This letter came from a mother and teacher on Long Island in New York, which has been a hotbed of resistance to the Common Core and the testing.
Newsday ran an editorial today saying that it is time to “Stop the testing tug-of-war.” The editorial insists that Common Core is needed no matter how many teachers and educators object. The editorial is accompanied by a cartoon showing a tug-of-war with Commissioner John King on one side and everyone else on the other. That is an accurate portrait. King sees no need to listen to educators with far more experience than his three years in a charter school. Nor does he care what parents or the public thinks because he rules as the King. He and the Board of Regents–with only a few honorable exceptions–forget that we live in a democracy. Newsday offers not a shred of evidence for its defense of the testing other than to insist that it is time to swallow this bitter pill. Why? Because they say so.
“Dear Dr. Ravitch,
Newsday, Long Island’s only newspaper, ran the attached editorial today. Below is my response. People have asked me to share my response with you. Many parents have said that my response clarifies many points that people have had a hard time finding amidst all of the muck that is being thrown around.
In response to “Stop the testing tug-of-war”
Upset is not the word. As a teacher, as a mother and as a taxpayer, I am filled with disgust. Let’s speak of facts from people who are in the system, rather than the hypotheses of those (the media and corporations) on the outside.
1. The “standardized tests” do not track year-to-year progress of a student. No teacher knows what students mastered, and what they did not. Last year’s assessment tested students on materials that were not available until after the assessment. It contained proprietary material that the test’s maker, Pearson, includes in curricular materials that it sells to school districts – giving purchasers an unfair advantage on the test. Next, the test’s outcome was predicted by the Commissioner weeks before the tests ever made their way to schools for administration. Finally, in the six years I have administered the assessment to my students, I have personally observed ten point swings between passing and failing – depending upon how the state wanted schools and teachers to be perceived by the public.
2. The state teacher evaluation system (APPR) will find few teachers ineffective because the majority of the score (60-80%) is derived from local measures – observation, lesson plans, parent communication, etc…. The state gave me a 1 out of 20 for my growth score for last year. If the state’s portion were used as my only evaluative tool, I would have been considered ineffective. I could accept a 1 out of 20, if the state could tell me what I did well, what I did not and which portion of that score was for my math instruction of 60 students, and which portion was for my English Language Arts (ELA) instruction of 30 students. No one has this information.
3. Standards-based evaluations have yet to be seen. During my years in business, I had objectives I was required to meet. Each year, I sat down with my supervisor and we discussed those I had met, those I had not, and how to improve. In this system, we give students assessments that have no standardized bar to pass. After they take the assessment, their teachers and parents never know what standards they have met, and which they have not.
4. The curricular materials were not available last year. This is true. This fall, the state released materials. The math modules available for my sixth grade class required me to spend two hours per day modifying them in order to eliminate spelling and grammatical errors, replace a 10-point font with a 14-point font that young children can read and see, as well as define ways to bridge gaps between what my students were able to do, and the skills they needed to have to get through the lessons. Furthermore, the first unit was comprised entirely of lengthy word problems that my students, who are reading several years behind, were unable to read.
As a mother and a teacher I ask for:
o Assessments that measure state standards, with consistent benchmarks for passing to track progress over time.
o Item analysis for parents and teachers so both parties know what students have mastered and what they have not.
o A state growth score that tells a teacher what his /her students mastered, and what they did not.
Until those three requirements are met, my own four children will not participate in the state’s fraudulent assessment system that drains valuable resources from cash-strapped school districts, promotes growth for corporations like Pearson and in its lack of transparency, erodes the teacher-student relationship.
Sincerely,
Melissa McMullan
6th Grade Teacher
JFK Middle School
http://www.comsewogue.k12.ny.us/webpages/mmcmullan/
https://www.facebook.com/MrsMcmullansClassPage
“No kind action ever stops with itself. One kind action leads to another. Good example is followed. A single act of kindness throws out roots in all directions, and the roots spring up and make new trees. The greatest work that kindness does to others is that it makes them kind themselves.” ~ Amelia Earhart
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This is video from a NY presentation last week. Peg Luksik debunks CCSS and clearly, like Dr. Ravitch, explains the problems. Scroll down to the fourth “story.”
https://schoolsofthoughtny.wordpress.com
I Watched the video. Thank you for posting it. It’s very informative and disturbing. It should be posted on the main page of Diane’s blog so that more people can see it!
