The Gates Foundation spent nearly $200 million to pay for the writing, review, evaluation, dissemination, and promotion of the Common Core standards.
It is difficult to find a D.C.-based education organization that has not received millions of dollars from the Gates Foundation to promote the standards.
Bill Gates believes in the Common Core standards.
That is why he wrote this article to explain that they really were developed by parents, teachers, local governments, and others, not by four D.C.-based organizations that he funded.
He also wants you to know that Common Core will not mean more testing. He said so, so it must be so. It does not concern him that almost all testing will be done online by two federally-funded consortia, and the questions will be written by people who work for those organizations, not by the teachers who know the students best.
And he is not at all concerned that the standards were never field-tested, even though Microsoft would never launch a new product line without extensive field-testing.
Nor does it bother him that whenever the standards have been tested, passing rates drop by 30% or so, and most kids are told they have failed.
Nor does he comment on the unusually high failure rate of English learners, students with disabilities, and students of color. Consistency matters!
Do you agree with Bill Gates?
Will common standards produce more or less creativity?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
He’s such a liar! He can prove me wrong when he looks at the new standards and rankings, donate money into the areas where it is needed most, and give credit back to experienced teachers rather than pouring his cash into Khan Academy and the rest of the technology schools that still feed into HIS pockets. Sorry, my response is negative, but I’m tired…just tired…of not being able to survive on the income needed for good emotional, mental, and physical health.
I’m a big fan of the Khan Academy for various purposes. I have done classes there myself. I love that any kid with a laptop and some English, whatever his or her other resources, anywhere in the world, can take these high-quality classes for free. Yes, one can quibble with particular lessons on the site, but one can quibble with particular lessons delivered by any teacher.
About the income, I know what you mean. Many, many teachers are in that situation. The situation is even worse, if you can believe it, for adjuncts teaching in universities, who typically are not given full schedules so that they will be part-time and the university will not have to pay for benefits for them. Seventy percent of all college classes in the U.S. are now taught by adjuncts who earn less than the person who bags your groceries. This is tragic.
Khan is an entreprenuer with a sub-continent background to make cash. As a deans list student, I could have used his college level non-interactive videos, but even as an achieving high school student, I wouldn’t have had the discipline and the drive to self-study and seek out alternative sources to my questions not covered in his video.
Understood. But it means a lot to me that that kid in that rural village with the hand-cranked generator and a $100 laptop can watch these. That’s significant. Really significant.
“Microsoft would never launch a new product line without extensive field-testing.”
Coulda fooled me! I’ve purchased Microsoft products that I would rate “highly ineffective.” Overpriced and over-hyped! Oops – sounds like the new Reformy materials…hmmm
Yup, Microsoft regularly sends out products and then waits for the consumers to field test them and let Microsoft know what’s wrong. The difference in education is that we’re not making changes based on consumer complaints!
C’mon now. That was obviously a sarcastic statement. Who doesn’t know about Windows Vista!
Of course it was sarcastic. Who doesn’t get those reminders of the assembly line of Windows patches. I have one waiting for me to install now and I just installed on last week. And if I don’t install it soon, my system will start to degrade.
Gates is an expert because ??? By the way, many microsoft products suck too. Internet Explorer tops that list. Shall we do a reiew on Microsoft products pulled after their failures?
In 1998, Bill Gates was sued by the United States for breaking antitrust laws. Bill was bundling Internet Explorer with Windows and thereby putting everyone else out of business. Guess who represented the U.S. as the lead prosecutor against Microsoft and questioned Bill Gates on the stand? (Bill Gates repetitive response was,” I don’t recall.”)
Joel Klein was the prosecutor. He played softball. Bill didn’t have to break up Microsoft. And now years later they are both part of the education entrepreneurs family of evil doers. Joel Klein is friends with Merryl Tisch whose neighbor in Manhattan is Michael Bloomberg. Six degrees of separation? How about 0 degrees?
I am absolutely shocked that he is such a blatant liar. Silly of me perhaps, but I am.
Put a tee shirt and jeans on Gates and have him over for a beer. Most teachers would laugh out loud over what he says. His mantra is test, collect data, and publish one set of materials for the nation. After thirty seconds he becomes a bore. You can put lipstick (or a suit) on a pig but it’s still a pig.
And Hillary and the entire Clinton Foundation welcomed Mrs. Gates to NY today. Can we find a better 2016 candidate?
Sent from my Verizon Wireless 4G LTE DROID
Diane Ravitch’s blog wrote:
> a:hover { color: red; } a { text-decoration: none; color: #0088cc; } a.primaryactionlink:link, a.primaryactionlink:visited { background-color: #2585B2; color: #fff; } a.primaryactionlink:hover, a.primaryactionlink:active { background-color: #11729E !important; color: #fff !important; } /* @media only screen and (max-device-width: 480px) { .post { min-width: 700px !important; } } */ WordPress.com dianeravitch posted: “The Gates Foundation spent nearly $200 million to pay for the writing, review, evaluation, dissemination, and promotion of the Common Core standards. It is difficult to find a D.C.-based education organization that has not received millions of dollars “
Jill Stein; Gov. Mark Dayton; Sen. Bernie Sanders; Diane Ravitch.
Like +1
Like +many!
Correction: They welcomed Mrs. Gates’ campaign contribution. That’s all she is to them–a check.
Money is all she’s got.
They use her.
And she lets them.
Disgusting.
Bill Gates will soon be adding Common Core to this list http://dailycaller.com/2012/06/19/top-8-microsofts-worst-product-flops-photos/tablet-2/
“Since the standards mark a big change, it makes sense that parents, teachers and students are asking questions. But in the back-and-forth, dangerous misconceptions are starting to crystalize.”
Since the standards mark a big change, maybe it would have been a good idea to develop and put them in after a public debate and carefully and responsibly.
You know, instead of rubber stamping every item on ed reform lobbyist list and throwing the whole ed reform agenda at publicly-run schools WHILE those schools were being systematically defunded AND constantly bashed.
It’s the hubris and arrogance, stupid. It’s the apparent inability of any of the adults in this “movement” to say “no”, to anything, and the complete disregard for how any of the ed reform agenda items we’re ticking off like a to-do list affects our existing public schools, in real life.
Gee Bill, glad you want to have a conversation about myths. How about this one–“Right now, 45 states are implementing new academic standards, known as the Common Core, which will improve education for millions of students.” Where is the EVIDENCE that these standards will improve education??? Also, why don’t you come clean about all the money that was passed around to get people on board–unions, organizations, corporations, politicians? Since you can’t match any of us with credentials, in the words of David Coleman, why should we care what you think???
I would to see this nerd come into a 3rd grade classroom for a week and try to teach this crap.
Or 8th grade. He wouldn’t last an hour.
“In fact, the standards will give teachers more choices. When every state had its own standards, innovators making new educational software or cutting-edge lesson plans had to make many versions to reach all students. Now, consistent standards will allow more competition and innovation to help teachers do their best work.” – Bill Gates
So teachers just need new educational software to do their best work???……that would be news to a lot of teachers.
He has outed himself many times. In another interview he is asked how he knows that the Common Core will improve student learning. He admits that he will not know that for at least 10 years.
Our kids are his guinea pigs. Our schools are his laboratories. Our teachers are his unwitting dupes.
Do not let him get away with this propaganda. Unfortunately he donates heavily to the media for good press. So it is up to us at every opportunity to correct the lies. Sunlight is the greatest disinfectant.
This sounds like the 90s when boomers, clueless about computers, were pushing the false paradigm that software and the internet would solve our problems, including deindustrialization. Boomers comprehend computers now; who is buying Bill’s crap at this point? The only magical thing about computers is how they got Bill laid.
If it had been gone about properly they very well could have been something grand.
But that is not how it happened.
I remember Word Perfect and how Microsoft stole it and made Word, and how it never was as good. Like Kraft, they are simply thief’s. Word Perfect sued, and won, twenty years later, but never for what could have been. Forgive me for hating corporate Amerika.
The ONLY reason anyone is listening to Gates is because he sprinkles $M wherever he goes.
Yes, Virginia…there is a Bill Gates who gives $M presents to his pilot fish, bottom feeders and AmericanGreed EdReformer$. None of them will turn him down or disagree with him. None are looking for expertise or knowledge in education. Who needs it when you can create anything and he’ll reward you wealthily?
His hate for traditional teachers, especially women, is a wild guess of mine. His Master Plan to annihilate teachers is his Mein Kampf! Final Solution for millions of children, especially children in poverty, is another wild guess.
The obsessive nature of hiring thousands of public policy folks to network and plug up every avenue of escape by teachers has many pathological megalomaniac and dictatorial qualities.
We keep looking for humanity somewhere within him. Not there!
There is no There, There! He gives us the intermittent feedback that he is concerned a out humanity…Nope! Just words and money and power!
History is littered with people just like him. Why don’t we see this coming? Why don’t we recognize it? Why are we not able to guard against this? Why are thousands scrambling for the $M strewn around the country and around the world?
Teachers are extremely vulnerable because we don’t scramble for the money. Never have! Easy target for someone like Gates & Co.
Melinda and Bill Gates have three children: daughters Jennifer Katharine Gates (born 1996) and Phoebe Adele Gates (born 2002), and son Rory John Gates (born 1999). Ages 17, 14, and 11 all of whom he has carefully protected from the Common Core.
“Do as I say, not as I do”
“Do as I say although I have never done it”
These are the credos of authoritarian cowards. It is a philosophy doomed to fail because it is the antithesis of leadership and begs the plea, “But that’s not fair.”
I wish he would spend his billions replicating the Lakeside private School where he attended and his children now attend. He could just provide every neighborhood school with extra money to make physical repairs to the buildings for beautification, and to be able to higher more teachers so that they could reduce class size and offer lots of interesting electives and especially a strong music and art program to round out a good classical education. Why don’t we try that as an experiment?
Gates writes: “Today, 80% of students say they expect to go to college while only 40% of adults have an associate’s degree or higher. Clearly, the old standards didn’t help them achieve their goals. Common Core was created to fix that. ”
Gates’ rhetorical method in that passage is to string together one preposterous non sequitur after the next. His conclusion is totally unfounded and without merit. (Close reading!)
So, why is Bill Gates so invested in a program that academically does not even resemble the one he chooses for his own children?
People of privilege often believe that the poor cannot comprehend the same things they do.
And people of privilege are often the most inconsiderate. And I think that is because they cannot comprehend the same things those who have less can.
I do not find people of wealth with whom I have spoken to be very concerned about Common Core because they believe it is good for the poor and that everyone else will somehow just be OK anyway. Like, so long as food banks have canned goods, all is well, pass the caviar. They don’t tend to think about the middle.
I have taught in many different socioeconomic situations and I always found that the wealthy children were more similar to the ghetto children in their priorities and what impressed them, than good old middle America children (like I taught at Fort Leavenworth, for example). So as the wealthy think they are looking after their poor compatriots with the Common Core, the entire middle is forgotten.
Someone ought to remind Gates what he told the National Conference of State Legislatures back in 2009:
Someone should remind him that he also said that we won’t know for at least a decade whether his “education stuff even works.” 😛
“We want schools to prepare children to become good citizens ”
Right, we do, which is why we probably should have had a public debate at some point, whether in a statehouse or in Congress.
I’m really just temperamentally wary of the constant impatient dismissal of PROCESS among ed reformers. If you’re in public policy yet you have NO USE for how messy and contentious it is, you should probably go back to the private sector.
It’s really an issue of trust. The thing probably would have survived an actual debate. There would have been some compromise, but that’s the deal. They can’t turn the whole country into one of their Authority Districts, and who names a public school district an “Authority” anyway? That’s insanely aggressive. This language is just amazing, and speaks to a real bunker mentality, where they’re not listening to anyone outside a small circle who already agree with them.
We want children to become good citizens, but we cut social studies, the arts, physical education and everything else that will help children to become good citizens.
And then take away their parents’ ability to even comment on those decisions (Newark, anyone?).
And by “we,” I mean the reformers.
Doesn’t he realize that he’s not fooling anyone (anymore)? All you have to do is “google” “Bill Gates Commend Common Core” to find there is no lack of opposition to his commendation. Thank goodness.
Everyone knows that Common Core is terrible but everyone is afraid to do anything about it. We have raised a generation of Americans that are unable to question authority. Just because Gates is a good computer programmer and has money, he can do what he wants.
Has any purely top-down reform movement ever stood the test of time?
Parents were successful at defeating Clinton’s Goals 2000 and School to Work programs to create a national data collection system to facilitate the state’s ability to inventory and control our students entrance into the world of work. The Common Core is Take #2. We will defeat it again…. because it is wrong.
Deliverology, invented by Sir Michael Barber, was also a colossal failure in England where Barber was an adviser to Tony Blair for 4 years. Barber runs Pearson International now. He and David Coleman worked at McKinsey & Company together and the Common Core is based on Deliverology which is a top down, chain of command, set targets and punish as they are not met type of system. Professor John Seddon makes a beautiful analysis of Deliverology at the University of California. You can find it on youtube. There are a lot of smart people working to expose this system for what it is. I am sure we will be successful.
The Common Core will not just be delayed. It will be thrown out.
Unless I am mistaken, there is no comment section for Bill Gates’ propaganda piece in USA Today. I couldn’t find one to point out how wrong he is.
I wonder how he’s connected to that newspaper. Did he pay for the space as if it was an ad?
One thing is obvious, Bill Gates has a stellar PR machine to purify his (filthy) image.
The comment section is at the end of the article next to the Share icon. There are 135 comments, not many in support of CC.
Thanks, I left a comment. :o)
Lloyd Great comment exposing the business deal.
He gives grants all the time to all kinds of media outlets for the purpose of “expanding their coverage of educational issues.” Then they do a puff piece or two in return.
Standardization fosters creativity.
Seriously Bill?
The fact that he had to write this piece tells me all is not well in Common-core-land.
Common-Core-Land. Its like Disneyland without the fun.
“Nor does it bother him that whenever the standards have been tested, passing rates drop by 30% or so, and most kids are told they have failed.
Nor does he comment on the unusually high failure rate of . . . ”
Ahh the “F” word. It is not the kids who have “failed”, it is the whole set up, meaning the adults who instituted/are instituting the process.
The “Failures” are many and large and have nothing to do with the students, other than they bear the brunt of these failing idiologies.
“Billy, Billy, Billy, Billy,” spoken in that demanding motherly tone, “how many times have I told you to play nice. Now start playing nice!”
Unfortunately, that concept never sunk into his being!
Two consequences of creating a single set of national standards, not recognized by most but extraordinarily important, are these:
Having a single national market creates enormous economies of scale for the large ed book publishers and the potential for the creation of a single monopolistic gateway for online educational materials.
