Carol Burris has written an article for Valerie Strauss’ The Answer Sheet in the Washington Post in which she reviews the effort by Arne Duncan and New York’s John King to identify the “enemies” of Common Core.
First, Duncan and King agreed it was the Tea Party. Then, as protests grew in New York, King said the enemies were “special interest groups,” but didn’t name them.
Now Duncan says the enemy is “white suburban moms” who are disappointed that their child is not as brilliant as they thought.
Meanwhile, they cast the advocates of Common Core (the U.S. Chamber of Commerce? the Business Roundtable? Jeb Bush? Themselves?) as bold champions of the civil rights issue of our time.
What is that issue? Higher and higher standards that produce astronomical failure rates. In New York, only 31% of children in grades 3-8 “passed” the Common Core tests in reading and math.
In reading, only 3% of ELLs passed; only 5% of children with disabilities; only 16% of black students; only 18% of Hispanic students.
The scores in urban and poor districts were lowest. The scores in low-need districts were highest.
Can anyone explain in what sense the drive to impose high-stakes testing that most kids will fail is a civil rights issue?
Sure, the kids who are headed for the top universities will do well.
But doesn’t our society need people who can be plumbers, mechanics, nurses, nurses’ aides, retail clerks, and fill the many other occupations that do not require an Ivy League degree?
If we design an education system that denies a diploma to all those who do not pass the Common Core tests, what will become of them?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
If we design an education system that denies a diploma to all those who do not pass the Common Core tests, what will become of them.
They will be the workforce that WALMART is looking for!
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A top-down, invariant system run by a centralized, authoritarian Common Core Curriculum Commissariat will be PERFECT for obedience training of the proles. And it will create those uniform national markets for educational materials that monopolists need. That–DUH–is why the CCSS were created to begin with.
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When the George Bush Sr. and Bill Clinton administrations floated the idea of having national standards, tests, and curricula, they were met with overwhelming resistance on the part of a free people. What a difference a few years make! Now, the same centralization of education is occurring without there being any real national debate of it. And, bizarrely, business interests like those who are members of Achieve, like the Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable, can’t WAIT until will have a totalitarian, centralized educational regulatory apparatus mandating standards, tests, curricula, pedagogy, and evaluation systems that must be employed by a previously free people.
What a WEIRD development!!!
I suppose that the new history standards will continue to speak of the Land of the Free. What a joke that will have become!
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“What a difference a few years make!”
That’s because in the interim, they’ve taken smaller steps. We’ve got this problem. When a student transfers from one school in the county to another school in the county, they may have already been taught what you’re teaching, and they might have totally missed what you previously taught. Let’s get all our schools to be teaching the same general content at roughly the same time. Then specificity came, and not just common to the county, but to the state. And now the whole country. I obviously left out a lot of other little steps, but looking back, it is clear that all of these “reasonable” little steps have lead us to this point.
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That “if a student moves” argument is ridiculous, prima facie, because it applies to so few students, and when students do move, then there can be accommodations.
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And if the standards are truly standards, then a student will still be unfamiliar with another district’s curriculum.
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“That “if a student moves” argument is ridiculous…”
I quite agree. To me, it’s evidence of a sort that when they realized going straight for national standards wasn’t going to work, they chunked it into bite size pieces that would be more palatable. We started hearing that argument sometime between 2000 and 2002. It was also about that same time that the amount of paperwork I had to do began to mushroom.
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I just want to take this moment to say, thank you, Robert D Shepherd, for your fierce and perseverant viewpoint. You are Da Man!
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Cyne3wulf,
At the end of the 90s and the early 00s is when I remember there being a strong push to “develop” “leaders” and the supposed importance of “educational leadership” a la business and military leadership and away from the collaborative management style of then. It seems in the 90s we were headed to a more “stewardship” sense of administration instead of “leadership”. I prefer stewardship as the dominant paradigm.
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Duane,
That sounds about right. I started in ’97. The first 3 years or so were great. Then the steady stream of paperwork, and hoops to jump through started. A few years ago, I went to a district meeting on developing leadership. It was very much modeled after business management, and one of the main things they focused on was “change.”
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well said, Al!
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A diploma might be a valuable signal of the academic and personal characteristics of a student, but giving or denying a student a diploma does not change those underlying characteristics. Roughly speaking, the same people will end up working at Walmart no matter the standards used in awarding a diploma of any sort.
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TE,
Aren’t you glad to be supporting the WalMart heirs earn millions through helping their employees survive by using “food stamps” (whatever it’s called now) instead of paying them a living wage?
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No doubt that efforts to help the poor are also helpful to those that employ the poor. I am not sure that it is a good argument against helping the poor.
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I replied to a related post earlier, but perhaps should repeat it here. I regularly give money (and groceries) to my foster son to support his family. Should I stop because it supports the Walmart heirs (actually not the actual Walmart heirs in his case, but a local small business person. Does that matter to you)?
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No, but then again I’m not sure what the “that” in your question is referring to
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So by counseling their employees to seek “food stamps” Walmart is “helping the poor”?
My point being that we are thoroughly subsidizing the wealth of the Waltons through things like WIC/food stamps (and I know that’s not what they’re called these days) at the same time Walmart doesn’t pay a living wage and banks the profit (from not paying them living wages) while we, the taxpayers pick up the slack from Walmart not paying a living wage.
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Indeed programs to help the poor often result in employers getting away with paying low wages. Just yesterday I wrote a check to my foster son so he could make rent and feed his children. Was that a mistake because it enriched his employer?
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TE,
Please do not ask me to explain what I mean. I should know better than to respond, but I cannot believe how good you are at twisting the words of others. Sorry, Duane. He was fracturing your comment. I should let you take him on or not.
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I will press you on this, because it is personal. The only way my foster son can feed, cloth, and shelter his children ON THE WAGES HE IS PAID is by our help. That allows his employer to pay less than a living wage and keep my foster son working. That is the very thing that Duane is condemning. If the government should stop subsidizing people paid a low wage by employers by providing food stamps, shouldn’t I stop buying food that does exactly the same thing?
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You are implying that his employer could or would pay your foster son higher wages if you did not help your son but chooses to screw him because you are helping. Balderdash and totally unrelated to what Duane was saying in relation to Walmart. (Unless, of course, your foster son’s small business boss is struggling to stay in business because he has to compete with the local Walmart.) Duane was condemning a highly successful company for paying their workers so little that they are eligible for food stamps when their profits clearly indicate their ability to treat their employees better.
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Correct!
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I think it likely that my foster son’s employers could pay him more, as could his spouse’s employer. His employer certainly does not choose to “screw” him because I subsidize his family, his employer pays what he needs to pay to get people to do the job. I have to say that the wage would be inadequate to support my foster son and his spouse had they not chosen to have two children, another factor that is out of the control of his employer (and, I should add, his foster parents).
I am supporting this small business (it does not compete with Walmart by the way) by subsidizing my foster son’s family IN EXACTLY the same way that Duane finds problematic. Should I stop?
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No you are not. I’m sure you can figure out the differences.
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The question is chosen with a specific intention. No answer is sufficient.
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I know, but every once in awhile he says something worth paying attention to. I’m done with this foray.
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I can’t tell the difference from the perspective of Duane’s criticism. What are you reading into it?
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Yes you can, TE. I believe in you.
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The difference TE, is that what you choose to do with your money is your business (and good on ya for helping out) whereas public monies (not necessarily voluntary) are used for food stamps which help those who are full-time employed by Walmart survive without which they couldn’t make ends meet because of the low wages paid by that mega-corporation which allows them to make mega profits, subsidized by you and I. And no doubt that Sam Walton is spinning faster than plane’s gyro at all times these days.
If you can’t see the difference then you are blinded by your economic ideologies to not see it.
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A couple point Duane,
I am generally not free to do what I want with my money as there is a long list of prohibited goods and services I can not buy and even restrictions on whom I may donate money. Perhaps this should be added to the list.
Second, I think you have the causal link exactly backwards. Poverty causes anti-poverty programs, anti-poverty programs do not cause poverty.
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If you believe that War is Peace, Freedom Is Slavery and Ignorance is Strength, then so-called education reform is the Civil Rights Issue of Our Time.
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“…what will become of them?”
Exactly what the corporatists want. Uneducated, down-trodden worker bees that they can pay third world wages, house in barracks, and work til they drop. Just think how much cheaper it will be if they don’t have to off-shore their slave labor, ship materials/finished goods back and forth, and send their managers afar.
Educated “rabble” doesn’t fit the Walmart model. Plus, it reduces the bucks available to the edu-corporatists from testing that convinces all but the brightest that they’re utter failures or from their phoney schools that refuse to enroll average or challenged kids — and simutaneously destroys the public education system.
