Caitlin Emma has a great story about Bill Bennett’s new-found advocacy for the Common Core standards in the Morning Edition of politico.com:
“CONSTERNATION OVER COMMON CORE: The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed [http://on.wsj.com/1qJabHV] this week supporting the Common Core – and it wasn’t long before the author, Reagan administration Education Secretary Bill Bennett, was targeted by critics. Chief among them: the libertarian Cato Institute, which said [http://bit.ly/1tDYm47 ] Thursday that Bennett’s piece is rife with spin and contradictions. For example, Bennett writes: “When I was chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities in the 1980s, I asked 250 people across the political spectrum what 10 books every student should be familiar with by the time they finish high school. Almost every person agreed on five vital sources: the Bible, Shakespeare, America’s founding documents, the great American novel ‘Huckleberry Finn’ and classical works of mythology and poetry, like the Iliad and the Odyssey.” But Cato’s Neal McCluskey writes that no such mandates are mentioned in the Common Core standards. “Presumably, the Core includes these readings that almost everyone Bennett polled agreed students should tackle. Right? Um, no.”
– Bennett told Morning Education that the op-ed was simply suggesting that such literature makes up the ‘intellectual roots’ of the Common Core. (The fundamental idea behind a core curriculum is “preserving and emphasizing what’s essential, in fields like literature and math, to a worthwhile education,” the op-ed says. “It is also, by the way, a conservative idea.”) But when it comes to curriculum or required reading lists, he told Morning Education, “I think that’s a decision that ought to be made at the local level.”
– Bennett said he wrote the op-ed because the Common Core has “taken a beating that’s been unwarranted.” And he’s planning to write more in support of the standards, he said. He also acknowledged that the public relations, lobbying and business consulting firm DCI Group paid him for the op-ed. “I’m compensated for most of the things that I do,” he said.
Rick Hess quickly dashed off a piece for National Review questioning Bennett’s “tepid defense” of CCSS. He says, conservatives believe in standards so these standards must be good.
So, conservatives can feel reassured about the value of the CCSS because Bill Bennett approves them. Whether he has actually read them is another issue. What he does not touch on is whether a national curriculum, enforced by the power of the federal government (e.g. Threatening to withdraw federal waivers from states that repeal the Common Core [Oklahoma] or states that won’t evaluate teachers by test scores, which is probably illegal in itself) is legal, constitutional or wise.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Someone should tell Bennett that “Shakespeare” is not “a book”. Nor, for that matter, are “America’s founding documents”, “classical works of mythology and poetry, like the Iliad and the Odyssey” or, technically, the Bible.
None of the Great Books that Bennett loves are required by CCSS
The CCSS lists exemplar texts. These are not required. The selection criteria included the used of a proprietary Lexile scale from Metametrics for text “complexity,” an undisclosed method of judging the complexity of graphics, and judgments by panelists whose names are not disclosed but who were supposed to be mindful of “classics,”
The list of exemplar books appears in Appendix B along with some examples of assessment tasks. Excerpts obtained under “fair use” are included. Also a very strict claim to copyright, a hallmark of all of the official CCSS materials. The developers are determined to protect the brand.
Click to access Appendix_B.pdf
If there were a list of required texts, I think it’s a lead pipe cinch that folks here and elsewhere would be squawking about it. And we have already had some mentally challenged conservatives (e.g., the truly execrable Donna Garner) drumming up hysteria with claims that Common Core mandates the reading of “pornography” for young children. Never mind that one of the texts she decries was a National Book Award finalist for fiction – DREAMING IN CUBAN – and never mind that it’s on a list of exemplary texts for 11th graders: it has sex in it, and domestic violence, and we can’t have our children knowing about that – which is why I’m 100% sure that Donna Garner and the many parents who weighed in favorably when she started mouthing off last summer on the porno in the Common Core have all banned ESPN and any news source that is currently focused on the Ray Rice and Oscar Pistorius cases, both of which involve domestic violence between unmarried adults of the opposite sex.