Print materials. If a single national market is created by having a single set of standards, you can, if you are really deep-pocketed, have print runs of literally millions of copies at breathtakingly low unit cost. A small publisher cannot do that. That publisher will have to do smaller runs at much higher unit cost and therefore will not be able to compete with you, period.
Online materials. If a single national market is created by having a single set of standards, and if you control the national database of student responses and test scores (that is, if you are the proprietor of that database), then you can correlate all student responses to that single set of standards and earn money by a) charging for maintaining and reporting on that data, b) selling curricula correlated to those standards and adaptive to those response, and c) charging other educational materials for using your gateway to do the same, and you will be the ONLY player in that game.
When the market is fragmented by differing and, in effect, competing state standards, there is a little more opportunity for innovation in curricula and pedagogy because, from time to time, a state will open a niche for a new publisher by creating an innovative call that flies under a big publisher’s radar. If there were no such bullet lists of standards but, rather, general frameworks for educational materials to follow, then there would be enormously more opportunity for innovation.
The movement to state standards and adoption criteria was the primary operant force in the dramatic consolidation of the educational materials market in a few hands that we’ve seen over the past few decades. Where before there were 20 or 30 companies with appreciable market share, there now are three.
It’s no secret that have already seen a MASSIVE consolidation of the educational materials industry in this country. Teachers, students, and schools are not well served by this. They are better served when innovative, differing products from smaller companies are competing with one another. But few understand the role of standards, state, now national, in consolidating markets and so killing competition and innovation.
All of this is basic econ.
You are absolutely right to the point. Duncan and Gates talk about taking the marketing of materials “to scale.”
The thing is, teachers don’t actually look at the standards on a daily basis. They look at the textbooks or software aligned with the standards. They look at the test prep materials and teach to that. So it doesn’t even matter after awhile what the standards say because the only game in town is going to have a lock on producing CC aligned materials and test prep. Those materials will be determined by the tests because the tests are the basis of those materials. The standards are an empty skill set. Any kind of content can be added in without straying from teaching the standard skills.
So that is the point at which propaganda can be inserted. The tests are being created by PARCC and SBC which are being given grants from Arne Duncan for $160 million each. So actually Arne is controlling the curriculum. Scary scary thought.
The PARCC and SBAC computer based, on-line tests will be their downfall. The train wreck is on its way – spring of 2015.
I agree, but we can’t wait till then. That is a lot of suffering to endure until Spring 2015. Stand up now.
Yes, Robert you are correct. And it’s no secret. Diane posted this on Aug 3, 2012, but it’s well worth another look. From The Harvard BUSINESS Review:
http://blogs.hbr.org/2011/03/the-innovation-mismatch-smart/
It turns out that Joanne Weiss, chief of staff to Secretary Arne Duncan, was right when she predicted that the standards would open up vast new markets. She wrote:
The development of common standards and shared assessments radically alters the market for innovation in curriculum development, professional development, and formative assessments. Previously, these markets operated on a state-by-state basis, and often on a district-by-district basis. But the adoption of common standards and shared assessments means that education entrepreneurs will enjoy national markets where the best products can be taken to scale.
That was the whole point. There is a REASON why the folks who paid to have national standards developed did so. This was a business decision, and a lot of educrats and politicians are being played.
Michelle, if this is no secret, why is there NO DISCUSSION OF THIS anywhere except on this blog? Where is, for example, the discussion of this key issue in statehouses, in state education departments, in Congress, in the major venues for education news and opinion? It’s such an important issue, and so very much is at stake!
The ONLY discussion of this that I’ve seen anywhere except on this blog was in a piece that I wrote for The Answer Sheet a year ago (I was graciously invited to write that piece by Dr. Ravitch and by the world’s finest education reporter, Valerie Strauss). Otherwise, nothing but silence.
Are you kidding me? We are sick of Corporate Greed and know-it-alls who know nothing about education and do NOT care about children! We teachers challenge these people, ALL of them, to come teach in our schools, in one of the urban districts especially! Come on, implement your stupid tests in one of our classrooms; stay for a month – no, make it a year! Let’s see how good each of you can teach the kids these ridiculous standards with faulty computer equipment or not enough, that most kids don’t even know how to use! Most kids in urban districts don”t even have computers at home! Stop trying to make wealthy people richer at the expense of our kids who WE love and truly care about! Let us teach kids how to be better people, how to survive their surroundings and how to learn all of the things that we know they’re capable of learning – at THEIR pace, not YOURS!!!
Leave teachers and kids alone and go find something else to do that you might REALLY be good at!
Everyone else, please help us to end this madness before it’s too late!
I agree that he must be feeling some heat or he wouldn’t be writing this piece. I have yet to meet a teacher who isn’t rolling their eyes about the Common Core. It’s not going to fly but in the meantime innocent children are going to be tested to death and feel pressure and stress to perform. My advice to teachers is take care of your students’ mental health first. Go the meetings and do what you have to do based on your situation. If speaking up works, do it. If not, nod your head, then go back to your room and take care of your students. The worst thing we can do is follow all these mandates and make students hate learning, feel like they are “dumb”, or see their self-image plummet. Bill Gates is basing his work on faulty reasoning and sooner or later the cream will rise to top and he will be exposed for who he is. In the meantime, write to people like the Gates and the Waltons and suggest they pay their workers a decent wage so we can begin to eliminate poverty for those who are trying to work, make a living and support their families. That will be a step forward for our neediest families and lead to the children in these families being more successful in school.
“I have yet to meet a teacher who isn’t rolling their eyes about the Common Core.”
I have! They’re of the especially virulent Brown Nosed GAGA variety. If my kids were to scheduled into their class I would make sure they were transferred out.
Sorry about repeating these, but I could not resist:
a. The CC$$ in ELA seem to have been written by amateurs with no knowledge of the sciences of language acquisition and little familiarity with best practices in the various domains that the standards cover.
b. The CC$$ in Math barely tweak a long-existing consensus about the progression and approach to mathematics education, one that leaves most adult products of that education, a few years after they’ve happily put it behind them, basically innumerate and fine with that.
c. Having national standards creates economies of scale that educational materials monopolists can exploit, enabling them to crowd out/keep out smaller competitors.
d. Kids differ. Standards do not.
e. Standards are treated by publishers AS the curriculum and imply particular pedagogical approaches, and so they result in DRAMATIC distortions of curricula and pedagogy.
f. Innovation in educational approaches comes about from the implementation of competing ideas; creating one set of standards puts important innovation on hold.
g. Ten years of doing this standards-and-testing stuff under NCLB hasn’t worked. It’s idiotic to do more of what hasn’t worked and to expect real change/improvement.
h. In a free society, no unelected group (Achieve) has the right to overrule every teacher, curriculum coordinator, and curriculum developer with regard to what the outcomes of educational processes should be.
i. High-stakes tests lead to teaching to the test–for example, to having kids do lots and lots of practice using the test formats–and all this test prep has significant opportunity costs; it crowds out important learning.
j. A complex, diverse, pluralistic society needs kids to be variously trained, not identically milled.
k. The folks who prepared these standards did their work heedlessly; they did not stop to question what a standard should look like in a particular domain but simply made unwarranted but extremely consequential decisions about that based on current practice in state tests.
l. The tests and test prep create enormous test anxiety and undermine the development of love of learning.
m. Real learning tends to be unique and unpredictable. It can’t be summarized in a bullet list. The last thing that we need is this Powerpointing of U.S. K-12 education.
n. We are living in times of enormous change; kids being born today are going to experience more change in their lifetimes than has occurred in all of human history up to this point, so they need to be intrinsically, not extrinsically, motivated to learn; high-stakes tests belong to a nineteenth-century and older extrinsic punishment/reward school of educational theory and fly in the face of the prime directive of the educator to nurture intrinsically motivated, independent, life-long learners.
o. If we create a centralized Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth, that is a first step on a VERY slippery slope.
p. The standards-and-testing regime usurps local teacher and administrator autonomy, and no one works well, at all well, under conditions of low autonomy.
q. The standards and the new tests have not been tested.
r. The standards and the new test formats, though extremely consequential in their effects on every aspect of K-12 schooling, were never subjected to national debate, nor were they subjected to the equivalent of failure modes and effects analysis.
s. The legislation that created the Department of Education specifically forbade it from getting involved in curricula, but as E. D. Hirsch, Jr., pointed out on this blog a few weeks ago, the new math standard clearly ARE a curriculum outline, and the federal DOE has pushed this curriculum on the country.
t. No mechanism exists for ongoing critique and revision of these standards by scholars, researchers, and practitioners.
u. The new tests—PARCC (spell that backward) and not-Smart imBalanced are just awful. There’s going to be a policy supernova when these hit nationwide.
v. These standards draw a narrow boundary in the potential design space for curricula and pedagogy and specify what’s in and what’s out, thus precluding almost all possible curricular and pedagogical innovation.
Oh, and I didn’t even mention the BILLIONS that these will cost–the breathtaking opportunity costs, the money that will be spent on more and more testing and CC$$ trainings and online test prep instead of on wrap-around services for the 25 percent of U.S. children who are living below the poverty line (more than 40 percent of African-American and Hispanic children).
And I haven’t even begun, above, to discuss specific standards and approaches to specific domains in the CC$$ in ELA, though I have done so elsewhere on this blog, from time to time. See, for example, the second entry on this page:
Robert, thanks for summarizing the problems with Common Core in this a-v list. As you point out, there are enough problems to keep going and make it an a-z list.
The multi-billion dollar price tag of implementing the untested and unproven Common Core standards and tests, at a time when schools are underfunded and children are in poverty, is sickening.
I wish this blog was set up so that individual comments could be tweeted or posted to FB, some comments are too good not to share, and this a-v list is one of them!
Thank you, Concerned Citizen. Very, very soon, when these absurd new tests hit, we’re going to have an entire country of Concerned Citizens.
I think we’re going to see that rare thing, a public policy supernova, that when these tests roll out, a whole lotta educrats and plutocrats and politicians are going to find themselves facing an awakened and furious populous.
It would be a difficult thing, indeed, to dream up assessments more convoluted than the new PARCC (spell that backward) and not-Smarter imBalanced tests are turning out to be, though it was entirely predictable that that would be the case. It took 400 million in taxpayer money and legions of consultants to produce work this bad.
I’m pretty certain that the new Common Core College and Career Ready Assessment Program (CCCRAP) will be a public policy disaster unprecedented in scale–one for the history books. This is certainly going to be interesting to see, but it’s a terrible thing that our country is going to go through this at a time when so many have lost faith in their leaders and in public institutions generally. Some see that as the plan. I do not. I don’t think that people are THAT devious and sick. I just think that the whole scheme for education deform is delusional and results from hubris born of a systemic disconnectedness on the part of the oligarchs. Distant, centralized authorities tend to be stupid because they know little of what is going on on the ground, and the more distant, the more disconnected they are, the more sure of themselves they are, until it all comes crashing down.
The CC pushback is getting stronger; Gates is in defensive mode.
And its really just starting to gain momentum. Keep an eye on the NY opt out movement. Hoping it becomes significant.
I just email the Gates Foundation. Here is the address – I hope we can all flood his inbox with information about how children truly learn and the damage his testing era is causing.
info@gatesfoundation.org
He owns 500,000 shares of Monsanto stock. Monsanto policies and products kill people. I don’t think he cares about what a bunch of teachers think about his deform skills. Although the logistics of clogging up his email is maybe useful.
Dawn,
Do you know if he owns any shares of Pearson (if it is a publicly traded corporation)??
Duane
Common Core’s Corporate Relations with Pearson and Teach for America (TFA)
by Michelle Maher, Ph.D.
Diane Ravitch’s new book Reign of Error outlines how hedge fund managers and investment advisors have organized a corporate takeover of public education, with dismal results. This blog points to which organizations that have invested in the Common Core/Race to the Top educational reforms. In other words, it names the organizations who have a financial stake or relationship with Pearson and Teach for America, two central aspects of the high-stakes testing and the replacement of teachers.
AT&T—donor for Teach for America
Bank of America—Corporate Partner/Sponsor/Supporter/Investor with TFA
Bertelsman (and by extension Time Warner, Sony, BMG)—Pearson Board Member’s Corporate Relationship
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation—Pearson Board Member’s Corporate Relationship
Blue Cross Blue Shield of Arizona—donor for Teach for America
British Petroleum—Pearson Board Member’s Corporate Relationship
Cisco—Corporate Partner/Sponsor/Supporter/Investor with TFA
Citigroup, Citibank, CitiCorp —Pearson Board Member’s Corporate Relationship
Coca-Cola Foundation—Corporate Partner/Sponsor/Supporter/Investor with TFA
Credit Suisse Americas Foundation—Corporate Partner/Sponsor/Supporter/Investor with TFA
General Mills Foundation—donor for Teach for America
Goldman Sachs Gives—donor for Teach for America
ExxonMobil Foundation—donor for Teach for America
FedEx Corporation—donor for Teach for America
Fidelity Investments/Internation—Corporate Partner/Sponsor/Supporter/Investor with TFA
Freddie Mac Foundation—donor for Teach for America
The Hartford—donor for Teach for America
Hellman Family Foundation—donor for Teach for America
Hewlett-Packard—donor for Teach for America
Hostess Brands—Corporate Partner/Sponsor/Supporter/Investor with TFA
JPMorgan Chase—donor for Teach for America
Lowe’s—Corporate Partner/Sponsor/Supporter/Investor with TFA
Monsanto—donor for Teach for America
Morgan Stanley—donor for Teach for America
Nokia Corporation —Pearson Board Member’s Corporate Relationship
Pearson: Always Learning
Penguin Random House —Pearson Board Member’s Corporate Relationship
PGA Tour—donor for Teach for America
Power-GEn—Pearson Board Member’s Corporate Relationship
Seventh Generation—Corporate Partner/Sponsor/Supporter/Investor with TFA
SurveyMonkey—Corporate Partner/Sponsor/Supporter/Investor with TFA
Symantec Foundation—donor for Teach for America
U.S. Bank—donor for Teach for America
Wells Fargo—Corporate Partner/Sponsor/Supporter/Investor with TFA
Williams-Sonoma, Inc. —Corporate Partner/Sponsor/Supporter/Investor with TFA
Visa, Inc. —Corporate Partner/Sponsor/Supporter/Investor with TFA
Yale University—donor for Teach for America
The federal government set the precedent for Gates’ non-beta-tested, we’ll see in 10 years Common Core, by rolling out the punitive not-ready-for-prime-time No Child’s Behind Left Untested, while falsely claiming education to be scientifically based, and letting that continue ad infinitum –12 years and counting…
Some of us have been enlightening the masses about the manufactured crisis and high-stakes testing travesties for decades, ever since the faux A Nation at Risk alarm was sounded in 1983, but we have been lone voices in the wilderness and have been mostly ignored. This has been a very long 30 year struggle for us.
