Dan Drmacich was principal of Rochester’s School Without Walls. He is now head of that city’s Coalition for Justice in Education. He read an opinion piece in the local paper by Xerox CEO Ursula Burns touting the virtues of the Common Core and decided he needed to respond. He concluded she had no idea what she was talking about.
He argued that her essay demonstrated why corporate executives like Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and Burns should stop telling educators what to do.
One by one, he took apart her flawed claims.
And he concluded by saying:
“To adequately implement any major education change, meaningful practitioner involvement must be a major part of the change process (in this case, teachers, curriculum experts and motivation researchers), along with field-testing and fine-tuning the processes, before it is fully implemented. I am sure Burns would not initiate any organizational change as complex as Common Core at Xerox without first using research-based processes.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Nobody from Xerox has any business criticizing education (or anything else). We’ve had a Xerox for almost two years and out of that time it’s worked maybe six or eight months (cumulative). They finally gave us a new machine this past Friday, and they’ve been out every day since to fix it. They even tried to blame the problem on us – someone must have pulled on the finisher because it was out of alignment. I dunno, maybe it came that way? So until they can get the logs out of their own eyes….
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speaking of CCSS buzz words, check this out:
Achieve Announces Launch of Business Center
for a College- and Career-Ready America
Washington, D.C. – November 13, 2013 – Today, Achieve proudly announces the launch of the Business Center for a College- and Career-Ready America and its website, http://www.BusinessandEducation.org.
American business leaders understand the importance of qualified talent. Yet, too many of our students graduate high school academically unprepared to succeed in the real world, not reaching the critical college- and career-ready bar. Graduating “college-ready” means being prepared for postsecondary academic experience, and “career-ready” signifies possessing the knowledge and skills most valued – and most urgently needed – by employers. In today’s increasingly knowledge-based economy, a career is not just a job. A career provides a family-sustaining wage and pathways to advancement and, more than ever, requires postsecondary training or education.
With this in mind, the GE Foundation and AT&T, along with Chevron and the Prudential and Travelers foundations, collaborated with Achieve to create the Business Center for a College- and Career-Ready America to help businesses think more strategically about how best to support college and career readiness for all students. The Business Center’s unique value for business leaders is rooted in Achieve’s deep understanding of implementation of college- and career-ready standards – and what will help states ensure success going forward. To strengthen the bridge between awareness and engagement, the Business Center provides a range of practical and customizable tools and examples of how business leaders can and do support standards-based education reform within and across states. Deeply aware of the importance of talented individuals to our nation’s competitiveness, American business leaders strongly support the college- and career-ready agenda. They also understand the Business Center’s important role in furthering that goal:
“Since 2008, AT&T has helped youth at risk of dropping out of high school prepare for college and careers in the 21st century. Achieve’s new initiative helps reach that goal by preparing business representatives to learn from best practices and fully support communities to prepare all youth for college and careers.”
Beth Shiroishi
Vice President, Sustainability and Philanthropy, AT&T and President, AT&T Foundation
“The goal of GE’s Developing Futures™ is to reach a national and state audience and build support for the college- and career-ready agenda among the public and private sectors. Achieve’s Business Center fills a real need to make this a reality. As a ‘one-stop-shop,’ the website provides the business community with up-to-date resources and tools that build support to help students meet rigorous college- and career-ready standards.”
Kelli Wells
Director, U.S. Education Programs, GE Foundation
On behalf of Achieve, President Michael Cohen states:
“The support of the business community is critical to the success of education reform over the long haul, and Achieve is proud to support this community through the Business Center for a College- and Career-Ready America. The new website equips business and industry leaders with the strategic tools and resources they need to help states, communities and students reach their college- and career-ready goals. Achieve looks forward to continuing its work with corporate and foundation leaders and strengthening education achievement nationwide.”
