The Gallup Poll reports that three-quarters of teachers support common standards, a similar proportion oppose standardized online common assessments, while 89% oppose teacher evaluations based on student test scores.
Evaluating teachers by the test scores of their students is the most prominent initiative launched by Secretary Arne Duncan. The Gallup Poll shows that Duncan’s favorite “reform” is almost universally opposed by the nation’s teachers.
Hello, President Obama. Please pay attention.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The Gallup result of teachers “in favor” of common standards is a collapsed result. I know this because Gallup labels the result as “total positive” and total negative,” and the other questions it highlights are on a four-point scale, same as AFT and NEA surveys.
When it is considered in its uncollapsed form– the form in which teachers actually responded– the Gallup result does not differ from AFT or NEA surveys; its largest category is “somewhat agree” in all four questions highlighting agreement with CCSS. Thus, there is nothing new here.
What is new is that for all four questions emphasizing the against side of CCSS, regardless if the question mentions testing or not, teachers ‘strongly agree” with the negative impact of CCSS.
All of the above I determined using the link from Diane’s post.
Thanks. Also note that a majority of teachers, about 70%, do not have job assignments that require the same level of intensity to the CCSS as teachers of math and ELA. This is not to say that these other teachers are exempt from “integrating” the CCSS into their instruction, especially in schools or districts facing NCLB sanctions if they do not produce higher scores in these subjects. Even so, there might be different results from some proportionate sampling by job assignments, beyond the three levels of instruction.
This report includes a few quotes from teachers but then an enquiring mind might ask: 1) ”Why did Gallop go to the Gates Foundation for the only “expert” comment on the survey, and 2) Who paid for the Gallop poll?
And the “strongly agree” numbers are terribly weak.
deutsch29.. so glad you brought up what you did. We seem to live in an age of the “directed” questionnaire. In fact, I just received one recently at work. The questionnaire claims to want your opinions on a subject but in reality is aimed at coercing “an opinion” by overly directing the questions. I cannot believe for one minute that the majority of teachers are in favor of common core but just not in favor of all the testing. What I do believe is that gallup came to its “conclusion based upon narrowly worded questions so as to be able to “tweak” the polls without outright lying. There are questionnaires like this for everything nowadays.
I probably know the wrong teachers.
Art Seagal: pardon me if I am misinterpreting your comments, but it sounds like “push polling.” From a wikipedia entry:
“A push poll is an interactive marketing technique, most commonly employed during political campaigning, in which an individual or organization attempts to influence or alter the view of voters under the guise of conducting a poll.”
As for differentiating CCSS from its conjoined twin, high-stakes standardized testing…
A grateful tip of the hat to deutsh29 aka Dr. Mercedes Schneider aka KrazyMathLady. I refer one and all to a blog posting of hers in which a charter member of the self-styled “education reform” establishment (Dr. Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute) explains the connection:
[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/
Please go to her blog posting for invaluable contextual information and a link to the blog posting (also of December 2013) Dr. Hess that she cites.
Thank you for your comments.
😎
DIRECTED questionnaire is RIGHT!
How do you know what the uncollapsed results are for the “common standards” question?
The I collapsed results are reported in the Gallup poll. Also, it doesn’t ask about Conmon Core.
The term “common standards” cannot be connected to any other “common standards.” In the media, the term “common standards” is used to mean CCSS.
On google, the first result for the term “common standards” is the CCSS home page.
The public will not say, “Oh, in completing this survey, I mean the theoretical construct of ‘common standards,’ not CCSS.”
The researchers should have clearly operationalized a distinction between the general idea of “common standards” and CCSS. Otherwise, the result is a convoluted response to CCSS– the only “common standards” game nationwide.
I don’t follow — I meant how did you determine what the uncollapsed results were for that question? I assume you’re inferring them from the other questions, but I don’t understand what the inferences were that got you from point A to point B.
But, Dr. Ravitch, I can’t believe people who answered the questions didn’t think of common core when they read this. And there is no evidence that common core, or common standards improve learning. Solid instruction does that and while that may sound like a duh. . . We are so focused on standards and losing the concept of solid instruction.
