Arne Duncan has been vigorously defending the Common Core standards and vigorously insisting that they were created by the governors and the states. Of course, he must do this because it is illegal for the U.S. Department of Education to interfere in curriculum and instruction in the nation’s schools.
But his version of how the Common Core came to be adopted by nearly every state since 2009 is not accurate. It would be interesting to ask the nation’s governors what they know about the Common Core and even more interesting to ask them to take one of the two federally-funded tests of the Common Core. If that seems a stretch, how about having the nation’s chief state school officers–who are cheerleading for the Common Core–take the test?
As for the states “leading the way,” as Duncan often claims, that’s not quite right. Earlier this year, Robert Scott, who was Texas Commissioner of Education until Governor Perry canned him for his criticism of out-of-control testing, said bluntly that his state was asked to adopt the Common Core before they were finished. Texas said no. Most other states said yes, because they wanted a chance to win Race to the Top funding.
For the real story behind Common Core, read what Valerie Strauss wrote here.
Here is a key section:
“The Core initiative was started in 2007 by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, a bipartisan effort to come up with a common set of K-12 standards in English language arts and math across states that would better prepare students for colleges and careers than in the past.
“The standards were written by school reformer and entrepreneur David Coleman, who now heads the College Board, and Susan Pimental of Achieve Inc., an organization created to advance “standards-based” education. Starting in 2009, the Obama administration, in its main education initiative, required states that wanted to compete for Race to the Top reform dollars to adopt the standards. It also gave some $360 million to two consortia of states developing standardized tests aligned to the Core, exams whose results would be used to evaluate teachers, another controversial part of the Obama reform agenda.”
And more:
“There is some irony in the fact that Arne Duncan keeps saying that the Core is not the work of the federal government while he, the federal secretary of education, goes around attacking its critics. In fact, he just bowed to those critics, agreeing to give states an extra year to comply with federal mandates on using Core-aligned standardized tests to evaluate teachers.”
Another angle: the Gates Foundation plowed more than $100 million into every aspect of the Common Core: the development, the evaluation, the implementation, the advocacy, on and on.
It seems that most of the nation’s grassroots are growing in Seattle, then watered inside the Beltway.
Arne has trouble with history, reality, truth, and other things that tend to get in the way of his abysmal policies.
Michael Paul Goldenberg: the only explanation is that Arne Duncan lives in an alternate Rheeality.
He stingingly rebuked the attendees at the recent American Educational Research Association for not dealing properly with the current obsession with standardized testing. It’s out of control! It shames and humiliates! Fix it!
😦
That is to say, he scolded them for resisting the policies he himself bears the most responsibility for implementing. Unfortunately for the rest of us, he has shown himself incapable of learning from his own mistakes.
“Being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn.” [Benjamin Franklin]
🙂
Poor Arne…he’s fumbling his talking points. Hey, Bill and Eli…time for a sit down to reprogram the puppet.
Maybe he can follow Sarah Palin’s lead and write his talking points on his hand.
Or be hooked up to a mini ear piece like George during the debates. Gates could invent a microchip with preprogrammed talking points. They would just have to teach Arne how to work the gadget….the USDOE Manchurian candidate. Poor Arne…he’s in way over his head and the reformy bull$hit isn’t working out anymore.
Arne,
Why were the FERPA regulations changed?
The sheep are getting assertive, hmmmmm.
Why? $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
$tudent$: The new cash crop for corporations….see here:
Will the intrepid journalists even ask such a question? Why the changes to FERPA, Arnie?
Like to hear him if were to be caught cold without a scripted answer his staff had prepared.
Here is a link to a letter written to Arne by a Republican Congressman from Missouri asking just that question, very forcefully.
http://truthinamericaneducation.com/common-core-state-standards/luetkemeyer-addresses-common-core-concerns-to-arne-duncan/
I have that letter. I saved that letter. I sent it to my representatives in DC. Does anyone know if he every received a response? If not, why?
Guess I should have listened to Luetkemeyer’s weekly? phone message about an hour ago. But I was in the middle of a Yachtzee game with my son and didn’t want to be bothered. Priorities, ya know! By the way Luetkey is about as far right as they get. Nuthin unusual for this neck of the woods.