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I loved Dan Drmacich’s letter and had to go back to read Ursala Burns’ essay. While I will not criticize Xerox products (though our school’s copiers were plagued with problems!), I would remind Ms. Burns what has happened to Xerox and Kodak with the advent of top down management, that only seeks to make money for those at the top. I daresay that alongside white flight, the economic woes faced by the city of Rochester, including Rochester City School District, are due in large part to the failures of Xerox and Kodak. Kodak has spent billions on CEOs whose sole purpose was to lead the company into bankruptcy, with those CEOs being grandly rewarded while eliminating promised benefits to retirees. The Rochester community has endured thirty years of Kodak’s slow death. Xerox’s death has not gained as much attention–perhaps because its leadership took note of the hostility towards Kodak, as its flailing destroyed the city in which it was founded. I’m sorry Ms. Burns, Xerox is no example of how to be successful–as if its way of doing business has any relevance to running a school district!
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That is a good point about business having relevance for running school districts.
It begs the question of where the responsibility of schools ends and some job training begins. I trust basic math skills would be a bother to have to teach at an entry level job, but it is interesting to consider.
Personally, I’d like to hear more talk about the Metric System being emphasized, if we really want to talk about being globally competitive.
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and I don’t mean it’s worth considering teaching basic math skills on the job, but where is the line drawn of what is school responsibility and what is work place training.
Maybe those were part of the conversation in CCSS.
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“Maybe those were part of the conversation in CCSS”
Come on, Joanna, I just spit my grapes out upon reading that. Hopefully Xerox makes a good computer cleaner.
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Sorry Duane. Didn’t mean to spoil your lunch (or your morning snack)..
I’m just trying not to make assumptions about things I don’t really, REALLY KNOW about. Ya know. The claim is that not having to do remedial courses is the reason for CCSS, so it stands to reason they discussed it. Right?
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But this subject does get philosophically interesting. We, as Americans, have the right to go to school and we have the right to slip through, I guess, as C students if we want. And then later, if we regret that we blew it in high school we can try to make up for it in community colleges (learning that hard way that we squandered something the first time). But not with CCSS, I guess. ? So is that a good thing in the big picture?
I always perceived other countries as more focused on work labor training in school, but America less so. But I also attributed that to the fact that schools were hosting integration; that is to say, schools are where the most interaction between races actually happened in the last fifty years(it certainly was not happening in churches or businesses much). And so now we are at the point where some places are moving backwards in that regard, some have not moved much at all (white flight, etc) and some have truly integrated and are ready to focus less on race interaction and more on good “schoolin'” and then they hand us CCSS and we’re still experiencing the aftershock because it happened so fast.
I don’t know. I need to think and read about that more. I am less in touch with high school because I have been in elementary for the most recent years of my teaching. I do think, though, that the Metric system gets ignored and needs to not be ignored. But are high schools supposed to be plugged into business as a matter of business calling the shots? Maybe yes? Maybe no? Maybe both? A balance?
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Joanna,
3rd hour plan with the first lunch time-all of 22 minutes so I eat somewhere in that total timeframe.
“But not with CCSS, I guess. ? So is that a good thing in the big picture?”
I guess if you consider brainwashing (mandatory learning through threats and use of force) to be a “good thing” then it is. That is what I hear you saying with that paragraph-that forcing a student/teacher/school to follow a single path is a good idea. I don’t and don’t think you do either.
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No, I don’t. Tis true. I don’t like it. I just don’t understand why folks do like it. So I keep trying to “walk around in their skin” (a la “To Kill a Mockingbird”) to try and figure it out. That’s why I’m on this blog every day.
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Joanna,
If you want to walk around in their skins then read the edudeformers blogs. If you can stomach it!
But don’t forget to come back here!
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Xerox created Xerox PARC. At PARC, the following were invented: the Postscript language used for type and vector graphics, the graphical user interface, the mouse, the laser printer, and Ethernet. Basically, the scientists at PARC created much of the personal computer revolution. And the top-down management at Xerox took one look at all this and said, “We’re in the photocopier business.” And they threw away trillions of dollars in potential revenue that ended up being developed and capitalized upon elsewhere.
