Conservatives who support the Common Core like to blame Obama for making it radioactive. They say that if he and Arne had stayed out, CC would have been non-controversial. Their involvement awakened the Tea Party and others who reflexively dismiss whatever Obama is for.
Peter Greene says balderdash.
“It’s Obama’s fault.
“The state-led initiative was chugging right along, moving forward without any interference from the feds, when somehow, they decided to leap in. Or as Kentucky Education Commissioner Terry Holliday recently put it, things were fine “until the President and secretary of education took credit for the Common Core.”This is part of the current conservative CCSS support narrative (you can find put forth by, among others, the boys over at the Fordham). The story goes something like this:
Once upon a time, some noble governors and dedicated corporate guys got together and created the Common Core, and people pretty much thought it was swell. Then the Obama administration tried to get involved with cheerleading and with Racing to the Top and NCLB waivers. This was a Bad Thing because it woke up the Tea Party folks, who began shrieking about federal over-reach. People who wouldn’t have cared one way or another suddenly were against it because Obama was for it and whatever he’s doing, it must be evil. If the feds had just stayed home and tended to their knitting, we would not be having all this CCSS fracasization……….
Even if we pretend that the feds weren’t involved from day one, even if we pretend that the feds haven’t been angling for this for several administrations, even if we pretend that the Obama administration wasn’t sponsoring slumber parties and buying the refreshments for CCSS-writing parties, the feds must still take responsibility for the prime motivator for the whole mess.
States were not open to CCSS because of some burning desire to revamp their education systems. They were all sitting on the ticking time bomb that was (actually, is) No Child Left Behind, otherwise known as ESEA, otherwise known as federal law. The feds were always involved. Always….
“For Pearson et al, CCSS represent a marketing opportunity sent from heaven. CCSS opened up the US education market faster and more completely than a velociraptor fileting a sleepy cow. To open a national market, they needed national standards, not the state-by-state patchwork of the past. They were always going to use every tool at their disposal to make this happen across the entire country, and that toolbox includes the federal government….
“Who can seriously argue that all the states were going to say, “Yeah, we should totally implement this untested set of standards, sight unseen. Especially since they come with a huge price tag. Yes, let’s do it.” Particularly states that had perfectly good standards already. “Now that we’ve paid off this beautiful Lexus, let’s junk it and get a Yugo for twice the cost,” said no car owner ever,
“No, a wave of bribery (Race to the Top) was needed to get the ball rolling. Or do you seriously want to suggest that states would have raced toward the Core for free. And when states wouldn’t fall in line for the bribe, we moved on to the extortion– “I’d hate to see anything happen to your state just because of some crazy No Child Left Behind law; you should really consider getting our special protection waiver plan.”
“Selling CCSS required a federal-sized stick and a DC calibre stick. States do not generally volunteer for massive unfunded mandates. Only a federal-sized sales job would do, even if it had to be carefully calibrated to avoid looking illegal….
“So say what you like. It’s impossible for the administration to have avoided involvement in CCSS. And if by some miracle it had kept its hands off, CCSS would now be an interesting experimental set of standards being tried out in four or five states, maybe. It’s true that Obama didn’t do CCSS any favors, but it would have died on the vine without him.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Did you mean, “It wouldn’t have died on the vine without
him?” Love you and your work so much, Diane. I found you through
Teacher Tom back when that lovely lady was running out in Seattle.
I live in Ontario, and read all your posts every day. Just amazed
by what you do. Thank you!
It would have been adopted by four or five states without the federal pressure, bribes, lures. That would have been a good thing. If it is great, other states would have copied it.
Yes.
That is how a true market works. Not the fixed market it seems we got.
Question: I read that RttT only required college and career ready standards, not CCSS. Can you expound on that and/ or do you know of any states who got RttT with a different set of college and career ready standards?
Joanna, RTTT did not require CCSS. It required “college and career ready standards.” The only ones around were CCSS.
That was just a way of circumventing federal law. The DoE could not come out and say that states were required to adopt CCSS because that would have been too blatantly federal over-reach. So, they couched the demand in euphemisms, such as by requiring that states adopt “common standards” that promote “college and career readiness.” The ONLY “common standards” in existence which promoted that were the Common Core.
I am pretty sure that all of the RttT states adopted the CCSS. Similar language on college and career ready standards was included in the ESEA waiver process and there have been states that qualified using the alternative of having their higher education institutions sign off on the academic standards. Virginia and Minnesota would be two.
Diane, Some states had those already, so the real “gotcha” was by requiring the “college and career ready standards” that states adopted were “common standards,” since the CCSS were the only “common” ones around.
common to whom? Did they define “common” in the criteria?
NC was already in the process of creating standards, and according to our state sup the CCSS were so similar that it made pragmatic and economic sense to just adopt them. (That is how she explains it).
Assessment is a huge part of RTTT and they required that each RTTT state join a consortium of states for the development of standards-based assessments. Here is their definition of a “common set of college and career ready standards”:
“Common set of college- and career-ready standards means a set of academic content standards for grades K-12 that (a) define what a student must know and be able to do at each grade level; (b) if mastered, would ensure that the student is college- and career-ready (as defined above) by the time of high school graduation; and (c) are substantially identical across all States in a consortium. A State may supplement the common set of college- and career-ready standards with additional content standards, provided that the additional standards do not comprise more than 15 percent of the State’s total standards for that content area.” (p. 9)
Click to access annual-performance-report.pdf
“common to whom? Did they define “common” in the criteria?”
