This comment came from a reader:
Diane,
In response to the Frank Bruni article in the NYT I wanted to share with you what I shared with my colleagues at the Schlechty Center. I am a Senior Associate with the Center, a former school superintendent in Texas and was heavily involved in the effort of the Texas Association of School Administrators in developing the document, “Creating A New Vision for Public Education in Texas”, with which you are familiar. Here is what I shared:
We have always had some parents who were over protective, but to use current parental reactions to Common Core and abusive uses of standardized tests as evidence that todays children are being “coddled” is a gross misinterpretation of what parents are saying. The “suburban white moms” comment from Secretary Duncan, which was the trigger for this article, is a misinterpretation and a misrepresentation as well as a mischaracterization. The suburban schools I am familiar with are highly competitive environments and in many cases a lot of children are pushed too hard, are expected to be involved in numerous organized activities in and out of school, leaving little time to “be children”.
More disturbing is how dismissive the author is of the critics of Common Core and the associated testing. He categorized the critics from extreme conservative to extreme liberal and those engaging in imaginary conspiracies about privatization. The latter is a veiled slap at the work of Diane Ravitch. The criticism of CC and the test-based accountability are real, growing, and based on legitimate concerns. The privatization movement is well substantiated. To reframe the discussion as “too much coddling” may be an attempt to shift the focus of the debate. The fact that 17 states are now backing away from Common Core is probably alarming to the so-called “reformers”, Secretary Duncan, Jeb Bush, etc. –and perhaps to this author.
If one looks closely at the criticisms, they are more about the standardized tests, arbitrary cut scores, and failing labels, etc., as the single means of assessing and reporting on the Common Core, than they are about the standards themselves. As Phil has asserted for years, when high stakes are attached to the assessments, the assessments become the standards.
John Horn
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Bruni should either put up the evidence supporting Common Core or shut up. Insults that elicit fiery responses from educators do not qualify Bruni as serious. It makes him just another troll. Education policy as any policy must be based on evidence.
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I agree with this commenter 100%. The reformers will use any language necessary to deflect blame. First, blame the extremists. Next, white suburban moms. What will the battle-cry be when we parents in rural Tennessee wake up? Podunk, redneck mamas have their aprons in a wad?
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Thus far, the public hearings in New York state have been held ONLY in suburbs. When they move to urban districts, I have a feeling that John King will get an earful from black and Hispanic moms. What will Arne say then?
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“Everybody” is coming out of the woodwork suddenly – MOB MENTALITY.. he always finds a way to winnow out of things and to deflect the blame instead of taking responsibility. I think we should give him a review via “Charlotte Danielson’s FFT” model of course tweaking a few of the items thus calling it FFL (framework for leading). Now really.. what rating would he receive? The reflecting and communicating with parents categories would be very telling! Deflecting is not REFLECTING Mr. Duncan! Management? The “masses” of angry teachers, parents and administrators are growing with every passing day and I don’t think Duncan will be able to calm them (until he steps down)… So far, the FFL rating is not looking so cheery and I have only addressed a few categories.
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My first sentence of my response should have included that it was in response to your question, “What would Arne say then” .. He would say.. “everybody” is coming out of the woodwork suddenly – MOB MENTALITY.. (and then the rest of the response follows). He treats title one (teachers, students, admin, parents) like riff raff.
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I already speak daily with those Podunk, redneckers and they can certainly see the idiocies that educational standards and standardized testing are.
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What is the evidence that is required to show the standards value and effect? Student work? Teacher work?
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My response: http://bbbloviations.blogspot.com/2013/11/on-coddling-kids-and-common-core.html
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Powerful reading at childrenaremorethantestscores.blogspot.com
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Here’s that link. http://www.childrenaremorethantestscores.blogspot.com
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It’s great to be an “empowered parent” unless you’re a parent who disagrees with your betters in the Reform Movement, in which case you’re silly and to be dismissed.
If the Long Island mothers had been advocating for a charter school it would be hunky dory but because they’re defending their local public school, they’re delusional and have to be corrected with a stern lecture.
Everyone knows all public schools suck, don’t they? Well, don’t they? I read that in the NYTimes, so it must be true.
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I just finished a school levy campaign with a bunch of rural public school parents. They don’t love ed reform either. When do we get a patronizing lecture from politicians and pundits?
Urban, suburban, rural. I think that’s all the categories of “moms”!
