Joy Resmovits has posted an admiring article about David Coleman, architect of the Common Core standards and now head of the College Board.
It tells you much of what you need to know about the man whose ideas are reshaping what almost every public school students in the United States will know and be able to do.
Note that Coleman tried to be a teacher, he says, but didn’t get hired. And now he will direct almost every classroom in the nation!
Since he couldn’t be a teacher, he went to work for McKinsey, where Big Data is a religion.
Then he founded the “Grow Network,” a company that provided data analysis about assessments.
McGraw-Hill purchased the Grow Network, for what insiders say was $14 million.
Then Coleman founded Student Achievement Partners, which played the leading role in writing the Common Core standards, which received $6.5 million from the Gates Foundation for this work.
At the same time that he was writing the Common Core standards, Coleman was treasurer of Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst in its first year of operation. The board had two other members: Jason Zimba, who wrote the Common Core math standards, and a third person who was an employee of David Coleman’s Student Achievement Partners.
Now, Coleman is reshaping the SAT and the AP tests to align with the Common Core.
Obviously, Coleman is an incredibly brilliant and well-educated man. He went to the very best universities. His parents were highly educated (his mother is president of Bennington College).
Since he has never been a teacher, what we must wonder about is his ability to understand that not all children will score over 700 on their SAT, no matter how hard they try. Not all children will go to Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. Not all children will go to Oxford.
We have a federal policy today that seems to have been written by people who got very high scores on their standardized tests and lack empathy for those who can’t do the same.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Your last sentence is wonderful, because it’s proof positive that tests cannot measure everything (even when properly used).
Coleman’s mentor and guide? David Sherman, former VEEP of the UFT. Anyone for some Vichyssoise?
Do the common core standards represent the best of the distillation of the knowledge of 50 states standards refined over many iterations and the collaberation of thousands of the best minds from those states? Call me critical, but I remain unconvinced.
David Coleman wants to get rid of all personal, introspective writing and thinking in schools?
Why?
“As you grow up in this world,” Coleman said at a conference last year, “you realize people really don’t give a shit about what you feel or what you think.”
Nice example to set for children and teachers alike.
From:
http://www.danagoldstein.net/dana_goldstein/2012/05/on-david-coleman-life-writing-and-the-future-of-the-american-reading-list.html
SO WHY ON GOD”S GREEN EARTH SHOULD ANYONE GIVE A SHIT ABOUT WHAT DAVID COLEMAN FEELS OR THINKS??????????????
It’s even more creepy to actually watch
and hear him say this infamous quote
at a speech in an auditorium at the
New York Department of Ed. in April
2012.
Watch how smug and creep he comes
across… apart from the potty-mouth…
and how the crowd laughs along with
this educational war crime:
This one of the most appropriate and poetic uses of all caps that I have ever seen in a blog comment.
Educational war crime. That phrase sums it all up for me.
So let me see. My wife and kids, they don’t give a shit about what I feel or think. My friends and neighbors don’r give a shit about my thoughts or emotions. My students don’t give a shit about what I feel or think. My principal and colleagues doesn’t give a shit either. So, what do they care about? What I do? And if my actions require no thinking (like a thoughtful lesson, or a thoughtful gift for my daughter) than what is Coleman really implying?
BINGO!!! I’ll take empathy over high test scores any day!
Except for the fact that I don’t want the likes of him near my first graders, I’d love to watch Coleman try to successfully teach Language Arts using some of the one size fits all CC ELA Standards to my first graders.
It’s simple to prove Mr. Coleman wrong on this one, from within the very field that he (falsely) claims expertise, namely, education.
After all, It’s apparent that Coleman and other so-called education reformers really give a shit what Bill Gates thinks and feels.
And that’s what they’re intent on burying us in…
It seems they want to blame the teachers of students who cannot do the same. It is as if high scores are the only value of a high school senior. It also is an affront to everything we know about assessment. Students should have many kinds of assessments. Portfolio work should be at least as important as tests. Observation of academic behavior is a better indicator than a test. All of these should be considered.
Yes….
Here’s more from the Goldstein article:
” ‘The problem,’ Coleman explained in a June
2011 talk to the New York State Department of
Education, is that ‘it is rare in a working
environment that someone says, ‘Johnson,
I need a market analysis by Friday, but before
that, I need a compelling account of your
childhood.’ ”
” … ”
“Currently, about 80 percent of the reading
American students are assigned in school is
fiction or memoir, and 20 percent is non-fiction.
“If Coleman gets his way, that balance will soon
tilt closer to 60-40. American children will spend
a lot less time reading and writing what Coleman
calls, somewhat derisively, “stories,” and much
more time reading and writing about the ideas in
‘informational’ texts by the likes of Richard
Hofstadter, Atul Gawande, and H.L. Mencken
in high school; John Adams, Frederick Douglas, and
Winston Churchill in middle school.”
From:
http://www.danagoldstein.net/dana_goldstein/2012/05/on-david-coleman-life-writing-and-the-future-of-the-american-reading-list.html
IT”S ALSO RARE IN A WORKING ENVIRONMENT THAT JOHNSON IS ONLY 9 YEARS OLD AND HIS MOTHER WAS TOO DRUNK TO MAKE HIM BREAKFAST.
