Jeff Bryant at the Education Opportunity Network is not a critic of Common Core. He is a thoughtful observer.
In this brilliant post, he shows that the worst enemies of Common Core are its advocates.
Why are kindergarten children given standardized tests? Why are teachers compelled to follow scripted curricula? Why are teachers and parents’ voices disregarded? Why the rush? Why the gloating over lower test scores?
None of this makes any sense. Friends of Common Core need to step back, calm down, listen to teachers, think of ways to make revisions, stop the testing until there has been adequate professional development, sufficient resources, time for children to learn the skills that will be tested, and a curriculum to go with the testing.
Who will pay for the new technology for the testing? Who will grade the essays? Temps from Craig’s List? Testing companies in India? Counters?
the needed changes and planning and implementation won’t take one year. It will probably take three. Maybe five.
Reformers, cool your jets. Do it right or don’t do it at all.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The last thing that we need is anyone “doing national standards” right. National standards will have two effects: a) they will create those national markets for products that can be brought to scale that Arne Duncan is so fond of (the further Walmartization of U.S. education), and b) they will end the innovation that comes from having voluntary, competing standards.
But yes, these high-stakes summative junk science tests have to be stopped. They are doing enormous harm, and it’s just going to get worse.
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It is astonishing to me that business people, of all people, would not understand the importance of having vigorous competition among various standards–competing standards, continually being debated and adapted and refined. Do these people think that it would be a good idea to choose a national uniform that everyone should wear? To empower a committee of self-styled experts (amateurs really, with little experience) to make all the production decisions for the nation? How could they think that a set of top-down, totalitarian, one-size-fits-all “standards” (especially one created with no vetting and no professional debate outside the Achieve echo chamber) would be a good idea? That’s just crazy. These people should have been the FIRST to cry foul that anyone should suggest unaccountable centralized regulation by self-appointed bureaucrats.
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The ability to hold two competing/conflicting concepts in one’s head is supposed to be a sign of intelligence. Don’t know if I agree with that thought. Some people (idealogues of various persuations whether religious, political, cultist, or any others) have an amazing ability to hold many contradictory thougts/concepts, etc. . . in their minds without thinking twice about it (which is part of the problem, the inability to meta cognate/self inspect-examine.
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“Do it right or don’t do it at all.”
As Robert states: “The last thing that we need is anyone “doing national standards” right.”
100% agreement from this poster
“Doing the Wrong Thing Righter”
The proliferation of educational assessments, evaluations and canned programs belongs in the category of what systems theorist Russ Ackoff describes as “doing the wrong thing righter. The righter we do the wrong thing,” he explains, “the wronger we become. When we make a mistake doing the wrong thing and correct it, we become wronger. When we make a mistake doing the right thing and correct it, we become righter. Therefore, it is better to do the right thing wrong than the wrong thing right.”
Our current neglect of instructional issues are the result of assessment policies that waste resources to do the wrong things, e.g., canned curriculum and standardized testing, right. Instructional central planning and student control doesn’t – can’t – work. But, that never stops people from trying to do the wrong thing righter.
The result is that each effort to control the uncontrollable does further damage, provoking more efforts to get things in order. So the function of management/administration becomes control rather than creation of resources. When Peter Drucker lamented that so much of management/administration consists in making it difficult for people to work, he meant it literally. Inherent in obsessive command and control is the assumption that human beings can’t be trusted on their own to do what’s needed. Hierarchy and tight supervision are required to tell them what to do. So, fear-driven, hierarchical organizations turn people into untrustworthy opportunists. Doing the right thing instructionally requires less centralized assessment, less emphasis on evaluation and less fussy interference, not more. The way to improve controls is to eliminate most and reduce all.
Former Green Beret Master Sergeant Donald Duncan (Viet Nam) did when he wisely noted in Sir! No Sir! that:
“I was doing it right but I wasn’t doing right.”
And from one of America’s premier writers:
“The mass of men [and women] serves the state [education powers that be] thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailors, constables, posse comitatus, [administrators and teachers], etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt.”- Henry David Thoreau [1817-1862], American author and philosopher
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It’s almost unbelievable, so many people have not heard about the common core standards. The issue has been with communication about the changes. School district across the country have been been preparing for this change, any many other have not.
It’s unfortunate we have people who are looking for another excuse due to their laziness. We have many people who will criticize and blame, but if you ask them how many district board meeting they went too, and they will say none. Ask people who are in charge, and they will, be following a program.
The bottom line to all of this, what will it take to help our students to be able to compete with students across the world.
