Anthony Cody reviews his own sharp criticism of teachers’ unions during the past year for their support of the Common Core standards in 2013.
Cody questions why teachers have no one to support them when they question the validity of the Common Core.
He doubts that a one-year moratorium on high-stakes testing of the Common Core will matter much.
In a column that he cites, he wrote:
In effect, the Common Core tests will refresh NCLB’s indictment of public schools and teachers, with supposedly scientific precision.
Teachers – and union leaders — may feel as if they should get on board, to try to steer this process. However, I think this is a ship of doom for our schools. I think its effect will be twofold. It will create a smoother, wider, more easily standardized market for curriculum and technology. This will, in turn, promote the standardization of curriculum and instruction, and further de-professionalize teaching. The assessments will reinforce this, by tying teachers closer to more frequent timelines and benchmark assessments, which will be, in many places, tied to teacher evaluations. And the widespread failures of public schools will be used to further “disrupt the public school monopoly,” spurring further expansion of vouchers and charters and private schools.
We must move beyond not only the bubble tests, but beyond the era of punitive high stakes tests. Only then will we be able to use standards in the way they ought to be used – as focal points for our creative work as educators. I would be glad to have a year’s delay for the consequences of these tests, but I think we need to actively oppose the entire high stakes testing paradigm. The Common Core standards should not be supported as long as they are embedded in this system.
He calls upon the unions to exert leadership–not just in helping to impose CCSS–but in thinking critically about the corporate agenda and CCSS’s role in that agenda.
He holds out hope for change in 2014, a hope that I share.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on Roy F. McCampbell's Blog.
quote: “He doubts that a one-year moratorium on high-stakes testing of the Common Core will matter much.”
this is essentially what the Boston Globe reported after the recent vote by the Board to give the tests…. fait accompli …. very difficult to alter the position once the tests have been administered on a “trial” basis….
Sorry to be a downer but what is the cause for hope. The NEA bought in to the Common Core and in Pennsylvania the PSEA chose to work with the DOE on the formulation of our new teacher evaluation system which measures effectiveness in part by test scores which the union admits is an invalid measure. They tried to “steer the process” and now we are stuck. No matter who is elected to, hopefully, replace Corbett I don’t see this changing.
The main reason I did NOT join NEA this year is because of the buy in to the Common Core.
Anthony’s last line is the key “The Common Core standards should not be supported as long as they are embedded in this system.”
Those who would like to have an honest conversation about curriculum and standards are never going to succeed in having the Common Core Standards accepted past this initial introductory phase as long as the testing regime continues. If I were someone personally invested in the idea of raising the standards through Common Core, I would be organizing against the use of punitive standardized assessments designed to destroy public education and define teachers and students as substandard.
In my high school district, the preparation for the upcoming tests in California are having a devastating impact on both the more challenged incoming 9th graders and the higher achieving math students. The Superintendent and the Principals of the 8 high schools have decided, against the wishes of almost ALL district math teachers, to narrow the curriculum to fit both the high school standards and the NEW Smarter Balanced Assessment. Thereby, they have eliminated ALL math course offerings below Algebra 1 and therein, forcing ALL students to enroll in an Algebra 1 class even though they may have fallen two or more years behind in their math levels according to where the CCSS would expect them to be when entering high school. Remember, the high school test they take as juniors is measuring math standards which include some of the old Pre-Calculus standards from the old CST exams. These standards were part of the previous CST referred to as the Summative Test and was given only to students who were enrolled in Pre-Calculus or higher level math courses. Now we are expecting ALL students to be able to understand these higher level math standards and answer more complex questions involving these standards. If not, they will be labeled as not College or Career Ready and the teachers and schools will be labeled as low performing again. You may have guessed that ALL of these decision makers have never taught a math course at any level and you would be correct. Their comments indicate a total lack of understanding of the difficulties ahead with implementing their plan and having the desired outcomes where larger numbers of students score high enough to be graded as College and Career Ready. For example, when asked by several math teachers for ideas on how to teach an Algebra 1 class where some students are two