Jan Resseger is upset that the New York Times posted an article seeking to revive the moribund Common Core standards.
Some states dropped the CC standards; some kept them but gave them a new name. Most dropped the CC-aligned tests.
In her view, the CCSS died because it was hated by significant numbers of teachers and parents. It launched the Opt Out movement in New York State, which annually enlists the non-cooperation of nearly 20 percent of the state’s test-eligible students.
They were hated because it was not “developed by governors, educational experts, state superintendents, and teachers,” as the founding myth claims, but by a small number of people who wrote them with minimal consultation of classroom teachers.
They were hated because they were funded by one man–Bill Gates–and never validated by any field trial in real classrooms.
They were pushed on the states not by consent but by the lure of $5 billion in Race to the Top funding. The only state officials who had to agree were the governor and the state superintendent, and most of those have since moved on. The states that did not agree to accept the CCSS were not eligible to compete for RTTT billions
They fell into disfavor because activists on the right saw them as federal overreach and activists among teachers and parents in the center and on the left disliked the standards and hated the tests.
They lost support when the testing consortia that Arne Duncan funded with $360 million arbitrarily decided to align the CCSS test standards with those of the NAEP, which was totally inappropriate. The NAEP standard for “proficiency” is not grade-level, nor is it pass-fail. It represents a high level of achievement, like a B+ or an A-. Massachusetts is the only state in the nation where as much as 50% of students score NAEP proficient, yet the Common Core testing groups expected that most American students would reach that high mark. They did not, and the CCSS tests wrongly generated headlines that inaccurately labeled students, schools, and districts as “failing” when they did not reach an impossible benchmark.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
We dropped them here in Oklahoma which has caused a massive educational divide amongst districts. Some districts have adopted their own based off CC. Some have gone completely off the rails. All districts however are testing students to the max which is causing teachers to flee in mass exodus. While we are already facing a major teacher shortage, the weekly testing isn’t helping anyone. It’s not beneficial for students nor teachers. It does nothing but take away from actual teaching and moreover it takes away from SEL. Teachers no longer have time to teach. It’s all test test test, then make sure students XYZ spent 60mins a week on computers to improve reading and math. Make sure students ABC & XYZ get 30 mins a week one on one with teacher. Oh and while you’re at it each year we’re going to rewrite the standards you’re supposed to be teaching and give you (or in some districts ask you to find it yourself) all new curriculum to meet these standards and this pacing guides. Guides and standards written by those who’ve either A: not taught in years, B: sucked as teachers so they went to admin, or C: have never stepped foot in the classroom, but wormed their way into this position.
I was reading a novel the other day. It was set in an International School. They kept talking about A levels, passing them. So I went down the rabbit hole of A levels, the UK as well as the EU educational system.
Why are we not doing this here? It makes a hell of a lot more sense than grades K-12. Also why can we not do away with grade levels all together? Have pods of levels where students move pods based on how academically prepared they are for the next level, and what challenges (to be challenged) they’re ready for. Stop with the testing. Teachers already carry rubrics, and know full and well which students are behind and which students are well beyond their peers. If we want to raise scores, be competitive, and keep teachers we need to teach and have students move up academically, not by age range.
Last thought. This year in Oklahoma, even with the pay raises we had an even higher number of emergency certified teachers requested. Oklahoma Republican controlled legislation tried to make all of Oklahoma school choice/vochers. It was and as far as I know still on the table, up for vote. I know dozens of teachers who hadn’t made tenure yet that were not only not hired back, but couldn’t find a teaching position. Those not hired back were replaced with new emergency certified teachers. EC teachers that had yet to take one education class, one test, and had never stepped foot in a classroom. This happened all across the state in the larger districts. I’ve spoken in lengths to these teachers. Our govenor took control of the state department of education. In fact he has total power over all state agencies. He gave himself that control. He know decides who is what position. He is also for school choice/vochers. What better argument for school choice/vochers than to say, “hey look we gave the teachers a raise, and they still left. We still have a rapidly growing number of emergency certified teachers. Our statewide academic scores are failing, are far behind other states”?
To me this all seems purposeful. They want school choice/vochers, and they’re going to everything in power to make it happen, and to make the voters of Oklahoma want it to happen.
Wherever Gates goes and whatever Gates does, there’s trouble.
