There has been much debate about who wrote the Common Core standards.
Here is a press release that lists the names of the writing teams for each subject as well as “feedback” groups.
You will notice a large representation of people from the testing industry (College Board and ACT), as well as people from Achieve, a D.C. think tank.
Notice that the statement says:
“The Work Group’s deliberations will be confidential throughout the process.”
Notice that the statement says:
“Final decisions regarding the common core standards document will be made by the Standards Development Work Group. The Feedback Group will play an advisory role, not a decision-making role in the process.”
Count how many people on either the writing teams or the feedback groups are identified as classroom teachers. Count how many have any experience in teaching children with disabilities. Count how many are experienced in teaching early childhood classes or English language learners.
Compare that number–whatever it may be–to the number who are experienced in testing and assessment.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I count exactly ONE person who could be identified as someone who is actively involved with teaching children (Vern Williams – Mathematics Feedback Group)
I remember the program called “America’s Choice” (sounds like a food product), written by business interests back in 2002. Teachers were pulling out their hair for all of the nonsense “assessments” over writing, which never went anywhere. One of their people sat on this Board of “experts”.
Was a business-backed group. It’s Pearson now:
“WASHINGTON, August 3, 2010 — Pearson, the world’s leading education company, today signed a letter of agreement to acquire America’s Choice, a leading innovator in research-based strategies to help schools, districts, and states dramatically improve student achievement. Pearson’s extraordinary resources and technological expertise will facilitate the adaptation and reach of America’s Choice’s comprehensive and proven school improvement model to a global community of educators and students.”
“Pearson (NYSE:PSO), the global leader in education services, technology and school solutions, provides innovative print and digital education materials for preK through college, student information systems and learning management systems, teacher professional development, career certification programs, and testing and assessment products that set the standard for the industry. Pearson’s other primary businesses include the Financial Times Group and the Penguin Group.”
I didn’t know Pearson owns Financial Times. I’ll keep that in mind.
http://www.pearsoned.com/pearson-and-americas-choice-announce-acquisition-agreement/#.U1ejSuZdVH0
YUP, and Murdoch, owner of the Wall Street Journal, owns Amplify. Ed deform and the now merged PR-news-entertainment industry–an incestuous little group.
I was just reading through the practice questions from the Pearson test that candidates must pass to become certified educators in the state of Florida. Question after question on how best to approach teaching those standards to prepare kids for the test.
Working with America’s Choice sucked all of the oxygen out of the school day leaving little time for other subjects. Teachers were required to interview every student about their writing each day and record such conversation in writing, when such constant interviewing was unwarranted, totally micromanaging the creative process. Suggestions about writing should be brief and timely with a sporadic mini lesson if there is a general misunderstanding. Even Lucy Calkins programs are too structured with constant mini lessons and contrived “turn and talk” events. I see the “graphic organizers” being used as the “prison bars of the mind” to creative writing for early learners in the writing process.
Spoken like a thoughtful person who is still actually teaching writing, Joseph! (as opposed to a teacher of “InstaWritingfortheTest,” which is the mode NOT mentioned in the standards [sic] but, of course, the one that matters now
“prison bars of the mind”
Another candidate for quip of the year!
thanks. had much time to challenge mainstream assumptions after doing my doctoral work in Literacy Studies.
“It is a very mechanistic view of learning which lends itself to the notion of teaching as a kind of “scientific cognitive engineering” with teachers as controllers of the process……
Thus one side of the learning coin becomes a process of constantly practicing the right patterns until they become habitual and automatic….
The plan went something like this. First the total literacy was fragmented into subsets of logically determined and sequenced concepts or skills. This was typically done by “experts”, who worked outside of classrooms and wrote textbooks for teachers.”
Brian Cambourne
from “The Whole Story”
Peter Green wrote on my blog that
“the CCSS appear to have been developed by that mediocre student in third period who didn’t really understand the lessons but memorized just enough to pass the test. Now, twenty years later, he sort of half-remembers that there was some stuff, and it was important, so let’s put that in the standards.”
Given how amateurish the English standards are, this seems an altogether reasonable hypothesis.
perhaps some members of a small-town Rotary club were tasked to make a list of “things to study in English class.” Perhaps some owners of local car dealerships and hair salons and life insurance brokerages vaguely recalling what they studied “back in the day”
certainly not anyone the slightest bit familiar with best practices in the teaching of English, with a scholarly background in literature or in composition, or with knowledge of linguistics, language acquisition, or the cognitive sciences of learning or human motivation
I have a rule of thumb–a heuristic–for finding out whether anyone knows the slightest thing about the teaching of English: find out whether he or she is a member of the CC$$ pom pon squad and glee club. Works like a charm.
They were hacked together by amateurs on the basis of a quick review of the lowest-common-denominator groupthink of the state standards [sic] that preceded them. And then a few glowing phrases were sprinkled over them like holy water (read complex texts, read them closely), and they were sent forth to numb the minds of a whole generation of young prole children.
