Reader Laura H. Chapman shares this exchange with a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution about the Common Core:
I had a brief email exchange with Darrell West of the
Brookings about the CCSS. He wants the CCSS to be standardized so
that test scores will provide “big data” for his real interest,
which is an automated system of tellin students what they need to
do in order to master CCSS content. He wants to ensure that that no
one is messing around with what he regards as a perfected agenda
for tests that will product lots of data.
He is absolutely clueless about who
developed the standards, who paid for them, or the role of the CCSS
in the enterprise of K-12 edcuation. He ASSUMES that these
standards can and should function in the same capacity as ISO
standards function for quality control in engineering–think
elaborate checklists for compliance–or as instruments for quality
control for entering professions such as law and medicine. He is a
complete slave to the spin thrown out by the promoters of the
CCSS. He is another in a long line of
economists who are in love with the idea of getting their algoritms
to munch on the big data forthcoming from tests of the
CCSS. Since he was hooked on the idea that the
CCSS standard-setting process settled everything that mattered (to
him), I did let him know that the CCSS did not meet the minimal
criteria for “setting standards” set forth by the The American
National Standards organization for designing and judging any
standard-setting process: These
are: 1. Seeks consensus from and through a
group that is open to representatives from all interested
parties 2. Solicits broad-based public review
and comment on draft standards 3. Gives
careful consideration to comments and offers a public response to
these comments 4. Incorporates changes that
meet the same consensus requirements as the draft
standards 5. Makes available an appeal process
for any participant alleging that these principles were not
respected during the standards-development process.
The Brookings has really gone over the hill with a bunch
of reports on education that are free of any moral compass or
academic integrity.
A site to discuss education and democracy
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No doubt Darrell West is an accomplished academic, but his Ph.D. is in Political Science and he was a professor in the Political Science at Brown University for 26 years. Why is he called an economist in this post?
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Thanks, TE, I corrected the description.
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Thanks for the correction.
At the Brookings, Darrell M. West is vice president and director of Governance Studies and holds the Douglas Dillon Chair. He is founding director of the Center for Technology Innovation at Brookings. West’s studies include technology policy, electronic government, and mass media.
Here are some direct quotes from Dr. West in our email exchange.
.
“I hope to write more in the future about how I wish the CCSS would act more like other standard setting organizations. These other bodies take responsibility to call out bad actors who have instituted policies that don’t align with the standards. I would include in this category districts that compelled teachers to teach in a certain way because of the Common Core.”
“In regards to your second point. I too am frustrated that we don’t know more about who the CCSS consulted with during the development of the standards. However, I take them at their word that they consulted experts from a variety of fields including numerous teachers.”
I provided ample evidence that districts were, in fact, requiring teachers to “teach in a certain way.” One example (via Susan Ohanian) is the absurdity of teachers having to rely on proprietary Lexile® algorithms to make CCSS-compliant reading selections.
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“He is a complete slave to the spin thrown out by the promoters of the CCSS.”
Don’t be so sure about this. I suspect West, like many others, truly believes in all of this- both ideologically and in terms of his pocketbook.
There were, and are, many types of slaves and West would fit the description of a House Negro. The Plantation will not function smoothly without these bureaucrats. I’m sure West likes his place at the table. Only serious scholars (read- bought off parrots of the establishment) work at lofty places like Brookings right?
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Michael, I am horrified by the Brookings call for the CCSSO/NGA to become a de facto national censorship office for curricula, one that issues its “nihil obstat,” or imprimatur, saying, “This textbook or online program is acceptably Core-ish and Rheeformish, and this is not.”
A free people will resist the creation of such educational Thought Police.
It is certainly the case that toadying to plutocrats is quite lucrative. I would use a different metaphor than that of the house slave. These Think Tank scholars are the courtiers in the feudal society that the United States is becoming.
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Hmmm…I prefer the metaphor of a fish in a fish bowl. Completely captive.
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Not much “think” in think tanks, corrupted by ideological bias. Academic success is clearly not a dependable measure of intellectual development.
