I am not happy with the way that Common Core was developed. Very few people were involved in this effort to develop national standards. Once a document was in hand, the Obama administration made adoption of the standards a condition of eligibility for participation in its $4.35 billion Race to the Top. Since then, adoption of the CCSS has become a condition to receive waivers from Arne Duncan from the nutty demand by NCLB for 100% proficiency by 2014–or else.
The Gates Foundation underwrote their development, their promotion, and almost every aspect of the CCSS. As Mercedes Schneider has documented again and again on her blog, it is hard to find a national organization that has not received millions of dollars from the Gates Foundation to support the standards.
There is now a price being paid in state after state for this top-down, non-democratic creation of “national standards.” The Obama administration aggressively defends them yet insists it had nothing to do with creating them (or imposing them, which strictly speaking is not true).
Since so few people in this vast nation knew much about them, there is a vigorous campaign in opposition to them, based on rumor and half-truth and semi-half truth.
I came out in opposition to them not because I oppose national standards in principle, but because I thought they should be field tested. I still think so. I worked on the development of state standards, and learned that the feedback from teachers was always helpful in making them better. Bringing in the field and listening to their ideas and reactions is a way to improve the standards and also build support for them. Not pretend support, not pretend listening, but real support and listening.
Now we learn from Education Week that major corporations are going all out to promote the standards. Since they have no idea whether the standards will work or not, whether they will narrow or widen the gaps among different groups of students, whether they will do all they promise, what is going on here? Would any one of these major corporations launch a new product nationally without trying it out in a city or state and finding out about how it works in reality?
Until standards have been tried in the classroom, they are only words on paper.
And because the promoters of the standards couldn’t wait to try them out and see how they work, they are now facing a major backlash as state after state withdraws from the testing consortia (funded by the U.S. Department of Education for $350 million).
Because of the U.S. Department of Education’s ham-handed rush to impose these standards while pretending not to; because there was no respect for the democratic process, the Common Core standards may fail. Twenty years from now, they may be a trivia question.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Mercedes Schneider’s Common Core writings:
http://deutsch29.wordpress.com/category/common-core/
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I suddenly hit in an aha moment. How can anyone, or any group, especially sans teachers, reach a consensus on what is appropriate for say, fourth grade?
Teachers would have difficulty agreeing, and they’re the experts.
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Not true. Teachers understand about child and adolescent, and young adults development. Teachers goo low the students’ needs and integrate what they need and want yo learn.?
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Of course! It’s about $$$$$, control, and power over…very SIC.
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The Common Core State Standards in ELA are a joke. They were created by amateurs.
For me, it’s a litmus test of whether a person knows anything about the teaching of English to find out whether he or she supports implementation of these.
The CCSS in ELA seem to have been conceived in complete obliviousness of what we know about language acquisition and in almost complete obliviousness of best practices in the teaching of English.
And they were misconceived at their most fundamental level, at the level of the categorical definition of “standard” in the various domains that they cover. Real standards, real measurable objectives in these various domains, would look nothing like one another across these domains and across the subdomains within them. But one needs actually to know something about language acquisition and about the teaching of reading, writing, speaking, listening, and thinking to understand why that is so. One can chalk up politicians’ infatuation with these standards [sic] to purest ignorance. But people who call themselves teachers of English or teachers of teachers of English should know better.
If a group of amateurs had created standards of this quality for, say, the practice of medicine, they would have long since been hooted off the stage by physicians. They would have long since drowned in a chorus of derision.
Reading these standards and working with them day in and day out, I think that one might as well have handed David Coleman copies of the 1858 Gray’s Anatomy and a translation of Galen and sent him to a cabin in the woods of Vermont to write new standards for the medical profession.
How can anyone who is at all learned in the field of English education not be appalled?
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At the end of Don Marquis’s poem “The Old Trouper,” from Archy and Mehitabel, the elderly theater cat turns to Mehitabel, the alley cat of ill repute and says, “Come, my dear. Both of our professions are being ruined by amateurs.”
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Touche!
