Anthony Cody follows up his brilliant analysis of the flaws of Common Core with this thoughtful projection of what to do next.
Cody believes that the standards are fatally flawed by the absence of any democratic process or review or trial.
There is also the indisputable fact that the standards were adopted by 45 states without their review but because the federal government made the adoption of “college and career ready standards” a condition for eligibility to win Race to the Top millions. This, despite the fact that the federal government is prohibited by law from exercising any direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum, instruction, or textbooks used in schools. Promoting CCSS, as Arne Duncan does, is probably illegal.
Cody concludes:
“…there is a deeper principle at stake here. Standards developed in secret without the active participation of K12 educators, parents, students and experts from the start are not acceptable or legitimate. There may be elements of the Common Core that are worthwhile, as jpatten suggests. The trouble is, we have not had any real process to debate these standards, or try them out with real children. And as indicated before, there is no process available to alter the standards in any meaningful way. According to their sponsors, they must be adopted as is, or dumped. I say dump them. Start over. Go back and fix the process – and the new standards we end up with will be better as a result.
“And for those who just want to skip over the issue of democratic process, and take the standards as a starting point, I challenge you to stop and think about the precedent being set, and the prerogatives we are handing to both the Department of Education and the Gates Foundation. This is our chance to set a completely different precedent, which would undermine rather than reinforce the prerogatives of the powerful. Isn’t that worth doing?”
My view:
Stop the Common Core testing. The students and teachers have not been prepared for the tests.
Stop the Common Core tests. The cut scores are aligned with NAEP proficient, which is a high level of achievement and not a reasonable pass-fail mark. it is guaranteed to fail–unfairly–70% of students.
This is what I hope will happen after the testing is called to a halt.
States and districts should review the standards and see how they work in real classrooms with real students.
The K-2 standards should be dropped or revised.
The arbitrary division between literature and informational text should be eliminated. It has no basis in evidence, experience, or research. If teachers want to teach all-literature or all-informational text, that is their prerogative.
Tests should be prepared and scored by teachers, as they are in other countries. The teachers not only get instant feedback, but see what their students understood and did not understand, and also learn what they did not teach well enough for most students to understand. The current Common Core tests do not provide instant feedback or item analysis, and nothing can be learned from them other than to rank students.
Bear in mind that no one can enforce the standards as written. Will the National Governors Association or the Council of Chief State School Officers sue a dozen states to stop them from improving the standards? Not likely.
Let us not forget that the central conversation here is not about test scores. It is about children, teachers, and education. What is in the best interest of our society? The Common Core causes scores to collapse. Its boosters say that is a good thing. But in the meanwhile, they are causing havoc in the lives of children, teachers, and schools. That is not a good thing, unless you believe that disruption is a thing of beauty and that something good is sure to emerge from chaos, disappointment, outrage, crushed egos, and upheaval.
Count me skeptical.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Maybe what we’ve learned is that children can’t be standardized.
The biggest change that needs to happen is to make the standards voluntary if we’re going to have them at all. Some teachers/schools might find them helpful as guidelines, but teachers and schools should be equally free to disregard them entirely or use portions but not other portions. No testing or stakes ever should be tied to them.
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YES!
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“States and districts should review the standards and see how they work in real classrooms with real students.”
This would be almost too good to be true. My only concern is that we’ve become such a data-obsessed nation that states would add in more testing in the name of seeing how the standards work in real classrooms with real students. Do you have any suggestions for alternate methods of showing whether the standards work or not?
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“Do you have any suggestions for alternate methods of showing whether the standards work or not?”
BW23,
I suggest you print out* and read Noel Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” to understand why they CANNOT work due to the empistemological and ontological errors that show the false basis of using “standards” as an educational foundation. At the fundamental base of what comprises standards and the accompanying notions of measuring the teaching and learning processes are logical contradictions and falsehoods which make the whole schema unstable. Wilson’s study can be accessed at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
*See: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-reading-brain-in-the-digital-age-why-paper-still-beats-screens to understand why the print media is better for the brain to understand what one is reading.
