Mercedes Schneider, who teaches in a public high school in Louisiana and holds a Ph.D. in research methods, wrote a post about the transaction in which Rupert Murdoch’s Amplify bought the rights to Core Knowledge ELA for 20 years.
She wrote:
A quick summary: A 2012 American Educator article notes that CK materials are free for teachers both in New York and across the nation to download. The CK website has some (but not all) CK ELA free materials, but only to read, and these have been recently “updated” (according to the CK site record) but are amazingly outdated. So, for usable, truly updated CK ELA K3 materials, one can go to the CK website, but one is redirected to Murdoch’s Amplify, where one must purchase these now-certainly-not-free CK ELA K3 materials.
When she went to the Amplify website, “The cheapest item by far is $650 for a CK ELA kit to serve 25 children. That’s $26 per student– just a few dollars shy of the cost per student for a Jeb-Bush-promoted PARCC assessment.”
“As a teacher, I realize the importance of schools’ purchasing teaching materials that are reproducible. Most schools do not have the funds for substantial annual curricular purchases for all subjects. And yet, the Amplify CK ELA materials are not reproducible, which means that a school would have to pay some serious money each year in order to use materials that are deceptively publicized as “free.”
E.D. (Don) Hirsch, Jr., has never profited from the Core Knowledge materials or program. He has placed every dollar from the royalties of his books into the Core Knowledge Foundation, which exists to disseminate his ideas about the importance of content. Let me repeat: Hirsch has not profited from the selling of any CK materials.
I asked Hirsch to respond to Mercedes Schneider’s blog post above. This is his response:
Dear Mercedes Schneider:
I noticed from the latest update of your blog that you have found the site where you can download all the latest files and materials from Core Knowledge Language Arts pre-K-3, — available to all under a creative commons license, which means that anyone can print, amend or use in any other way for their school or personal use, so long as they don’t try to sell it. If you were a first grade teacher you could print up copies for yourself and any number of students, You would not be charged a penny by anyone, and Amplify would not earn a penny.
In your update you complain that this web address is hard to find. I’m not great on computers, but here’s the way I found it. I went to the Core Knowledge web site, which appears when you google “Core Knowledge.” Then I wrote “CKLA download” which brings you to a web page that has a “free download manager.”
One of the reasons we put this site up is our dissatisfaction with the New York State website. As you note it still has the old 2010 pilot version of the materials when they were first sites being worked on, and did not want them downloaded yet. The NY site also has the up to date current version . You are right that those old sites old are still live, and we have urged that they be taken down. Those old sites have all the “still under construction” warnings that discourage distribution. We continue to try to get those out of date sites taken down. But we have no control over the bureaucracy of NY state.
The only way Amplify can make money from CK Pre-K-through 3 is if a school or district doesn’t want to bother with printing, and therefore orders from them. But this also means that Amplify would need to offer the materials at an attractive price.
And there’s another twist you could not have known about. We were pretty good bargainers on behalf of the public in this deal. Amplfify helped pay for the development of grade 3. But we insisted grade 3 also got put up for free.
You need to consult with Amplify where they expect to make money from all this. They are underwriting the development costs of grades 4 and 5, and our contract with them is a regular 20 year publisher’s contract with royalties to CKF. They probably hope that having the whole pre-K 5 package, with pre-k 3 available for free will make 4 and 5 attractive. You’ll have to ask them. Our view is: we want the get these coherent, knowledge-based materials available to as many schools as possible. And for as many grades as possible for free.
Don Hirsch
Diane Ravitch's blog 
My next response to Hirsch:
Mr. Hirsch–
First, you need to clean up your CK site.
The erroneous links are live links that
I found yesterday by googling
“core knowledge language arts
free downloads.”
On this link, make the free download more visible:
http://www.coreknowledge.org/purchase-ckla
Also, update this link. The last update happened right
before your arrangement with Amplify, so I know
it is possible to updagte:
http://www.engageny.org/search/site/core%20knowledge
Next, you need to publicize the information
you sent to me in the email below. Which he did,
in Diane’s post).
If Amplify really wants teachers to locate
the free downloads, it would not be so easy
to miss them by being caught in a series
of outdated links. Amplify could start by providing
a link to the free downloads on the page
where it is trying to sell its products.
This situation stinks. CK and Amplify
need to clean it up.
–M
Who are you, Ms. Schneider?
I responded, as did Mr. Hirsch again. Both I have included at the beginning of the original post.
I sent this email to Mr. Hirsch and received the following response:
Mr. Hirsch, there needs to be
a “free download” link on this
page:
http://books.coreknowledge.org/home.php?cat=365
Thanks–
–Mercedes
_________________
right.
forwarding now
When I click on that link, the first thing I see is “Download our Language Arts Program for free!” in large type, with the word “Download” hyperlinked to the free download manager. Did that just appear in the last 10 minutes?
yep
Well-done.
all suggested web site changes have been made — and just to make things easier still: here is the actual direct address where these great materials can be downloaded for free.:
http://www.coreknowledge.org/ckla-files#!
Will Murdoch be rotten to the core too
I’m at break. Can somebody connect the dots?
News Corp. Education Tablet: For The Love Of Learning? : NPR
The media mogul is counting on future revenues from his educational branch to help shore up the finances of his newspaper and publishing division as it is split off later this year from the conglomerate’s vast holdings in television and entertainment.
http://www.npr.org/2013/03/08/173766828/news-corp-education-tablet-for-the-love-of-learning
Rupert Murdoch Seeking Billion Dollar Payoff To Avoid Criminal Prosecution In Hacking Scandal:
Jun 11, 2013 – In what may be the biggest scandal in the history of … Murdoch’sCEO of the UK publishing division is currently awaiting prosecution. …
http://www.newscorpse.com/ncWP/?p=9884
kids are big business. http://disinfo.com/2013/03/gates-foundation-and-rupert-murdoch-unveil-new-database-to-track-k-12-students-personal-information/
Rich are you suggesting that this so taints the for-free CK language arts program — produced long before Murdoch came into the picture — that teachers and students shouldn’t use it? That they maybe should use the inferior — not for free — Pearson stuff? Is Pearson so guiltless? Why not choose the best materials for students — all the more so if they are free? If you can “connect the dots” for me maybe I can be more sympathetic to your indignation in this particular case. Of course I would have much preferred it if Warren Buffett had come along and enabled us to make these materials for free — than which none better exist.
The dots: the common core will be tested, and (to a lesser extent) its content delivered electronically. Murdoch is positioning his companies as integral to this. Murdoch needs content for his tablet…
I have no doubt that you are proud of your contributions to education. But Doctor, i have to ask: Diid you have any qualms about doing a deal with the likes of Murdoch?
I followed this link, and in order to get the files I’m supposed to sign in to my account, which I don’t have. I’m not so sure I want one. Is the price of the “free” material my info so that I can now be marketed to in other ways? I’m not offended by the notion, mind you, I just want to be clear.
Beats me. You can’t be too careful. But I’ve asked that somebody answer your question when they get back to work tomorrow. It’s pretty normal though. You had to sign in to get on this thread.
The tireless CK workers are still on the job: They don’t know how they might use this information. But they point out that if you want to download anonymously you can do so at the engageny website.
Alexis: Many sites require such registration. Do you have any indication that this cite is not living up to its stated privacy policies and is actively marketing others?