Now, with the CCSS, we are doing the same thing. We are allowing a centralized, authoritarian Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth to make a priori decisions about learning progressions and outcomes to be measured for the entire country. But this time, the top-down mandate will be enforced everywhere, and innovation, real innovation, will grind to a halt. The CCSS are a recipe for stagnation and mediocrity. Every totalitarian regime has its national standards, curricula, pedagogical approaches, and tests, and eventually, such systems fall of their own stupid dead weight, but not before a lot of damage is done.
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And of all people, business leaders should understand that what we need is NOT a single, invariant, inflexible, one-size-fits-all, totalitarian, mandated bullet list (the CCSS) but, rather, vigorous competition among varying visions for how we should be educating our children and what the outcomes of that education should be. Centralized regulation of education by a distant, totalitarian authority makes as much sense as centralized management of the Soviet economy did.
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Yes, PARC proved that freedom, beanbag chairs, and thick shag carpet are the key to enlightenment and innovation. Our nation’s school system should mimic this successful corporate model. But, if and only if, adequate training and preparation is first put in place for carpet care.
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Particularly insightful post. Most forget how cutting edge Xerox really WAS.
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We need a situation that encourages the development of innovative instructional approaches based on emerging understandings of how kids learn. But a single set of invariant, codified “standards” will ensure, instead, that approaches that do not closely follow those “standards” will not be taken, that true innovation in curricula and pedagogy will grind to a halt.
The new “standards” in ELA, for example, fail to recognize that there are vast differences in types of learning and types of knowledge acquisition across the various domains. Let me give just one of MANY possible examples:
The new ‘standards’ treat acquisition of the grammar of a language as the learning of explicit rules, and they require that the “texts” to which kids are exposed be leveled according to their complexity. However, we know that grammars are not acquired via explicit instruction but that they are intuited from the ambient linguistic environment by machinery in the mind dedicated to that purpose. For that machinery to work, the ambient linguistic environment to which the child is exposed at home and at school must contain the full range of grammatical constructions of the language, and we know from linguistic research in low SEO areas that kids in those areas do not get that sort of essential exposure.
Now, suppose that, understanding how, in fact, kids acquire the grammar of a language, an academic–a linguist, say–were to suggest to an educational publisher that in the early grades we should create compensatory environments in which kids are exposed to high-interest oral language “texts” that systematically and fairly rapidly introduce complex syntactic forms of the kinds to which kids have not been exposed in their home environments. This is the sort of thing that we should be doing, given what studies of language acquisition tell us. However, the educational publisher would take one look at such a proposal and say, “These oral language “texts” you are talking about are not at the readability level required by the ‘standards,’ and the ‘standards’ do not call for such a prominent role for early oral language, so the idea is incompatible with the ‘standards’ and cannot be considered. We’re looking for ideas that follow the ‘standards’ exactly. We can’t sell anything else.” As a result, an extremely important, scientifically warranted innovation in curriculum and pedagogy would be ruled out, a priori, because of the “standards.”
That’s one example of how the “standards” dramatically curtail curricular and pedagogical innovation. There are many, many more. Issuing these invariant, mandatory “standards” is equivalent to saying, “Build me a more efficient car. But it has to have a gasoline engine. And it has to seat six. And it has to have an internal combustion engine. And it has to have four wheels. And here’s my list of a thousand other specs that it has to have.”
But suppose that instead of having these invariant, inflexible, mandated standards, we had a situation that encouraged innovative thinking about standards and learning progressions in the various grades. Suppose that a great deal of debate about alternative proposals was encouraged. Suppose that there were national forums for such debates. Suppose that small, innovative publishers of educational materials could develop materials that pick up on the best of these ideas but that are incompatible with the CCSS. Suppose that districts could adopt those materials.
That way lies improvement and innovation. Adhering to a priori “standards” is a recipe for ensuring that our curricula and pedagogy will be stuck in the past.
