The states are roiled with pushback and rebellion against the Common Core, and wise heads say the problem is the implementation.
If only the implementation had been slower; if only it had left out the testing until much, much later; if only, if only.
But Peter Greene says the problem goes beyond implementation.
He gives a multiple-choice question to explain why CCSS is in big trouble.
It has nothing to do with the Tea Party or people in tin-foil hats.
He offers three possible reasons.
I choose Answer C.
What do you choose?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
We have a tough line, at least in math. There is much good content and especially practices there, but that’s because they were pretty much lifted from NCTM. Of course the NCTM position paper “Principles to Action”, while supporting CCSS, it draws a line in the sand about assessment.
So the tightrope is dealing all the issues of CCSS, even blocking them, without making it impossible to ever move math forward. What makes it difficult is that some of the opposition, read Tea Party types, would take us back to 1950. Their forerunners neutralized the NCTM Standards before. They’ll try again.
The enemy of our enemy …
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Interesting.
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Here’s what Professor Stephen Krashen, whose work I studied while earning my M.A. in teaching, had to say about Common Core.
To the Editor:
Yes, there’s a big problem with the state tests. But there’s a bigger problem: the whole idea of the Common Core standards. Accurately described by Susan Ohanian, a writer and former teacher, as “a radical untried curriculum overhaul” and “nonstop national testing,” the Common Core is an outrageous scheme with no justification and no empirical support.
The problems described by Elizabeth Phillips will eventually be solved, or at least reduced enough to stop complaints from coming, but the Common Core boondoggle will continue, with new and very expensive tests delivered online.
I suspect that these bad tests are a weapon of mass distraction, so that we forget what the real problem is.
STEPHEN KRASHEN
Los Angeles, April 11, 2014
The writer is professor emeritus at Rossier School of Education, University of Southern California.
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Stephen Krashen should be the definitive speaker on education, especially in ELA. Too bad he is just spitting in the wind.
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Is it too late for a last minute booking at Camp Philos?
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Phenomenal. This should be required reading for everyone (after all, we are all affected by this policy).
I especially loved the reference to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
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I get that political opponents of the Common Core now need to promote the “it’s not the implementation” meme, but it doesn’t hold up. It’s is not a fallback position. It’s the only real explanation for why CCSS is failing in NY and succeeding in states doing a good job, like NH.
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By defintion CCSS cannot be succeeding anywhere. It has all the errors identified by Wilson that render any results completely invalid. So no, it is not “succeeding” in NH unless you mean propogating lies, falsehoods and invalidities.
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Tell it to these teacher’s, Duane: http://anhpe.org/category/teachers/nh-teachers/
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Bill, I am confused. What Common Core tests did the students take? I thought NYS was the first state to adopt the CCSS assessment from Pearson. Also, it’s obvious the lessons are not scripted. And are the results high staked with teacher’s futures being dependent of students results.
NH doesn’t sound like the same CCSS found in NYS.
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The test NYS took was a Pearson preliminary test, not PARCC. If this curriculum is not scripted, I stand corrected: http://www.engageny.org/sites/default/files/resource/attachments/g3-m1-full-module.pdf
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I reserve judgement on the Math Curriculum. I know there are some issues. My younger children went through the Chicago Math Program which I detested, but they both learned how to do math adequately, so it worked for them.
It is my understanding that the CC math is scripted. It will take a generation to see if it is successful.
NYS did take the Pearson exam. The ELA portion was reported by Principals to be horrible. It is my understanding that PARCC is not available yet. I’ve heard that our state wants to have all students take the test electronically.
This will be a logistical nightmare in most schools who do not have the facilities and infrastructure for such a massive undertaking. But that is a separate issue from the actual test.
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CC math is not scripted. Read it. You’ll agree.
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Scripted or not, it is very specific on what should be taught and how to teach it.
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Bill is correct. CCSS Math is not scripted. Some of the implementations may be, but scripted curricula are counter to the spirit of the Practices. Which are being ignored in many cases
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I was unaware that there was “a” CC math. Aren’t we all supposed to be able to develop our own curriculum?
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I’m sure there are NH teachers who disagree if they were able to speak without being bullied and ridiculed fearing the loss of their jobs. It’s not all rosy in NH despite your cheerleading Bill. Tell us again about your software or digital tracking venture?
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Aw, Linda…that bit about fear of being fired is worn out. Has any NH, NY or any other teacher who has spoken out against the standards been fired? NH middle school teacher Larry Graykin has been forceful against the standards for years, building web sites, the whole bit. Just google him. He’s still there. Nashua teachers made a big political fuss over not liking the assessment. They’re doing fine.
No, teachers are at a greater risk form local CCSS opponents than being fired for criticizing the standards. Critics just get asked for help in improving them.
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Bill, what happens if the teacher evaluation “does not meet expectations” is that the teacher is put on “probation” and must jump through hoops and be closely monitored in order to keep their jobs. The stress is unbelievable. If their assessment does not improve, then they can be let go.
Whether this happens or not – we are still in the process here in NYS – will be up to the courts and the unions.
Ask the teachers in Syracuse, whose evaluations almost entirely relies on test scores. Some schools did not have a single teacher who scored the top grade.
Imagine that – an entire district full of duds.
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Is that happening, Ellen? Are anti-CCSS teachers targeted that way in NYS?
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Bill, it’s not anti-CCSS teachers who are targeted in NYS, it’s ALL teachers who are targeted.
Each teacher is assessed with an APPR. They are observed several times each year and are then given a formal evaluation by the administrator – usually the principal. That is only one part of their evaluation. They are also given a rating based on the test results of their students. Teachers who don’t teach a specific class are rated by the results of the entire school. This goes hand in hand with the SLOs, where the teacher must PREDICT the results of each student, based on five elements, usually test scores from previous years plus a pre-test which is given to each student in EVERY subject each fall. Of course, there is a post test to measure their development. Then there are the Artifacts which demonstrate items that can’t be observed, such as contacting parents or professional development.
Each district and union came up with a plan based on agreed upon measures which had to be approved by NYS. Syracuse had a plan which relied more heavily on the assessments, so many teachers were labeled as “developing” or “ineffective” instead of “effective” and none on the elementary level were “highly effective”.
Now, if a teacher is labeled developing or ineffective, they are put on a TIP (teacher improvement plan). If in two years they have not improved to effective, they are fired. This is the second year of this evaluation process, so we will see what happens.
Buffalo had a tougher time coming up with their APPR due to union pushback. We were the last to be approved by the state – after numerous compromises. 60% of our score is based on principal observations and only 20% on the SLO (which includes the test scores), plus 20% on the Artifacts. Hopefully, this results in a fair evaluation. Of course, we are counting on the principals to give a fair, not a biased, formal write up.
If Buffalo rated teachers solely on test outcomes, they would need to hire 3600 new teachers every two years.
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Oh, I very much agree, Ellen, about all NYS teachers being targeted by punitive evaluation policies. In this case I was just saying the teachers appear to be free to speak out against CCSS in NY and NH because they have demonstrated that willingness.
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Whether a teacher feels free to speak out or not usually depends upon the support of their principal.
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Right. And apparently there are many supportive principals.
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And many who are not. I feel free to speak out because I am retired. I have many colleagues who keep their mouths shut or say very little.
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Please note Bill, you and I are part of the minority of individuals who identify ourselves by name on this blog.
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Talk to your neighbors in Nashua, Bill. You’re closer than we are and the testing and standards are two peas in a pod. One cannot exist without the other…..designed to be forever linked.
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Oh, that’s what happened – there was a sample ON LINE test in NH.
I took a look at those samples and they were outrageous. So much back and forth and tiny squares for writing essays which were difficult to edit.
In order to take the test you had to suspend the entire writing process.
But I’m sure there must be a CC version of “Johnny on the Spot” essay writing.
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NH does not tie test scores to teacher evaluations. That changes everything. It completely removes the pressure, and allows for professional judgement.
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NY Teacher’s got it right. It’s about the test, not the standards.
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Bill,
re: “Critics just get asked for help in improving them.”
So there is some mechanism in place for “improving” the standards?
Please elaborate.
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Absolutely, Ang. Manchester has 65 teachers working on it; http://curriculum.mansd.org/resource-documents/standards-development
Other districts are doing it too, to a lesser extent.
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Bill,
Humm…
“The Memorandum of Understanding signed by state leaders to opt in to the Common Core allows the states to change a scant 15 percent of the standards they use. There is no process available to revise the standards. They must be adopted as written.”
http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2013/11/common_core_standards_ten_colo.html
Looks to my your link has a a list of standards that have not been improved rather painted with a happy face.
” Rewrite the standard in friendly language”
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That 15% is urban legend, Ang. It’s a useful part of the scary narrative, but if you find a link to that famous memorandum, you’ll be the first. As a practical matter, are you predicting that NGA will sue Indiana? Have they threatened anyone with sanctions of any kind?
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Bill,
Show me someone actually changing the standards.
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Indiana
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Bill,
List a state?
No
The question was show me the CCSS actually being changed.
Show me a standard from the original CCSS and then show the change.
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just follow this thread: http://anhpe.org/2014/04/17/mushrooming-critiques-of-indianas-alternative-to-the-common-core/
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Bill,
“if you find a link to that famous memorandum, you’ll be the first”
OK,
So I am the first.
Not really.
Easily available.
See Washington Post.
The Council of Chief State School Officers and
The National Governors Association Center for Best Practices
Common Core Standards
Memorandum of Agreement
Purpose. This document commits states to a state-led process that will draw on evidence and lead to development and adoption of a common core of state standards (common core) in English language arts and mathematics for grades K-12. These standards will be aligned with college and work expectations, include rigorous content and skills, and be internationally benchmarked. The intent is that these standards will be aligned to state assessment and classroom practice. The second phase of this initiative will be the development of common assessments aligned to the core standards developed through this process.
Background. Our state education leaders are committed to ensuring all students graduate from high school ready for college, work, and success in the global economy and society. State standards provide a key foundation to drive this reform. Today, however, state standards differ significantly in terms of the incremental content and skills expected of students.
Over the last several years, many individual states have made great strides in developing high-quality standards and assessments. These efforts provide a strong foundation for further action. For example, a majority of states (35) have joined the American Diploma Project (ADP) and have worked individually to align their state standards with college and work expectations. Of the 15 states that have completed this work, studies show significant similarities in core standards across the states. States also have made progress through initiatives to upgrade standards and assessments, for example, the New England Common Assessment Program.
Benefits to States. The time is right for a state-led, nation-wide effort to establish a common core of standards that raises the bar for all students. This initiative presents a significant opportunity to accelerate and drive education reform toward the goal of ensuring that all children graduate from high school ready for college, work, and competing in the global economy and society. With the adoption of this common core, participating states will be able to:
*Articulate to parents, teachers, and the general public expectations for students;
*Align textbooks, digital media, and curricula to the internationally benchmarked standards;
*Ensure professional development to educators is based on identified need and best practices;
*Develop and implement an assessment system to measure student performance against the common core; and
*Evaluate policy changes needed to help students and educators meet the common core standards and “end-of-high-school” expectations.
An important tenet of this work will be to increase the rigor and relevance of state standards across all participating states; therefore, no state will see a decrease in the level of student expectations that exist in their current state standards.
Process and Structure
Common Core State-Based Leadership. The Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) and the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (NGA Center) shall assume responsibility for coordinating the process that will lead to state adoption of a common core set of standards. These organizations represent governors and state commissioners of education who are charged with defining K-12 expectations at the state level. As such, these organizations will facilitate a state-led process to develop a set of common core standards in English language arts and math that are:
Fewer, clearer, and higher, to best drive effective policy and practice;
Aligned with college and work expectations, so that all students are prepared for success upon graduating from high school;
Inclusive of rigorous content and application of knowledge through high-order skills, so that all students are prepared for the 21st century;
Internationally benchmarked, so that all students are prepared for succeeding in our global economy and society; and
Research and evidence-based.
National Validation Committee. CCSSO and the NGA Center will create an expert validation group that will serve a several purposes, including validating end-of-course expectations, providing leadership for the development of K-12 standards, and certifying state adoption of the common core. The group will be comprised of national and international experts on standards. Participating states will have the opportunity to nominate individuals to the group. The national validation committee shall provide an independent review of the common core. The national validation committee will review the common core as it is developed and offer comments, suggestions, and validation of the process and products developed by the standards development group. The group will use evidence as the driving factor in validating the common core.
Develop End-of-High-School Expectations. CCSSO and the NGA Center will convene Achieve, ACT and the College Board in an open, inclusive, and efficient process to develop a set of end-of–high-school expectations in English language arts and mathematics based on evidence. We will ask all participating states to review and provide input on these expectations. This work will be completed by July 2009.
Develop K-12 Standards in English Language Arts and Math. CCSSO and the NGA Center will convene Achieve, ACT, and the College Board in an open, inclusive, and efficient process to develop K-12 standards that are grounded in empirical research and draw on best practices in standards development. We will ask participating states to provide input into the drafting of the common core and work as partners in the common core standards development process. This work will be completed by December 2009.
Adoption. The goal of this effort is to develop a true common core of state standards that are internationally benchmarked. Each state adopting the common core either directly or by fully aligning its state standards may do so in accordance with current state timelines for standards adoption not to exceed three (3) years.
This effort is voluntary for states, and it is fully intended that states adopting the common core may choose to include additional state standards beyond the common core. States that choose to align their standards to the common core standards agree to ensure that the common core represents at least 85 percent of the state’s standards in English language arts and mathematics.
Further, the goal is to establish an ongoing development process that can support continuous improvement of this first version of the common core based on research and evidence-based learning and can support the development of assessments that are aligned to the common core across the states, for accountability and other appropriate purposes.
National Policy Forum. CCSSO and the NGA Center will convene a National Policy Forum (Forum) comprised of signatory national organizations (e.g., the Alliance for Excellent Education, Business Roundtable, National School Boards Association, Council of Great City Schools, Hunt Institute, National Association of State Boards of Education, National Education Association, and others) to share ideas, gather input, and inform the common core initiative. The forum is intended as a place for refining our shared understanding of the scope and elements of a common core; sharing and coordinating the various forms of implementation of a common core; providing a means to develop common messaging between and among participating organizations; and building public will and support.
Federal Role. The parties support a state-led effort and not a federal effort to develop a common core of state standards; there is, however, an appropriate federal role in supporting this state-led effort. In particular, the federal government can provide key financial support for this effort in developing a common core of state standards and in moving toward common assessments, such as through the Race to the Top Fund authorized in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Further, the federal government can incentivize this effort through a range of tiered incentives, such as providing states with greater flexibility in the use of existing federal funds, supporting a revised state accountability structure, and offering financial support for states to effectively implement the standards. Additionally, the federal government can provide additional long-term financial support for the development of common assessments, teacher and principal professional development, other related common core standards supports, and a research agenda that can help continually improve the common core over time. Finally, the federal government can revise and align existing federal education laws with the lessons learned from states’ international benchmarking efforts and from federal research.