Great video! Naison nails it.
And Luksic. Both great videos. Highly recommended.
Luksic cuts through a great deal of obfuscation to core idiocies in the whole theory on which the standards-and-assessment program is based. I would dearly love to have every parent in the country year what she says.
Melissa this is great! Well Said. I think it could be adapted for most of us… Thank you.
Ditto and ditto and ditto and ditto etc!!!!!
Newsday is on board as most other major newspapers. Yet I doubt any editorial writer set with their child or grandchild to see first hand why parents and teachers are up in arm.
I suggest they write of the corporate beneficiaries which have just slicked marketing and scare tactics.
The question needs to be answered, why would any state want to implement a standard which was never tested or had evidence it was superior. The “money behind” Common Core are pushing this down the public’s throat.
And the extortion of the US Dept of Education, the treat of withholding committed funding for approved education programs proves Common Core would never had been adopted on its own merits, which after four years have yet to be identified.
ajbruno14 gmail
Nice job Melissa Now we need all parents to write a letter about your own children,s frustrations and testing.
In a way, I am content that the powers that be in positions of government are NOT listening to the general citizenry out there.
The more they do not listen, the more they will hang themselves with their own indifference, corruption, ignorance, and pure hubris.
It will take quite some time for this to occur, but the seeds are planted, and with a magnifying glass, one can see some roots and germination. They are both there.
As voters put pressure on their elected officials in NY state, even those officials will have to ignore this sham CCSS panel put together by Lizard faced Andrew Cuomo and get rid of most of those occupying seats in NYSED because their jobs (those in the state assembly) depend upon votes, and voters have excellent memories.
We are not by any means done with this tug of war . . . . .
Robert–
My husband tells me this too—-we have to let bad ideas fail so we can move on from them. We have to consider all of this a giant door opening for better ideas to move in.
But it sure is hard to be patient while the bad ideas seem to prevail! Goodness.
Parent pushback is speaking loudly in NC, I am proud to say. We’ve got to keep it up.
“Ring the bells that still can ring. There is no perfect offering. There is a crack in everything. . .that’s how the light gets through.” (I have no idea who said that, but I learned it as a teen when I had to confront imperfection). It’s a good one, I think.
Those are lines from a wonderful song by Leonard Cohen.
Joanna, I think you are quoting a poem/song written by the wonderful Leonard Cohen. He is still performing. I saw him a few months ago in Brooklyn, and he is about 83.
Leonard commented at a recent performance, “It’s great to be back here. I was here years ago when I was 67–just a crazy kid with a dream.”
Who is Leonard Cohen?
I am showing both my ignorance and my age ? . . . .? . . . . ?
Joanna,
Patience and fortitude are virtues. . . . For every negative thought you may have, there are 1000 people behind you who are aligned with you and see through this sham of a reform movement. Not that all of it is bad; just 98% of it is . . . . .
Tying teacher scores to employability, over testing, and leaving little to no discretion to educators to shape policy and curriculum is asking for major trouble, and now, goodness, parents are really catching on.
It takes just one little tiny match strategically placed in the forest of reform . . . . . .
Robert, Leonard Cohen is the de facto poet laureate of singer/songwriters in the United States.
Everybody knows that the dice are loaded.
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed.
Everybody knows that the war is over.
Everybody knows that the good guys lost.
Everybody knows that the fight was fixed.
The poor stay poor, and the rich get rich.
That’s how it goes.
Everybody knows. . . .
Everybody knows that it’s now or never.
Everybody knows that it’s me or you.
Everybody knows that you live forever
When you’ve done a line or two.
Everybody knows the deal is rotten
Old Black Joe’s still pickin’ cotton
For your ribbons and bows
And everybody knows.
