Jay Mathews writes a regular blog about education for the Washington Post. He has been writing about education for decades. His most recent book celebrates KIPP. He has been the guiding force behind the idea of ranking high schools by the number of students who take AP courses. One of the things I like best about him is that he changes his mind when the evidence changes. He gets enthusiastic about big ideas, but is willing to step back if he thinks he was wrong.
In this remarkable column, Mathews explains the allure of the Common Core, the idea that all children will be measured by the same yardstick. But then he interviews Tom Loveless of Brookings. Loveless is a Common Core skeptic. He analyzed performance in states with high standards and low standards and concluded that the standards–no matter how rigorous and uniform they are–won’t make much difference.
Mathews is persuaded that the Common Core will eventually fade away, as teachers and policymakers realize that they don’t live up to the hype.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Indeed. States have been using standards for years and rewriting them when they didn’t seem to make a difference. But question the assumption that standards will somehow make a difference? No way. It must be The Bad Teachers fault! More standards must be the answer! And lots and lots of tests!
If teachers and principals work together and they receive proper professional development during the next three years, they will discover for themselves ways to help all students think and use technology to master the 21st Century skills they will need to continuously improve their knowledge. The CCSS present a useful guide that principals and teachers have to understand deeply. They have to match their local curriculum to the CCSS and take their students beyond these tasks to deep applications of their criteria.
The extensive testing associated with the CCSS is the problem. Fewer questions and less testing time would offer teachers in each state sufficient information to know how their students are doing. States have to reform their testing models. We need to focus on better and less intrusive tests for our students.
The developmentally inappropriate and overly lengthy Pearson assessment regime has been inexorably linked to the CCSS in New York. Assessments that cannot be examined in detail, and that teachers are forbidden to correct do not inform instruction. The imposition of the CCSS from above and the lack of classroom teacher input in its design condemns them to the bandwagon junk heap of US education history.
All Right!! Great Comment!!
Did you see the sample questions in the NYT this weekend? Who in the world wrote them? Were they ever vetted by actual teachers, who presumably can actually write a coherent sentence? Were they developmentally appropriate? What about culturally sensitive? Think having teachers and principals working together is a fine approach. Oh that CCSS had bothered to apply that notion of collaboration to itself.
Like so much else in modern education circles, I imagine the writers were about as far removed from the classroom as is possible.
I am attending professional development on the CCSS this summer that is being presented by people who haven’t been in a classroom for years.
They don’t write lesson plans. They don’t teach lessons. They don’t assess learning. They don’t give grades.
They attend meetings. They go to seminars and presentations. They don’t actually work with students anymore and haven’t for some time.
But they are the “experts” who will teach us how to do CCSS “right” even though all they’ve done is read them, same as all the teachers that will be there.
This is the way it’s been for a while now and it’s so discordant and wrong I don’t know how to respond. I will go and do my best because that’s what I do but I wonder how to get the message across that the best PD would be teacher-led and guided by people who are actually teaching with the CCSS and not just theorizing.
Since the CCSS are just theoretical anyway I guess it’s fitting that the PD is taught in theory only and not through actual experience.
“…and take their students beyond these tasks to deep applications of their criteria.”
What make you think that teachers don’t already do this? Just because some Hedgeucator happened to notice “critical thinking” doesn’t mean that it hasn’t already been part of the pedagogical tradition going back at leat as far as Socrates.
Love this comment!!!
Utter nonsense! (and I’m playing nice with that term)
All educational standards and standardized tests are completely and irrevocably invalid. No amount of tinkering will ever make them valid. Any results/conclusions drawn from an invalid process will be, as Wilson states “vain and illusory”, a duende, a chimera, a falsehood. To understand why see Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Any attempt, and educational standards and standardized testing are attempts, to quantify the quality of human interaction that is the teaching and learning process is logically impossible (in other words a bunch of bovine excrement) that causes many harms to those subjected to those regimes, the students, and now teachers, schools and districts.
You are attempting to “do the wrong thing righter” (R. Ackhoff). I will re-post why that is the wrong course of action:
The proliferation of educational assessments, evaluations and canned programs belongs in the category of what systems theorist Russ Ackoff describes as “doing the wrong thing righter. The righter we do the wrong thing,” he explains, “the wronger we become. When we make a mistake doing the wrong thing and correct it, we become wronger. When we make a mistake doing the right thing and correct it, we become righter. Therefore, it is better to do the right thing wrong than the wrong thing right.”
Our current neglect of instructional issues are the result of assessment policies that waste resources to do the wrong things, e.g., canned curriculum and standardized testing, right. Instructional central planning and student control doesn’t – can’t – work. But, that never stops people trying.
