Linda Darling-Hammond of Stanford University is a highly respected figure in American education. She was Barack Obama’s spokesperson during the 2008 campaign, and many educators expected and hoped that she would be selected as Secretary of Education. How different the scene would be if that had happened!
I have been trying to persuade Linda to learn how to tweet (I say, there is nothing to it, if I can do it, anyone can do it), but she doesn’t have time. I want her to blog, but she is engaged in major multi-year studies. When I think of the people with the knowledge, the presence, and the stature to lead the battle against the bad policies that are now stifling our nation’s children, her name comes to mind.
She did write a blog and gave me permission to post. It was in response to a question about her views on the Common Core. Linda has played a role in developing the Smarter Balanced assessment, which is supposed to be more attuned to student thinking and performance than the other one (PARCC).
This was her answer:
My view about what we should be doing re: curriculum and assessments can be found in the last chapter of my book, The Flat World and Education, where I describe how many other countries create thoughtful curriculum guidance as part of an integrated teaching and learning system. In short, what I would prefer and what other more deliberative countries do is a careful process by which educators are regularly convened over several years to revise the national or state curriculum expectations (typically national in smaller countries like Finland and Singapore, and state or provincial in large ones like Canada and China). Then there is an equally careful process of developing curriculum materials and assessments (managed by the Ministry or Department of Education with the participation of educators) and organizing intensive professional development. The development process takes at least 3 years and the initial implementation process takes about the same amount of time and deeply involves educators all along the way. Unfortunately, this was not the process that was used to develop and roll out the CCSS.
But the CCSS is what we have now, so what do we do about it? I think there are some elements of the CCSS documents that are potentially useful in setting our sights on higher order thinking and performance skills, and those are important. However, I am fearful that they will be badly implemented in many states. What we should do is take time – at least the next 3 years – to develop curriculum resources that teachers can select, adapt, try out, and refine together in collegial professional development settings within and across their schools. We should use the standards as guideposts and not straitjackets. And we should develop robust performance-based assessments of the kind I describe in my book that provide exciting opportunities for students to demonstrate their learning and for teachers to be engaged in development and scoring – used for information and improvement, not for sanctions and punishments.
I continue to try to work on this agenda with one of the two assessment consortia (Smarter Balanced) and with the Innovation Lab Network states, because I want to try to make what is happening as productive as it can be, and perhaps more instructionally helpful than it might otherwise be. There are some states that are working hard to bring such a vision into practice, but the current federal insistence on implementing sanctions for teachers and schools associated with tests (through requirements in Race to the Top and ESEA waivers) could create incentives that will both narrow the tests and distort their use.
Diane anticipates these problems in her blog, and she could well be right about many of them.
It WOULD be a much different world if Linda Darling-Hammond was in Arne Duncan’s seat. She understands that curriculum development and implementation takes time and needs to come from the grassroots. I’m glad she is on the inside of the assessment tent.
A true professional, not a political hack.
Me too!
Thank you for sharing this. Ms. Darling, I implore you to bring your voice and expertise into this discussion and help save public schools – As Jersey Jazzman so appropriately states – Teach for America graduates (who received only 5 weeks of training) are calling themselves experienced teachers and are embedded in DOE, State Education, School boards …”If (TFA) is leadership, our nation is in big trouble. More “leaders” like these, and no one will want to teach (Or want to fund education). TFA is doing more to destroy the teaching profession than any other political organization in the nation.” We need real education leaders voices now.
Unless states and schools reverse course, no pressure will be put on the big publishing and lobbyist cartels or the DOE to reverse course. Seems we should not, on one hand, support Common Core and try to make it somehow better. While at the same, time hope things will just somehow radically change.
Consider standing firm with the opponents of Common Core to convince the states and local schools to reverse coarse. About 20 states are in various stages of retreat on Common Core, so we should not accept that “CCSS is what we have now.” Why are they in retreat? Parents and teachers FINALLY, after 3 years of working behind the scenes, are becoming aware of all the aspects of Common Core. Not just the feel good PR being put out.
