In story after story, the New York Times consistently misses the essence of the controversy surrounding Common Core.
Today’s New York Times gives its lead article on page 1, column right, top of the fold, to the battle raging within the Republican party, about the Common Core. On one side is Jeb Bush, standing up for the Common Core standards (presumably a moderate, let’s not talk about his fight for vouchers and for the destruction of public education in Florida), while on the other are figures like Ted Cruz and other extremists of the party. Common Core, we are told, is now the “wedge issue” in the Republican party, with sensible people like Jeb Bush fending off the extremists.
A few weeks ago, the newspaper wrote an editorial enthusiastically endorsing the Common Core standards, while giving no evidence for its enthusiasm other than the promises offered by the advocates of Common Core.
Story after story has repeated the narrative invented by Arne Duncan, that the only opponents of the Common Core are members of the Tea Party and other extremists.
Occasionally a story will refer to extremists of the right and the left, as though no reasonable person could possibly doubt the claims made on behalf of the Common Core.
Of course, David Brooks’ column on Friday echoed the now familiar trope of the Times, that only extremists could oppose this worthy and entirely laudable endeavor.
Missing is any acknowledgement of the many researchers who have challenged the wacky assumption that standards alone will cause everyone’s achievement to rise higher and higher, despite no evidence for this assertion.
Missing is any recognition that there are reputable educators and scholars and parents who are disturbed either by the substance of the standards or by the development process (Anthony Cody, for example, just won the Education Writers Association’s first prize award for his series of blogs challenging the claims of the Common Core).
Missing is the pushback from teachers that caused the leaders of the NEA and the AFT to call for a slowdown in implementation of the standards (the media sees this only as teachers’ fear of being evaluated by tests).
Missing is the concern of early childhood educators about the developmental inappropriateness of the standards for the early grades, which reflects the fact that no early childhood educator participated in drafting the standards. Also missing from the writing group was any educator knowledgeable about children with disabilities or English language learners.
Missing is any acknowledgement that not a single classroom teacher was included in the small group that wrote the standards, and that the largest contingent on the “working groups” was from the testing industry.
Missing is any suggestion that the writing of the standards was not “state-led,” but was the product of a small group of insider organizations inside the Beltway, heavily funded by one organization, the Gates Foundation.
Missing is any recognition that there is no appeals process, no means to revise standards that make no sense when applied in real classrooms with real students.
Missing is any awareness that the Obama administration made eligibility for $4.35 billion in Race to the Top funding contingent on state adoption of “college and career ready” standards, which turned out to be the Common Core standards. How else to explain their rapid adoption by 45 states?
Missing is any acknowledgement that there is very little connection between the quality of any state’s standards and its performances on the NAEP, or that some states with standards higher than the Common Core dropped their proven standards so as to be eligible for the new federal funding.
Missing is any recognition that the Common Core standards are an essential ingredient in a Big Data plan that involves a multibillion dollar investment in new hardware, new software, and new bandwidth for Common Core testing, all of which will be done (for no good reason) online.
Missing is the issue of value-added measurement of teachers and school-closings based on test scores, or the fact that major scholarly organizations (the American Educational Research Association, the National Academy of Education, and the American Statistical Association) have pointed out the inaccuracy and instability of VAM. Nor has it ever been reported by the “Times” that these same organizations have said that teachers’ influence on variation in test scores ranges from 1-15%, with the influence of the family, especially family income and education, looming far larger.
Question: How can the nation’s “newspaper of record” be so seriously indifferent to or ignorant of the major education issue of our day?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Please,please submit this an op ed!
I don’t think they miss the point. They go after the angle. Tea Party v Everybody Else is the angle they like.
Of course,this isn’t the first time NYT has been tragically missing the point.
Peter, I stopped submitting op-eds to the NY Times when I realized they won’t print anything I write. The last time I was published there was in 2011. I submitted an article last fall, summarizing the arguments in my latest book, which authors often do. It was promptly rejected. Subsequently, out of the blue, I got a call from the editor of the opinion page, apologizing, but offering no reason for the rejection. I think I know how to write. But it is clear that the Times will not print my submissions. So I am happy to have the freedom to write what I want here without having it heavily edited by someone who thinks they know what I want to say better than I do and revises my work. Freedom is a wonderful thing for a writer, even if I don’t have the Times’ huge audience.
This is the type of editorial behavior that caused my family and as many relatives as I could convince to drop the Times! I can get my news online faster and with a greater variety of points of view on most issues!
Very well put, Diane! I’m tweeting and emailing this column to Margaret Sullivan, the public editor of the Times, to request more balance in the Times’ Common Core coverage. Perhaps others would like to do the same:
public@nytimes.com
Twitter: @Sulliview
Public Editor
The New York Times
620 Eighth Avenue
New York, NY 10018
Great idea, concerned citizen.
The “Times” has been irresponsible at worst, and ignorant at best, in portraying the controversy over CCSSS in such a slanted manner.
Don’t forget Frank Bruni’s defense of Arne Duncan after his infamous comment about suburban mothers being deluded about their kids’ intelligence.
Let’s all do that
Done !
I sent it accompanied by a note stating that I am neither a left, nor a right wing lunatic. I am a veteran teacher in New Jersey.
Judy Miller and the NYT gave us false information leading up to the second Bush Iraq war. Now she’s on Fox. Why do we believe anything they print?
Time for JFA, journalists for America. Let’s start with our high school star, Abby White.
done.
Sent to NYTPublic:
“Many of us count on the Nyt getting stories complete, regardless of the editorial policy.
This post from Diane Ravitch illustrates the complete journalistic fail of the paper on the debates surrounding the Common Core.
This isn’t a matter of presenting both sides. It’s about a failure of covering a large story by not doing due journalistic diligence.
Consider past fails of the Nyt not getting the whole story and inappropriate cheerleading for pet causes.
Can you say Iraq War?
Peter Smyth
From NYT. Note “issues of journalistic integrity”
“Thank you for contacting the public editor. My assistant and I read
every message that we receive. Please note that this office deals
specifically with issues of journalistic integrity at The New York
Times. ”
Well. They said it!
Reblogged this on jonathan lovell's blog and commented:
A first-rate Easter day blog by Diane Ravitch on the many reasons why intelligent observers on either side of the political isle (the NYT’s stance notwithstanding) might have serious reservations about the Common Core. Diane is writing here at her trenchant best
Diane, this is your best post yet. Let it go viral. Tweet the link.
deb, I am hoping it will be reprinted by HuffPost.
Great post, Diane. Given all of the salient points you make here I am flabbergasted by the support for CCSS by leadership in the AFT, AFT-CT, and the democratic party in CT of which I am a now reluctant life-long member. If it weren’t for blogs like yours,Jon Pelto’s and many others, teachers would feel entirely unrepresented and without a voice and even more hopeless than they do now. There are NO major media outlets investigating and presenting balanced coverage. Will no one listen to reason?
You’ve made a very critical point….where was the “leadership” of the NEA and the AFT when public education and teachers needed it?
The Times knows who butters their bread, and it’s not you or anyone else committed to the common good or even a legitimate discourse.
Ms. Ravitch, I, like you, am disturbed at the continuing efforts to paint Common Core opponents as people on the fringe standing in the path of educational progress. Your points are right on the money. I posted a response to the Times article this morning that notes the myth that local school boards will still have control over curriculum, the costly requirements that are forcing underfunded school districts to invest millions in computers, including having to teach lower elementary students keyboarding skills just so they can take the tests, and the billion-dollar boon CCST has been for the technology, textbook, and testing companies. http://rturner229.blogspot.com/2014/04/when-it-comes-to-common-core-new-york.html As always, Ms. Ravitch, thank you for everything that you do.
Thank you, Randy. Maybe if enough of us complain, they might listen.
Diane-
As a retired teacher from NY with 35 years at a public high school I have followed your blog as well as others you refer to quite faithfully. So, here’s an attempt at a little humor based on some of what I’ve read from you and others. If we can’t laugh a little about the state of public ed then . . .
(With humble apologies to the New Yorker)
Greetings Friends!
Oh educators hail! It is of you I sing!
As we continue to enjoy our Education Spring.
Oh look who’s here, it’s Arne Dunc,
Who’s come to spread his Commom bunk!
What’s that say you Arne? The Core was developed by the States,
You’ve never heard of Mr. Gates?
And now your tune has changed, any Standards will do, you know. (So long as you don’t need any Federal dough)
Golly gee, it’s Michelle Rhee! Congrats on all your work to charter a new course in D.C.
Removing all that dead wood surely helped! The higher test scores will soon be ours to see. Tee hee!
And such a pundit have you become, poverty don’t mean a thing today,
Just three great teachers will provide the zing you say. (especially if they’re T.F.A.)
And now we needs must bow down as Lord Coleman takes to the stage.
So wise, so sage. We hang on every word he’s writ.
(But, dear reader, as I have no experience in the exposition of a personal opinion, I can’t think of a word to rhyme with writ.)
I guess I’ll just have to develop grit!
Now Davey Brooks (in full clown suit) from the NYT weighs in with such chagrin.
Why can’t we all get along and agree that Common Core is a big win.
Well now it’s time for recess here. And if your hearts are feeling drear – take hope my friends – for on our side we have great fighters:
All hail Diane Ravitch, Peter Greene, Bob Shepherd, Mercedes Schneider and EduShyster.
ANSWER to your question: Please read George Lakoff, “Don’t think of an elephant?” Presently, the whitehouse, aka, A. Duncan, are using the authoritarian/father frame to control the educational policy/language agenda—we need to get tough with kids, teachers, and parents –that is a value that, presently, overpowers the progressive nurturing value that you read about in this blog —just think of who wins when the word rigor goes up against child-centered — I know, I know, the research would send a different message, but as Lakoff expertly points out, in public debates values will always trump rational models of thinking and acting –that is what the right has been so good at—think of “tax-relief,” or even “race to the top.” Mr. Duncan, however, now finds the dominant father frame coming back to bite him, because another powerful frame, which is proving more powerful, is states right vs. big government — now that is a dangerous frame to be in right now — played out in the phrase, “Obamacore.” Instead of progressives arguing the merits of VAM, or the validity of standardized tests, they ought to be fighting fire with fire and screaming Obamacore at the top of their lungs.
Not really surprising that the NY Times supports an education reform movement that wants to put informational text in the hands of every K-12 school student.
See NY Times web page….”14 Ways to Use The Learning Network This School Year”
“1. Find a fresh Common Core-aligned lesson plan or activity every weekday…”
http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/03/14-ways-to-use-the-learning-network-this-school-year/
How does that saying go…oh yeah,don’t bite the hand that feeds you.