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As a teacher, the amount of school email I receive promoting the next “great” textbooks, workbooks, test prep, etc. to support the common core & STEM is insane. In addition to everything Diane wrote in this entry, what gets me is the willingness of districts (some really, really successful districts) to jump on the bandwagon and start feeding it to the parents. It is interesting teaching where I live because I can see how differently it is spun for the parents, community, and for the staff. What is the same, is that we are all expected to open wide and say “yum” after they have fed us.
I think parents and teachers are just beginning to ask themselves what the heck this common core thing really is. Good thing Diane’s blog comes up quickly on search engines. That is how I learned. Once we know about it, we all must spread the word to question it. Learning about the common core opens people’s minds enough to start pointing them in the direction of, Reign of Error. I have been passing them out like Halloween candy. Yum.
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Of course, the CCSS in ELA were nothing but a “rationalization” of those existing state standards, the spawn of NCLB, before them, with a sprinkling (a tinkling?) of New Critical theory thrown in. Those standards [sic] were typically just as bad, though one could pick through them for bits of sanity that had survived the bureaucratic processes in state departments of education.
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And, finally, I think people should be aware that the new standards are part of a strategic business plan, well articulated by Arne Duncan’s Chief of Staff, who said that the new standards were created “to provide national markets for products that could be brought to scale.”
Think, the big box store. The Walmartization of U.S. education. As if we weren’t already far, far down that path.
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Hi Robert,
I teach 8th grade English and the horrific CCSS emails pushing products are dinging in on the hour. Indeed, they are the Walmart of education. Instead of lowering prices, they are lowering the quality of lessons. No happy faces in those classrooms.
Teachers must resist and parents must speak up and demand more – much more.
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Hang in there, Danielle. Try your best to teach well DESPITE these standards. This madness, like the long sad parade of “reforms” we’ve seen (behavioral objectives, anyone?) will pass as well. But a lot of damage will be done in the interim, and the opportunity costs in lost innovation in standards, curriculum, and pedagogy will be staggering.
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If the creators of the new standards [sic] in ELA so believe in them, then let them compete, via a democratic process, for the hearts and minds of teachers and principals and curriculum coordinators and curriculum developers who are free to adopt, adapt, or disregard them in favor of something better
at the local level
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Do you want to have your autonomy as teachers of English to be stolen away by a national Common Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth?
I thought not.
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Maybe it’s just Socratic method or something to keep asking these rhetorical questions, so I guess I’ll bite and give the perfectly obvious answer …
Corporations just naturally lick their chops at the prospect of turning any public resource into a grab bag for private interests, so whether the conversion of funds works for its intended purpose or not is a purely trivial consideration. They know they like it from the go-get alone.
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I wonder will there ever be a name for that in business circles. . .like “public predatorism,” whereby it catches a stigma and is no longer thought to be best practice. I am thinking there might have been a time where people had more respect for public domain, considering it to have some amount of sanctity for the good of the nation. ?
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The trouble is — it’s hard to think of any pejorative so vile that the Greed Is God crowd would not adopt it as a compliment.
I personally see a contemporary analogy with fracking, driving residual resources out of their last resort, privatizing the profit, skipping town, and leaving the deadly consequences for latter generations to clean up.
Looking to history, we can recognize the character and conduct of conquistadors in all times and all places.
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Also from the git-go!
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What I find particularly outrageous is learning that Arne Duncan and the USDOE met with the Business Roundtable last week to urge them to aggressively support the Common Core initiative. In a world that isn’t inverted, like ours currently is, perhaps he might instead have urged them to pay their fair share of taxes so that the democratic PUBLIC education system could continue functioning as it should.
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Has anyone else caught the TV commercial for Teach for America (TFA) that’s been aired a lot lately? It’s not just promoting TFA teachers. It’s specifically about a TFA teacher that became a school principal. They are now trying to get America to accept them as credible at all levels of education.
TFA has basically morphed into Principals for America, Superintendents for America, State Chief School Officers for America, etc. I wonder how many of them were trained by Broad.
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Or maybe the Business Roundtable might have explained to him that innovation comes from competition between COMPETING products (standards, assessments, curricula, etc) chosen FREELY by users, not from top-down totalitarian mandates.
