Linda Darling-Hammond describes the possibilities for the transformation of assessment in the Common Core era.
Embodied in her analysis is a devastating critique of value-added measurement, which has been enacted by many states under pressure by the US Department of Education.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Wow, some people just never know when they’ve been had …
I was thinking the same thing…..deliverer of the Trojan Horse….
People have to get over the unfounded delusion that Linda Darling Hammond is any kind of ally at all. I know I have.
The phrase “multiple measures” marks the sleeper agents in the final assault of the Gates/Pearson axis, and this article demonstrates that LDH chose their side long ago.
Here is her description of the nightmare of bottomless cloud-based accountability demands. It’s one that that students and teachers are facing already in my “early adopter” district:
“These assessments, though, will not include all necessary tasks and skills for students, such as long-term research and investigation tasks or the ability to communicate orally, visually, and with technology tools. These kinds of tasks are needed to develop and assess students’ abilities to find and use information to solve problems, explain different approaches to a problem, and explain and defend their reasoning. That is why some schools, districts, and states are developing more robust performance tasks and portfolios as part of multiple-measure systems of assessment.”
So, the fifteen-year-olds are threatened and punished and driven to tears or complete disengagement. They’re trying to upload their performance tasks into a “portfolio” on a buggy Mahara platform in the cloud, under the data-masters watchful eye, so they can be held accountable everywhere and always to the demented machines up there. Their actual learning, their agency and their creativity, are of no concern whatsoever to the data masters who sit in judgement of them.
You are correct. LDH believes education can be reduced to “digital units” as Paul Horton described them so that the delivery can be efficient and one size fits all.
Movement toward more portfolio assessment would be a good thing. Having assessment disappear into instruction as feedback would be even better. Killing the absurd national and state assessments would be the best single thing that we could do in this arena.
The big assessment companies could be doing wonderful work to design a wide variety of diagnostics and concrete, subject-specific assessments for self checking by independently directed learners. We’re heading in precisely the wrong direction with these national summative tests. Portfolio assessment is wonderful. Having portfolio assessments be mandated by a national Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth as part of an overall Common Core College and Career Ready Assessment Program, or C.C.C.R.A.P. is an Orwellian horror.
But any movement away from the monolithic standardized assessment toward individualized portfolios is going to be a very good thing indeed, so I should take a more positive attitude toward this. I shall wait to see how constrained these new portfolio assessments are. The dream situation would be that they would truly allow for individualization, for kids to pursue unique, guided, mentored tracks that will make for intrinsic motivation and show their work with creative products not overly specified beforehand.
When I was in college there was an expression, “never trust anyone over 30”.
Now that I am well past there, I have changed it to anyone who uses the term
“education for the 21st Century” or “critical thinking skills”. A critical thinking skill is remembering how to do the Heimlich maneuver when someone is choking in a restaurant.
LDH is choking on these words. How can we save her?, which critical thinking skill should we use?
No saving anyone, they have to determine their own route.
Now that doesn’t preclude lots of persuasive arguments against the nonsense.
It looks to me as though what the consortia have in mind are highly specified performance tasks. If so, this will be just another horror of top-down regimentation–standardized creativity, bureaucratically conceived mind-manacles.
I hope that that will not the case, that these performance assessments will provide for much individuation by presenting broad frameworks for work that a student might do and by providing a range of options from which the student and his or her teachers can choose for the work to be done by a given kid and possibilities for customization within those.
I won’t be holding my breath, but hope springs eternal.
“. . . top-down regimentation–standardized creativity, bureaucratically conceived mind-manacles. ?
I think that one needs nomination for quote of the year!
Thanks, Duane
Gotta say it like I see it.
Nice echo of William Blake, an early foe of standardization:
London
I wander thro’ each charter’d street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow.
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every Man,
In every Infants cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear:
How the Chimney-sweepers cry
Every blackning Church appalls,
And the hapless Soldiers sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls.
But most thro’ midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlots curse
Blasts the new-born Infants tear
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.
Very pleased that you picked that up, Randal!
This article still presupposed that CCSS are a good thing. I cannot accept that. I have heard many people speak glowingly about Linda Darling-Hammond and with much respect. But the tone of the article still seems to me to accept CCSS as a done deal. Am I misreading? Is there another instance when she has spoken out against CCSS? Or is she another powerful person who has sold us out?
Performance tasks can be conceived of in such a way that they provide springboards for widely varied substantive creative and scholarly activity. They can, for example, provide a wide range of heuristics for unique, innovative formulation of problems, processes, and products.
Or not.
More often than not, not.
The CC$$ in ELA are the work of amateurs. I have a heuristic for determining whether anyone knows the first thing about teaching English: does he or she think the CC$$ in ELA acceptable?
It’s truly frightening to think that people who think the CC$$ in ELA acceptable are developing a new, mandatory nationwide assessment system. That fact should give people pause.
This article and the accompanying paper seem to be saying, “VAM was terrible. But just wait until you see new, improved VAM+.”
It’s great that LDH is expressing support for bottom-up continuous improvement via teacher collaboration, but the way to bring that about is not via invariant, top-down measures and further erosion of teacher autonomy. Again, I think we have to wait and see what the new rhetoric means. Will the new system enable creativity and autonomy and innovation? Will it require that teachers be given the time for collaborative development and for subjecting their practice to critique and refinement? Or will it be a lot of bureaucratic prior restraint on teachers’ conceptualization of the tasks that their students will undertake leading to crushing uniformity and narrowing and distortion of activity in ELA classrooms?
Beware the one who wants to help you by telling you what you have to do and providing others with the tools with which to make you obedient to their narrow, uninformed preconceptions about your work.
LDH seems wedded to the idea of assessment as micromanagement tool, and that’s disturbing.
Theodore Roosevelt had this advice about management: Find someone who know how to do the job and then get the hell out of his [or her] way.
Two underlying assumptions to be challenged. First, as others have noted, the acceptance of the nonsense and calculated money grab that is CC$$. Second, the implication–and maybe I am reading this wrong based on my experience with LDH supporting a national ‘performance assessment’ for student teaching- that we need standard assessments just really good ones.
This is not what we need. What we need is the time and resources to support teachers, students, and the community in conversations about teaching, learning and the purpose and challenges of education. We need democratic processes in relationships of trust and good will, in which we can challenge each other, be confused in all the wonderful ways that confusion is enlightening, and then keep at it together. The VAM argument in this piece is a red herring. We know it is useless, but so is the entire myth of standardized accountability instead of complicated responsibility in the context of relationships, and democratic education.
Barbara Madeloni… could not agree with you more! LDH supporting national assessments for “21st century skills” is just another cookie cutter “reform” in the making and it is NOT WHAT WE NEED. Some very outspoken people with lots of credentials are seemingly very far away from the realities of the classroom. I really like your words:
“This is not what we need. What we need is the time and resources to support teachers, students, and the community in conversations about teaching, learning and the purpose and challenges of education. We need democratic processes in relationships of trust and good will, in which we can challenge each other, be confused in all the wonderful ways that confusion is enlightening, and then keep at it together…”
Thanks for such a nice share.
I’ll begin by noting that I have a lot of respect for Linda Darling-Hammond. But I’ll also note that LDH is biased toward CCSS because she was involved in their development at the earliest stages.
