Peter Greene read a column by a teacher in Arkansas who is enthusiastic about the Common Core standards.
He is not a strident critic of Common Core. Count him as agnostic.
But when a supporter describes the virtues of Common Core, Greene wonders what they were doing before CCSS.
What does it encourage or permit that is new or different?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
More time for teacher corroboration, fewer mandates from on high.
http://www.ohio.com/news/break-news/ohio-christian-university-collects-public-school-dollars-to-teach-biblical-truth-as-its-president-and-lobbyist-sit-on-state-school-board-1.465321
Here’s another one of the ed reform initiatives in Ohio:
“Christian university in Ohio, whose president sits on the state school board overseeing school curriculum, is offering classes to public high school students at taxpayer expense and teaching courses from a conservative Christian perspective.
State law prohibits religious instruction as a part of the publicly funded Post-Secondary Enrollment Options Program, but Ohio Christian University makes clear on its website that it teaches with a conservative Christian perspective.
Students who enroll are eligible for high school and college credit. Many enroll online and some participate at the school’s Circleville campus.
As an example of its curriculum, the school says students taking the class Survey of American History “will be able to analyze the varied political, economic, religious, and cultural achievements of America in light of biblical truth,” according to an online course description.”
Choice!
Maybe the zaniest part about ed reform is how none of the pieces fit together. It’s complete and utter chaos. We’re expected to adopt a “Common Core” for public schools, while at the same time they push private school vouchers, charters, and really any old experiment at all, as long as some politically-connected ed reformer is selling it.
I think it’s just an inability to say “no” to anyone in The Movement. Every ed reformer gets every item on their wish list.
It’s completely incoherent in this state at this point. I have no idea where they’re headed with this, or what they hope to achieve.
Just what we need for the 21st century–more narrow-minded, parochial (pun intended) thinking.
Take the time to read what the teacher in AR wrote.
If you can stomach it!
Don’t make me go there, Duane. It won’t be pretty.
The teacher touting the CCSS strives mightily to separate the Standards from the avalanche of tests that are coming, but she fails.
No matter how the so-called reformers dissemble, the Common Core is a package deal: the Standards are a vehicle for the tests, along with which come teacher evaluations based on value added metrics tied directly to the exams. They are inseparable.
There is also the attitude, typical among reformers, that they were the first to discover the wheel, and that previous generations of teachers were primitives. Somehow we are to believe that before David Coleman, no one taught critical thinking skills that no one had their students engage in close analysis of texts. I resent that ignorant, arrogant slander against America’s public school teachers.
I am very fortunate to have a Principal who recognizes that his teachers have been doing these things for years, long before Bill Gates tried to rehabilitate his image with self-interested “philanthropy,” and before David Coleman became a testing entrepreneur, but I fear he is the exception. For far too many teachers and students, the tests are the Standards and the curriculum.
Standards with companion tests used to evaluate teachers. A three-legged stool that cannot stand without all 3 legs intact. A business model that has enough cracks to let the light shine through.
I read the piece you provided a link for and I attempted to leave a comment but had problems. It may not be there on the linked site.
Anyway, Common Core is not the magic bullet that will suddenly turn every child into a successful student who graduates from high school ready to go to college. It won’t happen no matter how many times the President and Congress threaten teachers and abuse them.
There is no magic bullet but there is an equation that explains the process that leads to college readiness and it takes a village for this to work.
Teachers teach + students cooperate, pay attention, do the work and read outside of the classroom for enjoyment + parents support the first two parts of the equation = earning an education with great outcomes
K – 12, I wasn’t a great student. In fact, I was hardly a student at all but I was no trouble maker. Most teachers left me alone in the back of the room where I read books, lots of books. In high school, I worked in the library as a student assistant and plowed through historical fiction, mysteries, science fiction and fantasy often reading an average of two books a day. As a child I was severely dyslexic and shy. But I loved books. I was so dyslexia that the experts at the local grade school told my mother I’d never learn to read and write—she made liars out of them at home. Of course back in the early 1950s, I don’t think the experts of that time had any idea of dyslexia or attention deficit disorder or all the other learning disabilities. There was one word used back then: retarded.