Thanks to Prof. Hirsch for his fast response. (Anyone able to say no to Mercedes??) I would just reiterate here what I and Robert Shepherd argued yesterday, namely, that there is no such thing as normative history because all items selected as “core” or all questions identified as “core” are designated by a selector who represents history and every other subject according to her or his politics of “what matters” and “how do we teach what matters.” Our k-16 school system needs conflicting and dissenting interpretations of subject matters if we hope to develop critical, questioning minds. Also, especially for k-12, transferring ideas or information are not the best ways to encourage deep learning, which Prof. Hirsch’s original long list of items appended to his 1987 “Cultural Literacy” book put forth most boldly. In that book, Prof. Hirsch proposed that cultural literacy(mastery of the foundational list)was all that stood between poor students and their future success. The last 25 years indicate that all students, the poor included, have been increasing their school achievement(record numbers graduating HS and coll), yet more people are in poverty now than then, and median family income has been stagnant, questioning whether educational advancement can actually be turned into economic advancement in the current economy. What I proposed as an alternative pedagogy is one that first studies what students already know, speak, and can do as the starting point for any syllabus, from which starting point we teachers offer a student-based, project-oriented, problem-posing, discussion-rich, inquiry-busy, field-centered outdoor model, with exhibitions, constructions, and enactments. Such an approach is most likely found in very costly private schools where authors and high-level advocates of CCSS send their own children. I do NOT include Prof. Hirsch in this dishonest group, not at all; he is certainly not doing his work for financial or personal gain; but others with great wealth and power are using this approach to undermine public schools so as to transfer the vast assets and budgets of the public sector to private hands. In a time of such aggressive privatization, we need more than ever to highlight pedagogies resistant to testing and standardization.
Ira,
Where does reading of serious books, essays, etc. fit into your syllabus? Your list of activities “…project-oriented, problem-solving…” is fine to a point, but what about older kids, especially in high school and even more so in college, and even beyond for lifelong learners? All knowledge is eventually distilled into words, much of the most important stuff into printed words. There’s more than a tinge of anti-intellectualism in too many progressive advocates, as Diane Ravitch has written about in previous books of hers.
This is a really important and really fascinating question, and I very much want to engage on it. Unfortunately, I am up against some deadlines and haven’t much time right now. A couple of quick points, neither of which will be news to you, Ira, nor to Don Hirsch:
One one side of this debate: There’s a reason why all totalitarian states have centralized authorities that make the curriculum decisions for everyone else, and there is a reason why the legislation that created the federal department of education prohibited it from making curriculum decisions.
On the other side: It’s extraordinarily valuable, I think, to have shared learnings across subcultures, especially when those learnings promote mutual understanding, and it’s important for the children of the poor to have access to many of the same keys that the children of the wealthy have.
I suppose you could say that I grew up poor. My working class single Mom didn’t have money or power. I figured out early on that the rich kid two desks over might have nicer stuff to wear and drive and live in, but I could have nicer stuff in my head, more knowledge, more understanding, more capability because of that. And what I learned no one could take away from me, ever.
Thank you for sharing a piece of your history. It is only to our benefit that you chose the path you did. I thoroughly enjoy your posts. You are continuing my education in ways I never imagined.
The children of the poor wind up with less access, though. Those kids can’t just “pick up” the narrative from the materials being vended. Their childhood gets used up in ugly non-learning activities.
The business agents who have taken control of their “failing” schools were surprised, I think, that they can’t even raise the scores. They really thought kids could absorb “facts” or demonstrate “skills” if they could just be made to sit with eyes on the whiteboard.
The schools are being gutted and closed. Murdoch’s solution is to issue each kid a tablet, whether his own brand, or an iPad. He needs something to load on the tablets that can be aligned with the tests he’ll administer to validate his power. Now, the great rivers of narratives are reduced to a seven inch touch screen and some buggy aps.
It is becoming more and more difficult to navigate these uncharted waters. This generation has access to so much more information than did my own generation who depended on books for knowledge. The problems faced by many of my students growing up in poverty is that of not only accessing that knowledge, but also interpreting, analyzing, understanding, etc. They have a limited exposure as compared to their wealthier or even middle class peers. Their early learning environments are not rich in language and books. Using the “raising the bar” analogy…It’s as everyone else starts from level ground while children of poverty are starting from a deep hole in front of that bar. Will more rigorous tests help fill that hole?
According to 2012 Census report, 24.4 percent of U.S. homes do not have computers, and 28.9 percent do not have Internet access.
Ira, that should read Robert Shepherd and I . . .
What is with this new trend of putting “I” or “myself” first in a list? That is not proper English.
I keep seeing that mistake.
Sorry you were the one when I finally said something.
That usage is poor English.
Nah, it’s okay. I think it’s more a question of politely letting the other person go through the door first, than of correctness.
There’s maybe a difference in emphasis: He and Robert weren’t arguing jointly, so he avoided that inference, which is somewhat included in writing “Robert and I were arguing that…”.
He was arguing, and Robert was also arguing.
The grammar of Dr. Shor’s post is just fine. And it was altogether proper that he list his name first. He was the fellow putting forward this argument. I simply happened along and said that it’s true that a list is going to be normative. I could have gone a lot further and said that it’s true that any list mandated by the state is going to further a mythos and that people with a commitment to democratic ideals will find ways to push back against that. I happen to think that the pushback should be informed and should be informed, in fact, by familiarity with the mythology. I haven’t read Dr. Hirsch’s book on Jefferson yet, but I have a great deal of his work over the years and have learned from it, and I am certain that he is not taking a position in favor of propagandizing children. Again, this is an important topic, well worth our thinking about. I am pleased that Ira Shor has raised it, and I am pleased that Don Hirsch has always patiently engaged in discussion of it. Unfortunately, discussions along these lines have a tendency to degenerate quickly into volleys from opposing, entrenched camps on the field of hermeneutics, and I’ve never known Hirsch to take that approach. Again, I would LOVE to hear these two brilliant men discuss this topic at length and not in sound bites and would gladly volunteer to moderate. : )
Yes, it would be easier to moderate a live debate, because Ira would have to stop sometimes to breathe, and his paragraphs wouldn’t be so long.
I am a fan of Ira’s writing style, which I find both lucid and transfixing, but tastes differ.
Are the materials reproducible?
yes. of course. you just can’t sell them
Mr. Shor,
The incredibly valuable approach of thinking “outside the box” presupposes that there is a box, and that we’re competent and comfortable with the standard approaches of, and information in, “the box.” Unfortunately, the knowledge and skills that comprise this foundational “box” are not given out equally to our students. The students in the private schools you mention, with their discussion-rich, inquiry busy, “think outside the box” approach, are getting “the box” at home, on trips, and in extra-curricular activities. Most poor kids are not getting “the box” anywhere.
This disparity is exacerbated by pushing the notion that there is a forced choice between the box and outside the box–that somehow a school system that gives kids (particularly young kids) a general factual foundation cannot also provide them with opportunities for inquiry and real-world projects. Worse, some folks characterize content-focused teaching as somehow *inhibiting* students from engaging in later critical inquiry. But there does not appear to be any support for this. Certainly the more fact-focused education that you and Mr. Freire received didn’t prevent you from engaging in serious epistemological and structural critiques of education in later life, to cite just two counter-examples.
The false dichotomy of inquiry vs. knowledge hurts low-SES kids because elementary schools, by and large, have chosen inquiry over content. For decades, particularly in what gets called “social studies,” there has been a focus on teaching outside the box, almost to the exclusion of teaching what’s inside the box (history, geography, civics, etc.). In the K-3 grades, many state curricula forego the teaching of historical narrative entirely, instead focusing on themes of family and community, cultivating “habits of mind” and, later, learning to “think like a historian.” As a result, low-SES students, many of whose only exposure to history, geography, and world literature comes from school, miss out on entire fields of content that their wealthier contemporaries get at home and put to use in middle school, high school and beyond. Mr. Hirsch’s work is a welcome tonic to the content vacuum of the K-3 years.
Not only can the box and outside the box both be taught without contradiction, but “outside the box” can work much better if one first teaches “the box.” By supplying a factual grounding to kids at a young age, Mr. Hirsch’s curriculum actually sets them up to be *more* critical and engaged in later life than they would be without the content, not less. Kids with a factual foundation have not only a basis for higher inquiry into those facts, but also more tools and information with which to engage in substantive critique and deconstruction of the portrayal and use of those “facts.” As one broad example, high school students will get a lot more out of reading and discussing Howard Zinn if they learned in the early grades about the traditional historical narrative (in the kind of updated and more enlightened version that the core knowledge materials appear to provide)–so that they can bring to the text the same knowledge that Zinn could assume his audience possessed at the time he wrote the People’s History. The core knowledge approach appears to provide very fertile soil for critical pedagogy.
