Carol Burris says that Common Core is dying “the death of a thousand cuts.” Its supporters claim that the critics represent the extreme right, notably the Tea Party. Of course, the Tea Party is vociferous against the Common Core, but they are not alone.
In Néw York, the Tea Party does not have a large presence, yet opposition is strong, coming mainly from suburban parents. The Chicago Teachers Union voted unanimously to oppose Common Core, and they don’t have many Tea Party members.
Common Core has plenty of friends in the Obama administration and major corporations. For the tech industry and the testing and textbook industry, the Common Core is a huge multi-billion dollar industry.
Burris responds to those who say there is no alternative to the Common Core. New York had a new set of standards in reading developed by educators. It was swept away by Common Core.
Can Common Core survive the intense controversy it ignited? Speaking as a historian, having seen great theories sweep in and out, I would say that the rushed creation and implementation of the standards doomed them. This was a time for deliberate speed, not a hurried and untested plan. Buying the support of education interest groups in D.C. is not the same as winning the support of the American public.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Just reviewing my daughter’s new CCSS based revamp of math curriculum for summer prep. C’mon. Math has been around for thousands of years. Do we need a “new” set of standards and tests? Before, our district had a reasonably coherent map. Now the courses look like a blurred, jumbled conglomerate of stats, number theory, algebra, and geometry. The Reformers need to learn the axiom “if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it”.
What grade is your daughter in, MathVale? Can you share what the summer work involves?
Do you think math education is not broken?
Do delays in testing cost the test-makers? I’m trying to follow the money here.
These are the Pearson rankings of national education systems.
The US is now # 14 and we apparently moved up from #17 in just two short years, from 2012 and 2014.
They knocked Finland down 4 pegs over those same two years, so I don’t know what’s going on there – probably not buying enough Pearson product 🙂
http://ow.ly/i/5uYfx
That’s because they added several wealthy Asian city states who get high scores by cheating, bumping everybody down.
It is typical of them to keep changing the goalposts in order to arrive a the result they want.
Is there a single state superintendent who supports the teachers by not favoring evaluations by test scores?
Reformers share a fatal disease called groupthink and believe they can extinguish other views. Taxpayers will not allow children to be “cored” by the testing corporations that exist for the purpose of monetizing students and teachers.
I don’t know, you-all certainly know more about these things than I do, but my sense is once the tests went in Common Core was a done deal. They have two giant testing consortiums and probably hundreds of millions in sunk costs on testing alone. Unless they pitch the tests Common Core testing inevitably drives everything, right?
PARCC is already moving onto very specific instructions for assessing kindergartners. Click on the link and follow it and you’ll come to kindergarten assessment “drafts” that involve gluing pictures into boxes in response to questions from the teacher on a text she just read to them.
https://www.parcconline.org/seeking-educator-feedback-model-content-frameworks
Chiara Duggan: IMHO, if I read you correctly, yes, the CCSS is inextricably tied up with high-stakes standardized tests.
No less a self-styled “education reform” insider than Dr. Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute backs you up in a piece he wrote on his blog in December 2013:
[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]
Access at: http://deutsch29.wordpress.com/2013/12/28/the-american-enterprise-institute-common-core-and-good-cop/
Thank you for your comments.
😎
But even if we don’t go to comparing schools or firing teachers or the rest of Mr. Finn’s personal goals and dreams on how we “must” use the tests, if the tests are in place then the Common Core standards are in place, right?
Common Core tests = Common Core standards, inevitably?
http://educationblog.dallasnews.com/2014/05/questions-on-two-staar-exams-were-accidentially-emailed-out-last-month.html/
Pearson accidentally mailed out the STAAR exams to 98 teachers who were currently teaching, before the test.
Nice move Pearson.
It’s up to all of us to make certain public PK-12 is not for sale. The proprietary culture of the national Common Core is at odds with local control of public education.
The corporate takeover of universities is relevant to how Pearson, Duncan, Gates, Murdoch, King, Rhee, Kopp, Broad, charter operators, and others are working together to takeover public schools.
Patents, exclusive licenses, royalties, grants, contracts and financial conflicts in research are in the mix for the purpose of squeezing profits out of children and teachers.