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I agree with the notion we must toss all of this CCSS apparatus. It was born of an egregious plan to profit on our children and our sacred public trust of education for all. Ideas spawned of evil never become acceptable.
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You are correct. It’s about the misuse of federal and state funds to create a non-existing education crisis related to child exploitation for the purpose of generating profits for corporations. Follow the money trail and all of Duncan’s federal “reforms” blessed by Gates, Murdoch and Bush. Say NO to federal education policies. Say NO to inBloom, one-size-fits-all education, Common Core, scripted NY Core Knowledge curriculum, high stakes testing, VAM, for-profit charter schools, etc.
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Good article. And most of the CCSS is built on bluster and b.s.; once we understand that and screw up the courage, we can kiss this junk good bye.
One of the red herrings I keep reading about is the idea that holding a copyright on the standards somehow means that Gates “owns” the standards. That’s nonsense. Copyright applies only to the expression of an idea, not the underlying idea itself. And the scope of copyright for factual material is very narrow. In the end, I expect that Gates’s copyright of CCSS doesn’t amount to much outside of make a literal copy of the standards. This is just more intimidation.
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I have been volunteering in a 2nd grade class this year that is using the Core Curriculum. I feel that children have not learned enough of the materials in the Core in order to be tested. I think that testing is overdone and does not prove that the teacher has been teaching. I feel that the curriculum should be loose, but with a program for things that should be taught and save all the testing for middle school.
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Such crazy mixed messages from ed reformers. A decade of telling us teachers are lazy self-interested union thugs and now the main selling point of the Common Core is that “X % of teachers polled” support it.
I guess teachers are useful to the cause this week.
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I don’t understand regulating that something cannot be modified but up to 15%. I don’t understand the rationale behind that, I don’t understand the ability to force that on someone/some group. If it relates to RttT dollars, doesn’t that eventually expire? I cannot imagine telling a parent, if they select a product for their child: “now, you must use it exactly as packaged and prescribed, with 15% wiggle room, or else. . .”
Or else what? What exactly is the ramification if a state changes it 20%? Do they get sued and if so for what?
This is way too thought police type stuff for my comfort level and it makes absolutely no sense to me. What do the writers of CCSS possibly have to gain from making that parameter? You buy it. You use it, as you see fit. Is it like performing a musical and you pay royalties and it has to be just as the publishers published it?
Can someone, anyone, please fill me in here.
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And it if is like a musical where you pay royalties and therefore you don’t change the keys of the songs or the lines, etc., then states should dump it. Who needs that kind of micromanagement? And furthermore, I can’t think of any curriculum or set of ideas that deserves that kind of deference. . .except of course the Constitution (both Federal and State). Maybe that’s where some loopholes exist that trump CCSS regulations.
What a frustrating thing. I’m getting tired of it.
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tired of CCSS.
I have started carrying a copy of the portion of NC’s Constitution that is about education. I am memorizing it.
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It’s always been about the royalties and the Texas Education Agency is involved.
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Extortion (also called shakedown, outwresting, and exaction) is a criminal offense of obtaining money, property, or services from a person, entity, or institution, through coercion. Refraining from doing harm is sometimes euphemistically called protection. Extortion is commonly practiced by organized crime groups. The actual obtainment of money or property is not required to commit the offense. Making a threat of violence which refers to a requirement of a payment of money or property to halt future violence is sufficient to commit the offense. Exaction refers not only to extortion or the unlawful demanding and obtaining of something through force,[1] but additionally, in its formal definition, means the infliction of something such as pain and suffering or making somebody endure something unpleasant.[
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Sound familiar? Think RTTT cash prizes and NCLB waivers.