Evidence? Secretary Duncan, You Can’t Handle the Evidence
http://atthechalkface.com/2013/06/26/evidence-secretary-duncan-you-cant-handle-the-evidence/
Arne’s version is not what David Coleman had to say:
“When I was involved in convincing governors and others around this country to adopt these standards,(MEW note: Weren’t standards state led, not David Coleman led?) it was not “Obama likes them”; do you think that would have gone well with a Republican crowd?”
Read the full transcript of Coleman’s speech here:
http://www.missourieducationwatchdog.com/2013/06/straight-from-david-colemans-mouth.html
How about having Duncan himself take and (maybe) pass the PARCC tests? Might be interesting…
There once was a common core.
It turned out like a s’more.
Quite the corporate bore….subvert, close the door and ignore!
Oh ya!
“It seems that most of the nation’s grassroots are growing in Seattle, then watered inside the Beltway.”
Absolutely love this statement.
We need a test on ability to tell the truth. OH, a lie detector. Let’s hook him up and start asking pertinent questions and see what happens.
And the media is buying his talking points. This is an editorial from last week in the conservative Utah newspaper. It’s almost as if Duncan read this before he spoke: the points are very similar.
http://www.deseretnews.com/article/765632628/Common-Core.html
Duncan is a hero on the far right. Remember how Romney praised him and there was speculation that Romney would keep him on.
That’s really weird, considering Duncan’s insistence on micro-managed at the federal level, which usually drives conservatives nuts. I know he IS a hero, I just can’t figure out WHY.
Exactly, Louisiana Purchase. Quite a contradiction at the heart of this support for the deform movement, and a lot of conservatives are wising up to that.
Duncan is NOT a hero. He’s a villain.
For a hundred million dollars one gets “standards” this mediocre?!!! The CCSS in ELA look to me as though they were written by complete NOVICES based upon
a. poorly conceived, unexamined notions about how the outcomes of ELA education should be characterized and measured AND
b. vague memories of extremely mediocre English classes that the authors happened to attend when they were in school years ago
It would be amusing that so much money and time had been spent on “standards” this mediocre if not for the fact that these pathetic “standards” (I can barely bring myself to use this term to refer to them) are going to have dire consequences on many different levels, including dire consequences for curricula, for curricular innovation, for pedagogical practice.
So, what are the problems with the new national standards in ELA? (My God, I could write several books on this topic, but I’ll settle for providing the outline.)
To begin with, as almost any teacher will tell you, the whole idea of creating a single set of standards for every child is freaking nuts, totally INSANE. No sane person, no thoughtful or experienced educator, no one who gave the matter the least critical examination, could possibly conclude that it makes sense to have a single set of ELA standards for every child in the nation. At the risk of stating what ought to be the blindingly obvious:
a. Children differ;
b. We need diversity in outcomes, not identity in outcomes, from Pre-K-12 education;
c. a single set of standards dramatically reduces the design space within which curricular and pedagogical innovation can occur;
d. a single set of standards for all effectively tells every curriculum coordinator, every curriculum designer, every teacher, “What you know or think you know about your students and about outcomes for them doesn’t matter–we have made these decisions for you. Shut up and do as you are told.”
These considerations, alone, should have been enough to have stopped the CCSS ELA metastasis.
But I haven’t even begun to address the problems with these PARTICULAR top-down, across-the-board, one-size-fits-all, totalitarian “standards.” A few of the many problems with these “standards” in particular:
a. As every teacher I’ve discussed these with knows, the CCSS at the early grades are wildly developmentally inappropriate.
b. The CCSS in ELA embody a lot of completely prescientific notions about how children acquire language skills.
c. They are full of glaring lacunae that teachers and curriculum designers will not be able to address because they will be told, “It’s not in the standards.”
d. In every domain, they reflect extremely unimaginative, pedestrian, mostly unexamined notions about what education in that domain should consist of. The characterizations of what education in literature, in writing, and in language skills should consist of are particularly unimaginative and uninformed.
e. Many of the standards–the language standards in particular–seem to have been assigned to particular grade levels completely at random.
f. Many logical, potentially highly effective curricular progressions both within particular grades and across grades will be precluded by the particular standards chosen for inclusion and by their particular organization.
g. They embody, in almost every line, unexamined and highly questionable assumptions.
