A reader asks an important question:
Born on the cusp of the New Math, where I first got catechized in the Old Math and then had to learn the New Math in order to help my succeeding siblings through their homework, I am the survivor of more national curriculum reforms than either fashion of Math taught me to count.
But the one thing that distinguished all those Old Style reforms was the question of who was in charge of reforming the curriculum. No matter how much textbook publishers may have had their hands in the till and their thumbs on the scales, it was the professional educators who mainly ran the show.
That is the main thing that no longer holds true today, and that is making all the difference.
Professional educators need to quit fussing over the red herrings in this current kettle of fish. Curing the Common Core will not happen unless the professionals who still have a clue what education is start asking who has now captured control of the ever-continuing process and start taking control back from those who know nothing but how to cash in on other people’s bees-wax.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I think there is a lot to be said in this idea of Who Should Control the Standards? question. There shouldn’t be standards. The standards movement has been a disaster and a disgrace. Battling for control of them is tantamount to battling over a ghost.
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“There shouldn’t be standards.” Amen and Hallelujah!!
Whenever I make that statement most teachers and administrators look at me like I’ve just stated that the moon is made of green cheese. “Whaaatttt!! How can you not have standards??? My response, “easy, no need for them”. More looks of incredible disbelief. So many teachers and administrators have bought into (or should that be “have been bought/sold into) this standards nonsense that it is literally mind boggling–as comedian Lewis Black states: “I took LSD when I was younger just to prepare myself for times like these”.
For a complete study of the problems and errors involved in educational standards please join me in a discussion of one of the most important educational “research” pieces of all times-Wilson’s 1997 dissertation “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” that I am exploring chapter by chapter in my blog “Promoting Just Education for All” found at: revivingwilson.org . So far I have put up an introduction, a course of study-two chapters a month, and the abstract and a discussion of the abstract. I’ll have a summary and discussion of Chapter 1 up in a week or so.
It’s a free graduate level seminar brought to you by the University of OYE! What the hell if Broad and others can fund “teacher and administrator training” so can I. Wait, no, no, I can’t fund anything on my exorbitant teacher salary and the course is not about training but about teaching and learning. Please read along and I especially like to read and discuss your comments!
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Great comment, as are most on this site.
From what I’m seeing from my colleagues and other teachers from around the country, most of us are running scared. I know what it’s like to be a teacher running scared. I taught in Texas. The people who run those “independent school districts” are vipers. They are experts at keeping teachers cowed and in line. I’m in a strong union district and I’m doing a double take right now. What were once strong teachers are now instructors with their souls ripped out. All because of a dropout rate that was actually wrong but the commissioner of education (a Broad graduate) made the moves to restructure anyway.
The reformers have a perfect storm on their part:
1. an economic recession
2. anti-union sentiment (and our unions on the defensive)
3. anti-teacher sentiment
4. sharp- young and energetic spokesmen and spokeswomen with wonderful, warm
and fuzzy, simple narratives
5. a propaganda machine Goebbels would have been proud of
6. the massive amount of money on the side of the reformers
7. the privatization movement
8. a silent academia in the *colleges of education (who are also being attacked by
the reformers)
9. a federal government run by people who have never read the Federalist Papers
10. an uninformed public
11. On the tail of #1, an economy that might bounce back a little, but will never be what
it once was. Let’s face it, a lot of cities and towns out there will NEVER have the
kind of money they did when manufacturing was king.
12. Add the Common Core Standards and the upcoming “National Curriculum” which
will lead to a deskilled teaching profession.
*They seem to be willing to throw all of us lowly school teachers under the bus. Do they know that they are next?
And what happens when we take to the streets? The Occupy Movement was a blip. The Mainstream Press treated it like a special interest story and Fox “News” blasted us. I was at the 1 AM mass arrest in Boston last September, wearing a red cross armband and a couple of bottles of eyewash. I can tell you that our government is more than willing to squash any true dissent and the kinds of change we really need. The Boston Police Department is union, by the way.
