Peter Greene feels sorry for Bill McCallum, one of the writers of the Common Core math standards. From what Greene has read, McCallum meant well but doesn’t understand what CC has become. He calls McCallum “a sad scientist.”
Greene says he believes there are three types of people who support CCSS.
“We have a tendency to characterize all CCSS backers as evil geniuses, malignant mad scientists, or greedy underhanded businessmen. But I’ve characterized CCSS regime supporters as three groups
1) People who make a living/profit from CCSS
2) People who see things in the CCSS that aren’t actually there
3) People who haven’t actually looked at the CCSS yet
I think Bill McCallum is part of group #2.”
He adds:
“Like a writer who has sold his novel to Hollywood, McCallum seems not to grasp that he no longer gets to define what the CCSS are or mean. Coleman appears to have fully embraced the complete CCSS regime and has moved with gusto to cash in on the whole complex. But McCallum keeps insisting that his CCSS is simply standards, and no standardized curriculum nor tests nor teacher evaluation nor school evaluations are any part of it. It is also true that a communist leader shouldn’t look like a Stalin or a Mao, but reality is just a bitch some times.
“I actually feel a little sad for McCallum. I imagine that some of the atomic scientists who thought they were developing an awesome power source, not a new way to immolate hundreds of thousand of people, might have struggled as well. But the corporate profiteers and data overlords and anti-teacher public school haters have found in his work a perfect tool for their agenda, and McCallum’s intentions, no matter how noble they may have been, no longer matter.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Mr. Greene left out one group from the list; those who HAVE read the standards, have followed the lifecycle of this thing and made an informed decision that CCSS are not going to benefit children in any real and sustainable manner.
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No sadness for them here. They are not selling a film script to Hollywood, they are destroying viable lives of children. It is our responsibility to take responsibility for what we do to them, whether we mean the outcome or not. So this week the tabloids report on Common Core math test questions featuring advertisement placement for Mug Root Beer, NIKE, Lifesavers, Barbie and iPod. We are responsible for that! Everything is curriculum. There are no unintended consequences. What goes unsaid or is understated is deliberate all the same when it is inflicted on these young lives. Ego may drive us too see what is not there. It serves us not to see but guess what? We are out of time and it is now time to open our eyes to what we are participating in.
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Not surprising. Given that Greene seems to have little contact with the real world of public education, is getting stroked by his association with the mukety-muks of the Gates Foundation, etc., and is probably pretty arrogant anyway, he is an easy mark for being made a fool.
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I think the analysis of Bill McCallum is hit and miss. I’ve had conversations with him, both public and private, via e-mail and by phone. He’s not stupid. But I think it’s easier to see in retrospect what the bigger picture is (and probably always was) with the overall Common Core Initiative than it was in the early days, particularly for those given a chance to write the Mathematics Content and Practice standards. And there was little consensus in those groups, I suspect strongly, just as in the end, elitists like R. James Milgram got to make the biggest splash by repeatedly and publicly trashing them (for all the wrong reasons).
Like other progressive mathematics educators from the NCTM/NCSM world, McCallum believes in meaningful improvements over the dead model of mathematics instruction that have dominated this country for over a century. I don’t know if he has been completely taken in by the prospect of seeing NCTM’s underlying philosophy (see the Process Standards from, say, PRINCIPLES AND STANDARDS FOR SCHOOL MATHEMATICS (2000) put into place nationally with the force of the US DOE and a ton of state DOEs behind it. I do believe and have said repeatedly that some prominent progressive math ed folks, including much of NCTM’s leadership over the last two decades, appears to have fallen, more or less, for that notion. It’s understandable that they would. Having tried and failed since 1989 to get that philosophy into K-12 classrooms, they are desperate to give it another shot. If Big Government & Big Business seem to promise the realization of that wish, can we really blame people who worked so hard and long (and unsuccessfully) to see it come to fruition for biting the poisoned apple?
Where I DO blame them and other well-meaning folks who support the Common Core Math Standards for progressive educational reasons is in failing to see the biggest flaw in this entire plan, REGARDLESS of the politics, the money, the greed, the corporate worms writhing throughout the fruit: the failure to adequately plan for an effective change in the entire culture of American school mathematics. Such a plan would be gradual, and it would meaningfully engage EVERY stakeholder, most importantly parents, teachers, and administrators. It would include a flexible and well-considered long-term plan for changing how each new cadre of K-12 math teachers thought about mathematics content and pedagogy. It would adequately train teachers at every grade level to provide deep content and pedagogical content knowledge of mathematics necessary for the task they face with diverse students in real classrooms. It would have provisions for getting rid of the dead wood that cannot or will not adjust to the needs of contemporary mathematics teaching and learning (and I’m thinking in terms of Finland, not Michelle Rhee in that regard). And perhaps equally importantly, it would have a well-thought-out strategy for educating parents so that the next round of the Math Wars wouldn’t simply be a repetition of the last two and a half decades’ worth of losing battles against smarter, better-funded, more ruthless opposition.
