Schneider here provides part 2 of her state-by-state review of controversies over the Common Core standards and testing.
This one includes the following states: Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, and Tennessee.
Her part 1 appeared yesterday.
She describes the entire mess as a textbook example of how NOT to create national standards.
Top-down, states bribed with millions of federal dollars to adopt them, public unaware of them until the fait has been accomplished, Gates’ millions deployed to manufacture consent.
It is not working.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Thanks, Mercedes. Your research & dedication continue to amaze me. I’d like to know what can be reported about states like Pennsylvania, who didn’t “officially” adopt the CCSS, but are about 80% aligned with them in our own state standards. This helps the state fly below the radar, but they are in bed with the reformers as much as these other states. I hope they get exposed, as well.
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Danielle, I wrote about the Penn “rebrand” in my third post of the series:
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Reblogged this on Roy F. McCampbell's Blog.
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Encouraging pushback. The forces behind this are powerful. We must show them no mercy, we will receive none in return. The sample PARCC item below will give some a glimpse into what lies ahead if these bills are defeated:
Grade 11:
Part A Question: Which statement accurately describes the relationship between two central ideas in the biography “Abigail Smith Adams”?
a. Abigail Adams had a significant amount of political influence for a woman of her time, and she used her influence in several ways, including trying to gain rights for women.*
b. Abigail Adams was given many opportunities to prove that women could handle the same tasks as men, and she studied a wide range of topics so that she could show that women could also be educated.
c. John Adams loved and respected his wife, and the letters they wrote each other are important because they show how a typical family was able to survive during the Revolutionary War.
d. President John Adams often called upon his wife Abigail for counsel on personal and political issues, and he encouraged her to help him determine his policy on women’s rights.
Distractors and key so lengthy that most students will be unable to carefully compare options. Just about right for a 16 year old special education, or ELL student wouldn’t you say? Imagine being a student who has their tests read to them. Seriously?
These tests are traps designed to trick and wear down students into giving up and failing.
TRAPS not TESTS, designed to TRICK and WEAR DOWN student into FAILURE.
Make this the mantra because its true.
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“If you can’t quantify it it doesn’t exist,” seems to be the mantra of the ed deformers. The common core will emphasize “close reading” strategies to ready children for the computerized tests by which they and their teachers will be judged. While trying to find out more about this “close reading,” I came across an article titled “What Is Distant Reading?” which describes a project by the Stanford Literary Lab to enter identified data from all the thee works of every genre of literature and obtain the gist of the collective body and thus obviate the need to read any single book. I find in this benighted effort chilling parallels to what Gates, Duncan, et al, have in store for our classrooms. The last paragraph from the article is instructive:
“The idea that truth can best be revealed through quantitative models dates back to the development of statistics (and boasts a less-than-benign legacy). And the idea that data is gold waiting to be mined; that all entities (including people) are best understood as nodes in a network; that things are at their clearest when they are least particular, most interchangeable, most aggregated — well, perhaps that is not the theology of the average lit department (yet). But it is surely the theology of the 21st century.”
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Democracy can end because of violent revolution. It can also end because people are not paying attention.
The consent of people not paying attention is quite easy to manufacture. That was part of Chomsky’s point in his famous essay of that title, and that was part of his argument in another famous essay on the role of the intellectual in modern society. There’s a reason why totalitarian states like that of the People’s Republic of China go after the intellectuals.
The plutocratic invasion force that has taken over our schools and the collaborators with the invaders have counted on people not paying attention, and until recently, they have not been disappointed.
If you do a poll and ask,
What do you think of having NEW, HIGHER standards to ENSURE that students will be college and career READY?
And you do not include as one of the answer choices, “I don’t know because I have neither thoroughly reviewed these purportedly higher standards nor thought yet about the advisability of invariant, national standards, generally.”
You are going to get the answer you were looking for all along.
However, the self-parodying Common Core College and Career Readiness Assessment Program (C.C.C.C.R.A.P.) tests now being prepared–PARCC and SBAC–are going to wake folks from their dogmatic comas (slumber is too mild a word), and this will be a rude awakening indeed, for people recognize real and present danger to their children when they see it.
When these reductions to absurdity of assessment are rolled out nationwide, there is going to be a policy supernova.
