Robert Shepherd, a frequent commenter on this blog, has spent his lifetime as a designer and author of textbooks and curriculum. He has frequently criticized the Common Core standards on grounds that they promote an unhealthy uniformity. Here he expresses his concern that the organizations that wrote and copyrighted the Common Core might actually enforce that copyright to stifle competition of ideas:
The Brookings Institution just called for the two organizations that copyrighted the Common Core State Standards to become a censorship office for curricula nationwide. I am not making this up. Here are the details:
Two economists at the Brookings Institution, Joshua Bleiberg and Darrell M. West, made three policy proposals in a piece published March 6, 2014, on the Brookings website. One was this:
“The Common Core [sic; they meant the NGA and the CCSSO] should vigorously enforce their licensing agreement. In the past textbook writers and others have inappropriately claimed that they aligned course content. Supporters of standards based reform should recognize that low quality content could sink the standards and enforce their copyright accordingly.”
Let’s be clear about what they are calling for here:
They are saying that the CCSSO and NGA should be censorship organizations that review curricula and gives it a “nihil obstat.” In effect, such a policy would create a national curriculum censorship organization, for if a state has adopted the Common Core, a publisher will not be able to sell product in that state without it being Common Core aligned, and in order to say that the product is Common Core aligned, the publisher would have to get CCSSO/NGA approval.
When I first read that the Common Core had been copyrighted, a disturbing thought occurred to me: “Were they planning, in the long term, to set up a national office to preapprove curricula?”
Now, that’s exactly what Brookings is calling for.
The Thought Police.
If you don’t find this REALLY CHILLING, you aren’t thinking AT ALL.
This is what totalitarianism looks like, folks.
Just when you think it can’t get worse, this.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Please let’s listen to Robert! It can and will get a whole lot worse. We already have thousands of children forbidden to select library books for personal use because titles don’t correspond to the Color Dots classifications these impoverished students have been assigned by test mad districts. Very good teachers are being driven out of the profession because they “know too much” about what is really going down.
“Not On My Watch!”
Totalitarian! Don’t be so timid — this is more like the end of life on earth.
Actually, though, are we OK with textbook publishers lying about their stuff being Common Core aligned? Last week we were against it (see https://dianeravitch.net/2014/03/08/researcher-most-common-core-ligned-textbooks-are-shams/), but I guess it’s OK now.
Crazy me, I think that having a distant, centralized authority decide for everyone else what THOUGHT is allowable fits quite well any conceivable definition of totalitarian.
Sounds like you aren’t comfortable with the whole notion of public education, then. Quite apart from Common Core, government authorities are regularly deciding what kids are going to be taught to think.
Anyway, are you cool with textbook companies lying about alignment with Common Core?
WT, I am quite comfortable with the notion of public education. I have always opposed having governments, state or local, usurp local autonomy by micromanaging pedagogy and curricula. Their proper role is to ensure that every child has equal access to a good education. It is not proper for them to act as the Thought Police. It’s not the either-or matter that you are insisting upon, and don’t make me into a straw man, thank you.
I guess that you are cool with empowering the Thought Police to decide what products do and do not align with the national bullet list, what products can and cannot be sold.
It’s astonishing to me that in a supposed democracy, we are even having this discussion. This is how far down the path to serfdom we have come.
Leaving aside why you’d say that “local” governments might usurp “local autonomy,” it has been routine for decades now (Ravitch even wrote a book on this once) that state governments exert control over curriculum and even textbook choices. And even at a local level, it’s still not clear why anyone should be happy that a local government is deciding what facts are taught to schoolchildren.
So if your objection to Common Core here has any consistency or intellectual honesty to it, you really object to any choice of textbooks or curriculum. The only option left is to give kids complete school choice so that they can go to any school without being forced to learn from the textbooks that some governmental agency (local or otherwise) approved.
Wrong, WT. I did write a book about it. What I said in “The Language Police” was that states should not dictate which textbooks are approved, that teachers should have freedom to choose their own instructional materials. How you connect that to Common Core, which actually has no intellectual content, just skills, is beyond my ken.
And it’s amazing that you don’t even notice the complete incoherency and contradiction in these two sentences:
“Their proper role is to ensure that every child has equal access to a good education. It is not proper for them to act as the Thought Police.”
How is anyone supposed to guarantee a “good” education without ever asking what a “good” education consists of? But as soon as the government starts asking that, it’s going to start saying that kids should learn about math rather than about how to cook meth, and before you know it, the government will be saying that this textbook is better than that textbook, and then we’ll have what you call the “Thought Police” (a better term would be “school board”).
I was writing hastily. I meant state and federal, obviously.
WT, grades given by autonomous high school teachers do a better job of predicting success in college than does the intensely vetted SAT. There are some of us who still believe that autonomous, free individuals make better decisions than do central planners, some of use who reject the creation of a Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth.
cx: some of us, of course
WT, if you are going to present staw man misrepresentations of others’ arguments, at least put a little work into it.
cx: straw man
sorry, answering these comments while engaged in other work
WT, how is one to guarantee producing decent goods and services without having a central committee making all the economic decisions.
SAME QUESTION
Ecologies are healthier than monocultures. Freedom is healthier and more productive and is centralized planning. We don’t need a curriculum and pedagogy Politburo in the United States, thank you very much.
cx: Ecologies are healthier than are monocultures.