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Thanks Diane for this post, and particularly for the two questions you pose at the end. I havelong been an advocate of Vocational Education, and see this RttT and Common Core as one more grab by corporations for endless profits on the backs of American students. Lifetime educators have always understood that not every child would want or need a college education. In terms of today’s job market, tech students are indeed competing with others from around the world. In India, techies with MBA equivalent degrees are working for about $12 an hour, and our home grown MBA’s will have to compete with these who are willing to work for low wages.
The private colleges which tout to them an easy and rewarding future in the job market do them a great disservice. The vocational jobs in the US, such as mechanics, electricians pulmbers, civil engeneers,
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continued…
Students prepare for these ‘local’ jobs with Community College training. In a nation of over 300 million residents, all of us need to pay for these vocational skills frequently, and these workers make on average, far more than teachers, and more than the college graduates who take ‘soft’ majors that produce NO jobs for too many.
However, the bankers and corporations that make endless profit off these college students for their tuition and their endless college loans, reap the real benefits…they profit in perpetuity.
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I like what you say, Woof Thomsen. I would add what my brother (a 55-y.o contractor) has been telling me for yrs- that there is at least one entire generation missing from the crafts in the US, thanks to the decades-old false cry from industry for college graduates, for ‘STEM’ graduates– that many incompetents respond to the market for the trades, that they will be, & are being replaced by immigrants willing to work for a wage that once defined ‘blue-collar’ here…
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There are VERY important EDUCATIONAL reasons for opposing the Common Core in ELA. If there had been ANY vetting of the Common Core, these issues would be well known, and this egregiously amateurish bullet list of abstract skills to be measured by high-stakes tests would have been chucked out a long time ago, and the authors of these “standards” would have been hooted off the national stage.
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I am not so much an enemy of the Common Core, per se, as I am of ANY invariant, inflexible, one-size-fits-all bullet list. The particular bullet lists for ELA put together by the amateurs hired by Achieve for this purpose are egregiously backward–basically a list of every hackneyed misconception and half truth about the teaching of the English language arts–but ANY invariant, codified set of standards is a mistake. We need voluntary, competing standards that are vigorously debated and continually revised in light of knew understandings and developments. That the CCSS in ELA were foisted on the country with NO vetting and NO expert debate regarding their strengths and deficiencies is unconscionable. But, they guys who paid to produce the CCSS were in a hurry. The CCSS were a necessary part of a business plan. They needed uniform national standards to align their new national computer-adaptive products to.
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Robert,
You often post about the ELA CCSS but do not mention the math CCSS. Do you have the same criticisms of the math CCSS as you do of the ELA CCSS or are they different?
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Well said.
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TE,
That’s because he’s an English guy not a math guy.
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Well in that case perhaps he could say that half of the common core is terrible, but the other half is the best thing since PostToasties. Perhaps he did say that, but it is certainly hard to keep up with his posts.
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And, TE, you know I have the same criticisms for all educational standards and the accompanying standardized testing.
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Indeed I know you have that position, but when you and a student in this first week of studying Spanish get the same score on the defense department Spanish exam or are judged to be equally fluent in Spanish by a native speaker, I will believe it.
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TE, on the whole, I think that the CCSS in math are a lot better than the CCSS in ELA. They are a very different beast. The CCSS in math, as Ed. D. Hirsch, Jr., pointed out on this blog a few months back, are basically a curricular outline–a learning progression. They specify knowledge to be attained. They rationalize and make uniform what was, pretty much, an existing consensus among state standards, almost all of which were minor variations on the NCTM standards that preceded them. And, the math standards seem to me to make some important advances in emphasizing logical connections between parts of the curriculum that were previously treated, in many standards, as discrete and unrelated.
So, yes, I do think that the math standards are better than the ELA ones. However, I have a problem with the whole way in which we approach math in the early grades. There are some kids who are born to this stuff, as you know. And those kids need a wholly different learning progression, an individualized one and lots of one-on-one tutoring. Those mathematically gifted children, from day 1, are rare, and it’s important that their gifts be recognized, that we not miss identifying the little Eulers in the next generation. For most kids, however, I think that we make a mistake by attempting to have them do very abstract reasoning of a kind for which they do not, at these early ages, have, yet, the proper mental equipment. Parts of the prefrontal cortex that handle highly abstract reasoning don’t even start to develop in most kids until around the age of sixteen. So, in the early grades, for most kids, what I would like to see is games and exercises for developing the underlying machinery of fluid intelligence–pattern recognition activities, play with formal patterns of the kind that Vi Hart does so delightfully. I’m entirely with Paul Lockhart on this. (See his brilliant “The Mathematician’s Nightmare.”) I suspect that if we saved a lot of the formal instruction until kids are of an age to enter into it with understanding, we would get further with most kids in three years than we do, now, in twelve.
Right now, I think that we are asking kids to turn a tiny, delicate Phillip’s screw with a butter knife–asking them to do that for which they are not, at early ages, cognitively sophisticated enough to do with understanding. And because they cannot understand, really conceptualize, what they are doing, it all seems rote and meaningless and dull, dull, dull. And so, what we end up teaching most kids, very early, is that math is something they can’t do well and, if they can because they are obedient enough, it’s at any rate no fun. And what a tragedy that is!!! What a loss!
I used to be married to an extremely math phobic person. One day, her son, my stepson, was doing homework–attempting to learn the foil method for factoring polynomials. I was busy with something else, so she grabbed his book, read through the chapter, and helped him. Then she said to me, “I could no more have done that when I was fourteen than I could have flown.” And I think that she was right about that. I think that she didn’t have the equipment, yet.
We can hasten that development by doing those fluid intelligence activities. And we can promise kids that, in time, they will be allowed into the inner sanctum–initiated into the hall of mathematics–when they are cognitively ready for it.
My view is, of course, NOT a popular one and is considered VERY radical. Evidently, having most of our graduates come out of school math phobic and innumerate is OK with most folks, who are perfectly happy with the way we’ve been doing this forever.
BTW, there are other, VERY sophisticated intellectual activities for which kids are BORN with the necessary machinery–e.g., intuiting the syntactic and morphological and phonological and semantic parameters of a particular language, for example, from the ambient linguistic environment. And, kids are little inference machines. What they are not ready for until they are quite a bit older is doing highly general reasoning about matters for which they do not have dedicated machinery. A bat’s brain does the calculus necessary in order for it to be able to intercept that bug in the air, but the bat doesn’t understand it. We’re trying to get kids to UNDERSTAND very general concepts before they are developmentally equipped to do that.
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Are the math common core standards a lot better because
1) they were democratically determined while the ELA standards were not
2) they are not one size fits all
3) they were developed by smart people while the ELA standards were not
4) none of the above
5) all of the above
I am well aware that you have a radical view of education that would seek to destroy the imposed uniformity of the neighborhood school. I am surprised that this is not obvious to most of the posters here.
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And, in lieu of their understanding it, we teach them symbol manipulation without the understanding, and it’s little wonder that they would find THAT dull, dull, dull. It’s as though we were asking them, day in and day out, to put random numbers into little squares for no reason whatsoever. We need to save this stuff until people are cognitively sophisticated enough to be able to UNDERSTAND, conceptualize, what they are doing. And in place of what we are doing, now, in the early grades, we should be doing all those fluid-intelligence building activities–to help put the machinery in place that will enable them to fly when they DO, finally, come to mathematical studies proper.
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I admit I am far more interested in specifics, perhaps even with references to the actual standards than in general hand waving. Perhaps you have some insight into the problems with the third grade standards for representing and solve problems involving multiplication and division. I reproduce them in their entirety for your convenience below:
CCSS.Math.Content.3.OA.A.1 Interpret products of whole numbers, e.g., interpret 5 × 7 as the total number of objects in 5 groups of 7 objects each. For example, describe a context in which a total number of objects can be expressed as 5 × 7.
CCSS.Math.Content.3.OA.A.2 Interpret whole-number quotients of whole numbers, e.g., interpret 56 ÷ 8 as the number of objects in each share when 56 objects are partitioned equally into 8 shares, or as a number of shares when 56 objects are partitioned into equal shares of 8 objects each. For example, describe a context in which a number of shares or a number of groups can be expressed as 56 ÷ 8.
CCSS.Math.Content.3.OA.A.3 Use multiplication and division within 100 to solve word problems in situations involving equal groups, arrays, and measurement quantities, e.g., by using drawings and equations with a symbol for the unknown number to represent the problem.1
CCSS.Math.Content.3.OA.A.4 Determine the unknown whole number in a multiplication or division equation relating three whole numbers. For example, determine the unknown number that makes the equation true in each of the equations 8 × ? = 48, 5 = _ ÷ 3, 6 × 6 = ?