Exactly Joanna! Who owns the definition of the term “College and Career Ready”? Every state essentially had College and Career Ready Standards in place already, as we know people have been graduating High School and going on to College and Career for decades. I myself am College and Career Ready as defined by me. So why couldn’t a State just use it’s own standards, right? But they meant every state must have College and Career Ready Standards as defined by… who? According to what entity? Now that states are pulling out and making their own Standards (like Indiana) – who judges them to make sure they are College and Career acceptable? What body?
“College- and career-ready (or readiness) means, with respect to a student, that the student is prepared for success, without remediation, in credit-bearing entry-level courses in an Institution of Higher Education (as defined in section 101(a) of the Higher Education Act), as demonstrated by an assessment score that meets or exceeds the achievement standard (as defined in this notice) for the final high school summative assessment in mathematics or English language arts.” (p. 9) Ibid
What is often omitted from the discussion about the quality of state standards prior to CCSS, which Obama and Duncan should have known very well since it applied to their home state, is that even in locations where the state standards were very broad, as in Illinois, this was because individual districts had the freedom to develop their own, more detailed standards. In my professional opinion, district standards were often very good, including in Chicago. Obama and Duncan should have kept their hands off and respected home rule.
That’s the bad joke about the potential of standards to make a huge difference for students, especially for children in poverty, It’s ridiculous to think that it is enough to just raise the bar for kids who couldn’t get over a lower bar in the first place. The Chicago standards were excellent, but they did little, if anything, for low income children struggling with the basics, because not much was done to help them find success.
The only additional remediation given was tutoring from outside opportunists and profiteers who were not necessarily qualified to provide it. (It makes one wonder if the ideas for many of the tactics used today to profit off public education dollars were hatched then.)
Under NCLB, an entire Supplemental Education Services industry was spawned and virtually anyone could capitalize on the distribution of free tax dollars to provide tutoring services. There have been a lot of stories in the news about the many fraudsters involved, like these two scammers who got “$33 million in federal taxpayer money,” padded invoices and provided low quality services to students in Chicago and the suburbs:
:
“Local schools face tutor scam questions, too”
http://newssun.suntimes.com/opinions/27277149-474/local-schools-face-tutor-scam-questions-too.html#.U4XM1_nKtJY
It’s kind of like the Girl Scouts hoping merit badges will help girls in developing countries. Maybe it can be part of the equation, but certainly not the only factors.
Indeed, these new “standards” were hacked together by amateurs, overnight, based on the lowest-common-denominator groupthink of the previously existing state “standards.” GIGO.
GIGO?
Help me out Bob!
garbage in, garbage out
Ah, I should have figured that one out. I usually use CICO.
Senor Swacker—I don’t even need to go to the Spanish interpreter for that one and it really is in Spanish, now isn’t it (part of it). 🙂
TAGO
GIGO
excelsior!
Don Duane Swacker, Hidalgo, you haven’t posted, yet, on this page, Mr. Wilson’s entire corpus of writing, from birth on. Slacker! Best to you, my brother from another mother.
Bob. . .don’t remind him.
We all have it memorized by now (although I do get a good chuckle every time I see it).
Me, too. I am not complaining. And I think it worthwhile to wade through Wilson, though, Duane, I do wish that you would start linking to Wilson instead of quoting the entire thing. Wilson formulates his ideas very, very poorly at times, leading to confusion about what he is saying, but his general critique of the pitfalls of assessment is a profound one and, interestingly, has deep resonances with ideas put forward by that another profound thinker but sloppy writer, Martin Heidegger.
It would be fun to do that Wilson text in a seminar or reading group with a bunch of folks from this blog, preferably one conducted around a campfire somewhere. There are profound ideas there, ones that rock foundations.
And so I understand, fully, Duane’s enthusiasm, though the discussions of the Wilson, on this blog, tend to get off onto tangential matters related to Wilson’s often poor phrasing.
I can see it now. . .Duane is busy writing something of work and he hits command V and there’s Wilson. Oh darn. . .I forgot that was the last thing I copied and pasted. And then he has to go copy it again. I’ll betcha he never uses his paste function just so Wilson will be ready for the paste!
lol
He could program it as a macro for a function key. Command-Shift-Alt-W or something.
I don’t know what TAGO is
Tralfamadorian Airfuels Generation Oversight
You will remember that according to Kurt Vonnegut, who is in heaven now, the universe ends with a mistake that occurs with a Tralfamadorian test of a new rocket fuel.
Oversight, BTW, is one of those weird words, like cleave, sanction, and inflammable, that is its own antonym, an auto-antonym or contranym.
OK, Jen. I was just pulling your leg. Best listen to Best on that one.
Jen,
some say it means “that’s a good one,” but I understand it as a high five among regulars on Dr. Ravitch’s blog.
Thank you Joanna. I gathered that from the context but I wasn’t sure if it was an acronym! Got it
Whether we like it or not built into the DNA of American schooling is local control of schools and a subject-centered curriculum. Any reform that wanders too far from that DNA steps on the third rail of American schooling — which Duncan and some state legislative bodies have done: remember the modern math debacle of the 70’s/80’s. The entire federal effort, beginning with NCLB, has been an effort to violate the DNA of American schooling. Even the testing component, which was largely overlooked at first, is slowly becoming a target of local school districts who have had enough of the federal government, Pearson, etc. pushing their agendas in what they consider to be their local instructional world.When you staff our educational departments with individuals with little knowledge of schooling, curriculum, instruction, or experience in the classroom you could see the train wreck coming.
