Paul Horton is a history teacher at the University of Chicago Lab School.
He writes:
The Cure for the Common Core
The Common Core is like that insidious commercial that creeps into the darker recesses of our short-term memories: the jingle that we wake up hearing; the embarrassingly male enhancement ad that we wince at; or the little message that penetrates the space between the paragraphs of every online news story we read. It has become the unintentional trope of market driven education: the separation of learning from creative, non alienated interaction between two subjects: the teacher and the learner. The Common Core Standards seek to reify the learning and assessment processes into code intended to objectify and operate skilled 21st century workers.
Stephen Pinker could not explain its staying power!
Readers of New York Times editorials who read nothing else about “The Core” tend to be down on trash talking critics. The message from the Times editorial board is that informed citizens want higher standards because we are fighting an educational multipolar Cold War with other countries that take an international test. We have to catch up or we are toast. Critics of catching up are ignorant cretins who are either burned out hippies who cling to warm and fuzzy notions of “progressive education,” lazy disgruntled teachers who will have to work harder for less, or “white suburban moms” who hover.
“Get real! say the Tiger moms, we have got to get our kids prepared for the ultimate multicultural meritocracy! The Spartans were wimps, we need real discipline!”
Well, I am hear to tell you that we did not need Common Core last year, and we don’t need it this year, just like we don’t need a lot of other things that we are told that we need.
Here is why:
1) The Common Core will not raise international test scores and there is no correlation between how we perform on international tests and the growth of our economy
2) The Common Core will not create high paying jobs. In fact, the net effect of the long-term implementation of the Common Core will be to drive down the salaries of teachers as their work is standardized to conform to digitalized instruction and standardized testing. The bargaining power of unions will be diminished as more charter schools are licensed and as digital learning forces students all over the world to compete for job qualifications (their test scores as well as transcripts will become what McKinsey calls “liquid information” that will follow them)
3) The Common Core will not lead to a more democratic society: the Common Core is funded by the 1% to make the one 1% more money. The corporations and foundations that have sponsored the Common Core are in it for the money, not kids, parents, or communities who effectively lose control of the educational process with its implementation. Microsoft, Pearson, Amplify and Rupert Murdoch have no loyalty to this country or any another country: they are loyal to stockholders all over the world. Money will be made by penetrating global educational markets with gadgets, software, and virtual learning systems. The leaders of the global movement to standardize education like Microsoft, Apple, and HP, to name three corporations have already set up schools in production and assembly areas that will interface with American and global educational standardization. So the corporate education reform movement might be sold in America as an effort to catch up with other country’s scores. The reality is that global corporations seek global skills alignment to be able to force workers around the world to compete with each other in acquiring a measurable set of skills. Value will thus be added by creating more competition between workers worldwide as test scores will create a scarcity of qualified employees worldwide. Competition for quantified qualifications will drive wages down even for the best jobs. Far from reducing income inequality, Common Core will make it worse locally, nationally, and globally. If you are a great test taker, you will have the opportunity to work for a global corporation, but you will always be competing against great test takers from all over the world.
4) The Common Core will not reduce the achievement gap. No credible study suggests that it does or will. Remember that the big foundations and companies that are pushing Common Core can create “independent studies” that skew results. Remember as well that our media consistently reports foundation “think tank” studies and not academic studies. Remember as well that the Gates Foundation’s resources are virtually limitless. Is there anyone on the Harvard Education faculty who has not received a grant that has origins in the Gates Foundation?
5) The Common Core Standards are top down, not written by experienced educators, and do not consider the individual needs of students of varying abilities who might need to be challenged more or who face steep learning challenges. The National Council of Teachers of English was given the opportunity to review the Common Core literacy standards and their review was scathing. The Common Core Math Standards are confusing, developmentally inappropriate for many students in grades one through three, and do not end up preparing students for college level calculus courses. As more students, parents, and teachers are exposed to the shoddy quality of the scripted lessons, software, and assessments that are being rushed out by for profit testing companies, they begin to understand that they are purchasing a lemon without ever being involved in a decision to buy at any level. The adaption Common Core Standards was required as a part of the Race to the Top competition that states entered to qualify for federal grant money. Our Education Secretary, working with two top aides who were previously employed at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, devised the RttT competition to compel compliance with more charter school creation, state mandated testing aligned with the Common Core Standards, data collection on students and their families, and Value Added Assessments for teachers based on student standardized testing. In many cases applications were prewritten and modified by the Gates Foundation. In most states, only two signatures were required: the governor’s and the state superintendent of education’s. There was very little involvement of experienced educators in this whole process from framing to drafting to mandating. Effectively, local districts gave up control without understanding how or why. Perhaps more importantly, despite Mr. Duncan’s claims, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and leading officials within the DOEd successfully collaborated on creating the requirements for RttT in violation of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Together, they successfully mandated the framework for the creation of a national curriculum and coordinated efforts between the National Governor’s Association and Achieve to fund the writing of national assessments that constitute a national curriculum that will be used as the foundation for a national testing regime.
