For many years, Frank Bruni was a wonderful restaurant reviewer for the New York Times. But now he is a regular opinion writer for the New York Times, and when he writes about education, he is way over his head. He was one of the few to write sympathetically about the corporate reform turkey “Won’t Back Down,” which opened in 2,500 theaters to bad reviews and disappeared a month later.
His latest effort was a strident defense of the Common Core standards and tests, in which he made fun of the parents who spoke out against the overuse and misuse of standardized testing. His thesis was that American kids are “too coddled.”
Surely, he was not referring to the majority of public school students in the south and the west who–according to the Southern Education Fund–live in poverty. Are they coddled?
Does he know that in New York State, only 3% of English learners passed the tests; only 5% of students with disabilities; only 15-18% of black and Hispanic students? What will we do with these students if large numbers fail these “rigorous” tests in the future? Surely they won’t be coddled.
His purpose is to show solidarity with the Common Core standards and tests, although he doesn’t seem to know how they were developed, why they were adopted, or why their advocates feel certain they will produce good results.
He disparages their critics as extremists, echoing Arne Duncan:
“The Common Core, a laudable set of guidelines that emphasize analytical thinking over rote memorization, has been adopted in more than 40 states. In instances its implementation has been flawed, and its accompanying emphasis on testing certainly warrants debate.
“What’s not warranted is the welling hysteria: from right-wing alarmists, who hallucinate a federal takeover of education and the indoctrination of a next generation of government-loving liberals; from left-wing paranoiacs, who imagine some conspiracy to ultimately privatize education and create a new frontier of profits for money-mad plutocrats.
“Then there’s the outcry, equally reflective of the times, from adults who assert that kids aren’t enjoying school as much; feel a level of stress that they shouldn’t have to; are being judged too narrowly; and doubt their own mettle.
“Aren’t aspects of school supposed to be relatively mirthless? Isn’t stress an acceptable byproduct of reaching higher and digging deeper? Aren’t certain fixed judgments inevitable? And isn’t mettle established through hard work?”
Imagine thinking that the burst of thousands of privately managed charters and the spread of vouchers to 17 states in the past 20 years is worthy of concern? Nah, that’s leftwing paranoic thinking. Imagine wondering how strained school budgets can afford billions for new software and hardware, more bandwidth, more teacher evaluations based on tests, more tests, more test prep…..Nah, just more left-wing paranoic thinking.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
What would anyone learn from an exam that, say, 90% of english learners or 90% of children with disabilities could pass?
If this is a call to simply change label of a particular score to passing, than we might still learn a lot, though devalue the notion of passing. If it is a call to write an exam that would allow almost all english learners and learning disabled student to achieve a 70% score, it would be useless in understanding how native speakers or those without learning disabilities might perform on a more challenging exam.
TE, what do you suggest we do with those who never pass these exams? Ideas?
You are welcome to proclaim that everyone passes. It will not change the students actual abilities and characters an iota.
Many years ago, we used to give some of the Special Ed students a certificate of attendance
@teachingeconomist.. I am going to answer your question as to “what anyone would learn from an exam that, say 90% of English learners or 90% of children with disabilities could pass..”? I would answer nothing just as we learn nothing from the current tests that almost none of the Ells and students with IEP’s can pass. Why? Because students and teachers are not allowed to see the tests after they are done and to review and go over them so as to learn from them. To add insult to injury, when students happen to tweet and use social media to discuss the questions, we teachers and parents learn of some of the idiotic, poorly worded or purely incorrect questions and answers that are part of these tests (remember the pineapple fiasco). If tests are given to learn something, does it not seem logical to you that teachers should have free and clear access to the questions as well as each student’s answers? When teachers give tests to students (their own that is) they want the students to understand the material. Current high stakes tests ironically do not appear to want any growth to take place. They are more about profit for the companies producing them and are treated like top secret highly classified documents so that “the competition” (other testing companies) won’t rain on their parade!
Great answer, Art. As a special ed. teacher who could read Math & Science portions of our state assessments in accordance w/student IEPs for many years, I can personally attest that numerous questions made no sense, had more than one correct answer, had no correct answer, or were otherwise flawed. Therefore,
as Todd Farley so aptly stated in his 2009 (& things have only gotten worse) book “Making the Grades,” the tests are in no way “standardized”–they are neither valid nor reliable.
