These days, parents and educators often feel powerless in the face of the powerful forces that are steamrolling them.
In Indiana, two moms started a campaign against he Common Core standards. They started with small groups, then organized large ones, and eventually made their voices heard in the state legislature.
The battle is far from over, but hey made an important point. This is still a democracy. Two informed citizens can make a difference.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
History has shown through time that a few dedicated people at the correct time can make dramatic changes that last. Some things I have learned to be constants are: Keep your irons hot, Keep your powder dry, you never know when opportunity will arise, big changes are times of opportunity, be prepared, timing and taking opportunities when they arise is most important and you never know when it will come and mud cannot stick against the wall unless you throw some.
Congratulations to you and your groups. Do not give up as that is what they want.
“We aren’t lobbyists. We aren’t paid. We’re just parents who are concerned about the future of our children’s education,” says Tuttle.
Love these two moms … a powerful combination … not to be underestimated,
If a critical mass of parents like these were to educate, organize and mobilize across the country, so-called education reform would collapse like the house of cards it is.
Why, it might even encourage the teacher’s unions to revisit the very questionable origins of The Common Core, the assumptions embedded in it, and its already-emerging consequences.
Thank you, Dr. Ravitch! Our anti-Common Core bill passed out of the Indiana Senate today, by a vote of 38-11.
Two years ago, I contacted you because I was concerned about Indiana’s voucher bill. I was thrilled when you told me on the phone that you would send some written testimony to Indiana politicians. Unfortunately, the bill passed before that was able to happen.
As a parent of children in a Catholic school, I was concerned there would be strings attached to the vouchers. Advocates assured me there would be very few. It was only the following Fall that I learned a bait and switch had occurred. Hoosiers had been told that voucher accepting schools only needed to administer our state ISTEP test, which we were accustomed to. In fact, at the very moment Indiana passed its voucher law, unbeknownest to most legislators and to the public, plans were afoot to replace the ISTEP with the Common Core PARCC test. I didn’t become aware of the Common Core until some “fuzzy math” started coming home. It was explained that this was necessary to prepare students for PARCC.
Dr. Ravitch, won’t you publicly join our cause? We sure could use your help right now.
Heather
Good job moms. I’m glad somebody was paying attention. Kudos to you.
More common sense, less common core.
I love your words, “More common sense, less common core.” And just think…it costs nothing!
Reblogged this on 70jamsession and commented:
Thank you, Diane Ravitch — and these two determined Moms in Indiana!
As a parent of a 4 year old and a high school teacher, I do believe — as always with Public Education — it will be parental involvement that will make the difference. I do hope the journey of these two Moms will inspire all of us to, at least, perk up and take more notice of what our students are and are not learning — directly as a result of the corporate, testing models bombarding our curricula. How many hours of direct math and reading / writing instruction engulf each school day? Are hours with these specific subject areas replacing other content not yet tested? Art/ music? Science? Library time? Recess?
After one becomes aware of such meaningless and, dare I say, harmful reform, I believe it then becomes our responsibility to seek the truth with the right questions. Action plans should then become quite evident — as with these two determined Moms in Indiana. For the sake of our youth, we must never feel powerless. It is up to us. Let’s JAM!
Open request to Diane: This is related in that this is a grass-roots effort in our town, but not related specifically to the common core…myself and a few other moms are challenging our district’s implementation of social/emotional learning throughout our entire curriculum (not just health class) and doing so with very little explicit information or “shared vision” with parents. The only SEL standards I can find are in Illinois. Most cases of SEL implementation involve schools requiring extensive interventions based on hugely evident issues. And this is all being done under the umbrella of Educational Reform and school climate.
We are a high performing district, lots of sports, lots of involved (some might argue too-involved) parents, lots of faith organizations in our community, and uber-supportive parents. Our district is giving in-school surveys to children without consent, and based on those results, adding the SEL component k-12 in all subjects which allows teaching and enrichment activities that don’t always align with parenting…does this sound familiar to anyone? Does anyone else have this type of experience?
What happens when school instruction of K-12 social and emotional issues is in direct contrast to parental teaching and upbringing of children? What happens when academics become diluted by teaching to some standard social or emotional outcome? HELP. We are trying to get more disclosure to parents and the opportunity to opt-out, but when surveys are given behind our backs, we are fighting “data-driven” decisions based on bad data! The parents seem to be losing local decision-making ability and are being pushed out of the equation in the name of school reform! Any ideas?
The Bad
Regarding the Common Core: Post 1 From Pathways to the Common Core: Accelerating Achievement by Lucy Calkins, Mary Ehrenworth, and Christopher Lehman, Heinemann 2012.