New Year’s Resolutions:
1) We need a new non-aligned movement: against RttT, the Common Core, standardized assessments, and VAM evaluations
2) State and local school boards and major teacher unions need to seriously examine all current and proposed standards to determine the standards that they will support and implement
3) We need to end standardized for profit assessments: why are we paying for shoddy products that will be used to punish kids, schools, parents, and the poor?
4) Allow only those charters that will be administered by the public and for the public. They must be transparent and not for profit. They need to serve communities and kids, especially in underserved neighborhoods
5) We need to end the involvement of for profit investors in education. We need legal transparency that identifies Wall Street influence on Education policy at all levels. We need to be able to identify which local politicians and investors have profited from the possession of Microsoft or Pearson stock or stock in charter companies
6) DOEd funds for special education and other support services should not be held hostage to compliance to RttT mandates
7) Teachers should mentor new teachers to reduce reliance on scripted curricula; teachers should create authentic assessments and grade authentic assessments. Boards of teachers at grade levels and subject departments should create authentic assessment rubrics and should control and examine the state wide assessment process
8) Laws should be passed at the Federal level and in every state to insure that policy makers have at least ten years in a classroom before they are allowed to assume an administrative or policy level post. Our educational system is being destroyed from within by policymakers who are more loyal to corporate and foundation interests than they are to students, communities, and parents. Increasingly, these policy makers have no experience in Education. They are hired to turn Education into for profit businesses
9) Citizens United must be repealed. Because both major parties are beholden to Wall Street interests, our education policies are beholden to bundlers who fund political campaigns in exchange for investment opportunities
10) Remember that although many on the corporate reform side are well intentioned, they care nothing for due process or democracy: they have pulled off a power play and we must resist by coming together. They have demonstrated to the American people that they have contempt for the democratic process. They have the money, the big media, the talking points, the PR firms, and the Chamber of Commerce and Exxon making speeches. We have the passion and the fight! Resist Moloch we must!
Happy New Year in Solidarity!
Paul AFT Local 2063
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé and commented:
Why President Obama’s Common Core is wrong.
A POWERFUL, PASSIONATE COMMENTARY.
Indeed.
Funny thing, I woke this morning thinking about how simultaneously clueless and certain the standards-and-testing advocates are. Diane Ravitch spoke of this standards-and-testing movement as a religion, and certainly there’s something cultish about it. I think of this movement, and I think of these lines from Robert Frost:
I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me–
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again
Great summary!
Is anyone aware of even one private school that has adopted Common Core standards?
Much to my dismay,the Archdiocese for which I teach has.
Our private school has compared common core to our curriculum. As with most private schools, parents are assured that we cover the common core “and then some”. The crucial difference between what common core demands and our curriculum is how and when the elements are brought to students. I was just reading a standard-by -standard accounting for ELA. This accounting easily reveals that compared to our curriculum, common core merely pushes down aspects of the curriculum to kindergarten and early elementary. This is viewed as absurd by parents and teachers alike because it is not as if our students have “fallen behind” by the later years. Quite the contrary.
