State Commissioner John King sends his own children to a Montessori school, which is his right as a parent.
But he insists that his children are getting an education that is similar to the Common Core, which he has mandated across the state.
This Montessori teacher disagrees. She writes:
Hi Diane,
I keep on hearing John King say that Common Core is a lot like Montessori education, but it is actually the polar opposite. Montessori schools do provide the type of education that you so passionately advocate. My students talk about what is important to them and how they are free to learn.
I thought that this quote by Maria Montessori is so fitting for the situation today: “How can we speak of Democracy or Freedom when from the very beginning of life we mould the child to undergo tyranny, to obey a dictator? How can we expect democracy when we have reared slaves? Real freedom begins at the beginning of life, not at the adult stage. These people who have been diminished in their powers, made short-sighted, devitalized by mental fatigue, whose bodies have become distorted, whose wills have been broken by elders who say: “your will must disappear and mine prevail!”—how can we expect them, when school-life is finished, to accept and use the rights of freedom?” [Maria Montessori, Education for a New World, translator unknown]
Thank you for your tireless efforts and strong voice for all of our nation’s children.
Marianne Giannis
1st-6th grade teacher
Kenosha Montessori School
Kenosha, Wisconsin
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Ms. Giannis, that post is magnificent!!! Thank you!!!
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This is what these parents opposing
Common Core are
up against… told in a parody
of John King talking to his advisors:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvKVkitKOgk
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Liars lie. Who knew?
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An even more powerful and cogent Montessori quote: “Follow the child.”
Says it all, really. Follow. The. CHILD.
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Amen to that.
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I already regret sending my child to our home school rather than Montessori after only 2 months. She’s 5 and has 2 standardized tests so far. We opted out of future testing, until she reaches the dreaded grade three when I’m sure we’ll have a HUGE fight on our hands.
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Opt her out then. Keep continual watch on the school wanting to do test prep. Don’t allow it. Demand a proper education. Force the issue!
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If what this teacher says is true, then not only is self-styled “education reform” totally misguided but—I shudder to think of this—it turns out that SLANT and Kids In Prison Program, er, Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) and the like aren’t Montessori either?
Wow. The things one learns on the world wide web.
🙂
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Thank you Marianne and thank you Dr. Maria! Great quote for a critical moment in our conscious evolution away from our current massively abusive classroom conditions.
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I can’t believe anyone would compare Montessori to Common Core. I wonder if he’s read Montessori’s book?
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…or ever set foot in his kids’ school when it was in session…
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We could send him a copy of Montessori Madness by Trevor Eissler or Understanding Montessori by Maren Schmidt. As you may know, these are books written for parents of Montessori children. Trevor Eissler is a Montessori parent himself.
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Never was it more apparent to me that freedom is something people have to learn how to manage than when I worked with numerous adult immigrants that came from communist countries, who had been taught at state schools under dictatorships, and who were constantly trying to avert American laws. They had no clue about the personal responsibilities that come with being free, when no one is constantly watching you and telling you how to behave.
I gained their confidence and many told me that they thought freedom meant there should not be any laws. Most became Republicans because they thought that meant there would be fewer laws and less government intrusion under the leadership of politicians who were looking out for disadvantaged people –because Abraham Lincoln had been a Republican. Little did they know about how the parties have changed since the Civil War.
What they had learned in their communist countries was to comply with authority or to be very sneaky about disobeying. Consequently, in our free country, many seemed like good citizens on the surface, but beneath that, they acted like rebellious adolescents and young children with poor self-regulatory skills. Several ultimately faced charges for infractions of the law.
IMHO, not giving children many opportunities to learn how to manage their freedom is very likely to be another pipeline to prison.
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“What they had learned in their communist countries was to comply with authority or to be very sneaky about disobeying.”
Hell, that was what I learned going to Catholic schools in St. Louis in the 60’s and 70’s. Maybe that’s why I’ve been able to survive with a job while taking on the idiocies, gotta know when you can press and when to ease up.
