Mercedes Schneider here compares two organizations that graded state standards: the American Institutes for Research and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. When AIR reviewed state standards and assessments, it concluded that the stands were so variable that common national standards and assessments were necessary, that is, the Common Core standards. She notes that AIR is very “scientific,” but recommends CCSS in the absence of any evidence. Fordham grades state standards without regard to their relationship to NAEP scores, and they conclude that what is needed most is Common Core standards.*
Fordham, as is well known, is funded by the Gates Foundation to advocate for CCSS.
AIR, though usually considered a research organization, has significant contracts to create CC assessments. AIR has a contract for $220 million to prepare assessments for Florida. It has a contract for $14 million as one of the developers of Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium. And more: “AIR has collected over $65 million from the Gates Foundation in the form of 23 grants since 2003.”
So, those who graded the state standards concluded that the Common Core was the very best thing even though there was no evidence for what they might accomplish, if anything.
*Note: I chaired the program committee at the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute until 2009, when I resigned from the board. The state standards’ ratings referred only to the academic content of state standards, without reference to the states’ performance on NAEP. I recall giving a speech in some state in the 1990s in which I criticized the academic insufficiency of their state standards. Someone in the audience got up and pointed out the state’s high scores on NAEP. I confess I was stumped. The point was that the quality of the state standards was unrelated to student performance. The lesson, I now realize (which I could not admit in those days), is that the Common Core standards is unlikely to have any effect on student achievement, as Tom Loveless pointed out in 2012. http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2012/04/18/28loveless_ep.h31.html
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It seems like everywhere we look, money from Bill Gates has already greased the manufactured results. Has anyone refused to take $$$$$$$$$$$$ from Bill Gates?
One highly relevant point to me is that Achieve, Fordham, Gates, and many states participated in the publishing of a set of “Common Core” standards in July 2008 that were subsequently pushed down the memory hole:
http://achieve.org/OutofManyOne
What happened to this? Why was it disappeared? Why won’t ANYONE talk about it now, including Common Core critics (not named Sandra Stotsky)?
I wrote about this report in my upcoming CC book. This report hints at a “common core” for K12 and is definitely part of the CCSS groundwork, but it is chiefly a review of the American Diploma Project– not a set of K12 standards.
It does more than “hint” at a common core. It specifies graduation standards and calls them the “Common Core” (e.g. “The ADP Core is the Common Core”). They had already published, iirc, grade 3-12 standards for the full ADP, so in theory that just needed to be simplified. The ADP had been in the can for several years with more “college and career readiness” evidence than the Common Core has today. Essentially, the whole product had been published when most of the same people started over again from scratch, or so we’re told.
Stotsky thinks the math was ditched because it was too difficult, but I have no idea what the conversations would have been around ELA, or why anyone would think the CC CCRS turned out better.
Exactly, aren’t there any research companies out there who are truly unbiased? What do they say about all this?
Mercedes: You forgot that AIR already has the contract for CC assessments for Utah. The ones that take 10 hours per student. It is $6.7 million per year over “the next several years” (great specifics!). http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/news/55349773-78/tests-state-system-students.html.csp
Great article! All here should read it!
Thanks, MERcedes!!!
From the article:
“Practically speaking, all those test scores could be… worthless (gasp!).
Forgive me. I slipped into rationality.”
Yes, due to the inherent epistemological and ontological errors involved in the standards and standardized testing educational malpractices that render the whole process COMPLETELY INVALID, those TEST SCORES ARE INDEED WORTHLESS!
Folks, to understand why please read Noel Wilson’s never refuted nor rebutted “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. And 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.
By Duane E. Swacker
“Money , Money”
We don’t need more standards. We need less standards and more emphasis put on skill mastery and ability levels for passing a standard. But, that would put testing companies out of business since that would mean teachers would have consistent standardized results in which to base grades. Kind of like what a lot of computer programs do now with frequent assessing as students are being taught. However student still need real world experiences to transfer skills.