The CCSS in ELA can most charitably be described as a bullet list of the hackneyed notions about the teaching of English, many of them misconceptions, common among amateurs who having given instruction in the various domains they cover much thought. The last thing we need to do is to treat this amateurish bullet list into holy writ.
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cx: “who having” should be “who haven’t”
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Excellent essay, Principal Drmacich!
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Part of Achieve Inc.’s marketing plan to market their product, the Common Core State Standards, includes gaining the support of the Business Community. In their Implementation Guideline document it is spelled out how they wish to reach out to Businesses and Business leaders as partners in promoting CCSS. This strategy is believed to assist in gaining community buy-in which is the goal for successful implementation. I suspect these business leaders and CEO’s are writing their speeches and op-ed pieces based on Achieve’s press releases or straight out of marketing plan points. I am sure we will see more of these support pieces as efforts are ramped up, and they will all follow a similar script. I hope that people continue to respond/refute them in this manner so the reply can be seen widely and awareness will grow.
Personally, anytime I see a big-money company like Xerox or Exxon-Mobil pushing an education program this is a huge red flag to me, and I have to really question the motives and the money trail that points to who is truly benefiting from this.
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The Common Core State Standards were part of a business plan hatched by folks who wanted to create a monopoly on computer-adaptive curricula. They had to have a single set of national standards for their curricula to adapt to. They weren’t created to improve educational quality. A lot of people are being played. And they are being played very, very well.
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I made a similar comment during my testimony before the NYS Assembly Education Committee — that I highly doubted Bill Gates would roll out a new computer program without beta testing and tweaking it first, as that would be very unsound business practice, indeed…..
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OK, so I just had to go to an hour long CC math standards workshop. Our Curriculum person lead it, along with the math team. First we had to use a bar diagram to figure out a problem they put on the big screen. I solved it quickly in my head, the way I do (intuitively and with practice, having learned my addition, subtraction, multiplication and division facts by memorizing in the 80s). Then I had to show them with a bar diagram and we were given coy smiles that we learned to work things backwards, but now we needed to show how to construct the problem with the diagram.
OK. Whatever. I teach music. I appreciate their zeal (I guess) and want to know what is going on in the classroom. Then we had to make an equation with an “unknown” (don’t all equations have an unknown? isn’t that what an equation is?) That’s when the curriculum lady (nice lady ,but I think she moonlights on the death star) sat beside me and in the quiet of writing a story to go with someone else’s equation, my cell phone (which was sitting in the wooden chair behind me) vibrated and sounded quite like I had suffered from flatulence, which was terribly distracting and terribly funny and the ESL teacher and i got the giggles, which was not appreciated.
Then I had to sit with fourth grade teachers as we made a chart of the main things they focus on (per the CC/OA K-5 Standards). I wrote what they said and one of the bullet points (4.oa.3) we skipped because they could not summarize what it said. And when the ESL teacher asked me why I ask so many questions about CCSS, I said because I am trying to figure out where to send my son for kindergarten and a fourth grade teacher said “there won’t be public school any more in a few years.” So, it’s like they acquiesce to this stuff, as if the train is headed unstopably off the cliff. Those who take it all very seriously seem scary to me. They get serious and concerned in ways I’ve never seen in an adult. And I asked a second grade teacher in the hall what she thought about CCSS and she says she hates it, wishes it would go away, it’s stupid and it’s not developmentally appropriate (second teacher to tell me that). So I think those who do say they like it, perhaps just feel powerless to change it. ??
I feel like someone is playing a trick on public school.
Nevertheless, I am going to continue watching, trying to understand, and waiting to decide where my son goes to school.
What a curious time.
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“OK, so I just had to go to an hour long CC math standards workshop”
Makes sense for the art teacher, eh!!!
Gotta get all on board the Train Wreck Educational Express.
It’s all for the children-Bwaahaa haa haa!!!
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Dan is a great guy. Mentored one of my former students and she graduated from School Without Walls when her previous school didn’t have confidence in her. A lot of courage!
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Thank you, Principal Drmacich!
The Common Core Standards are not developmentally appropriate for Early Childhood students!
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