The more apt question is, “Why Doesn’t the NY Times COVER the Controversy of Common Core”? They can understand and NOT CHOOSE TO COVER or they can turn a blind eye and choose the side that wields the money. To cover a controversy one has to give all sides of an issue… EQUAL GROUNDING and the NY Times gets away with turning a cheek away from views in opposition to “ed reform”! As an American it concerns me greatly that I can read an article like the Ravitch one above with TOTALLY well researched arguments about what is MISSING from the debate. Yet I cannot find a major newspaper giving any air time to those issues. This is not what democracy looks like at all! American is now OWNED and this includes our major media. If the NY Times choses to pass off unbacked “opinion” as fact, they are no longer beholden TO THE PEOPLE. They are beholden to a media monopolist who pays vast sums of money to buy positions… thinking Bloomberg, Murdoch etc… Concentrations of economic power rule the roost as to what information is disseminated to the public at large… Robert Reich (looking at the larger picture) gives us the answer to “why the NY Times does not cover the common core controversy in his “Anti-Trust in a New Guilded Age” posting. I doubt it is lack of understanding. MONOPOLIES are back and the Sherman Anti Trust is a relic of democracy!
http://robertreich.org/post/82938136466
You didn’t “miss anything”! Excellent post and summary!
The New York Times doesn’t “understand” the relevant facts regarding the Common Core any more than it first understood the relevant facts of the Vietnam War or the facts that Dr. King presented in his famous speech in opposition to the war (which the Times promptly labeled “Dr. King’s Error”). This is because, the ravings of the far right notwithstanding, the New York Times almost always endeavors to construct and express, in what Phil Ochs used to call “good times,” a “ten degrees to the left of center” distillation of what it supposes mainstream, elite consensus to be. The now bipartisan consensus on education is that public schools need to be reformed along corporate, market friendly lines We cannot expect to see the Times’ perspective even modified until our resistance to it becomes a major, national fact of life.
P.S. Like not a few of the would-be reformers Times editor Jill Abramson honed her reading and writing skills at a progressive private school. In her case, this was New York’s Ethical Culture and Fieldston schools, from which she went to Harvard. Whether she has spent any significant time in a public school or sent her own children to one is unknown to me but presumably unlikely.
The fact that NY principal of the year can only get published in the Washington Post and not the NY Times shows just how biased the CCSS coverage in “the paper of record” is. Many folks I know have discontinued their NYT subscriptions. Diane, In addition to Huffington Post, how about The Guardian and the Washington Post? Thank you for your insightful comments,
The Washington Post slobbered all over Michelle Rhee and her brand of “reform.”
And when the cheating scandal broke in the DC schools? The Post opined that all the massive answer-changing (always wrong to right) might be due to “innocent” circumstances.
Democracy, the Washington Post was split on the subject of Rhee. The editorial board treated her as a deity; the reporters, like Nick Anderson, did a good job objectively covering the news. Unfortunately for the Post, it was USA Today that broke the story of the cheating scandal in DC, which was later followed up by John Merrow. The Washington Post editorial board has never given up the pretense that Rhee achieved great things, despite the fact that the district still has the largest achievement gaps of any US city, also that she has spent her post-DC years raising money from rightwing billionaires to promote vouchers and charters and attacking any due process or collective bargaining for teachers. She is the face of the privatization movement.
Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé.
The NYT, NBC, and all the rest, see themselves as potential players in the new edutainment market they are busting their ethics to create.
Sent an email to the NYTimes too. Politics, politics, politics!
I cross-posted this article on Huffington Post here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/diane-ravitch/common-core-new-york-times_b_5182703.html
Who owns the paper and what is his goal? It is run like our public schools today. If you disagree with the schools leaders, then you know you will be doomed, end of your career. There is the answer. Simple. Now give me a more challenging question like the Hanging Fountain problem our students had to do for the Common Core Test as their Performce Task. It was too bad that none of my students have ever seen a Hanging Fountain and most of our teaching staff, so no one could explain the problem to them afterword when they inquired about it. Of course, maybe some teachers could explain the problem to them so they would actually learn something new, but they sign a paper indicating that if they actually do something like explain the problem afterword then they will never teach again! At times like this, I wish all schools were run like the private DAY schools.
Missouri teacher bullied for speaking out against Common Core:
I love the part where she explains how she has to administer AIMSWeb tests repeatedly to her kindergarteners, even though she could tell you without a single test which kids need reading help. So true! The data is pointless –except for enriching Pearson, which sells AIMSWeb to the schools.
This is the letter I sent to Ms. Sullivan.
Dear Ms. Sullivan,
I’m writing to express my dismay at the Times’s representation of opposition to the Common Core. I’m sure you have received many letters so far, some from “extremist” politicians, including Republicans and leaders of various teachers’ unions, sure; but others from parents, moderately political teachers and possibly even a student or two. I am a teacher and have been for 15 years which means I am right in the middle of my career. I have been recognized for my teaching by Math for America (I have been a “Master Teacher” for eight or so years now), am locally respected (sorry, no data to support that) and have loved my job for all of these years. Now I find that the nutty wacky whims of the Department of Education under Bloomberg and Klein have been dwarfed by NYS and the federal government’s desire to implement truly difficult standards in a matter of months. We (teachers) are required to write curriculum based on almost NO information, tailor said curriculum to testing about which there are NO data, and still teach our five classes of 34 students a day without skipping a beat.
I imagine you are thinking, why do you need to tailor curriculum to tests, especially if the tests don’t even exist yet? Sure, it has something to do with our jobs being on the line if our students don’t surpass some standard or other (sorry, but to us it all seems just so very arbitrary), but more to the point, no reform means anything until you see what assessment is going to be. We are accustomed to writing our curricula by determining what it is we want our students to be able to do and then designing activities and lessons to convey those expectations and to train students to accomplish goals. It would be duplicitous for the powers that be to withhold those expectations from us if they were even close to having established them, but we are all too aware that, unfortunately, Pearson and others are scrambling madly to write tests (for billions and billions of dollars) that they have no time to field test, which has already resulted in chaos and utter confusion in lower grades in NY State. My colleagues and I have NO problem holding students to high standards as long as those standards are clearly conveyed to us and as long as we have time to develop appropriate curricula and activities. (We would have used the summer to do this if the standards had been available before September — not happily, but we would have done so.) The current situation is diametrically opposed to that. And I must reiterate my disappointment that the NYT, the only paper of record as far as I am concerned, totally missed the point: that parents and students and educators are ALL up in arms about the Common Core, not just extremist politicians on both sides, because to us, the CC standards are not even standards. They are vague ideas being developed (for huge personal profit) by billionaires and testing companies, imposed upon teachers, students and parents with complete disregard for education, learning and progress. And there, Ms. Sullivan, is your story.
Thanks and very best wishes,
Heidi Reich
Well said Heidi! I can vouch for the vagueness of the ELA standards.
Thank you! You’re nice.
Outstanding!
Sorry…still getting used to button placements on this platform…
Outstanding!
No worries, thank you, thank you! Maybe she’ll read it…
This is the letter I sent to Ms. Sullivan:
Dear Ms. Sullivan,
I’m writing to express my dismay at the Times’s representation of opposition to the Common Core. I’m sure you have received many letters so far, some from “extremist” politicians, including Republicans and leaders of various teachers’ unions, sure; but others from parents, moderately political teachers and possibly even a student or two. I am a teacher and have been for 15 years which means I am right in the middle of my career. I have been recognized for my teaching by Math for America (I have been a “Master Teacher” for eight or so years now), am locally respected (sorry, no data to support that) and have loved my job for all of these years. Now I find that the nutty wacky whims of the Department of Education under Bloomberg and Klein have been dwarfed by NYS and the federal government’s desire to implement truly difficult standards in a matter of months. We (teachers) are required to write curriculum based on almost NO information, tailor said curriculum to testing about which there are NO data, and still teach our five classes of 34 students a day without skipping a beat.
I imagine you are thinking, why do you need to tailor curriculum to tests, especially if the tests don’t even exist yet? Sure, it has something to do with our jobs being on the line if our students don’t surpass some standard or other (sorry, but to us it all seems just so very arbitrary), but more to the point, no reform means anything until you see what assessment is going to be. We are accustomed to writing our curricula by determining what it is we want our students to be able to do and then designing activities and lessons to convey those expectations and to train students to accomplish goals. It would be duplicitous for the powers that be to withhold those expectations from us if they were even close to having established them, but we are all too aware that, unfortunately, Pearson and others are scrambling madly to write tests (for billions and billions of dollars) that they have no time to field test, which has already resulted in chaos and utter confusion in lower grades in NY State. My colleagues and I have NO problem holding students to high standards as long as those standards are clearly conveyed to us and as long as we have time to develop appropriate curricula and activities. (We would have used the summer to do this if the standards had been available before September — not happily, but we would have done so.) The current situation is diametrically opposed to that. And I must reiterate my disappointment that the NYT, the only paper of record as far as I am concerned, totally missed the point: that parents and students and educators are ALL up in arms about the Common Core, not just extremist politicians on both sides, because to us, the CC standards are not even standards. They are vague ideas being developed (for huge personal profit) by billionaires and testing companies, imposed upon teachers, students and parents with complete disregard for education, learning and progress. And there, Ms. Sullivan, is your story.
Thanks and very best wishes,
Heidi Reich
Welcome to our (conservatives’) world, Diane. This is what we deal with from The Times, WaPo, et. al. all the freakin’ time. The narrative is determined in advance, and the reporters do not let facts get in the way.
As much as I hate the way the Common Core issue is being distorted in the press, I have to admit a small degree of satisfaction in seeing the angst this is causing some folks who are, generally speaking, used to the press being completely on their side of most issues.
The corporate owned media do not represent everyday people anymore: left, right, middle. They serve their masters.
I really feel bad for those young,recent journalist grads, all starry eyed, and hungry to report…only to be reigned in by the owners.
Dear Jack:
What might be all those “facts” that the press so often ignores?
Please explain.
THE NEW YORK TIMES is and has been startlingly conservative about U.S. education. It publishes piece after piece that is anti-union, pro-charter school, anti-teacher, and pro-testing. It adores the Common Core. I’ve wondered for years if someone on their editorial board has something against the MEA or teachers in general that explains the hostility.
Steven: During the Wisconsin protests 2 years ago I was desperate for news, pretty sure NYT had next to nothing.
I’m not sure why one would expect the truth from the NY Times. The propaganda that consistently covers the pages of “the paper of record” is far more damaging than the troglodytes at Fox etc as it is far more subtle and stylish than anything Fox News puts forth. The NY Times is a mouthpiece of the ruling class and certainly has many sponsors who see to it that reality is artfully misrepresented.
I’m rather surprised anyone would expect anything else.