What is objectionable about the standards above?
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teachingeconomist:
My entry above should have appeared here as a response to your question.
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Take a look at the Soviet constitution, then read about the behavior of Stalin, and your question will be answered.
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Well said, Michael. We are adopting in this country the educational model followed by totalitarian states. Whether one comes from the left or the right, this should be troubling.
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cx: Whether one comes from the left or the right, one should be troubled by this.
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I don’t find the Soviet Constitution to be analogous at all, nor an appropriate comparison to the Common Core standards in any other way.
If you think they are analogous, perhaps you could explain how and why.
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Ed, the point is that ALL totalitarian regimes have a centralized federal authority that MANDATES standards, tests, curricula, and pedagogical approaches. There is a reason why this is so. And there is a reason why a free people will oppose such centralization, which takes away essential freedoms.
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Robert, don’t forget that ALL non-totalitarian regimes except the U.S. also mandate standards, tests, curricula, and pedagogical approaches. That Britain had such structures didn’t prevent Winston Churchill from becoming the Lion of Britain and rhetorically (and literally) saving our tail in World War II.
There is a reason that free people choose hard academics and serious study, and insist on it — it protects our freedoms.
Never forget the words of James Madison:
Madison, and his friend and mentor Jefferson, both prescribed hard and high standards for schools. They were neither authoritarian nor Marxist, but understood the value of education in the protection and preservation of freedom.
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The CCSS in ELA are not high standards by any means. They are a hackneyed list of misconceptions and half truths about the teaching of English and will set the profession back a hundred years.
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Then make that criticism. Don’t act like a Tea Party teapot an expect me to take that seriously.
Science standards in CCSS generally are miles ahead of Texas science standards. There are no Marxist teachers in Texas I have found, and they did not conspire to turn CCSS into a Marxist manifesto to set the stage for a Michelle Obama dictatorship.
What are the misconceptions? How are they hackneyed? What should they be replaced with? Can the better standards be tested as most Common Core pushers wish to test them?
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Nor, Robert, should we ever forget that old admonition, “Let a thousand flowers bloom,” nor forget either its origins: Chairman Mao.
The Soviet Constitution is not analogous in any way to the Common Core Standards. Pretending they are is not helpful to the discussion.
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Mao said it, but he certainly didn’t mean ANYTHING like it. In a democracy, we actually believe in letting many flowers bloom. We don’t blindly follow a distant, totalitarian authority. We aren’t told that we have to wear particular uniforms. We are told where we have to work. And until recently, we weren’t told that some tiny group appointed by Achieve had absolute authority over what our learning progressions should be.
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And in a Capitalist democracy, we believe in the virtue of having DIFFERING IDEAS COMPETE WITH ONE ANOTHER IN A FREE MARKET (At least that’s the theory). We don’t believe in MANDATING THOUGHT. That’s what Mao did. And that’s now what we are doing. Creating a Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth to TELL US what we HAVE TO THINK about what should be taught, when, how, and to whom.
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Yeah, well, my point is that someone has grossly oversimplified Soviet Communism and missed the point of Common Core and its problems. And then, when I point out that Mao said what you claimed to want, you dismiss that bit of history as . . . well, no, you just try to explain it away, to rationalize it.
Perhaps I would have gotten your buy-in had I just tried to rationalize the Soviet Constitution claim?
Authoritarianism isn’t the same thing as centralized distribution of resources in all cases (ask McDonalds); Common Core isn’t bad because it’s analogous to Marxism; and teachers are not evil Bolsheviks bent on turning children into brainless, Maoist flowers.
Are you just pulling talking points out of the Glenn Beck Texas Tea Party Playbook to irritate me?
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Ed, I am emphatically NOT dismissing that piece of history. I am saying that Mao’s comment about letting a thousand flowers bloom was a complete lie–that it was the LAST THING that he wanted.
Ed. My objections to the Common Core have little, very little, in common with those of folks in the Tea Party. I am saying that we are allowing a centralized committee to make decisions about what learning progressions we should have and that that is a TERRIBLE mistake because in a free country, we encourage the development of COMPETING ideas because we understand that that’s how innovation comes about. THE LAST THING Mao wanted was competing ideas. His “Let a thousand flowers bloom” was for the purpose of ferreting out dissidents. He let that go on for a while. Then he sent all the aberrant “flowers” to prison or to reeducation camps–those that he didn’t just shoot.
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Almost exactly what the Texas Tea Party say, but they are more clear that it’s the teachers’ fault.
Yeah, they say we need more competition, especially from charter schools. Give the kids vouchers, they say, they’ll choose to avoid Common Core public schools, which can then be shut down to save money.
Competition, you know. It works in hamburgers, so it must be good for education. Don’t give us that Marxist whine while they shoot the teachers, they say. When a horse is lame, after all . . .
And doesn’t the mere existence of CCSS indicate all teachers are lame?
Meanwhile, in Mao’s Communist China, competition flourishes in some areas . . .
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cx: We AREN’T told where we have to work.
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cx: We AREN’T told where we have to work
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As I mentioned in my note, TE, the math standards make uniform and rationalize, with some minor improvements, the state standards that preceded them, and these standards were remarkably uniform (I know this to be so, for I studied them carefully). So, the CCSS in math are basically a third-generation version of the NCTM math standards. Now, the NCTM standards, unlike the CCSS in ELA, were created by an organization made up of mathematics teachers–by experts in mathematics instruction. So, because people who had a clue–expert committees at the NCTM–developed them, and the work of those committees was subjected to a great deal of critique and refinement by the NCTM membership. There has been a de facto consensus about the learning progression in mathematics (with a great deal of squabbling about the details and some radical objections) for a long, long time. The story in ELA is completely different. After NCLB, state educrats rushed to put together state standards, and these differed enormously. Some were REALLY embarrassingly bad. Most were mediocre at best. And NONE OF THEM resulted from careful critique by experts in the various domains that the ELA standards covered. The amateurs who were appointing king and queen of English language arts in the United States by Achieve (David Coleman and Susan Pimentel) had a tougher job because they weren’t attempting to make uniform a set of state standards that were already well vetted and already quite uniform. And, unfortunately, while Coleman and Pimentel had some general ideas about education in ELA that were worth discussing, and which are to be found in their Publishers’ Criteria document–they didn’t have the expertise to do the job that they were called upon to do, and they rushed through this with all the certainty and hubris of a couple of high-school kids deciding that they were going to make a Hollywood film with Dad’s camera. The job was not approached with the high seriousness that it required. If it had been, there would have been a national committee on vocabulary instruction staffed by experts on how people, in fact, acquire the lexicons of their language, and those folks would have done a report that was then subjected to intense scrutiny and debate, and then a VOLUNTARY set of recommended standards would have been produced for that domain. And the same would have happened for every other domain covered by the standards.
But even then, codifying any set of standards is a terrible mistake, for what we need is a living document AND ALTERNATIVES TO THAT DOCUMENT, continuously refined and revised in light of emerging understandings of language language acquisition and of the cognitive psychology of learning and of new approaches to curricula and pedagogy in the various ELA domains. And those standards have to be flexible to accommodate the needs of particular students and the expertise of particular teachers. The LAST THING that we need to do is to set this stuff in stone. And with the CCSS in ELA, we are setting in stone standards that are breathtakingly backward. One couldn’t have come up with worse standards if one had given the job to a bunch of sophomore English majors as a class project.
So, in answer to your question, 3, mostly. But the real answers are more complex. And that should be an abject lesson about multiple-choice tests.
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Do you object to the adoption of the math CCSS?
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TE, I object to the adoption of ANY set of invariant national standards. We need competing standards, continuously revised and debated, and we need varying tracks for kids who differ in their propensities and interests. The last thing that we need to to set any of this stuff in stone. That makes as much sense to me as it does to require that all citizens of the country wear the same uniform. Placing the ability to make these decisions in the hands of a distant, top-down, centralized authority stifles innovation. Why would anyone think it a good idea to adopt in the U.S. the educational model followed by every totalitarian government? If centralized planning makes no sense in, say, manufacturing, and it doesn’t, it makes no sense in education either, and for the same reasons.
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Do you also object to any unvarient set of district or state standards as well?
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TE, of course I do. Of course I oppose mandatory standards. Kids differ. And teachers do, too. And the sciences and arts of teaching should always be in continual development. I think that it is perfectly reasonable for DISTRICTS to convene groups of teachers, regularly, to review options for curricula and to settle upon general frameworks and learning progressions, but it must always be understood that the last word about these will never be uttered. And, of course, it is perfectly appropriate for scholars and various learned groups to issue white papers describing their proposals for frameworks, learning progressions, curricula, and pedagogical techniques and tools.
