Common Core standards are usually described in the mainstream media in idealistic terms, using the positive and affirmative messages to sell the idea to the public. Doesn’t everyone want “high standards?” Doesn’t everyone want every single student to be “college and career ready?” Doesn’t everyone want students to be “globally competitive”? Of course. These claims, though untested and unproven, sound poll-tested.
Can standards be both “common” and “high”? If they are truly high and rigorous, won’t a sizable proportion of students fail? Can a single set of standards make everyone college and career ready? How do we know? What does it mean to be “globally competitive” with nations where educated people are paid a fraction of our own minimum wage?
Another way to view the Common Core standards is to see them as part of an integrated system of standards, tests, and teacher ratings that generate data. This data can be used to award bonuses, fire teachers, close schools, and identify students for remediation or college admission. The underlying assumption behind CCSS is that all children, if exposed to common standards, will learn at the same pace.
This post challenges the data-driven approach to school reform. “Data,” it says, “is the fool’s gold of the Common Core.”
He writes:
“Teachers should strive to meet the individual needs of their students, not the “needs” of standards or tests. There should be high academic expectations for all students, but to expect everyone, regardless of ability/disability, to meet those standards simultaneously and in the same way is foolish and inherently unfair.
“Standardized tests are toxic for the Common Core and they are the primary reason for the botched implementation efforts around the country. These tests do not generate comprehensive or reliable data regarding constructivist learning that is called for in the Learning Standards….
“The Common Core testing regime is more about satisfying data-driven enthusiasts’ ‘thirst” for more data, than it is about cultivating students’ thirst for knowledge.
“We are witnessing an unprecedented data collection “gold rush”, while the validity and reliability of this “fool’s gold” is of little concern to those who are mining it.
“The “college and career readiness” mandate or mission of the Common Core is misguided and not in the best interest of all our students. There are many “paths” to trade and vocational careers, and they don’t all go through college.
“Since the Common Core Standards were designed to serve and support the college and career readiness mandate, they are seriously flawed and deficient.
“A more inclusive and appropriate mandate such as readiness for “adulthood and employment” would better serve the academic, social, and emotional needs of all our students. Rather than simply “correcting” the inadequate Common Core standards, they should be reconstructed and redesigned from the ground up.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It’s not fool’s gold – the “gold” (money) is very real. There’s gold in them thar tests!
That same expression came to mind for me yseterday!
I think “crack cocaine” is the better analogy.
Good one, Sharon.
Crack cocaine is too low brow for the edudeformers. They’re going straight for the white powder up their noses.
In refreshing and scholarly contrast to the evidence-free rhetoric about Common Core, I recommend the discussion by the League of Women Voters: http://www.lwv.org/content/common-core-standards-and-assessments This serious look at the origin, implementation, and analysis of Common Core recommends the research and findings of Diane Ravitch, along with fellow experts in education. (Economic Policy Institute, http://www.epi.org). Both of these documents are essential for an understanding of the implications of Common Core, as well as its use in evaluating teachers and students.
” Both of these documents are essential for an understanding of the implications of Common Core. . . ”
Yes, those are important. But the single never refuted nor rebutted document that completely destroys the epistemological and ontological bases of educational standards and the accompanying tests is Noel Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)
1. A description of a quality can only be partially quantified. Quantity is almost always a very small aspect of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category only by a part of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as unidimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing the descriptive information about said interactions is inadequate, insufficient and inferior to the point of invalidity and unacceptability.
2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other word all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. As a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it attempts to measure “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
Thank you for your reasoned response. This document contrasts sharply with the poorly written and questionably researched language of the Common Core standards. Barely qualified persons were recruited to develop these guidelines, and implementation was a disorganized sham.
Have you read Wilson?
Let’s start with a twofer:
“Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” [Daniel Patrick Moynihan]
“When my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir?” [John Maynard Keynes]
The data—in massive amounts—is in. And it confirms what Dr. Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute wrote in Dec. 2013 on his blog:
[start quote]
In truth, the idea that the Common Core might be a “game-changer” has little to do with the Common Core standards themselves, and everything to do with stuff attached to them, especially the adoption of common tests that make it possible to readily compare schools, programs, districts, and states (of course, the announcement that one state after another is opting out of the two testing consortia is hollowing out this promise).
