A principal sent this account of a teacher’s experience to me:
“Common Core Training for ENCORE Teachers
“(ENCORE = subjects like Health, Physical Education, Art, Music, Technology, Home & Careers)
“The ENCORE subjects were assigned a period to meet with a Common Core Specialist. We were told to bring a sample lesson or activity that we use in class.
“I presented a project that I use at the end of my Violence Prevention Unit. This project allows students to research and bring in any article that interests them about Bullying. The article could represent facts about bullying, prevention tips, victim accounts or any other related material. The article could be from a magazine, a newspaper or an on-line source. Students then are asked to answer 5 questions based on the article they chose.
1. Summarize the Article
2. Personal Reaction to The Article
3. Victim’s Reaction – if you were a victim of bullying how could the information in the article help you work out the situation in a positive way.
4. Parent’s Reaction- if you were a parent of a child being bullied, how could you as a parent use the information in this article to help your child.
5. Your Future- How would this article influence your decision next time you are bullied or you are tempted to bully someone.
“Students then volunteer to share their responses. The responses are powerful.
“The Common Core Trainer stated that this did not follow Common Core Standards because the students need to extract evidence from the article.
“When I stated that the goal of the unit as well as this assignment was to promote empathy and give students the skill to be an upstander for themselves as well as others, I was told by the Common Core Trainer “We don’t care how students feel we want them to be able to extract evidence from the text”. When I challenged that statement I was labeled as uncooperative.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The architect of the Common Core.
“As you grow up in this world you realize people really don’t give a shit about what you feel or what you think.” –David Coleman at NY
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Except if you are David Coleman and then everyone should care what you think. What a POS.
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My only comment is that I’m thankful I was able to retire from teaching before all this happened. But again, teachers must speak out and strike like the nurses do, if they want to stop this craziness.
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Retired teachers have a greater ability to speak out. They no longer have to fear for their jobs. What is involved here is not the just the teaching profession; it is the future of our nation. Education of our children strongly affects everyone, and it is in our own self-interest as citizens to speak out.
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And this is what is ignored:
http://www.alternet.org/economy/numbers-are-staggering-us-world-leader-child-poverty
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Thought Police comes to mind.
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I like your lesson a lot. And the trainer is a typical, unqualified hack who presents PD but couldn’t teach themselves out of a paper bag.
How are the students supposed to answer your very thoughtful questions, which, by the way, vary in depth of knowledge and complexity, without extracting information from the text they choose? I could name at least another dozen ways your lesson fits the latest mumbo jumbo nonsense promulgated by ASCD and all the other money grubbing hucksters that promote this nonsense ad infinitum.
Idiots in charge everywhere now, it seems.
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You’re right. It is a good lesson. It does require students to read closely and pull evidence from the text. AND it will engage students and promote change with respect to the critical issue of bullying. Having taught middle schoolers for 20 years, I know that it will also foster interest in further reading as students look at the articles their peers present. What is wrong with these people? Isn’t this what education is supposed to be about?
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The goal is to control what students think about and HOW they think about it. The “teacher” – or textbook writers choose what is to be “extracted” and what that information is supposed to “prove.” It is meant to discourage free-thinking and the very “critical analysis” that CCSS claims to support.
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“We don’t care how students feel we want them to be able to extract evidence from the text”.
And we don’t even care if the evidence is relevant or valid. We demand evidence because it allows us to pretend to score student reading/writing. We don’t even care if they understand what they read. Its only about evidence extracted from context free reading of informational material. We don’t even care that such bogus reading/writing activities have nothing to do with the authentic ways that normal humans engage in reading and writing, Evidence dammit. Give us evidence!
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“We don’t care how students feel we want them to be able to extract evidence from the text”.
Doesn’t this lead to the very opposite of the development of critical thinking skills? If we want students to leave their own thoughts, ideas and life experiences at the door of the school building and merely parrot back ‘text evidence” to support an argument, aren’t we asking them to stop thinking for themselves?
