Amy Prime, a second grade teacher in Iowa, used to teach about dinosaurs as a unit that taught science, social studies, language, literacy, math, and the arts.
Now the dinosaurs are gone.
Killed again. This time by Common Core.
Amy writes:
“So I grieve for the lost dinosaurs. I grieve for the challenge and energy I got as a teacher from striving to get to know my kids and create lessons for them that would keep them engaged. I grieve my autonomy and my ability to use my professional judgment. Ask a teacher you know what she is grieving due to the demands of the Common Core. And then ask our leaders who are insisting upon the use and measurement of these standards in the current way if gaining a test score is worth losing the fun.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
First, let’s be clear that it’s not really the Common Core standards themselves that killed this unit, but instead a “testing is our only product” mentality coupled with authority to boss teachers around that got it done.
Second, the severe Common Core critics in Texas don’t like it because “it’s pro-Muslim, socialist, and pro-homosexual.” I suspect some of those critics in Texas would have difficulty pining for the return of a serious unit on dinosaurs, which probably conflicts with the version of Earth science those critics want to transplant from their cult churches to Texas curricula.
Ms. Prime’s beef is a good one — it’s not necessarily an indictment of Common Core standards, though, not so much as it is an indictment of the “daily flogging of teachers will continue until morale and test scores improve” philosophy that makes so many of us mourn for the profession.
And I confess to being torn; while I hear your complaints about Common Core, Dr. Ravitch, it’s better than the patently fascist programming going on down here in Texas now. Fascism with common core may be better than fascism without it.
Whatever happened to education?
I would like to know more about what curriculum Texas uses. What do they use?
Texas doesn’t use Common Core.
Big districts write their own curriculum. Some, like Dallas, do it rather haphazardly, but impose their own tests to be sure teachers have one more way to fail. (Well intended on the surface, and even most often by the people who are in charge of promulgating the stuff; but deadly, all the same.)
Smaller districts were left to the wolves. Sorry, left to the coyotes (very few, if any, wolves in Texas).
It’s a locally governed thing. Some districts don’t do much beyond the state-purchased textbooks and aids available there (which means the book publishers have a lot of sway . . . but that’s several volumes of complaints).
Years ago the state set up Regional Service Centers (RSCs), to aid districts in a region with preparing materials to meet state standards.
Several years ago, when the Texas State Board of Education had once again imposed new standards, but the legislature failed to appropriate any money to buy new books to meet the new standards, the RSCs formed a collaborative cooperative, called CSCOPE, to provide an aligned curriculum, scope and sequence, suggested reading materials, and exemplar lessons and other materials, written by other Texas teachers. CSCOPE also provided lesson planning tools on-line so teachers in even the smallest towns and districts could create their own, customized lesson plans, featuring materials available on CSCOPE, aligned with Texas standards, and coordinated with all state-approved textbooks.
This spring the Texas Right Wing/Tea Party/John Birch Society took aim at CSCOPE as “communist,” “pro-Islamist,” and talked right-wing politicians into conducting a McCarthy-style witch hunt to purge communists from the Texas teacher corps, and purge socialism from Texas curricula. This witchhunt got the support of the Texas Attorney General, Greg Abbott, as a tool to get support for his run for governor, and of the chair of the Texas State Senate Committee on Education, Sen. Dan Branch.
In the tussling, RSCs agreed to stop updating CSCOPE; in legal maneuvering around a silly claim that angry Texas parents were not allowed to get into CSCOPE and change the materials themselves, it was determined that since the system was set up, nominally, with tax monies, all the material is in the public domain — it has been preserved online in crude fashion.
Which is a long answer to saying, in 800 districts in Texas this fall, it’s unclear what curriculum is being used. Some are using old materials. Within hours of the decision to stop CSCOPE’s new products, Pearson blanketed Texas teachers and district officials with ads for their curriculum materials, which cost three to ten times as much, per student, as CSCOPE had.
Ironically, CSCOPE critics confused CSCOPE with CCSS, and they campaign against CCSS as socialist, marxist and pro-Islamist. CSCOPE had been a defense against Common Core, since Texas was one of two states to opt out of that program in the beginning. Ironic, because the materials Pearson is now selling is advertised as being Common Core-aligned.
That smoke drifting north and east out of Texas? Probably local pyres where witches — I’m sorry — third-grade teachers are being burned.
You can follow the CSCOPE saga at the blog of the Texas Freedom Network, and there is a good story in the Texas Observer about the entire dustup. I’ll post those links separately.
I’ve written very little on it at my blog, Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub, since I burst blood vessels when I have to deal with such insanity.
