Anthony Cody does not agree with Randi Weingarten and Linda Darling-Hammond. They recently published an article saying that California would be a model for the success of Common Core, because the new tests would be used to help schools, not to close them or to evaluate educators.
Cody posts a video from the Common Core website. Here is the script:
“Like it or not, life is full of measuring sticks: How smart we are, how fast we are, how we can, you know, compete. But up until now, it’s been pretty hard to tell how well kids are competing in school, and how well they’re going to do when they get out of school. We like to think that our education system does that. But when it comes to learning what they really need to be successful after graduation, is a girl in your neighborhood being taught as much as her friend over in the next one? Is a graduating senior in, say, St. Louis, as prepared to get a job as a graduate in Shanghai? Well, it turns out the answer to both of these questions is “no.” Because for years, states have been setting different standards for what students should know and be able to do at each grade level. That’s making it too hard to know if our kids are really doing well enough overall and if they can really compete for a job some day.”
The video concludes:
“The world’s getting more and more competitive every day. But now when our kids get to the top of their staircase, they can have way more options of where their life goes from there. Clear goals, confident, well-prepared students, that’s the Common Core state standard.”
Cody writes:
“So let’s unpack the assumptions built into Common Core. First, “like it or not” we are told our world is determined to measure everything. Bizarrely, we even have a picture of someone who looks like Albert Einstein measuring the circumference of his skull, as if this has any value. And these measurements are the basis for competition – and our students are in a race against one another, and against that kid in Shanghai, who may be better prepared for a job than our kids.
“The way to make our students “confident” and “well-prepared” for this race is to set up their learning as a series of steps they must climb, and every student at a given grade must mount these steps in order, and at the same age.
“This is a powerful framework for learning, and I think it is destructive.”
He adds:
“The promise of the Common Core is that we create confident students and help the under-privileged by measuring them on a set of difficult tests, which will show that those who have always been behind are further behind than ever. I just don’t see how this builds confidence. I think that in spite of the best efforts of teachers and leaders in our state, many of our students will do very poorly on these tests. And high-poverty schools will do worse than ever. We will then be obliged to use these scores as an accurate diagnosis of our problems, and in effect this will justify and reinforce inequities, rather than challenge them.”
Cody makes a powerful argument against the assumption that standards and testing will create equity or excellence. It is more NCLB, more Race to the Top, more of the same-old same-old.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
My analogy: the rich get richer and the poor suffer.
Here’s my piece about that Common Core video:
The CCSSO explains: Education is Stairmastery>?b>
The CCSSO has a new design for its website on the Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic]. The previous design was cleaner and more attractive, but who cares? Let’s get to what really matters: How good is the PR? Well, Bernays would be proud. For those with short attention spans, the new Parteizentrale for the Common Core-ing of the United States sports a nifty little propaganda video for the standards [sic]–a piece prepared by one of the innumerable CC$$ shill organizations, a group called “the Council of Great City Schools.” And what a little masterpiece this vid is! I’d say that it reeks right up there with the German Volk gymnastics exercise videos of the late Helene Bertha Amalie “Leni” Riefenstahl. The new vid is called “Learn about the Common Core in 3 Minutes.”
This slick RSA Animate-style piece of PR features an African-American female voice using a “tellin’ it like it is” tone to describe what you might recognize as the new standards [sic] prepared by that highly experienced educator and profound learning theorist Lord David Coleman–the standards [sic] paid for by a few plutocrats so that they could have a single national list to which to tag their oh-so-lucrative assessments and computer-adaptive curricula–the ones forced upon the formerly independent states of the United States by a program of blackmail called the “Race to the Top” carried out by our Secretary for the Department for the Regimentation, Narrowing, Distortion, and Privatization of U.S. Education, formerly the USDE. The oh-so-folksy but frank and no-nonsense voiceover says, and I quote:
Beginning:
“Like it or not, life is full of measuring sticks:
“how smart we are,
“how fast we are,
“how well we can, you know, compete.
“But up until now, it’s been pretty hard to tell how well kids are competing in school and how well they are going to do when they get out of school.
“We like to think that our education system does that, but when it comes to learning what they really need to be successful after graduation . . . is a graduating senior in, say, St. Louis, as prepared to get a job as the graduate in Shanghai?
“Well, it turns out, the answer . . . is ‘No.’”
Middle: [Blah blah blah. A lot of talk about how education is a staircase, and the Common Core is one big staircase for everyone, and each standard is a landing on that staircase. A graphic showing little boxes being checked off below each stair, all the way up. Some kids gloriously at the top. Some slipping and falling, barely hanging on.]
End: “The world’s getting more and more competitive every day, but now, when our kids get to the top of their staircase, they can have way more options. . . . Clear goals. Confident, well-prepared students. That’s the Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic].”
Why the folksy African-American female voice? Call me cynical, but this seems like a piece of cultural appropriation by the Council of Great City Schools and the CCSSO of precisely the kind that Disney is so famous for. One of the stock memes of racist films of the 1940s and ’50s is the wise, older woman of color who sits those crazy white folks down and talks sense into them: “Why, young Mr. White, it’s time you figured out the difference between wantin’ and doin’.”
And, of course, the video is directed at middle-class parents and plays upon the fears created in them by the recent and continuing economic downturn and the general theft of middle-class prosperity by the U.S. oligarchy: You have to have these standards if your kid is going to be able to get a job in the future. The video also employs another kind of subtle racism: If we don’t have these standards, those kids in Shanghai are going to take your kid’s job.
So, the Common Core Stairway to the Big Bucks video has me thinking, reevaluating.
You see, weirdly, I always thought that education was
a. An enormously rich, varied, and community-creating hand-off whereby many, many older individuals passed on to many, many younger individuals what they knew and cared about in art, music, literature, history, science, mathematics, philosophy–you know, in culture; and
b. A garden of many, many forking paths for young people to explore so that they might discover and follow those suited to their disparate talents and interests–differing paths leading to enormously varied adult roles in a highly complex, highly diverse, highly pluralistic society; and
c. Lighting a fire, not filling a bucket; and
d. A delight, an adventure, a satisfaction of innate curiosity, and a great, good time.
Turns out I was all wrong.
Education is competing in a race up a stairway. It’s a Race to the Top. (The dummies always go for the sports metaphors.)
And it’s invariant. The same boxes are checked off for everyone as he or she races up that stair.
Here I thought that education was some sort of humane undertaking. But actually, you see, it’s about beating those kids in Shanghai to the top and leaving the pathetic loser underachievers struggling to hang onto the landings below.
A wonderful piece, Bob. But I want to reply to words that are not yours: ““Like it or not, life is full of measuring sticks.” Yes, but it is also full of things that cannot be measured, most of them qualities of human beings: bravery, wisdom, concern for others, honesty,love, perseverance, and many more. Unfortunately, stupidity and greed cannot be measured either.
Awesome, Joanne!
I agree with you Joanne, many important things, such as children’s social and emotional development, cannot be easily measured, but can be assessed by observation .
Same with Bill Gates, his obsession with greed and control can be observed as signs of mental illness; yet who will challenge the wealthiest man in the country who is aiming to control the youth of America?
Bob, education IS filling a bucket, pace Paolo Freire and his many uncritical American acolytes. My gripe with Common Core is that it doesn’t fill the bucket. There’s no substance to it –it’s just going to lead to mental workouts, not mental nourishment. The only mental nourishment a kid gets will be haphazard and incidental to the mental “muscle” building project.