Many states, like California and Massachusetts, arguably already have of the best standards, schools and teachers in the country and increasing results across all student types to show for it. They are good starting points to improve upon. Each state should take the best available, improve upon and customize them (yes through an involved, thoughtful and inclusive process… don’t forget PARENTS, please), but leave decisions with states and local schools. Allow and foster innovation, without “straightjackets” (agreed).
I hear her in her efforts to work for the better on the inside, but I agree with the above. WE NEED LEADERS. She knows what she is doing. She must see the corruption and hypocrisy. Be more vocal. Speak out. Tweet, blog, argue. Diplomatically but with authority. Social media is our ally. Use it. Most people in higher education have not used their voices well in this debacle. LDH has provided leadership. But we need more from her and some courage from others. We let a bunch of business cronies run us over. The kids are the ones who are ultimately crushed.
This fits in with what I was looking at last night. The original draft of the CCRS standards for literacy were benchmarked (by the CCSSI) against similar documents of five provinces, two countries and one Special Administrative Region. Each of the benchmark documents is considered a curriculum guide, syllabus, etc. That is, the “standards” are presented as outcomes integral to the curriculum.
The further we get into the implemenation of the Common Core, the more evident it is to me that the artificial distinction we’re trying to draw in the US between “standards” and “curriculum” is harmful to the process (but deemed necessary in part because the feds are specifically not allowed to do “curriculum”).
“the artificial distinction we’re trying to draw in the US between ‘standards’ and ‘curriculum’ is harmful to the process”
precisely
Standards, curricula, and pedagogy form a hermeneutic circle. Each informs the other, and these must be developed concurrently, via an iterative process. Anyone who has tried to develop curricula within the CCSS framework will have run up against many, many inadequacies and infelicities in the CCSS in ELA, and the proper response, when that happens, is to adapt them or replace them, not to treat them as holy writ. Furthermore, I shall never understand why anyone would think it desirable to freeze the process of innovation in standards, curricula, and pedagogy by adopting a single model to be used by an entire nation or state over an extended period of time. What we should have, instead, is continuous development, adaptation, and refinement of standards, curricula, and pedagogy by practitioners (teachers and curriculum coordinators, together with the learning communities that they create in their classrooms) who are subjecting their practice to ongoing critique, as is done in Japanese Lesson Study, in light of actual classroom experience, the latest scientific understandings of the process of language acquisition, shared sources of information about best practices, and creative ideas originating from academia, from curriculum developers, and from practitioners themselves.
We are currently implementing a model that envisions the English language arts as a single, definable list of skills to be mastered, and so we are wrong from the start because there are many, many ways in which to develop into a masterful reader, writer, speaker, listener, and thinker, and diversity, not uniformity, should be fostered by an educational system preparing students who differ dramatically from one another for vastly differing lives in an extremely diverse, complex, pluralistic society. Furthermore, the CCSS in ELA instantiate many uniformed, prescientific notions of how learning occurs in the various ELA domains and so will inevitably foster extremely counterproductive curricula and pedagogy. (They seem to me to have been written in almost total ignorance, for example, of what we have learned of language acquisition in the past forty years.)
Ms. Darling-Hammond writes, “But the CCSS is what we have now,” as though national “standards” were a fait accompli, as though we have no alternative but to work within the CCSS framework going forward. However, the CCSS in ELA are so amateurish, so uninformed, so backward that it would be a terrible mistake simply to try to do the best we can with them. Trying to work with the CCSS in ELA will ensure the death of innovation in the teaching of English and a woeful distortion of curricula and pedagogy. Here’s an alternative: A) Reject the Common Core and allow individual school districts to choose their own curricula and standards from among competing alternatives. B) Invite academics to form independent groups to put together non-binding recommendations for learning progressions, standards, curriculum frameworks, and pedagogical approaches in the various domains of the English language arts. C) Create a national server for sharing of alternative approaches and for discussion and debate of these. D) Kill the high-stakes summative tests entirely and encourage testing companies to concentrate on development of useful diagnostics.
