Experienced curriculum designer Robert Shepherd wrote the following prediction after reading this post:
“The oligarchs who got together in a back room and decided that we were going to have
a. invariant, top-down national standards, and
b. these ridiculous new tests
“have grown used to absolute power. They have grown used to implementing policy in their companies, for example, and having people accept it because they have no choice but to do so.
“And so it came as quite a shock to them when, after the fiasco of the New York test, parents and teachers and students in New York state said, almost unanimously, “This is insane and has to stop.”
“Predictably, they ignored the lowly teachers and students. They are trying to get away with ignoring the parents.
“Who are these mere mortals to question their judgment?
“Those guys have an interesting experience coming, for when these tests roll out nationwide, there will be hell to pay. Rarely in public policy and never in the history of U.S. education will we have seen the like of what is about to happen.It’s going to be a policy supernova. Or, to use a different metaphor,
“I suspect that when the ed deform monster attacks the nation’s children with these tests, that will be when the villagers grab their shovels and pitchforks and track the monster to its lair.
“Woe unto those defending it when that happens.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
We live in an authoritarian society. It starts with our parents just after we are born. It continues through 12-20 years of schooling. It subjugates many women in their relationships with men. It controls our lives on the job for 50 years. It influences our decision-making through religious and biblical judgments. It affects our relationships and thinking through cultural mores. And at the end we are forced to abide by the pronouncements of the medical profession. Common Core is just one symptom of people’s willingness to put certainty above creativity, security above risk, and indifference above involvement. To make matters worse – all of our institutions, and especially education, are run in a top-down, autocratic manner – even the United States government functions like a corporation in the execution of its daily affairs.We even have class distinction based on wealth (traveled lately?). Welcome to the United Aristocracy of States. And the beneficiaries of our compliance continue to laugh all the way to the bank. No wonder they would suppress all dissent and want to maintain their control. The worst possible scenario would be for people to learn to think for themselves and act on their own behalf. That is why they want to control every aspect of education including the what and the how of it. And to assure that each and every individual has learned exactly what they want them to learn – no more, no less.
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Well said. And how to control the youth, the idealistic 20-somethings who are often the first and the loudest to take up the fight? Crush them under mounds of student loan debt.
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Last night the twenty-something restaurant host where I had dinner cheerfully told me he is working three jobs to pay off his student loans.
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The war has begun and any parent who loves their children as I do will not tolerate this insanity. This is America and we don’t have to be a part of this insanity by Arne Basketball Duncan
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Arabella,
I have a question for you:
What if a U.S. Surgeon General
told the nation’s parents that a
great new vaccine has just been
invented, and it’s going to
revolutionize the health of
children and their ability
to fight off disease … blah-
blah-blah…. all the while
the Surgeon General is
being handsomely
compensated for pushing
this vaccine.
And then someone asks,
“Mr. Surgeon General… why
don’t you give that new vaccine
to YOUR OWN children? If the
vaccine is so great, why do
you spend tons of your own
money so that your kids get
an entirely different, and—
by all measures—a superior
vaccine?”
“My children’s vaccination is
none of your business, and
not fair ground for discussion.”
And to add insult to injury,
the hypothetical Surgeon
General intones, “Your kids
are all going to be forced
to take this vaccine whether
you like or not.” With the
power of the state behind
him, he says that, figuratively
speaking, he and the state
will shove it down your kids’
throats, or strap them to
a chair and forcibly inject
into their biceps whether
or not their parents desire
such a vaccine. (which is
EXACTLY the situation for
parents who cannot afford
private school—and have
to attend public school.)
“This is what we’re doing,
and there’s nothing you can
do to stop us… so just shut
up and accept it.”
You can see how parents
might be a little vexed by
such a prospect.
Of course, you know I’m
talking about New York State
Ed. Commissioner John King
and his forcing Common
Core on other people’s
children, while keeping his own
children… figuratively
speaking… as far away from
Common Core as his Gates-
originated salary can afford.
Seriously… if Common Core
is the greatest thing ever
for a kid’s education, why
does King spend tens of
thousands of dollars of
expensive private school
tuition to make sure his own
children are kept as far away
from it as his Gates-
originated salary will allow?
Gates himself sends his kids
to Lakeside, another Common-
Core free, rich kids’ private
school… thus protecting his
own children from what he
otherwise claims will be the
greatest thing ever for a
child’s education.
