Charles Blow is one of the columnists in the New York Times that I usually count on to challenge the conventional wisdom and to speak up for the powerless.
Sadly, in this column, he parrots the conventional wisdom and voices the opinions of the elites.
Imagine, he calls the Broad Foundation a “reform” organization. The readers of this blog know the Broad Foundation as the source of malicious policies that are privatizing public schools and destroying communities. Some of the worst, most arrogant leaders in US education have been “trained” by the unaccredited Broad Academy. The foundation issued a guide on how to close schools that is a Bible for the corporate reform movement.
As for the international test scores, Blow should not have relied on Time magazine’s Amanda Ripley. He should have looked at the Rothstein-Carnoy study, which demonstrates that the PISA results were misleading, or the recent article in the UK Times Educational Supplement, where test experts maintained that the scores on PISA are “meaningless,” or considered the more recent TIMSS test, where American students did very well. Or read the chapter in my new book on the myths and facts about international testing.
Why in the world would he enthuse about the Common Core tests, which widened the gaps in New York between affluent and poor, between black and white, between English language learners and native speakers, between children with disabilities and those without? Common Core has no evidence to support its claims. As we see it in action in New York, we see that it is deepening the stratification of society and falsely labeling two-thirds of the state’s children as failures.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It appears that the Full Core-it Press is on …
Probably time to cherchez la moola …
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Blow joins the forces hoping to brainwash the masses into believing that “education” with a purpose of training victims for running faster, clawing harder to barely survive a system of inequity is better than education as a way to battle that status quo.
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I love your metaphor. I am going to steal it.
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It seems everyone on the Times Op Ed staff has written at least one column boosting standards that they know nothing about. When it comes to education, teachers, teachers unions etc., the Times editors are clueless and hostile, and their columnists fall in line.
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First Krugman and now Blow? Whose getting to these people and what are they saying? I don’t usually see black helicopters or wear a tin foil hat, but it seems the propaganda machine is in full force in anticipation of Diane’s book release.
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I usually like Mr. Blow’s columns, too. And look, his final paragraphs sound good:
In all the discussions I have with educational leaders and reformers on improving our educational outcomes, there seems to be some level of agreement — though obviously not full agreement — on strategies that work: attracting, supporting and keeping the best teachers and investing in their development; providing “wrap-around” services for poor and struggling students; making schools safe, welcoming, fun places with recess and art and music and nutritious food; and strongly promoting parental engagement.
And we need a national standard for what the kind of education that we want our children to receive. Our educational system has become so tangled in experiments and exams and excuses that we’ve drifted away from the basis of what makes education great: learning to think critically and solve problems.
We have drifted away from the fundamentals of what makes a great teacher: the ability to light a fire in a child, to develop in him or her a level of intellectual curiosity, the grit to persevere and the capacity to expand. Great teachers help to activate a small thing that breeds great minds: thirst.
Right on, right? Until he says that the Common Core will make it so.
How and why would the Common Core do that? It’s a list of standards. It has nothing to do with his “strategies that work,” and nothing to do with “the ability to light a fire in a child.” It’s just another experiment, tied to another set of exams.
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“We have drifted away from the fundamentals of what makes a great teacher: the ability to light a fire in a child, to develop in him or her a level of intellectual curiosity, the grit to persevere and the capacity to expand.”
Why have all you teachers neglected the fundamentals? What’s the matter with you? Come on!
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What’s the matter with us?
It’s because we’re only out for ourselves. Isn’t it obvious that’s why we all became teachers?
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Totally shocked and disappointed in Charles Blow’s column, also. Perhaps after he reads your response and the other fine comments here, he’ll print a retraction?
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I, too, found something heartening in Blow’s column:
“The problem is that, in some states, Common Core testing has been implemented before teachers, or the public for that matter, have been instructed in how to teach students using the new standards.
This means that, when students score poorly on the more rigorous Common Core-based tests, it threatens to cause a backlash among parents, who increasingly see testing as the problem, not the solution.
That Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll also found that most Americans had not heard of the Common Core. Only 22 percent thought increased testing helped school performance, and most rejected the use of student test scores to evaluate teachers.
Because we insist on prioritizing testing over teaching — punishments over preparation — we run the risk of turning Americans off one of the few educational strategies in recent memory that most people say we need.”
I don’t think the Common Core is the problem OR the solution. The TESTING is the problem… and the solution is to use tests diagnostically and not punitively. I think Blow understands this and hope that he and Krugman will read your book and get a better understanding of what the “reformers” are up to.
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The Common Core initiative is a 3-fer: the common core standards, the increased number of standardized assessments based on the common core standards, and the student longitudinal database. This is a package deal — cannot cherry pick. Accountability drives the U.S. educational system and fuels the ed reformers “solutions.”
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He’s a “celebrity journalist”–they don’t really read up on the issues, they just parrot canned responses based on their philosophical and political beliefs. Just because those opinions usually reinforce my own doesn’t mean that he’s well informed, or doesn’t make mistakes. This is just another blow (no pun intended) to those of us who are progressives and feel betrayed by our political leaders–there has been virtually no difference between Obama and Bush when it comes to education policy; the ed reform movement has been led by DINOs and financed by conservative foundations and big business, etc.
It’s been really hard to remain positive amidst this kind of misunderstanding by people like Mr. Blow.
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“He’s a “celebrity journalist”–they don’t really read up on the issues, they just parrot canned responses based on their philosophical and political beliefs.”
Correction: “they just parrot canned responses based on wahtthey are told by their wealthy & powerful patrons.”
The NYTImes is guilty of consistently staying loyal to the powerful interests in government & corporations.
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I guess if you can’t beat them , join them and that’s what this guy did! Or they paid him off since MONEY makes the “blind” see!
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One of the NYT recommended comments on Blow’s column is this one:
Lisa Hansel
Maryland
NYT Pick:
“Thank you for supporting the Common Core! You’ve done a great job of identifying “strategies that work: attracting, supporting and keeping the best teachers and investing in their development; providing ‘wrap-around’ services for poor and struggling students; making schools safe, welcoming, fun places with recess and art and music and nutritious food; and strongly promoting parental engagement.’ There’s one more effective strategy I’d like to add: a coherent, content-rich curriculum that systematically builds students’ knowledge and skills. I think the best feature of the Common Core standards is their clarity on the necessity and power of a knowledge-building curriculum. Page 10 of the ELA standards says: ‘By reading texts in history/social studies, science, and other disciplines, students build a foundation of knowledge in these fields that will also give them the background to be better readers in all content areas. Students can only gain this foundation when the curriculum is intentionally and coherently structured to develop rich content knowledge within and across grades.’ ”
Sounded fishy to me, too. Turns out she is the Director of Communications for Core Knowledge, which is a purveyor of curriculum and “professional development” tied to the Common Core. Guess her job is to monitor critiques of the Common Core, just as Cunningham’s is to monitor Diane.
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I made the following reply to her remarks:
“You failed to identify your relationship with Core Knowledge, which is Director of Communications. Your comment is nothing more than an infomercial for your company, which stands to profit immensely from implementation of the Common Core. In fact, your comment underlines one of the main critiques of the Common Core, which is that many seek to monetize our children’s education.”
What, did they serve Common Core Koolaid in the NYT cafeteria? Keller, Krugman and now Blow? Don’t any of these members of the fourth estate know a public school teacher they could have spoken to?
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Ed reformers have dominated the narrative from the beginning with the cooperation of mainstream media and journalists. Mr. Blow repeats some of the early and effective narratives: (1) the sky is falling — He repeats that our educational system is “not keeping up with other industrialized nations.” (2) zip code does not define destiny – He repeats that while poverty is a serious problem, it cannot “adjust for the lagging performance.” And now some new narratives:
1) cherry-picking the PDK/Gallup poll for evidence of public support of the standards while ignoring the polling results that 52% of respondents know nothing about the Common Core standards.