Very few, including Cody, mention the central flaw of both the Common Core and NCLB-era ELA standards the skills they enumerate are mythological entities! For instance, there is no such thing as an all purpose “complex text reading ability”. A baseball playing kid can read a complex text about baseball; that doesn’t enable him to read a complex text about diabetes. Yet we’re in the absurd situation of having to teach “complex text reading ability”, an ability that doesn’t exist. Reading ability is knowledge-dependent. If you know a lot about a topic, you can comprehend complex texts about it; if you don’t, you can’t. It’s pretty much as simple as that. The conventional wisdom is that struggling readers just need more “reading strategies” and practice, but you can’t get around the fact that you need to know 90% of the words on the page, and kids who know squat are going to remain abysmal readers regardless of how many years of reading strategy practice they’ve had. WE MUST FEED OUR KIDS KNOWLEDGE. Why do so few seem to understand this? Anthony Cody,I hope you’ll read E.D. Hirsch’s The Knowledge Deficit and Daisy Christodoulou’s Seven Myths About Education. Or contact me and I’ll talk to you in person –I live in Oakalnd too.
Ponderosa, you will not get an argument from me about the centrality of knowledge. You mistake what I mean by that, and what, I think, Plutarch meant by it (for his Moralia is the ultimate source of this comment). What I meant by this is simply that one cannot specify, for all people, for all time, what an education consists of. Education is not something that is done to a person in the first 12 or 16 years of his or her life. It is not something that one undergoes, it is something that one undertakes, and that undertaking lasts forever. No two readers, writers, or thinkers read, write, or think about the same things in the same way. A real education is a personal attainment, and it cannot be specified beforehand.
“It is not something that one undergoes, it is something that one undertakes, and that undertaking lasts forever. No two readers, writers, or thinkers read, write, or think about the same things in the same way. A real education is a personal attainment, and it cannot be specified beforehand.”
Yes!
I know you’re pro-knowledge, Bob, though I don’t share your aversion to a prescribed curriculum. How else will we ensure that kids will get a robust dose of labor history, to give just one example of things that every citizen should know?
And, Ponderosa, please note that I described education as “an enormously rich, varied, and community-creating hand-off whereby many, many older individuals passed on to many, many younger individuals what they knew and cared about in art, music, literature, history, science, mathematics, philosophy–you know, in culture.”
Every child is born curious. Our job is to harness and nurture that curiosity–to light the fire. Our prime directive is to do that, to produce intrinsically motivated, life-long learners. I emphatically agree that we don’t do that on the thin gruel of skills-based instruction. I agree with the claims of The Knowledge Deficit.
If you check the acknowledgements of The Knowledge Deficit, BTW, you will find that my name is mentioned there. I have long been an emphatic supporter of Dr. Hirsch’s work.
That said, we possess both knowledge of what (world knowledge) and knowledge of how (procedural knowledge). The problem is not with skills instruction per se but with skills instruction so vaguely and generally and abstractly formulated that it becomes meaningless. Most of those who blather on about “critical thinking skills,” for example, know almost nothing of any of the sciences and arts that deal with thinking per se and almost nothing of the cognitive science of human problem solving and decision making and creation and other activity that can be called “thinking,” and so most of what is done by pedagogues under that rubric is a complete waste of time. But it is not a waste of time to teach a student, for example, what means-ends analysis is and how to apply this technique to situations involving systematic transformation of an initial state of a system to a goal state. And that is a teaching of a skill, so not all “skills instruction” is a waste of time.
Certainly, there is no such thing as general “complex reading ability,” but this does not mean that there are no actual skills, including actual reading skills, though I agree that most of what people think they are teaching, there, is a complete waste of time.
Let me provide some examples of actual skills. I build guitars as a hobby. I know how to plane a piece of wood so that it has a surface extraordinarily smooth. That ability involves world knowledge (of wood and grain and planes and scrappers and of tools for sharpening). It also involves procedural knowledge (of how to hold and move the tools and the sharpening implements–you have to know how to hold the scraper. You have to know to scrape with the grain. You have to learn to see the direction in which the grain of the wood goes. And so on.). Now, you can “know” the implements and even “know” the procedures and still not be able to plane a piece of wood properly. Getting the hang of this requires practice, preferably under the watchful eye of a skilled woodworker, whereby you attain the skill. Many skills are of this “acquired in practice” kind. They are acquired, not explicitly learned. There is knowledge involved, certainly. That knowledge is a necessary but not sufficient condition of mastery. One has to practice to attain the skill.
There is a large class of skills that are acquired but not learned explicitly. This is true, for example, of most rules for the grammar of the language or languages that you speak. If you are like most speakers of English, you will not be able to articulate explicitly the rule that enables you to determine that the plural of the nonsense word stortz is pronounced stortz-iz, but you will be able to apply the rule, which you have learned unconsciously, quite easily, and this is a plurals-formulation “skill,” and it is quite real.
So, it’s a mistake to fail to recognize that education involves acquisition as well as learning, skills as well as knowledge, though you are absolutely right to be very suspicious of purported explicit instruction in vaguely formulated abstract skills like “ability to find the main idea” or “inferencing skills” and so on. It’s truly astonishing how much absolute hooey of that kind one finds on the educational carnival midway these days.
I agree with you, of course, Ponderosa, that the Common Core is just another pathetic list of mostly vaguely, abstractly formulated “skills.” I think that the best use for the CCSS in ELA is as droppings papers for bird cages.
That was an unfortunate turn of phrase. I emphatically do no support the caging of birds.
It’s hard to imagine that any teacher would object to a student gaining knowledge; the problem here, and I think the basis of the objection that some have, is with the metaphor being used.
Buckets are passive receptacles that have no agency in regard to their filling. Also, unlike the human mind, they have a rigidly determined capacity; and that’s where the metaphor falters. Yes, children of course need background knowledge in order to derive and organize meaning from what they read, but they are not, and must not be seen as, passive recipients of information.
I had a wonderful Shakespeare teacher in college who used to often draw the distinction between knowledge and information – perhaps an even more important thing to recognize in this era of all-powerful data – with knowledge being how one organizes and creates context from the information they have. From knowledge comes a worldview and realistic understanding of one’s place in, and interactions with, the world: shouldn’t that be something we try to instill in our students?
That mental organizing of information is something that children must ultimately discover and do for themselves, and if we describe them as buckets to be filled, we are grossly underestimating their abilities and our responsibilities as teachers.
Michael,
Filling, nourishing, depositing –why do we hate these verbs? Probably the influence of Dewey. What’s wrong with a little passivity? And, of course, beneath the skull there’s endless invisible activity going on: inferring, analyzing, connecting, recalling. Automatically the brain performs these functions as one listens. Trying to teach these automatic functions (e.g. “activating background knowledge”) is the absurd project of modern education –now egged on by CCSS, SBAC and PARCC.
Ponderosa,
I can be pretty passive myself at times, and agree that in moderation it’s OK, but you made the blanket statement that “Education IS filling a bucket…” so I took you at your word. I still think we need a better metaphor, even for learning that takes place as a result of direct instruction.
That said, my guess is that we would probably agree on these matters more often than we’d disagree.
Hey Bob,
Thank you for one of the best descriptions I’ve ever read of what education should be. One way I’ve thought of it is as trying to make
contagious your enthusiasm for some activity and/or field of inquiry.
Unfortunately, much of what passes for education reform has become contagion of the most negative kind.