Well, at this point, I know a lot more about Common Core and will fight to repeal it for the sake of all students, but when I first started looking at the CC Standards, what you have posted about them simply pushing down the curriculum was my concern. It is so developmentally inappropriate for my first graders!
a. The CCSS in ELA seem to have been written by amateurs with no knowledge of the sciences of language acquisition and little familiarity with best practices in the various domains that the standards cover. Some of the general ideas expressed in the appendices and supplementary materials connected with the new ELA standards are worth considering, but the standards list, itself, is pretty close to what one would get in informed educators and scholars put together a list of misconceptions and halftruths about acquisition of reading, writing, speaking, listening, and thinking ability and about the acquisition of the grammar and vocabulary of a language.
b. Having national standards creates economies of scale for educational materials, enabling them to crowd out/keep out smaller competitors, and so will reduce, dramatically, the choices available to educators.
c. Kids differ. Standards do not.
d. Standards are treated by publishers AS the curriculum and imply particular pedagogical approaches, and so they result in DRAMATIC distortions of curricula and pedagogy. In ELA, this problem is especially severe because the new standards are so backward, so hackneyed.
e. Real innovation in educational approaches comes about from the implementation of competing ideas; creating one set of standards precludes new innovation.
f. Ten years of doing this stuff under NCLB hasn’t worked. The new math standards are not appreciably different from the preceding state standards, and the new math tests are not appreciably different from the preceding state high-stakes math tests. It’s idiotic to do more of what hasn’t worked and to expect real change/improvement. The Common Core + PARCC or SBAC are simply Son of NCLB: The Horror Is Nationalized. That approach was tried. It has failed as measured by the education deformers’ own dubious metrics—the national and international standardized test scores.
g. In a free society, no unelected group (Achieve) has the right to overrule every teacher, curriculum coordinator, and curriculum developer with regard to what the outcomes of educational processes should be.
h. High-stakes tests and teacher and school evaluations based on those lead to teaching to the test–for example, to having kids do lots and lots of practice using the test formats–and all this test prep has significant opportunity costs; it crowds out important learning.
i. A complex, diverse, pluralistic society needs kids to be variously trained, not identically milled.
j. The folks who prepared these standards did their work heedlessly; they did not stop to question what a standard should look like in a particular domain but simply made unwarranted but extremely consequential decisions about that based on current practice in state tests. The ELA standards are misconceived at their most fundamental level, at the level of their categorical conceptualization, at the level at which one asks, “What should outcomes in this domain of the language arts look like?”
k. The tests and test prep create enormous test anxiety and undermine the development of love of learning, and so these undermine our prime objective as educators: producing intrinsically motivated learners. No kid ever got up in the morning and rushed to school so that she could improve her state’s test scores.
l. Real learning tends to be unique and unpredictable. It can’t be summarized in a bullet list. Creating a bullet list of standards could rightly be called an attempted Powerpointing of U.S. education. See Edward Tufte’s brilliant “The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint” for a superb analysis of what this is a terrible idea.
m. We are living in times of enormous change; kids being born today are going to experience more change in their lifetimes than has occurred in all of human history up to this point, so they need to be intrinsically, not extrinsically, motivated to learn; high-stakes tests belong to the extrinsic punishment/reward school of educational theory.
n. If we create a centralized Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth, that is a first step on a VERY slippery slope.
o. The standards-and-testing regime usurps local teacher and administrator autonomy, and no one works well, at all well, under conditions of low autonomy.
p. The standards and the new tests have not been tested.
q. The standards and the new test formats, though extremely consequential in their effects on every aspect of K-12 schooling, were never subjected to expert critique; nor were they subjected to the equivalent of failure modes and effects analysis.
r. The legislation that created the Department of Education specifically forbade it from getting involved in curricula, but as E. D. Hirsch, Jr., pointed out on this blog a few weeks ago, the new math standard clearly ARE a curriculum outline, and the federal DOE has pushed this curriculum on the country.
s. There is no mechanism for correcting the glaring conceptual errors, at various design levels, in the new ELA “standards,” no means by which this purported mechanism for achieving continual improvement can be continually improved in light of current and emerging scholarship, research, and practice.
And these are just a few general observations. I haven’t even begun, here, to speak of problems with specific standards and guidelines within the standards.
t. The whole NCLB/CCSS deform approach is predicated on a flawed educational theory: that learning is mastery of a list of skills and that teaching is punishment and reward via summative tests.
u. The tests themselves are extraordinarily flawed instruments and have never been properly validated.
cx: See Edward Tufte’s brilliant “The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint” for a superb analysis of WHY this is a terrible idea.
v. There are glaring lacunae throughout the CCSS in ELA, and so curricula based on them tend to be incoherent–to leave out essential material because it isn’t in the standards and won’t be tested.
w. The CCSS in ELA lead to distorted readings in which individual selections are put into the Procrustean bed of the standards for a particular grade level and everything not related to those standards is lopped off, even if it’s key understanding the selection.