Sadly, none of that happened. As a breed, mathematics educators in this country have proven to lack political savvy. NCTM as an organization has proved to be so hopelessly naive and incompetent that it’s little more than a sad joke in some circles (including cadres of very smart young math teachers who aren’t waiting for NCTM or anyone else to finally wake up and smell the coffee).
There are times when I think the only solution to making meaningful wholesale change in American mathematics education culture would be to take everyone over the age of 6 out to the middle of the Atlantic and sink them to the bottom. It’s like trying to get this country to adopt the metric system, something we’ve only been trying since the early days of the 19th century, without success for some strange reason. Maybe if the Founding Fathers had gone ahead with their thought about dropping English and adopting Hebrew as the national language. . . ? After all, if they could have sold THAT one, they could have succeeded at anything.
Meanwhile, I think McCallum gave things a reasonable shot given the limitations of his mandate and the fact that he was working with committees. Anyone who had tried to pull off anything vaguely like the vision of things I advocate would never have gotten the job or would have been dismissed or forced to resign sooner or later. That’s how politics (educational and otherwise) works. The ridiculous critiques of much of the “problems” with the Math Standards have approximately ZERO to do with either the content or the practice standards as written. They reflect for the most part the same disgruntlement and abject distortions from 25 years of anti-progressive reactionary pushback against the 1989 NCTM Standards, replete with amazing propaganda and scare tactics that have parents beshitting themselves every time they see a problem they don’t get. Couple that with a vast percentage of teachers and administrators who honestly don’t get what progressive mathematics teaching is about, don’t understand constructivism, don’t understand the difference between a MODEL for a mathematical idea and an ALGORITHM for doing computation, approach progressive math teaching with the same narrow-minded, clueless rigidity with which they approached traditional math instruction, and you have . . . a freaking disaster. A quarter century of absolutely wasted time, money, and effort. A vast spinning of our collective wheels in which a vocal minority of elitists and reactionaries have been able to keep the bus from moving five feet forward without pushing it 20 years backwards. And the Common Core has simply been a gigantic juggernaut that repeats every error made in the previous 25 years and exacerbates matters with a host of new idiocies, including the hijacking of the democratic process, willful capitulation to corporate capitalism, destruction of the teaching profession, selling of public education to the highest bidder, and full-fledged surrender to high-stakes testing insanity.
As Yakov Smirnov is wont to say, “What a country.” I don’t think Bill McCallum is the problem or the solution. We’ve met the enemy, and he is us.
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You have put in words so aptly what I have felt from the first time I encountered the CCSSmath standards and the vitriole that accompanies them. One of the MANY reasons I HATE CC is because constuctivist math will now forever be tainted as part of it. I argued for this kind of math in the early 90’s, and still do, but it is impossible in these CC days to get anywhere. And our students will continue to learn how to do math calculations, not learn mathematics.
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Thanks kindly.
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I would guess that maybe the mathematics “establishment” has done a poor job of pushing their agenda to all of the backassward old fogies. I imagine that progressive mathematicians were not so stupid as to push their ideas without extensive field testing. I would guess that progressive mathematicians would not march in and tell everyone teaching math that they were doing it all wrong. ( I have no idea if they did since any change in my own district was introduced slowly at least in recent years. I am suggesting scenarios from what I have heard out and about. Whether the reactions are “true” or not is superfluous. The reactions are not uncommon. Their existence should be enough to get people thinking about how to alleviate the perceived problems.)
How about an organic plan for change? How about not making parents feel totally incapable of helping their children? I suspect that because they saw the wisdom in a shift, it was assumed that everyone else would too with no push back. Think of that habit or tradition that has been passed down from time immemorial that we follow because that’s the way it has always been done. Think of your reaction when some well meaning soul suggests that your method of action is outdated and wrong.
The creators of CCSS killed it with a flawed process of development and execution.
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Yes. Organic plan for change is what I am waiting for. . . Soon.
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Perhaps you can show me the research that established the efficacy of the traditional, teacher-centered, lecture, worksheet, homework model of mathematics teaching and learning we’ve had for as long as I can remember (and I started school in 1955). No? That’s because it doesn’t exist and didn’t have to exist for such instruction to simply take over K-12 and college math teaching.
