For months, school officials in many states have warned parents to expect proficiency rates on Common Core-aligned tests to plummet.
They have warned that the proportion of students rated proficient was likely to drop by as much as 30%.
When this happens, it will make public education in America look just as bad as the corporate reformers have been claiming.
When New York administered the first Common Core tests last spring, a copy of one fifth grade test was leaked to a Daily News reporter. She sent it to me and I studied it and concluded that the test questions were similar in difficulty to what was typically seen on an eighth grade NAEP test. I went to the NAEP website, looked at the released items and questions, and ranked the fifth grade test as “difficult” for an eighth grader.
Here is a report that I just received from the testing coordinator of a high-performing school in one of the best districts in New York:
“Just to let you know that because I am my school’s test coordinator I just looked at the scores for the ELA. We are a “high achieving” school. Last year only 5 students in grades 3, 4 and 5 got a level 1. Now it is 32. Approximately 40% of our students scored levels 3 and 4 this year down from about 80% last year. What does this mean? Nothing because a test that measures skills that could not possibly be taught and is developmentally too hard is INVALID.”
So why the rush to make the tests so hard that more students will fail?
Rick Hess wrote last fall that many of the “reformers” believe that the terrible results (eagerly anticipated by them) will cause suburban parents to demand “reforms” and an escape from their neighborhood schools.
I can’t help but recall that David Coleman, the architect of the Common Core standards, was the treasurer of the board of Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst in its first year. If the Common Core tests produce a collapse of proficiency rates, then it makes Rhee and her attacks on public schools look good. Will everyone run for the exits and demand charters and vouchers?
Sick thought, but inescapable.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Diversionary Maneuver
Pay No Attention To The Man Behind the Scantron®
http://xkcd.com/499/
Since education “reform” has been in place for over a decade, couldn’t one also make the argument that the reform policies aren’t working?
Jonathan.. one certainly could make the argument and teachers do every day! Unfortunately, the “ed reform” movement is not concerned with the fact that their top-down policies are not working, they are too busy wracking up the profits – ca ching!
My Bridgeport Ct students took the pre – Common Core Smarter Balance online assessment, and there is absolutely no way they will ever do well on it. I’d flunk it, too.
Isn’t this cheating, not to mention exploiting and abusing our children?
At the July Regents meeting SED staff described in detail the process for setting the cut scores – 95 educators from around the state spent four days assessing each question as a level 1 through 4 question, setting the cut scores – a typical procedure – unfortunately the Report did not identify the 95 …
It sounds like the Common Core tests are another excuse for what used to be called “White Flight” from the urban schools.
Off topic, but Bezos bought the Washington Post: http://www.thenation.com/blog/175610/shocker-jeff-bezos-amazons-founder-buys-washington-post
I’m afraid it’s not off-topic, Dienne. Bezos is the founder of Amazon.com.
“… confidential data about our children and grandchildren are being amassed on a huge database that will be stored somewhere in the “cloud,” and managed by amazon.com.”
https://dianeravitch.net/?s=Wireless+Generation
These are some of the goals and consequences of CCSS and the high stakes attached to them:
This will backfire (hopefully). A lot of “suburban” parents are already or looking into opting out! We need to continue to fight until we have won back education! #badassteachers
Heather,
You’re right on the mark. Well stated!
Parents do not want curriculum being narrowed, dumbed down, and channeled into excessive, exhausting, hyper-time consuming, and counterproductive, budget busting standardized testing.
It will ultimately be parents and taxpayers, not teachers or their unions per se, that will swing the CCSS and testing pendulum back where it permanently belongs.
Standards and testing on them are best used to drive instruction, not to punish students and teachers.
Let’s hope that parents read these results in that manner and stand up to corporate-style reform instead of embracing its failing schools myth.
Chris, we can actually do more than hope. Put out the link to Parents Across America:
http://parentsacrossamerica.org/
and get as many people you know to look at the site and sign up as a member and advocate. . . .
This fight will be aided and abetted by teachers, but the majority core of fighters will be parents who will make the most difference. Granted, most teachers are parents, but most parents are not teachers . . .
