Dennis Van Roekel is a supporter of the Common Core standards. He recently said in an article in Education Week that no one has really set out their specific objections to the standards or offered a better alternative.
Two teacher-bloggers here offer help to Dennis. I know that Dennis is a dedicated advocate for teachers and for public education, so I hope he will read and take heed of advice from these two thoughtful and experienced teachers.
Here is Mercedes Schneider, a high school teacher in Louisiana, who patiently explains what the problems are.
And here is Peter Greene, a high school teacher in Pennsylvania, who offers help to Van Roekel.
Schneider writes in answer to the question, what is missing from the standards:
The entire democratic process is “missing” from the standards. CCSS is as “top-down” as it gets, and with a dash of “facilitated democracy” to offer pseudo-legitimacy: Teachers were brought in late in the process to offer “suggestions” that were even implemented word-for-word. However, no teacher was asked whether CCSS should happen in the first place, and no teacher in a “state” (only a governor and state super needed to sign the CCSS contract with USDOE for RTTT funds) that has adopted CCSS has the freedom to opt out.
Democracy is missing from CCSS, Mr. Van Roekel, and I assure you that I am not the only teacher that has a problem with that.
Greene writes in response to Van Roekel’s question about “what’s the alternative”:
When I teach logical fallacies, we call this a “complex question.” In the sales world it’s called “assuming the sale.” Either way, it is (and has been) the most odious part of DVR’s rhetorical strategy. Because “what’s the alternative” assumes that we need one.
It tacitly accepts the reformatorium assumption that US public ed is a hodge-podged mess of incompetent educators who don’t know what they are doing and who desperately need guidance and direction. What I would expect from my union president is something along the lines of, “Hey! My members are doing great work!” and NOT “Yeah, I need something to help these poor dopes that I’m president of.”
This question, and the assumptions imbedded in it, skip over one hugely massively crucial point. The people who insist we must have CCSS have not offered one shred of evidence that national standards– not just CCSS but ANY national standards– work. Nothing. I get that from up on Mount DC, things would look neater and it would be a lot easier to run a national school district if everybody were on the same page. But that is about providing the best possible education for every student in America; it’s about providing a better management experience for government bureaucrats.
This is like having a doctor say, “Well, since your headaches are so bad, I guess we could take out your spleen.” And when you protest that you don’t want your spleen removed, the doctor says, “Well, what do you want me to take out instead. It’s just a hodgepodge of organs in there. Which one do you want removed.” And then he can tell you that this is his best guess, and in a decade or so we’ll see if it pays off.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
My next to last graf should have read “that is NOT about providing the best possible education.” my bad
I read Mercedes’ post – Bravo, Mercedes! Yes, good teaching is contingent on the relationships a teacher has with her/his students, and an environment of trust so that students may engage freely in exchanges with their teacher. (Why must teachers continue to reinforce the obvious?!) – Yet – as teachers must become activists, I am frequently concerned about how, in activism, which is so necessary right now, time may be taken away from students.
But, to re-frame this as good news: Now that it appears that the education culture is hopefully reinventing itself to meet the irrational demands of policy-makers and et al. I’m wondering how teachers’ expanding roles as activists will inform (particularly English teachers) the types of literature and narratives that they choose to further amplify the necessity of Civil Disobedience. The most difficult task there – which writers to choose! There are so many!
“He recently said in an article in Education Week that no one has really set out their specific objections to the standards or offered a better alternative.”
Cripes, he needs to read your blog! Robert Shepherd alone has burned through the bandwidth elaborating in detail what’s wrong with the ELA standards, and plenty of others have stated specific objections to the Math standards.
As far as “a better alternative”, I’ll go back to my example of someone beating you over the head with a hammer, thus making it difficult for you to concentrate. “Experts” materialize out of the woodwork for all sorts of gadgets and gimmicks to improve your concentration, which you naturally reject. So these experts then demand to know what your “better alternative” is. Your better alternative, of course, is to STOP HITTING ME OVER THE HEAD WITH THAT HAMMER!!!”
Dienne: your point is well taken—
“Cripes, he needs to read your blog!”
Agree or disagree with the positions of the owner of this blog or the commenters on it, anyone who is not following this blog is functionally illiterate in the ed debates.
Quite apart from the level of commentary—your mention of Robert D. Shepherd is quite apt—in slightly over two weeks this blog has gone more than 600,000 views past 9 million. In other words, it has squarely placed itself in the center of the national discussion about education, in no small part becoming a forum for quite a few people who are otherwise denied a voice or a say.
With all due respect, Mr. Van Roekel acts as if he is as disconnected from the current realities in education as is Secretary of Education Arne Duncan who promotes—and derides—standardized tests and promotes—and then denies he is promoting—charters at the expense of public schools.
Plausible deniability won’t work in this situation. A mere click of the mouse on your browser and you can learn more on this blog than you can from a plethora of EduApparatchiks squeezing every last drop of $tudent $ucce$$ out of iPads.
At least, that’s my dos centavitos worth…
😎
Something better?
The previous NY State Standards approved by teachers.
“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
An interesting statistic: 40% of the unemployed have some level of College education.
These new standards will make us career ready? where are the careers?
When I started in my prior career, there was a standard called SGML for describing information in a non procedural manner. The standard was imposed on the tech community and was unwieldy, complex, and hence useless. Fortunately, people were given the freedom to innovate and a grass roots style revision emerged as the more relevant and workable HTML. It is so true that top down, rigid monstrosities like CCSS almost never work. Rather, evolution and excellence come from freedom, practice, and experience. The latter is found not in the high elevations of a board room or marbled halls of politicians, but from classrooms with teachers allowed to experiment and administrators allowed to lead.
The idea isn’t whether CCSS is good or bad. The problem is the standards have become a political weapon when they should be simply a tool in the teacher’s toolbox. Rather than collaboration, reflection, and refinement, we have competition, dehumanization, and rigidity. Even worse, the content of the standards is becoming irrelevant and being replaced de facto by the PARCC tests. So teachers are in reality being held to standards they cannot even see.
“The latter is found not in the high elevations of a board room or marbled halls of politicians, but from classrooms with teachers allowed to experiment and administrators allowed to lead.”
Agree with all but the last five words of your statement. We don’t need “administrators to lead” but administrators who are in service to what the teachers need and want for the classroom teaching and learning process and who know how to get the hell out of the way.
The concept of administrators as “educational leaders” really took off in the late 90s and early 00s with the end results being things like the “Broad Academy of Leadership” and the thinking that administrators should be like some “general” or other C.O.s with a top down managerial command and control hybrid militaristic corporate organization-guaranteed to stifle creativity and flexibility.
Administrators as educational leaders (along with the current crop of edudeformers) are the last thing we need to better the teaching and learning process.
People who do not enjoy or understand teaching become administrators. Teachers put children before ambition.
Rather, evolution and excellence come from freedom, practice, and experience.
Rather than collaboration, reflection, and refinement, we have competition, dehumanization, and rigidity.
yes, yes, yes!!!!
So very well said!!!
“The idea isn’t whether CCSS is good or bad.”
It sure as hell is! When something, CCSS, is completely invalid it can only be “bad”. Aint’ two ways about it!
See my post below about Wilson.
This is corruption Texas Style. The governor, the commissioner of education, elected officials, school boards, and the new power broker, Texans for Education (an arm of the very powerful Texans for Lawsuit Reform ) are all in this story. Looks like we will need the MOTHERS to step up again in the next legislative session.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jason-stanford/sort-of-a-jack-abramoff-k_b_4683652.html?utm_hp_ref=education&ir=Education
“When I teach logical fallacies, we call this a “complex question.” In the sales world it’s called “assuming the sale.” Either way, it is (and has been) the most odious part of DVR’s rhetorical strategy. Because “what’s the alternative” assumes that we need one.
It tacitly accepts the reformatorium assumption that US public ed is a hodge-podged mess of incompetent educators who don’t know what they are doing and who desperately need guidance and direction.”
Perfectamundo!
The reformatorium. I guess that this must be the name of the echo chamber within which these deformers blather their slogans, endlessly, to one another.
One person’s reformatorium is another’s vomitorium, of course.
their slogans, their easy answers to complex questions
Corporate Core is all about branding. You can’t have a market without brands, all so corporate marketers can own and profit off their brands.
The whole thing about the market model is the existence of third party middlemen who troll the traffic between producers and consumers without doing anything but parasite off the exchange. They have no other talents — that’s all they know how to do.
That is why they need their corporate owned politicians to create markets where none existed and none were needed before — the Enron model — destroying public institutions and public utilities in the process.
A better alternative would be to realize that just because a few students in several states don’t learn the exact same things doesn’t matter too much. Do we need a standardized national diet and excercize regimen? Would that solve the nation’s problems? I think not.
