In this trenchant analysis of the Common Core, Stan Karp explains that the fundamental problem is not about their content but their context.
While people argue the merits of the Common Core, public education itself is under assault:
Karp writes:
Today everything about the Common Core, even the brand name—the Common Core State Standards—is contested because these standards were created as an instrument of contested policy. They have become part of a larger political project to remake public education in ways that go well beyond slogans about making sure every student graduates “college and career ready,” however that may be defined this year. We’re talking about implementing new national standards and tests for every school and district in the country in the wake of dramatic changes in the national and state context for education reform. These changes include:
A 10-year experiment in the use of federally mandated standards and tests called No Child Left Behind (NCLB) that has been almost universally acknowledged as a failure.
The adoption of test-based teacher evaluation frameworks in dozens of states, largely as a result of federal mandates.
Multiple rounds of budget cuts and layoffs that have left 34 of the 50 states providing less funding for education than they did five years ago, and the elimination of more than 300,000 teaching positions.
A wave of privatization that has increased the number of publicly funded but privately run charter schools by 50 percent, while nearly 4,000 public schools have been closed in the same period.
An appalling increase in the inequality and child poverty surrounding our schools, categories in which the United States leads the world and that tell us far more about the source of our educational problems than the uneven quality of state curriculum standards.
A dramatic increase in the cost and debt burden of college access.
A massively well-financed campaign of billionaires and politically powerful advocacy organizations that seeks to replace our current system of public education—which, for all its many flaws, is probably the most democratic institution we have and one that has done far more to address inequality, offer hope, and provide opportunity than the country’s financial, economic, political, and media institutions—with a market-based, non-unionized, privately managed system.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The bigger agenda is starting to show its ugly face. All schools becoming Charter schools without elected school boards but funded with tax payer money is the plan. Obama, with the help of both the Republicans and the Democrats, (making huge profits ) will kill public education through federal “choice” vouchers embedded in the re-authorization of ESEA under Title I where the money ” follows the child.”
The flexibility waivers just helped Obama prepare the agenda before ESEA comes up for conference between both houses. That way, all education, including private and religious schools become Common Core schools. Charter Schools, Common Core, and Choice will be the vehicle to kill public education. Charter Schools continue to be expanded without any caps on that expansion. If you look over the horizon, the future is nationalizing education.
http://www.newswithviews.com/Hoge/anita104.htm
http://www.newswithviews.com/Hoge/anita101.htm
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Here’s how Ana Marie Cox at The Guardian described the controversy over the Common Core:
“The Common Core was formulated and promoted by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation…The Gates Foundation spent $170m to create the program, largely independent of input (financial or intellectual) from actual school systems, but with the suggestions and guidance of corporations. The non-profit company that actually authored Common Core, Achieve Inc, boasts that it is ‘the only education reform organization led by a board of directors of governors and business leaders’.”
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/feb/10/new-york-common-core-revolt
Cox neglected to point out the the ACT and the College Board had prominent places at the Common Core table.
Achieve, Inc.’s board includes Louis Gertner, who’s bad-mouthed public education for decades. It also includes Tennessee Republican governor Bill Haslam, a pro-life, anti-gay, corporate friendly politician. The board also includes Prudential executive and former big banker Mark Grier (Prudential has been fined multiple times for deceptive sales practices and improper trading), and Intel CEO Craig Barrett (who keeps mouthing the STEM “crisis” myth). Intel has laid off thousands of workers and is masterful and aggressive at avoiding tax payments and seeking subsidization, much like Boeing, and Microsoft, and GE, and IBM, and Chevron, and AT & T, all of whom funded Achieve, Inc. These are some of the biggest tax cheaters in the country. There’s a reason that Achieve’s main publications never mention democratic citizenship as a mission of public education.
The “leaders” at the College Board include president David Coleman, who was instrumental in writing the Common Core standards, and who was a former McKinsey consultant and treasurer of disgraced former DC chancellor Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst. It includes policy chief Stefanie Sanford, former policy director for Texas Governor Rick Perry and “director of advocacy” for the Gates Foundation. It includes assessment chief Cyndie Schmeiser, who is now in charge of the PSAT, SAT, and AccuPlacer (worthless academic measures), and who was previously the chief operating officer at ACT. And it includes Amy Wilkins (eye roll), formerly of the Education Trust.