Robert,
“Standards and testing on them are best used to drive instruction. . . ”
Educational standards and the accompanying standardized tests would be best not being used at all considering the educational malpractices that they are. Any practice that is based on so many falsehoods as those two along with the “grading of students” that render any results/conclusions invalid are not worth the time and expense and cause radical harm to many students. Noel Wilson has proven the complete invalidities involved with educational standards/standardized testing and the “grading” of students in “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” @ http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700 .
I think Diane hit the nail on the head. I think though, that suburban parents because they are more affluent, are more apt to have the ability to rebel in ways that will hurt legislators beyond staging protests (since they have more money and more political connections).
They are also more likely to be educated enough to be able to not just “accept” failing schools but to strongly question what changed (literally overnight in some cases) and are the measures reasonable.
Suburban parents also have more time to sit down and talk with their children and to understand what they should be learning in school and to know what colleges will expect of their children as they are by and large more college educated (rather than depending on reformers telling them what college and career ready means).
I don’t think this will cause a rapid turnover of public schools in suburban sectors simply because it hasn’t happened yet and it’s not for a lack of trying of reformers to try to infiltrate them.
What may succeed though is extra-legislative measures that take those meaningless scores and turn them over to state control which then effectively becomes co-opted by the national reform agenda (which Duncan swears is not on the agenda). That state/national control can then be transferred to charters…unless of course we find candidates that won’t allow that. Because so much of taxes as well as their children’s futures rests on this (and suburban people pay property taxes directly remember so they “feel” it more than those paying rents as many are homeowners) – I’m apt to believe that it becomes the hot button issue that will determine who gets elected in some communities.
The breadth of this testing mess and the tentacles as to its origins are so convoluted and entwined with religion and politics and greed that to “fix” it will take as many years as it did to create it. Elements of “white flight,” opting out of public education, elitism, home-schoolers needs (personal or religious), privatizers, profiteers, politicians, classisim and racism permeate the comments of the newspapers and these blog pages. How do we find “one answer”? We don’t. We just have to find a way to stop it, stop ALEC, stop Koch Brothers, etc. But, how?
Same tactic that brought us the Patriot Act. What’s next color coded warnings labeling schools.
Their is a reason NAEP is not given to every child and no parent sees the score.
Anyone that thinks low scores will get parents on their side has never worked in a school. Parents will be more than happy to blame the test or standards as being too difficult and call for a change. They will not be patient if their children continue to receive low scores, as the surely will if the tests truly reflect the CCSS.
When you go to a kindergarten meeting (in the wealthy suburbs), and the teachers are telling all the parents, “common core this and common core that/test and test”, I can’t really blame parents for opting out of the entire public school system. That is the danger I see. The wealthier suburban parents will get fed up with all this testing crap, and just take their kids to private schools who still teach students in a more traditional way and don’t try to label their kids as failing. In this way, the common core may succeed. Let’s be honest here. If you had school age kids would you want them going to public school the way it is becoming? Part of me wants a voucher, so I can send my kids to a private school (and I am a public school teacher). I don’t want my kids taking all of these bubble tests, and I will not let my kids become teachers in this crazy country.
John
What you describe is absolutely true, but please understand that teachers and administrators literally lose their jobs if they encourage parents to dislike and question the CCSS. Sounds bizarre, but ask most anyone who works in an LEA.
But if you and other parents advocate as a group or as a PA independnent of the teachers, you can make a huge difference. You MUST put pressure on the state and feds. . .. putting the objections and sticking them to the school district is not enough, as the district itself is almost always a victim of the state and federal policies mandating and forcing RttT. . . .
Please think about the big picture settings for your advocacy. I know it feels like you have more control within your own district, but the much bigger and more deadly “enemy” is the state and Feds, who are driving these mandates.
The money LEAs get from RttT can ONLY, by law, be used to purchase standardized tests, develop local tests, purchase and implement data collection systems for test scores and teacher ratings, test prep material, and the products and services used implementing and enforcing the CCSS.
The money CANNOT be used to hire teachers, increase teaching space, purchase texts, paper, pencils, art supplies, musical instruments, field trips, etc. . . .
It’s true. My sister put her kids in a charter school because, as she said, “The public school was all about testing. The charter school is like public school was when I was in school: arts, music, etc.”
I AM a teacher. As much as I want to, I don’t dare tell parents at school to question Common Core. I’d give anything to be able to pass out Truths About Common Core flyers to parents at carpool.. Please listen to Robert’s reply. Encourage your state’s Legislature to learn the truth about Common Core. Encourage them to invite teachers to meet with them or write to them their true thoughts about Common Core.
