Nicholas Tampio, who teaches at Fordham University, doesn’t understand why Bill Gates has been allowed to use his billions to gain control of American public education.
Tampio says that innovation comes not from standardization but from diversity, from differing ideas and perspectives.
He recalls when Gates used the power of his technology to replace WordPerfect with Microsoft’s Word. I remember that well, because I thought WordPerfect was far superior to Word and was disappointed when the better software was stamped out by Gates’ passion to standardize.
Tampio thinks that Common Core may stamp out competing ideas. He writes:
“The Common Core may raise standards in some school districts, but one ought to read the literature with a critical eye. The Common Core has not been field-tested anywhere. The Common Core does not address many root causes of underperforming schools, such as hungry students or dangerous neighborhoods. And the Common Core has an opportunity cost, namely, that it forces thriving school districts to adopt programs that may be a worse fit for the student body.
“We can learn a lesson from the recent history of the computing industry. Apple and Microsoft have pressed each other to make better applications, phones, notepads, and cameras. Though Gates may have wanted to vanquish Apple, Steve Jobs prompted him to improve his products, which in turn benefited every computer user. Competition brings out the best in people and institutions. The Common Core standardizes curricula and thereby hinders competition among educational philosophies.”
He argues:
“America needs many kinds of excellent programs and schools: International Baccalaureate programs, science and technology schools, Montessori schools, religious schools, vocational schools, bilingual schools, outdoor schools, and good public schools. Even within programs and schools, teachers should be encouraged to teach their passions and areas of expertise. Teachers inspire life-long learning by bringing a class to a nature center, replicating an experiment from Popular Science, taking a field trip to the state or national capital, or assigning a favorite novel. A human being is not a computer, and a good education is not formatted in a linear code.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I wonder what the “experts” will do about the fact that 1 in 4 children on this planet suffer from malnutrition? It affects learning and reading acquisition. How are standardized tests, teacher evaluations based on junk science, technology, Common Core standards, etc., going to FEED children?
http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/05/28/18550564-one-quarter-of-worlds-children-struggling-to-learn-because-of-malnutrition-study?lite
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Don’t worry; I’m sure Monsanto is on that.
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http://www.alternet.org/economy/real-numbers-half-america-poverty-and-its-creeping-toward-75-0
Half of America is in poverty.
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Great article. It’s time for this message to get out to the public. How true it is that innovation and curiosity can not be standardized. The people of this nation should be outraged that public education is being allowed to be controlled and standardized by the likes of Bill Gates. What qualifies him to decide what and how our children learn? Since when does a person’s wealth substitute for expertise in education? Why does he and the other Billionare Boys Club members get to decide that straight lines are superior to doodles??? The saddest part of this all is that what they think is good for others people’s children is NOT what they choose for their own children. That includes our President.
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You would eliminate all standards? Revert to the libertarian/anarchical ideal of total local/parent control? No standards? No set curricula? Hey, I have an idea, let’s change the name of our country to just “States.”
Daniel-san, you have to find balance… http://askingquestionsblog.blogspot.com/2013/05/apollo-vs-dionysus-is-teaching-and.html
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Absolutely! Parents should be able to decide what is best for their children. I have done it for all six on mine. And what do you know…… 4 of them are all intelligent, caring, productive adults (2 still children). I decided what the standards would be. I decided what curriculum we would use. Why do we need a federal government to set standards for us? I can’t find education control in the constitution any where.
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Balance cannot be achieved without solid information:
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Innovation and curiosity can however be stomped out.
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I am glad to see an academic from university level get in on the conversation.
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International Baccalaureate is a “Values” based program. Values from UNESCO, not America OR local parents. It’s NOT an academic based program. The LAST thing we need is MORE UN propaganda in the schools. We got that with IB and now we will get it with Common Core.
NO THANKS!
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Have you actually read the IB materials? It’s a way of teaching, NOT a curriculum. It’s very different than Common Core, and it’s NOT some kind of UN, black helicopter type conspiracy. It’s a actually extremely academic, and was founded by U.S. military families for their children to stay on track as they transferred from various locations.
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School districts choose whether or not to have an IB program. Perhaps it’s changed dramatically since I attended an IB program, but I was not brainwashed with UN propaganda. I had friends and teachers from across the political spectrum and we had lively debates about many topics. I loved the academic intensity of the IB program.
But would I place an IB program in every school in America? No way. Part of what made our program great was its scrappiness, its need to prove that it added value to the offerings in our county.
That is why I am in favor of competition among academic models. The IB program is my home team, but the championship can only happen with lots of teams.