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Limiting any additions to the CC standards to a maximum of 15% is rather telling. This bizarre constraint subverts the credibility of the founders and places them clearly outside the arena of public education. Instead of welcoming changes or additions (beyond 15%) – they effectively shut the door to any creative influence by real educators. Hmmm, now what could be the motive for such lockstep thinking from a group that stresses the importance of critical thinking and 21st century. Maybe they think the best way to compete with China is to act like the Chinese government.
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Good point about China. Giggled (but not really).
I was just telling my principal that it feels like the USSR c. 1984 ( with meaning in the date there).
She had never heard of David Coleman.
Many folks in education still do not know these truths about CCSS, I am finding. They discuss our acquiescence to this indoctrination as if it were just the next education trend coming down the pipeline.
Maybe at the end of the day that will be a good thing. I think you could tell classroom teachers tomorrow that we are abandoning it and they would be fine. They would know what to do (the experienced ones anyway).
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Top-down control of K-12…
Foisted on states under false pretenses…
Crony capitalism profit motives…
Elitist driven social engineering…
Having no legitimate Constitutional basis…
What’s wrong with all this, folks?
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“What is in the best interest of our society? The Common Core causes scores to collapse. Its boosters say that is a good thing. But in the meanwhile, they are causing havoc in the lives of children, teachers, and schools. That is not a good thing, unless you believe that disruption is a thing of beauty and that something good is sure to emerge from chaos, disappointment, outrage, crushed egos, and upheaval. ”
Naomi Klein wrote a book, titled, The Shock Doctrine. The Shock Doctrine is the story of how America’s “free market” policies have come to dominate the world– through the exploitation of disaster-shocked people and countries. The economist, Milton Friedman, was ecstatic that Hurricane Katrina was able to do in one day what he hadn’t been able to do in 50 years – privatize the school system of New Orleans. Let’s see, where else if collapse and disruption going on right now? The tragedy of the typhoon in the Philippines is being used as an opportunity to push for “climate change actions.” What would those actions be? Cap and trade. Carbon credit schemes, like the one where Al Gore buys carbon credits to offset his jet plane rides around the world from a company that he owns.
What is another policy that is being negotiated and created in secret right now? The Trans Pacific Partnership trade agreement.Their goal is to conclude talks by the end of this year. To be clear, this is not about helping business and industry in this country. As with everything this administration has done it is about “leveling the playing field,” and not only here in the US, but globally. It is about global redistribution of wealth, which does not mean bringing other countries up to our standards. It means bringing our standards down, all in the name of equality.
Being the most successfully industrialized nation, our wealth needs to be distributed to the “developing” countries, of course, under the guise of saving the planet. That is generally what global “communitarians” believe. That is the basis of Agenda 21.
When the rich countries refused, the group decided “the only hope for the planet” was for the industrialized civilizations to collapse. Maurice Strong, the creator of Agenda 21, through the U.N. pondered, “Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?
The real purpose of the Common Core is to indoctrinate our students into the “green movement.” The real purpose of the CC is for the federal government to be in charge of creating the tests, which they are through the two testing consortium, SBAC, PARCC. He who controls the test, controls the curriculum. Never mind the Standards. It is the curriculum that counts. Amplify and Achieve and all those dastardly companies are receiving RTTT funds to create CC aligned tests and curriculum materials. And that is where they place the indoctrination that “global governance” by the U.N. is wonderful and necessary to save the planet for future generations and to create equity in the world by enforcing policies that will collapse the U.S. economy.
The problem is that many people on this blog have already been indoctrinated and do not understand that we have to fight “sustainable development” and “smart growth” and “cap and trade” and “carbon limits” and TPP trade agreements with the same determination we have to save public education and our children’s minds from the CC.
The same billionaire boys club is behind all of it. Pass the Glass Steagall Act to defund their schemes and see if the country we once were can emerge again.