Agreement. The undersigned state leaders agree to the process and structure as described above and attest accordingly by our signature(s) below.
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Here’s what it says, Ang: “States that choose to align their standards to the common core standards agree to ensure that the common core represents at least 85 percent of the state’s standards in English language arts and mathematics.”
This provision does not prevent IN (and Manchester NH) and anywhere else from using the standards but not “aligning” with CCSS. And that’s what they are doing.
Many are doing this and no state or district has been threatened or sued. So what’s the problem?
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So there are CCS police monitoring every city, town, school, classroom looking for a verbiage, lesson, unit dip below 85%? How is that even measurable? It’s so ridiculous.
Any you have now interviewed MA teachers too?
Bill, please tell us all your background, your profession, credentials, time in the classroom, subjects taught, certification, years of services, setting/level, etc.
We will wait for your reply.
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Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah . . .
Some students were not achieving the former standards. The solution – rigor. That’s right, the problem was the goals weren’t challenging enough. Think how much harder they will try if we make it more difficult to succeed. They must have been doing poorly because they weren’t being challenged.
How does this solution pass for common sense?
We don’t need a one size fits all education because we don’t have one size fits all children.
I agree with Robert. Every child should have an IEP, or an individual educational plan designed to meet their own special needs. For my son, with dyslexia, the fact he learned how to read and write was an accomplishment. Albeit, he isn’t capable of digesting text on a college level, but he knows enough to function in everyday life.
And if 70% of the student population is not college ready, and 70% will be unable to pass the required five CC NYS Regents Exams, then 70% will be unable to graduate from high school (compared to the current 30% failure rate).
Tell me how this is good for our children, our state, and our country?
Is the goal to become an elite nation where the top third rules over the “uneducated”, “maligned” masses?
Where do you see a national curriculum headed (based upon the current experiences of the student body of NYS)?
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You can ignore the standards.
You can follow the standards verbatim.
You can alter the standards all you want.
You can add your own standards
You can teach underwater basket weaving if you want
BUT
Its not about the standards.
The TESTS are EVERYTHING,
They are the only standards that matter
They are the de-facto curriculum
They are the pedagogy
They are the lever that forces the implementation of CCSS
They are the driving force behind most school activities
They are the reason money is wasted on consultants and coaches
They are the stressors in the system for students, parents, teachers
They are the reason kids hate school more than ever
They are the primary focus of attention
They are the educational money hole
They are a threat to the careers and reputations of good teachers
They are the point source for the Gates business plan
They are the wet dream of corporate reformers/profit makers
The TESTS are EVERYTHING
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I agree NY teacher.
And what’s even worse, is that even if the students do improve (which is what happened a few years ago) the powers that be change the cut score line so that EVEN more children are failing. And that was pre- CCSS. Now they just fail almost everyone – except for that top stanine (you know, the kids who are considered geniuses by their IQ tests – and even some of them fail).
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Bill: king of the ever moving goal post.
What happened to no one has ever seen the memo? The memo is urban legend?
Then I post said memo and you seem to be familiar with it and quote what it says back to me.
Are you being disingenuous with your posts?
And I would still like to actually see evidence of more than 15% of the standards being “improved” (again, not “rewritten in friendly language”)
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You got me there, Ang. I had forgotten about the Scott leak a year ago. Of course, he has no way to know whether any governor actually signed that memo. I’ve never been able to find the real thing myself.
But let’s just say that memo is legitimate. (Btw, anyone who says that 15% business is getting their math wrong. If CCSS should be 85% of something, then 17.6% of that something can be something else, right? But you knew that.) It still doesn’t say what people say it says, does it.
What’s your understanding of why NGA is not objecting to Indiana’s changes? As Linda says, that would be just about impossible. That’s why all this 15% business, in addition to being the wrong number, carries no real weight.
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Bill, we shall wait and see if there is any pushback to NH’s changes to CCSS. If not, then other states will follow suit.
I think the ultimate test will be the test.
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(IN and other states, but not NH. NH has not changed the standards.)
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Again, we must wait and see what happens.
Here in NYS, we don’t like the results, so we are pushing back – and I’m talking about the parents who don’t like what they see. The teachers and principals and even many superintendents are already on board against this enforced program.
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Bill, I have seen these “standards” succeed–in lessons put together by people who construed them very loosely or didn’t actually do what the “standards” clearly said that they should do. I’ve read a bunch of these LDC modules put together by teachers around the country, and the good ones were put together by people who THOUGHT that they were “following the standards” but he didn’t, really, but concentrated, instead, on writing good lessons, wherever those took them. Ironic, huh?
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cx: who, not he
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It seems to me that you have constructed an alternate sphere of logic, Bob, in which the standards are by definition no good and therefore anyone who feels as if they have combined good teaching with the standards and achieved what looks to them like good results is, what, just not smart enough to realize they are fooling themselves?
I don’t think many people will follow you down that rabbit hole, Bob (sorry for the mixed metaphor).
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Bill the notion that one cannot have rigorous teaching and substantive learning without having bullet lists to base that on is complete balderdash. Sorry.
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A very persuasive comment, Bob.
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Bill, you are out of your league here. Really, I don’t think you even realize what you are saying. Put down the reformy playbook and read Bob carefully.
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You see, Bill, I have a bad habit of actually reading these purported “standards” and asking, well, now let’s think about that. Is that an accurate characterization of good reading, writing, speaking, listening, and thinking? Typically, it’s received nonsense, often prescientific nonsense, that has been parroted without anyone thinking about it much at all.
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Somehow, Bill, for hundreds of years, people taught and people learned without having invariant, mandatory bullet lists, just as people trade goods and services without having a central committee telling the what they can buy and when.
Ecologies are healthier than are monocultures. Judgments made by millions of independent, actors who are dealing with the particular realities in front of them are almost always more sound than those made by a central committee. How do I teach this short story to these students? What is important to understand about this? Not what some person in a room thought might apply to all works of literature at all times with any group of students no matter what their abilities or knowledge.
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No, I do get it, Bob. I do get that you are arguing for no standards.
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Bill, I have grown tired–very, very tired–of people who know nothing about the sciences of language acquisition presuming to write bullet lists to tell others how and why and what to teach in the language strand. Ditto for all the other strands. These “standards” are egregious. The ELA standards seem to have been written by a committee of real estate salespeople based on what they remembered from English class back in the day.
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Gates and Pearson should ask Coleman for their money back. The document he delivered is juvenile work. Puerile.
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Bob, read more here about Bill. Not all in NH agree with him. His “group” may be just him. May post in parts so I don’t await moderation.
Even in your tweets/articles , NH residents disagree with you. You are trying to paint NH as a state in full support of CCS. It’s not true. You have an axe to grind here.
@billduncan: Teachers really do understand and support the Common Core – Bill Duncan in the Concord Monitor http://t.co/6uiQbhx2H
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I am arguing, Bill, for general guidelines rather than for bullet lists, ones that would provide a framework within which teachers could tailor lessons to their students and to the actual materials that they are teaching and within which curriculum developers could truly innovate.
The problem is with how the notion of “standards” has been conceived. People didn’t do the essential work of asking themselves what a “standard” should look like in each domain. They assumed that they already knew. Wrong from the start.
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Is there a sample of your approach somewhere?
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For Bob:
@EDactivistNH: @billduncan Not in Nashua. They are waking up to the set up 4 failure: http://t.co/YKNwx8ON2P
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See comments on this post by Mercedes
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Bill, blind acceptance is not application of logic.
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Bill, let’s start at the very beginning. Define standard please. Your own words
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Bill,
I, and many of us, are not “no standards”guys. We are for the standards that those at Pingree, Deerfield academy! Harpeth Hall, Lakewood, and Sidwell Friends embrace, which, I believe! is NOT common core.
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How about a link to the standards you would support….
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Schools like Sidwell, which provide a rich, nurturing environment, should be the model for all schools, especially ones in the inner cities and rural areas where the children may need the enrichment opportunities which more prominent families frequently provide.
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Can’t find the link, but it was widely accepted that MA had the best ELA and math standards under NCLB. They could have simply adopted/tweaked these if their goal was “world class” standards. Unfortunately MA and others (NY, CA, et al) have had to settle for lesser standards under CC.
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MA had one of the best, along with CA, IN, VA, but, alas, MA didn’t actually have standards. It was a curriculum, marketed now by Sandra Stotsky as her “curriculum frameworks.” MA is one state and a very top down state at that, so the state could establish a curriculum and require every teacher to follow it, which is what they did. Just imagine the uproar if NGA had put forward a national curriculum specifying that native Americans in Arizona read the Greek classics specified in MA.
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Why would they want to require any student to master abstract and subjective skills like theses?
5. Analyze how an author’s choices concerning how to structure specific parts ofa text (e.g., the choice of where to begin or end a story, the choice to provide acomedic or tragic resolution) contribute to its overall structure and meaning aswell as its aesthetic impact.
6. Analyze a particular point of view or cultural experience reflected in a work ofliterature from outside the United States, drawing on a wide reading of world literature.
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It’s been great chatting, Bill. Interactions like this spur me on to complete my book on the Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic]. My interest flags after a while because it’s all too easy to point out where these “standards” are completely boneheaded, ignorant, backward, hackneyed, prescientific, randomly and incoherently organized, misconceived at the level of their categorical conceptualization, and so full of gaps that one could drive whole curricula through their lacunae.
If one had handed Coleman a copy of the 1858 Gray’s Anatomy and sent him to a cabin in the woods of New Hampshire to write new standards for the practice of medicine, one would have gotten a result just like this.
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These “standards” are a crime against the teachers and students and parents of this country. Again, the authors of them should long ago have been laughed off the national stage for producing work this shoddy.
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You know, I started out willing to believe that, Bob. After all, the standards did seem of a piece with the ed reform I oppose. But after visiting classroom after classroom, I just couldn’t hang onto that skepticism. These are teachers who are entirely willing to critique this or that about their schools or administration but they just can’t see what the big objection to these standards is. They keep saying they look like good teaching.
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Therefore everything before was bad teaching. Do you think you hear what you want to hear?
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I wouldn’t say everything before was bad teaching. I would say that many good teachers recognize the standards as encoding what they think of as good teaching and that, in implementing the standards, a large number of teachers become better teachers.
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I can’t believe that, Bill. I don’t know a single English teacher or a single curriculum developer who thinks that these “standards” are anything but laughable. I have had countless discussions with other professionals about these.
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I’d love to interview them for my blog, Bob. I’d be glad to post their opinions.
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Just give us a few representative paragraphs of your book, Bob. Just an example of the detailed critique and your (specific) vision of the alternative.
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See my posts, below, Bill. Thanks for your interest.
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Bill – Bob’s been around a while and is probably tired of repeating himself to shills like you. He has dissected a number of the ELA standards on this blog. You could look through Diane’s archives.
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I’ve exchanged comments with Bob before. It’s no more persuasive than ever.
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It’s finally getting some real discussion in Ohio:
” It’s not just big-city students who are expected to have trouble with Ohio’s new Common Core tests. Suburban school kids, who generally perform well on state exams, are already seeing challenges with them.
Students taking the tests in trial runs this spring are reporting harder questions, being asked for more complex answers than they normally have to give and not having enough time to provide the full answers they want.
“The questions were beyond where they are typically asked,” said Joelle Magyar, assistant superintendent of the Mayfield school district. She said the exams left some students frustrated, and a few in tears. ”
Obviously, the concern is the kids, schools and teachers will be judged harshly on the scores.
I don’t think that’s an unfounded fear. I think it’s completely rational, given the approach to testing for the last decade. A good faith response to what are rational concerns might be a guarantee to these people that it will be different this time when the scores come out, rather than accusing them of “avoiding accountability” or “lying to themselves”.
I agree with them. I think they will be judged harshly.
http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2014/04/common_core_tests_are_tough_fo.html
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I’m not the first to say that CCSS is a red herring, a distraction. Take away the testing and there’s not much there. RTTP and NCLB, even waivers require some kind of more rigorous standards, whatever that means. Take away the testing,and we’re back to where we were before, some state standards, most of which revolved around a fairly national curriculum as defined by textbooks which were written for the largest markets.
That’s not all that bad. Progressive states and districts could be progressive. We had some cover for flexibility and even innovation.
But take down the present incarnation, and we should for many reasons, and in many places we need to be ready for a much tougher fight. The far right move back to the past won’t go away. Pearson won’t go away, and in fact may profit even Morris; states and districts will still buy magic curriculum. Testing may not go away. Thar’s gold in them hills …
No one opposing CCSS except the Tea Party types (and therefore their founders) has articulated a post-CCSS landscape – not one that will get traction is schools, districts, and states. While many of us are screaming against CCSS, states are passing bills requiring cursive and memorizing math facts. I hear calls at anti-CCSS rallies for teaching math procedures without understanding (actual words); I hear calls for creationism. These people are organized and driven and well-funded where it counts.
One side has a coherent post-CCSS vision for education and a powerful grip in many statehouses. Whether we need a coherent vision is not a slam dunk; but we don’t have much sway in statehouses and/or the money and lobbyists.
It has crossed my mind that we may have fallen right into a well-baited trap and no is covering our flank.
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Peter, I have articulated an alternative many times on this very blog. Copying a post that I have made here many times in the past:
So, what’s the alternative? (Ed Deformers always ask this, expecting stunned silence in reply. Well, here’s the alternative.)
An open-source wiki to which are published, for every domain, in every subject, for varied learners, at every grade level, VOLUNTARY, COMPETING, ALTERNATIVE
standards
frameworks
sample lesson plans
model curricula
learning progressions (aka curriculum maps)
pedagogical techniques, strategies, and rationales
model assessments (diagnostic, formative, and performance)
texts
in a variety of formats (including video)
prepared by independent scholars, researchers, curriculum developers, practitioners (teachers, curriculum coordinators, other administrators), and professionals in various fields
That’s how you get innovation.
You don’t get it via regimentation, standardization, and top-down mandates from a national Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth, from a national curriculum and pedagogy Thought Police.
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Bob, I know and appreciate what you’ve written. I’ve got a vision for math as well.
But my point is that neither of us have the clout (sorry, maybe you do) to go anywhere with it where it now apparently counts. Legislatures. And the other side,the one that does have growing clout does. The one that opposes innovation, creativity, even critical thinking.
When I say post-CCSS landscape, I don’t mean as if they never happened; they did, and may have energized in a perverse way some well-organized, well-funded groups. Few readers of this blog are well-funded, I think.
