Who supports the Common Core standards? who opposes them? Are the critics right or left?
A new group in Néw York has been created to spend $500,000 to promote Common Core. This article says the group consists of business organizations but its prominent supporters are the Gates Foundation, the Helmsley Foundation, Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst, and the Gates-funded Educators for Excellence.
Allegedly, business wants “higher standards” because the CCSS will close the skills gap and produce more qualified workers. Is there any evidence for this belief? No. On the first round of Common Core testing, 70% of students in New York failed. The failure rate for minorities, English learners, and students with disabilities was even higher. Among students with disabilities, for example, 95% failed the Common Core tests.
Where is the evidence that Common Core will make all students college-ready? There is none.
Would business groups be equally willing to invest in a campaign for equitable school funding, reduced class sizes, universal pre-school, pre-natal care, after-school programs, school nurses, and a raise in the minimum wage? All of these have a solid research base. They are proven strategies for reform.
Do the business leaders think that CCSS makes those investments unnecessary?
It is certainly appealing to fiscal conservatives to believe that higher standards can somehow magically solve the problems of huge economic and social inequality. CCSS, they imagine, can compensate for the fact that nearly one-quarter of our children live in poverty. Someday, maybe 12 years from now, they think, all children will be college-ready, even if they live in squalor or have no home, even if they attend overcrowded classes with inexperienced teachers. Are they gullible? Or do they believe the public can be easily deceived? Remember when the same groups believed that tougher standards, tests, and accountability would raise up all children and “no child” would be “left behind”? We spent billions on tests and consultants, on closing schools and opening schools, and that didn’t work out.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The thing I hear most from kindergarten teachers and assistants is that the numbers of children coming into public school having had no preschool are rising AND that these children seem to have had a deficit of interaction with people.
We have to start there.
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Years ago, I rented an office in a lovely little house, which had been converted for office use, on a marsh in Massachusetts. One day, I heard a loud thumping sound: WHOMP!!! [pause] WHOMP!!! [pause] WHOMP!!!
I went out to the lobby (which had once been a living room) to investigate. There was an enormous seagull on the porch. He was eying his own reflection in the plate glass window, rearing back, striking the reflection with his beak, stumbling back from the severe blow, and then DOING THIS ALL OVER AGAIN.
I chased him off to keep him from killing himself, and the next day I taped up a picture of an Osprey on that window.
Well, in visiting SON OF NCLB on the country, the Ed Deformers have acted just like that seagull.
Gee, this thing was an UTTER FAILURE. It demoralized. It narrowed curricula and pedagogy. And we should have known that it would because all the science tells us that extrinsic punishments and reward are demotivating for cognitive tasks AND that the standards lists, the tests, and the evaluations are completely invalid.
An utter failure.
So, let’s do a lot more of that.
Time to put up whatever scares away Deformers on the schoolhouse door.
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cx: eyeing
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what could that be?
A picture of their own humanity? Or a picture of the fallout in the wake of their actions?
What? What would the 3 ghosts from Scrooge show them in a dream?
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I have often had this scrooge fantasy with regard to Mr. Gates.
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Negative ROI terrifies them
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cx: Time to put up on the schoolhouse door whatever it is that scares away Deformers.
Hate those misplaced modifying phrases!
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As long as we are into macho birds, let me tell you about the robin in our neighborhood who went around leaving bird droppings on all the neighborhood car side mirrors. We took to covering them with opaque plastic bags for a few weeks until he was satisfied that no one was going to invade his territory. I guess that’s where the expression bird brain came from. Need I say the obvious?
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lol
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The Biz-Brains are not gullible. (They just think we are.)
They know exactly what they hope to get from their investment.
(Hint. Mo’ Money.)
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indeed
The CCSS were a necessary first step in a particular business plan. It’s amazing that so many educrats, politicians, and even presidents of unions didn’t understand that.
