Robert Shepherd, experienced writer of curriculum, assessments, and textbooks, left the following comment on the “Newsweek” site in response to an attack on Louis C.K.’s critique of the Common Core standards. Instead of covering the commentary over Common Core, as one would expect of a newsmagazine, “Newsweek” has decided its role it to defend the standards and attack their critics. Shepherd has posted the comment repeatedly and says that “Newsweek” will not publish it. So, read it here.

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I left the following comment on the Newsweek page. A moment or two later, they had deleted it. I reposted it again. Waiting to see if they will delete it again (Diane’s note: they did delete the comment again).

I laugh a bitter laugh every time I hear someone refer to the Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic] as “higher.” These were hacked together by amateurs, overnight, without any professional vetting. They were paid for by plutocrats who wanted one national bullet list to tag their educational software and assessments to. The ELA “standards” are backward, hackneyed, unimaginative, often prescientific, and dramatically distorting of both curricula and pedagogy. And one could drive whole curricula through their lacunae. Learning involves acquisition of both world knowledge (knowledge of what) and procedural knowledge (knowledge of how). The Common Core in ELA contains ALMOST NONE of the former and expresses the latter so vaguely that, not being concrete or operationalized, they cannot be validly tested, and so the new tests being put together based on the Core are completely invalid. The lead author of these “standards” had absolutely ZERO relevant experience. The authors hacked these together based on a quick review of the lowest-common-denominator groupthink of the state standards that preceded them. Educational publishers are now taking these amateurish, puerile “standards” as a de facto curriculum, producing texts filled with activities that model the egregiously narrowed activities on the new Common Core College and Career Reading Assessment Program (C.C.C.C.R.A.P.) tests. Basically, these “standards” have turned K-12 education in the U.S. into low-level test prep. The “standards” are invariant. Kids are not. These “standards” belong to an extrinsic punishment and reward theory of education that is entirely discredited, for extrinsic punishment and reward is inherently demotivating for cognitive tasks. The “standards” are the product of a takeover of U.S. education by know-nothing plutocrats and business people and politicians who have decided to micromanage U.S. education based on dangerous, backward ideas, and these “standards” will have, are having, precisely the opposite of their intended effect. However, they are making and will make a lot of money for a few software vendors and testing companies. This piece by Nazaryan is clueless. Teachers oppose these “standards” not because they fear being held accountable but because the “standards” themselves are very, very badly conceived and are doing enormous damage, every day, in classrooms around the United States.