The core knowledge approach appears to provide very fertile soil for critical pedagogy.
I think a strong argument can be made for this.
Consider the CK first grade unit featured in this article:
http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ssf/2013/09/new_yorks_model_first-grade_curriculum_slammed_by_critics_ignored_by_central_new.html
At some point, some of us grow up and learn that we live in a complicated and often wicked world. We find that our heroes don’t look all that great naked.
We learn in school that Lincoln was the Great Emancipator. Perhaps we learn that he said, “When I hear someone defending slavery, I get a hankering to see it tried on him personally.” (I’m quoting this from memory and probably don’t have it exactly right.) But then we learn a lot more, about how he dragged his feet on playing the emancipation card, about his fealty to Clay, about how he repeatedly expressed his opinion that if continuing slavery would save the Union, he would continue it and if ending slavery would save the Union, he would do that; and we learn about how he repeatedly expressed, as well, his opinion that freed blacks and whites would not be able to live side by side on equal terms, how he funded a disastrous experiment in exporting ex-slaves to Haiti, how he was an exponent of the American Colonization Society program to export freed slaves to Liberia. Perhaps we read his letters to and from his slave-owning close confidant and fellow Kentuckian Joshua Speed and are moved and delighted by the vehemence of Lincoln’s antislavery comments in those (he describes seeing, with Speed, slaves shackled together and how memory of that makes him continually “miserable”). And this is moving because Lincoln often made public statements like “I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races . . . nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people.” So, a complicated picture emerges. It’s not the picture of the myth.
Here’s what I think: If people have no notion to whom the phrase “The Great Emancipator” refers, then they certainly won’t be able to begin to think about the realities behind the myth or to be able to read about those realities.
Of course, there are those who want nothing but the myth taught, those who think that school should exist primarily for the purposes of propagandizing children and making them into obedient and unquestioning workers. I don’t think that Hirsch is one of those people, nor do I think that he is an unwitting pawn of such people.
this was Gramsci’s point. He wanted the poor and the revolutionary to take mastery of the dominant culture as the best means of resisting or overcoming it. He thought it was the best means for overcoming inequality. In my view he was the deepest educational thinker that the left produced — the old left, that is,that Al Shanker represented — as distinct from (dare I say it) the pampered and self-righteous cultural left of our days.
Wait, what? That isn’t what Gramsci wrote at all. His interest was in breaking the cultural hegemony of the dominant culture, and raising up intellectual leaders among the working class.
“The individual consciousness of the overwhelming majority of children reflects social and cultural relations which are different from and antagonistic to those which are represented in the school curricula” (Gramsci 1971 p35). A learner had to be active not “a passive and mechanical recipient”. The relationship between the pupil’s psychology and the educational forms must always be “active and creative, just as the relation of the worker to his tools is active and creative”
http://infed.org/mobi/antonio-gramsci-schooling-and-education/
Whatever Gramsci thought about Italy in the twenties, though, or Friere thought about Brazil, this is here and now.
I think I begin to see the contradiction within your position. I very much want a rich and specific curriculum, but what if someone else deeply felt that the purpose of education was to support his own hegemony, which he saw as being under attack from the actual culture and history of the fascinating and vibrant country we live in?
I wish we could talk about eduation, instead of being distracted by your odd projections on other people’s politics.
Are you interested in starting a strand about the 3rd grade curriculum on pre-contact American populations?
This “takeover” still required a cadre of Marxist teachers Isn’t that what we have, and isn’t that why capitalistic society is attempting to “reform” schools which have been teaching revolution into charters and vouchers, and then to get rid of the Marxist teachers simultaneously. For capitalist American “common sense” hegemony wouldn’t that be a blessing? Only way to get rid of the reds is deprive them of a lock on employment.
James, I’m on your side about restoring content to elementary and middle school geography and history! But your proposal that we should inculcate any old box we can get in the early grades, and then teach outside it later, is an unnecessary dead end.
Let’s consider this third grade unit:
Click to access Earliest%20Americans.pdf
That’s something I definitely studied in Geography, at about that age. The list includes cool things like kachina dolls, longhouses, and lacrosse. But I could do a much better curriculum. This one doesn’t even conside the origin of corn, or the spread of agriculture. The person who wrote it had no particular expertise in the subject, and the teachers couldn’t find a key to open the Colorado framework’s fleshless conceptual outline.
This curriculum was apparently put together by somebody who had scanned through a few old National Geographics, and so it gives the Anasazi and the Mound Builders a prominent place. I’m not even sure it’s better than nothing, because look at the handouts and charts to fill in! They’re exactly like the ones I saw in the Kipp seventh grade I visited.
Maybe the step to raising content level in third grade is to publish a gorgeous geography book that gets it right, and let people choose it and adopt it without coercion? how about it, Robert D Shepherd? Is anybody promoting that, or spending tens of millions of dollars to advocate for it? We’re a free people, and if it was good, we could choose to adopt it with no interference from any bribed legislators at all.
I have long dreamed of doing a good book for schoolkids on precontact Americans, but my own ignorance and lack of time and funding have kept that on the To Do list. Because the Core Knowledge material is for early grades, it doesn’t, of necessity, go into a lot of depth on these topics, but again, I believe that the curriculum is meant to take about 50 percent of classroom time, which leaves open, importantly, the possibility of teachers’ picking up on students’ passion for parts of that curriculum and to do, with them, deeper exploration. Boas’s Kutenai tales, anyone?
cx of that post:
I have long dreamed of doing a good book for schoolkids on precontact Americans, but my own ignorance and lack of time and funding have kept that on the To Do list. Because the Core Knowledge material is for early grades, it doesn’t, of necessity, go into a lot of depth on these topics, but again, I believe that the curriculum is meant to take about 50 percent of classroom time, which leaves open, importantly, the possibility of teachers’ picking up on students’ passion for parts of that curriculum and doing, with them, deeper exploration. Boas’s collection of Kutenai tales, anyone?
Mr. Mink, thanks for your reply, and thanks again to Mercedes Schneider for her perfectly timed post of the item on CK Grade 1 learning goals, the immense list of factual contents reminiscent of Prof. Hirsch’s original list from 1987. At this late hour, I can’t do justice to the claim that there is a general factual content devoid of values, ideology, political orientation, which we can and should teach all students before releasing them into freedom of inquiry. Robert Shepherd AND I rejected this as the illusion of normative history. There is no neutral knowledge(lists of facts) and no neutral way of making knowledge(a syllabus, lesson plan, or exercise). All learning is always already situated in a complex time, place, and space very much marked by power relations, state control of curriculum from the top down, and terms of learning dependent on the class, race, gender, region, and rhetorical climate of the school. In addition, it is false to place fact against inquiry, student-based lessons vs. academic subject matter. First, Dewey proposed more than a century ago that academic subject matter had to structured into the shape or nature of student experience. Students at work on materials of concrete meaning to them in the language and habits they bring to class show the teacher how they make and use knowledge. Into these activities, the professional educator designs the introduction of questions that pull the activities in deeper inquiry and which integrate academic materials of all kinds. Here, I can’t indicate how Freire built from and went beyond this valuable foundational method of Dewey. I can say that learning in k-12 esp begins with students engaging some material of immediate interest and meaning to them in ways which ask them to articulate and show their thoughts. Using this approach, I teach by integrating legible factual content with active inquiry which leads to multiple levels of subsequent questioning. In my books on critical pedagogy, contents and subject matters are integral and simultaneous with critical study. We cannot train students to memorize facts as a precondition for critical inquiry. Critical habits of mind must be developed through encounters with legible, meaningful contents of some kinds. I thank Mr. Mink for his kind regard of my own critical thought and that of my friend and mentor, the late Paulo Freire. But I can say that my many years in the traditional fact-based curriculum where I memorized everything I could did indeed interfere with my abilities to critique the status quo, to question assumptions underlying received knowledge, and to imagine alternative ways of knowing. From my years of association with Freire, I can say that he too was limited by his traditional education. It is possible of course to develop critical thought and action about the status quo even after 12-15 years of mass education, but prior years of socialization become obstacles to our own re-development. Formal education is under state and corporate control because so much is at stake in how each generation is taught what is good, what is possible, and what exists(to use Goran Therborn’s framework). Diverse narratives, multiple stories, vigorous debate, different interpretations, conflicting ways of making meaning, dissenting proposals, alternative ways of being and seeing, are certainly good for democracy but not good for centralized power and intensely concentrated wealth.
