An interesting exchange about the pros and cons of the Common Core standards.
First, the case for the Common Core by Chip Cherry, president and CEO of the Huntsville/Madison County Chamber of Commerce.
Then, the case against the Common Core by a teacher named Russell.
It is a sharp debate. Worth your time to read. Both short pieces.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Wow! Love Russell’s closing:
Education is not about being “#1.” It’s about finding a way to bring all of our children into society in such a way that they can contribute to it.
Rankings are for sports teams, not for children. And anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to sell you something.
To the tune of $16 billion dollars.
No thanks, Mr. Cherry. Your vision of education is fundamentally flawed. If you were an actual educator, perhaps you could understand that.
As it is, it would be best if you simply sat down and shut up. You’re embarrassing us.
I’d give him a standing ovation, but my corporate overlords would beat me.
Thanks Linda. And thank you Dr. Ravitch for all you’re doing for kids like mine.
Russell nails it!
Yeah for Russell. He sees the *:<?!.
The idea of having common standards for elementary education was first proposed by Albert Shanker when he was president of the American Federation of Teachers. He argued that in so mobile a society as in the U.S., having certain common facets of the curriculum would indeed aide students who might move from state to state. There is no valid reason to dismiss common standards out of hand. What composes those standards have to be examined in detail.
Unfortunately the teacher named Russell just engages in ad hominem criticism.
I would strongly urge you and the Network that you helped to found to provide more exact information about the specific content of the Common Core. So far I have only seen negative criticism with no presentation of its concrete features so as to be able to judge it’s benefits or liabilities. And how is it similar or different from the curriculum proposed by Professor Hirsch?
Please provide us with more enlightenment.
Vivian R. Gruder Professor of History, Emerita Queens College, CUNY Sent from my iPad
Dr. Gurder,
Thank you for taking the time to read my post. Perhaps you could enlighten me as to where I engaged in ad hominem criticism of Mr. Cherry or anyone else for that matter?
Introducing the idea of common standards by Albert Shanker (or others, I doubt he was the first) and the introduction of CCSS are not the same things.
I am not opposed to having standards in education. What I am opposed to is having standards that were developed by people who are not educators, who seek only to profit off the the implementation of those standards on others.
Standards are not the problem, and I have never claimed that they were. The problem is the way these standards have been developed and implemented.
If you would prefer to contact me privately, please feel free to do so.
Thanks again,
Russell Winn
russ@geekpalaver.com
“Standards are not the problem,. . . ”
Yes, Russell, standards are a major part of the problem. First, please define what an “educational standard” is that all can agree upon.
I’ll wait. . . .
Okay, that’s all the time that is needed because there is no agreed upon definition of what an “educational standard” is.
The processes of defining and making educational standards, the giving of and dissemination of the results of standardized testing and the concurrent “grading” of students are so rife with error that the whole process is completely invalid. See Noel Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at:
http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700 to understand why.
Continuing my Quixotic Quest (and I challenge one and all to rebut/refute what Wilson proves):
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)
1. A quality cannot be quantified. Quantity is a sub-category of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category by only a part (sub-category) of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as one dimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing we are lacking much information about said interactions.
2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other word all the errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. As a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms shit in-crap out.
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it measures “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
Duane,
Evidently I can’t reply to your reply, so I’ll post my comments here and hope you will see them.
You ask for a standard that we can all agree on, and that’s a good question. Nailing it down to a single thing that everyone, everywhere needs to learn is impossible. I’ll give you that.
However, coming up with general ideas that a 1st grader should know by the end of the 1st grade is something that we basically already have. As I am not a first grade teacher, I cannot list them here, but I believe that most first graders have a beginning knowledge of how to read, how to write, and basic mathematical ideas.
The problem that I have with CCSS isn’t that someone came up with a collecting of standards that most people should know. The problem I have is that that standard leaves little to no freedom for the classroom teacher to decide what it will take to get her/his students to that level.
My problem with the CCSS is that there was exactly one teacher involved in the initial development of these standards.
There was little to no time for public review of these standards before they were adopted by the states.
There have been no trials run on the standards to see if they are, in fact, more rigorous.
I agree that applying a standard to everyone, everywhere is foolishness. CCSS with its ties to standardize high stakes testing eliminates the teacher’s freedom to adjust and adapt.
You may believe that is a problem with all standards. I do not know that yet. It may be, but I’m still willing to withhold judgement. There may be people who know more than I do.
I’m glad we agree at least that the way these standards are being implemented is problematic.