What about local people being tied in with the testing regime? I have heard of at least one county requiring even more assessments that the state does in math, and the central office lady making the call sits on a board for the company who makes the curriculum/assessments. How is it that nobody is noticing this? Is this sort of thing happening in other places?
Check for legislation regarding conflicts of interest in your area, which should be applicable in cases like this. Then file a complaint and cite the regulation that is being violated.
another great piece by Peter!
one thing though. Bribery is too weak a word for what Duncan did with RttT (how very appropropriate that this mediocrity was foisted on the country via a a program named by a cliched sports metaphor). Blackmail is more like it.
Amen to that. I am so tired of Obama being blamed for all these woes. This became an issue during NCLB when all students were supposed to be “caught up” by 2014. That didn’t work, so let’s try another ridiculous plan and not fund it. So tired of figureheads making decisions when they have no idea if what’s involved then blaming others for their plan.
The Obomber should be blamed. How the hell does a POTUS pick someone like the Duncster to be the Secretary of Education? That alone should be enough for you to realize he is to blame, he’s a neo-liveral through and through.
The Obama administration has worked assiduously to make CCSS happen, and it has used authoritarian tactics. Obama and Duncan are completely culpable here. Duncan will become known, in time, as the Robert McNamara of U.S. Education. His name will live in infamy because of the standards-and-summative-standardized-testing engine that he has fired up again and rolled over our nation’s children.
Some people in the Republican Party are starting to figure out how very, very strong the opposition to this Ed Deform is in the country, and if that party gets its act together on this, and if the Democrats do not have a Saul on the road to Damascus moment about Ed Deform, they will lose EVERYTHING in the elections over the next few years. The moment the political operatives figure out the actual strength of the anti-CCSS, anti-standardized testing feeling in the country, any politicians who supports this crap will be toast.
I think you are right Bob. Egg on the face around the corner.
For Republicans, CCSS federalism only plays well for a small group of small government types. Talking in the other ear is the Chamber looking to profit from CCSS and the destruction of schools. Crisis has opportunity goofiness.
Parents are the key.
YUP
You mean that schools have “un-funded or under funded” mandate? An people wonder why schools keep asking for more money. Every mandate that is required must be funded whether it is from a federal, state or local level.
This is a timely post for where my mind is this morning. I keep going to my state dept of Ed and re-reading the description of all the changes that came in 2012, trying to see if I can calmly embrace it. As of yet (after five close readings this morning), I still cannot. I see some points that are good—but a work in progress nonetheless. And maybe that is the problem: any initiative that puts forth the notion that soon our work will be done cannot hold water. Our work will never be done. Education is a process. Heck, life is a process. So those who smugly or even graciously (such as our state superintendent—you will never meet a more gentile person) assert the enthusiasm of initiatives tied to or given impetus or fuel by Race to the Top funds and/or (and worse yet) mindset smacks of either unbelievable conceit (we have it! We solved the education problem), blindness (we never had it right until now, but now we do! Yay us!), or a bought and paid for cargo load that is going to sink the boat.
So I will keep reading my state’s dept of Ed info today and I will hope I see something new in it, particularly if I try to imagine these self-proclaimed promising solutions without the embrace and coercion of the DOE.
Here I go.
I am thinking of that song, I think it’s the Pretenders: “it’s never enough until your heart starts singing.” My heart has not been singing about much of the reform I see. It’s not enough. Or it’s too much. Or something. Not sure what yet.
Are we on the right track?
Hell NO!
Joanna Best: I read your comments never knowing whether I will find myself in agreement or disagreement—that’s part of the fun.
😃
But on this day when we mourn the passing of Maya Angelou, I remind you to confound the self-styled “education reformers” and their educrat enablers and edubully enforcers by doing something that violates every jot and tittle of their Common Core Standardized Souls—
Let your heart keep singing. Sad songs. Happy Songs. Sad laments of defeats and triumphant shouts of victory and rhythmic shouts of joy and thanksgiving.
And don’t even think of leaving out the more tentative notes of uncertainty and doubt.
[start quote]
Who You Really Are
“If a human being dreams a great dream, dares to love somebody; if a human being dares to be Martin King, or Mahatma Gandhi, or Mother Theresa, or Malcolm X; if a human being dares to be bigger than the condition into which she or he was born—it means so can you. And so you can try to stretch, stretch, stretch yourself so you can internalize, ‘Homo sum, humani nil a me alienum puto. I am a human being, nothing human can be alien to me.’ That’s one thing I’m learning.” — Dr. Maya Angelou
[end quote]
Link: http://www.oprah.com/own-master-class/Maya-Angelous-Master-Class-Quotes
And your songs? Let them be those of others and of yourself, sung in your own way at your own time as it strikes your fancy.
You are not a data point on a bullet-list. And by being yourself, you will be every rheephormista’s worst nightmare.
😎
I don’t have a lot of sympathy for President Obama on this one. He’s surrounded himself with people who preach accountability to teachers, principals and public school districts but never accept any themselves.
Of course it’s President Obama’s fault! If it isn’t his fault it must be the fault of governors, who will then pass it down to state education chiefs, who will then pass it down to school districts and then to principals and teachers.
There’s already a list of excuses and the kids are just now taking the tests. Let’s see, “moms” are the problem, and “special interests” and the old reliable “unions” and “The Tea Party”.
What is different about the Common Core? What changed? Why won’t it be like NCLB, where we were told an over-reliance on testing is the fault of districts, principals and teachers because the designers of the system didn’t intend it to be used that way?