While I like the idea of performance assessment, I have to wonder where the rubric comes from. As an AP history teacher of nearly 20 years, my performance assessments are always based on essays and document analyses for brief research projects. There are also the ever-popular DBQ essays (which I like).
But in our CCSS training last November, they stressed an example of an ELA performance task that was based on original research (with narrow time limitations), construction of a speech (also narrow time limitations) and delivery of that speech. It was suggested that this would be evaluated by an outside source (the test companies I assume) who had also created the rubric.
So we do we have standardized national rubrics for these performance tasks or do we get to tailor our own as we see more appropriate to experience, difficulty and so on?
I love the idea of getting out of the test-and-punish business but I can’t be convinced that such measures would get away from that until I see policymakers moving away from using test scores as a cudgel.
Her note at the end about principals is also interesting because principals have never really been trained to be instructional leaders. They’ve been trained to be building managers which is an entirely different role. That’s a difficult transition.
As long as there is Common Core (or the next copyrighted nonsense it morphs into), there will be a push to standardize all associated curricula and assessments.
Yes. And that is why we need to put a stake into the CC$$. The CC$$ is the engine that actuates the whole Orwellian juggernaut.
Mercedes and Bob, I agree with you.
While AP is a standardized curriculum it grants a lot of flexibility to teachers. I emphasize different elements with each assignment until I can have students achieving at an appropriate level to achieve a high mark for the whole. This takes a while.
In our district, we use a lot of formative which creates a diagnosis and then leads to tailored measures. I have students that are poor thesis statement writers but then I have other that are poor essay organizers. My formatives are geared toward individuals rather than standardized class wide. I don’t want to lose that independence to someone else’s idea of what students should be doing, learning, or pacing.
Besides the CCSS for 11th / 12th grade Social Studies drive me insane. It’s ELA light. I could teach no history whatsoever and still accomplish those standards. So they’re not really Social Studies standards.
I know, I mixed my metaphors there. But I’ve known Shakespeare to pile ten of them into five lines! 🙂
Agree. There was no reason to copyright unless you wanted to push standardization.
@deutsch29… yes indeed. I also have a disdain for the obsession with rubrics that come with all the associated curriculum and for forcing teachers to create and post rubrics for each and every lesson as the rubrics make learning into way too cookie cutter an experience.
BINGO
“It was suggested that this would be evaluated by an outside source (the test companies I assume) who had also created the rubric.
So we do we have standardized national rubrics for these performance tasks or do we get to tailor our own as we see more appropriate to experience, difficulty and so on?”
Steve, this is the crux of my concern. Performance tasks such as research papers, presentations, etc., are more intellectually engaging for students and are more indicative of their abilities. Nonetheless, imposing an inflexible rubric or making a testing company the evaluator is just another means of stripping teachers of autonomy and professionalism.
Dufresne, your concern is the very reason I posed the question. I share that concern as well.
Having a large scale “standard” judged by outsiders to a standard that may not be applicable to my students is a huge concern.
As with the Common Core itself, this is a move toward having top-down legislation and evaluation of thought itself.
Comrade, the Party has deemed your publication unacceptable.
That’s one of a half million reasons to oppose this with everything we have.
It must be seductive to a certain kind of educrat to think that he or she has been given the POWER to make these decisions for everyone else in the country going forward. And it must be seductive to have the proximity to the powerful people pushing these deforms on the country.
At any rate, we should resist.
Opt out.
Say no.
Refuse.
….and I have heard of tests being outsourced, or scored by “calibrated” non-teachers, substitutes, or teachers in other content areas .
Years ago, I was judging a speech competition. In one dramatic interpretation event, a student performed on of those exploded e.e.cummings poems as a bit of Ella Fitzgerald-type scat singing. It was a perfect marriage of content and form and flawlessly executed. I gave her the highest possible score. The other judges didn’t know what they were hearing and gave her the lowest possible score. They had their preconceived notions about what oral interpretation of a poem meant, and this girl’s brilliant performance didn’t fit that.
Prior restraint by a distant, centralized, top-down authority tends to be unimaginative and stupid. It almost invariably narrows and distorts in ways that the centralized planners never envisioned.
We don’t need the centralized planners and their centralized tests. We don’t need NCLB+, VAM+. We need to empower teachers and to kick the educrats out, and we need to encourage real innovation by creating mechanisms whereby the new ideas of researchers and scholars and curriculum designers can get to free, autonomous teachers who can choose among them.
We don’t need the Common Core Curriculum Commissariat. We don’t need the Common Core College and Career Ready Assessment Program (C.C.C.C.R.A.P.). And we don’t need invariant national “standards.” That way lies mediocrity and stagnation. You don’t get innovation and individualization and intrinsic motivation on the part of students via ever more standardization.
We need to get the educrat to hell out of our classrooms.
Pretty darn well said. Agree.
Perfectly stated! So perfect I wish to repeat part of it…
“We don’t need the centralized planners and their centralized tests. We don’t need NCLB+, VAM+. We need to empower teachers and to kick the educrats out, and we need to encourage real innovation by creating mechanisms whereby the new ideas of researchers and scholars and curriculum designers can get to free, autonomous teachers who can choose among them…”
“We need to get the educrat to hell out of our classrooms.”
No hay ninguna duda de eso.
Amen.
By the way, Professor, how was the Kool-Aid?
exactly
It alarms me that LDH does not seem to understand that higher-order thinking in a given domain depends on a huge base of knowledge in that domain. If the important tests of the future do not test for content knowledge, then content knowledge will not be taught. What other nation has jettisoned content in its national exams? I’d love to know what exactly she means by “21st Century skills” and have her prove to me that they’re not largely a function of the hard-wiring of the brain, that they can indeed be imparted (not just lubricated) by a teacher, and that a curriculum predicated on building these skills really does produce smart human beings that match our conception of a truly educated person. I’m very dubious. I think these ever-more skills-based curricula are going to produce graduates who may be able to think nimbly on a tiny number of topics but who are largely ignorant.
My prediction: as the CC skills-heavy science and history standards roll out, practicing “21st Century skills” will push content knowledge ever further to the sidelines. In ten years we’ll wring our hands and wonder why our kids still can’t read, write and think well.
There is a real opportunity cost to doing these CC-style “skiil building” activities –they crowd out the slow and necessary transmission of knowledge.
yes yes yes
So true. Next year, our school is beginning the new RTI2, along with all TN schools. The required times in the core subjects, along with required intervention times, are going to put a huge time and personnel stress on schools. The first subject to suffer is social studies, followed by science.
Now we’ve been told that social studies will not be state-tested next year. All the things together mean social studies gets very little attention….our children are not learning about the world or about their rights. At my school, in order to get the required amount of reading time in, our social studies teachers will be responsible for some of the reading. Rather than focus on social studies content, they are to use social studies passages to teach students “close reading”.
Our children are not going to have a clue about democracy and how a democratic nation is supposed to work. Social Studies started getting drowned out with NCLB.
It will be interesting to see, Ponderosa, whether the assessment criteria will be flexible and whether they will take into account the substance, the content, of work produced and not just attempt to judge abstract skills.
Would the new assessments (is that just a euphemism for “tests”?) that she’s discussing be standardized?
