Rick Hess directs education studies at the conservative, free-market American Enterprise Institute. We often disagree but I am often impressed that he doesn’t follow “the party line” of free-marketeers. This article is a good example of Hess demonstrating his sharp intellect and his willingness to stray from the rightwing corral.
When it comes to the Common Core, Hess has always been skeptical, though not opposed. In the linked article he explains that the Common Core went wrong because Washington insiders convinced themselves that the nation needed rigorous common standards. Those standards were being developed as the Race to the Top was announced. States couldn’t be eligible for a slice of the federal billions unless they adopted “common college-and-career-ready standards,” shorthand for the Common Core standards. Consequently, dozens of states signed on without even reading the CCSS.
The bottom line is that the D.C. insiders thought they could pull a fast one. They thought the public might not catch on that their state had surrendered its power over its own curriculum and testing. They thought that people might be swayed by a massive propaganda campaign to fall quietly in line.
They were wrong.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Have you seen this spoof? http://time.com/3975777/key-peele-teaching-center-espn-sportscenter-comedy-central/
Thanks, TAGO!
My feelings and thoughts exactly. TAGO is right.
I have just read the whole article. It really is comprehensive regarding the Common Core itself, but he steers clear of the attached school and teacher evaluation stuff, probably wisely.
I read the whole article. Mr. Hess obviously believes in the lofty principle of a “Common Core.” However, he is wrong about the goals of the “reformers.” The true goal is to push a narrative of failure in order to justify the privatization of the public school systems. There is no other reasonable explanation for the political advocacy of a 2 tier system. The Common Core is a political animal, and its goals are not to lift up the whole nation to a better standard of education and thus a better standard of living. Its goals are to divide and conquer for the benefit of the chosen.
It would be ingesting to see a comparison of how private for profit prisons came to be so common. I suspect there is a playbook out there on how to wrangle public institutions and the associated tax dollars away from public control.
It’s a Koch brother playbook. Hess probably follows it…usually.
Is it just me or does anyone else find it odd that anyone at a conservative think tank called the American Enterprise Institute would ever not have been opposed to a massive system of centralized planning and control like Common Core?
I know they see schools as markets and $$$, but does that mean they are willing to “overlook” their entire ‘Conservative” philosophy (reduced Federal control, states’ rights, etc) ?
Rick Hess, highlights many important points about what “went wrong” with the Common Core State Standards, laying the blame on the Obama administration and inside the beltway technocrats. Missing from analysis is exposure of any the behind-the-scenes role for companies looking to profit from a more coherent and less fragmented market and the hopes of market ideologues searching for tools to undermine the power of teachers unions in particular and public education in general. The 100% proficiency demands were designed to undermine confidence in public education, as was the connection between teacher evaluation and common core testing in Race to the Top and School Improvement grants.
Absent from much of the media attention to the strident debates about federal v/ local control is the simple fact that no system in the world has made significant improvement based on standards and high-stakes testing. We are, I think stuck in a debate within an autonomy and control framework, while ignoring the great potential for mutual responsibility.
I wrote about this several years ago here: http://www.arthurcamins.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Past-Gets-In-Our-Eyes1.pdf
To have a supporter of corporate education reform like Rick Hess say, “At this point, however reasonable the rationale for the Common Core, it seems increasingly clear that American education would be better off if this unfortunate, quasi-national enterprise had never made it off the drawing board.” is quite amazing. To acknowledge that its implementation has been a “stealth strategy that bypassed a distracted public” is also quite amazing.
He gives a very good chronicle of what is wrong with Common Core. However, his main concern seems to be with how it was implemented saying it allowed critics on the right to claim it is “Obamacore”.
With his claim to be facing reality however, he never acknowledges that Common Core is part of the goal of corporate and financial interests to privatize public education. In his long article he never even mentions public education. He mentions charter schools as being hurt by Common Core saying:
“Along the way, the Common Core has driven a wedge between education-reform allies. In recent years, left-leaning groups like Democrats for Education Reform worked closely with Republican governors on issues like charter schooling, teacher evaluation, digital learning, and much else. Such partnerships are increasingly unlikely as anti-Common Core sentiment pulls Republican officials toward their base and away from compromise on education.”
To say Democrats for Education Reform is “left-leaning” is laughable disinformation. http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Democrats_for_Education_Reform It is a neoliberal organization that is totally on board with privatizing public education through charters. They along with the heads of the two teachers unions and a dozen old guard civil right organizations are running interference for the Gates Foundation agenda in the current Congressional Conference Committee on the ESEA rewrite for a doubling down of the use of standardized testing for teacher and school evaluations. (On July 7th, almost two hundred civil rights and community organization have expressed opposition to standardized testing and expansion of charter schools in a letter to the Senate hearings on the ESEA rewrite. https://seattleducation2010.wordpress.com/2015/07/08/civil-rights-and-community-groups-demand-end-to-high-stakes-testing-and-charter-schools/ )
Rick Hess is totally on board with ending a federal role in education raising the issue of states rights. States rights has a dark history in the U.S. beginning with the “Three-Fifths Compromise” which allowed slavery to continue in the U.S. from 1787 until the Civil War. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-Fifths_Compromise At the same time, this allowed the slavocracy to dominate American politics for a century. The current promotion of states rights by the Republicans in the Conference Committee is a grave danger to American education. It would make a smorgasbord of American education with fifty different state standards and empower corporate education reform at the state level, and the millions being spent on lobbying for it, with even more intensity than now exists.