Unfortunately, Mr. Cody’s article is behind a pay wall.
I was able to read it just fine.
Any real scientist knows that measurement is not a “treatment”; you don’t measure things to bring about change, positive or negative. Same thing with real quality control. If you find a flaw in the product, it’s not finding the flaw that makes things better.
Measuring a patient’s blood pressure does not make her healthier, and in fact a single focus on blood pressure can miss the larger picture.
Cody is right.
To the viewers of this blog: please excuse this overly long posting, but gee whiz…
Let’s put the pedal to the metal on this one. No holds barred, leave it all on the playing field, give 110%.
From a posting of 5-29-14 on this blob entitled “Common Core for Commoners, Not My School!”
The entire posting: “This is an unintentionally hilarious story about Common Core in Tennessee. Dr. Candace McQueen has been dean of Lipscomb College’s school of education and also the state’s’s chief cheerleader for Common Core. However, she was named headmistress of private Lipscomb Academy, and guess what? She will not have the school adopt the Common Core! Go figure.”
The blog posting links to an article entitled “Lipscomb Academy Chief Advocates For Common Core, But Not At Her School” [see link below]. The quote immediately below is the first two paragraphs in full and the first sentence of the third. The last paragraph is from the end of the article.
[start quote]
One of Tennessee’s biggest cheerleaders for Common Core has not pushed to adopt the education standards in the private school she now leads.
On an almost weekly basis, Candice McQueen is called on by the state Department of Education to beat back criticism. Last week, it was an Associated Press panel. The week before that, she advocated for Common Core as SCORE released its annual report card. McQueen testified before the Senate Education Committee during a two day hearing on the standards.
She praises the rigor and the benefits to having Tennessee kids on the same page as students in 44 states. …
Lipscomb would be unusual if it went to Common Core. Most of Nashville’s private schools blend state and national standards and don’t use the same standardized tests as public schools.
[end quote]
The following is from the same article, “Excerpt from McQueen’s letter to Lipscomb Academy parents” and includes all six paragraphs of the excerpt.
[start quote]
As with any change in leadership, questions and concerns often arise as a natural part of the transition process. Because of my role as the dean of the university’s College of Education some of you have expressed concerns about my appointment and the direction Lipscomb Academy will take as it relates to the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). I want to take a moment to address some of these concerns and possible misinformation.
First, the Common Core State Standards have not been adopted by Lipscomb Academy. While the standards have been adopted by the state of Tennessee along with 44 other states, private schools have the freedom to determine if they will use all, some or none of the CCSS. To date, Lipscomb Academy administrators have not adopted the standards, but have encouraged the faculty to learn about the math and English/language arts Common Core State Standards that are changing the expectations of students not only in Tennessee but also across the nation.
Second, I have also not been in any discussions about formal adoption of the CCSS at Lipscomb Academy. Currently, Lipscomb Academy draws from a variety of quality national and state standards selected by the school leadership and faculty to set a vision for what content, instruction and curriculum will be used at each grade level. This has proven to be effective; thus, I don’t anticipate any changes to this process now or in the future. As is current practice, all standards available will be reviewed at set intervals by leadership and faculty to determine the direction of Lipscomb Academy.
Third, some of you have voiced concerns that the academy will adopt the PARCC test that will soon replace the current Tennessee standardized test or TCAP. Lipscomb Academy uses the ERB test, not the TCAP, and there are no plans to replace the ERB test with PARCC.
Finally, in my role as dean of the College of Education, I prepare teachers to teach in all varieties of schools. Nearly 75 percent of our teacher graduates teach in a public school during their first three years post graduation. As a result, our College of Education faculty members (along with the other 44 teacher preparation programs across the state) promote and teach our teacher candidates about the standards adopted by the state of Tennessee. If we did otherwise, we would be irresponsible in preparing effective educators.
Our college and its associated Ayers Institute have developed teacher lessons and videos that demonstrate problem-solving, critical thinking and performance skills required by the CCSS in math, reading and language arts. As a result of a grant from the state of Tennessee, these resources were produced and are being used in teacher preparation programs statewide as we prepare teachers to understand the new standards. I have also spoken in favor of the CCSS before the Tennessee state Senate education committee in CCSS hearings this past September. In my role in education, I will continue to be part of the ongoing CCSS conversation. However, this should not be extrapolated to indicate or predict the adoption of CCSS at Lipscomb Academy. One of the blessings of being in the private schools sector is the opportunity to explore all possibilities within the community and culture in which you find yourself and to thoughtfully choose what fits your vision.
[end quote]
Link: http://nashvillepublicradio.org/blog/2014/02/10/lipscomb-academy-chief-advocates-for-common-core-but-not-at-her-school/
Writing on a blog can be very impersonal, muddy the waters or not make one’s point, clearly, and unintentionally convey sarcasm and contempt. I want to make it clear that I am just respectfully putting a simple question to Randi Weingarten and Linda Darling-Hammond—
If when it comes to actual practice, a fiercely active advocate and defender of CCSS doesn’t buy into it, why should they?
😎
Another awesome post, KrazyTA
“If when it comes to actual practice, a fiercely active advocate and defender of CCSS doesn’t buy into it, why should they?”
Exactly.
Dearest TA…still cannot get myself to call you Krazy…you clearly explain this situation in Tennessee. Thanks. And this is the state where Huffman of the Rheeform movement holds court, and sends his children to private school where obviously they are not impeded by endless testing for CC.
In California….Darling-Hammond, though a famous educator, operates from her base in Palo Alto, one of the richest and most privileged communities in California, and like Condeleeza Rice, she works with the Hoover Institute which had a decidedly singular view of public policy. Stanford all told is about as elitist as a university can get. Anthony Cody can attest to the fact that despite being in fairly close proximity in freeway miles, Palo Alto and Oakland are a world apart. Educators from UC Berkeley, not only in the School of Ed, but those economists such as Robert Reich, are far more well versed in inequality.
So my advice is that if you want to follow the real insights of a senior professor emeritus of anthropologic/sociologic education from Stanford, please read the works of Dr. Concha Delgado-Gaitan. She is the daughter of migrant field workers, and focuses her study on the poverty stricken students we all seek to educate.
That is my somewhat biased statement for the day.
awesome. Thank you, Ellen!
Money!
KrasyT – you nailed it!
What’s good for the goose should be good for the gander.
If not, ?
That’s brilliant, Krazy. I’m stealing it (if you don’t mind).
We measure. We know we use bias standardized measurement. We don’t care if we use bias measurement. We have to measure. How can we know if we are successful unless we measure — even after admitting our measurement tool will always measure some incorrectly.
I didn’t used to care about the standardized measurement so much . . . until because it didn’t carry much weight. We used it with an assortment of other types of more authentic assessment – portfolios, classwork, projects, essays, speeches, writing, observation, teacher made tests, and other tools teachers use daily without even thinking to check for understanding and then reteach and remediate as necessary.
The standardized testing and reforming problems came when all the money, power, and even a person’s career was attached to the imperfect standardized measurement tool. And those outside the realm of education started punishing kids, parents, and families because the biased tool told them to do it.
30 years ago I learned about the white privilege bias in this type of assessment. Yet this is what we are using to reform our oublic schools? If the politicians wanted to choose a more perfect tool to destroy at-risk schools – they could not have found a better one. Standardized testing will reliably fail at-risk children. After all, standardized national testing like this will clearly fail everyone I love to teach . . . because it ALWAYS has.
extraordinarily well said, Angie!