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The charitable interpretation would be that academics, educators, and the intelligentsia in general were so accustomed to previous cycles of reflection and renewal on “canon”, culture, and curriculum that they just automatically assumed we were passing through another period like that, and the routine has always been so habitual and healthy before that too many of them have yet to clue in to just how differently driven this current push is.
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Well thought and said, Jon. But this differs. The “accountability” movement reminds me a lot of another top-down initiative in US education–Behaviorism and Behavioral Objectives in the 1970s. That one was driven, of course, by ideologues in education departments and by their counterparts in state departments of education. This one differs from those deform movements of the past in having nothing whatsoever, really, to do with educational theory and praxis and everything to do with creating a single national market for monopolists’ products. That’s altogether new, and so you may be onto something there.
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Well, that’s what u get when u automatically assume …
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Pater, ignosce illis, non enim sciunt quod faciunt
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Oh yes, they do.
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🙂
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Is money going to the media? We learned well after the fact that widely read journalists were being paid (quite a bit) to push NCLB. Is the same going on now to a greater degree? I read many editorial board parroting (as they have from the beginning) the Duncan/Obama talking points (that we no longer hear from them).
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I do not want CCSS
or Pearson’s tests that caused this mess!!!
We Should Have Listened to the Lorax:
* Please share and send this poem to the Gates Foundation, the Helmsley Foundation, Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst, and the Gates-funded Educators for Excellence. It is in
language that they might understand.
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Bob, the poem is my Osprey 🙂
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🙂
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I hadn’t read your beautiful and powerful poem before I wrote a reply. I too saw a connection with Dr. Seuss but with The Grinch, and Mack the turtle. I am going to buy then when I get home : )
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Christine,
I connected with the Lorax because everyone ignored his warnings. Educators, child development specialists, and mental health professionals have been warning about the damaging impact of this punitive CCSS environment in elementary schools, but it is being ignored by those in power who could change it.
It was GREED that caused others NOT to listen to the Lorax! It appears to be GREED that causes the “reformers” and politicians NOT to listen to this message now!
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I still maintain, from personal observations, that the private entities did not want to be taxed for higher and higher teacher wages. It seems as teachers get older and technology changes every day, some felt that the “old ideas” were no longer valid. As we age, many of us slow down a bit, or we have health issues. We become burdensome. So, rather than allow experienced teachers to get higher salaries, the business community found a way to shove many of us out.
I felt that in the 1990s, when teachers began to negotiate decent, competitive, wages in Ohio, that there would be a backlash. When the economy fell kersplat in 2008, there was no turning back. Our wages froze at the level they were for all the years to follow. We got larger class sizes, more and more inadequate professional development, a principal who did not evaluate us on the correct implementation of our programs, because she didn’t understand them herself.
I think the private sector seized the opportunity to move in and gather support from those who were suffering financially and under the guise of “lower taxes” they continued to devalue the teaching profession and to start replacing experienced teachers with young people who were more computer dependent and savvy, since that is what they mean by 21st century skills. Skills collecting data. Skills using technology. But lacking skills in understanding human nature and giving love and warmth that are needed for growth as human beings.
As I said in one of my first responses to this blog, it makes perfect sense that someone like Bill Gates would see no problem with this philosophy. He seems to be without real human “connection”. I can’t diagnose him, but I feel certain that he has little understanding of typical human behavior. He is like Sheldon on ” The Big bang Theory”. How does that work for most people? Not too well.
But he can make money. And that rules the day. Whether it is good for kids is not taken into consideration. Not public school kids, anyway.
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Here is a link to the estimated average annual salary of public school teachers from 1969 until 2012-13. Keep in mind that this does not count the value of benefits.
The link: http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_211.60.asp
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It would be interesting to see the same numbers by median, or even more granular.
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Nor take home pay. Teachers in our state have more deducted out of paychecks than private sector. Also, Stats 101, mean is more affected by outliers and skew than median. Mean alone cannot tell a complete story and needs context.