Bravo, Ira. I’m fine with your pronoun order, but it would be easier to read if you tap the spacer bar twice when you stop to take a breath.
Here’s the Wikipedia entry for critical pedagogy, everybody:
Critical pedagogue Ira Shor defines critical pedagogy as:
“”Habits of thought, reading, writing, and speaking which go beneath surface meaning, first impressions, dominant myths, official pronouncements, traditional clichés, received wisdom, and mere opinions, to understand the deep meaning, root causes, social context, ideology, and personal consequences of any action, event, object, process, organization, experience, text, subject matter, policy, mass media, or discourse.” (Empowering Education, 129)”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_pedagogy
And he is absolutely correct that we need content, a substrate to go beneath, and it doesn’t have to be the hegemonist narrative.
As my 1th grade economics teacher taught me many years ago, “There ain’t no free lunch.” Our little district in Northern NY, about 650 kids has bought into the CCS nonsense. We received 17 grand in RTTP funds. I would venture that we’ve spent over 150 grand in “training” and then we have to copy the modules, if and when complete, and that ain’t free either. Of course, every publisher out there is selling updates and new materials “aligned to the new standards.” Somebody’s making a shitload of money off this and it ain’t me! 🙂
Prof Hirsch says it ain’t him either, at least personally, but his Foundation is rolling along. It got a grant from NY state to provide that K-3 professional development, or at least the materials for it, but apparently you still have to buy it from the vendors.
http://www.oms.nysed.gov/press/ELAMathCurricula.SEDAwardsContractsForDevelopment.htm
The taxpayers also paid for that K-3 curriculum the Foundation generously posted. It is still unclear to me what exactly could have been sold to Murdoch, since the K-3 curriculum itself is now ours, bought and paid for on the public dime.
So, what Amplify owns is the exclusive right to market the Core Knowledge curriculum and its derived products, for a profit? I’m more concerned about monopoly rents Murdoch and others will collect for the enforcement tools for the curriculum, than I am about whether Hirsch’s share is going to his Foundation or to him personally.
The accountability apparatus has been privatized. Little children are being held accountable to a business plan, of which this curriculum is now a tool. Hirsch says he did that, not for monetary gain, but for the power to crush ideas about transformational pedagogy.
The driving force is the money, though. Hirsch had to choose between selling his project to profiteers, and then letting them wield it, or being completely bypassed (and thereby outlawed) by the corporate Common Core enforcement industry.
Over the past thirty years or so, there has been an enormous consolidation of the educational materials industry in the United States. The advent of online texts–some produced and distributed for free by academics who were able to support themselves by other means and so could indulge their passion for their subjects by producing these–presented a problem for the big publishers who have gobbled up all the little ones, and those publishers have been quite busy carrying out a strategic plan that would erect gateways with tolls that only they could pay. I read with particular horror a comment made by Arne Duncan’s chief of staff about the CCSS ensuring that “those products that can be brought to scale” would succeed. It’s important that there be small, independent publishers and that schools and districts have the freedom to choose among them. For a long time now, the complex adoption requirements issued by state departments of education have effectively shut most small developers out of the basal textbook markets in the United States, and then those same people who issue those requirements complain about the quality of the materials produced by the monopolies that they have conjured into existence.
The furor over the early cultures material in the Core Knowledge Sequence raises another important issue. One of the reasons why the so-called New Math failed, I think, was that there weren’t enough New Math teachers who understood what was going on with that elementary set theory stuff in the new curricula. There were other reasons as well, having to do with kids’ ability to do very abstract formal reasoning in the early grades, but here’s a takeaway that could affect the Core Knowledge implementation in New York: A lot of elementary teachers have no familiarity, themselves, with those early cultures. All this looks extremely foreign to them, and they can’t imagine how to approach this stuff with kids given that they know nothing about this stuff themselves. And so it would have made sense for there to have been a lot more PD before throwing the kids and the teachers into those waters. The Core Knowledge Handbooks are quite good. Motivated teachers can learn from them how to start thinking about approaching this material with students. Some few teachers have already been doing that on their own and can mentor. I think it pretty exciting that we’re talking about instruction in elementary school classrooms related to early cultures. Talk about fertile ground for critical pedagogy! There are ways to approach this material with kids–ways that can introduce them to some fundamental ideas–that can help them to gain an intuitive grasp of elementary concepts like what a culture is; the fact that cultures transmit their particular values, understandings, ways of doing things to successive generations.
I can’t help but think that NY is going about this in the wrong way, that it should be funding PD first and then experiments in some schools. And I think all this needs to be opt-in, not mandated: here’s a model curriculum. You are the professionals. You make your own decisions about adopting and adapting it. But then I believe in the power of the innovation that occurs when one has competing models that are vigorously debated.
Robert, if Murdoch and Gates et al win, and one core narrative is imposed on third graders everywhere, and enforced by data-driven accountability, then the actual content of that narrative matters.
You speculate it will all come out okay anyway. You rely on the battles of individual teachers to develop intellectual agency for their students to take ownership and explore. We hope that, once the topic is in the room with them, they’ll take the idiot worksheet off the smartboard and engage it.
Ira is arguing that student’s will access the content THROUGH the process of delving into it. No one narrative can replace that. However, the example I chose isn’t a trivial one. Corn was sacred in Mexico and in the Southeast for a reason. Our Spanish speaking students deserve to hear that narrative, and so do their peers.
The teacher needs some prior knowledge to access buried layers. Agricultural history has been suppressed in our “common sense” narrative, which prefers to see the Woodland tribes of the Northeast living off the woods, in cool longhouses. Then how will they understand the events of the contact period?
The whole length of the Merrimac was bordered by corn fields, but instead of joining in King Philips War, Passaconaway sought the protection of English law for his people’s farms.
Robert speculates teachers can do this on their own, while Hirsch is up there misrepresenting Gramsci in his call to stamp out the very idea of student inquiry, and the troll is calling American public school teachers a cadre of communist conspirators.
Meanwhile, non-teachers clearly never been tasked with benchmarking their discipline to align their teaching to a test.
Great stuff. I wish I had time, right now, to discuss. Very, very interesting, though. You are absolutely right about the teaching to the test crap, of course. And WOW, kids could learn a LOT by looking at that early U.S. history via the lens you are suggesting. So, question: How does this kind of innovative, substantive history teaching get subsidized so that people have the resources to produce materials instantiating these sorts of alternatives from which teachers can pick and choose? And how do we get legislatures to back off their top-down, totalitarian mandates? I would LOVE to see this business of the creation of educational materials fragmented so that little, innovative publishers can compete, and I would love to see teachers honored with the autonomy to make site-based decisions about curricula. But we’re headed, furiously, in the opposite direction. That worries me. It worries me a lot.
In exchange for federal Race To The Top grant money New York has adopted the Common Core State Standards, common core-aligned curricula, common core-aligned standardized tests, and new teacher evaluations based on the new test data. For common core-aligned curricula, the New York State Education Department (NYSED) turned to two non-profits—Core Knowledge Foundation and Expeditionary Learning—to produce and make publicly available a complete K-8 English language arts curriculum. In 2012, NYSED announced the following:
“Four contracts have been awarded to develop pre-kindergarten through fifth grade curricular materials with associated professional development aligned to the New York State P-12 Common Core Learning Standards. The contracts, valued at $12.9 million, will be funded from New York State’s federal Race to the Top (RTTT) funds.”
