Mercedes Schneider follows an interesting story.
How did it happen that “the states” agreed to create common standards?
What was the federal role?
Who led this effort?
How did it work?
Was it really led by the states?
How did it happen that the United States has national standards that so few people are aware of?
If this a good thing?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Excellent questions.
How and by whom it was the Common Core created?
This has already been discussed.
This was an unprecedented circumvention of democratic-republican representative process:
I addressed at The Common Core and Gates’ Education Commercialization Complex
http://nyceye.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-common-core-and-gates-education.html
In the introductory section I wrote:
In the course of sifting through the facts from the myths, we see a cloaked political process, whereby a billionaire has charted educational policy. Yes, we have seen corporate prerogatives in governmental policy making in the past. But what is so disturbing is how in the Common Core creation process occurred, and in education policy in too many instances as the city and state level across the country, private power has been exerted over public policy making in a dangerously unprecedented exercise of decision making by private organizations –cast by government collaborators as doing a public service– supplanting traditional institutions, decision-making that in the past if with the intruding hand by corporate interests (as the corporatist model of public policy formulation) was at least manipulating public institutions. In Common Core in the present (Bill) Gatesean era private interests entirely evade public institutional channels altogether and function parallel to the manner in which policy has traditionally developed. The veneer of public collaboration is tagged on as a selling point to affix a gloss of representation.
How did the states get conned into this program? The Obama caught them at the vulnerable moment of the crest of the 2008-2009 economic crisis, when many state governments would do anything to get extra federal dollars. Any close reading of the Race to the Top federal awards to states conditions would yield this assessment.
When we allow the outright circumvention of democratic-republican process in one area such as this, we set the precedence for further degradation of the political process, as in NYSED Comm. John King’s brazen contempt for the legitimacy of a democratic voice.
Pitifully, we allow union leaders such as Dennis Van Roekel, Randi Weingarten and Michael Mulgrew to countenance the steam-rolling of the Common Core upon us, in our name.
Superb, Mercedes. Simply superb. Thank you for doing the homework that NOT A SINGLE EDUCATION JOURNALIST IN THE UNITED STATES has bothered to do. Outstanding.
Second your first thought, Robert! And your second!! And third!!
And be these juggling fiends no more believed,
That palter with us in a double sense.
This Common Core expose is one of the most important investigative piece of writing I’ve read recently, and there have been many good ones. Hopefully, all of us at the Illinois Federation of Teachers convention this coming weekend will be able to read it, think about it, and then begin to work on policy to challenge this stuff. Sadly, the AFT and others have signed on to it, so the battles will be more arduous.
What bothers me is that so many professional organizations have bought into this AWFULNESS.
Re: CCSS-Here was another example where a few had the opportunity to make an important decision for the many. Great questions asked by Mercedes. We always talk about the value of buying in for our teachers…I guess it only applies elsewhere.
“the value of buying in for our teachers”
There is no value. Who gives a flying flip what the teachers think, know, believe to be best for the students. The edudeformer GODS have spoken!
May those GODS fall into the realm of mythology sooner rather than later.
If they do, we’d never know. Very few of the CCSS creators have stood up to take the blame or “credit.” They wrote, they published, they left, they hide. If it was such a great document, where is all the posturing by the creators? Surely they can’t be wiser than us and humble at the same time?
I’ve never understood why everyone just accepted at a certain point that Coleman (and Pimentel) were “the authors” of the ELA standards. Basically you have a choice of believing that the initial group who we were told was writing the standards was a lie, or you can believe it is a lie that Coleman and Pimentel wrote them. It seems to me that what happened was that someone decided it was better to act like this impressive-seeming dude nobody had ever heard of did it instead of a committee of people from testing companies. I’ve never seen a shred of evidence one way or another indicating who actually wrote the standards, and I think we’ll never know.
One thing that would test it post hoc is if ANYONE had EVER asked David Coleman for his personal rationale was for some of the odder choices in the standards, e.g., what exactly ARE the important 18th century works of American literature? Why are they more important than mid- or late- 20th century American literature?
By the way, the initial drafts of the ELA standards were extensively benchmarked. See http://web.archive.org/web/20090924225541/http://www.corestandards.org/Standards/index.htm In fact, they did a good job of including links to the relevant international standards. It was a lot of work!