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Our 3 youngsters at an urban public school took AP, IB and College in the Schools courses. There were advantages and disadvantages to each. Glad they had strong options. I agree that there are many good things about IB>
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Educational diversity (outside of private and charter schools)?
Teachers focusing on their passions instead of the script?
Bill Gates and the other financially powered proponents of Common Core have THIS to say about THESE ideas: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07So_lJQyqw
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I got out of secondary education because I was sick of administrators telling me that my “passions” and interests were irrelevant, that it wasn’t about me. I had one observing supervisor tell me that teachers who taught in their own personal styles were basically unconscionable egoists who didn’t care about the common good. I get the arguments, all of them. But that passion does not justify the pendulum swinging to the opposite extreme… teachers can NOT use their righteous anger about NCLB/RttT/Common Core to justify a petty, childish “I can do what I want” attitude, and that seems to be the overwhelming popular response to this phenomenon. It will hurt teachers in the end, because all it will due is fulfill the prophecies of all those who would work against teachers. Teachers need to be strong and principled, and take a stand, not be petulant.
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Who is advocating that teachers just be allowed to do whatever they want?
I think your argument about the “pendulum” might be better directed at the current swing toward standardization and conformity, which most likely WILL result in a backlash in the opposite direction.
The argument about how specific the common core (or whatever it was and will be called) needs to be, and how much micromanaging of teachers needs to happen, will probably rage on forever. The pendulum will swing back and forth many times. Right now, the forces pushing it to an extreme that will likely backfire are not teachers seeking some degree of autonomy in the classroom.
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Corporate Core™ would be a more accurate name for it.
What is really going on here is that the academic and educational communities are being coerced to surrender their responsibilities for the curriculum to the control of external private interests.
That really has nothing to do with whether we maintain a common basis of culture and knowledge or not, something we have always managed to do before simply as a matter of reality testing.
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In this generally fine perspective on the common core, Tampio slips in the following sentence, “Competition brings out the best in people and institutions.” I’m very tired of seeing this concept thrown around in discussions of education. Competition, when it is playful, has a place, but it overrides too much as it is taken out of the playful context. Competition becomes the central element when winning trumps cooperative effort to enrich an entire classroom or school. If I must seek to be a “winner” compared to my own classmates, I lose compassion sooner or later. Striving to be at or very near the top makes me do things that isolate me from my peers. I come to want them to applaud my success. Sometimes, I come to feel I “deserve” their praise. I take on the strut of a winner.
Too often, I am encouraged in this deluded self-perception by getting good grades from the adults in my school, sports medals handed me by more adults, etc, I feel fine leaving my commuinty behind to make my mark in larger society.
In the meantime, the “average” students and the ones I dominated may be glad for my success. Perhaps they regret that they were not “winners.” However, they also get to shake hands with their fellow sufferers as they graduate. They return to the jobs they’ve had during school and continue to work in the community, not expecting to be a star, at least semi-satisfied to be a contributor to their community.
Bringing out the “best in people and institutions” is not the result of competition. The “best” doesn’t mean being a star. In reality, the “good” is more important than the “best” since it is the good in society who do the most to support and strengthen the society we share. The stars may blaze bright, but they do NOT all become productive. They may continue to “win” for a while and be rich as their reward. If, like Bill Gates, they see thier success as a blueprint for others, then we just get more of “race to the top” kinds of thinking.
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That is a good point. One of the perennial questions in American politics is how to balance liberty and equality. If we emphasize the accomplishments of the few, then we denigrate the well-being of the mean. If we focus on improving the lot of the middle, then we can clip the wings of the gifted. In a world of limited resources, there is no easy way to nurture every type of student.
I use the language of competition, in part, to counter the rhetoric of the Common Core. Defenders say that we need the Common Core to compete on the world stage. I argue that the Common Core establishes a monopoly that deprives us of new ideas and experiments. To compete in the world economy, we need Apple, not just Microsoft.
I agree that competition needs to be balanced with cooperation. Schools should nurture both virtues. In this debate, though, the ideal of competition can be used to support good public schools:
Just as the NFL shares revenue so that small-market teams can compete, “excellent” people should look out for the well-being of others. America needs great, diverse public schools; not just private schools for the elite and Common Core for the masses.
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Well said, Nicholas!
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More than a few teachers, I know, have been wondering lately if Bill Gates doesn’t fall under the umbrella, everything is so black and white.
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“Tampio says that innovation comes not from standardization but from diversity, from differing ideas and perspectives.”
Why does nobody see this statement as the either-or fallacy (false dilemma) that it is? My Freshman Composition students would.