Because of w, above, the standards in ELA ironically undermine their own call for close reading.
x. The CCSS and PARCC or SBAC are a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist and are a distraction from addressing the real problem of disparity of outcomes due to child poverty in the United States. By the deformers’ own preferred metrics, if one corrects the international test score results for socioeconomic status, U.S. kids lead the world.
Please forgive the occasional typo and redundancy in the list above (e.g., “new innovation”–that one is egregious). I edited this list far too quickly. But I stand by the points made.
This is one instance where your passionate erudition and advocacy need to trump editorial concerns. We should all agree that bloopers are pre-forgiven and seldom confusing. We will all continue to cringe when we sin, but I’m afraid our interests predispose us to be tough on ourselves.
Thanks, 2old2teach. U R, clearly, not 2old 2teach! 🙂
Thank YOU. Your posts always make me think.
y. Many of the “skills” listed in the CCSS in ELA are implicitly acquired, not explicitly learned; creation of the bullet list encourages the development of curricula and pedagogy that treat what kids are wired to acquire as explicit instruction in keeping with the explicit standard. Big mistake. Huge mistake. That’s like teaching kids the names of the muscles and bones in their feet in order to teach them how to walk. But because of the CCSS, rivers of such misconceived curricula are being created to “cover” the standards.
z. Both acquisition and explicit learning (it’s very important to distinguish between these) involve BOTH world knowledge (knowledge of what) and procedural knowledge (knowledge of how). The standards in ELA barely address the former and typically describe the latter at an extremely vague, abstract level that implies no operationalization, which is key to procedural learning.
Man, I can’t compete with that many posts in that short of time. I concede, Robert!
(But keep em comin!)
Robert – you’ve said it all.
We used to create benchmarks, not to drive curriculum, but as a guide. I think it’s all in the way a concept is utilized. Right now, outside forces are micromanaging teachers and forcing them to do things in a way which is counterproductive to all they’ve been taught as educators. As a friend of mine recently said, the requirements are overwhelming.
The reference to “insidious commercials” reminds me of Twain’s short story “A Literary Nightmare”. He reads an advertising jingle in the paper and can’t get it out of his head – eventually it’s all he can think or even say. If we go on too much longer being entertained to death, we’re all going to be like the character in that story.
Anyway, great article (as usual). Love the title. I would only expand on #4 – if we must have charters at all (and I wouldn’t), the ban on for-profit needs to be applied to the whole operation of the school. No more having “non-profit” charters contracting out everything to for-profit subsidiaries, affiliates or even non-related entities.
People really need to understand that this is about democracy. We’ve lost so much already that I’m not sure people even understand the concept any more, but the loss of democracy has been accelerating at such a rapid pace lately that, unless something happens soon, within a few years we won’t recognize ourselves any more – even the illusion will be gone.
Very, very well said, Paul!
Thanks, bro.!
Yes, Paul. You were able to eloquently capture the problems that educators face in the current political climate. I’m going to save your comments and refer to them when I need to defend my viewpoints on the problems teachers and students are currently enduring in the name of progress.
Paul, I read what you wrote and think to myself, “I bet this fellow is one helluva good teacher, for he gets it. He’s also a fine writer, clearly.”
Kids listen to passion, something you will not find in scripted lessons. I am one of millions of teachers who are passionate about what they are doing and their students’ learning. Fighting Moloch is a great story, kids listen to good stories, there is magic in narrative, something that escapes our mind-in-the-spreadsheet corporate reformers.
Long term memory is strongly linked to human emotion. Something scripted lessons will never accomplish.
There is magic in narrative, indeed. Narrative is a primary mode by which we make sense of the world. What are we but our memories? And what are those but the stories that we tell ourselves (largely confabulated stories, BTW–see the work of Elizabeth Loftus)? There is a whole school of clinical psychology called cognitive narrative therapy about teaching people to tell themselves different stories–ones that are more life enhancing. Long ago, in his brilliant “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact,” historiographer Hayden White pointed out that we tell ourselves that we understand a bit of history when we have imposed a narrative frame on it, replete with heroes and villains, BTW. Learning how to create, make sense of, and subject to critique our narratives is extraordinarily important.