It’s NOT the district’s fault. .. . they are clobbered over the head most of the time by the state. Do what your district tells you to do, but as a private citizen after contractual hours and off work premises, protest against the state and Federal government.
This is the formula that can work well for now for anyone employed by a school district.
The unfunded NYS mandates will cripple public schools and leave them bankrupt. Someone will have to bail them out. Very sad. What did I read today? More people are interested in A-Rods tests than their children’s.
In 2010-12, my district began heavy duty warnings of how badly the scores would drop when CC was fully implemented. We were infusing it into the curriculum curruculum early rather than waiting for it to “arrive”. Thus far our schools’ scores haven’t dropped, but the intensity that was was present to make sure we got 100% passage and then to meet AYP for ALL kids was incredible. Image is all important. And we are a rural/suburban district with lots of low income families and kids on lunch assistance assistance in SW Ohio. It wears people down.
To change the tests and then compare them is simply unfair and wrong-minded.
deb,
If I may change your last sentence: To USE ANY STANDARDIZED TEST and then MAKE COMPARISONS OF ANY OF THE RESULTS is simply unfair, UNETHICAL, ILLOGICAL, INSANE and wrong-minded.
EVERYONE NEEDS TO BE EDUCATED IN REGARDS TO THE TRUTH ABOUT COMMON CORE AND PROTEST! Visit your state’s Stop Common Core website or Facebook page if you have not already done so. Shop around and look at other states sites. As for private schools being safe from Common Core…Catholic schools aren’t and if the SAT & ACT go Common Core style as I have been reading that they will (especially SAT with David Coleman now being the College Board’s President) what do you think the private schools will end up teaching? However…they may not have to do the testing. Homeschoolers are being affected, too.
Even the GED will be Common Core style come January 2014.
Dr. Ravitch, I have a question…what is the truth to the claim that Common Core is internationally bench marked?
AT,
To answer your last question: NONE! Just another edudeformer lie (on top of the thousands of others.)
Not a sick thought at all. You’ve figured out the strategy and the goal behind this very common indeed, rotten-to-the-core playbook….annihilation of the public school system.
Parents are the sleeping giant. Most suburban parents have no knowledge of Common Core or the associated testing demands. It just is not on their radar. And not all suburban parents are wealthy enough for private schools. So once the testing begins and parents see the futility, waste, and low scores, I’ll just give them the phone number of the governor’s office.
I think part of the reason folks are interested in standardized testing is the perception that being a high school graduate does not tell an outsider very much about the abilities of the graduate. Is this perception incorrect? Could we safely say that all high school graduates read at, say, the tenth grade level?
The results from the ELA tests tell us almost nothing about student abilities. The new math tests are a bit better in this regard.
What would you say being a high school graduate feels us about a students abilities?
And we already have SAT exams that tell us something about student achievement. Those exams, while problematic in many ways, are at least well vetted, something one cannot say about these state and now national ELA high stakes assessments.
The flaw is first defining what is a tenth grade level. Who decides this arbitrary standard and what is their basis? What of the student that struggles with non-fiction but can write and reveal amazing works of fiction? Even in the seemingly cut and dry subject of math there are students who can follow complex proofs and other with amazing computational skills. For the past 30 years we’ve been undermining teachers and the classroom by sowing mistrust and insisting every aspect of learning be quantified.
How about an easier test. Can every high school graduate read at the the same overall level as the average sixth grader?
I’ve been saying this for years. We are tasked with turning EVERY child into a rocket scientist. No wonder we are getting beaten up.
And we as teachers are falling on each other with knives.
I saw a lot of that (teachers falling on each other with knives) last year and thought it was just my school.
The climate was toxic.
One more way to hasten the shutdown of urban public schools and teachers. In the meantime, TFA will fill in the gap between a professional, unionized teacher force and complete charterization.
BTW, a good article on TFA: http://www.blackagendareport.com/tfa-scab
As we know, it will depend on “which suburbs?”
In the Chicago area, some of the most affluent (and whitest) suburbs in the USA are to the north and west of the city. These suburbs include some of the “best” high schools in the USA, with New Trier (Winnetka, Wilmette) being just one among several.
