Peter Greene asks a simple, logical question: why are the Common Core standards written in stone? “Not just stone, but stone mounted in cement crazy-glued to bedrock all sealed in amber.”
The Common Core standards are copyrighted. “…if you want to use them, you must do so as is, with not a single change. States may add up to 15% on top of what’s there, but they may not rewrite the CCSS in any way, shape, form, jot, tittle, or squib. States cannot adjust the standards a little to suit themselves. They cannot adapt them to fit local needs. They can’t touch them.”
Even more astonishingly, there is no process for revision or appeal.
In every field of activity “It is taken as an article of faith that any set of plans and policies will contain problems that will come to light after implementation, and there must be a method for course correction. Plus, a robust system must have a means of adjusting to new realities.
“Every system includes measures for adjusting and changing and correcting. School district strategic plans have processes in place for review and revision. IEPs for students have multiple methods for evaluating and adjusting process….Heck, the damn Constitution of the United States of America has a provision for proposing and implementing corrections and changes.
He adds:
“If you found what you considered to be a terrible mistake in the CCSS, there is no place you can call, no office you can contact, no form you can fill out, no appeal process you can appeal to, no meeting of the board you can attend to submit your comment, no set of representatives you can contact with your concern. There is nothing. The CCSS cannot be changed.”
Fortunately, there is no Common Core police to follow up and make sure that every state and district is doing exactly what the CC says they must at every minute. If a state or district actually makes changes, who will stop them? That would be an interesting case that is never likely to happen. If a high school teacher violates the CC mandates about what proportion of the course should be fiction and what proportion should be informational text, who will know? Will the principal stand outside the teacher’s classroom with a stopwatch? Who will be the timekeeper? Who will keep records for all teachers in all subjects? Will teachers get rated ineffective if they teach too much or too little fiction?
Did anyone think this through?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
One reason to copyright the CCSS is to prevent folks from claiming their textbook was consistent with the CCSS when it is not.
There is no way this is true. On the latest NPR piece on the CC, they interviewed a woman who started a database to calculate what percentage of a book was CC aligned. Of all the books she reviewed on the radio, not one was aligned 100%. There was no mention of impending litigation on these companies for copyright infringement.
I see the opposite as equally possible. To get in on the mad rush to trough town, companies will exaggerate how aligned their products are to CC.
If no one enforces copyright over the CCSS, any charlatan is free to label there material as compliant. That is your concern here, right?
Brookings recently published an op-ed calling for the CCSSO to start enforcing its copyright. The Thomas B. Fordham Institute just announced that “a group of foundations” (guess who?) is in the process of creating a national startup to review educational materials for compliance with the CCSS.
A censor librorum for education in the Land of the Free^TM.
Whether materials are or are not “aligned” with a given set of standards is a highly subjective matter. Are we to have a centralized Thought Police to make this decision for us all?
Bob,
Will you recommend me for the committee to review texts for Common Core alignment? What are the required qualifications?
Thanks!
The qualifications are that you be a charter member of the CCSSO/Pearson/Gates/College Board/Achieve echo chamber with a big grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It also helps if in the past you have received funding from Pearson for junkets to conferences in Singapore on creating new national standards, as did the members of the CCSSO and NGA.
It would also help if you were an edu-entrepreneur who happened to receive startup capital from the Gates foundation and Pearson and now have a company in which Gates and/or Pearson own a controlling interest–a company that creates assessment materials, computer-adaptive software, student data repositories, learning portals, or tablets with preloaded curricula–anything tagged to the new national standards list in which Gates and/or Pearson has an equity stake.
I lack all of the qualifications. I will have to continue teaching. No Singapore for me!
Teaching, that simply isn’t true legally. Copyright doesn’t give the holder that sort of power. You are describing an issue related to trademark law, but you since can’t trademark standards and there is not “CCSS seal of approval”, the CCSSO has no ability to stop textbook publishers outside of a claim of fraud.
So, TE, you think that we should have a centralized curriculum Thought Police to decide what is compliant and what is not?
Interesting.
Interesting because stark raving mad.
Robert,
Where did I say anything to suggest that?
If the standards are adopted by most states, and if one organization has the authority to determine who is in compliance with those standards, then that organization becomes the de facto curriculum Thought Police. No publisher can afford to deviate.
And, in fact, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute just announced that “a group of foundations” is funding a new organization to review curricula for compliance with the CCSS.
A censor librorum for textbooks and online materials.
Any any publisher without that imprimatur will have no luck whatsoever in capturing appreciable market share.
You are an economist, TE, surely this is not difficult for you to understand.
If “no one enforces a copyright” on national “standards,” then educational publishers are free to innovate, to adapt and built upon and improve those “standards.” Let the MARKET DECIDE what publishers are charlatans and what are not.
Far better to let customers decide than to have a centralized Thought Police doing that for everyone.
We are talking here about IDEAS–about what can be taught and learned. Do we really think that it is compatible with our ideas about freedom to have a central committee making these kinds of decisions–who is compliant and who is not–for everyone else?
If we do, then we are joining the ranks of China during the rule of Chairman Mao and North Korea today.
For they, too, told people what they could teach and learn.
What an ugly idea, that teachers are to be forced to teach copyrighted material.
Peter, they did think this through…they want it just like this!
Written & Locked for ETERNITY!
$M & $B to assure mandate for Eternity.
They made damn sure that no one would EVER challenge them.
What about NO do most of us not understand?
They are tsunami proof, earthquake proof, hurricane proof and bullet proof!
They are so SURE OF THEMSELVES AND KNOW EVERYTHING, they locked them and threw away the key. Actually, melted it.
Done!
Only a final official Death Certificate can get you out. (Original Copy only)
Maybe…
The copyright can be challenged in Federal Courts. Without more specifics, if it is a system, copyright may not be available. Government owned copyrights are also frowned upon since the government is the public. Interesting issues.