I wouldn’t mind the 60-40 rebalance if Coleman displayed some understanding of why stories, reflections, and personal essays are still at the heart of teaching and learning. (Which I think he must know, on some level. If stories are really worthless, why not set the percentage at zero?) Some of the greatest thinkers of our culture have been, like Lincoln or Emerson, its most self-reflective thinkers. Writing down your ideas, opinions, and, yes, feelings helps you to reason through them. You gain self-understanding and self-mastery, which are important for professional and personal life, and for civic engagement and leadership as well.
What does Coleman suppose John Adams and Frederick Douglass were writing about, if not what they thought and felt?
Coleman’s cluelessness is utterly breathtaking. We humans are storytelling creatures. Storytelling is our primary means for making sense of the world. We are wired for that. Understanding how that works is, well, I can’t think of anything more important except loving one another, but that depends upon the stories we tell ourselves, too.
To Shepherc, this is the utterly sickening part:
thousands of underlings in the civic society, e.g., district staff developers, or school or district level supervisors that should know better, mouth his non-sense.
Note how this is like the swings of Mao’s politics,
in the recent past, the word was that personal narrative was king- find and encourage the student’s voice,
now- student narrative is verboten.
in the recent past- students learn at different paces, and in different learning styles,
now- all students must be expected to follow along Coleman’s expectation that every student be operating at his high Stuyvesant level (for those outside of NYC, that’s the highest level elite public high school in New York City) or else they be deemed failures and by virtue of value-added modeling, their teachers are failures.
We are told that we must follow, uncritically.
Does anyone else feel a sort of totalitarian follow the leader aspect in which we’re following every single assumption of Coleman? The blind fealty which people are exercising is truly scary.
like the swings of Mao’s politics. Well said! Quite accurate analogy!!!
A talking pineapple standing on a ziggurat sees a half built plane flying through the air and losing altitude. The plane has three people, the smartest man in the world, a hippie, and a pilot, but only two parachutes. Who should go? Obviously the smartest man says he should. That leaves the pilot and the hippie and the pilot asks if they should flip a coin. The hippie says, “we can both go, the smartest man in the world just jumped out with my backpack.”
And his last words were, “the death penalty to all failing . . .
These were my tweets re: this piece yesterday:
1) “So, CCSS is designed 2 turn every kid into a geeky bar mitzvah boy who goes to Stuyvesant HS. Wow.”
…and lest I be accused of antisemitism or being anti-intellectual…
2) “Was was reading re: David Coleman. We have things in common-both NYC Jews who attended specialized NYC HS’s. Diff.-I am teacher, he is not.”
I am just anti arrogant, ego-centric, know-it-allism.
One more excerpt from the Goldstein article:
(CAPITALS are mine)
“Alice Mercer, a California elementary school teacher
with experience in high-poverty schools, noted on her
blog that the current California standards for second
grade writing focus on narrative and producing
‘friendly letters,’ while the new Common Core asks
second graders to write opinion pieces and research
papers using documentary evidence from books.
“ ‘From friendly letters to writing opinion pieces…
that’s a mighty big leap,’ Mercer wrote, predicting
that in five years, the public will decry that ‘kids
can’t write a decent friendly email.’
“Alan Lawrence, an education blogger and former
English teacher who was California’s 2007 “teacher
of the year,” complained that Coleman ‘HAS ZERO
K-12 TEACHING EXPERIENCE.
” ‘SHOULD WE REALLY BE LEARNING HOW TO
COOK FROM SOMEONE WHO’S NEVER BEEN
IN THE KITCHEN?’
“Indeed, Coleman HAS NEVER BEEN A PUBLIC
SCHOOL TEACHER.. He holds a master’s degree
in philosophy from Cambridge, and his mother is
the president of tony Bennington College.
“‘So perhaps,’ critics say, ‘Coleman doesn’t fully
understand the power of “stories” to reach children—
especially poor children—who would otherwise find
reading and writing a chore.’
“As an education reporter, I’ve seen evidence of the
power of personal narrative in the classroom. One of
the most effective programs in the troubled Newark,
New Jersey public schools is the Children’s Literacy
Initiative, which teaches basic writing skills by asking
kindergarten through third grade students, every day,
to draft a short ‘story’ about a life event. Teachers then
use these pieces to go over grammar, spelling, and
syntax with each student.
“The idea is that children are most invested in improving
a piece of writing that amplifies their own experiences
and feelings. And the Children’s Literacy Initiative works:
The Newark schools using its strategies are among the
highest-performing schools in the city, and their students—
almost all of them living in poverty—routinely exceed
state test score averages not only in reading and writing,
but also in math and science.
“So I’m sympathetic to teachers who are turned off by
Coleman’s rhetoric. There’s something discomfiting about
Coleman—a white guy with advanced degrees, who earns
a living spreading his opinions—SENDING THE MESSAGE
THAT CHILDREN’S PERSONAL STORIES DON’T
MATTER so they shouldn’t write them down.”