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Here are the medians, from the Occupational Outlook Handbook of the US Dept of Labor Statistics. Figures are for 2012:
High-school: $55,050
Middle school: $53,400
Kindergarten and elementary: $53,090
For comparison:
Dental Hygienist: $70,210
Auto Damage Appraiser: $59,850
Cost Estimator: $58,860
Boilermaker: $56,560
Librarians: $55,370
Dietician: $55,240
Building inspector: $53,450
Mail Carrier: $53,100
Mortician: $51,600
Electrical equipment installers: $51,220
Plumber: $49,140
Millwright/Industrial Machinery Mechanic: $45,840
Brickmasons: $44,950
Sheet metal worker: $43,290
Chef/head cook: $42,480
Diesel mechanic: $42,320
Person trainer: $41,600
Construction equipment operator: $40,980
Machinist: $40,910
Correctional officer: $38,970
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more medians for comparison:
Postsecondary Education Administrator: $86,490
Human Resources Manager: $99,720
Sales Manager: $105,260
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So, teachers make slightly more than typical blue-collar workers do.
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I will continue to dispute the accuracy of the AZ numbers. A teacher in TUSD, the second largest district in the state makes $49,000 after 32 years.
http://www.tusd.k12.az.us/contents/employment/Documents/13-14Consensus.pdf p.61.
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Patricia: yes, one wonders about the federal numbers. these are based on state reports, and one wonders how well those state reports were vetted. When I have turned from the federal figures to independent salary surveys, the averages and the medians both turn out to be CONSIDERABLY lower than are the federal numbers, and it would be interesting to find out why this is so.
Of course, turn to any conservative publication on this, and you will hear these wild figures: teachers earn, on average, over $100K a year. And they have to do some astonishing numerical prestidigitation to come up with such figures–typically by annualizing salaries and adding benefits (including retirement) to pay during the work years and/or doing this for outlier regions and reporting the results as generally the case.
Of course, it’s the numbers guys who are best at faking these figures, and a lot of deformers are numbers guys, so it pays for those in the CounterRheeformation to become numbers guys, too.
but, in general, data-driven decision making is a name for a kind of numerological pseudoscience.
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Are there any equivalently powerful/wealthy foundations and/or groups out there that are putting their money behind those things that are research based? This isn’t even hard money invested directly in the problems – equitable school funding, reduced class sizes, teacher salaries, universal pre-school, pre-natal care, after-school programs, school nurses, and raising the minimum wage. I have trouble wrapping my head around the fact that not a single dollar of this money (and billions more) will be used to even scratch the surface of the real problems. It is just going to disappear in the form of a whole lot of hot air. Think how far all of that money would go if it were applied directly to the problem vs. an unproven product campaign.
If this analogy is stupid I apologize ahead of time but It makes me think of a patient with cancer. When a doctor discovers a patient has cancer he doesn’t just dismiss the reality, apply a topical cream and a bandage, send the patient home and just believe that if it is ignored then this ugly disease will just miraculously disappear. He has to get real, get in there and dig even deeper than the surface of the cancer cells.. Its an ugly, painful process but it is the only way. The surgeon has to remove the disease from the equation to change the inevitable outcome. He has to address the real core of the problem or it will only fester and get worse it will never, ever just go away. Education has cancer and we have a whole lot of surgeons in denial and unwilling to accept the truth and dig deeper to reach the core and solve the problems and do what research has shown for decades is the only way to change the reality..
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The dollars that are being spent are to advance a business plan.
The CCSS was needed by a large educational materials monopolist and by one who wishes to become a large educational materials monopolist in order
to have a single list to tag assessments and computer-adaptive educational software to
so that those could be marketed “at scale,” with the economies of scale that come from being able to sell a single product nationally.
In other words, the spending was NOT done for philanthropic purposes.
There’s a reason why Gates and Pearson paid to create the Common Core. And there is a reason why they are supporting all the Common Core PR shill groups. And there is a reason why they are supporting PR campaigns like this one.
They both believe, rightly, that we are in the middle of a great transition from print to digital delivery of educational materials.
If they play that transition right, they will make many BILLIONS of dollars.
