The Chicago Teachers Union adopted a resolution opposing the Common Core.
This is big news because the parent organization, the American Federation of Teachers, accepted millions of dollars from the Gates Foundation to support and promote the Common Core.
Fred Klonsky posted the following account of the CTU action:
Chicago Teachers Union adopts resolution opposing the Common Core State Standards.
MAY 7, 2014
Today the Chicago Teachers Union House of Delegates passed a resolution opposing the Common Core standards.
A similar New Business Item was not permitted to be voted on at the recent Illinois Education Association state convention. It was ruled out of order by IEA President Cinda Klickna. The NBI had been introduced by veteran Park Ridge fifth grade teacher and delegate, Jerry Mulvihill.
From CTUnet:
Today, members of the House of Delegates (HOD) of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) passed the following resolution that enjoins the city’s educators to growing national opposition to the Common Core State Standards, saying the assessments disrupt student learning and consume tremendous amounts of time and resources for test preparation and administration.
Now that the resolution has passed, the CTU will lobby the Illinois Board of Education to eliminate the use of the Common Core for teaching and assessment; and be it further and will work to organize other members and affiliates to increase opposition to the law that increases the expansion of nationwide controls over educational issues.
Common Core’s origins can be traced to the 2009 Stimulus Bill which gave $4.35 billion to the federal Department of Education which created the “Race to the Top” competition between states. In order to qualify for funding, the states needed to adopt Common Core with the added incentive that participating states would be exempted from many of the more onerous provisions of George Bush’s “No child left behind” program.
“I agree with educators and parents from across the country, the Common Core mandate represents an overreach of federal power into personal privacy as well as into state educational autonomy,” said CTU President Karen Lewis, a nationally board certified teacher. “Common Core eliminates creativity in the classroom and impedes collaboration. We also know that high-stakes standardized testing is designed to rank and sort our children and it contributes significantly to racial discrimination and the achievement gap among students in America’s schools.”
The official text of the resolution follows:
Resolution to Oppose the Common Core State Standards
WHEREAS, the purpose of education is to educate a populace of critical thinkers who are capable of shaping a just and equitable society in order to lead good and purpose-filled lives, not solely preparation for college and career; and
WHEREAS, instructional and curricular decisions should be in the hands of classroom professionals who understand the context and interests of their students; and
WHEREAS, the education of children should be grounded in developmentally appropriate practice; and
WHEREAS, high quality education requires adequate resources to provide a rich and varied course of instruction, individual and small group attention, and wrap-around services for students; and
WHEREAS, the Common Core State Standards were developed by non-practitioners, such as test and curriculum publishers, as well as education reform foundations, such as the Gates and Broad Foundations, and as a result the CCSS better reflect the interests and priorities of corporate education reformers than the best interests and priorities of teachers and students; and
WHEREAS, the Common Core State Standards were piloted incorrectly, have been implemented too quickly, and as a result have produced numerous developmentally inappropriate expectations that do not reflect the learning needs of many students; and
WHEREAS, imposition of the Common Core State Standards adversely impacts students of highest need, including students of color, impoverished students, English language learners, and students with disabilities; and
WHEREAS, the Common Core State Standards emphasize pedagogical techniques, such as close reading, out of proportion to the actual value of these methods – and as a result distort instruction and remove instructional materials from their social context; and
WHEREAS, despite the efforts of our union to provide support to teachers, the significant time, effort, and expense associated with modifying curricula to the Common Core State Standards interferes and takes resources away from work developing appropriate and engaging courses of study; and
WHEREAS, the assessments that accompany the Common Core State Standards (PARCC and Smarter Balance) are not transparent in that –teachers and parents are not allowed to view the tests and item analysis will likely not be made available given the nature of computer adaptive tests; and
WHEREAS, Common Core assessments disrupt student learning, consuming tremendous amounts of time and resources for test preparation and administration; and
WHEREAS, the assessment practices that accompany Common Core State Standards – including the political manipulation of test scores – are used as justification to label and close schools, fail students, and evaluate educators; therefore be it
RESOLVED that the Chicago Teachers Union opposes the Common Core State Standards (and the aligned tests) as a framework for teaching and learning; and be it further
RESOLVED, the Chicago Teachers Union advocates for an engaged and socially relevant curriculum that is student-based and supported by research, as well as for supports such as those described in the Chicago Teachers Union report, The Schools Chicago’s Students Deserve; and be it further
RESOLVED, the Chicago Teachers Union will embark on internal discussions to educate and seek feedback from members regarding the Common Core and its impact on our students; and be it further
RESOLVED, the Chicago Teachers Union will lobby the Illinois Board of Education to eliminate the use of the Common Core State Standards for teaching and assessment; and be it further
RESOLVED, the Chicago Teachers Union will organize other members and affiliates to increase opposition to the Common Core State Standards; and be it further
RESOLVED, that a copy of this resolution be sent to the Illinois State Board of Education, the Chicago Board of Education, the Governor of Illinois, and all members of the Illinois legislative branch; and be it finally
RESOLVED, that should this resolution be passed by the CTU House of Delegates, an appropriate version will be submitted to the American Federation of Teachers for consideration at the 2014 Convention.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Wonderful news, perhaps a signal of even greater opposition coming down the road.