That would be Peter Greene, with an e on the end. Sorry about the typo.
In Louisiana, Chas Roemer (#2 education policy man behind John White?) said in past few days that “as many as 26 educators” put together the Common Core. An interesting way of phrasing it. Disingenuous?
It’s like a district test that I’m supposed to give that says, “At least four teachers helped write this test.” REALLY?
From a posting today on deutsch29, “Those 24 Common Core 2009 Work Group Members”:
Link: http://deutsch29.wordpress.com/2014/04/23/those-24-common-core-2009-work-group-members/
😎
I’ve worked on a lot of big basal textbook programs over the years. The publishers always hire some big-name “consultants” and pay them to put their names on the programs and picture in the books. Only these people almost never plan anything or write anything. Some have recently ratcheted that game up just a tiny bit. They bring the consultant in, sit around chatting with him or her for a couple hours, and perhaps they even have the person write a half-page “personal response” to a half dozen pieces of really simple YA lit to drop into the text from place to place.
And then they send the work out to a development house, which hires freelance writers who are paid really low piece rates to do the actual work.
And to the extent possible, the publishers recycle old material. They have developed vast databases of their old material for this purpose. Plug in the topic–gerunds–and up pops (well, not exactly pops, the technology is clunky) reams of old lessons and bits of lesson, out of context, from old publications.
One editor said this to me: “They make me use this stuff, even though it is completely out of context. I spend three hours trying to incorporate the old junk in the name of efficiency when I could have created better stuff, fully integrated with my lesson, from scratch in a third of that time.”
The plutocrats were in a hurry. They needed a single national bullet list RIGHT AWAY to tag their tests and computer-adaptive software to.
It wasn’t always that way, BTW. There was a time when the person whose name is on the book actually wrote it. There are still a few rare–very rare–instances of that. But mostly the authorship of these programs is a big, fat lie–a scam perpetrated on the nation’s teachers, students, parents, and administrators.
However, the Edupundits and Consultants take home some pretty large paychecks for their “consulting services,” almost all of which, like the NCTE comments solicited on the CC$$, entirely ignored.
cx: pictures, plural
It’s the equivalent of educational junk food – there have been exceptions, but on the whole, it has always been like that. Even when someone with expertise contributes, the publishers then make so many changes and dumb it down so much that the result is mass-produced sausage. It’s always been like that. IMO our textbooks have long been the real weak point in US education.
There were a couple decades there in which they were REALLY bad. There have been slight improvements of late, but the ELA texts are still much worse than they were back in the late 1970s, when they were mostly just anthologies with a few questions at the ends of the selections. So much utter junk in these. Try finding the selection in the online editions of the big basal lit texts. It’s buried among 40 pages of worthless garbage, literally four or five folders down. One little scrap of a poem, five lines long, surrounded by 40 pages of drivel.
I was offered quite a bit of $$$$$ if I would allow a publishing company to put my name on their product, with which I had NOTHING to do. I was stunned.
Happens ALL THE TIME. And people rationalize it. Well, I gave them my suggestions, they say to themselves. It’s up to them now. And sometimes the publishers even have some editor incorporate something into a lesson and send it back to the author/consultant for review. And that’s about where it ends.
Your integrity, there, is remarkable. Few have that. I can’t begin to tell you how many of these big name edupundits and consultants have had their names on texts that I and other editors and writers I know produced and that they had no real involvement with. For many years, one of the best-selling detective fiction writers in the U.S. was the granddaughter of an American president. Only she didn’t write any of the books. A nameless woman in Ohio did. John F. Kennedy won the Pulitzer prize for a book written by Ted Sorensen. I used to go to IRA or NCTE and listen to these people speak to huge crowds who were excited to be in the presence of the author of their textbooks, and I would stand in the room and know that this person didn’t write a word of that program. An utter scam.
From time to time, one of these very well-known consultants would be asked to submit a few lines to be incorporated somewhere in an 8,000-page program to make the scam seem more convincing, and one would get his or her stuff, and it would so badly written as to be barely intelligible. I’m thinking here of one person in particular who was considered a HUGE writing guru. The writing guru couldn’t write AT ALL.
I wish I had saved the stuff from this person. It was breathtakingly bad. A few paragraphs that were completely unreadable–incoherent, full of basic errors in grammar and usage, conceptually clumsy and trite, containing material that would never be allowed to appear in a textbook–stuff completely inappropriate to the audience and the genre.
My kids had gerbils who could write better than this person could. But this person was an “Internationally Recognized Expert” in writing (lol), spoke at all the conferences, and had quite a following for a long, long time.
There were exceptions, of course–a few earnest, bright, knowledgeable, experienced educators. But they, too, were used and mostly ignored, though they got paid pretty well for this, given how little they were asked to do.
I could not find a single representative from either the National Council of Teachers of English or the International Reading Association. I must be a poor reader, for certainly no governor would think of adopting national standards without consulting with the two largest professional organizations in North America whose members are directly responsible for ELA instruction. I’m sorry, did I say national standards? I meant to say state standards. I should have known that David Coleman knows more about reading and writing than the NCTE president and the IRA president combined.