Check out the crucial final 20 min.
of last October’s town hall in
Poughkeepsie, New York,
where NY State Ed.
Commissioner John King
faced the public over his
backing of Common Core.
Here is the colorfully titled
YouTube video —
“Commissioner King Gets Spanked”:
This meeting was a Rhee-like
farce where King spoke for 2
hours straight, and was scheduled
to to be followed by 1 hour of
public comments and questions.
Note that… ***was scheduled to
be followed…***
The best laid plans…
Indeed, 20 minutes in, neither
King nor the NY State PTA
moderator “could stand the
heat, so they got outta the kitchen.”
They were totally unprepared by
how well-informed and
confrontational these parents were.
At about the 10 minute mark, one
parent brought up the fact that King
sends his own kids to a Montessori
School which has a curriculum that
is the antithesis of Common Core
as a Montessori school is…
(to quote its wikipedia entry)
– – – – – – – – – – – – –
“… characterized by an emphasis on
independence, freedom within limits,
and respect for a child’s natural
psychological, physical, and social
development….
“… and has these elements
as essential:[1][2]
” — Mixed age classrooms, with
classrooms for children aged
2½ or 3 to 6 years old by far the
most common
“— Student choice of activity
from within a prescribed range of
options
“— Uninterrupted blocks of work
time, ideally three hours
“— A Constructivist or ‘discovery’
model, where students learn
concepts from working with
materials, rather than by direct
instruction.
“Specialized educational materials
developed by Montessori and her
collaborators
“— Freedom of movement within
the classroom
” — A trained Montessori teacher
“In addition, many Montessori
schools design their programs
with reference to Montessori’s
model of human development
from her published works, and
use pedagogy, lessons, and
materials introduced in teacher
training derived from courses
presented by Montessori
during her lifetime… ”
– – – – – – – – – – – –
This disclosure of his hypocrisy
and implied attack on King pretty
much ended things.
King made the dubious claim that
his Montessori school scrupulously
follows “Common Core”
This totally enraged the audience
of parents as it was and is a
ludicrous and demonstrably false
claim that was rightly met with
skepticism and loud booing,
enraging the crowd… if for
no other reason that folks
don’t like to be lied to or have
their intelligences insulted.
Seriously… if Common Core
is the greatest thing ever
for a kid’s education, why
does King spend tens of
thousands of dollars of
expensive private school
tuition to make sure his own
children are, figuratively
speaking, kept as far away from
it as as Gates-funded salary
can afford.
It’s like if a Surgeon General
told the nation’s parents that a
great new vaccine has just been
invented, and it’s going to
revolutionize the health of
children and their ability
to fight off disease … blah-
blah-blah…. all the while
the Surgeon General is
being handsomely
compensated for pushing
this vaccine.
And then someone asks,
“Mr. Surgeon General… why
don’t you give that new vaccine
to YOUR OWN children? If the
vaccine is so great, why do
you spend tons of your own
money so that your kids get
an entirely different, and—
by all measures—a superior
vaccine?”
“My children’s vaccination is
none of your business, and
not fair ground for discussion.”
Anyway, back to the town
hall video…
The flustered moderator then
quickly wrapped it up, “We’re going
to allow two more people to speak.”
At which point people began
screaming even louder:
“WHAT HAPPENED TO ‘ONE
HOUR’ ?!!!”
This is absolutely riveting video.
Again, you can see that crucial
final 20 minutes at:
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I just noticed something while
watching this video. King
sends his kid to a “private
school”… but he doesn’t
use the phrase….
Instead, he calls his kids’
school a “non-public school”…
(at 15:52)
KING: “Non-public schools
are part of the community
of schools in our state… ”
It’s part of some Neuro-
Linguistic Programming
technique to subliminally
get the people in the
audience to not associate
King with elitists who avoid
the public schools and
instead send their kids to…
yes… PRIVATE schools…
No, he’s just like all you
“public” school parents.
I think it’s called “negation”
where what follows the
negation… in this case..
the negation is the weasel
prefix “non”, and what follows
it is “public”… with the “public
being what actually is actually
processed by the mind..
By calling it “non-public”
the word “public” is in the
phrase, and that’s what
gets processed… with
people then NOT associating
King with “private” schools…
i.e. avoid using the word
“private” at any cost.
