In an article in “Politico Pro,” which is behind a paywall, AFT President Randi Weingarten applauded the decision of the New York State United Teachers, which passed a resolution of “no confidence” in New York State Commissioner John King.
She said that NYSUT was right to withdraw support from Common Core unless there are “major course corrections.”
The implementation of the standards was badly botched, she said, and neither King nor Board of Regents Chair Merryl Tisch was listening to the public or teachers.
Randi was especially outraged that King is pushing ahead with the Common Core standards at the same time that budget cuts have caused the layoff of thousands of people who provide important services for students.
Weingarten was insistent that the standards had to be delinked from the new tests.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Have you noticed that President Weingarten often takes a position on public education issues that she later withdraws from but has little power or influence to change?
Kind Regards,
Nick Penkovsky
Please excuse any typos or terseness, this was sent from my Sprint BlackBerry®.
Welcome aboard Randi
We hardly knew ye.
Now let’s start doing indoor air quality testing in schools
to protect children and teachers.
I challenged the new NYC Council Chairman of the Education Committee, Daniel Dromm, about toxic schools
PS 7 in his district.
Go to the Jordan Journal 2/24 at the time 46:30
http://wbai.org/server-archive.html
“People who advocate for the CCSS [Common Core State Standards] miss the bigger picture that people on the ground don’t: The CCSS came as a package deal with the new teacher evaluations, higher stakes testing, and austerity measures, including mass school closings. Often, it seems like the leaders are talking out of both sides of their mouths when they say they want to improve education but need to defund our schools. . . . It makes no sense for us to have high expectations of our students when we don’t have high expectations for our school system.”
The coming Common Core meltdown
BY VALERIE STRAUSS
January 23 at 4:00 am
This statement from NYSUT is NOT about ending the CC. How can there be a “course correction” when these standards cannot be changed since there is a copyright? They cannot be fixed. They should be scrapped altogether and replaced with teacher-written, developmentally appropriate standards that reflect knowledge of child development, pedagogy and that recognize that there are regional differences in history and experience that deserved to be honored in children’s education.
Exactly! Remember the course correction for NCLB that never happened? Or the way the NCLB exemption tied to RTTT ended up brining on even worse stupidity like the evil Danielson checklists for VAM?
Until we follow the lead of our Mexican brothers and sisters and take to the streets, shutting down Congress and commerce, nothing will change.
Randi Weingarten?
Really?
Here we go again.
Let’s hope her change of tune will really shift the paradigms substantially. Yet, I will not hold my breath . . . .
Randi and I will be on the same Common Core panel at the Network for Public Education (NPE) conference in Austin, TX, on Sunday, March 2:
http://michaelklonsky.blogspot.com/2014/01/press-release-npe-national-conference.html
It’s time.
Come hear us.
Mercedes,
You are a mover, a shaker, an intellect, a scientist, and a moralist.
I am a fan of Deutsch29!
May you never become corrupted by power as you elevate your prominence in this fight (and you are rising, and you will continue to, legitimately so).
You are one of four future Diane Ravitches . . . .
Thank you for everything you say and do . . . . .
I hope you have a semblance of an idea of how much you impact readers on this blog . . . . as well as people they talk to . . . .
I wish I could attend and hear what you all have to say. But the only conferences I could possibly get to would have to be in the summer time. Too busy with work and home the rest of the year.
Wish I could attend also but the flight from Colombia is beyond my means at this time. Will be there is spirit and willing to help in any way possible.
I’m sorry Ms. Ravitch, I know you are friends with Ms. Weingarten, but she is as responsible for the mess as anyone else. At least from the outsiders perspective, it came across as she was more interested in being liked than fighting. Her and her successor at the UFT (Mr. Mulgrew) have allowed the city of New York to basically destroy the profession. Imagine if she and Mr. Mulgrew had put up the fight that the Buffalo teachers are, about all of this garbage, there is no way that it would have gotten this far. And we will not even get into the absolute worst use of PR by any group, ever that also allowed the former mayor to destroy the system.
Bunk. Without a viable alternative this runaway freight will never be stopped. And all the whining in the world wouldn’t have changed the mess we’re in. Cheap shots and finger pointing is a waste of time
You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows…
There is a shift in the education firmament.
Ms. Weingarten will be speaking on a panel at the Network for Public Education gathering in early March. She will be appearing with—among others—Mercedes Schneider, Anthony Cody and Paul Horton.
Unthinkable a year ago. Most crazy, no, Krazy props to the owner of this blog.
And this latest statement by Ms. Weingarten? I wait to see what more she does, but this is not an innocuous declaration. Decoupling CC from high-stakes standardized testing is like depriving a vampire of its blood supply…
As witness I call on Dr. Frederick M. Hess (“Resident Scholar and Director of Education Policy Studies”) of the American Enterprise Institute, literally a rheephormista insider and one of the most articulate spokesmen for the “new civil rights movement of our time.” A link to his blog via Dr. Mercedes Schneider’s blog is most telling:
[start quote]
In truth, the idea that the Common Core might be a “game-changer” has little to do with the Common Core standards themselves, and everything to do with stuff attached to them, especially the adoption of common tests that make it possible to readily compare schools, programs, districts, and states (of course, the announcement that one state after another is opting out of the two testing consortia is hollowing out this promise).
