Robert Shepherd, a regular commentator on the blog, has a long career as an author and a developer of curriculum, textbooks, and every other aspect of education publishing. From his comments on this blog, we know he has strong feelings about the Common Core. Let’s be blunt: He is not a fan. He has seen the future and he does not like what he sees.
Shepherd writes:
Dear Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth:
Orwell did not mean for 1984 to be a public policy manual.
Democracy might be dead in the United States, but we intend to resurrect it.
We see through your Doublespeak.
We will resist your Philistine technocratic vision of the future.
We will resist standardization.
We will resist your fascist mandates.
We will call upon others to do so as well.
We will tell them to opt their children out of your data machine and to ignore your bullet lists of what is and is not acceptable for teachers to teach and students to learn.
We do not accept regulation of our freedom of thought. We utterly and completely reject that.
We do not accept your authority.
We will organize.
We will speak truth to power.
We will practice civil disobedience.
We will opt out.
We will not look kindly upon those who collaborate with you to usurp the autonomy of teachers and learners.
We will not feed our kids to your data maw.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
There will be another informational meeting about parents’ rights to opt out their children and children’s’ rights to refuse the tests in my classroom, room 272, at Hartford Public High School on Saturday, April 12. All Connecticut parents, students, and educators are invited to attend.
It is obvious that the designers and supporters of CCSS do not have empathy for children. Narcissism is on a spectrum and intensifies with chronic stress. This is evident in how the Common Core Environment has created systemic Narcissism from the top down:
The antithesis of narcissism is empathy. If you have unconditional love for children and can be an empathic, you are not a narcissist. Empathy is the ability to get into someone else’s shoes and validate what they are feeling. The art of empathy is being there on this same level to hear and nurture feelings but is different from sympathy. Sympathy often feels to others like we are putting ourselves above them and feeling sorry for them. This does not bring comfort to most. But, if I express sadness, frustration or any myriad of emotions, and you are able to be with me, hear me, acknowledge the feelings and not judge… you are exhibiting an empathic response. If you jump to solutions or tell me what to do, are judgmental or critical, tell me what you do to solve your problems, or feel sorry for me, this is not practicing empathy!
When teaching children, creating an empathic environment is crucial for their development of self. Children need to know their feelings matter. It makes them feel real, noticed, seen, heard and visible. When feelings are attended to, the child then learns to trust their own feelings and can continue to grow up feeling empowered by their inner thoughts and emotions. This is in contrast to living in an adult world of crippling self-doubt because they were not heard in their early development.
Empathy does not mean you have to agree. Feelings are feelings are feelings. We can be critical of someone’s thoughts as thoughts can be distorted, but what we feel, we feel. Emotions need to be processed. Empathy with others is not about agreeing, but it is about getting into children’s emotional realm so you can understand them. . One minute in time can make a difference in someone’s life. It has happened to me and likely has happened to you. These moments are never forgotten, but in reverse, when not heard, that recollection can also stay on memory lane.
Narcissists are not accountable. They blame others, project their feelings, and are not able to tune in. As a parent, being accountable and honest is crucial. This is also a key to not raising a narcissistic child or a child who can’t believe in themselves because they were never validated. When adult children in recovery confront their narcissistic parents
and narcissistic teachers, they usually meet with defensive reactions, shame, humiliation, and judgment. How helpful is this? People make mistakes because we are all obviously and painfully human. When your child or student confronts you about your behavior, don’t be defensive. Be honest and listen.
The greatest gift you can give children as a parent or teacher is empathy.
To do this, requires a level of maturity so you are not acting defensive or hurt. Keep the door open for emotional connections and great things can happen. This includes compassion and comfort for pain, but also celebration for joy and success. If you find you cannot do that, consider getting therapeutic help. Learning how to tune in emotionally is an art and it can be taught.
Remember that putting work in front of a child is not teaching. That is punishment.
Real teaching is about inspiring children to use their own imagination and curiosity for self-discovery. The only way to do that is to guide, teach, nurture and listen to what is going on inside that person, and then to be there for them. It is not about “this student scored low, or this student was the top of the class. Most adult children of narcissistic parents report that their parents have no idea who they really are. While each child and adult has an outer life with accomplishments and “doing”, each one has an inner life about “being.” If you are tuning into the inner side of your children, you are not a narcissistic teacher or parent. Think about how it feels for you when you have someone really listening and caring about what is going on in your emotional world. In our narcissistic and technologically oriented culture, people are hungry for emotional intimacy… especially our precious children.
“ To touch the soul of another human being is to walk on holy ground.” Stephen Covey
This is fascinating because it is a mirror image of what one hears from the proponents of education deform. We need to get tougher with these kids. We need to teach them to be griftful.