They are very much alive. According to commoncore.org, forty-one states are using these standards. But there’s a catch:
The puerile Gates/Coleman bullet list of supposed “standards” rapidly became toxic. So, the oh-so-reverend Mike Huckster-bee went to the annual ghouls’ convention called CPAC and gave a speech in which he told people that they needed to address this issue–by changing the name of the standards and adopting state-specific names!!! In other words, the good minister’s advice was to go back home and lie about them. And that’s exactly what they did.
Interestingly, the material around the actual bullet list for ELA calls for a great return to reading substantive texts. However, the “standards” themselves are a backward, prescientific, almost entirely content free list of vaguely described skills (like the terrible state standards that preceded them).
Gates paid for these because he wanted a single set of national standards to key depersonalized education software and big, Orwellian student databases to, so that software and those databases could be sold “at scale.” And he got what he paid for. In ELA, we have had a VAST trivialization of pedagogy and curricula as both have devolved to become inane exercises in applying these moronic “standards” to random, isolated snippets of text. I call this the “Monty Python ‘And Now for Something Completely Different’ Approach to ELA.”
These so-called “higher standards” (in Deformish, the word “standards” must be preceded by the adjective “higher” when referring to the sacred Gates/Coleman text). Quite the irony, that.
CC by another Name
Name was changed
To shield the guilty
Rearranged
To hide the fealty
Beautifully said
succinctly said: shielding and hiding
“One of the huge criticisms of the Common Core Standards is that their developers focused on pushing more difficult content knowledge without enough attention to the wide variation in children’s readiness and to normal variations in linguistic and cognitive development.” — if Jan Ressinger looked outside the U.S. she would find that in most other countries schoolchildren study significantly more comprehensive, well-rounded material with grade and subject tightly interrelated. In this recent article https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-opinion-america-asia-education-differences-20191218-et52qvc4mbd2bjrialo6negeu4-story.html the author, who spent ten years in South Asian countries, in Japan, mainland China and Hong Kong, does not mince words, “Americans are being left in the dust when it comes to education.” He got the insider’s perspective “on how Shanghai students are up to four years ahead of U.S. kids academically” despite that “the U.S. teachers spend 27 hours per week in classrooms teaching” which is well above an average of 19 hours in OECD countries.
Elementary school teachers in the U.S. spend years “teaching” kids to read instead of teaching reading in one semester of the first grade and then moving on to real content. It is not the fault of the Common Core that kids as old as in 6th grade are unable to read fluently. Tests and CC goalposts are matched by design, because you can test what you have taught (and then some, which is why CC-aligned tests are not limited to grade, they are adaptive, so if a student knows trigonometry in 8th grade, he will get higher score).
CC standards are not perfect, but instead of disregarding them completely they should be maintained. Mathis is absolutely on the money about it, “The… common core standards should be subjected to extensive validation, trials, and subsequent revisions.” If Gates treated CC like Windows or Excel, he would be rolling out new versions with bug fixes. Sadly, after the initial hoopla the project has turned into Windows Mobile. When it pushes with his ideas he is blamed, and when he abandons them he is blamed just the same.
“The Common Core and PARCC and SBAC tests were rolled out without validation and trials” — the Open Court textbooks were validated and trialled and continuously improved for thirty years, still they could not push through the wall of “anti-intellectual American educational culture” and ultimately folded. In 2001 Education News proclaimed that “The education bureaucracy refuses to listen or bow to sage advice, and it will not accept ideas to improve student learning.” Therefore, it does not really matter whether CC was or was not tested and validated. Any school reforms are limited to optics: typing instead of handwriting, iPads instead of textbooks, but the core approach of individual teachers cobbling together their programs remains the same, and Common Core does not help much in this regard because it is not a real curriculum and is limited only to ELA and math.
It is quite clear you are not a teacher of children. Adults, perhaps, but not children. Do you even know who Piaget, Erikson, and Montessori are?
Bill Gates does nothing if he isn’t getting something back out of it.
Bill Gates, Sr. (Gate’s lawyer father) told him (about Bill’s business): “to “sew up the market” and let the users debug his products.”
Your children and grandchildren are “debugging” the catastrophe that is the CCSS. Instead of looking at Asian schools (which are an issue in and of themselves), look at Finland – always at the top in education.