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The people I’m referring to refused to comply with many laws here, such as related to employment, environmental safety and business practices but, most importantly, they defied laws that protect the rights of children, such as regulations that do not permit the use of corporal punishment in schools. This was in private for-profit education and, yes, I reported them to the authorities (both teachers and administrators).
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Oh my! King shows his ignorance one more time.
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“How can we expect democracy when we have reared slaves? ”
That about sums it all up, don’t you think?
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It is also worth emphasizing (as many have) how mandated curricula & mandated canned test prep lessons demolish the freedom that is necessary for great teaching, thus stifling both teacher and student.
Of course, freedom can lead to equally terrible student outcomes when a bad teacher is given freedom to be bad.
One way to think of arguments in favor of invariant standards/practices like CC is that they take poor teacher quality as a given and then try to figure out how to maximize the learning in the classroom of a bad teacher. Lets set aside for a moment the fact that it seems like CC is not a good set of standards according to many experts. Lets call “X Standards” the best set of invariant standards and practices that could ever be imposed from the top down. Maybe (I’m making these numbers up for the sake of argument, obviously) X Standards can make a bad teacher go from 20% effective to 50% effective, but it will also make a 90% effective teacher go to 50% effective. A school full of bad teachers might actually see improvements in student learning using X Standards, whereas a school full of good teachers will be greatly harmed by X Standards.
So maybe the long-term emphasis ought not to be on coming up with standards that are better than CC, but rather on improving the teaching profession so that invariant sets of standards and mandated “best practices” are not necessary.
How best to improve the teaching profession is a tricky question, and one thing that worries me is that some of the people who might have a big role in improving the teaching profession, like universities & colleges of education, might not have much incentive to do so.
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CTee,
Your “what if” is what psychometricians make a living off of. What if all the errors in the process are minimized, then everything is oaky-doaky. What if our cut points make no sense, doesn’t matter very few students will be negatively affected. What if someone reads the test, we make it so they can’t and the multiple construction errors are eliminated.
What if?
What if?
What if?
That is the question the psychometricians also avoid at all costs. Otherwise their whole regime comes tumbling down as Noel Wilson has proven will eventually have to come about due to the inherent invalidities that the psychometricians conveniently “what if” away.
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I’m a bit confused by this response. I’m not sure if you are agreeing or disagreeing with me, or something else. What “what if” are you referring to?
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I refer to your hypothetical example!
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Oh, and by the way that study is: “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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I’ll read that paper to which you linked but I am somewhat skeptical tht it will be germaine to my point. I’m confused on a sentence-by-sentence basis with everything you wrote above, but I’m not sure if blog comments are the best place for such a sprawling discussion.
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It is very germaine to your concerns about “improving the teaching profession”. Any attempt at quantifying the teaching and learning process by definition is illogical. Standards imply measuring.
And who says that the teaching profession needs “improving” anyway (other than the edudeformers)?
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“improving” does not imply “quantifying”. I’m certainly not advocating some kind of common core set of standards for the teaching process, or numerical teacher evaluations.
I also disagree that “any attempt at quantifying the teaching and learning process by definition is illogical”. It might be limited, but I have no idea how it is illogical by definition!
Also, plenty of people think that the teaching profession needs improvement. It certainly needs improvement where I work. Prof. Ravitch also writes at length about the need to improve the teaching profession. She just has different (and, I think, better) views than the “edudeformers” about what that improvement consists of and how to go about it.
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Often, it is not a case of good teacher vs. bad teacher but the effects of experience. I am a much better teacher now than when I first started. With time, I have developed an understanding of what works and what doesn’t in the classroom. I know what behaviors fall in the “normal range of quirkiness” for elementary students. Because I have been in a multi-age classroom for 12 years, I know that the first grader who can’t sit still and chews on his clothes will one day, as a sixth grader, be someone that you enjoy having a conversation with. We are talking about people, not numbers. Many of these decisions have been made by people who have lost sight of the humanistic purpose of education, and they lack the wisdom that is required to be effective and responsible leaders. Maria Montessori tested and refined her method based on what worked with for children, but she was a visionary because of her humility and wisdom. She always put the child first.