Kind Regards,
Nick Penkovsky
Please excuse any typos or terseness, this was sent from my Sprint BlackBerry®.
Having some background in this field—BUT NOT OFFERING A LEGAL OPINION—your point about not copyrighting systems is well taken. Given the nature of the subject matter, I think any copyright here will be very “thin”, i.e., at most covering direct copying only and not any derivative works, which is the only legitimate reason I see to copyright the CCSS. In short, this looks like a paper tiger to me.
So why do it at all? Like so much with the CCSS story (and so many other reforms) it’s all bluster and bullshit. The owners want to intimidate the country into accepting their will, no questions asked. This is another use of Margaret Thatcher’s TINA (There is No Alternative) canard at work, which in turn is just another arrow in the great quiver known as The Shock Doctrine.
nicholas, small publishers without Pearson- and Gates-sized checkbooks cannot afford to do this kind of litigation.
CCSS assumes we’ve arrived at the FINAL state of knowledge and understanding; as if we were “gods” and became omniscient. No good teaching believes that it is based on final, never to be editied, objectives; all knowledge is in flux, and therefore curriculum should be adaptable and relevant to the needs of the local stakeholders.
The real reason they want it codified in stone is so that we have to pay for it every time we teach; as if the “creators” of CCSS were the originators of education? What hypocrisy for them to believe that; for the objectives they propose have been in existence for decades. They just renamed and repackaged them, calling them “common”, and believing they should be nationalized (which ignores stakeholder needs in local contexts).
Rick, sounds just like Microsoft! Hmmm
Remember what happened to the competition in the word processing and spreadsheet software market spaces?
Deja vu.
Authoritative “truth” in educational standards developed neither by educators or experts in child development. Yeah…right.
I an “expert” on ELA curricula and pedagogy. I’ve spent my lifetime studying these. Seriously studying these. Very seriously (and joyfully). Had I been through half a dozen PhD programs in my field, and no more than that, I probably would not know as much about methods and materials in ELA as I do. I’m not bragging, for one thing I’ve learned over the years is how ignorant we all are, how much there is to learn, and despite my learning, I count myself among the ignorant, and so I am still studying, still teasing things out, still trying to be mindful and open-minded, still stealing sugar from the castles built by other educators throughout the centuries and from my colleagues around the country, some well known, many not but worth more than many who are all fame and name.
I have learned a lot. This becomes clear, quite quickly, to anyone in my field who gets to know me. I take learning how to be a better English teacher and a better ELA curriculum developer as seriously as anyone can, and I have done so for decades.
And guess what? I would never dream of telling every other teacher and curriculum developer in the country how he or she must teach English, what outcomes he or she must measure and how, or what learning progressions he or she must follow. I am happy to make suggestions, and often these will be well-informed suggestions. But I will not and would not tell everyone else in ELA how to do his or her job.
Why? Because I know too much to be that presumptuous. Because I respect my colleagues. Because I don’t know everything (by all the gods who ever were, I don’t, and neither does anyone else). Because there are a few million other people in my field, many with enormous expertise, who are crazy enough disagree with me about parts of this extraordinarily complex field. 🙂 Because ecologies are healthier than are monocultures. Because I treasure freedom, especially freedom of thought. Because freedom of thought in this field I love is precious to me. Because I believe that all our futures depend dramatically upon having that freedom.
Only the very, very ignorant can be as arrogant as are the folks who would foist this puerile set of “standards” on everyone else in the country.
Shame on these people. Ignorance and arrogance. A toxic cocktail, that. And they are making the rest of us drink it.
Shame on them.
EXACTLY. WE all received the objectives that the state outlined for each grade and subject, and we chose the materials that made our practice successful. Much as the doctor knows what healing looks like, WE teachers know what LEARNING LOOKS LIKE, and thanks to intelligence and education PLUS the talent to recognize what works, we use what we know, what we love and what we feel will work. NO ONE ever told me what to use in my practice, although I had curricula guides and too often (in primary school) ‘basil’ readers… which I ignored.
And because the very idea of there being one way to become a fine writer, reader, speaker, listener, researcher, and thinker is just laughable. Anyone who thinks that is thick as a brick.
You have a way with words… love the alliteration….better that my dumb as dogs#%t (poop)
And the expert has a typo in his first sentence. LOL.
The Buddha said, “If you see the Buddha on the road, kill him.”
Because that what it takes to convert our common culture into private intellectual property.
Large chunks of our common culture are already copyrighted if you include recent works of literature and the arts.
I suppose you could seek a patent on that Slip’n’Slide Argumentum Ad Slopum System® you keep trying to sell us, but I’m guessing it’s probably prior art.
At any rate, this corner of the market knows the difference that makes a difference between wanting due credit and wanting it all.
Teachingeconomist, works of literature and the arts are very different from standards. For example, you could say there are standards for impressionist painting, but then there are the paintings of Monet, which might or might not be entirely consistent with those standards.
I should think that if the creators of the common core had full faith that they had stumbled on some ultimate truth of education, whenever they thought textbook companies were calling their products common core consistent when they really weren’t, rather than seeking legal recourse, they would dialogue with those companies to nurse them towards the Ultimate Solution, as well as spreading the word that those publications were not what they had in mind.
Whatever the legal ramifications, I don’t understand how educators nor education publishers can engage in a healthy give and take on education methodology if there is going to be a rigid enforcement of any particular education methodology. Just to be safe, since the Common Core standards are such a Pandora’s box bizarre mix of good and not-so-good ideas, I would suggest that everyone associated with education just go out of their way to assure the ccss copyright holders that what they are doing is not in any way meant to be associated with the Common Core.
David,
My comment concerned poster Jon Awbrey’s comment about privatization of our common culture, not anything at all to do with CCSS. Most recent works of literature and the arts are supposed to be private, though modern technology has made it painfully clear that information is not excludable.