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Thanks for bringing that up, Chiara. Those that live and work in the beautiful countryside see it daily. Doesn’t get much press, though!
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Are children coddled?
Or is the common core cobbled?
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Common core isn’t only cobbled, it’s crap!
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This goes back quite a few years. As a teacher I had a chance to hear Phillip Schlechty speak a couple of times. I took careful notes, and I wish I could lay my hands on them right now. Recently I’ve been thinking about how his leadership may have contributed to the fix we’re in today.
He and Willard Daggett were two of the well-paid speakers who made the rounds for years addressing big groups of teachers and others about how US education had to change, and how schools weren’t doing right by their students. I found Daggett’s approach highly offensive–a manipulative, bombastic, egotistical brand of propaganda that, unfortunately, was pretty well received. After I heard him speak, my principal happened to walk by: “Well, you can’t argue with that,” she said. I could, and did. During the breakout session that followed, one speech teacher pointed out that Daggett had actually used some of the favorite speaking techniques of Adolph Hitler.
Schlechty’s approach was a lot more reasonable, but the message was roughly the same: we’re failing our children. The two Schlechty talks I heard weren’t identical, but one line he used in both of them made an analogy between US education and the old Soviet economy. Alluding to the bad quality of Soviet products and the lowly ruble, Schlechty said, “The workers pretended to work, and the government pretended to pay them.” He believed the same kind of thing was happening in US schools. So when Arne Duncan says we’ve been lying to our children about how well they’re doing, it’s straight out of the Schlechty playbook.
The influence of people like Schlechty can be seen in the “Common Core Standards,” too. His main argument was that we must prepare students to become knowledge workers, because that’s the kind of work they will be doing in the new economy. (This was around the time when the wood shop and auto shop were shut down at the suburban high school where I taught.) To me it looks like the “standards” were designed to produce David Coleman’s warped version of the knowledge workers that Schlechty yearned for.
To Schlechty’s credit, he avoided blaming parents and teachers for the perceived shortcomings of students. He expressed compassion for all involved, but his overarching message had more to do with preparing a globally competitive workforce than with inspiring students to reach their full potential, or inviting them to pursue an education suited to their own talents and interests.
I’m glad to hear that Phillip Schlechty is against high-stakes testing. Other than that, I don’t know where these men stand on the issues today. I admit to being impressed with Schlechty at the time, and intensely annoyed by both the substance and style of Willard Daggett (especially his sneak attack on teachers–a classic set ’em up, knock ’em down gambit). I have a feeling that these two voices, among many others, helped prepare the way for the “reforms” that children, teachers, and parents are suffering through right now.
Their critiques of US education may be construed in a way that makes the wholesale assault on public schools seem justified. It’s as if they and their fellow education leadership keynoters helped prepare the soil for the moguls of “reform” to plant their money in.
Both Schlechty and Daggett were able to found “Centers” for educational leadership, so it’s clear they’ve had an influence, for good or ill.
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“If one looks closely at the criticisms, they are more about the standardized tests, arbitrary cut scores, and failing labels, etc., as the single means of assessing and reporting on the Common Core, than they are about the standards themselves.”
And it is important that we continue to point out the shoddiness of both the process and product (standards). It is easy for teachers to pay lip service to mandates that have no teeth, which is probably why politicians frequently ignore the accountability piece. They realize when their legislation is basically political campaigning. The politician gets a headline. By not including rigid oversight, they allow those affected to ignore sloppy legislation/posturing and go about their lives. We cannot, however, ignore the sloppiness of the Common Core, even if we reject the idea of national standards.
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Beat me to the punch 2O2T.
I had highlighted the exact quote and realized that those problems really are secondary if not tertiary to the primary problems, those identified by Wilson in his “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error”.
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Arne Duncan believes Tom Friedman is “one of the smartest thinkers”:
“Here’s how Tom Friedman – the author, New York Times columnist, and one of the smartest thinkers on the profound impact of globalization – explains it. He says that so many of the jobs our students are training for today don’t even exist yet – and that many of the jobs of the future will be ones that individuals themselves help to invent.”
Did you know many of the jobs your kindergartner is training for don’t even exist yet?
That’s why “moms” must listen to learned pundit Tom Friedman. For brilliant insights like that.