I am sobered by the ways that the standards have been used: political football, teacher accountability measure, new income stream for for-profit companies, rampant test development, sadly ignorant “implementation” across the nation. Anyone who actually reads the standards, though, will see nothing amiss. These are the standards that we all want our children to meet.
Standards go hand in hand with standardized testing. And no, standards are not a logical good thing (having curriculum is another thing entirely).
To understand why standards are not the way to go read and understand Noel Wilson’s complete destruction of educational standards and of standardized testing: “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at:
http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)
1. A quality cannot be quantified. Quantity is a sub-category of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category by only a part (sub-category) of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as one dimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing we are lacking much information about said interactions.
2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other word all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. As a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any
result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it measures “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution
My answer is NO!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self-evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
I saw Governor Haslam blamed The Unions. The ed reformer all-purpose boogeyman. “Union thugs!”
Not surprising, considering Haslam an anti-labor political activist:
“Gov. Bill Haslam and other top state officials have asked the National Labor Relations Board to revoke subpoenas by the United Auto Workers union in advance of a labor hearing in Chattanooga next week.
The UAW had sought to compel them to testify as part of the union’s challenge of the February election results at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga.
State Attorney General Bob Cooper’s office filed the petition Thursday afternoon calling for the subpoenas to be voided, and also asked the NLRB to delay the hearing until the subpoena issue could be resolved.”
http://www.tennessean.com/story/money/cars/2014/04/17/haslam-others-fight-uaws-subpoena-vw-labor-hearing/7840903/
You guys are missing the point! Fewer than 50 years ago, the media was a reflection of over 100 corporations points of view. Today, it is owned and operated by a handful of companies. It has been bought; and thus the truth will never be reported on. The media has been bought by the corporate swines as everything else in this Country. I will give you an example: i used to visit a site called theedfly.com for various educational articles and information One day, I immediately noticed that the articles were politically slanted and not balanced. I did some searching and found that the site had been bought by Jeb Bush’s Foundation For Excellence. Need to say, that was the last time I visited that website. That’s what the corporate masters do, they crush any opposing viewpoint (the truth) and they silence it with their never ending stream of capital. This goes beyond education. These individuals want with all their hearts to rule and control every single commodity and asset in the entire world including the air we breathe. I know it sounds a bit radical but do some research and you will find that the plans of the elite go way beyond what any rational human being can begin to fathom.
I used to listen to progressive talk radio here in the Bay Area until ClearChannel shut it down. I miss Norman Goldman, Stephanie Miller, Thom Hartmann, et. al.
http://www.salon.com/2014/04/19/reaganomics_killed_americas_middle_class_partner/
http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2014/04/take_a_sneak_peek_at_the_new_c.html
Ohio newspapers are finally offering some CC information to parents. They pulled it off the testing website.
Might have been nice if the Common Core promoters spent less time talking to David Brooks and more time talking to the parents of the kids who are taking the tests.
They’re conducting an experiment on 50 million kids. Maybe they could have done some ground work in actual public school districts, instead of holding roundtables with media, pundits and consultants?
I haven’t decided where I am on the Common Core but I have absolutely no sympathy for people who don’t even make an effort to reach out to parents of the affected children.
Why don’t they stop with the sales pitch and just talk to people? Drop the celebrity endorsements and the stern lectures and make your case to public school parents. Try that. See how that goes.
Chiara Duggan: I value your comments.
Take as much time as you need to come to a firm decision about CCSS.
One small suggestion while continuing to mull this over. The self-styled “education reformers” mandate one sort of education for OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN. I would simply remind you to contrast this with John Dewey’s observation:
“What the best and wisest parent wants for his child, that must we want for all the children of the community. Anything less is unlovely, and left unchecked, destroys our democracy.”
Then visit the websites listed below (I am sure you could add many others) for the kind of education the leading charterites/privatizers of the “new civil rights movement of our time” provide THEIR OWN CHILDREN.
Link: http://www.lakesideschool.org [Bill Gates]
Link: http://www.harpethhall.org [Michelle Rhee]
Link: http://www.ucls.uchicago.edu [Rahm Emanuel]
Link: http://www.sidwell.edu [Barack Obama]
Link: http://www.delbarton.org [Chris Christie]
Then review the recent post on this blog regarding one of the biggest CCSS promoters in Tennessee, Dr. Candace McQueen, who literally advocates mandating for OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN what she won’t be providing for the kind of school the leading charterites/privatizers send THEIR OWN CHILDREN to. Namely, the school that she will soon be in charge of!
Link: https://dianeravitch.net/2014/03/23/common-core-for-commoners-not-my-school/
If there is any wisdom in those members of the education/political/economic establishment that are funding/promoting/mandating CCSS, then there shouldn’t be such a stark contrast between what they choose for their own and what they provide for everyone else.
Just my dos centavitos worth…
😎
I talked to teachers and (the) school librarian here (we used to have two librarians, now we have one) and I heard some positive and some negative on the Common Core. I haven’t made a decision on it yet.
I already know I hate the greedy excitement over the “new markets opening up!” and I’m already concerned that we are going to be inundated with cheap commercial garbage and gimmicks with the Common Core label.
Maybe the NYTimes could do that? Travel to an ordinary public school district and talk to some teachers? Why are they interviewing politicians and lobbyists, most of whom don’t even have kids in public schools?
Depending on where you work…you , as a teacher, cannot speak out against it. You have to let people talk and complain and tacitly agree with them. I was even afraid to speak out after retiring lest I be banned from the school property.
It was a fearsome work environment with horrid staff morale. It has only gotten worse. You just can’t expect the media access to truth. Yet, those who have “bought in” can talk willingly.
Chiara, parent and public ed faculty here, the problem is it’s all Common Core now, that’s it. Every other great conduit to great learning is gone. All PD: CC. All lessons:CC, It’s very limiting, depressing and scary. All the previous info I have over the years from great PD, is now filed far far away. And you know what? All that info? It was research based, developmentally appropriate and our school district did well. We are not a school with the impact of poverty. The first question before an observation? Is this Common Core aligned?
David Axelrod @davidaxelrod 9h
Q for RIght and Left: If U.S. doesn’t make up Ed gap with competing nations, what does it say about our future? http://nyti.ms/1nhrkqJ
Q for David Axelrod: When Common Core supporters put in a huge system change that affects 50 million children, shouldn’t they reach out to the parents of those children sometime prior to the Common Core tests beginning?
Chiara, that tweet from Axelrod is nutty. Please remind him we are the most powerful nation in the world. Tell him to read my book. We have had that “gap” with other nations for 50 years. And so?
Chaira,
The Axelrod claim – schools must do their jobs to make the U.S. economically competitive – is fallacious to the core. It’s the same claim that was made in A Nation at Risk (and soundly refuted by the Sandia Report).
The fact that Democrats now make it is more than a little worrisome.
The U.S. IS already internationally competitive (see the WEF rankings). When it drops in the rankings it’s because of stupid economic decisions made by corporate “leaders” and politicians that lead to big deficits and debt, and that caused a broken economy.
On a national scale, it’s called supply-side economics, and it’s been an abysmal failure for most citizens, but not for corporations and the rich. And they want even more of it.
This is my biggest concern with the Common Core, from the Toledo Blade:
“Certainly schools need time, flexibility, and support to align their instruction with the new standards. Teachers have to be trained adequately in how they work.
Until teachers, schools, and states can adjust fully and effectively to Common Core and the tests that are based on its standards, they shouldn’t be penalized if student scores lag a bit — maybe even for several years — during the transition. Testing needs to return to its original purpose: as a diagnostic tool, not an excuse for cutting off someone’s funding.”
I believe the tests are going to be used to bash teachers and public schools, and I’m sick to death of public schools being used as a political punching bag.
I don’t have a bit of faith in either the Obama Administration or the Kasich Administration re: public schools. I think both administrations have bashed public schools to advance their political goals, and I would bet my mortgage payment they’ll do it again as soon as the testing is completed. There’s simply no trust there. I know public schools are going to get screwed, because they don’t have advocates in government.
Read more at http://www.toledoblade.com/DavidKushma/2014/04/20/Make-Common-Core-better-in-Ohio-don-t-scrap-it.html#pITxlc6BOT3rzZGu.99
It goes beyond Common Core although that is an exceptionally galling example:
http://danielskatz.net/2014/04/09/lessons-for-the-media-in-the-age-of-social-media/
I think these people exist in a highly privileged bubble and are at once intoxicated by how Arne Duncan and Bill Gages court their voices and are at the same time shockingly unfamiliar with how they are no longer the sole gate keepers of what is known and what is worth knowing.
Some of it is also team cheerleading I am afraid. They are generally positively disposed towards Obama and also used to seeing his most fierce opposition coming from the unhinged segments of the right. It is an easy, if lazy, narrative to put on to the concerns about Common Core and the administration’s detrimental impact on public education.
But they do it anyway. Because their strongest bias is towards maintaining their influence with and access to the powerful.
Do any of Times subsidiaries or members of their boards have interests in firms/interests benefiting from Common Core?
Sent from my iPad
>
Doug,
I don’t know but I do know the big beneficiaries of Common Core are tech companies, Murdoch, others selling stuff to schools to comply with CC requirements
Diane, great synopsis, though you didn’t mention this teacher’s big worry with the Common Core: that by failing to demand robust teaching of content, it almost guarantees that our future graduates will be quite ignorant.
You continue to be a lone voice of reason on this critical issue.
We have really gone astray on this. Arguing for content in the classroom seems absurd.
Can you both expand on your arguments, please? I am missing something…It may have to do with the fact that I teach pre-k and am still learning about CCS for older grades….thx
CC standards are nearly devoid of content/subject knowledge. They focus much more on abstract skills that are, for the most part, un-teachable. Ponderosa, Bob Shepherd, and a few others have tried to highlight this glaring deficiency in these de-fact national standards. The Pearson ELA tests administered recently verified this. A complete absence of content based items. None actually. Students cannot think critically, problem solve, etc. without a strong foundation of knowledge. A foundation that the CC has given short shrift.
My family and I used to read the New York Times, but with its biases, and misguided lack of balanced and professional journalism, it has no place in our home or lives.
Perhaps this holds some explanation, a little something from my files:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/10/obama-press-freedom-cpj_n_4073037.html
Because the issue like most other issues today are fought on an emotional level. We will never win the battle with rational, objective thought. People first decide how they feel about an issue like CCSS, then build a foudation supporting that mindset. Evidence, observation, and reason are optional. This is where the Tea Party will succeed by appealing to fear over CCSS cloaked in “state’s rights” and “personal freedom” – and they be right. I’ve been asked as a teacher what I think about CCSS. I have yet been able to get out 1-2 sentences before the questioner loses interest or launches into an uninformed opinion. Usually talking points from a tv segment or web site.