Robert Shepherd is exactly right about what needs to be done in his marvelous A,B,C, and D conclusions. Especially like Robert’s recognition that ELA standards reject the best things we have learned about how to teach and learn reading and writing from the experiments of the last 40 years. Thanks again, Robert, for an illuminating post which sets the right standard for us–do not accept CCSS, oppose this shameful imposition of curriculum which we know can’t work, and keep building opposition and alternatives from the bottom up.
correction: “each informs the others,” of course
Thank you, Ira. It’s going to be difficult. Responsible educators will continue to do what is best for their students and to develop innovative curricula and pedagogy IN SPITE OF the CCSS in ELA.
But it’s going to be very difficult to do that.
Years ago, Ira, I had a class of 11th-grade boys who had long been labeled “remedial students” and who were, to a person, ready to drop out. I discovered that they had a common interest–cars. So, together, we wrote, a manual on basic auto repair. Those young men who HATED everything about school, who had tuned out for years, were arguing vehemently with one another about matters of organization and coherence and accuracy and diction and spelling and grammar and the like. Following the kinds of principles that you espouse, Ira–throwing out the textbook and starting with my students and what mattered to them–I was able, there, actually to teach them a few things (and to learn a lot myself). It was an extraordinarily successful project, but for my pains, I got called on the carpet by my principal, who was not happy that my class was spending half its time in the parking lot looking under the hoods of cars. I was able to explain to him what I was doing and why, and he gave in and allowed me to continue my work. Today, my district would be handing me some scripted text-dependent-questioning lessons from the Literacy Design Collaborative and demanding that I follow these. And they would be sending goons into my classroom to evaluate my teaching to make sure that I was sticking to the CCSS scripts–doing the 5-minute warm-up activity, doing the 10 minutes on standard CCSS.ELA.RI.11.2a, moving on to the 15 minutes on standard CCSS.ELA.RI.11.2b, and so on. So, teaching well DESPITE the standards is going to be difficult. And those who persist in doing so will get the jackboot treatment.
I see many, many parallels between the current situation and that of Vichy France. We’ve had an invasion of our schools by a distant, powerful, centralized, totalitarian authority. We’ve had the imposition of the new rules we are all to live by. We are witnessing our purges and the training of the young ideologues and boots on the ground. We have our collaborators, we have those who heroically resist, and we have those who just try to get by as best they can, who are quietly complicit and more or less troubled by their complicity.
Robert, your comments are spot-on!!
I want to echo Ira’s and campka14’s comments: Robert these comments are right on-about the CCSS ELA, what they do to our teaching, that we must reject them, and how we might grow conversations about our practice absent the ‘goons.’ Many thanks for saying it so well/
Yes, yes, yes, yes! I’m in that parking lot with you.
I also once again give my accolades to you, Robert, for your insights and the articulate way you sum up our dangerous situation. I think this statement is particularly important: “Furthermore, the CCSS in ELA instantiate many uniformed, prescientific notions of how learning occurs in the various ELA domains and so will inevitably foster extremely counterproductive curricula and pedagogy. (They seem to me to have been written in almost total ignorance, for example, of what we have learned of language acquisition in the past forty years.)” As a retired teacher of the deaf, I am especially concerned with the inappropriate demands that will be put on students who are already struggling under staggering linguistic burdens, but who have many un-testable talents.
This is what happens when ideologues who somehow developed the hubris to think that they know best dismiss the careful, thorough, productive work of people who actually have expertise.
I’m glad that you brought up the parallel to the Vichy government. I’ve been thinking of this myself, and (as unpleasant as it is), am glad for the corroboration from you. Because I’m retired, it’s easy for me to say this, but I think there really needs to be some major outpouring of defiance from classroom teachers and parents to prevent the massive harm that these policies are doing and will continue exponentially to do to our children.
Exactly!
What is Ms. Darling Hammond proposing? The consequences of the position she takes with respect to the CCSS can be foreseen in her advocacy of the EdTPA .
She writes:
In short, .. I would prefer …a careful process by which educators are regularly convened over several years to revise the national or state curriculum expectations. Then … an equally careful process of developing curriculum materials and assessments (managed by the Ministry or Department of Education with the participation of educators) and organizing intensive professional development. The development process takes at least 3 years and the initial implementation process takes about the same amount of time and deeply involves educators all along the way. ”
It seems to me that she is proposing the same process by which she claims that the EdTPA was created. The EdTPA turned out to be a hierarchical, assessment-driven assessment that many thoughtful teacher educators find deeply alienating, discouraging and destructive.