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It is so refreshing to see a teacher’s union doing its job! The way Gates’ money has subverted so many; soon we can expect the deformers to be union supporters, and teachers opposed.
Good job Karen Lewis – again.
And SHAME on you Cinda Klickna.
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The IEA and Cinda Klickna have been an embarassment. Karen Lewis is what it is all about.
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cx: embarrassment
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Go, Go Chicago!
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With the Obama/Duncan duo being such a huge embarrassment to my home town, it is altogether fitting and appropriate that this resolution should be coming from educators in Chicago.
Karen Lewis, You go, girl!
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Fantastic news. Wondering if there will be an increasingly fast domino effect around the nation. Would love to see this! Time to get on without “the BUSINESS of teaching” and get on with real learning in the classrooms.
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It seems there’s a domino effect related to “data mining” and Common Core. Chicago pushed back on inBloom thanks to Karen and Leonie.
However, today – Huffington Post gave Aimee Rogstad Guidera, an apologist for inBloom and for-profit student/teacher/family data gathers space today. I’m curious about why Aimee did not disclose that her “non-profit” has received at least 5 million from the Gates Foundation.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/aimee-rogstad-guidera/all-parents-need-access-to-education-data-now_b_5269001.html
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Write about Wisconsin’s issues…..WE are going through Gov. Walker’s Mad issues. If we get rid of a Common Core the legislatures will write up our Common Core. Help!
Sent from my iPad
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Congratulations to the Chicago teachers. All teachers should follow their lead and do the same.
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RIGHT ON!!!
Go, City That Works!
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I see only one “whereas” that is even plausible. The rest are anti-intellectual, stupid, inflammatory, illogical, and/or directed against something other than the Common Core itself.
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Disagree. If you are trying to state that only one directly attacks the problems of CCSS, I guess. But the rest are clearly stating the effects and collateral damage caused by the CCSS. So while they are not about the standards themselves, they do reflect the other moving parts that are affected.
But as a matter of opinion, I guess I would like to hear your reasons why CCSS is so awesome. As a high school history teacher (mostly Advanced Placement), CCSS is totally skills-based with no requirement for historical knowledge or content. Read the 11th / 12th grade standards for Social Studies. Technically, no history required. I could capably teach those standards with no historical information and therefore no context.
But I don’t mind a thoughtful dissenting voice. So don’t just scream adjective that are insulting. Support your point of view. Declaration is not evidence. In fact, your post in decidedly not proficient in the CCSS world.
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First whereas: irrelevant and tendentious. No argument has ever been made proving that Common Core is any worse at “critical thinking” or promoting “good and purpose-filled lives.” This is the worst sort of edu-speak by people who themselves seem incapable of critical thinking.
Second whereas: leave curriculum in the hands of classroom teachers? Dumb. This completely misses the fact that many classroom teachers would make idiosyncratic decisions that cheat their students out of knowing essential facts and skills that would help them succeed in life (and in the next grade).
Third whereas: developmentally appropriate. Now we’re approaching an actual argument — that Common Core asks things of children that they’re not ready to handle, poor things. Could be true some of the time, although the fact that we keep seeing people deride rather simple math worksheets seems to indicate to me that many adults (including some within the education system) have an amazing willingness to vaunt their own ignorance.