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They’re all saying this.
This is what Gates means when he talks about the electrical plug. He’s not talking about students. He’s talking about products. I don’t mean that as an indictment or a smear. It’s just a fact. Gates probably sincerely believes that these products will “revolutionize” learning. I am MUCH more skeptical, and I wish ed reformers were MORE skeptical, because blind faith is reckless and children shouldn’t be subject to reckless adults.
Here’s Brookings:
“Standards lower the barriers to entry for startups seeking to enter the personalized learning market. National standards reduce the resources necessary to develop big data tools that are usable nationwide. If each state has its own standards then analytics creators need to develop 50 different tools. This means that companies spend more time developing redundant products rather than innovating. The resource intensive nature of developing big data analytics also scares off entrepreneurs considering new startups in the sector.”
I swear, it would be EASIER for them if they would just sell what they’re selling. All they’re doing with this elaborate dance is destroying trust and their own credibility.
If one of the goals of this thing is to develop profitable product for “individualized learning” (and IT IS) then just tell the public that. Are people really expected to parse Bill Gates cryptic statements or read the Brookings website to see what’s coming to their local public school?
Why is this so hard for them?
http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/techtank/posts/2014/03/06-common-core-standards-big-data-bleiberg-west
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The Common Core has always been a business plan. It was necessary, Gates believed, to have a single set of standards to which to correlate the ed tech that was going to revolutionize learning, vastly reduce the number of teachers needed and thus the cost of K-12 education, and incidentally earn him a great deal of money. But instead of just creating products and then trying to sell people on that idea and products that instantiated it, he took the route of the monopolist. He tried to create a single gateway for student data and curricula, inBloom, that would make him the gatekeeper. That hasn’t worked out because, strangely, people don’t like Orwellian databases.
Interestingly, even as this conversion of K-12 education to the adaptive ed tech model is taking place, even as a lot of people with a lot of power have entirely bought into it, many people in education have no idea what it is, how it works, or what its flaws and limitations are. They don’t know that as typically conceived, such programs dramatically narrow and distort pedagogy and curricula, that they personalize only the sense of dropping the child down into a predetermined labyrinth of tracks with identical milestones and goals, effectively treating diverse children as identical, as rats in a maze with differing starting points but the same ending point; that they demotivate via extrinsic punishment and reward; that they are INTENDED to reduce the human interaction in education; and that this data-driven education decision making can best be described as numerology.
This philistine, technocratic replacement for the humane undertaking of teaching and learning is an Orwellian nightmare. Ed tech has enormous promise. But that promise should not to implement 1984 AS EDUCATIONAL POLICY.
See my Rheformish Lexicon, here:
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Chiara, The Dayton Daily News had the usual positive article about the Race to the Top that provided none of the insights in the Diane Ravitch Blogs. It’s on page B1, Thursday, March 20, titled “Districts Prepare for Big Changes”. The reporters provided contact info. including a phone number. The e-mail addresses were Hannah.Poturalski@coxinc.com and Will.Garbe@coxinc.com.
Please contact them to tell them about Gates spending on Common Core, the recent Common Core deal between Microsoft and Pearson, the change of opinion by the AFT, the mission of Lakeside, where Gates sends his kids, the copyright arguments for Common Core described by the Brookings Institute, etc.
I think, at least I hope, they’ll print the real information about Duncan et. al.
I contacted Sen. Brown about my opposition to the nominee for under secretary at the Dept. of Ed.. In the form reply, he said he had heard from other constituents about the issue.
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Thanks, Linda.
I’ll contact Senator Brown, too. He’s been consistently responsive on other issues when we’ve contacted him.
I wrote an email to the Ohio lawmaker who is advocating shutting down our public schools. I simply asked him why he would want to pitch a 150 year old public system that we own, invested in over decades, and paid for in the trash, particularly because he says he’s a “conservative”.