But the Common Core will only make a dramatic difference if those test results are used to evaluate schools or hire, pay, or fire teachers; or if the effort serves to alter teacher preparation, revamp instructional materials, or compel teachers to change what students read and do. And, of course, advocates have made clear that this is exactly what they have in mind. When they refer to the “Common Core,” they don’t just mean the words on paper–what they really have in mind is this whole complex of changes.
[end quote]
Link: http://deutsch29.wordpress.com/2013/12/28/the-american-enterprise-institute-common-core-and-good-cop/
More specifically, VAM can’t exist without the scores generated by high-stakes standardized tests. Junk the tests, you kill off VAM. Along with a great deal of the public rationale of the charterite/privatizer movement.
Like the old [¿?] song says:
CC & testin’, CC & testin’,
Go together like locusts and infestin’,
This I tell you brother
You can’t have one without the other
CC & testin’, CC & testin’,
It’s a oneness you can’t be contestin’,
Ask the local gentry
And they will say it’s elementary
Try, try, try to separate them
It’s an illusion
Try, try, try and you will only come
To this conclusion
CC & testin’, CC & testin’,
Go together like locusts and infestin’,
If teachin’ and learnin’ you want to smother
You can’t have one without the other
[with profuse apologies to Sammy Cahn & Jimmy Van Heusen]
Re CCSS in more general terms, I refer to comments by the owner of this blog and Bob Shepherd.
Just my dos centavitos worth…
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You got it, crazyta.
Authoritarians always exploit existing delusions as they seek to amass power and money. Fool’s gold, snake oil, crack cocaine — call it what you will, our society is in the grips of a mass delusion that somehow we can maintain our supremacy over rising powers like China if we can attach numbers to children’s minds that “prove” we are better than they are. We are pending untold billions and ruining our education system in the insane pursuit of data that cannot ever exist. The combination of knowledge, skill and imagination that characterize engaged and productive human beings is beyond measurement by bubble tests; only fellow human beings can “assess” a growing mind and help it develop properly. There will be a number to tell us what a good teacher is about the same time there’s a number to tell us why a painting by Gaugin or a poem by Keats is beautiful.
This era of education “reform” is going to join the Salem witch trials and McCarthyism in the annals of American mass psychosis. Let us hope our system us strong enough to withstand this latest collapse of reason.
Well said, Jeff Nichols.
Like, KrazyT, I like it a lot!
Data are ….only the reformers think data can be one datapoint!
Data may be fool’s gold in terms of its validity and reliability, but when politically manipulated, it’s a very real weapon to use against teachers and public schools, and as a commodity, it’s ripe for monetization.
The gold is real; the only fools are the one’s who actually believe that any of this is being used for the benefit of students or schools.
“Data-Fever”
Treatment: cold turkey – no testing
“Teachers should strive to meet the individual needs of their students, not the “needs” of standards or tests.”
This very simple concept is what makes for great schools. I am sure meeting the individual needs of students, is a basic principle of learning in every school where the children of the billionaires send their own children. But, for other people’s children, it’s one-sized fits all instruction, data and tests.
WM,
“This very simple concept is what makes for great schools.”
Yes, that quote also caught my eye.
Now the concept of “great schools” I find quite “grating”. “Great schools” is a way of thinking that is based on ranking, sorting and separating (like what standardized tests do), kind of like schools should be rated A+. What goes into that “great” or “A+”???? What does it mean? Why should a school strive to be “great” or “A+”?
I’ve generally found that those types of designations usually come from people tooting their own horn the loudest and that the non-tooters usually actually do a better job.
Duane, the “great schools” ‘thing grates me,too. Especially the implication that in a great school the teachers are somehow better.
Is that what makes say, Duke and Stanford “great schools”?
I wonder what the definition of a great school is.