To everyone else reading this: Isn’t it astonishing that those bastions of free enterprise, those opponents of centralized regulation, the Brookings Institution, the Business Roundtable, and the Chamber of Commerce, are arguing for the creation of a distant, centralized, educational regulatory organization?
Oh, I understand. This one is not a government organization. It’s a distant, centralized, education regulatory organization THAT IS PRIVATELY HELD. And they aren’t regulating the production of goods and services. They are regulating WHAT PEOPLE CAN THINK.
$&$%#&*#$&*!!!!!
Top/Down (Bureaucracy) is still a graded authority system of superiority and subordination.
Had Government (Bureaucracy) established Public Ed to function as the superior, Government would “Obey” Public Ed…
Readers of this blog. If you haven’t read Diane’s WONDERFUL book The Thought Police, treat yourself. She takes on groups on the right and left that reduce content in our schools to pablum by imposing censorship and, especially, targets the textbook adoption system. It’s a great read. It’s witty, insightful, moving, and beautifully written. It’s worth getting for the many examples.
I’ll share one of my own. Years ago, I was working for one of the big textbook publishers when it was still a small textbook publisher. We had a health text not adopted in Texas. The adoption committee objected to the line “Humans and other mammals lactate.” The reference to lactation disturbed them, but what really made them crazy was our having referred to humans as mammals.
And for any trolls who might think that I am contradicting myself in supporting local autonomy AND opposing censorship, let me say that
1. that’s what happens in a democracy; people make decisions that YOU don’t like
2. in the age of the Internet, when a local community makes a really bone-headed censorship decision like that, word gets out quickly, there are howls of derision across the whole of the net, and the community backs down. This has happened again and again in recent years.
In a free society, local people make their own decisions, subject to general legal guidelines (you must not discriminate, you must offer equitable educational opportunities to all). We elect school boards. If we don’t like them, we throw the bums out.
Here’s one thing that EVERY totalitarian state has in common: It has a central committee that makes the education decisions for everyone else. It’s BIZARRE that Brookings, the Business Roundtable, the Chamber of Commerce, and ALEC are promoting a model of education to be found in places like The People’s Republic of North Korea, The People’s Republic of China, and the former Soviet Union, in which it’s all nationalized, and an unaccountable oligarchy makes the decisions for everyone else.
cx: That title is The Language Police. It’s here:
WT, according your reasoning we have two choices. Total totalitarianism, (pardon the redundancy) or the wild, wild, west.
Actually, what I see here is the progression of progressive policies. (pardon, again, the redundancy) To use an overused analogy it is analogous (redundancy again) to boiling a frog. The water has suddenly become very hot and we have no idea who the enemy is.
They’re tightening the reigns…
If NGA and CCSSO allow Mike Huckabee to push “rebranding” CCSS, then they allow said states to escape copyright enforcement. “Rebranding” CCSS is itself a copyright violation.
Of course, the unelected NGA and CCSSO have the absolute authority to decide whether any given rebranding is a violation.
I had a brief email exchange with Darrell West of the Brookings about the CCSS. He wants the CCSS to be standardized so that test scores will provide “big data” for his real interest, which is an automated system of telling students what they need to do in order to master CCSS content. He wants to ensure that that no one is messing around with what he regards as a perfected agenda for tests that will product lots of data.
He is absolutely clueless about who developed the standards, who paid for them, or the role of the CCSS in the enterprise of K-12 edcuation. He ASSUMES that these standards can and should function in the same capacity as ISO standards function for quality control in engineering–think elaborate checklists for compliance–or as instruments for quality control for entering professions such as law and medicine. He is a complete slave to the spin thrown out by the promoters of the CCSS.
He is another in a long line of economists who are in love with the idea of getting their algoritms to munch on the big data forthcoming from tests of the CCSS.
Since he was hooked on the idea that the CCSS standard-setting process settled everything that mattered (to him), I did let him know that the CCSS did not meet the minimal criteria for “setting standards” set forth by the The American National Standards organization for designing and judging any standard-setting process: These are:
1. Seeks consensus from and through a group that is open to representatives from all interested parties
2. Solicits broad-based public review and comment on draft standards
3. Gives careful consideration to comments and offers a public response to these comments
4. Incorporates changes that meet the same consensus requirements as the draft standards
5. Makes available an appeal process for any participant alleging that these principles were not respected during the standards-development process.
The Brookings has really gone over the hill with a bunch of reports on education that are free of any moral compass or academic integrity.
1984 was not meant to be a public policy manual.
“On the Brookings website” Can we get a link to whatever it is you’re so riled up about, or are we just supposed to trust you based on the one paragraph you provided, which, to be honest, sounds pretty innocuous?
There is nothing whatsoever innocuous about empowering a central organization to decide whether educational materials do or do not conform to mandated standards. Doing that makes this organization into a de facto censor of educational materials. Diane reposted a comment that I made on this blog. I posted the link below. Here it is again:
http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2014/03/06-common-core-education-standards-bleiberg-west
Given any intellectual consistency whatsoever, there is likewise nothing innocuous about empowering any organization to decide what educational materials should be taught to most schoolchildren.
I welcome you to the school choice movement!