Public schools are a public asset. Why does he want me to sell my asset and become a renter? Why does he want me to sell my asset and accept a diminished role as a consumer buying a service? That’s not “conservative” at all. It’s reckless.
I haven’t gotten a response yet 🙂
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“…blind faith is reckless and children shouldn’t be subject to reckless adults.” Bill Gates, David Coleman, Arnie Duncan, just for starters…
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Again, the creation of a single set of national standards does one thing: It creates economies of scale for monopolist providers of educational materials. A single national data system does precisely the same thing. If there are competing frameworks and competing standards, there will be competing vendors. Brookings knows this. Gates knows this. But they FAVOR the Walmartization, the Microsofting of the educational materials market, and
THAT IS WHAT ED DEFORM HAS REALLY BEEN ABOUT. As Arne Duncan’s Chief of Staff put it in an editorial on the Harvard Business School blog, the Common Core is about “creating national markets for products that can be brought to scale.”
Products at scale. Large, national products from large, national monopolies.
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Moral compass? Academic integrity? Teachers are not seeing much of moral compass and integrity these days within the school walls. Teachers are busy, busy, busy jumping through hoops provided from the top-down and enforced by administrators whether willing or not (and yes they read like the “quality control” checklist mentioned above). Meanwhile superintendents (many who now are called CEO’s) figure out “how to implement” and perfect the roll out of CCSS and this is keeping everybody in defensive positions while deflecting real issues. CCSS is definitely a tool for data entry. But data KEEPS US VERY BUSY… and this is a strategy too. Politics for democracy needs to be restored DESPERATELY in this nation if policy is to benefit and reflect THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE. Robert Reich’s website is well worth bookmarking. Two articles of interest to me recently are the following:
http://robertreich.org/post/79512527145 CCSS is a giant and corporate profitable smokescreen. Here is an excerpt from the above link:
…”The reason Wall Street bankers got fat paychecks plus a total of $26.7 billion in bonuses last year wasn’t because they worked so much harder or were so much more clever or insightful than most other Americans. They cleaned up because they happen to work in institutions — big Wall Street banks — that hold a privileged place in the American political economy.
And why, exactly, do these institutions continue to have such privileges? Why hasn’t Congress used the antitrust laws to cut them down to size so they’re not too big to fail, or at least taxed away their hidden subsidy (which, after all, results from their taxpayer-financed bailout)?
Perhaps it’s because Wall Street also accounts for a large proportion of campaign donations to major candidates for Congress and the presidency of both parties.
America’s low-wage workers don’t have privileged positions. They work very hard — many holding down two or more jobs. But they can’t afford to make major campaign contributions and they have no political clout.
According to the Institute for Policy Studies, the $26.7 billion of bonuses Wall Street banks paid out last year would be enough to more than double the pay of every one of America’s 1,085,000 full-time minimum wage workers…”
Another Reich article:
http://blogs.berkeley.edu/2014/01/16/fear-is-why-workers-in-red-states-vote-against-their-economic-self-interest/
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The CC$$ was the first step in a business plan. That business plan also happens to be a set of educational policies, an instantiation of a vision for the future of education. And that vision is completely Orwellian.
We can have PUSH technology whereby canned ed tech curricula correlated to an invariant set of national standards is pushed at kids by a few monopolists, or we can have PULL technology whereby ed tech is used to provide diversity in offerings and tracks and to empower learners to follow their intrinsic motivations and become unique, creative individuals.
The Gates vision is the former. It’s training for the proles.
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Diane:
On Mar. 16, the Times had a wonderful lead piece: “Billionaires With Big Ideas Are Privatizing American Science” Letters followed. I replied to one in a letter I just submitted to the Times that says:
Ruth Schwartz Cowan claims that “until World War II, most American basic science was paid for by millionaires” (Letters, March 22), but the claim is not pertinent to today’s key issue: how the new class of billionaires exert powerful influence on society in areas as far-ranging as science, medicine, education and politics. Today is a completely different world: The level of wealth (and therefore power), relative to the rest of society, is easily five to ten times greater than earlier times. Back then, European public and private research were at a level or superior to American efforts. In addition, Ms. Cowan ignores the critical role played by (publicly-financed) land-grant universities and efforts such as the Gorgas Laboratory for tropical diseases. We may look to the past to attempt to shore up the argument for privatization of science, but we must first consider the impact of these trends on American democracy. Miles Wortman
I am the author of The Road to HELP: The Revolution in Charity, Philanthropy and International Development, recently published.