BUT, if you actually read the other standards, it was clear how DIFFERENT they all were from the CC. For example, see http://www.tuttlesvc.org/2010/03/many-facets-of-reading-standard-7.html
Not surprisingly, all that has been disappeared, but you can at least see the references on the Internet Archives link above.
Tom,
Can you identify the districts where they were field-tested? What were the results?
Hi Diane,
Benchmarked, not tested. Compared to equivalent standards in the states and other countries.
Achieve and friends are more interested in benchmarking in math and science, since that is relatively clear cut. In what grade do you teach dividing fractions? ELA is more vague, of course. Also, the CCSS team doesn’t like the approaches taken by high performing countries in ELA.
Tom, I hardly think that I am alone in which to see, in line-item fashion, the benchmarking of specific standards and specific approaches to meeting those standards.
Given all the farces we have witness, the Pineapple and the Hare, the Mesopotamia study for 1st graders, the critical, synthetic essays asked of kindergarteners … just where are these states of countries that are the benchmark models?
make that “wishing to see …”
Re the math standards and international benchmarks, you’re trying to tell us that top performers such as Korea are making kids write paragraphs talking about the math instead of actually doing it?
–or that they are dropping a year of Algebra requirements as Zimba has conceded (when cornered) that the math does?
Saandra Stotsky repeatedly asked for research evidence connected to CCSS and was ignored.
Makes one believe something noteworthy regarding the results was problematic.
Stotsky has indeed asked for the research evidence. And yes…she was ignored. After all, she is just a SCHOLAR. Scholars are ignored for they have the evidence and research.
The Fordham Foundation compares the implementation of the Common Core to “building a plane in midair.” Well, when people in the aerospace industry build a plan, they subject it to rigorous Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA). Where was the FMEA for CCSS? And where was the professional vetting? Where was the public discussion and debate? The CCSS in ELA are extraordinarily amateurish. IF they had been subjected to professional vetting, they would not have survived in ANYTHING like their current form. If someone had handed David Coleman and Susan Pimentel a copy of the 1858 Gray’s Anatomy and sent them to the woods in Vermont to write new standards for the medical profession, it is likely that they would have come up with standards that exactly parallel the new ELA standards in their backwardness and lack of instantiation of basic understandings of language acquisition.
But there was not testing and no testing. Yes, Achieve passed these “standards” around inside its echo chamber. But that’s about it.
The preparation of these standards [sic] was not approached with anything like the high seriousness that a task of such magnitude and consequence required. The CCSS in ELA are an embarrassment.
Based on no vetting and no testing, these people decidced to allow a couple of amateurs to overrule every teacher, every curriculum coordinator, and every curriculum developer in the nation with regard to what the outcomes to be measured in ELA would be and to bring to a screeching halt the innovation that comes from having voluntary, competing standards.
excuse the typos
There was not testing and no vetting.
Really? Some unknown entity or entities who do or do not have the knowledge and expertise, who are or are not educators, who do or do not use research as a basis for their program, are or are not (are) being paid a s…ful of cash to lead the next generation into educational nirvana, all in the name (or not) of creating non-tested standards for children around the country. If they did it right than they would have tested these standards on smaller groups of children, but of course, folks would then know if they are or are not useful, appropriate (you put and adjective here).
Sadly, it is no surprise and we again go like sheep to the slaughter. Shame on the groups that have accepted the common core without question.
Great post by Mercedes. Another sign of our growing corporatism.
And the list keeps growing, identifying complicit institutions and individuals who decades ago represented something higher and better.
Stanford
Lesley College
Teacher’s College
EDC
Who refused on principle to play at the Bunco Table? Did Bank Street turn and walk away? How about the University of Chicago? Did the International Reading Association say “No Thanks”? We are now digging and sorting to discover who and what is left in case there is an opportunity to rebuild the Free USA Public School System.
Writing standards is a long and difficult process. In Wisconsin we were in the process of rewriting our state standards when the Common Core came along. When it was clear that they were of high quality and not that different from what we would have created, it was much smoother to adopt them than to continue the writing process.
Of high quality? The CCSS in ELA appear to me to have been written by amateurs with no familiarity whatsoever with the sciences of language acquisition and very little knowledge of best practices in the teaching of English. They are woefully misconceived and will go a lot of damage.