WT, I welcome having independent groups put forward voluntary, competing ideas in the form of standards, learning progressions, frameworks, pedagogical approaches, curricula, reading lists, lesson templates, and so on. And I welcome competition among products based on those. To have such competition and the innovation that comes from it, we have to empower local teachers to make free decisions about these matters. I think that one can have innovative schools within a public school model, and I am disturbed by the rampant crony capitalism that I’m seeing in the school choice movement, which has been an open invitation to a lot of grifters. But certainly, what I want to see is variety and competition and freedom of thought about educational matters. The last thing that a complex, diverse, pluralistic society needs is to have its students identically milled. To give a concrete example, I think that it is possible to teach the entire 7-12 mathematics sequence through the lens of graphic design, computer science, or wood and metal shop. Ed tech should provide the potential for offering vastly differing programs from within a public school setting to students who, after all, differ.
One could teach that entire 7-12 mathematics progression from aboard a sailboat and have it deal with material related to sailing.
Students differ. We need a school system that recognizes those differences, celebrates them, and builds upon them, one that allows them to discover and develop unique potentials. The factory model is wrong in many, many ways. It’s not the appropriate model to take us into the future. And that, in a nutshell, is why I oppose the creation of a Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth and the promulgation of mandatory, invariant bullet lists that effect a priori constraints on possibilities for curricular and pedagogical development.
That was a great comeback, BTW, WT.
Long before I railing about the Common Core Curriculum Commissariat, I was directing my wrath at educrats in state Departments of Education who likewise ignorantly attempted to mandate all possible curricula and pedagogy.
Robert Shepherd you have brilliant insight! We need you to be Secretary of Education!
“The Brookings Institution just called for the two organizations that copyrighted the Common Core State Standards to become a censorship office for curricula nationwide.”
Doesn’t this sound like Monsanto’s patent and monopoly on soybeans? Now Monsanto sends their soybean lawyers all over the country for surveillance and to sue local farmers who may try to use their own seeds?
Can we soon expect to have Common Core patent lawyers doing surveillance all over the country and suing us if we have an original idea that happens to be similar to something on the Common Core?
Can we change the name “Common Core” to “Cuckoo’s Nest”?
Or worst yet…..having Common Core patent lawyers trying to sue teachers for using an original activity that is “not” on Common Core?
(…how do you spell t-o-t-a-l-i-t-a-r-i-a-n)
Thank you once again, Robert, for expressing the chilling reality of our situation so insightfully. Here is part of the testimony that I plan to give next week as the RI State education committee considers bills establishing a 5 year moratorium on standardized testing as a graduation requirement, and setting up a Task Force to investigate the Common Core and its ramifications for RI students, teachers, schools, and taxpayers:
Members of the Committee, we are living in the age of Orwell. The slogans that we are bombarded with mean the opposite of what they say. “No Child Left Behind” has left multitudes of children behind, and “Fewer, Clearer, Higher”—the mantra of the Common Core State (sic) Standards—are more, convoluted, and shallower. Children do not develop in lockstep by age. Each child is unique and precious. Each child has a cultural heritage, specific talents and interests, and specific enhancements or obstacles to learning. To expect a rigid amount of progress from every student, no matter where they started or what their unique circumstances, is unrealistic and essentially totalitarian. In the age of Common Core, background information and context are disallowed; the teachable moment—verboten. As a teacher of English Language Arts, this is unjustifiable and unacceptable.
It is the duty of public institutions to provide for the public good. It is also the duty to do no harm. It is clear that the policies of standardized testing and inflexible standards and assessments do harm. They do harm to all students, by denying them a meaningful and authentic education, but most especially they do harm to those students most vulnerable due to cognitive, neurological, or sensory differences, English Language Learning status, or living in a high poverty neighborhood.
To provide a valuable and appropriate education for every child, high-stakes standardized testing must be abandoned; the Common Core must be abandoned as well.
Sheila you get an A+ ! Thank you!
That’s wonderful, Sheila. This is particularly awesome:
They do harm to all students, by denying them a meaningful and authentic education, but most especially they do harm to those students most vulnerable due to cognitive, neurological, or sensory differences, English Language Learning status, or living in a high poverty neighborhood.
And thank you for your work on this!!!
Sheila Resseger: an important caveat.
The leading charterites/privatizers and their educrat enablers and edubully enforcers are doing what you describe to OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN aka the vast majority of children.
Just a very few examples of what they ensure for THEIR OWN CHILDREN—
Link: http://www.lakesideschool.org [Bill Gates]
Link: http://www.harpethhall.org [Michelle Rhee]
Link: http://www.delbarton.org [Chris Christie]
Link: http://www.sidwell.edu [Barack Obama]
Thank you for your comments.
😎
The first thing I noticed when I started reading that Brookings report was that in their 5 point ratings of existing math standards similarity to Common Core, Vermont got a 3, New Hampshire got a 2, and Rhode Island got a 1. Of course, THEY ALL USE THE SAME MATH STANDARDS, the NECAP GLEs. So much for analytical rigor.
Actually, I think I was reading a different recent Brookings report… I got confused because no linky.
http://www.brookings.edu/research/reports/2014/03/18-common-core-loveless
Well well, Brookings, a right wing stink tank bucks the Teafarty on the CC$$. I’m thinking popcorn may be in order.