Have we seen any accountability at the top for faulty systems design in ed reform over the last 20 years? I haven’t. It’s always a “few bad apples” at the bottom.
Obama is the windup toy here. He is carrying out others’ orders.
When David Coleman talks about the CC$$, he always speaks of a few general “instructional shifts.” And when the defenders of the CC$$ do their PR number, they do the same.
But the CC$$ is not these. It’s a specific list of items. And in ELA, most of those items are indefensible.
They are backward, unimaginative, uninspiring, hackneyed,often prescientific, and extraordinarily poorly formulated, often completely misconceived by treating as explicit learning that which is done actually via implicit acquisition or describing a skill so vaguely and generally that it cannot possibly be validly tested, though this is supposed to be a list of items to be measured.
Other problems are a) that MUCH of learning in ELA is learning of world knowledge (knowledge of what) as well as that procedural knowledge (knowledge of how), and yet ALMOST NONE of such world knowledge is covered and b) that one could drive whole ELA curricula through the lacunae in these “standards.”
Add to that the fact that this list is being taken by publishers AS THE CURRICULUM and is leading to really dramatic distortions of curricula and pedagogy.
Add the additional fact that there is NO ONE WAY for all to become capable readers, writers, speakers, listeners, researchers, media consumers, and thinkers and that an invariant list does not accord with this rich diversity.
And add to the fact that kids differ dramatically and do not need to be identically milled the extremely important fact that they are on dramatically different schedules for their development, especially in the early years, something the invariant CCSS in ELA does not take into account, which makes for a lot of damage being done to the youngest of our children.
Add to that the many actual howlers in the list of “standards”–the many places where the “standards” authors got things wildly wrong.
Oh, and did I say that it was hackneyed and unimaginative and uninspiring? Yes, I did. But this bears repeating. Almost anyone could come up with more important, more imaginative, more inspiring alternatives to almost anything on this national prescription for our teaching and measurement.
And now let’s talk specifics about what the list gets wrong about teaching and learning of grammar, vocabulary, writing, and literature. Do you have from now until doomsday?
The fact is that I agree, with reservations, with most of those general “instructional shifts,” as general guidelines for education in ELA, though for the most part THEY ARE NOT SHIFTS AT ALL. They are simply truisms that reflect what, for the most part, we have always done, and to the extent that they are not such truisms and so unnecessary, they are wrong-headed, because actual practice has always been wiser than these outsiders who created the CCSS have any notion that it was. However, the ways in which those guidelines are being understood and implemented are incredibly wrong headed and fly in the face of what good teachers of English know to be their best practice, again creating dramatic narrowing and distortion of curricula and pedagogy.
So, those non-shift shifts are defensible, with qualifications (big qualifications), but the specific list of “standards” is completely indefensible and there has never been any discussion of those because the guys who paid for this list wanted it adopted NOW. They were in a hurry and didn’t want any real vetting process–any process by which the learned community of scholars and researchers and classroom practitioners and curriculum developers could explain the innumerable problems with the formulations on that list. Which points to another problem: Is it not better to draw, continually, on that community and evolve a complex ecology of approaches in accordance with our best ideas, as they develop, rather than to write all of this is stone? Of course it is. This may come as a surprise to David Coleman, but that community AS A WHOLE is smarter than he is. Ecologies are healthier, by far, by far, than are monocultures.
So, why do we have the specific list? Why didn’t the NGA/CCSSO issue those “instructional shifts” as general guidelines instead of issuing the specific list? Wouldn’t doing that, clearly, have allowed for the degrees of freedom within which real curricular and pedagogical innovation could occur? Isn’t that what Bill talks about all the time–innovation? Why the BLATANT CONTRADICTION, there? Why wouldn’t it be OBVIOUS that centralization and regimentation are not the means by which you get innovation? Why the 1,600-item national Powerpoint bullet list for education? Because the folks who paid to have these “standards” created had a goal in mind, and that goal had NOTHING to do with better educating our children so that they can outgrit the Singaporeans in their Education as Stairmastery. They didn’t actually think that crap, which is so obviously ridiculous; that’s just the line that they sold to not-so-bright politicians with no education experience. Their haste and heedlessness and the form that their product took (the bullet list) had EVERYTHING to do with their desire to have a single national list to tag software and assessments to. In other words, we got the “standards” we have because those guys had a business plan for establishing monopolies in educational materials as we transition from print to digital delivery.
And so far, those folks, the ones who stand to make many billions from having this invariant national list have spent more than a billion dollars on PR to implement it, working from the top-down. And by working from the top down, through the political/regulatory system and via top-level administrators bought specifically for this purpose, they have cut out actual educators and have created, across the nation, A REIGN OF TERROR AS WELL AS OF ERROR, so that teachers and administrators are AFRAID TO SPEAK OUT for fear of losing their jobs and consultants and educational materials developers, including hundreds of thousands of editors and writers of instructional materials, are AFRAID TO SPEAK OUT for fear of not getting contracts or jobs.
And all of this is predicated on an incredibly backward, unscientific extrinsic punishment and reward model of education driven by summative standardized testing that is punative and invalid and demotivating for cognitive tasks, as our science and our experience (long, sad experience with NCLB) both CLEARLY SHOW.
Put a stake in it.
quite a few typos in my hastily written note, above. My apologies. Here, a corrected opening:
When David Coleman talks about the CC$$, he always speaks of a few general “instructional shifts.” And when the defenders of the CC$$ do their PR number, they do the same.