This blog is tough to read. Sometimes I want to zap it from my E-mail list. But I just can’t live in the bliss of ignorance.
It’s like I tell my students: “People do what they’re told. Those in power love this.”
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Please don’t zap it!
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When I came to college from the South to the North, way back in the last millennium, the students I met over the years knew the same history, literature, science, and most other subjects. Many of us had been through the same readings, science projects, and textbooks in elementary school and high school. There was a shared culture, however much we differed in our personal impressions of it and the tangents of interest that we drew from it. Maybe a lot of this commonality came from the work of national curriculum bodies, but hardly all of it.
I guess the internet has exposed me to more diversity of perspectives than I ever could have imagined back then, but I still get the impression that we no longer have anything like that level of common values anymore. I mean values in practice, not values in hot air.
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What New Math are you talking about? Back in my grammar school in the 1950-60’s I was being exposed to new math: the one that taught such stuff as the binary system in order to prepare us for computers. That’s in the South Bronx, in a school that continues to excell in leading. One that my mother went to in the 1930-40’s. And one that’s still motoring on.
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Yes, that’s the one. Sets and different number bases and all that.
It was all good as far as I was concerned. But then I did absorb everything I could from both paradigms.
I still have this book.
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THAT’S WHY I HAD TO LEARN BASE2!
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How do we take back control of our profession, let alone the standards.
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I was thinking the same thing. It is hard to watch what has happened to public education since NCLB. I look at the young teachers now and notice that their craft is so very different from the way we taught before NCLB. It so sad that they are so entrenched in the an environment that requires them to make every instructional decision based on how their students will be tested. Suddenly their very jobs depend on every student scoring at a certain level regardless of the fact that much of it is out of their personal control. Anyone ever heard of the bell curve? What other profession is required to have 100% perfection? Doctors, lawyers, politicians???
Those of us who know the difference between true learning and standardized testing are gradually retiring and soon very few teachers will be left in the profession who can speak from experience of teaching before NCLB. When will the 3.5 million teachers finally stand up and be heard? We are the ones in the classrooms and schools. When will we finally stop perpetuating this madness and say enough is enough? When will the district administration say no? When will the school administrators stop agreeing to implement district initiatives they know are unachievable? When will colleges of education stand up as a collective group and lead the way?
Each group has allowed the current privatization agenda to take over our country without even realizing it. We are all complicit because we didn’t see that it would eventually catch up with us personally. We needed the funding so we continued to comply. Now the vultures are circling and we continue to comply. Is it possible to stop the train? Where do we go from here? Do we have the courage to stand up and say ” No” I participate in this madness any longer?
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ddkona,
I agree that we need to “take back control” although that control was wrestled away from the teachers starting back in the early 1900s. It has been a relentless putsch by the business forces ever since, with a “progressive” push back every now and again-30s & 60s-70s. Guess it’s time for another progressive push back!
But we won’t be able to successfully push back if we continue to think that “controlling the standards” is part of the solution. The standards are one of the main problems facing our profession. Talk of standards only plays into the deformers’ hands.
I have posted this blog slog on a few other posts but I’ll say it again:
For a complete study of the problems and errors involved in educational standards please join me in a discussion of one of the most important educational “research” pieces of all times-Wilson’s 1997 dissertation “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” that I am exploring chapter by chapter in my blog “Promoting Just Education for All” found at: revivingwilson.org . So far I have put up an introduction, a course of study-two chapters a month, and the abstract and a discussion of the abstract. I’ll have a summary and discussion of Chapter 1 up in a week or so.
It’s a free graduate level seminar brought to you by the Universidad of OYE! What the hell if Broad and others can fund “teacher and administrator training” so can I. Wait, no, no, I can’t fund anything on my exorbitant teacher salary and the course is not about training but about teaching and learning. Please read along and I especially like to read and discuss your comments!
