Anthony Cody chastises Dennis Van Roekel, president of the NEA, for his enthusiasm for the Common Core standards.
Cody warns that standardization does not enhance teacher autonomy. One size fits all is not a recipe for professionalism.
He writes:
Mr. Van Roekel seems to want us to inhabit some alternative universe where teachers can teach according broad guidelines, and high stakes tests are on hold until we somehow have perfected their ability to fully capture student learning. Yet in New York, Common Core tests were given just a short five months ago, and only 30% of the students were rated proficient. Governor Cuomo is calling for the “death penalty” for low scoring schools. Teacher evaluations are required to include test scores. There will be more pressure brought to bear at every level, and once again, schools in African American and Latino communities will be the first closed.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Again, a Democrat.
Too many staunch Democrats down here in the south do not realize that this type thing is happening other places and is led by Democrats. Or they think, “well it must be really really bad in New York and those ghetto schools probably deserve it.” (this is not what I think—it is what I hear others saying).
and many of our school leaders have not even heard about New York’s test scores. As NC waits for ours to come back, I suggested to some people that they google NY test scores.
June Atkinson already preemptively made a blog post about how they can be expected to drop, but the prevailing attitude around here is just “we have to see how things play out.” Not “we need to take things in a new direction.” So those of us not driving the train just have to wait too. And that brings apprehension and anxiety and a hesitation to trust any new request from Raleigh or any new idea offered mid-stream. It seems like, while we wait for things to play out, we are flying by the seat of our pants (in a generalized sense). I see the daily grind working just fine.
And then of course meanwhile our legislators continue to knock down well-established programs and replace them with privately-run entities.
NC’s curriculum is PURE CHAOS.
Of course the scores will drop..
No textbooks…teachers working 17 hours a day and on weekends just to find structure..
NC has been a testing state for years….they think Tests are the only Indicator of Successful Teaching
I am so glad to be out of that stressful environment but I worry about former colleagues who have now developed all sorts of stress related health problems….and they HATE going to work.
If teachers can be held accountable for low test scores, (dumbest idea ever) then to make things fair, so should parents, administrators, politicians, the wind, too much sugary candy, late bedtimes, snow, rain and any other variable that affects children at any particular time of the day.
Dennis Van Roekel is President of the NEA, the largest teacher union in the country and historically the voice of the Democratic party and liberals across the country. When Dennis Van Roekel, and Randi Weingarten (AFT president) have come to their senses and finally accepted the fact that common standards and assessments are inevitable in our schools, progressives need to rethink their strategies and also become accepting of these aspects of education reform, as difficult as that may be for some of them.
Van Roekel and Weingarten realize all too well, parents and taxpayers nationwide are on the choice and accountability bandwagons and they’re not about to revert back to the way our public schools operated prior to education reform.
Rank and file workers do NOT agree with national leadership despite their “polls and surveys”. This experiment is doomed to fail with little buy in from your frontline workers. Many know how to go through the motions, subvert and continue to do what’s best for their customers, children and their families not standard widgets. Carry on with the nonsensical reformy mantra if it makes you feel better.
The only thing nonsensical is the attempted reform backlash. A small percentage of parents and educators are attempting to derail the reform agenda. Amazingly, many of these folks aren’t even aware as to the history of how/why education reform was initiated, and who is the target population. They’ve swallowed the wrong vile of kool-aid.
According to you. You don’t represent me or my colleagues or most teachers in our public schools. You can’t go to war on your workforce and win. They don’t have us …they never will.
We are all too aware of the history of education reform. To begin to understand that history, I recommend a reading of Diane Ravitch’s superb Left Back, which details the long, sad history of these movements to supply the vial of magic elixir that was going to fix everything in education. And now we’ve had more than a decade of these standards-based high stakes tests put into place by No Child Left Behind, of our schools having been turned into test prep factories, and only a fool says to himself, when something has utterly failed, “Gee, we should do a lot more of that.”
I am regretting using that term. It was not my intention to call anyone a fool. The behavior is foolish.
Have read most of Diane’s books and was a fan of everything prior to her metamorphosis. Still respect her overall body of work and her effort to “save” our public schools.
And Linda, you don’t represent me, thankfully. You state “most teachers in our public schools.” Have you conducted a study/survey to determine the authenticity of such a statement or is it simply an off the cuff attempt to substantiate your pov, like so many anti-reformers revert to? My guess is on the latter.
Your guess is wrong but expected. This will collapse eventually. Just wait. We’ll keep teaching.
I know not a single classroom teacher who supports the CC.
Linda represents me, and many others.
LInda represents me, as well. Common Core is not developmentally appropriate for my 1st graders.
Paul Hoss,
You make some genuinely fascinating statements. Please educate us all about your background.