I need someone to bottom-line this for me, because I found it almost completely unreadable.
purest Educratese with a heavy sprinkling of Reformish
Key quotation re LDH’s vision of the tests of the near-future: “They must measure the full range of higher order thinking skills and important education outcomes, including critical thinking, communication, collaboration, social-emotional competence, moral responsibility, and citizenship.”
I beg LDH’s pardon, but this is precisely the sort of thing that gives weight to some of the seemingly paranoid nightmares of our libertarian, conservative, reactionary, and/or Teabilly brothers & sisters.
When did we all sign on to having the government, via public schools, administer tests of, say, collaboration, social-emotional competence, moral responsibility, or citizenship? Whether that’s coming from a neo-conservative, neo-liberal, or any other oriented government, I would like to politely suggest that her vision is WAY over the line. I don’t want that. I would never agree to or support that. And I’m not libertarian, conservative, reactionary, or a Teabilly.
That struck me, too. It also reminds me of Diane’s other post today about the older NAEP assessments. Except in this case, it sounds mandatory.
And leaving aside the political issues, I shudder to think of how depressing, how *bad*, such tests would be. Heck, let’s add “grit” while we’re at it. We need multiple-measures, why the heck aren’t we testing students’ grit?
Is there any reason to think that another group of eggheads are going to get together and hash out a new set of tests that aren’t awful?
That quote caught my eye, also.
My question: How is it possible to know how to do the impossible, i.e., quantify (measure) the inmeasurable*-someone’s thoughts e.g., higher order thinking, critical thinking, moral thinking, etc. . . ?
*a misnomer on purpose
LDH seems confident that she can.
That’s the Orwellian, Philistine technocratic vision in a nutshell. Anyone who reads that sentence without having a chill run up his or her spine is not thinking.
It’s unfortunate that Darling Hammonds articles seldom leave a place for comments. She really is good. Very detailed in the direction we should go in the assessment field. Although my thoughts are more general, http://savingstudents-caplee.blogspot.com/2013/12/accountability-with-honor-and-yes-we.html, I feel we lean in the same direction. Her views are those of a professional educator.
The teaching profession is complex, unlike the simplistic win vs lose, and everyone is the same mentality of the current slavery based system of education.http://savingstudents-caplee.blogspot.com/2012_03_01_archive.html, Her ideas are truly designed to teach the differences in children and reach toward what is needed for the students future.
In addition to the assessment philosophy she presents, the system must then realize, not only do kids learn differently, demonstrate learning differently, they also learn at different rates. That’s where this MAP, or pathway to success comes in. http://savingstudents-caplee.blogspot.com/2013/12/the-personal-map-to-success.html
How refreshing it would be to have her in charge of DOE. Our country would soon become the leader in public education. Not just the leader in the bubble test. It’s time to take back our profession.
Those 21st century skills (dubbed P21) were developed by Ken Kay, a lobbyist with PR and “human relations” expertise who produced a montage of “skill” categories free of any connection to the history of education, or theory or research but of interest to the corporate world, especially tech companies for whom he served as a lobbyist. Promoters of the CCSS did not know how to deal with Kay, his meme of “21st century skills,” and his promotional savvy.
In order to retain a focus on the CCSS while giving some attention to P21, the Council of Chief State School Officers made P21 a managing partner for technology issues and addressed some of the topics of interest to P21 through an online website called EdSteps. Among the five skills of initial interest in EdSteps were writing, global competence, analyzing information, creativity, and problem solving. See: P21. (2010, August 25). P21 and the Council of Chief State School Officers form strategic management relationship. Press release. Retrieved from http://www.p21.org/index.php?option=com_contentandtask=viewandid=968andItemid=64
EdSteps was set up as a web-based standard setting and assessment project funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It is operated by the CCSSO as part of its interest in a national system of standards, assessments, and accountability. Although the Common Core State Standards are separate from EdSteps, the CCSSO says the two initiatives complement one another. “EdSteps was created to find new ways to assess vital skills—those that contribute to college and career readiness—that are not currently assessed on a broad scale for reasons of difficulty and cost.”
EdSteps has defined creativity, problem solving, and other skills for the purpose of identifying samples of work that range from novice to expert in accomplishment. These samples are expected to enable the development of a skill scale that will show a progression of achievement for each form of competence.
The process of constructing the scale is fairly technical, but it relies on comparing two works and deciding which of the two is the most “effective.” That process is carried out in multiple iterations, by multiple judges, with multiple samples selected and coded to permit comparisons based on factors such as age, gender, ability level, geographic region, type of work, and the like. When the process is fine-tuned, a scale representing a progression of achievement from novice to expert can be constructed without the need for written criteria or explanations, although these may be added. For more information see:
EdSteps. (2010). February 22). Developing the EdSteps con-tinuum: Report of the EdSteps technical advisory group. Retrieved from http://www.edsteps.org/CCSSO/DownloadPopUp.aspx?url=SampleWorks/EdStepsScalingApproach_Long.pdf
EdSteps. (2011a). EdSteps: A unique assessment tool. Re-trieved from http://edsteps.org/CCSSO/SampleWorks/EdSteps_UniqueAssessment%20Sept30%20singles.pdf
EdSteps. (2011b). Creativity launches. Retrieved from http://www.edsteps.org/ccsso/ManageContent.aspx?system_name=nP6iGdNaft7MEwLG6uDXXA==andselected_system_name=DRkDdjiObdU=
EdSteps. (2011c). Collecting work samples for problem solv-ing. p. 2. Retrieved from http://www.edsteps.org/ccsso/SampleWorks/EdStepsproblemsolving.pdf
EdSteps. (2011d). Permissions. Retrieved from http://edsteps.org/CCSSO/SampleWorks/EdStepsPermissionSlip.pdf
(EdSteps, 2010a, Introducing, para. 8).
Linda HD,
Obviously you haven’t understood what Noel Wilson has proven of all the epistemological, ontological errors in logic that the whole educational standards and standardized testing discourse/regime/meme that render the whole process completely invalid.
Read and learn, Linda, read and learn.
Here let me help you get a start:
“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.
I suspect that these assessments will be so awful that when they roll out, that will be the end of ed deform. People will finally put a stake in the undead NCLB that folks like LDH have resurrected.
Well, what do you know. The empress has no clothes. The very assumptions that underlie LDH’s support of the TPA are operating here. She didn’t understand the critiques of the TPA and she won’t understand the critiques offered here. It would require an entire paradigm shift. And that’s too much to expect.
I suspect that you are right about that, Ann.
Exactly Ann.
I think that we need to be clear about this.
Very clear.
These new assessments are a form of violence,
state violence conducted by a state that has been co-opted by a small band of oligarchs.
A free people will resist these new tests, the control of thought via enforced “standards,” and, of course, the top-down imprimaturs via mandated evaluation systems.
We need to remember who were the collaborators in this violence after the devastation that they have wrought becomes clear to all.
“These new assessments are a form of violence, state violence conducted by a state that has been co-opted by a small band of oligarchs.”
Quite correct in the violence perpetrated on the most innocent of the education world, the students. The labeling/grading of students causes many great harm.
Oh, but they need to “toughen up”.
‘Oh, but they need to “toughen up”.’ …while we dissect them without pain management or anesthesia.