After the fact, the “standards” put together by Lord Coleman based on his vast experience and scholarship in the area of education in the English language arts–he once looked for a teaching job, unnsuccessfully, for a while–were sent to the NCTE for comment. And then the comments were entirely ignored, and even those were hardly what I would call incisive, though they were better than nothing.
cx, typo: unsuccessfully
From the Achieve website: “Created in 1996 by a bipartisan group of governors and business leaders…” http://achieve.org/about-us
Also, two people on the work groups are from America’s Choice and that is Pearson: http://www.pearsoned.com/pearson-and-americas-choice-announce-acquisition-agreement/#.U1eh3PnKtJY
On the ELA workgroup is a Martha Vokely whose qualifications and “effective communications” company seem rather suspicious to me, especially considering the companies that are her clients: http://www.vockleylang.com/clients.html
Question–it’s well known that David Coleman is the son of the former Bennington College president, that he went from Yale to Oxford and Cambridge to study as a Rhodes Scholar . . . that he applied to be a HS teacher and was turned down. My question is, what is his educational attainment exactly? Did he complete a Masters degree at some point? If so, in what subject? What was the topic of his thesis? It seems he does not have a doctorate in any subject.
I’m not sure that that matters much, NY; I, for one, do not care whether the person has some credential. I care whether he or she can produce credible work. That was clearly not not so in the case of the ELA “standards.”
An interesting question, though! Didn’t he study philosophy? If so, this latest is a sad, sad day in the history of philosophy
I thought his degree was in English Literature. If that’s really the case, it’s even more ironic, since his CC has virtually eliminated literature in the upper grades in favor of “informational text.” As if literature doesn’t give “information.”
from Wikipedia:
English literature at Oxford University and classical philosophy at Cambridge University
BTW, there is a HUGE error in the Wikipedia article. It refers to Lord Coleman as an educator.
He is also described in the Wikipedia article as “a founding member of Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst”
So, a charter member of the alternate rheeality in which invariant extrinsic punishment and reward via testing a) motivates and b) brings about substantive improvement in educational outcomes
I’m sorry that I can’t remember where I read it – but I did read that David Coleman has said that he dislikes reading fiction and would rather read non-fiction. That would explain the CC’s veering away from fiction.
Coleman said that no one ever gave a crap about what he was thinking with his writing. Maybe he is trying to prove something, Revenge of the Nerds.
The Columbine of Curriculums.
Well, like his good buddy Aristotle, Lord Coleman wrote about matters that he had no knowledge whatsoever of. Aristotle wrote that people bleed to rid their bodies of impurities and that men get occasional nose bleeds and women menstruate because of the relative amounts of impurities they have to get rid of. And on just about every other matter of empirical fact, he was as totally wacked–the number of teeth in the human mouth, for example. Just like Coleman–someone who wrote definitely about matters of which he had no knowledge whatsoever.
but you would think that all that study of Aristotle would have taught the man to seek a middle way, not to be the raging mad, heedless bull in the China shop of the educational experiences of U.S. children
Good questions.
Did you know that Coleman’s father was a psychiatrist? Here’s more about “the most influential education figure”.
http://forward.com/articles/182587/david-coleman-the-most-influential-education-figur/?p=all
It is a very, very sad commentary on the state of affairs in U.S. education that this tyro, with no experience whatsoever and a head full of ignorant nonsense, should be (and doubtless is) the most influential figure in U.S. education.
When you think about it, Coleman’s background is very similar to Duncan’s. Coleman’s mom was president of Bennington College and his dad was a psychiatrist, while Duncan’s mom ran an after school program and his dad was a psychology professor. Both are do nothing heirs riding on the coat tails of distinguished parents into high seats of power, in a field for which they’ve had no training or experience.
I think the lesson here is that in oligarchies, people don’t just pass on wealth to their progeny. They also pass on a lot of influence and power.
“It is time for us as states to challenge the education system and finally answer the question, “What will it take for every child to be successful?” stated Gene Wilhoit, executive director of CCSSO. “Fewer, clearer, and higher standards will help us get there.”
Oddly oppositional language.
“States” are challenging “the education system”? Is a state education system somehow apart from the state? To me it’s like writing “states challenge the justice system and finally answer the question..”
Have state public education systems somehow been standing in the way of “states”? Bizarre opener to what is ostensibly a cooperative effort. To me it goes back to having something done to TO schools instead of doing something WITH schools. Why do they always set ed reform efforts up as oppositional? Then they wonder why “we can’t all just get along”
that “higher standards” bit always cracks me up
What a card!
But the joke is getting old?
Wait, wait, he actually MEANT THAT?
OMG
Why the constant adversarial language? Duncan does it constantly, and don’t even get me started on the edu-celebs. They’re like a lesson in how NOT to talk to people you want to work with.
I am so, so sick of the stern lectures, and I find the distancing hilarious.