I really do understand the desire and the need to get students to look for factual evidence to support the arguments that they make. They should be forming ideas about the world in which they live on more than, often narrow, personal and family belief systems. But children learn best when they are personally recognized for what they bring to the table. If a teacher doesn’t care what her students think, why would they care what she thinks?
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It’s actually very ironic (and funny) that Common Core expects students to simply assume that the content of “informational text” is true/correct.
Critical thinking is not about blindly accepting facts from what is supposedly “informational text” and using that to “support” one’s arguments.
It’s about questioning the information in all such texts based on the broader context. Does the “information” that is being presented make sense in that broader context? Is it consistent with “outside” information gleaned from other sources?
It’s actually not at all surprising that people like Bill Gates and David Coleman are behind Common Core because this is precisely the approach that they take to thinking in general and education in particular: adopt some cockeyed “theory” and then hunt for “information” from think tank position papers (that Gates funded!) that (supposedly) “supports” it.
This is also the approach that Gates took toward “stacked ranking” in his own company with entirely predictable — and disastrous for his company — results.
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Excellent comments all!
And I simply add: the PDista was acting out the teacher’s points. That is, was a bully.
There is a whole strata of people being trained to be edubullies. Just another example of how a large chunk of the leading rheephormistas—need I remind people of the ideological bent of so many of them, especially the free market fundamentalists?—were envious of, not opposed to, the apparatchiks of the now-vanished Soviet Union.
But no matter the political coloration or label or pretense, it’s all the same: those that think they get bigger by making other people smaller.
Opt of out CCSS and its conjoined twin, high-stakes standardized testing. Opt in to genuine learning and teaching.
It’s a health issue.
Literally.
😎
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Incidentally, when Common Core “experts’ say things like ““We don’t care how students feel we want them to be able to extract evidence from the text”, it amounts to blind acceptance of David Coleman’s own opinion about what is important (and what is not)
It also amounts to a kind of “argument from authority” — I say “kind of” because David Coleman is actually not an authority on education (or anything else that i am aware of)
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During my first introduction to CC ELA standards, we were flatly told there was only one correct answer to a question. You were to read the selection (another worrisome issue- reading just a select portion of something and never really reading the entire story, article, etc.) and discern what the author wanted us to get out of it.
I was flabbergasted and asked “don’t people create their own meaning from text? Don’t they find their own truth?” I was told no, this is not how it is done with CC- that we don’t want students to bring any experience or preconceived notions to the reading.
I have always been a questioner, a devil’s advocate, in essence a thinker. This is uncomfortable for a lot of people. People in charge do not want to be questioned.
To question is a natural part of how we learn. The 1%ers just want endoctrination and blind obedience – blank minds to be filled with servitude.
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“You too can become a Common Core Specialist with only 6
hoursminutesseconds of training at the David Coleman School of Oxfordmorons”LikeLike
I was there ’62 – ’65. They took students from the famous Eton College solely on the basis of their talents in rowing.
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At least they had talents in rowing, which is more than can be said for Coleman, whose main talent seems to be swamping the boat.
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Robots. They want everyone to be a robot. It’s in every level of education, and it’s quickly spilling into every area of life. Weary, just so weary.
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The more of this I hear about (previous was the New generation Science, and the ELA before that) the more I like the Common core math, despite its many horrors and deficiencies. (My opinions on the testing are unprintable).
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CC math standards and standardized math tests are requirements of the NCLB waiver package. They come with the force of LAW.
Not sure what you see as so appealing about CC math. All they did was push topics down a grade or two. Then threw in some bogus crap about deeper understanding for 8 year old kids, ignoring decades of brain science. Its still the kind of math approach that will leave the vast majority of adults essentially innummerate.
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You gotta read this, it’s priceless !
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WordPress put this here instead of as my reblog comment. Ah, well.
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Reblogged this on Saving school math and commented:
You gotta read this, it’s priceless !
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Wow! Reminds me of the absurd situations that Comrade Inspector Ferenc Kolyeszar faces in 1956 Eastern Europe in the novel by Olen Steinhauer, The Confession.
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I ordered the book.
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I am a physical education teacher. Common Core rubrics, assessments, and all the other BS is required in my lessons. It is sickening that people who have no experience in my profession are telling me what and how to teach. These “trainers” are nothing more than money grubbing hacks.