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A lot of articles about the privatization of science research have started appearing on the websites of right-wing think tanks. This is an extremely popular meme, right now, inside that echo chamber, though it has not yet reached the popularity, there, of the privatization of schools and the Walmartization and Microsofting of education via computer-adaptive worksheets on a screen keyed to national standards.
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I think that it’s healthy to have that debate. But I will say up front that I think we should have built the superconducting supercollider and that that sort of very expensive basic research requires more than individual effort. There’s also something to be gained from the results of basic research being open source.
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Please keep think tanks AWAY from our children…
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The fact is, they don’t know if “personalized learning” has any huge benefit to children yet. They don’t know. It sounds wonderful, but a lot of things sound wonderful, and then they’re not.
I see that as the role of adults re: children. We’re the people who say to them “that sounds wonderful, but is it?”
Comparing the “entry barriers” for lawyers and physicians to a theory geared to children does not give me a whole lot of comfort. Lawyers and physicians are adults.
I don’t know why the Department of Ed is pushing “blended learning” either.
If it’s a market, the market actors will do JUST FINE pushing it themselves. I have complete faith in Microsoft’s ability to push product. That’s their role. They really don’t need a government actor cheering them on. The government actor is supposed to regulate the wild swings of market actors and protect consumers, in this case, children, not act as a mindless cheerleading squad.
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This model is “personalized” only in the sense of dropping the kid down at his or her “appropriate place” in a predetermined maze with identical, invariant milestones and outcomes for all.
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Computer-adaptive learning is simply what we used to call programmed learning in the old days. It’s a useful model for some purposes, but it’s chief drawbacks are a) lack of human interaction and b) that it standardizes everything, as though there were only one way to become a good reader, writer, thinker, mathematician, etc. In short, it DEPERSONALIZES, and that’s the point of this. It’s a program for standardizing the training of the children of the proles to ensure that they are used to carrying out, obediently, with true grit, the predetermined plans of their betters, the overlords whose children will go to real schools and receive a real education.
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Could you offer the same criticism of books, textbooks in particular?
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Yikes. Typo. its, not it’s
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Yes, TE, and I do. I have LONG been a critic of state adoption criteria that basically create recipes for the creation of textbooks and PRECLUDE exciting, innovative, research-based curricula and pedagogy. That state adoption system is what led to the vast consolidation of educational publishing in this country and to the horrific, pablum-like sameness of the K-12 textbook programs being produced.
The adaptive ed tech is even more pernicious because this stuff is all keyed to an identical NATIONAL learning progression with identical milestones.
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TE: I will tell you a story.
A number of years ago, I was at the central office of one of the big textbook companies at a product planning meeting attended by the company’s C-level bigwigs. A legendary salesperson for that company, one of those guys who had spent a lifetime knocking his quotas out of the park, came into the room carrying a stack of literature textbooks from the big three monopolist publishers. He plopped them down on the table and said, “Now, you’ll take a look through those and tell me one damned difference among them. How the hell am I supposed to sell an identical product? I do, but let me tell you, you make it difficult.”
Those products were largely identical because of state adoption criteria that standardized curricula and created economies of scale for monopolists and because of the resulting market consolidation that gave these publishers reason to be as conservative as possible.
CC$$ takes this execrable trend to an entirely new level by nationalizing it.
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Your story suggests that the texts were identical long ago, and I agree (I am in the middle of picking out a text for my introductory class). The only way to create individual learning strategies at anything close to a reasonable cost is to allow buildings to specialize in different approaches to instruction and allow students to find the building that most closely matches their individual learning needs.
