Wendy Lecker, who is a civil rights lawyer, writes here that the Common Core standards have been rolled out without any forethought.
Children are being tested on materials they have never been taught.
States do not have a curriculum that aligns with the Common Core standards.
The federally-funded tests are being developed independent of the curriculum, which does not exist.
Teachers are not prepared.
Students are not prepared.
Yet the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Jeb Bush, Bobby Jindal, Arne Duncan, and other corporate thought-leaders say: Full speed ahead! We cannot delay! Now! Now! Now!
Lecker concludes:
The Common Core requires massive investments in textbooks, tests, training, and technology. Money is spent on the Common Core experiment at the expense of strategies with a long track record of success, such as high-quality preschool, small class size, wraparound services and extra help for at-risk children.
The benefits of the Common Core are speculative at best. A New York comparison of the 2013 Common Core tests, the previous standards and college completion rates, revealed that the previous standards were better predictors of college readiness. Moreover, the evidence is clear that neither tests nor standards raise achievement. Countries with national standards fare no better than those without, and states with higher standards do no better than states with lower ones. In states with consistent standards, achievement varies widely. The difference in achievement lies in those resources that states are now foregoing to pay for the Common Core.
As for justice, schools serving our most vulnerable students suffer most from a narrow test-based curriculum. A new report in New York reveals that poor children and children of color are least likely to be in schools with libraries, art and music rooms, science, and AP classes. Expanded Common Core testing will disproportionately harm our neediest children.
It is time to ask policy-makers why they made our children guinea pigs in the rush to impose the not-ready-for-prime-time Common Core.
This is a question for Dianne not a comment on the above article. Recently the :non-profit” organization Building Hope moved to Idaho. Their stated mission is to help charter schools obtain loans and guarantees for charter schools. http://www.idahoednews.org/news/non-profit-moves-to-boise-to-build-charters/
This coincides with charter school lobbyist Terry Ryan from Ohio moving to Idaho to lobby for charter schools. Am I right to be worried? How can I find out more about Building Hope?
Nadine
Nadine, if you have an Ohio charter lobbyist in Idaho the best defense against him may be Ohio’s charters.
We’ve had privatization-focused school reform longer than just about any state. It doesn’t matter where you look in this state, Cleveland, Columbus, Toledo; it’s been more than a decade and the promised “reforms” have resulted in an unregulated charter sector and diminished and damaged public school systems.
We were sold reform as a way to “improve” public schools. I don’t know a public school parent who believes that ANY of this decade-long agenda has “improved” existing public schools.
Yet, “reform” is expanded through our completely lobbyist-captured state government every year. The worst charter schools in the state were given yet another gift from our governor and state legislature in the last budget. My own (successful!) rural district lost 1.4 million in funding every year since 2008 because state leaders have abandoned public schools.
Public schools lose in Ohio reform, and they lose big. It will happen in Idaho too.
In my experience, state legislatures are “parochial” in the sense that they do not want to borrow failed policies from other states. Tell your governor and state leaders to go to Ohio and look at the last decade of results. Ask them if they really want to bring this Ohio plan to Idaho.
These ideas aren’t “new”. There’s a track record in other states. There’s no reason to “experiment” in your state.
Nadine, the arrival of Building Hope is not good news for Idaho. Read Jersey Jazzman’s careful research about how this nonprofit leverages government grants to leverage capital for the “for-profit” charter sector. (http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2013/07/make-big-money-building-charter-schools.html)
I know Terry Ryan from his years of working to create new charter schools in Ohio. He is a very decent, likeable fellow. But in a state like Idaho, composed mostly of small towns and rural communities, why do you need or want charter schools to compete with your community public schools? The charters will drain away the beset students and undermine the public schools.
Charter promoters can make a case for charters in big urban districts, but I frankly can’t see the value of dividing communities by having competing schools–some of which will get extra funding from rightwing groups like the Albertson Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation. Their ultimate goal is to destroy a community asset. Why?
Here’s NY Education Commissioner
reacting to Wendy Lecker’s article
and the possibility of parents
opting their kids out of testing:
hilarious!!
Supporters of the amateurish, backward CCSS in ELA often ask of those who opposed these new “standards,” what’s your alternative?
Here’s the alternative:
Voluntary, competing standards adopted by the free peoples of local communities,
ones that are continuously adapted and refined in light of what science teaches us regarding language acquisition and in response to ongoing local, state, and national dialogue and debate about best practices in the teaching of English,
ones that are adaptable to the needs of differing students and
informed by innovative, research-based experiments in pedagogy and curricula from small, competing developers of educational materials and by
Japanese-style Lesson Study at the building level to empower teachers to take charge of continuous improvement of their own teaching.
WHAT WE DO NOT NEED IN A DIVERSE, PLURALISTIC SOCIETY, IN SCHOOLS THAT SERVE STUDENTS WHO DIFFER ENORMOUSLY FROM ONE ANOTHER, IS AN INFLEXIBLE, TOP-DOWN, ONE-SIZE-FITS-ALL, TOTALITARIAN REGIME IMPOSED BY A DISTANT, UNACCOUNTABLE AUTHORITY BOUGHT BY A FEW CORPORATE INTERESTS IN ORDER TO MAINTAIN AND FURTHER IMPOSE MONOPOLISTIC CONTROL OVER THE U.S. EDUCATION MARKET. That’s what the Common Core REALLY is. It’s not about getting the best education for our kids. As Arne Duncan’s office says, the Common Core is about “creating national markets for products that can be brought to scale.” In other words, it’s about the Walmartization of U.S. education. It’s about making it easy for a few large corporations to lock competitors out of the educational materials market by reducing unit costs for those who can afford to produce print products in runs of millions of copies and can afford to pay the licensing fees to go through a new national portal of student responses called for, again, by Duncan, and delivered by Gates and Murdoch. The Common Core is part of a crony capitalist business plan, and it serves the purpose of ENDING free markets in educational materials and ideas as opposed to encouraging innovation and variety and continuous improvement.
Continuous improvement? Forget it. Under the “reform” plan, we wait 5 years for the self-appointed education Polituburo–the Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth–to meet again to decide, for everyone else, what our standards and tests and teacher evaluation systems and lesson plan formats are to be.
That’s, of course, very like the system that prevailed in Soviet Russia. And weirdly, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the business interests that make up Achieve are pushing such as totalitarian, centralized authority on the country.
Free people will resist this with all their might.
I believe our students and teachers are being used as prostitutes rather than guinea pigs. Wasn’t Race To The Top money taken in trade for governors and superintendents of education selling the souls of their teachers and students? How many students and teachers were asked about this exchange?
They weren’t asked. The Common Core was IMPOSED on every student, teacher, curriculum coordinator, and curriculum developer in the country by a self-appointed, distant, unaccountable authority that did NO VETTING of its amateurish products and did not submit these products to national debate.
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
Something seemingly forgotten in the rush to replace children’s welfare with corporate welfare.
Who made David Coleman and Susan Pimentel king and queen of U.S. education in the English language arts? A small, distant, self-appointed, totalitarian authority. The breathtakingly backward “standards” in ELA were IMPOSED upon every student, teacher, parent, administrator, and curriculum developer in the country. These people have trampled on the freedoms of all, and they are doing enormous harm to kids. This needs to be stopped.