Jennifer Washburn’s book, University Inc. The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education is a must read. Readers will learn about the Bayh-Dole Act and how the most important for-profit cheerleaders are tech-transfer managers with ties to universities and tout academic commercialism.
I think that the ultimate threat to local control of school districts is non-local funding. If the state government pays a large portion of the bill, state legislators will think it part of their job to see that the money is well spent. The same is true at the federal level. Giving up the funding, however, creates another set of problems.
What is above the federal level, pray? The United Nations?
Harold,
I am not sure what your response means.
Many States, like Arizona, have spent the last decade developing State Standards. Arizona got a jumpstart on NCLB. Lisa Grahmn Keegan, our State Supt. at the time, could barely pass the math test, even with tutoring. Over the past decade they have refined the test, and yes, made it easier. But isn’t a high school exit exam supposed to be about what the majority of students can do? And during the 2000’s, my district organized school and district-level committees to align curriculum with those standards. The tests improved, teaching was refined, and more kids were passing. But now we have to strangle our students with rigor.
I know a story about a small school on the Arizona border. The majority of students are poor, ELL Hispanics. Their English teachers have worked with the U of A on a writing project. This year, the Sophomores (the first year the test is given) actually met the writing standard. But many of them flunked the multiple-choice, grammar questions. Some bubbled patterns. I heard about this on the day the school got the scores, so I never learned what exactly happened. I just know those teachers read them the riot act. They had worked hard on writing and the students had learned how to do that.
The multiple choice? …They didn’t care? They were confused? They didn’t think it would really count?
And another anecdote about our State test. At first, the State promised 4-yr, scholarships to students who scored at the top level for two of the three tests. When the recession came in 2008/09, they began backpedaling on that promise. My son got that scholarship, but he didn’t score at the top on the writing. We offered him incentives to take the test again and improve his score. His reply to me: “Mom, those prompts are so boring it’s hard to write anything good.
So, after a decade of hard work, why do we have to change? Small towns like the one I described can’t afford the basics, but will have to fund these computerized tests.
I think your question about what a high school exit exam is supposed to do is an interesting one. It seems to me that the exam should not be built around what most students can do, but rather it functions as a signal to stakeholders in the public education system about what graduating from high school means in terms of the capabilities of the students.
TE, Yesterday I took my car in to be fixed. I got into a conversation with the young man who drove me home. He told me how he had gone to the high school in my district because it had a four year automotive program. By the way, he lived in another district and went to that school through open enrollment. You don’t have to have charters to have choice. He told me that all the math classes he took were about “automotive” math. I told him that with all the changes, he probably couldn’t do that now. Not every student needs to be prepared for college. Here in AZ, they call them the”College & Career Ready Standards”, not the Common Core. As I said in my earlier post, the tests & corresponding teaching had been refined & improved over the last decade. And it was a “teacher-involved” process, not just a top-down mandate.
Indeed you don’t have to have charters to have choice, a school board might create magnet schools and might allow students to cross district lines.
Many here, however, argue that the practices of all choice schools like requiring applications for admission (even if admission itself is random), destroying neighborhood cohesion by having neighboring students go to different schools, and having student populations that differ from local demographics are reasons to condemn schools. If school boards agree with the positions taken here, they are unlikely to offer choices to the students in and out of the districts.
Presumably, CCSS supporters “Buying the support of education interest groups in DC” includes a certain AFT leader who shall go nameless…
I appreciate the efforts of Carol Burris in trying to halt the spread of corporate-style education “reform.” However, citing Peggy Noonan as one of the Common Core critics just doesn’t carry much water. Peggy Noonan? This is the same woman who recently wrote that Benghazi was worse than the Iran-Contra scandal, which subverted the Constitution.
As I’ve noted previously, ACT, Inc. and the College Board – big testing organizations –were instrumental players in the development of the Common Core. Both say their products are “aligned” with it.
While some colleges have dropped any admissions requirement for the ACT or SAT, the number of those tests given each year to high school students is increasing, not decreasing. So, there has been no wholesale abandonment of the ACT and the SAT. Moreover, it’s not only corporate “reformers” (for example, Exxon Mobil) who push hard for more AP courses and test-taking, it’s also parents and teachers, and school counselors and administrators, and school boards. Adding STEM (the idea of a “shortage” is a myth) to the mix only compounds the problem.