Fourth whereas: adequate resources, wrap-around services, etc. This is all good, but it has absolutely nothing to do with Common Core. Critical thinking FAIL once again.
Fifth whereas: Common Core represents “corporate education reformers” rather than “best interests and priorities of teachers and students.” This is silly. Be specific — point to a standard that has anything to do with “corporate” reform, whatever that is supposed to mean here.
Sixth whereas: piloted and implemented too quickly, resulting in developmental inappropriateness. An actual argument again, although it’s duplicative of the third whereas above, apparently because someone realized that no argument had been made the first time. This time isn’t any better, though, because we’re still not seeing why any actual standard is “developmentally inappropriate.”
Seventh whereas: adversely impacts minorities. This is just dumb and more than a bit racist too. Tell us more about which standards black kids inherently can’t learn, eh?
Eighth: close reading isn’t good. OK, that could be true, although not clear how important this is.
Ninth whereas: there’s absolutely no evidence that Common Core is opposed to “appropriate and engaging” classwork, and if the CTU is right in claiming elsewhere that “corporate” reformers have done all the work in developing curriculum, it’s not clear why teachers are also supposedly spending so much “time, effort, and expense” developing curriculum. Maybe CTU needs to figure out a consistent story here: are teachers developing actual curricula to use in the classroom or not?
Tenth: assessments are not transparent. This is sheerly stupid and anti-intellectual. You don’t release all the test items to parents (most of whom, as shown by current debates, are incompetent to discuss testing quality), as that would contaminate the validity of the tests.
Eleventh: too much test prep. Dumb again. OK, teachers, you’re in charge in the classroom, and there’s absolutely nothing in the actual Common Core that says, “spend tremendous amounts of time and resources on test prep.” If that’s what you’re doing, it’s your own damn fault. Or it’s the fault of administrators who would be doing this anyway, regardless of the Common Core. Either way, it’s completely dumb to blame Common Core.
Twelvth: tests are used to “label and close schools, fail students, and evaluate educators.” OK, I get it, but please tell me the CTU isn’t so dumb as not to know that these testing and accountability practices date back 20 years in many states and to 2002 on the national level, and have zero to do with Common Core.
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cx: do, not does, in the sixth paragraph
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So in essence, it’s a matter of opinion. Yours and that of the CTU.
First whereas: No argument has been made that CCSS is better at critical thinking approaches either. From my perspective as a teacher with the social studies CCSS it really isn’t better. It’s different but not better.
Second whereas: You’re identifying a narrow minority of teachers. Don’t know if you’re aware of this but curriculum mapping, pacing and instructional models are available in every school. Teachers are held to expectations according to what is taught and the pacing of those lessons and units. Teachers have input but curriculum mapping has long been a collaborative endeavor which balances out the “idiosyncratic choices” and in fact eliminates them. CCSS is an unnecessary power grab to emphasize what the writers deem important to the exclusion of communities and other teaching professionals.
Third whereas: I will not speak to expertise since I don’t teach K-3. One 2nd grade teacher I spoke with said the problem with CCSS K-3 math isn’t that it provides multiple representations but boxes kids into using a specific representation for problems rather than the one students are most comfortable using. (Why use a number line if they can simply subtract in traditional columns and get the right answer?)
Fourth whereas: Off-topic true. But an example of the moving parts that get affected. Invest billions in tests that could be invested in other, potentially more valuable, ways.
Fifth whereas: I don’t need a standard specifically. It’s the standards generally that are geared toward corporate needs. It’s about training employees not educating people. Social studies standards are general skills and not really social studies. Kids don’t have to know what Pearl Harbor is but they should be able to read a first hand account of it without context. That subtracts from the power and relevance of the written piece. That’s silly.
Sixth whereas: Implementation was rushed because the creators of CCSS wanted it to be a fait accompli before anyone could fight back. As a teacher of high school upperclassmen, I’m more than a little concerned that my students will be tested on standards that they did not use for the first decade of their schooling. Why the rush?
Seventh whereas: Have you seen the stats out of New York regarding minority performance? Regarding ELL students?
Eighth whereas: As a history teacher I find close reading to be among the worst ideas ever foisted on a classroom. David Coleman used the Gettysburg Address as his specific example for close reading. He essentially stated that if kids had historical background on why the Address was written it would disrupt the process. Apparently having information is a disadvantage.