I’ve noticed the Common Core has produced some strange effects, like political conservatives both being for and against it. Also, the great E.D. Hirsch, a common core supporter, wrote extensively about his disdain for Dewey’s and Kirkpatrick’s discovery teaching methods that now carry the day with CCSS. Also, Hirsch certainly likes the national control over curriculum, having always disapproved local control; yet Bennett is here saying he supports local control and the Common Core.
It seems to me that some big name personalities in education have made some compromises. I posted these thoughts here because I have not received an answer to this anywhere.
Those observations/questions are very close to those I’ve been making/posing since I noticed intriguing splits on the Right over Common Core, both within the world of the Math Wars and in the wider world of educational politics. And I don’t think you’ll get any definitive answers, if you get any at all. I can’t manage to bait the usual suspects in the Math Wars to explain to me how they remain so entrenched against the Common Core Math Standards while their long-time allies Hung-Hsi Wu of UC-Berkeley and Dick Askey of University of Wisconsin-Madison, both mathematicians who long decried so-called “fuzzy math” and participated in groups like Mathematically Correct and NYC-HOLD, have openly and in the case of Wu enthusiastically and hyperbolically come out in support of those same Math Standards.
As a Math Wars veteran, I know that the Standards for Mathematical Practice should be anathema to traditionalists who comprise those above-mentioned groups, and for the most part they are. But how explain the “traitorous” Wu and Askey? And of course, how explain the Fordham Institution support for “the Core,” particularly that of long-time Mathematically Correct/HOLD ally and hero, Skipper Wasp, er, Gadfly McMosca, . . . oh, darn it, I mean, of course, Finny Chequer? It’s a riddle wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a thin tissue of bull.
Mr. Goldenberg, thanks for the feedback. I can see that you, unlike me, are a true Math Wars veteran. I’m a 32 year veteran math teacher without much knowledge of the citations you’ve provided.
It crossed my mind that Wu and Askey, names I’m not familiar with, might both BELIEVE the sales pitch: CCSS will make students learn math more deeply through investigations, discovery, complex instruction, etc., etc. Perhaps they feel that today’s students would benefit from more engaged classrooms. I recall reading Hiebert’s research a few years ago in grad school where he, and others, basically said the way we teach math in America was criminal, or some word closely resembling “criminal.” In fact, some people criticize the math standards for yet another reason, a reason that might be attractive to a Wu and Askey (again, I don’t know these guys), and that is the high school standards are TOO HARD, especially for most current secondary teachers to be able to successfully implement.
I’m just speculating here about why they might like the math standards. But, you point out another strange paradox in the Common Core minefield, a place where you don’t know the land mines from the decoys.
Regarding ELA standards, I can understand that debate a little better: different theories about teaching reading, and traditionalists favoring classical literature versus the camp that wants kids to learn how to read job training manuals (oversimplified here, no doubt).
@Tort: Wu has a host of articles for free download on his homepage in the math department at UC-Berkeley, and the ones from the last three years or so address various issues about the Common Core Math Content Standards (I don’t recall if he really ever addresses the Practice Standards, though he may). One topic he is very adamant about is that the Common Core Standards for teaching rational numbers is THE right way to do it. The funny thing there is that: 1) he insists that THE way to model rational numbers is as points on the number line, and that once you do that, everything falls into place from his point of view as a research mathematician (he doesn’t say it in exactly those words, but I believe that’s a fair statement of his viewpoint; please check for yourself and let me know if you think I’m misremembering, as it’s been about a year since I looked at those articles, at the least). However, the late John van de Walle, who in my view and those of many math educators is the go-to guy for how to teach K-8 mathematics (see any of his books on math methods for K-8), was very cautious about using number lines as models in elementary math teaching/learning, particularly in the primary grades, but I suspect that even for upper elementary he’d want teachers to have more than one model. I won’t claim to have van de Walle’s expertise with elementary math pedagogical issues or Wu’s expertise in high-end mathematics, but my sense is that Wu has gone a bit too far and is definitely too rigid in his claims about the number line as a model for rational numbers; 2) But here is the kicker: from what I have seen of the actual content standards for K-5, Wu’s colleagues didn’t agree with him. The CCSS-M standards, to the best of my recollection, do NOT prescribe the number line as the single or best model. They do not proscribe other models or tools or metaphors. So something seems amiss.