You might be interested in this rural charter school. It is located in Walton, Kansas.https://w-usd373-ks.schoolloop.com/
If you look at the in the news section, the second video down talks about the school.
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I will do that, TE.
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But that’s not the only way, of course. I am thinking a lot these days about how ed tech can be used to deliver open-ended, alternative tracks that build intrinsic motivation. It’s an interesting problem to solve.
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I would welcome, TE, and do welcome and am a proponent of computer-adaptive and other educational technologies from small, independent developers that provide real alternatives. But creating a single set of national standards to which all must adhere basically draws a boundary in the design space for curricula and pedagogy and says, “What is within this boundary you can think, and what is outside this boundary is forbidden.”
Creating such a priori constraints on the possibilities for development of conventional or tech products is a terrible mistake.
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Doesn’t labeling a class as Algebra or Geometry or Statistics create boundaries that should not be crossed?
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Yes, but VERY WIDE boundaries that make for lots of degrees of freedom. There’s a big difference between such boundaries and a 1,600-item bullet list of preconditions on curricula and pedagogy.
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Here are the stated boundaries for the common core state standards in mathematics as defined in Kentucky:
These Standards do not dictate curriculum or teaching methods. For example, just because topic A appears before topic B in the standards for a given grade, it does not necessarily mean that topic A must be taught before topic B. A teacher might prefer to teach topic B before topic A, or might choose to highlight connections by teaching topic A and topic B at the same time. Or, a teacher might prefer to teach a topic of his or her own choosing that leads, as a byproduct, to students reaching the standards for topics A and B.
This seems to me to be pretty broad.
Here is the document http://education.ky.gov/curriculum/docs/documents/kentucky%20common%20core%20mathematics.pdf
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TE, these are grade-by-grade bullet lists that require a particular learning progression. My area of specialization is language arts. I can tell you that the language standards and many of the other standards in the CC$$ in ELA appear pretty much AT RANDOM and rule out many coherent alternative language progressions.
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Again, I think you are overstating the case. Here is the paragraph that follows the one I quoted from the Kentucky document I linked above:
What students can learn at any particular grade level depends upon what they have learned before. Ideally then, each standard in this document might have been phrased in the form, “Students who already know … should next come to learn ….” But at present this approach is unrealistic—not least because existing education research cannot specify all such learning pathways. Of necessity therefore, grade placements for specific topics have been made on the basis of state and international comparisons and the collective experience and collective professional judgment of educators, researchers and mathematicians. One promise of common state standards is that over time they will allow research on learning progressions to inform and improve the design of standards to a much greater extent than is possible today. Learning opportunities will continue to vary across schools and school systems, and educators should make every effort to meet the needs of individual students based on their current understanding.
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Well, that’s a start. But, TE, you haven’t addressed my suggested experiment. Do you really think that those different groups of mathematicians would come up with learning progressions identical to those in the CC$$? Do you really think that there would not be radical divergences? And given that ALL CHILDREN WILL BE TESTED USING IDENTICAL INSTRUMENTS and that ALL TEACHERS WILL BE EVALUATED ACCORDING TO THEIR KIDS’ PERFORMANCE ON THESE IDENTICAL INSTRUMENTS, do you really think that that paragraph will mean anything, that it is not aspirin to a cancer victim?
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I think that any group of seven mathematicians would come up with a different set of standards than any other group of mathematicians.
Lets be realistic here. As long as students are assigned to school A or school B based on street address, there will be standardization of the curriculum in school A and school B. The only question is who you want to write those standards. In my state, I am much more comfortable having a national set of standards than a state constructed set of standards. Your state you might have more faith in the folks that run your state department of education. In mine, no doubt it would be whatever the folks in Texas decide.
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TE, I think that humans, who can figure out how to send probes to search for life under the ice cap of Europa, can figure out how to offer a rich menu of open-ended learning resources and alternative tracks in the local high school. And ed tech can be an important part of making that happen.