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I think that those of us not happy with Common Core need to be careful about being lumped together with the right-wing tea party nuts who are against common core due to being against anything done by the federal government, and look at Common Core as a communist plot or something. Did people notice that the post above by Dawn Hoagland is a rabid anti-environmental post, by someone who clearly believes that climate change is a hoax, that we need not be concerned about global warming, environmental standards, or anything of the sort. She says some things we may agree on mixed up with that stuff.
If we are not careful, we will end up getting lumped together in the public mind with such wingnuts. (“RIght and left crazies opposed to progress”, etc.) I think we need to be clear about how we express our concerns with how Common Core is being implemented, in order to avoid being lumped together with such folks.,
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PS to what I wrote above. On NPE I followed a link about Common Core to an article posted on Michelle Malkin web’s site. The article was good, by a mom concerned with Arne Duncan’s idiotic statement about “white suburban moms”.
However, looking around more on that site, one sees a lot of scare stories about that “terrible Obamacare that will take away our freedom”, etc., etc. Michelle Malkin is a far right commentator on Fox News. I think we have to be careful about being associated with such folks.
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Hey Mike, did you just call me a wingnut? If you want to label me something…you can label me veteran teacher, Democrat, union leader, activist. You have made several assumptions in your post about me that have no basis and are not relevant to the discussion. Why is it so important to you not to associate with people who disagree with you about some things? It is also easier than debating the facts. Exactly which point in my “rabid” post would you like to debate the veracity of?
I do believe that global warming is a hoax, not because I am a member of the tea party, which I am not, but because I have researched the subject and let the chips fall where they may. It turns out that Maurice Strong and Al Gore and David Rockefeller and Bill Gates have decided to use the ruse of global warming as the basis of their “green agenda.” so they can get people in developed countries like the U.S. to willingly collapse their own economies for the good of the planet. They make money on this stuff (Al Gore does own a carbon offset company) and they love the control it gives them. Also, the green agenda, just for the record, will not lead to “progress” as you say, but will rather take us back to the stone age. Limiting VMT (vehicle miles traveled) and how much carbon each person and each company can produce, controlled by heavy taxes, is not a progressive program but a regressive one.
It is based on the wrong idea that the world is a pie with limited resources. If you have more, that means I have less. The world is actually filled with unlimited possibilities that can be discovered and developed by the creative capacity of the human mind. That is why more minds are better than less. The green agenda has us believing that we should stop having babies because people are a blight on a once beautiful planet that we now need to restore for the animals. The first Director General of UNESCO was Julian Huxley who was also the president of the British Eugenics Society from 1959-62. If you think the U.N.is not an institution that wholly embraces eugenics, think again. And remember that Bill Gates, the pusher of the Common Core, is heavily invested in Monsanto, creator of experimental genetically modified crops which other countries have banned, The TPP I warned you about will make it impossible for these countries to refuse Monsanto in the future because they can be sued on the basis of “lost future wages.” I don’t know why you think it is so impossible for global warming to be a hoax when you think it is perfectly possible for Monsanto to be evil and the Common Core to be less than it is cracked up to be. The same billionaire boys club is behind it all.
On page 405 of David Rockefeller’s Memoirs, he outs himself and his whole family and admits that he has been working against the best interests of the United States in order to establish a one world government for years. 31,000 scientists have published letters and signed petitions and have publicly denounced global warming and the concept of climate change and especially the concept that CO2 is a pollutant. Carbon is the basis of plant life and our human life and we should not be concerned about limiting it. However, aluminum and barium and nano particulates that are being deliberately sprayed on us every day through chemtrails ARE pollutants and this practice should be banned immediately. Just because I do not believe in global warming does not mean that I do not care about the environment or curbing real pollution. But the billionaire boys club has infiltrated the EPA and they exempt companies like Halliburton from the Clean Water Act and they don’t even acknowledge that chemtrails exist although they are a line item in the federal budget.
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Yes Dawn, regardless of what you consider yourself, someone who calls global warming a “hoax”, warns people about that terrible “green agenda”, and how we must be afraid of the UN, certainly sounds like a right wing nut to me.