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I don’t think the vast majority of parents here know Common Core is coming at all. We have many, many ed reform initiatives in Ohio.
We have a new school grading system that will change, again, next year. We have a new teacher grading system that will change, again, next year. We have a new program where 3rd graders will be left back if they don’t pass a reading test. We have the usual ed reform budget cuts to public schools. We have unregulated and virtually unlimited expansion of vouchers and charters, with no regard for the effect of that on existing public schools.
Common Core may just be melding into this chaotic barrage of reforms, where every high-profile or politically-connected ed reformer’s individual policy preference was rubber-stamped and pushed down the chain where some lower-level person has to worry about whether any of “it works” or not.
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So correct…and the kindergartners.??? Sad..
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One of the things that’s missing on the reporting on Common Core is context. People at the local level experience ed reforms in context and in combination with the myriad other ed reforms we’re barraged with.
The big concern here seems to be the testing for 3rd graders. My own son is a 5th grader and the 5th graders are sympathetic to the 3rd graders, which I thought was really nice. It’ll be good if they reject this sort of cut-throat, win/lose ed reformers are setting up and sympathize with one another 🙂
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A big problem we have is how well CCSS has been package, and the strategy of hiding in contracts what should have been very public actions of legislatures and departments of education. The result is that the public sees only the very tip of the ice berg. But the time the real game is apparent, it will be very hard to undo the intricate web of dealings and commitments.
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Robert Shepherd is, to me..a GENIUS .
I scan the posts everyday looking for his posts.
He knows how to explain all to a 6 year old and that is genius.
Thank you Robert…again….
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“Woe unto those defending it when that happens.”
Sadly, that will include a lot of teachers who either drank the Common Core Kool-Aid or are suffering from Stockholm Syndrome. But as today’s New York Time non-attack of CCSS in NY shows, there’s no problem finding teachers who sing the praises of CCSS. Two short quotes form Carol Burris and Diane amidst paragraphs describing happy teachers and brilliant children don’t do much for the anti-refom movement.
I can’t begin to express my frustration over this. The gushing is just insane. But so long as the only teachers who speak out are those starry-eyed over CCSS, I don’t see how this can end well.
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MooseNSquirrels: the story in the New York Times did show that the opposition to Common Core is not limited –as Arne claims–to extremists on the right.
What I found annoying is that the story quotes spokesmen from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute as neutral observers, without identifying it as a conservative, pro-Common Core organization that belongs to rightwing extremist ALEC, and that has received millions from the Gates Foundation to promote CC.
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Hi, Diane!
I agree with your points, but nonetheless I found the article a sort of bait-and-switch that buried your points with glowing CCSS propaganda. The content of the article certainly belied the title.
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It is starting in Illinois with the PARCC fled tests coming next month . Technology coordinators and classroom teachers have been trying the online sample field test questions and are appalled at how developmentally inappropriate the tasks and questions are for eight, nine, and ten year olds. I am all for rigor. Ask my students and their parents. Rigor does not mean developmentally appropriate.
One ELA test can be as long as 120 minutes with only one three minute break allowed. During that break the students may not communicate with each other. They are nine and taking a test that for some will take 120 minutes and others will finish early and sit for 120 minutes. This is outrageous!
Plus, all staff members involved will sign a one page Security Agreement. If you are found in violation of it, you may lose you license. The manual and agreement state that you must have your full attention on the testing environment. The manual states that the proctor may not read, grade papers, check email, etc. while the 120 minute test is being taken. So you will just stare at you students while they struggle through the nightmare.
This must be stopped!
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A little off topic Diane, but shouldn’t you have a congratulatory post for our Secretary of Education who has literally scored a first! Arne Duncan is the first cabinet member to win the MVP of the NBA celebrity All-Star game!!!!! Congrats Arne.
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In addition to that, Kevin Johnson (Mr. Michelle Rhee) was named a finalist for the basketball HOF.
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He’s also well known for other reasons:
Click to access Phoenix_Police.source.prod_affiliate.4.pdf
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Can we trade him in for a real educator?
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The national roll-out by PARCC and SBAC of CCSS aligned tests in math and ELA will be a two-pronged disaster.