So, what do we do with these tests (rather than waste billions of taxpayer dollars on them that should go directly to schools, which would surely restore teachers {smaller classes!}, and art, music and P.E. classes)? A REAL D.o.Ed. working FOR the good of students would say cease & desist, states would cancel their contracts with Pear$on, and teachers could teach and children would learn…much more than how to take tests!
Student assessment would go back into the hands where they belong–to the teachers who actually USE assessments to determine where their students are doing well and in what areas they need help and further instruction.
TE, tests we have now are for one purpose only–to make money for Pear$on & their $tockholders. Oh, &–with the latest Dumkin comments–to show suburban moms just how bad their schools are, so they will clamor for more charter schools, so THEIR friends & stockholders can make even MORE $$$$.
Ka-ching, TE, &, sorry, no further discussion needed.
Your comment = right on target!
The “we” I am referring to there are not a students or teachers but society at large trying to understand how successful our efforts have been to educate the next generation of citizens. Just as my cumulative final exams (and cumulative final exams in high school) are formative exams relative to the next time the course is taught, standardized exams are formative from the perspective of the structure of k-12 education. This is the way society can decide if it is better to use resources to make classes smaller, pay teachers for getting graduate degrees, or expand to all day kindergarten across the state.
If you are simply arguing against poorly written exams, I doubt anyone would disagree, though there might be some disagreement about what constitutes a poorly written exam question. But standardized exams themselves are the only way to understand and give evidence to society about the impact of teacher education levels, hunger, class size, pedological approach, income levels, and all the other things we think might be important to the learning have on learning.
“But standardized exams themselves are the only way to understand and give evidence to society about the impact of teacher education levels, hunger, class size, pedological approach, income levels, and all the other things we think might be important to the learning have on learning.”
Really?? Whatever in the world did we do before the invention of standardized testing? No wonder the Renaissance didn’t happen until after the invention of standardized testing – I never realized the connection before. Sheesh.
Oh questioner of all things. Here’s what you should do with your students if these tests and cutscores are so magnificent.
First, barely introduce the material or do so in a haphazard way (like the rush to implementation that has occurred).
Second, create an incredibly difficult test in which proficiency is scaled to such a high level as to be unrealistic. Not average ability but rather above average ability.
Third, set a passing score so high that it becomes even more difficult to pass.
Fourth, declare anyone who did not pass a failure.
(Then, fifth, the following year make the test a bit easier with a lower passing percentage and claim growth!)
If I did these things in my classroom, it would be malpractice. But that’s the CCSS tests.
Very well said.
You can change the label you put on any score, but it will not change the student’s academic abilities.
When I first began teaching at my university, in state students were presumed to be “college ready” if they had a high school diploma and were automatically admitted to the university. This became unworkable as what it meant to be a high school graduate changed. Currently in state students are automatically admitted if they take a sufficient number of academic courses (4 English, 3 science, 3 math and 3 social science) in high school and average a 2.0 across those courses (if they do not achieve this GPA they can also be automatically admitted based on ACT score or class standing). Even this standard seems to be inadequate as the labeling of academic abilities and interest levels as “C” have changed, so there is significant pressure to increase the admission requirements for the university.
TE,
Read and understand Noel Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700 to understand why what you have written is “vain and illusory”
Diene,
What did you think of my own attempt to summarize “Temperature Standards and the Problem of Error”? If you commented on it, I missed it.
Steve K–Spot on!
Duane–correct, as usual (but I miss your larger exposition, where you state, “I say NO!”
TE–I’m sorry, but you missed the essence of what I said–“standardized” tests (in quotes) meaning that they are NOT standardized–they have shown to be neither valid nor reliable, just as the scoring of these tests is neither valid nor reliable.
And will never be…it’s ALL about the money, not the children, and we who teach/have taught K-12 know that.
I’m sorry to inform you, TE, that you are WRONG.
And, actually, I wish you weren’t, because that would mean that the tests were standardized, this whole thing wasn’t all about the money, and that all of this was truly in the best interests of kids.
When you say “and never will be” do you mean that there are no tests that are valid nor reliable or are some, say NAEB standardized exams, that are valid and reliable?
About the same we learn from all the current corporate made standardized test.
Nada.
At the heart of your argument is a non critical (non questioning) acceptance of the assumptions that form the foundation of ‘educational reform ‘: logical positivism, functionalism and technocratic rationality. Essentially you assume, we can measure, test and score the most salient variables that impact academic success/life success and use those numbers to ‘grade’ students, teachers and schools. Formal ‘standardized’ testing is not the sole determinant of successful teaching and learning.
