Education Week reports that 68% of districts plan to buy new instructional resources to meet the demands of Common Core.
That is, some 7,600 districts plan to buy new materials.
Most are planning to buy online resources, presumably to prepare for online testing.
I wish some researchers would estimate the shift of resources to pay for the new stuff.
As districts purchase more Common Core aligned materials, hardware and software, what do they spend less on?
Class size? Teachers? The arts? Physical education? Social workers? Guidance counselors? Librarians?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Yes. Fabricate failure and market a packaged solution. Kids, historically a drain with their pesky FAPE, can finally boost the economy.
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This gets at one of the underlying dynamics at work here: churn and ever-rising throughput serving the financial and political interests of those pushing so-called education reform.
Just as a corrupt stockbroker enriches him/herself by constantly churning an account and increasing fees, so-called education reformers enrich themselves and expand their power base by churning teachers, standards, curricula, evaluation systems, etc.
As long as I’ve been an observer or participant in this realm, panaceas of the moment have always afflicted education. After all, it’s a convenient and lucrative way to avoid what’s really holding students and the public schools back, at least in urban districts: poverty, unstable family and community life, and insufficient/misallocated resources.
The difference between then and today’s flavors of the day – merit pay, VAM, CCSS, teacher evaluation checklists, etc. – is that today’s panaceas, which are in fact emerging dystopias, are being imposed at the point of a gun. There’s no more, as the old timers would say in the past, just closing your door and teaching: entire industries are now pushing their way into your classroom to get their skim.
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Michael Fiorillo: I quoted you on the Fordham Institute blog today.
I quoted you today:
Re: Fordham Institute article on teachers being “good and ready to implement common core”: Using this title as you do communicates that you think teachers are being “stubborn”, or “recalcitrant” or some other attitude that you perceive? The purpose of the title would appear to bash teacher unions? or teachers as individuals? Fiorillo on another blog site reminds me that the Lawrence Bread and Roses strike included university students from Boston who were aligned with the uniformed police militia that came into Lawrence to break the strike. I was pleased that Fiorillo reminded me of the history (I live on the I 495 belt outside Boston) that this was true of the universities at that point….. for my years of training I had convinced myself of the assumption that universities were the bastion of liberals and much of the “Class war” rhetoric would pose the universities in that stance. However, Harvard, Fordham Institute (and given the new “MIT” study with Brown affiliate; the think tanks with the advanced graduate degrees in policy science) are just doing what they always did;align with power in the capital sense, gather power in the uniform of a militia or police tribe and beat up on the local workers in the factories then, accuse the teachers or other workers of being “stubborn”, “recalcitrant” or incompetent to divide them from the every day laborers such as represented by the Bread and Roses strike. History does have some lessons; time will say nothing but I told you so. Thanks to Mr. Fiorillo for bringing this to my mind.
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Thank you, Jean, I’m happy and flattered you find my comments useful.
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“. . . at least in urban districts: poverty, unstable family and community life, and insufficient/misallocated resources.
Most don’t realize that these same problems exist in many rural areas also, it’s just that it is more invisible as the poor are not concentrated in a barrio, ghetto, or housing complex.
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Indeed, Duane, you are correct. In fact, the issues are neither limited to the cities nor neglected rural areas: in older, inner ring suburban districts surrounding affluent, gentrifying cities, problems that have traditionally afflicted urban school districts are now quickly migrating as the poor are pushed out of the cities.
I limited my comment to urban districts mainly because they were the initial beachhead for the hostile takeover of public education, which is now metastasizing all over the country.
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a lot of people gave Silber (BU President) grief when he wanted to test students across MA (early versions of MCAS) but one of his goals was to find the kids in the suburbs and rural areas that were not scoring as well. Maybe I am just be too conciliatory at this point but I thought that was in his mind/stated goals. Of course, he also wanted Boston University to do all the teacher training for the whole state so that would have set up a monopoly….
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They’ve already cut those services in Buffalo – I don’t know what’s left.