Coleman = OY!
You’ve highlighted what is wrong with our government. A few clueless people who have been given power due to who they know or where they went to school. Why was one person given so much power? Way too much federal power. A few have the power to overpower the many. Why are people following along?
Great response! I have never neglected expository writing with my first or second graders, but narrative writing is how they learned to write and enjoyed writing. Yes, through conferencing, they learned a lot about correct grammar in the revision stage of the writing process.
I also worry about what will happen to story writing in general. Who will be the next Jan Brett, Eudora Welty, Ann Rice, etc. if there is nor more/very limited story writing taking place in school? What about the children whose careers really should be fiction writers? What will happen to English Majors? Will students really be ready for College Literature classes….or are those classes just going to disappear?
There is a particular vision of the future that is being implemented here. It’s one that involves an obedient workforce trained to have the grit, tenacity, and perseverance to do unthinkingly whatever their overlords tell them. I am coming increasingly to believe that this “reform” movement is primarily about replacing learning with training. As in roll over. Bark. Good boy.
Thank you, Robert, since that’s so much of what’s driving this nasty process.
Here, kids, go fetch…
Here’s Susan Ohanian making those same
points:
http://www.substancenews.net/articles.php?page=2716
Coleman’s arrogance is about to negatively affect 50 MILLION schoolchildren and their families. Unless we ACT SOON.
Arrogance is right!
It’s even more creepy to actually watch
and hear him say this infamous
“no-one-gives-a-shit” quote
at a speech in an auditorium at the
New York Department of Ed. in April
2012.
Watch how smug and creep he comes
across… apart from the potty-mouth…
and how the crowd laughs along with
this educational war crime:
Plus these tests do nothing to enable students to question and solve 21st century world problems such as global warming, economic inequality, universal health care and human rights.
He thinks Ivy League students who went to private prep schools should tackle those problems. Those are the students who will be taught how to think. The rest will be taught what to think, and will spend most of their time in school jumping through hoops wondering what’s on the test.
I think that’s right, Susan. The whole reform agenda seems about precisely that. Training for the do-bots. Education for the children of the elite.
Charles Schumer was one of the highest scorers on SAT ever and I don’t see him bashing teachers and destroying public schools or blaming students because they can’t get jobs. There are no jobs , folks, no matter what you teach them in the high school. This is a ruse used by the politicians to say who is deserving of a job…. when there are no jobs “go to the back of the line” so this tells them which students/people they can send to the back of the line and say “you don’t even deserve food stamps because you are ___” Fill on the word (lazy) ; one town administrator type said there should be a DSM 5 category called lazy…. the other administrator said “we had to train them because they are lousy parents and they had lousy parents.” Those are direct quotes from people who are in the local administration policy offices at city hall and they go to meetings and say these things. When the administrator said “lousy parents” I waited til after the meeting and said “I don’t like your choice of words.” I should have said it in front of the whole meeting; there were women on the panel, too, but not one of them heard the message he was sending?????
I am ambivalent about Coleman. His ignorance of public school realities and penchant for flawed standardized tests is very troublesome. On the other hand, he could be the one to give a long overdue come-uppance to the the frauds who populate our schools of education –people like Kate Kinsella and Lucy Calkins who falsely claim that reading ability is a matter of applying metacognitive strategies (in fact it’s mostly a function of background knowledge; thus, after phonics are mastered, robust teaching of content is the only legit way of teaching reading). Much of what ails American schools can be laid at the feet of the careerist hacks in the ed schools who pull novel methodologies (“think-pair-share” anyone?) out of their butts to advance their careers or bolster their ideological predilections. Take any platitude from ed school and the opposite is most likely true. For example we’ve been brainwashed to think that TELLING is the worst form of pedagogy. In fact, surprise!, it’s the best. That’s how humans have learned from the beginning of time –from kids at the feet of a West African griot to the M.I.T. students at a Chomsky lecture (oh, wait, shouldn’t he just be a “guide at the side”?). Coleman may be an imperfect leader, but American education has been plagued by terrible leaders for a century. I can’t hate a guy who advocates teaching Richard Hofstadter and H.L. Mencken.
Can you hate a guy who believes that studying
the following in school is a waste of time, and
any time spent on them is actually harmful
to students:
— the plays of Shakespear?
— the novels of Dickens?
— the poems of Petrarch, Byron, etc.?
— the short stories of Hemingway,
Fitzgerald, etc.?
and on and on….
Hell yes you can! It’s not about content, it’s about what is driving common core. It’s about the fact that CC is completely off target both grade and age wise. It’s about people who can’t themselves teach running the public education ship into the ground. How many clueless individuals jump from the mail room to the CEO’s position in the corporate world? And on and on….
ANYONE who professes there is only way to teach a skill that is right for every learner.or every child should be at a specific level at the same time should be immediately discounted.
If teachers are going to be held accountable for results, they need the freedom to choose the methods and materials they to be appropriate.