Since then, Core Knowledge Language Arts and Expeditionary Learning curricular materials are available to the world, free of charge, made possible by taxpayers like you and me. You can download the materials on http://www.engageny.org. Any parent or school in the state with a computer and printer can get their hands on a free and complete K-8 language arts program. Or so it seems. While the K-2 and 3-8 programs are more or less free, whether they’re complete or not is a different story.
An effective core-reading program is a necessity for classroom teachers—novice or expert—who are tasked with teaching kids to read. Research says that effective reading instruction includes explicit, direct teaching of phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and text comprehension. So that’s what we want to see from any new common core-aligned reading programs that were putting in the hands of teachers—especially the novice teachers who haven’t developed the expertise that comes with years of experience.
Unfortunately, it seems that both Expeditionary Learning and Core Knowledge have ignored some of this widely accepted research on effective reading instruction. According to the Core Knowledge Foundation website, the program is composed of two parts called the listening and learning strand and the skills strand. You won’t find mention of a third strand, called GRAIR, on the Core Knowledge Foundation’s website. GRAIR stands for guided reading and accountable, independent reading, and it was added on to the K-2 core-reading program that NYSED purchased from Core Knowledge Foundation (perhaps when NYSED realized some important parts were missing from the product it had purchased). NYSED explains it on http://www.engageny.org like this:
“It is also important to note that NYS has added the critical GRAIR component to the Curriculum…Guided Reading and Accountable Independent Reading (GRAIR) is additional literacy time within the school day where teachers can work with students in developmentally appropriate groupings to meet their individual needs. This is an opportunity for the favorite traditional read aloud work, literacy based centers, and immersion in text, where teachers can facilitate student choice from existing leveled libraries based on interest, availability, and readability. The purpose of this time is to build independent, interested, and capable readers.”
To build “independent, interested, and capable readers,” Core Knowledge Language Arts, which NYSED paid a handsome sum for, isn’t enough. It needs to be supplemented with “additional literacy time within the school day where teachers can work with students in developmentally appropriate groupings to meet their individual needs.” Sadly, both Core Knowledge Foundation and NYSED provide no curricular materials to accomplish this critical component of the program. The CKLA program, when used alone, is insufficient to meet the needs of an urban elementary school with a large number of struggling readers and English language learners.
When implemented according to plan, the listening and learning and skills strand, taken together, account for two hours of instruction per day. The third strand (GRAIR) extends the duration of literacy instruction further. That’s fine, because extra instructional is beneficial and necessary for struggling readers. But when it comes to a complete core-reading program, Core Knowledge Foundation says two strands and NYSED says three.
This disagreement conflates the guidance being given to teachers and confuses the implementation of an effective, research-based core-reading program. Many teachers had been using some form of guided reading and independent reading in their classrooms for years. As the state rushed to rollout new curriculum in preparation for new standardized tests that affected new evaluations, many teachers were told to just follow the new program, Because it’s common core-aligned. How many teachers and schools are unaware of the subtle note NYSED made on http://www.engageny.org, adding the “critical GRAIR component to the Curriculum.” And for all that money we (the people) spent, we couldn’t have been given some guided reading and independent reading curricular materials? At least things are different with Expeditionary Learning, right?
Wrong. NYSED paid Expeditionary Learning for its 3-8 English language arts curriculum. Here’s what NYSED has to say about the Expeditionary Learning curriculum [emphasis added]:
The New York State Common Core–aligned ELA modules for grades 3–5 were designed to help teachers build students’ capacity to read, think, talk, and write about complex texts. The modules fully address the reading standards for both literary and informational texts, the writing standards, and the speaking and listening standards. Foundational reading and language also are addressed within the context of the module lessons; these standards are more heavily emphasized in specific module lessons within Module 2B.
However, the 60-minute module lessons alone do not represent enough time to comprehensively meet the Foundational reading and language standards. To ensure that students receive adequate support building foundational reading and language skills, as well as sufficient time to meet the volume of reading required by the CCSS, research suggests that an additional block of literacy instruction and skills practice is needed.
This information was posted to http://www.engageny.org around Thursday, January 24th, 2014, in the middle of the 2013-2014 school year. As with the missing GRAIR strand from the CKLA program, the extra literacy block needed to supplement the Expeditionary Learning program is critical, but no real curricular resources are provided, just some words of guidance. It’s no surprise that many schools chose these programs upon receiving the recommendation from both the New York State and City departments of education. It’s worth mentioning here that Joel Klein, former chancellor of the NYCDOE, now works for Amplify Education, a subsidiary of News Corporation. Amplify Education owns the exclusive licensing rights to Core Knowledge curriculum, and sells it for thousands of dollars at http://www.store.amplify.com, even though NYSED is giving it away for free on http://www.engageny.org. More troubling is that with the entire product purchasing and testing bonanza some of the most basic aspects of an effective, research-based core reading program aren’t making their way into classrooms.
tuppercooks:
So what is the difference in $$ spent now and $$ spent previously?
Hey Bernie, great question. Honestly, I don’t know. Public schools (at least, ours) have a way of spending money like it grows on trees. I just believe, the $ spent on “training” and materials could be put to better use, like reducing class sizes.
tuppercooks:
The size of the k-12 textbook market appears to be over $18 billion which for the roughly 50 million k-12 students amounts to $350 per student. The costs of CK books and materials should be considered in this context. Jumping up and down about what any particular publisher does will not advance the discussion.
http://www.aepweb.org/aepweb/?p=3261&option=com_wordpress&Itemid=68
Point taken Bernie. But I say the textbook companies have had a monopoly of sorts for the past few decades. A 5th grade math text costs my school about $65. I think a comparable text could be supplied for half that. If I had 350 bucks a year for each kid in my class, 20 students, I’d have $7000. I could do a lot with that.
I do not disagree on the costs of textbooks and have said so here. The issue remains one of keeping your eye on the ball. Cheap Wi-Fi-enabled tablets plus e-textbooks are supposed to half the size of the textbook bill. Do we go in that direction? If so, whose tablet? If we cannot trust students with textbooks what about tablets?
If schools stop buying textbooks, expect publishers to come down really hard on teachers who duplicate material without their permission. How many of your students would report you for copying stuff if it meant a share of the award or simply cold hard cash? If you ran a business then you know what a potential nightmare the software piracy laws are like.
In short, this is a lot trickier than many folks here seem to think.
Point taken again Bernie. I have to believe that traditional textbooks are going the way of the 8-Track tape and cassette. That said, the digital revolution is coming. At what cost? I have no idea. I can say this, if the copying machines were removed from our school there’d be a collective cardiac arrest form the staff. Might not be a bad thing.
Copy machines must be a publisher’s nightmare. I have a friend in college publishing. The next time I see her I will ask her the extent to which publishers bake a premium into their price to cover the cost of illegal copying. Indeed such illegal copying – and we all do it to some extent – represents a big incentive for publishers to go digital where there may well be easier ways of tracking such “illegal downloads”.
College publishing is an interesting business. A lot of it is vanity publishing. Publisher X publishes professor Y’s Accounting for Dentists because they have put together a P&L based on the 2,000 students that Y can deliver at his college. And, with a market of 2,000 students, the print run is small and the price is high. Most of the cost of books is paper, printing, binding, and fulfillment. Very little to the authors, BTW. Just saying.
Robert:
In my search for current data on the size of the k-12 textbook market, I saw a number that suggested that authors get about 15% of wholesale – but I suspect that is named authors with a substantial following. The same source, which I have lost track of, indicated that self-publishing e-Textbook authors can look at 75%. But the issue is 75% of what. Still it will be interesting to see how this shakes out.