Angie Sullivan: re what you said, a few apt quotes that I have previously presented on this blog.
From Jim Horn and Denise Wilburn, THE MISMEASURE OF EDUCATION (2013), pp. 1, 55, and 147:
“What was once educationally significant, but difficult to measure, has been replaced by what is insignificant and easy to measure. So now we test how well we have taught what we do not value.” — Art Costa, professor emeritus at Cal State-Fullerton
“Initially, we use data as a way to think hard about difficult problems, but then we over rely on data as a way to avoid thinking hard about difficult problems. We surrender our better judgment and leave it to the algorithm.” —Joe Flood, author of THE FIRES
“When the right thing can only be measured poorly, it tends to cause the wrong thing to be measured, only because it can be measured well. And it is often much worse to have a good measurement of the wrong thing—especially when, as is so often the case, the wrong thing will in fact be used as an indicator of the right thing—than to have poor measurements of the right thing.” — John Tukey, mathematician, Bell Labs & Princeton University
And just my POV, but the real world effect of the way that high-stakes standardized testing is used to label, sort and rank students will penalize and punish the vast majority of white kids too. Among all children, IMHO, some will be harmed more than others, but almost everyone will suffer.
And the damage done? It is a feature, not a flaw, of high-stakes standardized testing.
Thank you for your comments.
😎
wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, oh KrazyBrilliantTA!
agree. We must look at the whole child, in the words of dr. angela Dye, “a” level achievement vs the “B” level aceivement used today, the test
Great quotes, Krazy. Stealing these, too.
cyn3wulf: your kind words are greatly appreciated but you give me too much credit. I didn’t do it all myself: Jim Horn and Denise Wilburn were a big help!
😉
However, a word on terminology: for you and me and all those that support public schools and a “better education for all” it’s not called “stealing.” It’s called sharing and collaboration and learning from each other.
From verse #4 of Bill Withers, LEAN ON ME:
You just call on me, brother, when you need a hand
We all need somebody to lean on
I just might have a problem that you’ll understand
We all need somebody to lean on
I read and benefit from your comments [whether I agree with them or not] on this blog. Keep posting. I’ll keep reading.
😎
Cream rises. There will always be the over achievers or the extremely talented who will do well no matter what.
BUT
What about the under achievers or those who just can’t keep up the pace?
What about “No Child Left Behind”?
How does Common Core meet the needs of those who cannot master the tests?
Are we dooming a whole generation to fail on a global level?
Some of these so called failures are very talented, just not at taking tests. In the past, there was room for these students. They were nurtured and encouraged.
CCSS and the assessments are for the above average student. The average child is left behind. Those who flounder are left to drown.
I don’t want this kind of education for my children. It’s great for some, but awful for most. That’s why CCSS will fail – the parents will not accept that their children are doomed. Who wants to send their kids to a school system where their child can never be good enough? Not me!
Exactly, Ellen! Well said!!!
Kids differ. And a complex, diverse, pluralistic society needs those differences recognized, nurtured, built upon.
And the slower in rate over achievers like Einstein who think too deeply for the simple test. There are so many as well as those who are pushd out before they blossom.
I was discussing this very thing, yesterday, with a friend. One of her students always gets 2s on the tests, but he is BY FAR the best reader in fifth grade at her school. Whenever they go over sample test questions in class, the boy commonly has very interesting, sophisticated reasons why one of the “incorrect” answers is the correct one.
The common core has replaced the golden lamp of knowledge with a rat race. Like Bob Marley said,
“Oh, it’s a disgrace
To see the human-race
In a rat race, rat race!
You got the horse race;
You got the dog race;
You got the human-race;
But this is a rat race, rat race!”
And here is Harry Chapin’s “Flowers are Red” to ponder.
Isn’t the phrase, “so repeat after me,” early childhood common core at its prime? If only our children could hear, “there are so many colors in a flower, so let’s use every one” instead of “so repeat after me.”
FLOWERS ARE RED
The little boy went first day of school
He got some crayons and started to draw
He put colors all over the paper
For colors was what he saw
And the teacher said.. What you doin’ young man
I’m paintin’ flowers he said
She said… It’s not the time for art young man
And anyway flowers are green and red
There’s a time for everything young man
And a way it should be done
You’ve got to show concern for everyone else
For you’re not the only one
And she said…
Flowers are red young man
Green leaves are green
There’s no need to see flowers any other way
Than they way they always have been seen
But the little boy said…
There are so many colors in the rainbow
So many colors in the morning sun
So many colors in the flower and I see every one
Well the teacher said.. You’re sassy
There’s ways that things should be
And you’ll paint flowers the way they are
So repeat after me…..
And she said…
Flowers are red young man
Green leaves are green
There’s no need to see flowers any other way
Than they way they always have been seen
But the little boy said…
There are so many colors in the rainbow
So many colors in the morning sun
So many colors in the flower and I see every one
The teacher put him in a corner
She said.. It’s for your own good..
And you won’t come out ’til you get it right
And are responding like you should
Well finally he got lonely
Frightened thoughts filled his head
And he went up to the teacher
And this is what he said.. and he said
Flowers are red, green leaves are green
There’s no need to see flowers any other way
Than the way they always have been seen
Time went by like it always does
And they moved to another town
And the little boy went to another school
And this is what he found
The teacher there was smilin’
She said…Painting should be fun
And there are so many colors in a flower
So let’s use every one
But that little boy painted flowers
In neat rows of green and red
And when the teacher asked him why
This is what he said.. and he said
Flowers are red, green leaves are green
There’s no need to see flowers any other way
Than the way they always have been seen.
You can hear Tom Chapins song (Harrys brother) on the Cd no Child Left Behind?????? http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/dhbdrake4
Always loved this tune.
I have a story about Harry. Years ago, I was working for the Indiana Public Interest Research Group. Harry Chapin agreed to come to our campus to do a benefit concert–with the proceeds to go to us. He played for a couple hours and then said to the audience that he felt like continuing to play. He as told that the auditorium had to be closed. So, someone found another big room on campus, and the whole audience and Chapin trooped over there, and he played for hours and hours. A wonderful, wonderful man. A terrible tragedy to lose him!!!!
And, I love this song.
TC & khomfeld: no disrespect intended to anybody else that posted comments on this blog today, but if all I had read were your two postings—
My thirst for blog reading would have been completely satisfied.
Most insanely krazy props from your friendly neighborhood KrazyTA.
😎
I posted this all over the place in 2011: http://sahilachangebringer.blogspot.com/2011/09/flowers-are-red.html
Note to common core, if you use a stair analogy, where’s the ramp that’s ADA compliant?
Love it!
Yes, where is that ramp?
The ramp IS in my upcoming book Brainstorming Common Core: Salvaging the Fiasco of Reform available soon, http://www.wholechildreform.com
LOL. GREAT!
ALL of the arguments for the Common Core are balderdash, because in every case, there is a glaring exception: private schools. If CC and testing are so important to the future of America, students, the economy, blah blah blah, then why is it just fine that American kids in private schools are free from these requirements?
Most of the people who created and promote CC and high stakes testing are sending their children to private schools, where none of this is mandatory. When you realize that those people have done nothing to insist that the schools their own kids attend tow the line, too, it becomes very evident that this is a huge scam that is just about standardizing public education across states, so that profiteers don’t have to deal with differing requirements in individual states and they can more easily raid public funds.
The US needs to immediately: STOP the Common Core, STOP high-stakes testing, STOP harassing teachers and STOP the corporations that pilfer tax dollars.