or more years behind and still struggle with adding fractions with unlike denominators and some students are being forced to repeat Algebra 1 even though they passed it in 8th grade and may be bored when the teacher tries to use examples to better reach the lower performing students. Their answer was “offer tutoring time after school for those who are behind and if necessary we can offer tutoring during Saturday’s”. The district would pay each teacher about $100 to tutor on Saturday’s if the teacher could get at least 20 students each Saturday to volunteer for the help. You can see that the Administration believes now that since CCSS will test ALL students at the Algebra 2 and above level, then ALL students must “have the opportunity to be taught these standards before they take the test as juniors in March”! This is exactly what most of us feared, the test is driving the curriculum and we are being forced again to teach to the test! There is only one reason we are going forward with this insanity and it is all about power and greed and has nothing to do with foreign competition or improving our schools or getting students College and Career Ready. The only way to come out a winner in this “game” is to not go into teaching, but buy stock in companies like Pearson who will make billions. If you must work with children, then move to another country that values teachers so you will have a rewarding career. The forces behind the reform are too powerful and have infinite resources, so I see no hope for the future of our current system. Even California, with the most outspoken Governor against what is happening, we are moving ahead as if we were dropped from a plane without a parachute and we do not want to fall but gravity is too strong a force and the result is predictable. The only question now is when will we hit bottom. People like Gates remind me of people like Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin, or a Roman Emperor. Hopefully, the long term results are better for our children and grandchildren.
Welcome to the world of rigor. The reason these children are two years behind is because the coursework wasn’t challenging enough.
Then Commissioner Mills, over ten years ago, decided that EVERY student in NYS needed a Regents Diploma (passing 5 Regent’s Exams) in order to graduate. This included passing Algebra (also ELA, US History, Global History, and one Science course). In the beginning students could pass with a 55% which gradually moved to a 65%. They needed to pass the exam ) in order to get credit for the class. Needless to say, graduation rates, especially in the inner city, plummeted, the teacher’s were blamed, and now we have the current Commissioner King called for more rigor, the CCSS, and high stakes testing (with scoring designed to fail 2/3rds of the students in NYS).
This is what you have to look forward to in the future.
Our one hope is the hornets nest which has been poked – the suburban parents who won’t accept the fact that their schools and their children are failing. They have a power and a voice which teachers lack. Many are opting out of the testing. Many are picketing and calling and writing letters. Many are going to school board meetings and demanding their rights.
There is hope. And when the politicians see their re election threatened, they’ll quickly change their tune.
I just hope I get to gloat and say, “I told you so!”
MarkTwainfive.. do not give up as hopeless as it may seem. The first order of business is to put a stop to the high stakes testing and there is growing anger at all the testing such that parents as well as principals across the nation are starting to react. Once the testing era is put to a screeching halt, common core perhaps can be revised and edited by people who actually UNDERSTAND teaching.. yup the teachers. Then, as long as common core is not attached to high stakes tests it will be possible to reference it as A GUIDE among many instead of as a cookie cutter dictate which makes no sense in the current context it is used. I for one will stay well away from any PD’s and workshops on common core unless forced to go (until the high stakes testing is extinct)!
I see the same relentless drive in social studies standards. State test questions with high school and college vocabulary, students at a 4th grade reading level (in 7th and 8th grades), a stress on “higher level” thinking skills. These kids are 12 years old. If you don’t get strong test scores at the end of the year, you are moved out to an untested grade. Despite the population you are working with…
7th Grade Teacher:
I always wonder how I’m supposed to be accountable for kids’ getting vocabulary questions wrong on these tests. Since we’re not given word lists to teach the kids, we’re essentially on the hook for the 30,000 or so common words in the English language. “Smart kids” get most of their vocab at home listening to parents’ rich vocab, watching PBS, traveling to Europe. They’ll get the vocab questions right regardless of what the teacher does. Another example of the grave flaws in the reformers’ accountability schemes.
And if you read the test passages and questions, they are geared towards suburban kids and their experiences, not minorities living in the inner city. There is definitely a bias which has been recognized for decades, but never addressed.