But the Common Core will only make a dramatic difference if those test results are used to evaluate schools or hire, pay, or fire teachers; or if the effort serves to alter teacher preparation, revamp instructional materials, or compel teachers to change what students read and do. And, of course, advocates have made clear that this is exactly what they have in mind. When they refer to the “Common Core,” they don’t just mean the words on paper–what they really have in mind is this whole complex of changes.
[end quote]
Link: http://deutsch29.wordpress.com/2013/12/28/the-american-enterprise-institute-common-core-and-good-cop/
And most Krazy props as well to KrazyMathLady for never letting a useful fact, number or stat pass by unnoticed and unappreciated.
😎
Waiting to see what she does??? Read EdNotes to find out how Unity is working to oust Iannuzzi. Didn’t Marc Anthony praise Cesar before killing him?
Reblogged this on Transparent Christina.
Good for NY and good for Randi. We must start immediately tp prepare a viable alternative. This blog gives some thoughts on the subject and it has been field tested years back http://savingstudents-caplee.blogspot.com/2013/12/accountability-with-honor-and-yes-we.html
I would be happy to help anyone who wants to improve on their assessment and or wants to use this reral information to counter the artificial test mania stuff. http://www.wholechildreform.com
Let’s get at it!
Wow! Could this be the shift….?
Yes, James, it could. The rats are deserting the sinking rats.
http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/albany/2014/01/8539167/anti-common-core-bandwagon-nears-capacity
Let’s hope so…. I personally need more than “Anti-common Core, but more “anti Corporate Reform.” And then maybe an apology for all the crap we have been put through…
As usualo Randi is on target and New York is rising to the occasion. However, unless we have a viable alternative ready and waiting, we will again fail and the efforts we have seen in New York will be for naught http://www.wholechildreform.com
We already had one, the original state standards, CREATED BY THE STATE, How beautiful they look today
Although the state standards look good, how much demonstration of learning is there? Sill paper and pencil tasks? And do they assess progress with pre and post to show what is really going n in the school. Are they still afraid kids who can actually do something will succeed. The system was broken long before the testing fiasco. And testing is testing
some may say I’m too hard on Randi, but nothing will convince me she’s “seen the light” until she publicly denounces education reform, pulls her support of Common Core and gives all that lovely moolah she accepted for the AFT from the ed reformers, so the AFT can once again stand in its own power, with integrity….
oops …. should read: “….gives BACK all that lovely moolah…..”
The dam has broken, and I think Randi (and Duncan!) are actually scrambling for cover.
I search Google News for Common Core every night, for instance, and look what just came up on The State Journal, West Virginia’s Only Business Paper:
http://www.statejournal.com/story/24541427/is-common-core-testing-good-for-mental-health
In this one piece of the nightly avalanche, West Virginian Erin Timony is reporting in detail on the work of Gary Thompson, director of Clinical Training and Community Advocacy Services of the Utah-based Early Life Child Psychology and Education Center. Their arguments are lucid, humane, comprehensive and powerfully persuasive. You should read it.
Let’s ask ourselves, here in our vaunted blue states, how we allowed simple truth and reason to be so exiled from our public discourse on this topic for so long. Opportunists like Randi certainly did their part.
The dam needed to be broken. Not in the way it evolved but that we can change. The old slavery based system using the lie of letter grades, pushing kids along without learning or sending them into the streets for failing can no longer be the guide. Try this for the future http://savingstudents-caplee.blogspot.com/2013/12/the-personal-map-to-success.html
Simply put, pushing these programs through like they did is sabotage designed to lead to failure. The result down the line would be more bad press bad mouthing public education.
For instance, I recently read an in-depth analysis of the most recent international PISA tests and it stated that the US tested a significant number of disadvantaged students compared to other countries and this caused the averages comparisons between countries for the US to be lower than they should have been.
The report indicated the selections for the schools that were tested was done by the U.S. Department of Education.
Why would the USDE skew the tests so they were weighted heavily toward the lowest of six groups? It’s obvious that the results would not be accurate but would make the public schools look bad. And the media only reports the average rankings and comparisons. Seldom does the media go in to detail.
But that analysis went into detail with parallel comparisons between all six groups from 1 being the lowest to 6 being the highest and when the US students were compared with comparable socioeconomic rankings, the results were impressive. The lowest level had a higher average score than all of the comparison countries and that included Finland.
More teachers should do the same.
As NCLB morphed into RTTT the corporate vendors salivated over the prospects of tapping into a single national market while converting public schools into test-prep centers dependent upon their goods & services. We know how learning works, we know what students need – and the hyper-regimentation that comes from overuse and misuse of high-stakes testing is clearly not beneficial to students. The disaster known as education reform will continue to generate pushback and more voters will begin to discover its pernicious characteristics. When education reform is thoroughly exposed for the marketing scam it is, then it will die. Genuine support for education, based on education science and proven methods, will eventually come. America owes a huge debt to the education activists who push for truth.