Here’s the link to the article in which Brookings calls upon the Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth to start acting as the Censor Librorum for textbooks published in the United States.
This is as totalitarian as it gets. If the CCSSO and NGA start doing what Brookings recommends, and their COPYRIGHT on the standards allows them to do this, then we shall have, in the United States, a censorship office for textbooks and online educational materials, for without that CC$$ seal, a textbook simply could not compete in a state that has made the CC$$ mandatory.
This is the stealth approach to imposing tyranny, the approach that they believe JUST BARELY stays within the limits of legality while still getting them what they want–absolute control. We’ve seen the same sort of thing with the “free adoption” of these amateurish “standards.” The USDE is forbidden by law from mandating curriculum. So, what do they do? They hold a gun to states’ heads and make adoption of these “standards” a condition of getting NCLB waivers and billions in federal funding.
However, I think that the Brookings proposal is NOT legal. It creates and illegal prior restraint on trade in educational materials.
But then, the CC$$ mandates what educators can THINK about what objectives to measure and what learning progressions to follow.
Tell your leaders what you think of creating an unelected Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth and making this organization into the Thought Police.
http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2014/03/06-common-core-education-standards-bleiberg-west
cx: However, I think that what Brookings proposes here is NOT legal. It creates an illegal prior restraint on trade in educational materials.
On the subject of the correct Brookings paper and Common Core, a good companion piece is today’s post on Common Core Watch – There’s a new sheriff in town: Louisiana judges Common Core alignment
http://www.edexcellence.net/commentary/education-gadfly-daily/common-core-watch/there%E2%80%99s-a-new-sheriff-in-town-louisiana-judges
If you look at the rubric, in ELA at least, what constitutes “alignment” to the Common Core has very little to do with the standards themselves. It isn’t simply “Does citiation in 9th grade require *strong and thorough* textual evidence (as opposed to the plain old textual evidence required by their 8th grade text)?”
It is almost all the “shifts,” stuff from the appendices, etc., all of which is really just speculation about how best to meet the standards.
Tom, the Louisiana rubric is a joke. What the paper fails to tell you, is that each textbook vendor alignment was judged by only one person at the state dept. with no collaboration, nor input or public notice. Also undisclosed is that textbook vendors had to pay a few thousand dollars just to be considered. This is such a sham. Don’t believe anything that comes out of Louisiana. The CCSS “curriculum” in Louisiana doesn’t exist. Local Classroom teachers are scrambling to create a curriculum weekly as they teach by using current textbooks and supplementing as best they can. School districts are scrambling to get “curriculum writing teams” to assist. No training other than a couple of days during the summer provided by our Dept of ED, lovingly known as the “playpen” because most there are young inexperienced non-educators brought in by John White from out of state. CCSS is a sham in Louisiana. Even our republican governor is now turning on Mr. White. Report is that Gov. Jindal is now denouncing it, and testing. What a circus! Bring in the clowns.
One gets the impression, Tom, from reading these puff pieces about the Commoners’ Core that the authors of them have not actually read the “standards” themselves, for all they ever talk about are the generalities from the appendices and the Publishers’ Criteria document–the stuff from the infamous Coleman videos on how to be an egregiously backward English teacher.
I think those of us who post here know exactly what Common Core is. It is unabashed indoctrination. Indoctrination, of course, has a ring of paranoia to it, but as they say; “you’re not paranoid if they really are out to get you”. “Chilling”? Absolutely. Most frightening of all is how many folks have absolutely no idea.
Common Core is what sent me searching for answers, and when I found this blog 18 months ago or so. It just didn’t feel right in the public school. CCSS is why, I think.
Yuck.
This is depressing.
Curious to hear where the American Association of School Librarians stands on this censorship concern? “School librarians deal with professional and legal responsibilities to protect the intellectual freedom and First Amendment rights of youth and to ensure that they have free access to information.” http://www.ala.org
Just wondering what would actually happen if teachers just refused to teach to these standards. Instead, here’s a thought: we will just teach the children in front of us. Perhaps what happened in Seattle when they just said ‘no more’ might happen in more places. We here in FL are getting very close to just saying ‘no more’. No more will we allow our classrooms to be used to harm the very children we spend our lives trying to help. No more will we be complicit in hurting children through endless days of meaningless testing. No more will we allow hedge fund operators to steal this profession we love. NO MORE.
amen to that
a few choice words about these “standards,” here:
Bob, Here is the link to sample PARCC questions. I would appreciate it if you would peruse them when you have a chance and provide your reaction. I looked at the ELA grade 3-5 (?) sample passages and questions and was sick. As a veteran ELA teacher, I didn’t know what they were looking for most of the time. Huge numbers of students will “fail” this test, as they did in NY. It seems to me that the computer format of the test is actually training future drones to point and click and drag and drop. (And 3rd graders will have the expertise to do this? And at what cost?) Have any ELA actual authorities critiqued these tests?
https://www.parcconline.org/samples/item-task-prototypes
“No more will we be complicit in hurting children through endless days of meaningless testing. No more will we allow hedge fund operators to steal this profession we love. NO MORE.”
This reminds me of another time in history when there were unjust and unfair laws so a women refused to give up her seat on a bus and changed the course of history.