Are people –educators and parents– going to continue to sit idly by while more decades of children’s lives are lost to false educational disasters and fixes conjured by non-educator politicians and corporations? Will you do nothing, while the true dilemmas, poverty, the opportunity gap, jobs with livable wages and the inequitable distribution of wealth, in our highly stratified society, are still not being unaddressed?
Now, more than ever, the end-games of disaster capitalism from this shock doctrine have never been more apparent –standardized education, drill and kill, ongoing testing, unprotected data files, privatized schools, low wage minimally qualified teachers and mega profits from an open till of public funds for any shyster snake oil carpetbagger on the take.
My generation has grown old and tired and most of us are retiring now, passing the mantle to your generation. Please, make politicians accountable and force them to address the real issues this nation faces. Please, people, DO something! Serve the children well
Just because a teacher retires doesn’t mean they have to step away from this fight. I taught for thirty years and retired in 2005, but I’m not going to back away. The public schools are doing the best job they can. Is there room for improvement? Yes, but then there’s always room for improvement in any business or industry.
In addition, retired teachers are in a better position to fight back and protest because during the school year many classroom teachers are too busy to do it.
I refuse to abandon the teaching profession just because I’m out of it.
We all owe a debt of gratitude to those like you, Lloyd, who feel this way. Good for you.
Not all retirees are healthy. Many of us have had no union protections, no health or dental insurance and have no pensions. Over forty five years as an underpaid non-union teacher with no benefits whatsoever has taken its toll on me physically, as well as on my mental health and spirits. Without a pension and with Social Security benefits that won’t pay even half of my rent, I can only semi-retire and will have to continue to teach until I die.
I’ll always love teaching and my students, but I can’t do it in this country anymore. It’s way too stressful for my disabled body, so I’m hoping to move and find respite somewhere else soon..As I said, I’ve been fighting this battle for 30 years. That’s very different from people like you who’ve only just realized what’s been going on with education in this country.
I don’t expect every retired teacher to join the fight.
In California, most teachers retire without any health care. If they retire before they qualify, they have to wait for Medicare or pay a small fortune for COBRA.
But I was fortunate to qualify for health care through the VA because I served in Vietnam in the 60s and came home with a 30% service related disability.
Thank you, Lloyd, for your life of service to your country.
I agree. Just because you are retired doesn’t mean that you no longer care about public schools and children. Once an educator always an educator. It’s time for the real experts, educators, to determine education policy. Education is being destroyed by people like Bill Gates that think they know it all because they were successful in business. They use their wealth to experiment in areas they know little about. If you look at his track record in NY city you would give him an F.
How many veteran retired teachers are there out there? I attempted looking through Google but could find no numbers. CALstrs in California lists the number of teachers who are retired through that pension program but what about the other states?
According to the CalSTRS website, there were 269,274 total benefit recipients who were retired and collecting their pensions compared to 472,660 who were still working. And that’s just in California.
If the retired teachers in all states and terrorizes could be mobilized—at least those willing to join the fight—that might be an impressive number. Several million for sure.
I retired early from teaching in North Carolina (NC) so that I could migrate to British Columbia (BC) in Canada where it is much safer to speak out. NC and BC educational systems make for a good comparative study because they are very similar, but are headed in opposite directions educationally.
NC is now the most conservative state in the US with the very aggressive policies to privatize education. BC is rewriting their curriculum according to the latest in educational research. http://www.bcedplan.ca/actions/pl.php
From my observations, the quality of teachers in NC and BC are about the same, but their international scores are much different. Why? Because the teachers in BC focus on the needs of the child, whereas, the teachers in NC are forced to teach to a test instead.
Look at the latest PISA scores coming out of BC. http://www.cmec.ca/Publications/Lists/Publications/Attachments/318/PISA2012_CanadianReport_EN_Web.pdf Scroll down to the charts on pp. 19, 35, and 36. (Best in western world for reading, 4th best in west for math, and 2nd best in west for science.) And with BC’s new curriculum, it will only get better.
There are other lessons to be learned from Canada, such as their single-payer health care system. They take the total cost of their health care at the Provençal level (without profit) and divide it by the 4.5 million people that live there. That makes the monthly bill for a family of four $138/month, and that is with no deductible or copays. http://www.health.gov.bc.ca/msp/infoben/premium.html In NC, I would be paying $600/month, with about $6k in deductibles, and a 30% copay. That gives you an idea of how much profit is being made off of Americans for their health care in the US.
It is the sort of thing that conservative don’t want you or your children to figure out. They accomplish this by keeping the American people confused about the true facts and by teaching your children not to think. To them, the dumber the public, the better. They only need about the top third students to operate, why would they want to waste money on anyone else.
What will it take for the American people to wise up and become a reasoned-based democracy again. Too much war and too much greed destroyed the Athenian democracy 2500 years ago. American should learn from history and the other functioning democracies around them and not repeat the same mistake.
“To them, the dumber the public, the better.”
This is right out of the neo-con handbook and there’s evidence that Obama and Arne Duncan are both neo-cons. The neo-conservative movement started in the Democratic Party and then a large number of them migrated to the GOP when Reagan was president but it’s obvious that some stayed behind and kept working to move into leadership positions. Now we have neo-cons in leadership position in both major parties. The neo-cons are the ones who think the public is too stupid to take part in a democracy and must be lied to to guide them in the right direction (according to the few who lead the neo-con movement).
“What will it take for the American people to wise up and become a reasoned-based democracy again.”
My wife, who was born in China during the Mao era and lived through the Cultural Revolution as a teen says that America will have to go through what China went through and when the suffering and pain is enough, the people will put a stop to this insanity.
But will America have its own Deng Xiaoping to lead the US out of the darkness of greed—greed of money and/or power—that’s driving the country right now?
The U.N. has nothing but praise for China. China is the model. They want the U.S. to become a dictatorship with government controlled workforce labor and a “one child policy.” The Common Core is designed to indoctrinate children to accept this as inevitable and even preferable. People who believe the “sustainable development, smart growth” mumbo gumbo are in fact calling for their own enslavement and demise. Wake up!
Hmm, I haven’t heard or read any praise from the UN for China. Please send me some links to some examples.
The only praise for China from the UN that I ever read was about the rural Bare Foot Doctors during Mao’s time—and that was back in the 1950s before the failed Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. The UN said that the Bare Foot Doctors was a basic model for basic health care that other developing countries with lots of poverty could follow.
If the UN wants the US to copy China’s one-child policy, they aren’t going to be happy because China is ending that policy and they’ve already announced a time table to phase it out.
Thank you, Lloyd.
Thanks, Victorino! Try to hang in there and enjoy your semi-retirement.
Both of these teachers of retirement age have spent their life times serving our country. Not all teachers have opportunities to belong to a union and, as a result, many of them are exploited.
Showing gratitude only to the retired disabled union teacher, who has a pension and VA benefits, and not the disabled non-union teacher, who has no pension or health insurance and will never be able to afford to stop working, is grossly insensitive and suggests an elitism that reflects very poorly on educators.
You say I or others are insensitive? Wrong.
Don’t change the subject.
It’s too bad the disabled non-union former teacher didn’t have the same union support I had. It’s too bad the disabled non-union former teacher doesn’t have access to the VA earned by serving their country and fighting in a senseless war.
That disabled, non-union teacher had choices like everyone in this country has choices and instead of staying in a school that wasn’t represented by a teachers’ union, they could have worked in a public school that did have union support for its teachers.
We all reap the results of our choices. Who is responsible for the choices we each make? It’s called cause and effect.
Instead, I see this as evidence that all teachers in the private and public schools need CTA or AFT to represent them (both democratically run organizations that answer to the majority of the members). In addition, I see this as evidence that the United States needs a universal health plan for all Americans and what’s known as Obamacare is better—for all of its flaws—than what we had.
Now that the country has a universal health care plan, the goal should be to improve it. We should also stand up and fight so all teachers have job protection, a retirement plan and a labor union to represent their voice.
When only Bill Gates and the other billionaire, private sector robber barons of public education and the Wolves of Sesame Street have a voice in the media, then all teachers will be losers left to rot when they are not useful anymore. Do not allow millions of teachers to be censored.
The non-union, disabled retired teacher is proof of what happens. Take notice because you could be next.
Hopefully, the tide will turn in the future, but it will take a hell of a lot for there to be a dramatic change, because union jobs in both the private and the public sectors have been in steady decline for years.
Don’t blame workers for this. We have been living in a trickle down world where employers have been trumping employees for a long time, especially in the private sector, where union membership peaked in the 1950s.
Last year it was reported that, in total, the “Share of the Work Force in a Union Falls to a 97-Year Low, 11.3%.”
I don’t expect labor unions to revive until the majority of working people are suffering so much they rise up in a bloody rebellion reminiscent of the Russian, French and Chinese rebellions.
Why do even a minority of people believe they need a union? What does an individual need that the Dept. of Labor and Civil Rights cannot provide? Curious
“What does an individual need that the Dept. of Labor and Civil Rights cannot provide?”
You’re joking, right? Members of the US Congress and the President support the private sector robber barons of public education and the Wolf of Sesame Street.
And we should trust a government agency to represent the workers when those agencies are led by bureaucrats who are appointed by the Congress and president. Those appointed bureaucrats must follow the letter of the law as written by Congress.
But labor unions operate outside of that political circus and the restrictions that come with federal and state laws.
The unions offers a collective voice. Unions are democratic organizations. The members vote for the union leaders. The members vote for their representatives who attend union conventions just as US citizens vote for members of the US Senate, House and state legislatures.
When the workers have no voice to represent them in collective bargaining, then the owners and CEOs are free to do whatever they want without worry of a protest from underpaid and abused labor.
I suggest you do some research to see what it was like in America before the rise of those labor unions.
Great response. Without labor unions there would be no Dept. of Labor or civil rights laws. The history of civil rights in the US is closely entwined with labor unions and workers rights.
I picture is worth a thousand words http://bit.ly/1bAcoQx
Lloyd,
Thanks for writing.
You sound like a conservative, the only difference they are fed up with the expansive reach of central govt. while you have no confidence it them.
This is why conservatives are rallying against Common Core
on the same side of Ravitch, even though on most other issues they are not in agreement.
About “robber barons”, that’s going back. But, I believe the collusion between the power brokers prove they still exist.
But, this is the poison of the governance we have had to endure, within both parties failing to adhere to the principles envisioned by the Founders.
Unlike you I have little faith in unions as well, as they self serving and attempt to influence its members with little regard for their independent thinking. Consider what is done with union dues, a large chunk used to influence political decisions, shades of robber barons? An “honest” union would not make political contributions with members dues, only urge them to support the candidates of THEIR chose.
Wouldn’t they be the democratic thing to do?
We differ on the purpose of govt, you tip your hand by not trusting it to represent “workers”. Govt. is not charged with serving workers, but the people.
Since you rightly don’t trust govt., allow me to not trust union leadership. Unions do not operate “outside” the political circus, and to borrow a term, you must be joking.
Is it more than a coincidence unions have been in bed with Democrat politicians for decades, getting prominent positions in discussion of policy, despite the fact unions represent a scant number of workers. Consider the largest American employer is never invited to participate when Democrats are in charge.
Or the billions given to the UAW to protect its pensions, money from you and me!
Nor, I’m not a believer in a ‘collective’ voice, its is the individual voice which must be heard and represented. That is the biggest problem with unions, individuals do not count…only adherence to union directives.
Look at the teachers unions, who will fight to save a job of an employee who should be fired, or another whose discipline means he is placed in “rubber rooms”, the equivalent to a time out.
Where are the rank and file quality teachers saying these people do not deserve to remain in education? If you know enough teachers, you know there are more than a few bad apples. Does any child deserve to be taught by them?
Unions would better serve the majority of its members by working in a direction to benefit to the school by not protecting a member who should be let go.
The public sees unions different then its members do. Which is why the majority of union members are in the public sector, which tightly connects them with politicians, funding campaign and receiving “tribute”. Is this any better than “robber barons”?
You are right about why unions grew in response to unfair labor practices, but so too did govt. This is why I opened with the mention of the Dept of Labor, one of many agencies to ensure citizens are fairly treated.
If you have so little faith in such agencies, would you shut them down? Why keep any agency the public has no confidence in?
Couldn’t we get along without the Dept of Labor?
Enjoy your remarks, even f we disagree.
You are kidding, I hope. If you have good union representation, you are no going to spend years waiting for anything to happen. As far as I know, the Department of Labor isn’t big on helping individual, abused workers. Civil rights legislation sets a standard that has changed society to a certain extent, but it is not a quick fix for discrimination of any kind. Older people getting nudged out for younger workers continues on and, I would argue, with little change. Being Muslim in America is not easy. Each poster hear can add their own examples of the inability of national legislation to address all the inequities in society. Unions do not always do better, but they can get closer to an individual occurrence. They give a voice to the individual.
Federal agencies are only mandated to implement laws passed by Congress. They are not in the business of running around finding workers to protect and defend unless those victims end up in court (and win), and going to court is very expensive.
Without the collective power of a labor union, individual workers seldom have the money to hire a lawyer to defend them and because school districts, corporations and billionaires have very deep pockets, they can bury one teacher who has little to no financial support in years of litigation (all the way to the Supreme Court if needed to kill of this one teacher) leading to certain bankruptcy for the teacher who will run out of money before the other side will.
Individuals who believe they are victims usually have only one recourse, the courts, not the Department of Labor and Civil Rights. Getting an Attorney General or District Attorney interested in a potential case is almost impossible because they are usually understaffed and overworked dealing mostly with criminal cases brought to them by local police departments.
In the United States, the defendant, be it an individual, school district or corporation, are conside4red innocent until proven guilty and in most cases, it is up to the person who feels they are a victim to prove guilt—not the state or federal government unless the case comes about due to an investigation by police or the FBI.
Hopefully, now you may understand see why corporations and billionaires want to kill off the labor unions.
“Hopefully, now you may understand see why corporations and billionaires want to kill off the labor unions.”
Don’t have to look far. Big money killed off a unionization attempt at the Volkswagen plant in Tennessee a few days ago. CEO and workers were subjected to big-bucks funded campaign to kill the unionization.
To some degree could unions be considered the “ambulance chasers” of labor?
Other teachers, sorry for appearing insensitive, that was not my intent. I felt exploited as a teacher too. Most every teacher I know works their heart out, while they are being victimized in a war against public education and government in general.
I was trying to shed light on the subject and show what really does work (teaching to the child)(labor unions)(socialized healthcare). America is falling apart because it is no longer a reasoned-based democracy. US makes decision according to profit, not reason.