When I was job hunting a few years ago (before I learned that the blacklist from Chicago also was against me in the suburban public schools) I visited Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire. Stevenson has more than 4,000 students, for those fans of “small schools” for black kids from the city, by the way. I almost cried. At the time, my eldest son was pitching for Whitney Young in Chicago, which has long ranked as either “the best” or one of the best high schools in Illinois as measured by test scores. One of my pet peeves was that our best athletes were injuring themselves playing on dangerous playing fields. The pitchers mounds in Chicago were rutted, so that the older and more powerful a pitcher became, the more he was in danger of that twist that would end his “career”. I drove around the Stevenson “campus” before I went in for my interview, and discovered their “main” baseball diamond. Everything about it was prefect: the mound was smooth and of the quality you see in professional baseball. The design of the infield was such that the drainage took water away from the field quickly (in Chicago, our infields drain toward the baselines and home plate, so that a catcher will often be in a mud puddle a day after a rain…).
One of the Stevenson custodial workers — the man in charge of maintaining the playing fields (that was a plural) saw me walking around “his” pitcher’s mound and asked what I was doing. When I told him, he gave me the tour, explaining everything, including how they had a half dozen crew people to maintain the “practice” and “varsity” fields for the major sports.
I could go on, but I don’t think the families who support the public schools in Chicago’s wealthier north and west suburbs (which include some of my in-laws) will be clamoring to get vouchers or charters just because one series of test scores go “down.” Most know better, and those who make a big deal of the test scores are usually outnumbered by families with a bit more serious understanding of the breadth of what constitutes a school.
(All my sons’ suburban cousins play hockey, for example. Try to find that in the home of the — once again — Stanley Cup winning “Chicago” Blackhawks…).
Only the craziest ideologues in these affluent school districts will be pushing for vouchers or more charter schools. And the parents know whether their schools are “good” — with or without the test scores.
At the same time, some of the poorest suburbs in the USA are to the south and west of Chicago. Ford Heights to the south. Maywood to the west. Those suburbs are as segregated and black as the south side communities in Chicago. Those are where the agitation for charters and vouchers — parental “choice” to further drain the local public school budgets — will be targeted.
The main thing that “low” scores on this round of the Common Core tests will provide is a “low” baseline for the current administrators (state, regional and local) to measure their “progress” against.
This was one of the many tricks used for years by those guys (and a few women). Paul Vallas did it in Chicago by false flagging the “important” test his first year and downplaying the test that would subsequently matter. He told teachers to ignore the ITBS (the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills) and focus on the IGAP (the Illinois test) in 1996, the first round of testing after Vallas became Chicago’s first schools CEO. Then he dumped the IGAP and emphasized the importance of the ITBS, which had the lowest scores in a decade in 1996 because everyone had been told it was going to be phased out. Vallas’s accounting tricks began with that one, and continued until he ran out the thread within five years. But I still remember each year the report on the citywide testing program was headlined ‘TRENDING UP.’ The low scores on this year’s Common Core will enable Arne Duncan and the rest of the Common Core crowd to show that things are ‘TRENDING UP’ for the next two or three years, once this year’s “bottom” is established.
It’s another example of how the Chicago Boys do the Chicago Plan and how most people still miss the facts on some key parts.
I understand that there are a number of high school graduates who have made it through high school but aren’t really reading or performing math at a 12th grade level. But I also know from personal experience that a test does not always show a student’s true ability level. I was a horrible test taker. Limited testing in itself might not be too bad….I remember taking standardized tests from time to time between 3rd-12th grade (early 80s-early 90s) but not every time I turned around…not even every year. Also, the high stakes were not there. Teachers weren’t having to teach to the test because their school’s AYP, their jobs and even their teaching certificated wasn’t depended on their students’ test scores. Testing had already gone overboard thanks to NCLB but now we expect kids to do well on tests not appropriate for their grade level, etc. ? WE CAN DO BETTER THAN THIS!!! We need to join together and demand that this practice be stopped. We may have voted Obama into office (or at least some of us did…) but we need to remind him that as an elected leader, it would serve him well to listen to ALL of his constituents.
In another thread about retention, a high school teacher claimed that many many of her students were reading at the first through fourth grade levels. This was part of the motivation for my question. I am old enough to remember Dexter Manley testifying that he was a functionally illiterate college graduate. What percentage of high school graduates are functionally illiterate?