This, along with a few other article releases etc., feels like an attempt by aft, nea and other corporate groups to save common core standards but to look like they are getting rid of the tests. .
This makes me very scared!
Tutucker, the CCSS willl never be separated from testing. They are part of a theory of alignment: standards, curriculum, methods, testing, teacher evaluation, consequences(merit pay or firing). All go together.
FLERP, I had to infer from other questions because the Gallup result does not include them, which they should for all questions referenced. The “uncollapsed form” I referred to were the other questions included (which were uncollapsed). I should have been clearer in my original writing.
I searched for a link to the full survey but found none. This is poor form.
The entire survey is centered on the Common Core by name.
Here is the text of the opening question:
“Public School Teachers’ Reactions to Main Elements of Common Core State Standards”
“For each of the following aspects of the Common Core, please indicate whether you think its impact on education in the United States will be very positive, somewhat positive, somewhat negative, or very negative?”
Then the categories are collapsed to offer the featured result of 76% “total positive” for “having one set of educational standards across the country for reading, writing, and math” and 89% “total negative” for “linking teacher evaluations to their students’ Common Core test scores.”
http://www.gallup.com/poll/178997/teachers-favor-common-core-standards-not-testing.aspx
Should the President pay attention to the reporting that 74% of teachers have a positive opinion of “having one set of educational standards across the country for reading, writing, and math”?
No.
And if he does it will be the first time the President ever paid attention to what teachers think.
Anyway, after Tuesday when the Republicans, thanks to Obama’s failed leadership, take control of both houses, who will care what he does or thinks.
I do hope Hillary is paying attention.
Hillary is another corporatist Democrat. Let us not fool ourselves.
I know. I don’t support her but I am hoping that unlike Obama she will come to the realization sooner rather than later that turning against teachers and unions is not a great long term strategy for the party of FDR, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, and Cuomo (Mario), not his wayward son.
GST,
You are the half full type and I am the opposite.
Hillary over saw Arkansas’ STANDARDS and TESTING state program. Remember WHO made states write STANDARDS…initially. Answer: Clinton. Hillary is just Hillary, and NJ Teacher is right.
A well designed, developmentally appropriate set of guidelines could be useful. As soon as high stakes testing is attached to them, a narrowing of instruction that focuses on that testing becomes inevitable. The argument for cross state consistency works better for math since inevitably math standards read very much like a scope and sequence chart. Literacy does not break down into such neat chunks without reducing it to a formulaic approach. When the approach taken is guided by how the content will be tested, how the material is taught is restricted and constricted.
Quite simply: sure. As long as he pays attention to ALL of the survey questions regarding testing and evaluation.
Ah, TE. Always picking the part you want to to debate but rarely addressing all parts of the topic.
Steve K,
Alas, that is what comes from occupying a middle place in the polarized world of internet policy debate and actually reading the posts.
They will love my new book. Complete and ready for printing. I thank Randi W Dr Angela Dye and Karran for endorsements and Will Allen for the forward.Go to http://www.wholechildreform.com
It is interesting to look at the wording of the question that earned the positive results. IT was not about the actual Common Core standards, but whether we should have a set of common standards.
The data for when the standards should be implemented was also interesting with only 28% favoring immediate implementation.
Going further down the line, I find it interesting ( as a high school science teacher) that high school math teachers find very little difference in the standards compared to what they have now.
Going down to the reasons, it seems the largest reason for supporting some common standards is to help students who move states. The other PR reasons did not earn overwhelming support. The one with the least support was to ensure that all students get the same education regardless of zip code. Teachers know that standards are not the almighty fix that the PR machine is spouting.
Agree. Difference between “in theory” and what is beginning to hit home and also what is not asked at all…like is the best way to address the most pressing problems in public schools?
If CCSS is “common standards,” then CCSS proponents will play up this survey as support for CCSS, and they will call it “common standards” and be technically correct– just like Arne is in stating that RTT does not require CCSS. RTTT requires states to adopt “common standards.”
We are playing semantic games here.
“Common standards” has a subset of one and only one.
Deutch29,
It is impossible to understand some of the questions in the poll, including those about rigor and implementation time, without “common standards” being understood as the CCSS.