Robert and Others,
I will look more into Leonard Cohen. . . . one more source of inspiration will be a boon. Thank you for the info . . . .
Leonard Cohen is/was a Canadian from Montreal. Moved to the US 50yrs ago. Was part of Andy Warhol crowd in 60s. Best known for poetry and folk music (“Suzanne” first covered by Judy Collins, and “So Long, Marianne”, both off his debut LP “Songs of Leonard Cohen”).
I have to agree. I began this fight by reaching out to the New York State Department of Education (NYSED). When they did not respond, elected officials. My letter writing continued to newspapers, blogs, etc… and I began speaking at forums hosted by NYSED officials and elected leaders. I learned that NO ONE IS LISTENING. In the end, this has been their undoing — not their ludicrous reforms, not their corporate sell-out, but their own arrogance.
But this fight is not over.
Thank you all your efforts as an educator, parent, and citizen activist. What is the point of giving a test you cannot review so you can reteach that which the students didn’t “get”?
Melissa,
The angry white suburban moms, the moms of color in the city, the moms of any background and persuasion in the rural regions of NY, like Chatham and Columbia County, the dads also, the grandparents, anyone and everyone from ALL parts of New York state have been roused and awakened to varying extents, and now that the seed has been planted, it is just the beginning of its germination and therefore JUST the very beginning of this fight.
You can’t have a fight without starting one, and it has commenced.
Get your opera glasses out, or you binoculars, folks, and make some popcorn . . . . . . But at the same time, put on your boxing gloves and demand that the state constitution be changed such that ANYONE who serves as a Regents must be voted upon directly by the public and must have been teaching in a classroom, K-12, in a public school for at least 8 years or have been administrating in an LEA for at least 10 or have been conducting cognitive research of at least 15 years.
It’s awesome, Melissa, that you understand that silence is complicity. Thank you for not giving up.
Give the paper a month and they will run something like this:
http://www.nbcnews.com/#/storyline/christie-bridge-scandal/new-jersey-paper-says-it-blew-endorsement-christie-n25991
Think I will cancel my newsday subscription
I live in Massachusetts and I am an administrator and a parent. We have the MCAS, which does offer the three things you asked for: clear standards, item analysis and student growth scores. I will admit that the data analysis of the scores can be insightful therefore if that’s what the test was for then that might be acceptable. Instead, the test is used to ranks schools, students and teachers. The benefits do not outweigh the threats and that is the sad reality.
can you explain your logic a bit? I think it’s stated upfront that part of the purpose of these tests is to differentiat, or rank, if you will, teachers. At least it’s my expectation. That ranking happens in every work place and profession with varying degrees of success. I’m inferring that the management, or adminstrators, aren’t using the results in a useful way. That’s a different problem from the analytics itself. It’s a management and culture problem, not an argument against collecting and analyzing the data.
insert cliche about babies and water getting thrown here.
thufirh, the ways in which the data are to be used are mandated by law.
If the child does not meet the cut score on the exam, he or she doesn’t go on to the next grade or doesn’t graduate. If the teacher’s students’ scores do not improve at some set rate or if they fall below some level, the teacher is fired. If this happens at the school level, the school gets taken over by the state and, perhaps, turned over to a private entity.
The building-level administrators do not make these high-stakes decisions. All they do is implement them. And that leads to all kinds of issues. We don’t rank doctors based on the health of their patients because that health is strongly determined by independent variables. Are the doctor’s patients poor? Do they live on top of a toxic waste dump? in a high-crime area? Do they smoke and consume lots of fast food, meat, and dairy? There are many variables beyond the doctor’s control. Same is true for the teacher and the school.
Absolutely, doctors stats are compared. You aren’t seriously suggesting tha their stats aren’t reviewed and evaluated? You are familiar, I’m sure with statistical techniques to factor in different facility, zip code, shift or other cosniderations…
Granted, it’s not reviewed in the same way, but…
thufirh
Nothing like what is done with teachers and kids and schools is done in other professions. We do not fire firefighters because there were five fires in his precinct last year instead of two, as there were the year before. You say, “granted, there was a difference.” Well, those differences make ALL the difference.