My kids went to elementary school in the 90’s when their local NYC district’s supt. had totally bought in to the Caulkins trainings-literally, with $ for professional development and contracts to whole language companies, and educationally, with the almost non-existence of phonics instruction (my son’s kg teacher told me that a rep. from the publishing company had her take “sound it out” off her reading strategies wall). The hushed advice at P-T conferences was “Don’t say I told you, but go out and get a phonics book and an old-fashioned basal reader and work with your child at home.”
Luckily, my son had an old-timer near retirement for 2nd grade who did phonics with the kids everyday-although many of the younger teachers at the time had bought into “phonics aren’t important.” The middle class kids got private reading tutors- the less affluent ones ended up with special ed. referrals. Then, one day the DOE quietly adapted what they called a “balanced literacy” approach.
Don’t get me started on the math disasters…
The math disasters-
There, you’ve got the stamp of Coleman’s chum, Common Core math architect Jason Zimba. (In a clear case of cronyism, he got to be the math architect. Few have picked up that they were in the same 1991 entering class at Oxford,) See him here in a statement that doesnt square with the hearing minutes of the disputed statement: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2aRYu-bSHc
Just Google “Common Core constructivism”. The Common Core dictates group experimentation in constructivist math, clearly a time waster. Just compare the accompanying Everyday Math books with the Singapore or Saxon math. Just which approach do you suppose the countries that are besting us use?
There is a reason that there are English/math/science/humanities questions in state teachers’ exams: teachers TEACH. That’s why they are in front of the classroom and a seven year old is not.
This is clearly contradictory argument: we want to be the highest performing in the world; teachers should not teach, but should stand aside and facilitate.
Coleman falls in line with people like Rhee. Couldn’t cut in the class room so they get to move to policy making. There are much better out there to write standards and be influential in public education. The college board tie in is also troublesome. Much of Common Core is flawed and geared toward testing and publishers making big bucks off of it while wasting our taxpayer monies.
Indeed. That metacognitive strategies crap is PUREST SNAKEOIL!!! I highly recommend reading the brilliant cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham on that subject. He writes about this topic regularly in his superb column Ask the Cognitive Scientist.
A lot of child development experts don’t think Willingham is so “brilliant” and believe that HE is selling snake oil. He is the supposed education “expert” that “reformers” regularly trot out, from Gates to Hirsch –he’s on the Core Knowledge board– to rationalize teaching advanced concepts that are developmentally inappropriate for young children. Many of us who’ve implemented Core Knowledge soon realized that teaching about ancient cultures like Mesopotamia doesn’t make sense to children who have only been on the planet for six years, often don’t yet know their own address, city, state and country, or know about their own cultures, how to tell time, let alone understand timelines in history or comprehend maps. Like Hirsch, Willingham doesn’t believe in developmentally appropriate practice –or readiness for that matter.
In his post regarding this issue last month, Willingham wrote, “I don’t think developmental psychology is a good guide to what children should learn; it provides some help in thinking about how children learn. The best guide to “what” is what children know now, and where you want their learning to head.”
As if trained, experienced early childhood teachers don’t already know the importance of starting where children are at. In my experience with Core Knowledge, however, that is not built into the curriculum. It’s sink or swim in Mesopotamia, regardless of the children’s background knowledge and readiness.
Thanks, Cosmic Tinkerer, for calling out Daniel Willingham.
I’m one of those who thinks Willingham is not so “brilliant.”
Willingham says that critical thinking cannot be taught.
He defines critical thinking as the seeing multiple “sides of an issue,” and being “open to new evidence that disconfirms your ideas.” It includes objective reasoning, and “demanding that claims be backed by evidence.” And it means that people “deduce and infer conclusions from available facts.”
Pretty much what jurors are asked to do on a daily basis. And pretty much what voters in a democratic society are asked to do in elections.
There are no “special programs” or “advanced classes” needed to teach critical thinking; critical reasoning can and should be taught to all students. Critical reasoning ought to be explicitly tied both to content and to the real world; doing so helps students to find relevancy and personal meaning, which are important to shape and mold “learning” into “thinking.” In the classroom (and via meaningful assignments), the teacher can help students to develop explicit strategies that assist them in thinking critically.
The real problem is that for teachers to teach critical reasoning, they have to engage in it themselves. And that poses a real dilemma, because the current testing regime is based on very dubious and specious assumptions. Moreover, many (if not most) current education “leaders” are threatened by teachers who are willing to question current practice(s). So, teachers are not really encouraged to “think” in the environment that pervades the upper echelons of most school districts.
John Dewey wrote that “active, persistent and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge, in the light of the grounds that support it and the further conclusions to which it tends, constitutes reflective thought.”
It isn’t easy to teach, but it can be done. And it takes time. And support. And it is essential to developing democratic character and perpetuating democratic governance.
As for “Think, Pair, Share” I’m not saying whether I’m for or against it, but its use was recommended at every “How to Teach the Standards” workshop I attended over the summer.
At a training a couple of years ago, we kept being forced to do it for EVERY little section of information. For a 3 day conference. By half way through the second day, we were shouting down the presenter to JUST CONTINUE, instead of having to do the stupid share AGAIN. I do “Think Pair Share” about twice a year with my students.
