The architects of the Common Core standards wanted to rush them into implementation, and Arne Duncan used the federal government’s billions to coerce states to “voluntarily” adopt the standards, if necessary, sight unseen.
Now they are paying the price of their haste.
There is very little buy-in. The Tea Party on one side, and critics of standardization and scripted curricula on the other, are attacking the CCSS.
Several states have announced they will not use the Common Core tests. More will follow.
The latest is Florida, where Governor Rick Scott responded to the furor on the right, by declaring that the state was pulling out of the federally-funded testing.
Meanwhile, experienced educator Joanne Yatvin has an article in Education Week explaining that teachers will have to fix and rework the standards to avoid their design flaws and to make them appropriate for the children in their classes. No one else will, so the teachers must do what they have always done: revise the standards and use what works and drop what doesn’t.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I would like to invite participants of this blog to participate with me in the development of a competing set of voluntary standards, a set developed with the democratic input of teachers and citizens. Consider this akin to a modern Constitutional Convention, wherein standards for our schools are developed from the ground up. Teachers and parents are welcome to participate in the development; their voices are wanted.
The process will be messy. We won’t all agree all the time. But we will crowdsource this thing; we will develop and wed ourselves to a thoroughly democratic process that makes room for dissenting opinions and minority opinions, but that protects the process from stalling because of disagreement. We will vote and move forward.
The end product will be an alternative to the Common Core, a Citizens’ Core that is less representative of the needs of commerce and more representative of the needs of the people.
Let’s offer the American people something better, something built by educators and parents, and then the average American can view the standards side-by-side and decide for themselves.
anonymous educator
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anonymous teacher, this is a good idea but you can’t organize anything without a name and a website. Come on out.
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Heck just go to MA and get their old standards. But we all need to understand standards are not the panacea of achievement. Dr. Stotsky will give any state her ELA standards from MA FREE OF CHARGE. The problem is we need to pull away from national standards. It doesn’t matter if CC were the 10 Commandments. They are national standards which will lead to national assessments and national curriculum. And the loss of state sovereignty. Most of us don’t care if the CC standards are good or bad………the idea of national education is unconstitutional and the federal governments overreach into assessment and curriculum is in violation of not only the constitution but federal law.
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It would be great, Anonymous, to build a site for sharing of best practices in the teaching of English, a practitioners’ site. I’m game. I suggest this for the masthead:
“I believe in standardizing automobiles. I do not believe in standardizing human beings. Standardization is a great peril which threatens American culture.”
—— Albert Einstein, Saturday Evening Post interview, 10/26/1929″
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Sandra Stotsky has already offered for free the excellent ELA Standards that she developed for Massachusetts. They are based on classical literature….not informational texts. That might be a good starting point.
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I would love to be part of this.
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Any cause to help the students I want to be part of. I left teaching not because of the CCS, but because no one knows what they’re doing with them.
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I applaud Florida, but I don’t think Yatvin gets the fundamental problem with the Common Core ELA standards: they force us to “teach the standards” rather than content. That means, for example, having kids write persuasive essays ten years in a row, rather than actually learning about the world and thereby –INDIRECTLY –developing the wherewithal to write. NCTE and the English “establishment” has got it all wrong: reading and writing are not “skills” to be acquired in content-neutral workshops, but rather the fruit of a solid liberal arts education. Alas, our kids are going to be subjected to another decade of anemic skills instruction!
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I couldn’t agree more. Reading and writing are two parts of the same whole. I learned about writing by reading truly outstanding writers in various genres and then trying it out myself. But the only way students will put the the work in for these oftentimes difficult writers is if they truly care about the subject matter and have some understanding of the issues at stake. Sure, persuasive essays do have a bit of a standard form but the best persuasive essays are successful in part because the author knows how to manipulate the so-called rules.
I don’t know much about the ELA standards. Is it just demonstrating that you are able to apply the persuasive writing formula to a variety of topics (albeit with increasingly sophisticated vocabulary?)
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Applying the formula. Yup. That’s about it. And THE formula, of course, guarantees that awful writing will be produced. The whole notion of there being THE formula would make any real writing sick to her stomach.
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Writing starts with having something to say. A piece of writing grows, organically, from there. It borrows from a HUGE stash of conventions. And it surprises by violating them.
By, say, dreaming of monkeys and mangoes.
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And so you teach in such a way that students will find something to say, something that they HAVE to say, and in such a way that they have that enormous stash of conventions to draw upon.
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I can say from experience that it is also difficult for students to unlearn formula-based writing once they reach college. As you mentioned below, many students don’t realize that you often have to write through your ideas in order to discover them. Students who approach writing as if they were decorating a Christmas tree may succeed in high school but when they get to college they don’t know how to generate enough ideas to sustain a 10, 15 or 20 page “persuasive” paper. It is not a matter of simply adding 10x more ornaments to the same tree.
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You said a lot there, Emmy. This is exactly what happens. We are producing a nation of kids who think that writing is pouring content into a pre-built frame. We’ve turned it into “paint by numbers.” And the moment people try to apply that procedure to real writing–to a task in which they actually have to grapple with an idea–it fails utterly. Looking at the writing sections of the CCSS in ELA, one gets the impression that the authors had spent themselves on producing their mediocre blather about what matters in the reading of literary and informative texts and decided just to say, in grade after grade, writing five-paragraph themes in three “modes.”