They need a single national market at which smaller players cannot compete.
It’s that simple.
Even a politician or edupundit could understand this, slow learners though they may be.
I’m a teacher. I have to believe that.
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One CCSS-dependent contract, the PARCC (spell that backward) contract that Pearson just won and was the sole bidder for, is worth over a billion dollars in revenue to Pearson in the first three years, and the taxpayer has footed all of the development costs!!!!
And that’s just the beginning of a great river of money that the CCSS will flow, because of CCSS, from taxpayer pockets to the educational materials monopolists.
Money that could have been spent on wrap-around services for poor kids, so they could have eye exams and warm clothes in the winter and notebooks and a safe place to go to play and learn in the evening.
We can have more bubble tests, or we can have those other things. We can’t have both.
Opportunity costs.
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But we in the CounterRheeformation can’t afford the bucks that it takes to set up a telephone tree all across the state, to buy television ads, and so on. The Deformers can do this marketing for their business plan AND CALL IT PHILANTHROPY!!!!!!!!
And no one is going to call them on this or revoke their 501(c)(3) status because they OWN the politicians and the bureaucrats.
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Cuomo and the like are proving they don’t care about children, families or this nation. They can give their children things other families can’t. Killing public schools isn’t going to provide students and families with those opportunities but it will end a decent middle class career that many students aspire to become as an adult. Teachers will be at the mercy of the powerful not those who care to make education available and equitable. This smoke and mirrors about improving education is really about ending public education by breaking unions. LIKE the Nazi propaganda machine….just keeping repeating your lie that “We are trying to reform education” like it means improve the quality experience all students should receive even if it is a “BOLD FACE LIE!”
Remember Cindy Loo Who…from The Grinch Who Stole Christmas…”Why Governor Cuomo Why are you dismantling our public schools?”
Grinch(Cuomo)…”I’m going to fix it in my shop and bring it back”
The Grinch grew a heart…Cuomo thinks having a “PAIR” (AKA being a bully with power and pleasing his powerful friends who will get him elected to the White House) is more important than living up to, “establishing justice, ensuring domestic tranquility, providing for the common defense and promoting the general welfare and securing the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.”
Read some Dr. Seuss and the lessons of the powerful and social justice are all there in color.
Cuomo’s actions towards education and social justice read like a nightmare but Cuomo is trying to look like a story where we will in the end live in a better world.
He has been skillful in placing a noose around our necks to attempt to prevent anyone from stepping out of line. All of our actions as parents and teacher appear to be less admirable than his, but we have to remember his “PARTY LINE” is based on a lie. We are thinking we are talking to someone who wants to enter into an intelligent dialogue. Cuomo doesn’t want that at all. He wants to prevent that at all costs.
CUOMO DOESN’T WANT TO IMPROVE PUBLIC EDUCATION HE WANTS TO KILL IT AND REPLACE IT WITH A SYSTEM THAT HIS FRIENDS WILL GET EVEN RICHER AND SEND CUOMO TO THE WHITE HOUSE!
Cuomo sounds like Old Man Potter from It’s A Wonderful Life. Made by a great Italian-American director Frank Capra. Where are those roots your father bragged about when he was running for office? We could use a leader who remembers how to help others up not step on others in order to reach higher office.
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GROSS’
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All of us realize that jobs that in most recent history have been held by women are seen as less in the eyes of most. Intelligent women that weren’t heads of households held these jobs for decades with some exceptions but this is an unrecognized element in this push to dismantle public education as it now exists. Women are treated as second class citizens regardless if you want to acknowledge it or not. Someone refusing to acknowledge it doesn’t make it less true.
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I so agree. Many women are supporting their families by being teachers. To have these threats hanging over their heads concerning their ability to do their job just adds unneeded stress to a job that is already demanding. How about the firemen, police, prison guards? Why us?
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In AZ those people are under attack too. Pension reform threatens them. Coming to work everyday instead of using sick days is now bad, because the Goldwater Institute doesn’t like what they call “pension spiking” and we call benefits.