There’s pushback, and then there’s “Dig your heels in no matter what” resistance to any and all change. What I find remarkable is the extent to which parents who did NOT thrive in traditional mathematics classrooms (often far from it!) defend the crappy method that convinced them that they weren’t “math people,” rather than consider that there are better ways to do it. My father had to struggle with my brothers bringing home work from “the New Math” that he’d never learned. He was pretty decent at math (an accountant with some engineering course work before that), but set theory, alternate bases, etc., was outside his comfort zone. Yet, he didn’t call for the heads of the Supt. of Schools, the school board members, the math dept., etc. He “got” that this mathematics was legitimate, even if it was beyond his ken (or so he thought).
Today, EVERY parent, EVERY subnumerate reporter and pundit and politician, knows far more about mathematics and every other aspect of K-12 education than do people in the field. It’s remarkable, truly. So what if few of these new experts actually can teach math (or anything else) to kids, for the most part?
Of course, that doesn’t apply to anyone HERE. Everyone HERE is a wise, widely and deeply knowledgeable expert on all K-12 curriculum and pedagogy.
Funny, but I thought I was calling for efforts that included everyone. I guess I only THOUGHT I wrote that. I’m getting more and more careless in my old age.
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Thank you for your wisdom and kindness in a very sharp, short and sweet advice to all 2young2learn math pros, like “Think of your reaction when some well meaning soul suggests that your method of action is outdated and wrong.”
Under the sun, there is always a reason whether it is intentional or accidental. We always learn until we can perfect our body, mind and spirit. Until then, we will realize that we are a master of our own destiny without imposing our idea onto others, neither submitting our life to others’ demand.
The best method is not only our instinct, but our true happiness when it comes to know what will be right or wrong for our children’s education, career and future. The bottom solution is all about ability, capacity, and talent/innate skills. Nobody wants to be the bottom of a ladder, but everyone wants to be happy. Therefore, in education, the ultimate motivation is to deliver a curriculum in which all students enjoy learning in their own pace, and all teachers love to improve their skills to teach within their students’ level.
Our existing public educational system has offered four levels in learning: open, applied, academic and IB (international baccalaureate). Each child will find their way to enter whatever level that they find to be interesting to learn. I cannot imagine elementary teacher would like to teach grade 12 math in IB level. Back2basic.
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When working in tech, we jokingly referred to the “Moses Syndrome”. The executives and self appointed braintrust of the organization would sequester themselves with overpaid consultants. After a time of fullness, they would venture back to the heathen masses and deliver their wisdom through edicts of emails, strategic plans, and team building exercises complete with three legged races and role playing. When the revolutionary designs/processes/products crashed and burned, the leaders could never understand why their wonderful ideas never quite worked and often floundered in practice. I don’t think it ever crossed their minds to ask the people who must actually implement the ideas.
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Love that. “Moses Syndrome. Good one. So true so often.
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MathVale: I like your approach but would add that, IMHO, Moses actually had good leadership skills and the ability to adjust and adapt to go along with his aspirational goals. And in the end people actually ended up more or less where they wanted to be.
I do not mean to offend, but I think what you are describing is, in part, like a Messiah Complex. One definition from WikiAnswers: “An extremely egotist [sic] attitude. Someone with a messiah complex believes he has the solution to all problems and no other person’s opinion even needs to be considered.” [brackets mine]
Just my dos centavitos worth…
😎
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Moses exemplified the expression “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.”
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Not to pile on, but, Moses did not ask for the job, it was thrust upon him. He had excellent technical support however, and he was acutely aware of his limitations. He let others speak for him as well.
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“. . . Common Core Math Standards for progressive educational reasons is in failing to see the biggest flaw in this entire plan. . . ”
Well it’s just not the “biggest flaw” but the “biggest flaws” as shown by Noel Wilson for any set of standards and their joined at the hip sibling standardized testing. These educational malpractices are conceptually fatally flawed which render any results/conclusions invalid or as Wilson states “vain and illusory”. To understand why download, read and understand Wilson’s “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 logicallly 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.
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How was the fishing?
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Was fine, caught a half dozen trout (over the years one per hour is the average rate, sometimes they jump on your line and others they keep their mouth shut for hours on end, but that’s why it’s called fishing and not catching, eh) , gave three away to some kayakers, ate some, kept some. Two were decent size-16 1/2 inch, all rainbows. My son caught five, biggest 14 1/4. In Missouri we consider a “trophy trout” to be over 15. I won’t have one mounted unless it is over 2 feet (caught two of those and had one mounted) as I prefer to eat them. Saw a lot of wildlife, an eagle, an osprey which is quite rare around smaller rivers (and by small I mean not the Missouri and Mississippi). Heard whippoorwills and chuck o wills at night, coyotes, turkeys. Generally a good camping trip.