I keep thinking of what it will look like after CCSS goes away, at least the mandated CCSS, and I see a lot of valuable land up for grabs, and some serious,powerful folks ready to grab it, and with no intention of backing off, giving up money, power, or ideology. I certainly don’t see a big push to grant teachers or schools autonomy, much less respect.
I think we’re on the same page about a lot of this. I’m already assuming CCSS will go away. I think that May have been the plan. So how do we get where we should go? Apparently it won’t happen in Kansas.
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I think the marketing and political campaign around it is weird, frankly.
The Vox piece was typical. The Common Core tests are “working!”
Come one. What does this gleeful coverage even mean? The bandwidth capacity and computer program(s) are “working!”
It just solidifies my whole concern that there’s this technocratic, narrow view of this that so trumps everything else and will continue to trump everything else.
If it doesn’t work for students and teachers, it isn’t “working”. They’re the intended users. ALL of the rest of these people don’t matter, at all.
I don’t care if they want to capture data, or set a “baseline score”, or set up computer capacity for some future iteration of testing. Their goal is not my goal. They are supposed to be working FOR teachers and students. That’s the client, not some DC consultant or “thought leader”.
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Peter, I would LOVE to hear what you have to say about math standards. Your posts are always well written and thoughtful.
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Thanks, Bob. The short version (I really am a math teacher and have been a coordinator,) is problem solving, building understanding, multiple representations, making connections. I go between what’s really done in AP Calculus to AP Statistics to what’s in Montessori. Or when I ask my six year old granddaughter to use six dice and make the up faces add to 18, then do it all with the same number. And don’t show her.
The AP maths do have pretty pretty well-defund content and a good exam. But elsewhere, I’m comfortable without bullet lists. But I’ll have to say that I’ve changed a lot in my perspective from the Algebra teacher who taught factoring and FOIL as magic tricks.
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Peter
Your call for an alternate landscape is a red herring.
There was quite a vivid landscape pre 2012 (CC) and even pre 2002 (NCLB). this repeated request for an alternative to CCSS is professionally insulting. By asking the question, you are implying that we had no idea how or what to teach until David Coleman bequeathed us with the CCSS.
See if this parable makes sense to you.
My next door neighbor has been playing very loud and disturbing music all night long. The music contains offensive lyrics and is preventing my kids from getting a full nights sleep. As a result, my children’s progress in school is being negatively impacted. Their constantly tired, cranky, and have trouble doing their homework.
And the music keeps playing, all night long.
I finally called my neighbor and demanded that he stop playing his music. Gave him all the good reasons any rational parent would need to stop. Tired kids. Inappropriate lyrics. Schoolwork suffering; parents being driven crazy; very frustrating. Please stop the madness, I mean music I pleaded.
My neighbor responded:
“I won’t stop playing my music until you tell me what to do instead?”
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NY,, I think you missed my point. I’m not calling for any particular landscape. I’m saying that post-CCSS (which I hope for), there will be a lot up for grabs and a lot of powerful grabbers.
Those grabbers may be the same entities behind CCSS.
Meanwhile. Bob and Bill spend a lot of time arguing about CCSS. I think CCSS are toast; at least the mandate for them.
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NY teacher,
LOL!
I think Linda said one time..it is like we are being hit on the head with a hammer. When we ask them to stop, they insist we give alternatives.
How about just stop hitting me in the head!?
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So you’re a “no standards” guy too, Ang, right?
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Precisely.
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“So you’re a no standards guy, too,” Bill says. A standard tactic from the Deformers of our educational system: the ad hominem attack.–people who oppose the Common [sic] Core [sic] don’t have any standards, have low standards, are opposed to standards. They just want to continue being sloppy and failing and passing kids through the system without their having learned anything. And why, because they have no standards.
These fools who are pushing this deformation of our beloved public school system have one talent, certainly–controlling the debate by framing the terms in which the debate is held–the Doublespeak technique. The states created these standards. That’s why they are called “State” standards. (LOL) They reflect what everyone wants kids to know and to be able to do. That’s why they are called “Common” standards. (LOL again) And so on. . . .
Common. Base, vulgar.
Core. Of the pit, the indigestible portion.
State. Of the Leviathan–the distant, centralized, totalitarian authority.
Standards. Specifications for identical milling of machine parts.
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It’s not an accusation, Bob. I thought you distinguished between standards and your notion of a “general framework.” Is there any existing ELA standard you think is ok?
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Bill, my reply is too long to post here. See my note at the bottom of the page.
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Bill,
So you’re a “no standards” guy too, Ang, right?
No.
I am not a guy at all.
Thank you.
However, I am a Bob Shepherd kind of gal.
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The key point in that article is that curriculum will be readjusted to better prepare the students for the exam (since the last exam asked questions which had not been covered by the curriculum). Please note the exams are given in February (half way through the year) with additional exams or finals in May and June.
If that’s not teaching to the test, I don’t know what is!
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The very idea of a single, invariant, bullet list of ELA “standards” that are, in every domain, for every ability to be measured, identically formulated as highly abstract descriptions of skills, as if one could rationally make a list, so formulated, for everything that might be worth learning in the areas of reading, writing, speaking, listening, thinking, and research, is just ludicrous on the face of it.
Never mind that we previously had such bullet lists state “standards,” lists that were similarly ridiculous–all of them products of lowest-common-denominator groupthink. Fortunately, for various reasons, people didn’t adhere, in many of their activities, from writing textbooks to planning their lessons, as closely to those “standards” as they are, like flies on flypaper, to the Common [sic] Core [sic]. Teachers and curriculum directors and curriculum coordinators took those state standards with not just a grain but a bucket of salt. No more. The new national bullet list is being treated like the LAW brought down from the mountaintop–only this set of commandments, unlike the one brought down from Sinai or Horeb by Moses (choose your text for that one), runs to 1,600 items.
So, to switch metaphors, we were able to limp along with the cannonball of the state standards manacled to our ankles because it was a small one.
Not anymore. Now we are chained to a freaking tank being driven by the noneducators of the CCSSO and being dragged along.
Anyone who wants actually to THINK about curricula or pedagogy has to follow the new NATIONAL PLAN conceived by that vastly experienced scholar of pedagogical technique, theory, and design Lord David Coleman. (He once looked for teaching jobs for a while but didn’t find one, so he REALLY knows what he’s doing.)
I have been very, very busy with other work, but from time to time I have been working on my book length deconstruction of the breathtakingly amateurish “standards” in ELA. That’s been fun. It’s child’s play, really, to identify the problems with these “standards.” The difficulty is that THERE ARE SO MANY OF THOSE PROBLEMS, and at SO MANY DIFFERENT DESIGN LEVELS.
I have a heuristic for determining whether someone knows the first thing about teaching English: I simply find out whether he or she is a member of the Common [sic] Core [sic] pom pon squad and glee club.
The new “standards” are a bad joke on the entire country, and the authors of them should long ago have been laughed off the national stage. The proper response to them is DERISION.
And, the whole undertaking of promulgating a single, invariant, mandatory bullet list for the purposes of extrinsic punishment and reward via testing was wrong from the start.
No “standards” formulated like these would ever be remotely acceptable, and a very, very strong case can made against having atomized standards at all but for having, instead, a few adaptable, non-mandatory, general guidelines that allow the degrees of freedom within which programs can be customized for learners and true innovation in curricula and pedagogical techniques can take place.
Here, some short pieces I have written about some of the “standards”:
http://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/category/education-deform/
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Most CCSS opponents don’t admit it, but in the end, the logic rejecting these standards does leads rejecting standards of most any kind. And, in the end, that’s also the argument in favor of CCSS.
Rick Hess makes a similar point from a different direction in his current blog post: http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/rick_hess_straight_up/2014/04/common_core_critics_cant_just_say_no.html?cmp=ENL-EU-NEWS2
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Not of any kind, Bill. The tool must be appropriate for the job. We have standards for the machining of nuts and bolts and screws (UF standards) because they are appropriate there. In ELA, beyond the most elementary levels, we should have general guidelines and frameworks, subject to crowd sourcing and continual refinement by the community of researchers, scholars, and practitioners.
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Anyone who thinks that these bullet lists are not grotesquely distorting and narrowing curricula and pedagogy and dramatically curtailing possible innovations in both areas isn’t paying attention.
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So Bill anyone not for CCS is for low standards or no standards at all? It’s the federal standards shoved down our throats vs. High standards that already existed in several states? Virginia kept theirs, so they will be failing to prepare their children for the future, right?
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I have always heaped scorn on these bullet lists, and so has every other experienced, qualified curriculum developer I know. No one ever took them very seriously because they were mostly ignorantly conceived. But, one could in the past pay lip service to the egregious “standards” and get away with it. Have you ever noticed that every program ever produced by any publisher was “perfectly aligned” to every set of standards ever produced by any district or state or national body? LOL. As I said, people took them with a grain of salt. But no more. People are following the idiotic bullet list slavishly, and so the idiocies of the bullet list matter now. They matter a lot.
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It amuses me to know end that people refer to this drek from Coleman and company as “higher” standards. Or it would if the consequences of actually believing that weren’t so serious.
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We meet again Bill.
So let me get this straight. Common Core standards were developed and then imposed by non-educators while ignoring the input and feedback of experienced classroom teachers. experts in cognitive learning theory and child development specialists. Then attached to these poorly crafted standards, are tests that require “proper” implementation in order to maintain one’s reputation or career. And this is the same as rejecting well written standards produced by experienced educators without the attached threat but with the flexibility to use our professional judgement. For crying out loud, you write as if we were picking our units and topics out of a wishing well. What the heck do you think we were doing before this mess was foisted upon us. You epitomize the professionally insulting nature of all that is Common Core.
Just in case you have a change of heart Bill:
In 4 days, 3,312 letters/emails have been sent to Washington DC by outraged parents and educators from all across the country. Read their comments and add your own feelings and experiences.
STOP COMMON CORE TESTING.
http://www.petition2congress.com/15080/stop-common-core-testing
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Trouble is, NY Teacher, 217 teachers in NH felt their feedback was put to good use and were pleased with the outcome. http://anhpe.org/2013/12/04/writing-the-common-core-standards-teachers-on-the-ground-were-deeply-involved/
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And what changes were they allowed to make?
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As you can see, they feel as if they made many global and detailed changes and were heard. States, in addition to NH, suggested that speaking and listening be included, for instance. The physical organization of the ELA standards was a NH suggestion. They redlined Word docs and saw those changes appear in the next draft.
It’s hard to see how, especially as teachers of just one of many states, they could have had much more influence…
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Not sure what Bill has to compare to before CCS as he had not been in classrooms either as a real teacher or an observer. He is commenting on what he sees now as though we never though critically, solved problems, gathered data, respected children etc before Gates and Coleman came along. He also has a digital data scheme going. Maybe he can tell us more about that someday. He thinks he is an authority on CCS because he knows some teachers who he says love it. Wow…there’s your DATA.
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Thank you Linda. that is the perfect point. And as far as input and feedback the vast majority of us were ambushed by the CCSS.
No teacher I know had ever heard about the CCSS until AFTER New York State signed on. Your credibility is slipping.
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Bill,
Did you say you want us to start posting comments on your blog? Do you want to risk having us contaminate the happy happy New Hampshire teachers? I would be hard pressed to find teachers who are satisfied with the ELA standards. I am constantly left scratching my head.
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Your straw man is falling apart, Bill.
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Bill, again I am confused. What standards or guidelines did Indiana use prior to CC? Surely there wasn’t anarchy in the public schools. And if Indiana needed standards, why not modify the successful standards developed by other states (which should have been the starting point for CC)?
If just doesn’t pass the smell test.
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I’m not sure why you want to debate Indiana. It is all well documented: http://anhpe.org/2014/04/17/mushrooming-critiques-of-indianas-alternative-to-the-common-core/
They had among the best standards before CCSS. Switched to CCSS. And now are making changes to CCSS for their new standards.
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Bill – My understanding from the article is that Indiana rejected CCSS and are now at a loss of what to do. Of course, I don’t put much faith in what the Fordham folks say.
Why are they scrambling to get a new set of standards when you state that they already had excellent standards which they had successfully implemented? Fordham says they are “lost” without the Common Core to guide them.
I’m just trying to understand and figure out what has gone wrong in NYS. I have looked at the Common Core Standards and found many horrors, especially in the early grades. Many of us feel the same way, so we question your support of what we find abominable.
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I do see a lot of reference here to “a lot of us” and “every teacher I know” objects to the standards, etc. I have talked to literally hundreds of NH teachers who have the opposite view. That’s the basis for my view.
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We all come here with the baggage we know.
My baggage is my fellow teachers in NYS. They tell a different story than your friends in NH.
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My point, precisely.
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“Most CCSS opponents don’t admit it, but in the end, the logic rejecting these standards does leads rejecting standards of most any kind.”
Uh, no. On two counts. First, it would certainly be possible to reject these standards in favor of ones that were not amateurishly prepared, and second, the applicable criteria are not logical but empirical.
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Robert – I love your allusion to Alice in Wonderland. From caucus race, to the Mad Hatter, to the illusive rabbit, to the evil Queen, the parallels are uncanny.
Unfortunately, I’m afraid we are not asleep and there will be no wakeful return to reality.
To quote another children’s novel – “Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore!”
And if we are in Oz, there are only a few of us not wearing those green glasses.
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It is the standardized-across-the-nation part that bothers me and always has. My gut just says no. We don’t need a curriculum that is followed in scripts, prescribed approaches and regulated by tests across the entire United States. That is yucky. It doesn’t feel American to me. Standards are fine. But the CCSS takes it too far, in my opinion and in my comfort level for what I value about being an American citizen. It elevates an ostensible universal agreement by some small force speaking for everyone too much and makes in punitive (with VAM). It’s uncomfortable in a way that alerts anyone who values their rights to interpret life, literature, how to do a math problem, etc. to its ills. I noticed it the minute I walked back into a school after three years out. The Soviet Union did come to mind. I went searching for answers and found this blog.
And so many people feel like they have to find something nice to say about CCSS. I can recognize strengths in things too, but the overall gestalt of a national curriculum (a national set of truths. . .imagine that! a national way of thinking. . .imagine that! a national way to do a math problem. . .yikes. . .a national way to interpret literature and write about and think about it. . .yuck). Shall we have one national set of songs too? That have to be played a certain way? And no others? I don’t feel the need to have to say something nice about that scenario, even as Pollyanna as I am wont to be. I do recognize, though, that they are a reality all around us and we have to be realistic about how far down this road we are and where to go next.
That’s my two cents. I appreciate conversations about how to go from where we are, because contracts have been signed whether we like it or not (although there are attorneys who specialize in contract law. . .). If the standards are dropped in states that adopted them, it has to be done responsibly and with great concern for children.
I love Colbert’s report on CCSS. So funny.