In her Guardian piece, Cox noted that “The companies contracted to administer the Common Core assessment tests – the key to the entire system – are the same for-profit entities that have been doing a none-too-successful job of testing America’s students for the past few decades.” And, of course, there’s the ACT and the College Board, who’ve claimed that their products are “aligned” with Common Core.
The testing is not going away. Unless and until educators and others start to acknowledge that the ACT and the SAT and PSAT and AP are all mostly worthless and constitute an enormous fraud on public schooling.
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You give us vital information that ties everything together. Thank you!
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From the highest mountain let it be known, Common Core is BAD. Got it.
A massively well financed campaign that seeks to replace our current system
of public education. Got it. WHAT exactly enables this to happen, if not our
system of Governance called “Democracy”? What part of this ongoing “Dung”
resembles “Democracy”?
To add insult to injury, public ed is called “probably the most democratic institution we have …” WHAT part of “Democracy” includes “Follow orders (give the tests enabling
CC) or be TERMINATED”?
If we continue to pretend all this is “Democracy”, and an assult on public ed is an
assult on “Democracy”, we are still PRETENDING. Pretending the Emperor is dressed
in Democracy IS the triumph of marketing over critical thinking.
We do have the Economy we bought into. We also have the Government we bought
into. Do the results indicate critical thinking or “Democracy”.
Why did the sales pitch fail in Egypt?
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The development of the Common Core can hardly be called the result of a democratic process.
What we are seeing now – in state after state – is democracy in action as those who will be most affected by the Common Core are protesting it, and its attachment of testing.
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I emphatically do not agree. In ELA, there are enormous problems with the “standards” themselves, beyond the problems with their etiology and implementation.
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And, in many areas of ELA, having any long, specific bullet list of standards, as opposed to a general framework, guiding curricula and pedagogical approaches is ipso facto distorting. Beyond the most elementary levels, language and the thinking that it enables are by their nature generative and deal with infinitely variable materials. Beyond the most elementary levels, there are many, many ways to be a good reader or writer, and apply not rules from which products are deduced but heuristics that vary enormously.
After the success of his poem “The Raven,” Edgar Allan Poe travelled around the country delivering a speech called “The Philosophy of Composition” in which he detailed the process of creating a poem GENERALLY. The speech is a hoot. Utter balderdash not even remotely resembling the process that he employed to create that one poem and certainly not remotely resembling the process of writing a poem GENERALLY. Poe was a genius, but he also had a bit of the grifter/con artist in him, and he cooked up “The Philosophy of Composition” as a means for garnering lecture fees in the Athenaeums that had sprung up around the country.
Good reading and writing starts with specific works and specific problems, and while it applies to those such heuristics as the reader or writer has learned, those heuristics vary enormously and even they, in their variety, do not begin to capture the essential grappling that has to take place with unique inventions, content, and context. There is no single formula for reading ANY poem or essay well or for writing ANY piece of writing, and issuing these long lists of standards to which all teaching and learning must conform results in every work being tied to a Procrustean bed and hacked at with an axe until what is left is whatever was specified, a priori, in the “standard.” So, instead, of dealing with the specific style and content and concerns and context of, say, The Grapes of Wrath or Brave New World, the student ends up dealing with some arbitrary aspects of the work that happen to be listed in the a priori bullet list in the standards that specify what’s important to attend to and, ipso facto, what is not.
Consider this scenario: You are tasked to come to grips with, say, three paintings, Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Grandma Moses’s Sugaring Off, and Jackson Pollack’s Number 14: Gray. I refer you to a “standard” for your analysis:
Explain how the artist framed his or her subject in such a way as to include those aspects of the subject that would faithfully represent its essential character.
This standard makes enormous, unexamined assumptions about how artists work and about the nature of artworks generally. One imagines, looking at that “standard” that the artist had in mind, say, a domestic tableau or a photograph and could imagine neither a work without a subject in any conventional sense like the Pollack nor a work in which the subject was not so much framed as transmuted like the Picasso or the Grandma Moses.
Well, the lit standards in the CC$$ in ELA are just like that. They are absolutely shot through with unexamined assumptions.
Now imagine a whole progression of study of art built on “standards” like that. The lessons in that course of study would distort the works being studied enormously. The student would no longer be learning from Picasso and Grandma Moses and Pollack some of the infinite possibilities of what artists and artworks can do and would no longer be attending primarily to the works themselves and their techniques and materials and specific characteristics and cultural contexts and etiologies and impacts and so on but to a bunch of blithering, unwarranted overgeneralizations about art and artists GENERALLY. The lit standards in the CC$$ are such a list of blithering generalizations. And making those the be-all-and-end-all of literary study leads to precisely such inane, narrowed, distorted lessons as that art standard would.
