Jose Luis Vilson’s Néw Book is Published!

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1. Green Mountain Educator says:

   May 1, 2014 at 9:18 pm

   Do people still read NEWSWEEK?

   Reply
   • Betsy Marshall says:

     May 1, 2014 at 9:20 pm

     A few must or it would have disappeared by now.

     Reply
   • Ponderosa says:

     May 2, 2014 at 12:47 am

     Newsweek is now owned by a Moonie-like Christian sect run by a shady Korean businessman. I learned this from the current issue of Mother Jones.

     Reply
2. Hannah says:

   May 1, 2014 at 9:19 pm

   This was a fun little virtual field trip. … Really enjoyed the Curmuducation defense of Louis CK… truth to power is always amazing.

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3. FLERP! says:

   May 1, 2014 at 9:20 pm

   Louis C.K. ‏@louisck Apr 30
   my favorite responses have been adults proudly announcing that they were able to solve these problems from a 3rd grade test.

   Reply
4. Cosmic Tinker says:

   May 1, 2014 at 9:33 pm

   Just read a tweet stating that Louis CK is going to be on Letterman tonight! Curious to see if he addresses the kerfuffle there.

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5. Joanna Best says:

   May 1, 2014 at 10:09 pm

   God bless Louis C.K.
   (I will say his “bye Jews” piece is incredibly funny because it captures the essence of a little girl who is overly enthusiastic about being an actress). . . in short, he gets children. I’m glad he ain’t afraid to point out when something doesn’t seem American. Like the Common Core.

   Is the Common Core the equivalent of the king declaring the length of a foot?

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6. WT says:

   May 1, 2014 at 10:46 pm

   So far we have zero evidence that Louis CK’s complaints have anything whatsoever to do with the Common Core per se. I mean, he says the words “Common Core,” and he’s clearly upset by a couple of problems on his kid’s homework for some reason, but no one has yet been able to establish that these problems are “Common Core” materials or that the alternative problems would have been any better.

   But hey, who cares about mere facts like that when an opportunity for propaganda presents itself.

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   • KrazyTA says:

     May 1, 2014 at 10:59 pm

     “A day without laughter is a day wasted.” [Charlie Chaplin]

     Thank you for not letting this day go to waste.

     😎

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     • WT says:

       May 2, 2014 at 3:59 pm

       Unsurprisingly, KrazyTA has nothing intelligent to say.

   • concerned mom says:

     May 2, 2014 at 6:38 am

     I think Louis CK has many valid arguments, including some confusing homework assignments (which was probably the case prior to the CC also) and excessive testing and assessments.

     However, I agree with WT’s point also. I don’t think the math questions that many people are posting on the internet is flawed. I don’t understand why people are up in arms about teaching children to add in different ways. If people cannot figure out that 100 = 10 tens or that you can add numbers by decomposing the number, then that is proof to me that we do need some changes in how children are taught to add. One way may be faster than another, but that does not prove that an alternative way is not worth learning. My child was taught several different ways to add and I don’t view this as a negative.

     When and if we get rid of the CC, are people still going to be upset that their children are learning math in ways that are different from the way they were taught?

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     • Duane Swacker says:

       May 2, 2014 at 11:03 am

       “. . . or that you can add numbers by decomposing the number. . . ”

       Add numbers by decomposing them????

       Speak English troops*

       *Apologies to Firesign Theatre.

     • concerned mom says:

       May 2, 2014 at 3:46 pm

       Thank you for proving my point. Just because it is different and we may have not heard of it, does not invalidate it. Decomposing is actually a good way to think about what is happening when you use this method. Another term is expanded form.

       so when we scarp the CCSS and these valid and useful math lessons are still taught – what will people do?

     • concerned mom says:

       May 2, 2014 at 4:45 pm

       scrap not scarp

7. John Young says:

   May 1, 2014 at 11:03 pm

   Reblogged this on Transparent Christina.