Duane,
Thank you for your well thought out response. I’m sorry that I didn’t respond as quickly as you wished. 🙂
Believe it or not, I agree with nearly everything that you wrote in your extended response, especially this:
“In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.”
If you re-read my post to Mr. Cherry, I think you’ll find that I have a personal and direct connection to a student who will likely internalize his marks.
I’m glad that we’re in agreement on so much. Thank you for helping me to re-state my ideas in a clearer, more detailed way.
Russell
Russwinn, I can’t hold a candle to you, Duane, and Vivian when it comes to throwing around technical jargon about “educational standards” and “epistemological mistakes.” I’m just a poor, benighted soul (with undergrad degrees in French and Economics, and an MBA from a major university) . . . so please bear with me… I have a question to ask you and your sparring partners….
My children attend an elementary school where the teachers never grade any papers. Teachers in grades K-6 never grade any exams. Teachers never put any letter grade or percentage score on written assignments. In fact, students are required to turn in very few written assignments.
There are no A’s, B’s, or C’s on any report card. Report cards consist of evaluations on about fifty different aspects of my children’s behavior. A majority of the report card is devoted to teachers’ subjective opinions about my children’s attitudes. “Effort” appears on the report card in thirteen different places…
Homework assignments are short and simplistic. Basic arithmetic is avoided like the plague (because adults carry calculators). Creative spelling is encouraged through 6th grade (adults use “Spell Check”). Good penmanship is a quaint notion (adults always use keyboards and never actually write anything by hand). Students are never expected to remember any facts (after all, we can quickly and easily locate any fact on the internet).
Now like you and your distinguished colleagues, I worry about the imposition of overly rigid “educational standards” and the repercussions of “epistemological mistakes.” But my children are not learning much at school. In the absence of objective testing, reasonable academic standards, and letter grades, my children (who are rather gifted) don’t accomplish much at school. They don’t see much incentive to learn anything. I am forced to home school in a big way, just for my children to acquire very basic skills. Teachers and school administrators seem perfectly happy for my bright and gifted children to shuffle along and learn not much of anything — just as long as everybody maintains a cheery and positive attitude!
What alternative do we have to high-stakes testing and the imposition of nationwide educational standards, when classroom teachers like ours have consistently failed to impose standards for academic achievement in the classroom and have relieved themselves of any responsibility to provide coherent feedback (to either students or parents) on their students’ academic progress?
Why should they provide “coherent feedback”? If you are educated and homeschooling your kid, don’t you already KNOW what is what with them? Haven’t you already benchmarked their academic progress in your own terms? Just get the CCSS and see where your kids fall on them. Why should the school do that? If that’s what YOU want, more power to you, but what is it you actually want from a public school? And in 6th grade they’ll begin getting letter grades, or 7th at the latest. The real problem is with uneducated parents who can’t do it for themselves as you can. And are you going to (figuratively) give academically weak kids a daily ice shower to satisfy your middle-class, achievement oriented heart? Teach your kids how to find their own challenges. Let your ‘gifted’ kids contribute their intellectual stimulation to their classrooms and class mates. Can any teacher’s report to you be ‘objective’?
Thank you for posting both of these pieces. Common Core sounds like such a good idea until you read all that’s wrong with the implementation and what all those buzzwords really mean. It’s too bad. The idea that the nation strives for a common, top-notch education, for all its children is idealistic and a worthy goal. It’s too bad that for the most part it has turned out to be a money-making scheme for education businesses. But I do want to thank all those educators who are working hard to make it as meaningful as it can possibly be within the context of our high-stakes testing culture.
When I realized that the Common Core and its Standardized Testing are instilling fear in the hearts and minds of the most expert, esteemed and dedicated teachers, I decided to find out why. When parents were becoming alarmed and one parent felt a need to take her child for therapy because of his negative reaction toward the pre standardized test I knew something was wrong with the CC. I was one of the people who aligned our district’s primary reading standards with NY State’s Standards. The NY State Standards are far superior to the Common Core’s Standards. There are problems with the CC on every front.
I first looked at the Reading Standards of the Common Core. The opening paragraph of the CC:
“One of the key requirements of the Core on reading … is that all must be able to comprehend texts of steadily increasing complexity… ”
The word must bothers me. A set of Standards can be presented as a goal but it is ridiculous to demand it. Furthermore, increasing complexity has always been one of the goals but we start with the child and the curriculum.