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cx: One imagines, looking at that “standard,” that the creator of the “standard” had in mind, say, a domestic tableau or a photograph and could imagine neither a work without a subject in any conventional sense like the Pollack nor a work in which the subject was not so much framed as transmuted like the Picasso or the Grandma Moses.
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“Beyond the most elementary levels, language and the thinking that it enables are by their nature generative and deal with infinitely variable materials.”
The “Experts” will continue to calculate the difference between
finate and infinate, as if they could, and offer a finate solution
for an infinately variable situation. A “one size fits all”, compulsory
in nature, designed to enlighten the masses, for a better tomorrow.
Today, defines the strategy of the “Experts”.
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Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé.
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The writing standards in the CC$$ in ELA are a joke. They completely mischaracterize writing and encourage formulaic instruction in creating the five-paragraph theme in one of three independent “modes” imagined to be mutually exclusive. And, they lack the specificity that would lead to operationalized instruction in the vast number of specific techniques in the varied toolkits of writers and so will have horrific opportunity cost, generating writing curricula based on highly abstracted rules instead of curricula containing operationalized activities for building procedural knowledge of specific techniques from writers’ toolkits. The speaking and listening “standards” suffer from the same problem.
The language and vocabulary standards assume ignorant, prescientific notions about how a) competence in the grammar of a language and b) general and field-specific vocabularies are acquired. Really, the folks who created these “standards” should have taken a few basic courses in language acquisition before foisting their prescientific folk ideas every teacher, curriculum coordinator, and curriculum developer in the country.
The lit and informative writing standards are almost exclusively a list of skills formulated as analysis of literary and informative works using formal, highly abstracted concepts from a hackneyed and woefully random, incomplete, and unexamined literary taxonomy and lead to the sort of terrible instruction that forgets that people write, usually, in order to communicate and, sometimes, to create vicarious experiences with significance. Approaches to instruction that concentrate on such matters turn the reading of texts into hunts for examples of items from the bullet list–e.g., for the method of expository development that the author used in paragraph 3 or the instances of hyperbole that appear in stanza 2, line 3, and stanza 14, line 4–to the sort of teaching of literature that skips over, duh, the experience of literature and its significance and so its value. Such an approach can be guaranteed NOT to develop intrinsically motivated readers. Kids will read about snakes because they want to learn about snakes. Kids will read Brave New World because it’s a trip down a rabbit hole into a very strange, dystopian, but plausible future, not because they are dying to know that paragraph 7 of chapter 8 contains an instance of comedic resolution as mentioned in CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.11-12.5. The formal analysis cannot be place first and foremost. It has to grow out of a grappling with the work. Ironically, this is just what the material AROUND the “standards” says, and the CC$$ for lit and informative texts are therefore, at their core, self-contradictory.
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In fact, the writing “standards” in the CC$$ look, to my eye, like some sort of Onion parody of writing standards. I get the impression that the authors of these “standards” simply ran out of time and didn’t bother to think, at all, about what they were doing there.
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And the language “standards” are not only egregiously prescientific and backward but also appear absolutely AT RANDOM. Why verbals at this grade? Why hyphens at that? Almost no attempt was made to order these in any sort of coherent progression.
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The analysis by Stan Karp, BTW, is superb. I highly recommend it. He does not claim in this that there are not serious problems with the standards themselves. In fact, he says up front that “that’s certainly an issue.”
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I’ve looked at a LOT of CC$$-inspired ELA curricula, and MOST OF IT has been subjected to the sorts of distortions that I describe, generally, above. Instead of starting with the work or with a type (e.g., the short story, the lyric poem) and dealing with whatever is significant there, the developer has started with a “standard” and tried to shoehorn the work or the type into a lesson on that standard. Even when works dealing with a common topic (works within a knowledge domain) are read in succession, the actual activities done by the students focus on standard 3, then standard 6, etc., in no coherent progression. I call this the “Monty Python ‘and now for something completely different'” approach to curriculum design.
The CC$$ in ELA promise and actually call for deeper engagement with literature, but ironically lead to the development of curricula mapped to the bullet list in ways that go a long way toward PREVENTING such engagement from occurring. Unfortunately, almost all the discussion in the public sphere regarding these “standards” takes place at a very high level of abstraction, and few are looking at the ACTUAL CONSEQUENCES that the new “standards” are having for curricula and pedagogy.