Try just “telling” with a group of 20+ primary and preprimary aged students. You’re lucky if you can hold their attention for 10 – 20 minutes tops. Forget it if you think you can get away with doing that all day long. That’s why many states require that schedules for young children be balanced between active and passive learning activities.
It’s also why a lot of universities with large lectures schedule seminars to go along with those courses and ask instructors to mix it up and use more than one instructional approach. If I learned anything in ed school (and I learned LOTS), it’s that we are not in a position to claim that there is ONE right approach for reaching all students.
A few very wealthy plutocrats have gotten behind the test-kids-until-the-scream movement and have poured a LOT of money into it, and so it’s not surprising that furthering that goal has paid off very handsomely for Mr. Coleman. Consultants get paid a lot to tell people what they want to hear. That’s a big part of that particular hustle.
What IS surprising is that anyone would have paid so very much money for work as amateurish, as received, as unimaginative, as pedestrian as are the Common Core State Standards in the English Language Arts.
These standards reflect almost nothing of what we now know about learning in the various domains that they cover. It’s shocking to me that they haven’t been met with a resounding CHORUS OF DERISION.
They look to me like what one would have gotten if they had been prepared by a group of reasonably bright undergraduates without any special training in pedagogy or curricula in the various English arts domains and without any familiarity with the scientific studies of learning in these domains, relying solely on a quick and dirty review of existing state standards and on the sort of generalist understanding that one gets from having been a student in English classes for 12 years.
The folks who paid Coleman to come up with this crap got hustled.
If these new standards had been prepared by a graduate student as, say, a master’s thesis in English education, and if I had been that student’s faculty adviser, I would have said, these are not defensible, not yet, not by a long shot. They show no depth of understanding of the domains covered. You have a lot of work to do to rethink these, but first you are going to have to learn a lot more than you now know about learning in these domains (reading, writing, speaking, listening, thinking, etc). There’s quite a lot that we have learned about these matters in the past forty years or so that is not reflected in this work AT ALL.
The new ELA standards weren’t vetted; they were NOT SUBJECTED TO EXPERT CRITIQUE. And yet this amateurish crap has been foisted on the entire country, just about.
That said, the state standards that they replace were no better and often worse.
Truly, a bright guy recommending that everyone else jump with the overloaded backpack he’s happy to sell you.
We have in this country thousands of genuine experts in each of the domains covered by the CCSS in ELA–we have literature professors who are expert on what it means to learn about literature, we have linguists and cognitive scientists with deep understanding of and insight into the acquisition of language skills, and a reasonable way to have approached these standards, if we were to have such things, would have been to put together working committees of these people to report on the state of our knowledge in each domain. But no. The job was given to a bunch a amateurs. I think of the last line of this poem by Don Marquis:
The Old Trouper, by Don Marquis
THE OLD TROUPER
i ran onto mehitabel again
last evening
she is inhabiting
a decayed trunk
which lies in an alley
in greenwich village
in company with the
most villainous tom cat
i have ever seen
but there is nothing
wrong about the association
archy she told me
it is merely a plutonic
attachment
and the thing can be
believed for the tom
looks like one of pluto s demons
it is a theatre trunk
archy mehitabel told me
and tom is an old theatre cat
he has given his life
to the theatre
he claims that richard
mansfield once
kicked him out of the way
and then cried because
he had done it and
petted him
and at another time
he says in a case
of emergency
he played a bloodhound
in a production of
uncle tom s cabin
the stage is not what it
used to be tom says
he puts his front paw
on his breast and says
they don t have it any more
they don t have it here
the old troupers are gone
there s nobody can troupe
any more
they are all amateurs nowadays
they haven t got it
here
there are only
five or six of us oldtime
troupers left
this generation does not know
what stage presence is
personality is what they lack
personality
where would they get
the training my old friends
got in the stock companies
i knew mr booth very well
says tom
and a law should be passed
preventing anybody else
from ever playing
in any play he ever
played in
there was a trouper for you
i used to sit on his knee
and purr when i was
a kitten he used to tell me
how much he valued my opinion
finish is what they lack
finish
and they haven t got it
here
and again he laid his paw
on his breast
i remember mr daly very
well too
i was with mr daly s company
for several years
there was art for you
there was team work
there was direction
they knew the theatre
and they all had it
here
for two years mr daly
would not ring up the curtain
unless i was in the
prompter s box
they are amateurs nowadays
rank amateurs all of them
for two seasons i played
the dog in joseph
jefferson s rip van winkle
it is true i never came
on the stage
but he knew i was just off
and it helped him
i would like to see
one of your modern
theatre cats
act a dog so well
that it would convince
a trouper like jo jefferson
but they haven t got it
nowadays
they haven t got it
here
jo jefferson had it he had it
here
i come of a long line
of theatre cats
my grandfather was with forrest
he had it he was a real trouper
my grandfather said
he had a voice
that used to shake
the ferryboats
on the north river
once he lost his beard
and my grandfather
dropped from the
fly gallery and landed
under his chin
and played his beard
for the rest of the act
you don t see any theatre
cats that could do that
nowadays
they haven t got it they
haven t got it
here
once i played the owl
in modjeska s production
of macbeth
i sat above the castle gate
in the murder scene
and made my yellow
eyes shine through the dusk
like an owl s eyes
modjeska was a real
trouper she knew how to pick
her support i would like
to see any of these modern
theatre cats play the owl s eyes
to modjeska s lady macbeth
but they haven t got it nowadays
they haven t got it
here
mehitabel he says
both our professions
are being ruined
by amateurs
archy
BTW, I am a FAN of New Criticism-style close reading. Like Coleman, I ate up those books by Empson and Wimsatt and Brooks and Warren and the like when I was an undergraduate. But I think that close reading is just one tool in the toolkit of a good English teacher. It’s not some sort of magical nostrum for all that ails ya.