All that said, I don’t think Wu or Dick Askey are the types to just sell out to corporate America or corporate capitalism from anywhere (remembering that Pearson is a British company). They also aren’t the types that would swallow a line of propaganda unless it fit what they already believe. Askey has been a fierce opponent of NCTM’s progressive ideas about math education dating back at least as long as I’ve been in this field, and certainly as far back as the release of the first NCTM Standards volume in 1989, which is around when I started teaching math at Borough of Manhattan Community College. Short of a very strange acid trip or a major blow to the head, I can’t see Askey suddenly liking anything to do with the Practice Standards. Yet I’ve been told by people intimately involved with the creation of the math standards that Askey basically likes them, did not raise a fuss in his role on the feedback group, and as far as I’ve seen hasn’t been speaking out against the standards, unlike Jim Milgram. Never the silent type, Askey would be joining Milgram in denouncing these standards if he agreed with Milgram’s analysis.
Wu was always more moderate, probably the most moderate of any well-known opponent of NCTM-style math back in the ’90s and into the ’00s. He also publicly criticized Saxon Math, something no other mathematician affiliated in any way with HOLD or Mathematically Correct ever came close to doing. But he was never a fan of the NCTM Standards and was sending papers critical of them to math ed faculty back in 1992 when I first started graduate work in mathematics education at University of Michigan (indeed, we read and discussed several of them in monthly seminars at the School of Education). And those papers, too, are online on his home page. Frankly, absent opportunity to talk to him or to Dick Askey, I am a tad confused as to how either of them, but particularly Askey, have come down at all on the pro-Common Core side. But then again, I can’t figure how Checker Finn did, either, though in his case I do suspect some possible financial factors.
Until I become psychic or one of these fellows gives an interview that explains his thinking process, I’m a bit at sea, though fascinated. 😉
You’re usually very incisive, Dienne, but that’s pretty much nitpicking in this context, don’t you think?
ain’t it hilarious watching ultra-conservatives drive themselves into a tizzy over CCSS. one hand wants absolutely everything in the universe to be a business model and make loads of cash for cronies and the other cannot bear the thought of federally based universal curric- just cracks me up… you can just see them turning red & blowing gaskets!!!
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I thought the emphasis of the Common Core was away from literature of any type and non-fiction reading that would help students become good employees who could analyze business information. Perhaps Bill Bennett should stick to his “Virtues.”
At least at my the high school my son attends, literature is totally gone. Last year, his sophomore year, he read no literature. And the year before, the only literature he read was Romeo and Juliet. I’m hoping they do some literature this year, but I’m not counting on it. He’s a huge Shakespeare fan, so we’re covered there. So I’m going to be reading To Kill a Mockingbird and Huckleberry Finn with him soon.
Oddly enough, in the advanced English track + AP English during my four years of high school c. 1964-8 in a very highly regarded public district in Bergen County, NJ, we never read any Mark Twain at all (I read HUCK FINN in graduate school) or Melville (I took a senior seminar on Herman M. in college). Or Hawthorne (also read in college). In retrospect, it doesn’t seem to me that we read much American literature at all. It was all Brits and Greeks, as I’m remembering it now. Loved me some Joe Conrad, Tom Hardy, and Chuck Dickens, though. Wasn’t really ready for Jane Austen at that age. And we read Shakespeare every year, with me getting an extra dose when I took a Drama Lit elective as a senior. So I remember doing ROMEO & JULIET, JULIUS CAESAR, MACBETH, HAMLET, OTHELLO, and KING LEAR (that was AP and I found LEAR more than I could grapple with). Have never met another American who read that much Shakespeare in high school, and it certainly made the course I took from Irving Ribner at SUNY@Stony Brook in 1971 relatively painless.
The only works of American fiction I can recall reading in school in those years are ANTHEM by the god-awful Ayn Rand, and John Knowles’ A SEPARATE PEACE. There must have been more, but damned if I can think of anything else by an American, not James Fenimore Cooper, not Emily Dickinson, not Walt Whitman; well, okay, T.S. Eliot was, technically, American, but not so we noticed. Maybe some Robert Frost. I’m starting to wonder how I got into college. . .