It would be useful to try to inject into the Common Core discourse a distinction between the “Common Core Standards,” that is, the enumerated standards for student learning (“what, not how” as they say), and the “Common Core Curriculum Standards,” or “Common Core Standards for Curriculum” that is, all the appendices, guidelines, introduction and other supporting texts which almost exclusively deal with “how, not what” students should be taught (which texts, which types of questions, etc.).
The authors of the Brookings report are almost certainly thinking of this in a straightforward, reasonable way — if your math series says it is “Common Core aligned,” it should address each particular standard at or prior to the required grade level. That would be simple and objective, like checking to see if your keyboard adheres to the USB standard.
This is not crazytalk, in Rhode Island right now there is still uncertainty about whether or not high school math courses are literally covering the material on the math graduation test (let alone teaching it well), so it could be helpful in a baseline way.
The situation would be much, much messier just stepping over to ELA/Literacy of course.
And if “aligned to standards” actually means “aligned to our arbitrary standards for curriculum design” and not “at least minimally covering the enumerated standandards for learning,” then it *is* an open ended invitation to all sorts of manipulation and essentially censorship.
Who anointed these people the arbiters of what is or is not acceptable thinking about curricula and pedagogy? It is one thing to have a free market in which a free people make free decisions about what products are and are not acceptable. It is another entirely to have a centralized office make these judgments for everyone else. The Catholic Church used to have a censor librorem that reviewed books and decided whether they would get the seal of approval that would allow them to be owned and read by Catholics. This seems to be what Brookings wants for educational materials, for the CCSSO/NGA to act as the censor librorem.
You mention, Tom, that it would be useful to distinguish between what’s done in the “standards” themselves and in the various appendices that deal with “how, not what.” Well, we have a word for the “how” in education. We call it pedagogy, as opposed to curriculum. And when defenders of the CCSS speak, it’s ALMOST ALWAYS about the general pedagogical principles vaguely described in that ancillary material rather than about the bullet list of standards. However, one of the myths that they’ve tried to perpetrate about the Common Core is that it is not a curriculum and not pedagogy, that it is “just a list of goals” and “doesn’t tell you what to teach and how.” But, clearly, that’s false. There’s a lot of curriculum and a lot of pedagogy ENTAILED BY the bullet list and its ancillary material, some explicitly described and some implicit. Let’s look at a standard at random:
CC$$.ELA-Literacy.L.8.1a. Explain the function of verbals (gerunds, participles, infinitives) in general and their function in particular sentences.
This standard tells us students are to be assessed on their ability a) to explain the function of verbals (gerunds, participles, infinitives) in general and b) their function in particular sentences. In order for students to do this, they will have to be taught, duh, how to identify gerunds, participles, and infinitives and how to explain their functions generally and in particular sentences. That’s several curriculum items. So much for the Common Core not specifying curricula.
Furthermore, in order for the standard to be met, these bits of grammatical taxonomy will have to be explicitly taught and explicitly learned, for the standard requires students to be able to make explicit explanations. Now, there is a difference between having learned an explicit grammatical taxonomy and having acquired competence in using the grammatical forms listed in that taxonomy. The authors of the standard seem not to have understood this. Instead, the standard requires a particular pedagogical approach that involves explicit instruction in grammatical taxonomy. So much for the standards not requiring particular pedagogy.
So, when the CCSSO/NGA says on its website, “these standards establish what students need to learn, but do not dictate how teachers should teach,” that’s equivocation because of the curricular and pedagogical entailments of these standards.
Of enormous significance is the fact that these entailments are both positive (the standards often tell teachers what to teach and how) and negative (they PRECLUDE a LOT MORE than they require). Think of that 8th-grade grammar standard, above. If a teacher or school or textbook is going to meet that standard at grade 8, then verbals and their functions will have to treated at grade 8, and that means that ANY LEARNING PROGRESSION THAT DOESN’T DO THAT, AT THAT TIME, IS PRECLUDED. Now, suppose, just for kicks, that it makes sense to have kids be able to identify verbals explicitly and describe their functions in sentences. In order to get kids there, a lot of prerequisite instruction has to be done. The teaching has to take place within a coherent overall learning progression. If you look at a standards survey of the most widely accepted scientific model of English grammar–something like Andrew Radford’s Minimalist Syntax–you will find that verbals are first treated, in this college-level text, HUNDREDS of pages into the work. There are a lot of preliminaries to be understood before one can understand, explicitly, what verbals are and how they function.
Now, put yourself in the position of a textbook developer or curriculum coordinator sitting down to plan the language strand of a K-12 ELA program. He or she doesn’t want to put the cart before the horse. He or she wants to present material in a coherent order in which knowledge builds upon knowledge. But the CC$$ is full of language “standards” that appear to have been plopped down at various grade levels pretty much AT RANDOM. So, the developer has no choice but to treat them pretty much AT RANDOM. Otherwise, his or her program DOES NOT ALIGN WITH THE COMMON CORE. However, give any competent developer of ELA curricula the task of planning a language strand for K-12 ELA, the probability is VANISHINGLY SMALL that particular competencies will happen to fall where they fall in the amateurish CC$$ or will be approached and measured in the ways entailed by the CC$$. In the case of this one language standard dealing with verbals, the authors of the “standards” have neither learned nor articulated the distinction between explicit learning of taxonomic descriptions of grammatical elements and implicit acquisition of competence in using those elements. But that’s a key consideration in language pedagogy and curricula, for grammatical competence is ALMOST ENITIRELY acquired, not explicitly learned, and there is a great deal that is known about the process of that acquisition, NONE OF WHICH IS REFLECTED IN THESE “STANDARDS.”
