Marc Tucker and others scoffed when I said that the Common Core standards should have been field tested in a few districts and states before they were imposed on the 46 states.
No one knows whether they will improve achievement. No one knows if they will widen or narrow the gaps between different groups. No one knows if the awkward mapping makes sense. No one knows if he standards are developmentally appropriate for the various grades. No one knows whether the standards are realistic or whether they were designed for students bound for IvyLeague colleges.
I think it would be useful to know answers to these questions in advance, before the nation spends billions of dollars on new materials, new tests, new professional development, and new technology for the online assessments.
I have a deep concern that the standards are meant to be so “hard” that many children will fail, and the privatization movement will gain new fodder for its campaign to smear American schools.
This reader understands my concern about the failure to field test the new federal standards before they were imposed:
“As a teacher who came to education from the software industry, there was one phrase that struck a nerve with me: “the Common Core standards effort is fundamentally flawed by the process with which they have been foisted upon the nation.” If there is one thing we can learn from business, it is that rolling out a new product in great numbers without field testing it thoroughly is a fool’s game at best and organizational suicide at worst. Companies who gamble this way often find themselves in bankruptcy.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Please see my take on what I call “Common Core Wars” in my latest article at :
http://blogcritics.org/culture/article/common-core-wars-the-stakes-keep/.
I just wrote two pages to respond to your article then realized that “There..you said it all and ALL WAS CORRECT”..
Everyone needs to read this article…
The CCSS State Departments are in bed with the Book Companies (especially one) and also with the Political Zombies who think still that a SCORE tells it all!
I think that it’s going too far to suggest that the standards were purposefully created to cause schools to fail. There are some rapacious types in the world, of course, but most people, on both sides of these testing and evaluation issues have good intentions, however misguided they might be.
There are many problems with the kind of top-down, centralized planning that one finds in these new standards and testing and evaluation systems, but I’m going to mention only two of them:
First, extraordinary control from the top requires extraordinary knowledge at the top–the kind of knowledge that no amount of prior vetting will reveal. Certainly, however, if one is going to replace every set of standards in the country with some single document, then one had damned well better make sure that this document is vetted and vetted and vetted.
Second, a mandate from the top completely ends all lower-level competition between competing systems and so stops innovation cold. THIS IS A VERY SERIOUS BUT UNREMARKED PROBLEM WITH CENTRALIZED, NATIONAL STANDARDS. Here’s why the problem is so serious: Standards are not curricula, but in the real world, people treat them as though they were. Publishers start producing products, print and online, that follow the standards slavishly. Lesson one deals with standard 1.1, lesson two with standard 1.2, and so on. So, the standards become a learning progression/curriculum map, and from that point on ALL SCIENTIFICALLY INFORMED innovation in curricular organization/design/progression stops cold. A textbook author is no longer free to ask herself, “What’s the best way to teach this?” Instead, she has to follow, slavishly, the order of instruction and the implicit pedagogy of the standards, even when those are wrong-head, counterproductive, clearly inadequate.
It’s funny that many of the folks pushing this new authoritarian, top-down, centralized planning that eliminates competition among pedagogies and curricular designs are people with business backgrounds, people who understand that competition breeds innovation. Or it would be funny if it weren’t so tragic.
Robert, I have to disagree with you when you say that the implementation of the Common Core is simply misguided, and does not have malicious intent.
Or, perhaps it’s more accurate to say that the forces pushing for this have deftly sublimated their greed and will to power in socially and politically acceptable ways, ways that identically correspond to their economic and political interests.
How many coincidences must occur before we identify a pattern, and how great must the contrast be between so-called reformers avowed purposes and the consistent results (parent disenfranchisement, public school closings, charter expansion, tests and evaluation schemes as weapons, etc.) of their actions?
Combine this with the overall climate of intimidation in the schools, and the neutralization/busting of the teacher unions, funded and implemented by the same small group of malanthropists and the recipients of their billions, and what conclusion is left, if not intense class antagonism?
Ethically challenged though they be, these are highly intelligent people, with tremendous resources at their disposal, who know exactly what they are doing.