I am absolutely appalled at the idea of racketeering in the school system, or creating unmerited difficulties, or, in many instances, flawed course material or tests for the purpose of inducing failure. Whether for the purpose of endeavoring to make private, charter, or other alternative schools more attractive or not, it is unscrupulous and costly, and should be stiffly punished. A student should not be forced to leave a school because of academic railroads, or because it is a hostile environment. Our public, private, charter, and other schools should be competing to elevate student proficiency, not to deflate it. An educator should be judged on their ability to make it plain to the student, not on how well they parade a show of their own “intelligence.”
Blanks of all tests and assignments should be available for public perusal to discourage unethical practices that are designed to induce student failure, though I’ll here share a few completed assignments that I assisted my son with last school year that were a bit too sophisticated for even an honors 7th grade student.
For whatever reason, the video for the cartoon that my son had to create for this project stopped working. We’ll have to fix that. http://issuu.com/yolandamichellemartin/docs/math_in_the_middle21
Another project that I assisted my son with while he was in Honors Math. http://www.slideshare.net/ymartin3/justice-adamss-proportion-presentation-justice-adamss-proportion-presentation-expert-math-project-14506885
Another project. http://www.slideshare.net/ymartin3/marrying-math-art-project-for-slideshare
My son was placed in honors math last school year after he scored relatively well on his TCAP (Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program) tests, but he had not done so well on the Math portion of the test, in part because he didn’t have a pencil to take a portion of the test, and his Math teacher didn’t bother to contact and inform me of this, and, until I started pressing this issue, I seldom saw any graded work to know what he needed help with.
These projects are a small matter compared with other issues that I’ve had to deal with at this school regarding my son. It’s been no less daunting than a war zone. I am a major proponent of student advancement, but via reasonable methods.
The goal of common core testing is to make everyone smarter by asking them stupid questions. You know, the old reverse pyschology thing.
If we teach the test and we test to fail, are we teaching to fail?
Something about that seems wrong, perhaps it’s my logic.
I call it child abuse. No teaching required. Ugh!
As for no teaching required…with our last reading series, teachers didn’t have to teach anyway. The teachers edition was so scripted, it was ridiculous. I put my teacher’s edition away and used the student text to design my plans.
Oh Alabama teacher, you maverick you!
“Teach your children well…”
Keep your focus on the test designs and outcomes. They are bad as stated because the tests are invalid. The use of the tests to evaluate teachers and assign them performance levels based on student growth scores in a year when the criteria cut scores have been made more difficult is simply an immoral practice. Teachers have to address the testing issue with parents in their own way. Teacher associations have to lead the way and prepare clear statements about the design and use of their state’s tests. Parents do not liked to be duped by state tests. In my experience, they will organize themselves if they feel their children are being mistreated. Parents need to comprehend the invalid use of these tests and the unnecessary hours of schooling being dedicated to testing that has only one purpose to rank teachers as ineffective, developing, effective or superior.
I personally think CC will fade because they didn’t bother to get any buy-in from parents. I would be surprised if more than 1 in 100 public school parents here have ever heard of it.
Are they even aware that this entire “debate” has been conducted with virtually no public input?
The public will find out about CC in the states that go thru with it when the tests
are rolled out and the scores drop.
Chiara, I think you are totally correct. Why was parents not involved at one level in planning this scheme??? This guy who developed: David Coleman has never taught in K-12 and knows zero of teaching!!! He has partnered with Michelle Rhee, you know the “reformer in the DC Schools” who was caught up in a scandal with testing of DC kids and removed! We do not need this!!!
I’m getting suspicious of reformers claims of graduation rate increases, now too.
Is anyone looking at for-profit scams in “credit recovery” programs? This looks like a growth area to me, in Ohio.
We may end up with more regulators and auditors than we have teachers once this thing is fully privatized. There are just endless ways to game this.
Are the numbers on graduation any good, or are those massaged too?
Yes, I agree~~~
My city’s public school system uses Credit Recovery in the high schools. I have never seen any information regarding the results, however. I also think that the students are limited on the number of times they are allowed to use this program.