Corey, I agree that the new math standards are generally better than the state standards that they replaced. There was remarkable uniformity in those state standards to begin with because they were largely modeled on the NCTM standards. I think that the CCSS team did a good job of rationalizing those state standards and made some significant improvements in coherence of the topics covered. I have issues with the entire approach taken in math at the early grades (I’m with Paul Lockhart there), but I won’t go into those here because my ideas about early math instruction would require very radical changes in how we approach the whole business of teaching math to kids. Look around you. Most American adults are innumerate, even though they have been taught math via this fairly uniform approach for decades now. A recent study found that 63 percent of U.S. adults could not calculate a 10 percent tip even though all they had to do was move the decimal point! Why? Because most people try to forget their awful experiences in math class as soon as they can. I think that in “A Mathematician’s Lament,” Lockhart nails the explanation for that. But, at any rate, the CCSS in math are not an embarrassment. The people who put these together can be proud of a job well done. If those standards were voluntary, not compulsory, they would be a worthy contribution to discussion and debate of U.S. educational policy and practice.
The CCSS in ELA are and embarrassment. These are just abysmally conceived. I have a litmus test for whether anyone knows much about the teaching of English: Does he or she support the implementation of these backward ELA standards? They were misconceived at the most fundamental level–at the level of the catgorical definitions of what measurable outcomes should look like in the various domains that they cover given what we actually know, scientifically, about how kids learn to read, write, speak, listen, and think. Don Marquis ends his poem “The Old Trouper” with the line “come, my dear, both of our professions are being ruined by amateurs.” I think of the CCSS in ELA, and I think of that line. It is shocking to me that these backward ELA “standards” have not been met with a resounding chorus of derision from folks who actually know about matters like how kids acquire the grammar of a language, how they learn vocabulary, and so on.
Let me pose a few questions: How many U.S. adults–products of our system–enjoy mathematics? How many read books dealing with topics in mathematics? How many do math recreationally? Why do publishers of popular nonfiction think of having a few formulas in the text as a certain way to kill sales?
The biggest lesson of every lesson that we teach is the love or hatred of the subject being taught. Most adults detest and fear math because we have taught them to. It’s not inevitable that this should be so. What we are doing, at present, is attempting to have kids deal with highly abstract materials before they are, most of them, ready, cognitively, to do so. It’s a though we were asking them to turn a tiny Phillips screw with a butter knife. No wonder they are frustrated and bored. They are moving meaningless symbols around. I strongly suspect that if we delayed formal math instruction until much later in children’s development and replaced what we are doing in the early grades with lots of play designed to develop fluid intelligence–pattern recognition activities and games, for example, that kids later on would learn more in a year than they now do in twelve years. Instead, what we are MOSTLY teaching in elementary math is a) that math is no fun, and b) some few are capable of it.
I do not mean to take anything away from the many brilliant, creative elementary school math teachers and curriculum developers. But I think that we have the timing all wrong. Math proper should be the sanctum that kids enter when they were ready to do so–the thing that they are prepared for and look forward to–the initiation into the mysteries proper after a great deal of really exciting preparation for those.
In foreign language instruction, we have it exactly backward too, because we are not attending to what science is telling us. Kids have innate mechanisms for intuiting syntactic and semantic structures form their ambient linguistic environments. Those don’t work very well, in most people, after about age 14. After that, explicit learning has to play a role. But instead of taking advantage of the machine in kids’ heads for learning language at early ages, we delay teaching of foreign languages until the very age at which the cognitive mechanism for that learning stops, for reasons we don’t yet understand, not working with the astonishing efficiency that it did.
From Bill McCallum, who led the math CCSS team:
CCSSO and NGA appointed teachers to the original Work Team, on recommendation of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association. There are 5 practicing teachers in this list, plus many other formerly practicing teachers.
Lead writers met repeatedly with teams assembled by AFT and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM). AFT in particular assembled teams of practicing teachers by grade band to come in on a weekend and meet with us. Their feedback was detailed, intensive, and influential.
The standards went out for two or three rounds of review to the 48 states who had signed on to the initiative. These states were really our clients, and we paid close attention to their comments. Many states assembled teams of teachers to review our work (for example, I know that Arizona did something similar to AFT, at least twice).