“States” demand that state educational systems get better! What the hell does that even mean? Public education systems are a part of “states”.
It’s the “fewer, deeper standards” that makes me crazy. There are dozens of standards per grade. My friends who teach ELA and math sometimes have to try to fit two or more standards into a single class period in order to “cover” them all.
Good point. If they had just issued some general guidelines
Read substantive work carefully
Then people would have the degrees of freedom in which to tailor curricula and pedagogy to their differing students and to create innovative, creative educational materials.
BUT NO. The Plutocrats who paid to have these hacked together overnight by amateurs needed a single bullet list, and a fairly fine-grained one, to tag their online assessments and software programs to. Gates and Pearson were both very much interested, for different reasons, in seeing print textbooks replaced with online, computer-adaptive educational materials and online tests. And, of course, Microsoft and Pearson are now partners in a new suite of CC$$-aligned materials designed to integrate with Microsoft Office.
Really beautiful, Chiara, how you called out the twisted illogic of that statement! Bravo!
Have I told you lately, Ms. Duggan, how much I appreciate your wit and discernment? Great comments. thank you
Chiarra,
I debated whether I should post this comment, but here goes. I find your comments fresh and thought provoking. You look at topics through a slightly different lens that goes beyond what can become a litany. We all recognize the competitive spin that the reformers have put on the debate, but you point out the “oppositional” nature in contrast to calls for cooperative effort. Your examples really make your points well. Thank you.
how embarrassing for anyone to have his or her name connected with the hackneyed, unimaginative, prescientific, stultifying, narrow, puerile Coleman bullet list
So there’s two things that bother me. The first is how there is a representative for charter schools at the table, but no public school administrator. I get a little tired of 5% of schools dominating the debate that affects the other 95% of schools.
The other thing is how it’s so college-heavy. I don’t think everyone has to go to college, and before we pull out the “low expectations” card, I’m a graduate of a community college trades program (before I got a bachelor’s degree and went to law school, which was much later) and I found the trades program the most challenging of anything I’ve ever done, including law school. It’s not easy. Also, my middle son is pursuing skilled trades, and the other two went the bachelors degree route, so I have all the flavors. Everyone is different, and everyone doesn’t need or want a bachelors degree. The whole college entrance-exam standardized test focus of the thing bothers me, particularly because I live in an area where trades are respected, and pursued by many students.
Amen to this! yes yes yes
The whole SAT focus puts me off. Didn’t I read they had to re-work the SAT because it wasn’t predictive or something? It measures household income, right? I didn’t take that test, but I did take the LSAT and I don’t know what that measures.
I vaguely remember some question about seating on a plane; if Hal sits HERE and Sal sits HERE, then is Mary stuck in the aisle? Like that 🙂
They first called it the Scholastic Aptitude Test because it was meant to be a test of aptitude for college. But it turned out to be a valid instrument for measuring aptitude, so, under pressure, they changed the name to the Scholastic Achievement Test. But it did not measure K-12 achievement validly either. It was pretty well correlated with “g,” what IQ tests are supposed to measure, so they changed the name yet again first to the Scholastic Reasoning Test and then just to the SAT. And now, in the grand tradition of the invalidity of this test, they are creating the Common Core version, which I have suggested that they might call the Scholastic Common Core Achievement Test, or SCCAT.
Kids differ. These standardized tests do not. And they do not validly measure what they are supposed to measure. So, I am entirely with you.
I have long thought, Chiara, that we give a lot of lip service, because of our Puritan inheritance, to the value of labor but that we actually disdain labor in this country–that the wonks who make policy think of labor as what the little people do, as unworthy. This makes me very, very angry. People differ. They have differing proclivities. I have a son who is not a scholar but is an extraordinary guitarist and a mechanical wizard.
cx: It turned out NOT to be a valid instrument for measuring aptitude. Oh., for a correction feature on WordPress!
CD,
“. . . but I did take the LSAT and I don’t know what that measures.”
It doesn’t “measure” anything. It, like all standardized tests attempt to assess something and does so in a very inadequate limited fashion. Those tests aren’t measuring devices even though many claim they are-many also claim there are gods, ETs, Loch Ness monsters, yetis, etc. . . but it doesn’t make it true.
Nothing that is done on the standardized tests of reading and writing remotely resembles authentic reading and writing and so, ipso facto, those cannot be valid tests of reading and writing. QED
It’s amazing the distance that people can go down an entirely crazy path simply because this is the path that they have been on. We need to step back from all of this. What is a “standard”? What do we want to know that leads us to give these tests? What, really, do we need to know? And is this the way to go about that? And if we asked these questions AT ALL, we would recognize that the so-called standards are entirely misconceived and the tests of those standards are completely invalid, on top of being extraordinarily distorting of curricula and pedagogy and extraordinarily abusive.
It’s time for teachers to take back their profession from the politicians, the plutocrats, and the Vichy Edupundit collaborators with these fools.