The last thing we need is a federal thought police deciding what can and cannot be taught and how. Like it or not, curriculum developers take these “standards” as a curriculum map, and they become the de facto curriculum. And this has, in ELA, led to dramatic narrowing and trivialization of curricula and, in math, to developmental inappropriateness in the early grades.
Here’s an alternative to top-down, invariant, inflexible, mandatory, amateurish “standards” like those foisted on the country with no vetting whatsoever:
In place of the grade-by-grade bullet list, states could promulgate a few general guidelines (a very broad framework–a few principles in each field of study), continually revisited and critiqued, that provide the degrees of freedom within which real curricular and pedagogical innovation can occur
and
open-source crowd sourcing of alternative, innovative ideas. In other words, we could have
competing, voluntary learning progressions, curriculum outlines, reading lists, pedagogical approaches, lesson and exercise templates, model diagnostic and formative assessments, etc., for particular domains, posted by scholars, researchers, curriculum developers, and teachers to an open national portal or wiki, and subjected to ongoing, vigorous, public debate and refinement based on results in the classroom and ongoing research and development, freely adopted by autonomous local schools and districts and subjected to continual critique by teacher-led schools–teachers who are given the time in their schedules to subject those, and their own practice, to ongoing critique via something like Japanese Lesson Study.
Or we can let Gates, again, appoint Lord Coleman, by divine fiat, the decider for the rest of us.
You want “a few general guidelines”, “a very broad framework”, “degrees of freedom”, “alternative, innovative ideas”, “voluntary learning progressions”, etc but you still want state and federal funding? And no accountability? Isn’t this what charter schools are precisely doing? You dream have come true.
12% of students avoid public/charter conundrum whatsoever by attending private schools, which have real “degrees of freedom” from the feds and very few “general guidelines”. Should we help more students to get there by offering them vouchers? It seems that DeVos does something right after all.
US public schools did a superb job for many decades without micromanagement from Seattle, thank you very much. Some of us have this quaint love for democratic institutions.
9% are in private schools. 6% in charters. 85% in public schools.
We are the most powerful nation in the world, thanks to uneducated public schools graduates like me.
“Some of us have this quaint love for democratic institutions,” should I take this as “yes, public schools should continue to be funded by state and federal money without showing anything for it?” But not charter schools, no, no, no, because instead of hiding the talents in the ground they appropriate their master’s money, and this is wrong.
US public schools operated for a century without micromanagement by states and the feds. In the 1970s, the big argument was about whether command and control should be centered on the individual school or the district. How far we have fallen!
You meant, of course, assume. No prob. WordPress doesn’t allow one to correct typos. Presumption is what Gates and Coleman and Achieve and the Chiefs for Ka-ching and Arne Dunkin Duncan showed when they foisted this nonsense on us. The CC$$ should have been laughed off the national stage when they first sullied computers and the dead bodies of trees.
The CCSS are skills based. You’re arguing that parts of other countries are doing better because they teach content instead of skills. So you’re arguing for more of the status quo? Do you see the contradiction?
Exactly
The CC$$ are a list of vaguely defined skills. They are almost entirely content free. They contain almost no indications of descriptive knowledge to be attained (knowledge of what) and almost no enumerations of procedural knowledge (knowledge of how). The blithering inanity and vagueness of these so-called “standards,” like that of the state standards that Coleman et al. ripped off, means that they cannot rationally be tested. A typical high-stakes standardized test on the ELA standards has one or two questions on making inferences from text. As if you can validly tell whether students can make inferences from text based on the answer to one multiple-choice question. The standard was written in total obliviousness to the fact that there are several varieties of inference–deductive, inductive, and abductive, and many, many sub-varieties of these, and whole sciences devoted to them with actual content that can be learned. It’s as though Gates handed Coleman a copy of the 1858 edition of Gray’s Anatomy and asked him to make up new standards for medicine based on it and he attempted to do this without any medical training himself. If we had such new “standards” for the US Navy, they would warn against the possibility of sailing off the edge of the globe. That’s how backward these “standards” are.