Finally, in his long essay not once does Rick Hess mention teachers. Teachers are the big obstacles to the corporate agenda. Having millions of critical thinking and questioning educators is not seen by corporate reformers as a good thing, but a threat. Whether it is by the federal government or the states, Rick Hess, by his silence, is on board with those who vilify teachers as being the problem in education. The current Conference Committee hearings are a grave danger to public education whether it is the states rights agenda of the Republicans or the neoliberal agenda of the Democrats. Educators at all levels whether K-12 or in the universities must pay attention to what is being proposed. We are going to be fighting this battle for years to come and it is only organizing from the grassroots that we are going to get a public school system that reflects the will of the people, not the will of corporate and financial interests.
PA House Education Committee hearing happening now. West Chester School District superintendent testimony in this blog post:
http://whatsthebigideaschwartzy.blogspot.com/2015/07/be-in-like-jim.html
A real PA hero superintendent! Please read and share!
Oh, boy…he really hit the nail on the head in his article! He also verbalized concerns I’ve had about CCSS, but have been unable to get to the meat of the concern to talk intelligently. I was very pleased that he pointed out the flawed idea that knowing historical contexts is irrelevant; if you use “close reading” students can easily understand author viewpoint and bias and what message the author wanted the reader to get. Frankly, that’s baloney. I think I will use Common Core as a case study, of sorts, for my government class this year! Lots of good discussion topics, research opportunities, and the whole states’ rights thing in terms of the various articles of the Constitution….just might work!
He demonstrates too much respect for the founders and advocates of the Common Core for this to sit well with me. Detailed but half empty.
It’s a long essay, and a misleading one. One of the worst omissions: no mention that the Gates Foundation funded both the writing and the promotion of the so-called Common Core State Standards. Another: Hess didn’t mention Gates funding of the organization he works for (AEI). Another: One Gates grant to AEI was directly related to the concept of “college-ready,” something the Common Core supposedly fosters.
Overall, the Gates Foundation has awarded more than $5,000,000 in grants to the American Enterprise Institute. AEI received a grant of $249,445 in January of 2014 “to support research and dissemination of effective teacher leadership practices.” The topic: “College-Ready.”
American Enterprise Institute For Public Policy Research
Date: January 2014
Purpose: to support research and dissemination of effective teacher leadership practices
Amount: $249,445
Term: 18
Topic: College-Ready
Regions Served: GLOBAL|NORTH AMERICA
Program: United States
Grantee Location: Washington, District of Columbia
Note: The above information is from the Gates Foundation website. Gates appeared at the American Enterprise Institute in March of 2014 and gave a long and garbled answer to questions about the Common Core Standards:
http://www.aei.org/publication/bill-gates-at-aei-on-the-common-core/
Hess not only failed to mention that Gates Foundation funded the creation and promotion of the “Common Core Standards,” he failed to mention that Gates funded almost ALL the groups that advocated for the Common Core, including both teacher unions.
Hess’s only mention of Bill Gates is in this paragraph:
“Standardized measures have been used outside of education with great success. For example, it’s not necessarily “better” to require all plumbing systems to use pipes that measure 5/8 inches rather than 9/16 inches. But having standardized gauges and sizes means that all pipe makers will supply uniform pipes and that all plumbers will have the tools they need to repair them. Common standards for computer code, railroad gauges, and cell-phone signals have benefited those industries, which helps explain why Bill Gates and other business leaders with technology backgrounds have been especially supportive of the Common Core.”
He’s using, without attribution, one of Gates’s lame arguments in favor of so-called education standards, deftly explaining away Gates’s ignorance when it comes to teaching and learning. In doing so, Hess ignores the question of how mechanical and electronic standards might be remotely comparable to something as infinitely complex and variable as education.
Of course he neglects this question. He isn’t writing learned commentary. He isn’t writing history. He’s doing spin.
Whatever its surface merits, the essay contains so many bogus assumptions, red herrings, outright falsehoods, and self-serving gambits that its only value is as a model for other think tank types on how to produce a work product that sounds reasonable and pretends to take opposing views into account but still maintains the thrust of his employer’s advocacy. The so-called research is always in service to the spin.
This is precisely the stance taken by Michael Petrilli, one of the Common Core advocates Hess mentions. It’s just that Hess does it with more presumed erudition and less snark. But Hess’s erudition is suspect for any number of reasons, as is his seriously skewed research. His failure to mention Gates as his benefactor (and Finn’s and Petrilli’s and Weingarten’s and Rhee’s and that of nearly every other prominent advocate of the Common Core) disqualifies him as a serious commentator.
That’s only one of the essay’s many misleading features. But it is a prime example of how money has corrupted the public discourse on education policy.