This morning the New York Times published a lengthy defense of the Common Core standards by Bill Keller, previously executive editor of the paper.
Keller asserts that opposition to the Common Core comes from extremists on the far-right fringe. (He does say that there are critics on the left, and adds a link to my blog, but not to the post explaining my reasons for not supporting the Common Core. My main reason: They have never been field tested and we have no evidence how they will work and whether they will do what they claim, and what their effects will be on real children in real classrooms).
Please take the time to read Keller’s article and add a comment, if you are so moved.
Susan Ohanian went postal when she read Keller’s article.
She titles her response: “Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire: War on the New York Times Embrace of the Common Core.”
She begins thus:
“Well, at least New York Times editorial remains consistent, proving once again that you can lead a reporter to evidence but can’t make him think. Keller was executive editor at the New York Times from 2003–2011, where he was a leading supporter of the Iraq invasion. Although he has since returned to his status as writer, he remains infected by the Times editorial bias on education policy. It seems significant that Keller’s father was chairman and chief executive of the Chevron Corporation.
Keller employs a deliberate strategy of welding opponents of the Common Core with the lunatic fringe. Note that no progressive who opposes the Common Core is mentioned. No superintendent of schools opposing the Common Core is mentioned. No researcher opposing the Common Core is mentioned. No parent opposing the Common Core is mentioned.”
Keller says that the Common Core implies no curriculum, just standards. He quotes E.D. Hirsch, Jr., whose K-3 curriculum has been adopted by New York state as its official Common Core curriculum. Keller obviously didn’t know that Rupert Murdoch’s Amplify division (run by Joel Klein) bought the rights to the Core Knowledge curriculum for 20 years, meaning that every school in the state will pay a royalty to Rupert Murdoch whenever they buy the resources to teach the state curriculum. Amplify and Core Knowledge plan to expand the curriculum to cover grades four and five. So this is quite a goldmine!
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Diane, I hope that you will reply in a letter to the times or an op ed to the NYT. If necessary, send a plea to your followers for contributions to pay for an ad or ads wherever they will do the most good.
Hear hear! I second the motion!
Good grief! Thank you for the information.
There is an old saying that I think fits this situation: “You don’t sue a skunk for stinking!”
Not elegant, but sure does convey the point that when a corporate partner in crime, like the head of the NY Times which hides from the public vital information, does their
worst to try to destroy/distort obvious actions of the corporate elite, it is to be expected. He didn’t write his pack of lies because of ignorance, he did it to grease the wheels of the corporate takeover of education!
This is my biggest fear come true. I written about this in the past.
Keller links the far right foil hat types with everyone else that is campaigning for the end of the Common Core experiment. He gives their conspiratorial rantings the same weight as those of us concerned with the Core’s pedagogical shortcomings. He ignores our arguments that the Common Core is developmentally inappropriate.
Folks this is what happens when the cause gets hijacked by those with agendas that are not really focused on education or our nation’s socio-economic responsibilities.
BATs are you listening?
agree. agree. AGREE!
Keller I expected, but this is really wrenching: Paul Krugman is spouting the same line! I thought he, of all people would look twice.
My son Sam sent me the link to “Stupid is a Strategy” just a couple of hours ago. Sam and many others have commented:
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/19/stupid-is-a-strategy/?comments#permid=44
I’m worried Krugman can’t read, though. Do you know him? Does anybody on here know him?
I’m sorry, I called Paul Krugman “Paul Kruger.”
Please, can we get an edit feature on this column, like Edweek has?
I will fix it. I am the sole editor. Also I wash bottles but I don’t do windows.