This ‘ testing’ ideology is, essentially, conservative, in that it ends up justifying existing forms of educational, economic, social and political relationships: it justifies schools as graders and ‘sorters’ of both students and teachers and perpetuates the historical myth of schooling based on meritocratic premises and “careers open to talent”.
This conservative ideology has led to excluding of any alternative narrative or discourse that permits make these existing relationships problematic and leads to a view of school whose reason for being is producing workers for the 21st century work world. What happens to notions of developing a critical citizenry; valuing creative forms of expression; valuing and working for the common good as opposed to individual accretion of vast wealth, commodities and other badges of ‘success’?
Of course, students should acquire skills that facilitate movement into meaningful jobs that pay a good wages. As important, how do we reestablish learning that values basic social safety net functions that have been extinguished? Without the re-establishing these most basic rights, how can you, with a straight face, even write. “…You (referring to a notion not even advocated by Diane Ravitch) are welcome to proclaim that everyone passes. I don’t believe It will not change the students actual abilities and characters an iota”. This last statement seems encapsulate pretty much captures your economist vision of education
^ thumbs up
Reviewing my post, which I should have done (under the general advice of ” measure twice, cut once”), I note and send my apology to Diane and blog readers for a sloppy posting.
I don’t think I am arguing Carl Popper’s position here. I am drawing a distinction between what exists and what we measure and label. A student that is illiterate will not learn to read if the student is given a high school diploma. A high school student who cannot do simple algebra will not become adept at mathematics because we change the cut scores on an exam.
I think this fundamental point is misunderstood by some in education. High school graduation does not cause students to have a brighter future than not graduating from high school, characteristics of the student cause both high school graduation and a brighter future. Students without those characteristics who nonetheless are given a high school diploma will generally not have a bright future.
As to the more general point about measuring, I argue that SOME salient variables can be measured and understood, and is ONE way, on a large scale, to evaluate the effectiveness of what we are doing.
No one would argue that literacy and numeracy skills are a required elements for democratic citizenship. Read most anything by Henry Giroux; his work is essential to understanding, what is at stake for this society when there is a fusing and merging of public school pedagogy, curriculum and instruction, with the interests of private industry and its philanthropic foundation progeny.
To correct you, In my initial post, I was not alluding to the work of Karl Popper, but, rather, to the insights derived from theorists of “The Frankfurt School, who developed “Critical Theory”, as mode of analyzing and critiquing society’s institutions.
What I poorly attempted to articulate was that the consequences of the ideology of the educational reform movement’s concepts and goals of ‘successful’ education are, finally, limiting or extinguishing students ability to enter the public sphere as vital, critical, inquiring citizens, rather than workers ready-made for jobs in the 21st century.
Standardized testing, a mandated nationwide curriculum, destroying the rights of teachers to act collectively, along with privatizing education, under the guise of school choice, are the primary tools of a deeply conservative and repressive ideology
Our critique of educational reform must be informed by both uncovering educational reform’s unspoken ideological assumption, as well as its destructive pedagogy.
Posted to Mr. Bruni’s facebook:
Mr. Bruni, I cannot comment on your reviews of restaurants since I cannot afford to go to NY restaurants but I do wish to comment on your op-ed on common core! You imply in your article that Mr. Coleman told you some “facts” about the common core but there are no implications that you spoke with any Teacher, Administrator, parent or student. You did indicate that you have read some articles about what people are saying and doing about the common core. This would seem similar to a critic judging a restaurant by reading what others had to say on Yelp and speaking to the chef. I am sure that someone would not do that in regard to restaurants, and surly, someone should not do that in regard to Education! To be quite blunt, you have no clue what you are talking about and how this corporate funded deformation is truly destructive to Education!
The comments are closed on the NYTimes site….
“Aren’t aspects of school supposed to be relatively mirthless?” says he.
ANATHEMA, cries I. What kind of world are we creating, when we WANT our children to learn to be inured to working at mirthless tasks — in Kindergarten?
“Aren’t aspects of school supposed to be relatively mirthless?”
Who is this sadist at the New York Times?
The whole purpose of education is to promote humanity for its positive advancement. Ain’t nothin’ positive about “relative mirthlessness.”
“Aren’t aspects of school supposed to be relatively mirthless?”
When HL Mencken wrote about “the haunting fear that somewhere, someone is having fun” he was talking about the Puritans. And apparently Frank Bruni.
This sort of advocacy for mandated failure and sanctioned cruelty is a hallmark of the educowards.