Such great comments about narratives. Kids are engaged when they can relate to the theme which results in rich discourse. Students not only learn about themselves but can scaffold and apply to other text and future life experiences. From my own experiences with kids from low ses schools, they love to read text that they can relate to their experiences. Its good therapy in that it becomes life changing. It also helps develop their formal register to be better equip in negotiating, compromising, debating, socializing, etc., allowing them to equally compete in the workforce. The power of lang. development is often taken for granted.
Wait a minute, reading Federal Reserve Bank minutes – something explicitly listed by David Coleman as “informational text” to be read on Bill Gates’ forced march to The Land of Excellencia – isn’t a narrative that will inspire young people?
Well, then let’s give them (poverty wage) job training and electronic device manuals.
As I keep saying – the “suggested” reading list is inappropriate, to say the least. They were just pulling titles out of an anatomy part which is not used for reading (perhaps for sitting).
Your humorous reference to the anatomy of the nether regions didn’t hit home until I had already clicked “delete” and sent your comment to trash land. It took a few minutes to dig it out again and fully process. I appreciate the chuckle.
I have my moments. If we aren’t laughing, we’re crying.
All good info except you left out the chief architect himself: Marc Tucker.
Read his letter to Hillary Clinton. He spells it all out there.
Yes, there are useful idiots like the tech companies who will make a killing off of Common Core, but this is more than that.
This is the centralizing of our education system. This is putting more power in the hands of the Feds over our local schools. This IS social justice. Like it or not.
The Central Planners will determine where our kids go in life. Surveys of students have already begun.
This is CENTRAL planning of education. We have CENTRAL planning in healthcare now too.
So for all of you who ThiNK the FEDs are our GOD, Daddy, SAVIOR, etc. Next time, be careful what you wish for.
If you were wise, you’d SToP FEEDING the MONSter you helped create and start to find ways to destroy it.
Look at those willing to abolish the US DOE!
You know nothing about social justice.
There was a time, in the 20th Century, I would have championed overtures from the federal government to raise standards, mostly in the South. However, the days of the civil rights movement and progress are over. The federal government is now merely creating a ‘market’ for private investment, using lead production management methods at the expense of civil education and cultural enrichment. So, I suppose, you guys won, the commons has been stormed by welfare enriched capital.
Much of so-called education reform, as well as labor/social policy In general today, is an attempt to revoke the 20th century.
It’s back to the future – the 19th century, that is – in the attempt to bust the unions, end regulation, shrink the public sector and eliminate the social wage.
It’s all of the above, with an omnipresent surveillance dragnet added.
A standing ovation is just not as effective when you’re alone in the mountains of Idaho. BRAVO!
My sentiments as well.
The “cure” for CCSS??
I’m sorry but there is no cure. We’re going to have to put it down. Injection or slug?
It’s not the CCSS that need to be cured – it’s us who need to be cured of them – they are a disease!
Reblogged this on Saint Simon Common Core Information and commented:
Awesome summary by Paul Horton of some problems with common core and some steps to take to resolve them.
Excellent post, Paul.
The Common Core is the vehicle that is being used to drive a stake into the heart of public education, teachers’ unions, local control, property rights, privacy, sovereignty, and creativity. They had to get most states to adopt the Standards and teacher evaluations’ tied to student tests and longitudinal data collection systems to track our children from the cradle to the workforce as the first step in the dismantling of our republic. The second step is incessant testing with failing results. The third step is firing teachers and principals based on two years of “ineffective” ratings. The fourth step is closing public schools and replacing them with charter schools. The fifth step is enacting legislation that mandates federal funding “follows the child.(The re-authorization bills HR 5 and SB 1094 for ESEA contain such language)” For profit charter schools run by Wall Street will be funded by our taxes while neighborhood schools lose top students and funding. Curriculum is put on line. Gulen charter school stock soars. K12 Inc. stock soars. Microsoft stock soars. Pearson stock soars. Children that can’t sit still for the scripted lessons or the computerized test prep are put on Ritalin. Novartis stock soars. It’s all in a days work for Bill Gates…..keeping the stock market humming.
http://www.newswithviews.com/Hoge/anita104.htm
Well done, Paul! Thanks for sharing, Dr. Ravitch. I think that this is the best post about Common Core that I’ve read!
