Mercedes Schneider and Peter Greene, both high school teachers, had different responses to NEA President Dennis Van Roekel’s acknowledgement that implementation of the Common Core standards has been highly problematic, er, disastrous.
Give Dennis credit for recognizing that things are going very badly.
Teachers are beginning to recognize that they are not prepared and that the boom will be lowered on their heads.
Mercedes thinks that the NEA sold its independence to Gates.
Peter G is thrilled that NEA recognizes that the standards themselves need a state-level rewrite, by teachers, not DC bureaucrats. That alone would be a huge improvement, and he welcomes Dennis’ turnabout.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Thank you for calling Van Roekel out on this, Mercedes. No, it isn’t good enough. An appropriate course correction would be “About face”, and then “Here is your money back, Mr Gates.”
And Peter G, who pays you? It doesn’t matter whether the crock is half empty or half full; we don’t need to rewrite, reimplement, or revise it because we don’t have to swalllow this crap at all.
If anybody happens to be in Massachusetts, we have a vigorous challenge underway to dislodge our corrupt leadership.
http://www.educatorsforademocraticunion.com/
Does other people around the country else have a grassroots NEA uprising to share?
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Chemtchr,
I’d love to be a part of that uprising, but I won’t pay another penny to them as the NEA is a much of a problem with public education (and no that’s not because it’s a union, the NEA isn’t a union) as the whole edudeformer SOBs. They’re some of the worst GAGAers there are. Maybe if the NEA was actually a “professional organization” that would “professionally” research educational issues instead of being bought off by Gatesy they might stand a chance. But the NEA has been in bed with the edudeformers too long now to kick them out, that’s some sweet jack they been gitten, them sugah daddys be nice.
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I’ve stated my position on the Core plenty of times: kill it with fire. But that’s not going to happen any time soon, if ever. So I’ll gladly welcome anything that opens the door to chipping it away, piece by piece, and anything that weakens its support. Shifting from headlines of “Largest Teacher Union Says 4 out of 5 Teachers Support CCSS” to “Largest Teacher Union Says CCSS Has Been Botched” is a step forward for making an impression on all th9ose parts of the public that barely know what CCSS is.
As far as an NEA uprising goes, DVR is only a few months away from being gone. A year ago I was calling for his ouster; now there’s no point. NEA members need to get their eyes on what comes next.
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You say, “But that’s not going to happen any time soon, if ever.”
Sorry, the battle has moved way beyond the sniveling defeatism stage. Whoever you’re working for isn’t even getting his money’s worth..
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Peter, somehow you manage to twist your every opposition to the corporate “accountability” attack into a careful maneuver to reposition it more favorably it.
For instance, your “Testing Resistance & Reform Spring: Three Simple Goals” post pretends to endorse the TRSS platform, but you subvert it by misquoting the platform exactly thus:
“3) Replace multiple-choice tests with performance-based assessments and evidence of learning from students’ ongoing classwork (“multiple measures”).”
No, those last two weasel words are NOT in the platform. They belong to the Gates Foundation’s counterattack drive, of which I now count you a member. “Multiple measures” is code for the imposition of “SMART” goals on teachers, which require us to specify our compliance with data-driven oversight. There is a proprietary corporate website, to which I am ordered to upload “evidence” of my collusion in putting the corporate heel on my own students’ necks. It calls this charade “multiple measures”, exactly, and I’m very sure you didn’t hit on the phrase by accident.
How fortunate for Van Roekel’s corporate-toady apparatus, that you’ve decided it isn’t necessary to depose them because Dennis is retiring anyway. What I said was, we need to dislodge his whole corrupt leadership (and Paul Toner’s, too). That includes hangers-on like you, doesn’t it?
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Abraham Lincoln — ‘Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?’
Friends of Diane should welcome Dennis Van Roekel’s change of position. How do you expect to prevail if you denigrate and chastise those who change their minds and move closer to your point of view?