It’s possible that I didn’t make my statement clear. I’m not saying that there is anything wrong with the data, it’s valuable and does help with adjustments to instruction and curriculum. We work very closely with teachers to ensure that they understand and utilize all of the information that Edwin Analytic provides us. I agree that it’s not the data but the use of it that is the problem, but it’s not the use at my building level that I’m concerned about.
The state now sees children as State Assigned Student Identification (SASID) numbers, which are categorized by subgroups and test scores. This makes it all too easy to simplify the data results and make decisions. Are these decisions helping schools? Are they producing better teachers? I have yet to see those results on a large scale. I have seen that the schools that scored poorly on tests ten years ago still score poorly and they will continue to do so because property values have dropped and people don’t want to live in those neighborhoods. On the reverse, the schools that scored well are still scoring well and will continue to because they are in the “good” part of town.
Teachers feel threatened and it’s not by me or my Superintendent, it is by the law and the guidelines of this new Ed. Eval. system. I’m just not convinced that these new standards and new tests are going to improve Public Education. I don’t have the answer and I applaud people for trying to improve things. I’m just not on board with this new system and I have yet to see data that would get me there.
well, this reply is for Robert even though wordpress doesn’t allow a direct reply to him.
While it’s true that “we do not fire firefighters because there were five fires in his precinct last year instead of two, as there were the year before,” we do look at response time. Similarly, with doctors, there are always (at least according to the ER tv show) morbidity and mortality investigations amongst doctors. Every profession has metrics.
It makes little sense to compare an urban firestation with a rural station, but, if two stations in the same city have vastly different stats, then that merits investigation. Maybe its equipment, maybe one is overused, or, maybe, one station is just slow to put on their boots. Regardless, the stats are kept, are public records, and there will be accountability.
If different doctors in the same ER have vastly different death rates, then maybe someone will get retrained, fired or even lose their license.
The point of these analytics is not necesarily to compare a poverty stricken student against an afluent, because, while there will be exceptions, everyone pretty much knows how that will turn out. That being said, it’s not without utility to say that a certain area has low standardized scores, or that a particular class of a particular teacher showed good progress. If there’s a huge spread in the metrics between two teachers in the same school or area, that’s a red flag. If two schools in the same city have vastly different outcomes, that’s a red flag. Or maybe it’s a green flag, either way it’s indicative of something. Maybe the administrators are incompetent, or maybe brilliant. Either way it should be measured, where possible.
I would be surprised if you would disagree with any of that, but maybe you will.
I read your reply further down, and just want to say I’m sure you’re right. It’s off that the teachers feel threatened at all, that obviously isn’t a good state of affairs. If the do feel threatened, it should be by their employer giving them legitimate warnings, which doesn’t seem to the case (or happen too often) from what you write.
Thank you, thufirh. Your careful consideration of the arguments is rare and commendable.
Did you write yor response to Newsday?
Newsday to the people of New York:
No one gives a $#&%*&#!@!!! what you think.
These decisions have been made for you by the Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth (MiniTru). Deal with it.
I expect this won’t go over well with some but I feel compelled to write. It seems that the majority of criticism about the CCSS is not about the actual standards (they do need some work) but about who wrote them, whose money supported them, how they were tested too soon, and their use to drive locally selected scripted curriculum, excessive high-stakes testing, outrageously unfair practices of evaluating teachers with test scores and other misuses.
Many schools are incorporating standards that work – and not those that don’t. Many are using them but with locally written or selected curriculum. Many are not using modules or modifying modules… Many are not using SLOs (we use a school-wide goal and everyone gets the same points (uggh, points). And, many are following the lead of NCTE, NCTM and others and are aligning them with their standards and principles.
If the CCSS are eliminated – then what? We’ve always had standards and need them – as long as local districts write/select curriculum and are not forced to turn quality local assessments into high-stakes tests. The tug-of-war over standards is not necessary – it’s the tests tied to evaluation, testing, locked in curriculum, scripted teaching and more that are the problem. (And – there is some irony that many of those complaining about the laws and regulations are those who wrote the laws and agreed to the regulations that got us here – and then there’s NCLB/RTTT that are out of control and out of State control).