It isn’t just a matter of disagreeing with one issue or another, even if you write some things that I agree with. That whole mindset of anti-environmentalism you espouse is very dangerous, and is characteristic of radical right-wingers, Fox News, etc.
You have done “research” on global warming? Then why do most scientists totally disagree with you? Are they all part of that evil cabal trying to destroy the world? (That in itself is a very simplistic world view. The world is more complicated than that.) (And one must remember what such mindsets of an evil cabal controlling the world, has brought us before, such as in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.)
Do you also believe that Obamacare is a plot to destroy our freedom?
Yes, you do seem to be a wing nut. I’m not saying so in order to call names, but to point out a danger,in our unhappiness with the implementation of Common Core, about being lumped together with such wingnuts, which could decrease our credibility,
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Do you believe the official line that Oswald was the lone shooter that killed Kennedy? If you don’t, then perhaps you can concede that there is a cabal of evil people perpetrating crimes against the people of the United States. If you do, then I would say you are too closed minded to make continuing this conversation worthwhile.
Just for the record, the purpose of Obamacare is to allow many people to die rather than receive excellent health care as well as bailing out the insurance companies. Does anyone believe a word that Obama utters any more?
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Dawn, you are truly impressive. You have a clear-eyed view of what’s what, display an impressive fingertip command of a wide array of relevant facts and connections, and, to top it off, have a highly developed facility of communicating your thoughts logically and persuasively.
Would that my children could have you as their teacher. Thanks for your post(s).
Mike, you have clearly drunk deeply of the Kool-Aid. More, you are a sly, slanderous, insular leftist bully. You are a pygmy lapdog next to Dawn’s lioness.
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For the Record, and I realize this water several months under the bridge: Thank you Mike, nice to read a calm response to people who come out with all guns blazing. Dawn and FlyoverGuy7, I think Mike’s concern stems from the shotgun approach used to lump a large number of unrelated items to CCSS which is the important matter at hand. And, when you start to wallow in “Kool Aid” comments your train has left the tracks.
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If you know the people who are the movers and shakers behind the creation, implementation, and marketing of the Common Core then it only makes sense to look at what else these people are up to in order to understand how the Common Core fits into their agenda. Just because you have not done the research to discover these links doesn’t mean they don’t exist. I could bury my head in the sand too but I choose to be informed and that is an ongoing process. The Rockefeller family has destroyed this country. They used their money to buy and control the education system, the medical industry and the policy making bodies of this country. They fund the United Nations. They donated the land in NYC on which the U.N. is built. They are implementing Agenda 21 whether you acknowledge that or not. (Just attend your local town council meeting and see how many times they use the word sustainable development.) The Common Core is outlined in Chapter 36 of Agenda 21. It is for the purpose of inventory and control of “human capital.” Stop being so closed minded and wake up. My posts have not left the track. They are exposing the track.
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Much of the dissatisfaction with CCSS seems, from the above, to emanate from their implementation. As a New Yorker and one who spends 1 or 2 days per week in high school classrooms, I can agree with the pressure to improve test scores. CA seems to have it correct: work with standards without testing.
That being said have heard no one speak against the essentials of the standards, to wit, challenging students to think:
Grade 7 Math, “Solve real-life and mathematical problems using numerical and algebraic expressions and equations.” (omit “real” since the alternative is not grist for a middle school mind.)
Grade 7 LA: “Write arguments to support claims with clear reasons and relevant evidence.”
I see the latter every week in 9th grade LA classrooms here in NYC. Might also say that this language is used in high school physics classes, e.g. make an argument about the relationships between force, mass, acceleration and the like.
The science, math and LA teachers are challenging students to think, to make a claim, an argument, support it with good reasons and relevant evidence.
Now, if this is not what we want our students to do. Please say so!
