To prove that he is definitely not over-reaching, definitely not telling states what to do, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is giving states more time to meet his deadlines to tie Common Core test results to teacher evaluation.
He is apparently responding to Randi Weingarten’s request to postpone “high stakes” until teachers have curriculum and professional development.
I hate to be the skunk at the garden party, but I think it is wrong to attach high stakes to testing.
There is very little evidence to support the value of high stakes testing–after all, we have had a dozen years of No Child Left Behind– and plenty of evidence that it is harmful. If it were so great, why aren’t other nations evaluating their teachers by their students’ test scores.
But now states may ask Duncan’s permission to defer the axe. Some members of Congress are beginning to think this is arbitrary and capricious. They don’t remember writing legislation putting the Secretary in charge of every public school in the nation. They don’t remember when they approved national standards and tests.
Duncan doesn’t seem ever to doubt that test scores matter more than anything else. He doesn’t care if value-added modeling narrows the curriculum or mislabels teachers or demoralizes teachers. That’s not his problem.
Remember, he is the guy who reformed the Chicago schools.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Something about an emperor and clothes came to my mind…
LIKE!!!!
And here is the response of the OK State Superintendent of Schools (she objected to being the Superintendent of PUBLIC Schools):
“This just shows again that federal bureaucrats in D.C. think they know what is best for Oklahoma children. Oklahomans know what is right for our children and that is an outstanding education system fueled by our state-generated education reforms. President Obama and the education establishment have caved into union bosses’ demands to roll back critical reforms. I pledge to Oklahoma to remain focused on the needs of Oklahoma children and on building an outstanding education system for each of our children. We do not need the U.S. Department of Education, the education establishment or union bosses running our lives. Oklahoma children come first.”
She’s very eager to get all those high-stakes tests in order so she can flunk third graders, deny diplomas to high school graduates and fire teachers. Notice the attempt to distance herself from the mean ‘federal government,’ recasting our CCSS work as a state idea! Blech
Arnie …trying to undo the mess our educational system is in..
Proactive Arnie..not Reactive..
If a teacher planned for a class the way you planned for this RTTT, they would need to be fired…and Arnie..so do you!
Hope you can find a good job in 2016
DUNK FUNCAN!!!
“They don’t remember writing legislation putting the Secretary in charge of every public school in the nation. They don’t remember when they approved national standards and tests..”
Neither do I.
So why does Congress and the American public allow this gross power play? Time to reign the numb-skull in. I mean, he’s failed in Chicago and now through-out the land. When will it stop.?
“They (members of Congress)don’t remember writing legislation putting the Secretary in charge of every public school in the nation.”
A great observation.
Better late than never.
Train Train Train …
It is really sad when egos continue to get in the way. Duncan and his like would serve all of us better if they could just admit ever making a mistake. Not being able to do so makes the error worse, the coverup more harmful, and the kids’ and teachers’ plight much more damaging. Arne, it’s ok to admit you didn’t anticipate ancillary consequences of your decisions. That happens. Really. Cut your losses and those of the communities you are adversely affecting and move on to some positive action that actually educates students and doesn’t punish teachers. Don’t postpone the bad decision. Cancel it.
Jeannie Kaplan
Denver Public School Board
District 3
I agree. A good leader knows when to say they were wrong
Two things are missing in your equation: Duncan is as far from a “good leader” as a drug dealer is to a good citizen. Secondly, for the person who created, implemented and knows the destruction his plan will cause, would hardly say he was “wrong.”
It’s just as bad as the cheating scandals… esp. the cover up part.
One cannot be a supporter of mandatory national standards without being an enabler of the deform movement in its entirety. Ms. Weingarten reminds me of the spouse with the alcoholic husband who agrees to drive to the liquor store to get the bottle if the spouse will agree to drink at home tonight instead of heading to the local tavern. Alcoholism is, I think, an apt metaphor for the education deform movement because of the utter heedlessness that characterizes both.
To use a different metaphor, the CCSS is the engine that drives the deform juggernaut. The juggernaut is in place. It’s not going away. It will crush students and teachers and schools. It will do horrific damage. That, in itself, is enough for one to oppose the CCSS. Even if one bought the highly dubious notions that a) we should have national standards and b) they should look like the CCSS, it is disingenuous to pretend that the CCSS are NOT the engine that runs the deform movement, which has as its primary objective of creating a 21st century workforce (Reagan, Bush, Obama NewSpeak for turning students into identically milled, obedient do-bots trained to have desirable affective responses to doing mindless, trivial tasks like worksheets delivered via computers, no teachers needed).