But I feel we are drifting off topic. Critiquing Murdoch is not useful until someone puts together the actual long-term costs associated with going in this directions and compares them to current textbook and materials costs. Accusing a businessman of being a businessman is kind of silly. One can argue about the content issues and the integration with assessments separately.
I agree, Bernie, that that stuff isn’t very productive. What would be productive is push back against the state mandates and adoption criteria that create insurmountable barriers to entry for small educational materials providers. Those mandates and criteria are written with the best of intentions, but they reduce competition, as we have seen, to the current abysmal state, and that kills innovation. When I started in the textbook business, a basal program cost a couple million to develop. Now one of these costs some 100 million or so, and most of that is to meet ridiculous adoption requirements. When I started in the business, a literature program consisted of a hardbound student edition and a softbound teachers’ guide. Now, thanks to the state criteria, a single grade level of one of these programs is shipped in four enormous boxes containing hundreds of components, most of them mandated and most of them rare, if ever used. They take up a lot of space in school storerooms, and that’s about it.
Most K-12 textbooks, BTW, are written by freelancers working for development houses that contract the work from the big publishers. Those freelancers make something like minimum wage. Big-name “authors” are signed by the big houses, and they actually do almost none of the writing. It’s very, very rare that one of those people pictured in the front of these books actually did anything but show up for a couple of meetings and talk philosophy. But they get a big check and their names on the spine and their pictures in the front of the Teacher’s Edition, and the publisher gets the street cred from having these names attached to their programs.
Robert:
For me, small is definitely better. The paradox is that in order to obtain economies of scale you need standards but with economies of scale comes large monopoly seeking entities. The struggle will always be there to keep their fingers off the scales! However, we will never get the scale and the standards if we simply try to turn publishers into bogey men. I am sure you have run across publishing executives who are actually nasty human beings.
Perhaps you can persuade Diane to allow you to post on the economics of textbook publishing for k-12 so that folks can get a sense of the different cost factors involved and the risks k-12 book publishers run.
Bernie, I have known a lot of publishers and publishing people who were extraordinarily honorable. I remember hearing Fred McDougal stand up in front of his employees, back when McDougal, Littell was a little company run by a real McDougal and a real Littell, and after fundamentalist kooks had killed the adoption of one of his health texts in Texas. He said, “We did in that program what was best for teachers and kids. And as long as I am heading this company, that’s what we’re going to do.” Many who work in the industry today will chortle at that.
In those days, the educational publishing houses were headed up by people who had been editors and teachers, by people who had come up in the business and still remembered that there were children and teachers on the receiving end of what they were doing. And if you walked over to talk to the person heading up the American government revision, you would find a scholar of American government, a deeply learned person who gave a damn about kids learning something about American government.
But something pretty awful has happened in the educational materials industry over the past few decades. As these entities have grown in size, they have become dominated, at the higher levels, by financial people and by professional project managers whose business has nothing to do with knowing history or government or literature or grammar or mathematics or whatever, by people whose sole business is to know how to improve, by any means, the next quarter’s earnings. They could be in any business. They just happen to be in this one.
And so the products from these houses have become almost indistinguishable from one another because we all know, well, how to read the markets.
But here’s what the new bosses in ed book publishing don’t know and don’t care to learn about: We’ve learned a lot, over the past 30 years, about how kids learn, and almost none of that has made its way into textbooks because no one with power in these houses is at all interested in having such discussions now. The business is all about repurposing as much as possible as cheaply as possible and getting that new edition out with the minimal changes needed to instantiate in it the slogans that are fashionable on the education midway this carnival season.
I hasten to add that I do not live in a world populated by heroes and villains. The people who are doing this are not evil. The young business school graduate who knows nothing of English literature and grammar and composition who is heading up the development of an Integrated Language Arts program is a good project manager. And that’s what she’s going to do: she’s going to project manage. She’s going to bring the thing in on budget (well, over actually), on time (sort of), and with all the crap in it that the adoption agencies and standards committees and the latest edufashionistas demand. And pedagogically, the product is going to be just terrible. Such people are not evil. They are products of a rotten system, one that has driven all the smaller players out of the business and put in charge people with purely financial interests, or just enough other interest to be dangerous and susceptible, themselves, to the prevailing edufashions, which always have this reformist zealotry about them, are always going to fix everything with some magic elixir. The current “reforms” are simply the latest in a long, long sad history of such. But in the past, they weren’t as dangerous as they are now because there was a lot of decentralization and dissent. When all the edupundits were certain that behavioral objectives were going to “fix the education problem,” there were enough people with enough local power and common sense to keep the oh-so-scientific and data-driven amateur education fixers at bay.
Here’s the thing about just “reading the market”: If no one has ever seen a car, and you ask what people want in their modes of transportation, they’re going to say, “Well, give me a gentle, sturdy one who won’t throw a rider or cost a fortune to feed.” What we’ve seen from the textbook publishers for a long time now is the NEW EDITION!!!! that is only new to the extent that it mouths the current education sloganeering. Everything we know about how kids learn language we have learned in the past 30 years, and NONE of that stuff has found its way into new curricula from the publishers. None of it.
11th grade.
” Somebody’s making a shitload of money off this and it ain’t me!” That language is offensive, very offensive.
Sorry Hoss, but I call ’em as I see em.
Guess that makes offensive language okay on this blog? Hang onto your hats.
Sorry Hoss, next time I’ll say poopload. Please accept my sincere apology.
This is not quite on topic but I couldn’t figure out how to send a link to you (Diane) directly so I’m doing it as a comment to a previous post. Have you seen this?
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/ideas-innovations/What-to-Make-of-the-Debate-Over-Common-Core-222514361.html?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=socialmedia&utm_campaign=20130905&utm_content=ideasandinnovationcommoncore&device=ipad
Core Knowledge scripts teachers with what to teach, how to teach it, when to teach it and how long to teach it without regard for individual differences. If used like directed, enthusiasm for learning and intrinsic motivation will diminish.
The “free” Core Knowledge downloads are like Texas CSCOPE; therefore, an educator and parent revolt will come. Like CSCOPE, CK is mediocre nonsense like workbooks or busy work that wastes valuable learning time.
What’s more, CK worksheets and coloring pages are not related to authentic reading and writing. Worksheets replace meaningful learning with meaningless tasks. Busy work with one right answer leads to behavior and classroom management issues.
These resources have no value for degreed and highly trained teachers and certainly are not appropriate for students. I’m curious about what teachers in Finland would think about the CK.
Don’t be fooled and the “free” downloads. As I’ve said before, Murdoch and Klein are only involved for the money.
LLC1923:
To what extent are these scripts different from the scripts in teachers’ editions of existing textbooks?
Core Knowledge Materials for Sale by Grade Level
“Now you can find all Core Knowledge materials suitable for each grade level.”
http://books.coreknowledge.org/home.php?cat=312
Preschool (17 products for sale)
Kindergarten (11 products for sale)
First Grade (8 products for sale)
Second Grade (9 products for sale)
Third Grade (9 products for sale)
Fourth Grade (17 products for sale)
Fifth Grade (16 products for sale)
Sixth Grade (7 products for sale)
Seventh Grade (6 products for sale)
Eighth Grade (6 products for sale)
LLC1923:
The size of the k-12 textbook market in 2011-12 appears to be over $18 billion which for the roughly 50 million k-12 students amounts to $350 per student. (Somebody may need to verify this estimate for the textbook market.) The costs of CK books and materials should be considered in this context. Jumping up and down about what any particular publisher does will not advance the discussion.
http://www.aepweb.org/aepweb/?p=3261&option=com_wordpress&Itemid=68
Many educators and publishers are anticipating a move to e-textbooks Open source on-line materials are also increasing at the college level. The market will likely be very different in 10 years. Tools already exist for educators to create and disseminate their own “textbooks”. This will likely increase the value of a well articulated core curriculum to a school district who are interested in ensuring the coverage of materials from non-traditional sources.