Dear common core, thank you for repackaging the world’s knowledge in a more confusing way at fifty dollar T-shirt pricing.
Meanwhile she is behind the push to have Iannuzzi voted out. Stop with the blinders please.
Like I’ve said previously, Weingarten is “leading” from behind, and trying desperately to cover her rear as she does it.
What will it take for the Regents to stop listening to the King and Queen and start listening to the actual practitioners and the parents of the children?
The rollout was a disaster, their response was horrendous (the “special interests” comment was particularly offensive) and yet they perseverate on this doomed track. Eliminating the grade 8 math test for students in Algebra and reviewing the protocols for Sp Ed students taking the test by chronological age rather than developmental should both have been done years ago. Those changes are supposed to placate the objectors?
Now that the legislators are feeling the threats to their seats perhaps they will actually respond appropriately and take the action that the Regents most fear: overturn the Commissioner and put a halt to the madness through legislative action.
It’s time that the Regents and legislators stopped protecting two imperious adults and started protecting vulnerable students.
Withdrawal to force changes in the CC but more importantly the testing process. This must become local. http://savingstudents-caplee.blogspot.com/2013/12/accountability-with-honor-and-yes-we.html And you can start now. Everyone is running their mouth but no one is doing something. Start now and prepare for the enivitable by developing a viable alternative
I’m so happy my high schooler is going to school today to take mid-terms created by, corrected by his own excellent teachers in NYS!!!!!!
Guess what? They can then guide instruction based on results.
I am sure their tests are better but they are also only tests. Demonstrations of learning and midterm projects whoud give your child a true accounting of what he has accomplished. Small pre and post test will help. But a midterm exam is designed to rank and sort kids with the first going to college and the last going to the streets.
High stakes exams like midterms and finals must be replaced by deomstrations of leasrning, taking every child from where they are with their own MAP to their future. http://savingstudents-caplee.blogspot.com/2013/12/accountability-with-honor-and-yes-we.html
Don’t listen to what she says; watch what she does.
test
Barack Obama Daddy Warbucks for UN Common Core
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/60737?utm_source=CFP+Mailout&utm_campaign=47ffa52872-Call_to_Champions&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_d8f503f036-47ffa52872-297712045
Interesting read:
http://articles.courant.com/2014-01-26/news/hc-teachers-unhappy-0123-20140122_1_classroom-teachers-education-reform-randi-weingarten
The link above is the first article I have ever read in which either union’s CC survey result is reported in detail (i.e., the surveys asked about teacher “approval” of CC using gradations). It is tied to NEA’s survey result but true of AFT’s, as well.
“Rothman said he thinks that states need to do a lot to ensure that teachers are prepared to use the standards. He noted that a National Education Association poll in the fall found that about 75 percent of teachers support the Common Core, either wholeheartedly or with some reservations.”
An interesting read is correct. What Mr. Rothman doesn´t get is that CC is all based on paper and pencil assessments that do not give a true representation of a childs real learning. And then we teach to the test to make it even worse.
There are too many linear thinkers in charge of education who simply can’t seem to grasp human growth and development concepts that teachers are educated to recognize. They don’t seem to understand that not all brains are the same and not all children are the same.
To grasp this a simple listen to Dr Temple Grandin would be a lesson they would never forget. Dr Grandin talks about autism and says that many of the geniuses in silicon valley probably have some mild form of autism. Able to think in a singular manner quite well but not in other manners. She gives an example that her brain couldn’t grasp algebra but could easily grasp geometry and trig.
The linear mind makes algebra a pre requisite for geometry and trig, while educators would recognize the individual needs of their students. Think about how many kids we are pushing out of school by forcing a pre requisite on them that doesn’t fit their skills. Or by putting time frames on their learning that does not fit their learning rates.
But that’s what the linear mind does. It’s easy they say. Work harder, don’t be lazy and all will be well. All you need is rigor. Children are different , brains are different and obstacles to success are different. Yet the linear mind tries to teach them all in robotic sameness. And they fail!
For those interested, here’s Dr Grandin http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcWx8UVhzpQ
And another:
“…Weingarten added that ‘even with all of this, polls have found that an overwhelming majority of teachers support the new standards, but too many feel unprepared and unsupported.’
“Other information reported by Breitbart News, however, suggests that Weingarten’s statement that an “overwhelming majority of teachers support the new standards” is not accurate and that a schism may be growing between union leaders who support the Common Core standards and rank-and-file union members.”
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/01/26/Connecticut-Teacher-s-Op-Ed-Against-Common-Core-Goes-Viral
unprepared and unsupported? Well if their leader makes them seem incompetent that they need Gates to pay millions of dollars for lesson plans for them “without” the common core. They are supposed to be teachers with Masters degrees. Education is a process, not just a “lesson plan”. They may feel un supported with nonsense curriculum, but should not feel unprepared.
Well, is it time to say, “WHAM, BAM VAM! Thank you, MA’AM!”(?)
It would be greater if she said, “I would not accept CCSS no matter what circumstance until they have a qualified educator as a director (not someone from Rheeform Inc.), do field testing, and let all teachers fix the bugs.” When that happens is anyone’s guess.