Emotions trump reason with most people. Excellent point here MathVale. The issue I like to bring up is the hypocrisy.
“Why won’t the people who promote the CCSS put their own children through the very same standards and tests that they push on others?
Not one of them – why?”
If this doesn’t resonate, nothing else will.
It seems to strike an emotional chord.
Duncan, Gates, and King say, good enough for other kids, but not good enough for my kids?
Substandard journalism is the hallmark of our times because it no longer matters if they get it right. We are not the customers anymore. Today’s readers wouldn’t notice the gaps anyway. This dumbing down has become a highly lethal virus.
YES! YES! YES! GOOD FOR YOU!
The Core Standards debacle is just one more missed opportunity for getting to the bottom of the lies disseminated by the snake-oil salesmen who sell their magic elixirs.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Magic-Elixir-No-Evidence-by-Susan-Lee-Schwartz-130312-433.html
IN fact, until the Common Core narrative was disseminated by Duncan and stooges, education ‘news’ rarely made it to the front page or editorial sections. The only ed news was about celebrating charter school alternatives to those failing schools, and giving Eva the bully pulpit to spin her propaganda.
I tell you Diane, I have letters to the NY Times going back ten years, to columnists, editors and the publishers, chronicling the lawless behavior of the principals and superintendents in NYC. The NY Times never answered any of them, and has never once covered the corruption of this largest school system in the country as it defended into the abyss.
They totally ignored the stories of teachers who were the victims of due process violations chronicled by Betsy Combier. There were wonderful human interest stories about fabulous teachers who went to court and WON, proving the most despicable behavior by administration. Veteran teachers in nYC were wiped out, as The New York Times decried the dead-wood and prescribed evaluation tools and tests.
David Pakter was one of the teachers our city lost. He wrote the medical illustration course at the Fine Arts HS and was presented an award by former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani for “Exceptional Achievement” in Education. But, he brought a plant to school, and was sent to the rubber room for insubordination. Yes, a plant… and they slandered him in the press.
http://ednotesonline.blogspot.com/2010/06/charges-against-david-pakter-dismissed.html
No investigative journalism in his case, or in the recent case of Francesco Portelos. What a story of abuse! But it is Not news for The New York Times.
http://protectportelos.org/does-workplace-bullying-continues-my-33-hrs-behind-bars/
Their educational news, that I get in their bulletins offers no ‘news’ that ‘s fit to print, but then, they don’t print much any more. They are going on-line with their Premier membership offer, where for $50 a month one can hook-up with all their on-line ‘fun’ stuff.
The NY Times ‘reporters’ who cover education in NYC are not journalists. The NY Times received a Pulitzer for photography this year. Perhaps, if they did some GENUIINE inquiry and investigation of the corruption in NYC DOE they might be recognized for their reporting.
Thank you for standing up for us in NYC and nailing this ‘news’paper.
Thank you for this scathing and informative summary of some of the abuses under Bloomberg. Do you see any improvement yet under the new NYC mayor and chancellor?
Not yet, but it hasn’t been very long and deBlasio is getting lots of pushback from Cuomo and others.
Well, I’ve read through all these comments and certainly agree there is a vast gulf between the reality of opposition in the real world and who it’s coming from, and what’s getting reported in the paper.
HOWEVER …. it is not clear to me from here in California at least, that those with misgivings about CCSS are (a) well-enough informed to articulate a position or (b) speaking out. And so perhaps the NYTimes may be owed a slight modicum of forgiveness.
I think here on Ravitch’s website we are speaking in an echo chamber and the chorus of reality might sound a bit different.
As has been pointed out widely and in particular above in the youtube video, teachers are personally and professionally silenced on this issue. Though their perspective is of course invaluable and critically pertinent, many have been explicitly instructed to keep their opinions silent on the subject of CCSS. Thus while their perspective ought to be front and center, teachers themselves are in fact subject to “sinister intimidation” that removes their voice from the conversation about which we are expecting the Times to report. True, we would expect them to dig deeper and get that voice all the same; its silence ought to be part of the story. And yet, for a non-investigative piece, one could at least understand how this is missed.
Moreover, I have to say that I am personally at least, more than spooked by the onslaught of right-wing opposition to CCSS that just swamps out more politically moderate voices of opposition to CCSS. Thus this post of mine here, on Ravitch’s blog, actually amounts to a cry of need for support from you-all — publicly, not just on Diane Ravitch’s blog.
In particular, I recently started a FB page focused on the need to corral information about the CCSS and potentially support parents who would opt out of its tests in the LA area (https://www.facebook.com/groups/LAQuestionsCommonCore/). That blog has been swamped with a slew of right-wing, tea-party type and possibly libertarian-swayed postings. I don’t really know what has hit me or where this is all coming from. It’s absolutely bewildering. As someone so partisan in their politics that I find I have trouble behaving humanly decent in just plain holding a pleasant conversation with a republican, it is just mind-bending to find myself politically awash in a sea of conservatives with such a faint hue of simpatico voices for support. In fact, in all honesty I used to write a blog twice-weekly that I have recently stopped writing because, among other reasons, I am just feeling deeply spooked by knowing that so many of my supporters are fairly strident, vehement right-wingers. It makes me feel positively creeped out in my own skin, to feel the preponderance of my support comes from folks with whom I vehemently disagree on most subjects.
Which is to say: where IS that common voice? The one that is expressed here (dianeravitch.net), but only faintly? I know many parents who have told me they look at the FB page, but won’t join it because they are so creeped out by the association with tea partiers. Yet they are missing out on the opportunity for discussion of the issue; they are clearly wanting and needing it. The conversation is dominated by conservatives, though.
And so again, I do hold some slight sympathy for the NYTimes in failing to investigate the source of opposition to CCSS. The cacophany of the disinterested really is from the right, mostly, I think. I do not believe this is the *true* extent of the preponderance of support, but I do think this is the arena from which the most noise is coming. And I think that noise is very, very strident. And I think it swamps the rest of us out.
Therefore I think it is incumbent on the rest of us, those who can, the parents and retired teachers and thinkers all, to make more noise than we do about CCSS. Not just here, among the converted. This noise needs to be louder in more common places, in the social media at large, etc.
I think another explanation for the resounding silence among non-extremists regarding opposition to CCSS is truly a widespread terror of expressing distaste for Prez Obama. I think non-conservatives by and large, have a hear-no-evil response to this administration. They are afraid that learning too much and developing a negative opinion regarding a set of Obama policies, will weaken the advances of political empowerment more generally made among people of color in this country recently, and democrats in general. I think there is a politics of association going on that is so powerful that people are more willing to ignore evidence of wrong-headed politics than to look at those policies critically and develop an opinion. I cannot tell you how many close political allies of mine have told me they simply will not read anything critical of Obama because no matter what the details of perfidy may be, the overwhelming partisan need to retain approval from the left as a bulwark against the right, leaves them uninterested in policy “details”.
This sort of attitude just sends me into a paroxysm of misery, but my own personal reactions aside, this is a personification of why the observations made above about how these CCSS policies are not being experienced by the policy makers, matters. It’s good democrats who are slathering this horrible protocol all over the public school population. But so many of them are exempt from its personal effect that they do not truly understand what they wrought. And these activist’s voices of experience are not present in the public debate. Because so many ordinary non-extremists, have removed their children to havens of sane Education. It’s the unpleasant reality of public school education at least in big cities: lots and lots and lots of the most active and aware parents, have sequestered themselves in Educational oases exempt from CCSS.
Thus the pool of ideological opposition to CCSS is in fact abbreviated and might well appear to be dominated by political crazies. If you disagree with this proposition, then muster your troops and make some more noise about it out there please! It feels pretty lonely to me….
A very heartfelt post.
I might add (see my comment below) that there are those who ‘oppose’ the Common Core (sort of) but who embrace other things (ACT, SAT, AP) that are, in essence, embedded in it.
Democracy, the representatives of the ACT and SAT were well represented on the working groups that wrote CCSS, unlike representatives of early childhood education and educators of children with disabilities and English learners.
@ Diane: I know. And that’s my point. The Common Core was pushed jointly by Achieve (think big corporations), the ACT and the College Board.
Thus, the ACT and the SAT (and AP) are the Common Core , and the Common Core is them. Both the ACT and the College Board very publicly tout the ‘fact’ that their products are “aligned” with the Common Core.
As I noted, there are those who don’l like the Common Core, but who embrace the ACT, SAT, AP programs, and/or STEM. It’s hard to be ‘agin’ one and ‘fer’ the other.
Thank you for this post. I too am a rather confused former Obama supporter. I have a right-wing friend who has been teasing me mercilessly, saying he knew all along Obama was going to be an authoritarian and a big disapointment to his supporters. I’ve been thinking a lot about Ralph Nader — in his last run for the presidency, he kept insisting there was no difference worth talking about between the major parties, they are both in the pockets of corporate interests and neither will uphold true democracy. New York City just voted in a progressive mayor, and the first thing that happened is our Democratic Obama-allied governor led the state legislature in squashing his attempt to rein in charter schools, a promise de Blasio ran on and that his voters supported. Where indeed is democracy? It’s getting very hard to find in the Democratic party.
Precisely. I *just* forwarded a quote of Nader’s to a friend in reminder of your point, as it happens. I know it was bitterly disappointing to many to understand the depth of Nader’s conviction that the true schism was not between ass and elephant, but 99% and 1% — his stance was taken before Occupy highlighted this true structural rift and it’s just hard to accept, for all of us. Nader’s been mano a mano with the 1% from the beginning and he never did lose sight of the whites of the eyes of his true enemy. The rest of us are subject to more confusion; few of us are as single-focused as he.
I confess to never trusting Obama to be much more than conservative, but I did not expect betrayal. I will always remember a photo on the internet handwritten “Thank You America” following his election. Cynicism may have cushioned the shock of this fall, but the betrayal is 100% as painful all the same. We need leaders from below.
From BOTH sides of our benightedly dichotomous political line. I think it takes enormous courage to recognize the outlines of one’s true enemy. But we the people ought to understand it is those who would fragment us into monochromatic cesspools. I love democracy. But we need to encourage more speaking out from all around, left right and center: “The price of apathy is to be ruled by evil men” (Plato)
Yes, redqueeninla! That is why in NYC we are very anxiously watching to see if de Blasio is going to fulfill the real mandate he was given by the voters to pursue a progressive agenda, or will be another Obama/Cuomo corporate type — massive disappointment.