Thank you, TE.
Nothing theoretical about the 2014 CCSS implementation.
Correct, Alice. The Gallup poll did not mention Common Core.
Alice and Dr. Ravitch,
It is difficult to claim what the respondents to the poll understood this as some generic unspecified national standard when 28% of the respondents thought the standards should be implemented in the fall of 2014.
I don’t know who they are polling, but the teachers I know, including myself, don’t support either! Someone is in need of a reality check!
AMEN!!
Poll results often function as a reality check.
Thanks, Stephanie. I was getting depressed.
National standards should be simple and straight forward – and should be used as a guideline or as a recommendation. Anything more is an over-reach. Flexibility needs to be built in. As for testing, I copy the post from the “Tech for Tots” as it fits here:
Please read my response to this article: “New Jersey education chief pushes Common Core” at this link – my post is under to line in response to the article.
http://www.pressofatlanticcity.com/education/new-jersey-education-chief-pushes-common-core/article_daa96b5e-5ef9-11e4-9e88-0f3d326e7323.html
_________
David Di Gregorio · Top Commenter
I respectfully disagree with the commissioner. My son is already on computers in first grade, before he can even form letters properly. Push a key for a perfectly formed letter and forget about developing fine motor skills or attention to detail. The children play “learning games” on computer instead of learning face to face, playing face to face – what is remembered are the game’s bells and whistles, not the beauty of what they are learning as presented by the teacher. The children sit in front of a smart board instead of learning through manipulatives – experiencing reality with depth. I could go on.
Then, there is the huge investment by districts in technology so the tests can be taken by computer to collect data on my son and other children. Is this necessary? I suggest walking through a school building and collecting information, observing, and feeling, rather than gathering cold data electronically – what are schools anyway? Factories? Walk through an affluent district – walk through a poor district – it is not that difficult to figure it out.
What is driving this? Is it profit for a very few? Or is it good will? Motivating educators and students will not happen through the data driven micromanagement – it will come through someone who can show how wondrous and beautiful the world is – and that it is the most worthy endeavor to be part of the process of learning and teaching about it.
David Di Gregorio
Father of a six year old and a school administrator
“Motivating educators and students will not happen through the data driven micromanagement – it will come through someone who can show how wondrous and beautiful the world is – and that it is the most worthy endeavor to be part of the process of learning and teaching about it.”
I picked a snippet to highlight, but your whole post resonates with me.
Thank you 2old2teach –
The Common Core State “Standards” in ELA are an amateurish embarrassment.
What???? Listen to an expert???????. Just kidding.
Gallop prefers an expert from the Gates foundation. Even I, not a teacher of ELA, saw the new criticism bit from mid-century last and the intentional fallacy at work, both real problems for teachers who venture into art criticism.
Well, that didn’t take long to debunk those results and interpretations. Knew Mercedes would come through, along with all the others.
The problem being that one can see the headlines now with a lot of edubabble being tossed at the ignorants of the country who believe all they see and hear on the boob tube and the rest of the Lame Stream Media.
Looks we all have a job ahead of us in the comments section of those articles. I want to thank all of the folks here and all the Chalkface blogs for giving me the data and the courage to do just that.
and “common standards” does not equal Common Core.
So, which respondents identified with the theoretical construct “common standards” and which thought of the CCSS that has been a volitle topic in the popular media esp this past year?
This can be teased out at best only if the researchers clearly operationalize the distinction– which they did not.
In Minneapolis they fired 200 teachers last year based on low scores using their new evaluation system that is a mix of student test scores, student evaluations and observations. The district is choosing to ignore inaccuracies in this process. Lawsuit anyone?
Poll on CCSS: Bad Science USA. Thank you.
Amen, Ken.
First, we have to stop phony cut scores on state exams where scores in the 7th stanine are described as “proficiency”.
Second, we need to recognize that the USA needs a foundational framework for learning that has world class standards. Third, we need to insist that teachers enjoy professional status and be given time and school structures that enable them to prescribe curriculum, assess student learning, and adjust instruction to ensure all students learn to apply their lessons in new contexts.