1. Does the CCSS help us to become competive. Yes! or NO!
2. Do Charter help our students? Yes or NO!
3. Has Big Business found it’s way in to Education? Yes or No
4. Has the Public School System been Hurt? Yes or No
5. What are we going to do with the children who are over looked?
6. What are going to do about teachers who are GREAT Teachers, and now they are not so good.
7. When will say “TFA” are not qualified to teach our children.
8. When will people say the SFA reading program is a intervention program, and not a valid Reading Program for ELA.
9. When will those in leadership really compensate teachers their worth, like other countries.
4.
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Too late
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The hubris of the deformers will do them in. This will be remembered as a very dark time in U.S. education, as a time when a lot of damage was done. One wonders, though, how much damage it will take before the standards-and testing mania will end. How many kids does this juggernaut have to roll over first?
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Yes, hubris combined with greed and uncontrolled will to power will be their downfall; they are so driven to smash and grab everything in sight that they will destroy themselves.
I’d say that I’m feeling schadenfreude at the prospect of the so-called reformers self-immolating in public, but that would be untrue, since I look forward to it: short of convictions under the fraud and RICO statutes, it’s probably the most satisfying result we can hope for.
Nevertheless, in the meantime, children, teachers and neighborhood public schools will suffer as these self-deluded greedheads rush to extract and loot what they can in the time remaining to them. The public schools and their stakeholders need more support than ever.
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Robert Shepherd and Michael Fiorillo,
You have hit the nail on the head. Their hubris in combination with their blindness regarding their personal limitations is the stuff of epic tragedy, positively Shakespearean. I remain mystified as to why they think that because they may have had success in one professional area, they know anything at all about another. I am even more mystified as to why others pay any attention at all to their opinions about public education, much less allow them to dictate educational policy for the nation. Why is Bill Gates giving TED talks about public education and why would anyone listen to them? Bill Gates did not attend public schools and Bill Gates not an educator! He may be a brilliant technocrat and businessman but why does he or anyone else believe that he is qualified to dictate educational policy for U.S. public schools? The same is true of many other reformers. Their lack of credentials and knowledge is mindboggling.
My own background is in theater. Perhaps there is a parallel in terms of people’s perceptions regarding what it takes to be effective either as an actor or as an educator. Many people who go to movies or plays think that actors memorize their lines and then recite them and that’s about all that there is to acting. They’ve seen actors perform, so they assume that they understand what actors do. Guess what. There is more it than that. Actors have to have ways of approaching the work each and every time they get a role and they need to understand how to sustain a performance over time. In acting this is called technique or craft. It may also be the case that people who have attended any school whatsoever think that they know everything there is to know about education because they have observed people teaching. Great actors and great teachers may make their work appear effortless, but it is not. In both professions, you really have to KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING.
Anyway, as an acting student, I studied the classical tragic characters, their hubris and blindness to their personal flaws and limitations. There are modern examples as well. The Walter White character on the television series Breaking Bad is one. This character and the series itself have been compared to MacBeth. As I watched the series over the summer and observed the character become consumed with power, money and arrogance, I was often reminded of the education reformers that I was learning about on Dr. Ravitch’s blog. Here is a clip. Remind you of anyone?
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Reblogged this on Transparent Christina.
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The rush is the rush billionaires get when they bilk us for big bucks, and that is really why they are in such an awful hurry. These oeople admit they know nothing about teaching and the fact that they believe these Pearson sales people are actually edication experts as they tend to title themselves is evidence of this.
These bullies do not care of the lessons fly or the tests are viable. They are interested in raking in more more more of that glorious green stuff.
I have heard there is critical thinking exercises on it. These cannot be multiple choice–thus scantroned . My be is Pearson grades it for a sum that would feed a third world country for years. : . Is that what you allude to in the little rant on grading? I am bettng there is some rubric that narrows down thr the possibilities and regiments the so tightly that the teachers will teach students the formula the rubric lays our instead of standarfds. We did this with CA HS Exif Exam. When my remedial reading class passed theirs the suits matveled. These miscreants have second grade skills! How ever did you teach them so much so soon?
We end up cheating them and ourselves a little when forced to out wit fools.
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“. . . are actually edication experts . . .” ????
dedication???
education???
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Thanks Diane!
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I agree with Robert, no doing national standards “right”. Time to get firm with these people! Glad that Mr. Bryant is reflecting, that’s a first step for him. But, no testing now or later and no testing after “adequate” professional development. A fully developed, education profession knows that this testing is wrong and abusive. Drop Mr. Bryant into one of these crying Kinder classrooms where multiple choice letter choices cannot be identified and we can only hop that his revulsion will manifest full-blown.