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It’s not the implementation. It’s a) the amateurish “standards” and b) the misconceived notions about what a standard ought to look like in the various domains.
See this:
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And this:
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and this:
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And this:
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I think Bill wants the sparknotes. 🙈🙉🙊
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Bill strikes me as a dedicated educator. He has spoken out clearly against the testing. He is willing to engage. I hold out hope there that he will come to understand that people who know something bout the teaching of English find these “standards” extraordinarily ill-conceived and dangerous for our country for sound reason.
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He’s not an educator. He maintains a pro CCS blog and talks to teachers once in a while.
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ob,
re: “Bill strikes me as a dedicated educator.”
It is my understanding that Bill claims no education background.
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I thought that this guy was a principal or superintendent. I speaks of how he is always talking to teachers and seeing what they are doing with the Core and how much they just LOVE being Cored.
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And he seems so earnest. Not knowledgeable about these purported “standards,” clearly, but earnest.
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and this:
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Ok. On your “brief” critique of two ELA standards: First, it’s not brief enough 🙂
Second, I don’t think the sarcasm (use of SIC and $$ and the other verbal tics) helps your case.
Third, I don’t end up knowing whether you would explicitly teach 8th graders – or students at any level – what a gerund or infinitive is and, if you would, I can’t tell when or how. You seem to be saying that, since there is so much science and subtlety involved, the teaching must either be done strictly by use of the language or by getting into the whole subject is such detail as to make it wrong for 8th graders and probably entirely impractical.
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Go back and read the post more closely, Bill. I do not go into any detail, for the post is already quite long, but I make a distinction, a very important distinction, between acquisition of grammatical competence and explicit knowledge of grammatical forms. In the former case, there are methods not even hinted at in the CC$$ that are appropriate. In the latter case, the instruction, as I mentioned, would have to be properly sequenced, which is not the case in the CC$$. Again, these ideas are in the piece, if you read it closely enough.
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Yes, both those ideas and their contradictions are in the post. Just tell me in a couple of understandable sentences you would teach grammar to who whom?
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But that’s one of the big problems with all this, Bill. For people to understand why the “standard” doesn’t work, there is a lot that they have to know, first, about learning in the area covered by the standard and how it takes place and about the better alternatives that the “standard” precludes. And your typical CC$$ pom pon squad member doesn’t want to sit still for that stuff because it cannot be communicated in sound bites. In the past 50 years, we have learned a great deal about how grammatical competence is acquired. There are whole sciences devoted to this. NONE OF WHAT HAS BEEN LEARNED THERE is reflected in these backward, prescientific, ignorant “standards.”
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Bob, if your premise is that no one but a peer specializing in your kind of scientific study of language is capable of understanding how children should be taught, and everyone else is pom pom wavers, how can your notion of “general guidelines” be expected to guide the teaching of 50 million children?
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Bill
Its your turn.
Please provide the one best, most innovative, and important CC standard that we had somehow overlooked for the past 70 years?
Just one ELA standard. And only the best.
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“Read closely,” the benefit of which is that it is not innovative.
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Yes we were all reading distantly before (in the dark on slate tablets in the woods) sitting on sheep skin while muddling through it all. Thank The Lord Coleman came along and saved us all. You are a parrot for the BBC Bill. They must love you. Yawn 😴
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I had to attend an in-service where we “read closely” a boring reading passage (2 pages long) 3x, looking for various assigned factors each time.
The worst in-service of my life – and I’m an excellent reader.
I pity the children who have to do this on a regular basis.
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CCSS isn’t responsible for every bad in-service held in its name. The standards do depend on good teaching, though.
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It wasn’t the in-service,but the idea that a piece had to be read three times to look for erroneous information. If I was bored to tears, what would happen to the students?
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$500 million dollars to teach kids to pay close attention to what they read. Seriously?
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You fool me every time, NY teacher. I keep thinking we’re going to have a real discussion.
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In addition, when close reading was translated into MC items on a timed test it was an absolute DISASTER. As Bob would say, it was like measuring the surface area of your driveway with a anemometer.
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Ask Lucy Caulkins what she thinks…she’s getting feedback from all over the country and thinks the test is looking pretty good.
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Then you have selected certain comments only because that is NOT accurate if you have kept up with testingtalk.org. Wow….you have tunnel vision Bill.
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No, I saw the comments – I watch only Smarter Balanced – and was concerned about them but it turned out the there were very few, and they trailed off in frequency, and there were a number of positive ones. Beyond that, it was Lucy who reported that her feedback was better than expected.
Plus, the feedback from NH – including from Nashua – seems generally positive so far.
Beyond the fact that there should be less testing, which is an NCLB issue, there could still be real issues with Smarter Balanced. We’ll just have to see.
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Your teaching credentials?
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This isn’t a real discussion. Pardon my style, the level of frustration here in NY is making many off us cranky.
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Forgot the [?]
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Ironically Bill we are waitng for that too and from you. Same talking points from months ago.
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Lucy Caulkins is a shill for the CCSS
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How do you ever get anywhere if everyone who disagrees with you is a shill?
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I haven’t talked to one ELA teacher that wasn’t appalled at the length, content, and difficulty with the Pearson exam. Not one. Zero teachers in favor of the CCSS ELA test (grades 3 to 8)
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Standing offer: put me in touch with them and I’ll interview them for my web site.
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Put read the PARCC (spell that backward) tweets. EVERYONE LOVES the new tests. Everyone is just all warm and fuzzy about them.
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There’s no reason there shouldn’t be a variety of opinion on the tests, Bob. Why make a parody of it?
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I have yet to meet or hear from a single teacher who approves of these tests, and I know a great deal about them, Bill, and can demonstrate that they are invalid, that they do not measure what they claim to be measuring, and that they distort curricula, which follows their lead.
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What is your critique of the tests, Bob?
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Bill, I am writing a book about the ridiculous “standards.” One could easily write a book about the problems with the tests. Basically, they are a tool that is not up the the task. They remind me of Walter Freeman using an ice pick and mallet to do brain surgery. They do not measure what their authors believe them to be measuring and they cannot.
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These are not questions that can be answered in soundbites. One has to look at a) the actual abilities that are purportedly being measured, b) the ways in which these are translated into operational descriptions that are measurable, and c) then at the tools being used for measurement. There are major problems with both b) and c). The tests do not measure what they purport to be measuring because the operational definitions are FUBAR and because, at any rate, the tools being used are not up to that job. There are other problems as well–the most important being that a) extrinsic punishment and reward is inherently demotivating for cognitive tasks, as a lot of research shows; b) there is rampant statistical chicanery, so much so that one can only call what they are doing numerology; c) because they are high stakes, they distort, grotesquely, both curricula and pedagogical approaches, which end up being modeled on them, and so they have enormous opportunity cost; d) they provide little real information and yet are enormously time consuming and expensive; and e) they are abusive to kids.
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Back before NCLB, many of the leading education thinkers in the country were writing a lot about how testing should disappear into instruction as diagnostics, formatives, and performatives. Some of the leading voices saying that then completely changed their tune when they saw how lucrative it was going to be to support this standards-and-testing madness–when they got a look at that great river of Plutocrat green. So, quite a few sell-outs, there.
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But that is still a strong theme. Some states will probably be looking for ways to do less state-wide testing and more locally driven assessment.
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Little parody is needed, Bill. These tests are so badly constructed that they parody themselves.
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If there not shills than they’re ignorant or afraid.
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If Lucy Caulkins really thought the Pearson ELA test was “pretty good” than she is being paid off by Pearson. I believe you are however referring to the new PARCC and SBAC computer tests currently being field tested. And if she thinks they are looking good she is delusional. Nor does she understand the degree to which they will test a students computer and key boarding skills. A very biased format for any learning disabled, dyslexic, ELL, or loe SES student.
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Ok. The most influential reading and writing teacher around, as far as I can tell, is either paid off or delusional. Name just one person who doesn’t agree with you who is not a shill or paid off or delusional or ignorant.
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You?
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Actually Bill, Lucy commented on testingtalk in reference to the option of making the testing of the federal standards like the NAEP where a small % of children are tested and only three grade levels. You should read all of her comments more carefully.
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Yes, she did. I agree with her and have made the case for that in several ways on my site. That’s a different issue entirely from whether the current tests are working within the current testing requirements. The testing consortia can’t correct the problems of NCLB.
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Bill
Wake up and smell the Plutocracy.
We are living in a neo-liberal, fascist state.
the games are all rigged and everyone who’s anyone is in bed together frolicking around in a giant pile of cash.
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Bill “Read closely” is a general guideline attached to these “standards.” And of course, we didn’t “read closely” before. We only imagined the millions of person-hours that we spent walking kids through works of literature. We only imagine the hundreds of thousands of pages of carefully, step by step guided reading questions in literature textbooks. We actually just tried to hold the texts up to the light to see if they would speak to us. We didn’t know that you had to “read” them. Not until Lord Coleman explained that to us.
GET REAL.
It’s really obnoxious that Ed Deformers keep making these comments. You should read texts closely. That’s like telling doctors, you should start trying to heal your patients. It’s insulting and ignorant. The comment reveals a complete lack of familiarity with what has been standard practice FOREVER. Explication de texte was a NINETEENTH CENTURY approach. New Critical approaches DOMINATED throughout the twentieth century.
Coleman opens his mouth and sounds like he has no clue whatsoever. It’s astonishing that people take this insulting, ignorant, presumptuous drek seriously.
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I know, Bob. I just threw it out there as bait. When you start from the political position that the standards are corrupt then the discussion of the standards themselves is just an opportunity to attack.
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According to you and that’s one opinion. Move on Bill.
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Bill, again, all politics aside, I think that these standards are incredibly amateurish, that they distort current pedagogy and curricula, and that they dramatically limit possibilities for development of future pedagogy and curricula.
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Yes, Bob, I know that “incredibly amateurish, that they distort current pedagogy and curricula” is your mantra, but you sound like a critical theorist who, once giving the stage to explain your alternative standards, launches into long logic trails that don’t lead to something a teacher could teach by.
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Bob has credential and you don’t so we will all go with Bob. Really Bill you maintain a pro CCS website. You visited some classrooms post CCS. Impressive.
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Bill, I have written some fifty textbooks in grammar, literature, writing, speech, and research that are widely used by teachers throughout the United States at all levels, K through college, and I have edited many, many more. I actually know something about all this.
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I have not suggested otherwise, Bob. I’m just responding to what I see in our exchange.
And is your opinion widely shared in your profession? I thought NCTE, for instance, was pretty supportive. They certainly played a role in development.
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NCTE played no role in the development. NCTE was asked to comment on a fait accompli. It produced a very long list of recommendations for changes. These were all ignored. I mistakenly said that I had not met a single English teacher who was supportive of the standards; I take that back. I did meet one, on this blog, who used to be an English teacher but is now an administrator who is highly supportive of them but who actually supports not the standards themselves but a few generalizations that serve, in her mind, in lieu of what the standards actually say (read substantive texts; read them closely).
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This letter http://www.ncte.org/standards/common-core/response was written almost a year before the standards were finalized, Bob.
It looks to me as if NCTE were invited, did play a role and are now supportive.
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Time for me to ask some questions. I have answered many of yours. What is the source of funding of your organization, Bill? What are your connections to the Gates Foundation, the CCSSO, or other such organizations pushing standards-based education deform? A Google search on your name reveals that you made money in the software business. What sort of software, for whom?
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I, personally, am the only source of the modest level of funding involved. No connection to Gates, CSSO or any education advocacy organization.
My reason to get involved in defending NH public education was the large number of anti-education bills in the NH legislature in 2012, particularly a voucher tax credit bill. All except the voucher bill were defeated. I’m a plaintiff on the state supreme court challenge to the law.
As the ANHPE web site makes clear, I oppose the current ed reform wave but see no valid basis for discounting the wide NH consensus among educators that, in a state like ours, with no high-stakes testing or scripted curricula, the new standards are a tangible step forward and promote good teaching.
My company made hotel software.
So there you have it. No qualifications as an analyst, but no ulterior motive, either.
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Excellent, Bill. Hotel software. That’s an interesting business, seriously. Congratulations on your successful entrepreneurship, and good luck in the challenge to the voucher bill.
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Bill, I do have skin in that game. I have spend several decades as a textbook developer. All the money, these days, is coming from Education Deform sources, so by refusing to take part in these Deforms, I am missing many opportunities to make a great deal of money. But I won’t do that because the deforms are bad for kids, bad for teachers, bad for the profession that I love.
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I do respect that, Bob.
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Bill, again, I have read the NCTE recommendations. None were implemented. This same sort of thing has happened in the textbook industry for eons. The publisher creates a book. It then solicits “feedback” on sample lessons from teachers and various EduPundits. It pays them for this. Then it puts their names and pictures up front and makes the claim that they developed the text when, in fact, they wrote exactly NONE of the material.
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I’m not saying that a minority view opposing CCSS ELA is not valid because it’s a minority view. But when its very much a minority view and leads to an alternative I can can only see as vague – and good NH teachers are enthusiastic about those same standards….they look good enough to me. (And based on her MLA speech, Diane appears to agree.)
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It’s not a minority view, Bill. Until very recently, most people had never heard of these standards. Even a lot of English teachers I knew had never read them.
As people come to know them, they will come to hate them, for they are extremely amateurish, puerile work. Really, Gates and Pearson should ask Coleman for their money back. One would have gotten a similar document by going to a small town Rotary Club and asking the assembled insurance salesmen and owners of local hair salons to hack together a list of “stuff to learn in English class” based on what they remembered from back in the day. A complete hack job. Embarrassingly bad.
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Just because you were once a student doesn’t make you an expert on education.
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I stayed at a holiday inn express so I have expertise on hotel software. Want to hear?
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Ha, ha!
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If opposition to the CC$$ in ELA is still a minority, it is so only because people are not up to speed yet. Not surprising, that, given that this work was basically cooked up in a backroom and then foisted on everyone else. It overrules every teacher, curriculum developer, and curriculum coordinator in the country. And most have not even read these purported “standards” yet. To know them is to be appalled by them. There is a great groundswell of opposition rising as we speak. And much of that is informed opposition. Thee people overplayed their hand. They did not consult with knowledgeable scholars and researchers in the various domains that they wrote standards for, and it shows in every bit of what they did, at various design levels of the final product. Now that these putative “standards” are actually in play, people are seeing the problems. Again, few have actually read them. I intend to expose them for what they are, the work of utter amateurs.
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Well, it won’t be all that long, in terms of these kinds of things, before the standards will probably be reopened for revision.
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We don’t need a Politburo telling us what we can think, Bill, meeting to lay out its next five-year plan.
Ecologies are healthier than are monocultures.
And the whole undertaking was wrong from the start.
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I am asking because I have found that zealous advocates of the Common Core and of this standardized testing typically turn out ot have skin in one of those games.