But the CC$$ are not JUST those shifts. They are a specific list of items. And in ELA, most of those items are indefensible.
They are backward, unimaginative, uninspiring, hackneyed,often prescientific, and extraordinarily poorly formulated. They often completely misconceive specific attainment in ELA by treating as explicit learning that which is done actually via implicit acquisition. They TYPICALLY formulate skills so vaguely and generally that those skills cannot possibly be validly tested based on those formulations, though this is supposed to be a list of items to be measured.
I have gone back and read speeches by the governors in NC from eighties and nineties (Hunt and Martin), and as both pushed for more teacher support, they continuously would mention working towards more accountability (particularly Hunt). So I wonder, did he really think that? Or was that what just seemed like the right (but seemingly nebulous)thing to say to garner support? That is, to use Peter’s analogy, were they creating an inevitable thorny issue out of the bunny by dropping that caveat in the conversation every time they made a gain for education? If so, then we are paying the price they signed us up for, I suppose. This is what my generation of teachers and students gets so that the previous one could have a higher check?
And more importantly, where do we go from here?
Peter Greene nailed it. Try getting into a pegagogical discussion on the Common Core with the Tea Party set. They glass over and all they focus on is some sort of grand conspiracy. Case in point, Diane took a lot of heat last week over her Glen Beck post. He is leading the charge of lemmings off the cliff on this one.
One can’t have a pedagogical discussion with any of the deformers, either. They also glass over. They don’t want a discussion. They want obedience.
Just tell them CCSS is big gubbermint.
I’d like to see some accountability in the Department of Ed before I get any more lectures on how students are coddled and lazy and teachers can’t be trusted and parents are ill-informed.
Why haven’t they regulated for-profit colleges? Why has that responsibility fallen to state AGs?
Why haven’t they regulated student loan servicers? Why has that responsibility fallen to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau?
Why is there never any mention that state after state has cut education funding WHILE all of these reforms are going in? Will schools be blamed if they prioritize funding to comply with the mandates and cut programs and services that are not mandated? How is that fair or a “partnership”?
good points all.
What if we didn’t have a new regulatory agency to do their job for them? They have been promising to regulate student loan servicers since 2003. Why wasn’t it done?
“All were victims of what the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau calls “auto-defaults,” or the largely legal practice of immediately declaring borrowers’ private student loans in default after the death or bankruptcy of a loan co-signer.
Since an April report by the CFPB highlighted the troubling practice, the financial services industry has spent four weeks on the defensive, arguing that borrowers who face the demands are often delinquent on their debts, or are just out of college and thus unable to shoulder the burden. What’s more, they argue, borrowers should’ve known they could face auto-defaults because it’s detailed in their loan contracts.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/21/sallie-mae-death-default_n_5360905.html
The AFT just released a video in which, they report, “In 2012, Wall St. raked in 10% of the total amount spent on higher education, in America.”
Loan servicing was included in the number, and therein, lies the answer to the rhetorical question, “why”.
If you’re not going to regulate student loans, maybe you shouldn’t be pushing them as official policy?
Are they an agency who gives advice or a regulator?
Didn’t we just go thru this with mortgage lenders? We were all going to be part of the “ownership society” and the DC people were all pushing mortgages, including President Bush.
They have to choose. They shouldn’t be selling product if they’re not going to regulate. Are they a federally-subsidized debt sales force or a public agency?
Remember that the interest on student loans is going to Duncan to spend as he sees fit: fund TFA, promote charters, use bad syntax. (I don’t think the man can match an antecedent in any incomplete thought he utters.)
What confuses me to no end is that the Republicans, at least in my neck of the woods, spend their entire careers harping on “local control,” and yet have embraced CC as the most wonderful thing in the universe, and that anyone who opposes it for any reason is a conspiracy theory-believing, tin-foil hat-wearing nutcase.
I know it’s because of the money involved, but it still confuses me.
Some people really do believe it levels the playing field in public school; and if you do get one of the proverbial “bad” teachers, some parents tell me, that at least with CCSS they know everyone is doing the same thing. I get a little confused by some of its supporters too even where no money is involved. Different perspectives yield different opinions. . .but these opinions should have been factored in during its development, not after its copyright (I understand it is copyrighted as in cannot be tweaked (which I don’t understand), but know very little about that—would like to know more). Even in music, if I need to adjust a piece so that it will work for my students, I do so. . .and I just put in the program by Beethoven, arranged by Best. (of course his stuff is public domain now. . .I guess we have to wait until 75 years after Coleman dies to rewrite the parts we need rewritten on CCSS???)
It’s not Coleman who owns the copyright on the CCSS; it’s the National Governor’s Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers. Good luck waiting for them to die off.
AND they claim no liability for damages whatsoever:
http://www.corestandards.org/public-license/
So does the copyright mean it can’t be cut and pasted into other approaches or does it mean it cannot be altered? I don’t understand how a copyright can dictate use, other than not plagiarizing or reproducing or selling or taking credit for.
One cannot copyright an IDEA. What one cannot do is use their name or its variants or, I suppose, a large portion of the “standards” in the form that they gave them, verbatim, without following their rules of use.
Now, according to the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and Doublethink Tank, “a group of foundations” has funded an organization that is going to vet educational materials for compliance with the Common Core–an educational materials Thought Police that will issue its imprimatur:
Nihil Obstat. The Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth.