David Coleman, the developer of the Common Core, is a testing entrepreneur who has not spent a day of his life teaching K-12, yet somehow was anointed as the person to craft academic standards for the nation, standards that sprang from the political advocacy
of Achieve, Inc. and The American Diploma Project, not from educators.
Finally, here’s an indiscreet description of the purposes of the Common Core by a well-known ed reform pundit (blogs.edweek.org/rick_hess_straight_up/2012/11the_common_core_kool_aid.html) who points out how so-called reformers are salivating at the prospect of repeating their hostile takeover of urban school districts in the suburbs.
If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck… it wants to close your public school, turn the classroom into a digital sweatshop, and make teaching into temporary, at-will employment.
I’m sure if the results are negative or do not meet “expectations” the data will be skewed to show success.
That’s another dirty little secret of this whole test-driven paradigm: It’s very easy to game. If you have the power to fiddle with the data and don’t like your outcomes, simply throw out the difficult questions or change the raw score to scaled score conversion formulae or change the cut-off scores for the proficiency levels.
NTS Ed Commissioner King seems to respond here.. http://campaign.r20.constantcontact.com/render?llr=on599rkab&v=001qwhULkbmHDuLgr_3K_AEaW-tWyVeZCmttrZW8gb4gpkxt9OYn_Ll8soYevtf–41rOzgQwUokiVqVi2BJz86QISWZ_npEsFL66mraGHDb4A%3D
I think these standards are un-American http://rlratto.wordpress.com/
To make these changes rather abruptly, taking real “ownership” from experienced teachers, making them feel as if their years of devotion to the profession have been unimportant and disrespected for providing inadequate education…has been very damaging. We have been through many 5-year cycles. Things usually turn back around to the way they ought to be, with tweaking here and there. But these changes have been initiated by those who have no idea about human nature or developmental.learning, making broad assumptions that aren’t based in fact.
I’ve been hearing this a LOT from teachers lately, people saying, “I’ve been teaching for 20 years. I’ve figured out things that work. Now I’m being told that I don’t know a damned thing, that I HAVE to do it this way, by people with very little experience in the classroom. Everyone I know is demoralized and upset.”
VERY WELL SAID
TOTALLY AGREE
Working through some of the middle school math standards last night, I couldn’t help but think that the goal here is indeed to serve a small, elite group of students and destroy the majority of public schools.
As for Marc Tucker and his ilk, they can scoff at people like Diane Ravitch all they like: when we’re back in the same conversations in a decade or less about how US schools are “losing” the international competition and how awful our public schools are, these people will have moved on to their next “miracle cure” and pretend they never asked us to put all our eggs in the Common Core basket.
So very true.
I am sure that the problems you are working have nothing to do with anything except a Test Score!
Even when curriculum designers do NOT follow the one-standard = one lesson procedure, their work is still so constrained by the standards as to stop innovation in curriculum design. The job becomes one of coming up with some system that “covers” these standards not one of coming with some system that is ideally suited to a particular learning domain. How best to teach organization of a paragraph or use of a variety of sentence types gets forgotten in the mad rush to produce something, anything, that “covers” the list of skills and concepts in the standards. The question for the curriculum designer becomes not, what is the most logical order and what are the most effective means for teaching kids to recognize and use in their thinking the common structures in literary narratives but, rather, how do I get flashback and the unreliable narrator and beginning in medias res and the third-person omniscient point of view into this one two-week unit in Grade 11? This is the tail wagging the dog.
LOVE THIS COMMENT!!!
TESTERS-PLEASE COVER ALL..
Their are no teachers in these 45 states..
These kinds of practical considerations–what curriculum planners will actually do as a result of having the standards in front of them–are precisely the sorts of considerations that distant, top-down, authoritarian regimes fail, in their hubris, to take into account. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Well, that sounded like a good idea. Kids need to know this and this. But is it really best to try to teach these together at the same grade level? One ends up with lessons that treat skills and concepts at random, without logical progression. The same thing happens with all overly specified top-down planning. Totalitarian regimes, left and right, fail as a result of hubris, of thinking that they know better than do those on the ground.
LOVE THIS COMMENT!!
RIGHT ON TARGET AND SO CORRECT!!
The real issue that seems to escape so many is that the children are people! How do they feel when we set them up for failure? What does that do to them as lifelong learners?