I don’t remember using “skill-based” or “content” in my replies, would you mind quoting me on that? In fact, it is precisely the jargon of administrators and school teachers who always want simple definitions. Skills vs content, traditional vs progressive, rote learning vs conceptual understanding — school teachers and admins love this binary soup and they think it has meaning. This is why Open Court could never make it through the “dumbed-down culture of American education,” as Ms. Ravitch pointedly noted in 2006. Open Court textbooks back in the 1960s through 1990s were developed by an engineer, he thought that simply offering a better product will guarantee recognition and sales. He learned his lesson, “We’re trying to teach children to think when the teachers don’t want to think.”
Sure. Here’s your quote: “Elementary school teachers in the U.S. spend years “teaching” kids to read instead of teaching reading in one semester of the first grade and then moving on to real content.” Do you have any more concerns or questions? We aim to please.
Touché. I set myself up for that one. Good searching skills. If by status quo you mean balanced literacy that supposedly dives right into content, then by late elementary school it becomes painfully evident that it does not work. Back in 1967 Jeanne Chall published Reading: the Great Debate, in which she systematically reviewed more than 200 studies of beginning reading. Her analysis showed that phonics have clear advantage. But it seems that half a century is not enough to drain the swamp.
Teach reading in the first semester (while teaching some simple content), then teach content (while teaching grammar, semantics, style, etc). It is not 400 new words a year using Dick & Jane, and neither it is Galsworthy from the very first day, it is something all the other countries do: learn the letters, then read, write and while doing that, learn to do all these things that CC wants kids to do: comprehend, infer, analyse, decompose, etc, but do it as a multifaceted yet singular process. This is what Open Court textbooks offered, designed by an engineer and yes, confirmed in test trials and comparisons.
Is there any hope? In the 1970s Richard Mitchell wrote, “If we wanted to do only so simple a thing as ensure that all third-grade teachers will be expert in spelling and punctuation, we will have to change everything that happens at every step of the process.”
QuelleProf Retread
If KellaProf were any good
At searching through his brain
Then Left Coast Teacher really would
Be commenting in vain
But KellaProf is really poor
Recalling what he said
So Left Coast Teacher cleans the floor
With KellaProf’s retread
Thank you, Poet. Loved it!
I engaged in no such binary thinking, whatprof. I merely pointed out that the CC$$ that you so love are almost entirely content free. Expertise in ELA requires a great deal of conceptual/descriptive knowledge (knowledge of what–e.g., What is a metaphor and what are its parts? How does a fable differ from a parable? Who was Percy Shelley? What is modernism, and in what ways is “The Waste Land” a modernist poem? What is signification, and what are some products of African-American orature that exemplify it? What does it mean to begin in medias res? What makes a work Romantic? or an example of Romance literature?) and procedural knowledge (knowledge of how–e.g., How is a press release constructed? How do you create melody in your speaking voice? [by varying your pitch] How do you create sentence variety and, so, interest?). These are basic categories of types of knowledge (descriptive, or categorical, and procedural), widely recognized by cognitive psychologists as distinct and mapped to different parts of the brain for their functioning. And your beloved CC$$ don’t treat either, except rarely, in an isolated “standard” here and there in the long, blithering, bullet list of vague, abstract skills.
Can we please take them, along with SLO’s, off life support?
I second that. All in favor, say, “Aye.”
SLOs
S. L. O. is slow
As slow as it’s devisers
Who really didn’t know
A thing about divisors
Diane, thanks so much!
Jan Resseger
https://janresseger.wordpress.com/
“That all citizens will be given an equal start through a sound education is one of the most basic, promised rights of our democracy. Our chronic refusal as a nation to guarantee that right for all children…. is rooted in a kind of moral blindness, or at least a failure of moral imagination…. It is a failure which threatens our future as a nation of citizens called to a common purpose… tied to one another by a common bond.” —Senator Paul Wellstone, March 31, 2000
R.I.P., Paul!!!
The CCSS are very much alive in Los Angeles. More accurately, they are very animated zombies. Even after they hopefully go, though, it will take years to replace all the low quality textbooks and test prep materials, online and off. It will take decades to remind and retrain CCSS trained teachers and administrators what real teaching is. Even after Goliath is in the ground, the destruction will still be active.
Hmm. I should have edited out a couple words in my second to last sentence. Apparently, I don’t English much.
Oh for an edit function on WordPress!
Alas, yes. We have a whole generation of young teachers who have been mired like flies in treacle in the CC$$. This damage will take a lot of undoing.