Ninth whereas: I haven’t worked enough with CCSS to know whether it is engaging. I can tell you the CCSS styled assignments I have given have been labeled as dry by a wide range of students of varying abilities. Dry does not signify good or bad but it also doesn’t signify engagement.
Tenth whereas: Lack of test transparency is not anti-intellectual. As a teacher, I’d like to know what I’m preparing kids for. It seems fair to me. AP releases multiple choice test sections with regularity so we can get a peek at what’s expected. (I’d also note that if you are an advocate of school choice, you’ve just defeated that argument. If parents can’t assess test quality, they are certainly not capable of “shopping for schools” which is a far more daunting and comprehensive task.) And parents should have a right to know what their kid failed. When parents ask to see my assessments, they are welcome to visit and review. Same goes for my essay prompts.
Eleventh whereas: In a system where evaluation factors in at least 20% of teacher evaluation on test scores, there’s going to be test prep! If a chunk of your evaluation rested on a particular element, wouldn’t you do what you could to bump it up? This is not the fault of CCSS but it intertwines with other issues. Therefore, it becomes a source of concern. If a school believes that low test scores will doom it (or high test scores will win praise), they will test prep. How do you think charters pull off their scores? Ever read the posts submitted by a teacher from Success Academy about the amount of test prep they do? The tests are THE sticking point to all of this.
I appreciate that you took the time to respond in detail. I disagree but I respect that you backed it up. I’m definitely not saying you’re wrong but ignoring some of the side effects of CCSS does not absolve it. CCSS is not functioning in a vacuum but part of a large-scale shift in educational priorities. Therefore, I believe that it must be weighed and considered in that environment. Thanks for providing me with the opportunity to think more deeply about this topic.
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Also, WT, why are you in favor of CCSS? What makes you confident that this is a better way to go? Criticizing those who oppose CCSS is fine but I’d be interested to hear why you think CCSS is an improvement.
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WT,
RE: “Tenth: assessments are not transparent. This is sheerly stupid and anti-intellectual. You don’t release all the test items to parents (most of whom, as shown by current debates, are incompetent to discuss testing quality), as that would contaminate the validity of the tests.”
Disagree.
AP exams have traditionally released previous exams. Teachers (yes, actual, current AP teachers) score the free response questions of AP exams every year. These tests are not “gag ordered” , “black ops” like the CC exams and other RTTT, NCLB exams that teachers and parents are forbidden to even glimpse.
If AP can do it, so can the mandatory tests.
I fail to understand how tests which are pimped as vital to the education of our students AND the continued American way of life can also be so super secret. On what evidence does anyone accept the “information” provided by these mandatory “assessments”?
Any parent/teacher/student should be able to see the test, the answer key and discuss the results if the test is to be in any way meaningful.
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As far as developmentally appropriate, with roughly 1.6×10^12041 possible DNA gene combinations, I’m pretty sure we can say students tend to be somewhat different. I dunno, maybe that number should be doubled.
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You don’t release the questions when you know that knowledgeable scholars and researchers and classroom practitioners will reveal them to be purest claptrap and the data generated from them purest numerology.
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Bob at 2:40
Of course. That was the point I was trying to make! Having seen many of these hot mess tests over the years (legally, I was supposed to read them to students), I can assure you they are mostly cobbled together crap. Full of errors and obvious bias, needless wordiness and all manner of problems.
I fail to understand why anyone puts any stock at all in these things.
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I do not see where this resolution is “anti-intellectial, stupid” or “illogical.” It was doubtless intended to be “inflammatory,” and sometimes that is appropriate. I too wish that the resolution had given more space to addressing the Common [sic] Core [sic] itself. Of course, if the resolution started delineating the problems in the Common Core, it would have to be very, very long indeed–perhaps book length. But a summary like this might be included:
Whereas, the CC$$ in ELA seem to have been written by amateurs with no knowledge of the sciences of language acquisition and little familiarity with best practices in the various domains that the standards cover
Whereas, the ELA standards are a bullet list of abstractly formulated skills that barely touches upon knowledge of what (world knowledge) and that treats procedural knowledge (knowledge of how) so vaguely–without operationalization–that valid assessment based on the standards is almost impossible. I heartily approve of some of the general guidelines that surround these standards–read substantive, related texts closely–but I disapprove of the narrow New Critical emphasis of the standards generally (texts exist in context) and of the general formulation of the CCSSO bullet list as descriptions of abstract skills.