Diane,
I am fully against CCSS, but I think it’s really important that we debate these issues factually. The 2009 press release you linked to does indeed show the original makeup of the Common Core work groups. But as NGA/CCSSO said at the time, there were plans to expand the work and feedback groups as the process moved forward.
The final, much different work and feedback group memberships can be found here:
Click to access 2010COMMONCOREK12TEAM.PDF
Still almost no classroom teachers, but fewer testing company reps, more professors, and more administrators. While there is still A LOT to criticize, it’s not as bad as the original list.
I have asked other anti-CCSS groups (including the Heartland Institute and Truth in American Education) whether the revised work groups actually wrote the standards or were just props, and they have indicated that they believe the expanded work groups actually were the ones who wrote them. Furthermore, I know that Dr. Louisa Moats had a role because she has spoken about it publicly.
So I will ask again what I asked last week: Do you have any factual basis for saying that the original work group members were the ones who “really” wrote the standards? If not, I think we on the anti-CCSS side should adjust our rhetoric because debunking that particular argument is low-hanging fruit for the other side and makes us look foolish.
I see Matt Davis, from Core Knowledge, on this list. That seems very bizarre because Matt, who is an extraordinarily bright and capable fellow, was always extremely opposed to approaches to education in the English language arts that were based upon bullet lists of abstractly formulated skills. He wrote about that opposition at length in his superb little book Reading: the Two Keys.
So, I’m pretty certain that even though his name appears on this list, and though he must have signed something for it to appear there, he did not have a role in conceptualizing these “standards.” They don’t look like anything, I think, that he would approve of. He’s far, far too bright and thoughtful for that.
I might be wrong, but I really, really doubt that I am. This suggests to me that the feedback groups must have been a formality–a list put together for the purpose of saying that they had a feedback group.
Matt would, at the slightest provocation, heap mountains of scorn on those abstract bullet lists of skills. He is a great scholar, a deeply learned young man who became fluent in Russian, has a PhD in English lit, has published a lot of beautiful, scholarly work on Samuel Johnson, is an expert on hermeneutics, and has taught himself more than most reading professors know about reading.
Well, that is an excellent question and one I would like to know the answer to.
To be fair, however, it should be noted that Core Knowledge and its founder (the UVA professor whose name slips my mind) is all on board with CCSS, so maybe Davis’ involvement is not as surprising as you would think.
That would be E.D. Hirsch, Jr.
Hirsch spent half a lifetime likewise arguing AGAINST basing U.S. education on bullet lists of abstractly formulated skills. He did this in book after book–The Schools We Need and The Knowledge Deficit, in particular–and in countless speeches, articles, and op-ed pieces. I hold out hope that Dr. Hirsch will denounce this standards, for they are PRECISELY what he argued against, eloquently and persuasively, for decades.
E.D. Hirsch is the name I was trying to come up with.
I see. You beat me to it.
cx: these “standards”
Have a look at The Schools We Need and The Knowledge Deficit. In these he goes into great detail about why it’s a mistake to base education on lists of abstractly formulated skills. Lists just like Common Core. He heaps well-reasoned scorn on the state standards so formulated, and the CC$$ is just another bullet list of the same kind–a skills list–with a little New Critical fairy dust sprinkled around the edges
The books Hirsch wrote indicating what kids should learn in each grade from P-8 consist of bullet lists and, from what I’ve read, some of that content made it to the Common Core tests. Hirsch supports Common Core: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/e-d-hirsch-jr/why-im-for-the-common-cor_b_3809618.html
Cosmic, Hirsch’s books are lists of knowledge, not skills. That’s his point. He argues for a different kind of list altogether. AND he has always contended that his list of background knowledge essential for reading comprehension, for that’s what it is, should take up only about 50 percent of the curriculum. Yes, he came out for the Core. And that was a tragic mistake, for the Core is everything he has argued against, at length, for years. Again, read his books, The Schools We Need and The Knowledge Deficit. He EXPLICITLY and AT LENGTH and IN DETAIL attacks bullet lists formulated as abstract skills.
So, to be clear, the argument that Hirsch has made for decades is that we should be concentrating on imparting background KNOWLEDGE, not having kids practicing abstractly formulated SKILLS. Thus his original list in Cultural Literacy and the lists in all those other books (What your ____-Grader Should Know). He explicitly, again and again, attacks standards formulated as abstract skills, and he did this for many, many decades. But the CC$$ is PRECISELY such a list. VERY different from his lists, and his lists were explicitly formulated to differ from those others. The argument is, bascially, that writers take certain knowledge for granted, that decoding is skills but that comprehension is dependent not upon “reading skills,” instruction in which he attacks over and over and over again, but upon having the requisite background knowledge. That’s his argument in a nutshell.
And so does Davis, at length, in Reading: the Two Keys
If you look at his curriculum books, they have all been updated and Common Core has been integrated within. They do include skills, too, not just background knowledge. See What Your Kindergartener Needs to Know at Amazon, where you can look inside the book: http://www.amazon.com/What-Kindergartner-Needs-Revised-updated/dp/0345543734
Yes, and this contradicts what he argued against for decades.
