The New York Times summed up the universally hostile response that Commissioner King has received from parents and educators in New York at an ongoing series of forums about Common Core and its botched implementation.
King should use these meetings to apologize for setting absurd cut scores (passing marks), aligned with “proficient” on NAEP, which is not a pass-fail mark, but represents solid achievement of a high order. He should have apologized for testing students on material they had not been taught. He should have apologized to teachers for threatening to evaluate them on the new scores when they had not been prepared to teach the Common Core.
Instead he made clear that he has no intention to change course.
Out comes the usual charge that the critics are led and manipulated by the teachers’ union, even though the union supports the Common Core. This is a variation on Arne Duncan’s claim that “white suburban moms” are disappointed that their child is not so brilliant after all.
The subtext is that suburban parents are dumb and are easily led by “outside agitators,” they don’t know what’s good for their children, they are being used, they don’t want high standards, etc.
Really, people in high public office should show respect for the public, not disdain. They should remember they are public servants, not bosses with unlimited power.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
King was nominated and directly appointed (in an unanimous vote: yes, even Harry Phillips and Kathleen Cashin and Betty Rosa voted for King) by the Board of Regents. The Regents themselves are not directly elected by the people; they are selected by the legislators from the state’s 13 judicial districts. These judicial districts do not neatly overlap with legislative districts, so even the lawmakers are not directly accountable for whom they select as Regents. Last but not least, the Regents aren’t paid a salary, which all but guarantees that the wealthy, retired, and politically connected will be over-represented on the board.
I support CCLS and the results of this recent poll –http://www.scribd.com/doc/184979745/SNY1113-Crosstabs — support King’s contention that the people showing up at these forums represent an extreme, not average New Yorkers. However, I think families, students, and taxpayers in New York would benefit from direct public voting to determine both the members of the board of regents as well as the NYSED commissioner.
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“support King’s contention that the people showing up at these forums represent an extreme, not average New Yorkers”
But doesn’t Duncan’s comment indicate he DOESN’T think the dissenters are “extreme”?
He said “white suburban moms” are scared, and he’s talking about these very specific NY forums where this very specific group that he has identified are complaining.
He didn’t say “white suburban moms who are Tea Partiers” or “white suburban moms who are radical leftists”
He was talking about property values and public schools. I think it was dismissive and patronizing and out of touch, a political comment from a political actor rather than anything substantive, and, sadly, typical for him, but it doesn’t seem to be a description of an EXTREME.
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Chiara, when Duncan spoke to newspaper editors in June in DC, he described opponents of Common Core this way:
“The Common Core has become a rallying cry for fringe groups that claim it is a scheme for the federal government to usurp state and local control of what students learn. An op-ed in the New York Times called the Common Core “a radical curriculum.” It is neither radical nor a curriculum. … When the critics can’t persuade you that the Common Core is a curriculum, they make even more outlandish claims. They say that the Common Core calls for federal collection of student data. For the record, it doesn’t, we’re not allowed to, and we won’t. And let’s not even get into the really wacky stuff: mind control, robots, and biometric brain mapping.”
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Arne is following a tried and true propaganda method–distort your opponents’ arguments and then attack the distorted version. This is the fall-back position when your opponents have arguments that are irrefutable.
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So, who DOES he listen to, value the opinion of, respect, think he is obliged to??? Who? Who? Who?
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The “education reform” movement is run by a small group of oligarchs, a few people who can get together in a room and make the decisions about standards, testing, teacher and school evaluation, curricula, and pedagogical approaches for everyone else. King is accountable to the antidemocratic folks who placed him in his position. Like Arne Duncan, he is a functionary, there to carry out an agenda that has been decided for him and for everyone else.
The Common Core Curriculum Commissariat will doubtless include, in its CCSS social studies standards, a lot of material about how we live in the land of the free. Freedom, of course, has been redefined as the ability to do as one has been told. And sadly, there are many, many upper- and mid-level educrats who are perfectly willing to sell the freedom of teachers and curriculum designers and curriculum coordinators and other administrators for a little access to the powers that be.
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The subtext is that suburban parents are dumb and are easily led by “outside agitators,” they don’t know what’s good for their children, they are being used, they don’t want high standards, etc.
Precisely. Such arrogance! This is what one gets from the reformers all the time–utter arrogance, refusal to engage on the issues because they have not stopped to think about their opponents’ views deeply enough to recognize that there are issues. The modus operandi of the reform movement is top-down fiat deriving from hubris–from a deep-seated conviction that the opposition isn’t in the know, is clueless and therefore not worth attending to.