Very well said, thank you. Approval of Weingarten/AFT and Roekel/NEA for CCSS betrays students, teachers, families, and needs of public schools.
Thank you, Ira.
One reform you would be in favor of is allowing students the ability choose schools to attend. I have always wondered how some people can support traditional zoned public schools and argue against a “one size fits” all curriculum.
Absolutely, teaching economist. Anything to encourage diversity, innovation, and competition among schools and among educational materials providers. However, I believe that we have been well served, traditionally, by public schools with site-based management, and what I am seeing around the country is a perversion of free market ideals whereby the language of competition, innovation, and free markets is being used to describe what is, in fact, a system in which the commissar hands the business to his or her cronies in fixed-bid or no-bid power plays.
Burke famously said in his Reflections on the Revolution in France that if circumspection and caution is necessary when we take down a wall (in order to keep it from falling on our heads), so much more so is it necessary when we presume to undertake social engineering. Site-managed public schools required by law to provide equal access have served us extraordinarily well, enabling, for example, genius to rise from among the families low in socio-economic status and for considerable socio-economic mobility, and though I love school choice in theory, I am skeptical, very skeptical, and with good reason, about the practice.
For example, the nationalization of standards and the creation of a real-time national database of student responses (not just exam scores) linked to curricular materials is ideal for ensuring that start-up hurdles for new educational materials developers/publishers will be insurmountable. We were already well down that track. Only 30 years ago or so, Joe Littell and Fred McDougal could borrow $200K or something like that and start McDougal, Littell and compete with Harcourt. But then, well-meaning but myopic folks in state education departments piled on requirement after requirement regarding new textbook programs (e.g., must contain “free” supplemental ancillaries in six languages, must offer “free” professional development) to the point that it became impossible for small startup publishers to enter the market. Only the guys with the big bucks could play in this game. Enter the Internet. All of a sudden, the costs of printing all the state-mandated ancillaries became, potentially, unnecessary. Pixels are cheap. The big publishers had to look for other ways to create barriers to entry to ensure that there would NOT be competition. A centralized national digital database of student responses linked to online curricula based on a single set of national standards was just the mechanism to replace the barrier to entry presented by the startup costs involved in meeting the byzantine state adoption requirements, for development of such products would be VERY expensive, as would the fees for using the database, and one could manipulate the gatekeeping process allowing connection to that centralized database. It’s a strategic plan for ensuring long-term monopoly control.
The same sort of thing is happening with the privatization movement. Years ago, I wondered what was going to happen when, predictably, most schools failed to meet AYP under NCLB. Where would the alternative schools come from? Well, it didn’t take me long to find out. Students from those failed schools would attend virtual charters run by the cronies of the oligarchs who formulated NCLB in the first place. In both cases, with regard to educational materials and alternative schools, the fix was in.
If I thought for a moment that we would see actual competition among radically different schools as a result of the deform movement, I would be its biggest cheerleader. But that is not what we are seeing and definitely not what we will see if the current legal framework is implemented. You can’t have distant, authoritarian, top-down control based upon centrally planned systems and think that that is going to result in competition and innovation. And it doesn’t matter who is pushing the centralization–people who spout leftist rhetoric or people who spout rightest rhetoric. What matters is that education is being centralized, and barriers to entry for competitive approaches are being made impregnable.
I have to hand it to Pearson. Theirs is a brilliant and brilliantly executed strategic plan. Not since the day of John D. Rockefeller have we seen its like. But the stakes are higher this time, yes, even higher than those involving centralization of control over energy production and sale.
That is because you are ignoring the history of how the current compromise over local control came about. You are also ignoring the realities of funding in a capitalist society. None of these things arose from socialist, liberal, or even moderately egalitarian ideals, but people came together after the years of school bussing churn and reached a modus vivendi based on compromises of equal opportunity and local control.
But that was not good enough for the radical right and the commercial profiteers, so now they are seeking to destroy the entire system of free public education.
How true, how insightful that the destruction of public education is just one small piece of the corporate, global, NWO plans that are going as well as our country descends into a security state where privacy is as dead as all the other Patriot Act, former rights we once had. To not realize this is much like snipping off dandelion blooms thinking you are destroying the weed.