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Whatever happened to Bloom’s Taxonomy?
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Replaced by Webb’s Depth of Knowledge in many of the PD torture sessions I have attended over the last few years of RTTT. Several claimed that Bloom has been refuted and proven bogus through some obscure, non-peer reviewed ‘research’ done by Gates-funded think tankers.
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Chris – I guess that means that everything I learned about education and child psychology (remember Piaget) is obsolete.
We are in the world of “because I said so”.
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Yes, Piaget is sneared at as well and has supposedly been disproven because his research wasn’t scientifically conducted and peer reviewed correctly, etc., etc.
Then the critics of Piaget and Bloom produce crap studies from think tanks and use their ‘scientific’ studies done with cohorts of 10 or 20 children in one class or school to ‘prove’ their ideology-derived theories, peer reviewed by their own think tank or other friendly entities.
Much of NCLB was based on this kind of scam and so was Reading First. It’s much more blatant now. I see it all the time and it disgusts me.
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“Development?”
From Piaget
To Common Core
From “Watch them play”
To “Test and bore”
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I was flipping through a book called “Crimes of the Educators” the other day– author claimed Bloom’s Taxonomy was responsible for the downfall of american education, or some such nonsense.
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I bet he was a Type A or Type 1 personality. Luckily he didn’t mention “the seven hats” or “learning styles” or “multiple intelligences”. I know that Madeline Hunter has been passé for years. What about left brain, right brain learners?
Now we have scripted education. Sigh!
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Oh, he may well have mentioned all of these (though I’m not familiar with “the seven hats”). Remember, I was just flipping through!
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“Crimes of the Educators” was written by Samuel Blumenfeld, a writer, not an educator, who nevertheless decided what and how children should be taught. He was against public education and made money off the homeschooling crowd. His bio at the John Birch Society follows. No doubt, in his world, teaching higher order thinking skills to children is a crime, while being a racist is just fine:
http://www.jbs.org/speaker-bios/samuel-l-blumenfeld
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As I said, just skimming through one book– thought he seemed like a nutjob, personally. Didn’t see anything racist, but again, I was just skimming. Thanks for the info!
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I think this was a matter of this one trainer speaking abrasively. In my school the Common Core consultants who introduce close reading and these exercises know they are falling completely flat with students. One brave consultant even tried to deliver the lesson herself but was rebuked within minutes as the class started talking over or ignoring her.
In the inner city, you have to maintain engagement by “giving a shit” about kids and their experiences. This doesn’t mean kids can’t learn to extract evidence from a text, but a holistic approach recognizes that is only part of the overall process of learning and growing. Managing a high needs class throughout a whole year means balancing genuinely interesting tasks with skill building and creating a welcoming environment for kids who are not all ready at the same time. The Common Core philosophy is the exact opposite.
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The term used when I was still working was “Obstructionist” applied to anyone who questioned anything
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Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé and commented:
An example of how the David Coleman conspiracy and Bill Gates funded Common Core [CRAP] Agenda works:
When a teacher was told by the Common Core Trainer “We don’t care how students feel we want them to be able to extract evidence from the text”.
When that teacher challenged that statement, he was labeled as uncooperative.
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The trick one learns as a long-term teacher is that when “trainers” deliver “new” information (which is seldom) is to confuse them by applying the same terms they have used in order to justify your position. Of course you don’t talk about how the kids feel. They have been trained to disparage such notions. Instead, you state that the students took points from the text– “evidence”–and extended it to the next higher level of critical thinking. Make sure the students have incorporated the “evidence” in their writing before reacting to it with other evidence or before showing how the evidence is to be used in real life. This then will show an understanding of the writer’s information.
I used to develop my lesson and then write the “standards” it met in the educationese of the moment. You are then thought to be brilliant.
Most of these trainers must be people who, as most people, do not want to have their thoughts and beliefs challenged, especially during training sessions. Co-option seems fitting.
Also, I was under the impression that the alternative way to think of Bloom’s Taxonomy was to turn it on its head. I do not know Webb but will now investigate the topic.