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“Someone finally polled the 1% — And it’s not pretty”
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/05/29/1302820/-Someone-finally-polled-the-1-And-it-s-not-pretty
“The federal government should spend whatever is necessary to ensure that all children have really good public schools they can go to
% Elites in Favor 35%
% Public in Favor 87%”
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This single stat says a lot, doesn’t it.
Wow.
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I urge readers to have a look at the other numbers on this poll.
This sort of poll is really frightening. It shows the breathtaking gulf between what the people think and what their leaders, in the new feudal class think. The result of this sort of division will result either in revolt or in very draconian command and control. Neither pretty.
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Eh, maybe. I likely would have polled in the “against” group to the question above. I see that question, and immediately I focus on the words “whatever is necessary” and “really good” and conclude that this is a question that does not deserve an “in favor” vote. Perhaps that says a lot about me, but it is what it is.
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you are right about that, FLERP. Not particularly well written, this.
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Although, if given the option, I would choose “I have no idea what this question is actually asking” over “against.”
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LOL. Well said!
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Ha, wonder of wonders. A lawyer might agree with the answer given by the 1%. How rich is that?
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That poll was ill formed.
For every question that had “The federal government should…”, there should have been an identical questions framed “The state governments should…”, or even “The federal, state, or local governments should…”.
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Quoted from the article, and I add, is this a frigging joke?
“You can’t be silent in the face of deception,” King said, referring to anti-Common Core rhetoric. “You can’t stand on the sidelines while some call for a retreat to lower standards.”
THEY are the deceivers. THEY are lowering the standards (so there are future WORKERS for the businesses THEY want to rally around this cause).
Quote:
He said businesses should play a primary role in boosting the Common Core.
“The more that we can link businesses in communities to school districts that are implementing the Common Core, and they can go into the classroom and see what’s happening and talk to the teacher and the kids, that’s going to be important,” he said. “They are and need to be participating in this.”
Yikes. THEY want nothing for other peoples’ kids except to be obedient, grateful, non-union worker bees.
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By referring to the Common [sic] Core [sic] as a set of “higher standards,” King reveals himself to be entirely clueless.
I can see how one might conceivably argue that in a few states, the CCSS for math are slightly, very slightly, more challenging than were the preceding state standards, but these are all pretty much the same, having been based on the NCTM standards that preceded them.
But the CCSS in ELA are a puerile, unimaginative, backward, amateurish joke. Really backward notions about the learning of grammar and vocabulary and writing wedded to what I call New Criticism Lite or New Criticism for Dummies.
It’s embarrassing to have people this clueless in powerful educational policy-making positions.
It’s a major embarrassment for the state of New York.
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An example is third graders discussing and comparing the structure of two paragraphs for the ELA test. I’m pretty sure I did that in college, not grade school. In math, since the standards were determined at the college level and then worked backwards, they are really developmentally inappropriate for 3rd graders. CC third graders are supposed to be fluent in adding and subtracting fractions with unlike denominators. Sorry. They’re brains are just not there yet. (I think I learned that in 5th or 6th grade.)
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Education has more than its fair share of charlatans. One way to spot these people is that they are just fine with applying gross generalities to children. They did this with NCLB when they decided that EVERY child was going to reach proficiency by the 2014-15 school year. (That would be by this coming August, btw.) They did this with CSS, aka Son of NCLB, when they did this working backward business to EVERYTHING and decided that text appropriateness at each grade level should be decided based on working back from the average Lexile of a college-level text.)
A seven year old is NOT just a younger version of an adult. In some ways, a seven-year-old brain is like an adult brain. In many ways it is not. In some ways, a seven year old is actually more capable than an adult is. For example, a seven-year-old brain is quicker, much quicker, at forming an internal, unconscious model of the grammar of a new language than is a thirty-five-year-old brain. Babies can be shown to be doing types of complex inductive and abductive reasoning. But there are whole regions of the brain that govern some kinds of abstract thinking that do not for most people even begin to develop until kids are around 16 years old and are not in most people fully in place until people are in their mid twenties. Further, individual brains differ. The innate language acquisition device that automatically intuits the syntax and morphology of a language breaks down at around the age of 14, making attaining fluency in a new language a far more difficult task for an adult than for a child, but there are some people to whom this doesn’t happen—who retain the child’s ease, there, and those are generally ones who have the facility exercised in the tween years.