Texas Freedom Network’s Blog, The Insider, and its CSCOPE coverage.
Maybe best article at the Texas Observer, “Adios, Reality: Texas Culture Wars Take a Madcap Turn.”
If you do a search for “CSCOPE” at the Texas Observer, you can get most of the sorry story of witch hunt, vilification, litigation, and hatred of learning.
Okay, we’ll have to do this one at a time. Part 1:
Texas Freedom Network’s Blog, The Insider, and its CSCOPE coverage.
Maybe best article at the Texas Observer, “Adios, Reality: Texas Culture Wars Take a Madcap Turn.”
If you do a search for “CSCOPE” at the Texas Observer, you can get most of the sorry story of witch hunt, vilification, litigation, and hatred of learning.
We’ll have to do the sources one at a time. Part 1:
Texas Freedom Network’s Blog, The Insider, and its CSCOPE coverage.
Texas Observer in Part 2.
Sources, Part 2:
Maybe best article at the Texas Observer, “Adios, Reality: Texas Culture Wars Take a Madcap Turn.”
If you do a search for “CSCOPE” at the Texas Observer site, you can get most of the sorry story of witch hunt, vilification, litigation, and hatred of learning.
The Common Corporate Standards – developed by a testing entrepreneur who’s never taught a day in his life, and who currently oversees a multi-billion dollar corporation devoted to testing – are a vehicle for high stakes tests, nothing more.
I agree with Ed. The issue isn’t Common Core, but the short-sighted, knee-jerk reaction of her school or district leaders (whomever gave her new materials and told her to use them). Admittedly, with the advent of CCSS she might have found it necessary to make some revisions or adjustments to the unit on dinosaurs, but I would assume this is something she’s done over the years as she identified improvements or discovered new elements to use in lessons. However, there is nothing about CCSS that would require her to scrap this great unit altogether. It’s important to distinguish whether the problem is the Common Core standards themselves or the way they’re being implemented – in this case, it sounds like the latter. Therefore, the remedy isn’t the equally short-sighted call to “get rid of CCSS,” but to push back on the diktats of her administrators.
Clearly you have not read Dr. Ravitch’s book. The CCSS have zero research to back them up and is $$ making scam for The deformers who created it. 7 yr olds,love learning as about dinosaurs. It’s called motivating kids something that the CCSS has done away with. Worksheets, modules, scripted lessons and testing has taken over the classrooms leaving kids bored to death! Peter Cook and Ed Darrell, do YOUR research be forcing opening your mouth about educaTion reform.
I use a stegosaurus song I learned in second grade (when we did dinosaurs and made giant dinosaurs that filled up our pod) as a rhythm warm up in my elementary music classes. The children love it.
That makes me sad too.
In fact, I was just on the second grade hall reading writing that the students did (while I was waiting for a small group to practice their special song for the program) and I was touched at how dear the writing was (spelling errors and all). One child wrote about her “chiwawa” and another child wrote about how she dreamed the whole world was pink, with “nekluses and pink rings.” Another one wrote about a dragon who breathed fire and was a good “fiter” and took “tresur” to give to poor people so they could have more “mony.” It was dear. It was wonderful. It was exactly what children should be writing (with pictures they had drawn).
You can’t measure that.
Joanna Best: even if those ancient dead Greek guys aren’t as old or fun as dinosaurs, once in a while they can be helpful.
“Those that know, do. Those that understand, teach.” [Aristotle]
Thank you for understanding and teaching.
🙂
“Those that know, do. Those that understand, teach.” [Aristotle]
I like that much better than the modern version: Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.
Joanna, you prove that music teachers use everything that the Common Core suggests – a synthesis of information, instead of learning in a vacuum. But the reason we are successful is because we aren’t forced to TEST our kids in a vacuum. Instead they receive authentic assessments by way of performance, both in classes like yours and in concerts like mine at the high school level.
As you know music educators often take a beating, but maybe all the policy makers out there should look at our model for a change!!
Reblogged this on Crazy Crawfish's Blog and commented:
This is the reality behind the fiction John White and Bobby Jindal try to pass off as Common Core freedom. You can teach whatever you want, however you want to, as long as it is “this” book and taught the way we say. Common Core Curriculum is more than just tellling students what they need to learn, and when they need to learn it. If you’ve examined the math curriculum it also dictates how students have to learn to do math problems using a variety of methods to derive the same answer. How exactly is that not defining a curriculum? The explained difference is so minute as to be the very definition of “splitting hairs” . The reality means no splitting necessary or even possible.