Even those at the microphones and forums often began with “I don’t have a problem with the standards if they are tweaked but…”
When Dr. Ravitch spoke recently, she noted that CCSS were not vetted – not field tested – and not given time for teachers to study, incorporate, and revise as needed.
So why don’t we just do that?! Not throw them out (unless there’s a better set in the wings) – but make them work – and while I am at it, let those who have been getting criticized (some of which is over the top) make those changes with teachers and those who have to implement it all. Some changes have already been made. So now as forums, hearings, and testimony wind down – let’s see what they do with it all.
From: https://dianeravitch.net/2014/01/22/a-video-of-my-talk-in-bedford-ny-about-common-core-teacher-evaluation-and-the-mess-caused-by-federal-policy/
”I recommend a moratorium for testing of the Common Core. I recommend regular reviews of the standards by the state’s teachers and scholars. No standards are perfect. These are not. They should be reviewed and revised where appropriate.”
From: https://dianeravitch.net/2014/01/18/my-speech-about-common-core-to-mla/
“I recommend decoupling the standards from the testing. And I recommend that the standards be reviewed, corrected, and updated on a regular basis by panels of teachers and scholars. No set of standards should be considered so sacrosanct that they can never be revised. These arrived encased in concrete.”
From: Common Core Standards: Ten Colossal Errors
By Anthony Cody on November 16, 2013 6:18 AM
http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2013/11/common_core_standards_ten_colo.html
“With this essay, I want to draw together the central concerns I have about the project. I am not reflexively against any and all standards. Appropriate standards, tied to subject matter, allow flexibility to educators. Teachers ought to be able to tailor their instruction to the needs of their students. Loose standards allow educators to work together, to share strategies and curriculum, and to build common assessments for authentic learning. Such standards are necessary and valuable; they set goals and aspirations and create a common framework so that students do not encounter the same materials in different grades. They are not punitive, nor are they tethered to expectations that yield failure for anyone unable to meet them.”
Jere, the problem is that real critique of these amateurish “standards” cannot be done in sound bites on blogs. Here’s an example, though, of a critique of ONE “standard.” It’s the second post in the Comments on this page:
The documents the states signed when they adopted these “standards” explicitly forbid modifying them, and the “standards” are copyrighted to prevent modification of them.
Modifying them???
Do they have a copyright on correcting them??
I have written goals and objectives for years and years…well-defined…unlike this CC$$ fisaco..I am glad their names are on the copyright and not mine!
What you are suggesting, Jere, are frameworks, not standards.
It would be one thing if voluntary frameworks had been issued–general guidelines. But it’s another thing entirely to mandate an extensive, invariant, grade-by-grade, domain-by-domain bullet list that all must follow with no exceptions, whatever the consequences for saner approaches to curricula and pedagogy than those that these “standards” entail. And the entailments are enormous.
My view is that the CC$$ ELA “standards” are basically a bullet list of hackneyed, backward notions about the teaching of English.
And if you do decide to deviate from the bullet list in the CC$$, you do so at your peril and imperil your students, for these “standards” are MEANT to have teeth–to be the basis for high-stakes testing and for high-stakes decisions, based on those tests, about whether schools remain open and teachers keep their jobs. If you fail to teach items x, y, and z from the bullet list and teach p, q, and r instead, you will have exercised admirable independent thought, but you will have done precisely what these standards are intended to keep you from doing, and you and your students and your school will be endangered as a result.
But I agree entirely that the first thing we need to do is to remove the high stakes from these AND give local schools the autonomy to add, modify, reject, revise, or replace standards as they see fit in light of their students’ need and of ongoing scholarship and research. We need a dynamic, varying, evolving ecology in K-12 education, not a monoculture.