“Great” schools become great primarily by recruiting distinguished faculty and being highly selective in their student admission. Being admitted there is the only really important thing. If you put down on your resume that you went to Harvard nobody really gives a rat’s ass what you learned there (if anything). The important thing is that you were selected for admission to a prestigious institution.
Jim, it sounds like the same scenario as in one of the Asian countries where high school students vie for the limited spaces in college by passing a single test. Once they’re in, they’re done. Everything else is anti-climatic.
So, I guess being accepted into Harvard is enough. The grades don’t really matter. Especially if your admission is based prestige and not on merit.
(My apologies to those of you who worked your butt off to have the privilege of attending an Ivy League Institution. Kudos to you!)
Ellen, you were nice about Jim’s Great Schools post. In reality, his elitism and arrogance misses the point that great schools actually educate people. To be great, you have to be great at what one is supposed to do. By his definition, a great hospital only admits the healthiest patients.
“The Common Core testing regime is more about satisfying data-driven enthusiasts’ ‘thirst” for more data, than it is about cultivating students’ thirst for knowledge.’
While that is certainly true, the important question is “why are these folks interested in collecting all this data on virtually every student in America?”
It CAN”T be simply to assess how well “education reform’ is working because one can do that quite adequately with statistical sampling, testing randomly selected students making up a relatively small fraction of the total.
Such sampling is used all the time in industry for process and quality control and works very well. In fact, it takes much less time, identifies problems far more quickly and uses far fewer resources than would “testing/inspecting” every item. In cases involving millions of items, no one in his right mind would do the latter, in fact
So, are the people who are intent on doing the latter for students ‘out of their mind?’
It’s possible, I suppose, but far more likely that some of them want the data for some reason other than simply to assess how well ‘reforms” are working.
A massive testing regime like the one currently in motion requires a massive database, and such a database can (and I’d have to say almost certainly does and will) store far more than just test scores
Think of the veritable treasure trove of information that is contained in a database ‘documenting” the lives of individuals from the time they are preschool age to the time they enter the work force (and then beyond): test scores, classes, grades, illnesses and other health problems, days tardy, days missed, discipline problems, friends and associations, clubs joined, rallies attended, photos, videos, (showing clothing and electronics brand preferences, for example), voice recordings, etc, etc.
Make no mistake. This is NOT “fools gold” for those who are collecting it. It’s the real deal.
Larry, it puts a new spin on that “permanent record card” that teachers used to threaten us with in the “olden days”.
Rather than simply “correcting” the inadequate Common Core standards, they should be reconstructed and redesigned from the ground up.”
NO. No. No. They should be tossed–folded, stapled, mutilated, burned. They are based on lies about “college readiness,” and they are based on lies about “careers.” They are based on lies about being “state led.” They are based on lies about “international benchmarking.” They are based on phony baloney ideas about “text complexity,” and a one-size-fits-all notion of grade-to-grade “learning progressions” and on-time “mastery” right out of a factory model of education–no child left behind on the assembly line.
These standards are the production of Bill Gates, Inc…., aided by for-hire workers and federal appointees in USDE who are so dumb they think standards do not have implications for curriculum.
The process of generating the 1,620 standards (including parts a-e) was so uncoordinated that nobody seems to have noticed that the only topic in math taught at every grade is geometry, with not an ounce of supporting rationale for that emphasis.
Prior to grade three the standards in English Language Arts (ELA) and math are off-the-charts wrong-headed, free of any this basic understanding: No one can simply reverse engineer back to childhood what someone may earnestly hope kids will “know and be able to do,” if they graduate from high school. Education is not an engineering problem. It is not the same as training.
These standards are intended to suck the vitality out of instruction in all other subjects, including the sciences, arts, and humanities. All are now subordinate to and are treated as if they must be “aligned” with the Common Core. Non-sense. Should be the other way around so students have a reason to read and calculate–content and problems and unknowns in these broad domains of inquiry. The CCSS distract attention from the historic mission of sustaining a democracy through education centrally concerned with informed citizenship, leaning what life offers and may require beyond getting a job and going to college.