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Amazing quote from the Times article:
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Timothy Daly, the president of the New Teacher Project, a group focused on teacher effectiveness and aligned with the reform movement, said that public displays of aggression toward Dr. King were political tactics that should be cause for concern.
“This is the first African-American leader of the State Education Department,” he said. “And to watch him be shouted at and insulted by largely white audiences in the suburbs is discomforting and it is jarring that, not only has it happened, but it has happened repeatedly.”
—-
I’ve watched most of the forums online, there was not a whiff of racial acrimony. These are parents, students, teachers and administrators speaking from the heart about their kids. Shame on Timothy Daly for baselessly accusing public school defenders of racism, rather than addressing the substance of the debate.
Maybe Arne Duncan’s remark about white suburban moms was actually an approved talking point, and not a gaffe.
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The racism charge is just moronic.
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Sometimes these people parody themselves. They outdo any parody that might be written of their views.
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I found the whole tone of that article annoying. Baker fawned over King. “If King seems professorial to the extreme, it could be his background: He has an undergraduate degree from Harvard…” Who ever said he seemed professorial? Uninterested, uncaring, disinegenuous- absolutely. Professorial? NO
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King is about as professiorial as Hulk Hogan . . . . .
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An undergraduate degree from Harvard makes on professorial? Give me a break.
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In a democratic republic such as ours was supposed to be, we have some elected and some appointed officials. All are supposed to be honest representatives of the people.
A culture of deception and dishonesty, whose philosophy is “enrichissez vous” (get rich if you expect to have a voice) is in no way compatible with democracy.
“Enrichissez vous” is the motto of corporate education reform banner.
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Reform is about enriching the reformers and NOT about education or children. That’s why they want nothing to do with Finland or the schools that the Obama and Gates children attend. With the billions in tax funds funneled to corporations in the US, all children could have a Finland style education in the US. The difference in US and Finland – Finland does not have Duncan, Gates, Bush, Murdoch, News Corp shareholders, K-12 on-line shareholders, Klein, hedge fund managers, corporate lobbyists, corporate donors to Obama, etc. hijacking public education.
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YUP. Six TRILLION dollars–much of it on no-bid contracts–has been spent in Iraq and Afghanistan. A small fraction of that would have completely revolutionized U.S. education. But it would not have enriched the oligarchs who own the defense industries.
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the “defense” industries
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It was similar here in Chicago – they had a bunch of “hearings” on the school closings issue. Thousands of parents, students and teachers turned out to rage against the closings, and BBB and her puppetmaster Rahm went ahead with them anyway. But here they did one better. They actually claimed that there was overwhelming support *for* the closings.
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With the Race to the Bottom and the multi Common Core disasters, Duncan projects blame on the “white suburban moms.” He’s in trouble, but I’m not certain that he knows the depth of anger that exists in every state as a result of his misguided policies.
As a result of NY Common Core disasters, King projects the problems on unions and interest groups. He’s in trouble, but he does not understand the anger that exists in NY as a result of his lack of leadership and his misguided alliances.
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Duncan’s attack on white, suburban Moms; David Colemen’s “nobody gives a &*@*&@$&*!! what you think,” Arne’s Chief of Staff revealing that the purpose of the new standards was “to create national markets for products that can be brought to scale” (i.e., the Microsofting and Walmartization of U.S. education)–
these guys are their own worst enemies. They hold such obnoxious, antidemocratic views, and such extreme versions of those, that they can’t help but show their true colors again and again.
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Because Corporate Ed reformers like the New Teachers Project’s Daly can’t possibly admit to a groundswell of opposition from an overwhelming majority of parents and educators, they must instead blame nefarious parties like unions or “special interests” like Class Size Matters. And when the dirt doesn’t stick to these usual bogeymen (and women), the reformers instead claim that the criticism and pushback is racially motivated. Pretty outrageous. Let’s see what happens when King and NYSED actually have the courage to hold meetings in minority-dominated districts like NYC…
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As the adage has it, “You ain’t seen nuthin’ yet.” Wait until these new tests roll out nationwide. They are going to be an unmitigated disaster, and the deformers will have a national revolt on their hands. NY is but foreshadowing.
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There’s another possibility, of course.