Working with the Common Core in ELA to develop curricula is like trying to manufacture an automobile in accordance with “standards” that say things like, “On Tuesdays, automobiles will have three, and no more than three, wheels.” That the authors of these “standards” don’t recognize that their standards are that absurd shows just what amateurs they are. They don’t know enough about the domains that they have issued standards for to understand the dramatic extent to which their standards PRECLUDE the development of rational, coherent curricula and pedagogical approaches.
Here’s how you get rational, coherent, innovative curricula: You allow experts to create programs, and you allow these programs to compete for hearts and minds. Innovative developers of curricula, pedagogical approaches, and learning progressions, in competition with one another, are going to do a MUCH BETTER JOB of all this than some central committee is going to do. Obviously.
Hi Bob,
This gets a bit frustrating as each sub-issue can be addressed at so many levels of sophistication.
A simpler take on your argument above would just be to point out that the curriculum outlines and syllabi of the countries we’re supposedly trying to compete with do not go into such detail as specifying individual grammatical elements at specific grade levels.
But clearly to most people, including most teachers, when they read this stuff they see “OK, verbals are going to be on the test in 8th grade.” Alignment would mean “Does our textbook/curriculum cover verbals?” Is that trite and ultimately wrongheaded? Sure.
But the kicker is that Louisiana, and I suspect other things we’re reading now about “alignment” or the lack thereof, aren’t even making a pretense of doing what people with a moderately sophisticated understanding of the situation are expecting — i.e., checking to see if the textbook covers verbals in the right year.
It is just screwed up on so many levels. Even if you suspend disbelief for most of the premises, is still doesn’t add up.
So, thank you, Tom, for making these important points. However, there is nothing sensible about addressing the particular items on the CC$$ bullet list at particular grade levels because different curricula, differently imagined by different developers will treat particular concepts and skills at different places in the curriculum based upon what makes sense GIVEN THE APPROACH THAT THEY HAVE TAKEN. If developers do not have that freedom to decide what, when, why, and how something will be taught, then MOST POSSIBLE CURRICULA will be precluded, including a lot of curricula that is VASTLY SUPERIOR to anything that the authors of these “standards” could have imagined.
It kills me, Tom, that the CC$$ in ELA are so breathtakingly unimaginative and pedestrian and constraining of the possibilities for curricular and pedagogical development. The amateurs who put these “standards” together have no notion regarding the extent to which that is so. As I read that standard, it says fairly specific stuff about verbals at Grade 8. It says that students will recognize them and be able to explain how they function. Well, would a text that called on students to “Underline the gerunds in the following sentences” be in alignment? No, because the kids haven’t identified the functions of those gerunds. So, what are the functions of gerunds. Well, they can function as subjects, direct objects, indirect objects, objects of prepositions, predicate nominatives, retained objects, subjective complements, objective complements, or appositive of any of those (to make a partial list). Are kids to be able to identify those functions? And at Grade 8? If so, that means that A LOT of work in explicit syntax will have to be done prior to Grade 8. But is that what the authors of these “standards” meant? It seems more likely that they were just confused, that they didn’t understand what they were doing when they promulgated these language standards. And certainly, they didn’t understand that there are MANY POSSIBLE APPROACHES to teaching students the grammars of their languages that WOULD NOT have them, at Grade 8, underlining gerunds and describing their functions.
And so it goes for the other 1,600 items on the bullet lists. EACH ONE HAS ENTAILMENTS for curricula and pedagogy that WERE NOT THOUGHT THROUGH by the amateurs who wrote these “standards” but that would be thought through by a curriculum developer who started from scratch, with the goal of, say, developing students’ grammatical competence. But the developer is not free to do that because he or she must follow the bullet list and produce an incoherent, CC$$-based paint-by-number curriculum that treats these language topics pretty much AT RANDOM.
Tom, I read your call, on your blog, for going back to a list of fewer standards. This makes a great deal of sense. A few general guidelines would give developers the degrees of freedom within which they could truly innovate. The 1,600-item bullet list that is the Commoners’ Core doesn’t.
While your concern may be fair-minded, the Brookings folks are right. Having worked in the curriculum industry, I can confirm that standards alignment is not much more than an imprecise, superficial layer added to already developed curricula in order to make them marketable to schools and districts. What we need is deep accountability for teachers, instead of tools that are sold to them by a desperate publishing industry that has very little by way of impact evaluation, teacher input and alignment accountability.
MG, would you please cite the relevant experience of the Brookings economists regarding curriculum, teaching, and learning?
What we need, MG, is for independent developers to put forward their best, most innovative materials and to have autonomous teachers in independent schools choose from among these. The CC$$ for ELA are hackneyed, backward, and unimaginative. They put ridiculous constraints on curricular and pedagogical development. The PRECLUDE approaches that make a lot of sense. They were hacked together by amateurs based upon the lowest-common-denominator groupthink of the previously existing state standards, and they do not represent the best possible thinking about learning progressions and outcomes to be measured in the various domains that they cover.