What I haven’t seen stated in all these discussions (and I haven’t read every single post) is the fact that teaching “to the test” isn’t really an accurate way to state the problem. Teachers are teaching as they are because they don’t really know what will be on the tests or even what kinds of questions will be asked. So they have to kind of shoot in the dark at a moving target with a black sack over their heads and hope that what they cover will be enough to help the students decipher the ever-changing questions and types of questions with which they are confronted. It is a crap shoot.
Teachers in the districts should be made aware of area to be tested, or yes, they are teaching in the dark! As all education is good, it may not be so good for ratings if the kids do not do well! The teacher will look negative in the teaching area!
You’ve got a good point, but are you aware that you can Google PARCC Sample Questions, Smart Balance Sample Questions and ACT Aspire Sample Questions and get results for all three? It’s not an exact match…one of them,but I don’t remember which, provides a sampler for third through fifth grades and sixth-eighth grades–but it is a good start.
I do not believe that parents will “head for the exits” for a couple of reasons. If one is a good teacher, and has the respect of the student, they will also have the support and respect of parents. The next reason is very simple. Parents do not like having their children called stupid. If a child is a successful, well rounded child, and they tell their parents they did not get the test or it was too hard, parents will believe them.
After the parent is told “they did not get the test or it was too hard”~~~then what, how do you rank learning! The parents can believe this or not, we need a test to see where students are!
Why?
I have just been looking at some PARCC sample questions and while they include the questions, they don’t include the passages, making the samples not especially illuminating and the sample answers hard to follow.
I also noticed that Georgia dropped out of the PARCC consortium because teachers have no way to influence the tests should they notice, for instance, that students need more help in an area not emphasized enough in the existing tests. In other words, the PARCC tests are being given in the same way the common core standards were created without letting educators themselves have a significant say in their creation.
I did not know about David Coleman’s link to Michelle Rhee, but now that I do know, I understand why the assessments have started before teachers or students had a chance to prepare for a very different kind of curriculum.
I personally like many of the standards and think the tri-part approach of reading, writing, and discussion is stellar, but it’s not easy to implement and teachers need some time and training to implement this approach effectively. Give them no time, test students right away, and the way is paved for people like Rhee to make her case for charter schools being the answer to everyone’s prayers. Low tests scores provide a veritable golden goose for the hyenas circling the public schools.
I think Margaret Spellings spilled a clue:
http://transformingtheconversation.blogspot.com/2013/08/what-is-goal-of-common-core-testing.html
Podgursky, Michael, Springer, Matthew G. (2007). Credentials versus performance: Review of the teacher performance pay research. Peabody Journal of Education, 82(4), 551-573.
——————
As I mentioned, I look for parallels and concepts that I have learned from Jim Guthrie, Michael Scriven etc. Continuing the “math wars” will not help improve schools in Massachusetts ( I cannot speak for the other states). For 10 years I taught reading comprehension in public schools. In the 1980s as part of MCAS I was the supervisor of teachers who were reading 10,000 student essays. When I read the articles from E.N. and Fordham I am appalled from the perspective of a reading teacher. I would grade the essays as mediocre. If I gave your friends at E.N. and Fordham a test
I would use the personality measures of 5 Ocean and I would get a good measure of “g”. I can predict that your staff/colleagues would be measurably different from my colleagues.
I can guarantee you I could get some of your friends to fail this standard. And, then I would recommend the bottom 10% be fired; turn the tables and see how it feels. I have good tests in mind that have been time – proven (so they have clinical validity) , that have predictive validity , and have been proven through evidence based practice.
What I am suggesting is a far more humane treatment than what your friends are doing to students and teachers.
You have the privilege of erasing this email. You should give the same privilege to the taxpayers and parents in Massachusetts who have to read every day their schools are failing when they are not. This is done to serve a political agenda of destroying public schools.
Thank You~~~~from Montana! I am not a teacher, but a parent, I do not see that Common Core is going to prove anything, except make money for profiteers and that does not help America or students!
I agree. I think that this is all a tactic to try to privatize the public schools by making them appear ineffectual to parents who don’t know any better.
There ya go Wendy, I totally agree with you! Break the Public School System in America!
Diane,
As much as I enjoy your blog, I still feel awkward agreeing with you on some of your viewpoints.
But, as you rightly points out some of the damage Common Core brings,
I wish you would see the damage the US DOE does as for several decades, after each study of an education-related problem. the public has been told it needs an expansion of public education.