And STOP voting for amoral and corrupt politicians who make it so easy for entrepreneurs to get rich quick off the backs of American children, people!
amen
And what do the best private school offer? A well-rounded liberal arts education, not drills on “complex-text reading skills” and test practice. It’s amazing the kids at Andover and Sidwell Friends can read, think critically or problem solve at all given their very un-Common Core-ish curriculum!
Competition in sports – yes
Competition in school – no
Doing better than your fellow student should not be the goal of a quality education.
Working hard to do ones best should be admirable, no matter what the results.
Doing well or poorly on a test does not define who we are.
We need to set new goals for education. Get rid of the steps – not everyone will fit on the top rung. Remember – we are all in this together.
Enough with the gawdawful Aztec stair metaphor.
Imagine, instead of that metaphor, the metaphor of a garden, with all the plantings of civilizations past–all the art and science and history and music and philosophy and mathematics and literature.
And imagine many, many paths in that garden, and many places to stop and partake of its fruits.
Imagine explorations into that garden that kids can take, together, scoping it out. Imagine them then deciding down which paths they wish to establish their camps and, eventually, to build a home.
Imagine teachers as leaders of those expeditions, those explorations of the garden. Here: taste this. Here: this is a pure spring that bubbles up from the deepest of sources. Try it. Heck, jump in, splash around a bit. Enjoy.
The metaphors that people use, that they resort to, reveal much, much about them–especially the metaphors that they resort to unthinkingly, reflexively, the unexamined metaphors. This stair metaphor is very, very disturbing. The people who think in terms of it are not ones whom we should be allowing to run things. We were given a garden.
There is a certain type of person that this kind of metaphor appeals to. It’s the same people who say things like “we can’t go back to the wild, wild west” to describe education pre-ccss. If it’s not orderly, straight, organized, linear, tidy, and neat, with each detail in its own spot, then it’s the wild, wild west. Where I see lush jungle, they see the desert. Where I see a rich array of flora and fauna, they see tumbleweeds and the odd cactus. Where I see order in an organic form, they see lawlessness. It helps to explain why they are on a mission to conquer, to control the world of public education. In the end, OCD is not a virtue. I have a bit of it myself, but I would never impose it on anyone else.
I, too, have astonishing powers of concentration and love order. But I certainly do not want to turn all of U.S. education into an orderly machine or into a monoculture.
Ecologies are healthier, by far, than are monocultures!!!! These people with an excessive rage for order are, I think, sick.
Since education is not a game, the goal should be personal best, not beating all others and leaving them in the dust –which amounts to every child left behind except the one winner.
Cues “Neue Regel”
“Ecologies are healthier, by far, than are monocultures!!!!” Exactly so.
lol
Clearly, yours is a more sophisticated aesthetic, cyn3wulf!
wabi-sabi
strength in variance; beauty in imperfection; complex, emergent systems, not crude, imposed ones
order in a healthy, natural system looks nothing like order on, say, an assembly line
and nothing is as cloying and insipid as the overly perfected
These people with their rage for order do not understand that greatness emerges from the autonomous actions of many distinct and variant entities–the bee flies, but not as does the eagle, and without the bee, the eagle dies.
wabi-sabi. I confess I had not heard the term before, though the concept is familiar to me. It’s nice to have a term to hang the concept upon.
In literature, both works that posses organic form and works that posses mechanical form have their place. So, too, in all of life. It is when mechanical form is imposed upon something which properly should exhibit organic form that things go awry.
It is funny how life brings certain topics up repeatedly during a short time span, though perhaps that’s just because the topic is on our minds and so we see it everywhere. In any event, I was just reading an article on the Millennium Falcon. The author wondered why it was so iconic. He came up with some very good reasons, but he didn’t mention the one that had immediately occurred to me: the asymmetry of the placement of the cockpit. Without that, it’s a cool looking but entirely forgettable ship. On the other hand, the X-wing is memorable because of its symmetry.
You said that, “greatness emerges from the autonomous actions of many distinct and variant entities.” Just so. Variety opens the door widely for greatness to walk through. If standardization doesn’t close the door entirely, it narrows the opening to a thin slit. Pixar’s Ratatouille dealt with this rather nicely.
This is VERY well said, cyn3wulf!!!
“In literature, both works that posses organic form and works that posses mechanical form have their place. So, too, in all of life. It is when mechanical form is imposed upon something which properly should exhibit organic form that things go awry.”
Because in sports all you have to lose is a game, in school its the rest of your life http://www.wholechildreform.com
I like the way Anthony Cody thinks. Often I agree with Randi Weingarten and Linda Darling-Hammond, but not this time. Cody is the only one of the three who has figured CC out.
agreed
In my upcoming book, I detail the need to develop a system and philosophy of education that serves all. Brainstormig the Common Core. Salvaging the Fiasco of Reform changes common core forward making standards guidelines rather than deadlines. it pretty well guts common core from there on in.
However, it does keep the proficiency base with 2 major differences. 1. The proficiencies are demonstrated 8 which can only be done locally) and 2. advancement isn’t a competition but taking every child from where they are., celebrating success at ever chance.
Let the conversation continue with Linda, Randi, Diane and others as they are thinking about a different way of doing things. Input is need by all, not bashing but input. Keep the conversation going as now is the time for solutions.
The argument about tests “driving instruction” and “informing us of what we need to do to help students succeed” are the arguments that drive me the MOST crazy. We cannot inform anything if we are not allowed to see the tests, as well as a question by question breakdown of each student and how he or she answered each question. Furthermore, if we don’t get the tests back until after our students leave our classes, then it doesn’t help anyone. I’ve been arguing this for YEARS with anyone who thinks that all of this testing is wonderful. No one has yet been able to give me a good rebuttal of my argument.
If your district buys CC aligned curriculum and test prep materials, then the tests will be driving instruction. From what I’ve been able to gather, constant drilling with CC aligned materials is how Success Academy got high test scores last year, while other NY schools didn’t have access to those materials. One of their teachers reported here that there were questions on the tests that came straight from the test prep materials. I don’t know how their teachers got access to the tests, but I’m guessing it also pays to have a CEO who is a politician with friends in high places.
Sickening.
Local assessments by people who actually see the child must drive instruction. And that must be done on a regular basis, in the classroom. The test is not an indicator of total achievement. Just a small snap shot
Have been disappointed in LDH ever since she agreed Pearson should take over certification of new teachers. Nothing like Joe the Plumber marking your tests.
Randi has been going around trying to co-author with lots of people to give herself credibility. Meanwhile she is endorsing Neoliberal candidates left and right knowing they have no vested interest in public schools or teacher unions. NYC just passed a contract that takes away one group of teachers right to due process. But hey!! Who cares about teachers we don’t know when we can line our pockets with a raise that will fall short in the end.
I am quickly losing my faith in teachers in general, especially those who hide their heads in the sand or are driven by the “fear” spin, as well with those who align themselves with Randi.
When I feel discouraged by the short sighted way some unions are acting I just look up what Chicago Teachers Union is doing. They are inspiring!
A
Not just Chicago, but Seattle, and other places as well. I was referring to NYC teachers who voted for a contract that took away due process rights for ATRs. You do not sell out other teachers because one day you can find yourself in that same position.