Or, if the ed deformers get their way, ed tech can be a means of enforcing a stultifying uniformity/regimentation/standardization.
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Not at a reasonable cost. Take a look at the math curriculum offered at Thomas Jefferson High School in Fairfax County Virginia and think about what it would cost to make that curriculum available in every high school in the country.
Here is a link:
https://www.tjhsst.edu/research-academics/math-cs/math/index.html
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In other words, TE. Let’s not be unimaginative about this.
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Lets be as imaginative as you want. How do we teach differential equations and multivariable calculus in every high school in the country?
Remember that online classes are condemned by the orthodox posters here and Carol Burris, a well respected orthodox poster, thinks Calculus BC is “good enough” for even the strongest students.
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And do you really think that if you put several groups of mathematicians in a room and had them, without this document in hand, and had them come up with grade-by-grade learning progressions that none of those would vary from the one in those KY Common [sic] Core [sic] standards? I think that you would get as many different documents as you have groups and that there would be MAJOR divergences. I’d be willing to bet a year’s pay on that one.
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Exactly, and I am old enough to have seen some of the first “teaching machines,” funded in the aftermath of Sputnik, and then discussed as “programmed instruction.”
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What’s happening distresses me to no end, Laura. I’ve long been a fan of programmed learning in its place. I love the notion that a kid might be able to discover a unique passion and pursue it on his or her own. But to use this means to enforce invariant learning progressions is criminal.
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Pixels are cheap. Every child should have an IEP. I will have a look at that, TE. I am not saying that this is an easy problem to solve. I am saying that a) We have to solve it and b) It can be solved.
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It will only be solved if students are given the freedom to choose classes outside of the assigned school, even if that involves the freedom to actually choose a school.
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It would be great to see that in every school, certainly. I suspect that there would be many high schools without the math teachers who could supervise students taking an online class in differential equations. So, how do we solve that problem? It doesn’t sound like it would be unsolvable to me. Let’s see, what if every school had access to outstanding advanced math tech and an advanced math online collaborative homework help site with an online collaborative whiteboard and at least one professor with advanced math skills who could be on the IEP team for the few kids who get to that point?
What if every kid had an IEP, and the whole model for schooling were changed to maximize the possible paths that students could take?
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That’s my dream, . . .
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I have written many times, here, TE, that I think that ed tech has the potential to be liberatory. But I also think that the human element, mentoring, is KEY to good teaching, and I think that research on outcomes for online learning bears me out there. Thus by three-prong speculation regarding a possible solution to the very real problem that you pose.
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I think the solution for many students will end up being something like what my middle son did the fall of his senior year: taking classes provided by three different organizations using two different delivery methods. This model, however, will require some kinds of standardization, as downstream classes need to know what students learned in upstream classes even when the two classes are from different institutions. You could do this using your ideas about micro certifications, but those will also need to be standardized in order to give them meaning.
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I still need to think this through, TE, but what I want to get at is stuff that is operationalized, so that ability is DEMONSTRATED. No one cares what grade you got on the software language certification exam. They care about whether you can write the code. Same is true for everything else. So, I hesitate even to use the term certification. I have had people with degrees in English from Ivy League schools come to work for me who couldn’t write a simple couplet in iambic pentameter and kids from state colleges who could write prose like Greek temples, of breathtaking clarity and beauty.
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I love this exchange that we are having here, TE, on this site for discussing “A better education for all.”
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From the Rheformish Lexicon:
technocratic Philistinism. Replacement for quaint values of humane scholarship and research, teaching and learning; another name for the Rheformish faith.
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The irony, as I read this, there are ads for Teach.org declaring how cool it is to teach, something to be aspired too. I could just wretch!
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Bill Gates is an extraordinarily bright guy. There’s a reason why he is the richest person on the planet. He had a particular vision. The CC$$ was a necessary precursor to carrying out that vision. That’s why he paid to have it created. Some union leaders and educrats don’t seem to understand this. They have been PLAYED.