We need another Charlie Chaplin to make a modern day “Modern Times”, the perfect metaphor for current educational “reforms”. Best scene in that movie as I recall was a worker working furiously on the assembly line and lunch break consisting of a robotic arm swinging around and stuffing sandwiches into his mouth at an ever increasing speed while still dealing with the assembly line. Hilarious and sad. That’s what we are doing to students/teachers educationally. The factory model of “standardization and efficiency” as brought to us by Gates, Broad, Pearson, etc.
“I believe in standardizing automobiles. I do not believe in standardizing human beings. Standardization is a great peril which threatens American culture.”
—— Albert Einstein, Saturday Evening Post interview, 10/26/1929″
How true!
Some terms from Rheformish (aka Rephormish, Rheeformish, or Deformish), one of the dialects of Goblish:
Common: base, low, vulgar
Core: indigestible; syn.: from the core, or pit
State: of the Leviathan, the totalitarian regime, top down
Standards: specifications for invariant, rigidly controlled outcomes; the bullet list to which education is to be reduced. See Powerpointing.
1984. Policy manual for Education Deform.
AFT and NEA: sometime propaganda ministries of the Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth (MiniTru). See Union.
bee eater: unqualified but dependably Reformish sociopath in position of authority
The Bell Curve: the Rephormation bible
C.C.C.C.M.T.: Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth (MiniTru)
C.C.C.C.R.A.P.: Common Core College and Career Readiness Assessment Program
charter school: mechanism for diverting funds and the best students from public education and enriching the cousins, siblings, and golfing buddies of well-placed politicians and bureaucrats
the Coleman: (weights and measures) a measure of co-incidence of arrogance and ignorance
Common Core: Common name for Son of NCLB, aka NCLB Fright Night II: The Nightmare Is Nationalized
complex text: text intentionally too difficult for defective children to understand
computer-adaptive curricula: worksheets on a screen keyed to responses in the inBloom database and to the bullet list of standards from the Common Core Curriculum
Commissariat and Ministry of Truth; replacement for teachers
data chat: local-level meeting to enforce the will of the Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth. See Waterboarding.
DEFORMY MAGIC: (brand name) cure-all, magic elixir for ending failure. See failure.
education reform: periodic, as yet unsuccessful attempt to secure proper controls over the training of the children of the proles. See Those People.
education: THE 21st-century investment opportunity; what children of oligarchs will receive in their schools after the Rephormation. See Other People’s Children.
failure: what schools in the United States have been doing
inBloom: cradle-to-grave repository of all information about citizens, including disciplinary records, psychological records, cognitive and affective responses; see Total Information Awareness
learning: mastery of the bullet list
Newspeak. Constructed language created by members of The Party in Orwell’s 1984; a variety of Goblish and the inspiration for the construction of Reformish
PARCC: CCRAP spelled backward
plutocrat: one who has “no seat whatsoever” at the policy table. –Arne Duncan
public-private partnership: the deal; more generally, any mechanism for subverting or circumventing democratic processes
Race to the Top: mechanism for coercing compliance with the Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth just within the legal limits (perhaps) of federal law prohibiting involvement of the Department of Education in mandating curricula
radical: one who supports the imposition of top-down authority by oligarchs via the state. See Bee Eater.
readability: what a Lexile tells you, a determination based on word frequency and sentence length (e.g., Dylan Thomas’s “Time held me green and dying” is 1st-grade reading level)
rigor: difficulty introduced to separate defective children from acceptable future workers
Secretary of Education: expensive, high-end wind-up toy for plutocrats
teacher: pimply adolescent from a wealthy private school given five weeks of training prior to spending two years doing Great Grates with dark-skinned children before going on to his or her real job in investment banking; (Archaic usage: whiny union member with ersatz degrees from an education “school,” responsible for failure. See Failure.)
teaching: punishment and reward via summative testing and feedback delivered to students via computer-adaptive worksheets on a screen
technocratic Philistinism: replacement for quaint old values of humane scholarship and research, teaching and learning
those people: proles and their barely trainable children (Usage note: to be used only among fellow crusaders for the Rephormation. DON’T PULL A ROMNEY!!!)
union: universal scapegoat. See, however, AFT and NEA.
virtual school: school in which costly, difficult-to-control teachers have been replaced by computer-adaptive curricula (Teaching, there’s an app for that)
Still a few typos in that Reformish Lexicon (e.g., “syn” s/b deleted from the definition of “Core.”). Apologies for those.