The VAM lawsuit in Houston offers another example. One of the teachers involved is an AP History teacher at a “gifted” magnet school. He’s been lauded as a “merit award winner.” That is, until his VAM score dropped him. Now he’s suing. So, why’d he take the bonus money if the first place? And why is he only questioning VAM which is, but the way, seriously worth questioning and fighting)? Why is he not also questioning the value of a small “gifted” magnet school that severely restricts its admissions which are based an awful lot on test scores? And why isn’t he questioning the value of the AP program, which research finds to be marginally helpful to students?
The Common Core has a lot of critics. Rightfully so. But it’s hard to condemn an engine of “change” when you keep using the engine’s essential parts.
I’ve asked this before, but it bears repeating:
Can someone explain how the Common Core/corporate “reform” will die a slow (or even a fast) death when its essential elements are woven into the fabric of public schooling?
What are the “essential elements” of the Common Core, how are they “woven into the fabric of public schooling,” and why will that prevent the slow death of the Common Core? You mentioned that the ACT and the College Board were involved in developing the Common Core, but that’s about all you said about the Common Core here.
FLERP, over the history of American education, no innovation has survived that was imposed on teachers without their ongoing involvement, nor has any innovation survive, no mater how many powerful supporters, once it became highly controversial.
That’s encouraging to read, Diane. Very frustrating that NCLB is still around, though. States would be more free to follow Washington state’s lead if it weren’t.
FLERP,
Are you playing a semantics game?
Both the ACT and the College Board were intimately involved in the writing of the Common Core standards. That’s been documented on this blog by Diane and others.
Both the ACT and the college Board have “aligned their products with the Common Core.
ACT prominently touts this: “ACT’s Course Standards and College Readiness Standards™ successfully align with the Common Core State Standards.”
The ACT also says that “the ACT Course Standards are empirically derived course standards that form the basis of ACT’s high school instructional improvement program.”
There’s an entire “alignment” package:
Click to access CommonCoreAlignment.pdf
The College Board says that it “has been a strong advocate for and played an active role in the development of the Common Core State Standards. As part of this collaboration, the College
Board helped draft the standards…”
The College Board has developed what it calls “the College Board Standards for College Success™,” which are “benchmarked
against the Advanced Placement Program.”
Moreover, the College Board says that its “Readiness Pathway,” which includes “the PSAT/NMSQT and the SAT — college readiness assessments taken by millions of students annually,” is also “aligned” with the Common Core.
And it adds this: “As new assessments emerge and existing assessments are enhanced, the College Board will conduct additional studies to understand the alignment of
other forms of assessments that may be administered in support of the Common Core State Standards, including end-of-course and end-of-domain assessments.”
Click to access Common-Core-State-Standards-Alignment.pdf
The Common Core is like climate change: it’s already here, it’s dangerous, and it’s not going away any time soon.
And by the way, teachers and other educators, and parents and school board members – and others – are now and have been very much a part of this problem.
So I repeat:
Can someone explain how the Common Core/corporate “reform” will die a slow (or even a fast) death when its essential elements are woven into the fabric of public schooling?
FLERP,
My comment was held up for moderation, so I’ll break it up.
Both the ACT and the College Board were intimately involved in the writing of the Common Core standards. That’s been documented on this blog by Diane and others.
Both the ACT and the college Board have “aligned their products with the Common Core.
ACT prominently touts this: “ACT’s Course Standards and College Readiness Standards™ successfully align with the Common Core State Standards.”
The ACT also says that “the ACT Course Standards are empirically derived course standards that form the basis of ACT’s high school instructional improvement program.”
There’s an entire “alignment” package:
Click to access CommonCoreAlignment.pdf
The College Board says that it “has been a strong advocate for and played an active role in the development of the Common Core State Standards. As part of this collaboration, the College Board helped draft the standards…”
The College Board has developed what it calls “the College Board Standards for College Success™,” which are “benchmarked against the Advanced Placement Program.”
Moreover, the College Board says that its “Readiness Pathway,” which includes “the PSAT/NMSQT and the SAT — college readiness assessments taken by millions of students annually,” is also “aligned” with the Common Core.