My question is this – where are all the computers coming from to take these tests? It’s not as if every kid has their own laptop. A 30 computer lab with 24 working computers isn’t enough for even one class. And what do they do if the test crashes before it’s completed – sometimes those computer screens freeze.and there is no computer teacher or technician assigned to the schools ( another cut ). Or is this a way to force every district to provide iPads for each student?
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That’s why NYS has indefinitely postponed PARCC testing. Probably will never happen.
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And are they testing computer skills or knowledge. Students exhibit wide variations in computer skills. The computer abilities of students will most certainly effect any test that is timed.
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Each child has their own LENGHY user name and password (even PreK) and the boot up time is ten minutes ( due to loading software and blocking features). Then I’m sure the exam will have some sort of password as well. It might take up to fifteen to twenty minutes to make sure the whole class is logged in. By then the lone, worn out teacher is ready to log off and go back to the classroom. But there will have to be some sort of directions to read – or are we going to use automated speech?
Welcome to half-way to the 21st century.
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Requiring 8 to 14 year olds to type their ELA respones in a timed test certainly does beg this question.
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In our district, it means that the school library and computer lab were closed for all purposes except testing for the first month of school as students rotated through to take their computerized tests. If we get a mandate that all tests must be taken at the same time by everyone, much like Regents in NYS, the hardware and software costs will break the districts.
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They already shut the library down for testing. It’s open half the time and sometimes half or a whole of the half of the time it’s closed. And that’s without using the computers.
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Let’s realize that one of the reasons that anything becomes bipartisan is that the parties agree to split the spoils. Classic case here, both parties get to share in the profits while both sides also can claim the “high ground” for society.
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This.
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Follow the money. It’s about MONEY and POWER OVER for PROFIT and POWER at ANY cost. Think, Roman Empire.
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“As districts purchase more Common Core aligned materials, hardware and software, what do they spend less on?”
“Class size? Teachers? The arts? Physical education? Social workers? Guidance counselors? Librarians?”
Probably all of the above plus the public’s confidence and trust in the existing public school systems. That may be the most tragic and valuable loss and will not show up on any balance sheet.
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Brookings has an article today on “the war on Christmas”…. and NAEP test scores
this is what I posted there; I have no “friends” at Fordham or Heritage or Brookings so I am just putting it here for that reason.
COMMENT:
You say nothing on the discussions around the validity of utilizing NAEP “proficiency” as a reliable measure of academic learning. So you have a tautology: the most powerful countries who control all the capital and the elite who are the most conspicuous consumers are also in charge of writing the tests based on what curriculum they deem worthy. It is the expression: “Let me write the test and I won’t care what you have in your curriculum.” I happen to have been baptized into the Christian church at infancy; I choose to leave behind the arrogance of those who say it is the only “truth”; as a protestant I had to remind people that there once was a reformation; that altruism is a unique value that may not exist in classical republicanism; that fear is an emotion and that greed is a learned value. And, in one session a student attacked a distinguished professor because he “did not know enough about Thomas Aquinas”. With this type of “christianity” I would choose to be not idenitified with the tribe any more. Your articles are no better than Richwine at Heritage and the foolishness at Harvard that permits those kinds of degrees .
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Where I am we are already poring money into this. Too many of my adult students are barely literate. How can I expect them to make the leap to the level of thinking skills that CC demands? We are setting them up to fail. I will soldier on in my classroom but my heart is filled with dread. Most of what I do with my students involves motivating them and instilling confidence in their own abilities. I will continue to strive to achieve these goals no matter what curricula I am forced to use.