How many years have you taught in public school?
Did you teach a high needs or low income or ELL population or any combination thereof?
Did you teach in a public school during NCLB and/or RttT?
Which kind of educational degree(s) do you hold?
In the spirit of heterodoxy, please tell us more about yourself.
Paul Hoss,
I await your reponse . . . .
Paul Hoss,
Are you a teacher? Are you a parent of children in a public school, I said public school, not a charter school, or another type of private school?
Have you read the Common Core State Standards?
Did you ask President Obama, Arne Duncan, and Rahm Emmanuel if the curricula in their personal children’s schools are aligned with the CCSS?
Come back and tell us again, after you have read the CCSS, what you think. Imagine your own children functioning within the limited, yes I said limited, framework of the CCSS. The goal of the CCSS is to dumb our population down even further. That’s not even touching upon the corporate goal for teachers.
The accountability isn’t really about accountability. It is about the destruction of our system of public education, pensions and health care benefits, along with the unions. It is about ending the “career” teacher. It is about making this once respected and hallowed position into a revolving door short term job, a stepping stone on a resume for a career that offers more prestige.
This is not what the American public wants, it’s what corporate America wants. Just like the possible action in Syria. It is not what the American public wants. The action is driven by corporate America.
Very sad times.
Nah, parents and taxpayers nationally aren’t “on the choice and accountability bandwagons,” and the bandwagon itself has thrown a wheel. There’s nothing “inevitable” about it. Dennis and Randi can retire into the imaginary little universe of overwhelming reformer power with you. Michelle Rhee will give them jobs.
That last Gallup poll shows people deciphering the hype and decisively opposing the policy of using standardized test scores to hold children, teachers and schools “accountable” to private interests.
No trains have left any stations, there’s no bus we’re going to be either on or under, and our union doesn’t have to “finally accept” anybody’s heel on our throats.
From the Pelto blog..posted by Jrp1900…see links below for reference:
Wendy Lecker’s critique of standardized testing and the standardized curriculum that is Common Core is judicious, rigorous and devastating. So, obviously, the corporate reformers will just ignore her! The failure of the reformers to engage intellectually is a mark of how facile and vacuous their positions truly are. If they had real arguments and hard evidence for their claims, they would obviously delight in sharing them with opponents. But they don’t have real arguments and nor do they have hard evidence. They have only platitudes, slogans and dogmas. And they will try to pass off any number of skewed statistics or tweaked “data sets” as “scientific” grounds for their putrid policies.
Wendy Lecker is right that we are being dragged into an Orwellian, upside-down world, where NCLB means precisely that many children will be left behind; where the emphasis on standardized testing is bound to produce non-standard educational outcomes. For it is well known that the “achievement gap” strongly correlates with income levels and social status. When all other things are NOT equal, the more the test is used, the more it creates and sustains the “reality” of a (cultural/intelligence?) gap between different groups of students. I remember W Bush said that NCLB was a rejection of the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” But making standardized tests the measure of all only produces the hard bigotry of familiar “racial” hierarchies. In the United States, the question is always: why are “the blacks” and “Latinos” so far behind “the Asians” and “the whites”? To pose the question in this way is ALREADY TO PANDER TO RACISM. Suppose the question was put otherwise: why do the lower classes do worse on standardized tests than the middle class and the rich? I venture to say that the answer is obvious to all but the most dense and the most ideological.
Wendy Lecker is also spot on in her criticism of the Common Core Curriculum. This fraudulent directive has its origins in a number of contexts: one context, as Wendy, says is the lucrative market in computer based “educational services”; another context, is the political Right’s obsession with what they think of as “the politicized classroom” (there is too much liberalism, multiculturalism, and “anti American revisionism” in the nation’s public schools for the Right’s liking); still another context for the Common Core Curriculum, is the corporatist goal of using schooling to make “subjects” rather than “citizens” out of particular individuals. As Wendy says, real education fosters a critical sensibility and the corporatists believe that tomorrow’s Americans don’t really need to think (especially think for themselves); they only need to follow orders.
Even Orwell couldn’t make this stuff up!
http://jonathanpelto.com/2013/09/07/orwellian-education-policy-part-2-another-must-read-wendy-lecker/
Here is the Wendy Lecker article, titled Our Orwellian education policy, part 2:
http://www.stamfordadvocate.com/news/article/Lecker-Our-Orwellian-education-policy-Part-2-4793521.php
As a teacher in the state of Delaware, and a member of NEA, I was more than fired up about Van Roekel’s comments about the Common Core in the Delaware State Education Association’s Action September newsletter. According to Van Roekel, we can now “stop treating children like widgets”, and the Common Core will “allow” teachers to stop their focus on rote memorization and teaching to the test.