CC states, “Far too often, students who have fallen behind are given only less complex text rather than the instruction they need in the foundational skill in reading as well as vocabulary and other supports they need to read at an appropriate level of complexity.”
First of all, student haven’t fallen behind. They were behind before they began formal education. What research are they referring to? What reading programs are they referring to? What tests are they referring to? A test can easily be invalidated if student is over come with fear, is upset to the point of vomiting or wetting ones pants… Standardized tests by its nature is regionally biased. The Standardized test cannot give the readability level of primary students. CC totally ignores what researchers have maintained for years: Students must be instructed on their readability level. Standards are a goal to aim for but teachers work with the abilities and home life of the students. Fear has a crippling effect on children. Marie Clay, a world renowned educator knew the importance of success in order to achieve. She knew the importance of teaching to a child’s strengths- not to their weaknesses but CC
ignores her research.
Do not assume students “fall behind” due to the complexity of the text being use to teach strategies and skills. It doesn’t take much to discourage some students especially if they come to school hungry, sick – physically or emotionally, homeless, from a violent home, a home devoid of books, disability of one kind or another. It is the home environment and the parents/caregivers that have the biggest impact on the child’s success. Over a million children are homeless. Children need a happy environment, confidence, and a feeling of success. Instead of spending money on pre and post Standarized tests, spend it on the children – food for body and soul. Standardized Test – the process and results- are having a very harmful affect on children, parents and teachers while testing companies pad their pockets. At a time when high unemployment, “46.2 million Americans, or 15 percent of the population, were living in poverty, and the number of homeless people on a single night in January 2012 was 633,782. The struggling US economy has caused many workers to move from full-time work to part-time, scraping by and living from paycheck to paycheck.” Over a million children homeless! Hunger and homelessness rise in the US At a time when the whole world is in turmoil CC is going to bring it right into the heart of the families who are already suffering from countless needs. Oh the psychological crimes states are committing by mandating retention of all third graders not meeting the accept testing results. One diagnostic test can not be the judge of a years work.
Either CC has no background or knowledge of the Emergent Reader, the materials, or of the reading process itself, or they purposely chose to go contrary to the establish norm which has been researched for years. But has their way been tested and proven?
CC calls for “varied and repeated practice to rapid recall and automaticity.” The time of the Look Say method is long past.
CC maintains that“emergent reader text is texts consisting of short sentences comprised of learned sight words and CVC words; may also include rebuses to represent words that cannot yet be decoded or recognize…”
If the author of CC understood the reading process and how students construct meaning, he would know that rebuses are a distraction and are not needed to construct meaning. Emergent readers need:
-1-2 lines caption books of stories which are familiar
-Strong picture support
-Predictability via repetition and the sentence structure
-Each line is a complete sentence
-Large print
And above all a feeling of success.
CC emphasizes “automaticity” in phonics and sight vocabulary. CC wants to bring back the archaic practice of studying sight words in isolation which is a waste of time. Words in isolation have no meaning.” As regards phonics: No more than 25% (and possibly less) of the time should be spent on phonics instruction,” states Steven Stahl in The Reading Teacher April 1992.
CC maintains, ” The Common Core develops higher order thinking skills through comparing and analyzing concepts only with text… Ask and answer questions to demonstrate understanding of text, referring explicitly to the text as the basis for the answers.”
CC appears to have again chosen to deliberately ignore research and the meaning of the reading process. CC appears to be challenging the meaning of reading: Reading is the interaction of the reader with visual/perceptual (text, pictures, and graphics) and non visual/conceptual which includes background knowledge along with knowledge of the language structure: semantic, syntactic, and graphophonics systems. The reader uses these two sources of information to construct meaning. It is a selective process bringing together experience, knowledge, skills, and abilities. It is a strategic process- strategies used before, during, and after reading to achieve goals. Researchers believe that it is essential to relate the child’s background knowledge/experiences to the curriculum/ text. Learning is social; we learn from one another. We don’t see with our eyes, or hear with our ears, we perceive with our whole being which is based upon our experiences.
CC again ignores research and states “… information lies in the text. Learn sight words, and phonics to decode and the student will find the answers within.”
Contrary to CC, Frank Smith, a psycholinguist, maintained that one must bring meaning to print before one can acquire meaning from it. As we become fluent readers we learn to rely more on what we already know, on what is behind the eyeballs and less on the print on the page in front of us.