Who wrote the CCSS anyway? One can search all 399 pages of the document and its appendices and find no trace of an author’s name, and yet now that the CCSS have been ratified, two people, David Coleman and Sue Pimentel, have emerged referring to themselves as “the” authors in their own documents. If this is the cause, why was their identity kept secret while states considered the standards? Was the goal to make it look like a large number of people (such as the Council of Chief State School Officers themselves) wrote the standards and thereby prevent questions about the specific authors’ credentials from derailing ratification?
Some documents published after the CCSS were ratified add guidelines for evaluating methods of implementation, contradicting the intentions of the standards. Since the CCSS were ratified, Coleman and Pimentel (and even others claiming to have some connection to the CCSS) have continued writing addenda to and interpretations of the CCSS that are hailed as “writer by the authors of the CCSS,” as if this give these addenda and interpretations the same authority as the CCSS themselves. These new documents spell out methods of implementation in a fashion that directly contradict the CCSS’s explicit premise that implementation decisions be left in the hands of teachers and school leaders. The document that was reviewed and ratified by the states explicitly says, “the Standards define what all students are expected to know and be able to do, not how teachers should teach.” Yet now, after states have agreed to take on these standards, some people are spelling out implications and specifying what they wish the Common Core had said, doing so without approval from all of the subcommittees that worked on the CCSSS or from the states that have already signed on. Once can argue, then, that it is problematic. Thomas Jefferson couldn’t rewrite the Constitution that the states agreed to, nor was he (or any other person) appointed as the Designated Interpreter of the Constitution. The full weight of these documents is not yet felt. At the time of this publication, Colman, as co-founder of Student Achievement Partners, received a four-year 18 million dollar grant from the GE foundation to develop materials and do teacher training around the CCSS. There will certainly be additional materials and documents that emerge following this new round of money, with the potential to make similar claims as the Publishers Criteria for the Common State Standards in English Language Arts and Literacy, Grades 3-12 (Coleman and Pimentel 2011) and the Rubrics for Evaluating the Open Education Resource (OER) Objects (Achieve 2011). When documents such as these are presented as if they’ve gone through the process of review and been ratified by the states on the subcommittees, it is troubling. Without that endorsement, these materials should not be regarded as having the authority of the CCSS.
Part 2: The good.
More from Pathways to the Common Core: Accelerating Achievement by Lucy Calkins, Mary Ehrenworth, and Christopher Lehman, Heinemann 2012.
“…we need to embrace what is good about the Common Core State Standards—and roll up our sleeves and work to make those standards into a force that lifts our teaching and our schools. For there is good in them. We would be pleased indeed if students in all our classrooms could do this level of work independently.
…
The CCSS emphasize much higher-level comprehension skills than previous standards. Although some may question a few particular priorities of the Common Core, the document becomes more admirable when one considers what it replaces. It was just a few years ago when No Child Left Behind (NCLB) required educators to focus on expectations of the National Reading Panel. Back then, the whole world of comprehension was compacted into one small item in a list of five priorities—phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension—with all of comprehension being equal in emphasis to phonemic awareness. Once glance at the Common Core’s expectations reveals that today’s document places stronger emphasis on higher-level comprehension skills. Even young children are asked to analyze multiple accounts of an event, noting similarities and differences in points of view presented, assessing the warrant behind people’s ideas. Readers of today are asked to integrate informant from several texts, to explain relationships between ideas and author’s craft. Whereas the nation’s last attempt to lift the level of literacy in a faction that fit easily into basal reading programs, with their emphasis on seatwork and on little reading groups convened under teacher’s thumb, this new call for reform forwards an image of literacy instruction that involves students in reading lost of books and documents of all sorts, meeting in small groups to engage in heady, provocative conversations about what they have to read, taking stances for and against the views they find in books, and engaging in accountable-talk interactions. Surely this represents an important step ahead.”
[So, perhaps, we should concern ourselves, as do the authors of this book, with what is good in these standards and make sure they are not made into the kind of toxic curriculum that NCLB produced. I would hope that we educators will study the contrasts in philosophy that generate standards such as these and those that spawned NCLB. There is a very different view of who we are as human beings and who it is that should determine how we go about living in this world. These standards, in the hands of intelligent educators can help to insure a rebirth of democratic society by helping students grow as independent thinkers rather than followers, surfs working for the benefit of the plutocrats who foisted upon us the terribly restrictive and dehumanizing dictums of NCLB].
Dear Ms. Crossin,
If your schools would withdraw from the voucher program, they would be exempt from Common Core. Easy solution. But…they want the money!!!! Too bad the money has those darn strings…!!!