As a retired teacher, I spend a lot of time trying research what works in education and share it. I hope that other retired teachers do the same because I know that working teachers like you don’t have the time, nor it is safe for you.
Lloyd, we should look to reason, not bloody war, not solve our problems. We will only be able to solve our larger problems collaboratively. If we throw reason aside and start fighting, humanity may not be able to survive our own extinction.
The American people have been lied to for a long time and can not recognize the real facts in front of them. My fear is that they will have to relearn history the hard way. My hope is that reason will rule anyway.
“. . . falsely claiming education to be scientifically based. . . ”
WHAT???
It’s not scientitivizedly based????
Well, blow me over!
scientivizedly. Man it ain’t easy coining new phrases!
You make a lot of assumptions, as if every teacher who works where there are no unions can just readily pack up and move elsewhere. If they all did that, we’d have a lot of kids with no teachers.
The largest contingent of exploited teachers in this country are the millions of teachers who are serving our nations’ youngest children in non-unionized preschools, since we don’t have public education for those ages in most locations.
Insensitive is right on target!
I would like to believe that Mr. Gates actually means well, that he believes what he says. In general, I don’t think people get up in the morning and say to themselves, “I want to do what I can today to make the world worse.” I suspect that he and Pearson see this as a win-win. They make money; schools improve.
But I think that Mr. Gates is tragically wrong about the standards-and-summative-testing approach, that it’s a recipe for stagnation and failure, and mediocrity, and I’ve outlined above some of the reasons why I think so. It saddens me that anyone would think that standardization is the route to innovation, especially someone as clearly brilliant and creative as Bill Gates is.
What could you have instead of that summative testing? Formative testing–feedback–in many formats, in specific products, that disappears into the instruction. What could you have instead of those standards? General frameworks broad enough to allow for real curricular and pedagogical innovation within those, in response to ongoing scholarship, research, classroom practice, and sheer invention.
I could sit down with you, had we the time, and outline a dozen extraordinarily innovative, research-based approaches in particular ELA domains that ARE RULED OUT, PRECLUDED BY the particular emphases and progressions in these “standards.” And I suspect that in each case, you would say, yes, I see. That seems obvious now that you say it.
The worst part of this approach is the least obvious–the opportunity costs–what could have been done instead.
Don’t be fooled. Gates presents a soft, friendly image to the public but you don’t become the richest man on the planet by being a softy. He’s a shark, so watch out for his rows of teeth.
Yes, we could have all of the musical instruments and music teachers to go with them to allow every student to have the opportunity to learn how to play…..so much money wasted on bubble tests. So sad.
Lloyd, Andrew Carnegie was just about as ruthless a businessman who ever lived. You didn’t want to be on the other side of a tussle involving him. But he proclaimed that it was a sin to die rich and endowed libraries and hospitals from one end of the United States to the other and built schools for the children of newly emancipated African-Americans throughout the South.
I grew up making trips–typically 2 or 3 times a week–to one of those libraries. In those days before the Internet, that library was, to me, a kind of temple. In its many volumes was to be found, I felt, the ghosts, the spirits, the collective, living memories of all who had come before me. I could feel them wandering the stacks. Sometimes, I would just wander aimlessly in those stacks, like a mushroom hunter in an old-growth forest, pulling off the shelves weird wonders: a fourteenth-century guide to courtly love; great, multi-volume monographs on the sand flea; grammars of Old Icelandic. I thought it wild and wacky, half mad, and altogether beautiful that someone would devote his or her life to the study of the sand flea.
What that ruthless businessman did with his money before he died meant everything to me.
cx: were to be found, of course
For the super rich, its a good way to keep their name alive long after their death. Better than naming a highway, bridge or airport after someone because those can be changed.
There’s a saying that you can’t spend your wealth after your dead, but this is a way to do just that.
Robert, he wasn’t just a ruthless business man. He also supported ruthless social policies with his money (just like Bill Gates actually) as as bringing in Thorndike who believed that standardized testing could identify “those fit to work, those fit to breed and those unfit.” He began the ruin of education by bringing in John Dewey who studied under G. Stanley Hall who studied under Wilhelm Wundt who taught that “man has no soul.”
I love libraries and I am really glad that he supported them but I will not remember him with fondness…ever.
Don’t forget the source of the money for the Nobel prizes. Irony.
Please don’t confuse today’s venture philanthropists with genuine philanthropists from days gone by. Gates et al. give nothing without agendas which are not necessarily of benefit to the greater good or without calculating their ROIs
Yes, but there are very few Carnegies now. Mostly the rich just buy more toys for themdelves.
Robert,
The difference is that Carnegie and philanthropists of his generation wanted to potentially change society for the better by donating money or facilities; Gates wants to donate and CHANGE and CONTROL social policy, legislation, and lives,
To me, there is a ROI for people like Gates that is part of his core mission . . . .
Carnegie’s philanthropy was also not directly tied to his business interests, unlike you-know-who.
Thus the difference between philanthropy and malanthropy, as practiced by the current set of so-called reformers, who seek to use their purported “non-profit” status to stealthily accumulate even more wealth and power.
When the consequences of one’s beliefs are so destructive, and when they so closely correspond to their financial interests, as is so clearly the case with Mr. Gates, his subjective beliefs about why he does things are largely irrelevant.
Exactly.
The other thing about all this is that Microsoft, along with many other businesses, have been abandoning the practices that they are urging on the schools. Most of the recent business literature reflects a very different philosophy to managing people and organizations.
This is true and important.
Excellent point.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/frederickallen/2012/07/03/the-terrible-management-technique-that-cost-microsoft-its-creativity/
The Terrible Management Technique That Cost Microsoft Its Creativity
Author Kurt Eichenwald interviewed employees and found that
. . . a management system known as “stack ranking”—a program that forces every unit to declare a certain percentage of employees as top performers, good performers, average, and poor—effectively crippled Microsoft’s ability to innovate. “Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed—every one—cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees,” Eichenwald writes. “If you were on a team of 10 people, you walked in the first day knowing that, no matter how good everyone was, 2 people were going to get a great review, 7 were going to get mediocre reviews, and 1 was going to get a terrible review,” says a former software developer. “It leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than competing with other companies.”
Professor John Seddon also critiques Deliverology which is the system that the Common Core accompanied by high stakes testing is based on and elucidates the same thing. He has been advising companies how to be more efficient, make more money and be pleasant places for people to work for years.
http://vimeo.com/11896519
I totally agree- I would hope that no one intentionally sets out to use children to make a profit. People like Bill Gates are successful business men/women – they just don’t see that schools and children are much more than a business. I have said the same thing many times – think what schools could do with that money to truly make a difference – lower class size, better training, filling classrooms with quality literature, math manipulatives, special ed staff, small group interventions as needed….all done in a developmentally appropriate way and blended with quality programs than include art, music, physical education, foreign language…the sky could truly be the limit.
When educators, school psychologists, special education teachers, early childhood teachers, primary teachers were not included in the development of the standards, it was clear this was a business deal. Anyone who had the best interest of students as a priority would have included all the specialist necessary in the development stages.
Carter himself, though, when the DOE was formed said he was fine with it as long as teachers were not involved. (Per his White House Diary). So teachers have not been invited since day one in shaping the large scale education policy. Maybe the DOE is the real problem.
I have to say, you guys are a little naive if you think Bill Gates is basically a nice guy. He hosted the centennial celebration of the First International Conference on Eugenics in July 2012 in London. He believes, along with his British eugenicist friends and a few Americans like Ted Turner and Michael Bloomberg that there should only be about 1 billion people living on the earth today. That means about 5 billion of us need to “be eliminated.” He is doing everything in his power to make this come about. He talks a good game but watch his money. See what he supports. It is all death and destruction.
He knows exactly what he is doing by implementing the Common Core. It is workforce training just like Clinton’s Goals 2000 and School to Work ideas. The thing about Clinton was that he couldn’t pull off the data collection system that is required to make all of this work. And that is Bill’s forte. He has friends in NY. So here we go, New York is the golden ring for Billy. If he can just get all those NY school children’s names into inBloom, he can start the real game of selling that personal info to third party vendors and maybe using some for blackmail, who knows? He loves data. And he hates children and babies. He supports research to develop vaccines to cause infertility and tests them out on unsuspecting young girls in far off places who don’t have lawyers. He is a very disgusting individual who deserves absolutely no homage and no respect.
Dawn, I believe that you are talking about the London Summit on Family Planning, correct? This doesn’t sound like eugenics to me. Far from it.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/family-planning-london-summit-11-july-2012
Robert, your link was to a British source UK.gov that wrote a complete puff piece on their good friend Bill Gates.
Here is an excerpt from an article that is not so complimentary:
“But what is eugenics and what has forced it to go incognito over the last century?
Eugenics is the infamous idea that governments should decide which kinds of citizens ought to be considered desirable (the 1912 consensus was that these tended to be white, athletic, intelligent, and wealthy) and which kinds of citizens ought to be considered undesirable (these tended to be black, Jewish, disabled, or poor) and employ the power of the state to encourage increases of desirable citizens (positive eugenics) and encourage decreases of undesirable citizens (negative eugenics). The founder of eugenics, Sir Francis Galton, a half-cousin of Charles Darwin, formulated the idea that the protection afforded by civil society had prevented the kind of natural selection occurring in Darwin’s Origin of Species from happening in humans, thus perpetuating the existence of weak and feeble-minded people who would have been unable to survive in the state of nature.
Eugenicists differed on whether eugenics should be practiced in a soft manner, with taxpayer-underwritten incentives, or in a hard manner, using coercive and often deadly force. The movement claimed many adherents. Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger and her British counterpart Marie Stopes were both involved in their national eugenic societies. Margaret Sanger viewed her activism as a way to “assist the race towards the elimination of the unfit.” Marie Stopes lobbied for “the sterilization of those totally unfit for parenthood [to be] made an immediate possibility, indeed made compulsory.”
The public appetite for open eugenics greatly waned after the fall of Nazi Germany and the Nazis’ attempt to use eugenic justifications for the Holocaust at the Nuremberg Trials.
Unfortunately, the idea lives on. Melinda Gates, wife of Microsoft founder Bill Gates, said recently, “Government leaders … are now beginning to understand that providing access to contraceptives is a cost-effective way to foster economic growth … Governments should provide all women with access to family planning tools that are safe and effective and meet the needs of all women.” This is a succinct summary of soft negative eugenics: for economic reasons governments should use taxpayer dollars to underwrite the decisions of citizens to pursue recreational sexual activity. The underlying economic assumption is that the prospective children of the poor citizens likely to utilize such government-funded programs would be likely to hamper economic growth if they are born.”
Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/06/melinda_gates_talks_eugenics.html#ixzz2tGGDPzXn
Also attending the summit was the United Nations Populations Fund, which supports China’s “one child policy” of forced abortions and infanticide. You want to shake hands at a summit with that crowd?
Robert, This goes along with the Agenda 21 conspiracy theory, the repeated trashing of Dewey etc. It’s all TeaParty / FoxNews / Glenn Beck spin.
I am not a member of the Tea Party. I don’t own a TV so I don’t watch or support Fox news or Glenn Beck. I read.
Point of information, Dawn. Are you against all forms of birth control if it is sought out by women themselves? Smaller families are a lot easier to support and nurture.
No.
You’re reading trash conspiracy theories that are promoted by the TeaParty. And, funny thing, i read on a website where you wrote that you made a presentation to a Tea Party “patriot meeting” about the CC and that now “political labels mean nothing” to you –not to mention your questioning of whether Diane was “hired to distract.”.
http://firesidelearning.ning.com/profile/DawnHoagland?xg_source=profiles_memberList
A little critical thinking would go a long way in sorting through the wheat from the chaff.
Maybe Robert can recommend some readings..
You are tracking me? How creepy are you?
That’s a website for teachers. You think you’re the only teacher here who visits teacher websites? How self-centered are you?
I visited that site once, created a member profile and never went back again. It is not a well traveled site with lots of members or current comments. For you to have found my profile there is weird. Anyway, you think I am a nut. So what?
“First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they attack you. Then you win.” ~ not Mohandas Gandhi
I’ve seen people from the TeaParty co-opt that Ghandi statement when denying global warming and when claiming dinosaurs coexisted with people, too.
When an educator fails to exercise critical thinking and is constantly spreading such garbage around here, it’s alarming and, quite frankly, an embarrassment to the profession.
And BTW, you’re not important enough to “track.” Get over yourself.
Refute any of the facts included in any of my posts. Stop calling me names.
cx: Gandhi
“Governments should provide all women with access to family planning tools that are safe and effective and meet the needs of all women.” This is a succinct summary of soft negative eugenics: for economic reasons governments should use taxpayer dollars to underwrite the decisions of citizens to pursue recreational sexual activity.”
OMG. Family planning = eugenics. Cripes.
I am copy/pasting Michael Fiorillo’s post in response:
It is inarguable that the beginnings of Planned Parenthood were marred by its association with eugenics, which Margaret Sanger was a great believer in.
After leaving behind her politically radical beginnings in Lower Manhattan during the first Red Scare after WWI, Sanger sought to promote and legitimize birth control among the middle class, and it’s eugenic benefits were among her selling points.
One of the tenets of the American Birth Control League, which she founded, was that children should be, “Only begotten under conditions which render possible the heritage of health.”
In a 1921 article entitled “The Eugenic Value of Birth Control Propaganda,” she wrote, “Today Eugenics is suggested by the most diverse minds as the most adequate and thorough avenue to the solution of racial, political and social problems.”
She also wrote a book entitled, “Women and the New Race.”
I don’t bring this up to argue against birth control, or the many good things she did, but it is inarguable that family planning has a complex and ambiguous history.
Whatever Planned Parenthood’s status today, and the many good things it does (and I have personally referred students of mine to it, for a variety of needed services ) it is inarguable that it beginnings were marred by its association with eugenics, which Margaret Sanger was a great believer in.
After leaving behind her politically radical beginnings in Lower Manhattan during the first Red Scare after WWI, Sanger sought to promote and legitimize birth control among the middle class, and it’s eugenic benefits were among her selling points.
One of the tenets of the American Birth Control League, which she founded, was that children should be, “Only begotten under conditions which render possible the heritage of health.”
In a 1921 article entitled “The Eugenic Value of Birth Control Propaganda,” she wrote, “Today Eugenics is suggested by the most diverse minds as the most adequate and thorough avenue to the solution of racial, political and social problems.”
She also wrote a book entitled, “Women and the New Race.”
I don’t bring this up to argue against birth control, or the many good things she did, but it is inarguable that family planning has a complex and ambiguous history.
Thank you for your grasp of historical facts.
The only names Reteach actually called you were “teacher” and “educator.” I would agree if it feels like those shoes might not fit so well.
He has referred to me as “a spreader of garbage” and “an embarrassment to the profession.” I consider that name calling.