Bill is also a great card player.
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I have long been a proponent of the promise of adaptive educational technology. But it’s extremely important that this technology be used to provide alternative tracks, to make possible REAL personalization. Using it to put every kid on the same track to reach a set of predetermined goals issued by a distant, centralized, totalitarian authority, a set of goals that reduces learning to mastery of items on a bullet list, is a horrific mistake.
We are at a cusp. The ed tech revolution in education WILL HAPPEN. We have a choice. We can go the CC$$ route and create a Orwellian future of centralized command and control, or we can use technology to liberate, to enable education as the pursuit of unique, intrinsically motivated learning. Tyranny or freedom?
It’s easy for me to decide which side I am on there.
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cxL an Orwellian future
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The Gates vision in a nutshell:
The Powerpointing of the training of the children of the proles.
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Can someone please go back in time and make sure Taylor was never born? For me this is about those who can only understand efficiency if it is reduced/objectified into data or numbers. When you get right down to it, the systems of efficiency that we had before the computer era were just as good if not better, they just used a human brain instead of a silicon one. Have there been any studies or examinations of the actual costs of the data bureaucracy, of it’s externalized and subsidized costs? I see a sledge hammer being used as a fly swatter here. There may be some finer grained details available that were not around before, but how much more actionable detail is useful before the point of diminishing returns is passed? When whoever goes back to stop Taylor is done with that, could you make a stop on the way home and bring Deming forward with you? Please?
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Deming wouldn’t be without Taylor.
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It is always a great pleasure to read Laura Chapman’s incredibly well-informed, thoughtful comments on this blog. She has a great mind and tremendous scholarship.
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incredibly was poor word choice, given the etymology, so, a correction:
It is always a great pleasure to read Laura Chapman’s exceptionally well-informed, thoughtful comments on this blog. She has a great mind and tremendous scholarship.
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I posted this on another of Diane’s blogs (https://dianeravitch.net/2014/03/22/lauren-anderson-why-the-focus-on-grit/#comments) earlier today, but I think it fits here, too.
Once again, I agree with you completely, Robert. To quote from myself (testimony I made to the RI legislature in support of a bill to pause the PARCC until a Task Force has had a chance to thoroughly investigate the ramifications of the Common Core package): I think that the worst flaw of the CC$$ for ELA is that the standards do not allow for teachers to encourage students to value and express their own stories and viewpoints. Without respect for the students’ heritage, strengths, interests, and needs, there can be no trust or mutual respect, and the learning that is supposed to be happening languishes.
Homo Sapiens sapiens is a social species. Teaching and learning is a human process. This technocratizing of education is inexcusable.
I see this first hand while volunteering in an 8th grade classroom of ELL students in a Providence middle school. One of their two periods of English daily has been devoted to “Extreme Weather.” The materials are from Pearson, and are totally disengaging and provide no scaffold for these students’ academic needs. This is standardization–everyone marches to the same inane, poorly thought out cacophony. No wonder some of them cut classes. Many of those students who attempt to do the work are essentially clueless, and are being totally deprived of any meaningful instruction that would actually provide them the skills so that they could develop motivation and become self-actualized learners. What we have here, is a mindless, dehumanizing pseudo-education. I like to call it the Stepfordization of America.
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I’m thinking that maybe math and science lend themselves better to standardization. If there was one national Algebra one book, who cares? Maybe no big deal. If every 11th grader in the US has to read Dicken’s David Copperfield, I would not like that. Art and language arts are a different animal.
Plus the term core, would seem to imply that there is still the rest of the body of the apple or the planet. The core should be so limited in nature that it is able to be covered in a quarter of the total class time. The other three quarters of time should be left for material beyond the core.
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I agree that they are different, but beyond an elementary level, there are also many ways in which to become an accomplished and capable mathematician. It’s certainly the case that not everyone who is adept enough with statistics to, say, formulate, tabulate, and analyze the results of a market survey is also a capable geometer.
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You dont become present by being humble.
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