When amateurs write standards, they understand none of this. And standards are, well, standard, but kids are not. They vary enormously. Low-SES and high-SES kids come into school with a 30-million-word gap in the amount of language they have heard and with a corresponding gap in vocabulary and in the complexity of their internalized models for syntax, morphology, semantic structures. These differences require very different pedagogy and curricula in the early grades, not a one-size-fits-all approach. The brain is extraordinarily plastic, and as people grow, they develop functional mechanisms for doing some things better than their mechanisms for doing other things and they develop particular interests and proclivities, and a complex, diverse, pluralistic society needs those differences recognized, celebrated, and built upon. It does not need to have children identically milled as though they so many rivets coming off a rivet-production assembly line, all needing to meet the specifications of ISO 1051:1999 or CCSS. Literacy.ELA.11-12.4a.
Lack of understanding of this kind of stuff by education policy makers, including ones who write standards, leads to these one-size-fits-all approaches and to developmentally inappropriate standards at the early grades. For example, one can do pattern recognition activities with very young children that help them to develop the functional neural mechanisms applicable to forming a concept of a variable or a function, but attempting to get them to understand, articulate, and use explicitly, at age seven, the concept of a variable or a function is crazy FOR MOST CHILDREN (but not for some few). Neither side in the so-called math wars seems to understand this. But reflective, mindful teachers of children at these ages sometimes do (though they also sometimes overgeneralize what a few of their most gifted kids are ready, developmentally, to do and thus form unrealistic expectations about what all should be able to do).
Unfortunately, in conservative education circles, it’s become popular to bash notions about the developing capabilities of the brain because of false claims made by education professors about those in the past. For example, E. D. Hirsch, Jr., who is so right about many things is wrong about this. It’s not simply a romantic notion that kids mental capabilities develop (and on differing schedules, btw).
The consequences for our pedagogy of failure to attend to what science is telling us about these matters are enormous and disastrous. For example, in the US we typically START teaching foreign languages AT THE VERY TIME WHEN THE INTERNAL MECHANISMS FOR AUTOMATICALLY INTUITING THE STRUCTURES OF A NEW LANGUAGE HAVE BROKEN DOWN, which is completely crazy. And we have predicated much of our “reform” of mathematics instruction on the idea of children forming explicit understandings of very abstract principles at ages at which they are not capable, for the most part, of such understanding but are capable of doing pattern recognition activities that will build a neural architecture for fluid intelligence that will put them way ahead, later on, when those abilities for explicit thinking thinking about abstract concepts do develop.
Our new national “standards” were hacked together overnight by complete amateurs working from the lowest-common-denominator group think of the preceding state “standards” and were not subjected to any learned vetting or critique and, at any rate, are insanely invariant and so do not accord with the reality of varying children.
And teachers know this. It’s only those who are IN CHARGE OF TEACHERS who do not–those, from the Dark Lord Arne Duncan himself down through middle levels inhabited by folks like Coleman and John King and Michelle Rhee–whose ignorance of these matters is matched only by their arrogance.
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Forgive the typos in that hastily written note. Oh, for an edit feature for these posts on WordPress!
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Mr. Shepperd, I think every comment thread should have a disclaimer at top stating you agree to disregard all typos when you start reading the thread. 🙂
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No kidding.
It’s in the public sector interest for their to be competition among businesses. It’s in the businesses interest to reduce competition.
The more involved businesses are in education, the more education will be jiggered to reduce entrepreneurship.