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Because it’s not much closer. DVR still thinks that these crappy standards are a great idea, just that the implementation was botched. While it’s something, it’s not much of something. He doesn’t acknowledge being bought and paid by Gates, nor the lovely surcharge to NEA members’ due to provide “professional development” for the CCSS, nor the leading a lot of teachers around by the nose about the “wonders” of CC at last summer’s “representative assembly.” Nor does he mention the fact that these standards were undemocratically created with NO teacher input, when NEA has been arguing for at least two years that teachers had “input.” He’s moved, alright, but a only fraction of a degree. That’s not enough for this NEA member, and I’ll bet there are a lot of others who agree with me.
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It’s hard to straddle an unstable fence.
A shift of one’s weight does not mean one plans to climb off of the fence.
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Mercedes, that is TOO funny!
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“Friends of Diane should welcome Dennis Van Roekel’s change of position. ”
Read the letter, Mark. Pure bullshit. He’s an enemy of public education and I don’t plan on participating in the Vichification of public education.
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Vichification. Exactly. These people are collaborators.
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Yep, that’s why they want us to “collaborate” on those days we’re being “professionally developed”, PLCs and all that crap.
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Anybody remember Vidkun Abraham Lauritz Jonssøn Quisling?
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The last name rings a bell!
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Let’s step back and ask a question. What is a summative test? Well, think about what summative means. When we summarize, we attempt to capture something big or complicated with something small and simple. There’s an old joke among English teachers regarding Cliff’s Notes: “Yeah, I hear that in they have a new, briefer version. It gets Tolstoy’s War and Peace down to three words.”
Summing up complex phenomena in a single score–in a letter grade given to an entire school, in an evaluation ranking given to a teacher, in a score on a high-stakes bubble test earned by a student–is often going to be like that–like attempting to sum up War and Peace in three words. Ironically, such faith in simple summaries is common among “data-driven decision makers,” who seem to have pretty low standards for what constitutes an an acceptable, summative datum. That’s why I call the deformers numerologists.
All that’s prelude to my saying that I have developed a simple, summative test for whether someone knows the first thing about teaching English: Does he or she support the implementation of the obviously amateurish CC$$ in ELA?
Yes, the new standards assume a lot of hackneyed, extremely backward notions about the teaching of English. Yes, they typically make wild, naive, controversial, and unsupportable assumptions. Yes, they are an incoherent, random stroll through the English language arts masquerading as a learning progression. Yes, they are full of howlers. Yes, they instantiate demonstrably false notions about what is measurable. Yes, they leave out much that is essential. Yes, the authors of them didn’t think carefully, if at all, about the differences in how outcomes in the various domains in ELA might be measured or about the consequences, in specific domains, of formulating outcomes as abstract skills. Yes, they read like what you might get if you got some of Joe the Plumber’s buddies together to make up a set of standards for the teaching of anthropology. Yes, they are a product of lowest-common-denominator groupthink. Yes, basing a test or a curriculum on them is a terrible mistake. Yes, they distort and narrow curricula and pedagogy. Yes, they were not vetted by scholars and researchers. Yes, no mechanism was created for addressing their glaring problems. Yes, one could pilot whole curricula through their lacunae. Yes, they preclude many of the best practices in curricula and pedagogy in the English language arts and, by ossifying half-truths and misconceptions, preclude future development of sane curricula and pedagogy.
But perhaps my simple heuristic, my summative test of people’s understanding of the teaching of English–does he or she support implementing these amateurish “standards”?–is too facile. Perhaps a given member of the CC$$ pom-pon squad and glee club hasn’t read these purported “standards.” Perhaps he or she hasn’t given them much, if any, careful thought. Perhaps he or she hasn’t actually worked with them enough to have encountered the many, many issues that arise when one attempts to apply them beyond the level of a single exercise or activity on a single standard. Perhaps he or she missed some classes in college on matters like language acquisition, rhetoric, and literature.