Yes, what I have laid out here is not about self-expression, curiosity, and getting in touch with feelings. That’s for another post, but is something we obviously want to see in classrooms. And do see, as a matter of fact, when students I observe are working on taking a stand on a significant issue, such as Stop and Frisk or Teenage Voting Rights.
Otherwise, I take the foregoing posts as set against how these high intellectual expectations have been implemented. That’s the problem with so many change efforts in any organization, how we go about implementing what has been developed. (Who did write these? Were there no educators on any of the math/LA committees?)
If we want to exempt a state from accepting, as some have, then go to the legislature and have them rescind the legislation. Only 44 states (?) have accepted.
We don’t have to implement them in the way that NY is doing. Maybe CA is better.
But will somebody please tell me that they do not want to challenge students to think, to prepare them for life, let alone college. Read Tom Friedman on any given week to get a perspective on what employees today need to succeed: to be innovative, creative, entrepreneurial.
So, if we have other standards in mind for LA and Math, please let us know what kids should be doing in these classes that I will visit down on 14th street today, Tuesday, in NYC.
I’d really like to know.
For the sake of openness, I must say that as a NYC LA and university teacher educator and now writer/consultant, some of us have been working to challenge students to think in just these ways for nigh on to 30 years. I think Socrates did the same by presenting what he called “perplexities” to the youth of Athens.
John Barell
http://www.morecuriousminds.com
@johnbarell
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John,
Right on. Socrates did not use standardized tests.
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One of Cody’s claims is that the standards were “developed in secret.”
Here’s from the standards website.
“Q: Were teachers involved in the creation of the standards?
A: Yes. Teachers have been a critical voice in the development of the standards. The Common Core State Standards drafting process relied on teachers and standards experts from across the country. The National Education Association (NEA), American Federation of Teachers (AFT), National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM), and National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), among other organizations were instrumental in bringing together teachers to provide specific, constructive feedback on the standards.”
Does anybody have evidence to the contrary?
Again, when I speak with teachers in NYC schools they do not like the testing aspect as it affects them. Being held accountable for results on standardized tests and having these same results count 40% of the evaluation. This is absurd.
But they are developing ways of observing, monitoring and assessing students’ growth in those areas previously cited: solving problems in actual world contexts and making/supporting claims/judgments with good reasons and relevant, representative evidence (and specifying the warrants that pertain.)
Can anybody listen to the babble on tv from politicians, pundits and news readers and not have the fond hope that we are educating students to think clearly, to look at all the evidence and arrive at reasonable conclusions and be able to support their reasoning?
Oh, for some to ask these folks, “How do you know?” “What are your judgments here based on?” “Where’s the hard evidence?”
Some teachers I observe would be and are striving for these intended outcomes regardless of the CCSS.
But let’s differentiate between the need to educate to the highest level each student can achieve and how this program is being implemented by 44 states.
Again, any state wanting out can just do so. Correct?
Don’t all our students deserve to be educated to achieve in this “globalized” society in which we live?
John Barell
http://www.morecuriousminds.com
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John,
I think most of us agree with the stated goals of Common Core–more critical thinking, etc., rather than kids just learning to fill in the bubbles on multiple-choice tests.
The problem is the implementation.
I would think that the way to foster deeper thinking, etc., would be to have less reliance on standardized testing, so that teachers can spend more time teaching, and less time on testing and test prep.
Instead, CC seems to involve more standardized testing than ever, created by publishers, with very little input from teachers, Besides, how can a computer-graded test judge critical thinking? Will a computer program grade the students essays? Can a computer really judge that? Or outsource the essay question grading to low paid “test readers” in India? Will they really be able to judge the creative thinking skills of American students? Wouldn’t the best judge be the students’ teachers?
Rather than decreasing the mind-numbing “teaching to the test”, CC seems to be a matter of “teaching to the new test”.
The plan to decrease the teaching of literature is totally outrageous.,
As others have said, education should not be looked at solely as a place to “prepare workers”.