I am a big Krugman fan… and I don’t think he’s taken a position in this blog piece and I sense that he “gets” the privatization agenda from his other writings. It looks like Sam has sent him in the right direction in the event he DOESN’T get it 😉
American Principles Project has the best flyer regarding CC myths and facts. It is titled Common Core: Myths VS. Facts. It debunks the myths that CC was a state-led initiative, that the federal government is not involved in CC, that states adopted CC voluntarily and will still be able to control their standards, that CC is standards only/not a curriculum, that the standards are rigorous and will ensure college readiness, that the standards are internationally benchmarked, that there is a need to have common standards to compare students performance across the nation and that common standards are needed to help students who move to another state. It states each myth and then explains the related fact, citing sources. I found it on Ohio’s Stop Common Core website and I’ve also seen it on Georgia’s Stop Common Core website. I’ve made tons of copies and besides handing it out to people I know, I walk around the parking lots of places I go and stick it under wind shield wipers. It is easy to read and stays clear of things such as socialism and the data mining. I think those are both valid concerns, but since Alabama isn’t using InBloom with ACT’s Aspire, I’m not sure about issues with data mining here and I don’t want people to be thinking that those against CC are grasping at anything such as bringing up Socialism.
There was a lot to speak against… but the Times limits a commenter to 1500 characters. I decided to go after the concept that the common core was grassroots:
“The Common Core was NOT a grassroots movement by educators or politicians. It was funded by a handful of billionaires who want to impose the business model onto public education in the name of “reform”. The business “reform” model assumes schools are factories where children are expected to proceed through academic instruction at the same rate despite their varied backgrounds, despite the reality that children’s intellectual growth— like their physical growth— happens at different rates, and despite the fact that formal schooling occurs only six hours a day after a child reaches the age of five. The business “reform” model assumes people who enter teaching are motivated by the same incentives as those entering business and assumes that student learning, like corporate earnings, can be quantified and analyzed using test results. The business “reform” model assumes all of this can and must happen quickly and cheaply— hence the need for de-regulation, the circumvention of democratic process, and the outsourcing of as much work as possible to nonunion employees. REAL reform would allow children to progress through the common core at their own rate instead of being grouped in age-based “grade levels” and would use the assessments diagnostically. REAL reform would address the underlying challenges students born into poverty face, for it is those children who struggle the most to meet the “world class standards”. REAL reform would abandon the factory school model completely”.
Anyone who reads this blog as well as other blogs and comments by teachers including social media, CANNOT DENY THAT TEACHERS ARE INDEED SMART, DEDICATED, CARING, and … WE ARE SICK OF THE DEFORMS. We know it’s about money and control. We know that Obama is no friend of public school teachers. We know that it’s ALL about CUI BONO. We know our students are being traded on Wall Street.
I am greatly amused that the NYT, of all publications, has embraced the CCSS and has labeled ANY opponent of them a member of my own tin-foil-hat-brigade opposition to them.
Could it be that you guys are all actually really secretly in favor of them as a tool of social control? Do you own stock in Pearson-Penguin? Health care, education, entitlements, energy, marriage, religion, newspapers and TV, even the judiciary. Control those, control the country and make it bend to your will, “for our own good.” At least THAT would explain Obama’s support of them better than profit.
You might want to reconsider individualism and constitutional freedom as opposed to utopian communitarianism and equity as your prime value.
Your “you guys” appears to need a referent, Harlan.
The Core Knowledge Sequence is an excellent curriculum. It’s very strange, however–bizarre even–that the Core Knowledge Foundation has aligned itself with the Common Core in ELA. The founder of Core Knowledge, E. D. Hirsch, Jr., has spent years writing books and articles about what a MISTAKE it is to couch standards (desired outcomes) as lists of abstract skills, and the CCSS in ELA is precisely such a list. (See Hirsch’s superb book The Knowledge Deficit, for example.) But if the Core Knowledge Sequence gets more traction around the country, this can only be a good thing. The Core Knowledge Sequence has its flaws, certainly, and could be considerably improved (What, no Ramayana?), but it’s an outstanding curriculum–rich, varied, interesting, engaging, and important because it teaches foundational knowledge. One could do worse than to adopt such a curriculum.
However, the Common Core “State” Standards in ELA are another matter altogether. As E. D. Hirsch, Jr., has never tired in pointing out, setting as the goal of K-12 education the mastery of a list of abstract skills, devoid of any particular content, is a terrible, terrible mistake.