   Reply
8. TC says:

   May 1, 2014 at 11:43 pm

   If one were to devise some common core program to excel in the world, one would think that the object would be to take concepts and make them clear and easy to understand. Something like Henry Beck did with the subway map.

   Instead the common core seems to succeed at making simple concepts unintelligible. I believe this to be the root of Mr. C.K.’s comments.

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   • chemtchr says:

     May 2, 2014 at 12:15 am

     How have the paid opinionators like Nazaryan gotten away with obscuring and denying the marketing goal of the Common Core, when there is such a rich, irrefutable record? The crappy stuff afflicting C. K.’s kids in New York is spread over the whole country, not because of “poor implementation”, but because the profit from those “products” is the very foundation of the CCSS.

     I went Googling for the Joanne Weiss quote, so I could tweet it into the @louieck stream, and laughed outloud when the search brought me right back here, to Robert Shepherds piece on April 27!

     Louis C.K. ‏@louisck 6h
     CCSS. It’s a new program. why defend it aS perfect? Why let poor test writers profit and tell parents and teachers they are “wrong”.
     Collapse Reply Retweet Favorited More
     RETWEETS 322 FAVORITES 700
     ThleenJohn ClarkEd HicksJesse BlazekMTEdith Baltazar

     2:36 PM – 1 May 2014 · Details
     ‏@mport84chemtchr 4m
     @louisck “common standards and shared assessments means that education entrepreneurs will enjoy national markets” http://blogs.hbr.org/2011/03/the-innovation-mismatch-smart/ …

     Reply
9. retiredbutmissthekids says:

   May 2, 2014 at 12:06 am

   Watching Letterman now–Louie C.K. DID address “standardized” testing, said his kids are taking days of tests, w/questions such as (gave a comic example of a question–how sad that we have SEEN such comic questions actually ON the tests {Have been seeing them for years giving Pear$on state assessments.}) Audience applauded all of his comments–& loudly. Watch it on On-Demand if you have it (or perhaps it will be posted on YouTube).
   Bravo, Louie–keep up the good work, & get your friends involved, as well!

   Reply
10. maria says:

    May 2, 2014 at 12:17 am

    Louis C K had the last laugh. He took his ire to David Letterman and characterized a test question as; “if you had two goldfish and you got one more goldfish, how many dogs would there be in London?” (If I heard correctly, since I was laughing out loud).

    Reply
11. chemtchr says:

    May 2, 2014 at 12:53 am

    Thanks, Maria – I’m sitting here wondering what’s happening on Letterman. God, I think I have to learn to turn on the TV, and get off ESPN, and subscribe to FX.

    I posted this comment on Newsweek. It’s “waiting for moderation”, where so many of my comments disappear.

    “Mr. Nazaryan, your glaring refusal to acknowledge or discuss the marketing goals of the Common Core drive exposes a transparent lie. You characterize the project as “a necessary idea, poorly executed”, and claim “it attempts to address a fundamental national problem”, without specifying what the idea or the problem are. You pretend the crap C.K.’s kids are enduring is an unfortunate side effect, rather than the inescapable, central intent of the “Standards”.

    Did you somehow miss this explicit account by USDOE Chief of Staff Joanne Weiss, in the Harvard Business Review”? If you want to defend the theory that a national captive market with guaranteed profitability will drive innovation, go ahead. You can’t pretend it was never the intent, when the “innovation” turns out to be a nightmare.

    “But the adoption of common standards and shared assessments means that education entrepreneurs will enjoy national markets where the best products can be taken to scale.”
    http://blogs.hbr.org/2011/03/t…”

    Reply
12. artseagal says:

    May 2, 2014 at 5:11 am

    Magazineything editor.. love it! It is disgraceful this kind of “journalism”. I feel like making my opinions known about good proctology exams so I think I will submit an article to the New England Journal of Medicine. So what if I am not a doctor or in the medical field right? Oh wait, I was a candy striper (equivalent is the Newsweek author’s time in Brooklyn)!