My cousin pulled his daughter out of public school for that very reason. He told me he was helping her with her math and she started crying and said if she didn’t do it a certain way she would get in trouble. He told me about it, I told him to google Common Core; he did and he put her in private school.
Is Common Core even available yet in Louisiana?
got hours and hours of stuff on it last year. Must teach it this year.
Every teacher I know complains of this. One was telling me just yesterday about how she has had to cut from her classes the most effective thing that she did–novel read-alouds that were part of coherent units that she had developed on some specific topics–because she now has to do CCSS skills lessons based on a Literacy Design Collaborative format.
I loved the post you referenced. As a child the first words I needed to learn how to pronounce were Dinosaur names. I cannot imagine removing Dinosaurs from the curriculum. Children love them and want to learn and remember everything about them. A wonderful way to teach children about so many things.
That’s such a shame. I would have loved to participate in that lesson plan as an eight year old child (maybe even now). I guess I understand the desire to have some sort of framework in place as far as educational standards, but there certainly should be a cost benefit analysis. Even though the CC standards do not specify curriculum, it sounds like the administrators at some schools are removing autonomy from the teachers in order to meet the standards. As this agenda moves forward, we will continue to see the creativity of the teachers suffer (as well as the quality of education).
This article perpetuates misinformation. I haven’t taken the time to read each of the replies already here, but I gotta hope someone agrees with me. It’s not that I agree or disagree with the contents of the CCSS, it’s that when all is said and done, I teach kids not content. Stop pouring so much of your energy into hating the Common Core (or the way it’s being implemented, or however you want to put it), and direct your passion toward doingwhat’s best for kids with the skills and resources you have.
The very people who are fighting the CCSS are fighting for the students. Our children’s educaTion and childhood is being robbed. Kids should not be taught developmentally inappropriate curriculum and have to take test after test. Part of being a teacher is advocating for your students. 29,000 BADASS teachers are doing just that! We are fighting the high stakes testing that is linked to the CCSS and teas her evaluations. Step out of the box. Do some research. I think you will be shocked at what is behind this so called reform.
In my 72 years, 50 in education, I have always found kids (my long distant self included) to be fascinated by dinosaurs.
Intended or unintended this is a sad consequence of present realities. The only thing that has made me sadder was a “Teacher of the Year” who lamented that there was no more time for her kindergarteners to do finger painting!
As a retired Superintendent I need to note that this loss of the 2nd grade dinosaur unit COULD be the result of “The Monarch Butterfly” syndrome… a phenomenon whereby every elementary grade level teaches about Monarch butterflies but no grade level includes physical science or chemistry. The syndrome exists in social studies as well where elementary teachers have units on Columbus and the early explorers, on Pilgrims sharing Thanksgiving with Native Americans, and on Presidents from Washington to Lincoln… but students seldom learn about anything after the Civil War… and when it comes to geography Asia and Africa invariably get short shrift. When the elementary curriculum is sequenced carefully it invariably means some teacher or group of teachers at some grade level will be asked to give up a unit they love to teach…
Please know that in writing this I am NOT defending the way the common core was put together but rather pointing out that in my experience any effort to introduce a coherent K-8 curriculum leads to lots of give and take… and a district that fails to take the time to have teachers work together to create a coherent K-8 curriculum will have students who know a lot about Monarch butterflies but may not know anything about the fundamentals of physics and chemistry.
Setting up an aligned curriculum probably doesn’t work well when it squeezes out of the education all the education, and fun of learning.
Monarch butterflies? Still a passion of mine. It was exactly that sort of unit in elementary school that gave me a passion for science. Fundamentals of chemistry and physics? What could be more fundamental than how life works?
I understand giving up a few things; but what I see and hear is a greater trend to giving up on education, in return for learning the test. And that’s dangerous.
I invite you to review your readings of Dick Feynman, especially his chapter on teaching physics in Brazil. Feynman’s interest in physics started with his interest in radios and how to fix them; his interest in play, specifically how Chinese acrobats spin plates, and how they wobble, led to his Nobel Prize.
Called to teach in Brazil, Feynman was astonished at how hard Brazilian college students studied, how they applied themselves to learning the formulas and working problems. But he was puzzled at their lack of research, or even interest in research.
One day, a day he hated to be in class because it was so nice in Rio, he went over reflection and refraction of light. Listening to one student explain how to work the problem, Feynman gazed out at the Atlantic off of the beach; and then Feynman asked the student to apply the formula to the reflections of sunlight off of the waves, the dancing lights that Brazilians or anyone familiar with Rio, or the ocean, falls in love with. The student was confused. The whole class was confused. Why was Feynman suddenly talking about the ocean and sunlight? It wasn’t in the book.