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Although I don’t agree that the common core is “like” the Montessori philosophy, it does focus much more on critical thinking and problem solving skills than its predecessors. I see this as a shift in public education toward what Montessorians have always known to be true. Good teaching is good teaching, and the federal government is finally starting to value a students ability to think for themselves, and not just recall facts.
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Amanda, I think that you are correct. Dr. Montessori insisted that she did not invent a model of education, rather, she discovered previous unrealized requisites for healthy human development and potential. Therefore, anyone who looks will find that each child has their own unique genetic blueprint that drives their development, and “each child’s brain is designed to follow an orderly, predictable inter-related sequence of development, facilitated through maturation and entrained through interaction with the environment” (Blythe). Just as one must work within the laws of gravity if we expect an object to fly, we cannot expect optimal outcomes from educational models that are in direct conflict with human biology.
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Critical thinking and problem solving when developmentally appropriate are excellent skills. Does the average Kindergarten student possess those skills? No, they do not. I work with Kindergarten and 3rd graders several times per week. Both of these age levels are in the concrete phase of thinking psychologically. They thrive off facts at this age. After those skills are developed, critical thinking and problem solving are natural progression. In Common Core the students are being presented with numerous methods to solve a problem as simple as 3×5. At age 8, right now a student will see that problem and look for guidance on HOW to solve it because they are used to being told how. All these methods do is cloud the brains of the students. There is no “deeper” understanding involved. All that’s involved is memorizing the methods, plain and simple. It serves no purpose. and is a total waste of good instructional time.
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“Dr. Montessori insisted that she did not invent a model of education, rather, she discovered previous unrealized requisites for healthy human development and potential. ”
I am not sure what you mean by this. Dr. Montessori did more than define the stages of development, educational philosophy, and tendencies of human beings. She created a complete method, a model of education, based on these elements. That is why Montessori teachers follow a sequential curriculum with specific lessons and materials that start with the concrete and gradually move towards abstraction. The lessons give flexibility and choice to the teacher in order to meet the needs of each student.
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The Kenosha Montessori school is very impressive and no doubt students thrive there. Apparently most of their kindergarten students are reading when they enter the kindergarten program there, so it would seem that standards that required reading in kindergarten would not be a problem.
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Yet another person who has some major misconceptions about the Montessori method. We must advocate for Montessori or I fear that it too, will go by the wayside. Perhaps we should suggest John King watch this short trailer. 🙂 http://buildingthepinktower.org/
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I agree that strictly speaking the two are not the same, Common Core and Montessori. (Montessori includes the important aspects of an excellent education that cannot be tested.) Can we believe that through an authentic Montessori education Common Core Standards can be met?
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I don’t see the similarity between Common Core and Montessori.
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Sheryl – Why have so many people in the Montessori community accepted Common Core as the standard that must be followed? Did Montessori schools and organizations alter the Montessori curriculum and teaching methods to comply with NCLB? I find it strange that many Montessorians, who routinely are critical of traditional methods of instruction, have not fully researched CC, its origin, its intent, and its impact before going through the process of aligning the Montessori curriculum to CC. I have talked to many new public Montessori teachers and they are so torn between trying to create a Montessori classroom and keeping their jobs because of CC and HST. These are teachers from Indiana, Illinois (mostly CPS), and Wisconsin. It is easy for us in the private schools to judge the “authenticity” of Montessori schools, meanwhile, the public Montessori school teachers are stuck between a rock and a hard place. As I started to research CC, something didn’t feel right about it. What I have discovered is that that it is fundamentally flawed in its theory, wrought with corruption, drunk with power, and run by arrogance. Do you really think that Maria Montessori would be in support of Common Core?
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Thank you! This is what I’ve been saying since Spackenkill. I attended Montesssori as a child and my mother was a Montessori teacher. Montessori has a different paradigm than Montessori. My favorite Maria Montessori quote: “Never let the child risk failure until he has a reasonable chance of success.”
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