This dyslexic child graduated from high school with less than a 1.0 GPA and went into the Marines. Several years later, honorably discharged he decided to go to college on the GI Bill and didn’t have to take any remedial bone headed English classes because of his high vocabulary from all those books he read.
In 1973, this dyslexic adult who wasn’t supposed to ever read or write and scraped by to graduate from high school graduated with a BA in journalism with an overall GPA of 3.56. Later, he would earn and MFA in writing.
What made the difference? His mother who was a partner in his education and a teacher who guided her when it came to teaching her retarded son at home how to read. You see, the teacher had a classroom of kids to teach and the attention I needed was much more than she could deliver so my mother filled those shoes.
My closing question to that teacher of the year in a southern state who thinks the Common Core is the magic bullet we’ve been waiting for: Where are all the parents when it comes to children learning to enjoy reading so books become part of their life?
I taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005) and saw one magic bullet after another appear and teachers forced to use them. I was a witnesses to the failure of all those magic bullets one after another, and I can predict that the Common Core if it continues will be another failure in a long list of failures that classroom teachers were not a part of creating. If the majority of classroom teachers don’t accept it, it will fail and it will not be because the teachers didn’t try.
A very inspiring story. Thank goodness for teachers and parents.
Just today at a Charlotte Danielson inserverice our district was ‘providing’ for us I had the chance to chat with two of the instructors on the side. Neither of them seemed to keen on the CCSS. Hmmm is there something about CCSS that goes against the Danielson group’s evaluations?
I also find it suspicious that our state is dumping CCSS, PARCC testing and Danielson evaluations all, on us in one year (IL). Come on…how are we supposed to change almost everything about the way we teach, get kids ready for new test (luckily we get to do them pencil and paper for one more year) and try to modify the way we teach completely, so that we get proficient on our evaluations (even thought CCSS and Danielson contridict each other on several points)? Any ideas? I mean one thing would be fine but all 3 in one year, we are definitely being set up to fail and in a very big way.
That’s a really good question, but I think you already answered it for yourself.
“What do the CC$$ in ELA encourage or permit that is new or different?”
I would ask, rather,
What do they mandate that is backward and counterproductive? and
What do they preclude that would be new and extraordinarily valuable?
The former list is long, indeed, but the latter is . . .
well, there is no limit to the possibilities for new, exciting, valuable curricula, pedagogy, and learning progressions PRECLUDED BY these primitive, dull, hackneyed, unimaginative, confused, amateurish “standards.”
If the CC$$ in ELA were music, they would be Muzak.
If they were a poem, they would be Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees.”
If they were a novel, they would be The Bridges of Madison County.
If they were a painting, they would be on black velvet and show Elvis ascending into heaven surrounded by hunting dogs and cherubs.
They are to the state of the art in thinking about curricula, pedagogy, and learning progressions in the English language arts as phrenology is to cognitive psychology, astrology to astronomy.
I hope that didn’t sound too strident!
I know a vaudeville-revival-style performer who does a routine called Nostradamus, Seer of the Obvious. It’s a delightful routine in which she goes around the room, grabs a head, enters a mystical trance, and says, “I’m seeing that someone close to you once died . . . or will die in the future.”
The good in the CC$$ in ELA–and there is some–is the obvious and already widespread. It’s what decent teachers have always done. But the neophytes who wrote these “standards” knew so little about what they were doing that they created a slew of videos in which they alternated between a) making completely idiotic, counterproductive suggestions that any experienced teacher with knowledge of current best practice would discount out of hand and b) saying what EVERYONE already knows as though it were THE REVELATION: Look for evidence in the text! Ask text-dependent questions!
Wow. Who knew? Gosh, David. Life changing. Really. I’m just in awe. And so grateful that you are now thinking for me. After all, thinking was so hard.
It’s mind-blowing to listen to some of these members of the CC$$-pom-pon squad and glee club gushing about how now that they have DEFORMY MAGIC, their students are thinking about what they read. And, OF COURSE, the question to ask is, “And you never had them do that before?”