Feynman was struck by the truth: Rote learning of the fundamentals had left these students, after 14 or 15 years of education, unable to apply their learning to life, to sunlight reflecting and refracting off of waves.
Of what use is understanding a fundamental of science, if unconnected to anything real?
My on-line friend Brian Switek recently published a book, one we all might enjoy, but whose creation we should pay particular attention to: My Beloved Brontosaurus: On the Road with Old Bones, New Science, and Our Favorite Dinosaurs. He’ll be the first to tell you how his interest in science, and explaining science, grew out of his childhood fascination with dinosaurs. If you scratch most great academics, they’ll have a similar story: Stephen Jay Gould, Stephen Ambrose, Charles Darwin, Thomas Jefferson . . .
If we don’t teach, first, the love of learning, learning will always be a chore. And if we don’t teach what the kids find interesting, and what they want to learn, they will regard education as keeping them from what they want to do. And they will grow to hate it.
The Excellence in Education Commission didn’t call for tests. They called for increasing teacher pay to attract the best and brightest to the profession, people whose love for learning would be infectious, and who would then pass that to students.
It was good enough for Ronald Reagan; on this one issue, we should pay careful attention to what Reagan backed, and why.
Align the curriculum. Help us find ways to beef up missed segments (skipping the Civil War? in the South, maybe — not anywhere Lincoln was taught as a hero). But don’t tell us that what we know works, no longer works. That exposes a program right away as just one more flavor of the month, a BOHICA program designed to push the best and brightest out of the classroom, in favor of the regimented, too-young-to-know-better, and cheap. That’s not where we should be heading.
When he wanted to educate his son to be a ruler, a leader of men and nations, Phillip II of Macedon did not find someone to set up the best technology and make young Alexander do basics of chemistry and physics on a slate. He hired the best teacher he could find, and sat the two together. If it was good enough for Alexander the Great, please do not tell me I must deprive these poverty-struck children in my classes of the same advantages.
You want students to know the fundamentals of chemistry, physics and biology in elementary grades? There can be no better place to start, than with monarch butterflies, and dinosaurs.
If the best parts of learning must be sacrificed for Common Core alignment, Common Core is the wrong path.
Great article. I like the second to last paragraph, because I believe learning works best when it is fun. The example from the movie Big and the sentiment was rignt to the point.
Thank goodness for choice so parents who come across a school like this can switch to a charter\open enroll in another district\use a private school voucher to enroll their child in a school that is not so short sighted. At least in Arizona, strong private and charter schools are ignoring Common Core as their standards far exceed what even these supposedly ‘rigorous and internationally benchmarked’ standards propose.
School administrators and governing boards who allow\promote this are lousy educators who should be removed. Lets hope the teachers in this district stand up and get this changed. In the mean time, parents who have a choice should exercise it.
Vouchers dont work – look at the studies coming out of the US and Chile….
Abdicating to charters – which, legally, are private schools, or so judges have determined on several occasions – and to other private schools – doesn’t solve the problem either – it’s what the ed deformers want you to do and will kill public education faster……..
Adopting CCSS is not a choice that individual schools make. These are state decisions driven in many cases by federal RTTT funding. It is interesting that the same people who force these standards on public schools give charters a pass. I would like to see how many who favor the expansion of charters also push CCSS in public schools. I wonder how many have invested in charters or receive campaign funding from the charter lobby. Has anyone seen the international benchmarks yet?
Here’s my question: If charter and private schools are so coveted by the educrats, and the private and charter schools don’t have to follow, or adapt the CCSS, why do public schools have to? It’s really that simple. Why are they trying to destroy REAL learning by making school so flipping BORING that the students become disengaged? I would be willing to give up some very interesting units to provide the scope and sequence needed to assure new units on each grade level, if we would just get some autonomy back. I am so glad my own children are grown. It is heartbreaking to give up more and more authentic learning through fun, exciting science and social studies units. Politicians need to get out of our business. They have already proven they can’t do anything right. I hope people wake up and realize that this country has been systematically divided. That way it can be conquered. Revolutions start when people have lived well for a while, and then it is taken away. Sound familiar? Send them ALL packing. Diane…….please run for something, PLEASE.
It all falls under Obamas RACE TO THE TOP education policy. He promised millions to districts that bought into the CCSS and APPR teacher evaluation system. What districts didn’t know was how little $$$ the RACE TO THE TOP actually would bring in and how much extra $$ it would cost to the implement this CCSS, evaluate teachers and do all the busy work associated with the so called reform.