The deep disappointment many members of BOTH major parties feel with their respective party’s leadership is made all the more painful by absolutely abysmal job the press is doing on education, leaving scholars and educators like Diane Ravitch and Carol Burris to do the work journalists are supposed to be doing. Not only is Common Core opposition grossly mischaracterized — where is the investigative reporting on Pearson’s cozy and destructive alliance with NYSED? They’ve covered — very lightly — the growing protests over Pearson’s unbelievably shoddy tests, but it is again left to bloggers like the great Fred Smith to actually explain why Pearson’s test development was inadequate to the point of being delinquent. He predicted a year ago the disaster we just saw with the ELA, because he had looked at the fine print of contracts and saw the tests were being thrown together using substandard methodologies.
Well, it’s amazing how educational it is having kids — among the thousand things I’ve learned from raising them, in mid-life I’m experiencing first hand all the truisms about democracy — that without constant vigilance, it is lost very quickly, and that those who are indolent (i.e. me most of my adult life) will soon find themselves with masters telling them what to do. Great civics lesson. Thanks, Arne and Barack.
Diane Ravitch asks this question about the New York Times: “How can the nation’s ‘newspaper of record’ be so seriously indifferent to or ignorant of the major education issue of our day?”
A fair question, but a narrow focus. That question is also fair game for The Washington Post. And Time magazine (remember that Michelle Rhee cover?). And most mainstream education reporters (including many at the Education Writer’s Association). And the ‘leadership’ of both the NEA and AFT. And the Association for Supervision and Curriculum development (ASCD).
Toss in the National School Boards Association. And the National Association of Elementary School Principals. And the National Association of Secondary School Principles. And the American Association of School Administrators. These groups recently issued a joint statement supporting the Common Core (but delaying its massive testing requirements). Their statement made clear that public education in the United States is in deeper trouble than many thought. The problem is not just the corporate “reformers” and their allies. The critical problem is not pedagogy nor is it the assessment of teaching. It’s not personnel, and it’s not standards or curriculum.
To be sure, all of these areas need attention. But they require thoughtful attention, grounded in research. And we’re not getting very much of that. And that’s because there is very serious lack of authentic leadership in the field. At all levels.
Moreover, too many parents and students and educators have bought into the fallacious assumptions behind the ACT and SAT tests (that they measure ‘intelligence’ and accurately predict success in college) and subscribe to the myth that the College Board’s Advanced Placement program is “better” than regular college-preparatory-type classes. It should surprise no one that both the ACT and the College Board were major players in the development of the Common Core. So were the big corporations and conservative foundations (through their puppets, Achieve and he National Math and Science Initiative) who push STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) education relentlessly, even though there is nothing whatsoever that resembles a STEM crisis or shortage.
In short, the New York Times (like other mainstream publications) has clearly misled its readers. Times editors are guilty of engaging in sloppy and critically unreflective thinking that results in deceit, and bad policy and practice.
But they’ve got an awful lot of company.
Time magazine is a major ed deform propaganda organ. It runs piece after piece of ed deform PR presented as news.
No surprise… for the most part the media belongs to the billionaires who want to see democracy go down… by the way, do not miss the John Stewart Show for April 23… about the outrageous lies propagated by the media… he goes after Hannity. I stood and applauded the tv.
Susan, what was the name of that great Shakespeare program again? I lost the link, and I wanted to share it with FLERP, who brought up the subject of Shakespeare with kids. The site was just great, but I failed to bookmark it, and I would love to be able to share it to show people what can be done there.
This is the facebook page.
https://www.facebook.com/ImprovEdShakespeare
This is the improv ed site.
http://improvedshakespeare.wordpress.com
My daughter-in-law, Andee Kinzy is a filmmaker and actress who created this for the home-school group in which her kids (my grandkids)were students.
I think she will eventual turn her attention back to theater and film, and simply does not realize what she has already created has great value for teachers. I would love to add a writing component, but I am the mother-in-law and … well… it would be wonderful if you and other educators actually added commentary to the site, so she could see that THIS is a wonderful product that has so much value at a time when the schools are failing to get the kids to use language… and to work hard to do something of value… memorizing those lines, learning the moves, the bits of action involves disciple and habits of mind.
Oh, BTW you can see my grandson Brant, at 8:23 on the timeline of Part 3 of “Winter’s Tale”.
and of course it is my granddaughter Zia who is Hamleta ( an in many other roles in the various productions, including as the bearded Shylock in “The Merchant of Venice”.http://improvedshakespeare.wordpress.com/2014/01/29/improved-shakespeares-winters-tale/
Outstanding post, Diane!
For a couple years now, I have been asking myself, “Since the ELA standards are so clearly idiotic–so backward, amateurish, hackneyed, unimaginative, so often prescientific, so misconceived conceptually, so limiting of curricula and pedagogy–why haven’t the authors of these been hooted off the national stage?
There are a bunch of interesting answers to that question:
1. Many people talk about the standards a lot but have never actually read them critically. This applies to ALMOST ALL the Education Deformers. And many of them wouldn’t know what these things meant if they did read them. In particular, they wouldn’t know what better ALTERNATIVES the standards PRECLUDE.
2. Many curriculum developers are scared to death that their bosses will learn of their opposition to the standards, think them not team players, and give them the boot.
3. Many teachers live in absolute terror due to all the sanctions, explicit and implied, they’ve heard about in “trainings” (sit up. roll over. good boy.), “data chats,” and other Rheeformish vehicles for ensuring absolute obedience.
4. Many consultants and edupundits are wallowing in great piles of green that have resulting from collaborating with Deform.
5. Some people are just, well, how do I put this politely . . . as yet unlearned in the relevant disciplines, aspiring learners, in the bluebird group.
6. Some are technocratic philistines who simply don’t know, don’t care to know, and never will know the difference between reading a poem and identifying which among the five choices is an alternate meaning of the third word in line 4 of stanza 16.
And for this last group, some lines from Frost:
I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me~
And here’s another big one:
Under NCLB, people got used to state “standards” that were likewise shoddy and ill-conceived but THAT DIDN’T MATTER AS MUCH because people took them with a grain (a bucket!) of salt (except, and this is a big exception, when it came to the standardized tests, where the standards always were the ONLY THING). The only people who really subjected the state standards to anything like careful exegesis were curriculum developers, who recognized them for the lowest-common-denominator groupthink that they were and went about developing, as best they could, given the limitations of the standards, curricula that paid lip service to those standards but that went way, way beyond them.
Under CC$$, of course, that’s become increasingly, exponentially more difficult. Most of the educational publishers (a thousand plagues on them!) are now treating Lord Coleman’s ignorant list as the Holy of Holies, as though it read, in part:
18 For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book:
19 And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book.
And the result is a horrific distortion of the materials being produced, a distortion so extreme that one begins to wonder when, if ever, reading, writing, thinking, and research will be taught again in K-12 in the United States.
After the deluge brought on by deform. . . .
@ Robert:
With regard to the Common Core (and especially the ELA standards), you’ve cited a host of culprits for the standards coming into being including “curriculum developers,” “consultants and edupundits,” “teachers,” “technocratic philistines” and “some people.”
But you’ve not mentioned those who are supposed to be public education’s “leaders.” Like the heads of the AFT and NEA (“the two national teachers’ unions have been among the initiative’s biggest boosters”). Or the executive ‘leadership” of ASCD, and the National School Boards Association. Or those in “leadership” positions at the National Association of School Administrators (superintendents), the National Association of Secondary School Principals, and the National Association of Elementary School Principals.
And what about those who “lead” the ACT and the College Board? How about those who “lead” state departments of education? And what about college presidents and admissions officers? A provost at a college where the SAT has been optional recently told USA Today that given the College Board’s recent change to the Common Core-aligned SAT, “the college might look at weighing the new test differently.”
When “leaders’ lead the wrong way, we’re more apt to get into trouble.
And we’re in some deep stuff now.
Indeed, I can’t figure out whether the union leaders are naive or venal or some combination thereof. They certainly haven’t any clue or seem to be acting as though they hadn’t a clue about why the plutocrats and the big educational publishers paid to create a national bullet list and what the consequences of that list are for our schools and for their own members’ jobs in the future. I want to shake these people and tell them to wake the —- up.
Bob, they seem to be reactive instead of proactive. They are cowering in their corners watching as their world falls in all about their heads. By the time they gain their voices, it will be too late. There will be nothing left to save.
The resulting low morale caused by the fear of unfair evaluations by administrators who are forced or willingly choose to push out any one who doesn’t play their game with open arms keeps local unions from having any ability to push back. It becomes ridiculous. What takes place in social settings, private grade level gatherings, school showers for weddings and babies and retirement, and even in the lounge reflect the true nature of teacher’s feelings. But, the admonitions by the principal (said to be via the superintendent) to say NOTHING to parents or in public that isn’t supportive of whatever the district is forcing upon us isn’t comfortable or conducive to following your conscience.
Even the union reps from our school resigned when the teachers voiced their negativity towards all this. No one will step into that position. It may not be this way everywhere but I would expect it isn’t all that rare.
I am not sure whether the local union or the NEA has greater influence on the behaviors of local teachers. All I know is that there are strong-arm tactics used to “keep teachers in line” with threats of replacement and evaluations that are not based on performance but on compliance.
Everyone wants to remain employed since the job market is so sluggish that finding a comparablevjob with a decent salary and benefits is unlikely for teachers and administrators who have tenure and experience
The Buffalo Teachers Federation has pushed back and argued against NYSUT. Rochester is also pushing back as should Syracuse’s Teacher’s Union.
Expect law suits, even if the local unions don’t have the support of NYSUT or the NEA.
The Big Five in NYS can’t afford to let King’s rampage continue. I just hope it won’t be too little, too late.
We need a presidential candidate who understands the issues and will represent the concerns of parents, students and educators. Our tax dollars have to stop going to charter schools. Taxation without representation is against the constitution. Where does Hillary stand?
On her effin head.
Do not look to another Clinton toady of the Waltons.
Sadly, I’m not sure Hillary would get it. Like Obama,mthe rest the matter of campaign donors, the media cheerleading, and the idea we can appear to be bipartisan on education.
The Democrats are handing the GOP major issues.
Hillary and Bill were at the very inception of this standards-and-testing movement, way back during the first George Bush administration, when Bill was head of the NGA, long before the idea bore its poisoned fruit in NCLB and Son of NCLB, CC$$.
So, for her to reverse direction on this would be HUGE. She was one of the founding mothers of this.
Well, Diane could counsel her through it.
HA! Yes, to be a fly on THAT wall!!! Two very bright and capable people, there.
🙂
I’m not committed to Hillary, but I think she is capable of getting it. And in the early 90s this was the thing. Or it hadn’t turned malignant?
Yes. I, too, hold out hope there, Peter. She has made some sounds of that kind, but nothing definitive.
I think that this is all becoming so toxic that many politicians will see opposition as an opportunity in the next election cycle.