I’ve just been reading Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle by Chris Hedges. In my opinion, his chapter “The Illusion of Wisdom” perfectly captures the source of David Coleman’s arrogance. Here is the beginning of the chapter: “The multiple failures that beset the country, from our mismanaged economy to our shredding of Constitutional rights to our lack of universal health care to our imperial debacles in the Middle East, can be laid at the door of institutions that produce and sustain our educated elite. … [They] do only a mediocre job of teaching students to think. They focus instead, through the filter of standardized tests, enrichment activities, AP classes, high-priced tutors, swanky private schools, entrance exams, and blind deference to authority, on creating hordes of competent systems managers. … The elite universities disdain honest intellectual inquiry, which is by its nature distrustful of authority, fiercely independent, and often subversive. … These elite universities have banished self-criticism. They refuse to question a self-justifying system.” And this is what David Coleman (and Bill Gates) want to foist on the entire country. As an anthropology major in the late ’60’s, I first learned about ethno-centrism. Unfortunately, we are in the grips of uber-powerful people who are ethno-centric to the Core. Real teachers honor the diversity of their students and are concerned for their well-being as well as their academic growth.
Beautifully said, Sheila! Bravo!!!
See my comments below….
“Joy Resmovits has posted an admiring article about David Coleman, architect of the Common Core standards and now head of the College Board.”
In the current climate, it pays–it pays handsomely–to fawn over Coleman and his amateurish “standards.” I really think that he is a well-meaning fellow, but these standards are awful–an improvement on some of the state standards that they replace, it’s true–but that’s very faint praise indeed.
Let’s complete the saying, “Those who can’t, teach. Those who can’t teach, test.
Note Ravitch’s summary includes the comment that he could not become a teacher.
So, he’s now making darn sure that he’s going to dictate to every teacher.
Notice how these know it all know nothings have this common denominator: they went to elite schools: Duncan to Harvard, Rhee, Cornell, Coleman to Yale & Oxford. Are we giving them passes on their ideas and authority because they to those schools?
This, once and for all, should crush our tendency to fall into fawning lock-step behind someone just because they went to Yale and Oxford or such.
Puny earthling, you dare question the superior wisdom of your Overlords from Oligarkia, speaking through their vassals from the Meritokratik galaxy?
Prepare for banishment to the Cat Food Domain…
Part 1
The state of education reporting in the United States is in serious trouble, and it isn’t getting better. Consider the piece on David Coleman, head honcho at the College Board, written by Joy Remsovits.
As I’ve noted previously, Joe Resmovits is a 2010 graduate of a small, private, selective, expensive, single-sex college in New York that touts its ” small, intimate classes” and its exclusivity (“we are the most sought-after liberal arts college for women in the United States”). Her real-world experience in public education is more than limited. But reporters like her are the face of public eduction journalism., and that’s more than just a tad bit disconcerting.
In a previous piece on the cheating scandal in the D.C. schools under MIchelle Rhee, Resmovits couldn’t even keep straight how the cheating took place. She wrote then that the cheating resulted from “a high number of RIGHT-TO-WRONG erasures.” Obviously, the cheating stemmed from a very high percentage of WRONG-TO-RIGHT answer changes.
In her fluff piece on David Coleman, Resmovits had an opportunity to actually engage in some serious and helpful reporting. She didn’t take it.
Resmovits writes that David Coleman is” in charge of the most important test score a student can receive,” the SAT, “the standardized test taken by many high school seniors as a part of the college application process.”
She adds that Coleman is “also expanding the Advanced Placement program, which offers college-level classes and tests for high school students.”
Resmovits might have taken the opportunity to share with the public what research says about the SAT (and the ACT), and about Advanced Placement courses and tests. But that might have taken a little bit of work, and thinking. And most education reporters today seem to do very little of either one.
The SAT is a badly flawed and virtually worthless test, unless one is interested in determining the family incomes of students. College enrollment specialists say that their research finds the SAT predicts between 3 and 15 percent of freshman-year college grades, and after that nothing. As one commented, “I might as well measure their shoe size.”
Perhaps even worse, as Matthew Quirk reported in “The Best Class Money Can Buy:”
“The ACT and the College Board don’t just sell hundreds of thousands of student profiles to schools; they also offer software and consulting services that can be used to set crude wealth and test-score cutoffs, to target or eliminate students before they apply…That students are rejected on the basis of income is one of the most closely held secrets in admissions; enrollment managers say the practice is far more prevalent than most schools let on.”