    On another note… just read a conversation with Sara Lawrence Lightfoot in the Harvard Gazette and am wondering if she ought to GET ON BOARD with the “anti reformy” crowd. For once I would like to see some of the academics who involve themselves in issues surrounding public education GET ON BOARD with ending this apartheid period in public education. Diane is one of a handful of academics (Mark Naison, Bill Ayers, Jonothan Kozol, Deborah Meier are a few others that immediately come to mind). Lightfoot is a “decorated Harvard scholar”… she needs to put her money where her mouth is and STAND UP in the here and now… just thinking here… do read…

    http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2014/04/i-have-always-been-temperamentally-wired-to-carry-on/?utm_source=SilverpopMailing&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=05.01.daily%201

    Reply
    • artseagal says:

      May 2, 2014 at 6:43 am

      Oh.. do take a look at a course Lightfoot is teaching connected to public education… just wondering if the realities are really touched upon? Wondering about Lightfoot’s first-hand understanding by actually seeing the daily goings on in the public school classrooms (particularly title one schools)…
      http://www.saralawrencelightfoot.com/current-courses.html

      I am just thinking that importance of those who actually address public education related issues in their courses.. the IMPORTANCE of really knowing the realities.. the old ivory tower vs reality debate I guess…

      Reply
13. Bob Shepherd says:

    May 2, 2014 at 6:02 am

    All adults are required by law to report suspected or confirmed child abuse. As educators, we have a particular responsibility to be alert to the signs of abuse. But what does a child abuser look like? Here are a few tell-tale signs:

    1. The person views difficulties or trials put in the way of children as a good in itself. He or she speaks might speak almost incessantly, for example, of children having the grit to do work that is rigorous (that is, difficult and dull).

    2. The person depersonalizes children. He or she might, for example, reduce the complex of qualities and potentials of a child to a narrowly and invalidly determined single number and may believe that this number not only tells what is important about the child but all that is important. Where the nonabuser puts up children’s art work and compositions, the abuser puts up a data wall—the educational equivalent of the production figures for pork bellies and pig iron continually broadcast by fascist regimes. The person speaks of children, continually, as “inputs” to a labor force or as “products” or “outputs” of schools conceived of as factories. He or she may conceive of education as a competition or a race to the top instead of thinking of it as as realization of potential, as acquisition of abilities for self- and community creation, as participation in a community of learning, or as the great handoff between generations of that which matters, ultimately, to us all and as providing opportunities for children to participate in that significant human activity. The person may, ironically, use the term personalization to refer to testing children continually in order to determine where to plop them down in an inflexible, invariant progression of demotivating activities in a software program. He or she may think it a good idea to replace teachers and the humane interaction that is teaching and learning with machines for teaching and assessment. He or she treats all children as products to be identically milled according to an invariant, inflexible set of “standards” and subjected to identical criteria for acceptance or rejection. If particularly pathological, the person may express extreme lack of concern for the emotional lives of children and say things like, “No one gives a $&#&*$#*&#!!! how you feel.”

    3. The person insists upon absolute command and control over children. The person speaks continually of “accountability,” subjects children to grueling hours of mindless testing and thinly disguised test prep, and adopts teaching strategies, like the ironically named Whole Brain Teaching, that require continual, invariant automaton-like response and little or no reflection or authentic human interaction but that do reduce the possibilities of human interaction to those that reinforce power relations. The person may speak gleefully of extreme measures taken with children, such as putting tape over their mouths, and of actions taken to intimidate children, such as eating a bee in their presence.

    4. The person treats children as profit centers. The person may, for example, draw a fantastically inflated salary as the head of a virtual or brick-and-mortar charter school, thus siphoning off public dollars intended for children. He or she may use such dolalrs to build vast personal wealth in the form of real estate holdings (buildings that he or she purchases and then leases to his or her schools, which pay off those leases with those taxpayer dollars). The person may run a “Learning Company” that spews out invalid standardized testing instruments or a software company that standards to profit enormously by dramatically reducing the teaching force and replacing teachers with machines and with software that dramatically narrows and distorts learning, turning it into graphically sophisticated but educationally vapid Powerpoints or worksheets on a screen.