Here’s another link to the great video by Dr. Peg Luksik:
Unfortunately, Dr. Luksik spoils an otherwise excellent presentation with an unfortunate reference to consensus climate science as propaganda. See the following piece by one of the foremost former skeptics about anthropogenic climate change:
She also seems to think that grammar is primarily explicitly taught and learned. It’s not. We don’t acquire competence in the grammar of a language primarily by memorizing a list of explicit rules. We don’t primarily learn vocabulary and spelling via explicit means, either, and Dr. Luksik suggests that we do. So, Dr. Luksik is confused about those matters and, ironically, shares those confusions with the authors of the CC$$ in ELA. Unfortunately, those confusions are widespread, and the CC$$ in ELA casts them in stone.
I looked her up… she is part of the overlap between liberals and tea partiers. She looks to be (after a quick once over on Google) part of several conservative think tanks… Never-the-less, I learned a great deal from the video… However, I don’t think a phone call (or two) will do any good… 😉
OH MY! You are so right!!!!
Did anybody call her and say global Warming is real…? Seriously, somebody need to call her, write her, text her, something… Seriously somebody needs to let her know that there is no “huge debate among scientists…” The only people I see debating are Republicans and FOX news… (perhaps that’s redundant).
But Really – somebody needs to call her… Because that lecture was great, until that point.
This article says that China is a major contributor to global warming. What about its PISA scores? They did not help China to find better and cleaner technologies? So more testing and more Common Core increases global warming?
The funny part is that the politicians who talk on global warming are the ones who care the least for the environment. All they care about is a convenient cause to do Agenda 21. Remember Al Gore.
She also draws invalid conclusions from the metastudies that show the level of math taken to be highly predictive of college success.
A few years back, the Harvard Business Review ran a cover article saying, basically, “If you are doing business in China, you better find out how clean your operations are because China is going to get serious about its horrific environmental problems. China sentenced the head of its Environmental Protection Agency to death because he sat on top of a great pyramid of graft and corruption. The HBR article said that as a result of industrial pollution, 60 percent of China’s urban water sources were no longer potable.
Well… We have all seen pictures of Beijing… Let us not forget our own Fracking and water issues. Which (I suspect) are directly related to some corporate malfeasance. China can be a lesson to us all… if it’s not too late already.
Muller was the go-to guy for the anthropogenic climate change skeptics because he was that rare thing, a skeptic who was also a highly respected physicist and a renowned expert on energy technologies. I read his Physics for Future Presidents and thought it superb. I have often recommended to others.
Muller was hired by the Koch brothers to do a meta-analysis of climate change studies, and to his credit, he came to the conclusion that the science demanded rather than to the one he was looking for–that anthropogenic climate change is quite real and very, very serious. And, to the lasting credit of the Koch brothers, they published his results, even though these were not the results they were looking for.
From time to time, one sees such noble behavior. Diane Ravitch likewise followed the evidence regarding the consequences of school deform, which led her to write her extraordinarily courageous Death and Life of the Great American School System. Her integrity, there, is a model to us all–to a country ravaged by the unprincipled, completely amoral partisanship of those who can only ironically be referred to as its “leaders.”
I have heard very little good about the Kochs’ But it’s good to know… Truth be told I am quite hopeful about our chances as a species on this planet… I attribute that optimism to my vocation- I believe we have the smarts to solve this problems of climate change- or at least adapt to it functionally… I meet students everyday that make me think. “Were gonna be OK.” (Insert sentimental music here).