Plus, CC is a hack, cut and past product, so there’s that.
Plus, it’s not free, open source, so it’s real objective is profit, not education, so there’s that.
Yes, especially in ELA.
““When I sit on panels and someone chastises us for supporting the common core, I always ask: ‘Are there specific things you believe should not be there?’ I never get an answer,” NEA President Dennis Van Roekel said. “Second, I ask, “What’s missing?’ I don’t get an answer. And the third thing I ask is, ‘What is the alternative? What do you want? Standards all over the ballpark, tests all over the ballpark?’ “
In point of fact, Van Roekel continued, ”the Common Core State Standards are our best guess of what students need to know to be successful, whether they choose college or careers. If someone has a better answer than that, I want to see it.” [Emphasis added.]
“Greene writes in response to Van Roekel’s question about “what’s the alternative”:
When I teach logical fallacies, we call this a “complex question.” In the sales world it’s called “assuming the sale.” Either way, it is (and has been) the most odious part of DVR’s rhetorical strategy. Because “what’s the alternative” assumes that we need one.
It tacitly accepts the reformatorium assumption that US public ed is a hodge-podged mess of incompetent educators who don’t know what they are doing and who desperately need guidance and direction. What I would expect from my union president is something along the lines of, “Hey! My members are doing great work!” and NOT “Yeah, I need something to help these poor dopes that I’m president of.”
What caught Greene’s eye caught mine, that DVR is offering a “devil’s bargain” type of argument in support of CCSS.
So Mr. Van Roekel, none of your questions are the correct ones. The correct one is “Are educational standards a valid epistemological and ontological mechanism through which to view the teaching and learning process?” And the obvious answer, at least to those who understand simple logic, rational thought is a resounding NO! For proof of the invalidity of educational standards as a valid educational concept see Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at:
http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)
1. A quality cannot be quantified. Quantity is a sub-category of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category by only a part (sub-category) of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as one dimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing we are lacking much information about said interactions.
2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other word all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. As a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it measures “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices,
educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self-evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
Great post – while reading this I was reminded of when you are on vacation and someone jumps in to take your picture then follows you around wanting to be paid. Oh you don’t want the picture? Sure, what picture would you like instead? We will wait for your answer on what you want to replace it with.
Great analogy, Jen!
Duane, these are subtle points, and they fly over most heads, but they are well made and important. It’s extraordinarily valuable to question the hidden assumptions on which the standards-and-testing regime rests. The technocrats confuse their simplifications with reality in all its complexity. Again and again they do this. No one looks at all deeply at the claims to validity made by the publishers of these high-stakes tests. I suspect that that will change when the national tests hit. Then, those claims will be subjected to astonishing scrutiny and be found wanting. There’s going to be hell to pay when that happens. It will be fun to watch (and participate in) that. But a lot of kids will be irreparably harmed in the process. That’s tragic.
Robert,
I’m not so sure that they are “subtle” points. More like “hardly known”, “refused to be acknowledged” and/or “best left ignored so that they settle to the bottom of the dust bin of history” points/concepts.
I find that whenever they are simply explained the vast majority of folks understand. Now it has a tendency to “shake their beliefs” so much that, well, but, but , but, “it just can’t be so”-“If what you (Wilson) proposes is true why have we been doing these things for a half a century?”-“Everyone else can’t have been wrong all this time.” “No, it’s to radical, to against the current practices to believe that what you say is true”.
These things really aren’t that complex, although, by necessity for a doctoral dissertation, Wilson’s word usage and stringing together of thoughts can seem to be “complex”. But after a go at it or two, the reading really blossoms out so that so much more can be seen/gleaned.
Wilson = Galileo = Newton = Einstein in the radical and meme shape shifting of well established traditional thought!
Robert,
Lets take the subtle points one at a time and see how high they fly.
Point 1, a quality can not be quantified. Hotness and coldness are qualities, therefore the can not be quantified. Fast and slow are qualities, therefore they can not be quantified. Tall and short, heavy and light are qualities, therefore they can not be quantified.
Furthermore, miles per hour, kilograms, temperature Fahrenheit OR Celsius are subcategories of fast, heavy, and hot respectively, and therefore it is illogical to attempt to characterize fast BY THE QUANTITY of miles an hour, heavy BY THE QUANTITY OF kilograms, or cold BY THE QUANTITY of temperature Fahrenheit.
If we are in agreement that we should ignore all these attempts to quantify qualities, we can move on to point 2, and discuss the locality of temperature measure to the part of the backyard surrounding the thermometer and how it is meaningless at the front door.
TE, of course qualities can be quantified. It would be crazy to think otherwise. The important point is the ways in which our measurement devices and procedures determine the measurement that we get. A famous example of this is Mandelbrot’s–measuring a coastline. The shorter the measuring stick, the longer the coastline.
So we the conclusion we reach from Mandelbrot’s work is that maps are useless?
Point one of the summary of Wilson’s work is not a subtle argument, but simply a false statement. Some qualities can be usefully quantified, it is not illogical to do so. The interesting argument to have is which qualities can be quantified and which not. On that question, aparently, Wilson is silent.
And, TE, it’s important to be cognizant of the extent to which all characterization via language partakes of the magical decree. Even simple ostensive reference singles out a thing as an object. I am various objects–man, father, teacher, whatever. But I am also a biome, a sort of great barrier reef, for only 10 percent of the cells in my body are me. The rest are independent organisms inhabiting this body. It’s important for us to recognize that when we identify, sort, quantify, classify, etc., we are doing so in ways that we’ve probably not examined very deeply.
TE
You’ve got it exactly backwards. Your examples are all quantitative properties that you are attaching qualitative descriptions to. This can be done with virtually everything that is quantifiable.
Low SAT scores; high ACT scores
Poor attendance rates
Excellent graduation rates.
However TE their are many qualities that cannot be quantified.
Compassion, exuberance, love, organization, work ethic, attention to detail, – must I go on?
Wilson’s (or perhaps I should say Duane’s) point one is not that many qualities can not be quantified, it is that NO qualities can be quantified. Drawing a distinction between those that can be usefully quantified and those that can not would be a useful and interesting exercise, but that is not what point one in the post does.
Even for those, we can come up with quantitative measures: e.g., Do you strongly dislike, dislike, have no opinion about, like, or love ______? We do a survey and use a standard technique like a five-item Likert scale.
But we have to be have clarity about, humility about, the limitations of the measurement devices and procedures that we’re using. If I ask,
What do you think of the government charging death taxes on money that has already been taxed once, thereby limiting the right of people to pass down what they’ve worked so hard to acquire to their children?
or
What do you think of some kids having everything handed to them by their parents while others grow up in abject poverty and begin their adult lives with no resources whatsoever?
I’m going to get different answers. But it’s the same question, or close to it. Each has enormous entailments.
Of course, not all quantitative measures of qualitative matters are that obviously FUBAR. But often they are equally FUBAR though not obviously so. Often, the measurement system simplifies and thereby distorts grotesquely.
But you guys already know this, so why are we having this particular discussion?
A useful discussion of these issues would draw distinctions between what can usefully be quantified and what can not.
Let me give two examples from the past week. I asked a group of my students to solve the equation x=1/2x +10. Most could solve it, but about 5% gave me the wrong answer (most commonly 5). I think we can usefully quantify a students knowledge of algebra by asking them to do algebra and observing how well they can perform algebraic manipulation of equations and that can be quantified.
My youngest son spent some time the other day listening to a small group of elderly veterans talk about their experiences on Omaha Beach, in the Battle of the Bulge, as prisoners of war, and at Nuremberg. The important things that my son learned from that are not quantifiable.
And that’s what the fuller material that Duane references is about–the ways in which our measurement systems distort and the ways in which they mask critical unacknowledged, unexamined assumptions.
But I think that what NY Teacher is getting at is this. Consider that Likert scale. Person A and person B both say that they “love” x. But what does that mean? Perhaps person A loves x the way I love this particular kind of pencil I’ve been using today. Perhaps person B loves x the way a junkie loves his smack. Big difference. So, we do more finely grained study. But how finely grained? How small do we make that measuring rod in order to come up with THE measurement of the coastline?
My youngest son spent some time the other day listening to a small group of elderly veterans talk about their experiences on Omaha Beach, in the Battle of the Bulge, as prisoners of war, and at Nuremberg. The important things that my son learned from that are not quantifiable.
Well said, TE
Robert,
Any thoughts on my basic point, that some aspects of learning are quantifiable, that Duane’s position that there is no way to quantify any learning is simply incorrect?