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well said, anonymous
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The failure rates on last years tests aren’t the best gotcha for CCLS not working-there hasn’t been the time for teachers to effectively learn how to abandon practice and teach to these new tests out of self preservation. The closest thing to the truth I’ve heard has to do with implementation-but even this line of reasoning avoids more uncomfortable truths: Creation is more at fault than implementation when it comes to the standards. Money bought politicians who then swallowed what non-educators posed as pedagogy. Implementation is simply the bastard son created by the sins of Devil money and his sinful sister, Politics. To hide their torrid affair, tests are created and their results are propagandized to suit the agenda.
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There was a study out of UC Berkeley by Paul Piff with experiments showing as people accumulated more wealth, their sense of entitlement went up along with propensity to cheat. Their capacity for empathy went down.
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It is a true addiction.
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Narcissistic Personality Disorder & sociopathic behaviors can be observed in the billionaires backing Common Core.
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I long for the day when people will dare to say,
There Are No Standard Children, and Our Job Is Not to Standardize Them
We Share in Common the Right to an Un-Common (Core) Education
Persons, Not Pearson; Gateways, Not Gates
Those Who Can, Teach; Those Who Can’t Micromanage Teachers
Extrinsic Reward: The Damaging Kind of Punishment because It Is the Most Insidious
Abracadabra, Hocus Pocus: The Test Results Are about to Speak
Please Add “Uncooperative with Tyrants” to That Evaluation. Thank You.
Warning: CCSS Literature Program. New Criticism for Dummies.
Sorry, but I Teach Writing, not InstaWriting for the Test
Enjoy the Fruits of Learning; Chuck the Core
Teaching: There Is No App for That
CCSS: Reign of Error and of Terror
PARCC: Spell That Backward
not-Smarter, imBalanced
My Third Grader Can Out-think Your Secretary of Education
1984: Rheeformish Public Policy Manual
Bee Eater: Unqualified but Dependably Rheeformish Sociopath in Position of Authority
Lord Coleman: By Divine right, Absolute Monarch of ELA Education?
Common Core: NCLB Fright Night II: The Nightmare Is Nationalized
Outgrit the Sinaporeans!
VAM: Vacuity-of curriculum-and-pedagogy Acceleration Mechanism
“All Your Base Belong to Us”–the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
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cx: That would be
Outgrit the Singaporeans!
of course
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Note that Singapore is think inking about dropping out of Pisa tests. They don’t think being number one has been an educational asset.
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wise move!
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Bob, your prediction: “Please Add “Uncooperative with Tyrants” to That Evaluation. Thank You” is a part of this Nationalized Nightmare that is already happening:
Under Dr Meria Carstarphen’s Reign of Terror in Austin ISD, after being threatened with my job for writing an OpEd for the Austin American Statesman about the psychological abuse to children in Texas schools, I was called “Unmanageable”! I’m not joking!
So, teachers and school counselors of Atlanta be advised: If you have an opinion about the testing obsession and covert abuse that you are about to experience with your new regime, and you share it with the public, be prepared to be declared “unmanageable”!
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The Sorting Test
A thousand thoughts or more ago,
When I was newly known,
There lived four wizards of renown,
Whose name are still well-known:
Bold Billy Gates from Microsoft,
Fair Rhee from her DC stint,
Sweet Duncan from Down Under,
Lord Coleman from Vermint.
They shared a wish, a hope, a scheme,
They hatched a daring plan,
To test all children in the land,
Thus Common Core began.
Now each of these four founders
Stack ranked to find the best
They value just one aptitude,
In the ones they had to test.
By level 1, the lowest were
There just to detest;
For Level 2, the closest
But failed to be the best;
For Level 3, hardworkers were
Barely worthy of admission;
And power-hungry Level 4s
Were those of great ambition.
While still alive they did divide
Their favorites from the throng,
Yet how to pick the worthy ones
When they were dead and gone?
‘Twas Coleman who found the way,
He whipped me out of his head
The founders wrote the standards
So I could choose instead!
Now slip me snug around your brain,
I’ve never yet been wrong,
I’ll have a look inside your mind
And tell where you belong!”