“Words empty as the wind are best left unsaid.” [Homer]
Frank Bruni would have been well served if he had heeded the words of an old dead Greek guy.
😒
Surely you don’t mean Socrates when he said, “I drank what?” 😛
Right on, fellow paranoiac!
This out-of-touch man is actually defending Duncan:
“…you can guess what set Duncan off: a concern, wholly justified, that tougher instruction not be rejected simply because it makes children feel inadequate, and that the impulse to coddle kids not eclipse the imperative to challenge them.”
Never mind once-happy children vomiting before tests and crying to quit school.
Poor Duncan, He was just “set off” by those white suburban mothers.
And here we have Bruni coddling HIM.
Ahh, the irony.
Really, it’s like a very bad joke: a food critic and a basketball player walk into a bar and insult white suburban mothers and their kids, twice.
Wish I could find the humor in it.
I have no idea other than arrogance as to what gives Bruni credence to be writing his uninformed education opinions in such a public forum or why anyone from the public should care about his opinion on education just because he has written restaurant reviews in a former time unless of course he wishes to write a review on school lunches.
I guess a job is a job and they couldn’t get anybody else to sell themselves for money.
The man does not understand the meaning of the word “stress” especially in children. Notice how his column was sexist in nature? He took a very real concern of mothers and turned it into a joke—same way Duncan did. However, I find this need for the NYTimes to defend Duncan and Obama at every turn just as silly as FoxNews doing the opposite.
However he was right about the need for extremists to turn the CC into something that it’s not. I recently found out that Ron Paul had an education curriculum with a not-so-hidden agenda. Yet CC has a hidden one. But why should I be surprised that an ob/gyn would now be an education specialist.
I’m for boosting the rigor of our schools, but not in the way the Common Core seems to be doing it. To me the main flaw with the standards is that that they lend themselves to being interpreted as a call to drill skills rather than teach content. Systematically transmitting rich content is the soul of education; practicing skills should revolve around that project. Common Core –especially the new tests –is inducing districts to cast the soul aside, making sterile skills drills the centerpiece of the new curriculum. Content is just seen as grist for this skill mill This desultory, haphazard approach to teaching knowledge is going to lead to bored, disaffected and ignorant students. We’ll have rigor, but sterile, fruitless rigor.
Under coddled in the dictionary, I see ‘eating out for a living’. Not exactly the discovery channel show Naked and Afraid, where they find grubs and hunt reptiles for food.
Yes, when it’s tough to decide what to order, mettle is quite important. I will not argue that.
Where is Michael Winerip? I think the Gray Lady dispatched him when he wrote columns questioning New York State’s preposterous test results and when he started exposing the wine and dine practices of Pearson–buying state superintendents to procure multi-million dollar contracts. Evidently that wasn’t fit to print.
Better to have an armchair thought piece by Frank Bruni express the pro-establishment biases of the NYT
With any luck, the NYT will soon get the memo that di Blassio won the mayoral election and they will bring back Winerp.
Speaking of memos, Bruni is late to the game so I guess he didn’t get the message that corporate education “reformers” have already replaced self-esteem with grit.
I agree! NYT, allow Michael Winerip to cover education again. He’s by far the best informed reporter you’ve got.
The decision by the New York Times to remove Michael Winerip from education coverage was horrible. He is the best informed writer in the entire newspaper about education, and they have him covering “boomers.”
Anyone who, to bolster his assertions, quotes people like non-educator architect of the Common Core, David Coleman, and Marc Tucker, who laid out the uniform “cradle to grave” training and tracking plan for public education in his 1992 Dear Hillary letter, is playing on the same team as those who orchestrated the business plan that’s being so aggressively implemented in public education today. (See Tucker’s plan here: http://www.eagleforum.org/educate/marc_tucker/ )
Bruni had to demean both the right and the left of the populace because all sides have become aware of and are pushing back against the hostile take-over of our public schools. His op-ed is just another clumsy example of defensive on the offense coming from big business and those in government they’ve bought. You can be sure the snide critiques of concerned adults and insensitive characterizations of children in crisis from those on their team will continue, because billions of dollars ALWAYS trump millions of children.
Just don’t ever trust Bruni’s ratings of restaurants, education or anything else because all indicators are that this guy can be bought off.