Bottom line: the Common Core is a lie. It is a lie that Arne Duncan desperately attempts to sell but cannot–he moans and whines like a child when it is rejected.
Well-written post, Paul. Dawn, you have nicely summed up the gist of it all: follow the money while turning American children (other people’s children, that is) into Walmart widgets. As has been said–again & again–our country has been going down the tubes for at least the last four decades. Four decades=forty years. ALEC just celebrated its 40th birthday last summer.
BTW, did anyone see “American Experience: 1964” Tuesday night? This year marks the 50th anniversary of both the Civil Rights Bill and the War on Poverty.
It made me cry. President Obama just talked about inequality and poverty.
Just talked.
I wonder what Albert Einstein would say about the Chaotic, Cluttered, and Scripted CCSS that has been thrown at the teachers from the Testing Maniacs..who believe that the arts, PE, have zero relevance in a child’s education…
“Never do anything against conscience, even if the state demands it”
” I fear the day technology will surpass our human interaction
The world will have a generation of idiots.”
“The Human Spirit must prevail over technology”
“Play is the highest from of research”
“The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination”
“Out of Clutter, find simplicity”
“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the Mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.”
‘Logic will take you from A to B…Imagination will take you everywhere”…
and on and on and on…..
Beautifully said.
Excellent !! A must read .We are the Passion. Never thought it has been fair for the Special Education children and other support services. Parents need to speak up .. We must continue to speak up.. Do it everyday…
Great post. More teachers and administrators should question the assumptions behind the Common Core Standards, as well as their actual substance.
One quibble about item 5) in the first list, though. Somebody affiliated with the National Council of Teachers of English might have given the CCS a bad review, but the NCTE website is loaded with “resources” for addressing the so-called “instructional shifts” that were a big part of David Coleman’s CCS sales job. In other words, NCTE accepts the CCS as a done deal, and backs them. The NCTE website frames its support as a set of suggestions for making instruction student-centered “in a time of Common Core Standards.” Still, NCTE did accept Gates Foundation money earmarked for “implementation” of the CCS: http://www.gatesfoundation.org/How-We-Work/Quick-Links/Grants-Database/Grants/2013/07/OPP1093423
One of the problems with a big, influential outfit like NCTE endorsing the CCS is that the CCS are reductive by nature. The authors try to define “English Language Arts” in a way that circumscribes the possibilities for what topics are studied and what methods should be used. In general, the standards tend to narrow both curriculum and pedagogy, and in a way that doesn’t necessarily make sense. The standards and related materials are shot through with controversial and, in my view, outdated and erroneous ideas about reading, writing, and literature (and how they should be taught). Robert D. Shepherd mentions quite a few of these problems above, but the critique could go even further.
Not everyone will agree on exactly what’s wrong with the CCS ELA standards, but based on my experience as a student and teacher, the best parts of the standards are things good teachers have been doing for decades. For many teachers, the “instructional shifts” won’t be shifts at all. For others, I suspect the pendulum will swing way too far in the wrong direction (especially in the lower grades).
But now that NCTE has endorsed the CCS (and publishers have long since jumped on the bandwagon), the English teaching profession is in danger of “shifting” toward a narrow and repetitive focus on the most formulaic prescriptions contained in the standards. This is a recipe for test prep (per David Coleman’s Brookings speech), so expect more boredom and frustration among students. Also, look for a misguided skewing of the purposes for teaching the “English Language Arts” in the first place. And notice how the brute-force implementation of the standards (and the high-stakes tests to follow) will have a chilling effect on teachers who dare to question any part of the enterprise.
In other words, the Gates Foundation paid NCTE $$249,482 to diminish the English teaching profession (and even, in some cases, to turn back the clock by fifty years or more). Instead of acquiescing to the CCS, I think we–I’m still an NCTE member–should fight to get rid of them. But if the standards really are carved in stone, who will have the guts to go behind the backs of Gates and Coleman and make some changes? (All you freethinking English teachers, get out your hammers and chisels!)
Like. Like. Like.
Diane, when you reposted this you (or Paul originally?) wrote “hear” instead of “here” – kind of undermines his whole argument. So just a heads up. Feel free to delete this, i just wanted to let you guys know!