Neither one of you has offered any refutation of the facts in my posts. That would form the basis of a critique of what I have to say. Maligning me as unworthy of my profession is mean spirited and unsubstantiated.
Am I the only Jew here who questions the sincerity of concerns about eugenics coming from the far right? Aren’t these the same people who so despise Obama because he’s black that they fail to recognize he is far from being a liberal?
I despise Obama because he is a murderer who is proud of the fact that he is “good at killing people” (by passing that task off to people who push buttons and fly drones to drop bombs on people thousands of miles away.) I despise Obama because he is a puppet for the international bankers who are destroying our country by allowing the Federal Reserve to print $85 billion dollars a month and allowing Goldman Sachs to rape Detroit and the Bank of America to continue to create derivatives based on the rehypothication of absolutely nothing and doing everything in his power including threatening people not to allow the Glass Steagall Act to be reinstated. I despise Obama because he is a fascist who thinks he can shred the Constitution by approving the NSA spying on everyone and allowing the NDAA to stand as an executive order under which allows the “indefinite detention of American citizens without due process at the discretion of the President.” I despise Obama for the content of his character not the color of his skin.
I think we’d should stay focused on Obama’s “Race to the Top” and the insanity of his Common Core program.
However, since you brought up the current war, let’s look a bit closer.
If you despise Obama as a President leading a nation during a time of war, then by definition you must despise the Founding Fathers for starting the revolution; Lincoln for the Civil War (the bloodies war fought on US soil); Wilson for World War I; Roosevelt and Truman for World War II; Kennedy, LBJ and Nixon for Vietnam, and both Bushes for three wars.
I suggest that before you condemn Obama for the way he’s fighting the wars he inherited from G. W. Bush, you know a bit more about US history.
All of the wars these presidents managed killed a lot more people that those who died while Obama has been president, and under FDR and Truman, the US firebombed civilians in Europe and Japan and finished the war by vaporizing hundreds of thousands of people of every age in two Japanese cities with two atomic bombs. Bombing Japan, the US killed 1 million Japanese civilians. The US, by comparison, only lost 1,700 civilians.
The following link has a list but it’s incomplete.
http://retiary.org/misc_pages/us_presidents_and_wars.html
I noticed that it left out the Philippine-American War (1899 – 1902) where US troops fresh from the American Indian Wars slaughtered 200,000 to 1,5 million Filipino civilians. William McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt were the presidents during that war which seldom shows up in US history texts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippine%E2%80%93American_War
A recent movie about this came out but it didn’t get much attention in the media and never made it into theaters. And on Amazon, it’s only available as a download. I wonder why.
“Amigo”, a film by John Sayles
http://www3.amigomovie.com/about-the-film/history/
Lloyd, you are correct, any anger with Obama is connected he inherited from Bush…who could also say he “inherited” Osama,
and on and on. To end this line, our country needs a reset on policies which have not improved the prospects of our citizens or international relationships. But, this can’t be done until the political class first admits it was wrong, which they up to now reluctantly do.
As to education, we can all agree what is best for kids come first, not the profiteers, whether they are the powers within the public schools, or those who promote charter and private alternatives.
May the best for our kids be the top priority of our concerned.
Lloyd, you are mixing apples with oranges now. You are asking me to get my facts straight?
To compare Obama’s wars of aggression and choice with the founding fathers impulse to demand that their grievances with King George be addressed by force if necessary is ridiculous. Britain’s taxation without representation and orders to quarter the British troops and the Stamp Act and all of the other acts threatened the well being of the colonists. They had every right to defend themselves with bullets. Obama inherited the Iraq war from Bush (who I have no respect for) but he has not ended it yet even though the Iraqis pose no threat to the U.S. Obama inherited the war in Afghanistan as well and escalated it to no avail; again the Afghan people are no threat to us. Obama has been sending material support to al qeada first in Libya to fight against Qaddafi and now in Syria to fight against Assad which is making a mockery of the entire “war on terror” because we are now giving money to the people we have supposedly been trying to defeat since 2001. How sad for the mothers and children of our soldiers killed in this travesty. As a former John Kerry (surely not the same man in power now) once said, “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”
http://www.examiner.com/article/anti-al-qaeda-libyans-reveal-obama-administration-helped-al-qaeda-benghazi
I am pointing out the fact that Obama is proud that he is “good at killing,” that he kills indiscriminately considering civilian deaths to be unavoidable collateral damage when he even acknowledges it is happening with drone warfare which is rare, that he considers it his right to create a “kill list” every Tuesday that can and has included American citizens to be targeted by drones without due process, that he considers it his right to brutally murder Qaddafi even when his entourage flew the white flag of surrender, that he even considers attacking Syria or Iran when he knows this will ignite a nuclear war (because Russia has said as much) which would ultimately end life on earth as we know it.
George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, FDR never acted with such rashness and bold traitorous threats to the international community. Obama is clearly a puppet for the international central bankers who start, finance and enjoy all wars.
I am intuitively against war in general. We tell kindergarten children not to take their problems to the physical level…..to use words instead….but somehow world leaders missed this lesson. My uncle was only 19 years old when he was shot as a paratrooper in the Philippines under General MacArthur in WWII. How sad I never got to meet this brave man.
It is a fact that all wars in the past 200 years have been financed by central bankers looking to make money on the loans to desperate governments and on the sales of weapons and reconstruction materials. The Rothschild family and the Rockefellers have done their level best to keep the world at war by financing both sides of every conflict and inciting conflicts when there were none as in the completely useless and incomprehensible WWI.
On Education:
Obama has brought in a British system to ruin the education of our children. Sir Michael Barber invented Deliverology. He was an adviser to Tony Blair where he tried out his ineffective methods on the British population. It didn’t work there and it won’t work here. Sir Michael Barber worked with David Coleman at McKinsey & Company. Next thing you know, Bill Gates is financing David Coleman at Achieve to create the Common Core and persuading politicians to tie teacher evaluations to student tests which is all based on the ideas of Deliverology. Now Sir Michael Barber is the international head of Pearson making money hand over fist on Common Core aligned materials and consultants. And David Coleman is the head of the College Board busily aligning the SAT to the CC as well.
George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy never would have allowed the Common Core to take over public education as it has done today.
Only Obama, the Trojan Horse, has allowed this treachery to take over our schools.
You replied by focusing on the Founding Fathers and the rebellion but you ignored all the other examples and there are many.
If you condemn Obama for how he wages war, you must condemn most of the others that I mentioned.
I don’t have time to go through a point by point analysis of each and every president you mentioned although I should. All war is pointless. Talk it out. Come to an agreement. That’s what is done after all the killing so why not do it at the beginning of a conflict instead of all the killing? Oh, that’s right, you have to show who is the tough guy on the block, the bully, before people will sit down to talk.
Why are you defending Obama who should be impeached? Bush and Cheney also should have been impeached and should still be held to account for their war crimes. He does not deserve your time or effort. he is a traitor to this country and has proved as much on a daily basis for quite some time now. It is only the cowardice of the members of the House that stands in the way of his inevitable impeachment.
Put your efforts into fighting for the reinstatement of the Glass Steagall Act or something that would really save this republic, not defending the indefensible Obama.
You can’t always negotiate yourself out of a war.
There are times when war is unavoidable. Ask anyone alive before WW II in the UK, China and France who invaded who at the start of World War II. In fact, Japanese diplomats were in Washington DC talking peace a few days before the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. Those diplomats flew home first before the bombs were dropped.
You may also want to ask the families of the thousands who died in the World Trade Center what they think about the effectiveness of pulling out of combat to talk reason to an enemy who has already sworn to destroy your entire culture and wipe out the US population—an enemy who believes they will go to heaven and their god will reward them with more then seventy virgins for blowing up a few more infidel Americans.
Have you been in a combat zone and fought in a war? I have.
War is hell and the only sensible rule when in combat is to survive and to do that you usually have to kill someone before they kill you.
As for Obama being impeachable. Everyone has a right to an opinion. I condemn Obama for his harmful public education policies but I see no legal grounds for impeachment. If there were real grounds for impeachment, his enemies in the GOP would have tried to get a vote in front of the Congress, and many elected members of Congress are lawyers.
Back to my first comment in this thread: Do you think the 200,000 – 1.5 million Philippine civilians US troops killed after the Spanish American War during the US occupation of the Philippines wanted to die?
Troops never want to die. It is the bankers that throw people like canon fodder into wars of aggression. When we start blaming the bankers, like Hjalmar Schacht (backer of Hitler) and Prescott Bush (backer of Schacht) and the Rothschilds for bankrolling all wars and the Rockefellers for building up the Soviet Union so that the U.S. would have an enemy, then we will be getting to the truth of the matter. And maybe if we see that we are all just tools in the big banking game, we can stop and refuse to play any more.
I would like to see the name Hjalmar Schacht become as famous as Hitler because he was the man who put Hitler in power. It is the bankers who rule the world….not the politicians. We need to be clear on that.
What about before there were banks? Wars have been around a lot longer than banks. I wonder what came first: motherhood, wars or prostitution
Hjalmar Schacht
Does a book count?
Schacht was found not guilty! Too many war criminals from World War II escaped their just rewards.
I don’t think the current political leadership in both parties will ever thinking about changing course. They are blind by choice and change is hard when you are part of a group think.
If change is going to take place, we may have to wait for these leaders to die out and be replaced by the next generation as they move into politics and then hope the new wave won’t think the same way.
Surveys have already indicated that most of the young generation reaching maturity doesn’t think the same as the current leadership, and it will take a decade or more for them to climb toward the top starting in their local communities.
People should read the UN’s 1992 non-binding, voluntarily implemented action plan for sustainable development, Agenda 21, and determine for themselves if that is about creating a new world order, depriving individuals of property rights, depopulation/eugenics and all the other claims of conspiracy believers: http://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/index.php?page=view&nr=23&type=400
You claim to despise Obama for doing the very same things that Bush did, such as the drones, letting banksters off the hook, permitting corporate profiteering, etc. Liberals can’t stand BOTH of them for all of that, but rarely hear Bush condemned for it.
Bush is out of office. He was roundly criticized while he was in. The 911 tragedy was under his watch. There has never been a proper investigation although it has been used to justify every loss of liberty since then. Bush and Cheney should go directly to jail for being war criminals now. Obama is actually worse than Bush if that is possible because he is a wolf in sheep’s clothing and a silver tongued liar. Bush tripped over his own lies and made jokes of his murderous endeavors (Weapons of mass destruction? Nothing over there? Nothing under here?) Obama is handsome and well spoken. You want to like the guy, but you can’t, because he is a traitor to this country. He is allowing it to be destroyed every day he is in office.
Actually, people who were really paying attention realized the fact that Obama is in the same camp as the “centrist,” neo-liberal, let’s-outsource-our-jobs-to-slave-wage-workers-overseas, corporation enamored “New Democrat” Bill Clinton, from Walton country.
Quit being so rational logical and professional with your prescriptions, retired teacher. Why would they listen to a true professional????
“And he is not at all concerned that the standards were never field-tested, even though Microsoft would never launch a new product line without extensive field-testing.”
I don’t know if anyone has commented on this statement or not, but I would like to contest it. Microsoft is infamous for putting software out there that needs extensive debugging. The joke among tech people became that Microsoft released their software to the public to do their beta testing. We never bought the first version of a Microsoft product because inevitably it was a nightmare while they issued all the patches for the glitches discovered by the public. He is using the public school system as one big beta test at no cost to him. In ten years he will have made back and more any investment he made in the deform mantra, and he can walk away to diddle with his next project.
Heh, I thought much the same thing.
” In ten years he will have made back and more any investment he made. . .”
Why do you think he said that it would take tens years to know if these malpractices would work???
Exactly.
Off topic but while we are discussing the lies of Bill Gates the lies of Michelle Rhee seem appropriate as well.
Students First has a new evil plan in Florida — coming to a statehouse near you?
Return on Investment in Schools. something wicked this way comes . . . .
http://www.tampabay.com/blogs/gradebook/studentsfirst-to-focus-on-florida-finances-not-parent-trigger-for-2014/2160901
It’s time to form a Noah’s Ark of Americans who will go to Canada (perhaps for a generation). We can pull our wagons up there and beg for asylum. We teachers under attack are refugees. We are the persecuted ones now. We can take what is worth saving from American culture for a time in the future when we can bring it back. But like the Acadians, we won’t ever come back. We can take Dickinson, and Twain, Jazz and Blues, “Goodnight Moon” and “Charlie Brown” and leave. We can be the Irish monks preserving what is worth saving from a disintegrating, bankrupt culture. We can’t change the trajectory of our own country at this point. I don’t think we all need to go down with the Titanic to prove our love of country. I want to drive a cab in Canada and tell young Canadians what America used to be like in the 1970s. I want them to realize how good it is to live in Democracy where the common good matters. I want to live in a real society again. I want to live surrounded by goodwill and not by hate and fear.
Stephen Harper is a heavy handed right winger. You can’t run from Agenda 21. It is a global agenda emanating from the U.N. affecting every country in the world. It is a plan to inventory and control every resource, animal, tree, body of water, and human being in the world. it is a sick idea. Unfortunately it is supported by lots of sick people in high office and lots of unsuspecting good people who are unwitting dupes that are actually petitioning the government for their own enslavement by demanding “sustainable development” and “smart growth” and “go green” initiatives. Stay here and fight for your country. We are experiencing a fascist coup right now but we will prevail. Impeach Obama to send a message to the global bankers, “we no longer accept your puppet.”
“Is Stephen Harper displaying fascist-like tendencies?”
http://canadiandimension.com/articles/4486/
Dawn, where you see Agenda 21, I see a cabal of billionaires. Where we might find common ground is the idea that omnipotent outsiders should not be permitted to take control of communities.
Schools should be controlled by local school boards, and school board elections should be free and fair. Campaign finance reform is needed at all levels of government, including for school board elections.
Canada isn’t a utopia, and America will never improve if we don’t fight for our democratic rights.
Have you been to your local town board meetings lately? Have you seen the “smart growth” in your town? Have you looked at your county’s community planning guide? It is all Agenda 21. Yes there is a cabal of billionaires supporting it for the purpose of getting people to clamor for or at least agree to their own enslavement. When you find your vehicle miles traveled have been limited or your carbon credits have been used up but you still need some electricity…..remember the warnings. Ignore it at your own peril. Do you actually have to hear the jail cell lock behind you before you acknowledge what they are doing? Look into it.
Look into it by reading Agenda 21 yourself, instead of just the conspiracy theorists like Glenn Beck: http://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/index.php?page=view&nr=23&type=400
I don’t own a TV. I don’t watch Glenn Beck. I do own a copy of Agenda 21 which is 40 chapters devoted to the inventory and control of all resources. Chapter 36 specifically calls for education to be used as a vehicle to spread the ideas of sustainable development. Have you seen the Scholastic “Going Green” worksheets for K-2? They have little games about how to spy on your family to determine who is wasting energy.