BTW, the initial impetus of the deform movement, going back to the propaganda that accompanied NCLB, was to improve the education of students who were being “left behind”–to rid ourselves of “the soft bigotry of low expectations” (It must have taken GW FOREVER to memorize that line.) So, let’s think for a moment about what we know about language development and about the specific case of the language development of kids from impoverished rural and inner city backgrounds. We know that speech is antecedent to writing and, in particular, that listening with comprehension is antecedent to reading with comprehension. And we know that kids are universally born with hardwired principles for language use (e.g., that every phrase has a head, that verbs assign theta roles) and that based upon the language of their ambient environment, they set the parameters of the actual language that they acquire (e.g., that the head will be first or last, that the language being learned is SVO). We know that vocabulary is acquired in use, in semantic clusters. We know that there are VAST differences in the total number of words, in the number of distinct words, and in the variety of grammatical forms used in the speech to which poor and wealthy children are exposed, and that exposure to a lot of language, to a wide lexicon, and to a wide variety of grammatical forms is a necessary condition of the development of a child’s competence for spoken language and that that competence is in turn a precondition for competence in writing and reading. Furthermore, we now understand that something similar happens with reasoning ability–that, for example, categories are learned not as natural kinds but as natural prototypes that are THEN developed into loose, associative subordinate and superordinate categories, that variety of experience of the world is necessary for this development, and that poor and rich kids, again, differ VASTLY in the variety of the experiences that they have on which their pattern recognition abilities can operate in order to form such associative categories. We also know that poor and rich kids’ experiences of engaged communication with adults differ VASTLY, and that in the course of that communication, the rich kids learn a great many facts about the world, and that a particular type of factual knowledge–knowledge that is typically taken for granted by writers as part of our common inheritance–is essential for comprehension of texts. So, given all that, it would make sense, in the early grades, to create for kids from impoverished linguistic and experiential backgrounds compensating environments involving exposure to sophisticated spoken language containing a broad lexicon and a wide range of grammatical forms and that presents the sort of knowledge of the world that those kids don’t have but that privileged kids typically do have. It would also be important for those compensatory environments to involve one-on-one dialogue with adult speakers so that the forms specific to dialogue can be intuited.
Now suppose that you are an exceptional principal or superintendent of schools that serve an impoverished population, someone who has read a lot about these matters and thought carefully about them, and you become convinced of the soundness of the reasoning that I’ve just outlined. Suppose that you want to institute such a program of compensatory, knowledge-based oral language in the early grades. What you will find is that NONE OF THAT IS IN THE CCSS IN ELA and that, in fact, THE CCSS IN ELA CALL FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT in those grades–for phonics and, as soon as the code is broken, for “close reading” of leveled written texts. In other words, you will find that the sound plan that I’ve just described IS COMPLETELY INCOMPATIBLE WITH THE NATIONAL STANDARDS even though it makes complete sense for your particular student population. You will find, in fact, that where your kids need exposure to spoken language of great syntactic and semantic richness, exposure of the kind that their home environments did not give them–the standards call, in the early grades, for PURPOSEFULLY exposing kids mostly to written texts that are INTENTIONALLY IMPOVERISHED SYNTACTICALLY AND SEMANTICALLY–i.e., leveled to be of “appropriate” complexity. Wrong from the start because they authors of the “standards” didn’t understand much about how kids actually acquire vocabulary and grammatical competence.
If the “standards” are mandatory, there is nothing you can do except to play out the losing game mandated by the “standards.” If they are voluntary guidelines, you can do what is best for YOUR PARTICULAR STUDENTS.
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The early explicit phonics instruction is, of course, essential for the vast majority of kids, and we arrived–somewhat painfully–at something like a national consensus on that WITHOUT HAVING IT MANDATED by a centralized, totalitarian Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth.
The more general point of my comments, above, is that if you were to channel Borges for a bit and were to imagine the design space of possible curricular and pedagogical approaches in its totality, any set of invariant “standards” will necessarily preclude entering into MOST of that design space. It will make some few approaches possible and preclude most–including many not yet dreamed of, and including many highly warranted by what we are learning about how learning takes place. Standards are instruments for limiting the design space to some well-traveled ground, and so we implement invariant, mandated, static “standards” at a great cost–at the cost of stopping needed innovation cold.
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Who are the enemies of the common core? I don’t know, what’s the definition of core standards? I’ll go with the basic skill set that can be mastered by 90% of students. Then beyond the core is the elective material.
By my thinking, the core has to be the easy stuff, and the elective is where the rigor comes in.
So, I would say the enemy is still the enemy that they recognized from the start, that of a mile wide. Condense the core to less material and begin with success.
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“Enemies” of the Common Core?
Absolutely wrong question.
Problems? Now we’re talking.
The Tea Party oppose Common Core (I’m not kidding, really), because they are teacher-created and federal-created, Marxist indoctrination right from the bowels of Arne Duncan’s Marxist U.S. Department of Education. (I just report these jokes, I don’t write them.)
Many teachers oppose implementation of the Common Core standards because it’s coming without adequate back-up resources, like texts, exercises, and a couple years’ experimentation to figure whether they work, how they work, nor how to make them work well.
Many teachers (not excluding the previous teacher group) oppose Common Core because it seems to be more test focused than even the previous test-focused stuff. It’s not the standards themselves, but the fact that the test requires that all supplemental material NOT specifically listed in the standards be abandoned, because that’s the only safe way for a teacher to save his/her job and make sure the students do well on the test. That’s a long way of saying the test displaces education in the classroom, and that’s bad for America and doesn’t sit well with a lot of teachers.
Creationists oppose the Common Core because they don’t allow room for religion in science classes, and they feel threatened that kids — their very own kids! — will learn stuff preached against in a few Sunday schools and a few more pulpits in the Churches of Big Money and Loud Preachers.
Many teachers and parents oppose Common Core because it seems to be just one more chapter of usual BOHICA* organizational hurdles coming disguised as “high academic standards” (and displacing high academic standards in reality).
Education is a collaborative process done by people who care for students and the lives the students will lead outside academic institutions. Common Core implementation chooses to make war on collaboration, on the people who collaborate, and on the students themselves — and Duncan labels heroes who point that out as “enemies?”
Time for Duncan to follow Richard Nixon’s lead. Once you’ve got an enemies list, it’s time to get out. You should have had a friends list, and used it.
There weren’t enemies, until Duncan declared war on ’em.
* “BOHICA” is an acronym familiar to soldiers, engineers, and many frontline workers in industry, from “Bend Over, Here It Comes Again.”
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Oh, boy, will you guys love this one from Bob McManus from the New York Post?! Who can guess which group he’s missing?
http://nypost.com/2013/11/20/suck-it-up-soccer-moms/
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The CCSS in ELA seem to have been written in complete ignorance of what we have learned about language acquisition in the past forty years or so. The assumptions that they make about how kids learn vocabulary and grammar, for example, are prescientific folklore. The writing standards encourage the production of five-paragraph themes in three “modes,” a kind of egregious schoolroom-only writing that is not found in the real world. The literature standards are descriptions of abstract skills to be mastered and gloss over, entirely, WHY anyone would want to read and encourage really bad teaching in which the abstract skill becomes the point of the encounter with the text, as though we read solely for the purpose of honing our “recognizing methods of characterization” skills. If you like the idea of having reading of “Sailing to Byzantium” reduced to a list of the symbols that they author used, you will LOVE the CCSS in ELA. And you will also love them if your knowledge of literature is so sketchy that you think that this bullet list of abstract skills is anything like fundamental or comprehensive.
There are many, many particular CCSS ELKA “standards” that are extraordinarily ill conceived. There are many, many lacunae in these “standards.” There are extraordinarily valuable possible approaches to teaching in the various domains covered by these “standards” that cannot be made compatible with them.
BUT THERE WAS NEVER ANY DISCUSSION OF THE MERITS OF THESE. We are simply to accept them, to deal with them, no questions asked.
If some government agency had hired a couple of amateurs to compile a list of standards for the medical profession, and if they did so based on a quick reading of the 1858 edition of Gray’s Anatomy, the physicians of the country would have hooted these people off the national stage. But something very similar happened with the CCSS in ELA.
Let’s have a real national discussion and debate of the particular merits of particular CCSS “standards.” in ELA. Then it will be QUITE CLEAR that the opposition to these is principled and based on knowledge of ths sciences of language acquisition and on best practices in the teaching of English.
McManus has NOT CLUE what he is talking about. This “essay” of his is a public confession of his idiocy.
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I get really, really tired of hearing people refer to “standards” this hackneyed, this backward, this ignorant, as being “rigorous” or “more challenging.” I could put together “standards” based on Aristotelian physics that would be “rigorous” in the sense that kids would have difficulty “mastering” them, but the “rigor” of those “standards” would be beside the point. The CCSS in ELA will set the teaching of English back a hundred years.