I, too, am impressed by the kids I encounter. So much going on in their little heads! Daniel Dennett thinks that the Flynn Effect (the dramatic worldwide increase in IQ over the past century) is due to what he calls “intuition pumps”–heuristics for thinking–that have filtered down into the popular culture and into everyday life. I think that that’s part of it but also that people today are simply exposed to a lot more variety than they were before, and so they can’t rely as much as they did on habitual thinking. There’s a dramatic disconnect between the simple-minded tests that the deformers give and the complexity of what’s going on with kids. There are new equivalents of literacies emerging, for example. I’m quite optimistic, but I think that we’re going to have some pretty dramatic showdowns in the near future. We’re creating an all-powerful, all-knowing surveillance state. At the same time, we’re creating kids who need autonomy to follow their interests the way they need to be able to breath and sleep and eat. Centralized, totalitarian structures tend to be really, really stupid and corrupt, but they don’t come down easily. I suspect that things will get very, very messy sometime in the not-too-distant future, when brighter kids who expect more, who are not willing to accept alienation from the fruits of their labors, from their own interests, and from community with their peers, confront a political and economic machine that demands that of them. But that’s all very far afield from ed deform. Except that the major reason for opposing these deforms is to stop the precipitous course we’re own toward ever-increasing centralization of authority and control.
we’re on
And make no mistake about it. Education deform is about one thing, can be summed up in one word: control.
I want to ask how much homework (total hours) daily a 7th grader has to do. How much on weekends(hours)? With Common Core it is much more homework than it was before. Because teachers are required to give additional project-based, evidence based, group based homework and projects that take days, weekends, holidays, etc. The school finishes at 2:30pm. Kids come home and have o.5hour break. Then they have to rush for their daily load of homework. With only a few breaks and a rushed dinner the homework goes on until 11-12pm daily. On weekends the teachers give more homework, and on holidays extra because – oh you have one more day. On Saturday at 10am homework story starts again and forget going out on Sat nights. A must go birthday of a dear friend is a disaster that will require catching up on homework by spreading it over a few days.
Sunday is a day when one has do finish weekend homework no matter what. Get up at 5am next day Monday if you cannot. And they bring home 20-pages packs of questions of cite-evidence from the text. Have to be finished next day or in 2 days. You have to answer question and copy the paragraph from the text, otherwise your answer is not proven and you will not get a credit. That is ELA. Plus word maps very detailed with drawn pictures. History same. Cooking class supposed to be fun – have to do essays in addition to pay some respect to Common core. And math history essays. On top of that science project, history inquiry, project model. Who at school is supposed to coordinate the total hours of homework daily? And what happens on East coast where schools finish at 5pm or 6pm?
My kids don’t get the same load of homework, but your comments about “fun” courses is true here. My youngest child isn’t having nearly as much fun as my oldest child did at the same age. He now hates art, which used to be his favorite subject, because they have to spend so much time writing essays. I often wonder what it is like for kids who have real trouble with writing – they will end up feeling like they are not good at anything.
That’s OK with the deformers, Susan. Their answer is, “too bad.” They have a backward, nineteenth-century view of the job of the teacher and school
Tell B for the beast at the end of the wood.
He ate all the children when they wouldn’t be good.
Those in the Rheeformation are control freaks by definition. They don’t get that the PRIME DIRECTIVE of the educator is to nurture intrinsic motivation to learn. Their WHOLE THEORY is an extrinsic motivation theory–punish and reward.
Tell B for Bill Gates at the end of the wood.
Preeti, that’s hilarious!
Thanks for this. I am definitely going to share. I am not opposed to tests if they provide feedback, but what you have outlined is what has reduced me almost to tears of frustration when people tell me that I have low expectations because I am against these tests that don’t provide students, teachers and parents with any information we can work with.
My kids go to school in a district with a very low high school graduation rate. We WANT information on what our kids know and don’t know so we can help them be successful in elementary school, middle school, and, eventually, earn that diploma. All the current set-up does is waste resources, both time and money, to provide some sort of info (who knows what) to the state to do something (who knows what) with.
My spouse , who has evaluated hundreds of teachers using a rubric he has shared with people all over the USA…said it so simply…
“Kids must be Kids”…….
This tells me that most parents are smarter than national/local media, contrary to what Ed sec. DoneCan thinks.