CC places emphases on facts/ knowledge but Dewey says that the pursuit of knowledge is only one higher order thinking skill; imagination is what makes advances in science. The affective realm is ignored. Narratives study the whole person: soul, mind, and relationship, empathy and respect for others. Narratives provide laughter – food for mind and body. They encourage life long learners/readers. Expository text, in contrast, fills the brain with facts but today’s technology removes the need to commit to memory the facts and figures which CC is trying to do with the informational text. It is not that committing information to memory is not important, but if that is our only goal than we are neglecting other higher order thinking skills which are also necessary for any educated person.
CC has no respect for diversity and Gardner’s 9 intelligences. It does not recognize mental limitations. All children can learn, but children do not learn in the same way and at the same pace. Fourteen states and the District of Columbia mandate retention of all third graders who do not score adequately on the Standardized Test. When medical researchers publish a finding, we listen; we had better or most of us would be dead by now. But we ignore the findings of our esteemed psychologists who maintain that retention is most devastating and destructive- destroying ones self image to say the least. It is compared to a death of a parent. Edmund Burke stated, “The equal treatment of unequals is the greatest injustice of all.”
Instruction for slower readers is most effective when it addresses all of the critical reading components in an integrated and coordinated manner. Students who need additional assistance, however, must not miss out on essential instruction their classmates are receiving to help them think deeply about texts, participate in thoughtful discussions, and gain knowledge of both words and the world.”
Again, a lot of gibberish! Once again, totally ignoring years of research of the methodology of reading. CC ignores the fact that higher order thinking skills are developed at every level with the text being used as their teaching tool be they caption books or B, C, D, E…levels. CC ignores the need of skills and strategies being developed at the rate the student can understand and master. Research has proven the need of concepts, skills, and strategies to be interwoven; CC believes in teaching in isolation. The CC made up their own definition of scaffolding instead of the meaning given to it by the world renowned learning theorists of Jerome Bruner and Lev Vygotsky.
CC has a one track mind: have the students read difficult text with the help of the teacher until they understand. CC does not spell out what that support looks like. However, research has proven that placing a text into the hands of a student that is too difficult will hinder a student’s progress. Forcing a child to read on a frustration level can cause a disability. A student will, furthermore become discouraged and lose interest.
Instead of top down trying to prepare students for the future, for college, we need to learn how to live and interact in the present. Examine how we can close the Achievement Gap starting at the bottom – the home.
The State Standards support the teachers but the CC Standards place fear, hardship, and impose a harmful task on the teachers.
Other realities about CC that are wrong:
Politically it is unconstitutional.
THE COMMON CORE STANDARDS/RACE-TO-THE-TOP EFFORTS VIOLATES THREE FEDERAL STATUTES!
“Federal law lays down broad prohibitions on Department of Education involvement in curricula decisions. The General Education Provisions Act- prohibits the Department of Education from ‘exercising any direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum, program of instruction, administration, or personnel’ of any school, or ‘the selection of…textbooks, or other…instructional materials’ used in any school. Similar prohibitions exist in the Department of Education Organization Act and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA).”
Examine their origin:
The architect of CC, David Coleman, has degrees from Yale, Oxford and Cambridge but that does not make him an expert in all areas. He is not an educator; he never taught, has no degree in education. Susan Pimentel has an early childhood degree and a law degree. Jason Zimba has a BA, MA Ph.D. in math and physics. He taught on the college level. He is a cofounder of Grow Network, an education technology company and the founding principal of Student Achievement. None have a background in education nor have they taught on the elementary and high school level. Pimentel has no background in education beyond that of early childhood. These three are telling elementary and high school teachers what they should teach. What an insult to the teaching profession not to have one educational expert on the original team!
Who is at the top approving all this craziness with the CC? Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education; a man whose degree is in sociology- not in education, not in philosophy of education or learning theory. He has no masters nor a doctoral degree yet our N Y State mandates a masters degree for teachers; worse yet, he is imposing standards which are now inferior to our state standards.
If you compare the members of the English-language Arts Work Group and the members of the mathematics Work Group you will find some names on both the English and math group: Sara Clough, Hohn Kraman, and Sherri Miller. English and math are two different disciplines. All three belong to a company. Other members on the “Work Group” belong to one of the following three: founders of Act, Inc., Achieve, or are a member of the College Board. The Feedback Group have credentials but final decisions regarding the common core standards document were made by the Standards Development Work Group. The Feedback Group served as an advisory role, not a decision-making role in the process. Two people on the Validation Committee didn’t sign off. Dr. Snow signed off but in a video she made at a later date she made a point to state her position on the need to use prior knowledge. Something is not right.