Duane
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Yes,me too! My undergrad course work at Penn State in the late 60’s taught the foundations of New Math as “Modern Math” It was all new to me….but once it clicked, it made perfect sense and a lasting impression! I really made use of the ‘set theory’ when I had to create my own math lessons with 8 yr old deaf children..There were no texts for them….New math could be so easily translated into visual schemata and manipulative materials. I taught multiplication ‘X’ as “sets of __”- 4 (sets of) 5 “are the same as” 20…4 X 5 = 20; telling time- 4 (sets of 5 minutes) are 20 minutes, So very visual on a clock as my students circled sets of ‘5 minutes’ around the clock face. Measurement- sets of 12 things(a dozen) sets of 12 inches (a foot), sets of 10 millimeters ( a centimeter), sets of 3 feet (a yard). and when they moved from quantitative counting to qualitative counting sets again translated nicely into a manipulative money number line that I designed which stretched 6 ft long. It had lengths of 5 penny sets glued to a strip which matched the length of strip with 1 nickle; 2 sets of 5 penny strips equaled the length of 1 dime strip; 5 sets of 5 penny strips equaled the length of 1 quarter strip …The concepts were so visual for the kids to understand and so ‘hands on’ for them to experience via manipulation. The kids ‘caught on’ with very little struggle..Symbolic Math became its own language for them…I loved teaching with New Math! I sure got teaching mileage from that college course! I still use those lesson formats with my classes today because it still works well with low language, visual learners whose faces light up when they have that “ah hah”, (I got it!) moment. Love it! Back then in the early 70’s, in special education, we had to make our own materials because commercial companies didn’t want to invest in academic materials for special ed populations. They said the special ed market was to small to be profitable. That sure changed when PL 94-142 was passed. Public school teachers screamed for materials as droves of special ed kids entered regular public classrooms and commercial companies responded….lots of public school dollars! LOL. But, I really did enjoy coming up with my own materials though….wrestling with how to translate ‘abstract theory’ into practice’ with multisensory “adapted materials” was a challenge, but so satisfying when it was successful. …Now that’ was real higher level thinking and resourceful problem solving! (Thank you ‘New Math’ Prof., Dr Muth, where ever you are).
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Wow! Thanks for the inspiring math lesson. I forget how much fun math can be. I too began as a sped teacher, but in the 80’s, severe/profound, then mainstreaming, then inclusion… We too, had no curriculum, but unlike you we suddenly had funding, The problem was that there wasnt anything out there, nothing to spend it on. So we got creative, ordered lots of stuff, and created our own manipulatives and lessons, and figured out how to make learning come alive. It was such an exciting time. We had to be resourceful. The young teachers have no idea what it is like to teach with only a scope and sequence and no Internet to look things up and share ideas. We actually had to figure it out and talk to each other. I am an administrator now and am amazed at what is available for teachers at their fingertips. I do my best to help them navigate through it all bc there is so much out there, but also to remind them about the old school stuff that still works.
Of course we have had to change with the times, but I am so glad that I had those experiences “back in the day” , LOL. You just reminded that we will get through this, just as we always have. I know this new agenda is different, and really scares me, but I also know that we can be resilient and figure out how to survive. Thanks for reminding me. I needed that.
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Diane, Duane, & All …
The word “standard” is highly ambiguous — it can suggest anything from an Old Blues Standard to a Standardized Test. My meaning is more toward the Blues end of the spectrum — what we used to call the matter of a Canon.
The canons of a subject must be set by scholars who know what they are talking about when they talk about their subject. And the canons must be transmitted to succeeding generations by educators who know that education is a leading out and not a ramming in.
Ideally, in accord with long-hallowed ideals that we must persist in hallowing, scholars and teachers are one class, not a pair of mutually exclusive classes, no matter how varied the fraction of their time various individuals may spend on each task.
That is what a profession is.
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People might be interested in reading the short article “a mathamatician’s lament”, written by a mathamatics teacher at St. Ann’s School and former professor of mathamatics at Brown. A link to the article can be found here: http://www.maa.org/devlin/devlin_03_08.html
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