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“I used to develop my lesson and then write the ‘standards’ it met in the educationese of the moment. You are then thought to be brilliant.”
LOL – I did the same thing when we had to show what standards the lessons were addressing. I planned the lesson and then went to the book of standards and listed the ones that were covered. Planning came 1st, 2nd, 3rd and proving I was teaching standards came last—-always—just to make the idiots at the top happy and off of my back.
It seems that the rule was that the higher the climbed the administrative ladder, the higher the odds were that they were also fools impressed too much by their title and paycheck. There were exceptions but that number was usually smaller. The best administrators were usually vice principals, because they were closer to the teachers and what was really going on in the classrooms.
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Some administrators realize that teachers do this [because they did it] so they try to tell us that: “Hey, you’re probably already doing this, just put it into the “educationese of the moment.” ” Often the most important skill-set a teacher develops is how to be effective in spite of the “help” from consultants and administrators. The best administrators know this and try to stay out of the way of their best teachers.
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And that probably ex”plains why micromanages like Arne Duncan, David Coleman and Bill Gates want to put videos in classrooms to monitor teachers and make sure they do exactly what the master wants.
“Bill Gates’ $5 Billion Plan: Let’s Put a Camera in Every Classroom”
http://www.takepart.com/article/2013/04/22/bill-gates-5-billion-put-camera-every-classroom
Proof that Bill Gates is the Big Brother that George Orwell warned us about in his novel Nineteen Eight-Four”.
The next step would be to slave those video cameras to a super computer programed to catch teachers who do not teach to the Common Core step-by-step agenda.
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OMG, I didn’t know about the cameras in every classroom. Of course with smart phones that already exists!
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I write lesson plans exactly the same way. I have yet to have an administrator criticize me for not addressing the appropriate standards. I mix them up from lesson to lesson. It is like alphabet soup.
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When I was taking a psychology class in 1968 at a community college during my first year in college, a female student, who wasn’t enrolled in the class walked, in the room one day. She confronted a male student and accused him of molesting her. She then pulled a revolver out of her purse and shot the boy who fell out of his seat to the floor looking like he had been killed.
There was a moment of shock. Two other student went to the victim’s aid. One girl broke down and started to cry.
The professor then revealed this was all fake and he asked us to write down our reactions. I wonder if the Common Core Creep would accept what students witness as evidence or does it have to only come from written text selected by Common Core Creeps like David Coleman or Bill Gates who has to be a cold, dead fish when it comes to having feelings. I think that Gates has had some training to look like he has feelings to fake people out and fool them.
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the problem was not the Health Teacher or the lesson. The issue is the CCSS Expert was no Expert. The lesson clearly called for analysis of research and then critical thinking and then an application of both.
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The cognitive dissonance of situations such as this led me to decide it was time to retire. I refuse to extract the affective domain from teaching. We are humans, not robots, not computers.
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I am right behind you deb.
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Reblogged this on elliepurple77's Blog and commented:
“When I stated that the goal of the unit as well as this assignment was to promote empathy and give students the skill to be an upstander for themselves as well as others, I was told by the Common Core Trainer “We don’t care how students feel we want them to be able to extract evidence from the text”. When I challenged that statement I was labeled as uncooperative.”
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I am curious about “extracting evidence from the text” what on earth does that mean and why would you need to do that in a health class? Isn’t the purpose of health class to learn to stay healthy by making informed decisions. Don’t you read non-fiction in general to learn about something not to “extract evidence” and why, why why is the the main ELA piece that seems to get drilled in every class.
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According to my administrator, extracting evidence from a text is a critical Common Core skill. My challenge was getting kids to read the text. It mattered little how short the text, or how many years below their purported grade level. The vast majority were insistent on answering the questions without a cursory glance at the text. My generation thought we had to at least pretend to read the text.