Whereas, the creators of these standards did not seem to understand that much learning in ELA is acquisition–is not acquired by explicit means. ALMOST NONE of the vocabulary and grammar that a person commands was learned via explicit teaching of that vocabulary and grammar. It’s extremely important that English teachers understand this and understand how, in fact, grammar and vocabulary are acquired so that they can create the circumstances wherein this acquisition can happen, and they are not going to begin to do that based on this bullet list, which in regards to language learning, can most charitably be described as prescientific–as instantiating discredited folk theories on which it is counterproductive to build curricula and pedagogical strategies.
Whereas, the CC$$ in Math barely tweak a long-existing consensus about the progression and approach to mathematics education, one that leaves most adult products of that education, a few years after they’ve happily put it behind them, basically innumerate and fine with that. (The preceding state standards were almost all based on the NCTM standards and so were remarkably similar.)
Whereas, the CC$$ in Math does not recognize different levels of preparation in mathematics appropriate for students with differing futures ahead of them. In particular, the learning progression embodied in these “standards” is insufficient preparation for students being prepared for entry to college-level programs in engineering and other fields that are heavily mathematical.
Whereas, having national standards creates economies of scale that educational materials monopolists can exploit, enabling them to crowd out/keep out smaller competitors. This is a HUGE issue with the new national “standards” that has received almost no attention. There’s a reason why the education materials monopolists kicked in a lot of money to create these “standards.”
Whereas, kids differ, and invariant bullet lists of standards do not.
Whereas, standards are treated by publishers AS the curriculum and imply particular pedagogical approaches, and so they result in DRAMATIC distortions of curricula and pedagogy. Every educational publisher in the country is now beginning every project in ELA by making a spreadsheet with the amateurish CC$$ in one column and the places in their program where these are “covered” in the next. So much for curricular coherence.
Whereas, innovation in educational approaches comes about from the implementation of competing ideas and creating one set of standards ossifies, precluding much potentially extraordinarily valuable innovation.
Whereas, ten years of doing this standards-and-testing stuff under NCLB hasn’t worked. It’s idiotic to do more of what hasn’t worked and to expect real change/improvement.
Whereas, in a free society, no unelected group (Achieve) has the right to overrule every teacher, curriculum coordinator, and curriculum developer with regard to what the outcomes of educational processes should be.
Whereas, high-stakes tests lead to teaching to the test–for example, to having kids do lots and lots of practice using the test formats–and all this test prep has significant opportunity costs; it crowds out important learning.
Whereas, a complex, diverse, pluralistic society needs kids to be variously trained, not identically milled.
Whereas, the folks who prepared these standards did their work heedlessly; they did not stop to question what a standard should look like in a particular domain but simply made unwarranted but extremely consequential decisions about that based on current practice in state standards that were themselves the product of lowest-common-denominator educratic groupthink.
Whereas, the tests and test prep create enormous test anxiety and undermine the development of love of learning.
Whereas, real learning tends to be unique and unpredictable. It can’t be summarized in a bullet list. The last thing that we need is this Powerpointing of U.S. K-12 education.
Whereas, we are living in times of enormous change; kids being born today are going to experience more change in their lifetimes than has occurred in all of human history up to this point, so they need to be intrinsically, not extrinsically, motivated to learn; high-stakes tests belong to a nineteenth-century and older extrinsic punishment/reward school of educational theory and fly in the face of the prime directives of the educator: to identify the unique gifts of unique kids, to build upon those, and so to assist in the creation of intrinsically motivated, independent, life-long learners.
Whereas, if we allow the creation of a centralized Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth, that is a first step on a VERY slippery slope. Have we come to the point in the United States where we are comfortable with legislating ideas?
Whereas, the standards-and-testing regime usurps local teacher and administrator autonomy, and no one works well, at all well, under conditions of low autonomy.
Whereas, the standards and the new tests have not been tested.
Whereas, the standards and the new test formats, though extremely consequential in their effects on every aspect of K-12 schooling, were never subjected to national debate, nor were they subjected to the equivalent of failure modes and effects analysis.
