Anthony Cody, in a brilliant column, asks whether Common Core will be the Rosetta Stone of Corporate reform.
The Rosetta Stone, he explains, made it possible to decipher ancient languages:
” In the year 1799, a French soldier discovered an ancient stone in Egypt that had been inscribed with a royal proclamation in the year 196 BC, in three languages; Ancient Greek, Demotic, and Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. The same text in all three languages allowed scholars to crack the code of the Egyptian hieroglyphs, and since then, the term “Rosetta Stone” has come to signify a means by which hidden codes are uncovered. The Common Core has become a Rosetta Stone for understanding how corporate education reform is reshaping public education.”
The Common Core weaves together and makes plain what once seemed to be disparate themes:
1. It unveils the powerful role of the Gates Foundation, which poured nearly $200 million into creating and promoting the Common Core standards.
2. It shows the heavy hand of the federal government, manipulating states into adopting the Common Core, despite the fact that it is prohibited by law from influencing curriculum and instruction in the nation’s schools.
3. It has revealed the extent to which nonprofits, including the teachers’s unions, accepted funding from Gates to advance the Common Core.
4. “The Common Core is propelled by a vision of education as serving the needs of commerce and corporations. Many of the arguments for Common Core portray our children as products on an assembly line. As a high level Gates Foundation official wrote recently, “I am pleased to see the excitement in the business community for the common core. Businesses are the primary consumers of the output of our schools, so it’s a natural alliance.”
5. Common Core reinforces NCLB’s insistence that schools be held accountable for constantly rising scores.
6. Common Core was designed to cause tests ores to plummet.
Read on.
What comes clear is that Common Core has little to do with education reform and everything to do with the corporate agenda of high-stakes testing and the undermining of public education.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I will add to this.. common core requires technology to be implemented as it has “curiously” become more and more necessary to have more and more technology. Think the roll out of the new PARCC assessments and such. Think LA…. they used money set aside for school improvements via construction bonds to buy i-pads for every student. Does this have anything to do with construction bonds? Absolutely not! Does this have everything to do with high stakes testing implementation? Absolutely. Read this latest fiasco in the LA Times. It is very telling… common core weaves profit from the school desk to the corporation. Could “they” .. the school board have misinterpreted the words “construction and building” at schools to mean that common core connected testing “builds” profit? Ughh… Here is the article:
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-ipads-back-on-agenda-20131213,0,3770028.story#axzz2nSFMrKZZ
“Businesses are the primary consumers of the output of our schools. . . ”
So, the “primary consumer” should be the one dictating what a producer produces and how the production process works? Maybe that is how it is in the commercial world for some businesses but certainly not all as many transactions do not involve a “primary consumer” but a plethora of consumers. And public education cannot be construed to having “business being the primary consumer” as the primary beneficiary of public education is the individual and his/her partaking in the “diffusion of knowledge and intelligence being essential to the preservation of the rights and liberties of the people”.
What is the primary goal of public education?
And where can it be found?
To answer the second question first, in each state’s constitution in the article that authorizes public education. So in essence there are 50 different goals/purposes although I suspect that they are similar in nature to what Missouri’s constitution has to say: Article IX, subsection 1a: “A general diffusion of knowledge and intelligence being essential to the preservation of the rights and liberties of the people, the general assembly shall establish and maintain free public schools for the gratuitous instruction of all persons in this state within ages not in excess of twenty-one years as prescribed by law.”
I’ll let you decide what “A general diffusion of knowledge and intelligence being essential to the preservation of the rights and liberties of the people. . .” means. But I do not see anything about “preparing students to be products for businesses to “consume”. The business community has assumed a purpose that probably is not in concert with what the constitution states is the main purpose of public education.
I just don’t get this.