As I said, I hold out hope that he will see that–will see that the CC$$ list is leading to precisely the sort of instruction that he has long derided–instruction that actually makes texts no more than simply vehicles for skills instruction and that makes skills instruction abstractly and vaguely formulated (not concretely) into the sole point of any given lesson. Of course, his books won’t do that, but most CC$$-inspired curricula and certainly the CC$$ tests do precisely that. They test skills.
I basically support Hirsch’s idea that the curriculum should focus on content, and I also support the content he wished to include, which I think most sensible people would — so l looked to him with considerable hope. However, the curriculum he put out (or that was put out in his name), like the Common Core, was also screamingly inappropriate for the early grades, and moreover, Hirsch consistently refuses to acknowledge this. The fact that from the beginning Hirsch focussed so much on lists (which tend by nature to be a mile wide and an inch deep) was a red flag that has turned out to be a fatal flaw. Also, Hirsch had some bees in his bonnet, like an obsession with trashing the work of Thomas Dewey, which were strange, uninformed, and unworthy of a person of his intellect and stature. Hirsch is not young and is apparently well past his period of flexibility and creativity. Worst of all, he has so much invested in his own project that he has been willing to turn a blind eye to the destructive, predatory behavior and aggressive abuses of the corporate oligarchs — which is really terribly disappointing. To put it crudely, at this point he is a blinkered sell-out, unfortunately.
He was a mentor to me and remains a friend. I am terribly disappointed by the connection to Coleman’s amateurish bullet list. And the approach in New York to the CK material was an utter mess. I still hope that something good can come of it. I have seen really exciting, kid-friendly, engaging work in Core Knowledge Schools. But those New York lessons need a LOT of editing, and there would have to be a lot of really good PD to begin to explain to people how to make such a sea change in approach–how actually to use these in a classroom. As scripts, they just aren’t acceptable. And, at any rate, I don’t believe in invariant mandates. I believe in autonomous educators making informed decisions from great options. In ecologies, not monocultures. Core Knowledge can be a great option, but it has to be implemented correctly by people who have learned how to take this approach.
Thank you for posting the link to the Development and Work Teams. It includes Hung-Hsi Wu of UC Berkeley, who has written extensively about the work of writing the math standards at:
http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/
Some Hirsch – like elements are in the CCSS. However, given the pages and pages of topics forbidden to be tested on the SBAC assessments, this cultural knowledge will never be able to be evaluated! See the so-called bias and sensitivity guidelines @ http://www.smarterbalanced.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/TaskItemSpecifications/Guidelines/BiasandSensitivity/BiasandSensitivityGuidelines.pdf
Thanks.
“I have asked other anti-CCSS groups (including the Heartland Institute and Truth in American Education) whether the revised work groups actually wrote the standards or were just props, and they have indicated that they believe the expanded work groups actually were the ones who wrote them.”
That’s not what Heartland wrote here: “Five People Wrote ‘Stete-Led’ Common Core ” http://news.heartland.org/newspaper-article/2013/06/07/five-people-wrote-state-led-common-core
” the standards’ lead writers: David Coleman and Susan Pimentel in English, and Jason Zimba, Phil Daro, and William McCallum in math. Coleman and Zimba did not have previous experience writing standards.”
What you say here, Cosmic, is my understanding of what actually happened.
But isn’t it interesting that this was so done in the dark of the night that only the “deciders” for everyone else at the CCSSO know the ugly truth, though that truth shines through clearly in the amateurishness of the CC$$ in ELA
Yeah, I remember reading that, too. But if those five really did write the standards by themselves, then even the testing guys got cut out of the loop.
Again, I just think that by citing the 2009 press release without any backup for why that list, not the 2010 list, is the “real” list of standards writers, we leave ourselves open to easy potshots from the other side (And who can blame them? We would do the same thing if the situation were reversed!). If we’re just speculating, then we should say so.
I find it interesting that we even have to question who wrote the CCSS. Why do we have to wonder? Would not that ordinarily be information that we should expect would be available. I am in no position to question the expertize of these people. I don’t see classroom teaching as a magic ingredient to writing standards although serious representation is essential especially as a reality check. (Is this representative of what we can expect in a classroom?) The secrecy surrounding these proceedings only have served to make them highly suspect.
“It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.” [Ionesco]
I much appreciate all the comments on this thread. However, you deserve krazy props for asking a question so obvious that it might never have been posed at all:
Why should we have to go through all this to begin with?
Keep writing. I’ll keep reading.
😎
What has been secret about it? Dr. Ravitch takes her list from a public document. The question is whether or not it’s the right list, the list of writers.
“February 11, 2014
Cathy O’Neil, mathbabe
Bill McCallum, … Department of Mathematics at the University of Arizona… led the Work Team which recently wrote the Mathematics Common Core State Standards…
Q: Tell me about how the Common Core State Standards Mathematics Work Team got formed and how you got onto it.