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“In a world that isn’t inverted, like ours currently is. . . ”
Well, hopefully you did LSD when you were younger to prepare yourself for times like these. (apologies to Lewis Black)
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I keep asking this and hoping for an answer: has anything like this ever happened before? Has there been any other sweeping thing where a move was made before a case was made, followed by persistent and insistent propaganda to promote something, or justify it, or rationalize it or whatever it is that the promoters are trying to do?
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Iraq comes to mind.
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Obama comes to mind, too.
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Interesting that none of these companies would accept a major change in the way they do business with NO testing trials or research to back up the major change, but it is fine to impose it on ALL of the nations children. I do not know why I am surprised by this act because this has been the way we have treated children and people working with children for 200 years! Even Doctors working with children are paid and treated as second class Doctors. I will never forget a comment from my own mother 45 years ago when I hinted that maybe I would become a teacher. Her reply was, “At the least, you should consider becoming a Pediatrician. ” Now I know what she was inferring. Talking with the members of my local Chamber of Commerce, I now realized NONE of them have even looked at the Common Core Standards! This is very upsetting because WE should NOT be making MAJOR decisions without knowledge of what we are changing and why. We can now see how a whole nation of very intelligent people can be influenced to do almost anything without much choice or thought. This should be a HUGE call for Americans to Wake-Up before it is too late. We are losing our Democracy and the terrorists do not need to do anything more to make that happen because a FEW very wealthy, powerful people are doing it for them. ALL I can do is pray for my Grandchildren. Maybe we can have a National Boycott of Exxon! Please Help Make That Happen before they take away all our ability to question what is happening to our Children and Grandchildren. We are at a tipping Point. It is now up to us! God Bless America!
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Mark Twainfive—I get what you are saying. It seems like it is considered low on the totem pole/food chain (even if not spoken) to work with children. I have a friend who works in sustainability (some company that advises businesses on sustainability and best practice); I have heard him interviewed on TV about conflicts of interests in the university setting, but when I approached him about what is going on in K-12 he seemed quick to distance himself that his company doesn’t deal with K-12. So, I commented to him that I don’t understand specializing in sustainability without giving consideration to K-12 education. And I got him a signed copy of Diane’s book, which he should be receiving any day.
I think it is often still considered women’s work or what you do if you didn’t make it to something higher up. We know that isn’t true, but I have very few friends or peers who work with children. They considered themselves too ambitious for that. (I even have friends who will organize your closet and shop for you and want twice what I get paid in an hour, though I teach 680 children a week). There is a disconnect for sure.
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“. . . the terrorists do not need . . .
. . . the Reds do not need. . .
. . . the boogymen do not need. . .
ad infinitum.
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Who’s behind the CCSS? The DOE, and maybe a certain corporate industry that stands to profit from headaches and acid indigestion?
The DOE rolls out the CCSS, “Try this you’ll like it.”
schools, “What’s this?”
“Try it, you’ll like it.”
“But what is it?”
“Try it, you’ll like it.”
I can connect the dots.
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Diane, I found a document indicating that it was Clinton who split hairs between the notion of “national” and “federal” standards” in 1997, when he spoke to the MI joint legislature and said,
“I have challenged our Nation to meet these national standards in the basics, not Federal Government standards but national standards” http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/WCPD-1997-03-10/pdf/WCPD-1997-03-10-Pg290.pdf
Do you know if there was any hair splitting between “national” and “federal” standards prior to that? Could this have been the catalyst that later propelled Jeb Bush’s formation of Chiefs for Change consisting of members of the Council of Chief STATE School Officers who got behind the Common Core –and thus avoided the standards being tagged “federal?” Or was there something else before or since?
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Clinton is the fellow who hit on the notion of using the governors to go around the limitations on what the DOE could do directly. It’s been downhill ever since.
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The Clinton-Gore campaign in 1992 advocated for a national system of standards and tests (see “Putting People First”).
The US Department of Education is prohibited by law from interfering in curriculum or instruction. Strictly speaking, Arne Duncan should not be defending CCSS, should not make waivers contingent on accepting CCSS, and should keep miles away. But he missed the class on federalism.