Check out your community sustainable development planning guide and then tell me you believe Agenda 21 is a non-binding voluntary treaty never ratified of no consequence to you.
Here’s mine: Mid-Hudson Regional Sustainability Plan Implementation Guidance Document May 2013
excerpt:
Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative
The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) is the first market-based regulatory program in the United States to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. RGGI is a cooperative effort among the states of Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Rhode Island, and Vermont. Together, these states have capped and will reduce CO2 emissions from the power sector 10 percent by 2018.
So it looks like my “region” (a U.N. term having no corresponding U.S. elected official in charge of this area) will be reducing its C02 emissions 10% by 2018 whether I like it or not. I wonder what is going to change. Will there be a limit of my vehicle miles traveled? Will there be some manufacturing shut down in my county? The details of this reduction are lacking.
I have one question for you? Do you work for the U.N.?
Paranoid much? I’m just a veteran teacher who cares about the earth and who is concerned about the corporate billionaires intent on rolling back environmental protections, in order to increase profits, such as the Tea Party’s Koch brothers, who promote anti-global warming propaganda and are most likely to benefit from the spread of Agenda 21 conspiracy hooey.
40 chapters and your problem with Agenda 21 is that it has a chapter on educating people about sustainable development? And you are an educator? Take up the work sheet issue with Scholastic.
The real consequences of not following this non-binding agreement are what happens when we don’t take care of the earth, continue to pollute it and squander our planet’s resources.
The Kochs must consider themselves very lucky to have hoodwinked people into fighting their denial of climate change battle for them, so they can rape the earth with no holds barred and further increase their profits. You are being manipulated as a tool of corporate greed.
Mike, I moved to Canada in 2012 after teaching for 20 years in North Carolina (NC), and see the similarities and differences in the two systems. They are mostly the same except that they teach to the child up here, not a test, and that makes all of the difference in their better performance. Look at British Columbia’s (BC) 2012 PISA scores on pp. 19, 35, and 36. (http://www.cmec.ca/Publications/Lists/Publications/Attachments/318/PISA2012_CanadianReport_EN_Web.pdf)
The teachers I taught with in NC are just as good as the ones that I have observed in British Columbia. That is great news because it means that the solution is simple, go back to teaching the child, like NC did before the ABC Accountability Program in 1995. (Model for No Child Left Behind. (http://www.lesn.appstate.edu/olsontoo/ABC%20web%20folder/NC%20ABC%20tests.htm) The 1995 instantly changed the character of the educational atmosphere. It pitted teachers against each other (mostly over who was not going to get the learning disabled kids) and devalued subjects that were not tested, like science at the time. (I was repeatedly told that science did not matter by the English and math teachers.)
BC is reforming its educational model too, but it is based upon the latest in educational research. (http://www.21learn.org/) Here is what BC is doing to improve their education system. (http://www.bcedplan.ca/) US teachers may not be able to move to Canada in mass, but you can use BC as a model. Even Finland is looking at BC right now because it has a diverse population that makes any system much more difficult to operate.
The teacher union helps to make a big difference up here as well. Last year the teachers went on strike and increased student expenditures $2.2k up to $8.5k/year. (http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/policy-expert-calls-for-independent-review-of-education-spending-in-bc/article551446/) The US spends $10/year.
Canada in general, but British Columbia more specifically set a good example. Use its numbers and approach to shed light upon the US debate darkened by subversive misinformation.
To answer Diane’s question: will they produce more or less creativity?
I think they will foster less creativity, but there may very well create a wave of reactive and counter-CCSS creativity. Humans have a way of doing that (thank goodness). Like more punk.
We won’t be buckled down. We won’t become drones (unless we are drugged).
The dream that this won’t cause more testing or that the tests will not be bubble tests is more of a night mare that, in reality, will not come true. Of course Common Core should be reviewed and adjusted by those who know the kids best. Not just a handful in a committee, but field tested throughout the country.
However, as the results come in prepare for a disaster. all kids are different and as they score all over the board failures will reach an all time high. Not becuase kids are stupid, but because they are different and blossom differently.
As that happens be prepared to de couple the test from Common Core to make it real. Here’s some thoughts http://savingstudents-caplee.blogspot.com/2013/12/is-stumbling-and-bumbling-good-thing.html
I am a fan and follower. My career has been spent in high poverty, urban schools. I have a different perspective on the Common Core.While the CCSS were not tested before they were dropped on us, the same can be said for most of the State Standards it replaces. The Common Core represents a focus on what students need to know to be college bound. So for me the shift of what is needed for college trumps what students need to know to graduate. The Common Core is raising expectations of what kids of poverty should be able to do. So while I too wish education would finish assembling the plane before flying it, I remain hopeful of the impact the Common Core will have for children of poverty.
Who paid you to write that dreck?
Follow the corporate money. You are misinformed and must be drinking a kool aid flavor –
You know I keep hearing the analogy of “building the plane while it’s in the air”… but the other one I hear is…
Common Core is like telling a track coach whose kids can’t clear a four-foot bar… “Well, the problem is your low expectations. So I’m ordering you to raise it to five feet… ”
Yeah, yeah, I know… if they can’t clear it a four feet, wouldn’t raising the bar be not only pointless, but frustrating and demoralizing for the athlete?… No, the higher expectations will get the athlete to re-double his efforts and clear the now-higher, five-foot bar.
To take the analogy further… and then, when the athlete predictably can’t clear the new five-foot bar, the bosses fire the track coach, as it’s his fault for not being inspiring enough, and having such low expectations for the athletes that he coaches.
I’m not as anti Bill Gates as many here. I’m not a fan either. I just think it’s hilarious that we Americans assume that if you are rich, you know how to solve all problems. Bill Gates reminds me of the line in the song “If I Were a Rich Man” from Fiddler on the Roof ” And it won’t make one bit of difference if I answer right or wrong.
When you’re rich, they think you really know!”
It is just the same as in the Lord of the Rings. Those who support the dark lord do not know that their fate is not going to be so nice at the end (but this the dark lord is not telling them yet)..
http://allpoetry.com/poem/8500001-One-Ring-by-J-R-R-Tolkien
Three Rings for the Business-kings under the sky,
Seven for the Governor-lords in their halls of stone,
Nine for Mortal Men and their kids doomed to die,
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne,
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
One Common Core to rule them all,
One Common Core in-Bloom to find them,
One Common Core to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
Brilliant.
wow. that’s superb.
Very Clever! 🙂
The Ex Officio Secretary of Education Bill Gates is as much in touch with Rheeality as Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.
In touch with reality, that’s another matter altogether. For example…
Arne Duncan is simultaneously somewhat for/somewhat against/somewhat for & against high-stakes standardized testing.
Link: http://www.ed.gov/news/speeches/choosing-right-battles-remarks-and-conversation
From the Bill Gates’ short fictional story accessed by the link in the above posting:
[start quote]
Myth: Common Core State Standards means students will have to take even more high-stakes tests.
Common Core won’t necessarily add to the number of annual state tests students take. States will introduce new math and language arts tests based on the standards to replace tests they give now. Most states are taking a cautious approach to implementing the new tests, giving teachers and students time to adapt before scores lead to serious consequences. What’s more, unlike some of today’s tests, the new tests will help teachers and students improve by providing an ongoing diagnosis of whether students are mastering what they need to know for success after graduation.
[end quote]
Leaving aside the deliberately misleading and imprecise “won’t necessarily add” I call on an intellectual star in the firmament of “education reform,” Dr. Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute, to do an English-to-English translation of what the above word salad really means:
[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/
A reminder: never take literally what is said by someone under the influence of a Rheeality Distortion Field.
There is a 98% “satisfactory” [thank you for that one, Mr. Bill Gates!] chance of certainty that they don’t know what they’re talking about.
😎
Rupert, Joel, Arne, Bill and Melinda would not last a week as teachers in any K-12 public school in any state.
I don’t believe Gates is well informed and his M O is to privatize education. All this testing is beneficial to companies that make the tests and not at all beneficial for students.
The data says that the common core curriculum is failing miserably. Either Gates is a man of science, or he is delusional. His choice.
Most teachers I talk to think it will be gone in two years.
And even if this were to be true – in that time my child will have gone from K to 4th grade and had a shoddy sub-par education during her most crucial and formative years.
Not learning proper math, not learning proper writing, spelling and grammar, not learning any real history, or science. Being encouraged to do “Reading Response” (ie. not a book report) on biographies and non-fiction (ie. not Charlotte’s Web). Having points taken off homework becuase she did not do enough “group work” (ie. helping her teacher get a good evaluation). Having “Physical Education” that includes sitting and listening to lessons on nutrition and heart disease (ie. not playing kickball).
But she will know what it means to be a global citizen. She will know about taking the PARCC. This is a disgrace and bordeline criminal.
That’s great that teachers seem so confident this will all blow over for them – but my kids don’t have a couple years to waste.
I am with you. Yesterday would not be soon enough to throw these standards out and take back our old state standards which in NY were just fine. If your state had lousy standards, take Massachusetts, they are free and have been tested and seen to be superior to all others.
Gates is not the world’s worst person (just think Bernie Madoff) but he is typical of the arrogant people who run modern software businesses. They are bright and assume they can solve any problem, but don’t let anyone be fooled in thinking they know what they are doing at the start. Windows took years to be useable, but Gates and company made profits from the start. Perhaps Common core is the magic bullet for US education and all the people who actually work in education are fools. Perhaps not.
Does anyone think a poor curriculum is the main problem of education in the US? Of course not. It is all a move to sell stuff, their stuff to the tax payer.
Gates writes: “In fact, the standards will give teachers more choices. When every state had its own standards, innovators making new educational software or cutting-edge lesson plans had to make many versions to reach all students. Now, consistent standards will allow more competition and innovation to help teachers do their best work.”
How does engageNY, for instance, allow more competition and innovation to help teachers do their best work, when it is not the teacher doing the innovation themselves?
After doing a close reading of this specific passage, I sense a lot of “double talk” and rhetoric. After a close reading of his whole article, there is nothing to substantiate his rebuttal. He is not demystifying any “myths” with evidence.
His arrogance gets in his way as he talks like a fool on a subject he clearly has no background knowledge about. I get nauseated listening to talk about anything. He loves hearing himself talk. Don’t people like that make you nauseated? How can anyone take him seriously when he attempts to speak about education? He doesn’t have an ed. degree let alone the fact that he didn’t finish college.
It sounds like the plan is for competition and innovation to be happening amongst the overlords’ and their peons, who would be the curriculum, testing and software developers, and then trickling down to teachers.
The scheme is top down in every possible way.
Gates writes: “In fact, the standards will give teachers more choices. When every state had its own standards, innovators making new educational software or cutting-edge lesson plans had to make many versions to reach all students.
I will finish this thought. When innovators had to make many versions of their software or lesson plans, this was costly for the innovators. Innovators had to spend lots of time and resources developing different versions. With one set of standards the innovators will only have to make one version, spend less time, probaly require less workers and overall will increase their margin. This is the economies of scale that National Standards bring.
I think he is hung up on the idea that teachers will all compete against each other to produce the most innovative renditions of core curriculum. He just can’t get it through his head that competition is not the supreme motivator of all human activity.
The USA Today piece written by Bill Gates is an exercise in prevarication.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2014/02/11/bill-melinda-gates-common-core-education-column/5404469/
Gates says the Common Core was conceived as a way to “prepare children to become good citizens.” He also says that when the Common Core standards were in the process of development “The major teacher unions and 48 states sent teams, including teachers, to participate.”
Both statements are patently false. But this is nothing new for Gates. Indeed, the trial judge in the Microsoft antitrust suit said in his findings of fact – facts which were sustained on appeal – that top executives at Microsoft had “proved, time and time again, to be inaccurate, misleading, evasive, and transparently false. … Microsoft is a company with an institutional disdain for both the truth and for rules of law that lesser entities must respect. It is also a company whose senior management is not averse to offering specious testimony to support spurious defenses to claims of its wrongdoing.”
The Gates claim that teachers participated in the Common Core development hyperlinks to a list of testimonials by those who subscribe to the Common Core. One of them is from Bill Gates himself, and he says that the standards are necessary for the U.S. to become “more competitive as a country.” That line is echoed by Craig Barrett (formerly of Intel) and Ed Rust, chair of State Farm. But as I’ve noted on this site many times, it’s absolutely not true.
http://www.ccsso.org/News_and_Events/Press_Releases/NATIONAL_GOVERNORS_ASSOCIATION_AND_STATE_EDUCATION_CHIEFS_LAUNCH_COMMON_STATE_ACADEMIC_STANDARDS_.html
What’s disturbing is the number of “educators” who buy into the Gates malarkey. E.D. Hirsch says that with Common Core “we can finally address the literacy crisis in this country.” Randi Wiengarten says the Common Core is a “foundation for better schools” that will prepare kids “success in college, life and careers.” Lily Eskelsen, vice-president of the NEA, says “”We believe that this initiative is a critical first step in our nation’s effort to provide every student with a comprehensive, content-rich and complete education.” And Byron V. Garrett says the “National PTA enthusiastically supports the adoption and implementation by all states of the Common Core State Standards, which were recently released in final form.”
Are all of these people clueless?
Are all of these people clueless?
They are “Just Following the Green Paper Road($) $ $ $ ”
but in truth ………
They are “Just following the Gold Plated Sidewalk($) $$$$”
And where that Sidewalk Ends is one Sad Place…
The Portly Plastic Politicians have their own Private Highway leading to their Pot($) of Gold…..
They know of “One Size” and that is the size of their Bank Accounts!!
Democracy
Yes they are ALL CLUELESS.
Principals and other administrators have little to any understanding of life in the trenches. Seems as though the instant they leave the classroom, all is forgotten. They work in the same building as teachers but live in a very different world. I’m sure there are some exceptions, but none that I have encountered. Now if principals and administrators a generally clueless, how on earth could anyone outside the sphere of education stand a chance?
I’m not sure about all states or school districts, but in the California public school district where I taught for thirty years, the administrators had no job protection at all.
Over the years, we had more than one principal and vice principal terminated (fired) and seldom knew the reasons. Usually, they were let go at the end of a contract but in one case the principal had a few years left on his five year contract and the district wanted to get rid of him so bad they paid him a lump sum for the years remaining on the contract and gave him a glowing recommendation that landed him a job several hundred miles away in San Diego. In his case, not one teacher spoke out in his defense and the nickname he earned from his staff says it all: Little Hitler.
The one vice principal who lost her job told us why—before Little Hitter was hired to do the same thing she didn’t do.