A: There were actually two separate documents and two separate processes, and people often get confused between them.
The first part happened in the summer of 2009 and produced a document called “College and Career Readiness Standards“. It didn’t go grade by grade but rather described what a high school student leaving and ready for college and career looks like… The second part of the process, called the Work Team, took that document and worked backwards to create the actual Common Core State Standards for mathematics. I was the chair of the Work Team and was one of the 3 lead writers… But the other members of the Work Team represent many educators, mathematicians, and math education folks, as well as DOE folks, and importantly there are no testing or textbook companies represented. The full list is here.”
He then links to the COMMON CORE STATE STANDARDS INITIATIVE K-12 STANDARDS DEVELOPMENT TEAMS, the list linked to earlier in this discussion by Jack Talbot.
I see that McCallum makes such an effort to point out that some of the companies/agencies involved are non-profit. By now, most of us know that the designation doesn’t mean charitable. The Rhees, Moskowitzs, and Kopps of the country make damned high salaries for what we used to think non-profits were. The label is a convenient mask that provides tax benefits, but the leaders earn as much as CEOs at for-profits.
I meant to reply to you, and instead I posted it to a different column.
Thank you for posting the link to the Development and Work Teams. It includes Hung-Hsi Wu of UC Berkeley, who has written extensively about the work of writing the math standards at:
http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/
Ms. Ravitch, Is there any information as to what each author’s previous experience has been? For example, were any of them classroom teachers or principals before they began working at for profit entities?
Thanks, Barb Schafer
I will post an analysis of each of the original work group members. Some had classroom experience in the past. None presently are classroom teachers. None had any experience with early childhood education. The largest group come from the testing industry.
Who exactly are the Council of Chief State School Officers? Is Common Core “officially” sanctioned by the states? Was there some sort of vote? Or is this just a fig leaf over an attempt to monetize education? Because I can assure you that Alabama officials want no part of Common Core – too communist!
A self-appointed group that HOLDS THE COPYRIGHT on the “standards,” no less. The Brookings Institution recently suggested that the CCSSO start enforcing that copyright and becoming the de facto censor librorum for educational materials in this country. A really chilling proposal, that–having a centralized Thought Police issuing the nihil obstat.
Who exactly are the Council of Chief State School Officers? http://www.ccsso.org/who_we_are.html
Is Common Core “officially” sanctioned by the states?
Well, if you call the governor and the state superintendent signing off on it (to qualify for RTTT money), it was sanctioned by the states.
Vote? Do we believe in that anymore?
democratic processes. what a quaint idea
How did Alabama come into this? But for the record, Alabama is like most states in that the politicians and business cadre has thoroughly drunk the CCSS Kool-Aid.
My bad. I live in Alabama where there is a backlash occurring but, as you say, the Governor and the State Board of Education have voted to keep it.
Diane, Has Diana Senechal verified to you how much involvement she had in writing the ELA standards compared to others in her work group?
The silence of Congress? This is a not an educational problem. This is a Criminal Justice Problem!
I agree
Diane very wittily compared privatizing to a video game: Grand Theft Education.
that applies here as well
Actually, Diane said, “Grand Theft Public Sector” because it’s not just larceny in education.
Ah, yes, you are right. And that is MUCH better!
I do understand, Cosmic, that Core Knowledge decided to play nice nice with the deformers. I was pointing out, however, that doing so is a violation of its primary mission, of the principles that it has espoused throughout its existence and that Hirsch has argued for all that time. It’s tragic, really. E.D> Hirsch, Jr., was always a lot more adamant about the objection to skills instruction than I. I see a major role for concretely, operationally defined instruction in procedural knowledge (knowledge of how) in addition to instruction in world knowledge (knowledge of what)–unlike the vaguely formulated stuff in the CCSS.
Notice what was said by Dane Linn, director of the NGA Center’s Education Division. “These standards will be research and evidence-based, internationally benchmarked, aligned with college and work expectations and include rigorous content and skills.”
I’m pretty sure they never got around to that research and evidenced based part.
Who wrote the engageny math modules?
I’m not surprised to find that the list is not accurate, the transparency is not even transparent!
During the creation/writing phase an ELA supervisor from my ISD was part of the writing team, regularly skypeing with someone in Arizona in collaborative writing/review/whatever. I see neither of these educators (and they were district level employees, so I’ll count them as closer to kids than most of the people on the list) on this list and wonder why they would be left off or if they were part of the ‘farmed out’ writing that happens with organizations. Perhaps they were a later level of review or editing?
The list is a press release from the consortium that created CCSS
Perhaps they were part of the process described here:
http://isupportthecommoncore.net/2013/10/01/the-role-of-teachers-and-the-public-in-the-common-core/
“The role of teachers and the public in the Common Core
October 1, 2013
Bill McCallum
This the second post in response to this question over at my other blog, particularly his comment
‘But I’m also seeing people complaining on her blog (and Diane does it, too) about the way the standards were developed. No teachers involved, no opportunity for public review, etc. And I don’t think those concerns are based in fact.’
