This blogger is not happy with the Common Core.
He says it discourages creativity. He thinks it is about preparing workers and consumers, not thinkers.
And there is this too:
“The Common Core is one reason my sixth-grade daughter has yet to read a novel in ELA. It’s also a reason she no longer has time to get to the school library. The Common Core’s emphasis on nonfiction would be fine if it emphasized good nonfiction. My favorite authors are nonfiction geniuses. Annie Dillard, Jon Krakauer, James Herndon, Jonathan Kozol, Robert Pirsig, David Sedaris, Natalie Goldberg, Anne Lamott, and, lest we forget, Thoreau. They write nonfiction at its best, but that’s not what my girls are being fed.
“The nonfiction of the Common Core consists of shorter pieces, often articles, much like what workers will be expected to read on the job. So, there’s no room for To Kill a Mockingbird, The Catcher in the Rye, Speak, or Of Mice and Men. What good is all that novel crap anyway?
“Creativity is a valuable commodity, but the Common Core does not promote creativity. My daughters are about to embark on eight days of testing. Eight days of pissing away ninety minutes at a time on tests that will teach them mostly to dislike school. I don’t want data from these tests. I don’t need it. I know my kids and so do their teachers.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Children learn from what is expected.
what the entries are expected from children! the question is whether children have careers want to bring in the market, or learn not occupy important ridiculed Irish time! if werklich any proof that you forward expected to try more fun by learning time and also have pisikalich pedagugisch, teater music, read on newspapers, books and writing bring other schools comunikiren and systamitige new technology out, of course, was able to write from the use also of any may also be candidates politician from.
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Ahmad Hesam
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You may very well have something valuable to contribute here, but you’ll need to work on your translation if you want anyone to understand what you’re trying to say.
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Would that it were ONLY eight days being “pissed away” taking tests. Friends of mine who are elementary school teachers tell me that they are now spending better than a third of each school year a) taking practice tests, b) doing test prep, and c) taking the actual tests. And when they are not doing that, they are having “data chats” after school with their administrators. Somewhere in there, they are supposed to remember that they are teachers.
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Let’s not forget scoring the tests (NY) and multiple days of training prior to the tests.
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The lack of rich, meaningful literature as part of children’s language education is one of the most disturbing elements of the CCSS. I am a middle school math teacher, and there are many components of the mathematics CCSS that I take issue with, but the elimination of literature that exposes children to creative and imaginative writing does, indeed, further my contention that the goal is to program assembly line robots rather than nurture and develop young minds. Take the time to ask for and read some of the ‘passages’ students are presented with in their classes and for so-called writing ‘assessments.’ (We’ve had three this year, along with a full-page list of other ‘assessments’ this year… ‘the year of the test.’)
I am so glad to see so many stand up and speak out about the atrocities taking place in our schools on many levels. Thank you.
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“I know my kids and so do their teachers.” Yes, parents and teachers know this to be true.
Policy wonks, billionaires, educrats, politicians, Rheebots don’t care and they never will.
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My broken record reply: it’s not the Common Core that’s the problem… its the testing based on age-based grade levels. If the blogger’s daughter’s teacher wasn’t being held hostage to tests she might be able to provide a wider array of reading materials instead of assigning readings that mirror what will be on the test. In a review of your book that appeared in EducationNext (http://educationnext.org/distorting-dewey/) Gerald Grant and Jeffrey Mirel wrote: “But IQ testing became the norm: the short history of American education in the 20th century is that Terman won and Lippmann and Dewey lost.” And so we are stuck with Terman’s world of standardized pencil and paper tests and mathematical gymnastics like VAM instead of Dewey’s world or individualization and self-actualized learning. What’s sad is that we could use technology to move closer to Dewey’s world… but instead we are using technology to reinforce the factory model.
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But the Common Core pretty much implies testing. What good are “standards” if you can’t tell whether they’re being implemented and whether the kids are learning them?
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You make excellent points, wgersen. However, in today’s world in which teachers are pushed to become frightened teach-by-rote parrots of “managed curriculum,” or else, the CCSS themselves are tools, along with the testing. Whatever the intentions of the creators and spreaders of CCSS (and some of the intentions sound quite noble) one cannot separate them from the atmosphere in which they are being pushed on all of us. IMO.
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The Despoilers Of Public Education (DOPEs) have created a broad-spectrum prescription for making people stupid.
The question we should start asking ourselves is why these DOPEs want the majority of the population to be stupid.
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DOPEs, that’s a good one. Could also stand for Deformers/Destroyers/Disasters/Denigrators/Dumbasses/Dictators, etc. . . Of Public Education
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Demolishers, Despisers, Dismantlers, …, the Dumbeat goes on …
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and the wrong implentation continues. as bad as th ecommon core is, the implementation is worse because of incorrect interpretation. Diane, you have addressed this, as have the authors of the common core; literature is not to be replaced. On the document itself the percentages are given and then explained in very small letters, the nonfiction is to be picked up by other disciplines. So school districts are taking one bad idea, and compounding it by not understanding it.