And while 2016 is not here,someone like Hillary could influence some of the people at all levels running in 2014.
You can bet CCSS will be an issue in GOP primaries.
The Repugnicans for now, but I am willing to bet that there will be Dims defecting too, despite their now full-blown addiction to $$$ from folks from folks in finance and high tech businesses.
Despite the utter hogwash promulgated by the AFT about parent and teacher support for deform, there is, in reality (as opposed to rheeality) massive untapped popular opposition to CC$$ and testing, and that untapped source of ready and spirited popular support will prove, I suspect, too much to resist come election time. There will be a lot of equivocators and some who will actually come into the light.
I have great respect for her. Extraordinarily bright. Very, very capable. We shall see.
Is she capable of understanding our critique and its accompanying arguments? Certainly. But would she be willing, absent far more mass pressure than thus far exists, to do battle with the corporate forces that such a shift would require? Not bloody likely. Hasn’t the history of the Clinton and Obama administrations taught us that? These are people who come out of a context where they were e posed to a variety of progressive viewpoints. Yet they persuaded themselves long ago that their personal power was far more important, and in their minds could do far more good, than any adherence to progressive principles. We ignore this at our own peril.
A ram, this isn’t a political battle. You’re right; we don’t know. But now is the time to educates those who might well be candidates.
I am going to hear Hillary speak later this week. If I have the opportunity, I will ask her position on education and CC. I will report back on my return.
wonderful
In the end I do believe the argument that everything’s emotional. Even to inveterate politicians like ClintonI and ClintonII. And so, you just have to ask: where did she send her kid to school? And I am afraid that will stake out her position on charters, and CCSS right there alone. If ®eform was not good enough for her child, she will not speak out against it; she will not know otherwise.
How many leaders with kids in private school speak out against CCSS? Basically, almost no leaders have children present in the public school system, do they? I cannot think of a one who is not opposed to CCSS. Anyone care to correct my impression?
You have a point, red queen in LA, but I can excuse high profile individuals who send their kids to a private school for their own protection, IF that is the reason they do so. But you are right – the people who doth protest know not what the speak.
When I was on the committee to create a new high school, I was one of the few teachers who actually went to public school – and that was at a top school in the suburbs. I don’t think any of us truly understood the needs of an inner city population. We had pie in the sky ideas which had to be tweaked. The difference was, our motives were altruistic, not monetary.
Today’s decision makers are not only clueless, but pretend to be deaf, dumb, and blind to the rolling wheel they have put in motion. And there are no plans to stop this wheel, no matter who it rolls over and hurts (as long as their kids are safely off the mountain).
Very well said, Ellen. I would agree with you on the need for a “safety-exemption”. I don’t, in fact, begrudge our president’s decision to school their children privately for precisely this reason. I would absolutely do precisely the same, but this is a rare, different situation. And as you point out, does not change the reality that this does – -simply in their case excusably so – result in clueless rulers. A little humility might go a long way in acknowledging their inherent disqualification under the circumstances. It’s not just that you don’t know what it’s like to walk in another’s moccasins without doing so — it’s that you *cannot* know what it is like. Good intentions notwithstanding, intelligence notwithstanding, or any other claimed mitigation. Imagination is no substitution for reality. Not ever. Guesses are allowed but they must pay obeisance to fact.
sigh.
And it is also very wise of you to call attention to the experience of probably most of us here, on this board, amongst the relatively privileged schools, public though they be. Having options, it is certainly the case that were my children’s experience not tolerably good-enough I would pull them from their public schools in an instant. And that there are legions without this safety net option, makes their experience wholly different, too. Privilege matters, totally.
Which is what just nonplusses me about the scope and scale of this CCSS revolution. No questions asked, no experience scrutinized, no respect paid, nothing whatsoever listened to — troubling details of practicality or planning are just jettisoned; irrelevant. They are in a hurry to clean out the kitty before anyone notices.
The Times has been “off” as far as educational reporting goes for as long as I can remember (going back 30 years.) Those columns and assignments are usually given to junior reporters or staff members who need an easy gig which they can do without too much traveling (after all, there’s a school within a 5 minute walk of just about every Times reporter!) I’ve traded correspondences with Richard Rothstein over the years, attempting to educate him on the finer points of mathematics and education, and he’s been a good sport. But on the whole, their reporting leaves little in the way of nuance and a lot in the way of vapid generalizations.
thank you!
I’ve been writing to the NY Times’ public editor on this subject (as well as the Times’ malpractice with respect to testing) regularly. I just received a response from them that that they’re looking at the paper’s common core coverage. I suggest that LOTS of people write to public@nytimes.com.
I got a good response too! It makes me a little hopeful. Not too hopeful, of course, but a little.
Thanks for the suggestion. Done.
When fighting against No Child Left Behind, protesters were called “commies” for suggesting that education is somehow different than business –and that accountability in the form of testing students, was a bad idea.
The compromise was to neutralize as much damage as possible NCLB, but leave some testing in place — AND try to ensure that wherever students live in this country, they can expect to receive a quality education that teaches the latest in science and technology (not a Scopes trial).
Now everyone acts as if CC is the devil, and started us down this wrong headed path.
So, how DO we protect children …and move away from NCLB?
and what about Amanda Ripley?
How do we protect our children?
First, I would say…SLOW DOWN.
We are in a panic driven state. We need to look at what is going on with the economy and society at large. This mess is symptomatic of what we have allowed to occur in this country and differences of opinion as to who is “entitled”.
So, slow down. Attack the testing before content is in place. Support public education publicly. No excuses. Public education should not be a means of filling pockets of rich people, esp with ties to foreign countries. The testing machine has taken over and has been driving educators nuts for 20 years in Ohio. I don’t pretend to know what other states are doing relatively speaking.
Our state curriculum and standards started over-riding ourvlical curriculum 10 years ago with the added stress of constantly modified verbiage. The students were improving on the tests each year, so they decided to use unfamiliar terms just to keep everyone on their toes. The staff and students have been redefining everything we do every year since 1995. The onset of CORE classes began in ELA in 2007 and continued to change the grade levels at which we introduced each objective. We continued to absorb more and more pressure, having lower and lower morale each week, day, minute…until most of those over 45 were driven away. Disrespect. Hatefulness. Lack of consideration. Demands. It has been unbelievable. Yet we made it our mission to keep our students happy as possible. We had the added burden of teaching all our local objectives and placing them into the standards that were being developed or simply provided by Common Core. We teachers had no say or input. As the powers that be shoved learning expectations into lower and lower grade levels, we did our best to catch students up, teach what we needed to for our curriculum. But we were told we couldn’t do our City Simulation, our field trips were cut to one, we had little time to do anything but teach students in a different manner that we thought would match up with the ever-changing tests. We never knew. We always felt like we were aiming at a moving target while blindfolded with one hand tied behind our backs.
Stop the testing first.
Then there will be usage for the Common Core.
There will be no VAM to use punitively. Their legs will be kicked from under them.
But the word has to be spread and enough people have to be willing to say NO. It may take some time.
Besides…who are they trying to kid? Why go to college? There are no good paying jobs out there unless you have someone on the inside pushing for you. So…why let all the scare tactics rule the day??? Mt kids worked their behinds off and made great grades and have very good people skill, excellent writing and speaking skills, …and their great resumes don’t provide a foot in the door. Who are these test promoters trying to kid?
Get rid of the rhetoric ..tests will NOT make their lives better. They will not get great paying jobs.
But the very few will get rich…selling a false bill of goods.
Well, Ted, when one starts with fallacies and invalidities one invariably ends up with fallacious conclusions and invalid results.
And that is exactly what has happened with the state standards and accompanying standardized tests and now with the CCSS and the accompanying standardized tests–PARCC and SBAC.
There ain’t no gittin ’round that!
To understand why I advise you to read and understand what Noel Wilson has irrefutably and undeniably proven in his “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
I also challenge you to refute and/rebut Wilson’s work (but won’t hold my breath.)
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)
1. A quality cannot be logically quantified. Quantity is a sub-category of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category by only a part (sub-category) of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as one dimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing we are lacking much information about said interactions.
2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other word all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. As a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it measures “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
A reminder to late arrivals. You should email your thoughts to Margaret Sullivan public@nytims.com.
I’d suggest hitting them up on the journalistic integrity issue and failure to fully cover the story. Maybe mention how they covered the run up to Iraq II. I wouldn’t rehash all of CCSS.
Sullivan is public editor and her job description is issues of integrity.
Diane has given us another great opportunity.
Margaret Sullivan used to be the editor of The Buffalo News. The Buffalo Teacher Federation often had issues on how the News reported on education issues in the city schools.
Dear editors of the New York times:
You are bright, cultivated people. Read the ELA standards. They are abysmal. Really amateurish drek. Nothing “higher” about them. And read this:
http://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2014/02/25/a-brief-analysis-of-two-common-core-state-standards-in-ela/
and this:
http://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2014/04/10/on-developing-curricula-in-the-age-of-the-thought-police/
and this:
http://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2014/03/15/what-happens-when-amateurs-write-standards/
and this:
http://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2014/04/04/connecting-the-pieces-open-source-big-data-and-the-origins-of-the-common-sic-core-sic/
and this:
http://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2014/04/09/who-said-life-aint-no-crystal-stair/
It’s time that these people learned that there are substantive PEDAGOGICAL and CURRICULAR and other EDUCATIONAL issues with these purported “standards”–that this is not JUST a matter of politics, and many, many of us who object to these “standards” do so on such grounds.
Many of the biggest cheerleaders for these “standards” haven’t read them or haven’t understood what they read. People are now getting to know these standards, and they don’t like what they see, and for sound educational reasons. The ELA standards are backward, unimaginative, hackneyed, conceptually misconceived and confused, full of enough gaps to drive whole curricula through, often prescientific, and based upon a lot of lowest-common-denominator groupthink from the state standards, also extremely problematic, that preceded them.
There’s nothing “higher” about the puerile bullet list now being forced upon every teacher, curriculum developer, and curriculum coordinator in the country.
That’s a lot like saying:
“It is time that tobacco companies learned that smoking is harmful to human health.”
I suspect that there are quite a few middle-level editors and wonks who haven’t looked beyond the PR, who are earnest but confused, who have believed the hype because it came from what they think of as reputable sources. At the top, that’s a different matter.
lol. yes, you have a point there, Jon!
It’s good to have a logician around! 🙂
I do agree that I would feel more comfortable if more teachers and early childhood experts had been part of the process. Then again, what comes out of many committees that are too large can be “more of the same” with few substantive changes.