Well, this has been fun. And it’s what this messy business of democracy is all about. I would hate to see the kind of passionate commitment to educational alternatives, from Core Knowledge to chemteacher’s fascinating hints about that powerful material on the cultural geographies of the pre-Columbian Americas–I would hate to see all this wonderful innovation–engulfed and/or bastardized by totalitarian mandates–mandated standards, mandated tests, mandated curricula, mandated evaluation schemes, mandated student response and curriculum portals, mandated adoption criteria and by–this is an important one, don’t miss it–the creation of barriers to entry that prevent all but the big money players from participating in the business of putting their innovative ideas and materials before teachers and students and parents and administrators. Teachers and students and parents and administrators who are free to choose among them.
We need site-based school management in this country–empowered teachers, principals, curriculum coordinators, and superintendents.
Nothing good–and a whole lot of evil–will come of these totalitarian “reforms.” They run smack up against what is deepest in us–that we are freedoms, that we are projections, forward, of what we care about. To all those authoritarians with their mandates, I say, if you are successful and kill that–if you kill people’s autonomous expressions of their caring–there will be nothing left worth presiding over from your lofty eminences.
So, a question: Why would I, who feel so strongly about all that, be a fan of the Core Knowledge curriculum? Let’s talk. After I meet these deadlines I’m on right now.
Robert:
Good luck with your deadline.
It is great to see such an articulate argument in favor of a free market. I am totally in favor of allowing school districts to develop their own curriculums and to chose their own textbooks – provided (and I acknowledge it is a big “BUT”) there are some minimum standards.
Does CK provide a framework – not the actual content, but perhaps in the level of detail and sense of progression, i.e., its architecture – that could act as a template for what a school/school district needs to have? If not can you point to a model of what could work?
As to barriers of entry, that is a very important point. I strongly suspect that with emerging tools for creating and disseminating e-textbooks the big publishers like big newspapers will go the way of the dinosaurs.
The one concern I would have is that if you grant school districts the freedom to implement their own curriculum how do you logically and politically justify the opposition to some form of vouchers when groups of parents strongly object to the curriculum and/or pedagogy? What if different schools in the same district want to pursue different curriculums of pedagogies? Advocating for freedom for some when others actually foot the bill is likely to be a source of considerable discontent.
Bernie, you raise a very good question, and I think that the answer to it is complex. We’ve been served enormously well by the public schools in this country, despite what the reformist rhetoric tells us about comparative international test scores, which is quite inaccurate. And, so, with what Burke has to say in Reflections on the Revolution in France in mind, I am cautious:
“If circumspection and caution are a part of wisdom, when we work only upon inanimate matter, surely they become a part of duty too, when the subject of our demolition and construction is not brick and timber, but sentient beings, by the sudden alteration of whose state, condition, and habits, multitudes may be rendered miserable.”
Robert:
I am a Burkean too. Incremental change is best and the open discussion of the issues without implicit or explicit violence is essential.
Common Knowledge Administrator Kit ($499.00)
http://books.coreknowledge.org/product.php?productid=16362&cat=313&page=1
“The Administrator Kit is designed for administrators and curriculum coordinators of Core Knowledge Schools. This kit provides all of the items needed for reference when implementing Core Knowledge, at 30% off of list prices when purchased individually.” Each kit contains:
1 copy each of The Teacher Handbooks: Grade K-5
1 copy each of the What Your Grader Needs to Know K-5
1 copy of The Core Knowledge Sequence
The Knowledge Deficit by E.D. Hirsch
Cultural Literacy by E.D. Hirsch
The Making of Americans by E.D. Hirsch
Teachers: Say NO to the CK nonsense and organize.
Hirsch, Murdoch and Klein are working with others to control classrooms based on sales and ideology without independent evidence. They are labeling schools as “Common Knowledge Schools.” As a result, they are hijacking schools and renaming schools for their own for-profit purposes.
Core Knowledge Preschool Assessment Kit ($245.00)
“The Preschool Assessment Kit provides the materials needed to assess each of the critical skills found in the Core Knowledge Preschool Assessment Tool. An assessment activity can be found for each skill including Autonomy and Social Skills, Oral Language, Early Literacy Skills in Reading and Writing, Math, and Science. Each activity contains detailed directions as well as rating criteria to make assessment a breeze. This kit makes it easy for a teacher to assess a student with minimum preparation. The kit can be used for both pre- and post- testing to monitor student achievement.”
Preschool Assessment Kit must be designed for TFA!
“This kit makes it easy for a teacher to assess a student with minimum preparation.”
Here’s the link for Murdoch’s Core Knowledge Preschool Assessment Kit ($245.00) –
http://books.coreknowledge.org/product.php?productid=16264&cat=364&page=1
We are paying corporate reformers tax-payer money to sell their goods at higher profits!
“The Mathematics Content Lead will manage the development of Mathematics assessment items for a high quality Common Core State Standards (CCSS) item bank.”
But the catch is:
“This position may be funded, in whole or in part, through American Recovery & Reinvestment Act funds”
So we are giving private companies tax-payer dollars to produce materials so that these companies can sell this material to us at an even higher profit!
So with a little research on
http://www.recovery.gov/espsearch/Pages/advanced.aspx?data=recipientAwardsList&AwardType=CGL&RecipName=wireless%20generation
Amplify is receiving $649,663 in ARRA funds!
Since I was here, I found:
Wireless Generation was receiving $22,799,095 of which $3,056,599 was from NYS DOE!
AND
Pearson was receiving $226,255,339 of which $19,132,521 was from NYS DOE
Grand Total of $249,704,097 of ARRA Funds!!!
This does not include any of the $4.35 Billion RTTT or direct State funding that they receive. Somebody is getting rich!
Do you think that kind of money could instead possibly help struggling school districts?
Tim: You are correct.
At the same time Murdoch/Amplify/Wireless Generation/inBloom receive federal grants and tax funds, teachers and districts are bashed for financial waste and labeled as failing.
Then, Murdoch through his insiders promote their scripted worksheet driven Core Knowledge “curriculum” or busy work and the inBloom database to access millions in education dollars for the purpose of undermining public education with the reform hammer. It’s interesting that Murdoch’s financial interests are not disclosed by the US media in the interest of transparency.
It remains to be seen how the trials in the UK will affect Murdoch’s US for-profit education ventures.
Through FOIA requests, Murdoch’s contracts must be obtained and shared through social media.
Dr. Hirsch–I still keep a copy of your 1988 DCL next to my bed. I remember when I asked for a copy at Christmas my junior year in high school.
Dr. Hirsch,
Thank you for your contributions and your leadership. As a founder of Rocklin Academy and the Rocklin Academy Family of Schools, schools that use the Core Knowledge Sequence, thousands of students and families have benefited for the deep and rich education that is possible with CK.
For the last few years we have watched with great interest the CK Foundation’s work on the new language arts program. We are excited by its promise. The Rocklin Academy elementary schools are piloting the program this year.
I find it very unfortunate that some people always assume the worst about other people and organizations like the CK Foundation. To try to strike a better balance, thank you again for all your work and generosity, and the work of the CK Foundation, and all the educators at CK schools across America. America is better because of these efforts.
David Patterson, Ed.D.