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A saleswoman from a learning company spoke to the parents in our school district. She said that teachers had to follow every lesson plan in the workbooks. In the Common Core rhetoric, the standards can be met in different ways; in practice, cash-strapped school districts have to sign up for programs that allow minimal innovation.
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Andrew, in logic, when the bivalent disjunction applies, it’s not, by definition, an example of the either-or fallacy to say that it applies. It is in fact the case that all students, whatever their unique propensities, backgrounds, plans for the future, etc., are being subjected to a standardized regime and that the alternative to that is one that is not standardized (p v -p).
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Agreed, this is the either or fallacy. Progress does not come just one way.
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Couldn’t somebody get Gates to drop schools and focus on climate change? win-win!
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Maybe he could videotape all the glaciers disappearing from the earth, and pay a bunch of people to analyze why some glaciers disappear slower than others.
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How (Really) to Apply Sound Business Principles to Education
There’s an old story that business people tell. You’ve probably heard it. I’ve heard it many times and have no idea where it came from. (All these stories end up being attributed to Warren Buffett, who is, of course, a masterful storyteller.) A grocer buys a hundred watermelons for $8.00 apiece. He puts them on display for $10.00. No one buys. He lowers the price, first to $9.00, then to $8.00, then to $7.00. The watermelons sell out. Wow, the grocer thinks, if only I had bought a hundred more of those melons! The moral is clear: When something isn’t working, doing more of the same is a stupid mistake.
But that is precisely what we are doing with the new Common Core State Standards, high-stakes tests, and teacher evaluation systems being rolled out around the country. We’ve had ten years of failed mandatory state standards, high-stakes tests, and evaluations of educators based on test scores, of an accountability policy that has turned our K-12 schools into test prep factories. In schools across the nation, now, a third of each school year is spent doing test prep, taking practice tests, and taking high-stakes tests. That’s failed. It has clearly, utterly failed. And so we’ve decided to do a lot more of that.
What’s behind the push for ratcheting up standards, high-stakes tests, and evaluation systems based on those? Well, a lot of very powerful politicians and business interests want to apply a business model to bring about education “reform.” They are attempting to apply to education the business principle that you get what you measure. Fine, but in doing this, they are violating a number of other fundamental principles of good business that the reformers ought to be thinking about. Business people ought to understand better than anyone that real change, real reform, real improvement happens when competing models vie with one another in a free marketplace.
But what they are pushing, instead, is one model, one dictated learning progression, one set of what are, de facto, mandatory scripts that every educator, every textbook or online education developer, must slavishly follow. In other words, the new standards overrule every curriculum coordinator, every textbook writer, and every teacher in the country. They say, in effect, we know better than you do. The particular expertise of hundreds of thousands of professional educators is rendered, by the new national standards, entirely moot. The unspoken subtext of the standards, ominously readable by every educator, is this: What you know about your field, about your community, about your students, about what to teach and when and how, no longer matters at all. Those decisions have been made for you. Follow the script, or else. We will have innovation in the future when the Politburo convenes again to revise the five-year plan we’ve created for you.
Gee, how did that work out for the old Soviet Union?
Compounding this problem is the abundantly obvious fact that the new standards are sloppy, unimaginative, retrograde, and full of glaring lacunae. Furthermore, they seem to have been prepared in complete, perhaps blissful ignorance of most of what we have learned, scientifically, in the past forty years about the domains that they cover, such as child language acquisition—how kids actually learn the grammar and vocabulary of a language. The language arts standards for the early grades are wildly developmentally inappropriate. The language standards for focus at each grade level seem to have been chosen almost completely at random. The writing standards call for students to do narrative writing, informative writing, and argument at each grade, but ever since No Child Left Behind enforced a nationwide emphasis on standardized tests, we’ve had kids being drilled, drilled, drilled to produce formulaic five-paragraph themes in these three writing “modes.” It’s an awful pedagogical practice, but because of the way these standards are written, the pressure will be on educators to do more of the same, and anyone who tries to innovate in curricular design will be pink slipped. Reading through and working with these new standards, one gets the impression that they were prepared by nonexperts based on vague memories of what they were taught in school sixty years ago. If these standards had been prepared by a graduate student as a master’s thesis, her advisor would have had to say to her, “These are a mess; they are not ready for submission to your committee; you need to get some practical experience before you attempt something like this.” Educators around the country are finding that the more they attempt to work within the confines of these supposed standards [sic], the sloppier the standards [sic] turn out to be.