Robert and TE,
I wish there was some way to notify others of responses when there is no “reply” available. I’m enjoying your all’s discussion of my/Wilson’s thoughts and the meaning of what it is when we “measure” something.
I’m putting together a response to your conversation but I’m not quite sure where to put it as it probably will have a tendency to “get lost” in all the postings. I’ll post it at the end of this post but also post it ASAP on a new Diane post to which I can somehow relate these conversations.
Duane
I understand the need for democracy in developing the CC. What I was hoping to here was specific sugestions about CC to give me ammunition to fight for the change. I don’t see that here. Give us the specifics please.
Read the book that Robert Shepard has written on this blog for specifics.
Duane, I get the impression that only a few of the anti-deform idealists read those posts. These people ask, “Where is the critique?” but they aren’t really interested in the critique. That’s meant to be a rhetorical question. Following the critique would be difficult and time consuming. Of course, there’s no time, not when all those DOLLAR$ are to be made on $TUDENT$ by implementing the CC$$ and so “creating national markets for products that can be brought to scale,” as Arne Duncan’s Chief of Staff put it. The plan for the Walmartization, the Microsofting of U.S. is in place, and it’s on a timetable.
I think that really, really sad because these are not matters that can be dealt with adequately in soundbites. But that’s the whole deformer modus operandi, isn’t it? Replace ongoing research and development in pedagogy and curricula with the invariant, mandatory bullet list of standards and their myriad entailments for pedagogy and curricula. I call this the Powerpointing of U.S. education.
Our schools are failing.
Class size doesn’t matter.
Teacher education doesn’t matter.
Poverty doesn’t matter.
Differences among students don’t matter.
You get what you measure.
Learning is mastery of the bullet list.
Teaching is punishment and reward.
School is a sorting machine. You go left. You go right.
Arbeit macht frei.
The troglodytes of U.S. politics and policy are masters of the slogan. Don’t scratch any of those slogans to look at what’s underneath. It’s not pretty.
I think of Robert Frost’s lines:
“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”
How are “specific suggestions” helpful, since we have the momentum now to defeat it? I think you and Van Roekel are using that ploy to avoid understanding that the CC$$ game is up, period.
Nobody is planning to leave Gates in control of our classrooms, with or without modifications.
amen to that!
I’ll give a specific suggestion. Stop focusing on “education” as only math and reading. There are a lot of other things that students should experience in order to be good citizens and well-rounded members of society that the “Core” just overlooks or dismisses as unimportant. Any core worth its salt should also include art, music, vocational and life skills, science, geography, history, civics, etc. I do NOT want this awfulness hitting my subject (I teach history and geography), but state cores all have these things. What was so wrong with state cores, anyway?
Oh, it’s coming. ELA and Math are just the first salvo in the Coring of the United States. Gates and company have similar plans for post-secondary education, too.
I know it’s coming. I’m angry that instead of fighting the standards, the national organizations are just following the CCSS like lemmings off the cliff.
Here is one specific:
VAM/APPR is a disproven method for teacher evaluation. It is unfair, invalid, unreliable, and inaccurate. ELIMINATE IT and most of the issues discussed here will go away.
STOP using tests to threaten, punish, and coerce. END this aspect of RTTT policy/law.
hear
“what’s the alternative” assumes that we need one”
That says it all right there.
It’s automatically assumed in DC that the schools need fixing without spending the time to see if they are broken or not.
What we have are a bunch of mostly billionaires who grew up with silver spoons who have no experience working with the kids that offer the biggest challenges. These billionaires—-that includes the Koch brothers, the Walton family and B Gates, etc—didn’t grow up in communities mired in poverty; didn’t attend schools that kids who live in poverty attend. They assume that all kids approach learning the same as they did and don’t understand that many of these kids come to school without the motivation or tools that make learning important—-something we find in most middle class homes.
These billionaires who are funding and supporting the movement to destroy public education see the world through tinted lenses that are either tinted by greed; a fundamentalist Christin tint; a libertarian tint, a neoconservative tint, or an idealistic tint that thinks all it takes is a motivated person to bring about change.
The high attrition rate of new teachers reveals that idealism and motivation to make a difference isn’t enough. Shocked, many young teachers who discover the truth run and never return. And most don’t stay long enough to understand what’s going on—what’s causing this. Instead, they flee back to their middle class bubble and the lifestyle they grew up in. The closest they will come to poverty is when they are on a freeway and fly by communities that are mired in poverty. And they see nothing because there is a tall wall between the freeway and the people that live on the other side of that wall.
Most of our elected leaders did not grow up in poverty. They don’t have a clue. In fact, half of the Congress are millionaires and these idealists wearing different stripes assume the kids who aren’t performing come to school hungry to learn as they did when our elected leaders were young and the reason kids aren’t learning has to be incompetent teachers. They can’t even conceive that there are kids who don’t come to school to cooperate to learn.
Most countries in the world get this and make no attempt to teach kids who do not cooperate. That’s why China has almost 100 million kids attending k – 12 but about 10% only make it to grade 10. The kids who don’t cooperate and perform are left behind to survive as best as they can. Late bloomers or kids that have to mature to have a chance to overcome a dysfunctional family are just out of luck.
The first school where I had my first long term teaching job was in a grade school in a barrio in La Puente, California that was so dangerous and violent, the school had concertina barbed wire strung along the edges of the roofs to keep the gangs off the roofs at night. If they got on the roofs, they would chop holes in in it so they could get into the building and steal the TVs and VCRs. They did it once that year and took all the TVs and VCRs.
It was common to arrive at school on a Monday and see the custodians filling the bullet holes in the classroom doors and repainting them. The custodians arrived every morning at six and the first thing they did was drive around in an electric cart with paint bucket and putty to cover the gang graffiti and fill the bullet holes then paint them over.
What’s the alternative? is the question that can and must be answered. No one can be so naive to think that schools were just fine before the testing fiasco. There was still a tremendous drop out rate, letter grades were still a lie, grade levels did not indicate what level of learning students were on, students were passed forward with a D- not really having any skills and were held back so often that they gave up.
Yes I’m talking about the slavery based system of education the Thomes Jefferson referred to it’s purpose as “raking a few geniuses from the rubbish” Yes a viable alternativeis absolutelt essential, and you can start with assessment as it drives the curriculum. Do it locally http://savingstudents-caplee.blogspot.com/2013/12/accountability-with-honor-and-yes-we.html Oh yes we need an alternative, because the junk ain’t working Change it forward
I might add that I am not as harsh on those who advocate for common core because, unlike them I am not a linear thyinker. I understand that brains are different. I understand as Dr. Temple Grandin says brains have different strengths.
Linear thinker can do well organizing a business but suck at understanding the fundamental purpose of education. They have a difficult time understanding human growth and development. They assume with rigor all kids will be the same- They don’t get that we have children that range from severe cognitive disabilities to the gifted book learned kids without a lick of common sense.
The lack of undertanding children leads to a rigid Common Core. However, if we reworked common core from the bottom up, Made it guidelines instead of deadlines and made assessment real and local, what a difference would be made. And then take kids from where they are with failure as a positive learning experience. Like this. And this was field tested, until they through us out
Once again, your comment assumes the system isn’t working—-that is is broken and needs fixing. But it is working as it was designed to work long before “No Child Left Behind” and “Race to the Top”. Just because Congress and the US President pass laws always that say schools must be 100% successful getting 100% of the kids ready for college by the age of 17/18 doesn’t mean they are right or that law is rational.
The Congress has passed many stupid and ignorant laws.
I suggest you study the history of education for every country and the current state of education in every country, and you will soon discover that what is perceived as problems in the US public schools are common and are not really problems but reality.
How do most other countries deal with the same challenges? They don’t. They let the most difficult kids to teach fall out of the system or maybe offer them some vocational training at an age when most kids in the US are sitting in academic classes designed to ready kids to go to college.
Most developed countries offer two high school tracks leading to graduation: vocational and academic. The US doesn’t. Who decided not to have a vocational track for high school graduation? It wasn’t the teachers or their unions.
The only acceptable alternative is the Charter Schools as they were meant to be—an alternative school that would take the most difficult kids to teach and explore different methods—controlled by teachers—-that might help. The Charter school concept was thought up by teachers and one of them eventually was the president of AFT.
The flaw is thinking that all kids—-100%—-can catch up and be ready to go to college out of high school by age 17/18. No other country has ever achieved this goal or even has this goal. None. The US has chased this fantasy thinking for decades.
Instead, the goal should be to achieve 100 literacy (with no functional illiterates); support kids who want to go to college and offer a vocational choice to high school graduation for those who don’t want to go to college.
Once kids are literate if they change their minds later and decide to go to college, they will have the tool to do that.