But we also have a lot of teachers who have continued to teach despite the attempted Coring of U.S. education.
The Common Core is not dead yet. It is being supported by the Gates-funded
Collaborative for Student Success and publicized in Education Week Also funded by Gates and other billionaire foundations.
The Collaborative for Student Success and Education Week recently sponsored an afternoon “ESSA Turns 4 Summit” to promote ESSA. https://forstudentsuccess.org/essa-turns-4-summit/
Featured speakers included ESSA’s main authors: Senators Lamar Alexander, (R-TN), Patty Murray (D-WA), Congressman Bobby Scott, (D-VA), and former Congressman John Kline (R-MN) who opined that the law “is likely to govern education policy for the foreseeable future.”
Most of the participants criticized states for failing to live up to the “accountability” measures in ESSA. Democratic Delaware Governor Jack Markell closed the summit saying that ESSA is here to stay and that we should “double down on high expectations.”
https://www.educatorsforhighstandards.org
The Collaborative for Student Success is a brainchild of Bill Gates, and it is designed to keep the Common Core and his fetish about college and career readiness alive and well.
A major project of the Collaborative for Student Success is called Educators for High Standards. This project is designed to sustain local, state and national attention to ESSA, COMMON CORE, and COLLEGE/CAREER STANDARDS. Educators for High Standards enlists teachers as promoters of the CCSS and ESSA. Teachers can sign up for a Fellowshio with a stipend. Teachers who become Fellows are taught how to write opeds, organize parents to promote an agenda, and design strategies for political action and pushing legislation. This training includes easy to read ESSA-related topics, standards for each state, promotions for the COMMON CORE and COLLEGE/CAREER STANDARDS. Fellows are also able to take education policy courses from Teach Plus Online. They are urged to consult Learning Heros for tips for talking with parents about standards.
Educators for High Standards has a presence in 24 states. Fellowships are awarded for state-level projects. Participants are called “Teacher Champions.” I looked at some of the projects, Twitter profiles and activities of some Teacher Champions. Many projects cite or promote reports from Achieve the Core, Data Quality Campaign, EdReports (Gates-funded reviews of curricula for compliance with the COMMON CORE).
Educators for High Standards counts eleven organizations among its “Friends.” http://www.educatorsforhighstandards.org/our-friends/
Each “Friend” is also a sponsor of other programs and projects beating the drums for the Common Core, ESSA, teacher quality, measures of teacher effectiveness, tests. Here are some friends of Educators for High Standards and the Gates funded Collaborative for Student Success.”
–Center for Teaching Quality promotes the CCSSS and it among its six funders is the Silver Giving Foundation, offering grants in support of awarding micro-credentials for teachers who lead COMMON CORE instruction in California.
–Council for Chief State School Officers CCSSO, Sponsors National Teacher of the Year and many fee-based collaboratives see https://ccsso.org/collaboratives. A long time pusher of the Common Core.
–Educators 4 Excellence Active in Boston, Chicago, Connecticut, Los Angeles, Minnesota, and New York pursues teacher voice as if an alternative to teacher unions
–Hope Streep Group (active in six states with teacher “fellows” to voice policies)
–PARCC tests
–Smarter Balanced tests
–Student Achievement Partners (founded by David Coleman, Susan Pimentel, and Jason Zimba, lead writers of the Common Core State Standards in literacy and mathematics).
–Teach for America, (also known as Teach for Awhile)
–Teach Plus (active in 11 states. offers up to $1500 for teacher advocates on policies, 2 day orientation followed by 3.5 hours monthly online or group coaching).
In other words the CCSS are not dead yet. In my opinion they are getting more attention then they deserve from EdWeek, those who foisted ESSA on workers in public education, and teachers who are being paid to promote the CCSS.
Erwin Schroedinger’s Quantum Cat
The Common Core’s alive AND dead
Like Erwin’s quantum cat
You might as well get through your head
That Common Core is that
Oh. My. Lord. One of your best, yet, SomeDAM!!! Thanks for a good laugh.
I’ve long thought that Coleman should have named his new Common Cored SAT the Scholastic Common Core Aptitude Test, or SCCAT. (Consonants are often lengthened in Deformish, which is, ofc, a dialect of Corporate Ghoulish.