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Ask David Coleman to “extract evidence” from the Common Core which demonstrates the standards effectively make K-12th graders “college and career ready.” He won’t. He can’t. The standards were never piloted, nor were they internationally benchmarked. And Gates said in 2013 they won’t know if his “education stuff ” works for another decade. The standards and associated high-stakes testing are just strategies used by profiteers to promote the business plan to claim US public education is failing so they can privatize schools, and Gates invested a pretty penny in making that all happen:
“How the Gates Foundation Used $3.38 Billion in College-Ready Education Grants to Change Education Policy”
http://www.artofteachingscience.org/how-the-gates-foundation-used-3-38-billion-in-college-ready-education-grants-to-change-education-policy/
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This is a excellent assignment. It teaches the students so many things and allows student buy in because they can pick the article that is interesting to them.
Based on what the common
core trainer said it seems like they don’t want the kids to think for themselves .
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It sounds like they are hiring non-educators to promote CC to classroom teachers, because most formally trained, experienced educators would probably recognize that directing students to answer questions based on “using information” from an article amounts to extracting evidence. If the teacher had used the words “extract evidence” instead of saying “use information”, I doubt the trainer would have been able to say there was a problem with the lesson. The trainer is a Coleman clone and they want teachers to also become clones.
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The trainer was an idiot. A student can’t provide reasons as to how the article would be helpful to students or parents without “extracting evidence from the text.” And people wonder why teachers are quitting?
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This story is a wonderful illustration of something I said continually for years — there are many important learning objectives that are not measurable and that doesn’t make them less important. Often the most important objectives — this being a good example — are not reducible to a number (or “data”) — aside from the question what made the trainer think that he/she was in charge of determining the learning goal for the lesson?
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The development of the Common Core standards was akin to a first year teacher planning every unit, lesson, and activity (all untested) the summer before her first day of class, then smugly exclaiming. that she will never change one thing.
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This is absurd. Common core standards are in reading, writing, speech and math. Don’t force it.
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Isn’t odd that the teachers had a Common Core Cop to talk to, but teachers can no longer talk to EACH OTHER!! Are they afraid teachers will bond and unite? Fear and isolation are a necessity for their agenda to be successful.
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Yep, I’ve heard of a number of charter schools that have no Teacher’s Lounge, probably for this very reason. It’s about power, controlling teachers and preventing rebellion. The same schools demand that teachers follow scripts & take away their desks so they don’t ever sit down. These kinds of working conditions also ensure early teacher burn-out for profiteers who don’t want to have to pay career educators.
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Never being allowed to sit down also winds up putting older teachers out of the workforce. Normal aging of the brain isn’t allowed, holding on to what has been proven to work isn’t allowed, worsening health due to stress isn’t allowed, independent creativity isn’t allowed, just this scripted stuff that takes no thinking on the part of the teacher. It’s convenient that while your health is breaking down due to giving your profession your all for 25+ years, you are driven away from the job you have loved and developed only to be told that your education has been misguided and harmful so you should simply quit. Breaking down the retirement system makes life most difficult. Sad state of affairs.
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Remember that Section 504 isn’t just for students.
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Same with ADA, but you need evidence that you have a disability and, last I heard, aging alone is not on the list of disorders.
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Well, if the ageing causes one to need accommodations and there is a diagnosis, then the law applies. But for those who prefer to just complain and not take a stand — well, what can I say? Laws are useless unless they are enforced. They won’t be enforced unless they are used.
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The employee still has to provide proof of a disability to be eligible for accommodations and growing old isn’t a disability in itself. However, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act might apply for employees over 40.
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IMO, it isn’t necessarily about overt discrimination for medical reasons per se. It is more of an eye-rolling, “please don’t try to defend anything you have thought was correct for 20 years”, annoyed condescension that creeps in towards anyone who doesn’t jump on the band wagon for scripted lessons and shoving curriculum down into lower grade levels.
The stress of dealing with jumping through hoops with which you don’t agree, wasting time writing endless documented lessons for every class (elementary teachers have no fewer than 5-6 per day, 25-30 per week) requiring at least another 4-6 hours of work on the weekends in addition to grading papers and gathering supplies, and pretending to feel like you are actually able to deliver proper instruction to students through these means is destructive to a teacher’s health. When your hands are tied and you feel you are living a lie, it takes toll on your health and mind.
