CCSS themselves but, rather, what’s going to be done in the real world as a result of them–more isolated skills instruction in online, bite-sized, unrelated chunks; more testing, testing, testing; higher stakes value-added measurement of teachers; the reduction of all instruction to standards review and test prep; the transmogrification of curricula to follow, slavishly,the standards as roadmap; etc. Real learning is idiosyncratic. There are no standardized teachers and students, and there shouldn’t be. Standards should be helpful suggestions, guidelines, from experts with experience and knowledge worth sharing. They should NOT be mandates.
I don’t see a problem with us having a national curriculum. I will defer judgment on the core of the CCSS until I have had more experience working with it. My biggest concern with it is the notion that objectives expected to be mastered in a given year are not to be be retaught the following year (I am talking about the “step diagram”, in contrast to the spiral curriculum of old.) In theory, everything taught the previous year should have been mastered that year and we do not need to spend time revisiting those concepts the following year. In practice, we know that there is summer loss for our students and we also know that some children do not master every objective the first time around. I see this a lot with young children. Some of them are, dare I utter the banned phrase, developmentally unready for certain concepts the first time around. Any teacher worth his or her salt is going to review what concepts or skills are necessary before moving on. To do otherwise is educational malpractice.
Sandra Stotsky is presenting a paper in St. Louis today about the Common Core Standards (and, by the way, Robert Shepherd, they ARE “sick”), where she discusses these very issues. She sent me a copy. Diane, think she’d put it out here for all to see?
As I read through the previous comments, I have to wonder if any were made by actual common core practitioners. I have been piloting the standards with students since last spring. Simply stated, my experience has been amazing. Since we have less standards to cover, we have been granted the luxury of exploring the curriculum at a much deeper level. My students possess a greater appreciated of all text, because they understand how it enriches their lives and prepares them to have a meaningful discourse. And the writing that naturally follows would leave a lasting impression on any second grade teacher. In my twenty years as an educator, I have never encounters another set of standards that provide a solid guide for critical thinking in all grade levels and across all disciplines. I am also forced to improve my skill set everyday, and I have never felt more rewarded. I think everyone should apply a true cycle of inquiry, before they speak out so firmly against the Common Core.
What do I think? I think I’m tired of this decades old debate.
We need a balanced curriculum, in every sense of the word.
We need to understand that a “higher,” “better,” or another standard won’t help the poor kids in my community’s middle school who slipped through elementary without learning to read. Only good teaching and a proper learning environment can help them.
Is that what Common Core will produce?