But Randi’s ego is causing a dangerous situation for teachers who don’t know there are ways to find information on their own and because of her endorsements for Crist over Rich in Florida, Maloy in Ct. and now Cuomo in NY (although this hasn’t been announced, she has been working behind closed doors for him), I fear teachers will follow her endorsements which will only put a sharper knife in their backs.
In response to Anthony Cody disagreeing with Randi and Linda…”Like it or not, life is full of measuring sticks:…”
We need our Cognitive Pyschologists to enter the discussion. For one thing they will tell you that testing is not a perfect science like physics and farming. There is a large range of error: noise, hunger, fear, panic, etc. Give a test at a different time, different days and the results will be different. At best the scores can reveal strengths and weaknesses in a school system.
This is especially true for standardized reading tests. They can reveal strengths and weakness but can’t pinpoint the actual reading level of the students. That information comes when teachers administer appropriate tests- assessments generated by reading specialists for a specific region. With a true assessment it must be fair. Students need to be able to relate to what they are reading in some way. Consequently, the child from foot hills of Oregon mts. should be given different topics to read than a child living along the banks of Lake of the Woods, or a child living in the farm belt surrounded by corn fields, child from the wide open ranches of Montana, child living in the heart of NYC, or the child surrounded by Magnolia trees at the mouth of the Mississippi. Every region offers differ support systems such as the public library. Since every community can not provide the same resources why test these students with the same standardized test,
Once again I purport that primary children should not be given standardized tests. For years, psychologists have spoken out about the harmful effect of standardized testing on youngsters. Results of district wide standardized tests can not the the soul source of evaluating a student’s progress and above all should not be used to retain third graders as is done in 12 states.
“I believe in standardizing automobiles. I do not believe in standardizing human beings. Standardization is a great peril which threatens American culture.” Albert Einstein
I also believe in the old saying, “When injustice becomes law, rebellion becomes duty.”
More proof that with friends like these…
Common Core is NOT legitimate. It is the tool to destroy public education in the United States.
I question the authenticity of anyone backing common core who may have sought and received Gate’s funding. This includes many teacher’s unions as well as education programs or researchers at various universities around this country. So I then must question why Randi and Linda are so adamantly supporting common core despite the loud protestations of public school teachers, students and parents (which grow by day). Teachers and students are on the front lines.. in the trenches and forced to endure the idiocy of common core. Intention is not a good enough justification for carrying out foolish policy created by others. Were Coleman’s intentions noble? Were Gate’s intentions noble? Frankly who cares. What we should care about is the destructive nature of an entire nation forced to carry out those intentions all because they are “paid for” by ONE INDIVIDUAL – Gates. Just who are Randi and Linda basing their common core support on? And why? Are not teachers and students on the front line of common core? Are they not the ones in the know? If not them than who???? I have a serious problem with leaders claiming they know what is best for others when there is no substance on which they base their views. I can only surmise they are beholden to support common core because Gate’s money has been given to union leadership and to professors at esteemed universities with his tentacled stipulations.
And by the way.. if we are in a “global war” and money becomes the end all, let all the one per centers worldwide spend a month on an isolated island with limited resources like water and food and see just how far their megabillions will take them.
And NO MORATORIUM like Randi Weingarten is promoting. A moratorium just means they are on the defensive and want time to wear the opponents of Common Core down.
A moratorium COULD be a way to hold ed reformers accountable.
If their pitch is the assessments won’t be used for punishment, and public schools will be supported rather than used as political punching bags, one could then look at their actions (rather than words) and make final adoption conditional on delivering what they’ve promised.
I think adoption should have been conditional all along, but I think public schools need better advocates in government (not union leaders, but government).
Just a thought, from the other direction. Offense, not defense 🙂
I know you’re all opposed for substantive reasons (and I don’t pretend to understand those) but “a deal” doesn’t have to be “a bad deal” for public schools. Public schools HAVE gotten bad deals, but that isn’t a given. It doesn’t have to be that way. If they had strong advocates at higher levels they could get what they need in return for taking on this huge project. I don’t mean a RttT “grant” either. I mean real support.
Considering adoption, Chiara, assumes that CCSS has merit. I think it is pretty clear that the process through which these standards were developed was totally illegitimate. To consider a moratorium is not going to make them legitimate. Too much of the process was subverted. In any case, all we can test is how well a particular curriculum is being absorbed by a particular population of students. Even then, the only assumptions we should be making from the results are global. Is the curriculum testing what we think it tests? Are the tests an adequate sampling of the curriculum? Is the curriculum and/or the test a fair reflection of this population of students’ learning? We have a lot of questions to answer before even considering how we should use the information. We already have NAEP to do the kind of comparative analysis policy makers want. Beating up students and teachers with high stakes tests of poorly vetted standards is not going to improve teaching or learning.
Notice we haven’t heard any more about that moratorium. And after Cuomo announced last year’s scores won’t count against students, but VAM will still be used to evaluate teachers, not one peep out of her about the lack of fairness in that decision. Bottom line: She is a really bad leader and the only person she represents is herself.
artsegal and philaken,
I am with you. We are in the trenches. Randi has no idea what she is talking about. No moratorium. Get rid of Common Core. It stinks to high heaven.
a moratorium gives time to get better ideas in while they sit with their heads placed firmly up their butts
If someone were proposing that our children be exposed to a deadly disease, would we be saying, gee, we should declare a moratorium on that? Well, these tests are a cancer on our educational system. They were a bad idea when forced on everyone by NCLB. They are a bad idea today. They will be a bad idea a year from now, two years from now, three years from now.
The moratorium idea is completely absurd. Many of those pushing for a moratorium simply want time for more PR and for arm twisting. And they want time to figure out how to fix the really, really dreadful tests they have created. Look at the debacle in New York. A 70 percent failure rate.
And what that means is easy to figure out: the makers of the tests failed.
And the truth is, the failed from the start. The end was in the beginning, in their flawed extrinsic punishment and reward “accountability” vision for U.S. education.
People reveal themselves by the metaphors they unconsciously adopt. The deformers’ key metaphor is Judgment Day:
Judge those kids. Judge those schools. Judge those teachers.
There are other controlling metaphors, alternatives to this ugly vision.
We were given a garden. We are stewards and keepers. There are many paths within it. Many wonders. Our business is to guide students as they encounter those wonders. To show them the many paths. To lead them down this one and that one. To help them set up camp and partake of the fruits and drink from those deep springs. In that garden left us by our ancestors.
We are not judges. We are stewards and gardeners.
In addition to the Anthony Cody and Bob Shepherd responses to that CCSS video, here’s Peter Greene’s: http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2014/06/ccss-schooling-for-wretched-people-in.html
Good stuff.
my response will be in my upcoming book Brainstorming the common Core, salvaging the Fiasco of reform A couple of months away
This quote from Anthony explains one of the reasons for CC–“The Common Core creates a template for learning, because these standards were written with measurement in mind. There is a reason test-writers were prominent members of the team that wrote the standards. And nobody is discussing eliminating the tests – just promising that the Smarter Balanced tests we are getting are somehow “better.”
The tests are not indicators of academic achievement no matter how smart. They are indicators of test taking and I am one who supports eliminating them except for a small pre and post test.
Tests are “b” level learning while “A” level learning is assessing the whole child. authentic assessments as well as many more are so much better than the test. We assess science fairs dont we? We can assess real learning. We must stop thinking 18th century and start looking for real answers rather than warmed over rhetoric.