Executive Director Emeritus
Rocklin Academy Family of Schools
Some reflections on Murdoch and his profits. Too long for a comment:
Thanks to chemtchr for posting excerpt of mine, and for emphasizing that contents are learned through inquiry, not one or the other by itself. Students do not simply read, write, speak, and think—they read, write, speak, and think ABOUT SOMETHING. That something is a content, a topic, a subject, a theme. No one speaks or writes about nothing, always about something in a defining context–language use is about something undertaken for some reason and with some result. This is what I meant by “the rhetorical setting or climate”–Someone is addressing someone about something for a reason using specific tools of expression with some result. The complex setting in which any student studies presents limits and possibilities for what can be done. In reiterating this approach to critical teaching, I appreciate Robert Shepherd volunteering to moderate a discussion betw Prof. Hirsch AND MYSELF. Happy to do so. Robert’s emphasis on centrality of PD is absolutely correct. Standardized Curricula produced far from classrooms and then imposed from outside and above help management achieve centralized control but these tools undermine teaching and learning, which are localized, situated experiences. Any curric without intense teacher PD is at high risk for doing damage. Critical per as I understand it is not a standard method but rather a way of working in, with, for and against the actual conditions we encounter in real classrooms. Teachers onsite know these issues best. They should write, test, debate, and refine diverse approaches locally. I started this 42 yrs ago as a new remedial writing teacher at a comm coll, joining wonderful colleagues for a weekly colloquy on our discoveries and dead-ends, published our reflections, taught each other what was working/not, etc. We were never paid for this self-organized staff dev though it went on for 5 yrs until higher-ups in corp/govt/admin ended the experiment in, open admissions, free tuition, democratic learning and f/t fac budgeted for neediest students at City U of NY. I taught remedial writing there for 15 years.
It’s an honor to meet you, Ira. I think the discussion we’ve had here can stand on its own, for honest inquiring readers. It has certainly elucidated a lot of philosophical fault lines in the inter-monopolist struggle.
As Harold points out, the anti-public education front will say anything at all about Gramsci, but their real front is the money motherlode.
I was struck by Hirsch’s allusion to Pearson as a competitor against Murdoch and Klein’s Amplify product. Does that mean he expects both monopolist corporations to go forward with competing product lines, based on Murdoch’s “exclusive” right to suppress exploitation of the Core Knowledge brand name, if he so chooses? Gates is tight with both of them, and I don’t think he wants to see his data-driven monopoly split like that.
Well done, all.
It is amazing to me that Professor Hirsch doesn’t see any irony in the appropriation of the rhetoric Gramsci (who is best known for his advocacy of *adult* workingmen’s education), by the likes of Joel Klein and Rupert Murdoch of Fox News and Wall Street Journal fame (not to mention Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and the Walton family — savage capitalists all).
Furthermore, he attempts to smear the humanist philosopher John Dewey, who was exclusively concerned with *early* education, by associating him with Giovanni Gentile, who in reality was exclusively interested in the study of classics in secondary school and had no interest at all in early ed. For Gentile, see:
http://books.google.com/booksid=hHgMm6APG_0C&pg=PA67&lpg=PA67&dq=fascist+education+act+of+1923&source=bl&ots=cjiMF6AdoA&sig=GArP6XWnRi1kPPcEzlgKN37Os4&hl=en&sa=X&ei=xm0qUv2QI5jH4AOahoH4Aw&ved=0CD0Q6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=fascist%20education%20act%20of%201923&f=false
(This is a potential limitation of the tendency of “cultural literacy” to lend itself to a focus on a shallow familiarity with the names of things — not that I oppose cultural literacy, I am all for it, but as an end, not a means). The spirit of Gramsci could not be further from the peddling of high-priced, high-profit text books and and ipods. It is much better represented by the adult labor schools of the 1920s and 30s that helped register voters, build unions, and fight Jim Crow and that were attended by people like Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks. These were schools that did not attempt to impose a curriculum, but rather, asked the people what they themselves wanted to learn.
I probably sound more anti-Hirsch than is my intention, since I read his book on cultural literacy when it first came out with great enthusiasm.
From Professor Joseph Buttigieg a few months ago:
Dear Professor Hirsch,
The phrases that Gramsci uses are: “scuola unica” and “la scuola unitaria o di
formazione umanistica {. . .] o di cultura generale”. My translation of these
phrases is basically the same as Hoare & Smith’s (in Selections from the Prison
Notebooks). In other words: “scuola unica” and “scuola unitaria” are both
rendered as “common school”. The phrase “la scuola unitaria o di formazione
umanistica {. . .] o di cultura generale” is interesting because it explains
that the “common school” Gramsci was thinking of was “a school of humanistic
formation [and he specifies that he means humanism in the broad sense of term
and not just in the traditional sense] or of general culture.” Of course, the
“common school” envisaged by Gramsci would do more than impart “general
culture”; he saw it as necessary for the inculcation of mental discipline, the
acquisition of a basic understanding (and habits) of scientific thinking and
logic, etc.
The context makes it clear that for Gramsci the “common school” is necessary for
“reasons of equal opportunity”, as you put it, and to remedy the tendency of
modernity and modernization to channel pupils/students into special(ized)
schools meant to prepare them for technical, industrial, etc. jobs. Gramsci
envisaged an educational system in which everyone would go through the “common
school” before moving on to specialized schools. I’ve always considered
Gramsci’s positions on education to be informed by a profoundly democratic and
spirit. His views, in my opinion, are pedagogically sound. I wish more people
currently involved in educational policy adopted perspectives similar to
Gramsci’s
Thank you so much for responding, Professor Hirsch. What I have gathered is that, as you say, Gramsci wanted a common — what we now call a “comprehensive” school — that is, a school with no ability tracking. He wanted the teaching of reading and other fundamentals to take not more than three years and the next six years to feature small groups with in depth, face-to-face discussions (seminars, the opposite of i-pads). He felt that by the age of fifteen or sixteen all pupils should be ready to leave school.
I agree with you that Gramsci’s views are pedagogically sound, and indeed, something very like this has been implemented — as far as the criteria mentioned — with apparent success in Finland, where classes are relatively small, and secondary schools, both academic and technical, and university are free (including board) but not compulsory.
As far as the curriculum, Gramsci favored a classical curriculum, which in his time would have included the study of ancient and modern languages. As for myself, I happen to agree on the desirability of this curriculum. Thus, the Finnish reforms, which I have seen attributed to Dewey, also fit Gramsci’s criteria and are both attractive and effective. Academic instruction begins at age 7 and all citizens receive the same education for the next nine years, after which they can choose an academic or vocational curriculum, both fully supported by the state. Also, students are free to switch between the two if they feel they have made a false start. And there is plenty of adult education after that. Early education, which is non-academic is also generously supported. Of course the Finnish taxpayers do not have to support a multi-trillion-dollar military and security state.
Harold, Gramsci proposed all this because he was looking to break the hold of the hegemonist’s false “common sense” core. He said that false narrative is intellectually defeating when it’s absorbed by workers. It turns working class children against education because it presents their own situation as helpless against the dominant oligarchy.
Hirsch wants to reinforce that hegemony, by forcing other people’s children to be held accountable to a data-driven enforcement monopoly. He sold Murdoch an academically weak “core” that he holds sacred because he skimmed it off the top of his own head.
Murdoch will do whatever he wants with it, as he will with the with 20th century skills brand.
Hirsch has an article at the Fordham Institute dated Sept 5. It reads pretty well and he says we have put the cart before the horse with all the testing. I don’t think he fully understands learning or at least the deliberative work of teaching when you work with students . In particular, the field of high school science.
quote from hirsch: “Then base the reading-test passages on those knowledge domains. Not only would that be fairer to teachers and students, it would encourage interesting, substantive teaching and would, over time, induce a big uptick in students’ knowledge—and hence in their reading-comprehension skills. That kind of test would be well worth prepping for.”
I don’t necessarily agree with Hirsch that this testing approach would encourage “interesting” or innovative teaching methods.
I don’t think it is reasonable to put all of the burden on “reading teachers”
When I go to a middle school classroom for a student who is not doing well in science, I don’t think a reading test should be the measure.. … I ask the teacher are the students learning science or reading about science? For 30 years we said a high school teacher needed a substantial command of a subject field; why are we showing the 8th grade students in MA are succeeding in school subjects and tests but not in science????? Making the science teacher into a reading teacher is not the answer no matter how many encyclopedias are available on the computer discs. The field of science cannot be captured in an encyclopedia of the past. It requires a different approach such as Jack Hassard describes in inquiry methods.
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