We were told years ago to let go of any ‘pet projects’ we had. And trust me they were serious and verified- to determine if we indeed had stopped doing them. So we tried hard with any unit to incorporate the standards into our work. I remember defending some of our projects: the ones that created lasting memories, developed traditions at our school and generated enthusiasm with our students. This was before Common Core.
Has the Common Core replaced the dinosaurs with a field trip to:
http://creationmuseum.org/
Where kids can learn how dinosaurs and cavemen lived together a few thousand years ago!
At our school, we use the Common Core Standards as a design and planning tool. I work with a teacher who uses the Common Core Standards as a sort of checklist to help her keep track of the skills she is teaching our students while the class explores fun stories, lots of different math games, and themed units on such topics as dinosaurs.
The anguish felt by many of the commentors, above is palpable, but I don’t understand HOW the STANDARDS are causing that anguish. Is it because administrators are overmanaging and actively removing such topics as dinosaurs? I ask, because the Common Core itself certainly doesn’t do that.
FROM NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND to COMMON CORE STATE STNDARDS INITIATIVE
BY CONN CARROLL | SEPTEMBER 19, 2013
President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind education law was the largest expansion of federal involvement in elementary education since President Johnson’s Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965.
And the Bush measure was unpopular from day one.
Conservatives never liked the federal government’s encroachment into what they viewed as something best left to the states.
Liberals never liked the law’s reliance on standardized testing, which education unions hate because it potentially provides a non-subjective metric for judging the performance of teachers and administrators.
And just about everybody hated the millions of hours of additional paperwork the law inflicted on school administrators.
NCLB required all public schools to establish Adequate Yearly Progress standards and administer statewide standardized tests to make sure those standards were being met.
Each year, a higher and higher percentage of each school district’s students had to meet the AYP. So by 2014, 100 percent of all students had to meet each state’s standards for reading and math.
If any school failed to make the statutorily defined standard for two years in a row, then the students at that school would be given an option to transfer to a different school.
If a school continued to fall short of its AYP, it could eventually be closed or turned into a private school. Each year’s failure would bring more and more paperwork and reporting requirements as well.
Congress began trying to change the law in 2007, but Republicans (who want less federal interference in local public schools) could never agree with Democrats (who want more federal interference in local public schools) on how best to rewrite it.
After President Obama was elected in 2008, attention switched from NCLB to Obama’s Race to the Top initiative, which received $4.35 billion in funding under the 2009 economic stimulus.
Where NCLB sought to control schools by cutting off funding, RTTT sought to control them by bribing them with federal grants. Schools that adopted federal Common Core curriculum standards, lifted caps on charter schools and adopted union-approved teacher performance reviews were most likely to be beneficiaries of Obama’s largesse.
But by 2011, Obama’s RTTT-stimulus honey pot had run dry. And more and more school districts were hitting the upper limits of how many of their students they could get to meet their state’s standards.
States were faced with a tough choice: They could either lower their standards so more kids would pass or let the federal government label more of their schools as “failed” under NCLB.
But instead of going to Congress to get NCLB changed, Obama decided to just unilaterally rewrite the law.
On Aug. 5, 2011, Education Secretary Arne Duncan announced he was inviting states to apply for waivers from NCLB, but only if those states could satisfy new criteria. Those criteria just happened to be very similar to Obama’s since-expired RTTT plan.
“The reforms the administration seeks as a condition of granting waivers are the same that it put forward in its Blueprint for reauthorizing NCLB, and that it advanced in its Race to the Top competition,” Brookings Institution Director for Education Policy Russ Whitehurst wrote at the time.
“It is one thing for an administration to grant waivers to states to respond to unrealistic conditions on the ground or to allow experimentation and innovation,” Whitehurst continued.
“It is quite another thing to grant state waivers conditional on compliance with a particular reform agenda that is dramatically different from existing law. The NCLB waiver authority does not grant the secretary of education the right to impose any conditions he considers appropriate on states seeking waivers, nor is there any history of such a wholesale executive branch rewrite of federal law through use of the waiver authority.”
But that is exactly what Obama and Duncan did. To date, 44 states have applied for NCLB waivers from the Obama administration and 34 have been granted. And those grants were not easily obtained.
“There is a huge gap between what the states asked for and what they ended up with,” Michael Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute told The Washington Post.
The House of Representatives has since passed a law changing many of NCLB’s draconian federal requirements. But the Senate has not brought the bill for a vote on the Senate floor and Obama has shown no interest in pressuring them to do so.
And why should he? If Obama can rewrite the nation’s education laws without Congress and get away with it, why would he ever ask their opinion on the subject again?
http://www.killcommoncore.com