As for public comment, a public draft was released in March 2010. It attracted about 10,000 comments. These were compiled into a spreadsheet of actionable comments by Grade, and I personally went through the whole thing. This led to further substantial changes in the standards before they were released in June.
@ Corey: Don’t you consult for McGraw-Hill’s Key Curriculum?
And isn’t KCP Technologies “the software research and development affiliate of Key Curriculum?”
And didn’t KCP recently note that:
“In August 2011, we made the strategic decision to sell our basal textbooks in order to re-focus our energy and expertise on the rapidly growing frontier of digital mathematics learning tools. To support those who joined us on this new digital adventure, we expanded our extensive professional development programs around our technology and the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics.”
“In August 2012, Key joined forces with McGraw-Hill Education to further expand our reach in the market and the investment in our technology. McGraw-Hill’s strong presence in the STEM disciplines.”
So, is it fair to say you have a vested interest here?
I have no vested interest in M-H or Key Curriculum. I have done work for them as well as other publishing companies, but that hardly gives me any stake in the company. I’m a high school teacher making a little money on the side working on textbooks and professional development.
Key Curriculum Press was the best mathematics publishing company. Period. But they sold their textbooks because they were not selling enough to make them profitable. Quality does not sell books, familiarity does. They sold the books to Kendall-Hunt and kept Geometer’s Sketchpad, Fathom, and Tinkerplots – three excellent software programs that have transformed teaching of mathematics. Then they were purchased by M-H. Nobody from Key Curriculum Press, other than the software folks, are with M-H anymore.
I should also point out that I have been active in the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, the Wisconsin Mathematics Council, and the AP Statistics community. My interest is in good educational practices. I think the Common Core is in line with that. I think the high stakes testing and accountability movement is not.
And, to be clear, the comments I posted were from Bill McCallum’s answer to my questions. I was not involved in the standards process.
I’m curious. You say you’re interested in “good educational practices.” A National Research Council report on AP courses and tests found them to be a “mile wide and an inch deep” and inconsistent with research-based principles of learning. Other research over the last decade show that AP is more hype than reality.
For instance, 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.”
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.”
In The ToolBox Revisited (2006), Clifford Adelman finds that “Advanced Placement has almost no bearing on entering postsecondary education,” and when examining and statistically quantifying the factors that relate to bachelor’s degree completion, Advanced Placement does NOT “reach the threshold level of significance.”
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 (even the College Board concedes that “interest and motivation” are keys to “success in any course”). Klopfenstein and Thomas (2010) find that when these demographic characteristics are controlled for, the claims made for AP disappear.
But I’ll guess that you will defend AP as “good practice.”
I can’t speak about AP in general. I teach AP Statistics and it is a thorough and rigorous curriculum. So I defend AP Statistics as good practice. I can’t speak knowledgeably about any other courses.
I think there’s something to that charge, and it’s a symptom of how AP works. To be accepted by a college, a course must cover what is in that college’s course. To be accepted by a lot of colleges/universities, then, the course must necessarily cover what’s in any of those college/university courses. That makes them pretty wide.
But I can tell you that the AP Statistics course is pretty deep, too. Take a look at a typical AP Statistics exam. Take it to a college statistics instructor and ask if their students, after the intro stat course, could pass it.
Other than that, none of your criticisms actually point to any weakness in the course itself. Only their use as predictors of other things.
@ Corey: It’s not MY criticisms of AP…it’s what research says about AP. And the research is pretty doggone clear: AP is far more myth than reality. By the way, did you not see what the NRC said about AP courses and tests?….they are a mile wide and an inch deep, and they don’t comport with research-based principles of learning. Those go to the very core of what you said you were interested in….”good educational practices.”
Again, I can’t speak about anything other an AP Statistics. But I do think AP Statistics does very well based on my experience. I don’t think the ‘mile wide, inch deep’ description is accurate for AP Statistics. It may very well apply to many other programs.
And I meant the criticisms you brought up, not that they were your words. I take some issue with the idea that, because AP courses don’t predict future success, that it means the course is not worthwhile. So I’m not sure what you mean by ‘more myth than reality.’ AP courses exist. They are a reality. Have people put some unreasonable expectations on them? Maybe those expectations are the problem.