This is the uncollapsed results. http://www.gallup.com/poll/178892/teachers-offer-split-decision-common-core.aspx
PRINCETON, NJ — In a new Gallup survey of teachers, U.S. public school teachers are closely split in their overall reaction to the Common Core State Standards: 41% view the program positively and 44% negatively. Even in terms of strong reactions, teachers’ attitudes are divided, with 15% saying their perceptions of the initiative are “very positive” and 16% saying “very negative.”
Even this report does not provide a link to the comprehensive survey. Some of the data tables leave the reader wondering what was actually asked. For example, the one about most teachers who implemented CCSS in 2013-14 “viewed it positively.”
First of all, the survey was of fewer than 900 teachers total (867 I think), and only “one in four” was somehow connected with 2013-14 implementation. That is a small sample– roughly 215 teachers. And 61% “viewed CCSS implementation positively.” Perhaps 120 teachers offered some indication of “positive” CCSS implementation. What were they asked, and how was the question presented?
By the way, the Gates influence is on this survey.
Gates = Big $$$$$
I think the Common Core testing gets tweaked as states realize it crashes into their 500 other state mandates like The Third Grade Reading Guarantee and the slew of new high school graduation requirements which in Ohio include around 47 different test and/or “credentialing” combinations to graduate, and they’re not even done.
I myself see a lot of potential for profiteering on the “career credentials” alternatives to high school academic testing they’re working on in this state. I’m dreading seeing how THAT looks in real life. If I were ambitious and well-connected politically, I’d get into “career credentialing” for high school students. That looks ripe for exploitation. Ugh. It’ll be a free for all.
I read a piece where Sandy Kress was pushing “career credentials” for high schoolers and I just got this sinking feeling of big wads of cash flying out of state coffers to contractors.
The concept and practice of a common core is a good thing for society.
The problem is the following:
1) The people who wrote the CCSS are not bona fide educators. Just ask Mercedes Schneider.
2) There is far too much testing.
3) The utilization of test scores is evil, pure evil.
4) Technology has not been judiciously applies. Technology should be used to aid the teacher, not to replace the teacher.
5) Technology cannot grade tests in which the modality has far too many human factors, such as essay writing, for starters.
The elimination of tenure, bargaining rights, and tying test scores to evaluations has NOTHING to do with a best practices lens of having a common core for all children, and perhaps some much needed variation for ELLs and differently abled children.
The CCSS has been tied to all the above, unfortunately, but that has to do with power, not with the whole ideology of a common core.
The whole process of writing and materializing the CCSS was anything but democratic. Had it been otherwise, we would be in a far better place.
Whether people want to acknowledge it or not, we ALL have standards. When you see that your daughter is dating someone at 16, you don’t want her to be with some guy who is doped up or has a track history of petty thefts. That’s because your rubric is something like “guy must not be into drugs or crime”.
When you go to a restaurant that does things well, there’s a reason why the moussakka was to die for, and that is because someone knew how to layer the ingredients at the right thickness and could make a bechemel sauce with just the right amount of flour and milk and nutmeg. There were standards that applied, and that’s why you walked out content and maybe inspired to make the dish yourself.
(I am a HUGE fan of moussakka when made well, even variations on it in the recipe are great.)
However, the CCSS were not written with human development in mind nearly as much as they were written with academic progression. These two concepts are NOT the same. They should intertwine with each other, but they did not, thanks to the incompetence and corruption of our body politic.
I don’t see why people are so frightened by a common core. Is the United States fragmented and divided enough? Of course, I am frightened by THIS common core, but the idea and practice of one that is done well would be a big boon to American culture . . . .
Terrible how Obama and crony capitalists could take something so pure and taint it so heavily with their e-bola-like deadly politics . . . . .
Where I’m located (Alaska), teachers look at me like I dropped a dozen of my marbles when I begin to speak about CCSS, VAM, and the implications to public education and our society. Maybe we are too far removed from the “real” world; we work in isolated Native villages along Norton Sound and North along the Bering Sea. Nonetheless, I find it very difficult to get anyone to consider taking a look and doing a bit of reading about CCSS, VAM, and the possible consequences.