It’s bizarre, totally bizarre. ALEC, the Business Roundtable, the Heritage Foundation, Brookings, the Chamber of Commerce–these organizations are always the FIRST to SCREAM when someone tries to implement a new centralized, authoritarian, government-sponsored regulatory command-and-control authority.
And yet that is just what they are supporting FOR EDUCATION–for that sector of our activity THAT DEALS IN IDEAS.
Centralized command and control.
BIZARRE.
As I say, a lot of Republicans are starting to figure out the disconnect there, and a LOT MORE are starting to figure out how very, very strong the anti-Ed-Deform feeling is in the country. This feeling will be THE POLITICAL ISSUE in the coming elections.
If the Republicans get their act together and make opposition to the Common Coring of the United States their platform in election after election, they will win it all. If the Dems don’t have a Saul on the road to Damascus moment about Ed Deform, they are toast.
I could write the election-winning anti-Common Coring commercials right now. Doing that will be child’s play.
It won’t take long before the political operatives figure this out. This issue is a powderkeg. The country is sick to death of teacher bashing and letter grading of schools and venal plutocratic monopolists and MOST OF ALL of standardized testing.
Remember how Johnson won it all with the Daisy ad? George Bush, Sr., with the Willie Horton ad?
Ed Deform. It’s what the country now most loves to hate. And the smarter politicians and political operatives are beginning to figure that out. Even within their echo chambers, they are starting to notice that the villagers are gathering their pitchforks and shovels and preparing to track the Ed Deform monster to its lair.
Sorry about mixing my metaphors up a bit there, but hey, Shakespeare did that all the time.
It will be SO SO easy to tap into that latent anti-Common Coring of America feeling around the country. There are two kinds of ordinary citizens with regard to this: there are the ones who HATE the Common Core and the testing, and there are the ones who haven’t noticed either yet but will HATE this stuff readily enough. As I say, the political commercials would be a PIECE OF CAKE to write.
Want applause from that audience? What them to leave that rally REALLY fired up?
Give an impassioned speech against abusing people’s kids with standardized tests and about harrying their teachers and allowing politicians to tell them what and how to teach.
Easy.
Bob, Do it and post the commercials on YouTube!
Samuel Johnson said,
“No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.”
–Boswell, Life of Johnson
But I might be persuaded to produce those pieces for another reason altogether:
“When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art.’ I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.”
–George Orwell, Why I Write
These are great observations but there are a few reasons why I don’t believe common core will be the biggest issue.
Tom Corbett is standing on the gang-plank because, for the first time in years, Pennsylvanians are ranking education — the shutting and meager funding of their schools — as a more important issue than the economy. The people of THE swing state are smarter than falling for any CCSS rhetoric when they know the funding has been overtly slashed for American public schools. Following that race closely, as a predictor for what may follow in other purple states… As for the republican message in the blue states, the only platform messages that are sexy enough to become conversation is the economy and cutting taxes.
I’ve felt for a long time that the endgame of cancervative groups you mentioned via the scores/accountability/standards regime is to effectively crush the teachers’ unions. Therefore, the most logical and effective approach is to continue implementing the most rigorous standards as possible in order to justify control over the occupation.
The test questions might change but the culture of oppression won’t. I don’t think they can risk shouting “overhaul the testing culture” without candidates losing major donors. Remember, there has to be an excuse for public schools to be failures and NOT NECESSARILY A NEED TO PROVE THAT CHARTER SCHOOLS ARE SUCCESSFUL.
(You are right about the dem’s opportunity to gain traction in changing the conversation around charters’ supposed success aka Ed Deform.)
Then there is the lot who will obediently shout along with the “More Grit!” cheer. For, if you don’t succeed it’s your own fault and you’ll grow up to be a taker. I don’t expect many conservative voters will carry the “testing is abuse” torch, either. I read a recent poll that Republicans are around 25% (maybe even 30%??) more likely to NOT intervene when their child is being disciplined by another adult. They are more likely to support authoritarian and what others would call “abusive” environments for their children, it seems.
It’s not just about money, it’s about power and ideology, too. Those are many of the same people who tout “choice,” want charters, want vouchers for church schools, seek to dismantle public education, and also want to deny women the choice to have abortions. Power over the masses and ideology often trump local control for them.
Interesting point. Advocates of choice (Jeb Bush, for example), don’t want choice when it comes to standards. How is this any different than the argument against monopolistic schools?
It’s monopolistic standards. Monopolistic summative assessments. Since my state (Michigan) accepted an NCLB waiver, we are locked into CCSS. That was the most important condition of getting the waiver. And tracking back to Peter Greene’s original post, that can be attributable to the Obama administration.
I’d like some accountability on this:
http://www.ohio.com/news/local/ohio-s-charter-school-dropouts-soar-push-state-in-opposite-direction-of-u-s-1.490893#.U4R6BiYHPTQ.twitter
Do Ohio’s public schools do a better job with kids who are at risk of dropping out than outsourcing that job to a for-profit chain?
If they do, in the interest of “science” and all, shouldn’t we look at that? Because that has two parts. Were public schools unfairly demonized for drop outs, now that we know outsourcing brings worse results? “Accountability” works both ways, or it doesn’t work. Public schools were very publicly trashed, repeatedly, and there was a political motive behind that. Shouldn’t ed reform ideas also be publicly criticized and public schools be given some credit for doing a better job than the conventional wisdom has directed us to believe?
I think I’d fall off my chair if I heard Duncan admit public schools were doing better in one area than his preferred “free market” solutions. I will NEVER hear that. Why not? Why do we only use data to push in one direction? That’s not science. It’s ideology and politics.