Have a look at the newly redesigned CC$$ website. It features, most prominently, a video about what?
It’s about competition. It says, we have to teach to the Common [sic] Core [sic] bullet list because otherwise, your child will lose and our country will lose THE COMPETITION THAT IS LIFE.
What we have here is two completely different visions of what education is about.
In one, knowledge is POWER, and people obtain it because of extrinsic rewards and punishments, the score on the test, the recognition, the status, the money. Knowledge is the power to get that proficiency score, to win that competition, to beat those kids in Finland and Singapore in the Race to the Top. Scientia potentia est. This was the motto, you will remember, of something called the Total Information Awareness Program.
In the other, knowledge is empowering, yes, but it is also lots of other things. Knowledge is what comes from awareness, mindfulness, from caring enough to pay attention. It is satisfaction of curiosity and, as such, a goal in itself. It is transactional. It’s what is passed between people. It’s the passing of cultural attainment between generations, the handoff wherein one generation shares what is most precious to it and stands back in wonder and delight to watch what new forms it takes in those new hands and minds. Knowledge thus bridges the ontological gap which is the basic human condition, my mind over here and yours over there. In this vision, people obtain knowledge because it is intrinsically motivating. We are already curious. We already want to connect and to belong. And knowledge is that which satisfies our curiosity and allows us to connect, to belong to a community. Knowledge is satisfaction of curiosity, and knowledge is connection.
In the first model, the extrinsic punishment and reward model, education is something you undergo. It’s something that is done to you.
In the second, the intrinsic reward model, education is something you undertake. It is something you do.
In the first model, the teacher is the one who wields the power, the one who metes out the punishment and reward, and he or she is replaceable by a machine.
In the second, the teacher is the model of what a learner is and is irreplaceable.
cx: What we have here ARE two completely different visions of what education is about.
This distinction between knowledge as power and knowledge as lots of other things is discussed in one of Derrick Jensen’s books. I forget which one. It may be in his superb book about surveillance, Welcome to the Machine.
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education.
“We will resist your Philistine technocratic vision of the future.” Well said, Robert.
In light of the technology neomania all around us, I have been revisiting the works of Neil Postman. I think this excerpt from a speech he delivered to theologians in 1998 covers a lot of important ground:
“[T]hese are my five ideas about technological change. First, that we always pay a price for technology; the greater the technology, the greater the price. Second, that there are always winners and losers, and that the winners always try to persuade the losers that they are really winners. Third, that there is embedded in every great technology an epistemological, political or social prejudice. Sometimes that bias is greatly to our advantage. Sometimes it is not. The printing press annihilated the oral tradition; telegraphy annihilated space; television has humiliated the word; the computer, perhaps, will degrade community life. And so on. Fourth, technological change is not additive; it is ecological, which means, it changes everything and is, therefore, too important to be left entirely in the hands of Bill Gates. And fifth, technology tends to become mythic; that is, perceived as part of the natural order of things, and therefore tends to control more of our lives than is good for us.”
Excerpted from “Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change” a talk by Neil Postman (Denver, Colorado, 1998)
Full speech:
Click to access postman.pdf
Technologies can be used for good or ill. The internet can create isolated people who belong to online social networks but don’t have any friends in the real world. Or it can connect. People can go onto Meetup and find and then meet in the real world people who share their concerns, interests, and enthusiasms, other survivors of breast cancer, other hikers or kayakers, other young Moms. Trains can carry people to work or play, or they can carry people to death camps.
The ed tech revolution is going to happen. We must decide what that is going to mean. Is it going to mean availability of the universal library to all? Is it going to mean that unique, specialized classes and programs can be made to schools and districts that could not otherwise afford them? Is it going to mean availability of wonderful tools, like graphics and graphing software, to all? Is it going to mean great demonstration capabilities for teachers? Is it going to provide collaboration spaces and help create communities of learners? Is it going to provide students with publishing opportunities?
Or is it going to be a means for dispensing punishment and reward in educational software programs that are basically instantiations of a predetermined, invariant maze derived from a predetermined, invariant bullet list of skills put together by a distant, all-powerful Common Core Curriculum Commissariat? Programs that replace interaction between teachers and learners? Is it going to mean 200 kids in a room at machines doing the next lesson on CC$$.Literacy.ELA.RL.8.2c while a low-paid aide mills around to make sure that the computers are working and giving occasional assistance?
Two different visions for the future.
Here is another democratic problem with depending on technology, e.g. flipped classrooms:
http://www.teach4real.com/2013/10/14/you-wanna-talk-about-flipping-classrooms/
“Fascist mandates” and “regulation of our freedom of thought”? Is this post trying to be hilarious? Because it is hilarious. Hilariously blowsy and narrow-minded.