Economically:
With the Freedom of Information Act, Matt Chingos of Brookings Institute estimated the cost of testing to 41.7 billion..
States’ Taxpayer Cannot Afford Common Core Standards. Education News ” In New York, the CCS Cost per Student will be $411.”
The total nationwide cost for 7 years of the Common Core Standards Initiative is $15.8 billion. This includes the cost to states of CCS Testing, Professional Development, Textbooks, and Technology. .. The taxpayers in each of the 45 states (and D. C.) that have committed to the Common Core Standards Initiative (CCSI) will be left “holding the bag” because our federal government with a national debt of $16 trillion cannot come in and alleviate the cost to the states.”
The Sequester reduced govt. funding by $2.6 billion for ’13-’14. Districts had to lay off teachers or agree to no pay increase for the coming year. One district on Long Island had to lay off 100 teachers and the superintendent does not foresee hiring for another ten years. With the govt. 17 trillion – 100 trillion net present value of future obligations- in debt (Jonh Willians: The US Has $100 Trillion in Debts & Obligations), the high unemployment, the high number of homeless, and people working for salary that doesn’t pay the bills, who is going to pay for all this unnecessary bill?
A big concern is the Pearson Company, head quarters in England, a conglomerate.
Pearson Conglomerate Gets $32 million for Standardised Test Scandal and Idiocy
Jeffery Horn summarizes well:
So Who REALLY Developed Common Core State Standards?
Common Core State Standards were developed by individuals coming from interests in the testing, textbook, training, and student and teacher tracking industry. Here are the major players:
America’s Choice – http://www.americaschoice.org
• Senior Fellows Phil Daro (MATH) and Sally Hampton (ELA)
• Really Pearson Publishing – One of the largest providers of services and materials to help low performing schools raise their performance through professional development, technical assistance and high quality materials.
•
Student Achievement Partners – http://achievethecore.org
• Founders – Jason Zimba (MATH) and David Coleman (ELA) [now with College Board]
• Non-profit with goal to promote CCSS
• $18MM Grant from GE Foundation
ACT, Inc. – http://www.act.org
• Sara Clough (MATH and ELA), Ken Mullen (MATH), Sharri Miller (Math and ELA), Jim Patterson (ELA), Nina Metzner (ELA)
• One of the largest college testing and test preparation services
The College Board – http://www.collegeboard.org
• Robin O’Callaghan (MATH), Andrew Schwartz (MATH), Natasha Vasavada (MATH and ELA), Joel Harris (ELA), Beth Hart (ELA)
• One of the largest college testing and test preparation services (SAT)
Achieve, Inc. – http://www.achieve.org
• Kaye Forgione (MATH), Laura McGiffert Slover (MATH and ELA), Douglas Sovde (MATH), John Kraman (ELA), Sue Pimental (ELA)
• P-20 Data Systems Consulting, Student and Teacher Assessment Tools, Data and Accountability Systems with strong alignment to policies in post-secondary and economic development sectors
So, the Common Core State Standards were created by two trade associations by individuals who worked for interests with a great deal to gain by creating a national standard for education in the United States!
This entry was posted in Background on Common Core, Pushed By Big Business on April 13, 2013 by Jeffrey Horn.i
And I have just scratched the surface of the pending problems.
Mary DeFalco
http://maryidefalco.com/reading%20site%20reconnected/reading__language_arts_primary_teachers_2/Reading_Primary_Teachers.html
“And I have just scratched the surface of the pending problems”
And even with that excellent “scratching the surface” you must surely realize that we need to rip the heart out of the standards beast. We have the weapons/tools. Noel Wilson’s work referenced above and his “A Little Less than Valid: An Essay Review” found at:
http://www.edrev.info/essays/v10n5.pdf .
Scratching the surface will not kill the beast of standardization, read and learn how to kill it at it’s illogical heart, read, understand and then shout out Wilson’s complete takedown of the beast to all who will listen and to all who don’t want to listen. Pound the message home!
Common Core is completey developmentally inapropriate. Besides reading instruction that is going to leave a lot of students left behind narrative writing is gone. This is becausel all of our CC students are just going to learn expository writng. Not only that, they will not even be able to express their own opinion since their opinion must be based on text evidence which may not support the view that they have of something. Finally, CCS are setting kids up for failure by simply bringing the curriculum down to the lower grades in the false belief that by teaching 1st graders grammar such as prepostiona phrases is going to lead them to being “College and Career Ready.” I read lots of good fiction, wrote plenty of narratives and didn’t even know the term prepositional phrase until 7th grade but somehow I got through college without taking any remedial course and went on to get my Masters degree. I am not going to stress my first graders out about prepositons!