But here’s the biggest problem of all with these particular standards, and it’s a problem with most of the state standards that they supplant:
It’s an ENORMOUS mistake to couch desired outcomes in ELA terms of abstract skills to be attained rather than in terms of
a. world knowledge (knowledge of what) and
b. SPECIFIC procedural knowledge (knowledge of how).
In other words, the CCSS in ELA are WRONG FROM THE START, misconceived at their most fundamental design level, that of their categorical conceptualization.
Robert
You need to be Secretary of State…
You have pinned this chaos down simply and correctly!!
I do mean Secretary of Education!
Toadying to plutocrats does pay exceptionally well, neanderthal!
However, I’ve spent thirty years teaching English literature, composition, and speech to students at various grade levels, from middle school through college; planning, writing, and editing textbooks, online learning materials, and assessment programs; thinking about curriculum design in ELA; studying child psychology and the cognitive psychology of learning and language acquisition; studying the histories of curricular design and pedagogical approaches; studying what constitutes expertise in writing; learning about the science and art of assessment; analyzing local, state, and national standards in the English language arts; and trying to educate myself in the domains of English, American, and world literatures; traditional and contemporary grammars of English; rhetoric; hermeneutics/literary interpretation; discourse structures; reading; etc.
And because, after all that, I know something of what I am doing, I recognize the limits of my learning and understanding and would not PRESUME to dictate standards and evaluation criteria and techniques to EVERYONE ELSE working in English language arts education in the United States.
Clearly, having spent time engaged in any of these activities is an automatic disqualification for the job. Almost total ignorance of these matters is a sine qua non for high-level administrative authority in American K-12 education.
: )
Thank you for this brilliant exposition of why the CCSS for ELA are fundamentally flawed. The reasoning can be extended to special needs and ELL students and is exponentially more damaging for them. The concept that we are respecting special populations by demanding the same outcomes in the same time frame, with little to no flexibility in matching curriculum to their backgrounds, interests, and meticulously identified needs (through the IEP process) is arrogant and counter-productive. I’d say this entire enterprise (I use that word purposely) is arrogant and counter-productive (at least counter-productive to ensuring healthy psycho-social development of human beings). Has the NCTE weighed in on these “standards”? Further, now that the DOE realizes that grit, tenacity, and perseverance are necessary 21st century skills, students will be monitored for their development of these skills based on inappropriate materials, pedagogy, and assessments. This is a nightmare.
I’m not sure who said this first on this blog, but it’s a precise characterization. The CCSS are a monoculture.
And that’s just NOT what is needed by a diverse, pluralistic society, one that prizes and benefits from individual autonomy and difference.
People who think that a set of across-the-board standards doesn’t constrain (and hobble) curricular and pedagogical design simply haven’t thought about this much.
The man is a bold faced liar and I want to know why mainstream journalists keep letting him get away with it and do not question him.
Yesterday, he said, “Some of the hostility to Common Core also comes from critics who… oppose intervention in chronically low-performing schools.”
So he is calling standards, high-stakes testing, firing faculty and shutting down schools “intervention”???
He also said once again, “Some seem to feel that poverty is destiny.”
Could he really not know research keeps demonstrating that, despite education, in our highly stratified society, the zipcode you come from really DOES strongly predict your future income? See: ‘RIP, American Dream? Why It’s So Hard for the Poor to Get Ahead Today’:
“High-income kids who don’t graduate from college are 2.5 times more likely to end up rich than low-income kids who do get a degree”
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/06/rip-american-dream-why-its-so-hard-for-the-poor-to-get-ahead-today/276943/
Come on, everyone. Arne Duncan brings LOTS of relevant experience to this job. He was a basketball player and . . . and . . . .
Well, that’s about it. He was a basketball player. Then he was made a high-level education administrator, skipping right over all that messy business of actually being a practicing educator.
Oh, and he went to Harvard where, obviously, he met the right people.
Oops. Left something out of the resume. He also worked for a while for his Mom.
I just finished reading this conversation and totally agree. I am a retired Reading/Language Arts Consultant who is confused about what they are calling “standards”. I always felt that learning was a process that happened over time with the help of everybody including teachers. Oooooops, that’s not the way all of this foolishness presents learning. One can’t help but become cynical and think that the bottom line is really about ruining pubic schools and helping gazillionaires step in with their private schools. Federal money is a wonderful payday.