Prong #1 – The COMPUTER FIASCO that will unfold as the US school system will reveal to the ivory tower reform group that the LACK OF1) working computers, 2) necessary bandwidth, 3) keyboarding skills, 4) fine motor skills, and 5) money to upgrade
Prong #2 – The TEST WRITING CRIME that is about to be perpetrated on 20 million 8 to 14 year olds. Remember these tests have not been constructed by accident. They have been constructed to achieve the exact result that the DOE wants. All that $325,000,000 can buy! They are TRAPS not TESTS, designed to TRICK, CONFUSE, and WEAR DOWN the test takers. beware the false claims of test security. Demand that they be viewed in their entirety.
On a side note; if theses are really state developed standards – why is the federal government paying $325,000,000 for the test development?
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Why, indeed.
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Those “higher-ups” in charge of implementing CCSS do not want a nationwide protest such as the one in New York. Therefore, what is to stop them from setting the passing scores (on Parcc & SB) so low, giving the illusion to parents and the public that CC works and all the kids are succeeding? Is this possible? Then what do we do?
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That would disrupt their business plan. Keep in mind it would also show that public school teachers are highly effective.
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Momoffive: This is exactly what is being done, in NYS the passing/failing scores are changed yearly to accommodate the agenda du jour of DOE.
Common Core going national? Isn’t that wonderful? Everyone will learn, read, think and interact the same way.
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Or, as one fed up former teacher has said, “Guillotines don’t kill people; angry peasants with guillotines kill people.”
_____
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Hilarious!
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Now, now, everyone, we can’t go scrapping the Common Core College and Career Ready Assessment Program (C.C.C.C.R.A.P.). Three hundred million in taxpayer funds were spent to develop the new assessments, and they are essential for numerology-based educational decision making.
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You may want to watch the 60 Minutes segment from February 16 on the F-35 and how the Pentagon signed the contract for these fighter aircraft without any evaluation or pretesting from experts. As the one general said, this wasn’t normal for how the Pentagon develops weapon systems and it turned out to be a very expensive disaster they are still trying to fix several years later at the cost of hundreds of billions of dollars.
Sounds about the same for Common Core. What happens to America’s children while they stumble around trying to fix this boondoggle in public education? That is if they are allowed to spend almost a decade to fix the mess once it blows up in their faces.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/f-35-joint-strike-fighter-60-minutes/
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If there is ever a chapter in Diane’s book that needs to be burned into all people’s brains, it is the chapter, “Privatization of Public Education is Wrong,” and specifically page 301 that sums up the fatal flaw of the “reform” movement. That is the statement to the effect that the reason public schools cannot be run like businesses is because there is no control over the raw material (students). The schools have to take all students, not “weed them out” when is routinely done in private schools. ALL of the “reform” ideas fail because they are all based on the faulty assumption schools are businesses and can be run on business models.
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That is the precisely why I conclude that the ‘business model’ mantra is a collection of talking points designed to sound logical to uninformed voters. MBA’s aren’t actually stupid. Follow the money.
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When many, many extremely bright people, employing many checks and balances, create an end product that utterly fails, then there is something systemically wrong–something wrong with the guiding assumptions under which they are working. People ask, how could this possibly have gone wrong? We had the best and the brightest working on this. We were extraordinarily careful.
The classic case of this is the Vietnam War. It’s because of Kennedy that the phrase the best and the brightest became everyday currency. He had such people engaged in the oversight of U.S. military and intelligence operations, and those same people stayed in place during the Johnson administration. They were experts. They extraordinarily were experienced. Some of them had overseen the programs that led (though at terrible cost in civilian lives, it must be remembered) to the Pacific theater of the Second World War. And they followed sophisticated procedures, based on flawed assumptions, that led to the horrific boondoggle that was Vietnam.
Often, in organizations, there are horrific dysfunctions despite the fact that very bright people are working very hard and very diligently. The problem is not with the people but with the system and the unexamined assumptions built into it. That’s what’s happening with the tests being developed. Some think that are being developed by idiots in a sloppy, haphazard manner. They could not be more wrong about this. They are being developed extraordinarily carefully by very talented people. But those people are working under general assumptions that are wrong. For example, they are assuming a) that you get better what you measure and b) that if you measure more sophisticated skills, then c) you will get more sophisticated skills. This seems to them obvious–rigorously true in the mathematical sense of being a consequence of deductive reasoning from true premises.