Teachingeconomist,
I did read Jon’s spot-on remark. So, you were not implying that copyrighting the common core is comparable to copyrighting “recent works of literature and the arts,” i.e. it’s nothing too outrageous?
While we’re at it, I think Rick made an excellent point about the CCSS creators acting as though they originated education. And up above that Bob Shepherd made an excellent point about the subjectivity involved in deciding whether something is compliant with those standards, too much subjectivity to keep any attendant claims from getting laughed out of any self-respecting court, I should think.
Exactly, Jon.
Jon, it gives me great pleasure that some few, like you, are actually THINKING about what this means.
Since CCSS was funded by Gates, it’s pretty clear why they were copyrighted: they are “his” (or in practice, his puppets’, agents and partners’) intellectual property.
After all, this is the man whose genius is in creating monopolies, not exceptional products. His products were intended to be tested by his hapless customers, who would discover their flaws so that they could be ironed out in the next upgrade.
In fact, his approach toward education is in harmony with his business practices, aside from seeing kids as a profit center: just as Windows customers were expected to unearth the bugs in his mediocre software, so too are today’s children the guinea pigs for Education Reform 1.0. He publicly stated that we might know in ten years if “this stuff” works, without a dram of concern for its effect on children in school today, who are enduring the beta form of his “intellectual property.”
What’s the proper metaphor for so-called education reform: a poisonous onion, whose layers become ranker as you peel them back? An evil matryoshka doll, whose faces becomes more sinister as you remove them, one by one?
No true standards body ignores a revision, feedback process. Most of the standards I worked with were open and extensible. The copyright is to make the standards proprietary. If they are corporate owned rather than open, then absolutely the CCSS is purely for profit, not learning. The math standards are a mess. Curriculum becomes a jumbled mess.
Even biblical scholars allow interpretation of their sacred work. Have any of these authors of the common core attended a real world faculty meeting, in a real school.
The “Standards” aren’t written in stone. They’re written in blood. That of our children.
“Will the principal stand outside the teacher’s classroom with a stopwatch? Who will be the timekeeper? Who will keep records for all teachers in all subjects? Will teachers get rated ineffective if they teach too much or too little fiction?”
Diane, ordinarily I enjoy your posts, but today I fear you are giving the enemy entirely too many ideas…
The Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth is even now, as people are responding to this thread, creating its centralized Censor Librorum for curricula. Brookings called for this. Thomas B. Fordham let slip in an op-ed a week ago that “a group of foundations” has funded the creation of such an organization.
Bill Gates > Aspergers Syndrome > High Cognitive but Low Social Emotional Development > Obsessive Need to Control Own Environment and Relationships > Rigid Inflexibility > Unable to Make Human Emotional Attachments > Unable to Experience Human Emotions of Joy and Pleasure > Lack of Empathy > Lack of Guilt > Obsessive Attachment to Possessions > Possessive > Superiority and Entitlement > Capable of Cruelty to Others Without Recognition > Gelotophobic > Robotic
Yup!
With ultimate Power & $B – $T.
Frightening.
Nobody’s perfect.
Exactly. Which is why nobody should have the kind of influence and control that Gates has. You agree, right?
I certainly wish he would go away but my preferences make little difference. Somebody or other will always wield power. Whoever it is won’t be me or likely anybody I would like. On the other hand Bill Gates doesn’t seem all that satanic. if I ever met him the most I would fear is that he would bore me to death
Bill Gates is the biggest culprit, but he’s part of the billionaire class, which is full of sociopaths and cretins.
Saying he has some kind of developmental disorder lets him off the hook. He needs to stay on the hook, just like the rest of these good-for-nothing sharks.
Too much money screws up the head. Period. There isn’t a single one of them, not even Warren Buffet, who isn’t somehow screwed up mentally when they have more wealth than the GNP of many countries.
Bill Gates and Warren Buffet are both pretty boring. Diamond Jim Brady was a lot more fun.
I don’t think it’s letting him off the hook. John Wayne Gacy has been analyzed six ways to Sunday by everyone who fancies him/herself an amateur shrink. I don’t think any of them are excusing him for his murders, just trying to understand why he did it. Same with Gates – what drives someone to ruthlessly amass that kind of wealth and power and use it the way Gates has? I think Izzy’s formulation is touching on some very important understandings.
Dienne,
Philosopher king with the money of of the central bankers. Scary stuff.
Common Core is written in stone because it lacks human qualities.
CCSS can’t be altered because that would upset the algorithms used by the computerized grading software that is surely being developed…
Alan: I know I am riding this horse to death by exhaustion, but Dr. Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute spoke from deep inside the belly of the $tudent $ucce$$ beast when he wrote at the end of 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]
Link: http://deutsch29.wordpress.com/2013/12/28/the-american-enterprise-institute-common-core-and-good-cop/
In other words, the tail of testing is wagging the dog of teaching and learning. Why? Because the standardized test scores are to be used for the labeling, sorting, and ranking that determine the [many] punishments and [few] rewards for students, teachers and public schools. Bottom line: $tudent $uccess isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.
Sometimes an old dead Roman guy will do when you can’t find an old dead Greek guy:
“For greed all nature is too little.” [Lucius Annaeus Seneca]
Thank you for your comment.
😎
Keep riding and I’ll keep reading KTA.
This horse is a winner.
Uh…No.
The answer is simple: bribery.
There is little that can be done to stop it with politicians because bribery by billionaires and corporations is now seen as a form of “free speech.”
The answer is quite simple. They are invariant and copyrighted and come with a warning that they cannot be changed but simply added to because their creation was not driven by a desire to improve education. The people who paid for these “standards” wanted a single national list to tag their assessments and computer-adaptive software to.
That’s why Pearson and Gates paid to have them created.
Of coruse, it’s CRAZY to carve these in stone. No one in his or her right mind would think that this list is the BEST WE COULD EVER COME UP WITH.