And it adds this: “As new assessments emerge and existing assessments are enhanced, the College Board will conduct additional studies to understand the alignment of other forms of assessments that may be administered in support of the Common Core State Standards, including end-of-course and end-of-domain assessments.”
Click to access Common-Core-State-Standards-Alignment.pdf
The Common Core is like climate change: it’s already here, it’s dangerous, and it’s not going away any time soon.
And by the way, teachers and other educators, and parents and school board members – and others – are now and have been very much a part of this problem.
So I repeat:
Can someone explain how the Common Core/corporate “reform” will die a slow (or even a fast) death when its essential elements are woven into the fabric of public schooling?
Thanks. I take it that your argument is that these groups have substantial stakes in the survival of the Common Core, and that therefore they will fight to ensure it doesn’t die, and that they are likely to succeed because they are very powerful and are allied (in ways I don’t understand) with teachers, administrators, parents, and elected officials.
I certainly can’t answer your question. Interesting stuff, though.
FLERP,
I’ve said this before….you (not you specifically) cannot be against Common Core and simultaneously in favor of the ACT, PSAT, SAT, and AP and STEM. They are it and it is they.
I am no Common Core supporter, nor did I support NCLB. At any time. It (NCLB) was a bad idea from the very beginning. Common Core is no different now.
But Common Core is well-ingrained in public school policies and practices.
I wish it were not so. And I wish that teacher “leaders” (Randi Weingarten and Dennis Van Roekel, for example) has actually stood up for teachers and public education long ago. But they didn’t and they haven’t.
I wish that students and parents and teachers and school board members and politicians – and the mainstream press – would investigate the very serious limitations and the nefarious consequences of the reliance on the ACT and SAT.
As Matthew Quirk wrote nearly a decade ago, “The ACT and the College Board don’t just sell hundreds of thousands of student profiles to schools; they also offer software and consulting services that can be used to set crude wealth and test-score cutoffs, to target or eliminate students before they apply…That students are rejected on the basis of income is one of the most closely held secrets in admissions; enrollment managers say the practice is far more prevalent than most schools let on.”
See: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2005/11/the-best-class-money-can-buy/4307/
It seems to me that there is a large fruit basket of things in your list (CCSS, ACT, SAT, PSAT, AP, STEM (what is STEM?), presumably SAT II exams as well). It seems to me that these all serve different purposes.
http://www.politico.com/story/2014/05/student-data-privacy-market-106692.html
@ TE:
It’s not MY basket.
It’s the Common Core basket.
And I didn’t make it…..
There is nothing necessarily “common” about AP classes and exams except that they reflect the material commonly taught in introductory college classes.
STEM = Science, Technology, Engineering, Math
The claim is that there’s a “shortage” of STEM grads and workers, and thus STEM is in “crisis.”
Not true. Not even close.
So STEM (a collection of disciplines) and ACT (a stand alone test) and the K-12 curriculum are all in the same basket?
One should be highly critical of any top down “common” curriculum. The very nature of learning and of educating as well as the uniqueness of individual students and teachers run contrary to a single federalized curriculum.
There is no one magic pedagogy nor can any single curruculum provide students with all the “knowledge” they need to succeed.
Education should provide students with the tools they need to lifelong learners and critical thinkers.
Federal bureaucrats should in no way dictate pedagogy or curriculum. The federal governments view of citizens prepares them to be worker bees,discourages critical thinking, has a huge propensity for despotism and is decidedly, un-American.
From the students point of view, isn’t a district or even building level curriculum “top down” in a traditional school system?
If the Common Core is in fact doomed, what doomed it wasn’t the failure to win the support of the American public. It was the decision to tie teacher evaluations to test scores. Resistance and activism by teachers has led the public’s reaction against the Common Core at every step.
FLERP, Race to the Top was a brilliant business plan to promote education ideas that don’t work, never worked, and are disproven time and again.
I was part of the group that helped create the NYS curriculum which was immediately replaced by the Common Core. I specifically worked on an integrated 6th grade reading/social studies curriculum. How did we do it? A bunch of teachers (gasp!) sat down together, got into teams focussing on a specific period in history, and developed lessons. We checked each others’ work and asked for feedback.