I also am in the middle of the testing component, and am wondering if my students could ever get strong enough to do well on these tests. I hope that, over the years (with high quality teaching) the students will build stamina from beginning the thinking process in Kindergarten. Many of my charges have IEP’s, second languages and 504 programs (as is true for many classrooms out there), and it is overwhelming right now.
I feel that we have not had enough training, time and practice to get ourselves grounded in these standards yet. However, I am not convinced that absolutely everything is evil about the Common Core standards. I know I am having to ramp up to teach at this level, and that level seems to me to be better than the No Child Left Standing (Behind) discrete information testing.
No matter what systems and standards we adopt, there are always parasites latched onto the side of it. We teachers tend to be more altruistic than publishing companies and technology vendors. It gets to us when we see groups acting like snake oil salesmen selling less than adequate materials without really caring about the kids.
Perhaps we could find a (non-emotional) middle ground. Get more non-penalizing warm up time from the various governments. Try it all out. Fill out the feedback surveys about the testing. Give feedback to the writers of the CCSS. Spend money to make sure teachers can help each other on stellar lessons that actually worked. Go back and refine. Test again. Document what works and what doesn’t. Repeat.
Deborah Christman, I too have been on committees where it is difficult to get consensus. But it is not impossible. It is hard to imagine a committee drafting national academic standards that did not include even one classroom teacher; not even one person familiar with the learning needs of children in K-3; not even one person familiar with children with disabilities or English learners. Do you think the testing industry should have the largest voice in writing the nation’s standards? I don’t.
Thank you, Diane. Exactly. Beautifully, concisely said. And completely damning of the process followed.
An issue we have never covered is the goal of CCSS – to be college ready. Nothing about the assessments has anything to do with the skill sets needed for college.
My husband and I both went to UB. I have three degrees, he has over six. All four of my children went to college and one daughter recently graduated from Buff State. I am also on Facebook with several of my former students who are currently in college. I feel these experiences, plus my role as a school librarian qualifies me to make the following statements.
What a Student needs to know to be College Ready:
Time Management – in college to procrastinate is to play with fire. A professor knows the difference between a report done on the fly and one which has been fully researched. There is also the possibility of multiple projects or exams being due almost simultaneously. Too much leisure time is really borrowing trouble. Learn to manage.
Key Boarding, including the use of common programs such as Word and Power Point! Is essential. I made all my children take keyboarding in high school which included tips on creating research projects. Anyone who is not adept at basic computer skills is at a serious disadvantage. Speed is also a plus. Typing up a thirty page paper in a few hours will be agony using the hunt and peck method. Skill at spell check and proof reading is also a must. Heaven forbid you miss a typo – that could make a difference in the grade for your finished project. My suggestion, find a best friend in the English Department to read through your work before you submit either electronically or with a hard copy.
Using Data Bases for research projects is a must. Students need to be able to tell the difference between a popular magazine and a scholarly or peer reviewed journal. Google and Wikipedia are not credible sources and need to remain your dirty little secret if used for background information. And Time Magazine is not considered scholarly, despite what they think about themselves. When using any web site, the student must be able to identify the author of the piece, who published it, and the date of publication. The perspective of an article on the value of drinking orange juice will change if the sponsor is the Florida Orange Growers vs the Recommendations of the USDA vs Dr Oz’s web site.
Creating a Bibliography using the correct writing style whether MLA or APA or some bizarre choice of an individual professor is another necessary skill. And this also applies to the format used in writing a paper. You can purchase a template of various styles, but watch out if the particular style the professor requests comes out with a revised edition. I used to be able to write an MLA biblio with my eyes closed until they changed the entire procedure. My daughter got a D on a paper for not following the APA format to the letter. Close is not good enough. Also, for citing online sources, you need the correct information (see above) – DO NOT put Google as a source. Now each article is given an ID number. If it has the number, there’s a good chance it’s an acceptable source.
Students also need to be able to give an oral presentation with all the accompanying paraphernalia, including power point presentations, handouts, displays. And practice makes perfect. Make sure you know the material so you can explain it and answer questions. This skill will also be useful in many career choices. That same daughter who got a D on her paper, nailed her final oral presentation and ended up with a B in the course.The fact she brought bagels and cream cheese (her class was at breakfast time) was a plus, but she was extremely well prepared (it helps to have parents who know the ropes).
Grit and determination do play a role. Or self control might be enough. Students need to go to class, pay attention, do any problems and assigned readings, complete and turn in papers on time, and study and take the tests. If the course is difficult, get a study partner or create a study group. Divide and conquer is the key. Sometimes there is literally more work than one individual can do, so split the readings and share. Discussions to clarify info also helps. Attend all recitations and review classes plus visit the professor if there are any questions. They all have office hours. I can’t tell you how many of my former students had a meltdown, especially during the first semester. And these were talented, bright kids. My advice, keep moving forward and don’t look back.
Finally, follow directions. Don’t do what you want, give the professor what he wants. This can sometimes be difficult, because the instructor is not always clear with their expectations, but if the above suggestions are used, the desired results will be achieved.
There are other “little” skills necessary for individual career tracks, such as writing a lab report, utilizing advanced algebra and analytical geometry to solve calculus problems, using flow charts to create a computer program, reading poetry, reading and understanding college texts, reading and enjoying literature written in another century, etc.
Please note: the Common Core does not address these skills. A better segway into college would be to take the students to a university library for a presentation by the university librarian on the ins and outs of the college experience. Of course, that would be too practical.
Ultimately, there is nothing that can truly prepare a child for college. It is a unique experience, a rite of passage, that changes a child into a young adult. Survival skills are a key, but many of the lessons, life lessons, are learned on the go. How the student handles the adversity they will experience, will determine what kind of adult they will become. If they survive and get a degree, they will be on their way to facing the next step – finding a job which will support and sustain them. And if that us not their goal, it is the goal of their parents.
I’m making college sound like The Hunger Games. My undergraduate years at the University of Buffalo were the best years of my life. I absolutely LOVED college.
A great list, Ellen! What a wonderful resource you are for students!
And how I wish one could download your understanding of these matters to the heads of the policy wonks who support the Common Coring of our educational system without giving thought to such matters!
Thank you, Robert. I once attended a library convention where the keynote speaker talked about life lessons learned from her English teacher who taught her how to write a term paper. It was phenomenal.
But true learning, life long skills, are not a part of the Common Core plan.
An issue we have never covered is the goal of CCSS – to be college ready. Nothing about the assessments has anything to do with the skill sets needed for college.
Actually, I would object on a level more basic than that they fail to deliver on the purported underlying purpose of the exercise, this axiomatic set of goals: “to college and career (don’t forget the “career” part) ready”….
I do not believe this is axiomatic at all. I was at a talk today where it is presented as the starting point that this is the purpose and point of a set of national Common Core Standards and I just want to shout “Wait — who said this is the purpose of Education, the point of why our kids are going to school??? I don’t agree!!!”
IMHO, children go to school to be Educated to learn how to learn, to learn the value and beauty of Learning and being Learnéd. They also go for socialization. And they go for the benefit of learning from and among those who have been through this already. They go to learn stuff they don’t know, and to learn that there *is* stuff they don’t know, and that there always will be. But they learn to acquire skills and tools for addressing that which they do not and will not know, in the future.
Where in all that does it say “to be career ready”? Where does it say to be _college_ ready?? These are derivative side-affects, maybe, happily. If a child has been schooled adequately, as per above, then as it happens they will de facto be “college ready”. And career ready too. But the purpose, to my mind, of Education is not to aim for the finish line, but to figure out how to lope purposefully through the course.
This “college-ready” bs is the analog of teaching to the test. Which is not Education.
So their whole precept is off.
Grump.
I agree, red Queen in LA. If the goal is to be college ready, the CCSS miss the mark. I don’t have a clue what skills people need to be career ready.
But the skills to be ready for the future include life long learning skills – The ability and desire to seek out information on all sorts of topics of interest. And the goal of education should be to expose children to all facets of the human existence, the things which make life worth living, such as the arts. My goal as a parent was to give my children the opportunity to have as many experiences as I could afford. Actually, we went beyond my pocketbook as I am still paying down my debt, but it was worth every penny. And education should do the same for all children, especially those in the inner city where poverty restricts their existence to a life within the confines of the neighborhood.
So, Reading, writing, and arithmetic are not enough – this is not the 1800s.
Sometimes I think the creators of common core were nostalgic and wishful for the days when the masses lived off the land and didn’t need to be “edercated”. “Don’t need none of that larning stuff, nosiree!” The three Rs were enough in those days.
I say we need to move beyond our past and teach children to look towards the future, as well rounded individuals knowledgable in the ways of the world. (Of course, that would expose too many hypocrisies.) The ability to be successful in college and/or in a career will follow naturally.
Love the way you put things. My favorite description of what happened to our tenured teachers, is in your other comment where you use the phrase “sinister intimidation” to describe the traumatic harassment that teachers faced — for simply wishing to teach the only way that the human brain acquires skills.
I experienced it, and because I was so famous they had to go to extraordinary means to eliminate my voice, not merely my job. (yeah… I brought the Pew research($$$) on the national standards to District 2 because they wanted to study my curricula — and they did… matched me to the new standards.) My story is on for the books, but they were lawless and it was sinister, as well as criminal.
This whole conversation about Core Curricula would not be on going if the veteran teachers had not been the first target of the assault on public education. The narrative about tests would not be THE conversation if the experienced professional was still enabling and facilitating the acquisition of skills and knowledge the way they had been doing it for the century when our schools meant opportunity for everyone to learn.
Sigh!
That is an interesting point you make about having first gotten rid of the opposition so efficiently. I apologize because I am sure it is galling on some level to hear me/anyone say this as it is no doubt on your mind day in and day out. But the rest of us might forget this sometimes. The rest of us parents, that is. Because the truth of the matter is, water does just fill in over holes and as our children are actually in a classroom, albeit a sparsely manned one, we forget that the collective wisdom among the leaders of these classrooms is every day getting younger and more naive.
I always feel rooted in just plain bizarre surrealness hearing people talk about “teaching to a test”. I know it is hard to find the beginning of a circle, and tests could maybe be constructed to inform curriculum…? Only no, not really; no, they do not.
Tests are a snapshot tool available for evaluating the learning or teaching that has taken place, but it is beyond upside-down for a test to drive learning or teaching; it’s like water running uphill. With enough energy put into a system artificially I suppose this could be sustained for a brief period of time, but it is unnatural. It is simply improper.
I cannot begin to count how many times I have said this HERE and at Oped, and everywhere I write– The 4th PRINCIPLE OF LEARNING was for TEACHERS, not administration, and it stated clearly that ‘GENUINE EVALUATION & AUTHENTIC PERFORMANCE ASSESSMENT” was a crucial tool … FOR TEACHERS, so that they could plan lessons! (NOTE THE ADJECTIVES… the standards language!)
