AFT President Randi Weingarten called for a moratorium in the rush to impose the Common Core. Several states are considering proposals to withdraw from the Common Core. The Republican National Committee lambasted it as federal intrusion. Progressives like Stephen Krashen and Susan Ohanian object to standardization. Defenders try to paint critics as far-right extremists.
Is the Common Core too much, too soon? Did the Obama administration nd the Gates Foundation move too fast, without adequate buy-in from educators?
What happens next? Stay tuned.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Unfortunately in New Jersey no one is listening or wants to listen to the problems with the new standards and the testing to come. I got my local school board (of which I am a member) to pass anti testing resolution at least for a start.
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I’m a lot of things, including a vehement critic of the Common Core Standards. What I’m not by any measure is right-wing. So those who hope to stave off criticism of CCSSI had best realize that there are too many outspoken progressives who’ve been questioning these “standards” and the VERY IDEA of national curriculum standards, texts, or assessments for that particular defense to gain traction. Susan Ohanian myself, and many others will never be confused with conservative extremists, and we aren’t going to stand quietly by while the Standardistas try to tar all their critics with the “right-wing” brush.
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Finally – Obama found a way to bring the country together:)
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That’s a good one!!
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Thank you, Mr. Goldenberg. I am not by any measure left wing, nor am I a right wing extremist. I think we have more in common than we have differences. I started out poor, but was rich in family. My husband & I realized the American Dream. For many years, we did business internationally. I am fiscally conservative; believe in the Constitution, rule of law, property rights, limited government and local (State) governance of education. Today I read to Pre-K thru 3rd grade classes in a low-income public school. We had a good exchange and a lot of fun with the books. The children were eager participants. It is so necessary that children learn the joy of reading, read with comprehension, write clearly, and use basic good grammar and punctuation. The most inspiring teachers are being weeded out under the weight of testing and standardization. How will our people prosper in mind and spirit, if we turn our next generation into little robots? Who will create the next medical, tech, or other innovation? We have no idea what that might be, nor can we program it to happen. People are not standard, not common– not all alike. Teachers have a right to teach, not just test. And students have a right to learn all they are able. STOP COMMON CORE AND THE INVASIVE DATA GATHERING & DISTRIBUTION.
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Here, here!!
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CCSS and RttT = same-o, same-o! Neither are theoretically and developmentally sound.
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Randi called for a moratorium on extensive testing and their use to evaluate teachers. She stated principals and teachers needed at least two years of professional development regarding the common core standards and how to align local curriculum to the CCSS .
Her primary criticism was aimed at the rush to test what teachers have not been prepared to teach. Randi is absolutley correct. The common core standards are not the problem. Foolish state politicians, Regents and State Education Commissioners who impose new state exams without preparing the principals and teachers are the main problem. We should celebrate the common core as a good step forward. We should oppose foolish testing practices.
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Randi is absolutely effin wrong! Common core is just one of the symptoms of the problems. If we “should oppose foolish testing practices” then we (including you) would be doing everything possible to counteract them. Common core is educational malpractice take to the nth degree.
By the way, please define standard for us. What is an “educational standard”?
Eagerly waiting a response I’ve never received for those two questions. Have at it!
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A standard is an expected outcome.
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Common Core is an attempt at an easy fix it (easy in the sense if prescriptive). There are none. Education should be a journey. Not a race to the top, the bottom, heaven, hell or anywhere. I hope there is an eventual way to undo RttT too. The only silver lining I see is that these vast, sweeping fixes have been (will have been) tried and proven no success. And back to the journey of educating. This is the nation stuck in traffic. The journey will continue. It has to.
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I listened to a presentation recently from teachers at our local school, and they’re liking the common core standards and finding them an improvement over the current California standards. It was genuine and they were enthusiastic. I was glad to see it.
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We have a lot of those enthusiastic types, too.
They seem to fall into two groups:
Many of our bandwagon riders were paid by the district to implement the CC…motivation to “like” obvious and apparent. They got paid and they were chosen by the district to influence the rest of us.
Some of the others like what ever they are told to like.
These are the ones who, despite all information to the contrary, insist that the states really wanted these (called out for them!), that the CC was written by groups of teachers, it was all funded with Race To The Flop money, so the CC is not going to cost us anything and they will definitely lead to “good things”. I will charitably refer to these as naive.
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Common Core actually lowers California’s math standards, and will cost the state 800 million dollars to implement.
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As Upton Sinclair stated: “”It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”
That is why they are so supposedly enthusiastic. They know who butters their bread and they don’t have the cojones to go against “the team”. They go along to get along and harm the students along the way. Cowards they are.
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Opponents of Common Core make strange bedfellows, to wit: Glenn Beck and Diane Ravitch. We don’t “oppose” Common Core, we just want their substance fixed first, before they are inflicted on millions of students. The main problem with the math standards starts at their roots: they are not based on sound research, they are not internationally benchmarked, and they don’t address the underlying shortcomings in American math education.