That said, if what the workplace needs is more creative thinkers, there is no way that standardized testing and scripted teaching can teach that. What is needed is less of that, and more reliance on the creativity of teachers. A non-creative system cannot teach creativity.
And, it seems to have been designed in many aspects to help corporations rather than students. Why is so much technology required?
The experience New York has had with CC testing points out to us how bad this system can be.
As Diane often points out, look at the example of Finland. That is the reform direction we should be headed towards, not the increase in standardized testing that the so-called “reformers” here are preaching, which is really not reform at all, but regression into the worst aspects of what has occurred to US education in recent decades.
I think though, we have to be careful in how we express our opposition to aspects of Common Core. Just to say we are against it, doesn’t make clear what we are for? Are we for the status quo, the current testing regime? Do we share the concerns of the tea partiers who are against anything the federal government does?
Perhaps we should not ask that CC be abolished, but that it be seriously revamped, that its testing be halted, and totally redone with much more input from teachers, that the level of standardized testing involved in it be seriously reduced, etc
In other words, to make clear that we are totally for the goal of changing education to help develop more deep and creative thinking, but that the manner that CC has been developed has been wrong, and that it needs to be redone.
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I don’t at all appreciate the way that testing the CCSS has been brought in or the way they’ve been tied into teachers’ evaluations too soon. I won’t even mention the way that places use test scores, which will include these, to track students into classes. That being said, I am a big fan of having these standards and have been able to use them for nothing except great conversation and collaboration with departments and schools regarding what and why we’re are teaching and expecting from students in each course.
I won’t go into a play-by-play with this article, but I will ask this of people who don’t want there to be CCSS at all, want to fully repeal them and start over. Do you believe that your schools and teachers all met prior to this and democratically developed the standards and curriculum in your schools? Do you actually believe that all of your schools had a curriculum and planned expectations in use? I know there have always been some great schools out there, but I’d bet we’d be surprised at how many classes were running without a plan and how many schools never spoke to sending or receiving schools (switch in grade levels) about expectations and content.
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In Upstate NY, my wife and I have two boys 6 and 9…1st and 4th grades. They are very smart and we work on this CCS an extra hour each day seven days a week. The stress is evident on both, their desire to learn is numb. Our school is stressed right down to the janitors. The paper wasted every day is unbelievable. It would be interesting to see a study the number of trees being wasted on this. I see and understand the concepts but am scared to death for the well being of my children. I can not imagine how kids without parents dedicated to their education or are spending their time trying to work to feed and dress them will survive this. There is very little time to be a kid with this. Looking at every other society with incredible smart citizens and you will find most with a happier childhood not wasted on study. This reminds me of Germany during Hitlers build up. Very scary.
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I am also very worried about what happens now that NYS is pulling back on RTTT. I’ll apologize for the somewhat random order of my thoughts .
1) Most media and people who’ve been talking about the move are pointing towards NYS pulling out of RTTT but saying CCSS. This is the first piece that I’ve read that actually points to rolling back on the standards themselves instead of just the testing and attached APPR system. Our own inconsistency and inaccuracy is alarming.
2) I know many want state-level standards, but I wonder if – for example – the 2005 NY standards were created with deep collaboration, vetting, and trial periods. I know in Maine (where I taught before NY), we were handed the Maine Learning Results after NCLB happened. Is there really a tight bond between NYC area and upstate or Western NY that are going to make state standards any more representative of the needs of a school’s students than national standards would be? After time in the Bronx and Westchester/Rockland suburbs, I’m not thinking that there is a single NY that would make state standards any better.
3) I don’t agree with VAM or the insanity that is the SLO process or the demeaning labels brought about by Pearson’s tests from last year, but I do believe in a strong teacher observation / evaluation system, and Danielson – for example – has plenty of review to support the Framework’s use. Is NY really going to scrap all of that work and head back into limbo?
4) I fully disagree on the criticism around specifically speaking to informational texts. The idea of cross-content literacy needs all the help it can get.
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