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2005/11/the-best-class-money-can-buy/4307/2/
Resmovits…sorry for those typos
well said, Democracy!
Part 2
Part 2
The ACT is no better. The authors of a study in Ohio found the ACT has minimal predictive power. For example, the ACT composite score predicts about 5 percent of the variance in freshman-year Grade Point Average at Akron University, 10 percent at Bowling Green, 13 percent at Cincinnati, 8 percent at Kent State, 12 percent at Miami of Ohio, 9 percent at Ohio University, 15 percent at Ohio State, 13 percent at Toledo, and 17 percent for all others. Hardly anything to get excited about.
Here is what the authors say about the ACT in their concluding remarks:
“…why, in the competitive college admissions market, admission officers have not already discovered the shortcomings of the ACT composite score and reduced the weight they put on the Reading and Science components. The answer is not clear. Personal conversations suggest that most admission officers are simply unaware of the difference in predictive validity across the tests. They have trusted ACT Inc. to design a valid exam and never took the time (or had the resources) to analyze the predictive power of its various components. An alternative explanation is that schools have a strong incentive – perhaps due to highly publicized external rankings such as those compiled by U.S. News & World Report, which incorporate students’ entrance exam scores – to admit students with a high ACT composite score, even if this score turns out to be unhelpful.”
And what about Advanced Placement courses and tests?
Jay Mathews at TheWashington Post has popularized the myth that “AP is better.” But the research doesn’t support Mathews’ contention, although students seem to understand the importance of constructing a facade. Students admit that ““You’re not trying to get educated; you’re trying to look good.” And, “The focus is on the test and not necessarily on the fundamental knowledge of the material.” Students know that AP is far more about gaming the college acceptance process than it is learning.
A 2002 National Research Council study of AP courses and tests ––an intense two-year, 563-page detailed content analysis conducted by a large group of experts and top-notch researchers –– concluded that AP courses and tests were a “mile wide and an inch deep” and they did not comport with well-established, research-based principles of learning. (Mathews dismissed that study as the cranky “opinion of a few college professors.”)
The main finding of a 2004 Geiser and Santelices study was that “the best predictor of both first- and second-year college grades” is unweighted high school grade point average, and a high school grade point average “weighted with a full bonus point for AP…is invariably the worst predictor of college performance.” But high schools award bonus points, and that’s why many students take AP, to pad their transcripts. Even more perversely, the College Board, which produces the SAT, now recommends that schools “implement grade-weighting policies…starting as early as the sixth grade.” Yes, you read that right. The SIXTH grade! If that sounds stupid, perhaps even fraudulent, that’s because it is.
Part 3
Klopfenstein and Thomas (2005) found that AP students “…generally no more likely than non-AP students to return to school for a second year or to have higher first semester grades.” Moreover, they write that “close inspection of the [College Board] studies cited reveals that the existing evidence regarding the benefits of AP experience is questionable,” and “AP courses are not a necessary component of a rigorous curriculum.”
A 2006 MIT faculty report noted ““there is ‘a growing body of research’ that students who earn top AP scores and place out of institute introductory courses end up having ‘difficulty’ when taking the next course.” Two years prior, Harvard “conducted a study that found students who are allowed to skip introductory courses because they have passed a supposedly equivalent AP course do worse in subsequent courses than students who took the introductory courses at Harvard” (Seebach, 2004). Dartmouth found that high scores on AP psychology tests do NOT translate into college readiness for the next-level course.
AP has become “the juggernaut of American high school education,” but “ the research evidence on its value is minimal.” AP may work well for some students, especially those who are already “college-bound to begin with” (Klopfenstein and Thomas, 2010). But overall, AP is not “better.”
As Geiser (2007) notes, “systematic differences in student motivation, academic preparation, family background and high-school quality account for much of the observed difference in college outcomes between AP and non-AP students.” College Board-funded studies do not control well for these student characteristics. Klopfenstein and Thomas (2010) find that when these demographic characteristics are controlled for, the claims made for AP disappear.
So why are education reporters like Joy Removits, or Emily Richmond at the oxymoronic-named “The Educated Reporter,” not informing educators and the public?
Maybe these reporters should do their homework, and read the research and start paying attention to what it says.
If thinking critically is, in fact, “a crucial skill in an ever-changing economy,” then why do so many people – including Resmovits and David Coleman – so studiously avoid doing it?
A democracy properly speaking carries the idea that the perspectives of the people are valid.
We the people should practice critical thinking: exercise the myriad assumptions embedded in the Core and challenge them.
Yes, the Emperor has no clothes.
David Coleman is the demon in every English teacher’s nightmares.
The other day I received an email from Pearson promoting their PreK curriculum: OWL: Opening the World of Learning (2011). While the program may be good (I have not seen it to review it), the promotional materials on the website just set me off: “College and Career Readiness Starts in Pre-K”. That section heading infuriated me. I am so sick of hearing how we preschool teachers have to prepare kids for Common Core in kindergarten. All of my students need intensive support for their developmental delays in communication, motor, readiness, and/or behavior. I am more focused on assisting them in their play explorations, language and counting development. The LAST thing I need to be reminded of is that they are on the track to college and career readiness!