But, MG, you are absolutely right that standards alignment is, in the industry, basically a joke, a hoop that publisher jump through. Proof of that: Every program ever published was accompanied by a document put together to show that it was PERFECTLY ALIGNED with every set of standards in every district or state where that program was to be published. LOL.
Here’s an alternative: Give producers free rein to innovate, and create forums for crowd sourcing of critiques of their products.
One doesn’t have to empower a distant, centralized censorship office to achieve the goal that you want to achieve.
And that goal, of holding publishers accountable, is an important one.
Unfortunately, having a single national bullet list creates scale that only very large publishers can successfully compete at and so will lead to even more consolidation, more Walmarting, of U.S. curricula. If we want real competition, real innovation, then we should encourage the development of competing, voluntary standards, frameworks, learning progressions, lesson templates, reading lists, pedagogical approaches, etc. A crowd-sourced, national forum for these, by domain, would be a great idea.
As usual, Bob, I welcome your insights and your suggestions. I’m wondering how much the entire enterprise of drafting these “standards” was impeded (not only by the amateurism and ignorance of the drafters) by their premise that the development of standards starts with what a high school graduate must be able to do to enter a post-secondary program without requiring remediation and then back-mapping to the youngest grades. There was evidently no thought given to the incontrovertible fact that young children are not short adults. Their linguistic and literacy abilities actually develop over time with the appropriate guidance. The fundamentals of their instruction cannot be governed from an analysis of the desired end product. This is absurd. That so many otherwise “educated” people do not see this is mind-boggling.
Excellent point, Sheila. For example, it’s important for those who teach reading, writing, speaking, and listening to very young children to know something about the process of language acquisition and the stages that kids go through, there. Those who actually know something about how language acquisition works would not be so hell-bent on DRAMATICALLY LIMITING the syntactic structures to which kids are exposed early on, for example. They would think twice about Lexiling every bit of language that kids encounter. This is something that the amateurs who put together the CC$$ did not understand.
That said, there is also a lot of nonsense about developmental stages that is widely believed and that can be pernicious. As Alison Gopnik explains in such wonderful books as Words, Thoughts, and Theories; The Scientist in the Crib; The Philosophical Baby; and How Babies Think, even very, very young children are little theorizers running inference engines ALL THE TIME. They are built to theorize and test, and a lot of asking them to think about their thinking actually IMPEDES their thinking, as thinking about where to place your heels and when to pivot onto the balls of your feet will impede your walking. But despite this, a LOT of what we’ve been trying to do is to get kids to operate at very abstract metacognitive levels at ever earlier ages. The CC$$ in ELA, for example, is ALMOST ENTIRELY a list of abstractly formulated skills.
Now, there ARE things that we can do to increase fluid intelligence–formal reasoning ability–at early ages. A great deal of success has been demonstrated, there, by folks who give young kids exercises in pattern recognition and and other such computerized formal reasoning activities to do (matching, sequencing, categorizing, etc). See Richard Nisbett’s superb Intelligence and How to Get It for more on that. However, the way to UNDERMINE that work is to try to have kids think about and articulate, generally and abstractly, what they are doing. The parts of the brain that do that sort of explicitly articulated thinking–that deal well with abstractions qua abstractions–develop late. So, early on, it’s important to give them lots of engaging CONTENT and have them do things with that content that employ functional structures already existing in the brain for carrying out various sorts of reasoning tasks, for otherwise, those functional structures disappear through disuse, but having kids describe those tasks abstractly or describing them to them abstractly, is actually COUNTERPRODUCTIVE, just as it would be counterproductive to try to teach them to walk by instructing them on muscles and bones and motor neurons and having them try to direct those explicitly.
So, the facts versus skills debate that is so common among educators is misconceived. What many are failing to understand is that there is a difference between acquisition and explicit learning. You know that
the great, green dragon
is grammatical, and that
the green, great dragon
isn’t even though the chance are very, very good that no one ever taught you the explicit rules for order of precedence of adjectives in English. In fact, if you did try to teach people how to order adjectives in their sentences using explicitly articulated rules, you would screw them up. The mind has functional mechanisms for learning rules for that order UNCONSCIOUSLY, and what’s needed in order for those mechanisms to work is simply exposure to language that uses serial adjectives. But language that piles up adjectives rapidly outruns the Lexile and is ruled out as inappropriate for the grade level. Dumb. Dumb. Dumb.
It’s very important for teachers to understand the difference between acquisition and explicit learning, and it’s important for curriculum developers to understand how one can go about designing materials that provide the proper circumstances in which acquisition can occur, as opposed to ones that try to make the natural process of acquisition into an unnatural process of explicit learning of skills.
The amateurs who put together the CC$$ didn’t understand this AT ALL, clearly. If they had, then they would have articulated many of their “standards” very differently.
But I hesitate even to initiate such discussion in such a forum as this because these are complex matters. Different types of acquisition and learning occur in different ways, and educators far too often hit on some one idea and overapply it. It’s important not to grab a hammer and then treat everything as a nail.
So, for example, my concern about having kids do a lot of metacognitive skills work at an early age–attempting to get kids to be able to understand and articulate the concept of a variable at third grade, for example–as opposed to creating situations in which they will simply USE such a concept–should not lead people to think that all direct skills instruction is a bad thing. Explicit instruction in a series of concrete steps–the operationalizing of instruction in procedural knowledge, or knowledge of how–can be quite valuable for many purposes. Such instruction can be used, for example, to teach kids how to do a line drawing in perspective using a Durer grid, something that otherwise would be very difficult for most to learn.