This is a slap in the face to nearly every teacher I know. I graduated from the University of Delaware 25 years ago, and “rote memorization” was anathema even then! NCTM threw out rote memorization decades ago, so much so that multiplication tables and algorithms were all but thrown out with the bath water.
With these comments, Van Roekel joins forces with those who place the blame on teachers and curriculum for what plagues American public education. Mr. VanRoekel, you clearly do not know how and what I teach, nor do you know what is going on in countless classrooms across the nation.
When will MY union officials stand up for those who pay their salaries? When will My union leaders stop playing the game with federal and state officials who seek to undermine teachers, their unions, and even public education? Get out of the bed, pull up your pants, and represent us, PLEASE!!
From the mom of Ana Grace to all teachers:
Nelba Marquez-Greene’s 6-year-old daughter Ana Grace, who was killed in the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary on Dec. 14, 2012.
As another school year begins and old routines settle back into place, I wanted to share my story in honor of the teachers everywhere who care for our children.
I lost my 6-year-old daughter Ana Grace on Dec. 14, 2012, in the rampage at Sandy Hook Elementary School. My son, who was in the building and heard the shooting, survived.
While waiting in the firehouse that day to hear the official news that our daughter was dead, my husband and I made promises to ourselves, to each other, and to our son. We promised to face the future with courage, faith, and love.
As teachers and school employees begin this new year, my wish for you is that same courage, faith, and love.
It takes guts to be a teacher. Six brave women gave their lives trying to protect their students at Sandy Hook. Other teachers were forced to run from the building, stepping over the bodies of their friends and colleagues, and they came right back to work.
When I asked my son’s teacher why she returned, she responded, “Because they are my kids. And my students need me now more than ever.” She sent daily updates on my son’s progress, from his behavior to what he’d eaten for lunch. And four months later, when my son finally smiled one day after school, I asked him about it. His response? “Mom. My teacher is so funny. I had an epic day.”
While I pray you will never find yourself in the position of the teachers at Sandy Hook, your courage will support students like my son, who have lived through traumas no child should have to.
Your courage will support students who are left out and overlooked, like the isolated young man who killed my daughter. At some point he was a young, impressionable student, often sitting all alone at school. You will have kids facing long odds for whom your smile, your encouraging word, and your willingness to go the extra mile will provide the comfort and security they need to try again tomorrow.
When you Google “hero,” there should be a picture of a principal, a school lunch worker, a custodian, a reading specialist, a teacher, or a bus monitor. Real heroes don’t wear capes. They work in America’s schools.
Being courageous requires faith. It took faith to go back to work at Sandy Hook after the shooting. Nobody had the answers or knew what would come tomorrow, but they just kept going. Every opportunity you have to create welcoming environments in our schools where parents and students feel connected counts.
Have faith that your hard work is having a profound impact on your students. Of the 15,000 personal letters I received after the shooting, only one stays at my bedside. It’s from my high school English teacher, Robert Buckley.
But you can’t be courageous or step out on faith without a deep love for what you do.
Parents are sending their precious children to you this fall. Some will come fully prepared, and others not. They will come fed and with empty bellies. They will come from intact homes and fractured ones. Love them all.
When my son returned to school in January, I thought I was going to lose my mind. Imagine the difficulty in sending your surviving child into a classroom when you lost your baby in a school shooting. We sent him because we didn’t want him to be afraid.
We sent him because we wanted him to understand that while our lives would never be the same, our lives still needed to move forward.
According to the 2011-12 National Survey of Children’s Health, nearly half of America’s children will have suffered at least one childhood trauma before the age of 18. They need your love.
A few weeks before the shooting, Ana Grace and I shared a special morning. Lunches were packed and clothes were picked out the night before, so we had extra time to snuggle. And while I lay in bed with my beautiful caramel princess, she sensed that I was distracted and asked, “What’s the matter, Mom?” I remember saying to her, “Nothing, baby. It’s just work.” She looked at me for a very long time with a thoughtful stare, then she told me, “Don’t let them suck your fun circuits dry, Mom.”
As you begin this school year, remember Ana Grace. Walk with courage, with faith, and with love. And don’t let them suck your fun circuits dry.
So sad but I love that she says such nice things about teachers.
4equity2, you say, “Get out of the bed, pull up your pants, and represent us, PLEASE!!”
We’re far past the “Please” stage here. Raise up a delegation in your local to throw the bums out. Vote.