The result is that each effort to control the uncontrollable does further damage, provoking more efforts to get things in order. So the function of management/administration becomes control rather than creation of resources. When Peter Drucker lamented that so much of management consists in making it difficult for people to work, he meant it literally. Inherent in obsessive command and control is the assumption that human beings can’t be trusted on their own to do what’s needed. Hierarchy and tight supervision are required to tell them what to do. So, fear-driven, hierarchical organizations turn people into untrustworthy opportunists. Doing the right thing instructionally requires less centralized assessment, less emphasis on evaluation and less fussy interference, not more. The way to improve controls is to eliminate most and reduce all.
Former Green Beret Master Sergeant Donald Duncan did when he noted in Sir! No Sir! that: “I was doing it right but I wasn’t doing right.”
And from one of America’s premier writers:
“The mass of men [and women] serves the state [education powers that be] thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailors, constables, posse comitatus, [administrators and teachers], etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt.”- Henry David Thoreau [1817-1862], American author and philosopher
I love this quote and it is so right on!
Sigh.
It can hardly be said that Jay Mathews – who pimps incessantly for Advanced Placement – “changes his mind when the evidence changes.” [Note: although Mathews does say he’s change his mond on evaluating teachers based on test scores…just think what that might do to his beloved AP?]
The research over the last decade shows clearly that AP courses and tests are far more hype (thanks to Jay) than reality. But does Mathews “change his mind?” Absolutely not.
What DOES Mathews do. He cites a two-decade-plus-old book of his. He cites College BOard “studies” which invariably shows their products (PSAT, SAT, AP, Accuplacer) are beter than canned sardines, though independent research not only fails to corroborate the College Board “studies” but contradicts them. And he cites a screed titled Do What Works,” by Tom Luce and Lee Thompson.
In “Do What Works,” Luce and Thompson wrote –– in contradiction to research on creating highly productive cultures –– that school “accountability” systems should be based on rewards and punishments. They said such systems offered “a promising framework, and federal legislation [NCLB] promotes this approach. While researchers pointed out that the 100 percent proficiency requirements in NCLB were virtually impossible to achieve, perhaps even laughable, Luce and Thompson called the requirement “bold and valuable,” “laudable,” “significant,” and “clearly in sight.” Luce and Thompson were flat-out wrong.
In the piece cited by Diane Ravitch, Mathews says this: “Virginia has stuck with the standards it has. Mounting evidence shows Virginia is right, and the others wrong.”
But, if a click on the hyperlink, takes the reader to another Mathews column (one of Mathews’ favored practices, citing himself). And in that column, he cites Jay Greene from the University of Arkansas, to be sure, no friend of public education. Yet, nothing in that column – from Mathews or Greene – says anything about Virginia, much less provides any “evidence” whatsoever that “Virginia is right.”
But this is typical.
All-in-all, Jay is in the bag for more testing, more charters (he drools over KIPP), and more and more AP courses anad tests….despite what the “mounting evidence” says.
Common Core will fail for the same reason other educational “reforms” have failed: they do not address any of the critical variables that affect the academic achievement of a student.
What these standards will likely do is to increase the profits for textbook and testing companies and that’s probably the goal anyway.
That’s the goal, along with spying on every student in America and selling his private data. Once the states have constructed the mandated surveillance systems so that InBloom can access private student information, store it, and sell it to the highest bidder, the federal governent will probably ease up on the Common Core curriculum and let the states grovel for waivers.
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One thing I have never seen discussed in these blogs and posts is the factor of living arrangements and safety for people who go into some communities. I taught 4 years in a very rural county in WV. I wanted to be there. But, it isn’t a place that everyone would enjoy. Sometimes, those areas don’t attract people who want to stay in the area, In the urban areas that might be very unsafe, it is difficult to get teachers to go there instead of looking for work in suburban areas. That is why it costs so much and the claim is made that you “can’t just throw money at education”. We have to confront those issues, too. Education won’t improve as long as people won’t go into certain areas to teach. Technology can’t be used to test students with no technological experience.
My district has a fairly extensive technology program. Even it will have difficulty scheduling these new computerized tests. I know of other districts with very few computers and little student exposure to them. So, how will they compete?
There are so many issues confronting implementation. The fact that they are testing students on curricula that to which they haven’t yet been exposed is only part of the problem. But, we all know that.
Proper pay and compensation is a big factor when it comes to attracting teachers. The trend now in urban areas is to create low-paying charters with inferior benefits. It gives people no incentive to stay and work in extremely difficult environments.
I know that, but in the political discussions, this is glossed over.