This is slightly out of my depth technically, but a big concern was “vertical scaling.” Google that and you’ll probably get a technical paper on the subject prepared shortly before they launched the CC effort. But basically, if you want growth measures/VAM, you want to rate teachers, etc. based on that, you would ideally have a system where everyone from K-12 would be on one continuum, like they would be for weight, except for “reading,” or whatever, except instead of measuring inches you could measure “months of learning.”
Let me pause to say, yes, it is ridiculous.
But in particular I think they REALLY didn’t want a system with an obvious “seam” in it, the most obvious one being between primary and secondary systems, because then your growth measures around those grades will be (more) screwed up.
That’s really why they needed new tests and standards, to cement the Race to the Top VAM, etc. agenda.
So the data geeks seem to have been allowed to create the basic structure. This might have ended up at least SIMPLE, if somewhat absurd, but another powerful faction was the Fordham/Core Knowledge, pro-content. group, which might not think they are powerful, but they had done a lot of work leading up to this, and realistically had a veto. So they got their pound of flesh and a bunch of “content” was scattered somewhat randomly through the standards, and the supporting materials.
The sudden re-emergence of “New Criticism” was probably driven by the need to constrain the scope of student writing to allow computer scoring.
That’s my theory of course, based on close reading, naturally.
well said, Tom!
Tom, you have hit upon the actual intent of the Common Core. The big players in the educational materials markets wanted a single set of standards to correlate their ed tech to, for pixels are cheaper than paper is, and by having one set of standards, they could operate “at scale” and crush smaller competitors. Their vision for ed tech is the computer-adaptive one, but it’s adaptive only in the sense that it tests continually to determine where to place the kid in a predetermined maze. The problem with that, of course, is that the maze is predetermined. A different developer can’t develop a different one, and one can’t develop differing ones for differing kids and differing purposes. This is all basically the old “programmed learning” writ large.
Robert Frost said, “It’s a trick poem and no poem at all if the best is thought up first and saved for last.” Ed tech COULD provide opportunities for children, under mentorship, to seize upon a passion and pursue it in unique and incredibly productive (because intrinsically motivated) ways. And, of course, it offers many other potential benefits–access to the universal library of knowledge, access to alternative tracks that otherwise wouldn’t be available to small schools and districts, collaboration spaces, publishing possibilities for kids, incredible possibilities for demonstration, and so on. But the way to realize these possibilities is not to replace pull technologies with push ones, especially push ones that are entirely predetermined by some invariant bullet list.
Robert, Diane, Anyone: We have received what I hope is some good news in Tennessee. This information is from a legislative update that I receive from a TN senator: The TN Senate approved 3 key bills that will block federal intrusion into Tennessee’s curriculum, reform the state’s textbook commission and prevent data-mining of student information in the state’s public schools. I SO want to believe this and take it at face-value! However, I’d like someone more “in-the-know” than me to take a look. I’ve included links to the bills. Thanks so much for your help!
http://wapp.capitol.tn.gov/apps/BillInfo/Default.aspx?BillNumber=SJR0491
http://wapp.capitol.tn.gov/apps/BillInfo/Default.aspx?BillNumber=SB1835
http://wapp.capitol.tn.gov/apps/BillInfo/default.aspx?BillNumber=SB1602&GA=108
Well, this is exciting news!
On this one I agree. Thought police. But we need to recognize that the public schools are already under control of the thought police. Funny to find reformers AND anti-reformers practicing the same kind of intellectual tyranny. Eventually I expect the big fat amoeba of the public school systems to surround and ingest and incorporate the CCSS, and will become identified with the CCSS. I suspect the ed schools are already teaching their darling students how to write CCSS “aligned” lesson plans. On this blog there is opposition to the CCSS as a defense of public schools, but eventually defending public schools will, I suspect, entail defending CCSS.
Charters, vouchers, and private schools anyone?
The thought police are dipped in intentional subterfuge, self-parody,
or just plain intellectual debility. A point/counter-point discussion is
rare… If you can’t “Defend” your position(point), you control the dialogue. Meet the challenge or cut and run (ignore). After all, singing
out of tune, is a gesture that breaches the ordained demeanor of
prostrate obedience to the thought police “Genius”. What genius
wants to be lectured by his “Lessers”?
I wonder if the self-admiring narcissists of the “Ben Dover” school,
avoid reality, to sustain unrealistic expectations, by a strong
resistance to accepting negative feedback.
See you under the bridge, make sure to wear your foil hat…
The extent and nature of registered claims in copyright can be viewed at the US Copyright Office catalog at http://cocatalog.loc.gov. For example, search by name (e.g., publisher as claimant) and limit by year of publication, to see number of works and total titles claimed in any given recent year.
I thought Common Core copyright allows anyone,teacher, educators a limited use to the Common Core material via “open source” system. Also allows limited changes to the made to the contents in order to meet the users need. Maybe, access is “free” for a limited time just to get things going. Then maybe the owners drop the hatchet on users that can’t afford the financial burden. Then what?
Please read my post on CCSS tomorrow at 8 am.