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I have to take slight issue with the “17 states” figure. One of the states in Mercedes’ roundup was my state, Kentucky. What was listed for Kentucky was a tea party personality singly filing a lawsuit against the state, which is likely to fail because it’s only narrowly focused on state constitutional issues and not the myriad pragmatic issues in Common Core. He’s not involving an attorney in the suit, nor involving anyone else damaged by the standards. In short, I wouldn’t call this a movement.
That all said, we do have a Kentucky BATs group, and there was recently a meeting in Louisville to engage parents about the issues in standardized testing and the Common Core. Something is happening in Kentucky, but I like to refer to a quote attributed to Mark Twain (although it’s unclear he actually said it): “When the end of the world comes, I want to be in Kentucky because it’s always 20 years behind the times.”
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I sent this in response to the “17 states reject common core” article – applicable here, too.
The majority of the criticism is about CCSS is about implementation failures, funding, testing, timing, too many changes simultaneously, misguided evaluation, and blaming many legitimate problems of current reforms and RTTT on CCSS.
CCSS do not require excessive standardized testing and we’d have the testing mess with or without the CCSS
CCSS do not require using high-stakes test scores and turning local assessments into high-stakes tests to evaluate teachers. RTTT drives that train, not CCSS and with or without them, we’d be stuck with RTTT regulations.
CCSS do not require states to develop tightly aligned curriculum and scripts or to purchase curriculum with the CCSS stamp of approval.
CCSS does not promote a timeline – and the states wanting to delay implementation don’t necessarily disagree with them, they are just smarter than others and are going methodically.
Among the many ironies is that the politicians and reformers who tout states rights and local control don’t have the courage or will to develop their own reforms and curriculum. They love to complain but sure love posting their test scores. Low scores = more legislative fixes = more profits for corporations and privatizers. No CCSS then no scores which means they’ve got nothing to fix and lobbyists lose their jobs.
Except, of course, Texas who is very willing to ignore the standards and implement creationism and take evolution out of the curriculum.
Oddly, few of the critiques in the states have to do with the content and direction of the standards. Yes – there ARE content, scope, and direction issues with CCSS – but those changes are easily addressed – or ignored.
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Left to their own devices and using a democratic process to determine public education curriculum, my state would get as close to creationism as the federal courts would tolerate.
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Thank you for addressing what I see as some of the virtues of Common Core. Even though their origin in the current reform movement makes them suspect, I have seen some positive results from using them here in FL. (Please remember that in Florida our standards have been historically shoddy and nebulous since the inception of NCLB.) I agree that if you take away the high-stakes testing, value-added craziness, Charlotte Danielson, and push to privatization, the standards are a step up from previous teaching mandates. Of course, I can only speak for kindergarten, and it’s possible CCSS in high school doesn’t work. Nevertheless, when FL adopted CCSS I was looking forward to our DOE finally having to be accountable for their tests and “cut scores,” both of which seem to be arbitrarily changed at the whim of our chancellors (and we only seem to hire the rejects from other states– Google Gerard Robinson and that crook from Indiana– we definitely appear to need some federal oversight).
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I think many will disagree that CCSS is developmentally appropriate for Kindergarten.
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What I think is so funny about Bruni’s piece is that he asks whether “today’s” children are coddled. This is a favorite theme of pundits in any era, because we’re always sure that our own hard upbringings made us into the virtuous, responsible adults we are today, whereas the coddled younger generation is clearly going to pot. But since we adults were brought up before the Common Core, shouldn’t he be asking whether “yesterday’s” children were coddled? How on earth did we manage, back in the bad old days of low expectations and low-stakes testing? Thank goodness today’s children aren’t being coddled the same way we were. Heaven forbid they should leave kindergarten without hitting their college and career readiness benchmarks, the way we did. Things are much better now — that’s what you meant to say, Mr. Bruni, isn’t it?
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You nailed it, Gloria. This article is just more of the same predictable blather. In his The Educated Imagination, critic Northrup Frye wrote about one of the earliest human texts that was not simply a record of the amount of grain in some granary. It was a Sumerian text that read, “Children no respect their parents or honor the gods.”
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This made me laugh. Thanks for it!
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Robert D. Shepherd: notwithstanding my respect for those old Greek guys, sometimes they could plumb the depths as well as scale the heights:
“Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company; gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers.” [Socrates]
Not an old Greek guy: “The more things seem to change, they more they stay the same.” [Corinne Bailey Rae, PUT YOUR RECORDS ON]
😎
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