The ELA standards, themselves, are a mess. They are extraordinarily amateurish and misconceived. It astonishes me that any professional English language arts educator would look at these and think them at all acceptable. Even if one bought into the extremely dubious notion that it’s a good idea to have one set of standards for every child, as though children were parts to be identically machined, there would still be the issue of how really badly thought through these standards [sic] are. They weren’t vetted. The instantiate a lot of really bad ideas about what measurable outcomes in ELA ought to be and encourage a lot of really bad pedagogy and curricula. The standards themselves seem to have been created in almost complete obliviousness of what we now know about how kids acquire reading, writing, speaking, and listening ability. They look to me like what one would get if one put a bunch of undergraduates with no knowledge of/expertise in these domains on the job. It’s shocking, really, that education leaders would find these at all acceptable. Yes, yes, they simply tried to rationalize existing state standards, but those were an egregious lot too.
The creation of these standards was not approached with the high seriousness and care that such an undertaking required. When people design airplanes, they do extensive expert failure modes and effects analyses. Nothing like that was done here. I’m shocked at what was spent to develop material this received, this misconceived, this amateurish. Now we all get to ride in this airplane. Inevitably, given how poorly it was put together, it will come crashing to the ground.
And the new standards [sic] were misconceived at their most fundamental level, at the level of the categorical description of what a “standard” should be. That description would, if approached scientifically, vary enormously from domain to domain. But such discussions were never held. Instead, a small cadre of amateurs took it upon themselves to create these and to overrule ever teacher, curriculum coordinator, and curriculum developer in the country with regard to what the measurable outcomes in each domain should be.
As far as I can tell, the best way to enhance teacher autonomy would be for teachers to create their own charter schools.
I do not disagree that experiments in alternative schooling are valuable. I have seen, personally, a lot of good come from particular experiments. Kids differ. One size doesn’t fit all. In the Midwestern town I grew up in, there as a university lab high school that I attended, and it was an outstanding opportunity for a fellow like me from a working class background. And there was a great alternative high school with an excellent voc tech program that gave direction and purpose and meaning to a lot of kids who didn’t fit the Procrustean bed of the standard high school. That said, I am very cautious about all this.
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. When I think of charter schools and vouchers, I remember what Burke had to say in in his line from his Reflections on the Revolution in France:
“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.”
I don’t think that replacing the public school system with a charter school system, which is clearly what the Obama Administration intends, makes sense, given what the public schools have accomplished, which is pretty amazing, though one won’t hear about that from the reformy crowd.
Enhancing teacher autonomy isn’t your goal, teachingeconomist. Thank you for your kind concern, though.
Actually it is if accompanied with stronger teacher education.
Why is he still head of the union? That he hasn’t been overthrown is unconscionable.
Robert, the NEA is my union. Teachers agree with your analysis, and we know it. So, who are we arguing with here?
Van Roekel took Gates’ money to promote the Common Core (just like Randi did). He’s done the math wrong, though. His pay has been coming out of my paycheck for the past 18 years, and he works for working teachers like me, not for Gates. Fortunately, our unions still have a democratic structure. Self-serving “leadersip” have built enormous procedural barriers into our delegate system, that make it hard to dislodge them, but we can. Chicago showed it’s possible, and then Chicago showed it’s urgent.
So, we are going to have to remove Van Roekel from office, instead of arguing piteously against Gates’ agenda. Union members need to reassert our leadership of our union, at every level. Brothers and sisters, the first step is to get your listserve of all members up and running. My local just did that.
It’s far past time to get these sell-outs out.
When I first learned that test scores would be tied to evaluations, I realized that our union leadership was not as strong as I had believed. But the reformers want dissension in our ranks–it’s part of the master plan to dismantle unions. There are many teachers who believe that the unions went along with tying test scores to evaluations because to fight it would further erode public opinion of educators. They believe that their locals will fight for them when they lose their jobs due to unfair evaluations. I believe they are sadly mistaken.
But haven’t you heard, the LEADER$ of both UNION$ have polled their MEMBER$.
ENGLI$H TEACHER$ just love the CC$$ in ELA. They love doing $CRIPTED CC$$ LE$$ONS based on one $IZE-FIT$-ALL $TANDARD$ put together by AMATEUR$ with no UNDER$TANDING of ENGLI$H education, and they love having their $CHOOLS turned into FACTORIE$ for the milling of $TUDENT$ into identical machine PART$, JU$T A$ the S$UDENT$ love bubbling those BUBBLE$!
BTW, I am using the new approved NEA/AFT font. It’s called Gates. What do you think?
Takes some getting used to–like all things reformy it’s extraordinary glitchy, but using it is a constant reminder of what matters here.
I love your new font and we are on the same wavelength…see here:
$tudent$: the new ca$h crop for corporation$
Me too, love the GATES font.
GATES, the neo-liberal font, it shuts the mind to creativity and critical thinking.
Yet the ca$h flow$ to hi$ educronie$.
I love it!! It hits the nail on the head…