We began implementing CCSS (Alaska’s version–almost mirror-like to the federal version) and VAM this year. I learned this week that “persistence” is part of a core standard in math (I teach English). Honestly, when I was in high school, a very long time ago (think long hair, hallucinogenics, and free love), someone would have had to pay me to persist with any math. I found it so boring (no offense intended to our talented math teachers).
I don’t see any good coming from CCSS or VAM.
“The Common
CoreTest”Common Test’s the aim
And Common Core the way
They differ in their name
But not in how they pay
From the horse’s mouth:
I agree completely with you that there are other motivations and even ulterior motives in the realization of the CCSS. But what I am talking about is a common core without all the common whores who have perverted the concept of it. . . . in theory and in practice . . with their eye on prizes awarded to people who know little to nothing about teaching and learning, such as Gates and so many others . . . .
Robert:
Actually, I wasn’t responding to your comment.
But your phrase is catchy
“The Common
CWhore”From Common Core
To Common Whore
Once a virgin
Never more!
Oh! So miss leading:
“Teachers Favor Common Core Standards, Not the Testing”
What teachers were surveyed? TFA Teachers who have no background in Philolosphy of Education, Child Psychology, methodology of reading? A books could be written about all the problems with the Common Core Standards.
As David Di Gregorio stated National standards should be simple and straight forward – and should be used as a guideline or as a recommendation. The opening paragraph of the Primary CC uses the word must numerous times.
Just to reiterate a few problems: CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.3.1 “Ask and answer questions to demonstrate understanding of a text, referring explicitly to the text as the basis for the answers.”
CC: Believes that the answers are to be found in the text itself so they concentrate on the text instead of starting with the child and what the child knows.
“Closed reading” negates the years of research stating the importance of utilizing prior knowledge.
The philosophy embedded in the CC is a modified version of Behaviorism. For the primary grades CC states, “varied and repeated practice leads to rapid recall and automaticity.” Being able to regurgitate information will be of no use to the students if he/she can’t relate to the information in some way. Furthermore, some people/children have phenomenal memories but others do not. Just like actors on stage need props/cues to help them remember their lines so do children need cues to retrieve information. Relating the subject matter/curriculum to the students and their background is like using mnemonics not only to help them retrieve information but more importantly to help them construct meaning and apply the information. This, however, is not in the CC Standards.
CC wants the readings to stay on topic year after year instead of expanding interest on other topics. Where is the research supporting such an idea? In examining the examples of informational text across grades K to 5, the topic of the human body appeared on each level K to 5 suggested lists. The designers of the CC think by assigning increasingly complex information texts on the same topic each year starting with the “very earliest “ grades will increase the students’ ability to read more complex informational text. CC maintains that by having students listen to informational read-alouds in the early grades helps lay the necessary foundation for students’ reading and understanding of increasingly complex texts on their own in subsequent grades. Where is the research proving that a heavy dose of informational text on one topic will develop better readers and life long readers? Where is the research validating the imposing of the same topic on students year after year is better than expanding students’ interests? You can build on expanding knowledge year after year via videos, photos, graphs, but that is not going to augment the skill of reading. The skill of reading more difficult text is built up gradually through scaffolding with many kinds of genre.
CC has no understanding what scaffolding is all about nor phonological awareness.
Someone told me that finally the students will develop higher order thinking skills. Is she referring to NCLB reading program? Well that is the same reading program advocated by CC. Our old NY State standards included all the higher order thinking skills. The focus of Common Core is far too narrow – just utilizing the higher order thinking skills of analysis and comparing information is incomplete. Analysis doesn’t necessarily include comprehension; that is a different higher order thinking skill. Imagination is the most crucial and CC doesn’t mention imagination.
CC uses the Lexile scale to determine readability. There is far more to readability than measuring the number of syllables in a word and number of words in a sentence.
“…students (grades 2- 12)should be given text that they may struggle with in order to expand their knowledge. ”Also found in the document “CCSS guidelines on text complexity encourage teachers to engage students in reading at least some texts they are likely to struggle with in terms of fluency and reading comprehension.”