2) the standards are not the problem, the implementation is the problem.
So does that mean students fail, teachers fail, schools fail because of gross incompetence and/or malfeasance by Common Core initiative developers or was implementation always meant to fail? I predict the implementation narrative will be short-lived. It opens doors that the ed reformers are unprepared to answer.
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Calling the Broad Foundation an “education reform” organization is kind of like calling Wal-Mart a “community development” association. No matter what they say, their first-and-only purpose is to make money. I really wish columnists would either not write about education or do some basic research before they do.
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Blow’s enthusiasm for the Common Core testing is an enthusiasm for social science. Numbers guys are going to tend to like schemes that produce numbers.
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Even sadder is this: Charles M. Blow @CharlesMBlow 18m. My mom was a teacher her whole life and is now on a school board, and my brother is a teacher. I know how tough it is.
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Sometimes, when a columnist writes about something you’re well informed about, and it’s obvious that the columnist is essentially just regurgitating someone else’s press release or conventional wisdom, you realize that’s what they’re doing most of the time in their columns.
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Ding ding ding. Winner winner chicken dinner.
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FLERP, Yes, it is alarming to realize that most of the time they are reporting on someone’s press release. We only recognize it when it is our own field. Journalists call this “thumb-sucking.”
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We have very few journalists. Most who claim the title are mere stenographers. The few who can legitimately claim the title are routinely attacked as not being journalists – Glenn Greenwald for instance is merely a “blogger”, we’re told.
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I don’t think Common Core labels our children as failures but rather, highlights a need in our society as far as education goes for reformation. The data also highlights the fact that privatization of our educational system here in America is going to be the ruin of education for low income school systems. WE CANNOT AFFORD TO TAKE FROM OUR POOR AND GIVE TO COMPANIES!!!
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One problem with Blow, Krugman and other “liberal elites” is that they embrace the meritocratic nonsense regnant among our “progressive” leaders (check out Booker in NJ) that they are among the best and brightest because, well, they got their badge of merit from one of the universities that use high-stakes tests to maintain their status and, in passing, churn out wise men and women who know how to manage a “good society.” (These universities also churn out the Federalist Society.) They like to appear as if they are still New Dealers, when in fact they are dupes (at best) or shills (at worst) for financial elites who are fighting to take over–“privatize”– public institutions. You can’t be a New Dealer if you bow down to Goldman Sachs. or Broad, or myriad other elite propoganda outlets. No matter what your test scores. No matter how much you bow before the Common Core. (The Common Core: what old ain’t new, and what’s new ain’t true.) It is a bit comical that many progressives have bought in to the right-wing fantasy that the Ivies are hotbeds of radicalism.
Consider Larry Summers. Wunderkind. Harvard Presdient. Treasury Honcho. Trusted Obama confidant. Clinton’s doppelganger. Democrat. Larry is no friend of ours. Let this be the test: if a progressive columnist, academic, or other “friend of the middle class” has trouble saying that Larry Summers is bad for the health of the middle class, show him or her the door. So let’s ask Blow, Krugman, Obama, Keller, Cuomo, Booker, and a host of other “friends of the middle class and poor” what they think about the leadership and vision of the Larry Summers of this world. Is Blow Summers redux?
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Until these DINOs find out that edu-privatization will be punished politically, they will continue to ignore any opposition. David Frum had it exactly right when he said (I paraphrase) Republicans fear their base, Democrats despise theirs.
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Disinformed, not misinformed, a very different and more insidious thing…
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Charles Blow needs to do his homework and learn from Abby Rapoport formerly employed by the Texas Observer. The article found at the link below is must read for all parents, educators and taxpayers who are being used by Pearson’s lobbyists under the guise of education accountability nonsense. Media insiders who work with the reform profiteers are creating the perfect storm – neighborhood school parents are on top of the testing fraud and are following the billion dollar testing contracts that have NO value for children.
Education Inc.
http://www.texasobserver.org/the-pearson-graduate/
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