And we are already seeing the consequences, all over the country. At the end of the teacher “training” session (“Sit up. Roll over. Good boy.” ) on text-dependent questioning or whatever, one gets the five minutes devoted to the rubric for the “performance task”–the formulaic theme based on the “Essential question” into which one pours the “evidence” from the selections[s] as though writing were filling out an employment application form for the state of New Jersey.
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These rubrics and tests treat writing as if it were a matter of pouring content into the blank spaces on a form–no sense at all of writing as making choices, all along the way, from among alternatives, of that which fits, grows out of, advances a particular line of thought. The paint-by-numbers approach to writing instruction.
Well, here’s the thing: Painting by numbers won’t produce a competent local amateur landscape or still life painter, much less an Artemisia Gentileschi.
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YES YES YES
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Ponderosa. You are dead on. Precisely. So much wisdom in what you have written here. It’s wonderful to hear from someone who has a clue after listening to these deformers for so long.
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Spot on Ponderosa. The CCSS regarding high school social studies is all skills and no content. Suddenly, knowledge is meaningless.
We’ve darkly joked that we could easily get good scores without teaching any actual history. Social studies simply becomes formulaic informational ELA.
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If you want to see some decent standards in Social Studies, look back to the ones developed by Diane Ravitch when she was in the standards-making biz. Meaty stuff.
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“Standards-making biz” : )
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Ponderosa: I’m afraid we can’t blame this problem on the Common Core. We’ve been subjected to a non-stop barrage of vacuous “skills are more important than content” pedagogy for a long time now, from reformer types but also from real educators. The predictable result is that kids have nothing to say because they aren’t learning enough content to say anything about. A similar problem is the awful “depth over breadth” cliche that we’ve all fallen in love with, which would reward me for spending 9 weeks teaching a single short novel. Skills are not more important than content; skills and content need to be balanced. Depth is not more important than breadth; depth and breadth need to be balanced. Whatever happened to balance, anyway?
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There is knowledge of what and knowledge of how. Both are important. However, procedural knowledge comes in different varieties based upon very different cognitive processes. One has to understand which, in a given case, one is dealing with. But certainly, the content-free skill drill–treating skill as an end rather than as a tool to en end–has been a horror. It has led to what I call “And now for something completely different” Monty-Python pedagogy and curricula. The problem with that, of course, is that learning happens within knowledge domains. New learning that builds on previous learning occurs much, much more rapidly. And the content, of course, should drive what skill is applied. If I come to a point in an argument at which I really need to present, say, the difference in spread between two normal distribution curves in order to make my point, then measures of spread are the skills of the moment, the ones that I need to apply–to the end of advancing that particular content, that particular notion, getting my readers to understand it. One doesn’t start with the skill. One starts with a toolbox of skills, and one applies them to a purpose within a context.
Without the context, there’s nothing there, nothing worth thinking about, at any rate.
And that’s precisely what we’ve been doing for years now in official materials–in lessons in textbooks from the big publishing houses, for example–giving kids work in which the content didn’t matter–could be anything–as long as the skill (CCSSELA.RI.6.4a) were being addressed. What a stupid approach, but the new standards [sic] encourage, demand, a lot more of that–teaching to the stupid test that will cover the abstracted list of skills that is the standards [sic].
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CCSS and ALL that goes with it and truly defines it must go. States and districts have always compared standards and aligned them with BEST PRACTICES of education pedagogy. The NBPTS standards exemplify what effective accomplished teachers do. Teachers need pseudo reformers to get out if the way while states need to provide the proper funding and structure so that accomplished teachers can mentor and participate in constant collaborative professional development.
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amen to that!
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He’ll figure out where the votes are and change his mind tomorrow based on who will get him the most votes.
Gov Scott always goes back on his word and everyone else’s again and again.
Serena Samar
Case Manager
Language Arts Teacher
Garfield High School
slsamar@seattleschools.org
(206) 252-2380
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Thank you, Governor Scott, for rejecting this totalitarianism, for stating, unequivocally, that the federal government has no constitutional authority in matters related to standards, curricula, and pedagogy. And thank you for rejecting the obscene notion that students’ private data should be put up for sale.
There will be people who question your motives, mostly folks on the left, but clearly, left, right, center, almost wherever we stand on the political spectrum in the United States, we stand against tyranny. We are a free people. Thank you for reminding everyone of that.
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Scott is also very, very clear in his Executive Order that the feds have NO AUTHORITY WHATSOEVER in the area of assessment.
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this was good news from Scott who has destroyed teacher morale in Florida. One more thing, Scott just appointed a 32 y/o from New York to the department of ed.
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What Scott has to say about outside imposition of standards, testing, student response databases, etc., is really worth reading. His Executive Order is here:
Click to access eo-13-276.pdf
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Impressive. We need the rest to join Governor Scott. There is nothing Common about learning. Each student sees learning from a different viewpoint.
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common = ordinary, vulgar, base, of little account or value
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now, the Commons, that’s a different matter altogether
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Perhaps someone can explain this to me. Since CCSS Math has been implemented we have noticed a whole new approach to addition and subtraction in our elementary aged childrens’ curriculum. Several lessons are spent estimating problems, for example, 23+33 now becomes 20+30, with the student adding the tens digit first, followed by the single digits. Once the estimating lesson is completed and the real answer has to be given, the lesson plan still has the student adding from left to right, (20+30=50) + (3+3)= 53. I am trying to figure out the benefit to adding from left to right, or why so much time is given on estimating, which I though was a natural product of finding the specific answer. Any help would be appreciated.
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