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Which is why Bill won’t give a direct answer. I have asked many time before and on other thread. There’s an angle. He will dodge but still pontificate.
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It’s been loads of fun. I have work to do now.
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And Lucy Caulkins is not a shill?
Lucy Calkins is the Founding Director of the Reading and Writing Project LLC and the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project as well as the Robinson Professor in Children’s Literature at Teachers College where she co-directs the Literacy Specialist Program. She has authored several books about teaching writing, and she has recently co-authored a book, Pathways to the Common Core: Accelerating Achievement.
Much of the speech was directly lifted from her article, “Explore the Common Core” where she advocates for teachers to embrace the Common Core to be a “a co-constructor of the future of instruction and curriculum, and indeed, of public education across America.” She writes,
“As challenging as it must have been to write and finesse the adoption of the Common Core State Standards, that accomplishment is nothing compared to the work of teaching in ways that bring all students to these ambitious expectations.The goal is clear.The pathway is not.”
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A “a co-constructor of the future of instruction and curriculum, and indeed, of public education across America.”
Seriously? This is the premiere teacher of reading and writing. probably never spent one period teaching a class of 8 year olds.
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Ok, I’m signing off. But my offer to you and Bob stands: I’ll be glad to interview any of those numerous classroom teachers you both cite as opposed to the Common Core and put what they say on my web site.
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Bill, if you will reread my post, you will learn that the term “grammar” is ambiguous. Do you mean grammar in the sense of internalized competence in the construction and interpretation of sentences employing gerunds and infinitives in the many different ways in which they are used in English? Or do you mean grammar in the sense of explicit labels for forms? These are very different competencies. The latter is not terribly useful, but again, if you wanted to teach the latter (for god knows what reasons), you would have to build up to it. You would want to teach, over the course of several years, an explicit, contemporary scientific model of English syntax, and these topics would appear pretty far along the learning progression. Some argument might be made that such a model would be useful to know as a language with which to describe syntactic options in discussions of writing, but I would agree only if one committed to teaching a simplified model of the whole of the syntax and this as part of it. As it is, the grammar topics in the CC$$ are almost all ones related to explicit description of grammatical forms and so irrelevant to to competence in reading, writing, listening, and speaking. This is a long conversation, Bill. It would help if you first read a basic book on contemporary scientific models of grammar–something like one of Radford’s surveys, for example. Then what I am saying here would make sense to you.
But clearly the authors of the CC$$ were entirely ignorant of what is now known of how grammatical competence is acquired. If they had had any understanding of that, then much of these “standards” would be entirely different. For example, there would be diagnostic testing of children’s speech on entry to K-12 to learn about the model that they have internalized and the issues with that. Then there would be appropriate spoken-language intervention. But again, you won’t understand why that’s so until you first learn something about how grammars are acquired. They are not acquired through explicit instruction.
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Bill, save yourself some trouble. Go read the comments about the Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic] posted by teachers on TestingTalk.org. This site would put up by a bunch of folks who are CC$$ apologists (that pays very well these days), and I think they were shocked to find that the comments are 9-to-1 against the stupid “standards.”
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And, Bill, the grammar and other language topics in the CC$$ appear completely AT RANDOM throughout the learning progression. No coherence whatsoever. No understanding that if one WERE going to teach an explicit model, there would be prerequisites throughout. Topics would build on one another. And, of course, what is described, in completely random snippets in the CC$$, are bits and pieces of a prescientific, folk theory of grammar that bears little relation to modern, scientific understandings of the same.
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There should be a special circle of hell for the big name educational “consultants” who are now shilling for the Common Core because doing so happens, right now, to be profitable. One of these, and I will not name names, built a HUGE REPUTATION on arguing in workshops, books, conference presentations, and in consulting gigs with state departments and districts, that testing should NOT BE SUMMATIVE but should be FORMATIVE. Now this person is one of the biggest Common Core shills. This person TURNED ON A DIME THERE as soon as it became clear who was writing the big checks these days.
There are many such.
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I just can’t buy the notion, common in anti-CCSS circles, that all supporters are ignorant or self-interested shills. For one thing, as you just agreed, supporters are in the majority, even if only temporarily.
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There are few loud members of the CC$$ pom pon squad who also just happen to be making a great deal of money in those roles. Money talks. The Gates Foundation has poured half a billion dollars into creating the support for these standards. Why? Well, Gates and Pearson are partners in a computer-adaptive educational software revolution, and they needed a single national bullet list to tag their software to. A lot of people have been bought and/or played. But that gig is just about up. What has happened there is becoming very, very clear, and these people are being exposed for the Vichy swine that they are.
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This is details, but Pearson has no corner on computer adaptive. And it’s not their algorithm that SBAC is using. And PARCC appears not to be doing computer adaptive.
I don’t really think the big computer company conspiracy rational holds up in the end. There is no new market being created here.
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There is an enormous new market being created there, Bill. And like all new market spaces, it has been completely overhyped.
I am, BTW, a HUGE supporter of technology in education and even of computer-adaptive technology, used appropriately.
Bil, before NCLB, we were starting to make some progress on teaching reading, writing, literature, grammar. Some of what we have learned in each area was starting to take hold and grow. Then, these deforms, NCLB and now Son of NCLB, stopped all of that COLD. The Common Core as written PRECLUDES much of what we should be doing in ELA. It takes us far, far BACKWARD.
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NCLB was a disaster for American education in just the way you describe and it continues to be, even when parts of it get waived.
NCLB dramatically expanded the testing market. CCSS and its tests did not.
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You are seriously misinformed. We have more testing now than we have over the past 25 years. Get out more Bill.
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Bill Common Core + PARCC or SBAC is NCLB on steroids. Same idea, but even more dramatically dangerous because the idiocy is perpetrated nationally and taken more seriously.
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You have to be kidding me, Bill. CCSS is all about the testing. I have seen about 50 CCSS-inspired programs come across my desk–all filled with exercises modeled on the new tests. CCSS has spread testing like a cancer through all the curricula.
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What drives the extent of testing the the still in place NCLB. If it went away, far fewer, if any, systems would do annual summative assessments on every child every year in grades 3-8. And the market size would shrink. That’s all I’m saying.
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I agree entirely. The fact that we now have terrible national standards would be less of an issue if the tests weren’t driving everything because, as I say, people would silently correct or ignore the standards where they are ignorant, backward, unimaginative, prescientific, puerile, lacking in significance, etc.
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CCSS, Bill, is more of the same. More standards-and-testing. NCLB should have been a referendum on that failed approach. Ed Deformers have looked at an approach that failed and said, “Gee, we should do a lot more of that.” That is INSANE. But that’s what has happened. More standards-and-testing. What’s the big difference? Well, it’s been nationalized.
Let’s see: It was a really crappy idea, and it failed utterly, so let’s nationalize it.
YUP. That makes a LOT of sense.
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Let me give you an example. We now know that people learn vocabulary not through explicit instruction but via exposure to and use of new vocabulary in semantic groupings. So, you take an art class from the local Parks and Recreation Department, and in the course of a few weeks, you learn what a filbert brush is, what stippling and chiaroscuro area, names for various types of paints and other materials (titanium yellow light, gesso). And these stick because they are connected to one another and to a significant context that you have been engaged it. And, importantly, you have used and heard used not only the base words but also the words in their derivational and inflected forms. So you’ve actually learned to use them. A GREAT review of the research on all this can be found in George Miller’s masterful The Science of Words, from Scientific American press. So what do we find in the Common Core about vocabulary? Specific standards for teaching, explicitly, lists of prefixes, suffixes, and roots; standards on explicitly using context clues of various types; a standard on words from mythology; standards on learning words with multiple meanings; and so on. And these lead to lessons and curricular materials that teach to these standards specifically and explicitly, and there is enormous opportunity cost there, because THAT’S NOT HOW THE HUMAN MIND IS BUILT TO LEARN VOCABULARY. So, the well-intentioned “standards,” seemingly innocuous, lead to extremely counterproductive curricula and pedagogy with enormous OPPORTUNITY COSTS because it crowds out other approaches that actually wood be effective because they are based on what we have learned, scientifically, about how people ACTUALLY acquire the lexicon of a language. Is it a terrible thing to teach kids affixes and roots? NO, not in itself. But when this becomes THE MAJOR APPROACH because it’s what’s in the standards, something that would actually work has been crowded out. Do people use context clues to figure out meanings? Well, yes they do. But they do not use them explicitly, and teaching them to do that actually undermines the learning, as it would undermine teaching a kid how to walk if you tried to base this on having him or her think about how his or her tendons, muscles, and bones are moving.
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I agree with a lot of what you say here and I don’t want to use bad curricula as a copout, but I do think bad litteral curricula are not the fault of the standards.
I would agree with those who say that, look, after all, the standards aren’t that big a factor in creating great schools. They’re necessary for guidance and grade-to-grade coherence, but it’s still all about the teaching. Which means leadership in curriculum development and lesson plans developed locally and probably by a team.
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Bill, what you are not understanding is that people are rewriting curricula and changing their pedagogy to adhere to standard that are backward and to mimic tests that narrow reading, writing, and other activities in the English language arts to InstaReading and InstaWriting Test Prep.
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I would not disagree – and would not know enough to be the judge – that here could be more advanced methods for teaching reading and writing, including Don Graves’, than are codified in the standards. And I see the detailed workshopping that went into teaching teachers to teach that way. I don’t know what the obstacles to doing that at the scale required to guide teaching for 50 million children are, but you should work it out for the next revision. It’s not that far in the future.
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Bill Duncan, please let us know when the next revision of CC is scheduled. Or let us know when the first revision is scheduled. This seems to be a product so perfect that no one made any arrangements for any revisions at all.
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I would agree that it was a mistake – it is an ongoing error – for the revision not to be planned into the process. But I see no alternative to there being one. So I’m betting on it.
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The whole approach, Bill, of issuing an ossified, one-size-fits-all set of mandates for all teachers to follow slavishly is just ludicrous. Curricula and pedagogy are ONGOING enterprises, like genetics research or pharmaceutical development. At least they were before NCLB and Son of NCLB, NCLB Fright Night II: The Nightmare Is Nationalized. We have hundreds of thousands of researchers, scholars, and curriculum developers developing approaches in these domains ALL THE TIME, and before we started bullet-listing our approaches to instruction, a LOT of that innovative work was finding its way into classrooms. No more. Lord Coleman has, based on his vast knowledge and experience of English language arts pedagogy, has done the thinking for everyone else, until, that is, the Politburo meets yet again. What a tragically stupid approach. Bill, you would not think that we should have a centralized economic planning committee that sets prices and production quotas, tells people what they can buy in what quantities, and so on. So why on Earth would you think we should have centralized educational Thought Police?
Again, before this standards-and-testing madness, autonomous education professionals drew upon the ongoing work being done by scholars, researchers, and curriculum developers, and innovated in their classrooms and programs. And there was a lot of such innovation because it could go somewhere. No more. Now, people follow the script. And the script was written by tyros.
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Bill, unlike Ed Deformers who TALK about markets, I actually believe in a free market in ideas in curricula and pedagogy, in autonomous individuals putting forward ideas and those sinking or swimming in the marketplace of ideas, in which autonomous individuals chose among them, based on the merits of those ideas rather than on some centralized Thought Police’s mandates. Silly me. I think that an ecology is healthier than a monoculture is, that the community of scholars and researchers and practitioners AS A WHOLE AND ON AVERAGE knows more than David Coleman does. I have thought about approaches to instruction in the English language arts very seriously and specifically for thirty years. And I’ve actually put my ideas into materials and tried them out with students. I have studied and studied and studied this stuff. And I WOULD NOT DREAM of forcing everyone in the United States to do it my way. And why? Because I don’t have all the ideas, because a free marketplace of ideas is smarter than I am. And certainly smarter than David Coleman is.
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I have grown very, very tired of having educational publishers tell me, “No. You can’t do that. It’s not on the bullet list,” where THAT refers to any good idea about teaching and learning in the English language arts that has been developed over the past half a century or any idea based in contemporary scientific research into the cognitive psychology of learning or language acquisition. People who don’t actually work in curriculum development have NO NOTION what a complete HALT the Common Core has placed on any progress, whatsoever and, in fact, how far backward these “standards” (I want to spit when people refer to them using that term) have taken us.
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The Miller book is from Scientific American press. Miller was the great psychologist and linguist who formulated the “magical number 7, plus or minus 2” model for short-term memory. He was also a renowned expert on vocabulary acquisition.
The devil, Bill, is in the details, in the ways in which teachers and curriculum developers and curriculum coordinators react to these standards–in the specific pedagogical techniques and curricula that they end up employing because of them, and in the opportunity costs of those techniques.
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I agree
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And so it is with strand after strand, standard after standard–received, hackneyed, prescientific ideas have been ossified, precluding real progress.
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There are actually sciences of language acquisition, and those apply here, but nothing learned from them is reflected in the amateurish standards for vocabulary and the language strand. And don’t get me started on the standards for literature, writing, and informative texts. These are even worse. Pre-NCLB, we were actually making enormous strides in writing instruciton in this country, using the writing process/writing workshop models, championed, BTW, by yours truly and by New Hampshire’s own Graves. I wrote large parts of several leading textbooks employing these models.
Now, we teach InstaWriting to the Rubric for the Test.
All that progress, gone. Further progress, dead in the water. Except where teachers ignore Ed Deform and go ahead with good practices IN SPITE of the machine.
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Of course, it’s a little more subtle than that. Connected to the standards are some GENERAL IDEAS that aren’t half bad–read substantive texts, read them closely. And that gave the shills cause enough to equivocate and become supporters, which they were inclined to do anyway because doing so was going to be so lucrative. So, a number of them held their noses and went along for the very well remunerated, luxury ride.
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But the standards are not those general notions. They are a 1,600-item bullet list. And an incredibly amateurish list at that. And it’s that list that is now driving curricula, pedagogy, and assessment in this country, much to the detriment of all three.
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Please forgive the typos in my hastily written posts: wood for would, etc. Thanks.
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Some thoughts from a NYS math teacher:
Can anyone really unequivocally understand and interpret the standards as written…I know I have had great difficulty with this…are they purposefully written ambiguously…I often think people that claim to be the experts in the area are full of it.
If the purpose of all of this was to raise the bar for students nationally , then why didn’t we all use a set of standards and adjoining curriculum that had the best scoring outcomes ie. Massachusetts…is this because there would be less $$$ needed to implement a well-established curriculum?
Let’s face it…this is all about $$$$ and the push to privatize the public schools….period.
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You need a Rosetta stone to make sense of the math standards.