During my four years of high school c. 1970-74 in a highly regarded public district in Bergen County, N.J. – we read both Twain (The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) and Melville (Moby Dick). So hey, you never know.
MPG who would’ve thunk that you and your favorite coward have common roots.
The Common Core does not say “Thou Shalt Not Read Literature.” What it does do is proscribe a way of reading literature which is extremely technical. It’s so strange reading through them, especially in their manifestation in the EngageNY curriculum. Kids are now expected to read in a very analytical way, looking for transitions of tone, main idea, theme, etc. without any real grasp of the larger literature.
The 6th grade unit on the book “The Lightning Thief” is a particularly bad example. It is repetitive in the emphasizing of analysis and test-taking strategies, but that’s not even the worst part. The unit includes some poorly written handouts which are reviewed over and over again for different reading strategies. I counted five lessons that discuss the same single handout. How about instruction in Greek mythology? Not much at all.
I’ve been teaching Greek mythology for a decade now, and I can truthfully say that I do a much better job than this. This doesn’t even touch the point that this curriculum is extremely boring! How do you expect to “engage” kids when the exercises and content are tedious to the extreme?
I thought it was about reading how-to manuals and out of context non-fiction. Oh, and don’t forget they don’t like cursive writing either — make sure the next few generations can’t read handwritten historical documents.
“He also acknowledged that the public relations, lobbying and business consulting firm DCI Group paid him for the op-ed.”
DCI Group:
“Media today is fragmented as never before with audiences demanding information that is personal, credible and accessible. To reach your constituencies it is crucial to draft the right message; to identify trusted messengers; and to utilize the appropriate medium. As communications counselors, DCI Group provides expertise and judgment to help clients articulate their messages to key audiences on global, national and local levels.
Our communications offerings include:
Corporate Communications
Crisis Management
Issue Management
Message Development
Multicultural Media
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Is Bill Bennett a “trusted messenger”? All I remember about him was how he was one of those people who were always scolding the riff-raff and then he had some sort of minor scandal that I didn’t and don’t care about.
I thought they were going with “teachers are trusted”? That’s actually true, looking at polling.
Chiara,
Bill Bennett had two big problems. One was that he made a racist statement on his radio show; that the way to reduce crime was to have more black babies aborted. Then, there was a scandal when somehow it got out that he was a gambling addict and had lost millions at the gaming tables. Not very virtuous for the author of “The Book of Virtues”
The Onion:
http://www.theonion.com/articles/tips-for-fixing-the-nations-education-system,36919/?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=SocialMarketing&utm_campaign=Pic:2:Default
This is my favorite tip for fixing our schools: “Toss Northrop Grumman another $4.5 billion and see what kind of curriculum it pumps out”
Meet the folks who purchased your government:
http://www.brookings.edu/research/interactives/2014/billionaires-us-political-power-index
It is truly frightening how many of them are ed reformers.
Gosh, I hope they’re good people! It’d be a real tragedy if we turned public education over to them and they turned out to be self-serving or crazy or not very smart!
Oh, well. I guess we’ll find out.
Never been a fan of Mr. Bennett. But he’s certainly not wrong about it being a good idea for people who want to grow up to be literate Americans (or literate English-speakers) to read from that list. And he’s also right, on my view, that there should be some local input on other choices, as well as input from (horrors!) students themselves, if in fact they have some idea about things they’d like to read.
I’m concerned, however, that Bennett, whom I believe to be in the Core Knowledge camp, though I could be wrong on that, would, when push comes to shove, be both more proscriptive and more prescriptive than I believe is good, but for now I’ll take him at his word, particularly since he’s not in charge.
That said, I think the important point in this piece is the last sentence: “What he does not touch on is whether a national curriculum, enforced by the power of the federal government (e.g. Threatening to withdraw federal waivers from states that repeal the Common Core [Oklahoma] or states that won’t evaluate teachers by test scores, which is probably illegal in itself) is legal, constitutional or wise.”
That’s precisely the big question that’s loomed over this Common Core business from the outset and about which I would love to hear from some constitutional experts with deep knowledge of education law.