We don’t have to destroy the public schools to achieve that goal. What we must do is get rid of those stupid, unrealistic laws that demand 100% compliance and support the schools with new goals that are realistic.
Your assertion that we pass kids automatically is wrong. For instance, in California, there has been a minimum competency test for decades that kids must pass in addition to earning enough credits to graduate from high school. Kids who fail one or more of the competency tests are offered support in reading, writing and math to boost their minimum competency skills to 9th grade level.
When I was still in the classroom, free tutoring was offered in the library after school every day and there were summer school classes that focuses on the three competency areas: reading, writing and math.
Kids who didn’t pass, didn’t graduate on time. Instead, they were referred to adult night school classes designed to help them in those areas or the local community college that also offered those types of classes.
If kids don’t accept the help and they don’t graduate, that is their choice. The teachers were there to help; the tutoring was there to help, there were night classes offered to help; there were summer school classes offered to help.
The public schools were doing their job but the kids weren’t doing their job and that job is to learn.
Not every kid is ready to graduate at age 17/18. About 75% do and that academic graduation rate is the highest in the world when we only compare academic high school graduation rates in other countries.
Then by age 24, many of the kids who didn’t graduate on time do and bring the high school graduation rate up to 90%.
Well said, Lloyd. And fascinating!
You speak the truth, Lloyd, and one that many do not want to hear- that students should share responsibility for learning. When we constantly hear that education is a right instead of a privilege, that takes away the responsibility of students to do what they need to do to take advantage of what they are given.
It’s symptomatic of entitlement mentality. No matter what socio-economic group one belongs to, when one feels entitled to have or to be provided something, it usually follows that the something is not appreciated or taken care of.
We need to get back to the concept of earning privileges. When you work hard to earn something, you appreciate it more and understand that you have a huge part in taking care of it if you want to keep that privilege.
Robert Tellman,
Education is most certainly a “right” and not just a privilege. All state have a clause that constitutionally guarantees, usually something to the effect of “a free and appropriate education”. Yes, education is very much a right.
Now, do many a student throw that right to the ground and stomp on it, usually only to be dismayed by their own behavior later? For sure, but it is still a “right” to do so.
Please explain “entitlement mentality” as it relates to public education.
Thanks in advance,
Duane
“Now, do many a student throw that right to the ground and stomp on it, usually only to be dismayed by their own behavior later? For sure, but it is still a “right” to do so.”
But, when kids do this—stomp on organized education—teachers get blamed and the critics call the public schools failures and want to close them; then send those same kids to private run schools where they seem to be repeating the stomping.
The original concept of charter schools—-proposed by two teachers, one of them a future president of AFT, one of the two major teacher’ unions—was a potential way to deal with kids who stomp on organized traditional education.
In fact, in the district where I taught for thirty years, there was an alternative high school for those kids who stomped on organized learning but it wasn’t called a Charter School. It was called an alternative high school where the teachers had a lot more power in how they taught and worked with those kids.
And here’s a link to that alternative high school’s page:
“Santana High School, long established as a California Model Continuation high school, provides educational options for high school students in Rowland Unified. Students attending Santana are provided the opportunity for credit recovery or acceleration through the use of individualized and personalized instructional methodologies. A high point of the Santana High School program is a focus on student support services. The entire staff works to provide ongoing support to encourage and advance student academic, career and personal/social development.”
http://www.santanahs.org/about/mission.jsp
Alternative Instructional Programs in Rowland Unified are available through Santana High School.
How to Enroll:
Student must be between 16-18 years old.
Student must be referred by the school of residence.
Student and parent MUST attend an orientation.
Submit: transcript(s) from previous high school, updated immunizations, and proof of residence.
Please contact the school office for more information regarding enrolling at Santana.
http://www.santanahs.org/apps/pages/index.jsp?uREC_ID=94054&type=d&pREC_ID=172269&hideMenu=1
” but the kids weren’t doing their job and that job is to learn”
Learning isn’t a job. Kids are learning all of the time.
Learning is the DEFAULT CONDITION of the human child.
We have to work really hard in order to squash that. But the standards-and-testing, all-test-prep-all-the-time, extrinsic-reward-based deform approach to education is quite effective in accomplishing that.
Your logic is flawed.
Learning is not exclusive to children. From what I’ve read, we start learning in the womb and keep learning until death at any age—but that sort of learning has nothing to do with what goes on in a classroom where organized learning takes place.
There’s a difference between learning in a classroom and waking up in the morning and learning useless or useful information from just living life and interacting with family, friends, the TV, etc.
In the classroom learning is an organized activity that comes with assignments and responsibilities for kids, but many kids don’t live up to that responsibility. Many students—especially those who live in dysfunctional home environments and/or who live in poverty—don’t read the assignments, don’t read for fun, and don’t do homework. In fact, some don’t pay attention in class for whatever reason be it attention deficit disorder or another learning disability.
I had kids often show up after lunch where they ate a greasy bag of French fries or a slice of cheese pizza washed down with a 64 ounce Coke. About the time class started, the sugar rush was dropping into crash mode and the kid had trouble functioning let alone staying awake.
In the classroom, teachers teaches focused lessons on specific skills/information, and it’s the responsibly of the child to follow directions, do the work and learn those skills.
Hopefully, the child will remember what’s taught but memory is a complex function that’s usually out of control of both the teacher and student.
For instance, a teacher lectures and then assigns classwork and home work to reinforce was the lecture was about. But at home, the kid forgets about the homework and the reading assignment that’s designed to reinforce the learning because dad is drunk and arguing with mom while the TV blares in the background. The kid may have left school with good intentions to do what the teacher assigned but once at home all is forgotten. Then sleep arrives after several hours of TV or video games or listening to music or texting friends about the parents argument. While sleeping what’s stored in short term memory is edited and what the brain considers important is moved to long term memory. Unfortunately, the drunken dad and the argument between the parents is remembered while the teacher’s lecture and the importance of the assignment are forgotten. On test day, the kids—who never did the assignment at home–bombs the test and misses all those questions.
Teachers are always learning too—how to be more effective. In California to renew the teaching credential every few years, teachers must continue to attend workshops and classes to learn more about how children learn and techniques that make for more powerful learning and they have to prove it.
Like most medical doctors, public school teachers never stop learning about teaching methods and how children learn.
Today, to survive, almost everyone needs to be a lifelong learner and being a good student is the best way to learn the skills needed to be a literate lifelong learner.
It’s very important not to underestimate or discount the truly breathtaking about of knowledge and skill acquisition that we do unconsciously. Children are little inference machines. See Alison Gopniks’ wonderful books The Scientist in the Crib, The Philosophical Baby, and Words, Thoughts, and Theories for wonderful discussions of this. And, in fact, a lot of what we ought to be doing in classrooms is constructing experiences to facilitate implicit learning, or acquisition. MOST of what people know and are able to do was not taught to them explicitly.
Good point, Lloyd, about how teacher learn continually.
Learning is not something that is done to us in a 12-to-18 period after we enter school. It is something that WE DO over our lifetimes, and teachers, in particular, never stop doing a great deal of it.
But the deformers want to ossify it, to reduce it to a bullet list, to give people seals of approval for having finished their learning. A real learner tells them what they can do with their gold stars and their certificates and their merit badges because he or she knows that only a fool takes those at all seriously because he or she is engaged in the actual, serious and wonderful business of real learning, in all its difficulty, complexity, and open-endedness.
Duane,
I will just say that getting a formal education is an opportunity and a personal responsibility and leave it at that. I don’t want to debate this because people just do not understand what I mean. And everyone has an opinion.
My father had to quit going to school in the 6th grade so that his sister could have shoes and continue going to school. He worked hard his entire life to provide for his family and did feel strongly enough about this privilege to earn his GED.
As far as entitlement, I feel the attitude that people feel they have the right to get something for nothing has brought this country down. I am not just talking about the poor. Some wealthy people who have inherited that wealth feel very entitled to having the best of everything through no effort on their part. I just see the value of hard work and earning things in life.
On the one hand, Van Roekel claims nobody has shared with him specific objections to the common core , then in an NEA editorial dated January 7th (“Getting to the core of common core”) he talks about one of the “accusations” that the common core downplays fiction. Also gotta love how there is no place for replies/responses at the conclusion of his editorial. Am guessing he will be hiding out with Michelle Rhee whenever someone comes calling for a panel discussion with Ravitch and Schneider on board.
Well! I don’t think that it’s would be helpful. I think a few students in several states don’t learn the exact same things doesn’t matter too much. If you want to solve nation’s problems then we need a standardized national diet and advance level exercise. It’s my thinking…..
http://www.thehoustonimmigrationlawyer.com/
Shame on any union leader who feigns ignorance regarding alternatives to the Common Core. It just goes to show how disconnected they are from teaching.