The assistant superintendent in charge of the secondary schools (a micromanaging tyrant few respected or liked. I always thought of him as Stalin) out of the district office handed a a black list with orders to get rid of all the teachers on that list. Most of the teachers were outspoken critics of district policies that teachers had no say in and didn’t approve. My name was on that list. That vice principal took the black list, kept her mouth shut and did nothing.
After losing her vp job, she went back to the classroom where she started her career in education—to teach English in one of the three intermediate schools in the district. She had earned tenure (for want of a better word) as a teacher but had little to no job protection as a site administrator.
Over the years while Stalin ruled supreme out of the district office micromanaging the secondary schools and pandering the political correctness and agreeing with the critics of public education, several honest and supportive VPs pulled me aside and warned me to soften my criticism or Stalin was going to eventually find a way to get rid of me. Then they said they would deny they ever talked to me if I brought their names up. Eventually, most of the honest administrators quit their jobs and left after finding work in other districts that may have had better district administration.
I hold out hopes that Dr. Hirsch will see that the CC$$ for ELA instantiate everything that he has attacked in papers, speeches, and books for half a century now–that they are a list of formal skills (and a poorly constructed list at that) and are leading to the creation of a LOT MORE of precisely the sort of vaguely formulated skill-based instruction that he despises and has exposed so eloquently for decades. See, for example, his take on such instruction in The Knowledge Deficit.
They are not clueless. They know very well but they are amoral and their testimonies were purchased, in each case:
AFT = BOUGHT
NEA = BOUGHT
PTA = BOUGHT
by everyone-has-a-price-that-I-can-afford-to-pay-Gates
The Bill Gates money can’t buy everyone. There are millions of Americans who can’t be bought. Need an example: the homeless man who picks up a lost wallet filled with hundred dollars bills and then he turns it over to the police who find the owner and returns the wallet without a dollar missing.
As I said, those who were bought “know very well” and “are amoral.” That in no way implies ethical people who can’t be bought are nonexistent. In fact, I believe there are probably many conscientious people who would turn down money from Gates on principle. I’d just be very surprised if Gates doesn’t think he can buy whomever and whatever he wants.
And while Rome is burning Arne is playing celebrity basketball.
Anyone else amazed (and pleased) at the number of comments Gates has elicited?
Mr Bill Gates and company…..
Do not expect Professional Educators to Race with you on your “Highway to H*ll” via your
Money Ride Express..
Not
I’m going to say something very unpopular, I like the Common Core Standards. I’m a math teacher and I’ve spent time reviewing, “unwrapping”, and training teachers in my district. I see the progression and logic to the way the mathematical standards are laid out and I appreciate the concept of a common document that our entire nation is using so we are all on the same page.
However, there are somethings beyond the standards themselves that raises some concerns. This is only the second year common core has been implemented in Algebra 1, yet our freshmen will be given the first end of course exam next year. I don’t feel I’ve prepared them. This group did not grow up with the common core, they first saw it in middle school.
Now that we’ve taught these new standards, there are some flaws and ambiguity that no one seems to want to address. Mostly, age appropriateness, the amount of content to be covered, and the expected level of “mastery” for students. We were told our students would be better prepared as they entered high school, thus reducing the need for remediation, this is not true. We were told there were less standards, so we would have more time for depth. Once the standards were unwrapped there is an average of 5 learning targets per standard, so this statement is not true. Our students are expected to “master” each subject to a degree of depth and understanding that equals their teacher’s knowledge. This is a high goal for 14 and 15 year olds, and we plan on punishing them by not granting a high school diploma if they can’t reach it.
I love teaching, I love math, but I hate my job.
>I appreciate the concept of a common document that our entire nation is using so we are all on the same page.<
Let me dispel this myth with a simple example that any classroom teacher will understand:
Its mid March, you're teaching your third period algebra class and a new student arrives from with schedule in hand. And you ask, "So Justin, what school district are you from?" Justin replies, "I just moved from Florida." You try again, "What city in Florida Justin?" "Oh, I lived in Tallahassee." You ask, "What algebra topic were you studying in Tallahassee?" Justin shrugs, "I don't know, some kinda math."
I’m merely referring to a common ground so when I meet with other educators from across the county, and I do, I don’t have start with “well in my state we…” I’m not delusional enough, nor would I want every student to know everything at the same time.
You are willing to sacrifice your autonomy as a teacher because one day you might meet a 9th grade algebra teacher from Idaho?
You might want to re-think your priorities.
Besides my example debunks the claim made by the Master Rheeformers, Duncan and lord Coleman. No one in charge is using your argument.
The common ground in algebra did not need a trillion dollar overhaul.
We solve for unknown quantities; end of story. Now if they bothered to change the standards enough to actually make math meaningful to students we might have something worth discussing.
@ Mrs S:
It sounds to me like you just made a very strong case AGAINST the Common Core standards. And yet you “like” them?
I like the standards, I don’t like their implementation and apparent lack of flexibility.
The Standards are a package deal, joecoolmath, you won’t get them without the increasing barrage of tests – and teacher evaluations based on those tests – that they re vehicle for.
Joe Cool
You can’t claim you really like knives but are completely against cutting things. You bought a three-legged stool: standards+tests+teacher evals based on tests. The creators of this mess decided not to offer their ideas buffet style.
Unlike the ELA “standards,” the math standards are a mere tweaking of what was already a near consensus because almost all the states had based their standards on preexisting NCTM standards. One can quibble about them, certainly, and one should. In fact, any standards should be subject to approval, rejection, modification, and ongoing critique by scholars, researchers, and practitioners in the classroom, obviously. The ELA “standards” are another matter entirely. The folks who put these together had little notion what they were doing–how very profoundly, and for the worse, their little experiment would affect curricula and pedagogy. The ELA standards were, like the math ones, an attempt to rationalize and improve upon existing state standards, but the job was horribly botched. It was not approached with anything like the high seriousness that such a consequential move required. When people build an airplane, they work from detailed specifications resulting from enormous efforts by specialists, and they employ failure modes and effects analysis and extensive testing to identify problems. In this case, no such work was done, at all. Achieve appointed a couple people who really didn’t have a clue what they were doing absolute monarchs of education in the English language arts in the United States, and what those two authors of these “standards” didn’t know is even now having dramatically dire consequences for lesson planning, test construction, and creation of new curricula and pedagogy. It’s as though a small group of people had decided that we needed new nuclear power plant designs, had hired a couple amateur tinkerers with cars to draw up plans, and then immediately proceeded with the building without consulting any nuclear engineers or having those plans vetted by the scientific and technical community. The results of this heedlessness are playing out, predictably disastrously, in schools and educational publishing houses throughout the United States right now. In very little time, it will become plain to all what a dreadful mistake this all was, what hubris was involved, and how many were harmed.
Have you read the CC math standards carefully? There are some serious concerns about the developmental appropriateness of standards that have pushed higher level math down into grades where they clearly don’t belong.
Example:
Students extend their understanding of the base-ten system. This includes ideas of counting in fives, tens, and multiples of hundreds, tens, and ones, as well as number relationships involving these units, including comparing. Students understand multi-digit numbers (up to 1000) written in base-ten notation, recognizing that the digits in each place represent amounts of thousands, hundreds, tens, or ones (e.g., 853 is 8 hundreds + 5 tens + 3 ones).
2. Students use their understanding of addition to develop fluency with addition and subtraction within 100. They solve problems within 1000 by applying their understanding of models for addition and subtraction, and they develop, discuss, and use efficient, accurate, and generalizable methods to compute sums and differences of whole numbers in base-ten notation, using their understanding of place value and the properties of operations. They select and accurately apply methods that are appropriate for the context and the numbers involved to mentally calculate sums and differences for numbers with only tens or only hundreds.
3. Students recognize the need for standard units of measure (centimeter and inch) and they use rulers and other measurement tools with the understanding that linear measure involves an iteration of units. They recognize that the smaller the unit, the more iterations they need to cover a given length.
4. Students describe and analyze shapes by examining their sides and angles. Students investigate, describe, and reason about decomposing and combining shapes to make other shapes. Through building, drawing, and analyzing two- and three-dimensional shapes, students develop a foundation for understanding area, volume, congruence, similarity, and symmetry in later grades.
These are CC $tandrad$ for 7 year olds (Grade 2).
Every 7 year old!
Special needs
Learning disabled
Dyslexic
ELL
I’m sorry, they are not the math standards for the children of John King, Bill Gates, Michelle Rhee, David Coleman, or Arne Duncan.
NY teacher, the grade levels were decided after the Standards were written. I also believe I mentioned the lack of age appropriateness.
I think that my point is being missed here.
Both CCSS committees started by gathering together and examining the existing state standards. Now, in math, most of the states had already written standards that were minor variations on previously existing NCTM standards, so LIKE THEM OR NOT, in most states, the CC$$ standards are more similar to than different from the standards that they replace, though there is debate, as there should be, about what was emphasized and what was not in the final document. Having read through the NCTM and all the state standards for years, I know this to be the case. To anyone familiar with the NCTM standards and with most of the state standards in math, the CC$$ for math were no surprise whatsoever.
Both sides of the Math Wars find things they don’t like in the new math standards, and it would be quite difficult to make an argument that the new standards represent a win for either side. To my eye, they look like more of the same with, as a said, a few tweaks–more emphasis on conceptual understanding at earlier grades and more emphasis on connections among mathematical ideas.
Now, I happen to think that the entire approach to the learning progression in math is wrong because it fails most kids. All one has to do is to find out about the attitudes toward and knowledge of math on the part of the adults who have been through that K-12 learning progression on which there has been remarkable consensus for decades (even in the midst of the math wars). Most U.S. adults, a few years after they leave school, have put anything they learned in math behind them for good, and, furthermore, they HATE and FEAR math and are effectively innumerate, even though they’ve all been through a system with standards and a learning progression more like than unlike the new standards and learning progression. For most, clearly, what we’ve been doing hasn’t worked and has been a colossal waste of resources. Tweaking that system a bit isn’t going to change outcomes much. A fundamental rethinking needs to occur.
Let me put it this way. Suppose that I told you that in my country, we have a program for teaching every child to play a musical instrument but that if you ask adults, most of them hate and fear musical performance, avoid musical performance at all costs, and can’t play any instrument, at all. Well, a few of them can blow into an ocarina.
Then suppose that I told you that we just issued a new set of musical instrument learning standards that basically tweaked the existing standards and progression. Is that crazy, or what? But that’s just what we’ve done.
Asked to rationalize disparate existing standards into a single document, the writers of the ELA standards faced a more challenging problem because the state ELA standards varied enormously. The New York standards were nothing like the Michigan standards which were nothing like the Massachusetts ones, and so on. So, the hired hands who had been given the lucrative job of rationalizing the ELA standards tossed out a bunch of those state standards as inadequate (with the help of a study from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute), narrowed their list, and then tried to rationalize the narrowed list. And they appended to the “rationalized” version some general guidelines–read closely, read substantive texts, do more informative reading, etc.
The resulting ELA standards are embarrassingly bad–a list of hackneyed (but, alas, commonly held) halftruths and misconceptions about the teaching of English. So, in that sense, they are, indeed, “common.”
common. adj. Base, vulgar
“Common sense is that layer of prejudices laid down before the age of eighteen.” –Albert Einstein
Surely you have not looked closely at the first through fifth grade Common Core Math standards or you would not be so generous with your acceptance of them. The Lattice method of multiplication???? A throw back to 13th century methods touted as superior to memorizing times tables. I don’t think so. Division by the Tens Method where it takes 16 steps to solve a 2 step problem. Why? Double digit addition by the Tens Method where it takes a lot of drawing and dividing numbers into tens before you can solve what should be a simple addition problem where you carry a number over to the tens column. How is turning a 2 step problem into a 16 step problem an improvement?
The grade levels were decided after the Standards were written. I believe I mentioned the lack of age appropriateness.
Here it is in action:
I’ll have to remember to only post negative comments and not anything reflective nor professional to gain respect on this forum. Thank you for modeling this. I was hoping to gain perspective from those who would be open to all ideas, as most educators should. Clearly I was mistaken.
PS I like buffets, I like to see all the options.
Who elected this ignoramus?
Who allowed him to use his money to hire 11 “Regents Fellows” in NY at $189,000 a pop, who are no more than corporate lobbyists, to do the job of the regents? Oh that’s right, his buddy Chancellor Merryl Tisch. She put up $1 million of her own money too. Her opinion on the subject, “What is not to like about free fellows?”
Public education policy in the hands of private entrepreneurs. Isn’t that illegal?
Bill Gates is probably a decent guy on a personal level. Probably a good father, husband, and neighbor. Probably.
Bill Gates the businessman is a cold hearted, ruthless, tyrant. I know Shark Tank is a reality show, but those billionaires can’t hide their business personalities. Bill Gates would eat Mark Cuban alive. When it comes to funding the CC he is all business. Don’t let his public persona and mild demeanor fool you.
If he really meant well regarding the CCSS he would not remain so adamant about a field he knows he knows nothing about. Someone who means well would be willing to listen and act on the advice of experts in the field. His refusal to change his tune tells me all I need to know. Protecting his own kids from CCSS is icing on the cake of hidden agendas.
Because he is truly a narcissistic, greedy, controlling…person of inhumane character, he gets his way and people listen. He duped people into thinking that he was a philanthropist and we didn’t see/or denied that he would ever build his empire into a “Shark Tank” as you stated. I hoped that we have learned our lesson on how corporations work in the future and how they gain more power through our government. We have to question and be cautious when predators are disguised as philanthropist approach us. We always tell our kids not to take candy from strangers. We adults need to follow our own advice.
He has given grants to every university in the U.S, Therefore, research on the safety of genetically modified foods for human consumption doesn’t get done in the U.S, There is one study from France that demonstrates cancer tumors and infertility. But Bill Gates gives grants to all of the media outlets so we don’t hear about that. There has never been a long term study of vaccinated vs. non-vaccinated children done to demonstrate the veracity of the claims of the medical industry that vaccines are safe and effective. But Bill Gates funds all kinds of research into vaccines that cause infertility because he hates babies and people and wants less of them on the planet. His “philanthropy” is ubiquitous as you say and has given him incredible power over many aspects of our lives. It is amazing what family connections, monopoly, copyright infringement and government contracts can do for an individual who never graduated from college.
He’s evil.
Very well put, I agree 100%.
Actually, I don’t think you can be a good father and a sociopath at the same time.
As the saying goes Freedom is not free and the vipers are all around us. Who died and left Bill Gates as heir to everything, there isn’t anything he doesn’t have his fingers in . Ensuring that his type of public health care is administered in third world countries, for an unelected talking head voice drowns out everyone with it my way or the highway because of the money he made off of America, tax loopholes and being a monopoly. Is there any difference between him and the Governor of New Jersey. Whatever he states is the truth I know it is his truth Mayor Bloomberg,Ms Rhee in their successful attack on the American people to further destroy public education and our lives.