Just a layman here. The celebrated LDH seems simply to be saying, yeah, the assessments are awful, but I can slice & dice them in a few more directions, then you’ll have the kind of mush you REALLY can define with a “rubric” (how I have grown to hate that word).
Computer folks, correct me if I’m wrong: transcribing into binary every whorl of the brain-squiggle, then cross-matching to indicate potential correlations– might we finally reach a tipping point where it’s actually cheaper to get a handful of teachers into a room to tweak their curriculum?
“Computer folks, correct me if I’m wrong: transcribing into binary every whorl of the brain-squiggle, then cross-matching to indicate potential correlations– might we finally reach a tipping point where it’s actually cheaper to get a handful of teachers into a room to tweak their curriculum?”
LOL
‘Radical Math’: Social Justice Indoctrination in Math Class Courtesy of Common Core Assessment Creators and Obama-Backed Ed Reform
Posted on December 9, 2013
radicalmath
By Danette Clark
Re-post with new information. Original posted January 12, 2013.
To ensure that not a single minute of precious indoctrination time is wasted in the school day, liberal educators have incorporated brainwashing into every course subject, including math.
Next month, the organization, Creating Balance in an Unjust World, will hold its annual conference on “math education and social justice”.
The conference is sponsored by Radical Math, an organization founded by Jonathan Osler, a math and community organizing teacher at a Coalition of Essential Schools high school in Brooklyn, NY.
The Coalition of Essential Schools (CES) is the progressive education reform movement expanded by President Obama and domestic terrorist William Ayers through their work with the Chicago Annenberg Challenge in the 90′s.
As I explained here, Common Core ‘architect’ David Coleman’s Grow Network also worked with Chicago Public Schools, Obama, and Ayers during that time.
Common Core assessment creator, Linda Darling-Hammond, who served as education advisor to Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, is a long-time advisory board member to the Bay Area Coalition of Essential Schools (BayCES/National Equity Project).
Radical Math and the Creating Balance Conference both provide training and resources for teachers to learn how to teach mathematics for social justice. For example, participating trainers coach elementary school teachers to not use traditional math lessons when teaching children to calculate the cost of food. Rather, they recommend making it clear to students that in a truly just society, food would be as free as the air we breathe.
Radical Math’s website provides over 700 lesson plans and other resources covering a wide range of political and social issues (with extreme bias), including globalization, the redistribution of wealth, and various ways the poor are discriminated against and oppressed by whites, banks, corporations, the rich, and the government. One such resource, Rethinking Mathematics: Teaching Social Justice by the Numbers, contains chapters titled, “Sweatshop Accounting”, “Racism and Stop and Frisk”, “When Equal Isn’t Fair”, “The Square Root of a Fair Share”, and “Home Buying While Brown or Black”.
Rethinking Mathematics is a creation of Rethinking Schools, an organization that refers to William Ayers as “a long-time supporter”. In 2011, Ayers was keynote speaker at Rethinking Schools’ 25th Anniversary Benefit.
Co-founder and co-organizer of the Creating Balance in an Unjust World/Radical Math Conference, Kari Kokka, works with Linda Darling-Hammond at the Standard Center for Assessment, Learning and Equity (SCALE), the very organization currently creating Smarter Balanced and PAARC assessments for the Common Core State Standards.
Common Core ‘Architect’ David Coleman’s History With the Ayers and Obama Led Chicago Annenberg Challenge
Posted on November 29, 2013
By Danette Clark
Re-post. Original posted June 17, 2013. Also found at EAGnews.org.
Referred to as ‘Common Core lead standards authors’ by the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), David Coleman and Jason Zimba are just two in a long list of Common Core creators whose academic roots are with the education-for-a-revolution machine borne by Annenberg Institute, Carnegie Corporation, Bill Gates, et al.
Today, Coleman and Zimba are head of Student Achievement Partners, an organization that played a leading role in developing the standards and actively supports districts and states in implementing them.
Prior to Student Achiement Partners, Coleman and Zimba were co-founders of the Grow Network (now owned by McGraw-Hill Company). Grow Network began as a pilot program in New York in 2000. Less than a year later, the Chicago Public Education Fund began negotiating a contract with Grow Network on behalf of Chicago Public Schools.
The Chicago Public Education Fund (‘The Fund’) was created in 1998 by the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC) board of directors, which included Barack Obama as board chairman and communist Bill Ayers, as co-chair.
President Obama’s recently appointed Commerce Secretary, Penny Pritzker, was one of twelve founding board members appointed to The Fund.
Obama himself worked with The Fund for the next several years as a leadership council member, along side Bill Ayers’ father, Thomas Ayers, and brother, John Ayers.
From Catalyst Chicago, March 2000:
“The Chicago Annenberg Challenge will close up shop in June 2001, but its efforts to improve public education will live on through a new community foundation…the Chicago Public Education Fund…”
The Fund existed and still exists to carry on the work of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge — that work being the expansion of Theodore Sizer’s Coalition of Essential Schools, the reform movement that now (even absent Common Core) indoctrinates students in several states and districts nationwide with a Marxist-Communist political, moral and social ideology.
In 2001, shortly after Arne Duncan began his stint as CEO of Chicago Public Schools (CPS), David Coleman’s newly formed Grow Network solidified its $2.2 million contract with CPS to provide the district with data driven student performance reports for the 2002-2003 school year.
In CPS’s 2002 Education Plan, which introduced Grow Network as a new initiative, President Obama is listed as a member of the district’s planning and development advisory committee. The report also names John Ayers and Communist-Maoist Mike Klonsky of Bill Ayers’ Small Schools Workshop as participants in CPS’s education plan discussion groups.
In 2004, Coleman and Zimba sold Grow Network to McGraw Hill, which continues its lucrative partnership with CPS today. In fact, two former Grow Network members now work for the Chicago Public Education Fund — one of them as its managing director.
The fact that Grow Network has history with the Ayers/Obama/Annenberg led Chicago school system, and was recruited by the Ayers/Obama/Annenberg created Chicago Public Education Fund, doesn’t necessarily implicate David Coleman and Jason Zimba as supporters of Chicago’s radically progressive style of education. However, given Coleman’s progressive upbringing and the fact that CPS paid more than $2 million to bring his untested and unproven program to the district, it does seem likely that Coleman and Zimba had prior connections to the Chicago ed machine.
Fast forward to today and we see each of these players still working to expand the Annenberg/Coalition of Essential Schools (CES) reform model, a model whose teaching strategies, lesson plans, and curriculum resources are identical to those now being used with Common Core.
Communist, domestic terrorist, and creator of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, Bill Ayers, continues to speak on behalf of the Annenberg/CES reform effort and provides professional development to teachers and principals from CES schools and districts.
From the White House, Obama and Duncan promote, by name, Bill Ayers’ Small Schools Workshop and the Coalition of Essential Schools while funneling billions to states that have adopted Common Core.
Carnegie Corporation, which has continued to support Annenberg/CES reform over the years, now also provides heavy funding to the Council of Chief State School Officers for the creation and implementation of Common Core.
Dawn, nothing about the Common Core has anything to do with Marxist ideology. The Common Core does indeed represent the imposition of a totalitarian, top-down, distant, centralized authority on the entire country. That much is true. But all centralization is not informed by Marxist ideals. Far from it. A corporate Board of Directors is not a Marxist entity.