Creative, appealing names, such as “No Child”, “Race Top”, “More at Four” have persuaded parents each provides benefits to solve whatever problem is identified.
Yet, today we have more programs than ever (review the DOE website) yet the problems are still with us and teachers are saddled with burdensome non-productive requirements having nothing to do with educating our children, only provide jobs for the cottage industry dependent on the growing DOE.
It would be nice to see you take a stand against what the DOE is doing, for the results are in….it has failed to meet its fundamental mission to provide guidance to the states, NOT dictates…as the ‘carrot’ of Federal dollars ensures compliance.
This is not a partisan battle…as the children are the losers with the ‘good intentions’ of Arnie Duncan, Bill Gates, and the DOE.
Lead the fight, work with parents, state legislators who see first hand what Federal compliance does at the classroom level.
ajbruno14 gmail
If this is the article by Rick Hess to which you are referring,
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/rick_hess_straight_up/2012/11/the_common_core_kool-aid.html
I, for one, will believe my “own lying eyes” regarding the quality of my local suburban public school.
One of the aspects of the Common Core initiative that continues to amaze me is the astonishing PRESUMPTION of the creators of the Common Core State Standards–that this small group of people should presume that they know better than every curriculum designer, every curriculum coordinator, and every teacher in the country.
Pride cometh before a fall.
Amen!
Double Amen~~~~
A major goal, aside from the purported up-front educational goals, the Standards are stuffed with the goals of putting kids through computerized testing, and managing all of the data on huge student database management systems, creating new tests, new curricular materials, benefiting Gates, Pearson and other computer and publishing interest. Unnecessary millions will be spent to support this commercial bureaucracy. These are the goals.
Check out the Gates, Intel and McGraw connections and the flow of money: “The Common Core and Gates’ Education Commercialization Complex”
Shepherd, in this piece, you’ll read how there were just 5 main authors in a highly secretive process. How outrageous that curriculum coordinators and other elementary and secondary school educators were shut out of the process. Apparently, only one teacher was involved –as a reviewer or validator. And the people in the outer circle of 55 outside the core of 5 had a vague idea of how their feedback was taken. Interesting that 5 of the 29 validators refused to sign off on the Common Core.
Yes, Chiara, the CCSS will fail, yes, parents will hit the roof when they see what is being done with their children’s schooldays, but only after a political mobilization.
As a parent, I’m concerned, AND I don’t know enough. Somehow I’m getting Gates name involved as well as a small group, oh and money.
I need to read up more, but I do wish that someone would explain in a very simple factual way to us parents. I’m curious how many states are oppose from it?
Susie the fact that you have found Diane’s blog shows you are further ahead of the game than most parents and that is the scary truth. I just started a blog originally on my local Patch with the idea I could reach local parents and give them the facts as a fellow parent sees them. Only have one post but working on the second so much to write about so little time:).
http://dearparentslovemom.wordpress.com/
@Susie N: If you look through Diane’s blog posts, you will see so many states’ names popping up. There are problems in NY, RI, MA, CT, NJ, VA, PA, NC, FL, OH, KY, TN, TX, AL, MN, MI, WI, OK, UT, WA, CA, MO, CO, and probably others that I am missing. The point is … this is a widespread problem with similar issues arising everywhere.
Evidence points to a carefully constructed corporate infiltration of the legislatures and decisions made by them and other elected officials to coax them to see the need to privatize schools, prisons, and other professions in order to lower the pay and benefits and job security of the employees. The travesty is that they are harming children by so doing.
I am totally concerned in regards to this “Common Core” as a scheme by a David Coleman who has never taught K-12 and he has partnered with that Michelle Rhee who ran amock in DC School Systems back in the day with testing and was booted! Now they partner with the Gates Foundation and voila; we in the community are “learning in the dark”!!! I have seen zero for parents and the community to learn anything about how and what for, this new system is or will work! I have heard praise from teachers, but let’s face it, the staff does not know exactly either! Our kids are guinea pigs on this!
Tell us about your best lesson this week. http://pointeviven.blogspot.com/2013/09/teacher-show-and-tell-saturdays.html
We must get parents involved. As that Long Island teacher told King, “the mommies are angry”. Anyone know you don’t mess with a lioness, she wolf or mommas babies.
[…] And that is exactly what happened in the New York testing fiasco. […]