While some groups were a little contentious, on the whole it was a positive intellectual exercise. My group which worked on the medieval period created differentiated sections within the lessons to address the needs of different levels of learners. The lessons were interesting, engaging and appropriate.
I’ve looked at the EngageNY curriculum and find it very wanting. There’s no passion in the lessons. They’re confusing to understand and feel like something created by an educational publisher, not a teacher.
Diane,
I am hoping you will see my comment here. Today I received the April 2014 edition of AASA School Administrator. The issue is entitled, Common Core C’s of Change: Countering falsehoods and staying the course. Here is the link to the digital version while it is still accessible
http://aasa.org/content.aspx?id=33106
Jim Dunn, a public relations consultant from the National School Public Relations Association was brought in by AASA to develop the issue. I am dismayed to see that here we have another script of soundbites without any serious consideration of whether or not there is a degree of validity to some of the concerns around the issue. Whatever happened to administrators or educators in studying a controversy to arrive at one’s own well-informed view? Everyone just seems to be in frenetic rush to memorize the elevator speech rather than to get to know the crux of the issue.
Get ready to hear this script coming from district leaders as the new talking points this month. People I work with are clamoring to wrest copies of this edition from hands of colleagues, so they can share it far and wide as their new sacred text. I cannot believe educators are so willing to let someone else do their thinking for them. Meanwhile, I recommend your blog or share my copy of Reign of Error with my fellow district administrators and everyone is too busy to read those sources. Have we really become that lazy intellectually? Are we truly just lining up like lambs to the slaughter? Where is our ethics? What happened to the educated mind?
Jeannie
Jeannie, the American Association of School Superintendents has endorsed Common Core.
So has the he National School Boards Association, the National Association of Elementary School Principals, and the National Association of Secondary School Principles. And ASCD.
And the American Federation of Teachers, and the National Education Association.
And the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Business Roundtable.
And as I noted in my comments (above), ACT, Inc. and the College Board are all-in on Common Core.
It is NOT going away, or dying a slow death.
What happened to our ethics? Good question.
And what happened to our collective ability to think critically and reflectively?
Hmmmm…..where is our ethics? Definitely a typo in the heat of my passsion. I promise I am literate. 🙂
Arne Duncan’s “Principal Ambassadors”: Federally Monitored “Local Control”??
http://tellmenow.com/2014/05/common-core-federal-agents-to-be-placed-in-schools/
Today I opened my papaer and read this little ditty by Jay Ambrose, http://www.newsday.com/opinion/oped/abandon-the-common-core-immediately-jay-ambrose-1.8018455
The left, the right, and the middle say abandon the common core.
“It is a mathematically weak, humanities-jabbing, ideologically inebriated, innovation-squashing, sparsely tested and therefore unproven scheme to dramatically change the educational lives of tens of millions of American children in grades K-12. You might want to study it some.”
Usually I think Robert Shepard says it best, but Jay’s giving him a run for his money.
Here’s an excerpt from the article to which you link:
“Diane Ravitch, one of the country’s most highly respected education experts, notes there was ‘minimal public engagement’ as the work on a single standard was mostly done by a non-profit group called Achieve Inc., along with the National Governors Association.”
And as I note in comments (above) ACT, Inc. and the College Board were intimately involved in writing the standards and they’ve “aligned” all their products with it. Those products do not seem to be going away.
Ambrose also says that ” liberal teachers unions aren’t overly happy with Common Core.”
Yeah…but they endorsed it.
For the teachers unions it was a Trojan horse. It looked good at first.
And now? Now that the Trojan Horse has revealed itself? They have not changed their stance have they. What’s their excuse now?
Actually, Diane/Carol, I have seen claims that the opposition is all from the right, just that it is led from the right, which is true – Eg., all anti-Common Core legislation comes from the right.
there is no left in the United States with any power. there’s the right and the extreme right
Loved the Hirsch, btw…use it all the time…
Great stuff! Thanks, Bill.
No one really explains CC. After reading this I understand now what it is trying to do.
http://azdailysun.com/news/national/what-parents-rail-against-common-core-math/article_1436a50e-dafe-5316-ae50-3049380dda36.html
But the big lobbies paid for it. Why isn’t it working? Duh. Thank you so much, Diane, for your voice of reason and truth telling. Thanks for standing up to the billionaire club.