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“…the nonfiction is to be picked up by other disciplines.”
flolindy,
Nowhere is this stated on the Common Core official documents that I have received or read online at CCSS websites.
From http://www.corestandards.org …
“The Standards are not alone in calling for a special emphasis on informational text. The 2009 reading framework of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) requires a high and increasing proportion of informational text on its assessment as students advance through the grades.”
Distribution of Literary and Informational Passages by Grade in the 2009 NAEP Reading Framework
Grade Literary Information
4 50% 50%
8 45% 55%
12 30% 70%
(2008). Reading framework for the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.
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But the content areas, social studies and science, are not being evaluated and tied to test scores. So ELA wil be evaluated only so who do you think the pressure is on? Will the non fiction elements of SBAC or PARCC be sorted out and not attributed to English teachers? Highly unlikely. As stated by many it is not just the NATIONAL standards but the testing/evaluation trap.
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But this is just what we can expect to happen. Just look at the Broad-educated superintendents who now run so many school districts.
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I will not presume to state that I would have made $5 or $20 more a week if I had read the short non-fiction pieces of the CC, but I do know what reading OF MICE AND MEN and THE CATCHER IN THE RYE [among many others] did for me pre-teen.
I learned to love to read. To focus by blocking out distractions of all kinds in order to be able to concentrate on what I was reading. To build the endurance required to follow the themes and characters of tomes slim and thick, even if that might take hour after hour after hour of my time. To develop a taste for more difficult texts. To develop a sight vocabulary that often drew favorable comments from teachers and peers. To learn [however vicariously] what it meant to walk in someone else’s shoes and have a completely different perspective on and experience of life, and then be a bit disappointed when I got to the words “The End” and I had to return to my own reality.
To develop the unexpected and unintended skill to ‘game’ the few [but important] high-stakes standardized tests I have taken in my life. No secret here: because I usually sight read and absorbed content so quickly [again: not always—depended on the nature of the text] I have often annoyed others [including some very educated people] who assume that I must be skimming if I finish something much more quickly than they do. Hence in a timed high-stakes standardized test, it was as if I was given significantly more time, since I was reading and [generally] understanding what I was reading, more quickly. I cannot remember an instance where I didn’t have time to review all the reading passages and questions, rethink my answers, ask myself what answer the test givers wanted [it was never about what the best answer was], and sometimes figuring out that my initial response was not what was required and correcting my ‘mistake’ [there you go—WTR erasure, but without Beverly Hall’s help, honest!].
Almost all of this was outside of school courtesy of a well-educated parent who valued reading and learning for its own sake—and had good books at home. It shouldn’t have to be that way. For those schools that provide and assign such texts, the CC proponents should hang their heads in shame for exiling such wonderful learning and growing experiences from the formal school setting.
It bears repeating at the end: the deadly dullness of the CC [as it is actually being implemented] will only apply to OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN, i.e., the vast majority. The leading lights of the charterite/privatizer movement and their backers and beneficiaries will be sending THEIR OWN CHILDREN to schools that will open up, not close down, the many worlds of their imaginations.
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Without three hours of homework a night and reading a lot of books from the library I would not know what I know or be who I am doing this work. What is so hard to understand unless you have another goal or “Outcome” you desire. And if so what is that?
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One of my favorite quotes from Civil Disobedience, short and to the point.
“It [government] does not educate.”
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As a middle school ELA teacher I (and my colleagues) constantly fight the battle against diminishing literacy and diminishing love of reading in our world. Most often we can end the school year looking back on successes, because loving reading comes naturally to young people when given a chance to discover writing at its best.
Personally, getting back to reading something I love at the end of the day (right now it’s a return to Hugo and “Les Miserables” oh joy oh joy!) is the best kind of dessert, and I want my students and everyone to have that kind of pleasure in their lives). One of my current day-time biggest joys is helping a non-reader find something he/she takes pleasure in reading. So often, these young people also find a parallel joy, outlet, and invaluable tool in becoming writers themselves — of poetry, journals, and more. When this happens (and it DOES), I feel that I can hold my head up another year to bear the challenges foisted more and more on us as teachers. That they are still manageable because the rewards are still there.
But now? I dread dread dread our district’s CCS-driven mad rush to rewrite our curriculum to move out the tastes we’re now allowed of literature and to move in just about anything that they deem “informational text.” Just that counterposition alone is frightening. And now this blog . . . This blogger’s appeal reminds me of a report on NPR recently of a study that shows current writing (at least in this country) uses fewer and fewer good words of passion except for the passion of fear. Do Pearson and Gates and company know (or care), or is it a conscious conspiracy, that this education “reform” train is taking us to a place where the vast majority of our people are having hopes and dreams delimited to a tiny portion of what it can and should mean to be a full human in a community and world of other full humans . . .
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