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“. . . no doing national standards “right”.”
Exactly kathyirwin1!!
Considering all the logical errors and epistemological and ontological fallacies involved in the processes of educational standards and standardized testing as shown by Noel Wilson why we would want to “do them right” is beyond my ability to comprehend.
Tisn’t difficult to comprehend the Quixotic Quest to rid the world of those who would “Do the Wrong Thing Righter” by those who “Go Along to Get Along” along with the standards and testing I implore, I beg of all to read:
“Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at:
http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)
1. A quality cannot be quantified. Quantity is a sub-category of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category by only a part (sub-category) of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as one dimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing we are lacking much information about said interactions.
2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other word all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. As a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it measures “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self-evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
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High-stakes summative testing is extraordinarily counterproductive. This will soon be the common wisdom. The answer to the question “Will the Reformers Kill the Common Core?” is, “Of course. Inevitably.”
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Parents, where are they. When methods like these are used, parents need to be informed.
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There are VIGOROUS debates among very well-informed people about how best to teach writing, grammar, vocabulary, literature, reading of nonfiction texts, speaking, listening, and thinking, AND THAT IS HOW IT SHOULD BE!!!!
The LAST THING that we need is some Politburo meeting every five years to do committee think about about how to do these things.
Business people, OF ALL PEOPLE, ought to understand why this is so!!!
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And don’t tell me that standards are not pedagogy and curricula. Of course they aren’t (though the CCSS in math is really a curricular outline). Standards drive pedagogy and curricula. That’s why people suggest them. If you want to stop innovation cold, if you want to enshrine mediocrity, then enforce national standards. Mediocrity is certainly what we have in the CCSS in ELA, which are extraordinarily amateurish.
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“Mediocrity is certainly what we have in the CCSS in ELA, which are extraordinarily amateurish.”
You’re being kind this morning Robert. 100% pure grade A bovine excrement shouldn’t be considered “mediocrity”.
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At our Sunday dinner my 7 year old daughter (2nd grade) proclaimed in the dramatic fashion of a typical 7 year old girl, “This is going to be the best week EVER!” Of course, I asked her why — and she said, “No more MAPS testing until January. Ugh! That testing!” I couldn’t help but say, “Now you can just think about learning.” She agreed.
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I will not speak for the writer of this blog nor anyone else on this thread, but this is how I interpret [in part] the advice at the end of this posting:
Given the fundamental changes that CCSS are meant to implement in the entire system of public education in the USA, they need an extremely limited and focused test run of the very highest quality in order to see whether under the best of conditions they could (in practical terms) be successfully implemented; even more importantly, that test run should answer the question of whether or not the standards have any realistic chance of working at all on a broad scale given the incredibly diverse educational environments that exist in this country.
In other words, prove their worth beyond the shadow of a reasonable doubt. Unfortunately, this is not how the “impatient optimists”—aka “hasty creative destructionists”—operate. Their word is enough to validate any and all magic feathers, silver bullets, and pixie dust that they apply to public schools.
Any doubts in the infallibility of their verbal abracadabra should be eased—if not erased—after considering the ongoing ‘$tudent $ucce$$’ story of LAUSD and iPads. $1 billion [oops! plus another $32 million worth of keyboards and counting] validate beyond the power of any doubting Thomas to deny that the education reformers know what they are doing. **Validate: when the education establishment repeats what they are asserting in public to themselves in private, and find themselves even more convinced than ever that they are right right right.**
Why not repeat that marvelous accomplishment countrywide?
😦
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Isn’t the creative destruction model predicated on getting in and out fast taking all the value with you? These turn around guys don’t “turn around ” anything. They go in and spin off the assets and leave. That’s kind of an apt description of what they are doing to urban education.
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The common core is intellectual inbreeding! Diversity of thought is the key to the rainforest.
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Well said, TC. Yes, as someone on this blog observed months ago, the Common Core is a monoculture.
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I just heard a good one at an education meeting last night–in a very affluent Chicago metropolitan school district, they have half-day Kindergarten. Due to the demands of Common Core (not to mention Kindergarten testing), recess has been cut to ONE DAY A WEEK.
I hope the parents react accordingly.
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Check out how this suburban district is pushing back! “I really don’t think I’m overstating the importance of this moment when I say the resistance in Montclair is a turning point in the national story of the breakdown of corporate reform.” – See more at: http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2013/10/another-broad-super-is-failing-in.html#sthash.pLHsoQm5.dpuf
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