A couple of critical mistakes were made by the developers of these “standards” at the outset: They did not think about the many different things that we might mean by the term standard, and they did not think about how different types of learning and acquisition in very different domains within the English language arts might call for very differently conceived or formulated measures of outcomes. They did not think about the potential consequences of basing curricula and pedagogical approaches on a long bullet list of skills conceived abstractly and formally. Instead, they simply tried to rationalize and improve upon existing state “standards” that suffered from the same problems.
The standards bullet list + high-stakes testing of that list approach that we took under NCLB got us NOWHERE, and CC$$ is simply a ratcheting up of that failed approach. Why? Well, people didn’t rethink the approach, didn’t subject it to critical scrutiny based upon the consequences of that approach for practice in educational materials and in classrooms.
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It’s a mistake, in ELA, to mandate an apriori bullet list instead of issuing general frameworks (nurture intrinsic motivation to read; build syntactic fluency; build general and domain-specific academic vocabulary; have students read related works within knowledge domains, provide opportunities for close reading, etc) and building specific programs upon a wealth of ideas for specific curricula and pedagogical approaches in specific domains to be generated, going forward, in response to those general frameworks by the entire community of researchers, scholars, and practitioners in ELA. The “standards” as written preclude many promising approaches and learning progressions. They ossify. They narrow and distort.
But they provide a means for formulaic production of educational materials by monopolist providers seeking economies of scale and a simple means to turn databases of existing activities and exercises into correlated products with no thought whatsoever.
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Wow. You are so right!
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Here’s the most clear-eyed explanation I’ve read of the development of the math common core: http://mathbabe.org/2014/02/11/interview-with-bill-mccallum-lead-writer-of-math-common-core/. He outlines the rationale for the CCSS math standards, explains how they were developed, and makes a distinction between CCSS and tests and CCSS and curriculum.
And here’s my take on why CCSS is opposed by teachers:
1. If we didn’t have CCSS we couldn’t have two consortia developing de facto national standardized tests that innumerate politicians believe can be used to measure teacher performance.
2. If we didn’t have de facto national standardized tests that innumerate politicians believe can be used to measure teacher performance we wouldn’t have teachers narrowing the math curriculum to questions that will be tested, thereby creating a de facto national boilerplate curriculum.
3. If we didn’t have de facto national standardized tests that innumerate politicians believe can be used to measure teacher performance we wouldn’t have school boards eliminating programs that CAN’T be readily assessed… like the arts, like creative writing, like any subject that requires divergent thinking.
As one who questions the longstanding practice of grouping students in age-based cohorts for instruction and assessment, I question the CCSS’s back-mapping of graduation standards to “grade levels” based on a students age and then basing individual and group performance on the attainment of this interpolated “grade level” performance. Students should be allowed to progress through standards at their own rate the same way students progress through shoe sizes at their own rate. As a result of this link of standards to age cohorts we’ve created an artificial timeline for progression through the standards that leads some to the conclusion that the standards themselves are unattainable… We need to make time a variable and have learning be constant… not the other way around.
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One of our country’s leading public intellectuals, E.D. Hirsch, Jr., recently pointed out on this blog that the CC$$ in mathematics clearly ARE a curriculum outline. Of course, the legislation that created the Department of Education specifically forbade it from mandating curricula, but Arne skirted the spirit of the law, there, by not mandating it but by tying billions in funding and freedom from the absurd penalties of NCLB to its adoption.
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In other words, our Secretary of Education is a scofflaw. I guess that’s what we look for in our high public officials these days.
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wgerson: your point about the back-mapping to age cohorts is very well taken.
That’s a HUGE problem with schools as we have traditionally conceived of them, too. We should abolish grade levels, and every kid should have an IEP and be working at his or her zone of proximal development and doing at least some work in his or her areas of particular proclivity. I would like to see grade levels replaced with accumulation of portfolios of highly specific certifications that mean “I have read the American transcendentalists. I can create a basic web page with cascading stylesheets in HTML 5. I can describe wave motion mathematically. etc.”
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Here, here!!!
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Reblogged this on Nathan Merz's PLN and commented:
I agree with almost everything in this article. Teacher’s continued to be asked to do more and more with less funding, less support, and laws that are not practical nor make any sense.
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