Just a few days ago, Bill Gates told the annual assembly of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards that the Common Core standards were “the key to creativity,” and likened their development to the standardized electrical plug. I am not sure I see the analogy, but I guess he meant that with a standardized electrical plug, we could all have electric lights and do better work in the light. Or something. But if he meant that standardization was a formula for creative teaching and learning, I doug that many of the National Board Certified Teachers in his audience were convinced.
David Greene certainly does not agree. He is an experienced teacher trainer and mentor who recently published an article in U.S. News & World Report about how the Common Core standards kill creative teaching, precisely because they attempt to standardize what teachers do.
He writes:
To try to live up to the new demands and ensure better test scores, states, districts and schools have purchased resources, materials and scripted curricular modules solely developed for test success. Being lost is the practical wisdom and planned spontaneity necessary to work with 20 to 35 individuals in a classroom. Academic creativity has been drained from degraded and overworked experienced teachers. Uniformity has sucked the life out of teaching and learning.
Good and great teachers leave and are replaced by new and cheap workers more willing to follow fool-proof, factory-like, prescribed lesson plans. In fact, the average teaching tenure has dropped from approximately 15 years of service in 1990 to less than five in 2013.
Imagine your brain surgeon having to “follow the book” while operating on you or lose his job. While you are on the table, he discovers an unforeseen problem that, because of his experience and practical wisdom, calls for a spontaneous change of plan, yet he can’t do what he knows will work. You die on the table. So have students. He retires early, frustrated with conditions. So have the best teachers.
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman coined the term “Carlson’s law” to describe Dr. Curtis Carlson’s take on autocracy in the workplace: “Innovation that happens from the bottom up tends to be chaotic but smart. Innovation that happens from the top down tends to be orderly but dumb.”
Top down innovation is what Common Core and other efforts to homogenize education are bringing us. So the only real question left is: Why have President Obama, Education Secretary Arne Duncan, the National Governors Association, the Council of Chief State School Officers, Bill Gates and Achieve Inc. chosen to be orderly but dumb, especially when the opportunity cost is children?
David Greene’s recently published book is called Doing the Right Thing: A Teacher Speaks. Unlike the technocrats, bureaucrats, and Beltway insiders who wrote the Common Core standards, David Greene is a teacher with long experience and deep knowledge of the classroom and of students.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on DCGEducator: Doing The Right Thing.
The backward, amateurish, hackneyed, unimaginitive Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic] for ELA in effect draw tiny boundaries within the possible design spaces for curricula and pedagogy and say, “You are allowed to THINK what is within these boundaries, and whatever is outside them is FORBIDDEN.”
In other words, they legislate permissible THOUGHT.
And that legislation is done by two self-appointed groups, the NGA and CCSSO, completely outside any democratic process, based on PROPRIETARY standards for which they hold the copyright, which gives these legislators of thought the power to WITHHOLD take legal action to refused their “nihil obstat,” or imprimatur, as they see fit.
A free people will RESIST this imposition of a distant, centralized, unaccountable, totalitarian authority over what can be thought in the areas of curricula and pedagogy.
cx:
The backward, amateurish, hackneyed, unimaginitive Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic] for ELA in effect draw tiny boundaries within the possible design spaces for curricula and pedagogy and say, “You are allowed to THINK what is within these boundaries, and whatever is outside them is FORBIDDEN.”
In other words, they legislate permissible THOUGHT.
And that legislation is done by two self-appointed groups, the NGA and CCSSO, completely outside any democratic process, based on PROPRIETARY standards for which they hold the copyright, which gives the would-be legislators of thought the power to WITHHOLD their “nihil obstat,” or imprimatur, and to take legal action to enforce their copyright as they see fit.
A free people will RESIST this imposition of a distant, centralized, unaccountable, private, totalitarian authority over what can be thought in the areas of curricula and pedagogy
David and Diane,
You are so right! Common Core wipes out creativity in the classroom! And the stress on teachers is insurmountable!–the knowledge that you are no longer effectively teaching and reaching students like they need to be taught and reached for success! I couldn’t take the stress any longer. After ten years of teaching business subjects, I sadly left the profession. I possessed years of valuable corporate business experiences combined with LOTS of creative teaching skills. The stress of knowing that you weren’t teaching and reaching the students like they needed to be taught, with the knowledge of the things that would make them successful–low socio-economic students and ELL students that you admired so much and loved so dearly–and you knew what they needed to be successful! And, the “20-minute” “evaluations” (shams) that “said” you were a good teacher! Here’s the real kick! In Georgia, in many vocational/technical classes, the tests being used for the courses don’t even match the standards! The students raise this issue over and over! And, you guessed it! The “tests” are actually “Microsoft” certifications! Special thanks to you, Diane, Robert Shepherd, and many others who shout this mantra to so many others who are unaware. You give us hope! The very foundation of our nation is crumbling. Daily, I hope it’s not too late.
“The very foundation of our nation is crumbling.” How true and how frightening. And yet President Obama sees nothing.
Come and speak with us. The more voices are heard, the more power we have.
I see the encroaching standardization in my school, which serves a 100% immigrant population, has a superb, diverse and creative staff, and supportive administrators.
Our teachers and administrators not only help students succeed in school and in a baffling new country, but we attend their weddings, visit them at home and in the hospital when they are sick, and have attended wakes for them and their family members. Some of us have been with our terminally ill students and their families when they died at home.