Perhaps. One has to be careful not to make blithering generalizations.
Still, that anyone would think “standards” this poorly conceived acceptable is damning. So, what do others think? Do you agree that gauging a person’s level of support for these “standards” is a good heuristic, a good summative test, for judging his or her expertise in the teaching of English? I’m in a charitable mood these days. I’m thinking, perhaps it isn’t. Perhaps the person who expresses support for these standards this bad simply haven’t read them yet. Perhaps that’s a more generous view than the conclusion that he or she must be an amateur, charlatan, grifter, or snake-oil entrepreneur like the folks who prepared the CC$$ in ELA.
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cx: Perhaps the person who expresses support for standards this bad simply hasn’t read them yet. Of course.
Oh, for an editing feature for posts on this blog!!!
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Or perhaps they haven’t read Wilson’s definitive study of the complete invalidity educational standards and standardized testing. Hey, DVR and Mark F. read and understand Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
And to help you along on the process and to not make this a string bean response see below!
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“Let’s step back and ask a question. What is a summative test? Well, think about what summative means.”
Here’s my summative evaluation of DVR’s letter: 100% pure Grade AA Prime Bovine, mixed with Porcine, (just to make it smell that much worse) Excrement.
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Robert, from perusing comment threads on articles published about Common Core around the nation, I observe that a number of [pro-common core] people are now reading them & quoting them– mostly the ELA stds– to other commentators as proof that there’s nothing wrong with CCSS.
They quote them from an entirely adult point of view— as tho it were they themselves being asked to read the text — w/o regard to grade level & w/o context of how such a std translates into lessons, assnts, tests. So they miss entirely the tribulations of my little 5th-gr friends (whom I tutor in for lang) who are up until after 11pm nightly trying to draft treatises on the MLK letter (for soc stud) & simultaneously 5-para essays [draft, rewrite, final – for Engl] while still keeping up with math hw. Let alone the K’s, still learning how to grip a pencil, instead of simply discussing a K-level story, are required to spend hours laboriously writing out its main idea complete with cites.
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Yes, it is time for a comprehensive book on the problems with the CC$$ in ELA. One is needed in order to counter this hogwash. I’m working on such a thing, off and on, but ars longa, vita brevis.
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Robert, I will contribute to the Math Comprehensive Evaluation
Just one example of the CC$$ Cr*p and it is just that..
The wording on this is a bunch of gobbledegoop and…. One would think that a bunch of Thanksgiving Turkeys wrote this for payback on Turkey Day.
Paragraph 4 -Equations-Inequalities
http://www.corestandards.org/Math/Content/HSA/introduction
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The NEA and the AFT both just entered into a partnership with the two testing consortia, PARCC and Smarter Balanced, to put together groups of teachers to rubber stamp the new assessments and to act as propaganda ministries for those assessments. The funds for this are coming from the Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust.
So, K-12 education will be haunted, for a while, by the shade of the queen of mean.
If DVR is rethinking his association with these tests, that’s a good thing indeed. Now, if only he would do a little close reading of the purported standards in ELA.
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Vichy, as in Vichy France and not Vichy, MO (yes there is a Vichy, MO) is where the NEA and AFT are based.
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Duane, are you sure? I thought that the “show me” in the state motto meant “show me evidence,” not “show me the green.”
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TAGO!
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But he doesn’t seem to be doing any rethinking. A careful reading of this shows that it’s full steam ahead for the NEA. The deform propaganda machine is in full swing. They recognize that there has been a tremendous backlash, and so it’s entirely predictable that there will be a lot of such pieces calling for minor corrections of tack on the predetermined and not-to-be-altered course.
The thinking seems to be: give the impression that one is responding to the criticism and go ahead as planned.
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So, what do we do going forward?