Corey is quite right that these concerns are not based in fact.
CCSSO and NGA appointed teachers to the original Work Team, on recommendation of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association. There are 5 practicing teachers in this list, plus many other formerly practicing teachers.
Lead writers met repeatedly with teams assembled by AFT and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM). AFT in particular assembled teams of practicing teachers by grade.. Their feedback was detailed, intensive, and influential.
The standards went out for two or three rounds of review to the 48 states who had signed on to the initiative. These states were really our clients, and we paid close attention to their comments. Many states assembled teams of teachers to review our work…
As for public comment, a public draft was released in March 2010. It attracted about 10,000 comments. These were compiled into a spreadsheet of actionable comments by Grade, and I personally went through the whole thing. This led to further substantial changes in the standards before they were released in June.”
I know and have great respect for Carol Jago, who was an exemplary high school teacher, and who now writes wonderful curriculum materials…..for high school. She has worked with the National Writin Project at UCLA for decades. As for the rest on that list, they are all far removed from the every day realities of K-12 classrooms.
Then why, En B Cee, are the writing standards so amateurish, hackneyed, backward, unimaginative, and puerile? And why were they envisioned as informing two tests of what can only be called InstaWriting? Surely any competent writing instructor, looking at the writing “standards” in the CC$$, would be completely appalled.
She may well have been “appalled,” who knows? But just because someone gives feedback does not mean anyone acted on that feedback. She was not part of the group that actually wrote the standards. I’m guessing that you have neither met nor worked with Carol. I have, and find your remarks to be an ill-informed and overly generalized ad hominem attack.
En B Cee, I don’t think these people actually paid attention to any professional feedback. They certainly did not incorporate the suggestions made by the NCTE, so I doubt that they listened to the others whom they enlisted so that they could say that they got feedback. I have written about this elsewhere on this blog. These “standards” were not vetted. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be as amateurish as they are, clearly.
I would be deeply embarrassed to have my name connected to work this amateurish.
Armchair quarterbacking. You are not in her shoes, so until you know for sure what she may or may not have done to attach or remover her name – back off.
I don’t get these lists at all.
Where are the majority names of the cognitive scientists and the veteran teachers? NBCT teachers and administrators?
Where are they?
They are on the list, linked earlier in this discussion by Jack Talbot, published in 2009 announcing the COMMON CORE STATE STANDARDS INITIATIVE K-12 STANDARDS DEVELOPMENT TEAMS. I believe I first read it at that time. I admit to being astonished that persons interested in the Common Core still have not read it. Cognitive scientists, veteran teachers, NBCT teachers and administrators are not in the majority, but they are there.
http://www.nga.org/cms/home/news-room/news-releases/page_2009/col2-content/main-content-list/title_common-core-state-standards-k-12-work-and-feedback-groups-announced.html
“Common Core State Standards K-12 Work and Feedback Groups Announced
November 10, 2009
“… The K-12 standards development process has a parallel structure to the college- and career-readiness standards, with a work group drafting the standards and receiving continual input from outside experts and practitioners.
The Work Group for K-12 standards development is composed of individuals representing multiple stakeholders and a range of expertise and experience in assessment, curriculum design, cognitive development, early childhood, early numeracy, child development, English-language acquisition and elementary, middle, and postsecondary education…”
Click to access 2010COMMONCOREK12TEAM.PDF
There were 24 individuals on the “work groups” that wrote the CC standards. Not one was self-identified as a classroom teacher.
I believe there are at least 50 people on each work group and only 5 classroom teachers in each group, Math and ELA. It’s a very small number, I agree. The rest are mostly university faculty and specialists.
If the problem is that the smaller, more corporate group defined the goal, college/career readiness, then I agree the teachers and educators had their work cut out for them. But I think it’s important to know who they were and what they did.
Linda Wood, on Monday I will share a person-by-person analysis of the two work groups that wrote the CC standards. There were a total of 24 people on the two work groups, some were on both. Not a single one of the 24 is currently a classroom teacher. The few who had ever been classroom teachers were mostly high school teachers. The largest group on the work groups were from testing companies.
The long list of people associated with testing companies + the dearth of people associated with professional educators (NCTE, NCTM, etc.) + 2 classroom teachers hidden in the group + no child psychologists shows that the goal was always to support the testing industry.
It’s hard to tell exactly what experience these people have had. Catherine Snow, for instance, although considered a leading expert in reading theory, has publicly admitted that she’s never actually taught anyone to read.
“It is a very mechanistic view of learning which lends itself to the notion of teaching as a kind of “scientific cognitive engineering” with teachers as controllers of the process……
Thus one side of the learning coin becomes a process of constantly practicing the right patterns until they become habitual and automatic….
The plan went something like this. First the total literacy was fragmented into subsets of logically determined and sequenced concepts or skills. This was typically done by “experts”, who worked outside of classrooms and wrote textbooks for teachers.”
Brian Cambourne
from “The Whole Story”
The link is broke