Yes it does, schoolgal, and also how bought they are. So for NEA members, the question becomes, what are our alternatives to Dennis Van Roekel?
I happen to be an NEA member, and we are moving rapidly to answer that question. Wherever you are, brothers and sisters, either bring your state leaders over or replace them. Sign on now to be a state convention delegate from your own local.
Was DVR ever a teacher? Anyone know? And if so, what he teach, and where, and for how long, and how long ago?
“No one has put forward specific objections to the Common Core.”
Could this have something to do with the fact that these “standards” were not implemented in such a way as to subject them to ongoing, continuous critique and improvement by scholars, researchers, teachers, curriculum coordinators, and curriculum developers? Hmm.
The defenders of the CC$$ often make this claim that “the standards do not tell you what to teach.” That’s purest equivocation.
The standards are a list, by domain, of outcomes to be measured in mathematics and in English language arts. If a standard says that a student will be able to x, then that means that the student will be taught to x. It also assumes that x should be taught, implies that x is to be taught explicitly, and, importantly, takes time from teaching y, where y is something not in the standards. The whole point of implementing standards is to have them drive curricula and pedagogy, and claims to the contrary are equivocation.
The equivocation from deformers on this issue means one of two things: a) they don’t know what they are talking about or b) they are dissembling. So, let’s look at a particular standard, at one taken at random, and do the sort of work that would have been done if the CC$$ in ELA had been subjected to any real critique. Let’s consider possible objections to it. Bear in mind that the same sort of process that I’m going to carry out below could be carried out for just about every standard on the CC$$ bullet list.
Here’s a standard:
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.L.8.1a Explain the function of verbals (gerunds, participles, infinitives) in general and their function in particular sentences.
This standard tells us students are to be assessed on their ability a) to explain the function of verbals (gerunds, participles, infinitives) in general and b) their function in particular sentences. In order for students to do this, they will have to be taught, duh, how to identify gerunds, participles, and infinitives and how to explain their functions generally and in particular sentences. That’s several curriculum items. So much for the Common Core not specifying curricula. Furthermore, in order for the standard to be met, these bits of grammatical taxonomy will have to be explicitly taught and explicitly learned, for the standard requires students to be able to make explicit explanations.
Now, there is a difference between having learned an explicit grammatical taxonomy and having acquired competence in using the grammatical forms listed in that taxonomy. The authors of the standard seem not to have understood this. Instead, the standard requires a particular pedagogical approach that involves explicit instruction in grammatical taxonomy. So much for the standards not requiring particular pedagogy.
So, to recap: the standard requires particular curricula and a particular pedagogical approach.
Let’s think about the kind of activity that this standard envisions our having students do. Identifying the functions of verbals in sentences would require that students be able to do, among other things, something like this:
Underline the gerund phrases in the following sentences and tell whether each is functioning as a subject, direct object, indirect object, object of a preposition, predicate nominative, retained object, subjective complement, objective complement, or appositive of any of these.
That’s what’s entailed by PART of the standard. And since the standard just mentions verbals generally and not any of the many forms that these can take, one doesn’t know whether it covers, for example, infinitives used without the infinitive marker “to,” as in “Let there be peace.” (Compare “John wanted there to be peace.”) Would one of you like to explain to your students how the infinitive functions in that sentence and to do the months and months of prerequisite work in syntax necessary for them to understand the explanation? Have fun. Then tell me whether you think it a good idea to waste precious class time getting kids to the point where they can parse that sentence and explain the function of the verbal in it.
Shouldn’t there have been SOME discussion and debate about this, at the very least? Do the authors of these “standards” have any notion how much curricula and what kinds of pedagogical approaches would be necessary in order for 8th-grade students to be able to do this?
And so it goes for the rest of the long, long list of specific, grade-level standards. All have enormous entailments, and none of these, it seems, were thought through, and certainly, none of them were subjected to critique, and no mechanism was created for revision in light of scholarly critique.
Given what contemporary syntacticians now know about how gerunds, participles, and infinitives function in general and in particular sentences, I seriously doubt that that the authors of this standard understood what they were calling for or that students can be taught to explain these at all accurately, at this level (Grade 8) without that teaching being embedded in an overall explicit grammar curriculum. Furthermore, the authors of the standard doubtless had in mind a prescientific folk theory of grammar that doesn’t resemble contemporary, research-based models of syntax–so they are doing the equivalent, here, of, say, telling teachers of physics that they should teach kids about how empty space is filled with an invisible ether or teachers of biology that living things differ from nonliving ones because of their élan vital.
Of course, people do not acquire competence in using syntactic forms via explicit instruction in those forms and the rules for using them. Anyone with any training whatsoever in language acquisition would know that. While there are, arguably, some reasons for learning an explicit grammar (for example, one might want to do so in the process of training for work as a professional linguist), what we are (or should be) interested in as teachers of English is assisting students in developing grammatical competence, which, again, is done by means other than via explicit instruction in taxonomy and rules (e.g., through oral language activities involving language that uses the forms properly, through committing to memory sentences containing novel constructions, through exposure to these constructions in writing, through modeling of corrections of deviations from standard grammatical rules). The science on this is overwhelming, but the authors of these standards clearly weren’t familiar with it. Their standard requires particular curricula and pedagogical approaches if it is to be met, and these aren’t supported by what we know, scientifically, about language acquisition–about how the grammar of a language is acquired by its speakers. In other words, the standards often assume and/or instantiate backward, hackneyed, often prescientific notions about what we should teach and how.
And, of course, again, these standards were foisted on the country with no professional vetting or critique, and no mechanism was created for ongoing improvement of them based on such critique.
Basically, if one imagines the whole design space of potential curricula and pedagogical approaches in the English language arts, standards such as these draw rather severe boundaries within that space and say, “What is within these boundaries is permitted, and what is outside them is not.” In other words, the standards, as written, preclude some curricula and pedagogical approaches and require others. Basically, they apply a severe prior constraint on curricular and pedagogical innovation based on current knowledge and emerging practice and research
I happen to believe, BTW, that there is a role to be played in the language and writing and literary interpretation portions of our curricula for explicit instruction in some aspects of current scientific models of syntax. However, that’s another discussion entirely, and it’s one that none of us will be having because the decisions about what we are to consider important in instruction have been made for us by Lord Coleman, and ours is but to obey.
That seems, sadly, to be OK with the defenders of the amateurishly prepared CC$$ in ELA.
Let’s turn to the place of this “standard” in the overall learning progression laid out by the Common Core.
Why verbals at this particular level? Why not case assignment or the complement/adjunct distinction or explicit versus null determiners or theta roles or X-bars or varieties of complement phrases or any of a long list of other equally important syntactic categories and concepts? And why are all those and left out of the learning progression as a whole, across all the grades, given that they are key to understanding explicit models of syntax, which, evidently, the authors of these “standards” think important for some reason or another? Answer: this standard appears at this grade level pretty much AT RANDOM, not as part of a coherent, overall progression, the purpose of which was clearly thought out based on current best practices and scientific understanding of language acquisition. It’s as though one opened a text on syntax, laid one’s finger down randomly on a topic, plopped it into the middle of the Grade 8 standards with no consideration of the prerequisites for tackling the topic.
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Let’s move on to how the existence of the “standard” precludes development of alternative curricula and pedagogical approaches—to how it stifles innovation in both areas. Suppose I had an argument to make that it’s useful for kids to learn construction of basic syntax trees for coordination as part of a section of a writing program in which students are learning how to create more various, more robust sentences. Now, you can agree or disagree with this proposal, but the point is that you should have the right to do so–to look at the specific proposal and accept it, reject it, or accept it with modifications. The answer to the question, “Should we do that?” should NOT BE, “Well, it’s not in the standards.” And your answer to that question should not be, “We can’t do this because we have to be concentrating on the functions of verbals at these grade levels.” Instead, educators should consider the relative merits of these proposals.
But now, because of the CC$$ in ELA, and previously, because of the state standards, those are the standard answers to most suggestions for innovation in curricula and pedagogy.
That’s not how you get continuous improvement. Continuous improvement comes about when people put forward their suggestions for curricula and pedagogy, without such prior constraint, and those are evaluated critically.
Why has there not been more critique, like this one, of the “standards” themselves? Now, THERE’S A PROBLEM. In order REALLY to be able to counter claims about the standards made by the education deformers promoting them, one has to do fairly detailed analysis of particular standards and what they entail. That’s a big job. And the moment one starts to talk about those matters, people’s eyes glaze over. This stuff can’t be done in pithy soundbites of the kind that is the stock in trade for organizations like Achieve, the Chiefs for Change, Students First, and the Fordham Institute.