I can also state that, anecdotally, I get one or two e-mails each year from past students, generally students who didn’t do all that well in my AP Statistics course. They tell me how they’ve had to take the course in college because they didn’t take or didn’t pass the AP Exam, and how they are now at the top of their class. The preparation they received in my AP course has made the course in college easy for them, even as they watch their classmates struggle mightily with the course. So, yeah. I will defend my course and good practice.
Part 1
I’ve said this multiple times here, and elsewhere: The Common Core is largely the work of – as Mercedes Schneider points out – three main groups, “Achieve, ACT, and College Board.” Toss in the Education Trust. All of these groups are tied tightly to corporate-style “reform.”
Achieve, Inc.’s board includes Louis Gertner, who’s bad-mouthed public education for decades. It also includes Tennessee Republican governor Bill Haslam, a pro-life, anti-gay, corporate friendly politician. The board also includes Prudential executive (and former big banker) Mark Grier (Prudential has been fined multiple times for deceptive sales practices and improper trading), and Intel CEO Craig Barrett (who keeps repeating the STEM “crisis” myth). Intel has laid off thousands of workers and is masterful and aggressive at avoiding tax payments and seeking subsidization, much like Boeing, and Microsoft, and GE, and IBM, and Chevron, and AT & T. These are some of the biggest tax cheaters in the country. There’s a reason that Achieve’s main publications never mention democratic citizenship as a mission of public education.
Achieve’s funders include – not surprisingly – Boeing, Intel, GE, IBM, Chevron, Microsoft, Prudential (and State Farm, MetLife and other insurance companies), and the Gates Foundation. The Education Trust is funded by MetLife, State Farm, IBM, and by the Broad, Gates and Walton Foundations, among others.
The “leaders” at the College Board include president David Coleman, who was instrumental in writing the Common Core standards, and who was a former McKinsey consultant and treasurer of disgraced former DC chancellor Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst. It includes policy chief Stefanie Sanford, former policy director for Texas Governor Rick Perry and “director of advocacy” for the Gates Foundation. It includes assessment chief Cyndie Schmeiser, who is now in charge of the PSAT, SAT, and AccuPlacer (worthless academic measures), and who was previously the chief operating officer at ACT. And it includes Amy Wilkins, formerly of the Education Trust.
So, what does the ACT do? Not much. For example, the authors of a study in Ohio found the ACT has minimal predictive power. The researchers found 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.
What the researchers said about about the ACT in their concluding remarks was telling:
“…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 added:
“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.”
In other words, the ACT is mostly a sham, many college administrators likely know it, but they are “incentivized” to play along with “the game.”
I think you are mixing up two documents here, the end-of-high-school expectations produced in summer 2009, and the standards themselves, produced in 2009-10. If you google “NGA press releases”, then search the press releases on “Common Core”, then read those in chronological order, you will get the bare bones of the story, including the composition of the various teams and the various organizations involved.
huh? what two documents are mixed up? in my comment (part 1) above, the only document explicitlyl mentioned is a study in Ohio on the ACT.
Part 2
And what about the SAT? Princeton Review (a test-prep company) founder John Katzman says it’s ” a scam…It has never measured anything… does it measure intelligence? No. Does it predict college grades? No. Does it tell you how much you learned in high school? No. Does it predict life happiness or life success in any measure? No. It’s measuring nothing.” Nicholas Lemann, author of “The Big Test” (the SAT) says ““The test has been, you know, fetishized. This whole culture and frenzy and mythology has been built around SATs…the level of obsession over these tests is way out of proportion to what they actually measure… ETS, the maker of test, they don’t actively encourage the obsession, but they don’t actively discourage it either. Because they do sort of profit from it…every time somebody takes an SAT, it’s money to the ETS and the College Board. ”
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.” Matthew Quirk reported this 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.”
So, the very same groups who seek to “reform” American public schooling so that no child is left behind, are selling snake oil that will –– already does –– deny millions of kids a decent education. They perpetuate a corrupted system marginalizes workers and citizens, that off-shores millions of jobs, that creates enormous inequities in income and wealth through transfers of money from public treasuries to private coffers, and they tell us that the solution lies in better teachers, more “rigorous” standards, and “accountability.”