But, if you are asking multiple-choice questions about complex skills and requiring that all your distractors be “plausible”–that is possibly true–then what you are producing is a test guaranteed to trick large numbers of test takers into choosing the wrong answers and, inadvertently, you are creating an industry for those who can train students in answering questions of that type. In other words, you are creating a new test prep industry with enormous opportunity costs that will usurp and take time away from actual instruction in subject matter.
And then there is the problem with the initial premise–that the way to get better performance on sophisticated cognitive tasks is via external punishment and reward (high or low test scores). There is a large body of research, now, that shows this premise to be dangerously false. See Daniel Pink’s book Drive,, a popular account of this research.
The new tests will not be a failure because they were produced by idiots. They will be a failure because they did the wrong things very, very well. As John Tukey, the statistician who invented the box plot, said
“When the right thing can only be measured poorly, it tends to cause the wrong thing to be measured well. And, it is often much worse to have a good measurement of the wrong thing, especially when it is so often the case that the wrong thing will, in fact, be used an a indicator of the right thing, than to have a poor measure of the right thing.”
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cx: They were extraordinarily experienced.
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cx: to the victory in the Pacific theater of the Second World War.
I wish this blog had an edit feature!!!
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“Plausible” distractors does not mean possibly true. It means that the three wrong answers are at least related to the topic. The distractors in fact have to be wrong. Plausibility eliminates silly, ridiculous, or obviously wrong answers.
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That’s the problem with many of the ELA distractors we saw in the Pearson tests. When asking objective questions about subjective ideas such as author’s intent, we had teachers that couldn’t agree on the right answer. hard to write three clearly wrong answers and make them plausible.
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Yes, of course, NY. I was writing hastily. I should have written that they are answers that seem to be true.
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People are using the wrong tool for the job. Objective question formats are best for Level I stuff–for testing factual recall. While it is possible to write multiple-choice questions that require higher-level thinking, doing this consistently turns out to be fiendishly difficult. As a result, it’s child’s play to tear about the questions on most of these tests–to demonstrate problems with them, even though those questions have typically been vetted by highly experienced editors.
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Or, rather, answers that seem as though they could be true, as when I we say that a plausible explanation for what look like dry river valleys on Mars is that once there was running water there.
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Robert
Just think about the ELA standards you have so assiduously decried
As you have so accurately described them, they are ABSTRACT and SUBJECTIVE, and they focus on mostly UN-TEACHABLE SKILLS.
They are in essence, test-prep-proof. A lot of teachers wasting a lot of time. Multiple choice, objective test items will be used to quantify student responses to subjective questions. This is a huge problem of course. The outcry, the DEMAND must be: SHOW US THE TESTS.
False claims of test security will be made; but can be trumped by parental outrage.
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Yes, NY, you are correct that the ELA standards are test prep proof. They are so sloppy and vague as not to be operationalized by any means whatsoever. However, the new tests being constructed are a test prep author’s dream. There will be, inevitably, ENORMOUS amounts of time and effort dedicated to developing and teaching strategies for answering test questions constructed as these questions are–time that will be taken away from legitimate instruction in subject matter. Again, you get what you measure. If you are measuring the ability to take tests like these, then you will get instruction in taking tests like these. In fact, that’s just about all you will get. This is inevitable.
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And absolutely, the demand must be, “Show us the tests.” That, too, is inevitable. When these tests roll out nationwide, parents everywhere will awaken from their current slumbers, as they have awakened in New York, and they will demand to see the tests. And then the community of scholars, researchers, and classroom practitioners nationwide will expose these tests for the sham that they are and the “data-driven decision making” based on them for the numerology that it is.
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You nailed it, NY teacher: “a huge problem”
The makers of the new C.C.C.C.R.A.P. tests are attempting to do neurosurgery with an ice pick and a mallet.
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Parental pressure has resulted in the NY Board of Regents voting to make Pearson tests transparent. How this actually shakes out remains to be seen.
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cx: they are so sloppy and vague as not to be amenable to being clearly operationalized enough to be tested accurately
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The current education deforms are basically large-scale experimentation on the U.S. educational system based upon
1. an early twentieth-century factory model for milling identical widgets and
2. an extrinsic reward theory of performance that goes back to the hydraulic empires of the earliest stages of human civilization.