As a NYS math teacher I would suggest paying very close attention to the Pearson CCSS integrated algebra test in early June. DO NOT be afraid to look at the entire test. This test will be like the canary in the coal mine. Expect a TRAP, not a test, designed to trick, confuse, frustrate, tire out, and wear down the test takers into failing. The math tests will also prove to be test-prep-proof just like the ELA exams that were recently administered.
The entire country could not adopt the MA standards because that would have disabled Bill Gates business plan. If they were legitimately trying to produce reasonably high and apparently successful math standards, your idea makes perfect sense.
Clearly, that was not their goal.
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One more question to ponder:
Are the Common Core $tate $tandards ” too big to fail”?????
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Referring to one person is everyone? Geez Bill can you please think.
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That Lauren IS the $500 million dollar question!
On second thought,
is it TOO FLAWED to succeed?
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I would like to bequeath CC to Bill Duncan. He really likes them and faithfully defends them. Perhaps NGA and CCSSO will agree to transfer ownership so long as the individuals and corporations expecting fat profits from CC for years to come might agree to some modified custody arrangement. I’ll put in a good word,
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Let’s both bequeath them to teachers in all states without high-stakes testing or scripted curricula. The standards will be in good hands.
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From my hands to the fireplace….good hands indeed.
Back to teaching children not automatons.
You don’t even know what you don’t know Bill.
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Gee, Linda, what state do you teach in?
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Bill
Here’s what Linda is alluding to.
What you apparently don’t know or understand.
The CCSS were part of a package deal accepted by 45 states.
The “deal” was a waiver from NCLB punishments
The “package” required states to 1) adopt CCSS (as carved in stone); 2)CCSS aligned test by PARCC and SBAC; 3) Scores from these tests used to evaluate teacher performance (VAM); 4) Loosening restrictions on charter schools; 4) Data mining systems for student scoring
Very few states escaped this “offer that governors could not refuse”
You and your NH teachers are a few of the lucky ones. So please don’t come around here spouting (selling?) your magical potion for college and career readiness and maybe even the astronaut training program. Most of us that actually teach are in a very different boat than the lucky few. And its sinking fast.)
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You’ve got a bunch of errors in this rendition, NY teacher. The NCLB waiver did not require CCSS. VA, AK and TX all got waivers w/o adopting CCSS. PARCC/SBAC were not required. ACT, Pearson (separately from PARCC), CBT and others are all doing CCSS testing and there will be more, including Kansas State.
The use of the scores for teacher evaluation was a a heavy requirement initially but is receding now. (VAM wasn’t required in any case.) NH, for instance, got a late waiver and was able to negotiate no high-stakes testing.
The data mining assertion is totally bogus. The fact is that there are no new data reporting requirements with CCSS or the testing. No personally identifiable data needs to be reported to the feds. If you think InBloom is the culprit, NYS, the last customer InBloom had, has dropped them.
My point is that all these myths that surround CCSS are just political positions people like to repeat to oppose the standards. But when you look at the educational impact rather than the politics surrounding the standards, you see teachers doing just fine with it where it is well implemented, such as in NH, CA and other states.
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Crappy standards in good hands makes your offer pointless.
Thanks but no thanks.
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Forgot to mention. CCSS also came with a hidden agenda. Produce tests designed to fail in order to support their bogus claim that America’s schools are failing. Opening the door to Bill Gates snake oil cure: personalized, computer adaptive instruction and assessment.
As I told you earlier, its time to wake up and smell the plutocracy. The reformers, the politicians, the corporations, the lobbyists, and the consultants are all in bed together frolicking in a vey large pile of cash. A money orgy!
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Yes, I know there is a fear that raising the standards supports the privatizers’ argument that our schools have failed so we need to replace them with charters and vouchers.
We need to oppose that argument. But we can’t let fear of that argument be an obstacle to setting higher standards.
And, yes, people will say that if test scores are lower, the test is at fault. Tests are hated. But the new tests are much better than the bubble multiple choice tests and, if they get things wrong at first, they can be improved.
But the standards are higher. Multipart math problems are harder. Performance tasks are harder. Scores will be lower at first. It’s about setting higher standards.
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I liked the comments of one blogger –
You have common core, but what about my child who is uncommon? Where does he fit?
NH is pretty homogeneous, but NYS has much diversity, including refugees with little to no educational background and only a rudimentary ability in our English language. Surprise – they are failing the exam. And the schools which nurture them are being threatened with closure due to their low test scores.
This is the reality in NYS.
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We are more homogeneous, but we do have a lot of refugees in our largest cities. The real NYS problem is bad education policy.
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Bill – NYS having bad education policies – I can’t argue with that.
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Nothing doing, Bill. They’re all yours.
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These states are where?
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NH and CA among many others
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Not unless they lift the copyright.
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Not errors at all Bill. You seem to have forgotten that this package deal was offered not just for the sake of NCLB waivers but was the enticement for participating in the federal Race to the Top contest.
The more bells that a state rung (criteria met) the better their chances to WIN MONEY. This of course happened to coincide with the devastating impacts that the great recession was having on school districts all across the country. And yes, PARCC and SBAC were not required, however the alternative for states was to write very similar tests on their own while jumping through a zillion hoops along the way. Why else do you think that 90% of the states originally opted for PARCC or SBAC testing. No one knew at the time just how bad they would turn out or how expensive technology upgrades would be.
As far as VAM goes, it is synonymous with tying teacher evaluations to test scores so I’m not sure what you’re talking about. Data mining systems were one of the 5 main criteria for winning RTTT money. Go check out the RTTT website. To call these facts “myths” is being a bit more than disingenuous. From a very technical standpoint you may not be wrong but when you combine the cash incentive of RTTT, the NCLB waiver, the secrecy of development. the rush to implement, plus the $500 million dollars of Gates money that pushed this through with very little debate, and the exclusion of teachers, administrators, superintendents, and school boards from the table, your side is the one relying on myths and propaganda, not ours.
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You can defend this mess all you want but in the end CCSS will wind up on the ash heap of failed education reform movements. An enormous amount of time, energy, and money will have been wasted for naught. Hope you sleep well knowing that you are just one more snake oil promoter contributing to this waste. The punitive, test-based reform movement has been in place since 2002 and it has not budged the needle. You my friend are really promoting the status quo while at the same time railing against it.
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You know, I mostly debate conserves who support vouchers and privatization but whether it’s conservatives or, what, progressives? or however you characterize people who comment here, it always come down to the same ad hominem bile. Why is that?
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deutsch29: I am grateful for you for solving this Kore Konundrum with a previous posting on your blog.
Alright then… Quite telling that Mr. Bill Duncan [4/17/14, 2:53 PM] refers above quite approvingly to what is an undeniably expert witness to the core nature of the CCSS.
To whom do I refer? None other than Dr. Frederick M. Hess, “Resident Scholar and Director of Education Policy Studies” of the American Enterprise Institute. A link to the original posting by this eminent insider of the self-styled “education reform” movement is included in the link provided below.
[start quote]
In truth, the idea that the Common Core might be a “game-changer” has little to do with the Common Core standards themselves, and everything to do with stuff attached to them, especially the adoption of common tests that make it possible to readily compare schools, programs, districts, and states (of course, the announcement that one state after another is opting out of the two testing consortia is hollowing out this promise).
But the Common Core will only make a dramatic difference if those test results are used to evaluate schools or hire, pay, or fire teachers; or if the effort serves to alter teacher preparation, revamp instructional materials, or compel teachers to change what students read and do. And, of course, advocates have made clear that this is exactly what they have in mind. When they refer to the “Common Core,” they don’t just mean the words on paper–what they really have in mind is this whole complex of changes.
[end quote]
Link: http://deutsch29.wordpress.com/2013/12/28/the-american-enterprise-institute-common-core-and-good-cop/
Forgive me if I violate staid proprieties, but I invoke little league baseball’s ‘mercy rule’ in this championship fight. Bob Shepherd over Bill Duncan, KO in the first minute of the first round, fight commission revokes Bill Duncan’s license in perpetuity to spare him damage in future bouts because of well-founded concerns that he may suffer permanent irreversible damage to his physical and mental faculties.
More than anything else, I feel some embarrassment that this thread offers the very best defense of CCSS—and still falls woefully far short of making its case.
Why is it that CCSS discussions keep coming back to a Marxist close reading of even stock fairy tale figures?
“A black cat crossing your path signifies that the animal is going somewhere.”
As if we didn’t know that…
¿? Groucho, of course.
😎
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Common Core is about compliance and monetizing public school students. Therefore, the scheme cooked up by Gates, Rhee, Murdoch, Duncan, Klein, Bloomberg, etc. will ultimately fail.
Parents will send the corporate CC “worksheet” nonsense back to the school and at the same time they will post the worksheets on social media.
Students do not need assembly line work via test prep and mind numbing CC worksheets.
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TOO BIG to fail?
or
TOO BAD to succeed?
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We should all sue Coleman et al. on products liability grounds and deceptive advertising practices for the bill of goods they sold. Then again, I’m wondering if caveat emptor (buyer beware) would apply.
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I always wondered why everyone was so worried about not making NCLB’s ridiculous mandate. How the h*** do you get 100% of anything above average? By definition it is no longer an average if everyone performs better. Why didn’t we just all violate NCLB? What were they going to do? Take over all the schools? You don’t have to even have much formal education to know that this stuff is a crock. I think too many of us see titles and degrees listed after people’s names and think that means they are somehow better than we are. Guess what people? It ain’t so! My parents taught me to treat everyone with respect. (I don’t always succeed.) They taught me to value getting an education, but they never judged anyone by their degrees or titles. I know this sounds hokey, but I am so tired of fighting off people with an inflated sense of self worth and an obsession with power treating the vast majority as if they are beneath notice. Whether we live or die is of no concern to the power brokers just as long as we do it quietly. Be good collateral damage in their schemes: “Oops! We goofed! Oh well. Let’s try something else!”
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It wasn’t just the waivers that USDOE dangled in front of the states. Race to the Top was a contest (seriously a competition) where states could WIN CASH PRIZES. Lucky us here in NY. We rung every bell and “won” $700 MILLION.
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I laugh when I hear that this year there is a LAW which says that 100% of the students MUST be above average. You are so right 2old2teach.
Bell curve anyone?
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And that’s assuming a fair and balanced test. Our exams are more like the Fox News version of fair and balanced.
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Bill, there are a few scraps of the excreble CC$$ that I would consider retaining, but only tentatively and after a process like the one outlined below.
I get the impression from defenders of these “standards” that they think it a simple matter to put these together, that they conceptualize the task as something like “making a list of skills” kids should have on graduating.
Wrong from the start. The task of coming up with standards for the instruction of a nation is one that must be approached with high seriousness. Doing the job correctly is easily as important as, say, building an airplane correctly. People’s lives depend on doing the job well. When people build airplanes, they employ experts in the various subsystems, they subject designs to failure modes and effects analysis, and they test, test, test, test, test.
If this task had been approached with anything like the care that a job of this magnitude requires, then time would have been devoted, at the outset, to determining what the goal state—the ideal set of outcomes—of a K-12 course of study in ELA should look like.
The authors might, for example, have consulted with experts on dividing ELA into domains. They might have come up with a list like this (23 domains):
language: phonetic component;
language: syntactic and morphological component;
language: semantic component and the lexicon;
language: pragmatic component, register, and context;
decoding,
basic reading comprehension,
reading of literature,
functional reading,
nonfiction reading,
functional writing,
nonfiction writing exclusive of journalism;
journalism;
creative writing of literature;
nonfiction writing exclusive of journalism;
discussion,
spoken performance,
debate,
negotiation,
listening,
critical thinking/formal and informal logic,
creative thinking,
study skills and research,
media
And then they could have proceeded to study the characteristics of persons who have completed K-12 courses of study and demonstrate competence in each domain. (They would have to consult experts to explain to them what competence looks like in each domain, and there would be much debate before a reasonable consensus was developed).
In the course of that debate, the authors would have discovered that in each of these domains, there are two VERY DIFFERENT types of knowledge possessed by competent persons: world knowledge (knowledge of what) and procedural knowledge (knowledge of how, aka “skills”) and that for each of each of those, there are two VERY DIFFERENT modes of attainment of the knowledge: implicit attainment, or acquisition (implicit knowledge) and explicit attainment, or conscious learning (explicit knowledge).
So, that’s 23 domains times 2 types of knowledge times two types of acquisition, for 92 very distinct TYPES of competence to be measured.
Further study would have revealed that highly competent persons occupying the goal state VARY ENORMOUSLY with regard to their areas and types of competence, as befits distinct types of individuals, with distinct interests and abilities and ideal life trajectories.
In other words, one size would not fit all. That only makes sense, after all, because ours is a highly complex, highly diverse, highly pluralistic culture that needs people coming out of our schools who are ready for very different second stage paths.
Only after having rigorously performed such empirical work and publishing it for critique could they even begin to start formulating descriptions of operational measures of these highly distinct types of learning: standards for them and to formulate categories of successful learning outcome types with different combinations of these learnings.
At this point, our authors would be faced with a choice: a. attempt the enormous task of outlining alternative learning progressions for each grade level for each of these outcome types, or b. recognize that the job is too large for a weekend’s work in a cabin in New Hampshire by even such a highly experienced education scholar and philosopher as Lord Coleman is (LOL).
At that point, I would recommend to these “authors” that they issue a small set of general guidelines (a framework) for ELA instruction rather than a bullet list of standards and that they do they following:
Require that all students nationwide have an IEP (in keeping with the necessity for varying tracks for varying outcomes) AND
create an open-source wiki to which would be published, on an ongoing basis, for each of those domains, for those varied types of learners, at every grade level, VOLUNTARY, COMPETING, ALTERNATIVE
standards
frameworks
sample lesson plans
model curricula
learning progressions (aka curriculum maps)
pedagogical techniques, strategies, and rationales
model assessments (diagnostic, formative, and performance)
texts
in a variety of formats (print, video, audio podcast, etc)
prepared by independent scholars, researchers, curriculum developers, practitioners (teachers, curriculum coordinators, other administrators), and professionals in various fields.
That’s how you get innovation, and that’s how you spur the development of the variety of instructional paths appropriate students who differ and have differing trajectories.
And it goes without saying, of course, that you would outlaw standardized testing for any but very low-level, fact-based material and encourage diagnostic, formative, and performance assessment instead, for it needs to be understood by all that extrinsic punishment and reward (e.g., via standardized testing) is inherently demotivating for cognitive tasks (there is a lot of research on this) and violates our prime directive as educators, which is to create intrinsically motivated, lifelong learners.
And, of course, you would ban state adoption and centralized databases because these create economies of scale for large publishers and prevent innovation and competition in the development of educational materials, and what the plan, above, requires, is precisely such dramatic innovation and competition,
which you don’t get, of course, via regimentation, standardization, and top-down mandates from a national Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth, from a national curriculum and pedagogy Thought Police.