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The place where the critique should be leveled, if someone were to create such “standards” for physics would be not at their “rigor” or lack thereof but at their backwardness.
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Unfortunately, even people against the corporate reformers have bought into the idea that standards must be rigorous. But no one seems to ask why. Standards should be standards because they are standard. Whether they are difficult or easy or somewhere in between is quite beside the point. By artificially increasing rigor, things that are not standard gain the label without actually having to embody the name.
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exactly, cyn3wulf!
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Robert D. Shepherd: perhaps you missed the emailed memo. That would explain why you are “dead” set against CCSS [word play—read on].
The leading charterites/privatizers backing CCSS mean “rigor” as in “rigor mortis.”
Maybe you aren’t on the Rheeally important email lists?
Why oh why not?
😎
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KrazyTA, there are plenty enough collaborators with the invasion force that has taken over our schools. I think, for example, of one fellow who made a fortune peddling to the country his notion that summative tests should be done away with and replaced by formative assessments who turned on a dime when he saw the green and is now a well-paid national consultant preaching the standards-and-testing gospel AS THOUGH THAT WERE WHAT HE HAD BEEN PROMOTING ALL ALONG. And this guy calls his new gospel, which is the antithesis of his old gospel, by exactly the same name, and many districts have stuck with him through this as though nothing whatsoever had happened. This particular fellow reminds me of the guy in Orwell’s 1984 who gets the memo in the middle of his speech and switches, without missing a beat, which country Oceania is allied with and which it is at war with. There are enough of these “We ahve always been at war with Eastasia” folks around. The country stinks of them these days. I don’t need to swell their already bloated numbers.
So, no, I am not on the Rheeally important email lists, and I am not being paid to sell my soul to the Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth. Shame. I could buy a private island for the money that some of these people are making by selling off their principles. How they sleep at night, I do not know. I suppose that all that Gates money busy some really nice pillows.
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I am not sure that Gates is capable of understanding typical children. He is not himself, typical. I believe he exhibits traits of Asperger’s. He compartmentalizes bits of data into his concept of how the world would/should be/look if only everyone saw things as he does. He acts as if he has found “the way” even if he calls it an “experiment”.
As nice as he seems, I would hope my children we not be like he is because it is outside of the ways most of us communicate. He only has limited appeal in many areas. And, of course, he is admired for his money and the power it brings.
It appears that he didn’t fit in to the K12 system well and thinks that it should be changed because he found his way outside of those walls.
Is that what the majority of Americans want for their children?
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Come on Robert, you’re teasing us! Name the name. I have a thought as to who it might be since you said “him”. Marzano????
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S-h-h-h!
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Duane, I try to avoid personalizing this stuff. I make exceptions for politicians, bureaucrats, and those who have assumed quasi-political roles–those who have set themselves up as a parallel government–e.g., the gang at Achieve and the Gates Foundation.
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Great essay, Principal Burris!
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In my view, the most basic civil right should be a full-time job that at least provides an above-poverty standard of living for anyone who wants one. To get there, the minimum wage needs to be increased, companies (like Walmart) need to be compelled to allow their employees to organize (or least be restrained from getting in the way of it), and government needs to create community service jobs that fill in the cracks.
I don’t see these “civil rights leaders” of the corporate deform movement doing anything to advance this basic civil right.
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While I am sympathetic to the goal, I think there are several problems with this idea. First, some people might in fact choose not to work while on the job. Could the employer fire them? Second, we need to be concerned that employing people should create value for society. Using natural resources to make goods that no one wants, for example, would be an ecological disaster.
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I am an “enemy” of the Common Core because those standards will inhibit our young people’s development as readers, writers, and thinkers. I do not belong to the Tea Party . I am a Democrat who voted for President Obama and am an avowed liberal. I also am an educator who has won national awards for creating English programs in public schools and effectively conducting professional development of teachers. I am in favor of the government playing an active role in improving the lives of its citizens. These Common Core Standards, however, will diminish the quality of the lives of students and diminish our integrity and effectiveness as a nation.
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But, yes, please do put me on that “enemies” list. Proud to be there.
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In many ways, the standards for elementary students simply make no sense. They are developmentally inappropriate. Beyond that, they are being inserted horizontally into each grade level. This allows no chance for students to even attempt to be “on grade level” without prior exposure to the skills upon which they would need for success.
To me, this would be like forcing me to take a German IV course before having I, II, and III. I would fail because of having no prior skills. How does this not “compute” as a major objection to this implementation?
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It seems to me this is an objection to the implementation of the CCSS rather than an objection to the standards themselves. Would it be useful to separate implementation and the CCSS themselves in the discussion?
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Both. Just stating my observations from both reading here and personal exposure to implementation. Implementation is a problem because these standards are not appropriate for the elementary levels. I am not familiar with the high school standards. So my view is about the early grade levels.
My objection is that they are being jammed through with total disrespect for the professional educators, blaming them for being too “soft”. There is a direct factor, imo, that when schools suddenly became “businesses” (which the financial aspects ARE a business, but kids are not products per se), it became obvious to me that the top down, paternal, condescending, data driven attitude was supplanting the nurturing, maternal, whole child approach.
While some changes might be in order, it is obvious that there is a movement to simply slap down the “old” and replace it with the “new”. After all, we are in the 21st century and we can’t take the time for sensible, appropriate implementation.
My objection to the standards themselves has to do with forcing 5th grade objectives and expectations into the first grade. While I have no objection to exposing children to a wide berth of rich topics in various formats from the time they enter school. However, when one looks at the expectations of “proficiency” on these topics, it is obvious that the writers of this “document” know nothing of child development. Yes, some kids can learn more quickly than others. But are we to just assume that “proficiency” involves so much higher level thinking in ALL kids that some kids MUST fail? That is absurd.
Have they addressed what all these “failing” students will do in subsequent years? Will they be held back? How will they become “proficient” in the next year’s testing if they don’t possess the skills needed for the current grade level? If these students are held back … how many times … what will the students think of themselves … what will become of them? Will they just drop out of school? Are we creating MORE poor people, more depressed people, more unemployable people? Or are we just creating a sub-class of “bots” to do the bidding of the 30% that CAN achieve at these levels?
So look at the CCSS. Look at each grade level. Look at the operative verbs/expectations to see if they apply to the AVERAGE student, let alone those learning English, those with special needs, those who are sick, those who are hungry with high rates of absentence at school.
Just because the “white/any race suburban moms/dads” are annoyed, it doesn’t mean that these standards are by any means appropriate for ALL students.
And, if the current curricula in most states or districts is too difficult for the neediest of all, how can expecting the kids to suddenly go from a functioning first grader to a functioning 2nd grader, if the objectives belong in the 6th grade?
Simply, we can’t expect that of most kids, let alone those in need of assistance instead of spending money on testing and technology.
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It would be very helpful to my understanding of the arguments against the common core if we could find particular examples of CCSS that are age inappropriate and the research that determines that this concept is age in appropriate.
Actually it would be very helpful if we could flesh out how age appropriateness is determined (is it that no student of a given age can understand the concept, only 10%, or some other fraction) and how to map age appropriateness into grade levels when there might easily be students in the same grade that are a year different in age.
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TE,
“. . . rather than an objection to the standards themselves.”
The objection to “standards themselves” has already been proven to be so factually and intellectually stout that there hasn’t ever been any rebuttal (and if I’m mistaken please show me the rebuttals, and thanks ahead of time). See Noel Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at:
http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Have you read it yet, TE?
If so, your thoughts.
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Perhaps you could point to the particular math standards that you find wanting. Here is a handy link to the CCSS for math: http://www.corestandards.org/math
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I should add that it do use the weather report every morning to influence my clothing choice for my walk to work despite temperature being measured using a quantitative measure rather than a qualitative one and also with the full knowledge that it is measured with error and not being entirely accurate for particular micro environment of my walk. So far I have never worn shorts on days that it snowed!
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I will reply in the thread about weather.
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And if one day the weather report indicated 90 degrees and sunny and you wore shorts, but the weather was 40 degrees and rainy. And then the next day 40 degrees and cloudy but ended up 90 degrees and sunny you’d probably not believe their forecasts anymore. Well, that’s how unstable standardized test scores are. So why use them?
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But isn’t anyone here concerned about the “Marxist influence” in the Common Core standards?
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“…this would be like forcing me to take a German IV course before having I, II, and III. I would fail because of having no prior skills.”
Yes, but it certainly does make it rigorous!
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Nah, doesn’t make it “rigorous”, it makes it insane!
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Sorry, Duane. I forgot the sarcasm alert after “rigorous”
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My sarcasmometer must need adjusting, eh!