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A basic skill of instructional leadership is selecting and then interpreting what theories, ideas, and practices you allow in a building. Too many central and school office administrators abdicate their instructional leadership role by knee-jerk purchases of programs/technology/or consultants. These purchases are then sold to a board and staff as a strategy for implementing a new instructional initiative. This is not instructional leadership, this is instructional management. Quality instructional programs require coherence and constancy of purpose. Administrators cannot achieve these two criteria distributing a different program or technique of the day at the beginning of each school year. The underlying problem, of course, is that training programs for school administrators focus on budgets, boilers, and boosters and spend little time on curriculum and instruction. Without a fully developed instructional worldview (coherent response to the fundamental questions of schooling: how do children learn? what knowledge is of most worth? how should knowledge be organized? how should we assess what students understand? and HOW SHOULD WE TEACH), most school administrators become managers of program allocation rather leaders of signature pedagogies (an instructional regime authored by administration and staff). Not to belabor the point, but after the boxes are distributed, instructional managers will waste countless hours of teacher time (that could be focused on lesson design/critique) on completing mindless alignment charts or some other managerial tasks that documents compliance with a new program, but ignores the kinds of staff development that makes a difference in classroom learning environments.
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You really have identified an important shift in school leadership. I like the way you have differentiated between instructional leadership and instructional management. The business model really does not recognize instructional leadership as a necessary part of school administration. Their instructional worldview is totally centered around future economic productivity. I really do not miss the hours spent on “mindless” managerial tasks.
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yes yes yes yes yes!!!!!!
signature pedagogies. That’s how real innovation and real improvement occurs.
Continuous improvement flows from the bottom up (if the structures are in place to allow this to happen). You know what flows from the top down.
It’s time for administrators and teachers to take back their profession from the plutocrats and the politicians, to say no, emphatically, decisively, to the top-down, centralized, unaccountable, inflexible, Orwellian Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth.
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Robert, Diane is leading the way and we, plus many others, are trying to make our voices heard, but, unless you are a salmon, it is almost impossible to swim upstream against the current. And this current is deeply entrenched.
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The owner of this blog has quite rightly alluded to the idea that the good management and husbanding of resources requires being constantly aware of the trade-offs involved in allocating and shifting resources.
Remember that one of the most stirring rallying cries of the self-styled “education reformers” is that they are hard-nosed private-sector types, unquestioned experts in all matters educational and financial who will spend wisely and not waste. Only one problem: when do the educrats and edubullies and edufrauds actually, you know, inform us [in advance, of course, if they’ve planned properly] how they’re allocating and shifting and saving and spending well and wisely? Demonstrating all the while, natcherly, their fiscal and managerial genius.
For just one egregious example of their stunning ineptitude across the nation, click on the link below for the latest in the ongoing $1 billion iPad fiasco in Los Angeles Unified School District.
Link: http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-lausd-ipads-20131219,0,7923874.story#axzz2nvp1knZ8
You’d think, or at least hope, that those in pursuit of $tudent $ucce$$ would be straight shooters, but apparently
“Honesty is the best policy — when there is money in it.” [Mark Twain]
Maybe honesty just doesn’t make ₵ent₵ to them?
😎
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This is one more reason all this testing accomplishes little for students, but much for vendors. What a travesty!
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Corporate control (CC) is counting on our weakness to drive their profit. We teachers, parents, and students must talk about boycotting Pearson and others….get the conversation started! Teacher unions must educate themselves about the complexities of these pseudo-reforms and take immediate steps to stop passing the buck.
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Formula for failure: CC = CC
(common core = corporate control or vice versa)
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The “CCSS aligned” materials are not advancing critical thinking – but librarians do! We are losing human resources in order to perpetuate the profit machine. It’s frightening. Students are losing doubly – they lose what they value and they gain boring, tedious rote worksheets and poorly designed outlines for “research” to be done in two quick lessons. Thank you for posting this – People, wake up!!!
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The purpose of the CC$$
according to Arnie the Dribbler Duncan’s Chief of Staff
is “to create national markets for products that can be brought to scale.”
This is what she said about them in an article on the Harvard Business Review blog.
The CC$$ were paid for because they were part of a BU$INE$$ plan that had nothing whatsoever to do with improving the quality of U.S. education. ONly an utter fool or one who is woefully ignorant about education would think that adopting these standards [sic] will bring about any improvement.
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In drubs and drabs, the truth is leaking out -and it is even worse than we feared.
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