Unless, of course, you are an educational materials monopolist and a would-be educational materials monopolist and you want a single set of standards so that you can market products tagged to those “at scale”–at monopolistic, national scale.
According to my tech family member this has been discussed and tossed around in the tech community for at least 15 years. Individualized instruction delivered on your devise at any location. Eliminate educators, buildings, transportation, admin. I never believed the public would go along with this.
If we have a set of national standards, and any publisher DARES deviate from it, then he or she will not be able to sell his or her product.
That’s the way it is.
And so, absolutely compliance will be required.
Of people who deal in ideas.
If you are among a group of editors at an educational publishing house, and you think that you have a better approach to, say, teaching figurative language than is laid out in those “standards,” and if you implement that approach, then you will not be in compliance with the national list, and your product will have no chance whatsoever of being sold.
And what that means is that the national list is a recipe for mediocrity, for conformity. That means that it stops real innovation COLD.
That means that you have, in effect, a national pedagogical and curricular Thought Police.
Common core for the common clown, or the recipe to make the common clone.
Probably a good idea to put them in stone, for civilizations of the future to know what not to do. Did they run out of water and the crops dried up? No, for some reason they followed these narrow rules and their empire dwindled.
On this thread, I posted a great many objections to particular components of the CCSS in ELA:
I think that these are sound objections.
However, if I incorporate any of my ideas into new curricula, even if that curricula is otherwise CCSS compliant, then the Thought Police will say that my curricula are not compliant AND THERE WILL NOT BE A SNOWBALL’S CHANCE in the inferno that the product will sell.
And so, only educational publishers who slavishly follow the standards will be able to survive.
One ring to rule them all.
This is not the kind of thing that is done in a free country. This is the kind of thing that happens, say, in China during the Cultural Revolution.
Dissent–the slightest bit of dissent–is absolutely crushed by the Thought Police.
Bob, And yet most folks just carry on in the fabricated world of their borrowed excess.
As Peter describes…the set in stone, mounted in cement, etc. is reason enough to dump the CC. The lunacy is amazing.
lunacy
unless you happen to be a monopolist seeking to effect a digital revolution in curricula and want to have a single national list to tag your national products to
in which case, having a single list–any list would do–makes perfect sense. The national list enables you to create one product that you can market “at scale”–crushing smaller competitors with innovative approaches.
Reblogged this on We Are More and commented:
“If you found what you considered to be a terrible mistake in the CCSS, there is no place you can call, no office you can contact, no form you can fill out, no appeal process you can appeal to, no meeting of the board you can attend to submit your comment, no set of representatives you can contact with your concern. There is nothing. The CCSS cannot be changed.”
Fortunately, there is no Common Core police to follow up and make sure that every state and district is doing exactly what the CC says they must at every minute.
I posted a number of sample critiques of the CCSS in ELA here:
Let me hasten to add that the critiques that I posted there are examples for particular standards of the kind of critique that could be leveled against other particular standards. The CCSS in ELA are hackneyed, puerile, unimaginative, and prescientific. One could drive whole curricula through their lacunae. They exert chilling prior restraint on innovation in ELA pedagogy and curricula. They are the work of amateurs.
Bob, Amateurs ARE THE EXPERTS!
Barely an educator, a true educator among them.
PoliSci, public policy and economics are driving the financial flotilla, carrying $B to the CCSS amateurs/experts.
This financial flotilla may be another reason why the world’s water levels are rising & flooding is everywhere.
Insanity, but many are getting filthy rich.
From the Rheeformish Lexicon:
education. noun. THE 21st-century investment opportunity. Contact: Bill Gates, Michael Barber, or David Coleman.
Thank you! Apparently, something wasn’t working right on my site, and I am just now receiving comments from a while back. Thank you for the link!
There is indeed a Common Core police.
They bare the Pearson test writers currently developing PARCC and SBAC tests. Comming soon (2015) on a computer near you.
BUT THERE IS, Gerri. It’s called the tests. Maybe they can’t dictate every moment in the classroom, but the CC people sure as shootin’ can dictate that only their warped vision of education is all that is tested, meaning that, over time, it WILL be all that happens in classrooms. Resistance is futile, at least according to the CC people. I wish more teachers, particularly those whom I consider friends, would realize this. I, for one, have been crying out in the wilderness.
I doubt that the tests truly test the standards.
Exactly, Ponderosa. This is demonstrable. They cannot do so, validly, as those “standards” are currently formulated.
Common Core standrads CANNOT be FIXED.
Common Core standards CANNOT be IMPROVED.
Common Core standards CANNOT be CHANGED.
Never.
Of all the talking points proponents can use to argue against the CCSS, I have found that none resonate more clearly than this one. My non-educator friends and family members get stopped dead in their tracks with this one simple point. At first, many refuse to believe it could be true.
CC = Cast in Concrete
cx. opponents (not proponents)
Common Core standards CANNOT be MOVED either.
Let’s imagine the vast majority of middle level math teachers in America decide its best to MOVE percents and ratios from 6th grade into 8th grade because it isnt working well with 11 year olds. No way Jose. NO ACN DO. Even if they get down on their hands and knees to beg David Coleman. Never. Ever.
This straightjacket of a constraint is simply unacceptable.
CCSS = Cast in Concrete, Straightjacketed Standards
CC = Bill Gates Aspergers Syndrome
People who would not DREAM of having a central committee decide upon a single design for all clothing that people will wear, a single outline that every movie will have to follow, a single set of recipes for what people will eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, have decided that it makes sense to have a central committee decide for everyone else precisely what must be taught and learned at every grade level by every child.
insane
but some monopolists and would-be monopolists have poured about a billion dollars, now, into creating that list and selling people on it
because they have a business plan
and all these folks who are usually the first to scream, “Let the market decide!” are lining up to say, “Let the Thought Police, the Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth decide.”