The means by which we were forced to accept this testing mania actually forced out every single teacher over the age of 50 in our district. The pseudo respect we got only upon retiring was disingenuous and made us feel nothing but relief that we were no longer part of what we had once been proud to say was a fine institution. Even with so-called ” Excellence with Distinction” ratings, we just never felt true appreciation.
Testing ruined our careers and lives. But we kept it together for the sake of the kids until we just couldn’t deal with it any longer.
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The last 4 years have been hell for me. I was targeted by an admin that I had previously been friends with. After a year of harassment, I “luckily” got sick with severe anemia. After taking 1/2 a year off to recover, she placed me in a school and position she knew I did not want (as a friend, she knew I did not want this). I came back strong, so the next year she placed me with a violent student who beat up on me daily, but she would not help and forced me into common core (with MH) and high stakes evaluations. After 6 months I had a seizure at work. After all tests came back good, they diagnosed me with PTSD and severe anxiety. This would not have happened if I could have used 504, right? Union said I could not claim harassment, because it was woman to woman. I was systematically isolated.
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That did not happen to me. However, finally, the teachers banded together, with the exception of about 5%, and got rid of our principal for bullying. She treated everyone, except the few who pretended to like her or who were just like her, like inferior dead weight. Our scores were great, so great that it was hard to show AYP since they were scoring so well on the Ohio tests. But, nothing was ever enough. After I retired, I was asked to submit my memories along with the things the other teachers wrote as their incidents of being bullied. She was, however, allowed to retire. Our supt and board didn’t want our district in the news for anything negative, so she was quietly shuffled away. The pressures of CC got to her, but she was unable to even know what to expect of us. She made nearly impossible demands of demonstrating our ability to deliver the objectives 1) of the district, 2) of the state benchmarks, 3) of the standards, and 4) of her own maniacal choosing. It was absolutely exhausting. Teachers were forbidden to talk in groups. Teachers were always looking for “the mole” and didn’t know who to trust.
I did NOT go into teaching to deal with this kind of game playing and debilitating disrespect for the profession.
I hope you are doing better now. I concur that this became a situation not unlike PTSD. Night sweat, panic attacks, nervous breakdowns, metabolic syndrome, thyroid issues, stress, depression. What a shame. A group of excellent teachers, trying to cooperate, trying to comprehend the absurdity of expectations, was systematically reduced to a pile of nerves.
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A Brave New World in the making.
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This comment mirrors my thoughts. There’s something wrong when one is called uncooperative for being a critical listener as this teacher was. I believe Common Core touts creating critical thinkers or readers. The response of the trainer was hypocritical!
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Most definitely! I wonder if the trainer ever taught. That was always a problem here in DCPS. I truly enjoyed being told what would and wouldn’t work when you have never stepped foot inside my room or even had a classroom. I especially enjoyed how it would be my fault if it didn’t work out. Ah!
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Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education.
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Reblogged this on lifeofgraceandpeace.
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As with other words and ideas, Common Core tries to redefine “critical thinking” by emphasizing only the collection of facts and details and deemphasizing judgment and reflective thought. This seems appropriate for data entry jobs in business, but not for evaluating human interactions and priorities, or being thoughtful and discriminating citizens in a democracy.
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I think some are over reacting a bit. Simply adding a quote from the article from the victim or parent would have been considered providing evidence from the text. So if a student were to write “the parent was outraged” what is wrong with asking a student how they know this? It doesn’t mean that we are asking students to accept provided evidence as “truth”. They can still evaluate the claims and include their personal feelings. I think the trainer was out of line stating that we don’t care how students feel, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask students to cite evidence from the article. Being able to provide a claim and reasoning is not mutually exclusive from the objective of this lesson. We’ve all gotten so defensive.
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By reading the clip and determining the different points of view you are extracting information. Aren’t you?
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Reblogged this on Creative Delaware and commented:
This is what is happening to content areas classes in Delaware too! The core foundation of our class is being systematically changed and we have to stop it!!!!
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I am an art teacher I have went through similar conversations about art. My class is being changed forever!!!!
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