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AWESOME! I love this.
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Cross posted http://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Business-Group-in-NY-Pledg-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Business-As-Usual_Group-Think_Standards_Supporters-140531-528.html#comment492141with this comment
“I hope that many of you are following my posts “52/15,880, because THEY (the oligarchs and corporate pirates) know that they do NOT have to divide in order to conquer. All news is local, so that folks have no idea how the same people are waging the war on education.
“Common Core was not written by educators. It does not work. It farther undermines the profession of pedagogy, so that the teacher cannot address the real needs of the learners, but must follow the mandates. Failure breeding more failure,and the end of democracy because DEMOCRACY DEPENDS ON SHARED KNOWLEDGE, as E.D. Hirsch explains.http://www.aft.org/pdfs/americaneducator/winter2009/hirsch.pdfIf they control what is taught in the schools, then…”
“Please Share my “52/15,880 NEWS with others, so that more people know what is afoot in America as public education’s under attack… and if you want ALL the education news, there is one place you can go… the Diane Ravitch site ( I provide the link)covers it all, and the conversation there, among top education academics, teachers and parents across the country will fill you in, while the media focuses on baseball, celebs and the latest crisis.”
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After hearing for the first time just yesterday that 99% of Cuomo’s donations were $1,000 or higher, it became clear to me that we are dealing with major public misconception. Even as politically aware as I am, I had no idea how little actual donor support from real people Cuomo has.
Yet the masses turn out to vote and poll for him in great numbers. This means Democrat leaning parents are hoodwinked and hive-minded, but even more are simply unaware or inactive.
I also learned just recently how the Albany-lobbyist-campaign golden triangle works, such that there is no need for small time donors anymore. What happens is that Governors like Cuomo and Christie steer large contracts to companies or industry that pay certain lobbyists handsomely.
Then, come election time, the same lobbyists and their allies beat the bushes to get the industry to ensure the governor has all the funds they need for reelection. These are not small donations, and preclude any need for governors to listen to the people on issues like Common Core, fracking or tax breaks for millionaires.
Formerly prohibited, rulings like Citizens United and McKutcheon made it perfectly legal to buy ads in favor of a candidate or issue, and in the minds of Supreme Court justices Scalia, Alito, Thomas and Roberts, it’s the intended exercise of democracy because it does not limit the wealthy from expressing free speech.
Despite centuries of evidence showing that concentrated wealth corrupts elections, the legal justification hinged on the idea that elections are ultimately decided at the ballot box. So how does Cuomo get the common folk to pull the lever for him despite his allegiance to the 1%?
One major way is relying on the Republicans to run weak (or even batty) candidates. Progressives vote for Cuomo despite feeling held hostage, and third parties like the WFP help cement this by telling voters to vote for Cuomo on the “progressive” line to send him the message “I’m voting for you, but I wish you were helping working families more”.
Another way is the power arrangement in the state legislature, an alliance between the Republicans and the IDC, the small put pivotal caucus of breakaway Democrat State Senators Jeff Klein, Diane Savino, David Valesky, and David Carlucci.
IDC in my mind stands for Independent Democrats for Cuomo because they render the Democratic majority a minority, deciding the state’s business with far less input thanks to a cunning parliamentary strategy that tips the balance between the the parties.
The final piece is the media. Because NY is the broadcasting and publishing mecca for the nation, state politics barely get mentioned in the “news”. But the media industry in NY, like the financial services industry, influences everything in it’s obit. So the reporting is seriously imbalanced on issues like class war, the environment, or how miserable kids are in schools.
Here is a report on the most liberal news network, MSNBC and the connections they have, through parent Comcast, with ALEC who sponsored legislation to introduce teacher accountability tied to test scores. As a result, their reporting on Common Core has been very contradictory: http://www.opednews.com/articles/CONFLICTED-A-Look-at-MSNB-by-Gustav-Wynn-Accountability_Al-Sharpton_Alec_Charter-Schools-140505-22.html
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