I also find the cheerleading of ed reformers around public schools taking these tests really disingenuous.
I don’t think they’re credible when they spent 6 years of the Obama Administration bashing public schools to push one or another political agenda and then turn on a dime for the brief period it takes to put in the CC tests.
All of a sudden our uniformly inept and “failing” public schools are rocket scientists when it comes to putting in a new test. Once the tests are in they’ll go back to their objective, which is using public schools as a political punching to expand charter schools and vouchers. I don’t think they’re credible on “improving” public schools. They don’t value public schools. I don’t find this brief period of interest in existing public schools convincing.
RIP, Maya Angelou, April 4, 1928 – May 28, 2014
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/10/22/top-authors-including-maya-angelou-urge-obama-to-curb-standardized-testing/
The chain of command:
Bill Gates >
President Obama >
Arne Duncan >
Those People
The vermin only teaze and pinch
Their foes superior by an inch.
So, naturalists observe, a flea
Has smaller fleas that on him prey;
And these have smaller still to bite ’em,
And so proceed ad infinitum.
–Jonathan Swift, from “On Poetry: a Rhapsody,” 1733
This, from my local newspaper:
“The pros and cons of both testing methods were put forth in a single page comparison by the State to the school districts”
“Under the cons for MCAS was that it was paper-based and that districts are not held harmless as a result of the MCAS testing. If districts went with PARCC for 2015, districts would be held harmless as the PARCC testing system was measured and gauged.”
Many things trouble me about the Common Core and its aligned testing; blame is not going to remedy the problems. I am going to reiterate them. I am troubled by the published report about which states scored the lowest percentage of proficient students in reading -Tennessee, Arkansas, and West Virginia. Why publish such information when the wrong comparisons are being made? There are five major reasons why students cannot meet the standards which the politicians hand out.
Reason #1There is a connection between the reading program these 12th graders in Tenn. Ark., and WV. had in the primary grades and the level of achievement they have reached in 12th grade. Cunningham and Stanovich (1997) found that first-grade reading achievement strongly predicts 11th-grade reading achievement. These students were subjected to a reading program that was very problematic: NCLB is anchored in phonics. Phonics is a skill; readers occasionally use skills but constantly need to use strategies. Plus, how can phonics be the primary approach to reading when there are so many varied speech patterns around the country? How can the same phonics program be taught throughout the states when only the Midwest uses Standardized English? How can different regions with their various accents and dialects teach phonics when so many sounds are distorted. For example, Massachusetts residents like to leave off the r sound. My son once stopped a Boston police officer for directions. He asked the officer to repeat it five times and finally gave up. My son could not figure out what the officer was saying. He left the officer confused and lost.
Being from the Midwest, I once was a stanch believer in the phonetic approach. It wasn’t perfect; e.g., a worksheets centered on the short o sound, pictured dog and log as two example of short o. But even the people from the Standardized English region pronounce the o in dog and log as aw as in law. But if it follows the rule, dog should have a short sound as in hot. Plus, there are countless words that do not follow the phonetic rule. It appears to me that students on their own must be using more of the whole word approach in lieu of sounding/blending or learning words through analogy. Furthermore, students have an unnecessary challenge in trying to learn through phonics – trying to decode words via Standard English and then translate into another language – their accent or dialect language. Do children from regions with heavy accents and various dialects have to learn to read via the unspoken language like the Chinese? It is like learning another language – Standard English in lieu of what they speak. Contrived and meaningless sentences compound the task. The year I taught in the inner, inner city of Newark gave me a new awareness. Too often my students didn’t understand me and I didn’t understand them. I still see a student holding his head and stamping his foot saying, ” What are you saying?! I don’t understand you!”
In a document published by nonprofit educational center, CELT, entitled “Center for Expansion of Language and Thinking” addresses the problem of different dialects in the teaching of phonics. “There is a single spelling across dialects that pronounce words very differently. .. The pretense of a single set of phonics rules is not only confusing; it damages people’s chances for school success. Most standardized reading tests have a section on phonics that asks students to match rhyming words or to identify words with similar sounds. …Out-of-context, uninformed phonics instruction is not only confusing; it makes the learning of phonics harder. And when the rules being taught in out-of-context lessons do not match the learner’s own dialect, it is that much more confusing and that much harder to learn. Yet another barrier for far too many children! ”
“Familiar words can be read as fast as single letters. Under some conditions, words can be identified when the separate letters cannot be. Meaningful context speeds word identification. All phonics can be expected to do is help children get approximate pronunciations.” Becoming a Nation of Readers p. 11
I look at the material my four year old grandsons bring home- letter a day. A letter a day is the wrong approach. Children shouldn’t begin formal instruction – direct teaching in reading until the end of kindergarten at the very earliest. Some may not even be ready then. Phonics should be taught simultaneously with other reading skills but four year olds are not ready for that.
Reason #2 The lack of prior knowledge is a very basic problem. Just because students didn’t pass the state tests doesn’t mean they can’t read- they are just asked to read material that they can’t relate to. In order to construct meaning the reader must be able to relate to what he/she is reading. Frank Smith, a psycholinguist, in Comprehension and Learning maintains that what is behind the eye ball is more important than what is in front- the visual/text. But instead of building on their prior knowledge, Common Core directs teachers to the practice of “Close Reading.” “Closed reading” is contrary to what constitutes good reading instruction. A good teacher bridges the text to the students’ prior knowledge. Repeat: In order to gleam some understanding of a text, the reader must be able to relate to the subject matter in some way. “Closed Reading” just attacks students confidence and makes the students more anxious. A good teacher may spend an entire lesson on building background knowledge via a video, pictures, field trip, maps etc. If an academic text book is on a student’s frustration level, the teacher either needs to give the student an easier text which covers the same concepts or read the text to the student. What is the teacher’s objective: to develop concepts or is it to develop reading skills. Ordinarily a teacher should be able to accomplish both simultaneously but not if the text is too difficult. Also, Common Core negates the importance of prediction. Being able to predict is an indication that the student understands/comprehends.