We need thinking beyond the old left-right divides. To meet the current threat, we must put aside those old enmities, stop fighting those old battles. The threat, today, is of a new character. It doesn’t matter whether statism originates on the left or the right. Statism is statism.
Simply put, most supporters of neighborhood schools advocate for site-based management, including democratically elected local school councils, to prevent requirements that top down mandated one size fits all curriculum be implemented.
In the traditional zoned school system it does not matter that there is site based management. The student is allowed to go to one and only one public school. The other schools could be identical or completely different. That student had better fit into whatever the school has decided to be.
Yes, TE, that model had many limitations. The feds had to tell Hillsborough, Florida, that it had to educate black kids, too, for example.
However, site-managed local public schools had a number of extremely valuable characteristics:
1. Locals could throw the bums out.
2. Individual teachers, for the most part, had a lot of autonomy. Sure, there were some principals and department chairpersons who were tyrants, but for the most part, teachers and their colleagues made decisions about what they would teach, when, and to whom (while paying lip service to district curricular requirements). When workers have autonomy, they care about what they are doing and about doing it well. They take pride in their work, they think of themselves as valued and valuable, they rise to their self-created standard, and they innovate a lot. (Imagine that you hire a housekeeper. You stand over this person and tell him her her, all the time, exactly how every job must be done. No, wipe the counter like this. No, use this brush. Move it in this way. In any job, that sort of micromanagement kills initiative and productivity.)
3. Local schools could respond to local conditions. They knew their students and their needs and could design for those.
4. Schools could choose their own educational materials, and so the markets for those materials were much more fragmented and competitive. There were many, many more competitors in the ed books (for it was mostly books in those days) business. And that competition resulted in a great deal of innovation in curriculum design. I’ve been in the ed book business, now, for thirty years. Twenty years ago, one could hit upon a dramatic curricular innovation, implement it, and allow the market pass judgment on it. No more. Curricular and pedagogical innovation is pretty much dead. The four big houses that control almost all of the educational materials industry now produce indistinguishable products, and they are not interested, AT ALL, in new approaches to instruction, only in what a) the market already knows, b) what the market leader did during the last sales cycle.
5. A given student would have a great many VERY DIFFERENT teachers, with different teaching styles/approaches, rather than teachers all following the same script, using the same materials and the same tests. So there was a better chance that the student would meet that one teacher who ignited his or her passion for something–auto mechanics, shop, computers, reading.
6. Schools varied enormously from one part of the nation to another, and produced the diversity that a complex, varied economy needed. In Russell Springs, Kentucky, the kids tended to become involved in 4-H and take classes in husbandry. At Los Alamos High School they became geeks like their Dads working at the National Laboratory.
7. When a natural leader emerged within a school–the teacher with a passion for mathematics and an idea about engaging kids by having them compete with one another in College Bowl-type activities–the English teacher with a passion for the Great Books curriculum and the Socratic method–he or she could implement that innovative idea. The school principal, the department chairperson had the authority to make it happen. No one would say, “You can’t do that because it doesn’t follow the state framework or the national standards or the textbook program from McGraw or Houghton or Pearson that the district adopted.
8. Every child had a shot. It mattered, of course, whether you were born poor, but at least there was this opportunity–you could go to a decently funded school and use good materials because there had been some redistribution to provide everyone with at least some educational opportunity.
All this made a difference. I’m not saying that local, site-based management in public schools was an ideal system. But there was much less sameness within it than your comments suggest that there was. There was real innovation because there was real autonomy. And that’s why the public school system of the United States was, for quite a long time, THE GLORY OF THE WORLD. And still today, despite the meddling in teaching by no-nothing educrats and politicians, it still is. When you correct international test data for socio-economic status, our public school students hold their own with the best students in the world.
I have made many of these same arguments here when defending the idea of charter schools. They have never been well received here. I wish you luck.
But I don’t think that that will last. When you take away autonomy from teachers, you kill initiative and innovation and self respect. It’s shocking to me that many people who ought to understand the power of autonomous competition to produce positive innovation should be championing top-down, mandated standards, tests, evaluation systems, data systems connected to curricula from a small group of monopolistic providers. Shocking, but not surprising. Our politicians, the enablers of all this, are the wind-up toys of the crony corporate interests that keep them so well oiled.