There are devils in the generalities around the Common Core. But there are many, many devils in the details. And there are NO MEANS WHATSOEVER built into the CC$$ implementations for exorcising those.
Deformers love to say, “What’s your alternative?” But they expect stone-cold silence in response. Sorry to disappoint. Here’s an alternative to top-down, invariant, inflexible, mandatory, amateurish “standards” like those foisted on the country with no vetting whatsoever:
Competing, voluntary standards, frameworks, learning progressions, curriculum outlines, reading lists, pedagogical approaches, lesson templates, etc.,
for particular domains,
posted by scholars, curriculum developers, and teachers to an open national portal or wiki,
that are crowd sourced and
subjected to ongoing, vigorous, public debate and refinement
based on results in the classroom and ongoing research and development,
freely adopted by autonomous local schools and districts
and subjected to continual critique by teachers who are given the time in their schedules to subject them all, and their own practice, to ongoing critique via something like Japanese Lesson Study.
For a superb, brief introduction to contemporary research into how kids actually acquire grammatical competence, I highly recommend the following:
Roeper, Tom. The Prism of Grammar: How Child Language Illuminates Humanism. Cambridge, MA: MIT P., 2007.
Shame on you Mr. Van Roekel! If you don’t know what’s wrong with the Common Core, then you have not been paying attention. You and your Board should know exactly what the many objections to the Common Core are, and you all should have been discussing them in your Board meetings. That’s what Presidents and Boards do Mr. Van Roekel (speaking from experience.) Do your job Mr. Van Roekel, and you’ll find out all you need to know about all sides of the Common Core.
The supporters of the CC$$ always say, “No one has objected” and “What is your alternative?” I have tried to give an example, above, of what an objection looks like and an overview of an alternative. However, doing either properly involves an enormous amount of work and quite detailed reasoning. The deformers aren’t interested in any of that. They mean these to be rhetorical questions.
They are not, emphatically are not, rhetorical questions.
But whenever one actually attempts to explain an objection, no one bothers to read the explanation because it cannot be given in a sound bite like those that are the stock in trade of Achieve, the Chiefs for Change, the Fordham Institute, Students First, and other deformy institutions.
DO they REALLY want critique of these standards? Well, if they did, they wouldn’t have presented them as an invariant fait accompli.
And, Mr. Roekel, respectfully, there are problems with the very idea of having invariant national standards. A few of those:
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.
b. Having national standards creates economies of scale that educational materials monopolists can exploit, enabling them to crowd out/keep out smaller competitors.
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.
e. Innovation in educational approaches comes about from the implementation of competing ideas; creating one set of standards puts important innovation on hold.
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.
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 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.
k. The tests and test prep create enormous test anxiety and undermine the development of love of learning.
l. Real learning tends to be unique and unpredictable. It can’t be summarized in a bullet list. The last thing that we need is this Powerpointing of U.S. K-12 education.
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.
And, the CC$$ in ELA are formulated almost entirely as abstract, formal skills. They were not subjected to critique at their most fundamental level–at the level of the categorical description of what a standard should look like in each of the domain covered. These domains are incommensurate, but the standards do not reflect that.
In other words, the “standards” [it pains me to call them that] do not reflect the fact that there are different kinds of explicit and implicit learning and acquisition of vastly different kinds of knowledge and skills (e.g., world knowledge, or knowledge of how, and procedural knowledge, or knowledge of what). If one were to assume (big assumption!) that we need invariant standards, it still would be the case that those standards, to be at all valid, would have to be formulated entirely differently for different knowledge and skills. But the CC$$ aren’t.
But this is what happens when one subjects material to Powerpointing–when one turns the complexity of the real world into a bullet list. One distorts, grotesquely.
Just for fun, let’s look at another “standard”:
RL.11-12.5 Analyze how an author’s choices concerning how to structure specific parts of a text (e.g., the choice of where to begin or end a story, the choice to provide a comedic or tragic resolution) contribute to its overall structure and meaning as well as its aesthetic impact.
First, this standard [sic] flies in the face of a century of work in hermeneutics, the theory of interpretation, in its assumption (big assumption!) that an author’s choices are a proper object of study. This is an extremely controversial position, but it is taken for granted in the standard [sic]. E. D. Hirsch stood almost alone, throughout much of the past century, in his heroic defense of the author’s choices, or intentions, as proper objects of scholarly attention. During that time, many scholars and critics, perhaps most professional literary people, contended that the author’s choices, or intentions, were irrelevant or irrecoverable or both and that we must attend, instead,
• to the text itself (Ransom, Tate, Empson, Brooks, Warren, Wimsatt, Beardsley, and others of the New Critical school; Propp, Jakobson, Stith Thompson, Levi-Strauss, and other Formalists and Structuralists);
• to the reader’s construction of the text (in their various ways, Barthes, Fish, Rosenblatt, Derrida, and other Reader Response, Postmodernist, and Deconstructionist critics); or
• to historically determined responses to the text and differences in these over time (Heidegger, Gademer, Foucault, Greenblatt, and other Historicist and new Historicist critics).
It’s fairly typical of these standards [sic] to be worded in complete obliviousness of the fact that people have thought pretty seriously about literature over the past hundred and fifty years and have, in the course of all that, learned a few things and in complete obliviousness of the fact that there are alternative approaches to literary study that take as fundamental the notion that the author’s choices are not a legitimate subject of study. This is a very controversial notion, a notion that was CENTRAL to the raging debates over approaches to literary interpretation (over hermeneutics) in the twentieth century. Who decided that David Coleman and Susan Pimentel had the right to overrule every scholar, every teacher, every curriculum designer, every curriculum coordinator, who belongs to one of those other camps? Are we to have a central committee deciding what IDEAS are acceptable?
Second, why, at this level (Grades 11 and 12) are students being asked to concentrate, in particular, on the structures of specific parts of a text? Would it make more sense, instead, to address overall structure at these grade levels, building upon analyses of structures of specific parts of texts done at earlier grade levels? Was this possibility considered? Certainly, there is much that we know about structure in texts that is quite important to the interpretation of works of all kinds, literary and otherwise, that is never addressed anywhere in the standards [sic]. Unfortunately, the standards [sic] do not build in students, over time, familiarity with many extremely common structural patterns–episodic structure, cyclical structure, choral structure, the five-act play, the monomyth, the three unities–one could make a long list.
Shouldn’t this be the time, at the end of the K-12 program, to sum up what has been learned in earlier grades about specific literary structures, to draw some broad conclusions about common overall literary structures and their determinative influence on the making of literary works? Do we want to make sure, before they graduate, that students understand the basics of conventional plot structure? Shouldn’t we review that because it is so fundamental and because this is our last chance to do so before we ship kids off into their post-secondary colleges and careers? Shouldn’t a school system or a planner of an instructional sequence be free to decide that such an approach would be more preferable in grades 11 and 12? Did someone make Coleman and Pimentel the “deciders” (to use George Bush’s unfortunate phrase) for everyone else in this regard? Were such questions considered by the authors of these standards [sic]? I doubt it.
Third, aren’t the relations of specific structure to a) overall structure, b) meaning, and c) aesthetic impact quite distinct topics of study? Why are they lumped together in this standard [sic]? Don’t these require quite a lot of unpacking? This is a common fault of the standards [sic]. They often combine apples and oranges and shoelaces and are ALL OVER THE PLACE with regard to their level of generality or specificity,. Often, there seems to be no rationale for why a given standard is extremely specific or extremely broad or, like this one, both, in parts.
Fourth, does it make sense, at all, to work in this direction, from general notions about literary works as expressed in a standard [sic] like this, rather than from specific case studies? Wouldn’t real standards be encouraging empirical, inductive thinking, beginning with specific works, with study of patterns of relationship in those works, and then and only then asking students to make generalizations or exposing them to generalizations made by knowledgeable scholars who have thought systematically about those patterns of relationship? Wouldn’t that be a LOT more effective pedagogically? Isn’t that what the Publishers’ Criteria say? Isn’t the overall approach taken in these standards [sic] antithetical to the very “close reading” that they purport to encourage? Isn’t it true that by handing teachers and students nationwide a bunch of implicit generalizations like those in this standard [sic], the makers of the standards [sic] are encouraging uncritical acceptance of those generalizations about texts rather than an empirical approach that proceeds inductively, based on real analysis, to build understanding?