You might find this interesting:
http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2014/08/federalizing-education-by-waiver.html
I would also question the constitutionality of a law (NCLB) that intentionally included
a requirement for which compliance was knowingly IMPOSSIBLE. Imagine a law that required every phys-ed student in America to be able to run the 100 in under 12 seconds, including the physically handicapped. And that same law would punish phys-ed teacher and their shcools if they could not “comply”.
MPG – read your comments on Khan Academy and could.t agree more. Common grouind never felt so good. YFC
One more comment: is it really better to be in bed with Hess and the Cato Institute folks than with Bill Bennett when at least he says something that makes sense, even if he doesn’t really mean it and even if someone is paying him to say it?
I think that few disagree that students need to be well read. However, when we have a mutant curriculum in which all that is read are book exerpts and not the complete text in order to do the pedagogically flawed “close reading,.” true literacy which enables a person to think for him or herself will never happen.
My book and documents are a little different than Bill Bennett and others who would probably want some of these books, essays and primary documents banned:
War and Peace
All Quiet on the Western Front
The Dolls House
Enemy of the People
To Kill a Mockingbird
Slaughterhouse Five
The Pentagon Papers
Two Treaties on Government
The Jungle
The Other America (Harrington was one of my Queens College professors as an undergraduate)
Yes, our founding documents are important but one also needs to really focus on
The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom
The Federalist Papers
The letter George Washington wrote to Temple Sharieth Israel in New York
The letters between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams in their latter years.
Selected essays by Mark Twain
The statement of grievances written as part of the 1848 Woman’s Rights Convention
Closing Arguments on Religion, Law and Society by Clarence Darrow
This little lists create thinking, literate voters that understand the fragility of our freedom and how one must fight everyday to keep it from those who believe not only in political tyranny but economic tyranny.
Sorry for some of the typos above. Wrote it quickly, just before bedtime. Just think of it as a work in progress.
When the Common Core is defeated/renamed, what will people do when they want to control (censor) the reading lists for their soon-to-be adult children? Books can have S-E-X in it and not be pornography.
In a county nearby a parent made a stink about the Bluest Eye so the board caved and removed it from the reading list and sent the Color Purple on an alternative reading list.
For me, there is something far worse than the Common Core, it is censor-happy parents being able to decide what a HS teacher assigns for reading. I worry that one of the results of the defeat of the CCSS is that in its place, we are going to allow parents too much input on what replaces the CCSS. I know in my state, they are proposing writing new standards with an appointed commission that includes business leaders and parents.
http://www.newsobserver.com/2014/08/31/4112752_east-wake-high-school-removes.html?rh=1.
“Books can have S-E-X in it and not be pornography. ”
I find the delineation of supposed differences as that statement attempts to communicate to be, well, rather preposterous, fuddy duddy and risible.
I find my gut reaction to parental censorship of literature and other curricular materials, as well as school administrators’ attempts to limit or nullify student or teacher 1st amendment rights, is a strong desire to exercise my 2nd amendment rights. It’s a good thing I’m a reasonable person who generally believes that the pen (or computer keyboard) is mightier than the sword (or latest firearms).
Yet somehow we managed to put a man on the moon with “old” math.
Many engineers have an advanced understanding of math and even when old math was taught, most likely they intuitively approached math differently.
They did it with old physics. This is where math education falls short.
Zak, I’ve seen that comment made repeatedly, but it doesn’t quite make sense. First, many of the key contributors to the US space program that sent people to the moon were Germans we captured/’saved” from the Russians. Not the biggest selling point for anything, on my view.
But more to the point, it isn’t like the entirety of Americans educated in the ’20s through the ’50s contributed, but rather a very tiny subset who managed to learn a lot of math in spite of, not because of, the way it was badly taught to most of their peers, a way that left the majority of Americans in the dust when it comes to even mundane mathematics, and many hating and fearing the subject like the plague (don’t believe me? Next time you go to a party, tell people you are a mathematician, a math teacher, or a math educator and listen carefully to the reactions that draws).