The dirty little secret of the testing industry is that one can design a test to get whatever results one likes. It may be that the Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth will learn from the New York experience and field test the new tests and throw out the most difficult questions so that fewer will fail. They will have a careful balancing act to perform, however, because they need the results to back up their contention that our schools have failed. So, the results have to be bad but not TOO bad–not NY bad. Fine tuning them to get those results will be a considerable undertaking, and they will doubtless fail at it.
A prediction: I fully expect the standards-and-testing mafia to get their wind-up toys in Congress to introduce some sort of test security legislation to keep people from being able to see, ever, copies of the actual national tests that kids will be taking. That legislation will, no doubt, be wrapped in the flag–in language about protecting kids against evil-doers who would undermine the educational process. Authoritarian legislation that takes away basic freedoms is almost always wrapped in the flag.
These guys have to know that the tests that they are developing will not stand up to NATIONAL scrutiny, so they are doubtless going to do their best to try to hide them from the people and to get the people to think that doing so is in THEIR interest. Parents aren’t going to buy that, though. They are going to DEMAND to see the tests.
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I’m having trouble posting. Trying again with single spacing. This article, written a few months ago in anticipation of the confusion over common core was double-spaced. I’d love to know if anyone can identify with my arguments.
THE CORE CURRICULUM: AN EXCEPTIONALLY UN-AMERICAN INVENTION
By Robert B. Elliott
Historically, the one thing that has probably been most often and most proudly and loudly touted as a positive ideal for education in the US is our encouragement and fostering of independent thought and autonomous action via progressive or “liberal” educational policies. Education has traditionally been defined, at least for the better part of the last century in terms that attach a high value to self-determination, Yankee individuality, personal initiative, and autonomy. Any suggestion in the past that people of any age were to be programmed with dogma or spoon-fed information, propaganda, trivial memory work, or “knowledge” from some central source or authority was looked upon with great suspicion, or rejected out of hand. Indeed, this evidence of John Dewey’s influence is unfortunately about all that remains of his great legacy within most of our schools.
It is peculiar that now, practically everything that students are exposed to in school is scrutinized and approved by alleged “experts’, officials or authorities in advance, to the exclusion of nearly everything else. The core curriculum is arbitrarily imposed as the latest and greatest gospel with a cult-like adherence at all levels. That this sort of top-down, externally delivered content is widely accepted without protest or outrage in the 21st century is an anomaly that needs explanation.
Curriculum formerly referred to a general course of study in specified disciplines, sciences, liberal arts or broad subjects. Schools offered a list of courses or training and instruction in certain areas, depending on the age and background of the students; the experience and expertise of the teachers, and the avenues for career or professional preparation and development that were chosen as a focal point by students or by parents and others, usually as a consequence of social and technological advances or popular interests. Those curricula were general and broad. No central group or specialized authority was tasked with surveying and selecting the specific items for daily review, or with determining the minimum range of topics and points of information, skill or knowledge that were required for universal adoption and acquisition. No “standardized” tests were administered tied to sets of detailed curriculum content. No criteria were designed within a federal bureaucracy to verify that the official information had been “learned” and fully incorporated into each child’s repertoire.
If it quacks like a duck
How does one distinguish between fact-based material that is essential as a “core” or a foundational base for an adequate education, and arbitrary or subjective material that is intended primarily for the purpose of indoctrination? The simple answer is that one does not and cannot make such a distinction. Therein lies the rub. There has been massive confusion relative to the popular fiction that there are certain identifiable “basics” and minimalized segments of information or knowledge and skill prepared for any and all students on some accessible scale that should be expertly or scientifically isolated and defined for future universal application. That haughty concept is purely delusional. The “basics” are different for each child and they vary considerably with time. Any attempt to condense knowledge into some canned format cannot help but congeal into indoctrination.
One still hears admonitions that it is necessary to get “back to basics”. The belief is that educators somehow became distracted by notions about self-esteem, by higher level sophisticated and fanciful material, or by “modern” theories relative to learning styles or holistic development at the expense of simple techniques, elemental intellectual constructs, behavioral discipline, or basic foundational concepts. This is a highly simplistic misperception of what has been or should be an educational process.
The fallacy is that there MUST be some set of fundamental or rudimentary conceptual items or ideas or mental learning blocks upon which more sophisticated learning or knowledge is subsequently built. This is the Rosetta Stone that is foolishly sought, and the reason for much futility. While it may very well be true in theory for any given child that “basics” exist for that child, it is a huge mistake to presume that identical blocks can be discovered and presented for groups of children to be administered like so much nutritional food and therapeutic medicine.