Fifth, what is meant by this word structure in the standard [sic]? The examples given (where the piece begins, comedic or tragic resolution) suggest that students are to analyze narrative structures, but there are many other kinds of structures in literary works. Are teachers to ignore those and concentrate on narrative structures? Was that among the “choices” that the authors of the standards made for the rest of us? What about rhetorical structures? metrical structures? logical structures? imitative or derivative structures based on forms in other media (e.g., John Dos Passos’s “Newsreels”)? Are teachers to ignore those? Is it unimportant for 11th- and 12th-grade students to learn about the reductio (Vonnegut’s Sirens of Titan or Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King); the thesis, antithesis, synthesis structure, or dialectic (Rebecca Goldstein’s Mazel); choral structure (The Book of Job, Antigone); metrical structures like formulaic oral composition (the Sundiata, the Iliad) or terza rima? The standards [sic] are shot through with such glaring lacunae. One asks oneself, reading them, why are students studying this, in particular, and not that? Why at this grade level? Why is this and this and this and this left out?
The point is that questions about standards, learning progressions, frameworks, etc., are complex, and there are many possible approaches. The CC$$ standards preclude most of them. They take one mostly unexamined tack, and the rest of us are supposed to go along because Achieve has appointed David Coleman, by divine right, absolute monarch of English language arts in the United States. In a democracy, that is not acceptable. In a democracy, a Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth is unacceptable.
A lot of these upper-level ELA standards (or “rules,” or whatever the “RL” citation signifies) read like the product of some kook who tried to break concepts like “literary analysis” and “critical thinking” into every one of its basic components. Serious micromanagement. And the jargon is just abominable.
Yes, and the consequences of this for curricula are just horrendous. Instead of starting with a work and thinking about WHATEVER makes sense given that work, people start with these stupid lists and try to fit the work into that Procrustean bed.
However, much can be gained by attempting to do just such a kooky thing. For example, many years ago, in The Philosophy of Literary Form, Kenneth Burke described the woeful inadequacy of our terminology for describing the techniques of sound that writers–poets, for example–achieve by manipulating patterns of phonemes. We have a handful of terms–assonance, consonance, alliteration, etc.–but these don’t really capture the wealth of actual techniques that writers employ, and he makes various suggestions for extending our terminology (e.g., using the term “ablaut” to describe what’s happening in a sentence like “God is good”: G–d is G–d) or the terms “diminution” and “augmentation” for describing less or more separation between repeated consonants due to the amount of intervening material, such as the length of the vowel, as in “the man and his meaning”: the m-n and his m–ning. Roman Jackobson makes similar suggestions in various works. Even when the invention of new literary taxonomy fails, as in Northrup Frye’s The Anatomy of Criticism, it’s often a glorious, instructive failure, and my own feeling is that we should do a lot more of this kind of thing instead of making do with a hodge-podge of inherited terms that often don’t, together, make for any sort of illuminating, meaningful system.
However, all this kind of formal analysis stuff should grow out of, be in response to, be incidental to genuine engagement with the literary work and should NOT BE PLACED FRONT AND CENTER in our approaches to texts in the classroom, especially in the early grades (K-12). Unfortunately, placing that stuff front and center just what the bullet list in the CC$$ encourages. After all, what kids are going to be tested on is the skill from the bullet list, and that skill, in the bullet list, USUALLY deals with some item or items from whatever pathetic Handbook of Literary Terms David Coleman happened to have on hand when he was hacking together his amateurish list that everyone else is to treat as the gospel brought down from the mountaintop.
cx: commandments, not gospel, of course
The the CC$$ in ELA were voluntary suggestions, they would be a contribution to the vast undertaking that is scholarly discussion and debate about the teaching of the English language arts. But they are not. They are a prescribed, mandatory, invariant prior restraint on freedom of thought in curricular development and pedagogical approaches.
cs: constraint, not restraint
So, the question was posed, “Where are the objections?” I’ve offered a few, above. But as someone said recently on this blog, if one set out to enumerate all the absurdities and hackneyed assumptions in the new CC$$ in ELA, we would all be here from dawn to doomsday.
Robert…Hope you are writing a book….I really do…I enjoy reading all of your posts and they are always Spot On..
Thank you, neaderthal.
Robert,
You’re cracking me up!! Love it!
But, I don’t think DVR would begin to give a moment of thought to reading what a true “expert”, you, have written, much less process it through his bought off brain and attempt to understand.
A letter dated 10-28-13 from CCSSO Exec Director Chris Minnich to Pam Stewart, who inquired about Florida’s supposedly altering CCSS. The letter is a smooth work of propaganda that underscores CCSS’ rigid adoption– no “flexibility” to alter CCSS– though Minnich insists that “state standards are under state control”:
Click to access CCSSO%20Letter_10-28-13_to%20Commissioner%20Stewart%5B2%5D.pdf
Thank you, Mercedes, for your tireless work dragging this ugliness out into the light.
“And be these juggling fiends no more believed,/That palter with us in a double sense” –William Shakespeare, Macbeth
You have control of them. But you can’t change them.
What a great assignment for rhetors in training it would be to have them attempt to turn that piece of illogic into a diplomatic response!!!
Perhaps a rubric is in order, one that ranks the letter on its use of shiny platitudes, its deflection of critical examination of its contentions, its marshalling of equivocations and ambiguities to mask realities, etc. The letter is a little masterpiece of sophistry, don’t you think?
As part of its Phase 3 RTTT application, Louisiana indicates that only 37% of schools (both traditional and charter) approved of RTTT.
I highly recommend that people read these excellent posts by Mercedes Schneider and Peter Greene, reference by Dr. Ravitch, above. Well worth your time.
Bottom line: The Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic] in ELA represent the triumph of philistinism over the tradition of continuously critiqued and revised practice based upon ongoing humane scholarship and research into the various disciplines that make up the English language arts.
Welcome to the era of the Powerpointing of U.S. education.
Continuation of conversation above:
First let me address TE’s point #1 “Hotness and coldness are qualities, therefore the can not be quantified. Fast and slow are qualities, therefore they can not be quantified. Tall and short, heavy and light are qualities, therefore they can not be quantified.
Furthermore, miles per hour, kilograms, temperature Fahrenheit OR Celsius are subcategories of fast, heavy, and hot respectively, and therefore it is illogical to attempt to characterize fast BY THE QUANTITY of miles an hour, heavy BY THE QUANTITY OF kilograms, or cold BY THE QUANTITY of temperature Fahrenheit.
If we are in agreement that we should ignore all these attempts to quantify qualities, we can move on to point 2, and discuss the locality of temperature measure to the part of the backyard surrounding the thermometer and how it is meaningless at the front door.”
And his final question of “Any thoughts on my basic point, that some aspects of learning are quantifiable, that Duane’s position that there is no way to quantify any learning is simply incorrect?”
TE, your main confusion lies in believing that a part of a “thing” (temperature) can be an adequate description of the whole “thing” (the qualities of hotness/coldness and how we humans perceive them)-and this argument holds for your other examples of speed and weight. We have defined scales of “heat” and miscellaneous measuring devices all with varying degrees of accuracy. The number that we get from those thermometers can only be a part, and I would argue a small part, but the size of the “part” is irrelevant, of the human experience of temperature. Many other factors come into play other than “temperature” in how we perceive “hotness or coldness”. When my son and I were camping (tent) between Xmas and New Years the temps got down to 17 degrees a couple of nights and barely over freezing during the day. The “warmth” that we felt when it got up to 45 degrees, low humidity, barely a breeze one day would more likely than not been felt by those snuggled cozily in a heated environment as “cold”. Which is the correct description??? Is the “degree of temperature” the defining characteristic of either the coldness or hotness felt by humans??? Or perhaps temperature in conjunction with many other factors define that hotness or coldness. So no “quantifying” a part of the description in no way justifies which description would be valid
Now in relation to the teaching and learning process what is the agreed upon/defined measuring device? Has there ever been one?
. . . . ???
Didn’t think so. There is none and never has been. A test is one form of assessment (which is not a measurement but a description) and even though these assessments assign a number, usually corresponding to the number correct/percentage correct, that numerating is not measuring. Just because we assign a number to a concept doesn’t mean we have “measured” it. Again, what is the agreed upon/defined measuring device for any of the teaching and learning processes?
At worse we should acknowledge that attempts to numerate (and I prefer my term “numerize”) the teaching and learning process falls woefully short as being an adequate description of the teaching and learning process and what a student supposedly knows. At best we should realize that attempts to numerize descriptions of the teaching and learning process are chimeras, duendes, “vain and illusory”.
I can’t concede to “Duane’s position that there is no way to quantify any learning is simply incorrect?” I will concede that one can attempt to numerize learning but that attempt is less than adequate and is logically epistemologically and ontologically invalid.
By the way, TE, have you read Wilson’s work in its entirety? If so, what are your specific objections to what he has written? I am quite interested to hear/read rebuttals/refutations of his work as I’ve not found any yet.