OK, so maybe the new standards are mediocre at best and completely off base at worst. But what’s wrong with standards in general? Wouldn’t a world without standardized rulers and clocks and specifications for screws be completely dysfunctional? Of course. But there are a couple of problems with this argument: First, students and teachers are not rulers and clocks. Student needs and propensities vary enormously. Second, a complex, pluralistic society needs an educational system that will recognize the differences among students and build on their particular talents and propensities, and good teachers and curriculum designers have learned a lot about how to do that. What a complex, pluralistic society doesn’t need is robotized students, robotized teachers. The new standards and high-stakes tests are less like uniform specifications for screws than they are like a single set of specifications for screws and shoelaces and football teams. Surely, the business interests pushing the Common Core understand the dangers of overregulation, of centralized authoritarian mandates that keep people from being able to respond flexibly to actual market conditions (or to the actual abilities and challenges of their actual, differing students).
And then there’s the problem of the evaluation systems based on the standards and tests. There’s a school of thought in management and process control theory called Sociotechnical Systems Design. It says, basically, this: In any complex operation like a modern corporation (or a modern educational system), when you impose from the top a new system-wide change, you will INEVITABLY be doing this in complete ignorance of hundreds of thousands of details that might well make the change completely unworkable. Given this, you would do well to follow a few practical principles:
1. Don’t mandate the change from the start. Make it flexible so that people can fix its bugs, can adapt it to their particular needs.
2. Implement slowly, in stages.
3. Don’t just seek to “secure buy-in” to an inflexible mandate. Build from the ground up. And where possible, allow competing versions to operate so that workers will be encouraged to innovate and you can see what works best.
4. Don’t place too much importance on a single metric (like last year’s sales or the data from standardized tests). The whole Balanced Scorecard revolution in business was based on this very principle. If you look only at historical financial data, you’ll miss a lot of important stuff—like the fact that the world around you is changing and your organization is not. If you look only at how well the student’s five-paragraph theme responds to standard W.4.3a, . . . well, you see what I mean.
5. To the extent possible, don’t tell people what they have to do. Tell them what the goal is and then stand the hell out of their way, as Theodore Roosevelt famously put it. The new standards do not simply tell educators what the goal is. They micromanage curriculum designers and teachers. They tell them what the process to achieve the goal has to look like. And any knowledgeable businessperson will understand that in a complex system, that’s a horrific mistake, one that robs workers of the autonomy they need in order to care at all about their jobs and to meet the specific challenges that no one saw coming or that no designer of the new system had the specific expertise to understand.
A few weeks ago, Secretary of Education Arnie Duncan called on The Chamber of Commerce to ratchet up its support for the new standards, tests, and evaluation systems. These are businesspeople. They ought to understand better than anyone what a mistake that would be.
There is much to love in the philosophy informing the new standards, in the emphasis, for example, on close reading of related, significant texts. And competing, voluntary standards should be welcomed. So should balanced evaluation systems that place power and authority at the local level where experienced educators know what the hell they are doing. But this is supposed to be a capitalist democracy. We don’t like authoritarian mandates from the top because we know, we know, as citizens and educators and business people, that they simply don’t work, and the reasons why they don’t work are particular and complex. They can’t be covered adequately in a soundbite or a memo or an op-ed piece. That’s the point, and business people ought, more than anyone, to understand that.
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The common core is a monoculture, it will end like the Irish potato famine.
The common core is a rotton core. Save America, quarentine the common core.
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Monoculture is a good term to apply in the discussion of the Common Core State Standards. Monoculture is most often applied to agriculture, where one crop dominates a field or even all the fields of a region. If your goal is to grow corn with the highest possible yield, it makes a kind of sense to plant a strong variety of corn across a wide area.
The problem of applying monoculture in agriculture is that natural diversity is harmed. This becomes especially true when the large scale farms use herbicides to knock down any and all competition. In that case, only corn can grow, corn of the specified variety.
The planet Earth has not developed monocultures often, and when they do happen (red tide, algae blooms, locusts, etc.) we recognize them as a bad event. Diversity and cyclic advance and decline of multiple populations is the balance which has been our planet’s nature.
Education cannot be exactly matched with the monoculture model of agriculture, of course. We give some recognition to the idea of individualizing the school experience for each learner. Nonetheless, we need to anticipate the impact of CCSS monoculture on public education.
There is a real chance that students will be “the corn” in this analogy. They will miss the natural opportunities to learn from the variety of perspectives of a diverse corps of professional educators. They may, instead, be exposed to a fixed curriculum delivered in a relatively rote way by inexperienced and uninspired content delivery specialists. As “good corn”, the students graduate into a world where they hope “good corn” is the desired food for dinner. If not, they will grumble through their adult years becoming the individuals that they couldn’t be in school. Students with difficulty being “good corn” won’t get the chance to try to be “good beans” or “good peaches.” A rich mix of cultures and expectations could let students know what it is like to be good corn, good peas, good peaches, etc. but only if diversity is honored in the school. Humans vary. We need to be judged by more than our ability to be all alike.