Whereas, the legislation that created the Department of Education specifically forbade it from getting involved in curricula, but as E. D. Hirsch, Jr., has pointed out, the new math standards clearly ARE a curriculum outline, and the federal DOE has forced this curriculum outline on the country.
Whereas, no mechanism exists for ongoing critique and revision of these standards by scholars, researchers, and practitioners.
Whereas, the new tests—PARCC and not-Smart imBalanced–have not themselves been validated as measurements of real reading and writing ability and could not be so validated, given their construction
something like that would do
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yikes! The third paragraph, above, needs editing to remove the first-person pronouns, of course. (I did a quick repurposing of this from a different document.)
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cx: federal DOE should be USDE, of course
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As the Chicago Teachers Union delegate who moved to close debate on the Common Core resolution at last night’s meeting, I’m glad to read through all these comments. Especially interesting are Bob Sheperd’s because they mirror so nicely the challenges we faced during the past four or five months as my brothers and sisters, in CORE and on the CTU Executive Board, moved forward with this important position. As everyone who has watched Arne Duncan (and I began that sad process as a reporter long before he became a national monster — 13 years ago it began, to be precise here in Chicago) knows, he is capable of weaseling in pivoting and not just on the White House basketball court. Whenever we were catching Arne in a lie (for example, that infamous one about “charter school waiting lists” proving there was a demand for that type of “choice”) he would dodge the question with a “I will get back to you on that…” These Harvard guys are trained to act as if they are smarter than everyone else, even when they are blowing snot to the sky like Ahab’s nemesis in Moby Dick.
Hence, we knew we were facing a challenge with the “Whereases”.
Hence, the resolution was channeled into a shorter space, with each WHEREAS able to be debated by many of our brothers and sisters.
By the time we reached that terminal point in the process last night, I knew that almost all of the 800 teachers and PSRPs who voted in favor of that resolution could stand up against the nonsense that will spew from Arne and the remainder of the Common Core core.
Sure we could have had a ten-page resolution with a hundred pages of footnotes and about 100 hours of You Tube videos of various children, parents, teachers and principals talking each of us about how stupid the entire Common Core project is.
Now, however, we will be preparing for that debate at the AFT convention, which will see 150 delegates from Chicago, led by Karen Lewis and Jesse Sharkey, Michael Brunson and Kristine Mayle (our four officers) making sure that our position becomes the position of the 1.5 million members of AFT.
That will be a proud day for teachers in the USA, and a major pushback against the enemies of public education and public school teachers. We will be reporting each of these steps as they are taken, now that one of the biggest ones is a fact.
At the AFT convention, the trick usually is for the leadership (New York tries to lock things up — or down) to destroy certain resolutions in committee. But I do not think that will prove the fate of this particular “Ed Issues” resolution at it comes to the floor in Los Angeles. Our brothers and sisters in New York have come part of the way against Common Core, and now that we have gone all the way, we’ll just be waiting to welcome them with open arms.
And one other ting to note.
Bob Shepherd and others are speaking here in their own voices, standing up as we have done in Chicago as part of the continued movement for democracy.
I note sadly that most of those who are taking cheap shots at our resolution don’t have the courage to come out in their own names to defend their positions. It’s OK, I guess, for blogs to have that tradition of cowardice. But last night I stood with 800 teachers (and others) who know what it means to do the fight for democracy democratically. Neither our leaders nor our “rank and file” hide behind pseudonyms or “anonymous.” And I would urge those who value their supposed arguments to give them credibility by standing up for them as we are doing.
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You have a right to be very, very proud of what you did, there. I am honored that you responded to my note. And thank you for your courageous and difficult work in the service of kids and their teachers. Democracy is a messy business, and armchair quarterbacking is simple and easy. I hope that I did not give the impression that I was doing that. Warm regards to you and your colleagues. Great job!
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And my apologies, George, for not editing that list, above, before posting it. Many, many infelicities in the expression due to my having posted it, with a hurried adaptation from another piece that I wrote. Oh for an edit feature on WordPress! Thanks again, George!