Thanks for asking NY teacher, hope you can get away soon as NY has so much to offer also in regards to outdoor activities. NY is a beautiful state not withstanding NYC-ha ha!
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I’m trying my best to understand what CC math is missing. Could you give just ONE “meaningful improvement” that you think should happen.
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Yes I would add also the group of myopic Democrats who refuse to acknowledge that their party could make a mistake, who have done some mild research so they can say they’ve seen it, and then offer up that in and of itself it’s fine. Why not admit they are trouble, troubled and troubling.
As for me, I left the Democratic Party because of Common Core.
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I have to kind of disagree. There is freedom within the CCSS to use or not use publishers’ materials, and there is freedom to not couple the Common core with testing. Here is one article: http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2014/04/23/29cc-curriculum.h33.html about that very thing happening. Here is another post, this one by Linda Darling Hammond, about the fact that the common core does not *necessarily* include the high stakes testing. http://prospect.org/article/pencils-out
I think we can either take the common core as a step forward and then work to make it better, or we can be reactionary, in which case I frankly don’t think we’ll make any progress. For instance, the biggest issue most people have with the common core is the high stakes testing that often seems linked to it. I agree! So we can either say, yes they are linked, throw out babies and bathwater, or we can say, they don’t have to be linked, no matter that the publishing industry wants you to think; let’s decouple them and get rid of the ridiculous high stakes testing and start working on improving the common core. From what I have seen, it is not perfect but actually has quite a lot in it that is an improvement. Let’s look for babies to save.
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Teacher lack, I am not sure about your sate, but the Common Core is definitely linked to high-stakes testing in New York. The federal government gave out $350 million to two testing consortia to create CC Tess. From the beginning, CC was designed to be tested, to e used to evaluate students, teachers, and schools, and to supply Big Data, all the while opening a national marketplace for vendors of software and hardware. If you can separate the pieces, good luck.
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teacherblack
We don’t get to say whether or not the standards and the tests will be linked. NYS education LAW requires they be linked. WHY? Because it was a required component of the RTTT contest. Linking teacher evaluations to said test scores is also non-negotiable. Its the LAW here in NY. Not sure where you’re from but you sound rather ill informed.
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And it wasn’t just RTTT requirements, either. ANY state that wanted a waiver of NCLB had to sign on to this mess.
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With all due respect, Dr. Frederick Hess of the American Heritage Institute is much more qualified than anyone posting on this blog to give a pro-“education reform” insider’s view of the indissoluble link between CCSS and high-stakes standardized testing.
[start quote]
In truth, the idea that the Common Core might be a “game-changer” has little to do with the Common Core standards themselves, and everything to do with stuff attached to them, especially the adoption of common tests that make it possible to readily compare schools, programs, districts, and states (of course, the announcement that one state after another is opting out of the two testing consortia is hollowing out this promise).
But the Common Core will only make a dramatic difference if those test results are used to evaluate schools or hire, pay, or fire teachers; or if the effort serves to alter teacher preparation, revamp instructional materials, or compel teachers to change what students read and do. And, of course, advocates have made clear that this is exactly what they have in mind. When they refer to the “Common Core,” they don’t just mean the words on paper–what they really have in mind is this whole complex of changes.
[end quote]
Link: http://deutsch29.wordpress.com/2013/12/28/the-american-enterprise-institute-common-core-and-good-cop/
If anyone has any doubts about his bona fides re his understanding of, and membership in, the “new civil rights movement of our time,” please google.
He validates the comments above by dianeravitch.
😎
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I’m in California, and here they have left whether people want to switch to the new tests optional. But high stakes testing certainly preceded the common core. NY Teacher, I have a gut level reaction against personal insults on the internet. Call me old-fashioned, but I am happy to discuss issues, but if you are going to call me names, I will have to unfollow.
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I did not call you any “names” however I apologize if I offended you.
The high stakes testing during NCLB was very different than under CCSS.Failure to meet AYP under NCLB resulted in Title 1 SCHOOLS being punished and labeled with SINI status. Under CCSS TEACHERS and schools are punished and labeled using the invalid and unreliable VAM, Marzano/Danielson/SLO/SGO methods. Feel free to unfollow, but I would suggest not, you have a lot to learn.
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