Do you really think that the organizations promoting the Common Core–the Business Roundtable, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Hoover Institution–are Commie fronts? That kind of talk gives the Education Deformers all the ammo they need to dismiss critics of the Coring of America as a bunch of fringe conspiracy theorists.
I have yet to read “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” or “Workers of the world unite” or “A spectre is haunting the United States” or “Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains” or “The capitalist appropriates the surplus value of the labor of the worker” in the Common Core State Standards for ELA. LOL
I don’t find the collapse of our economy and our currency very funny. And if you don’t think there is a cabal of international bankers who arrive at “secret” meetings in cars with tinted windows to discuss the next regime change they plan to orchestrate……well I will just say you need a better source of information. (They have recently installed a banker as head of the Ukraine after George Soros funded a coup to oust the democratically elected President who the western media has smeared as a murderer with no proof. Meanwhile some real neo-Nazis have taken power in the street due to the power vacuum and nobody really intended that to happen but regime change can be messy and not turn out the way it was planned sometimes.) I am not afraid of being called a conspiracy theorist because that was a term the bankers created for people like you to use to try to humiliate and silence people like me……divide and conquer. We are on the same side (because neither of us are international bankers) so don’t fall into their trap.
The Common Core has not been fully implemented yet. The wonderful assessments from PARCC and SBAC have not been rolled out. The textbooks and software that will be aligned with the CC and the curriculum being designed as the plane is flying is not fully developed yet. I hope we can stop this train wreck before all of this occurs. However, the plan is very much for the indoctrination of our children into a socialist mindset. How do you get the American people to give up the American dream? You raise them without it. You start as young as possible to let children know that they will not have a house in the suburbs with two kids, two dogs, two cars and two incomes. You let them know that those days are gone. We need to be sustainable now. No child left behind has now become no child can get ahead.
I did not post those articles to start a discussion on communism and the CC. I posted them to trace the background of Linda Darling Hammond with that of Bill Ayers, Obama, Coleman, Gates. The CC is just a continuation of what they all started with the Chicago Annenberg Challenge and the Grow Network. This has been in the works for years. Birds of a feather flock together. Coleman and Sir Michael Barber knew each other at McKinsey & Company as well before one created the CC and the other became the head of Pearson. Mr. privatize education Bloomberg is now the special envoy for cities working with the U.N. to force them to become sustainable or else. You can’t make this stuff up. The connections and the corruption is amazing. But you want to call it a conspiracy theory when it is a conspiracy fact. Not connecting the dots does not make the big picture go away.
They have been trying to create a soviet style workforce training model of education in the U.S. for years. Outcome based education in the 80’s. School to Work and Goals 2000 in the 90’s. The Common Core in 2009. I am older and I read history so that I won’t have to repeat it. History gives us so many examples of bankers conspiring to enslave the masses. Why is this an unbelievable theory to you?
A wise congressman wanted to make sure that people would be able to verify the fact that Clinton planned to implement national economic planning of the workforce so he had it read the education plans into the congressional record:
“On Sept. 25, 1998, Rep. Bob Schaffer placed in the Congressional Record an 18-page letter that has become famous as Marc Tucker’s “Dear Hillary” letter (written in 1992). It lays out the master plan of the Clinton Administration to take over the entire U.S. educational system so that it can serve national economic planning of the workforce.”
I always thought of President Clinton as a Rockefeller Republican. Now I see President Obama as pretty far to the right of Rockefeller. It’s hard for me to see these men as socialists.
As for Bill Ayers, my understanding is that his educational philosophy derives from his experience with school children, and it’s pretty far removed from David Coleman’s philosophy, isn’t it?
Not sure where to put this, but here’s a link to a provocative article by Marion Brady, reprinted by Valerie Strauss in The Answer Sheet:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/02/24/one-way-to-help-solve-americas-major-curriculum-problem/
I think this guy is onto something. He attacks a few of the key weaknesses of the CCS (and schooling in general) and offers a different way of looking at the big education picture. He is definitely at odds with Coleman and his backers, also offers some interesting alternatives.
I am old enough (barely) to remember these events from the 1960s. Even then I was opposed both to the so-called Weather Underground and to the Vietnam War. My opposition to both has not changed over the years, but like most people, and I suspect that this applies to Ayers (I know very, very little about him), my ideas about a lot of things have changed over the intervening years.
It is certainly true that sometimes a small group of powerful people get into a room and make decisions for everyone else. That’s basically what Achieve did, with funding from the Gates Foundation and from Pearson. And certainly, over the years, there have been orchestrated coups, and certainly corporations are now major political players. I even suspect that the state Socialists of the former Soviet Union and of China have long-range strategic plans that are not generally recognized, but I see no evidence of a worldwide conspiracy of Socialist New World Order bankers. As Randal rightly points out, the goals of many of those whom you lump together, Dawn, are diametrically opposed.
Imagine two scenarios:
In one, autonomous teachers assign to students whatever work they, according to their own judgment, think that students should undertake and assign letter grades based on that work.
In the other, a national organization with a small army of expert psychometricians puts together a standardized, summative test of aptitude to be taken by students in their senior year and spends many millions vetting it.
Which will be more predictive of students’ success in college–those grades assigned by teachers or the scores on that high-powered test?
Well, the grades given by teachers are far more predictive of success in college than the SAT is.
Why?
Ecologies are healthier than are monocultures.
The teachers are working in conditions of knowledge of local conditions. They bring to bear knowledge of their students, knowledge of their subjects, and they act under conditions of subtle social sanction exerted by other teachers, administrators, and the surrounding community, including parents and school boards. In other words, the teachers are responsive to the actual situations they are encountering on the ground. The distant group of experts lacks the knowledge of local conditions that the teacher has. The distant authority is ignorant. It can only apply grotesque, Philistine, technocratic generalizations. The centralized planning doesn’t work as well as do the actions of millions of autonomous entities.
Imagine two scenarios:
In one, a group of highly educated and experienced curriculum developers is gathered together to create a 9th-grade literature textbook. They are employed by an educational publisher that wants the textbook to be a raging success and to make a lot of money. So, they pay a great deal of attention to what has been done in other successful 9th-grade literature textbooks (to the “votes” with their dollars made by millions of teachers in the past). But they also look for ways to differentiate their product from existing products, from the competition. They draw upon research, scholarship, reports from the field, their own knowledge of the subject and of kids and how they learn, and they do their best to craft the best 9th-grade literature textbook that they can. That text competes with other such texts created by a few dozen other companies, and independent, autonomous teachers in independent, autonomous schools choose among the resulting products.
In the other, the situation is the same as above, but with one difference: There is a single set of national “standards” for the subject, and all students will be tested on those. Ultimately, all that will matter are the scores that kids get on tests of those standards. Because there is one set of national standards, big publishers can achieve economies of scale. They can create a single, national text at VERY LOW unit cost. Smaller competitors cannot do this. So, the field of competitors consists not of twelve or twenty products but of one two at the most.