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on open source ecology based on embedded assessment that builds intrinsic motivation of highly skilled but differing persons
or a centrally dictated monoculture based on assessment for purposes of extrinsic punishment and reward with the goal of producing identically milled low-level worker bees
Freedom and innovation
or totalitarianism and stagnation.
Gee, I think I’ll take the former.
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The former, of course, draws upon the expertise of the entire community of scholars, researchers, and practitioners.
The latter draws upon–what?–the wisdom of Lord Coleman?
Give me a break.
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BTW, Bill, E. D. Hirsch, Jr., spent half a lifetime writing books and journal articles and giving talks about why a bullet list of skills like those in the state standards and JUST LIKE THE CC$$ was a terrible thing to based an educational system on. I won’t repeat all those arguments here, but they are quite sound (with, I think, some modification). I recommend that you start with his The Knowledge Deficit but that you bear in mind, as you are reading, that there is a difference between the vaguely formulated abstract skills list that he excoriates and concrete, operationally defined procedural knowledge (skills definitions that actually means something measurable).
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You do realize that E.D. Hirsch supports the Common Core, right?
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I have had a number of discussions with Don Hirsch regarding this. It was a mistake for him to accept this in exchange for getting purchase for his Core Knowledge Sequence in New York. Please read his books. He is VERY CLEAR in these that he does not approve of standards lists framed as abstract skills. He writes about this AT LENGTH in many, many works. I know. I’ve read them all and have discussed these matters with him at length.
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Do I reat this right? Are you saying the Hirsch sacrificed his integrity? Was that the mistake?
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I made no such claim, and it is OUTRAGEOUS for you to say that I did, Bill. I cannot speak to Don Hirsch’s thought processes regarding this. Perhaps he felt that the good of having people adopt his knowledge-based curriculum outweighed the clear evil of a set of standards formulated as abstract skills. But the fact remains that for fifty years, E. D. Hirsch, Jr., wrote books and articles and gave speeches in which he presented arguments, AT ENORMOUS LENGTH, to explain why it was a terrible mistake to based our approach to education on bullet lists of skills abstractly formulated. I refer you to his works Cultural Literacy, The Schools We Need, and The Knowledge Deficit.
Again, I am shocked an horrified that you would say such a thing, Bill. Don Hirsch is a friend and mentor to me, and I have enormous respect for him. I would NEVER impugn his integrity. NEVER.
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Good, Bob. Just wanted to give you a chance to clear that up. So who considers Hirsch’s trade a mistake – you or him?
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Of for the love of Mom and apple pie, Bill. Once again, Don Hirsch has written whole volumes of works, for decades, on why it is a mistake to base our educational system on lists of abstractly formulated skills rather than upon concrete knowledge to be obtained. The positions are inconsistent, and I have had discussions with him of this, but I am not about to air those private discussions in this public forum. Dr. Hirsch is fully capable of speaking for himself, and I would not presume to speak for him. Again, I have enormous respect for Don Hirsch and a deep acquaintance with his curricula and his thought over many decades. Bullet lists of standards formulated as abstract skills are PRECISELY the ill that he attacks in work after work and has attacked for MANY DECADES with detailed, reasoned, powerful arguments. I could repeat all those here, but this is not the forum. Again, Bill, your comment was ENTIRELY INAPPROPRIATE.
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Got it. It’s you who is saying he made a mistake in making that trade.
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I did not say that, Bill. I said that I am not going to discuss private conversations with Dr. Hirsch in this public forum. Again, Dr. Hirsch has spent half a lifetime attacking K-12 standards formulated as abstract skills. Why? Because he understands, and has written at length about, why those distort, narrow, and render incoherent our curricula and pedagogy.
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Now, if you will excuse me, I have work to do.
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Bill, we are still waiting for your credentials and your professional background.
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I’m an open book, linda. Google tells all…
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So cut and paste it here. Aren’t you proud? Lots to say until now
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That’s it for me, Bill. I am done with this conversation. Have a nice life.
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New York chose wisely in making the Core Knowledge Sequence an option for its curricula. However, in true form, it utterly FAILED to do the intense professional development necessary for the launch of such a curriculum, which is a COMPLETE CHANGE from what has been done in the past and requires a great deal of orientation.
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We agree there. The scripted curriculum in NY is a disaster.
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And I hold out hope that Dr. Hirsch will publicly repudiate the Common [sic] Core [sic], which is precisely the sort of thing that he has argued cogently AGAINST for decades.
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It did not need to be a disaster. But education in New York is being run by incompetents. This could have been a great, shining moment for New York, but these people had no understanding, at all, of what a sea change this was and how very much work would have to be done to prepare the way for it. I have seen this curriculum in action many, many times, and it can be breathtakingly fertile. But people have to understand what it’s about, how it works. It’s as though the state had asked people to make the transitions for the horse and buggy to the automobile without teaching anyone how to drive the things. Utter ridiculous. The incompetence at the state level is breathtaking.
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Bob, I felt the former NYS standards had been revised over the years and were broad enough to be very doable. We could live with them, but the city needed better results on the NCLB assessments.
Buffalo purchased scripted lessons for ELA in the elementary, and then middle schools, prior to CCSS, with a guarantee that they would bring up scores (developed by one of the publishing companies – not Pearson). The theory was that the teachers were “doing” their own thing and not properly teaching the reading program. Even my school and City Honors, where the kids were reading well above grade level, were forced to participate. (Talk about teaching to the least common denominator).
Obviously, it didn’t work.
Now the district classrooms are still stuck with the walk throughs by downtown administrators. No wonder nothing is getting done – the department heads are twiddling their thumbs each day berating the teachers for minor infractions – Plus adding unnecessary stress.
Bill, all the teachers I meet tell me I’m lucky I retired when I did. One told me that the CC was “difficult” to digest. When we were going over the standards during training sessions, the veteran teachers were dismayed by some of the philosophies, such as giving no background information prior to a reading selection (especially if the book was historical in nature and true understanding could not be gleaned from context).
Bill, maybe things are different in your state – FOR NOW, but don’t hang on too tightly to your convictions. This fiasco in NYS could happen to you and others if you don’t take heed.
We are just trying to warn you – in spite of your single minded point of view.
It’s not up just coming – IT’S HERE!!!!
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I agree that the New York standards were broad enough to provide the degrees of freedom within which teachers could adapt the work to their students and curriculum developers could innovate. They were not without problems, however. It’s very important that these things be open to continuous critique and revision, again, following an open source model.
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Agreed. No system is perfect and all should require constant revision to remain current and relevant. All successful corporations change and adapt to the times.
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Sure, Ellen, many bad things could happen in NH or any other state. But fortunately NYS is almost alone in its whole hog adoption of failed ed reform policies and how poorly it has implemented its standards. And it’d be hard to make as much a mess of it in a local control state like NH.
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Bill, I hope you are right. I wouldn’t wish the mess here in NY on anyone. Please take our mistakes as a warning of what could happen to you.
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sorry about the typos. Working quickly here.
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The problem, Bill, is not the curriculum itself. I have looked at these lessons, and they do need editing and proper organization, but a lot more is required. These work in the context of a whole set of pedagogical approaches that people have to learn about. The PD required, there, is significant, and New York did nothing in this regard. Without that context, the materials themselves will make little sense to many people and will be open to the sorts of uninformed criticism that these materials have received. With the proper context–with the right theoretical backgrounding and PD on pedagogical technique–such materials can work astonishingly well. Again, I know this. I am very familiar with Core Knowledge schools and materials and have seen their results–extraordinary student engagement and a lot of learning taking place, even in very low SES areas of the country.
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I’m agreeing, Bob. I would never blame anyone else for the mess NYS has made of its education system by making itself the poster child for failed ed reform policies.
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So, Bill, I did not say that the scripted curriculum was a disaster. I said that what New York has done with it has been a disaster.
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Ok. We don’t agree on that either. I say that a tightly scripted curriculum such as I have see on the engageNY site is a disaster.
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We can agree that scripted curricula are a mistake. It’s extremely important that we put TEACHERs in charge of continuous improvement, including defining what that means and choosing their own assessments for their students.
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I started The Knowledge Deficit this morning and, having followed Hirsch w/o reading his books, I look forward to it.
I did see this in The Answer Sheet, though: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/guest-bloggers/ed-hirsch-jr-common-core-stand.html
It’s dated April 2010 and looks to me like deep support for CCSS at that point, presumably before NYS adopted the Core Knowledge curriculum but, in any case, not instrumental. Real.
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Anything from 2010 is out of date. We deal,with the reality and not the illusion.
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Read what he says of instruction based on abstract formulations of skills, Bill. And see, as well, The Schools We Need for this.
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Will do.
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So in essence, Bob, you are saying screw Danielson type standards that dissect the joy out of learning. Provide for a national discussion that places the frameworks and standards, etc. up for scrutiny and allows for use (or not) by all.
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well, not exactly, but close. 🙂
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I have feeling decidedly irreverent lately, hence my rather raw analysis of your position. 🙂
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I always lament, Robert, that you weren’t involved in developing the CC. On the surface the original idea looked good – common guidelines for our nation’s children. But this monumental task was taken too lightly and thrown together without regard to the reality of teaching.
You are the expert on language development. I feel I can speak to the literature component. The list of recommended books was a disaster. Older titles wrong for the assigned age levels, out of print books and articles, ignorance of modern children’s literature – all were rampant throughout the list. I was appalled.
Bill, you see, there are many components of the CCSS which you might not know about. Literature titles are just another part of the disaster taking place within the “enforced” curriculum.
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I have written elsewhere on this blog about the disasters that are the literature and writing components of the CC$$. Both a complete mess. This is what happens when people employ amateurs to write standards. It would have been a joy to collaborate with you, Ellen. My point, of course, is that we should be drawing upon the entire community of scholars, researchers, and practitioners to do continuous development of alternatives and improvements for all these guidelines, standards, etc.
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I agree, Bob. I would have loved to have had a say about the suggested reading list. We would have made a great team with the addition of a few others on this blog.
If you get the opportunity, let me know.
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I know. I’m so ignorant that when I keep asking for the superior folks like you and Bob to explain it to me, I can’t even understand the answer. I’m hoping someone will translate.
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Bill – I, too, am ignorant in so many areas, which is why I read this blog.
However, I am a retired school librarian who has developed many reading lists over the years, some even using lexiles. The CCSS “suggested” reading list is very flawed and I was appalled by some of the choices which were assigned to the wrong age groups. It was obviously not reviewed by an individual knowledgable in children’s literature. I have listed specific complaints in other blog threads, but you can take my word for it – as this is my particular specialty.
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I would not presume to comment on the reading lists in detail. In my experience, reading lists, especially for young children, are much debated. The ELA lists are no different, but they are just suggested, not part of the standards. The whole point is for teachers to do their own teaching.
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The suggested books are actually a list to choose from, not simply recommended, but required.
I suppose you think that 7th graders can handle The Autobiography of Frederick Douglas much better than 11th graders can during their American History class? It is a difficult read requiring higher thinking level skills than should be expected from a budding adult reader.
Some items might be debatable, others are obviously just plain wrong.
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You are just incorrect there, Ellen.
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So be it (from your perspective). Happy reading.
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Perhaps the students in NH are better readers than the ones in Buffalo, NY. Please take me seriously when I say that certain books or articles are inappropriate for the assigned grade level.
I base this on 35+ years of experience as a librarian and as a parent of four.
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I definitely do take you seriously on that. My only point is that, if you call the suggested reading list required, you’re setting up a straw man.
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Bill, I’m not the one requiring teachers select choices from the given list. This is what is happening in NYS.
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Yes, Ellen, I think we all agree: NYS is a mess.
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Read until they last paragraph, Gates says it clearly so it must be true. The tests are all that matter.
“Facing a growing avalanche of grassroots opposition from teachers, parents, and voters across the political spectrum, pro-Common Core forces — Big Business, Big Media, the Obama administration, and more — are striking back at their critics, oftentimes with outright deception and utterly ridiculous claims. However, under even a modicum of scrutiny, the absurd allegations and unsubstantiated statements made by proponents of the Obama administration-funded nationalization of education standards promptly fall apart. It appears, then, that while Common Core supporters have the big bucks — much of it from U.S. taxpayers, most of the rest from Big Business and the Gates Foundation — advocates for local control and proper education have the truth on their side.
From the outset, the shadowy development and nationwide imposition of the widely criticized national K-12 standards have been shrouded in deception. The oft-parroted myth that Common Core was in any way “state-led,” for example, has been thoroughly discredited by this publication and many others, including by some of the nation’s top experts in the field. Claims that the nationalized standards would improve education have also been widely debunked, even by some of the respected educators who sat on the largely for-show “Common Core Validation Committee.” The content experts in both English and Mathematics refused to sign off on the standards, citing poor quality, incorrect math, and more.
Meanwhile, Common Core financier and population-control fanatic Bill Gates inadvertently exposed the lie that the standards did not represent a takeover of the curriculum. “Last month, 46 Governors and Chief State School Officers made a public commitment to embrace these common standards,” Gates said during a speech at the 2009 National Conference of State Legislators. “This is encouraging — but identifying common standards is not enough. We’ll know we’ve succeeded when the curriculum and the tests are aligned to these standards.”
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Complete article: http://www.thenewamerican.com/culture/education/item/18077-pro-common-core-deception-falling-apart
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One of the pieces on the CCSS required reading list is the allegory of the cave from Plato’s Republic.
Imagine teaching that to kids with no background information–without setting it up beforehand!!!! Anyone without a proper introduction to the questions that Plato is addressing there will be completely clueless as to what questions he is addressing and what his answers to those questions are. This is a perfect example of why the Coleman approach doesn’t work–attention to the text and only to the text–doesn’t work.
Texts exist in context. One has to understand this context to make sense of them. Wittgenstein argued this at length in his Philosophical Investigations a century ago, and his take, there, is almost universally accepted among analytical philosophers of language.
Texts exist in context.
Don Hirsch has written extensively about the importance of background information to comprehension, in book after book, for decades, BTW. See his Validity in Interpretation and The Knowledge Deficit.
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To add on to your point, Robert:
I always have difficulty understanding the true meaning of bible verses. Part of the problem is that I am unaware of the context. Our society has a habit of looking at the past through 21st century eyes. The bible is from year aught backwards. How can I understand the translation of the translation of the translation . . .?
I recently downloaded a book from the 1800s with some explanations of the various bible components.
It seems the eye of a needle is a low lying gate. A camel is unable to get through the gate when it is loaded with cargo, so the baggage must be loaded on one side and reloaded after entry. Therefore it is a difficult process for a camel to walk through the eye of a needle.
Much different than a sewing analogy.
Just one example of how background info can change the dynamics of a story.
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Especially when Murdoch/Amplify came by with a bag of cash.