I posted these resources/links as a quick push back against Bruni’s article yesterday on our group’s page, Central Ohio Friends of Education and my personal Face Book page:
Here are some gripping, factual resources and personal testimonies to push back against the ridiculous question posed in this NY Times article that our kids might be too coddled and require “tough love that some parents and educators don’t like” with the implementation of Common Core…
http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2013/11/common_core_standards_ten_colo.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/11/19/white-suburban-mom-responds-to-arne-duncan/
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/11/17/1256353/-A-parent-s-response-to-Arne-Duncan#
http://news.firedoglake.com/2013/11/21/arne-duncan-doubles-down-on-white-suburban-moms-comment-promotes-economic-ignorance/
Facts? Facts? Bruni doesn’t need any facts. His opinions are baseless, but harmonious with NYT editorial policy. The perverse ‘beauty’ of Mr. Bruni’s opinion pieces is that he has a huge, panting, devoted, readership waiting to feed at his trough of ignorance.
(M)aureenkennedy’s; citations, provided above, point to a reality that comports with the lived- life of real teachers, parents and students . But such matters are beyond the ken of Frank Bruni, luminary writer: for him, “Ignorance is bliss”. Hello, bliss. For Secretary Duncan, “ignorance is bliss. Ideology rules supreme.
What is most serious and ominous, is that Mr. Bruni, Arne Duncan and cohorts, have absolutely no interest in listening to a different, coherent narrative; their only interest is to push the ‘reform’ agenda at all costs, by demeaning any person or group who have the temerity to offer resistance to their juggernaut.
Sure, write a “Letter to the Editor”. even an opposing “op-Ed” piece. It will, assuredly make one feel better; it is better than abject passivity. If there be optimism to be found In the cruel world of the educational reform complex,it lays in the hope and possibility of continuous, vocal, electoral, resistance too each and all aspects of the ‘reform’ agenda when they are proposed at the local level: citie(s) and town(s); school(s) and school committee(s).
Too coddled? Come to the schools this time of year, it’s the time of year teachers dig deep to provide gifts of boots, coats, Visa cards, clothing, toys etc. for their needy families, on top of already purchased school supplies.
This is insane, and adding to this foolish piece, the article about the NYS Regent Fat Cats pulling in hundreds of thousands of dollars on our kids’ backs. it continues to be much worse than we all thought. Greedy ##^#!@(,
The entire hired advocacy industry is spinning in space, in counterattack against all sides. They’re trying to find an argumentative style to promote corporatized child abuse and the only weapons they have are gibberish and drivel.
For instance, I’m struck by the ugly rhetorical questions a restaurant critic and a teachingeconomist have spun out.
Burris asks,
“Aren’t aspects of school supposed to be relatively mirthless? Isn’t stress an acceptable byproduct of reaching higher and digging deeper? Aren’t certain fixed judgments inevitable? And isn’t mettle established through hard work?”
And teachingeconomist chimes in his two-cents-worth,
“What would anyone learn from an exam that, say, 90% of english learners or 90% of children with disabilities could pass?”
They present these questions with the idea that they’re unanswerable, and therefore a generalized justification for any industrial-scale brutality the mandated assessment industry might wish to impose on English language learners, disabled children, children of poverty, and all the coddled others.
Let me answer all that from the perspective of teaching and learning, rather than testing and marketing. I’m about to walk into a classroom in one hour and forty minutes, to teach the topic of stoichiometry to all of the above. In two weeks, I’ll give them a test, and (by God) 90% of them will pass it.
A certain amount of stress is indeed inevitable, for me and for them, but it is not an “acceptable” by-product, and so I’ll do everything I can to combat and minimize it. Mirth is always there for us.
The tests these stooges are promoting aren’t “reaching higher and deeper”. I know what higher and deeper actually means, but my district has just proposed a new assessment rubric based solely on the “assessment vocabulary” of the CCSS. It’s a gridfull of jargon, shallow and narrow and mean.
And please let me say, with all my heart, your “fixed judgements” about these kids are bullshit.
Dr. Ravitch cites the 3% “passing” rate for English language learners and the 5% “passing” rate for students with disabilities as problematic. Presumably that means that some other “passing” rate would not be problematic. Just trying to find out what the non-problematic passing rate would be.
If I may be so bold, I believe Diane’s contention is that the NAEP definitions of below basic, basic, proficient, and advanced are fair and reasonable, and that “basic” represents a child more or less at grade level. The problem in her view is that the New York tests were incorrectly aligned to NAEP–only proficient and advanced scores were considered to be “passing,” when “basic” should have been included as well.
I’d really like to see a separate explanation of this as I’ve had trouble finding a more in-depth description of NAEP proficiency levels or how they tie in to state tests and standards.