Case in point: a world-class 5th grade problem caused fits to American-education-system trained students all the way up to the graduate school mathematics level:
http://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/1c46c7/does_this_quadrilateral_area_problem_really/ and such a divide will not be addressed by Common Core.
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If the Common Core is the Tar Baby to non-reformers Bra’er Rabbit, what is the briar patch? Where do we go from here?
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http://susanohanian.org/core.php?id=476
“In truth, the education enemy passeth all party labels. The education enemy is Corporate and holds hands with Republicans and Democrats alike. Conservative resolutions don’t often decry Corporate control of school. Instead, they call on “a free market approach to education for students to achieve individual excellence.”
Yes I flinch at the words, but risky as it might seem, Progressives should be able to join Conservatives in saying the words “local control” out loud– without fear of plunging over the cliff into a quicksand of hysterical right wing denunciation of everything from Social Security to the United Nations.
We can agree to agree on just this one evil thing–the Common Core.
I remember that it was Republicans who prevented President Bill Clinton getting the national test he wanted. And I applaud the way Conservatives have organized against the Common Core. I hope Progressives will join them. “
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Who cares if the opposition is from the right or left? Free yourselves from “label” thinking. Become a free thinker accepting and rejecting ideas from wherever they come based on logical rational thought. Anything less is ideology in whatever form it takes.
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Exactly.. Would you agree with the idea or statement if you did not know whether it came from a liberal or a conservative. Doo your own research. Test against your values. Question–don’t just accept soundbites…
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I think it’s important to understand where specific objections are coming from, not in the sense of who is objecting but rather why they in particular are raising those particular objections.
That said, if a group or individual with an established track record when it comes to educational politics objects to something that I, too, find objectionable, yet I know that I rarely, if ever, have agreed with him/her/them in the past, my curiosity is, quite naturally, piqued. Has someone had a major shift in perspective? If so, why and how did that come about? Has my own perspective changed so that I am now more in agreement with the views of people I have historically disagreed with? Again, why and how?
To leave such questions unexamined is to presume that the motives behind people’s public statements need not be taken into account. Frankly, I think that’s at best a naive view.
I think it’s important to realize that people have been known to dissemble in these various wars. Not everyone on the Right opposing the CCSSI is being forthcoming about why. My take: most don’t oppose national standards. They oppose standards they didn’t control and write. Some of the loudest opponents are folks who’ve actively worked for conservative, anti-progressive state standards in various places, have engaged in hijacking the political process to do away with the very enlightened mathematics standards in California in the late 1990s (behind closed doors and via back channels, as has been documented in at least one book and several on-line articles), and generally shown themselves to be perfectly fine with CERTAIN sweeping standards (despite their current rhetoric that would make them SEEM opposed to one-size-fits-all approaches). So why do such folks oppose the Common Core? Simple: they didn’t get to write enough of it, didn’t get to block the inclusion in the Math Standards of the Practice Standards which, for the most part, are just like the NCTM Process Standards from 1989 – 2000 that they loathed and fought against tooth and nail, etc. Suddenly, they’re all about free choice, local control, and so forth, despite having actively undermined local choices and control throughout the country when schools and districts opted for the “wrong” math and/or language arts texts, programs, philosophies. And this is all well-documented.
So politics is relevant. Motives are relevant. Truth is relevant. If that’s a problem, I’m really not sure what to tell you. But trusting that all opponents of something are coming from similar points of view and operating with similar long-range or even short-term agendas is worse than naive: it’s a recipe for disaster in the very near future, should the anti-CCSSI movements succeed.
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I think you make good points, Michael. From my reading of the anti-CCSS conservative blogs & web sites, I’ve concluded that these people have so much emotionally invested in their dislike of moderates & liberals that they can’t bring themselves to work with others on even this issue.
In addition, I think they are being snookered by the right wing pundits & politicians. Freedom Works, while sponsoring Tweets to Stop the Common Core is publishing puff pieces on how FL gov Scott is bringing “revolutionary reform” to FL education — by signing the Common Core standards into law. Meanwhile, the much-touted (and Tweeted about) Grassley letter is meaningless; and the senators who signed it must know that. It just makes them look like they are supporting the Tea Party types without having any impact on the interests of whichever monied CCSS/charter school proponents the senators really care about. Unfortunately, the right-wing opponents of the CCSS regime don’t really understand what’s going on and, because of their biases, can’t seem to learn.
The idea of a politically broad coalition of CCSS opponents working together is appealing. However, I think that the right-wing opposition will turn out to be a tempus in a teapot (sorry, couldn’t resist that) which will just serve to strengthen the support of moderates & progressives (like the NY Times Editorial Bd) who don’t really understand CCSS. To these people CCSS sounds like a very reasonable idea; the fact that the kind of “wing nuts”who have already done so much damage to the country oppose CCSS (partly for some bizarre reasons) will make the Common Core regime seem even better to them. After all, how many humane, rational thinkers want to be seen keeping company with Glenn Beck & Michelle Malkin?
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