(First – Mr. Cody’s post is right on target. My interpretation – It’s all the side and after effects prostituting the standards that are the problem)
I went to school in Missouri. Got two degrees in Missouri. Served as a teacher, principal, and superintendent. Out of that crowd of thousands of kids there are thousands who graduated high school were it not for a desegregation program, hundreds whose bands marched in major bowl games and parades, scientists, artists, Cy Young candidates, NFL players, architects, soldiers, religious leaders… Yes, thousands over the years in the state dropped out, too, and validate there is a pipeline to prison. But millions succeed – all with that intentionally VAGUE CONSTITUTIONAL statement. Would you prefer it be PRESCRIPTIVE like too many laws are now?
Yet – in spite of ultra-right wing attempts to co-opt the public schools, a religious club case that got to the Supreme Court and the religious folks won, and various attempts to the corporations at a distance – – UNTIL NOW with their interest in CEE-Trust’s charter incubators – the schools retained LOCAL CONTROL.
There’s a state curriculum informed by standards of professional organizations (NCTE, NCTM, etc). Guess what, when NCTM rolled out new standards – the math wars began.
And, guess what, text book publishers were selling books – lots of them and making money decades before common core standards.
And, states like Missouri could use rigorous standards to insure that standards are high – that a diploma means something – and to LEVERAGE the legislature to FUND high expectation so zip code does not dictate the future.
It’s when commissioners sell out to the charter incubators, state boards dictate teaching evolution, and legislatures stick their nose in professional evaluation (with scores) and corporate lobbyists seize the opportunity to fill the pockets of those legislators that we have are in trouble.
I understand that sentence in the Missouri Constitution. It says to me, “Figure it out locally, keep academic standards high, and teach kids.”
“Figure it out locally.” Exactly.
The last thing that a free people should accept is a centralized, totalitarian Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth.
The fact is that if you correct for the socioeconomic status of kids taking the tests, U.S. students lead the world. CCSS will not increase rigor. It will increase rigor mortis. In this country we believe that creativity and innovation come about when free people make their own decisions.
I think there’s another element to add to this, namely the idea that the structure of the standards, the phrasing, organization, and often strange level of detail, is driven by database design. From my reading of the various standards, I’m struck by the often trivial level of detail. When I consider that every one of these elements has to be given a numerical score, it becomes clear to me that CCSS is really about computer-controlled pedagogy and curriculum. Gates & Co. are looking to automate education to a degree that has not yet been discussed.
HAL, not Spock, will be your child’s next instructor.
Common core is a mess, but the best way to fix the system is to move forward with proficiency based system that is not as based on defining kids as smart and stupid. Remember, with competition, it is mathematicall impossible to not have a loser. And that bleads the soul out of them.
CC will fail kids and then, ready to pounce http://savingstudents-caplee.blogspot.com/2013/12/is-stumbling-and-bumbling-good-thing.html
Yup. What the meritocracy are creating is a system that will say to millions of kids, even more emphatically than we do now.
Sorry. You were not what we were looking for. Not at all.
For they have no sense that kids differ and have different gifts and that it is the business of schools to discover and nurture those. Kids are not machine parts to be identically milled. Only a technocratic type severely challenged in the emotional intelligence department could fail to understand that. But we’ve put just such people in charge.
cx: What the meritocracy is creating
Oh for an edit feature on this blog!!!
Sadly, some Superintendents of Catholic schools have fallen for the “College and Career Ready’ jingle, too. My Archdiocese’s Associate Superintendent for Curriculum is in hog heaven with all the additional technology needs/uses. What I don’t think that she understands is the idea that technology is at some point going to take over everything else such as real teachers in this Common Core mess. She just believes hat we are preparing our students to work in the 21st century.
The only reason there is a Common Core is to define one nationwide set of standards for the production and distribution of educational products. Otherwise, Pearson, Microsoft, K12 and the rest could have 50 sets of standards.
This is only about creation of a market for mass produced educational products.
21st Century Education nonsense exists to make us believe it is necessary to buy into.computer learning and constant software and course upgrades. This negates the well proven 5th Century BC Socratic Method of intelligent teachers working with small classes..
With 75 million captive customers its quite the market niche.
50 million K-12; 25 million higher ed.