The CCSS will, at all levels require, “embodiment.” If NYS chooses Hirsch’s content as that embodiment and manifestation, it is doing well. My contention is that all skills are knowledge.
Sorry, Harlan: I don’t buy it. E D Hirsch has been making a fortune presuming to tell us what everyone’s Nth Grader “needs to know” for decades. I had no respect for him or his literary theories when he was “just” an English professor at UVa in the ’70s and I was a graduate student looking at the history of literary criticism at U of Florida. I found his ideas ludicrous then and still do today. When I was accepted to the Ph.D program in English at UVa for Fall of ’76, I was told by several professors at Florida who had either studied or taught at Virginia that I would hate it there and that I would find most of the faculty rather cool to me personally and my ideas about literature (I should mention that I had been urged to apply by Douglas Day, who had won the National Book Award for his biography of Malcolm Lowery, while Day was teaching as a visiting professor at Florida in ’75-’76. He was a really cool guy, but apparently not typical of the department).
At any rate, I chose not to go, even though it would have been a big step up in prestige, not because of the warnings, but because they didn’t offer enough $$ to make it feasible. (Coincidentally, same thing happened in ’92 when I applied to doctoral programs in mathematics education: was accepted to Virginia again, but the money was just too little, and when Michigan offered a full-ride, it was a simple choice). But I never would have guessed that by declining, I missed a chance to be in the same department with Mr. Hirsch (as I was told by my mentor at Florida, male faculty there preferred to be addressed as “Mister” rather than “Doctor” because “anyone can earn a Ph.D, but you have to be born a gentleman.” Imagine: being in the same building with the man who would soon reveal himself to be the nation’s leading expert on curriculum, not only in literature, but, well, EVERYTHING! I was a fool then, and, happily, remain one, far from E. D. Hirsch, another alleged lifelong liberal Democrat I wouldn’t trust as far as I can toss a Mack truck.
Finally, it may be true that all skills are knowledge. I think the question for the “Core Knowledge” foundation and the Common Core is whether all knowledge contributes meaningfully to skills. Or more simply, whether everything is worth knowing, and whether Mr. Hirsch & Company are better positioned to tell us what is and is not than lots of folks who have rather different views about what counts.
Teacher should think in terms of communicating world knowledge (knowledge of what) and process knowledge (knowledge of how), but these CCSS ELA skills are incredibly vague, not operationalized enough to merit being called process knowledge. That’s a mistake.
Diane – I agree that unethical and inaccurate charges MUST be answered. Parents of the 70% of kids who failed are looking WANT answers and ammunition and will become your allies if you provide them with both. You’ll build a whole new legion of followers. So give it to them with BOTH GUNS.
Teachers, kids, and parents don’t get to see what standardized test questions were answered incorrectly. So no one learns what needs correction. But profits come before achievement.
The textbooks, teacher training, and field testing were not done BEFORE the tests were
given because of a rush to profits. Teaching and achievement were less important than profits once again.
Standards are unrealistically high such as expecting kindergarteners to explain the purpose for lessons they are taught. It’s doubtful they’ll ever be able to explain how various assignments develop their motor skills. But these kids need to be labeled as failures at age 5 and made to understand that they just aren’t competing in the global scheme of things so parents will become alarmed, forsake public schools OR force school boards to run to for-profit companies for assistance. That’ll surely teach 5 year olds to get with the program.
Then if all else has failed to drive schools, parents, educators, and the media to for-profit companies for answers, set the cut scores at a level which guarantees failure rates far beyond that of any assessment previously given. And while we’re at it, let’s ignore national and international research showing that our college prep kids outscore the college prep kids in most of the rest of the developed world.
Failure is the name and profits are the game. Once enough students have failed and Common Core doesn’t raise acheivement, we measure school success another way. After all, a decade of New York City education reforms has produced huge failures. So let’s set a different “cut score”. Did the profits per student increase?
I agree with you, Nancy. Just wait and see what happens when parents finally receive their child’s score report.