Recently, the National School Boards Association, National Association of Elementary School Principals, National Association of Secondary School Principles, and the American Association of School Administrators issued a joint statement supporting the Common Core, but delaying its massive testing requirements. That statement made clear that public education in the United States is in deeper trouble than many thought. The problem is not just the corporate “reformers” and their allies, and it’s not only a matter of pedagogy or teaching personnel, or curriculum. It’s a very serious lack of leadership in the field.
The “leadership” groups’ statement on the Common Core standards shows that these “leaders” just don’t get it. They know no more about the Common Core than they did about No Child Left Behind. They say that the Common Core “tests are necessary” for “use in teacher and principal evaluation.” After more than a decade of tests and “data-driven” instruction and evaluation, we need even MORE of it? Are they serious? This is like saying the economy needs more tax cuts for corporations and the rich to “stimulate” job creation. Or like a doctor saying he needs to bleed more “bad blood” from the patient in order to cure him.
A former assistant secretary of education in the Bush administration said that NCLB was really a “Trojan horse…a way to expose the failure of public education…to blow it up a bit.” Is the Common Core really so different?
Unless and until public school educators divorce themselves from the ACT (and its test) and the College Board, and its plethora of badly flawed products –– from the PSAT and SAT, to AccuPlacer and the Advanced Placement program –– corporate-style “reform” will march steadily ahead.
In June 2013, Senator Rubio (R) Fla. sent a letter to Sec. Duncan questioning the constitutionality of the RTTT waivers with the condition of accepting the Common Core standards. I have read that Florida has withdrawn from the Common Core Assessments but are implementing the Common Core. My question is, has anyone heard of a response from Sec. Duncan in reference to the constitutionality of attaching CC standards to the RTTT waivers?
No word, but I think the violation is of ESEA Subpart 2, Section 9527(c)(1):
“IN GENERAL- Notwithstanding any other provision of Federal law, no State shall be required to have academic content or student academic achievement standards approved or certified by the Federal Government, in order to receive assistance under this Act.”
http://www2.ed.gov/policy/elsec/leg/esea02/pg112.html
Once again, you nail it, Mercedes! Outstanding.
In a better world the teachers’ unions would be joining with the ACLU to bring a legal challenge based on this. But the unions have been taking money from the Gates Foundation, of course, in exchange for supporting the Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic].
Thank you, Robert. I appreciate your encouragement. 🙂
This is the most brilliant , inspired post of all. Nailed it. Sending out far and wide. Use THEIR stuff to bring them down. Works every time.. make this go viral.
The edubulllies exhibit sneering contempt for public schools and those who teach in them.
It is only fitting that they get schooled by Dr. Mercedes Schneider.
Her most powerful weapons? Facts and numbers, powered by integrity and a commitment to excellence.
But most of all, courage, even knowing what she is up against.
“The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet notwithstanding, go out to meet it.” [Thucydides]
Most Krazy props to KrazyMathLady, who chooses to be on the front lines of this incredibly difficult battle to win a “better education for all.”
🙂
You said a lot there, Krazy. A lot of these people have utter contempt for teachers. They have no clue how many brilliant, dedicated people there are in this profession. They presume to tell professionals how to do their jobs, and the teachers unions support them in this, which is utterly disgusting.
History REPEATS itself and no one learns, certainly not the politicians and the BIG money who backs them.
Merecdes,
The CCSS would have been just another binder collecting dust if not for the all important punitive provision of the RTTT competiiton (and subsequent NCLB waiver). States could have accepted and implemented the CC standards and assessmnets in any number of half-hearted ways. The founders knew that the standards and companion assessmnets needed serious teeth (fangs really). Accountability was the term used to disguise good old fashioned threats/fear, it was this punitive criteria that makes the CCSS so valuable to the corporations behind them. Linking test scores to teacher and administrator evaluations (APPR “accountability”) was as nefariuos as it was brilliant. This misuse of standardized test scores and the subsequent pressures that came with it was a crucial piece of leverage used to spread panic, fear, and desperation throughout the public school system here in NY. Do you have any background on this aspect of RTTT and the NCLB waiver? Thanks.
Your Common Core nonsense helps no one. Do the people a favor and resign. NYS DOES NOT NEED YOU OR YOUR EGO. No one likes you, we need someone who actually listens to us.
Who are you addressing here