At this very moment, as people are reading and writing on this blog, many millions of people are at work–teachers, administrators, curriculum developers–revising everything they do in accordance with a set of ELA standards that was amateurishly prepared and that has enormous entailments that were not thought through at all. The consequences of these standards for curricula and pedagogy in the English language arts have already been and will continue to be egregious. The details regarding those dire consequences make for a very, very long and sad story that is even now playing out. These “standards” (one is compelled to put that word in quotation marks because the ELA “standards” were so badly conceived) are a wholesale experiment being performed on the children of the United States heedlessly, recklessly, wantonly. I look at what is happening and think of the folks who foisted these “standards” on the country and say, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
Robert
If you and I re-wrote the standard medical procedure for performing by-pass surgery and forced every heart surgeon in the US to use our flawed technique, and patients who normally survived were dying because of our no-nothing intrusion into the medical field, the heart surgeons would, 1) return to their previously successful procedures, and 2) have us arrested on criminal charges or sue us in a civil class action. They would not dream of telling their patients or surviving relatives, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
The analogy is apt. I have often put it this way: “It’s as though Achieve handed David Coleman a copy of Galen and a copy of the 1858 edition of Gray’s Anatomy and sent him to a cabin in Vermont to write new standards for the medical profession based on those.”
The result was a breathtakingly backward document, one that is most charitably described as a list of half-remembered, hackneyed halftruths and misconceptions about the teaching of English. What astonishes me is that the authors of “standards” this bad haven’t long since been met with howls of derision and driven off the national stage.
That is what I am looking for, “howls of derision” during the faculty meetings where we are asked to take this stuff seriously. “Howls of derision” on professional development days when we are wasting our time doing close readings of the standards instead of discussing best practices for teaching a rich classical curriculum which most teachers would love to implement.
Again, a simple question: How many teachers stand up at faculty meetings or even meet privately with their principals to discuss the inappropriateness of implementing the standards?
Commenting on a blog is one thing. Speaking out in public is another.
I have no room for forgiveness. You’re a better man than me!
I agree, NYteacher. This is definitely not a Jesus moment unless you talk about the way he reacted to the money changers in the temple. It’s a righteous wrath moment cause they know exactly what they are doing.
One can only be forgiven if one acknowledges one has done something wrong and tries to do what one can to make it right. Bill Gates has not and will not.
He knows exactly what he is doing and should be held in contempt and open to ridicule and most importantly held accountable for what he has done and is doing. This mild mannered snake oil salesman should be “driven from the temple” as long as we are looking to the Bible for advice.
John 17:15 – I pray not that thou shouldest take them out of the world, but that thou shouldest keep them from the evil.
“While they were in the field, Cain attacked his brother Abel and killed him. Then the Lord said to Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?” “I don’t know, ” he replied.
Then he went on,”I just did my part in preserving the natural environment of the field. The area was a bit overpopulated, after all…”
Hillarious.
People are naturally fearful for their jobs. All around the country, people are being told in “trainings” (Sit up. Roll over. Good boy.) in not-so-subtle ways that they had better shut up and listen:
“We’re going to go through this lesson format today, but let me start by saying, that we’re here to learn about this, so please direct your questions to matters having to do with understanding the format, and keep any negativity to yourself. If you have concerns about something, you can see me after the training”
The message is VERY clear. And in “data chats” and teacher evaluation sessions, it’s even more blatant and clear. You are here to learn the script and follow it. Otherwise, you will be replaced.
In short, a culture of fear is descending on American schools, where once there was free democratic discussion and debate about methods and materials.
This happens frequently. Administrators at district level are a bunch of puppets and puppeteers who bring out the ruler to hit your knuckles if you blurt out an ounce of contradiction. And then there are those brown nosers who want to climb the ladder to join them someday. It’s like the mini version of the rich corp and political reformers’ scene–dispicable!
That Bill Gates thinks that rate-and-punish is an effective tool for process improvement should surprise noone – his company did it to his employees for years:
“the system forced managers to rate a certain percentage of workers as underperforming, no matter what… the program pit staffers against each other — which hampered collaboration and put the focus on internal, rather than external, competition”
(http://money.cnn.com/2013/11/13/technology/enterprise/microsoft-stack-ranking/)
Microsoft finally ditched this travesty of a management tool last year but sadly the new CEO at Yahoo has implemented it there. Funny how CEO’s love this stuff because no one ever says that 20% of them MUST be ranked underperforming. In CEO-world all the children are above average.
Of course, the thing that Achieve should have done is to issue not a mandatory bullet list of standards but, rather, a voluntary framework, a list of general guidelines within which development of innovative curricula, pedagogical approaches, and learning progressions could place, and those should have been posted for ongoing exemplification, modification, critique, discussion, debate, on a national website open to researchers, scholars, curriculum developers, and practitioners. And, a fund could have been established to award grants toward work to those ends and toward development of model lessons, reading lists, etc., related to those guidelines. The general guidelines could have taken a form as simple as this:
Build intrinsic motivation to read.
Encourage independent reading.
Build syntactic competence and fluency.
Build competence in prosody.
Encourage reading over time of connected texts within knowledge domains.
Encourage learning of related vocabulary in meaningful, engaging, extended semantic contexts.
Encourage close reading of substantive texts.
Provide models of, and operationally defined practice in, specific techniques from writers’ toolkits.
To the extent possible, provide opportunities for students to discover a passion and pursue it via varied and extensive research.
To extent possible, eschew summative assessment and instead a) bury assessment within instruction as self-checks and useful feedback and c) use performative assessment in which students create portfolios of substantive work they have created to be assessed.
Create an IEP for every student.
And so on.
If something like this had been done, the result would have been an explosion of innovation in curricula and pedagogical approaches instead of this horrific distortion and narrowing of curricula and pedagogy that is actually taking place.
Two additions to that list:
Use varied instructional modes appropriate to differing students and differing goals for acquisition, which is implicit, and learning, which is explicit.
Emphasize acquisition and learning of significant a) world knowledge (knowledge of what) and b) concretely, operationally described procedural knowledge (knowledge of how).
Instead, we are expecting, bizarrely, that innovation will come from standardization, from enforcement, from the top, of teaching to a bullet list. Of course, such a “one ring to rule them all” approach will be an utter failure, much, much damage will be done, and the actual and opportunity costs will be catastrophic.
These people are supposed to be experienced managers, leaders. Haven’t they learned anything about how innovation occurs? about, for example, crowd sourcing and competition among ideas? They are asking people to follow an eighteenth-century factory model into the 21st century.
cx: Of course, such a “one ring to rule them all” approach will be an utter failure; much, much damage will be done to kids and to communities; and the actual and opportunity costs will be catastrophic.
Your “one ring to rule them all” would be my minimal standard with room for diversity.
First we had No Child Left Behind, then we had Race to the Top, now we have Common Core State Standards. If students can’t pass the current tests, obviously the solution must be to give students different tests, right? Obviously, that’s completely not true. Unfortunate that Mr. Gates doesn’t focus more energy into ensuring that all students, not just the wealthy, receive a well-rounded education through access to small class sizes, full-time nurses, arts teachers, counselors, early childhood and adult education programs. Why is it that what’s good enough for the children of the wealthy isn’t good enough for all students?
That is a very, very good question, David
Exactly. Gates could use his billions to replicate what his own school experience was like at Lakeside for every child in America. Classical education with small class sizes and an emphasis on the arts.
Why don’t you give some grants for that to every public school, Bill Gates?
I recommend that people google Lakeside School in Seattle, Washington to see the kind of education Bill Gates received. You’ll discover no common core, low student-teacher ratio, every arts program you can imagine every sport a kid would be interested in. Make sure to read the school’s mission statement and compare it to the one for your school. Oh, and don’t forget to compare their school lunches to the ones public school kids ate today. Then check out the tuition!! If Bill Gates’s mom thought this was the best education for her son why shouldn’t it be good for all sons and daughters??
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Special privileges are only for the privileged class. And that’s what they really believe.
Why doesn’t Bill want to replicate that for every child in America?
From the Lakeside website:
Mission
The mission of Lakeside School is to develop in intellectually capable young people the creative minds, healthy bodies, and ethical spirits needed to contribute wisdom, compassion, and leadership to a global society. We provide a rigorous and dynamic academic program through which effective educators lead students to take responsibility for learning.
We are committed to sustaining a school in which individuals representing diverse cultures and experiences instruct one another in the meaning and value of community and in the joy and importance of lifelong learning.
Mission Focus
Lakeside School fosters the development of citizens capable of and committed to interacting compassionately, ethically, and successfully with diverse peoples and cultures to create a more humane, sustainable global society. This focus transforms our learning and our work together
academics
Overview
A Commitment to Excellence
Lakeside’s 5th- to 12th-grade student-centered academic program focuses on the relationships between talented students and capable and caring teachers. We develop and nurture students’ passions and abilities and ensure every student feels known.
The cultural and economic diversity of our community, the teaching styles, and the approaches to learning are all essential to Lakeside academics. We believe that in today’s global world, our students need to know more than one culture, one history, and one language.
Each student’s curiosities and capabilities lead them to unique academic challenges that are sustained through a culture of support and encouragement. All students will find opportunities to discover and develop a passion; to hone the skills of writing, thinking, and speaking; and to interact with the world both on and off campus. Lakeside trusts that each student has effective ideas about how to maximize his or her own education, and that they will positively contribute to our vibrant learning community.
IT’S NOT JUST ABOUT ACADEMICS
Lakeside believes there is more to life than academic success. We actively uphold a balanced approach to education; one that develops students who excel both inside and outside the classroom.
We offer a diverse array of activities, from leading-edge experiential learning programs to numerous athletics endeavors, arts experiences, and student activities and clubs. Everyone can find whatever it is that interests them to deepen their involvement in our vital community.
Lakeside also recognizes that it can be hard for some students to achieve that balance. That’s why our student support team is ready to help. Thoughtful and motivated counselors, teachers, and administrators work with students and their families to ensure that all have the opportunity to reach their full potential at Lakeside.
In the 2013-2014 admissions season, with tuition at $28,500, the school was able to award $5 million in need-based aid to 30 percent of the student population.
STILL LOOKING FOR THE CCSS . . . .?
Some one should give them a call and ask about the role of standardized testing and the Lakeside experience.
1-206-368-3600
Err, that’s utopia. Sure, it would be nice if everyone went to a school like that, but there just isn’t the political will to spend that kind of money on sports, arts, etc.
You are missing the point. Bill Gates has spent $200million dollars in support of CCSS but sends his kids to Lakeside where test is a four letter word.
We spent 6 TRILLION dollars on the fiascos in Afghanistan and Iraq. About $121,800 for every public school student in the United States.
Think about that.
http://www.csun.edu/~vcmth00m/nsf.html
“The NSF is not the only funding source for defective math programs. Corporate foundations also contribute. In 2001, for example, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation teamed up to award the San Diego Unified School District $22.5 million, but only under the condition that the school board retain its superintendent and chancellor of instruction so that they could institute educational “reforms.” The two administrators required schools to use a controversial high school physics program, an ineffective reading framework for elementary school, and Everyday Mathematics, an NSF-funded, K-6 series not aligned to the state’s standards.[14] By the next school board election, both administrators had left the district, but San Diego school math scores had already declined relative to the state as a whole. Because I have written and spoken publicly about issues in math education, I regularly receive emails and phone calls from parents across the country asking for help and advice on how best to avoid the negative effects of NSF-funded math programs in their children’s schools. I receive more complaints about Everyday Mathematics than all of the other NSF-funded programs combined. And the complaints are legitimate. Like TERC, Everyday Mathematics eschews the standard algorithms and does not develop fluency in basic arithmetic.”
Thanks for advising of Bill Gates Op-Ed in the USAToday.
Bill Gates like other NC luminaries Gov. Jim Hunt and SAS CEO Jim Goodnight keep telling the public how great Common Core is for public education. If this is all we heard, it would be impossible to argue against it.
But, thanks to the Internet, other voices, from the parents and teacher to highly qualified educators offer a different opinion, and deserving of being heard.
This link is Gates Op Ed in USAToday where he attempts to fight back against with he calls the ‘myths’ of Common Core. Read what Gates says then scroll down and read the comments in response to Gates piece. They will provide the sentiments of parents, teachers and even high regarded members of academia. The Link http://usat.ly/1boEmyo
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Regards,
Anthony Bruno
Its confusing when people say content is king, without the inbound links
it won’t do well in serps
p.s Stay away from the Warrior Forums 🙂
For the last 30 years we have had one top down education initiative after another. Common core is just the latest of the many bad ideas inflicted on our schools by our ruling elites.
http://www.gallopingcamel.info/education.html
Finally, real reform has arrived in the shape of Donald Trump’s promise to return the control of education to the local community. My hope is that he will initiate the dismantling the K-12 educracy from the federal Department of Education down to each and every county school board.
Each government school should have its own board of trustees as in New Zealand.
The US Department of Education was formed to see that the minorities in the South got an education. The Southern states would have had a separate and unequal school system if they weren’t forced to educate everyone by the federal government after the Civil War.
I live in Canada now where each province takes care of their educational systems so I know where you are coming from, especially with Common Core. But it’s different in the Southern US where I taught for 20 years. In British Columbia where I live now, private schools have to meet the same standards as the public schools to get public money. That’s not the case in North Carolina where the private schools get to experiment with their own standards and with no oversight.
Most of the vouchers go to private religious schools where many are taught the evil of evolution and the goodness of the KKK. For example, Bob Jones University puts out a series of textbooks designed for religious schools that talks about the KKK in favorable terms and teaches children that the Trail of Tears was good for the Cherokees because that’s what brought them to Christianity.
I’m all with you when it comes to local control and ditching Common Core. But Trump is getting ready to roll back education in the states back to the Jim Crow era. And the college educated professional teachers trained to teach to the child, will be replaced by teachers who are trained how to teach to the test, for about 3 months. Trump’s not trying to educate the kids up in the US, he wants them dumbed down so that they can be more easily misled in his post-fact world.
“Finally, real reform has arrived in the shape of Donald Trump’s promise to return the control of education to the local community.”
Really!?! Are you that naive?
Have you bothered to read how reliable a Donald Trump promise is through the decades he’s been in business? Have you bothered to fact check his promises to discover how many are outright lies? Have you fact checked all of his allegations to discover how many of them are lies?
Every parent and teacher I know and I myself think common core math is a ridiculous way to teach math, there is nothing wrong with old math. Gates must have alterior motives for pushing it and Our government must be idiots to have approved it.How many parents and children have suffered due to this ridiculous curriculum.