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One reason I can come up with is property values. Did you know that test scores have an impact on how much your house is worth? It does. It also explains why the importance of tests vacillates wildly. In LA Eli Broad was behind gentrification in many of the hoods. In fact, teachers were encouraged to buy homes there as a part of a program. Many did and they were geting loans from the credit union and from pensions. They needed help with the down payments and got home imprivement bonuses ( how nice!) because that was at the height of the real estate boon, and these were dixer uppers. The it all bottomed out and left home owners under water. Or in foreclosure. Gentrified areas slipped swiftly back to ghettos . I was in the middle of that myself as I lived in Long Beach. I bought my house after the bottom fell out but only because I was renting and the mortgage cost less than rent. The owners were losing it and I had to let it go too, but no great loss as my hood went to hell. All these condos were empty. The only place doing well was the new Walmart. And banks. They made the fancy buildings section 8 and the testing hit with a vengeance. Low scores? You bet; in fact just as the prime lending boondoggle hit hardest, the administrators at my much improved school were replaced with a team of Nazi’s who came in to tell us we needed an AYP of 800 like San Marino, a very affluent area near Pasadenal. Every meeting we got the same PowerPoint graphics showing that beautiful campus near mini mansions and the Huntington Library beneath our scores beside theirs. Despite historical gains we actually made, we were expected to leap 150 points more that year which is statistically impossible. Nevermind the crisis in the community as families lost their homes, their incomes . Nevermind the upheaval of staff when the ACLU abolished seniority and the district went right in for the kill. I know it sounds paranoid like some thriller by Freidken or Kubrick
But if Billionaires will do what they are doing to schools, why not parlay that into real estate profits? It is just business. It also seems criminal. I guess the difference is being white and having too much power and money, we need to put a cap on wealth. I wonder if we would have more success if we went at this from a broader angle . What ALL Americans may be inspired into uprising for is simply justice. If you can send truants, hoppers, shoplifters, winos, drug freinds, wife beaters, cheats, dealers and assorted thugs to prison, why not the ones who cause the most damage? The corrupt officials, the polititions operating in behalf of oligarchs who exploit the people, the grifters who sell humble folks houses they cannot afford, knowing they will lose them. Why does Broad get away with unloading toxic sites on school instruct, building substandard chools and housing and charging 3x as much for it? How can Gates impose his faulty rubrics on teachers and not be sued when it is so erroneous Microsoft dropped stack ranking and Gates. Gates may mean well, but he has ruined teachers’ lives with his meddling. These test scores are bogus and so is his research. But oh well? Look what happened to Flint Michigan when GM decided profit mattered more than people. They outsourced and that town has never recovered. The factory was an integral part of this community, which went broke without it. GM never was the same after that, if you think about it. They havent made any great cars or been an iconic American company since.
Schools are crucial element in any neighborhood, and these closure take a toll . If you look at the haunting photographs of empty detroit schools you get it.
Eli Broad bankrupted Detroit a city where he grew up, and he and his pals at working on Philly, LA and who knows where else. we have to stop them. We have to make them answer for their crimes as well. We do not let criminals outside tof cages if they present a threat to others. Can you really think of any bigger menace than the BBC ?
We see Walmart worker bees rising up to demand what the deserve. The may not have great educations but they know the score. They know the government is not going to enforce the laws the Waltons break by failing to provide healthcare or a living wage because Obama is affording them and other billionaires tax breaks and access to policy. We are all being ruthlessly exploited, and we are the people , and the people have the power in a Democracy! Use it or lose it! The high cost of low prices…. Of philanthropy, of a class system out of balance is more than we can afford as we are losing Democracy. . Yeah, I am ranting again, I know, but I have had it. We have to do something more than tap out our angst in blogs and petition the people in office.
How about this: I hear Walmart workers may strike on Black Friday. Encourage that and support them in your blogging and sovial networks. If you can, join them instead of shopping at the superstore. Be thankful we can still protest without drines microwaving our flesh or Swat teams shooting us down in clouds of teargas, for now anyway. Boycott Walmart all told until the company treats employees well. When the cash registers grow silent, we will have their attention,
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School quality has always had an impact on property values, and property values have an impact on school quality. This is the result of having geographically based school admission.
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No, that result does not follow. Perhaps from the result of locally funded schools but not from geographically based school admission.
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Every real estate listing in my town lists the school catchment areas in which the property is located. Those listings are there for a reason. In school districts like mine (and I suspect yours) where the district boundary is always in some large farmers field, the district is not listed because it is obvious. This is not the case in the densely settled coasts of the country and I believe the real estate listings there also include districts.
The importance of location has been made evident in posts on another thread. Posts on that thread include a story of an aspiring teacher who was jailed for sneaking her children into the neighboring school district. My own posts include a NYT article about a happy town that gives a $300 bounty to anyone who reports an out of district student to the authorities.
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Arne Duncan is wrong and the Moms are right:
“It’s fascinating to me that some of the pushback is coming from, sort of, white suburban moms who — all of a sudden — their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought they were, and that’s pretty scary,”–Arne Duncan, US Secretary of Public Education”
.
Their is something “corrupt” and dishonest in the Secretary’s words, words that create a false narrative, words that serve the Secretary’s purposes, but are misleading:
“suburban moms who — all of a sudden — their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought.”
Science and common sense agree, standardized tests DO NOT provide reliable data for the individual child. The Reason: humans have good days and bad days. We make lucky guesses, and silly mistakes.
In saying what he did, the Secretary demonstrates, in cinemescope and technicolor how easily the test scores can be misused.
.
This is the worm at the heart of Duncan’s rose. A toxic worm, a cruel worm:
“suburban moms who — all of a sudden — their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought.”
Why the grammatical tap dance?
The Secretary of Education of The United States is telling a group of mothers that “their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought.”
Arne Duncan is as qualified to tell those women about their children, as I am to tell him about the bunion on his left foot. But to find out that I’m crazy, he only need take off one shoe and a sock.
His belief is sincere. How can it not be. He is supported by leaders in education, Michelle Rhee for example, and leaders in Politics, President Obama is there too.
Are they being affected by huge corporations? The testing/publishing industry is responsible for more than a billion dollars in cash flow yearly. That means jobs. And I have heard all three say that the best education policy is the best economic policy.
All the “number two” pencil marks of millions of children are harvested, digitized, and processed. Then they are sold back to the school district.
And the children who take time off from their classwork to generate those numbers, aren’t even told that are using there time in service of the greater good, good jobs, and a more comfortable life for others.
Now our “experts” tell us we need better standards, “Core Standards,” universal standards, higher standards than ever before.
Like sellers of gas-guzzlers back in the days, “Hey pal, look at the size of those tailfins,” Secretary Duncan is selling the sizzle, but their is no steak on the plate, only baloney.
According to Carl Rogers, Secretary Duncan’s style of education is probably detrimental to a child’s sense of self-worth.
Child suicide is increasing, while many educational and political leaders are self-invested in a process with sickening consequences.
What do the parents of Einstein, Edison, and Darwin have in common?
All were asked to find a less demanding school for their child. Each family needed to know that their child did not have the mental capacity to perform at the level of the school’s standards.
To see what a Carl Rogers style class might look like, please go to
denverfreeschool.com
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I agree that small differences in standardized exams are not informative, but I think large differences are. The variation in an individuals performance on an exam from day to day is typically much smaller than the differences between individuals if the individual means are far enough apart.
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Thank you for commenting. Is the following relevant to your point?
In 1977, I developed my own spelling program for my fourth graders. Of course, I was anxious to see how they did on the standardized test.
As I monitored the test, to my horror, I realized that I had forgotten to teach the rules for when to double a final consonant. And there were three questions testing that skill.
I expected the spelling scores to be lower because of my mistake. But when the class averaged zero growth in spelling, I decided that my new spelling program must not be effective.
The following year, my class moved as a group to one of our fifth grade teachers, She walked into the teacher’s lunch room the second week of the school year, and called out, “Michael, what did you do in spelling last year?
I was ashamed. I hadn’t used the text book, I thought my way would be more effective. I hid the truth. “Nothing special,” I lied. “Why?”
“This has never happened in my twenty-two years in the classroom,” she said, and I cringed. “I just went over our first spelling test, and every child in the room had zero errors.” .
If that one conversation hadn’t taken place, I would never have used that spelling program again.
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“Why the grammatical tap dance?”
Because he was speaking off the cuff which for him means open mouth and insert foot.
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It’s mildly humorous that in the course of attacking others’ brilliance, our Secretary of Education committed a G.W. Bush, Jr., sort of agreement error. But Arne’s bad grammar is the least of the problems with this statement. That sort of thing happens when one is speaking off the cuff. But it happens to some–GW and Arne are prime examples–a LOT more than to others.