The learning sequences, patterns, orientations, styles, attitudes, needs and environments, both internal and external for individual children (or adults) are never even close to identical, with the possible exception of identical twins. The primary impetus for choosing what will be presented for learning and the manner of presentation to students should optimally be the questions that the learners ask and their responses to stimuli and to dialogue. Their levels of awareness in various contexts; the knowledge that a particular adult or “teacher” has with respect to the learner(s), and the circumstances and situations that are recognized in the present within their environment that are actually or potentially affecting perceptions and perspectives must be given preeminence (respect being the operative term).
It is foolish, highly presumptive and dangerous, to attempt to predetermine what all of these variables will be for unknown future students, and to try to answer questions or to dictate “knowledge” sequences before they arise in the life and mind of the child. The “basics” do not exist even as rough guides to be permanently defined and spelled out as a template for future students in future classes to use as the building blocks for an “education”.
The building blocks of education originate with the personal and private experiences and perceptions of each individual child, which each child must use with maximum flexibility and autonomy in making “sense” of the world. Indeed, the senses and intuition are profoundly more crucial than most of our current crop of “educators” seem able to imagine or appreciate. Education is to a large extent ineffable. It must be experienced; it cannot be scientifically or methodically analyzed, magnified, glamorized, scrutinized, or preplanned by selected professionals.
Concepts and comprehension are virtually always partly cognitive understanding that can be represented in tangible symbols and common language, and partly mental, emotional and psychological, or some composite of these. Attempting to integrate some wizard’s ideas, interpretations, feelings and beliefs into some grand engineered program, boxed for distribution within a core or a curriculum is the antithesis of providing educational opportunity. It’s called comprehension because it is comprehensive!
Science in the Back Seat
Teaching is more art than science. Learning is more organic and spontaneous than it is a matter for programming or scheduling by professional teachers. Education is not something that one acquires by attending classes; by reading textbooks and/or performing exercises; by listening to lectures or instructions, or by following arbitrary orders and obeying authorities, although those things occasionally contribute to education, mostly through coincidence. A core curriculum is a symptom of a pathological disease of falsified understanding and mythology. Curriculum, as we have come to conceive it over the last few generations is the surest means we could ever employ to derail the educational process for millions of students for twelve long years.
Once again, let’s talk about what this signifies for the US and for our national future. In establishing a “core curriculum” we are allowing a handful of select ostensible experts to choose what will be the designated official or approved content for any particular course. In trigonometry or calculus, there may not be much to dispute or much in the way of changing theory, given today’s level of development in these less mutable disciplines. Yet, style, methods and teacher’s applications of materials and illustrations cover a wide range when not micro-managed from the top down. But in history, biology, civics, psychology, and even in various other sciences, subjects or classes, such as in literature, language and physics, what is specified as correct and acceptable today or in one classroom may be a matter for much speculation or disagreement tomorrow or in another location, depending on sources and various professional or personal beliefs and viewpoints. Even at the elementary level, it must be left to the teacher in the classroom to know what should be at the core of the day-to-day plan for individual students and classes.
With an official curriculum locked in place, science, reason, inquiry, art and physical needs may all take a back seat to politics or political correctness, to narrow conceptions held by over-cautious authorities, to ignorance or religiously motivated theories, or to fear-based thinking, beliefs and policies. To the extent that there is a science of education, it is blocked from effective implementation. In pursuing the ideal in this domineering manner, we can’t even approach the mediocre.
There is a long list of reasons why a core curriculum or any type of arbitrarily imposed or prescribed curriculum dealing with content is inimical to educational progress. However, none of the reasons are more compelling than the fact that the primary driving forces will inevitably become dogma, orthodoxy, false certitude and doctrinaire belief and canon, subjecting young people to dangerous extremism and narrow-mindedness and leading to un-American manipulation. These risks are inherent in any such scheduled and mandated prescriptive process.
In addition, the bias toward a polar gravitation in the direction of conservatism is obvious as a consequence of the irresistible temptation to select those people who have safely shied away from controversy or uncertainty as the purveyors of content for fear of ruffling feathers. If they are the anointed “experts” they will typically decide on certain favored material and a given orientation with the presumption that their discretion is superior. Such experts typically take their expertise and imputed wisdom all too seriously.