I posted this on Facebook and tried to get it posted to the NYT but comments were already closed:
This is such a naive analysis as to be laughable. The same lies coming from clueless puppet Arne Duncan, repeated just as unconvincingly. One might hope for better from the NYT, but it long ago abandoned reasonable education reportage when it dumped Richard Rothstein.
In brief: this isn’t a Tea Party issue. It’s not a Libertarian issue. It’s not a Democratic or Republican issue. It’s an issue of understanding the corporate takeover of public education, under the cooperative neoliberal administration currently in power, but following groundwork laid during previous neoconservative and neoliberal (Clinton) administrations.
This isn’t about Obama, GWB, Clinton, GHWB, or Reagan (though it started with “A Nation at Risk” in the ’80s). It’s about Gates, Broad, Koch, Murdoch, Walton, Coors, Scaife, deVos, and other billionaires, and the corporations they own or control, destroying public education and taking it over for profit. Look at Chicago, where Obama’s ex-chief of staff is gutting the public schools and turning things over to for-profit charters. Arne Duncan once ruled there. And Paul Vallas. Look at New Orleans. Look at Philadelphia. Look at Detroit. I work in places like those. I see what’s going on in high-needs districts devastated by poverty, its ills, and the withdrawal of any real attempts to address our unprecedented economic injustices.
Don’t be fooled by either the tin-hat rhetoric of the Tea Party or the apologists like Keller: CCSSI is a bad deal for us all.
I agree with your conclusion in the last clause of your sentence, and possibly with your interpretation of the motives behind testing leading to privatization as economic, as a way for investors to tap into the income stream of educational taxation, which has heretofore gone essentially to supporters of the Democrat party.
However, many red-state districts LOVE their public schools because of the community focus and sports, and that is one way of successfully delivering education, but I, personally, actually would prefer to see all education in the hands of private interests rather than under the control of even local government statists, who think all good things should come from the government. I blame the public schools for ever taking NCLB seriously, and for their own greed in chasing RTTT money, and now their collaboration (yes, like Quislings) with CCSS.
It shows me that public education, as an institution, cannot be trusted with so important a task as education of citizens. I think it is important to have choices for schooling other than the public school paradigm as part of the effort to restore this country to a true constitutional republic.
I’m not sure, however, how people got the idea that the public schools as a whole were failing. My grandson has done just fine, although perhaps not quite as fine academically as I would have liked, but well enough, and he has certainly had as marvelous a time in school as far as sports, friends, and music and theatre go, as I could have wished. It’s clear to me that he would have been stunted by the local private school to which I had hoped he would aspire. He needs a BIG high school for a stage. But even he, provided with a voucher could have “spent” it at the public high school he attended.
My granddaughter’s elementary school has, however, failed her. She does not read at grade. She has slipped through the proverbial cracks academically, but that may be as much her own fault as the school’s. Still, if SHE had a voucher, she would have had available to her a broader range of choices than she has, which are essentially the public middle school or homeschool, which from her point of view is not much of a choice.
As an side but a related bit of info, the LA Times today announced what many of us fought against in the past weeks. Our new mayor Eric Garcetti has chosen Broad trained Supt. Melendez to be head of his education policy staff. She cut a great deal economically and is identified as still a LAUSD educator, though she was Supt. in another county, so that she can enrich her retirement on the back of the tax payers.
So sad for us in LA to learn how the new mayor is going to operate. Melendez is a vociferous supporter of charters (as is the wife of the Mayor who worked with Richard Riordan in his charterization days). And Melendez is a helluva negotiator for her own benefit it seems with her questionable retirement deal. I wonder if she will be that focused when it comes to inner city students who desperately need more trained and experienced teachers in their public schools, but not more for-profit charters which the Times article addresses.
Did the NYT forget their own article where they acknowledged the concerns in spite of the fact that they aligned with the Tea Party?
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/09/opinion/sunday/the-common-core-whos-minding-the-schools.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1& NY Times Article
What’s worse is that Keller is either lying or uninformed about public schools.