Sheesh!
… and if it was a stand-up comedy routine, it would be booed off the stage.
Rereading the piece by the teacher from Arkansas to whom Mr. Greene is reacting–the “guest column” in Education Week–it seems all too polished, too like a professionally prepared press release or commercial. Did anyone else get that impression, that it’s a little too pat a sales pitch covering someone’s list of talking points?
I’m frankly wondering who wrote it for her. I could be wrong, but . . .
Isn’t that what we always get, Robert? Warmed over talking points, test-marketed in focus groups, touted by naifs, opportunists or outright liars?
Generally speaking, yes
I am sickened by the Hollywood practice, for example, of showing film endings to focus groups and then forcing writers to redo their work to make the mob happier.
The interesting thing, Michael, is that people are very much aware of the continual lying, especially the young people coming up. I have a good friend who grew up in Soviet Russia. He is full of stories about the absolute distrust and disdain that was created in people as a result of never being able to believe anything told them by the State. We’re getting there.
Not to be overly negative, Robert, but I sometimes wonder if many, many people prefer “comfort” of the lies they’re told.
There’s an old saying that goes something like this, “Keep it simple stupid.”
The Wolves of Sesame Street keep the message very simple and they keep repeating it so it becomes a meme and takes on a life of its own.
The results of all the simple messages is to instill fear:
Your kids are failing and face a dismal future because of incompetent teachers in outdated public schools that are kept this way by the teacher unions. We can save your kids by sweeping this all away.
The solution:
School Choice.
To counter this, the teachers and parents who support them are challenged to find a simple message to counter the Wolves, and many people are incapable or unwilling to take the time to study all the data that proves the Wolves of Sesame Street wrong.
However, if we were to boil our message down to a simple pitch and flooded the media and the Blog-o-sphere with it through Twitter, Facebook, etc. we might start to swim against the current and make some headway.
First, identify simple taking points that point out the errors of the Wolves claims. And be ready with more simple talking points when the Wolves counterattack with more simple slogans.
He told the teacher, “You do not know what you are talking about.” She had cited her own experience to support her points. How can he be judge, jury and executioner on her empirical judgment? Way to turn off people with his arrogance!
The vaudvillian takeoffs are fun, but here is the real deal. The cynical marketers of Arne’s Race to the Top (RttT) teacher evaluation scheme are federally funded as the Reform Support Network.
The Network is an umbrella under which contracts are given to marketers of RttT. One of these marketers recommended states and districts organize and train “teacher SWAT teams that can be deployed for teacher-to-teacher communication at key junctures of the implementation and redesign of evaluation systems“ to develop buy-in to the agenda. (2012b, December). Engaging educators: Toward a new grammar and framework for educator engagement. Author. Page 9. Retrieved from www2.ed.gov/about/inits/ed/implementation…/engaging-educators.pdf
Of course, the RttT agenda includes the Common Core, new tests, the use of student test scores to evaluate teachers. A credible and fair evaluation system should not require the intimidating tactics of teacher SWAT teams.
In a belated recognition that no evidence supports the teacher evaluation policies it has foisted on states, USDE decided to commission a study for the purpose of getting “rigorous” evidence on whether the evaluation systems called for in federal policy have their intended effects on teacher and leader performance and student achievement.
This five-year, $16 million study of Teacher and Leader Evaluation Systems will be completed in 2017, long after teachers and principals in almost every state have endured the requirements of the Common Core and associated evaluation systems known to be unreliable and ineffective as means to improve educational outcomes. Some teachers and principals will have lost their jobs.
If the economy were stronger I think many teachers would be leaving in droves. It the legal system offered more protection for teacher speech and collective action, the levels of discontent would be far more visible than rants in blog posts. See: American Institutes of Research. (2012, February 23). AIR selected to conduct study measuring the impact of teacher and leader evaluation systems on student learning and performance. Press Release. Retrieved from http://www.air.org/news/index.cfm?fa=viewContent&content_id=1755.