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That’s OK. I wasn’t being sarcastic. For those of us who have been debating on the professional side of this issue since the publication of “The Manufactured Crisis” and “One Size Fits Few”, we realize that there is a vast body of very good professional writing (bolstered the past few years by Reign of Error most best selleredly) material. So when Michelle Gunderson and the CTU Education Committee, along with CORE, went into how to draft a resolution to bring us this far, we knew the problem wasn’t having the material but whittling it down. So that’s what we did, and will stand with.
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No sane business leader would rollout an untested product or service nationwide. Shareholders would be livid.
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What is happening in California regarding Common Core Standards?
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I mean, is there any organized pushback to CCSS in California?
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Reblogged this on Transparent Christina.
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CTU, you rock! Why can’t UTLA be more like you. You need to relocate to Los Angeles, We need a union with moxie. You have it.
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Hear-ye, hear-ye and hip, hip hooray! Now back to the ghetto that is Arizona. Recently posted in a local paper:
http://cvbugle.com/main.asp?SectionID=1&SubsectionID=1&ArticleID=42364
Is it any wonder Arizona ranks at the bottom for educational performance. Shame, shame!
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The obvious question now is this:
Will Randi Weingarten of the AFT and Dennis Van Roekel of the NEA retract their support for the Common Core and disavow it?
And a second question is, if not, why not?
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Ding!
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I don’t know much about dennis van Roekal and how the NEA operates, but you can be sure that, no matter what she might say publicly, Weingarten will act to undermine the CTU and continue enabling the so-called reformers
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NO
Weingarten takes money from Gates.
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Does anyone know how AFT used the money it received from Gates or how it was intended to be used?
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We’re also reporting the story, to include a cute picture of Randi and Bill Gates from the 2010 AFT convention, at http://www.substancenews.net.
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Be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. While I am in agreement with the what, why, and how of the opposition to the common core, as professional educators we do need to step back and reflect on how the subjects we teach are organized, how topics are selected, how they would be assessed, and how they would be taught. There is nothing inherently wrong with the effort to make all the theories, ideas, concepts, facts, etc. make sense to students and provide them with the intellectual tools for occupational and personal success. In fact, developing curricula frameworks, which NCTM, NCTE, NSF, have done is a worthwhile and required goal of professional educators. Let’s me honest and say that the selection, organization, and presentation of knowledge we all the experienced in schools —THE TEXTBOOK (and those 10 questions the end of the chapter) falls far short of mark of how children develop a love and understanding of a discipline. The traditional textbook/workbook/worksheet/friday test curriculum is a poor model for curriculum design. We do need curricula frameworks that depart from subject-focus to problem based/interdisciplinary approaches to knowledge/domain areas — which the common core attempted to do, but for professional and political reasons misfired. So much of what is written in these blogs I agree with, but care must be exercised not to ignore the long-time warts of institutional schooling. I think we all agree that children do not learn well in a schooling platform whose goals are credits, grades, seat time, and whose go to pedagogy is 1 adult teaching 30 students for 55 minutes–this is not how children learn.
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So you’re saying the Common Core is the educational “baby” that must be saved?
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No, I am saying that the concept of curriculum development needs to be saved. There is not enough room to explore the problem with the traditional subject centered curriculum, which in the world of curriculum design professionals as long been a problem. The subject centered curriculum plays into the materials (textbooks), the school schedule (7 periods), goals (credits), and assessment (Friday’s multiple choice test), but fails miserably to present a discipline domain in a meaningful way or how that discipline was originally conceived. And so, beginning in California 15- 20 years ago, and continuing in our professional organizations there has been effort to develop curriculum frameworks that more accurately represent the origins and goals of the discipline they represent. I would hope in all of our schools that curriculum development was an on going process—not the mindless alignment exercises so many schools participate in (aligning textbooks to state standards/ common core, etc. ) but transforming how, say a subject like science, from how scientists think about and practice science, instead of how it is represented in textbooks and classrooms: “OK, students today we will learn the five steps in the scientific method.” Whether you look at the writings of John Dewey or Ralph Tyler or Deborah Meier, they all focused on adopting disciplinary understandings to the particular context of the students we teach. Because the SOE puts out a ill-conceived curriculum framework is not to say that the goal and process of curriculum development is null and void.
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How about we resurrect the concepts that served as the basis for the Eight Year Study? How about we develop a curricular framework for public education with democratic citizenship as the main curricular focus?