In the first situation, editors and writers sit down to create a unit on “the short story.” They look at what other successful publishers have done. They think about what they know about teaching short stories to ninth-graders. They draw upon the latest research and scholarship on the short story, on narrative structures, and on how children learn. They apply their knowledge of the short story, of ninth-graders, of the research and scholarship to come up with innovative ways to differentiate their product from the competition. They are free to approach the teaching of the short story in a logical, coherent way. For example, they might choose an outstanding exemplar, on grade level, of standard, traditional short story form and begin with that and then present successive variations on that model. In other words, the editors and writers might follow a prototype and variations model. The initial exercises, created to go with the initial short story, will deal with standard plot structure—with how a plot is based upon the unfolding of a central conflict—setting the stage, introducing the conflict, showing how that conflict builds to a point of highest suspense and how it is resolved, and then showing how things are tidied up after the resolution. All along, as they work, the editors and writers bear in mind the existing de facto consensus about teaching short stories (what the market leading existing texts do) but also try to innovate, to do a better job, partly by introducing innovations into their work. For example, a given group of editors and writers might be impressed by research from clinical psychology showing that narrative is a primary means by which people make sense of the world. So, they might take this angle throughout—the angle of interpretation of events by imposing a narrative frame on them. They might emphasize training students to do that. In thinking about how to do that, they come up with some creative, interesting ideas. And, of course, throughout, they make their decisions about what to include or not to include based upon criteria of grade-level appropriateness and coherence from lesson to lesson. The editors and writers have to innovate because there’s a lot of competition, and all those competitors will be innovating too.
In the second situation, editors and writers sit down with one overriding task: they have to teach those “standards” prepared by the central committee of thought police. The “standards” represent an all-important prior restraint on the possibilities. So, they choose stories and informative pieces at random that all deal with some topic (“space,” “the body”) throw them together in a unit, and follow each “selection” with some exercises on one or two of the standards, making sure that all the standards are covered in the course of the unit and that the exercises follow the formats of questions on the all-important standardized test. Coherence is out the window, of course. In fact, one might call this the Monty Python “and now for something completely different” approach to curriculum design. And because of those economies of scale created by the national “standards,” there’s very little competition. Districts get to choose from among a couple of paint-by-number “standards”-based products, and they hold their noses and do so, having no choice.
Again, the monoculture based on textbook design to the standards leads to a product that is inferior to one based on the ecology of a market in ideas without absolutist prior constraint, one that provides more degrees of freedom to the actors but at the same time takes into account sensitive measures of local conditions (how the market has responded in the past).
God forgive the educrats, for they know not what they do.
The rubric is a prior restraint that leads to production of the formulaic five-paragraph theme. You get what you measure, the education deformers love to say. If you are measuring adherence to a formula, you get formulaic writing. This is especially the case if the evaluation of conformity with the formula is being done by en masse by a distant authority.
I had a conversation recently with a young man who is now in college. He said to me, about the state tests he took in high school: Oh, that was easy. You didn’t have to say anything. You followed the formula. No thinking required.
Here’s the bottom line: These people are in the process of creating a national script for teaching and assessment. Their standards and evaluation systems will impose enormous prior restraint on what is possible in curricula and pedagogy. They want robo teachers following a single national script.
Some of the people involved in this are well intentioned. Centralized planners typically are. But their hubris knows no bounds, and “The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men /
Gang aft agley.”
Ecologies are healthier than are monocultures. Far healthier.
But, all that said, I am going to try to keep an open mind. The proof will be in the pudding. Will these new assessments being envisioned be a step away from regimentation and standardization? Will they be designed in such a way as to lead to divergent, creative, innovative work? That’s possible. Performance and portfolio assessment approaches are definitely improvements on standardized summative assessment.
But given what we’ve seen so far. . . .
Bob, you posted your first comment before I posted mine. Here’s what you wrote:
“But any movement away from the monolithic standardized assessment toward individualized portfolios is going to be a very good thing indeed, so I should take a more positive attitude toward this. I shall wait to see how constrained these new portfolio assessments are. The dream situation would be that they would truly allow for individualization, for kids to pursue unique, guided, mentored tracks that will make for intrinsic motivation and show their work with creative products not overly specified beforehand.”
I work in an early adopter of the dream system, and the dream turns out to be a skin-crawling nightmare. The system has already been mandated in my district, for our current tenth graders.
There’s no support of any kind for student agency, no provision to respect children’s creativity, and no actual portfolio. There is a buggy platform on Mahara and the children must produce performance tasks to upload, or face punishment. It puts the machine’s heel on their necks in every aspect of their schooling, and the goal is to make them pay endless tribute to the demented, insatiable data gods in the cloud.
I am very saddened, but not surprised, to hear this.
It may well be that LDH has decided to work from within the system to move it away from monolithic standardization toward more open assessment models. If so, that’s a very good thing. I trust Diane Ravitch’s judgment and will keep an open mind about this next phase.
That open mind line is bull, I’m afraid. While you dither about working “from within the system to move it away from monolithic standardization toward more open assessment models'”, they’re coming for our kids, in one glove or another. We need to stop them in their tracks.
Any “assessment model” that holds children politically accountable to the data industry is a bad and dangerous thing. The authors of the CC$$ have no right to demand such authority, and you’re a fool to hand it to them.
Alas, none of us in the trenches is handing this to them. They have taken it. It’s an utter and absolute appropriation of teachers’ authority to assess their own students, which these people have taken to themselves outside any democratic process.
And thank you, chemtchr, for your passion in defense of kids and teachers. Strong language is altogether appropriate in this matter.
chemtchr:
“Any ‘assessment model’ that holds children politically accountable to the data industry is a bad and dangerous thing.”
You’re really getting to the heart of the matter. I’d go further and say that any *anything* that holds children politically accountable to *anything* is bad and dangerous. But that’s exactly what the geniuses behind these testing regimes are doing. And you’re right, in the absence of informed opposition or even the slightest opportunity for teachers and parents to object at the outset, these people (the unqualified CCS authors, their self-interested funders, and the benighted officials who bought the goods) just went ahead and grabbed that authority. David Coleman has said as much in public.
There are plenty more problems with this new, supposedly improved vision of assessment, but the raw reality is that a small group of insiders hatched a coup, and so far it has succeeded, to the detriment of the kids. It doesn’t matter how sophisticated the coup apologists may be, they’re still backing an illegitimate, anti-democratic power grab.
I had a chance to see a 100-minute adaptation of Orwell’s 1984 enacted in a small theater last week. As expected, it was chilling. The actor who played O’Brien was brilliant as the role evolved from convincing double agent to logic-twisting faux intellectual to relentless thug. In real life we’ve already met the Common Core con artists and their specious-platitude-spouting supporters. The thugs will be harder to detect, but given the growing resistance, can they be far behind? (Hint: They’ll be the ones wearing the fancy gloves.)
Winston Smith maintains that “Sanity is not statistical.” I think I know more or less what he’s saying, but the sentence takes on new meaning when you put it in the context of high-stakes testing, and data analysis that’s detached from reality.
That power grab is reason enough to oppose all of this. We need no other reason. The teachers of the United States did not put these people in charge of their classrooms. They were hired for that purpose by a small group of plutocrats.
That’s not acceptable, period.
I trust the judgement of people like chemtchr and other educators across the country who are calling out the chilling technocracy of LDH’s scripts for teacher education and student assessment.
I’ve written about this before on this blog. Years ago, I had an 11th-grade English class consisting entirely of “remedial boys,” all from blue-collar families and all a nanometer away from dropping out of school. Most were flunking the rest of their classes. To a person, they HATED school and were biding their time.