Avoiding Further PARCC Muggings: A Public Service Announcement
Note: The following message is NOT brought to you by
PARCC: Spell that backward
notSmarter, imBalanced
AIRy nonsense
CTB McGraw-SkillDrill
MAP to nowhere
The College Bored, makers of the Scholastic Common Core Achievement Test (SCCAT)
Pearson over Persons, Inc.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (“All your base are belong to us”)
The Common Core Curriculum Commissariate College and Career Ready Assessment Program (CCCCCCRAP) needs to be scrapped. Here are a few of the reasons why:
1.The CCSS ELA exams are invalid.
First, much of attainment in ELA consists in world knowledge (knowledge of what—the stuff of declarative memories of subject matter). The “standards” being tested cover almost no world knowledge and so the tests based on those standards miss much of what constitutes attainment in this subject. Imagine a test of biology that left out almost all world knowledge about biology and covered only biology “skills” like—I don’t know—slide-staining ability—and you’ll get what I mean here. This has been a problem with all of these summative standardized tests in ELA since their inception.
Second, much of attainment in ELA consists in procedural knowledge (knowledge of what—the stuff of procedural memories of subject matter). The “standards” being tested define skills so vaguely and so generally that they cannot be validly operationalized for testing purposes as written.
Third, nothing that students do on these exams EVEN REMOTELY resembles real reading and writing as it is actually done in the real world. The test consists largely of what I call New Criticism Lite, or New Criticism for Dummies—inane exercises on identification of examples of literary elements that for the most part skip over entirely what is being communicated in the piece of writing. In other words, these are tests of literature that for the most part skip over the literature, tests of the reading of informative texts that for the most part skip over the content of those texts. Since what is done on these tests does not resemble, even remotely, what actual readers and writers do in the real world when they actually read and write, the tests, ipso facto, cannot be valid tests of real reading and writing.
Fourth, standard standardized test development practice requires that the testing instrument be validated. Such validation requires that the test maker show that the test correlates strongly with other accepted measures of what is being tested, both generally and specifically (that is, with regard to specific materials and/or skills being tested). No such validation was done for these tests. NONE. And as they are written, based on the standards they are based upon, none COULD BE done. Where is the independent measure of proficiency in CCSS.Literacy.ELA.11-12.4b against which the items in PARCC that are supposed to measure that standard on this test have been validated? Answer: There is no such measure. None. And PARCC has not been validated against it, obviously LOL. So, the tests fail to meet a minimal standard for a high-stakes standardized assessment—that they have been independently validated.
2. The test formats are inappropriate.
First, the tests consist largely of objective-format items (multiple-choice and EBSR). These item types are most appropriate for testing very low-level skills (e.g., recall of factual detail). However, on these tests, such item formats are pressed into a kind of service for which they are, generally, not appropriate. They are used to test “higher-order thinking.” The test questions therefore tend to be tricky and convoluted. The test makers, these days, all insist on answer choices all being plausible. Well, what does plausible mean? Well, at a minimum, plausible means “reasonable.” So, the questions are supposed to deal with higher-order thinking, and the wrong answers are all supposed to be plausible, so the test questions end up being extraordinarily complex and confusing and tricky, all because the “experts” who designed these tests didn’t understand the most basic stuff about creating assessments–that objective question formats are generally not great for testing higher-order thinking, for example. For many of the sample released questions, there is, arguably, no answer among the answer choices that is correct or more than one answer that is correct, or the question simply is not, arguably, actually answerable as written.
Second, at the early grades, the tests end up being as much a test of keyboarding skills as of attainment in ELA. The online testing format is entirely inappropriate for most third graders.
3. The tests are diagnostically and instructionally useless.
Many kinds of assessment—diagnostic assessment, formative assessment, performative assessment, some classroom summative assessment—have instructional value. They can be used to inform instruction and/or are themselves instructive. The results of these tests are not broken down in any way that is of diagnostic or instructional use. Teachers and students cannot even see the tests to find out what students got wrong on them and why. So the tests are of no diagnostic or instructional value. None. None whatsoever.
4. The tests have enormous incurred costs and opportunity costs.
First, they steal away valuable instructional time. Administrators at many schools now report that they spend as much as a third of the school year preparing students to take these tests. That time includes the actual time spent taking the tests, the time spent taking pretests and benchmark tests and other practice tests, the time spent on test prep materials, the time spent doing exercises and activities in textbooks and online materials that have been modeled on the test questions in order to prepare kids to answer questions of those kinds, and the time spent on reporting, data analysis, data chats, proctoring, and other test housekeeping.
Second, they have enormous cost in dollars. In 2010-11, the US spent 1.7 billion on state standardized testing alone. Under CCSS, this increases. The PARCC contract by itself is worth over a billion dollars to Pearson in the first three years, and you have to add the cost of SBAC and the other state tests (another billion and a half?), to that. No one, to my knowledge, has accurately estimated the cost of the computer upgrades that will be necessary for online testing of every child, but those costs probably run to 50 or 60 billion. This is money that could be spent on stuff that matters—on making sure that poor kids have eye exams and warm clothes and food in their bellies, on making sure that libraries are open and that schools have nurses on duty to keep kids from dying. How many dead kids is all this testing worth, given that it is, again, of no instructional value? IF THE ANSWER TO THAT IS NOT OBVIOUS TO YOU, YOU SHOULD NOT BE ALLOWED ANYWHERE NEAR A SCHOOL OR AN EDUCATIONAL POLICY-MAKING DESK.
5. The tests distort curricula and pedagogy.
The tests drive how and what people teach, and they drive much of what is created by curriculum developers. This is a vast subject, so I won’t go into it in this brief note. Suffice it to say that the distortions are grave. In U.S. curriculum development today, the tail is wagging the dog.
6. The tests are abusive and demotivating.
Our prime directive as educators is to nurture intrinsic motivation—to create independent, life-long learners. The tests create climates of anxiety and fear. Both science and common sense teach that extrinsic punishment and reward systems like this testing system are highly DEMOTIVATING for cognitive tasks. The summative standardized testing system is a really, really backward extrinsic punishment and reward approach to motivation. It reminds me of the line from the alphabet in the Puritan New England Primer, the first textbook published on these shores:
F
The idle Fool
Is whip’t in school.
7. The tests have shown no positive results.
We have had more than a decade, now, of standards-and-testing-based accountability under NCLB. We have seen only miniscule increases in outcomes, and those are well within the margin of error of the calculations. Simply from the Hawthorne Effect, we should have seen SOME improvement!!! And that suggests that the testing has actually DECREASED OUTCOMES, which is consistent with what we know about the demotivational effects of extrinsic punishment and reward systems. It’s the height of stupidity to look at a clearly failed approach and to say, “Gee, we should to a lot more of that.”
8. The tests will worsen the achievement and gender gaps.
Both the achievement and gender gaps in educational performance are largely due to motivational issues, and these tests and the curricula and pedagogical strategies tied to them are extremely demotivating. They create new expectations and new hurdles that will widen existing gaps, not close them. Ten percent fewer boys than girls, BTW, received a proficient score on the NY CCSS exams–this in a time when 60 percent of kids in college and 3/5ths of people in MA programs are female. The CCSS exams drive more regimentation and standardization of curricula, which will further turn off kids already turned off by school, causing more to turn out and drop out.
cx: to tune out and drop out
cx: That would be Pearson over Persons Ltd.
cx: Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth (C^4 MiniTru), aka the CCSSO/NGA
Does Randi Weingarten know anyone who’s a teacher? Is LDH trying to make sure Hilary doesn’t make her the runner up in the Sec of Ed position as Obama did? Could these two be any more anti teacher and pro corporate takeover if they tried? Pathetic. Both of them.