And even more on point: the math isn’t what’s changed, but rather the TEACHING of math that some of us are trying to change. The “New Math” of the late ’50s through early ’70s wasn’t new to mathematics, only to most parents and most teachers, not to any mathematicians. Set theory, the backbone of modern (20th century) mathematics, was hardly new when the various “New Math” projects were trying to develop better curricula. But regardless, those projects, with one unfortunate exception, never really had much impact in public schools. The one that did, which was published as the Dolciani series (still lots of copies of various editions of various volumes of algebra, geometry, and ” modern introductory analysis” – aka, precalculus – still kicking around the used book market, and while not my favorite texts, worth a look if you can pick them up cheaply) scared the bejeezus out of folks who simply didn’t have the background for it.
Somewhat ironically, despite the counterreaction from some traditionalists, most notably the late NYC mathematics professor, Morris Kline, there are mathematicians and engineers who were vocal opponents of NCTM reforms in the ’80s through ’00s who write glowingly about Dolciani. But it wasn’t particularly user friendly, very formalistic somewhat in the French (Bourbaki) style, and the results of putting such books into schools was, predictably, far more negative than positive, regardless of merit. You can’t make wholesale top-down changes to curricula in math or literacy for many reasons, not the least of which is that even when the average person may be pretty terrible at mathematics, everyone thinks s/he knows “good” math books when s/he sees them, and they look just like the ones from his/her youth. No little irony there, but no one ever said that American thinking about education makes a lot of sense.
The Madison Project, on the other hand, which was led by the late Robert B. Davis, a truly brilliant mathematics educator, should have gotten wide distribution but did not. You can still download free pdfs of one of the books that came out of that project for early grade math (I have a hard copy I got relatively cheaply via the used book world), and I STRONGLY recommend reading this wonderful CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR article from the early ’80s on the project: http://www.csmonitor.com/1981/0302/030203.html
Here is a link to the book I mentioned, DISCOVERY IN MATHEMATICS : http://bit.ly/1wqJ7jR
You won’t find anything in either Dolciani or the Davis book that was “new” mathematics. And, I would argue, neither will you find anything new in the NCTM-style books of the last twenty five years. And finally, there’s no new mathematics in the books that have “Common Core aligned” printed on them in large friendly letters. Because with the possible exception of a couple of things from descriptive statistics, linear programming, and computer-science mathematics, there’s nothing in any K-12 math text that is newer than the very early 18th century (unless a delta-epsilon proof slips into an AP class somewhere or other).
If only people who are so sure they know the shot on math education bothered to learn its history along with the relevant history of mathematics. I won’t be holding my breath, however, as most Americans seem to conveniently buy into part of Henry Ford’s pronouncement, “We don’t know whether Napoleon did or did not try to get across there and I don’t care. I don’t know much about history, and I wouldn’t give a nickel for all the history in the world. It means nothing to me. History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.”
I would urge every math teacher to link to the article and the book. The Madison approach involves 3 key ingredients:
1) Computation skills
2) Understanding math concepts
3) Real world applications/uses
DISCOVERY in MATHEMATICS covers #2.
Current textbooks #1
#3 seems to require knowledgeable and creative teachers.
The Madison approach would require math specialists at the elementary level.
Asking traditionally trained K – 6 teachers to implement this is simply unrealistic which is probably why it never gained any traction.
More common ground MPG.
YFC.
Bill Bennett–like a bad penny, he keeps turning up again and again. Why ANYONE in his/her right mind would even READ something he wrote (&–BTW–his “Book of Virtues” {as Diane pointed out, written by a “not very virtuous author”} was, in fact, simply a collection of recycled Aesop’s fables & other writings–nothing original, & anyone could do it {seems to smack of plagarism to me} may have been to pay off those gambling debts). I used to consider him the worst U.S. Education Sec’y. ever–that is, until Arne Duncan came along. That having been said, did he ever really DO anything–anything at all–to improve American education, to help students, parents, teachers, administrators, school boards or school communities? I do remember one thing he DID do–he came to Chicago, pointed his finger at cameras during a press conference, then stated, “Chicago has the WORST school system in the nation!”
Then he flew back to Washington, D.C.
After that, I often wonder what he did–as U.S. Sec’y. of Ed.–day after day, week after week and month after month. Perhaps he was visiting casinos. I know he wasn’t helping the Chicago Public Schools improve…or any others in this country.
So–why should we listen to him now?!