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This comment appeared after my WAPO blog today…
“John Birch Society used to have a name for the federal government, they called it the ZOG, zionist OCCUPATIONAL government. I am sensing the same sort of fear here, strangely enough in liberals. ”
So, if one opposes the Common Core you are a racist, special interest, white suburban mom or anti-semitic.
Wow!
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Then I’d say thanks for the back handed compliment!
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Wow, indeed! What a crazy comment!
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I saw that comment. The John Birch name drop and anti-semitic connotations didn’t bother me as much as the complete misreading of the underlying emotions of those of us in the opposition. There is no fear. There is anger or sadness or some mixture of both when there is emotion at all. Some of us oppose the CCSS on principle alone.
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Opposition to the common core standards and the standardize tests that accompany them, is bipartisan within both sides of the political spectrum. They may differ on the ‘reasons’ they are against them. ( see link of article below by Michelle Malkin).
When the ‘ corporate’ education reform movement started its takeover of urban public school districts and implemented its ” disruptive forces ” strategy by closing schools, firing teachers,moving staff around, hiring many Broad Academy Superintendent Academy Graduates, many who had no education backgrounds,and opening “chains of charter schools….I kept hoping that this would receive national media coverage.( almost total media black out of this topic)
It kept happening throughout many US cities, the pattern was repeated over and over.
The goal was for corporate America to destroy public education and to run schools like a business and to make millions of dollars profit$$$$.
Many of the the urban school parents saw these charter schools as better than what was available in their districts.
After years of insufficient funding ( some say this was intentional to create a crisis) and lack of resources to educate the neediest children in our nation, the “public education” system needed REFORM and FUNDING, not a takeover.
It all seem too easy for Arne Duncan….. His plan to destroy public education and open up charter schools ( that are very profitable to the owners …using public tax dollars) like he did in Chicago.
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Now, Duncan is trying to implement the common core into the suburban school districts ……….. along with his plan to expand the opening of charter schools into the suburban areas ( these schools are not failing although needed funding is not adequate)
Corporate ed. reform is trying to expand into the suburban areas in NJ, and their is opposition, protest, and resistance from parents and administrators.
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Now that Arne Duncan’s comments have received National attention, with both print and TV coverage, maybe the issue of the corporate takeover of public schools can be addressed and debated.
Allowing Arne Duncan, who has no education background, to dictate the educational changes and thus destroy public education should cause alarm and national debates, which hopefully will inform and educate the citizens and elected officials on the corporate educational reform movement.
So does money for schools from philanthropists get to dictate what changes happen in the US public education system?
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A viewpoint from the right :
http://michellemalkin.com/2013/11/18/a-brown-skinned-suburban-mom-responds-to-common-core-bigot-arne-duncan/
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Question: if SAT will soon be aligned with CCSS, will private schools start to use it? Or will we see a decline in SAT participation and more ACT?
predictions?
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My son received a GED and is working as a chef in a high end restaurant in a Buffalo suburb. He is well respected for his skills and work ethic.
He would have received a high school diploma, but former Commissioner Mills insisted that everyone receive a Regents Diploma (usually reserved for the top students) instead of a school diploma. He couldn’t pass the required finals so we pulled him out of school. The philosophy was that some students needed to stay in high school five years to get a diploma. Nonsense.
The result of this philosophy is that many students quit school. They had no hopes of graduating so why bother. Vocational education courses, once in abundance for non-academic students, were curtailed or limited. The mandatory five Regents exams were required for all students. That is why the graduation rate is so low in NYS.
It wasn’t broke, but they tried to fix it anyway. Now the entire education system is failing. The answer is not common core – the answer is common sense.
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Do you think receiving a diploma would have changed anything essential about your child or any aspect of your child’s background that makes him or her a valued employee?
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“My son received a GED and is working as a chef in a high end restaurant in a [St. Louis] suburb. He is well respected for his skills and work ethic
Is this one of those alternate universe things? I could have written the same thing for my oldest.
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Ellen, there are plenty of people in the world who are quite willing to set themselves up as the sole models for what it means to be accomplished and to envision schools as a mechanism for sorting everyone else into two categories: “like me” and “failures.”
That approach to preparing young people for their futures has the advantage of creating lots of beaten down, docile folks ready to take their places, obediently, at the bottom of the economic, political, and social hierarchy. Such people look at children and see not extraordinarily varying potentials but genetically determined a) potential or b) lack thereof–one or the other.
People who have a Social Darwinist view of the world, who believe that life is a pitiless, remorseless struggle for existence between the inevitable winners and losers never tire of arguing that having schools operate in this way is not a matter of their own immoral choices and justification of their own current status but a matter of natural and economic law, a matter of necessity. And there is a huge pseudoscientific industry that goes by the name of evolutionary psychology the purpose of which is to relieve them of any qualms resulting from the nagging suspicion that things are as they are because people choose to make them that way.
It’s no accident that the oligarchs are busy recreating schools as a new and improved version of the great SORTING MACHINE–one far, far more invariant, more inflexible than any that we have seen since the days when schooling was simply denied to the masses. The members of the oligarchy, those who aspire to be members, and their upper-level sycophants and toadies, look in the mirror and they see, reflected back at them, pure products of a meritocracy that cannot be changed because it is in the natural order of things.
Mirror, mirror on the wall. . . .
It doesn’t have to be that way.
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And, of course, there are others who see in Darwin’s great accomplishment other lessons: the diversity of niches, the incredible adaptiveness of life to those niches, the richness of the ways that life will develop in order to flourish in those niches, continuity with VARIATION, for variation is the golden key to it all.
Kids differ. The national “standards” and tests and evaluation systems do not. There are many folks who LIKE the idea of having schools be more efficient sorting machines. And those people are now in charge–they are the one envisioning the future of U.S. education–training for the proles, education for the children of the oligarchy. We are headed back to our future, back to a medieval Great Food Chain of Being with a few, a very few, at the top.
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TEST
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Who are the enemies of Common Core? All thinking Americans. If we as a country had truly wished to establish a National Core Curriculum, we would have turned first to our own educators & educational researchers, whose ideas are based on practical experience as well as on a century of research. At the same time, we would have turned to those OECD countries who have established National Core Curricula, & done some analysis on their results. A national, and international dialog would have ensued. Our new ‘Core Curriculum’ would have been posited as a guide for states to adopt, with a mechanism for feedback and changes going forward.
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Very well argued!
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Es un grandísimo “si”.
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Two observations:
1) “Use multiplication and division within 100 to solve word problems in situations involving equal groups, arrays, and measurement quantities, e.g., by using drawings and equations with a symbol for the unknown number to represent the problem.”
This is an example of really bad writing. What does “multiplication and division within 100” mean? And “solve word problems in situations involving” isn’t a model of precision, either. I sort of know what the authors are saying in the four quoted items, but really, it’s gobbledygook.
2) In the excerpt you copied, there’s a whole lot of interpreting, context describing, and determining of unknowns going on. Maybe this is why some of the sample questions have seemed so clumsy and hard to follow. Will third graders enjoy math that’s presented in these terms? I guess it’s possible.
The specific prescriptions given here sound an awful lot like items from a curriculum, not just a program of “standards” (an ill-defined word if there ever was one). Calling these items “standards” and not components of a “curriculum” is making a distinction without a difference.
I’m a lot more familiar with the weaknesses of the “ELA Standards” and the authors’ questionable beliefs about teaching English, but these math “standards” sound a little dicey, too. At least in the way they’re presented.
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No doubt anything written by committee could be helped with a great deal of editing and there are other materials available on the site to flesh out the standard. What I was hopping for is a discussion of the substance of the math standards and where we can find examples of some of the common criticisms of the CCSS. For example which of the math standards imposes unreasonable constraints on a teacher’s creativity in teaching and/or which standards are inappropriately difficult?
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The CCSS in Math are a learning progression–basically, a curriculum outline. Is it not possible to imagine other progressions, other outlines? Surely creative mathematics professionals can think of lots of other ways to approach all this. I suggested one, above. The New Math was another (which failed because all that elementary set theory and logic was introduced too early, when kids couldn’t really grok it and because there were precious few New Math teachers who understood the aims of the approach).
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Could one not, for example, take a math curriculum approach that took almost all its impetus from computer science? And wouldn’t that be potentially a lot more interesting and practical? Couldn’t math instruction in K-12 become a) modeling and b) programming? I think it could, and with vastly improved outcomes. Basically, the system we are following today results in adults who are, for the most part, innumerate, and the new math standards are a beautifully prepared perfection of that system.
One problem though: It hasn’t worked. Again, most adults, a few years out–have no interest in math, think that they are terrible at it, employ in their lives and work only the most rudimentary mathematics. It’s difficult to imagine how we could create a learning progression that would have WORSE long-term outcomes.