See Mercedes latest:
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A great article. Mercedes should be required reading by all Ravitch followers.
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The Brief History of Educational Standards and Curriculum
Pre-NCLB Era (1945 – 2001) = The Textbook
NCLB/CCSS Era (2002 – Present) = The Tests
Exceptions:
Regents courses = The Tests
AP Courses = The Tests
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That just about sums it up! 🙂
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Bill Bryson has nothing on me.
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One more exception:
Very conscientious and creative teachers that have ignored both,
carefully crafting their own customized program.
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A Brief Prediction of Educational Standards and Curriculum
PARCC/SBAC Era (2015 – ?) = Pearson/Microsoft
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It cant be the tests because we are not allowed to see them.
No peeking all you NY math people!
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I had a commenter on my blog use the line, “it’s the tests, stupid!” in regard to my Gates, Duncan, and CC Freedom Charade post:
I responded as follows:
No, it is not “just the test.” I can tell you from teaching English II (same set of CCSS for English I) that CCSS does not fit my students; in the case of reading comprehension, it assumes that all learn at the same rate and in a linear, incremental fashion across the school year. Standards on reading comprehension also dictate my manner of teaching and completely ignore my role in assisting my students in the ongoing construction of a knowledge base necessary for critical thinking.
Even if the “tests” disappeared, CCSS is still designed to be a major money maker for curriculum and student data collection. There is also the nightmare of “standards-based grading”– teachers’ having to base student achievement on a 4-point system of grading each student on each standard. I spoke with a school board member in Utah, and standards-based grading is happening there– and Utah dumped CCSS tests a couple of years ago.
If the standard doesn’t fit the student, too bad. If standards-based-grading eats up all of a teacher’s time and then some, too bad.
CCSS needs to go– not just the tests.
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Thank you for your link. You really put the situation into perspective. It makes one wonder if any of this will end up in federal court.
One item you clarified –
You can’t CHANGE or MODIFY the Common Core, but you can ADD to it, but no more than 15%. So states can’t pick and choose which standards to adopt, as previously implied by Bill.
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You can pick and choose all you want. Teachers and schools however, will be held accountable by PARCC and SBAC tests.
PARCC and SBAC will never include test items covering this
great gift of 15% of imaginary flexibility. Makes them completely moot.
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So true, NY teacher. Those tests make a bad situation totally intolerable.
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You can do anything you want to the standards as many states and schools and teachers are proving.
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Bill – it’s fine to do anything you want to change the standards, but then the question – “Are they still CCSS?”. I say “No!”, you’ve just created your own standards using Common Core as a starting point.
Now add the assessments and see what you get.
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If the tests go, CCSS will be dead in the water.
They have nothing without the tests coupled with teacher evaluations tied to test scores. Nothing. That’s why it was a package deal – or else.
If the tests and the accompanying threat are gone, you are free to pick, choose, discard, ignore the CCSS to your hearts contents. The Bill Gates business plan could not allow a buffet style reform. CCSS + PARCC/SBAC + VAM + DATA. The ONLY way it works.
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Yes, without the stick, one could ignore or modify or pay lip service to the ignorantly conceived “standards” and create decent curricula DESPITE THEM. Still, it’s a national disgrace that crap like the CC$$ in ELA should be the blueprint for our instruction.
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Not actually true, Bob. You must have seen enough lesson plans to know that the standards become embedded and students are tested daily to see how well they are able to perform them.
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Tested daily? Wow when do they learn, explore, create, wonder? It’s time to perform kids. Let the circus begin. A sad school with Bill watching. 👎
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Of course they are tested daily, Linda. Teachers are minute-by-minute assessing what their students know – everything from homework to answers in class – in order to know that they need to teach them.
It’s a constant feedback loop of formative assessments. But, of course, as a teacher, you know that.
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Actually we don’t call it testing and since you’re not a teacher or an educator, just an observer, you don’t know that.
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That’s a political construct to create a narrative, NY teacher. But it’s not true.
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Guess that’s true: all of Common Core at its core is a political construct.
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Not actually true, Bill? How many textbook programs have you worked on? I have worked on a couple hundred. In every case, in the past, people took the standards with a grain of salt. They recognized that they were poorly thought-through, vague a priori notions that had to be worked around as often as they were worked with. All that has changed. The standards are now the recipe. And the result of treating them as a recipe for curricula has been incoherent nonsense.
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Bob – what you say coincides with my personal experiences. We created our lessons and then found the standard which most closely matched our objectives.
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What I see in classrooms is not that the good teachers take the textbooks with a grain of salt but that they start with the standards and use what they can from a given textbook.
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Many creative, conscientious teachers fine tune their lesson, units, and further prefect their craft to customize for the children each year and then we find the federal standard and drag it where it fits and go back to teaching humans who are not common.
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To the extent that they are starting with these amateurish standards, Bill, they are probably implementing pretty backward pedagogical practices.
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Bill
You are overlooking the most important aspect of this reform. Your perspective in NH is like wearing blinders. Teachers careers and reputations are now dependent on the scores from CCSS aligned tests. That is the end of the story. The tests become the curriculum. Teachers teach to the tests in an effort to save their jobs. Do you not understand the dynamics at work here? Try visiting schools here in NY or Florida, or NC and talk to teachers working under the pressure to have their students succeed on tests that are designed for failure.
you are making some rather sweeping statements based on the very narrow and skewed viewpoint of the NH situation. Are you bucking for this year’s Common Coleman Award in bloviating blogging?
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Ah, yes, we agree there: it always comes back to the high-stakes testing. It’s not, after all, about the Common Core. It’s mainly that some of the same people support both the punitive testing regimes and the new standards.
That is unfortunate. But it’s time to get over it.
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>The standards are now the recipe. And the result of treating them as a recipe for curricula has been incoherent nonsense.<
They are also the recipe for PARCC and SBAC test items. And as Bob has repeatedly stated but many still don't seem to understand, mastery of the standards, as written, cannot be tested using primarily multiple-choice items. It is impossible to do well; difficult to do a half assed job, and easy to really screw up as witnessed by the recent Pearson tests in NY and according to many of the PARCC and SBAC reports.
e.g.
Try writing an MC item to test these standards.
Impossible to do it well
Difficult to even half ass it
But really easy to make a mess of it
5. Analyze how an author’s choices concerning how to structure specific parts of a text (e.g., the choice of where to begin or end a story, the choice to provide a comedic or tragic resolution) contribute to its overall structure and meaning as well as its aesthetic impact.
6. Analyze a particular point of view or cultural experience reflected in a work of literature from outside the United States, drawing on a wide reading of world literature.
Keep you popcorn buttered. And your seat belts fastened.
The Great Standardized Testing Disaster of 2015 is coming soon to a PC, laptop, or iPad near you.
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Bill
Outsiders who occasionally peek into classrooms should really refrain from drawing broad conclusions about pedagogy. Your presence alone changes the dynamics and contaminates the true teaching and learning environment. I give you props for shear effort, but outsiders, try as they might, will never understand life in the trenches.
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Sigh of relief from NH teachers too when he leaves. Shoo fly
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Oh, please.
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>That is unfortunate. But it’s time to get over it.<
Oh no Bill, its time to GET RID of IT.
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From Linda:
>Many creative, conscientious teachers fine tune their lesson, units, and further prefect their craft to customize for the children each year and then we find the federal standard and drag it where it fits and go back to teaching humans who are not common.<
Exactly.
Fortunately there are many veteran teachers cut from this mold who have lots of professional currency and respect in their districts, and can therefore afford to ignore the imposition of nonsensical standards.
many veteran teachers here are not fighting for themselves, but for the new and future teachers that really deserve a much, much, more respectful start to their careers,
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And we share ideas with the younger teachers because it is not a competition. Bill should show some respect rather than preaching to those who do the work every day. We live it. We don’t observe it.
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“Oh, please, make him go away”
The words you never hear Bill every time you intrude on a hard working teacher.
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Still waiting for that one, best of the best, remarkable, never seen before, Earth shattering ELA standard, the one that will make the Finns and Estonians quake in their shoes.
Verbatim for the CCSS website please.
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I know you will refuse to respond to this one simple request because you know it doesn’t exist. Not even ONE stinkin, amazin, mad crazy good CC standard. I hate to be rude to my elders but, “Oh please, will you just go away.”
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I actually don’t come often and when I do it’s just a simple observation that doesn’t fit the consensus here. After that, I’d be gone but for all the angry reaction. I’d say you should learn to disagree in a more productive manner.
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And you should display more respect for the professionals we are. You’re comments drip with disdain for the real teachers who post here.
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Your not you’re
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Perhaps you have noticed that your experience in New Hampshire does not seem to resonate with most of the people on this blog. As one of the smaller states in the U.S. at slightly over 1.3 million, I suspect it is much easier to disseminate information statewide and have an impact as you seemed to have with vouchers. Yours is not a state that billionaires seem to covet (not a very large or profitable market) either. If NH has not succumbed to the debunked practice of trying to grade your teachers by student test scores and has not campaigned against your lazy, overpaid veteran teachers, union or otherwise, then you are dismissing the opinions of teachers who have seen and/or experienced what you have not. There may be common ground around other issues, but I suspect that you are not living in the same world as many who post here when it comes to CCSS.
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Not dismissing anyone. Just pointing out that if CCSS can be a positive tool in NH and CA, then the trouble in NY and CT is education policy, not the standards.
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Wrong again. The standards ARE the Ed policy and federally mandated.
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I missed the positive force of CCSS in California. VAM has certainly not been received kindly. Teachers are not free to speak out without the support of their administration if they want to keep their jobs, so until CCSS is used as a bludgeon in NH, I don’t expect you will hear much criticism. As others have said, teachers learn to teach around bad mandates. Too much garbage has been generated by people more interested in their political future and their pocketbooks for teachers not to try to work around them.
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Best post! “Teachers learn to teach around mandates.”
And we said “This, too will pass”.
Notice that almost all mandates are there to deal with the (very rare) “problem” teachers.
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Are all mandates bad? Should teachers basically be on their own, with the guidance of their principals?
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“Are all mandates bad? Should teachers basically be on their own, with the guidance of their principals?”
Is this a serious question?! Of course we all know that life is made up of strictly black and white decisions.
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Guess what, Bill. We once had something called curriculum. Districts purchased textbooks, had curriculum advisors and committees, teachers created lessons to meet the curricular objectives based on the needs and learning styles of their particular students. There were final exams created by the teacher or the district to rate individual mastery. In NYS, the brightest students took Regents Exams to get a Regents Diploma (something special), while the rest of a school population received a local school diploma. Not everyone went to college – usually just those on the Regents track. Elementary students did not receive grades, just comments and an indication if they were ahead or behind the curriculum expectations.
If only we could return to the days before NCLB. We didn’t know those were the good times until they were gone.
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This is just one of many positive reviews: https://dianeravitch.net/2014/01/07/bill-honig-why-california-likes-the-common-core-standards/
Yes, opponents always cite teachers’ fears when they need more negative views from the classroom than they have, but I don’t buy it.
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Then why are you here? If you don’t buy teachers ‘ negative opinions of CCSS, why on earth would you come to a blog that is designed for teachers to be able to do just that? Of course that is an unfair reduction of the massive reform agenda, but it is nonetheless true. You are not going to convince us of the wonderfulness of the CCSS. At the very least, I would expect the two educators on the validation committee to support CCSS. They were included to do just that. They didn’t. Why not, Bill?
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I agree with Diane that public education must be defended against privatization and punitive teacher valuation. I also agree with what she said at the last MLA meeting,
“We must then curb the misuse of the Common Core standards: Those who like them should use them, but they should be revised continually to adjust to reality.”
And with Dr. Milgram when he concluded his New Hampshire testimony by saying, “In spite of the issues raised above, it is true, first that Core Standards are considerably better than the old New Hampshire Math Standards, and second, that much of the material in them is very well done. In fact Core Standards are better than the standards of 90% of the states..”
He did that sentence by saying that all those political problems make the standards “entirely unsuitable for state adoption.” but went on to recommend that New Hampshire put together a few good math teachers and tweak the Common Core standards, something that happens throughout the State every day as the statewide networks of teachers organized by NHDOE discuss their best practices and our school districts and math departments deploy the standards in their classrooms.
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Again you use NH as an example, the assumption being that anybody can do the same thing if they want to? Well, dang, you New Yorkers just go off and tell your politicians harder that you want to do what NH is doing. Even if you don’t happen to agree with Bill’s chosen expert, Bill says its okay, so it should work for NY and every other state in the nation. Yes, I am being a bit snide. I am happy for you that everything in NH is hunkey dory. That doesn’t appear to be the case across the country and we are all not just bigger or smaller New Hampshires. We have obviously already proven the point about the diversity of individual opinion.
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Dr. Milgram’s telling NH that they could go ahead and tweak the Common Core to fit their needs certainly does not fit the message that CCSS have given to most states. the message has been you may not change the CC in any way. You may, however, add up to 15% of your own content. Since he refused to sign off on CCSS, he hardly seems like the “go to” authority.
My other comment has to do with what you can train children to do. Just because you can train a child to count to 100 (at the age of 4-5) doesn’t mean that is the most productive way of spending your time, nor does it mean that the child is a failure if they are unable to perform that trick. I seriously doubt that we will find that 4-5 year olds who can recite their numbers to 100 will be better math students than children who are 6-7. I seem to remember a tested corollary in reading.
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What is your evidence that is has become a “positive tool” in CA?
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The attempt to develop and implement a national set of standards that homogenizes education for 50 million students has already failed.
No two states doing the same thing. CCSS a “positive tool” for some. a disaster for others. The Gates business plan is in deep trouble and they know it. Expecting some desperate actions soon.
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If it does fail, I assume Diane will be very disappointed: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/07/opinion/07ravitch.html?_r=0
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2005, really? Bill catch up. Do your homework. You look desperate.
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He’s a cheap shot artist now
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Always was…true colors shining now out of desperation.
Possible software tracking scheme brewing as well. Beware and be aware.
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Have you noticed how so many software people have suddenly developed an interest in public service late in their careers?
All for the KID$$$$$$$$$$
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Isn’t it time for this thread to die?
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You are right Peter. I’m getting ready for church and I should go calmly and happily to spend Easter with my family.
Shalom!
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Shalom and Happy Easter!
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NO Peter. We are shooting for the Ravitch posting record.
And we have Bill the thank if we make it.
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381+ posting with no wrap-around! Go Bill.
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And this years winner of the Baiting Bill Award is …
Go for it!
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I didn’t mean it. Really. All the credit goes to Bob Shephard.
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Is 2005 too long ago to be relevant? How about this? https://dianeravitch.net/2014/04/10/schneider-schools-sol-stern-on-the-common-core/
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Your point?
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Happy Easter, Bill. Have a nice day.
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