Here’s a novel idea: Let’s let independent teachers, scholars, researchers, and curriculum developers think about these matters–about how to teach reading, writing, speaking, listening, grammar, vocabulary, thinking, research skills, and so on–and put forward their ideas in an ongoing manner, as those develop, and let’s give local districts the autonomy to choose from among the best ideas available. In other words, lets have a national forum for free and open sharing of suggested frameworks, standards, learning progressions, pedagogical approaches, and curricula and for ongoing critique of those.
Crowd source it. Encourage new, creative thinking. Submit ideas and practices to ongoing critique. That’s how you get continuous improvement. You don’t get such improvement with top-down, monolithic approaches.
Let’s learn the lesson of the NCLB era and end the “one ring to rule them all” approach to K-12 education. That’s not how we get progress, innovation, the unleashing of creative energy.
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cx: let’s, not lets, of course.
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My reply on Mercedes blog:
Gracias, Mercedes!
About upchucked reading that 100% pure bovine excrement spewing forth from Van Roekel’s mouth. Goddamn there is so much just dead wrong in what he says. Guess he’s gonna become a politician next. As much as a true union, not the pseudo union that NEA is, supporter as I am, those would be fighting words if I were a member. Come on all you NEA supporters, oust that bastard.
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Another great piece by Mercedes Schneider!
She and Dr. Ravitch are the Ida Tarbell and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, the Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, of our generation.
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Can I be Lucy Stone? I really like her. 😉
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Well, you can be better than Lucy Stone, eh!!!
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Good call! Of course you can be Lucy Stone, Mercedes. We don’t even have to travel back to 1850.
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Me too, Mercedes!!! Lucy Stone rocked!!!
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I’m a card-carrying member of the Alice Paul fan club, myself. 🙂
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Duane Swacker: what you said!
😎
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For DVR’s and Mark F’s benefit:
“Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)
1. A quality cannot be quantified. Quantity is a sub-category of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category by only a part (sub-category) of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as one dimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing we are lacking much information about said interactions.
2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other word all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. As a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it measures “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
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From the Rheformish Lexicon:
union. n. Universal scapegoat. See, however, NEA and AFT.
NEA and AFT. n. Propaganda ministries of the Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth (C^4 MiniTru). Archaic usage: organizations representing the rights and interests of teachers; teachers’ labor unions.
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This is so bad….as all of the Math Standards ..just one example of why this CC$$ needs to be tossed…
Paragraph 4 of Equations and Inequalities
http://www.corestandards.org/Math/Content/HSA/introduction
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I believe Dennis came to this conclusion because of the discussion from our teacher voices speaking about the bad implementation. Maybe they are starting to listen??
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Mercedes keeps fighting the good fight.
Peter is clinging to a positive – if teachers could make changes to the CCSS, than maybe the curriculum would be doable.
Dennis seems clueless about the real issues and is simply reacting to the tip of the iceberg. He either recognizes, then ignores, that there is a lot more beneath the surface or he is a fool.
Yet it is all a moot point. The controlling hands disregard our concerns. They are at the helm calling – full speed ahead and damn the consequences.y
It’s too bad that our children/grandchildren are the ones aboard the ship.
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Today, in an editorial in the New York Times by Thomas Friedman he listed the qualities sought by Google in their employees. I’m not proposing that we all should aspire to work for Google, but it is known that they are trend setters when it comes to locating what they consider to be the best and the brightest. Friedman writes,
“And in an age when innovation is increasingly a group endeavor, it also cares about a lot of soft skills — leadership, humility, collaboration, adaptability and loving to learn and re-learn. This will be true no matter where you go to work.’
He also notes that many of the employees they hire have not graduated from college. So, the career and college readiness lessons we are pushing down our elementary students (starting in kindergarten) are misguided.
I know that Thomas Friedman is no friend to public education, but maybe this time he helps prove the point that The Common Core will not pave the way for our students to be ‘career ready.’ From my vantage point as a 4th grade public education teacher, the Common Core Standards will not prepare our students to be Google employees. Love of learning? You’ve got to be kidding!!! You try reading books 3 and 4 years above your reading level and see how much you love learning!
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