Good for you, Denise, for calling out this nonsense and for sticking with what’s good for your kids!
Denise, I think you are right to be cautious. I have experience with this curriculum and, although it has some strong points, it’s far from being my favorite PreK curriculum. (After implementing it for some time, we chose to supplement it with other curricula.) We used the 2005 edition, so some things will have changed, hopefully based on feedback. I will leave it to you to determine your own opinion, but let me just point out a few things that might not be so clear.
OWL is scripted. That may not be immediately evident, so look closely at the teacher’s guide.
In the video that’s on the Pearson homepage for this curriculum, the narrator says, “The OWL program is aligned to the national PreK standards.”
Pearson is claiming that there are “national” standards? Interesting, since everyone else says there is no such animal. And, as it happens, even states that won the Race to the Top – Early Learning Challenge still have their own standards for PreK –so far… (I’m guessing they are referring to the NAEYC standards for accredited programs –very different from the Common Core.)
This curriculum was implemented in many programs across the country involved in Early Reading First, which means a huge amount of data was collected over the years on its effectiveness. However, the publisher is still citing as evidence of “Research and Validity” a pilot summer program (in one city) implemented before that national data was gathered. They did add info about WestEd and Vanderbilt studies (one of the authors is at Vanderbilt), but very few programs were included in them. Curiously, I could find no listing at the What Works Clearinghouse for this curriculum…
Another issue we encountered was that this curriculum is geared for 4 year olds, but many PreK programs include 3 year olds in mixed age groups. So, unless things have changed considerably in this edition, there are concerns about developmental appropriateness for 3 year olds. Plus, in our experience, those 3 year olds were expected to complete the same exact units when they were 4 years old. So, check to see if there is a Scope and Sequence chart for teachers which covers two separate years for those ages.
Pearson thinks that even a caveman can teach a group of students to read and be “College and Career Ready” as long as the caveman either has access to a SMART Board or can read the scripted teacher’s edition and follows their scripted lessons to a T.
All students need to be taught within their zone of proximal development. This is not the same as having low expectations. It’s not only young children who will have developmentally inappropriate concepts thrust at them with the Common Core. Several years ago before I retired from teaching the deaf, I had to proctor the state assessment in English Language Arts for my 8th grade students. One student had emigrated from west Africa several years before. This particular student had had normal hearing until age 6, but then lost her hearing due to illness. She was not in any school program for about 6 years until she immigrated to the U.S. She was at first inappropriately placed in an ESL class, and finally came to the school for the deaf. She had developed limited literacy skills in English by the time she came to my class. One portion of the writing assessment had to do with ancient Rome. I was allowed to explain the instructions to her in sign language, but obviously could not give her any guidance. When I did the limited explaining I could do to give her a sense of the past in order for her to address the prompt, she looked at me and signed “camp … last summer.” What was the point of giving this student an assessment of this type? As her teacher, I could build her world knowledge base, but not in order for her to grapple with a task of this nature at this point in her schooling. Now with the Common Core and PARCC, these students and their teachers and their school will be considered failures, and their heroic progress despite incredible obstacles will be completely discounted.
How awful, Sheila! Such a moving and important story. How I wish that the clueless jerks who are forcing these tests upon everyone had some actual experience of the kind that you so movingly relate!
By simply attempting to rationalize the existing state standards, the CCSSO missed a historic opportunity to rethink what we mean by standard in English ed.
It grieves me that the standards committee that Mr. Coleman headed would undertake so heedlessly a task as consequential as the creation of national standards that would be linked to assessments with extremely high stakes for kids, teachers, and schools. I can’t forgive these people for that. They have done a lot of damage. They should have approached this task in as careful and in as scientific a spirit as one would approach, say, the design of an airplane.
The new standards are deeply flawed at their most fundamental level, at the level of their categorical conceptualization. They needed to rethink what we mean by “standard” in English ed. They needed to recognize that different types of learnings require very different types of descriptions of desired outcomes (which is what I suppose that they mean at the genus level by “standard”). And certainly they needed to rethink the whole notion of having a single set of mandatory standards for all students.
They did not approach this task with the high seriousness that it required. These standards were rushed into place. They are received, pedestrian, unimaginative, antiquated and unscientific, often extraordinarily very poorly worded, often ill-conceived, often quite random, full of glaring lacunae, often suggestive of demonstrably poor pedagogical and curricular practice, . . . I’ll stop there.
It is not that surprising that one arrogant Ivy Leaguer believes he should dictate to the whole country what constitutes a proper education for every child. What is surprising is that we are all trying to implement what he has dictated.
How can you teach critical thinking when we have let 6 mega corporations take over our media and public education?
The most influential man is Bill Gates. Coleman is the tool he used.
I can’t see conceding this point without better evidence. “Obviously, Coleman is an incredibly brilliant and well-educated man. He went to the very best universities. “
As a retired teacher who worked to get Obama elected the 1st time— I’m sorry . I should have worked for Hilary. Hindsight is 20/20. Joe