Teachers and kids have been drowning in a sea of standards since 1997 with the “Goals 2000” project on behalf of world-class standards, K-12. Standards were written in 14 domains of study, 24 subjects, then parsed into 259 standards, and 4100 grade-level benchmarks. Some scholars at McRel guessed it might take 22 years to address them all. And, of course, they were not coordinated or fact-checked–(I found some strange and wondrous errors and emphases, like a zillion history standards).
Right now in Ohio, counting the CCSS, we have 3,203 standards on the books, about 265 per grade. We also have “accountability year” that runs from pretest “data” reporting by November 1 to posttest “data” reporting by mid April so the “evaluators of the data” can be delivered well-organized reports from every teacher.
The typical school year is no longer 180 days, 36 weeks, 9 months. It has been severely truncated by the practice of data mongering, and time stolen for testing and test-prep.
Now add some insult to injury by DARING to define “effective” teaching as the production of “a year’s worth of growth;” by suppressing the fact that “growth” is a pretest to posttest gain in test scores. The concept of “a year’s worth of growth is one of many statistical fictions teachers are dealing with. Many of the others are a by-product of an extraordinary marketing campaign to install the CCSS in every school.
The CCSS is a profit-making bonanza. yesterday at OfficeMAx I had the opportunity to buy a grade-level set of the CCSS, $20 per grade, boxed and formatted for a teacher’s use to appease the principals and other evaluators who will have their checklists to see whether you have posted the “expected learnings” for the ELA and math standards. These poster-like cards of the CCSS are plasticized for durability and coded with the CCSS numbering system for easy data-entry on the accountability spreadsheets that each teacher will need to “populate” with data.
Just say no to the CCSS and the whole bundle of “worst practices” it has spawned.
“Teachers and kids have been drowning in a sea of standards since 1997 with the “Goals 2000″ project. . . ”
Yep, and Noel Wilson’s work came out in the same year warning us of this insanity, proving the fallacies that are “standards”. See above for reference.
Laura Chapman, this one post says it all, in the most appropriate tone of controlled exasperation. I’ll send my pro-CCSS friends right here.
“Fool’s Gold” – What a perfect metaphor for high-stakes testing. For most testing, actually. Yes, you see the big picture. But when you dial down to the individual, you can’t make accurate predictions. Any physicist or statistician could tell you that. In fact, they probably did, we just weren’t listening.
I used a similar metaphor in a comment I made elsewhere yesterday. Editing for clarity:
Conscientious academics and business people tend to imagine there is some kind of bona fide actuarial intent behind all this data mining. I suppose that’s what’s familiar to them and how they were trained to operate themselves.
But that was yesterday. Our new brand of data mongers have no intention of mining the raw materials of data for real information, as useful as that might be. That would be hard. They are alchemists who create market values from scratch. The market distinctions they create are supposed to be artificial, that is, disconnected from real values — otherwise they would be difficult to control.
As many of your readers know, Diane, we will be debating this very question at the AFT convention later this week in Los Angeles. Chicago has a resolution before the convention demanding an end to Common Core. That resolution was passed unanimously by our House of Delegates (800 representatives from 600 schools) and is unequivocal. We learned a couple of weeks ago that Randi has put forward a “leadership” resolution that rambles all over the map but lands squarely in support of Common Core at the finish line. Now we hear that AFT operatives have been telling some reporters that AFT leadership and “Chicago” are working on a “compromise.” Not from anyone I know who will be a voting delegate at the convention. We in Chicago oppose Common Core, and there is really no basis for a “compromise” with that meandering mush of verbiage that Randi’s people plowed together to divert the issues.
The thing is, if the administration, Obama and a new secretary, would backtrack on CCSS, testing, data, all that, the Democrats would regain union and teacher support.
But right now,they are blowing off teachers, and hence the 2014 elections.
George Schmidt: you are right to hold firm.
“Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the land.” [Frederick Douglass]
Keep plowing.
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What does the CCSS data prove that one size does not fit all?
Excellent, Diane. You nailed it!
Ah, but in Lake Woebegone, ALL children are above average!
Data ARE. . . data is plural, datum is singular. . . .
Judith, I too would have written “data are,” but I quoted the author of the post.