Tim,
Go to NAEP website for definitions of levels
Advanced is superior achievement and very few reach it.
Proficient is solid academic achieve not
Basic is partial mastery of academic skills
Below basic is low achievement
Bruni, not Burris. 🙂 I know that was a typo but wouldn’t want anyone new here to think Burris isn’t on the side of public ed.
Bruni’s column was yet another example of the NYTimes’ failure to grasp reality. http://waynegersen.com/2013/11/24/the-nytimes-not-seeing-reality/
Here’s an earlier Bruni column – http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/29/opinion/bruni-a-bold-bid-for-better-schools.html?_r=0 This one was applauded by Wendy Kopp. I don’t think he’s uniformed – he knows where his bread is buttered. I also miss Michael Winerip. Although the NY Times comments are closed, comments continue on Bruni’s facebook page…
While it might be debatable whether US children are coddled – actually, it’s not, since so many of them live in poverty – it’s inarguable that ignorant NY Times columnists are.
As someone who loves to cook, I read the food section and restaurant reviews in the New York Times, but am consistently amazed at how it’s really an unconscious anthropological study of bourgeois faddishness.
Perhaps that explains how Bruni got his columnist gig…
Yeah, that editorial pissed me off. I got to comment (under my wife’s name and our shared account) about how freaking wrong Bruni was. When will these non-educators learn to shut up and let us experts do our job?
One quick semantic point: I don’t think that living in a Census- or DOE-defined impoverished household precludes a child from being coddled. I can’t count the number of times I’ve read teachers refer to students in Title I schools who stay up all night playing video games, e.g., or who miss eight weeks of school to visit relatives. It’s as much about expectations and responsibilities as it is the things that money can buy.
I think Bruni would have written a stronger and potentially more interesting editorial if he hadn’t tried to connect “coddling” to suburban objections over the Common Core (it’s really more about protecting property values and jobs), but this paragraph definitely hit home for me: “If children are unraveling to this extent, it’s a grave problem. But before we beat a hasty retreat from potentially crucial education reforms, we need to ask ourselves how much panic is trickling down to kids from their parents and whether we’re paying the price of having insulated kids from blows to their egos and from the realization that not everyone’s a winner in every activity on every day.”
The tests aren’t going away, and as far as I’m concerned parents aren’t the only adults — it’s also many teachers, admins, superintendents — who need to do a much better job of insulating kids from their own anxiety.
“The tests aren’t going away.”
In other words, the interests and desires of parents, students and teachers are to be willfully ignored, in favor of political mandates from the Overclass.
Thanks, Tim, for pointing out how casually unresponsive our private government has become.
By the way, you’re wrong: parents and students will succeed in halting this forced march.
Parents, students, and teachers aren’t the only stakeholders in our $600 billion public K-12 system, remember. There is very little political will to undo NCLB, a piece of legislation that 100 years from now may be studied more as the last gasp of bipartisanship than for its influence on American public education, and which of course is the source of the mandatory testing.
I say “the tests aren’t going away” only to acknowledge reality, not to endorse or condemn them.
The problem with the Common Core is that they are JUST COMMON. Look up the definition of common, the synonyms, and the antonyms.
The Bruni OpED piece is just part of a more general problem of the NYTimes education pieces. They DO NOT have an expert in education on their Editorial Board, nor are any of the current writers on education issues minimally qualified for doing so. Of course, in education EVERYONE can pretend they are experts since we were all students….Interestingly this is not the case in other subject areas (Nicolas Wade for science sections, for example, is a great scientist and scientists, and many invited or accepted for publication essays are by actual scientists). What NYTimes must do, on a critical public issue such as education, is constitute an expert panel on education, to help them make decision about what to publish, corroborate facts and distinguish and evaluate opinions, and above all provide some sort of research based skeptics context for the claims that are regularly made by the education pundits (and the Barbarians from the MBA, law and management worlds that have taken over education). Maybe it’s me getting old and grumpy but I perceive a de-intellectualization of the NYTimes – publishing on subjects one just can’t imagine it bothering with 20 years ago, pandering to topics that are popular (but irrelevant), allowing people like Bruni (and others) with no expertise on the subject matter to run the public discourse…
I am a teacher. What fries my soul is that the very same consultant who, a few years ago, told us that “They only have to read enough to pass the test” and”Homework iseducational malpractice” and wondered “Do they really need to know who [Queen] Victoria is?” is now the Common Core authority/consultant. Close reading, anyone?