For surely David Coleman knows better than every other teacher, curriculum coordinator, curriculum developer, scholar, and researcher in the country. Any ideas that those millions of people might have can’t possibly be better than the revelation to Lord Colman is, in any respect.
But who are we mere mortals to argue? After all, the masters at the CCSSO have appointed David Coleman and Susan Pimentel, by divine right, absolute monarchs of English language arts instruction in the United States, and surely, as Hobbes argued in the Leviathan, monarchy is best. Surely, in Hobbes’s words, we all need to live under “a common power to keep [us] all in awe,” for as Queen Elizabeth I wrote in 1601, “The Royal Prerogative [is] not to be canvassed, nor disputed, nor examined, and [does] not even admit of any limitation.”
Actually, there is a CCSS “police” force coming to a school near you via the Principal Ambassador Program. http://www2.ed.gov/programs/principalfellowship/programoverview.html It always sounds so innocent when they start it….
In a message dated 6/5/2014 8:03:00 A.M. Central Daylight Time, Diane Ravitch writes:
“Peter Greene asks a simple, logical question: why are the Common Core standards written in stone? ‘Not just stone, but stone mounted in cement crazy-glued to bedrock all sealed in amber.’
Even more astonishingly, there is no process for revision or appeal.”
The outlook for change in the USDOE’s K-12 education policy appears bleak. Nevertheless, that’s no basis for not keeping up the fight. Consider the following response to a non-response from the USDOE:
In a message dated 4/22/2014 4:31:02 P.M. Central Daylight Time, FNJSMP@aol.com writes:
Luz N. Curet, Team Lead
Management & Program Analyst
Control Correspondence Unit, Executive Office
Office of Elementary and Secondary Education
US Department of Education
400 Maryland Ave., SW
Washington, DC 20202
Dear Luz:
For your information, my recent messages to the USDOE are documented as appendices to a commentary titled “School Wars 2014: Conflicts over K-12 Education Technology, CCSS, and VAM.” It’s posted at
https://collegeathleticsclips.com/news/schoolwars2014conflictsoverk12educationtechnologyccssandvam.html
Finally, it would be really encouraging to see a glimmer of hope, say USDOE invitations to experienced educators and education historians to meet to form action plans to counteract wrong decisions and the damage already incurred by CCSS, VAM, and the over-commercialization of K-12 education.
On June 5, 2014 I wrote:
Dear Luz:
To the best of my knowledge, the USDOE has not extended invitations to experienced educators and education historians to meet to form action plans to counteract wrong decisions and the damage already incurred by CCSS, VAM, and the over-commercialization of K-12 education. Therefore, it appears that the USDOE has cast its path forward in concrete–ignoring the rising chorus of complaints and studies that cry for corrective action.
The above situation prompted the appended commentary “School Wars and Scandals: A Crisis of Leadership” that has also been posted at
https://collegeathleticsclips.com/news/schoolwarsandscandalsacrisisofleadership.html
I and many others look forward to your reply.
Respectfully,
Frank
Frank G. Splitt
Former McCormick Faculty Fellow
McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science
Northwestern University, Evanston, IL
http://thedrakegroup.org/authors/splitt
_____________-
a College Athletics Clips Guest Commentary
School Wars and Scandals: A Crisis of Leadership
The author provides still another extension to his Clips commentary “School Wars 2014” with an appeal for corrective action for the problems brought on by the commercialization of America’s K-12 education system and a related crisis in leadership.
By Frank G. Splitt, FutureVectors, Inc., 6-4-14
“At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.”—Abraham Lincoln
America’s overall health and well being is dependent on educational leadership that can help render an educated and skilled citizenry—human capital with plenty of STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics) in the mix. So I wrote in “School Wars 2014.”[1]
Then came the eye-opening Peggy Noonan epigraph to her Wall Street Journal opinion piece, “The VA Scandal Is a Crisis of Leadership.” It read as follows: “Shinseki is gone, but Obama’s inattention to managing the government remains.”[2] The lack of leadership applies equally as well to the school wars and scandals of today.
Noonan wrote:
“There is another management and accountability question here. It appears that part of the VA story is that local managers and administrators were given bonuses and the prospect of promotions for reducing wait times—so they falsified the records. What was meant to be an incentive to productivity became an incentive to lie.
Have we seen this before? Yes. The VA scandal is starting to look like the public school scandals in which administrators fudge test scores to get more money for themselves and their schools. Higher test scores equal more money and a chance to advance professionally. So they claim higher scores.
The question a good executive in either system would ask right now is: Do such incentives make things better or worse? Do they encourage real improvement or gaming the system?
When you look at public school systems you often see a surprisingly large number of bureaucrats and fewer than expected actual teachers. Is something like that true at the VA? Are there too many clerks filing fraudulent forms and not enough doctors, nurses, aides and examination rooms? If so, why? What steps should be taken to turn this around.”
And that’s not the only threat to America’s public-schools and the teaching profession. Conflicts abound over K-12 Education Technology, Common Core State Standards (CCSS), and the Value Added Measure (VAM) used to assess teacher performance.
Threats come from non-educators such as wealthy donors and technology company officials who have bamboozled naïve elected officials and appointees who use K-12 education domain for political gain and glory. Most of these non-educators appear to be concerned about almost anything other than a positive intellectual and moral impact on the lives of K-12 students. They exude confidence based on be-all-end-all technical solutions for learning and testing products. These products are the key to the development of a commercialized K-12 education market that offers a seductive promise to minimize the need for credentialed and experienced teachers.