Look, the CCSS is not out to destroy education. It’s just a set of dang standards. The harm to children comes from overtesting, mis-testing, underfunding, etc. State legislatures are more dangerous than the CCSS.
That set of standards draws a narrow boundary in the vast design space for possible curricula and pedagogy and say, “You are not allowed to think what lies outside this boundary.”
That’s what I call a fascist mandate and a regulation of freedom of thought. It’s an entirely accurate description.
And that set of “standards” is, in ELA, so backward, so hackneyed, so pedestrian, so unimaginative, so often prescientific, that one can only call them “standard” in the sense of base, common, received, unexamined, ordinary, etc.
cx: That set of standards draws a narrow boundary in the vast design space for possible curricula and pedagogy and says, “You are not allowed to think what lies outside this boundary.”
“You are not allowed to think what lies outside this boundary.”? What, are the CCSS police going to come and arrest a great classroom teacher because she/he teaches something that’s outside of the CCSS? No. CCSS isn’t forcing anyone to do anything. What creates negative pressures around the CCSS are things like: “grading” schools based on tests, tying teacher evaluations to test scores, using test scores for purposes they aren’t designed to serve, wasting too much time in class preparing for tests, wasting too much time actually taking tests, etc.
I’m no fanboy of the CCSS. But the ways that schools, districts, states, and the feds implement and use the CCSS–or any other set of standards–create the problems.
Keep on keepin’ on, Bob. I like your style.
“What creates negative pressures around the CCSS are things like: “grading” schools based on tests, tying teacher evaluations to test scores, using test scores for purposes they aren’t designed to serve, wasting too much time in class preparing for tests, wasting too much time actually taking tests, etc.”
Reginald,
This sounds like the entire CCSS movement. When one says “CCSS” today, one thinks of the entire baggage CCSS implies. There certainly is no separation between the standards and the Smarter Balance tests. There certainly is no separation between the tests and teacher evaluation. It’s all part of the same corporate education reformist garbage. And, given that this entire program is being forced upon us by a distinct minority of dictatorial reformists, it is, indeed, Fascist. Zeig Heil!
And, in fact, that kind of thing is happening daily across the United States, Reginald. Evaluators are coming into people’s rooms and telling them that what they just did isn’t in the standards. They are insisting that the standard being taught be up on the whiteboard. They are insisting that people follow the script, sometimes LITERALLY scripts for canned CC$$ lessons.
And, Reginald, every educational publisher is beginning every project by making a spreadsheet with the bullet list of standards in one column and the places where that standard is “covered” in the next. By that means, these “standards” are becoming, to an enormous extent, the curriculum and warping, narrowing, and distorting the curriculum and pedagogical practices. Here, you can read about how that happens in my analysis of just two of the 1,600 “standards”:
Thank you, Reginald. I like yours, too, I think.
Reginald, the CC$$ becomes the blueprint, the learning progression, that all curriculum developers must adhere to. And in ELA, it’s a stupid progression, backward and unscientific and pedestrian. This is not difficult to understand. Imagine yourself a curriculum designer sitting down to plan a program to build grammatical competence in kids, over the span of several grades. You should be able to figure out what the problem is. Think a bit.
You have to follow the CC$$ blueprint, not one that makes sense given what we know about how children gain competence in the grammar of a language. The hacks who put together the CC$$ were clearly CLUELESS about, completely, utterly unfamiliar with, the science there. And the same applies in every other domain covered by the CC$$ in ELA. It reminds me of what you would get if a bunch of real estate salespeople got together and made a list of “stuff to learn in English class.” It’s completely uninformed and amateurish.
Your comment is wonderful. I have been watching the extinction of public education since 1998 when, at the top of my career in NYC , and a celebrated educator I found myself a target for removal, and exposed to tactics of lawless administrators. Sixteen years later, I know that th war on teachers was the first step. By removing the voice of the classroom practitioner, the real professionals who knows what learning looks like, and what must be present in the classroom to enable learning, public education could be controlled by corporate entities and politicians for their own purposes.
http://billmoyers.com/segment/preview-public-education-for-sale/
The corporations would make out like the bandits they were, selling magic elixirs for genuine curricula, and the political entities would profit by the creation of an ignorant citizenry which would except the lies and propaganda that they disseminate at will.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Magic-Elixir-No-Evidence-by-Susan-Lee-Schwartz-130312-433.html
I thought it was Orwllellian from the start, as I faced allegations and lies that were diametrically opposed to the truth of what I had accomplished, but couched in words that made the malefactors seem as they were doing a great service.