This is Bob Somerby:
“Persistently, the New York Times simply defies belief: Bill Keller’s column didn’t appear in today’s hard-copy New York Times. For that reason, we hadn’t seen it until we saw Paul Krugman’s link.
We clicked the link and started reading. In paragraph 5, we hit this:
KELLER (8/19/13): [The Common Core] is an ambitious undertaking, and there is plenty of room for debate about precisely how these standards are translated into classrooms. But the Common Core was created with a broad, nonpartisan consensus of educators, convinced that after decades of embarrassing decline in K-12 education, the country had to come together on a way to hold our public schools accountable. Come together it did—for a while.
“After decades of embarrassing decline in K-12 education?” Which decades is Keller talking about?
There is, of course, no perfect way to measure educational attainment. But it’s astounding to see a person like Keller making a statement like that without any apparent sense that it needs explaining.
Every journalist at Keller’s paper—and he was in charge of the paper through 2011—cites the National Assessment of Educational Progress (the NAEP) as the “gold standard” of educational testing. But the NAEP shows very large gains in reading and math over the last several decades. As a general matter, American students have shown similar progress on international tests, although the NAEP goes back farther. (It dates to 1971.)”
http://dailyhowler.blogspot.com/2013/08/what-is-bill-keller-talking-about.html
So the NYTimes is either lying about public school performance or completely ignorant on public school performance.
How long is this ridiculous myth going to be repeated by media? There’s been no “embarrassing decline in public education” They are misinforming their readers.
I’ve seen those articles all over the place lately. Suddenly there are lots of
articles supporting CC and surveys indicating that parents and teachers are
also in support. Looks like the propaganda machine is running full speed right
again.
Really, how many times do we have to “reinvent” education?
Here’s my take on school: I don’t care how my kid compares, I care that he grows up to be a decent happy person. It doesn’t matter if he can compete with China, it matters that he’s not a miserable wretch like most of us who grew up in this ugly system.
Seriously, we have a our priorities all wrong. It’s not about being the best, it’s not about “success”, it’s about having a life full of love and a modicum of joy. Everyone is so busy trying to be a winner that we’re all losing.
The “Comments” section at the end of Bill Keller’s NYTimes article is closed so I cannot add my two cents about Keller’s ridiculous article.
Susan Ohanian isn’t being frivolous when she questions the value of New Criticism for second graders. It goes right to the heart of two problems with the “Common Core”: 1) the fallacy of pushing high school and college level skills (close reading) down to the early childhood and primary curriculum (I wonder what neuroscientists would have to say?) and 2) endorsing a discredited protocol for literature study while ignoring decades of reading research. Put all that together and you’re asking children to use cognitive processes they aren’t ready for and at the same time killing the joy of reading. AND using bad pedagogy.
There is a fantasy version of how this could work, though. Watch the outtakes at the end of Talladega Nights: The Legend of Ricky Bobby. Ricky’s mom, Lucy Bobby, is leading a bedtime discussion of The Bear, by William Faulkner. Her newly reformed grandsons, Walker and Texas Ranger Bobby, do a very nice literary analysis: http://thebookshopper.typepad.com/the_book_shopper_atlantad/2012/10/william-faulkner-talladega-nights-and-the-old-south.html
So painfully comically true.
Interestingly, the superintendent of Pasco County Schools in Florida blamed opposition to the common core standards on the Tea Party. This superintendent is a conservative Republican in a very red county. Many of the people who voted for him are likely Tea Party people. The left has succeeded in painting the Tea Party as far right lunatics to such a successful degree that they are now useful scapegoats, effective for politicians of any political persuasion to trot out and beat with a stick. It serves to distract eyes away from the broad, bipartisan opposition to the ccs, which we evidently need to do a better job of advertising.
So perhaps we all need bumper stickers, t-shirts, magnets, pin-ons, etc. stating I am a (Democrat/Repubican/Tea Party Republican/Independent) and I oppose Common Core!
Common Core represents the federal takeover of education, a dream that progressives have had for 100 years. Of course, the Times is in favor.