I think that the CCSS in mathematics were beautifully prepared. They are a superb outline that brings to a high level of perfection an approach that has been the consensus approach to math instruction in the U.S. for a long, long time. We can’t expect that we are going to get DIFFERENT OUTCOMES by doing A LOT MORE OF THE SAME.
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So, the authors of the CCSS in math did a great job, but they did a great job of codifying something that hasn’t been working–not if one looks at long-term measures–the mathematics abilities of adults who have come out of our K-12 system.
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Robert D. Shepherd:
This is part of your commentary on “A First-Grade Math Test in the Common Core,” one of Diane’s posts from November 12…
“Lest there be any confusion, this seems to be some sort of practice test, not the actual high-stakes test. However, this practice test is an excellent illustration of the ways in which the CCSS distort curricula and pedagogy. In both math and ELA, publishers attempt to prep kids for the tests by giving them these questions keyed to the “standards.” Instead of starting with a coherent learning progression, publishers start with the list of standards themselves and attempt to work through these, “covering” them all. Every educational publisher now begins every project not by asking, “How best can we teach X?” but, rather, by making a spreadsheet with the “standards” in one column and the place where each “standard” is covered in the next. The “standards” become the curriculum. If the “standards” were a learning progression, then this would make some sense (though it would still be a mistake to set in stone any bullet list of standards). But the standards are not a learning progression (though the math ones are closer to being a learning progression that the ELA ones are).”
I wouldn’t disagree with the above quotation, but it’s a little different from what you’re saying today. I’m not qualified to evaluate the substance of the Common Core math standards. However, based on the excerpts I’ve read and some of the expert commentary I’ve read, it doesn’t sound like the authors did such a great job. For one thing, clarity isn’t their strong suit.
Also, I’m getting the impression that the math “standards,” especially for the early grades, do represent a departure from current practice. It looks like young children are being asked to understand the theoretical foundations of arithmetic and other branches of math. Are they also being asked to use abstract reasoning in a way that their brains may not be ready for? I’ve heard teachers make that claim. What’s worse, the writers of practice materials and tests seem to be having trouble putting the abstract concepts into terms that kids (or anybody) can understand.
When I was searching for more information on this topic I ran across a really informative article by a high school sophomore, featuring quotations from Phyllis Schlafly, James Milgram, Mark Naison, and others: http://foothilldragonpress.org/doubts-about-common-core-math/
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I really believe parents, teachers and others do not truly understand Common Core and it’s impact on children and society. It started years ago, with the removal of the Arts and career pathways (other than STEM).
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Here we have two radically different views of how education should work. In one, their are many alternative pathways because kids differ and the needs of a complex, vibrant, diverse, pluralistic society differ as well. In the other, schools are a great sorting machine. They exist not for the purpose of developing varying potential but for sorting people out into a few haves and a lot of have nots of the servant class.
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cx: there, not their, of course. I do wish that one could edit these posts!
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Diane, does this post oppose high standards themselves, the hard tests, or the fact that the tests are used to bash teachers and schools?
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The supporters of the Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic] in ELA always point to general guidelines from the apparatus AROUND the standards–from the Appendices, from the Publishers’ Criteria, etc. Some of these include
1. Have students do close reading of substantive texts.
2. Have students do independent reading as well.
3. Have students do writing based on evidence from those texts.
4. Make sure that the texts that students are reading are of sufficient complexity.
5. Have students read more informative texts than they did in the past–especially a) foundational texts in U.S. history and b) scientific and technical texts.
Not as often remarked upon, but certainly present in the CCSS ELA guidelines, is this:
7. Have students read, over extended periods of time, related works in particular knowledge domains.
8. Delay generalization and other higher-order thinking about related texts until after the texts themselves have been closely read. In other words, avoid prejudging the texts or reducing them, before kids have actually attended to them, to some generalization or list of generalizations.
Now, as general guidelines, these are fairly reasonable, though what is meant by each and what curricula and pedagogical approaches with these goals should look like are both arguable.
HOWEVER, the CCSS in ELA are MUCH MORE than this list of general guidelines. They are a particular list, by grade level and by domain, of desired outcomes of instruction that are to be measured via standardized tests, and THAT LIST was never subjected to vetting. Despite this undeniable fact, every curriculum developer in the country is now beginning every project by making a spreadsheet with that particular list in one column and the places in the curriculum where items on that list are “covered” in a column next to it. And so the SPECIFIC standards and, more importantly, how those standards were conceptualized–e.g., what standards should look like in particular domains–were never subjected to scrutiny but, nonetheless, are having DRAMATIC effects on curricula and pedagogical approaches–distorting and limiting both, creating a great deal of curricular incoherence, encouraging the development of curricula and pedagogy that instantiate discredited, backward assumptions about teaching in particular domains that have been codified in these “standards,” and dramatically limiting the innovations in both curricula and pedagogy that can take place.
I have said this before, and I will say it again: If Achieve’s anointed prince and princess of ELA education had issued voluntary guidelines, these issues would not have arisen. But they didn’t do that. They issued mandatory requirements and so overruled every teacher, curriculum coordinator, and curriculum developer in the country, saying to them, in effect–what you think a learning progression should look like in the English language arts, what you think the outcomes to be measured ought to be–is of NO INTEREST. Neither is ANYTHING THAT ANY EXPERT HAS TO SAY ABOUT THESE MATTERS. We have MADE THESE DECISIONS FOR YOU. The last word has been spoken.
And given the backwardness of specific standards in the CCSS, given fundamental misconceptions instantiated in them about how kids actually acquire language and thinking abilities, given the chilling effect of these “standards” on real innovation in ELA, and given the inflexibility of any standards that are to be applied to ALL STUDENTS, whatever their particular proclivities and abilities and backgrounds, that totalitarian MANDATING OF SPECIFIC STANDARDS is a TRAGIC MISTAKE.
Anyone who has studied the history of U.S. education will know that every few years. some group emerges with a new CURE-ALL. Everything that anyone ever thought about how to teach becomes subordinated to the new CURE-ALL. A great Renaissance is going to occur because of it. (The NCLB requirement that every child would be proficient by 2014 was just the latest in a long, sad series of such idiotic expectations.) The Common Core is just the latest CURE-ALL, and the medicine is very likely to be worse than is the disease.
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The CCSS is our little red book of education. It represents what we are allowed to think and do.
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But I guess we have a new way here in the United States. We shall entertain new ideas about our curricula and pedagogy and standards when the Central Committee meets to decide upon its new Five Year Plan, its next Great Leap Forward, its next Cultural Revolution. Until then, we must understand that we are allowed to think what David Coleman and Susan Pimentel think. Any other notions are Thought Crime.
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Fortunately, we who are not worthy have David and Susan do do all our thinking for us, relieving us of that wearisome burden.
“There’s no bullet list like Stalin’s bullet list.” –Edward Tufte
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For freedom lies, of course, in doing precisely what you are told to do, believing what you are told to believe, and WANTING THAT and ONLY THAT. 2 + 2 = 5? I don’t knowl Let’s find out what the Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth says. By golly, by gee: It does!
Just ask O’Brien from Orwell’s 1984.
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In a democracy, we would have VOLUNTARY, COMPETING, CONTINUOUSLY EVOLVING STANDARDS, vetted by experts with differing ideas, and the FREE people of localities would decide among them, adapting and adopting as they saw fit.
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Or we can let the Party decide these matters for us.
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The whole point, Ed, is that competition among ideas is what leads to progress. If you will read my comments earlier in this thread, you will see remarks on a very few of the grosser misconceptions instantiated in the CCSS in ELA. However, there are so many of these that I am outlining a book on the subject. The CCSS in ELA were prepared by amateurs.
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I have observed for many years that there has been a certain degree of disrespect for those in education. Professors from the sciences and maths, as well as those in business, engineering, etc. There is a disdain often based on the idea that hard research is necessary to support the success of the universities. Also, there is a resentment towards those who get degrees in education, considering the skill ability to be inferior to getting a degree in other areas. It may just be due to the distaste of some for what they call a liberal arts degree, considering it to be inferior and useless.
Could this be the reason that teachers and other educators were left out of much of the processes in designing the CCSS? And it could also have a lot to do with counting on the internet technologists to develop ways to put all education on line.
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All this will be moot after the ridiculous high-stakes tests now being prepared are given. The educrats and politicians and pundits who foisted these new “standards” and tests and evaluation schemes on us will experience something altogether unprecedented in U.S. education history–a grassroots revolt such that we have never before seen, one that will have the deformers falling all over one another to explain how they weren’t REALLY supporters of any of this absurdity. Since Babylon fell, there will not have been a better thump.
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