    5. The person engages, as a primary modus operandi, in extrinsic punishment and reward, which, of course, is demotivating for all cognitive tasks. Instead of helping children to become intrinsically motivated, self-motivated, independent learners, for example, he or she may place emphasis on achieving a good score and not getting a bad one. Instead of viewing learning as its own reward and as building upon children’s innate curiosity, he or she sees it as something difficult and grueling and unpleasant that has to be forced upon the child via the threat of the bad grade, the bad score. The person insists upon stack ranking via invariant, extrinsic punishment and reward systems such as standardized testing, VAM, and letter grading of schools. The person speaks often of gritfulness because grit is necessary if one is to persevere in the face of a steady stream of inherently alienating tasks (see almost any Common Core-related activity or any activity on one of the new national assessments). The person may approve of activities that reduce something inherently motivating like a) reading a good book or b) expressing one’s self in writing to a) picking apart texts to find examples (“evidence”) of randomly chosen techniques or tropes or b) doing formulaic InstaWriting to the Rubric for the Test.

    If you witness any of these behaviors, IMMEDIATELY remove the person exhibiting them from any interaction with or responsibility for children. He or she is a child abuser and should be kept far, far away from any school or from any desk where educational policy is made.

    Reply
    • artseagal says:

      May 2, 2014 at 6:34 am

      my version of signs of a child abuser:

      Reduces education for aims not in children’s benefit – think mass produced tests “for profit” of business

      mandates child developmentally inappropriate tasks through reforms far removed from education professionals

      Puts teachers in classroom who do not have professional requisite experience (aka TFA)

      eliminates physical movement by eliminating PE and recess

      Serves students over processed plastic encased foods heated in microwaves with misleading labels like “reduced sugar”…

      Requires students to complete extensive test prep “homework packets” during a scheduled VACATION period (comes from district departments who have wasted untold amounts of money on salaries of people who actually make these packets to distribute to schools in districts)!

      Requires students to take endless batteries of tests as pseudo “assessments” but THERE ARE NO ASSESSMENTS just SCORES… no help for students in areas of weakness possible.

      Emotional abuse… badgering over useless test score results

      Forces teachers to TARGET specific students for data purposes involved with (not education) but TEACHER EVALUATIONS.. yes this is child abuse … creates apartheid classroom for purposes other than student learning…

      Reply
14. Allison says:

    May 2, 2014 at 6:37 am

    It’s so sad today in journalism that to get to the truth you have to bypass the article and read the comments.

    Reply
    • Hannah says:

      May 2, 2014 at 7:21 am

      Although it is “sad,” this comment struck a chord in my “humorous” bone!

      Reply
15. Bob Shepherd says:

    May 2, 2014 at 7:26 am

    I left the following comment on the Newsweek page. A moment or two later, they had deleted it. I reposted it again. Waiting to see if they will delete it again.