Oh the damage that will be done if teachers adhere to that directive. Our reading problems will escalate and the Reading Gap will just get wider. The text that the teacher gives the students for guided reading in order to develop skills, strategies, and higher order thinking skills must be on their instructional level. Primary children including second and third graders should not struggle: should not be forced to try and read on a frustration level. Students will regress if they are forced to read on a level that is too difficult for them. To expect second and third graders to cope with material that is too difficult is poor teaching and will cause a student to regress and worse can cause a disability say nothing about squelching the desire to read.
CC states, “Far too often, students who have fallen behind are given only less complex text rather than the instruction they need in the foundational skill in reading as well as vocabulary and other supports they need to read at an appropriate level of complexity.
First of all, students haven’t fallen behind. They were behind before they began formal education. What research are they referring to? Standards are a goal to aim for but teachers work with the abilities the students have. The “one size fits all” belief is ridiculous.
I have only scratched a small area of CC. CC is problematic on every level in both math and literacy. It boggles my mind how any educator can support the CC unless the survey was controlled or the so called educator didn’t have the background to evaluate the CCSS.
Mary DeFalco,
The link provides some information about who was surveyed.
Teachers favor common “core” standards, not the copyrighted “Common Core Standards.” A purposely deceptive title in the article, and yet another soon to be oft-quoted statistic.
Thenextlevel2000,
I think it is fairly clear from the questions asked that the focus of the survey was correctly understood as the CCSS, not an abstract notion of common core standards. How else could the teachers evaluate if the common core standards were more or less rigorous than the existing standards?
There is something goofy about the idea that CCSS will standardize American ed such that students can move from state to state and just pick up where they left off. School calendars do not align because of CCSS. Type of schedule does not align (e.g., block), and the reality is that even different classes taught by the same teacher might not be “aligned.”
The whole idea seems to be based on some ’50’s-’60’s notion of the ‘mobile work force’. I think it’s just a marketing sound-bite that catches on w/ older folks.
I knew there must be a logical reason why so many schools are now using mobile classrooms,
“The UnCommon Classroom”
The common trailer moves around
With Common Teacher o’er common ground
With Common Core that Bill has found
UnCommon Classrooms do abound
The entire foundation not to mention notion of the CCSS is flawed.
I’m not so sure I see anything ‘pure’ about a common core.
Even math– more of a ‘discipline’ than the lumped together massive field that goes by the acronym ELA– will always have standards that reflect pedagogical attitudes/ approaches which evolve in an un-standard way, in fits and starts as groups learn from each other and build on others’ work, much as technology itself develops.
In broad brush, as a non-math person, I see phases: we’ve had the ‘rote’ era; we’re in the ‘fuzzy-math’ backlash with verbal explanation & reiterative number layouts etc to demonstrate conceptual understanding; we may eventually arrive at Asian methods where number sense is developed early w/abacus & manipulatives, then one learns to develop various methods/ formulae to explain a set of data. Restricting the entire nation to following one standard pedagogical approach slows everybody down. Let the university towns pursue the latest thing; state ed depts will compare notes & create rough guides only– poorer urban & rural centers must be free to pick & choose from all available sources, adapting as needed for delayed-starters, ELL, etc.
As for ELA, the common core is anathema. There is a place for an intelligent, research-based, bare-boned set of guides for the multi-grade phasing in of learning to read and write. Likewise for phasing in the study of fiction & non-fiction, the crafts of expository, critical, and persuasive writing. High-performing states already had such stds onboard & shared them w/ other states before NCLB then CCSS came along w/their curriculum-warping& -restricting annual reqts/tests.
Can there even be national standards for high-school graduation? I believe it’s possible. But we’re going to have to reinstate & update voc-ed in a big way before we can put together a set of realistic standards. At present we over-emphasize ‘college-ready’, to the detriment of those who would be ‘career-ready’.
The end goal is to save the common core standards. Therefore, the call is now for less tests, better tests, all in order to make sure common core stays – all in order to appease folks like us who understand the true agenda to privatize public schools. This survey – and how it is being portrayed by Gallup – is one more piece to push forward that agenda.