Dumb and Dumber
Establishing a core curriculum is dumb, to put it bluntly. It necessitates dumbing down everything that is to be studied before a page is turned. In order to get to this imaginary “core” the supposed experts must reduce everything down to the lowest common denominator. This entails over-simplification and a narrowing of scope. It means homogenizing and pasteurizing language and ideas that are no longer true to life or history. It requires standardization and political correctness that have no place in education.
Students who are more academically inclined are typically bored out of their skulls as a result of the core that has incrementally become the whole rotten apple. They often become jaded, recognizing that this narrowing of curriculum is a sad joke played on them.
Furthermore, by zeroing in on certain facts, information and specific statements supposed to represent reality for students in a specified curricular content an entire world of other content is automatically excluded. The teacher is forced to concentrate on that material as prescribed and has minimal opportunity or flexibility to relate his or her personal knowledge, experience and perceptions regarding “reality” to students. The relationships of teachers to students and of students to each other are of little or no value in this pathological scenario. Students are also deprived of adequate opportunities to provide input that is their own or to dwell on the things that are of particular personal interest or curiosity for them. The curriculum must keep moving like a slow moving train that cannot stop for passengers. Education, however, can only be something that integrates personal experience and interest with reliable public and adequately established material.
Another major consequence of establishing a core curriculum is that content is subsequently validated and verified through testing. It arbitrarily puts in place a specific compilation of concrete material content that must be taken at face value and accepted as authority and final truth. Nuance disappears from the scene. Any possibility that some other perspective or alternative or answer may be permissible or even possible is permanently quashed when students are tested on precisely that material and that one correct answer. Testing thereby takes on a massively exaggerated significance. This again is a refutation of principles of education and democratic process that have long been held sacred in America.
An anonymous quote from about 1960 says all that needs to be said about testing and measurements in education. That statement was, “Good Lord! The thing was a mystery; and we measured it!”
A final handicap of a core curriculum to be discussed here (there are others) is our generally perverted concept of what knowledge is or where it resides. The popular conception of knowledge is that it is comprised of the information, data, previously discovered facts, or other accumulated stuff that is contained in media, such as in printed books or computer bytes and bits, visual and auditory records, artwork, or oral history and other symbols, which are passed down from parent to child and teacher to student. This is anachronistic and unscientific.
The extent to which one has absorbed, understood or articulated this sort of symbolic material has been equated with having knowledge. Levels of study and interaction with others presumed to be knowledgeable are agreed by consensus to confer upon an individual a certain “degree” of knowledge, often validated by a degree offered by an institution. However, external media cannot contain or confer knowledge. An institution cannot verify with certainty that one has knowledge.
Knowledge is what is known. Something can only be known by a living, breathing human being. This is a crucial distinction. Symbols, regardless of the form they take are merely symbols, which cease to be knowledge as they are transmitted from the human brain to whatever media is chosen. What gets recorded is information, not knowledge, regardless of how profound and indisputable it may appear. My ability to know what you know is limited by numerous factors and your knowledge has innumerable and unidentifiable correlates that cannot be fully known to me.
Knowledge that is transposed into symbols is never perfectly transmitted without some degree of nuance and difference in perception and sensation within the recipient as a consequence of that person’s unique history. Every man IS an island in this respect. Yet, curriculum is applied under the pretention that knowledge exists externally and that it can be absorbed by some sort of osmotic process. The ability to parrot the symbolic form in one media or another is NOT an adequate demonstration of knowledge. These grave errors are just a few of the reasons why schools do not educate and why we were declared a “Nation at Risk” nearly thirty years ago by a blue ribbon commission appointed by the president.
Most of the teachers in our public and other schools are fully dedicated to serving the best interests of children. Most are relatively competent, if not excellent as teachers of the subject material they are designated to teach. The particular path teachers take in guiding students is of far less significance than the relationships they establish and the internal compass they follow in deciding the course of study. The number of questions they answer and their facility in answering them as aware adults is of greater importance than whether or not a magically determined sequence has been followed for the students collectively.
The logical question one might ask is; how do we change in order to stop deluding ourselves into believing that there is some way to guarantee that more children will be enabled to fulfill their potential through a guided curricular tour around a trivial circuit? The bad news is that it will never be possible to eliminate the demands for a pre-approved curriculum as long as school attendance laws are in place. The good news is that each competent teacher has always had a curriculum that she or he follows, which relies upon an intimate knowledge of students, an intimate knowledge of a subject matter, a talent for communicating with students, and a holistic approach to teaching.