I tossed out our textbook and the regular curriculum, and together we wrote a manual on basic auto repair. For the first time in their school careers, these boys did something they cared about. It was amazing to watch them go at it!!! I would get to the class, after lunch, and find them already there, arguing over details of grammar, usage, mechanics, spelling, and format!!!!
I doubt that what we did in that class would be appropriate for uploading as a performance task to the new assessment system. I am willing to bet a lot that what we did would not fit the specifications.
But you know what? IT FIT MY STUDENTS.
This is what I mean about the mismatch between centralized planners’ autocratic, pie-in-the-sky, notions and the actual realities on the ground.
Dear Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth:
Orwell did not mean for 1984 to be a public policy manual.
Democracy might be dead in the United States, but we intend to resurrect it.
We see through your Doublespeak.
We will resist your Philistine technocratic vision of the future.
We will resist standardization.
We will resist your fascist mandates.
We will call upon others to do so as well.
We will tell them to opt their children out of your data machine and to ignore your bullet lists of what is and is not acceptable for teachers to teach and students to learn.
We do not accept regulation of our freedom of thought. We utterly and completely reject that.
We do not accept your authority.
We will organize.
We will speak truth to power.
We will practice civil disobedience.
We will opt out.
We will not look kindly upon those who collaborate with you to usurp the autonomy of teachers and learners.
We will not feed our kids to your data maw.
While I have tremendous respect for Dr. Darling-Hammond, I believe we are all being drawn into an arena that we should avoid — the assessment arena. In an effort to make sense out of the current accountability morass, we play the assessment game,—Darling-Hammond recommends a number of attractive and more humane ways to assess learning (e.g. authentic assessment). The fundamental problem with all assessment schemes is a process that selects some content for measurement (privileged knowledge) ,some formulation of a standard of performance, some means of ranking that performance and some “qualified” expert to make a judgment in the assessment regime. All assessment schemes (teacher made tests, standardized tests, mastery learning schemes, rubrics of all kinds), are reductionists in design in order to arrive at some metric outcome. Even in the case of authentic assessments you end of with an artificial and often wrong definition of proficiency. Any human undertaking, whether writing as essay or wiring a house is flooded with a myriad of variables that defy any attempt at measuring “true” performance. Recent articles on what kinds of knowledge and skills companies are looking for always identify an individual’s ability to apply a set of immeasurable dispositions (curiosity, persistence) to situational problems in that industry—so it is not surprising that even graduates from our elite universities, who score well on institutional assessments, are not what google is looking for. Institutional assessments require some form of “equal means/equal ends” schooling—psychometrics are built on this assumption. Institutional assessments , except maybe for formative types of assessment which are now frowned upon, will not work within an instructional regime that “believes that fairness is providing different resources so that different individuals can achieve their own different end points” (Wilson, 1999). Let’s stop playing the assessment game, which professional educators can never win, and focus on the kinds of instructional environments (activity structures, organization of content, discourse patterns) that have the best possibility of engaging young people in the kinds of activities, teacher-student interactions, and real time feedback that will develop the kinds of knowledge and skills that are now most valued, not only in the vocational world, but in the civic and personal worlds we all live in.
We simply do not need and have many, many reasons to oppose a national assessment regime. These people do not have the right to impose this on every teacher and every child and every parent in the United States. They appointed themselves the assessment gods. That’s not OK. Not in a democracy.
In other words, who put these people in charge of our classrooms and our students?
We need to tell them in no uncertain terms what we think of their presumption.
It would be one thing if a highly respected, knowledgeable scholar like LDH were working with a group to put together a PROPOSED assessment program that independent, autonomous local schools and school districts could accept, reject, or modify in an ongoing way based upon local conditions and their own best judgment. IT’S A DIFFERENT MATTER ALTOGETHER for this unelected group to FORCE ITS MATERIALS on the entire country, for this unelected group to EXERCISE A FIAT. All of this comes down to a preliminary question: Will we accept totalitarianism, or will we remain a democracy? I’ll take the latter, thank you, and I will defend that with all my powers and energies.
There’s a BIG difference between a scholar and researcher putting forward a vision for assessment and having that vision debated. It’s quite another to have a few plutocrats in collusion with cronies among the bureaucrat to make these decisions for everyone else and to present us all with fait accompli.
And one thing I am certain of: ANY ACROSS-THE-BOARD, INVARIANT system is going to be inappropriate for a highly diverse student population in a highly diverse society.
I have very strong and, I believe, informed ideas about assessment. I’ve learned and thought about assessment for decades. But I would never dream of forcing my views on every student, parent, teacher, administrator, and curriculum developer in the country. What presumption it would be for me or anyone else to do that!!! Money from plutocrats does not confer divine right. We’ve long since thrown over belief in the divine right of kings and queens.
In answer to Bob Shepard concerning the group of people that have been identified with the creation, funding, roll out and support for the Common Core: David Coleman, Sir Michael Barber, Barack Obama, Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, Bill Ayers and Linda Darling Hammond to name a few. You are looking at this list and thinking, one is a Democrat, one is a Republican, one is from England, one is a communist terrorist for years on the run, two have some reputation in education, all of the others do not and the only thing they all have in common is they are rich to one extent or another and most of them have been in each others’ living rooms and have sat on “boards” together and they are all “friends” for quite some time now.
The political labels they assign to themselves or are labeled by others are meaningless. They have common goals. That is the point. They each want to gain money and or power from the implementation of the Common Core and they are presently doing that (except Bloomberg but he is working with the United Nations to implement Agenda 21 of which CC is only a part.) These people share a common agenda. They want to collapse the United States in order to redistribute opportunity and wealth to people in other countries. Just listen to any speech coming out of the U.N. and tell me that is not the agenda being taught by the Common Core. Read the post above about math lessons about social justice. I am not making this stuff up.
Keep in mind that the Common Core is a bunch of empty skill sets. So in that sense you are correct to say there is no communism being pushed by the standards. But what you are not taking into account is the elusive “curriculum,” the actual lessons, the actual supposedly CC aligned texts and materials being brought into the schools and the tests as well. That is where they slip in the indoctrination and nobody knows about it because the standards are empty. How harmful could they be? Clever trick, right?
You did not do a close reading of the article I posted or you would have noticed the following and could not have made the statement that Ayers isn’t doing much now:
“Fast forward to today and we see each of these players still working to expand the Annenberg/Coalition of Essential Schools (CES) reform model, a model whose teaching strategies, lesson plans, and curriculum resources are identical to those now being used with Common Core.
Communist, domestic terrorist, and creator of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, Bill Ayers, continues to speak on behalf of the Annenberg/CES reform effort and provides professional development to teachers and principals from CES schools and districts.
From the White House, Obama and Duncan promote, by name, Bill Ayers’ Small Schools Workshop and the Coalition of Essential Schools while funneling billions to states that have adopted Common Core.”
Back then, the former bomber and co-founder of the communist terrorist Weather Underground organization was Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The two had worked together closely from the year Ayers hosted a political launch party for Obama, in 1995, to 2002. At the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, “the brainchild of Bill Ayers,” they funneled more that $100 million to radical groups like ACORN and Gamaliel, which used the funds to promote radical education. This initiative was also promoted by Arne Duncan, now Secretary of Education. Also as board members of the Woods Fund, Ayers and Obama channeled money to ACORN and the Midwest Academy.