I say THIS everywhere too… the real NEW STANDARDS research that NO ONE HEARS was a set of eight principles, stated in a thesis by Lauren Resnick at Harvard.
Pew funded real THIRD LEVEL RESEARCH ( which means it must be proven everywhere… it cannot just work in Oshkosh or San Diego, it must work everywhere).
Pew spent millions to involve tens of thousands of teachers.
MY practice was chosen by Harvard as THE COHORT in NYC.
http://www.opednews.com/author/author40790.html
How could Pew, Harvard, Resnick and the LRDC (Univ. of Pittsburgh ph’d arm – which ran the workshops and were the observers of the cohorts, BE SILENT AS DUNCAN LET PEARSON RULE THE DAY — with the FAILED rational of Bush regarding standardized tests… which Diane grasped long ago, left all children behind THE REST OF THE MODERN WORLD.
I don’t know. I just do not know.
I don’t understand the resounding silence and selling out of the existential concept of Education.
I just do not get this at all either. I hark back always to the pernicious, and ironic, New Markets Tax Credit, http://www.democracynow.org/2010/5/7/juan_gonzalez_big_banks_making_a , that turns the business of education into Big Business. I’m not sure how idealistic, wonky, ethically (relatively) pure educators could ever hold a candle to the sort of attention this evil-stink-eye could bring.
I enjoy reading your comments, because I see your confusion and it is what I see everywhere. You said: “I know it is hard to find the beginning of a circle”.
But, what if it is not a circle. What if it is an avalanche and the root cause is that the ground was eroded so that the whole shebang fell down. What if that structure — that platform that the public education system depended upon — WAS that which the practitioner in the classroom provided. Then you have to say, “what was there that is NOT there now — and why is it gone? Only then can you rebuild it.
The novices teachers that are being hired, my dear, are all too often, merely trained. How surprising is it when the patient dies because the medic was merely trained, and what was needed was the practitioner of the complex profession, the DOCTOR!
We classroom practitioners ( I seldom say teachers, by the way…THAT is their appellation) know how the brain learns… and it is a complex process that is different for each emergent mind.
We educated, experienced and often very talented ‘classroom practitioners, have learned the psychology of the brain AND the crucial how-to, MANAGE a complex program of content and skills objectives, AND 30 or more kids who do their own thing with impunity.
Knowledge plus management skills is what is lacking in the novice-practitioner, and when the school fails to support them in any way –with services, with materials –and in fact actively IMPEDES their practice, It is no wonder that the young novice runs.
I write at Oped News, where the publisher’s mission is to show how top-down management has replaced bottom-up resourcefulness in almost every sphere of American life. When it happened in the schools, when the BASE of education — the teacher who was the grunt on the line– was overruled by top-down mandates — that WAS the end, but no one saw it happen.. because — despite the sites like NAPTA and Perdaily, and Betsy Combier’s chronicles of what was happening in NYC, NO MEDIA PICKED IT UP — the only thing that wasOUT THERE IN THE MEDIA was the spin from the very ones who were the destroyers of public ed.
Learning in the classroom is driven by professional knowledge of pedagogy (how the brain acquires skills& information) not a list of standards or a core of curricula imperatives.
The public, like you, needs to take a look back at HOW they reviled the teachers who made public education work… a look back is necessary to recognize what really happened to ME, and David Pakter, and Lenny Isenberg, and Lorna Stremcha and Karen Horwitz, etc.. and then it will be possible to see the insidious process and return to a firm footing where the teacher-practitioner is trusted to educate those in her care for the next ten months.
Did you see this yet???? GRASSROOTS AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH WAITING FOR SUPERMAN:
It shows how it started, how BEST PRACTICE was eroded so the avalanche could be enabled.
Love the lyrical way you express things. You grasp what is happening…everyone is beginning to see what they have done. The question is can we demand that they return the real professional to the classroom.
I need to add one more component:
The Writing Process – the old fashioned one. Students need to read through a myriad of credible sources, synthesize the information, create a paper citing the ideas of others and adding their own original ideas, stay on topic, and come to a logical conclusion. No copying. They need to ask questions, take notes, outline their response, keep track of their source material, write a rough draft, wait a day, use spell check, proof read, add and subtract information to make the result concise and accurate. And they need to give themselves enough time to put out a polished product, not a bunch of garbage – the garbage so many of them turn in for their high school classes. I lament the death of the Senior Term Paper – it gave me the foundation necessary to write successful college papers. I, in turn, was able to assist my children during their college years.
I hope my knowledge, learned over the years through my own trials and tribulations, has been of interest or help to others.
Imagine a world in which an actual educator like Ellen Klock is serving as Secretary of Education. Oh, what a difference that would make.
The writing process. The senior term paper. No time for those when we have InstaWriting for the Exam to teach!
I don’t aim so high, but I would love for you and I to be chosen as consultants to rebuild the nonsense for what now passes as education in our country. We would take away a lot more than we would add.
One lesson should be on plagiarism. Assign the students an essay, then have them switch papers, cross out the true author’s name and replace it with their own. Then assign a grade to the bogus author. If they were proud of their original work, they will resent someone else getting credit for their efforts, especially if the paper they received isn’t “up to snuff”.
And this will work at any age level – use pictures if they are too young to write. A concept which will stay with them forever.
Ellen, when I was given the entire seventh grade at a brand new magnet school on the east side of Manhattan, I had to find a writing tool that 13 year old NYC kids would use. I had just read Nancy Atwell’s “In the Middle’ and so I created a program around a weekly “reader’s letter.”
The reason I could do this was that they gave me nothing! NADA.
I had a room, but no blackboards and no books AND NO DIRECTIONS. So, at garage sales and with a purchase of $3000 worth of books with my own money, I started a reading program and a place to talk about reading, about ideas.
I wrote them weekly, and they wrote back. My expectations for the conversation were clear in September, and as the year progressed, and they read (with me IN CLASS) wonderful literature as we examined great writing, the expectations became more demanding (as to content and clarity. )
We talked, and wrote and talked and wrote, with very clear expectations and rewards for achievement. We compared movie versions to printed ones, and we talked and wrote.
The letters which contained 50 to 100 words in September, became 1000 words and more, by June — and the “Dear Mrs Schwartz’ letters” became a place where children talked about life, not just about characters and plots. Stenmore Publications asked me to write a book on how I did it, which was ALSO what Pew wanted to know, and why the filmed and studied this writing program.
The letters stopped people in their tracks. Parents flocked to the school and my class, and to a team of teachers who collaborated for success. I became famous when Harvard chose me as cohort, and DISTRICT 2 GOT ZILLIONS OF PEW MONEY… of course my name appears nowhere in all the bulletins and workshops.
My colleague in humanities had the kids write the serious essays about democracy and history, after his SOCRATIC SEMINARS.
My colleague in science expected clear concise, accurate factual reports. My math colleague expected writing about math problem solving that was logical and detailed.
As for me:
I expected to be able to read their writing and take meaning from their letters, and enjoy the conversations. I expected strong, sentences (lyrical, ansi interesting was rewarded, too) .
I expected organized paragraphs and a mastery of mechanics (punctuation, grammar, spelling).
I expected them to have fun with creative writing, and the kids wrote their story ideas in the letters; during class, I taught them how to create a classically well made story ( I am a playwright!) and how to enjoy writing.
They won every story contest in NY, were accepted to the top high schools, and aced the first ELA ; when 2/3 of NYC failed my students were 10th in the state…
… and I was in a rubber room and eventually charged with INCOMPETENCE… because they had done away with due process in NYC!
My program never saw the light of day again, in NYC although I have letters form the LRDC that said they loved my work at the Danforth Seminars, where it was displayed as one of six educators who had matched the standards in a unique way…. and they sent my work around the country.
Sigh…
I retired and ran for my sanity at age 60. I wanted to teach for another decade, and mentor young colleagues.
Sigh…
Dearest Diane…
I smile as I read your reflection. For me, not all New York Times articles are equal; nor is there a singular essence. Nothing is missing. Each addresses what for them is meant to be…Some you refer to can be found in The Politics section, Republicans See Political Wedge in Common Core Others appear on OpEd Pages. A few are columns. When the Circus Descends. The New York Times Editorial section is another you covered. The Editorial Board is notably conservative on the issues, and absolutely, not academic. Thus, to believe that any of these missed the “research”…I do not see that as their essence.
In the Politics section, the Times discusses politics. It can be easily argued that politically Common Core for Republicans, and Democrats too, is a wedge issue. One stance or another sets a candidate apart …which for candidates is essential. To appear to speak with or for the people is everything if you are running, and if you are to be elected particularly in the primaries.
In the political world research can be as an anchor. It was not missing…It, I believe is not wanted. An over reliance on research and statistics can pull an aspirant down. Pundits and Political Advisors stress the need to avoid what can be weighty. The Conservatives do this extremely well…as Cognitive Linguist George Lakoff, Psychologist Daniel Kahneman, Activist Advocate Van Jones, and countless others observe. [I read the research.] People do not vote on the issues; they vote on their moral identity. Thus, we see what occurs on the “Right” [and Left] and also in the Middle. Words become wizards. The people are wooed…if only by a reputation.
Jeb Bush has honed his performance for decades. Ted Cruz, while newer at his craft, too, is an expert! You may have watched the Freedom Summit last weekend. I thought it pure entertainment. Each of the 2016 Republican Presidential hopefuls did their routine… what seemed like a comedy routine. And wow! Were they effective!
Ted Cruz was the master [of ceremonies]. The thought to stop Common Core rolled off his tongue and instantly he received a Standing Ovation! I trust the other candidates took that as a lesson. Each had their laugh lines, but none compared to the power of bringing up the “issue”…the moral identity, Common Core, the want for local control, freedom, choice…all conservative “visions.”
I think of Cuomo and DeBlasio…Academics? Neither claim to be. Nor is the Times a scholarly Journal.
As for David Brooks or the The New York Times Editorial Board or indeed, other articles., it depends what you read and how you view it…as a scholar, a subscriber, a person who finds humor in reflection…Regardless. I believe the essence is as beauty. It is in the eyes of the beholder.
May life bring you peace, prosperity, pleasant dreams being the best and your reality…Betsy
The comment section wasn’t any better. The purpose of that article IMHO was to make a case that those opposed to the Common Core are those nutty Tea Party followers. The comment section lit up with and it wasn’t pretty. The NYTimes is on a mission to blur the facts when it comes to public education. And because of the power of their name, they can take a page out of the Daily News and NY Post and get away with it.
I hope you submit this post as a Letter to the Editor.
Ms. Ravitch, your continued fight and ours is analogous to the latest NBA gear commercial! We are behind you!
Love it! What a great analogy.