My 34 years of teaching included teaching regular first through fourth grades. After moving to LI and becoming a reading specialist, I worked with first through fifth “At Risk” students. My teaching now takes on a different role with my grandchildren. I keep in contact with teachers in many districts including some teaching in the city. Their stories are all the same.
“One teacher took time from her busy schedule to relate the impact of CC on her and her colleagues:
I have many thoughts on the common core and the state of education today. Unfortunately, my thoughts would probably fill a small book. In the interest of brevity, I will constrain my thoughts to just two today.
1. On the matter of common core, during the school year 2011-2012, we spent our common planning time placing sticky labels into notebooks. Each label had a common core standard printed on it. In our notebooks, we listed examples of ways we meet that standard in our classrooms.
Interestingly, we found that for every common core standard, there were already multiple ways we implement each one in our classroom.
So, on the matter of common core standards themselves, we felt that the teaching we have been doing already met the standards.
However, that is just one small piece of the pie. I could go on for pages about “close readings” which we were asked to implement this year and the push to get kindergarteners reading on a level D before exiting and how that impacted instruction this year and the new math program aligned with Singapore math and of course, the assessments implemented this year to measure student progress and teacher effectiveness.
2. My other thought, related to common core, is that government treats education like a business and it is not. Like a business, government believes that putting in more money will increase productivity and the quality of the product. Education is not a business. Yes, there are parts of education that are business – salaries, staffing matters, building maintenance, etc, but not teaching itself. Furthermore, it is a very subjective entity with numerous variables. Yes, we need to be held accountable, but many, if not most, of the measures we have in place are invalid. We need more input from educators and less input from business and politicians. We see it even in the new math series. How many of the “experts” have been in a classroom in the past ten years or ever, for that matter? Yet, they design these curriculums and claim they are based in research and teachers are told to follow them and not stray from the sequence even though we know our students and what makes sense and what doesn’t.”
Mary DeFalco
http://maryidefalco.com/reading%20site%20reconnected/reading__language_arts_primary_teachers_2/29_B._Common_Core.html
ALEC is the root cause of the ongoing strategy to undermine our public education. What we need to do is to take each election seriously from school board elections to city council races. We need to take each election seriously not just the Presidential election. Their goal is to destroy public education.
v feehan:
Thank you for your question. While I am certainly a teacher, I do not have an education background. I teach at the college level. The reason that I write and care about K-12 education is simply because like you I have two children who are affected the decisions being made at the national, state and local level that affect my children.
I tell you all of this to let you know that there is a significant amount of jargon that I don’t readily know either.
I’m distinguished only insofar as I try to be a good parent who is involved in his children’s education.
So, now that we understand each other, perhaps we can get down to the actual issue.
Your experience has not been my experience. In my experience children, as young as three and four in Pre-K are obsessively concerned about their “grades” and their testing performance. This is a direct result of our superintendent not being an educator himself and having no clear understanding of education. He understands test scores and nothing else. So that is all that he values.
In our district, children as young as six take tests on a weekly basis. They practice for those tests on a daily basis. Teachers are then evaluated on their students’ test scores.
This is why I believe that CCSS is entirely about high stakes testing because in our district all of this testing has been laid at the feet of common core.
To tell you the truth, a district that didn’t test students but rather taught them sounds like a dream come true to me. My child has never experienced anything other than preparing for the test. (That’s for my gifted child. My special needs child faces a different set of issues that I’ll save for another time.)
You claim that your children aren’t learning at school as a result of their approach to education. I can assure you that the other extreme, of which my children are suffering under, offers no solution to that dilemma. I too must significantly supplement my child’s education as well.
So my question for you is this: have you discussed the non-testing approach with your children’s teachers, their principals, or their district leadership? What justification have they offered you for their approach? Have you shared your concerns about the lack of learning you perceive? Have you asked them for their assistance in supplementing their education?
Have you pushed for a more balanced approach at the school level, or district level?
I ask because that is what I’m doing both publicly and privately. And it does make a difference in my experience when parents advocate for a change in the educational process their children are facing.
Good luck. I wish you well. I know how difficult it is to raise a child, and I know how a system’s policies can make that harder.
Standing up for your kids’ education makes a difference.
Russell