The school scandals involve not only cheating on test scores, but charges of manipulation and falsification at charter school records.[3] Just as Noonan reported on the VA, there are whistle-blowers with allegations of local cover-ups—money-making rackets and remarkably high compensation for administrators
Like the VA scandal, school scandals won’t go away as others have, because the American public is united in this thought: We care about our children. They have every right to expect a good education. Paraphrasing Noonan, everyone in America knows what it’s like to go to a bureaucracy when you’re in need and get jerked around and ignored. Just ask Troy LaRaviere, the principal of Chicago Public School (CPS) Blaine Elementary.[4] Or ask the parents of the students in the 50 Chicago public schools closed by Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s Board of Education.[5]
In a 2011, interview on NPR, Diane Ravitch, educational historian, author, and leader of the fight against forces aligned against America’s public schools, said: “We are destroying our education system, blowing it up by these stupid policies. And handing the schools in low-income neighborhoods over to private entrepreneurs does not, in itself, improve them. There’s plenty of evidence by now that the kids in those schools do no better, and it’s simply a way of avoiding their – the public responsibility to provide good education.”
Ravitch recently quoted Tim Farley, an education activist, as follows: “A year ago, few had heard of Common Core, data mining, APPR (Annual Professional Performance Review), and “high stakes testing”. Now, unless you live under a rock, everyone has heard of Common Core and it is the number one issue in the country.”[6]
The current lack of close oversight renders uninformed management of America’s K-12 education enterprise. It leads one to believe that President Obama is living under a rock and that certainly does not bode well for America’s position on the future world stage.
In an 1838 speech to the Lyceum in Springfield Illinois, a young Abraham Lincoln observed that the greatest threat to our nation came not from without, but within. So too is the case for America’s public schools where a lack of educational leadership can lead to America’s undoing. Corrective action needs be taken to turn this situation around.
As suggested in “School Wars 2014,” a good beginning would be USDOE invitations to experienced educators and education historians to meet to form action plans to counteract wrong decisions and the damage already incurred by CCSS, VAM, and the over-commercialization of K-12 education.
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NOTES
1. Splitt, Frank G., “School Wars 2014: Conflicts over K-12 Education Technology, CCSS, and VAM” College Athletics Clips, May 20, 2014, https://collegeathleticsclips.com/news/schoolwars2014conflictsoverk12educationtechnologyccssandvam.html
This commentary was updated to enhance the argument against the widespread commercialization of K-12 education as well to introduce readers to: 1) Devra Davis’ concern about the unmet need to investigate the potential danger to the brains of young school children to the electromagnetic radiation emanating from wireless products that are part and parcel of this commercialization, and 2. Mercedes Schneider’s new book, A Chronicle of Echoes. Who’s Who in the Implosion of American Public Education.
2. Noonan, Peggy, “The VA Scandal Is a Crisis of Leadership,” The Wall Street Journal, May 31-June 1.2014 http://online.wsj.com/articles/noonan-the-va-scandal-is-a-crisis-of-leadership-1401402352?KEYWORDS=Peggy+Noonan
3. Mihalopoulos, Dan, “SEC charges UNO with defrauding investors, warns probe ‘not done’,” Chicago Sun-Times, June 2, 2014, http://politics.suntimes.com/article/chicago/sec-charges-uno-defrauding-investors-warns-probe-not-done/mon-06022014-1106am#bmb=1
4. LaRaviere, Troy, “Under Emanuel, principals have no voice, “Chicago Sun-Times, Letters to the Editor, May 9, 2014, http://www.suntimes.com/opinions/letters/27339293-474/under-emanuel-principals-have-no-voice.html#.U3H9scu9KSM
5. CNN Staff, “Chicago board votes to close 50 schools,” CNN, May 22, 2013, http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/22/us/illinois-chicago-school-closures/
6. Ravitch, Diane, “Graduation Advice from Bill Gates.” Diane Ravitch Blog, May 25, 2914, https://dianeravitch.net/2014/05/25/graduation-advice-from-bill-gates/
Frank G. Splitt holds a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering (1963) from Northwestern University where he served as the McCormick Faculty Fellow of Telecommunications at the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science (1993-2005). He is a member of The Drake Group, a member of the College Sport Research Institute’s Advisory Committee, University of South Carolina, and was the Vice President Emeritus of Educational and Environmental Initiatives for NTI, the U.S. subsidiary of Nortel Networks, formerly known as Northern Telecom Limited. He was the recipient of The Drake Group’s 2006 Robert Maynard Hutchins Award. A Bio, CV, and listing of links to his essays and commentaries on college sports reform can be found at http://thedrakegroup.org/authors/splitt
Cross posted at
http://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/CURMUDGUCATION-Common-Cor-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Change_Common-Core_Focus_Review-140605-43.html#comment493076
with this (it has links at the Oped site)
Read the fact sheet and see what Fairtest had to say about COMMON CORE.
What is happening in 52 states this travesty written wholly by NON-EDUCATORS, is already conquering because no one knows what is happening in the almost 16,000 school districts… for example
In NY, A Conversation About Tests New York Teachers Can’t Haveand this one about the The Pseudo-Science of New York’s Common Core Tests
Student: Standardized Tests Taking a Toll in New Mexico Classrooms
In New Mexico: Standardized Tests Taking a Toll in New Mexico Classrooms
IN Oregon:Oregon Teachers Seek Common Core Testing Moratorium
In Maine:Why Standardized Testing is Ruining Maine Schools, Hurting Our Kids
This excellent article on AlterNet offers more insight:
“The high-stakes standardized testing attack has always exacted the highest toll on communities of color. And activists of color are playing leading roles in the movement to curb these abuses. In the name of closing the achievement gap, entire communities of color in cities around the country have seen classrooms converted to test prep centers, where the time spent on studying strategies for eliminating wrong answer choices has pushed out inquiry, collaboration, creativity, critical thinking, the arts, and culturally relevant pedagogy. Two clear examples of standardized tests supporting institutional racism are Chicago and Philadelphia, where the tests are being used to label schools in communities of color as “failures” and then shut them down at unprecedented rates.”Submitted on Thursday, Jun 5, 2014 at 12:00:42 PM
“Think”? I think not!
The Buddha said, “If you see the Buddha on the road, kill him.”
That’s what he thought of gurus and tyrants and standards makers.