Robert,
When you say “locals can through the bums out” in the context of building level management are the “bums” the school principal and/or teaching staff? It would seem unfair to blame the school board or district staff for decisions that are made in the school.
So intead, we go with the status quo and have thousands of high school drop outs, unemployable graduates, and the dreams of college graduates deferred as they take remedial courses without receiving college credit and incur student loan debt…all while watching the nation’s student loan debt increase, unemployment rates increase…
Oh, and let’s mention that this will happen for both white and black/latino students in non-affluent districts (rural and urban). Our students are competing with affluent schools that have AP courses and prepare students for college and beyond.
Why should I sit back and watch my community not be able to compete with affluent schools and international students?
MsGary, and the evidence that Common Core solves these problems is…..?,
They don’t remember writing legislation putting the Secretary in charge of every public school in the nation. They don’t remember when they approved national standards and tests.
So very well said!!!!
“They don’t remember,” but my district reminds me all the time as I spend my summer going to one CCSS training session after another. I wish I could forget, but I still need my job so I’d better not.
Teachers are a hopeful, positive sort. To trust that Arnie is just misinformed, unaware of the damage he has perpetrated upon public schools and teachers is to hope that corporate raiders will become humanitarians. Neither will ever happen. Arnie is just displaying a little sophistry in his comments. An old sophist’s trick to do a kabuki dance and mimic a caring corporate czar. That Machiavellian trick could deceitfully fool the teachers’ of his constant purpose: rid the country of public schools and make the path to teachers’ rights, fair pay and creativity a relic of a non-corporate run country. One
falsely appearing compromise is just that: false, with no more conscience attached than a wolf howling of his care for sheep. And that’s what we are, if we give any credence to this offer to delay his plan…mere sheep for the corporate wolf’s table.
People who are basically decent and honest have a very difficult time comprehending the actions of people who arne’t. They just keep refusing to believe that anyone could possibly operate that way.
His Excellency Arne Duncan was very clear. There will be “no pause,” he said, from rolling out new national standards, new tests based on those standards, and new evaluation systems based on those tests. But states can negotiate getting a little more time to fall in line.
Robert, the proper response is “thank you, Lord Duncan.”
I have a very difficult time sorting out the proper honorific. I’m not sure that it has been decided what the proper protocol will be for addressing the new National Secretary of Education. But Lord Duncan is probably safe! The Dark Lord.
Arne Duncan needs to be impeached.
Fortunately, we don’t need to go through such a long drawn out process to dethrone him. Unfortunately, I doubt Obama will ask for his resignation. He needs “family reasons” that necessitate his “reluctant” departure from public service.
Don’t hold your breathe! Now that the EEOC has found NO CAUSE for the hundreds of Denver Public School’s older teachers’ destruction, I fear that is NO stopping any of the illegal designs in their takeover of education. That the EEOC claims NO EVIDENCE of age discrimination in that tattered system is beyond reason. The facts are known to ALL the DPS teachers. With this false decision, the law against such destructive practices are null and void. Teachers have and will continue to be the fallacious reason for all weaknesses in public schools. By smearing them successfully with the public, anything done to them, be it cessation of tenure, destruction of pensions or employment abuses; all will be allowed in the corporate game to destroy public education.
Don’t hold your breath indeed. Duncan is Obama’s darling. It is very much the case that Duncan is simply the functionary carrying out the president’s plan.
All of the EEOC decisions in education are under Duncan’s purview, so it’s a matter of the fox being in charge of the hen house.
I believe you are totally right about the EEOC. I should, I was victim of that federal system that refused to deal in the slightest, just way, in the hundreds of EEOC, age discrimination against the Denver Public Schools. Their vicious decision of “NO CAUSE” in a system that had as one of its business plan tenets a blatant statement of age discrimination, is the epitome of a corrupt system. Could you share any information or sources that confirm your statement about the EEOC? Any confirmatory data would be greatly appreciated by present and future victims like the sacrificed ones in DPS.
Just a bit of wishful thinking in response to susannunes’ wishful thinking. Holding my breath didn’t get me what I wanted at two, I doubt Obama or Arne are going to indulge me now. Arne is here to stay.
Persistently ignoring the difference between charter schools as originally conceived and charters schools as they are being perverted in reality today is like ignoring the difference between a cruise ship and a pirate ship — which is why no one with any sense is willing to get on board with that.
Still, there will be those who persist in regaling us with their persistent ignorance.