I have seen what happens to those who are repeatedly unsuccessful in school! They drop out! Then all the good intentions were for nothing. Do high standards and expectations help their lives then?
The real question is not about whether the teachers have expectations. The real question is whether the teacher can figure out HOW to help the students meet the expectation, which takes knowing the individual students.
A few years back, a large percentage of fifth and eighth graders in Georgia failed the state test in math because they had just changed the standards and test. The state Secretary of Education called it growing pains of a new system. All these kids had to fail and go to summer school and retake the test.
Now that looks like failed implementation. (To be sure, I think the kids still were struggling with the math when Common Core came.) More importantly, how many children missed their summer vacations because of the growing pains of a new system?
We are constantly setting end goals without any attention to variable and process. No one is against better education, especially for our most vulnerable. The problem is that policy makers seldom address how. Then teachers are given scripts that don’t work and held accountable.
Dare do dream! Dare to have high expectations! Find the ideal destination, but make sure the rubber CAN meet the road!
On Disney Channel, they have a commercial that says, “Don’t ask why, ask why not.” I would take that a step further by saying, “Then ask how.”
It’s one thing to provide models of standards, of curricula, of pedagogical techniques and forums for discussion of best practices. It’s another thing entirely to say, this is how things must be. The former treats people as professionals. The latter is totalitarian hubris.
VERY WELL SAID!
If I am not mistaken, one usually crawls before they walk.
One usually gibberizes before they talk.
The critical question is who will control the curriculum. What third parties do we trust to interfere, and toward what end, in the dialogue of learners and teachers that maintains our communities and moves our civilization hopefully forward?
The government will control the curriculum.
The Book Companies will support their elections..
The students will be used as guinea pigs.
The tenured teachers will be fIred.
The CHAOTIC CURRICULUM WILL MARCH FORWARD until every Tester is burned out!
Isn’t it ironic and sad that McDonald’s put more time in testing its new Fish McBites than anyone did with the Common Core?
LOL..Par for the course. McDonalds is a success..
CCSS Education is one big Flim-Flam-Scam..
Here is what I wrote on Kathleen Porter Magee’s blog, in which she claimed that the Common Core could not be field tested:
http://shar.es/eNES5
I have trouble understanding your argument. The theory behind the Common Core is that setting specific goals and/or expectations and a common set of standards and assessments as well as prescribing the sort of texts and analysis that should be encouraged will raise achievement and enable more students to be “college and career ready.” Why can’t that theory be tested out in a state or two before being foisted on the nation? I thought one of the points of the Common Core is to prod students to cite evidence for their beliefs. Why are the supporters of the Common Core so averse to evidence themselves, to the extent of claiming that their support for that theory cannot be tested in the real world?
Leonie Haimson
Having spent some time in the computer/software biz, CCSS has something of a familiar ring to it for me…
1) Step One: Vaporware. Remember how the states were being bribed/strong-armed into signing up for the standards before there even WERE any standards? The key buy-in on the part of state DOEs took place while we were still in Step One…
2) Step Two: Disguised Beta-testing. Reputable companies, of course, allowed end-users to participate in beta testing of new products, intended to diagnose and fix problems before the product was released to the general public. Other companies (*cough* Microsoft *cough*) preferred to use their CUSTOMERS as unpaid beta testers. There is a reason for the old advice that one must NEVER purchase version 1.0 of a new Microsoft product…
3) Step Three: Issuing Fixpacks/Patches. Once a product was out there in the marketplace, it didn’t take long for problems to be identified. This usually resulted in the release of some sort of “patch” to the software, sometimes referred to as a “Fixpack” if it contained a multitude of different patches. Successful programs usually carry out an ongoing practice of issuing periodic updates of their software this way, especially as new hardware comes along that doesn’t work well with their software. Expect this to happen with CCSS eventually as various defects in it are “patched” with replacement standards…
With CCSS, we are now well into Step Two. It doesn’t take rocket surgeons to see where there are going to be problems, but we’re committed, so the states will continue to push the CCSS onto local districts. In another year or two, we will have enough evidence of malfunction to get us to Step Three…
In the meantime, of course, all that is being damaged is the idea of local control of education, kids’ futures, teacher morale and retention, etc. No big deal…
One thing good about the CCSS..My kids..both PHD’S do not have to suffer the consequences of this madness.