Changing schools won’t have much effect, either. If everybody has the same curriculum set into the same timing of scope and sequence, it won’t matter if an individual is quick or slow. A new teacher and a new school will be indistinguishable. Just because the name of the teacher is different will not make any more difference than a different name on the tractor tilling the corn field.
Times change, the environment of Earth flexes from cold to hot and back, wet to dry, and so on. A healthy ecosystem has varieties of plants and animals with the genetic tools needed so that some part of the system survives. Perhaps a strong monoculture of education will succeed, but only if tomorrow is an exact copy of yesterday. We know that change in our future is accelerating not stabilizing.
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“As ‘good corn’, the students graduate into a world where they hope ‘good corn’ is the desired food for dinner.”
Well, that statement gave me chills. That’s OK, I didn’t want to sleep tonight anyway.
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TC, Algot, very well said!!
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The social engineers who crafted the common core curriculum are already at work on the next 5 year plan.
Such a great nation, shame a shameful endeavor. Bill and Melinda Gates, Eli Broad and Jeb Bush will win the day but history will not be kind. Expect a major PR campaign to scrub the images of these enemies of free and public education.
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I don’t think those people will win the day. The Common Core scored a quick, easy victory when governors signed up for “high standards.” Who is against high standards?
Yet the Common Core does not merely stipulate “high standards.” Legislatures require school districts to show compliance, and the way that school districts do that is to purchase comprehensive educational programs. For me and other parents in our school district, the Common Core instantly lowered educational quality. Gifted teachers became painters without brushes.
This is outrageous.
Once enough people raise their voices about what is happening on the ground, politicians will come to their senses about the Common Core.
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N,
I hope you are correct about “enough people seeing what is happening on the ground”, but I don’t think it will happen. The media is controlling the narrative and “people” are too busy living and earning to even trust “their own lying eyes.”
Your work, voice is helpful though. Please soldier onward.
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There are plenty encouraging signs in the fight against the Common Core.
(1) Parents are mobilizing on behalf of their children. Mark Naison posted this story about a meeting on Long Island: https://www.facebook.com/groups/TheInnovativeEducator/permalink/420497631382795/
(2) People from across the political spectrum realize that the advertising of the Common Core does not match its reality. Here is a recent op-ed from the Wall Street Journal: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324659404578503561386927962.html#articleTabs%3Darticle
(3) Lots of people around the country are suffering because of the Common Core. The task is to mobilize these people into a political force.
The Common Core cannot survive if it lacks legitimacy. So please keep sharing stories, data, and ideas about why the Founders were right to have local communities–not states, the federal government, or private corporations–make education policy.
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“Competition brings out the best in people and institutions. The Common Core standardizes curricula and thereby hinders competition among educational philosophies.”
It hit me as I read this that the same people who have been beating the drum for ‘choice’ in education are now insisting-with the CC-that there be no choice. They aren’t even internally consistent (=no integrity).
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The only thing Gates has is money and his MONEY TALKS, because people are blinded by greed and power. Has Gates read DRIVE by Daniel Pink?
This is a quote re: DRIVE…
Summary: The use of rewards and punishments to control our employees’ production is an antiquated way of managing people. To maximize their enjoyment and productivity for 21st century work, we need to upgrade our thinking to include autonomy, mastery and purpose. There is little of these attributes in our current education DEFORM policies. And them there is CHILD POVERTY and the closing of these students’ schools.
What a rap!
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I’ve often wondered if Gates is just trying to “beat” Apple & Jobs.
Wasn’t it Apple/Macs who got their foothold in public schools (way back when)
before Gates? I wonder if he resents that initial success & is just trying to
reclaim what he thinks is his “rightful” place in public education.
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The Minnesota legislature asked Mn Education Computer Consortium to study several different kinds of “personal” computers, including APPLE, Radio Shack, and Commodore Pet. After a year of study, MECC picked Apple as the best for schools.
The Mn legislature then said “now what” MECC suggested creating software for the APPLE and the Leg gave some $ and said “go to it.”
MECC Created software and the idea of a site license. This allowed school districts and states to purchase a piece of software and for a fee, make unlimited copies of the software.
APPLE was able to go around the country (and world), telling people that an objective group had studied several different kinds of computers, picked APPLE, and was making ed software available at a modest cost.
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Speaking to the same issue is this piece from a Finnish educational expert. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/05/15/what-if-finlands-great-teachers-taught-in-u-s-schools-not-what-you-think/
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