And this extraordinarily backward thinking is ironically being touted as what is needed to produce students with 21st-century work skills.
Wrong from the start.
Valid but false conclusions have been drawn from flawed premises.
Garbage in, garbage out.
The testing and evaluation system being put into place is being hailed as “data-driven decision making.” No. It’s numerology-based decision making. And what the deformers do not realize is that
1. A complex, diverse, pluralistic society and economy needs students who have been extraordinarily variously prepared for extraordinarily various roles, not ones who have been identically milled, and
2. Our prime directive as educators must be to create independent, intrinsically motivated learners, which cannot be done with a highly scripted, top-down, monolithic, external punishment and reward model.
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Bill Gates says that it will take decades for us to know whether the current deforms have worked. If the deformers are successful in foisting these on the country, he will be right about that. Those will come to be known as the lost decades in which outcomes plummeted, humane ideals related to teaching and learning were forgotten, and millions were robbed of educations that would have helped them to identify their potentials and pursue and develop those toward ends productive for themselves and for the larger community.
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One aspect of PARCC testing that gets little mention is their requirement for TWO SUMMATIVE test sessions. Math and ELA at 75 course completion AND math and ELA at 95% course completion. So when Arne or King or whomever claim that CCSS brings no increase in the amount of testing they are wrong by a factor of 100%.
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Their approach turns ALL of K-12 education into preparation for the test. All test prep, all the time. That’s what they WANT, bizarrely.
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For districts that have completely lost their collective minds, PARCC also offers two additional tests (one formative, one benchmark) for a grand total of FOUR possible test sessions. Just wait until they get their hooks into science and social studies!!!! Will need a longer school year just for testing.
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Originally, that was going to be the requirement for all schools. They backed off that.
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Reblogged this on 21st Century Theater.
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I hope the public rises to the occasion. It just seems like so many parents follow whatever the school dictates they are doing. I work in a low-income area, so maybe it is different in higher income areas. I hope so. I hope the parents get good and mad, and tell their representatives to shove this CC out the door. Then give education back to the communities where it belongs.
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I can’t wait…
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Of course, what the deformers might do is cook the numbers for the national roll-out in order to avoid a repeat of the NY fiasco and to innur people to accepting the initial roll-out. Deformers are nothing if not accomplished at the art of numerology.
The dirty little secret of high-stakes criterion-referenced testing is that you can design a test to get any results, whatsoever, that you wish to get. You give the test to a sample group and add or throw out questions until the results are what you want. Or, if that’s too much trouble, you simply manipulate the raw-score-to-scaled score conversion tables. (If you graph the conversion tables for the New York exams during the NCLB era, for example, you will find that instead of those conversions being linear, they jump around like a gerbil on methamphetamine or like lines in a Jackson Pollack painting.) And, if that’s too much trouble, you simply announce whatever cut scores you want.
If the education deformers take this tack of manipulating the outcomes for the national roll-out, they will avoid the immediate backlash, but not entirely. People will still demand to see the tests. The deformers will balk and invoke security rules. But there are enough people in this country who still think that they live in a democracy that they will not be able to withhold the tests for long, and once they release them, it’s game over. Our country will awaken from the dogmatic coma (slumber is too mild a word) into which it has been placed by the Education Deform PR apparatus.
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cx: inure, of course; sorry about the typo
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Believe it or not, the NY Pearson math and ELA tests were NORM REFRENCED!!!!!
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They have to walk a very fine line with national results. Can’t fail 70% of the country as the NY pushback showed. But they can’t make the scores look too good because it debunks the central claim that America’s schools are “failure factories” and America’s teachers are mostly ineffective. Will be very interesting to see how they play this.
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But the point is that they CAN play it any way they decide to.
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Should also demand that they reveal their scaling prior to administering the tests. PARCC and SBAC will of course refuse because they have no reliable baseline. They’ll simply crunch the raw scores and then figure out the scale post facto.
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It will not surprise me if there wont be a modern day Ellsberg willing to risk the consequences of leaking the tests.
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Opt out
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No one wants to see America turn into AMERIAPAN or AMERHINA.
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Scroll down to see President Obama’s reply to an e-mail I sent to The White House complaining about what’s happening in public education.
Sincerely, Lloyd Lofthouse
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