I’m disappointed in Randi Weingarten and Linda Darling-Hammond. Anthony Cody totally “gets it”, but what has happened to the other two formerly respected “experts”? Have they have been indoctrinated by the elitist attitude of their community, or do they now have stakes in the money machine.
Is anyone talking about this aspect?
“In all, 640 colleges and universities have committed to participate in PARCC. These colleges and universities, including many flagship universities and most of the largest state systems, have pledged to participate in the development of the new college-ready assessments in mathematics and English Language Arts/Literacy and have signed on to ultimately use these tests as college placement tools.”
Boy, that better be some super-duper test. More and more seems to be riding on it.
Will we bother with teachers giving students grades, I wonder, or just the test from pre-K to college?
http://www.parcconline.org/postsecondary
The deformers’ vision–Gates’ vision, for he has been talking about this for a long, long time–is one uniform, invariant, standardized, regimented system, PreK through college. K-12 was just the beginning. They deformers are already on to Phase 2.
Chiara-
What goes around comes around.
So higher education supports PARCC.
Now those same schools are screaming because it is their turn. Obama wants to rate each college on a scale of one to four, with the “grades” determining governmental funding levels.
What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. So now colleges are rated on student grades and graduation rates. And the administrators are belly aching that it is not fair, especially for schools which include the students with lower SAT scores – the ones who are attaining a liberal arts education.
What? There are legitimate reasons you might not get the arbitrarily “expected” results?
Welcome to the club!
What in heaven’s name has gotten into Linda Darling-Hammond? Diane, can you enlighten us? Thank you!
CCSS is incomplete.
They left out behavior standards for demonstrating oppositional defiant, non-compliant, emotional outburst (swearing, kicking, spitting, hitting, crying, barfing, hiding, lying, cheating, etc.) as effects that CCSS causes. And I’m talking about teachers for starters. It really hits the fan when students take on these symptoms. Then what?
“The way to make our students “confident” and “well-prepared” for this race is to set up their learning as a series of steps they must climb, and every student at a given grade must mount these steps in order, and at the same age.”
And there goes 80 years of research into the Zone of Proximal Development down the drain…
Every day I get more and more sickened by the amount of power that’s been granted to non educators in the field of education. Obama and Duncan are absolute disasters, wielding their significant power to further the agenda of the money interests that guide them.
Our nation’s strength and tradition has been in the are of innovation. We recognize, respect, and nurture creativity in children. We are not a nation of standardization…yet that is the road we are being forced to ride, at this point in history.
I respect your friendship with Randi, Diane…but she’s lost the respect of many, many educators, myself included. Every time she endorses an aspect of education reform, whether it’s the CCSS, a political candidate, or charter schools, she’s used as a reference to our nation’s teachers supposed support for that idea or person. She does not represent us and is not working as leader in the field of education. My opinion, yes…but it’s not given lightly.
I dug this up from a thread of yours a year or so ago. I think it’s an excellent appraisal of the CCSS from an expert in the field who worked on the development of those standards, herself, for a couple of years, before resigning. I think Ms Stotsky nails it and I’m surprised that Randi and Linda don’t:
http://m.deseretnews.com/article/765634632/This-is-why-I-oppose-Common-Core.html?pg=all?ref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F
Randi and Linda will present their plan for accountability within the next week or so. Let us wait to get the total information before passing judgement
I’m not just talking about this particular issue, Cap. I hope their plan is a good one. I’m talking about her past track record.
For one thing, I can’t, for the life of me, figure out why she would support the CCSS as a set of standards that will govern all public schools in all states. And then to say she has our support. Which gets quoted from here to eternity.
But, yes: wait and see.
I just read through the article. It’s good…but there are some things I’d like to bring up:
1) “…The standards are not a curriculum but skills that students should acquire at each grade. How they are taught and materials used are decisions left to states and school districts.”
People keep saying this. It might be true if there wasn’t such importance being pinned to the tests that are accompanying the CCSS. These tests will be closely aligned to curricula that schools will invest in so that they can remain in existence and principals/teachers can keep their jobs. This is not paranoid thinking. There is a lot at stake in the field of education when it comes to “meeting the standards”.
2) “…local tea party groups began protesting what they viewed as the latest intrusion by an overreaching federal government — even though the impetus had come from the states.”
Who are “the states”? Few people knew about this takeover until late in the game. Who are “the states” and what was their real motivation (aka: Race to the Top and the stick that was “No Child Left Behind”)?
3) “…Referring to opinion polls, he noted that most teachers like the Common Core standards and that those who are most familiar with them are the most positive.”
Unfounded and disturbing. Why did you say this, Randi? With so many brilliant minds in both the teaching and administrative ranks saying exactly the opposite?
4) “…“The country as a whole has a huge problem that low-income kids get less good education than suburban kids get,” Gates said.”
This is, to me, the essence of the problem. Is there a gap in achievement between low and higher income families? Yes. Should we create a set of standards that all PUBLIC schools have to adhere to in order to close that gap? Should we be telling schools that routinely send students to some of the top colleges in the nation (or even successful state, city, and community colleges) that they need to have the same standards as the lowest achieving school in Louisiana? Is there research to show that this will raise the educational outcomes of these struggling schools? Is there research to show how these changes will effect the schools that are doing well?
Is there really a crisis in the entire public education system in the United States?
I can’t imagine that anyone as astute as Bill Gates would honestly believe in such a simplistic concept, much less allow it’s widespread proliferation without at least some field testing and review by numerous professionals in the fields of K-12 education and childhood/teen psychology. It makes me think that there are ulterior motives at work, here, despite his protests to the contrary. He should not have this kind of power. No one man should.
Please read this. It’s a short essay written by Sandra Stotsky; a powerful advocate of education reform and educational standards who resigned from the CCSS writing team:
http://www.deseretnews.com/article/765634632/This-is-why-I-oppose-Common-Core.html?pg=all
where I come from, we use logic – a lot….
I worked at Microsoft for a brief time, and I can tell you that logic is in short supply there… and Microsoft is Bill’s baby, so one can assume that logic is not his strong suit either…
logic says that in order to be effective in educating our young we should:
DECIDE WHAT THEY NEED TO KNOW…. CURRICULUM – a broad and deep range of information/content/skill necessary for understanding the world around them (what it is and how it functions) and for interacting with and traversing across and through that world
DECIDE WHAT LEVEL OF MASTERY IS DEEMED SUFFICIENT – STANDARDS – based on what is developmentally appropriate and what are the unique factors and talents/interests each child brings to the equation
TEACH WHAT THEY NEED TO KNOW – PRACTICE – using whatever methods best resonate with each individual child
CHECK TO SEE WHAT LEVEL OF MASTERY HAS BEEN ACHIEVED AND WHAT NEEDS SUPPORT – TEST – again using multiple INDIVIDUAL AND INDIVIDUALISED measures of competency and success ….
Because ed reform approaches all of this arse-over-kite – as does Microsoft in some of its most expensive (and failed) R & D – we will end up “producing”, just as Microsoft does, a seriously flawed “product”…. but unlike Microsoft, we aren’t producing widgets and millions of lines of identical code, we can’t issue “patches” to correct bugs/faulty programming, we don’t have the luxury of absorbing the losses incurred in ‘returns’ and there’s nowhere else for our ‘customers’ to go to get a ‘better product’….
Propaganda