When initial White House visitor logs were released in 2009, the administration quickly dismissed speculations about visits by “William Ayers.” That was a different William Ayers Americans were told.
http://www.aim.org/special-report/terrorist-professor-bill-ayers-and-obamas-federal-school-curriculum/
Bill Ayers, unrepentant terrorist, is coming back to Wisconsin, this time to hawk his new book, Public Enemy: Confessions of an American Dissident.
Ayers was in Milwaukee on October 15, 2010. He was the keynote speaker at the 25th anniversary bash of Rethinking Schools. Marquette University, Alverno College, and Mount Mary University were official sponsors of the event.
These Catholic institutions didn’t hesitate to embrace the terrorist.
Among the “respected reformer” Ayers’ accomplishments is being a founding member of the radical, violent Leftist group the Weathermen, later called the Weather Underground Organization.
Terrorist Bill Ayers does not apologize for his efforts to overthrow the U.S. government via violent means. However, he does regret he didn’t cause more destruction and damage to the country.
Ayers, allegedly an expert on educating our children, was an author of Prairie Fire.
The manifesto states:
We are a guerrilla organization. We are communist women and men, underground in the United States for more than four years. We are deeply affected by the historic events of our time in the struggle against U.S. imperialism.
Our intention is to disrupt the empire, to incapacitate it, to put pressure on the cracks, to make it hard to carry out its bloody functioning against the people of the world, to join the world struggle, to attack from the inside.
There’s more: The distinguished Ayers is an admirer of Sirhan Sirhan, Bobby Kennedy’s assassin.
“They want to collapse the United States in order to redistribute opportunity and wealth to people in other countries.”
I’m having trouble following your logic.
What has been happening to the U.S. for the past 2 decades? Collapse of productivity. Collapse of currency. Collapse of infrastructure. Do you think that has been a mistake? This has been the plan for “globalization” all along. NAFTA, CAFTA and now the impending TPP have ended U.S. productive capacity. All of the equipment has been sold for pennies on the dollar and shipped overseas. Our machine tool sector is out of work. Brilliant highly trained people out of work on purpose for the benefit of redistribution of jobs and opportunities and wealth to other countries. The United Nations provides the “justification” for such redistribution. Social justice. The U.S. has 5% of the population and uses 25% of the resources of the world. We have had our industrial revolution based on coal and environment ruining technologies. Now it is time for us to go back to the stone age. Other nations need a chance to grow. They have more people. It is only fair. The climate change hoax is used to make people believe there has been man-made global warming and this is causing typhoons and hurricanes and droughts and it is all the fault of the U.S. so the U.S. should pay up. There are two ways to pay. One with direct cash. The second is by collapsing U.S, productivity and allowing other countries to take over that role.
Do not listen to Obama’s words because at this point I think even people who voted for him twice can see he is a rabid liar. Watch his actions. What has he done? Has he tried to put people back to work doing anything productive for the country? Is he pushing for the TPP to go through which will utterly devastate the remaining union labor that exists in this country? Has he tried to save our currency by reinstating the Glass Steagall Act that even Sandy Weill and Carl Icahn are calling for at this point? Has he stopped the massive money printing that is completely devaluing our dollar? His inaction on all these counts is actually treasonous. He should be impeached immediately but that is another topic for another day. My point is that Obama, Coleman, Barber, Hammond, Ayers and especially Bloomberg now working so closely with Ban Ki-Moon are all in agreement with the plan of the U.N. to collapse the U.S. (Do not be fooled by Obama’s speeches about increasing STEM education and making our students college and career ready. We have so many highly trained STEM people out of work right now it is ridiculous to ramp up expectations of our high school students….they will be living in their parents basement at 25 with one light bulb if the U.N. will allow them to have that large of a carbon footprint.)
“The Secretary-General has invited leaders from Governments, businesses, finance and civil society to bring “bold announcements and actions” to the September summit to raise the level of ambition through new and more robust action on climate change. Cities play an essential role in developing and implementing actions and driving ambition, significantly affecting climate change.”
http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp/story.asp?NewsID=47055&Cr=climate+change&Cr1#.UxKWi-LfKuI
Continuing disclosures of underlying ‘studies’ showed that the IPCC did not use peer reviewed scientific studies as it claimed but instead sought and referenced anything supporting its predetermined conclusion. One such ‘study’ even turned out to be an opinion article by an environmental activist with no data whatsoever.
In an interview with Germany’s NZZ Online Edenhofer exposed the real purpose behind the climate change scam [red emphasis added]:
NZZ am Sonntag: The new thing about your proposal for a Global Deal is the stress on the importance of development policy for climate policy. Until now, many think of aid when they hear development policies.
Edenhofer: That will change immediately if global emission rights are distributed. If this happens, on a per capita basis, then Africa will be the big winner, and huge amounts of money will flow there. This will have enormous implications for development policy. And it will raise the question if these countries can deal responsibly with so much money at all.
That does not sound anymore like the climate policy that we know.
Edenhofer: Basically it’s a big mistake to discuss climate policy separately from the major themes of globalization. The climate summit in Cancun at the end of the month is not a climate conference, but one of the largest economic conferences since the Second World War. Why? Because we have 11,000 gigatons of carbon in the coal reserves in the soil under our feet – and we must emit only 400 gigatons in the atmosphere if we want to keep the 2-degree target. 11 000 to 400 – there is no getting around the fact that most of the fossil reserves must remain in the soil.
De facto, this means an expropriation of the countries with natural resources. This leads to a very different development from that which has been triggered by development policy.
Edenhofer: First of all, developed countries have basically expropriated the atmosphere of the world community. But one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy. Obviously, the owners of coal and oil will not be enthusiastic about this. One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole.
But unlike the financial crisis, in climate policy a country benefits if it does not join in.
The financial crisis was an emergency operation – in the face of danger we behave more cooperatively. Such a thing will not happen in climate policy, because it will always remain questionable whether a specific event like a flood is a climate phenomenon. But there is always the risk that individual rationality leads to collective stupidity. Therefore, one cannot solve the climate problem alone, but it has to be linked to other problems. There must be penalties and incentives: global CO 2-tariffs and technology transfer.
http://usactionnews.com/2010/11/un-climate-official-admits-climate-hoax-is-about-redistributing-wealth-globally/
Now at the Warsaw meeting, delegates from the poor countries claim there has been “no clarity” from the rich countries on what’s going to happen with climate change aid until they begin disbursing aid through the Green Climate Fund in 2020. Poor countries insist that, in the interim, the rich countries ramp up climate change financing for poor countries to $50 billion per year. “How can you expect developing countries to show ambition without support?,” asked one African delegate. “Ambition” meaning that a country will agree to do something to counteract the effects of global warming. Translation: If rich countries pay for solar panels, we will agree to install them.
For comparison, official development assistance totaled $133 billion in 2011. Keep in mind that the $100 billion annually is for adaptation. Now that the world has supposedly entered “the era of climate change loss and damage,” more compensation money is being demanded. And since loss and damage is “beyond adaptation,” the G-77 countries and China are pushing for the creation of a “new mechanism” that would be separately funded under the UNFCCC.
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2013/11/un-climate-conference-is-all-about.html