Coleman also has his claws into SATs ACTs and GEDs!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
No one can see the trees through this forest they created.
Exactly, Bruce.
This is exactly why Gates and Pearson paid for this stuff.
If you have a single national market, then you can print millions of copies of a single text at a very low unit cost. And the beauty of that is that a small publisher or upstart competitor can’t touch them. They print that million copies at $5.97 apiece. The small startup can afford only to print 10,000 copies at a unit cost of $13.63.
Here’s what Arne Duncan’s chief of staff said about the Common Core in a Harvard Business Review blog: the standards were created “to create national markets for products that can be brought to scale.”
Products from a few big publishers.
And Gates needed national standards for his inBloom national database and its connected computer-adaptive curricula to work.
The National Catholic Education Association took more than $100,000 from the Gates Foundation to implement Common Core: http://wdtprs.com/blog/2013/11/ncea-took-money-from-gates-foundation-to-promote-common-core-in-catholic-schools/
Oh, Anthony. That is very bad news indeed. I had hoped that the bishops would keep them from caving into this CCSS barbarism.
It’s called social Darwinism! And the president is promoting it!
Barry O is the oligarchy’s dream guy. He is charismatic. He talks like a progressive. And the carries out the entire neocon agenda.
And his “so-called” (to use Gwen Ifill’s term) Blackness makes it hard to contest his actions without being accused of racism by lobotomized liberals and sycophants.
And what about Pearson? I hope you saw this one.
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Pearson Caught Cheating, Says Sorry, But Will Pay http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alan-singer/pearson-caught-cheating-s_b_4439043.html According to The New York Times , the New York State Attorney General has exposed the supposedly non-profit Pearson Foundation for what it really is, a partner with the for-profit wing of the global Pearson publishing mega-giant. The Pearson Foundation agreed to pay a penalty of over seven million dollars to New York State that will be used to prepare teachers to work in high needs communities. According to New York State law, foundations are prohibited by law from using charitable funds to promote and develop for-profit activities. While the Pearson Foundation and Pearson for-profit were supposed to be separate legal entities, they operated in tandem. Pearson for-profit is the largest donor to the Pearson Foundation and the staff of the Pearson Foundation included several Pearson for-profit employees. Until 2012, members of the Pearson Foundation Board of Directors were all executives at Pearson for-profit. The New York State Attorney General’s office found that the Pearson Foundation was developing course material and software aligned with new national Common Core standards and high stakes assessments that Pearson for-profit was selling to states and school districts. Pearson Foundation was also involved in drumming up business for Pearson for-profit. The foundation paid for education officials to attend “conferences” in places like Helsinki and Singapore where Pearson for-profit pitched products and services. The report issued by Attorney General Eric Schneiderman accused Pearson of using its Foundation to secure endorsements and donations from prominent funders including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In April 2011 the Pearson and Gates Foundations formed a partnership to design online reading and math courses. According to the Attorney General’s report Pearson executives wanted to market the material and predicted potential profits would be worth tens of millions of dollars. After Schneiderman’s office started to investigate, the Pearson Foundation sold the courses to Pearson for-profit for $15.1 million. A spokesperson for Pearson claimed: “We have always acted with the best intentions and complied with the law. However, we recognize there were times when the governance of the foundation and its relationship with Pearson could have been clearer and more transparent.” As part of the agreement, the Pearson Foundation agreed to appoint three board members to review financial transactions that might benefit Pearson for-profit and pledged to limit the involvement of Pearson for-profit executives and sales personal in educational conferences that it sponsors. What I do not understand is why Pearson for-profit and the Pearson Foundation do not face criminal charges and why New York State will continue to do business with a foundation and a company that admitted under pressure, to have violated state law.
Alan Singer, Director, Secondary Education Social Studies Department of Teaching, Literacy and Leadership 128 Hagedorn Hall / 119 Hofstra University / Hempstead, NY 11549 (P) 516-463-5853 (F) 516-463-6196
So much wisdom on the blog. What a pleasure. What a break from the ubiquitous deformer datachat Newspeak.