How do you propose to quantify that, Mr. Gates?
Despite the supportive reflexes of our administrators, themselves immigrants, they too are under tremendous pressure to have us standardize our content and instruction. That, combined with the Danielson checklist – never intended by its creator to formally evaluate teachers – has led to intensifying feelings of being stifled and demoralized.
Stifled and demoralized: is that your definition of success, Mr. Gates?
If I had not been observing this witchhunt develop for more than twenty years, I might think that it was all just an awful mistake, and that the so-called reformers would realize their grave errors, apologize for the damage they’ve caused, and humbly withdraw, but unfortunately it’s working exactly as planned.
Stifled and demoralized: welcome to the world of so-called education reform.
Michael,
I’m so thankful to know that there are supportive administrators left out there! Your administrators must be under unbelievable amounts of pressure. Unfortunately, in Georgia, nearly all of the administrators and superintendents of the school systems statewide “drank the KoolAid”. Theories abound that Bill Gates established a personal, secret monetary reward system that’s being distributed to all as “hush money”. The state education workers are completely “Microsoft’d”!
One hears from administrators, all the time, in the current climate, that they are so involved with accountability measures due to ed deform that they cannot, otherwise, do their jobs. Many are extremely harried and stressed. Ed deform does that, Midas-like, to everything it touches.
……and “stifled and demoralized” is so very true and correct!!!
In my opinion, it’s one thing to have a technocratic business tycoon like Bill Gates not understand the bigger picture of what is happening. What I can’t begin to fathom is how our Secretary of Education isn’t able to see it.
Our Secretary of Education is a paid wind-up toy with no experience in education who was hired specifically for the purpose of NOT SEEING this but, rather, being the enforcement arm of the CC$$ business agenda.
“… a paid wind-up toy…”
Bingo!
MVP of the NBA Celebrity All-Star Game! Again…inexplicable.
He is a basketball player and fundraiser, not an educator.
He likened CC to a electrical plug because:
“When the tests are aligned to the common standards, the curriculum will line up as well—and that will unleash powerful market forces in the service of better teaching. For the first time, there will be a large base of customers eager to buy products that can help every kid learn and every teacher get better. …”
I never had the slightest doubt that this is what he envisions. Large base of customers. I think he’s been quite clear on it. I think he sincerely believes that the products will help.
They can’t create product for 50 states with 50 different standards.
The real question is why he thinks the CURRICULUM around the CC will be like the standard electrical plug, because that isn’t what anyone else is saying. There’s a contradiction there between what Gates says and what everyone who is selling this says.
I genuinely wish someone would ask Gates, but the people who interview him seem to be in awe of him, and we all know the politicians think he’s just dreamy – they kiss his ass- so they’re not going to ask him any difficult questions.
It’s one of the biggest problems with billionaires running public ed, in my view. Everyone defers to them. They never get any real questions.
http://atthechalkface.com/2014/03/20/bill-gates-sobering-2009-speech-to-legislators/
When I asked about the inBloom database last year, I got a reply with a “plug in the wall” analogy.
At the TeachersLetterstoBillGates website, they ask us to call our representatives in Washington, on Monday, March 24, and ask them to conduct Congressional hearings into standardized tests.
Remember, or read what Frank Smith wrote almost 30 years ago! “..The computer is the ultimate weapon of instructional programmers, and in many people’s minds at least, it is a device to take the place of teachers. Anyone who believes that students learn best from systematic instruction and tests can say goodbye to teachers. For dispensing programmatic instruction, computers are cheaper and more efficient than humans.
..Our schools should not remain places where the enormous potential of the human brain is systematically eroded, and possibly destroyed. The invasion of education by instructional programmers must be turned back now.”
http://www.buildbetterschools.com/?p=510
Read Frank’s book “Insult to Intelligence” here: http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/insult.pdf
This is what produces creativity in kids! Watch the BBC docu-drama about the Sudbury school. http://vimeo.com/22205368
Creativity is also found in experiential, hands on learning…from blocks in kindergarten to the WISE program in High School Senior year…(www.wiseservices.org)
Why, I had no idea great teachers like Socrates used that ‘key to creativity’ the whole time, Common Core.
Thank you, Gates.
What is really tragic is that the successful teaching strategies and successes that evolve from really great teaching is diminished/squashed because of the neo-liberalism propagating this CCSS and REACH ridiculousness.
Hey everyone! For a graduate school project my peer and I posted a debate on Reddit about the Common Core and whether or not it stifles creativity. Please help us out by commenting!
I just started a discussion forum at QuickTopic for our topic “Creativity in the Common Core”. To join in (or just to read) use your web browser to go to:
http://www.quicktopic.com/50/H/7yVR3UqiUFER
You don’t have to register or sign in, and you can choose to receive email for newly posted messages — just click the “Get email” button when you get there
As a teacher and parent in California, I’m excited about the Common Core. Perhaps that’s because CA already has so many standards that CCSS are LESS standards and MORE creativity than we currently have. With CCSS, I have skills my students need to learn, but I can choose the vehicle in which to teach it. Rather than rote memorization, students have to explain WHY they arrived at that answer. I am all for doing away with or drastically changing standardized testing, but I think the skills based standards in CCSS will be good for students.
Becca, wait until the testing for CCSS starts, then get back in touch.