And, of course, the CCSS in mathematics ARE a curriculum outline and learning progression, as E.D. Hirsch, Jr., pointed out on this blog a few weeks ago.
Tom, to my regret, I’ve been too busy to follow your posts about the international benchmarking of the standards, but I’ve got the posts bookmarked. I understand you’ve characterized the CCSS as “idiosyncratic”– is this invented distinction between “standards” and “curriculum” the main idiosyncrasy?
I agree that the distinction we draw here in the US is absurd, misleading, and counterproductive. In my experience, we have a whole generation of mid-level curriculum people who spend entire careers explaining to exhausted teachers the all-important differences between goals and objectives, standards, curriculum, benchmarks, and outcomes. That, and how the tests measure what they say they’re measuring.
I think it’s bizarre to establish national tests without a national curriculum, and it’s even more bizarre to establish part of a national curriculum and pretend that it’s not what it clearly is. If we just must march down the road toward a national curriculum, we might as well call it what it is.
There are so many statements made about the standards that aren’t supported by facts. I just read over at Susan Ohanian’s that Arne Duncan was out in public somewhere, telling people the new standards have the capacity to set “loose the the creativity and innovation of educators at the local level”– a statement that has no basis in reality or reason.
I’ve pored over the ELA standards, and I fail to see how such a bureaucratic catalog of invented, year-by-year upticks in alleged complexity will be the basis for any kind of national, transformational change. I can think of several texts that have moved the country forward, and none of them are anywhere near as tedious or passionless as these sleep-inducing, rubric-ready prescriptions.
Well said, Tom!
“In my experience, we have a whole generation of mid-level curriculum people who spend entire careers explaining to exhausted teachers the all-important differences between goals and objectives, standards, curriculum, benchmarks, and outcomes.”
Don’t forget essential questions.
At this point we’ve done an incredible job of confusing ourselves around the ELA/Literacy standards. Looking at what other countries do is the only way to start gaining some perspective on the process. Hopefully I’ll be able to get myself to really plow through the kind of comparisons that need to be done. It might have to wait for the World Series to finish though.
Close, but no cigar …
LDH gets the Lani Guinier Prize for Being Thrown Under A Bus By A Politician.
The real research on the CCSS should be over at least a 12 year period and probably a 16 year cycle. We won’t be able to tell if the standards did anything but create profit for the private sector until a large enough number of students go through the system. Furthermore, who among us believes the careers in 12 years will be the same careers today and the colleges in 12 years will be using the same criteria. The current lack of a clear articulated research agenda for this massive movement screams out at how we have been sold out!
The CCSS were part of a business plan. They had nothing to do with creating a more effective educational system.
Read Arne Duncan’s technology blueprint, issued at the beginning of his tenure as Secretary of Education. It’s basically the Gates/Murdoch/Pearson strategic plan–every kid on a computer, all student responses going into a single national database, computer adaptive curricula delivered through that portal, and computerized national testing, based on national standards, as a justification for creating the rest of this.
Duncan’s chief of staff accidentally spilled the truth, recently, when she said that the purpose of the new standards is to “create a national market for products that can be brought to scale.” That is, the new standards are all about giving the education market in the United States the Walmart/Microsoft treatment. A single set of national standards was a necessary component of a plan to maintain (in the case of Pearson) and enable (in the case of inBloom and Amplify) monopolistic control of the education market in a situation in which the internet was about to enable truly competitive, truly free markets (because pixels are cheap) responding to diverse demands from education consumers and to the diverse potentials of students. The new standards are part of creating centralized push media in a time when pull media were about to revolutionize education. These people took one look at the fact that professors were posting open source textbooks for free and said, “We need to control this. We need to create a few gateways by which curricula can be delivered, and we need to create a single, large, national market that will serve as a barrier to entry to other players who will not be able to operate at such a scale.” Duncan is simply the wind-up toy for implementing this plan, and many others are unwitting tools of this implementation.