How is it possible to construct a valid national standardized test with so many major regional differences? Is it possible to create a test that is not biased? Pearson Company, a British company whose main office is in England, publishes the tests. Who are the people who consturct them? The British?
Reason #3 The third major problem is stealing learning time away from students. In Finland the students take only one standardized test in their academic career. We are wasting precious student time with all this unnecessary testing and test preparation . “… test prep and testing absorbed 19 full school days in one district and a month and a half in the other in heavily tested grades.” The best way to increase reading skills is by reading independently. Instead of giving students time to do extended reading, students have to waste time in test prep and testing. “How much time do school districts spend on standardized testing? This Much “The Answer sheet 7/25/13
It is only through reading that a child can learn to identify new words on the basis of old. Too often formal instruction in reading doesn’t provide enough independent reading. Independent reading at school and at home supports the learning of reading. Here the parent/caregiver must play a part.
As Dr.Carmelita Williams, former president of the NRA once told a group of educators,
“You do not have to read every night – just on the nights you eat.”
Reason #4 Failure to pass the reading portion of standardized test from first grade on starts eroding a student’s confidence and attacking the student’s ego. How many fail the standardized test because of the phonics portion or a lack of confidence? Frank Smith states, “…when an individual is anxious or unsure of himself/herself or has experienced an unhappy succession of ‘failures’, his/her behavior exhibits an inevitable consequence: he demands far more information before he makes a decision. His very hesitancy aggravates his difficulties. …The more anxious he is, the less likely he will be to rely on non visual information. …Where the relaxed individual sees order, the tense individual sees visual confusion.” The old saying, “Nothing succeeds like success.” That is why Marie Clay’s approach with the emergent reader prevents students from making a mistakes.
Frank Smith purports, “Remedial action with older students who are diagnosed as ‘reading problems’ may magnify difficulties rather than facilitate fluency. The main need of a student inexperienced in reading is to engage in reading that is both easy and interesting. Instead he is likely to get less reading and more exercise and drill and texts. Material that is challenging …rather than easy, raises the anxiety level so that reading is neither meaningful nor pleasant. The problem of a fifteen-year-old who has difficulty reading may not be insufficiency of instruction, but that his previous years of instruction have made learning to read more difficult. …After ten years of instructional bruising a student may be far more in need of a couple of years …in education convalescence than an aggravation of his injuries.”
I maintain that students should never struggle. Regardless how far behind a student is from what is considered “on level” reading, a teacher must start instruction/reading at the student’s instructional level. Easy reading builds up confidence and then the student can begin to make progress. Common Core totally ignores “instructional” level and advocates, at times, giving students text that will be a challenge/struggle- an erroneous mandate.
Smith maintains that reading is essential in order to read. Reading should be made as easy as possible for children. Instead of drilling phonetic elements and words in isolation, back ground knowledge should be developed so the child can identify with the text. The less the student can relate to the story the more difficult the task of reading. If the child meets a word he/she does not know he can predict or guess if the student has some familiarity with the topic.
Reason #5 My fifth point of concern is the absorbent cost of testing. “Many districts have increased class sizes and reduced services to students. Some leave closed libraries and laid off librarian, social workers, counselors, and psychologists. Many thousands of teachers have lost their jobs…” It boggles my mind how districts can spend millions of dollars on testing material but lay off teachers, close libraries…!!!!!!! Some are even getting rid of art, music, dance, electives, etc. The very activity that could give students a chance to excel, boost their ego, give them confidence is taken away! Oh woe to those who are out to destroy our youth. “With no gym, art class, librarians, or significant science or social studies…”!!!!!!!
School Testing In U.S. Costs $1.7 Billion, But That May Not Be Enough: Report 11/29/12 Huff Post
The Midwestern district spent $600 or more for standardized testing per pupil in grades 3-8; about $200 per student for grades K-2; from $400 to $600 per student for grades 9-11. The Eastern district spent more than $1,100 annually on testing per student in grades 6-11; around $400 per student in grades 1-2; between $700 and $800 per student for grades 3-5. The Answer sheet 7/25/13
If we gave only one standardized test during the students academic career as they do in Finland, think of all the money that would be available to hire the needed reading specialists for every building. At Risk students should received extra help daily with a reading specialists working in tandem with the classroom teacher- two classes of reading instruction daily. Teachers’ assessments should be good enough for the administration and politicians. It has been stated countless times: students are individuals each with their own gifts. Politicians nor the corporate world can standardized them. Can you imagine how boring life would be if every child had the same interests, acted and spoke the same way.
Reason #6
CC = Cast in Concrete
These are permanent standards. There is NO mechanism for revision.
Common Core standards CANNOT be fixed;
they can NEVER be improved.
They are (CC) Cast in Concrete.
Excellence can never be achieved without way to improve.
Tangentially, Arkansas, headquarters for Walmart, remains the 2nd poorest state in the union. The Walton family missed an opportunity to apply their miracle fix.