To Anthony:
Thank you for keeping the unions’ feet to the fire. I’m very distressed by how the California Teachers Association is rubber stamping the standards without scrutiny. As you point out, these standards are just NCLB 2.0: they narrow the curriculum to a paltry, gray pair of subjects –math and processing of random texts –thereby robbing kids of a real education. The curricula being written to meet the ELA standards looks unlike any English lessons I’ve ever seen: perform mindnumbing, dry analysis –not to shed light on the text and its themes, but merely to gain practice at these “valuable” mental contortions (cf. Gates’ LearnZillion videos). And then they foist invalid, conceptually-flawed tests on the schools and try to make them the basis of teacher and school evaluation. There are parts of the standards that are likable, but the dominant interpretation of them, their de facto effect, is deleterious for kids and teachers alike.
But when we complain we are accused of being self serving. Our concern is for job security and not for the children.
Teachers need a good PR person to get our message out.
Diane Ravitch is leading the way, but we need more voices like hers.
If this link is valid, we have a HUGE problem! http://aft.org/pdfs/americaneducator/winter1314/TFT_Resources.pdf
How dispiriting. There’s something similar right at the ccss site.
I must be living in a parallel universe. To me, every answer that was given was a lie.
Reinventing the major teacher unions will be the only other major step to take in fighting back against this corporate business reform model in public education.
It is the teacher unions that have contributed, right next to people like Arne Duncan and Bill Gates, to the demise of public education. Harlan Uniderhill, you are with me on that one, I hope.
It’s not because unions are a bad idea; it’s because the unions that have evolved simply do not behave like real unions. Karen Lewis is a miracle. She is an outlier.
Which is why Randi Weingarten is far more pernicious a leader than someone like Joel Klein, philosphically speaking.
At least Klein knows what he wants and what he stands for. Of course, he is a sniveling little shrimpy impotent rat of a man, but he knows how to wield power and advance himself in the name of “civil rights” and “education”.
Weingarten and Van Roekel try to be everything to everyone from all camps.
That’s known as fraud drinking whiskey with deception while sleeping with traitors.
Reinvention is very difficult and expensive.
But it’s far from impossible.
It needs only motivation.
Look around you.
It’s in the air . . . . . . . . . . .
We already know that Randi Weingarten has sold out her teacher constituency. Perhaps she really thought Common Core was the “right” thing. Maybe the Gates money influenced her. Maybe she just wanted to “get on board” the Common Core train because it appeared to be inevitable (and it does). Ultimately, it doesn’t matter really matter why…she sold out.
So did the NEA. Here’s the NEA position statement on Common Core:
“NEA believes the Common Core State Standards have the potential to provide access to a complete and challenging education for all children. Broad range cooperation in developing these voluntary standards provides educators with more manageable curriculum goals and greater opportunities to use their professional judgment in ways that promote student success.”
Seriously?
The NEA’s chief policy analyst repeats the nonsense spewed by the corporate “reformers.” She says “Students need the knowledge and skills that will prepare them for college and career in our global economy.” As I keep noting, the U.S. already IS internationally competitive, and when we drop in the World Economic Forum’s competitive rankings it’s because of stupid economic policy choices that piled up big deficits and debt and plunged the nation into the Great Recession. The corporate-style “reformers” – from ExxonMobil to the Waltons, from Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan to State Farm and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce – supported all of those stupid (but for them, lucrative) policy choices.
Then, the NEA policy analyst cites some specious research (from the conservative Manhattan Institute) to insist that Common Core is necessary because “Among high school graduates, only half are academically prepared for postsecondary education.” The lead author of that “study,” Jay Greene, is no friend of public education (see the link to his review of Reign of Error at the bottom). In the “study, Greene says this about college attendance:
“Our results indicate that nearly all students who can possibly apply to college already do attend college… increasing financial aid or strengthening affirmative-action programs cannot substantially increase college participation…there is already a wide variety of programs designed to help low-income students attend college”
Uh-huh.
Greene says that “Some might find our results implausible.” Apparently, no one at the NEA does.
When the top teacher representatives don’t do their homework, and resort to reciting bad “research” and inane pronouncements, then teachers truly are in trouble. Such is the current state of public education in the United States.
The Greene review: http://educationnext.org/historian-ravitch-trades-fact-for-fiction/
The NEA overview on college and workforce readiness:
Click to access SCEA_Common_Core_and_Career_Readiness.pdf
Testing….if i can get on.
Geronimo, you are on