History of the literacy program mentioned in last note
Reading Program Is Called Ineffective
In War Over Teaching Reading, a U.S.-Local Clash
She Found Abuses in U.S. Plan for Reading
Justice Dept. Is Asked To Investigate Reading Plan
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=FA0C16FB3D5A0C728EDDAD0894DF404482
Schools Chancellor Stands by His Choice of Reading Program
Report Says Education Officials Violated Rules
I like the conversation I find here on this blog site but I have been following the conversation for a long time, since before NCLB, and I am always wanting for a statement of some kind by those with whom I am conversing as to what it is they understand the purpose of education to be. I ask this because I have to think that those who devised NCLB had a very different notion of goals for the educated than I do. And I find myself to feel at times, when I read Diane Ravitch’s comments and those of many who follow this blog, that I differ in important ways with the goals that seem to influence the perspectives presented here. I feel myself to be a warrior of sorts, who had to rough it through the bad days of NCLB and I wonder if those who are currently expressing their concerns with the current state of education see the problem with NCLB being with the methodology and not necessarily the goals.
My sense, from reading the documents that lent support to such NCLB elements as Reading First and the push away from concern with thinking (some were pretty hard on those who promoted critical thinking as a central goal of good education) toward content delivered to students by content experts who, it seems, were thought to hold truths that were to be taken as truth by students who would be rewarded for repeating as truth what they were told was truth.
It seemed to me that this emphasis, that resonated in the writing of many of NCLB’s supporters, represented a notion of education that fit Freire’s definition of “banking education,” which is an approach used not by those who wish to liberate minds, but control them.
NCLB, to me, was created by and forced upon us by people who truly believed in the importance of their authority, believed themselves to know so well what others should know and become and be that they could impose a world view (through the dissemination of “the “information” they found to be important) that they really did not want those they were “educating” to question.
My sense that this was the notion of “goal” in force during the NCLB period was to indoctrinate rather than educate was reinforced by the behavior of the administration that forced NCLB upon us, an administration that wanted to tell people what to believe even if what they were seeing with their own eyes contradicted what they were being told (think WMD). This was an administration that was pretty much responsible for the economic collapse that we still are suffering, an administration that pretty much allowed the public to be duped by corporations and big banks, an administration that was advised in its methods by a man named Carl Rove who does not care much about helping people to discover the truth of things for themselves.
So, tying things together in what may be my own paranoid (or possibly informed and thoughtful way) I came to think that a lot of what was going on with NCLB was about making sure that people were susceptible rather than circumspect.
And now I ask that those with whom I converse for the purpose of improving education come clean with their motives, with their sense of the goals their comments are intended to help our educational system achieve.
Mine, simply stated, are to create and educational system that works to promote informed independent thinkers who are able to “deliberate effectively” so that their ideas are helpful to the democratic decision making process, a process dependent on respect for the opinion of people who are able to demonstrate with reason that their opinions, their hard won opinion derived through effective deliberation, are respectable enough for consideration by men and women of good will who desire to contribute to the building of an ever more perfect union.
Reblogged this on Transparent Christina.
The more I am forced to read about and implement the CCS, the more I realize we’re doomed as a society.
The darkest blotch in American Education history would have to go to laws in southern states that strictly prohibited the education of African-Americans. Ignorance was necessary for security: slaves were not to question their lot in life.
No establishment in our educational system should ever be allowed to exist that has the potential to purposely keep an entire populace ignorant and unquestioning. Even if a set of high-quality Common Core Standards existed (which they do not), the potential deconstruction of our democracy would far outweigh any potential benefit they would bring. Anyone who supports Common Core Standards is foolishly overlooking a potential disaster.
Hi Diane,
Thanks for your support. The Indiana pro-Common Core supporters are the Chamber of Commerce and Stand for Children. They are powerful groups with incredible financing. They are also among the largest voices championing privatization.
As far as Stand on Children goes, they are not Hoosiers. They have only recently set up shop in Indiana to promote the privatization agenda. How can Indiana allow a group, after two years of “residency,” to form education policy? This is not local control.
In our hearing, Stand organized 10 or so teachers, who are members of their organization and TFA, to testify in support of CC. These teachers associations were not clarified to the senate and were made to look like they represented the teachers of Indiana.
We need teachers to write letters and voice their objections to the CC. We can’t allow Stand and their affiliates to represent what teachers want. They have no clue. Please continue to support teachers and give them the information they need to stop this one-size-fits-all sham.
We welcome comments from teachers on our website at http://www.hoosiersagainstcommoncore.com
Thanks!
Fascism begins when corporations begin to run the government. In Indiana, the Chamber of Commerce continues to mail its members urging them to support Common Core, under the guise of “better college preparedness”, and the nearly unrestricted Voucher Bill under the guise of “choice”.
What “business” does the Chamber of Commerce have in directing educational policy? With this Republican Supermajority, any Hoosier who fails to admit the makings of a fascist state is turning a blind-eye to the truth.