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For once, Diane, I totally agree with you.
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Wow. If I was a litigious person and independently wealthy, I would file lawsuits against all these folks for collusion to deny states and citizens their Constitutional rights –Clinton, Jeb Bush, Obama, Duncan, Gates, the National Governor’s Association, Council for Chief State School Officers, etc.
You’d think that someone would take legal action against at least some of these major players for violating the law. Are there any lawsuits pending?
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In general, to sue, one must be able to show injury in order to have standing.
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Many of those folks are lawyers, including Constitutional specialist Obama. Are they banking on being long gone before anyone can prove that students were injured?
There must be another form of government redress when the Constitution is violated.
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Impeachment, of course, quite unlikely with this congress, since the senate would try him and wouldn’t let their darling be convicted. It wouldn’t even convict Blow Job Bill for lying in office. It all seems so trivial now compared to what is going on now. However, you might also look at article 5 which provides for states to initiate the amendment process. A long hard process, but the only way left. Even Reagan failed to get congress to pass an amendment proposal for a Balanced Budget. But your interest is in something else. J. P. Morgan has offered the government 3 billion to settle the 5 or so cases against it. The government hasn’t accepted. As Vonnegut says, “So it goes.”
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I have been reading about this, here and elsewhere, and I am sure that I am dwelling in the Twilight Zone. But, it isn’t only when it comes to education. It is all around in all areas. So many things have been turned inside out. For years now, it seems that what was right is now wrong. What was good is now bad. What mattered the most matters the least. And, whatever anyone says, it can be turned around by those in opposition to point the fingers at the other. It is amazing.
The rise of the armchair politicians has moved to the online politicians. So much is spewed that has no basis in fact, but it seems as if it is repeated frequently enough, it becomes truth. The game of “Telephone” has never been more obvious. As we sit by and “watch” the corporate buy-up of smaller corporations, lay off or fire workers, consolidate jobs making those still employed wear 5 hats, but paying them less and less, and taking away benefits, some people continue to support them.
This attitude is transferred to the businesses who want to run schools for PROFIT. These LLCs that are cropping up simply take what they can; if they fail, they shrug and move on. They get their money and have no responsibility towards all those they have disenfranchised. Local communities are torn apart. Businesses are torn apart. Police, fire, and education endeavors are being dismantled.
As the population grows and we need a solid infrastructure, the rug is being pulled out from under those who need it, while the few are laughing all the way to the bank. Yet, some people can’t see it. They will “play the game” as long as they get their money. Think about it, if enough people without teacher ed schooling or pedagogical, there won’t be many vestiges of “the old guard” left to defend it. There is little conscience being utilized in this new world. I sometimes wonder if there will be a “12 Step Program to Get Over Old-fashioned Education”. If there is a profit in it, I am sure it will happen.
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Marketing. It is all marketing. Marketing sells but seldom delivers.
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Dear Diane,
Thanks for putting this so succinctly and forcefully. I agree entirely that the CCS are likely to a trivia question for the cognoscenti in another ten to fifteen years. Looking forward to seeing you and hearing you in Berkeley in just a few more days!
My very best,
Jonathan Lovell, Director of the San Jose Area Writing Project, San Jose State Univ.
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Some form of subject matter content/standards has always existed. The difference now, are national/state law makers thinking that the act of codification will result in the exact representation of that standard in schools. At the end of the day, whatever subject matter content is offered up as a standard, will be interpreted by school staff. The challenge of teaching is transforming disciplined ways of knowing the world into lessons and activities that resonate with diverse student bodies. Unfortunately, in our new accountability driven universe, the interesting act of interpretation has been reduced to writing a standard on the board or reciting it at the beginning of the period.
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Besides pushing Diane Ravitch’s book, “The Death and Life of the American School System,” I’m also giving away copies of Berit Kjos’ “Brave New Schools.” Please encourage people to read both! (They might also read or reread, “1984” and “Brave New World.”
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“Heck-of-a-job, Arnie!”
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Obama’s Katrina
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