The best news is that students will soon be demanding that they not be hoodwinked into following inept leaders down this dead-end path to Memoryville. Through social media enabled by Internet interaction and stimulating conversations as part of a revolution in education, young people will no longer be willing to cooperate in this debacle or the scandal of standardized testing and monthly faux school reforms. The revolution is getting close to critical mass at this very moment.
The reality is that schools cannot guarantee education and never will. Their original purpose was not to educate and they will never have the capacity to become educational institutions. Institutions cannot educate, period. More often, they interfere with the process. This essay is merely one in a series of articles and writings that will be instrumental in breaking new ground and motivating parents, teachers, students and others in forcing the changes that have been blocked by inertia, bureaucracy, legal requirements and a vast mythology. Autonomy and independent thinking cannot ever emanate from un-American practices or from the unconstitutional usurpation of the rights of citizens.
SUMMARY:
The irresistible urge on the part of educators to create a core curriculum that will be the base or foundation upon which great educations will be built derives not from any logical or scientific theory or successful practical experience, but rather from an excessively long series of frustrating failures. It is a presumptuous mistake to state a definition for education for someone else, or for everyone else, since education is ineffable, ever expanding and not subject to uniform definition. However, it is safe to say that narrowing the range and scope of what will be presented to students by establishing a specified and sanctified core goes directly against the fundamental concept of education that places a high premium on broadening the student’s explorations and exposure in the wide, wide world.
Liberty, autonomy, independent thought and a spirit of creativity and expansion of ideas and limits to new frontiers are elemental to the American credo. We have a strong tradition of rejecting too much interference and dogmatic or autocratic control over our everyday lives or over our pursuit of happiness and success. We invented anti-establishmentarianism. What is the establishment of a core curriculum in schools, but the imposition of artificial and arbitrary limits and borderlines and restrictive definitions that dictate to teachers and students what they will AND WILL NOT study and learn. How can it not exclude a phenomenal amount of information and narrow the scope of education to something unrecognizable as education? That sort of oversight has a name and it is called indoctrination.
Education, by any rational and American definition cannot be predetermined, or prescribed, or confined to what some authority or supposed group of “experts” have decreed. The myths behind this derive from the false belief that there are basics that can be identified and spelled out for teachers or students for mastery; that students need blinders to prevent them from being distracted; that there is a science of education that can guide everyone involved; that teachers can’t be trusted to make proper choices and decisions, and that the intimate knowledge of the student by the teacher isn’t necessary for education to take place.
OOPS! The problem must have been an extra page at the end, which caused the window to be blank until I managed to scroll up. But, I don’t believe it was ever sent.
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tl;dr
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Very, very well said, Barry.
I used to be a big supporter of having a knowledge-based core curriculum. I still think that having a knowledge-based curriculum (one devoted to helping kids to attain world knowledge–knowledge of what–AND procedural knowledge–knowledge of how) is MUCH to be preferred to this skills-based stuff that we’ve been doing for so long. And I also think that some shared material having to do with the common human legacy should be universal. Of coruse, the CCSS in ELA are nothing like that. The CCSS in ELA are more of the same abstract-skills-based stuff that we have been doing for decades now–a ratcheting up of the gawdawful “today, class, we are going to learn how to identify the main idea” crap that we’ve been wasting kids’ lives with for years–more skills separated from ANY coherent, extended, meaningful context, varied OR invariant.
I emphatically agree with you about NOT having an invariant curriculum for all. To his credit, E. D. Hirsch, Jr., always said that his “Core Knowledge Sequence” should take up no more than HALF of school time. He, too, has long understood (and many of his proponents AND opponents don’t understand this about him) that kids differ and that the last thing we should be striving for is turning our schools into factories for producing uniformity. Unfortunately, the Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth wants for our schools precisely what you attack here–an invariant Procrustean bed. They think that we can turn education into a series of Powerpoint slides–bullet points to be checked off (though those bullet points, in the CCSS in ELA, are abstract skills, separated from any coherent context, not descriptions of bodies of knowledge–of both what and how–to be attained and demonstrated).