There is a reason why Gates and Pearson paid for the new standards and the new tests, and it isn’t because of a desire to serve the common good. It’s about centralized control. And there’s a reason why the new LA iPads come loaded with Pearson curricula and why New York state has simultaneously adopted a) the Common Core, b) the PARCC tests, c) the inBloom database, and d) and Core Knowledge curricula aligned to the Common Core and delivered via Amplify tablets.
Again, read Arne Duncan’s tech blueprint from the outset of his tenure. This was all a business plan, and it was in place from the day this administration went into office. The Common Core was simply one milestone in the implementation of a business plan.
Linda Darling-Hammond would have been a much better choice for Sec. of Education. Duncan’s ideas are not compatible with quality education and his focus on testing and involving billionaires in decisions regarding out students, is very troublesome.
This is more than a business plan; it’s the new eugenics, the latest permutation of the same racist and class-based drive by the capitalist class to maintain their hegemony by masking it as meritocracy. Is that hyperbole? Maybe–but I don’t think so. To trace this trajectory, especially it focus on literacy education, take a look at the new edited collection by the Goodmans & Rofbert Calfee, “Whose Knowledge Counts in Government Literacy Policies?” Not only is it a devastating indictment of “know-nothing” education policies (Ken Goodman’s chapter, “Pedagogy of the Absurd,” is worth the purchase price alone), but also paints a frankly frightening picture of the trans-national scope of this corporate movement. Given the ferocity of this globalized fascist movement, I sometime wonder if we might finally be entering that economic period that Marx thought necessary for the overthrow of capitalism.
Have you seen this?
From Moll, M. (Ed.) (2004). Passing the Test: The false promises of standardized testing. Ottawa: Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. pp. 57–66.
“Leaning between conspiracy and hegemony:
OECD, UNESCO, and the tower of PISA”
by Larry Kuehn
Click to access KuehnArticle2004.pdf
http://www.stopthecrime.net/core02.html
We can have this:
or this:
or we can have the CCSS: One ring to rule them all.
One Ka-Ching To Rule Them Alll
LOL. Too true!
Great video! What if we could teach math that way – using doodling?
Finally, someone gets it …
No, not LDH, I mean RDS …
I think that’s a very useful contribution to the discussion from Linda Darling-Hammond.
I agree with Robert D. Shepherd’s four recommendations. For recommendation B, I believe the academics ought to consult with successful classroom teachers as they formulate their suggestions.
It would be great if Professor Darling-Hammond would resign from the Smarter Balanced group, join with people who see the flaws in the “standards” (and in the “common core” assessment project), and start work on something that makes sense. By continuing to build on a shaky foundation she lends the Common Core supporters credibility they don’t deserve. “Smarter Balanced” isn’t likely to be less stupid than PARCC, which, based on what I’ve seen, is pretty stupid. Why not say “NO!” to the whole thing?
Indeed, Randal. I was thinking that academics could have something to say about matters like how kids acquire the grammar of a language, how the acquire vocabulary, and so on and make suggestions regarding these matters that free teachers and curriculum coordinators and curriculum developers could then develop. It was precisely such a national dialogue and debate involving experts and teachers that did NOT happen with the Common Core. A few plutocrats and politicians appointed David Coleman and Susan Pimentel king and queen of English language arts education in the United States and, bizarrely, many educrats went along with this, despite the amateurishness of the product that they created.
I don’t think it was bizarre at all. It was a coordinated effort. Some day the true history might be written. I have a copy of Richard Rothman’s book (Something in Common: The Common Core Standards) but haven’t read it yet. Maybe that will shed some light.
For now I believe the English language arts “standards” are based more on ideology and manufactured crisis than on literary scholarship, educational research, or any other kind of legitimate foundation.
That’s one reason the sales job for the Common Core had to be framed in a way that misrepresents and demeans the actual practice of English and reading teachers. Just think of it! For the first time ever, teachers are asking students to support their ideas with evidence. No, my teachers were asking me to do that back in the 1960’s, just as I asked my students to do the same thing for thirty plus years after that.
How they’re getting away with this charade would be beyond me, except for the obvious reason. Money. Many of the people supporting it are either getting paid to do so, or they are expecting a return on their investment sometime in the future.
Correction: That’s Robert Rothman.