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Reformish, the variety of the Gobblish language used to speak of the new standards, is not a natural language.
It’s a language like Orwell’s Newspeak, carefully constructed to control the conversation and to manufacture consent. Starting with the word standards itself, just using the Gobblish language assumes the dubious notions that the deformers want to inculcate–that folks who oppose the imposition of this particular bullet list don’t have any standards, that this particular bullet list represents “higher” standards, that these standards are characterized by rigor (inevitability and precision like that found in a proof in geometry or logic), that the standards [sic] were created by the states, that they are core, that they are a contribution to the Common and serve the Commonweal, and so on.
I wish I had a dime for every time that someone who can only VERY loosely be be called a journalist has unthinkingly parroted the deformer party line: “Former Washington, D. C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee spoke today to the Flatland Chamber of Commerce about the new, more rigorous standards being rolled out nationwide.”
The assumption has already been made, in the first sentence, that the new bullet list is the sort of thing that only extraordinarily perverse persons would oppose. Control the language, and you ensure the end at the very beginning.
Whatever you might say about deformers, they are very, very talented propagandists.
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cx: “just using the Reformish language assumes . . .”
Again, Reformish is a variety, an offshoot, of Gobblish. This artificial language was created for the purpose of speaking the unspeakable–the deform agenda–in terms that make it seem both right and inevitable and that make objection if not impossible at least difficult.
“The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of IngSoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought — that is, a thought diverging from the principles of IngSoc — should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meaning and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meaning whatever.” George Orwell, “Principles of Newspeak,” appendix to 1984
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Thanks to Ken Watanabe for recognizing and naming the Gobblish language. Your philological services, Ken, are invaluable.
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Sorry, that would be “Goblish,” with one b, of course.
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Wars it can be settled with diplomacy or fierce and fearless resistance. When no one on the other side is listening, they leave you with no choice.
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Questions have arisen regarding whether Reformish, also known as Rheeformish, is a dialect of Goblish or a language in its own right. The answer hinges on intelligibility, which exists on a continuum. I assert that Reformish is a language derived from Goblish, but a language in its own right. Thus the need to teach it to many native speakers of Goblish. That the Rheeformation that led to the construction of the Reformish tongue was itself a movement from within the Goblish population–led, in fact, by its chiefs–is beside the point.
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Were you JRR Tolkien in your previous life?
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FUBAR?
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I liked that New Mexico Sen. Lopez called for a fiscal analysis. The curriculum and testing of RTTT/Core will cost billions. It is an unfunded mandate for the states.
Unless the state voters pass a tax hike to pay for it, there is no will of the people for these programs. No taxation without representation. Coercion is bad public policy in 2014 and beyond.
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many billions
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Outstanding work, Mercedes!
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Thanks, Robert. 🙂
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The CC$$ and the C.C.C.C.R.A.P. tests are a classic case of overreaching. The plutocrats have become so accustomed to having nearly absolute power in their own spheres that they underestimated (or “misunderestimated, to use George Bush, Jr’s term) what would happen once people started waking up to what they were doing–basically overruling every parent, school board, teacher, administrator, and curriculum coordinator in the country and presuming to dictate THOUGHT–what people can teach, when, how, and to whom. Mercedes has put together an astonishing list.
One wonders where the “education journalists” were who should have been doing the work that Diane Ravitch and Mercedes Schneider have had to do for them.
To those journalists, I say, remember these names: Helen Hunt Jackson, Ida Tarbell, Ida B. Wells, Lincoln Steffens, Upton Sinclair, Diane Ravitch, Mercedes Schneider
The pushback that Mercedes outlines in this superb series is just the beginning.
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Two words: BAD MAN!
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In California: Todays Feb. 9, 2014, LA Times, page A31, reports that the LAUSD’s expenditure of $1 Billion in iPads from Pearson, has HUGE consequences.
Pearson refuses to release the curriculum uploaded onto the iPads according to LAUSD Board member Monica Ratliff. She has attempted to get access to the curriculum for months. Pearson is also bidding on devices and instructional materials for laptops.
How many laws are being broken while officials turn a blind eye? Who is the responsible party and how is it that LAUSD Board members are so uninformed?
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Where are the lawyers when you need them? This smells of anti-trust violation.
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Buying something sight unseen? Critical thinking?
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