I am a writer, not an activist, but I have watched a group of activists organize and attempt to fight the powerful interests. In 16 years, not a single story of the assault on teachers has made it into the media, despite their yeoman efforts.
Now, behind the scenes, as Diane reports here, I see the money flowing to charter schools and candidates that want to end public education, and I am frightened that this is the end. As Ed Hirsch says , ‘democracy depends on shared knowledge,’ and democracy dies with the end of public schools that teach authentic science and history, and develop genuine thinking skills. http://www.aft.org/pdfs/americaneducator/winter2009/hirsch.pdf
When i was teaching literature and humanities, I chose Orwell’s Animal Farm, not 1984, to demonstrate to my 13 year old students how the passage of time creates a “memory hole” that can be ‘filled in’ with lies and propaganda so that an original contract (the animals hard-won constitution) could be re-written.
The essential ingredient, once public education creates an ignorant citizenry is the media. The greatest propaganda machine in human history, television now fills the memory hole. This is a must watch Moyers interview with John Nichols and Robert Mcchesney on how big money is purchasing the media:
http://billmoyers.com/segment/john-nichols-and-robert-mcchesney-on-big-money-big-media/
Bill Moyers also writes on this subject in a must read essay
http://billmoyers.com/2012/08/30/money-in-politics-where-is-the-outrage/
“We are nearing the culmination of a cunning and fanatical drive to dismantle the political institutions, the legal and statutory canons, and the intellectual and cultural frameworks that were slowly and painstakingly built over decades to protect everyday citizens from the excesses of private power. The “city on the hill” has become a fortress of privilege, guarded by a hired political class and safely separated from the economic pressures that are upending the household stability, family dynamics, social mobility, and civic life of everyday Americans.
“Socrates said to understand a thing, you must first name it. As in Athens then, so in America now: The name for what’s happening to our political system is corruption — a deep, systemic corruption.”
Bob, I fight on as you and Diane do, and we all are the greater fools
because at the very least we can do is, as Moyers says: “Learn something from the emptiness of what you see and hear — and if it doesn’t make you mad as hell and ready to fight back against the Money Power, we are all in real trouble.”
Even if the Common [sic] Core [sic] were not backward, hackneyed, unimaginative, pedestrian, amateurish work, even if it distilled the wisdom and experience of scholars, researchers, and practitioners in the various domains that it covered, it would still be a terrible idea to MANDATE IT, to MAKE IT INVARIANT.
If the CC$$ were voluntary. If it were one of many competing models put forward as part of an ongoing, public, national discussion, then it would be a genuine contribution. It would represent a distillation of the basic notions instantiated in the lowest-common-denominator groupthink of the previously existing state standards on which it was based.
But the CC$$ are not voluntary. They are not one set of standards among many.
They are that which must be obeyed. Achieve appointed David Coleman (by divine right) absolute monarch of instruction in the English Language Arts in the United States, and Lord Coleman has relieved you of any further thinking about learning progressions or about what objectives are worth measuring at what levels for what students in what domains and about how those might be formulated. He will do the thinking for you from now on.
Why would any fool think it BETTER not to have continually revised, voluntary, competing guidelines, frameworks, standards, learning progressions, lesson templates, curricula, pedagogical approaches, and so on put forward by independent curriculum developers, scholars, researchers, and practitioners? Well, the folks who paid to have the Common [sic] Core [sic] created had one reason for doing so: They wanted a single bullet list of objectives to tag their educational software to, the software with which they are planning to revolutionize education (and make it a lot cheaper by reducing the teacher force and increasing class sizes).
What’s the alternative?
Well, when the education deformers praise the CC$$, they never talk about the actual bullet list of skills, for that is indefensible. Instead, they trot out a few generalities: kids will read substantive, complex texts. They will do sustained reading in knowledge domains.
A few general guidelines would provide the degrees of freedom within which TRUE INNOVATION in curricula and pedagogy would occur.
The a priori bullet lists are a TERRIBLE IDEA. Why? Because they draw a boundary in the vast possible design space for curricula and pedagogy and say, only what is within this boundary are you allowed to think, are you allowed to imagine.
Wonderful posts, Robert, thanks, clarifying what counts most.
Amen. Great post!
You said it Mr. Shepherd! I’ve been teaching 25+ years and never imagined that things could get this bad in public ed. However, more and more people are starting to pay attention and time will certainly tell. Excellent post!!!!
No professional educator can truly support CC$$or any component of what that dubious program entails. The entire body of professional literature on the science of human development and how the brain learns has been completely ignored because there were no knowledgeable and professional educators on the CC$$ design team. This entire fiasco is simply garbage.