Here’s the gist of what Linda Darling-Hammond wrote:
“But the CCSS is what we have now…there are some elements of the CCSS documents that are potentially useful..”
After three “we shoulds” –– concerning curriculum and assessment –– she says this:
“I continue to try to work on this agenda…I want to try to make what is happening as productive as it can be…”
I think it’s very clear that, instead of actively taking a principled stand against the Common Core, Darling-Hammond recognizes (1) that it’s here to stay (yes Robert Shepherd, a fait accompli), and (2) that she may as well stay connected to it and try to exert some professional influence on its implementation.
So, though it may be “slowed” somewhat, it appears that Darling-Hammond is conceding that the Common Core is public education’s future.
What Linda Darling-Hammond left out of the interview: She served on the Validation Committee for Common Core (and endorsed it); She served as an education advisor for Obama and was considered for the Secretary of Education; she was a professor of education at Columbia’s Teachers College (the same program that King and Tisch graduated from together as classmates); she has served on the board of directors for the CARNEGIE FOUNDATION for the Advancement of Teaching; served as a member of the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO); advisory role for National Governors Association (NGA); the Common Core testing consortia – she is literally helping to write the tests for Common Core.
I am hopeful, for our students, that the portfolio components of these new tests will be highly flexible, but what I have seen of the other products from these two consortia does not suggest that that will be so. I fear that we’ll see in these a lot of constraints that will unnaturally limit the possibilities.
I’m troubled, however, that she is pals with terrorist Bill Ayers and shares his thinking on social justice. Doesn’t she believe in an increased federal role in education in the name of fairness?
Melanie, Sarah Palin pals around with Bill Ayers as much as Linda Darling-Hammond does. I met Bill Ayers once. Does that mean I pal around with him? As for social justice, I have no problem with it. Why would anyone oppose social justice?
So, how backward do the “standards” have to be before people say that these just aren’t acceptable? It’s shocking to me that people take the new CCSS in ELA at all seriously. They were, clearly, created by amateurs. One could have created standards as informed as these by stopping people randomly on the street and asking them to fill in the next standard on the list.
Bill should be asking for his money back.
I was reading over the technical documentation for the computer readable version of the standards (I actually work on software that does competency tracking, among other things) and found a quote you’ll appreciate, Robert:
‘All individual standards and lettered sub-items; all anchor standards in ELA; and all practice standards in math, as well as cluster headings in math, have received identifiers. We have not provided numbers for reading headings such as “craft and structure” or “key ideas,” since these headings were intentionally left un-numbered and since they do not strictly define different domains in reading.’
Apparently that’s at least one part of the standards that CCSSI has realized doesn’t make sense. (see http://www.corestandards.org/common-core-state-standards-official-identifiers-and-xml-representation)
She is “fearful that they will be badly implemented in many states”? Really? How about ARE being “badly implemented in many states”!!!
Garbage in, garbage out. The new ‘standards” are dreadful, and the implementations are making them even worse.
It’s unfortunate that Linda served on the Validation Committee for the CCSS.
In Googling Linda Darling-Hammond, I came across a very strange page: http://whatiscommoncore.wordpress.com/2013/03/25/top-ten-scariest-people-in-education-reform-6-linda-darling-hammond/
It calls her the “sixth scariest person in education reform”. That is total nonsense, of course. It is clearly written by a far-right-wing person or organization.
It reminds me we have to be careful with whom we ally ourselves. The page takes some positions similar to many of us–opposed to Common Core, so called “education reform”, etc. Yet unlike most of us, their ideology is far to the right.
The Koch Brothers, for example, are financing a major opposition movement to Common Core.
It might be tempting to work together with people who have a similar position on an issue. But there would be real dangers in working with these folks.
First of all, they are extremist kooks, and if we work with them, the media will try to put us into the same bag. Furthermore, many of their education positions are diametrically opposed to most of ours–they are opposed to teacher tenure, want governments to spend less on education, would prefer to dismantle public education entirely, no federal aid to education, etc.
Mike, I promise you I do not work with the Tea Party or the Koch brothers. They scare me.
Linda Darling-Hammond is a great scholar and a wonderful person.