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The eight year study is a good beginning—historically the field of curriculum is rich with a variety of instructional designs that are far more effective than the 450 page textbook. To elaborate on the democratic citizenship focus —absolutely agree, but again, not how democratic citizenship is now taught is most schools: “OK, class, write down the 7 steps in the legislative process.” Rather, as we did in our school, created a semester class titled: “Legislative Assembly,” where students spent entire semester writing legislation, conducting committee hearings on a bill they are interested in pursuing, and finally legislating their bills in a 2 day session in the auditorium —sitting in that auditorium and the classes that led up to the final session was truly a remarkable educational experience.
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Except much of that “legislative assembly” stuff is very much teacher led and controlled, and not very authentic. Sort of like mock elections. Ask students if they “like” those things, many will say yes. Ask them what they learned, and many will say not much.
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No, I am saying that the concept of curriculum development must be saved. While the subject centered curriculum serves the institutional goals of schooling quite well, they are poorly designed for interest, meaning, and are poor representations of disciplinary thinking. Common core was an attempt, albeit, not a very good one, to move away from subjects into the origins and goals of what disciplinary knowledge was meant to accomplish — not to take a test or receive a grade, but to solve problems. All disciplines originated with a set of problems, whether they be instrumental/existential/—that we humans set about solving. Institutional schooling has transformed a problem solving heuristic into huge catalogues of names, dates, procedures, etc.that are to memorized and replicated on Friday’s test. Physics or chemistry or history, etc. never emerged out of a textbook or a subject, they emerged out of a set of problems that certain individuals (Newton, Einstein, Gibbons, Plato, Shakespeare etc.) felt well worth solving. Read a primary resource (say Hamlet or the Republic) and then read the textbook description of these works and you quickly see what textbooks have done to big ideas/big questions/big concepts of our century.
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yes, and we should be working from competing frameworks put forward by competing scholars, researchers, practitioners, and curriculum designers that are vigorously debated, and free people should be able to adopt and adapt these. Ecologies are much healthier than are monocultures.
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General frameworks are much to be preferred to invariant bullet lists, of course, because they provide the degrees of freedom within which curricula can be adapted to varying students and true pedagogical and curricular innovation can occur
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Of course, the contemporary basal (and the hundreds of ancillary materials accompanying it) presents far, far more than a few questions at the end of a chapter. These, in fact, are built upon learning progressions, and these days, those are lifted directly from the standards. And therein lies the problem. The standards become the curriculum, or the curriculum outline. Alan Jones is absolutely right that good curricula are extremely important. General frameworks, as opposed to bullet lists, provide the degrees of freedom within which real curricular innovation can occur.
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Alan,
Would you expect that a school district would be able to adopt the practice you describe for all schools or is it more likely that the ball gets rolling in a setting where parents and students can choose or not choose?
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Common Core is NOT the standard. The standard has become the tests. We have no idea if the tests are accurate or relevant. We cannot independently verify the correctness and quality of the tests or scoring. You might as well use the CCSS to line a litterbox. The amount of noise and dissonance between the standards and tests will be great. A teacher could diligently deliver every single standard item and still be faced with test questions poorly designed or misaligned.
Standards should be broad, foundational guidelines. Teachers must be trained and trusted to adapt the standards. Standards are meant to enforce uniformity and interchangeability. Innovation and advancement comes from the FREEDOM to ignore standards.
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“A teacher could diligently deliver every single standard item and still be faced with test questions poorly designed or misaligned.”
Agree.
May I add…
Or biased.
Or containing an error (factual, typo, omission, answer key error, etc.).
Or just plain crumby.
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But back to the point on which this post was originally focused, Chicago teachers coming out against the Common Core:
Will Randi Weingarten of the AFT and Dennis Van Roekel of the NEA retract their support for the Common Core and disavow it?
And if not, why not?
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Randi Weingarten loves Common Core. Common Core is Bill Gate’s baby. Randi takes money from Bill Gates. Which part is not clear democracy?
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MORE POWER TO THE CHICAGO TEACHERS! STAY STRONG!
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I think the debate around common core is a diversion from the real issues: fighting for decent contracts that protect teachers and students. The recent sell-out to DeBlasio in NYC is evidence of our unions’ failure to carry the struggle for members’ right forward.
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