    I laugh a bitter laugh every time I hear someone refer to the Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic] as “higher.” These were hacked together by amateurs, overnight, without any professional vetting. They were paid for by plutocrats who wanted one national bullet list to tag their educational software and assessments to. The ELA “standards” are backward, hackneyed, unimaginative, often prescientific, and dramatically distorting of both curricula and pedagogy. And one could drive whole curricula through their lacunae. Learning involves acquisition of both world knowledge (knowledge of what) and procedural knowledge (knowledge of how). The Common Core in ELA contains ALMOST NONE of the former and expresses the latter so vaguely that, not being concrete or operationalized, they cannot be validly tested, and so the new tests being put together based on the Core are completely invalid. The lead author of these “standards” had absolutely ZERO relevant experience. The authors hacked these together based on a quick review of the lowest-common-denominator groupthink of the state standards that preceded them. Educational publishers are now taking these amateurish, puerile “standards” as a de facto curriculum, producing texts filled with activities that model the egregiously narrowed activities on the new Common Core College and Career Reading Assessment Program (C.C.C.C.R.A.P.) tests. Basically, these “standards” have turned K-12 education in the U.S. into low-level test prep. The “standards” are invariant. Kids are not. These “standards” belong to an extrinsic punishment and reward theory of education that is entirely discredited, for extrinsic punishment and reward is inherently demotivating for cognitive tasks. The “standards” are the product of a takeover of U.S. education by know-nothing plutocrats and business people and politicians who have decided to micromanage U.S. education based on dangerous, backward ideas, and these “standards” will have, are having, precisely the opposite of their intended effect. However, they are making and will make a lot of money for a few software vendors and testing companies. This piece by Nazaryan is clueless. Teachers oppose these “standards” not because they fear being held accountable but because the “standards” themselves are very, very badly conceived and are doing enormous damage, every day, in classrooms around the United States.

    Reply
    • Bob Shepherd says:

      May 2, 2014 at 7:35 am

      So, I keep reposting this, and Newsweek keeps deleting it. Interestingly, the other comments on the piece are as negative as mine. Many say that Nazaryan hasn’t a clue what he is talking about. But my piece they take special umbrage to. Any ideas as to why that might be the case?

      Reply
      • dianeravitch says:

        May 2, 2014 at 7:38 am

        Well, Bob, I think they don’t want their readers to see what you wrote. Can you think of another explanation?

      • Bob Shepherd says:

        May 2, 2014 at 7:39 am

        That is clear enough. I must have struck a chord or two. LOL

      • Mom from District 2 says:

        May 2, 2014 at 8:44 am

        Most of the other commenters are speaking from a more “regular guy/gal” POV. You sound like an expert.

      • Duane Swacker says:

        May 2, 2014 at 11:09 am

        MfD2,

        BS (maybe that would be better as RS) sounds like a true expert because he is!

16. Titleonetexasteacher says:

    May 2, 2014 at 8:34 am

    I enjoyed reading ten minutes worth of negative comments on the Newsweek article, followed by *one* positive one. The “journalist” was probably floored.

    We are lapping the privatization movement people!!!!

    Reply
17. sharsand2013 says:

    May 5, 2014 at 9:05 pm

    You need to check out to the new owners of Newsweek to know that nothing should surprise you. They are now owned by a religious cult with an agenda.

    Reply
18. gfrblxt says:

    May 7, 2014 at 12:54 pm

    What do any of these comments have to do with the book?

    Reply
19. Robert D. Skeels * rdsathene says:

    May 7, 2014 at 3:17 pm

    I’m very excited that Haymarket Books has released Jose Vilson’s book. I’m looking forward to reading it. I’ve been reading a lot of works focused on Intersectionality lately, and have heard this book focuses on that important perspective.

    I’m equally surprised that while I found this post via Jose Vilson’s tweet: https://twitter.com/TheJLV/status/463489159769096192 , that a more conservative, pro-CCSS element on Twitter is attacking Professor Ravitch for the brevity of her post above. While I agree that more attention should have been paid to the book, the accusations being made are seemingly unfounded and unfair.

    Reply
    • Bill Fitzgerald (@funnymonkey) says:

      May 7, 2014 at 8:17 pm

      Hello,

      Like many people, I’m really glad to see Vilson’s book out. It’s a great read; I have read it, and I strongly recommend that people buy it, read it, set it down for a few weeks, and then read it again.

      However, the false equivalency of “a more conservative, pro-CCSS element on Twitter is attacking” isn’t accurate. People can be pro (or anti) CCSS without being conservative. People can want to see a more substantive review of a great book *regardless* of where they stand on the political spectrum, *regardless* of where they stand on CCSS.

      And disagreements aren’t all attacks. We can all learn from healthy disagreements. People with shared goals shouldn’t need to walk in lockstep.

      Reply