The kids entering our schools today are going to experience changes, in their lifetimes, that will be more dramatic than all the changes that have occurred since recognizably modern humans emerged 100,000 years ago (or so). Things are going to get very weird, very fast. And even at the beginnings of their adult lives, they are going to take extraordinarily varied places in an extraordinarily varied, complex, pluralistic society. We should be looking to identify the proclivities, interests, inclinations, needs, wants, etc., of every child and figuring out how to build upon those. Education is not fulling a bucket. It is lighting a fire. EVERY CHILD should have an IEP. Every one should have regular meetings with a committee that includes teachers and his or her parents or guardians, to take stock and to make course adjustments. We need to to produce independent, intrinsically motivated learners that are VASTLY DIFFERENT from one another–not obedient do-bots. The curriculum should be extraordinarily more varied than it is today and should include a lot that people never dreamed, before, of making part of ordinary schooling. The LAST THING WE NEED is a model that treats kids as widgets, as parts to be identically machined. The LAST THING WE NEED is a system that forces an invariant, one-size-fits-all set of standards, curricula, and evaluation and pedagogical techniques on every child and every teacher.
Thank you for your essay, Barry. I bet that you are one helluva teacher.
The toadies who are supporting the standards-and-testing juggernaut now rolling over our nation’s children will protest that the standards are not a curriculum and that, consequently, you are off base, Barry. But the fact is that the CCSS in math are a curriculum outline, and the CCSS in ELA dramatically distort and curtail what can be done in both curricula and pedagogy.
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People like to draw a facile distinction between skills-based curricula and curricula that are all about memorizing lists of facts. But that’s all wrong. Skills are what are honed or acquired when one is deeply engaged in material, over a period of time, that is intrinsically fascinating. We don’t read in order to hone our finding the main idea skills. We read because we are interested in ants or buffalo or sailing or permaculture or vegan cooking or Hindu religion or dirigible driving or dancing or computer games or whatever. And, of course, we should attend to explicit skills instruction where appropriate–understanding, however, that our job is to operationalize that instruction, for we are communicating “knowledge of how.” Many, many skills are not profitably taught explicitly, however, until people are in their late teens or early twenties. These are the kinds of skills that are innate and have to be exercised or ones that we are built to acquire incidentally, in the course of other work. And the important thing about that work is that it must be intrinsically interesting to individual kids, which means that it can’t be the same for every kid because kids differ, and THAT’S A GOOD THING. It’s something to be encouraged and built upon, not snuffed out. With every lesson we teach, we teach the love or hatred of learning. And our goal must be, has to be, to create intrinsically motivated learners. One doesn’t do that by force feeding every child the same invariant stuff.
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Again, love your essay, Barry. One minor suggestion. “Philosophers’ Stone” would work better, I think, than “Rosetta Stone” in this piece.
It’s wonderful to run across people who are thinking deeply about these matters! Thanks for sharing this.
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I am beginning to be frustrated with people that are looking for a roll back, or an adjustment of the program, or a “slowing down”.
We need a three year moratorium and a stake in the heart of a program that contributes to the emotional suffering of young children. Any new program should include local classroom teachers.
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We don’t need a moratorium on the Common Core and standardized testing. We need to put stakes into both before they suck all innovation out of our schooling and all interest in learning out of our kids.
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King must have failed the leadership classes that are related to his doctorate. Are his courses and grades public record?
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King is the son of John B. King Sr, who was Brooklyn’s first African American principal and later was the New York City’s executive deputy superintendent of schools. His mother was Adalinda King, a guidance counselor in the city’s public school system who was born in Puerto Rico. When King was 8 years old, his mother died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 48 while working in a middle school. A few years later his father started showing signs of advanced Alzheimer’s disease, which left King to more or less take care of himself. When he was 12 years old, his father died at age 79. King credits the New York City Public School System for literally saving his life after the tragic loss of his parents. He feels a devotion to give back to the educational system to make it possible to save more kids like him.[1]
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“King feels a devotion to give back to the educational system to make it possible to save more kids like him.”
May God have mercy on his unsuspecting soul.
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King reminds me of the many know-nothing fringe advocates I’ve encountered in education who are plagued by the curse not even knowing what they don’t know about children and schools..
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The arrogance and stupidity. What a deadly combo.
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Mr King…
“You do not care about Public Opinion????”
Neither does Mayor Rob Ford…
Equal in your apathetic attitudes…
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Besides everything else, what particularly bothers me is King’s quote in the final paragraph in which he asserts that the need for “higher standards” is a done debate. Very disheartening. These people are entrenched and smug. Disgusting.
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