I should have said, that’s what he thought of gurus and tyrants and those who would mandate standards.
Twin Towers have been blown up in order to distract public concern about Afghanistan and Israel warfare. Today, Common Core Educational issue is used to distract public intelligence to be aware of the looming East Southern Asian warfare (Japan, China, Vietnam, possible Russia and USA in the last minute) which is soon happening as WW III. European community will play a wait-and see game so that they can reclaim their territories or their colonies
History keeps repeating but global leaders keeps ignoring the consequence which we all can prepare and turn things around to be in peace. Being as strong, rich and smart people is far less important than being considerate, kind and care people whose priority is for the well being of all sentient beings.
Devilish intention will be outrageously catastrophic! If we cannot stop snobbish people (only care about money) who acts as if they are noble (care about public well being), then it is likely we will be all in our century catastrophe without Savior. Back2basic
Why have so many people been convinced that these standards will fix something.
Sarah 5565,
PT Barnum had an answer for your question.
I have only begun to read here this past month, and this kind of question stuns me.
I am 72 years old, and was forced into retirement when I was 58, and a famous educator in NYC… in fact I was The Educator of Excellence in NY State.
I have seen the assault on public education begin and now 20 years later I see what he plan had been all along. People can be sold anything when the issue is complex, and once the television campaign decreeing failed schools began, it was easy for those with the bully- pulpit, to explain what was wrong, and how they could fix it.
If you were to ask people to ‘evaluate’ the physician’s procedures, they would look at the OUTCOME, which was the “healing” and easy to see, but they would still need to trust the professional to accomplish that objective. It is complicated.
People thinking ‘teaching’ is easy. Anyone can be trained to do’it.’ Pedagogy as a profession is a mystery.
Teachers were the problem declared the national narrative, and charter schools would fix it. The campaign began. Look at the pot of money paying for propaganda at PBS! (funding revealed here and at Pando.) http://pando.com/2014/06/05/revealed-gates-foundation-financed-pbs-education-programming-which-promoted-microsofts-interests/
You have only to read that Pando essay on PBS. “They” know how to sell a product that promises a solution to an audience unable to grasp the complexities of the problem… which is to enable the real ways that humans learn skills and acquire knowledge.
THE Answer to your question is simple…. people have no idea what real LEARNING LOOKS LIKE. Thus, they can be sold a magic elixir.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Magic-Elixir-No-Evidence-by-Susan-Lee-Schwartz-130312-433.html
Look, when I was the cohort for the REAL National Standards — (the Pew 3rd level research on the Harvard theory)– the workshops began with WHAT LEARNING LOOKS LIKE. It is so easy for a parent to be taken in by bulletin boards and magic elixirs, but for a teacher to succeed there can be no doubt about the process.
The vocabulary — the language that Duncan and company use to shape the national narrative is the key. TEACHING is their word and their emphasis, but in truth, what goes on in that classroom is ALL about LEARNING… and how it is enabled, facilitated and achieved in the HUMAN BRAIN no t’teaching.
A “trained” teacher will meet the subjective benchmarks of ‘evaluation’. Teachers can be evaluated like the employees of a business which they are.
A real teacher is another story entirely.
The NY Times obit on famous educator Maxine Greene offers this glimpse at the reality of a great teacher: “she may be best remembered for her classroom instruction, which drew on personal experience and a wide range of cultural references, from Sartre to Mel Brooks, and inspired a rare kind of loyalty and admiration among generations of students. “At the very least, students were given access to an active mind, inquiring openly and in full view,” Mr. Ayers wrote in “Doing Philosophy: Maxine Greene and the Pedagogy of Possibility,” an essay that appeared in a 1998 collection, “A Light in Dark Times: Maxine Greene and the Unfinished Conversation.”
But here is the sentence that is at the core of the issue, how she did it… and it wasn’t because she was given a core curricula that had to be followed and evaluated:
““Because she harvested her teaching from her own lived experience,” Mr. Ayers went on, “it always had an improvisational feel to it — fresh and vital and inventive, yes, but also firmly rooted in a coherent ground of core beliefs and large purposes. We could see imagination at work, and questioning that knew no limits, and dialectics. And students were invited, if they chose, to join in, to open themselves in dialogue and pursuit.”
Understand one thing, THE VOICE OF THE TEACHER IS MISSING IN THIS DEBATE.
By eliminating the opinions of the most experienced, veteran professionals, they could sell their magic elixirs.
I have a story to tell, and I will tell it in my blog SPEAKING AS A TEACHER, here at wordpress, and on OPED NEWS in diaries and essays on WITT (WHAT IT TAKES TO TEACH), but I was that teacher who drew on personal experience and a wide range of knowledge, who watched for the teachable moment as those 30 pairs of eyes watched me, and those emergent minds searched for meaning. Imagination was at work, and improvisation, too, in order to motivate the minds of children, and all of what I did was based on a solid ground of core objectives… all things that are hard to pinpoint and evaluate but which make LEARNING possible.
I went to look to see if the common core authors are listed on their website. They’re not but they are selling curriculum there now.
And on the 7th day, Bill Gates created robots in his own image.
BTW, here is where you can go to file a comment, during the open comment period on the FCC’s proposed ruling ending net neutrality:
http://www.fcc.gov/comments
Take the time to do this. Tell the FCC not to create fast and slow lanes on the Internet. Tell them to preserve Net Neutrality.
I may be wrong, but from what I’ve seen, read, and heard, it would seem that the CCSS is written in stone so that curriculum and test writers can have an unchanging playing field on which to base their work. Predictable. No fuss. No muss.
It’s about production. Education is there…but it’s in the backseat.
Education is being dragged from the back bumper.
For a long, long time, states have had standards very like the Common Core: vague lists of poorly defined skills instantiating hackneyed, backward, prescientific ideas about the teaching of English. The worst curriculum developers simply produced worksheets that treated these skills in isolation. One could spot these programs quite easily because there was a one-to-one mapping between the standards and the worksheets. Often, such programs were produced for the most challenged students, which meant that the most challenged students got the most rigid, standards-driven skill and drill.