Diane, again you add supporting arguments to your beliefs that lost most rational readers. Do you really think that supporters of CCSS want schools to fail so that privatization is catalyzed? I think you make good sense when you advocate for field testing of CCSS, but when you add conspiracy theories you lose most rational folks. I wonder if you are really interested in changing people’s opinions on this matter? I can’t help but think of folks like Rush Limbaugh in this situation, who often have a degree of truth in many of the arguments presented, but add phrasing and additional supporting arguments that alienate reasonable individuals.
To be clear, I also strongly suspect that there are folks out there who are financially driven to privatize schools, but thinking that the development and implementation of CCSS is an explicit tool of those folks is just going too far.
Eded, I have no conspiracy theories. State leaders are warning (as in NY) that scores will plummet when the Common Core is implemented. They did plummet by 30% in Kentucky on a recent CC test. When this happens, as the corporate reformers hope, it reinforces their refrain that public education is “broken” and needs radical medicine like charters, vouchers, and all the shlock that the tech industry is peddling. That’s not theory. That’s in plain sight.
Well said Prof. Ravitch! Well said!
And this is a reason that they cannot “trial test” the Common Core. The Common Core introduced to all grades at one time will not work. How could a 9th grade math teacher, teach a course were the “backward designed” prerequisites for the course have not been taught yet!
But how is that connected to the inception and design of CCSS? I’m not saying failure as a result of CCSS wouldn’t benefit corporate reformers’ pockets, but it’s a different thing to say that such motivation is the catalyst behind development of the CCSS. There just hasn’t been a case laid out for such a claim.
Second, even if corporate reformers would be be happy about CCSS demonstrating failure of public education, that same sword would be thrust against those same reformers and charters, leaving them vulnerable to such failure as well. Doesn’t really sound like a sustainable business model.
How can they compare these CCSS Scores with the other scores?
They can not say scores plummeted if they have nothing to compare them with.
The entire CCSS scandal is one big joke and does nothing to boost any area of education.
Again…the State people need to teach in a classroom with 32 starving and homeless children for one year and again every 3 years thereafter.
They need to be full-time…only then will they understand the CHAOTIC SITUATION OF EDUCATION TODAY as they so made it!!
One thing that is amazing about all this is that, at the high school level at least, while on one hand the Common Core is just a sub-set of what Achieve’s been working on all along, I don’t think there is a school in the world you can point to as an example of just the kind of implementation demanded by the ELA/Literacy standards.
In particular regarding how the disciplinary literacy standards are actually supposed to be implemented in science and social studies, ESPECIALLY how they relate to high stakes accountability and teacher evaluation.
There are and have been so many good programs that really teach but the State people had a little RTTT money and have destroyed education by sleeping with the Book Companies…
SO GLAD we opted for parochial schools. Although Obama will not be happy until he’s destroyed them too.
When you hand power to the feds, this is what you get.
Get the FEDS out of Ed.
Unless you enjoy watching your children be used as lab rats
Didn’t parochial schools accept CC(sic) also?
MOM…YOU ARE NEEDED!!
These people want to keep the MOMS in the dark..
The parents are the only people who have any clout!!
Parents need to organize and get a few thousand lawyers because the lawsuits will be numerous.
You can also opt out on the State Tests..
For the second year in a row,NYS is inserting field test questions into this year’s test. That’s sort of like trying to build a plane in the air. Who will scoop up the casualties when this social experiment crashes?
They insert the field test into a timed test that is 30% of your child’s score..Your child makes a C instead of an A because they spend all of their time trying to answer the field test questions!!
Parents….If they want to filed test….make them pay -$$$-your children!!
CCSS-SCATTERED-CHAOTIC-DISPORGANIZED-NOT REAL-MONEY MAKING-USING STUDENTS FOR GUINEA PIGS OR LAB RATS OR WHATEVER THEY ARE TESTING IN THOSE LABS.
CCSS-IS ONE BIG POT OF WHATEVER YOU CARE TO CALL IT..I CALL IT C**P
Are CC standards really harder, or are they written in vague terms that promote confusion?