Were any early childhood or elementary teachers push polled in this? We know the CC are completely inappropriate for our youngest learners. I know very few people who “support” them. My spidey senses have been tingling lately over a not so veiled attempt by quite a few people who rail against the testing but are still trying to save these god awful standards developed by non educators.The entire philosophy on which the reading is based is refuted by years of research and plain common sense. Please do not play us for fools. They need to go along with the testing.
“Survey says”
Survey says:
The Edu-war
Is family feud
‘Tween test and Core
I met a teacher, once, who described herself as a supporter of the Common Core State Standards. This was like encountering a panda in the wild–a rare event indeed. These polls are ridiculous. Clearly, they are designed to get the outcomes that the designers are looking for.
Polls are a sub-field of statistics so there are actually four* kinds of lies:
lies, damned lies, statistics and polls
(*five if you include the other spelling:pol)
There never was any learned vetting of the Common Core State Standards in ELA. If one started enumerating the problems with them, one would be kept busy, as a wag once said on this blog, from daybreak to doomsday. It’s dispiriting to have people asking whether we should have “a set of common national standards” when what they are really asking about is the unholy mess that is the CCSS.
The CCSS in ELA is a list of vague, abstractly formulated “skills” to be explicitly taught and learned. But much of ELA deals not with explicit learning but, rather, with acquisition. For example, far less than 1 percent of vocabulary and almost none of the syntactic, morphological, phonological, and semantic rules of a language known by a competent adult have been explicitly learned. That’s why linguists make the critical distinction between learning and acquisition. But the CCSS authors knew none of this. Turning to explicit learning, there are a couple different kinds–attainment of procedural knowledge (knowledge of how) and attainment of declarative knowledge (knowledge of what). The CCSS contains almost no standards related to the latter (it’s almost completely content free) and formulates standards related to the former so vaguely that one cannot, based on such “standards,” operationalize them sufficiently to test them at all validly. The whole theory behind the literature standards is discredited New Criticism Lite or New Criticism for Dummies and sets the field of ELA back seventy years, as though nothing had happened in English studies since Cleanth Brooks, and that theory ignores the critical distinction in hermeneutics between meaning as intention and meaning as significance and so is fundamentally flawed. The writing standards are based on a crude and unscientific division of types of writing into three modes and encourages the kind of teaching that ignores the enormous toolkit of specific techniques used by writers and promotes the creation of lessons and rubrics yielding formulaic nonwriting. Many of the standards seem plugged in at random; they appear in no rational progression. Many deal with minor matters (the effect of figurative language on tone) while ignoring entirely matters of enormous import (the role of metaphor in concept formation). One could easily formulate a rich curriculum in ELA based solely on lacunae in these amateurish, prescientific “standards.” They are an utter embarrassment, and it’s shocking that anyone who claims to be an ELA professional would react to them with anything other than derision. And texts for the CCSS–those random, arbitrary snippets of great works that are now being read in lieu of, say, novels and dramas–are chosen based on ludicrous measures like Lexile scores. BTW, Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride,” that staple of elementary school classrooms, has a Lexile score at the college level, and Dylan Thomas’s “Time held me green and dying,” which expresses a sophisticated, profound, complex idea and is quite difficult conceptually has a Lexile level of less than second grade.
Imagine what would have happened if Gates and Achieve had handed David Coleman a copy of the 1858 edition of Gray’s Anatomy and sent him to the woods in Vermont to write new standards for the medical profession. Well, something like that happened here. Clearly, Coleman knew as much about ELA as he does about medicine. So, he cribbed from existing state standards that had most of the problems that I outlined above, and he sprinkled a little New Critical fairy dust over the whole, and as a result, became the de facto lord and master of ELA instruction in the United States, despite have precisely NO relevant learning or experience.
This is shameful.
“A little learning is a dangerous thing,” wrote Alexander Pope. But what the authors of these “standards” lacked in learning in ELA, they made up for in hubris.
Of course, Gates could have saved himself a lot of money. Amusingly, he paid millions for this claptrap. He could have got similar results, of course, if he had called together the members of some small town Rotary club and asked them to make a list of “stuff to learn in English class.”
Almost nothing of what is known about teaching and learning in ELA is reflected in these embarrassing “standards.”
Reblogged this on 21st Century Theater.