Duane,
I am not seeking to completely characterize either the weather or my students. What I am doing is learning if it is a good idea to wear shorts when I go out the front door or have the class prove the existence of a general equilibrium using a fixed point theorem. Nor am I trying to assess the learning process, I am trying to assess what has been learned.
When you went camping, did you go with just shorts and teeshirts because you know the temperature does not completely characterize how you would feel? Did you take a sheet or a sleeping bag? Should I pay no attention to my student’s demonstrated ability to solve algebraic problems when teaching?
I have read some of Wilson’s work, but it is just word salad. There is no there there.
Let me address some other of your comments, TE.
“A useful discussion of these issues would draw distinctions between what can usefully be quantified and what can not.
Let me give two examples from the past week. I asked a group of my students to solve the equation x=1/2x +10. Most could solve it, but about 5% gave me the wrong answer (most commonly 5). I think we can usefully quantify a students knowledge of algebra by asking them to do algebra and observing how well they can perform algebraic manipulation of equations and that can be quantified.”
No doubt that a useful discussion would be about “what can usefully be quantified and what can not”. When it comes to the teaching and learning process to be able to “quantify” in the fashion you wish (as shown by the example) we would first need to come up with an agreed upon definition of what learning is, how it might be measured if possible and what is the appropriate measuring device. All you have done with your algebraic example is state a simple fact that Y amount of students answered Q amount of questions correctly. Now was that a multiple guess assessment? Did they have to show their work? How was that numerized? Still it comes down to a percentage of answers right? Which students knew which answers? Can’t tell by that percentage, eh!
Please explain how you the students performing “algebraic manipulation of equations” was quantified. We need to know that to continue the discussion of whether your numerization of their work is valid, complete, accurate.
How do you quantify if a teacher is teaching when using multiple choice tests that don’t determine if kids paid attention in class; reads outside the classroom (and that doesn’t mean they read in class); never does homework, etc.
Here are some quantifiable facts that may answer why teachers who teach fantastic lessons end up with kids who don’t do well on quantifiable tests of any kind:
From the University of Michigan we discover: How does watching television affect performance in school?
TV viewing may replace activities that we know help with school performance, such as reading, doing homework, pursuing hobbies, and getting enough sleep.
One research study found that TV’s effects on education were long term. The study found that watching TV as a child affected educational achievement at age 26. Watching more TV in childhood increased chances of dropping out of school and decreased chances of getting a college degree, even after controlling for confounding factors [26].
Watching TV at age four was one factor found to be associated with bullying in grade school [27].
http://www.med.umich.edu/yourchild/topics/tv.htm
Our conclusion after six years of
studying child care regulations and
oversight is that we still cannot say with
confidence that America’s children are
protected by state licensing and
oversight systems. Nor can we say that
child care policies are in place to help
young children learn and be ready for
school.
Click to access full2012cca_state_factsheetbook.pdf
More than 16 million children in the United States – 22% of all children – live in families with incomes below the federal poverty level – $23,550 a year for a family of four.
Research is clear that poverty is the single greatest threat to children’s well-being. But effective public policies – to make work pay for low-income parents and to provide high-quality early care and learning experiences for their children – can make a difference. Investments in the most vulnerable children are also critical.
http://www.nccp.org/topics/childpoverty.html
Children represent 24 percent of the population, but they comprise 34 percent of all people in poverty.1 Among all children, 45 percent live in low-income families and approximately one in every five (22 percent) live in poor families. Among children 6 through 11 years old in middle childhood, 45 percent live in low-income families and 22 percent live in poor families. Being a child in a low-income or poor family does not happen by chance. There are a range of factors associated with children’s experiences of economic insecurity, including race/ethnicity and parents’ education and employment. This fact sheet describes the demographic, socioeconomic, and employment characteristics of children in middle childhood and their parents.
http://www.nccp.org/publications/pub_1078.html
EDIA AND TECHNOLOGY USE*: Kids today are being entertained on multiple devices, but TV still rules, and its importance is growing.
— Media consumption among kids has grown over the past four years to
nearly 35 hours per week, presenting an increase of 2.2 hours since
2009.
— TV usage is up 12% versus nine years ago, according to Nielsen, despite
the many alternative devices available to them including tablets,
computers and games consoles.
— Computer and gaming consoles make 27% of kids’ daily media consumption.
— While tablet adoption rates have increased, their adoption still
represents a small slice of the pie, at 8%.
— Though computer and smartphone usage is up among kids, gaming is their
number-one activity across devices. 96% of kids say they use their
computer for gaming, compared to 88% on the tablet and 86% on the
smartphone.
— Three-quarters of kids say they watch short form video on their iDevice,
and consuming long-form programming is growing: more than half of kids
with an iDevice now watch long-form content, a 23% lift over last year.
http://www.frankwbaker.com/mediause.htm
Out-of-School Learning Activities. Reading is an activity that has been shown to be
strongly linked to children’s scores on standard verbal achievement tests (U.S.
Department of Education, 1999; Snow, Burns & Griffin, 1998), as has studying (Keith,
Reimers, Fehrmann, Pottebaum & Aubey, 1986).
Watching a lot of television, in contrast, has been linked to lower cognitive test scores (Timmer, Eccles & O’Brien, 1985).
Several studies show that more television viewing is associated with less time spent in activities such as reading and studying (Koolstra & Van Der Voort, 1996), which may partially explain its negative effect.
In the early 1980s (Timmer, et al., 1985), children spent only 8 minutes per day reading for pleasure, whereas 2.3 hours were spent watching television. It is important to explore what factors affect time spent in these activities and what difference these activities make to children’s achievement.
Click to access rr00-458.pdf
Longitudinal studies carried out in the United States have been crucial in demonstrating some of the key factors in producing and maintaining poor achievement. Their findings have gone well beyond a model that blames schools or a student’s background for academic failure. Comparisons of the academic growth curves of students during the school year and over the summer showed that much of the achievement gap between low and high SES students could be related to their out-of-school environment (families and communities). This result strongly supports the notion that schools play a crucial compensatory role; however, it also shows the importance of continued support for disadvantaged students outside of the school environment among their families and within their communities (22).
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2528798/
Remind me what the original question was? We need to be succinct and stay focused.
The original issues were these:
Mr. Van Roekel made the claims that a) no one ever offers specific objections to the Common Core and b) no one describes offers alternatives.
So, I wrote two rather long posts in each of which I analyzed ONE standard from the CC$$ in ELA to tell what my objections were to the standard, and I also described a clearly superior alternative to the CC$$.
In addition, Joseph, I stepped back from Mr. Roekel’s challenge and provided a list of 18 reasons why the general notion of having an invariant bullet list of standards is a bad idea.
You are right, of course, that these blogs often wander off onto other topics, and that’s sometimes annoying. For example, there is some eugenicist who keeps popping up on this blog to spout random, horrific stuff about genetic determinism, IQ, and race, but at least that guy has the courage to SAY what he thinks, however pseudoscientific and unrelated to the topic at hand it might be. Most of the deformers who hold those sorts of views–the same ones who made The Bell Cure into a bestseller–talk that way only among their own and not in public forums.
I don’t like censorship. I’m with Milton that in a free and open encounter, the Truth will prevail.
or the truth will be obscured. I have always heard that the best writers are the briefest.
The proverb ‘brevity is the soul of wit’ means that articulate and intelligent communication (speech and writing) should use few and wisely chosen words. It is best associated with the play ‘Hamlet,’ by William Shakespeare.
As a former adjunct, I see the abundance of the irrelevant, as from my students.
I never post more than a paragraph.
One of the big problems we’re facing, Jim, is that the debate about education deform is being done in soundbites. People aren’t taking the time and effort to look behind these. Mr. Van Roekel said that people don’t offer specific objections to the Common Core. Well, there are several HUNDRED Common Core standards in ELA alone. Each of these needs to be critiqued, as do the general assumptions on which the CC$$ is based. Such critique can’t be done in soundbites.
It is precisely because these “standards” weren’t subjected to detailed critique that a) they are as poorly conceived as they are and b) that they are taken at all seriously.
Shakespeare put the line “Brevity is the sole of wit” in the mouth of one of his most offish characters (Polonius) in his longest play. Yes, brevity is sometimes a virtue, but as I have tried to illustrate here, people haven’t looked at all closely at these “standards,” haven’t thought at all carefully about what consequences they have for curricula and pedagogy, and THAT WORK can’t be done in slogans. Sloganeering is the stock in trade of the education deformers, and I suggest that we avoid it.
But your point about the wandering off topic that occurs, here, is well taken, as are many of your comments, Joseph, which tend to be pithy and wise.
oops. Soul, not sole, of course!
These are the times that try men’s soles
Hilarious, Jon! LOL
I was able to answer the question(s) in two sentences or was it one?
The NYS standards are excellent and quite sufficient.
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