Mediocre big-box basal publishers did their best to create curricula that were coherent but that “covered” the standards–meaning, that each was treated somewhere, often in multiple places, in a program. Of course, the standards bullet lists constituted quite severe prior restraints on curricular innovation, but publishers did their best to strike a balance–to create coherent curricula that also hit all the standards. The mediocrity of a lot of these basal programs directly resulted from their instantiating the lowest-common-denominator groupthink of state standards-writing committees.
Anyone who has ever worked as a writer or editor for a K-12 publisher or educational materials developer will tell you that the biggest drag on his or her ability to innovate was having to create curricula and pedagogical approaches within the prior restraints of the state bullet lists. Lesson after lesson after lesson, unit after unit after unit, the best approaches and materials would often be pushed out or precluded by the need to “cover” the standards. So, when preparing a unit for 9th graders on, say, the short story, teams of editors and writers would not ask themselves how best to teach the short story to 9th graders and then draw upon the best thinking ever done about this. Instead, they would draw up lessons that flitted, often incoherently, from standard to standard.
When Gates and Pearson decided that they needed a single national list to tag their assessments and computer-adaptive software to, they paid the CCSSO and NGA to produce such a list. The CCSSO hired some amateurs to hack such a list together based on the lowest-common-denominator groupthink of the state standards. And they tacked on some general guidelines, or instructional shifts, that the standards supposedly instantiated but in fact did not.
Now, these standards are supposed to be descriptions of measurable outcomes, and they are supposed to drive assessments and evaluations. Because of the high stakes attached to them and because of the billions that have been poured into promoting the new national list, curriculum developers are taking these standards more seriously than they ever did before. This is causing major distortions of curricula and pedagogy. In effect, the standards are becoming the curriculum, and that’s a huge mistake, but it was entirely predictable that that would happen.
If states simply drop the CCSS and return to producing these awful, vaguely formulated skills lists as they did before, there won’t be any improvement.
If you want to see real change, then you create voluntary, competing standards, alternate versions of which are put forward by scholars, researchers, and practitioners, thus encouraging a kind of ongoing continual close examination of these “standards” that has never been done. That’s quite doable in the age of the Internet. And then curriculum developers will be free to adopt the best of these and to adapt them as they see fit to create materials that are coherent.
And if that were done, there would not be a terrible sameness to all the materials created by our curricula mills. There will be real innovation and competing approaches reflecting new and better ideas.
Do you think it is likely that states will not simply return to their practice of “…producing these awful, vaguely formulated skills lists as they did before….”? I fully expect that they will in my state, with as much creationism in science classes as they think they can get away with.
I suspect that states will return to producing their bullet lists, but publishers will not follow those as slavishly as they are now following the national lists. That will be so if the future is anything like the past.
With regard to the creationism, TE, when local schools and schoolboards have tried to do that crap, they have been challenged in court and hooted down. We have depended upon social sanction and law, not top-down regulation, to root out the nonsense.
For publishers the important bullet lists will be the big markets. Texas I imagine will set the standard again.
Texas includes evolution in its curricula. And there is enormous social pressure, now, all around the country, to do that.
The way to keep these big states from having that sort of power over curricula is to return to site-based management–to do away with the state adoption system whereby a state can determine what programs go onto an approved list. Those approval processes favor monopolists and create a lot of corruption.
The scientific conclusion of evolution is taught as gospel in the science curriculum while faith as in “we all worship the same god” is taught in “social studies”. In one class faith is ridiculed and in another it is cause for unity. Once and for all, do public schools reject a spiritual realm or do they dictate it?
I did say that they would incorporate as much creationism as they could get away with. The courts would be the thing trying to hold them in check.
Not just the courts. A lot of these challenges happen at school board meetings and in the press. Some moron removes a book from the library. The press gets wind of it. There is a flurry of articles about the censorship, and the book gets restored. Social sanction is a powerful force.
There’s never any shortage of people who think that they know best for everyone. And these people get centralized regulations passed, and those act as a drag on innovation. That’s a terrible thing to do when the regulations govern what can be taught and how.
Regulations about what is taught and how are the inevitable results of assigning students to schools by street address. It is only through regulations that the families of students can influence the education process. If you give families another way to have a voice in the education of their children, say by allowing them to choose a school, you will reduce the demand for regulation.
If you give families another way to have a voice in the education of their children, say by creating alternative tracks within public school systems for kids who, after all, differ from one another, then you will reduce the demand for regulation.
I use the term choice school to cover all kinds of schools where the admission system is not the all and only geographic catchment admission system of the traditional zoned school. Good to see that you acknowledge that site based management must be accompanied by student choice of sites.
Well said. The scare mongering has allowed federal over reach to dictate curriculum. I don’t believe, for one moment that there is one “magic” formula to learning.
I not only question the judgment but even the sanity of anyone who would think so.
Again, if you encourage the ongoing creation of competing, voluntary standards, you will get innovation, and ongoing debate and discussion about best practices, and you will get improvement. If you write hackneyed groupthink in stone, you will get mediocrity.
I am a BIG FAN of creating frameworks, learning progressions, and standards. But I think that there should be many competing ones and that they should be voluntary. That’s how you get innovation and continual improvement.
NO ONE IS ARGUING FOR DOING AWAY WITH STANDARDS or FOR HAVING “HIGHER” STANDARDS.
I am trying to explain how you actually end up with standards that are, year after year, “higher.”
You don’t get there by writing mediocre group think in stone.
The result of many years of standards-driven curriculum production in ELA has been that when writers and editors sit down to plan a program, they do not ask themselves,
how best can we teach x, y, and z? what is the best contemporary thinking about this? what do we know about it scientifically?
instead, they ask themselves,
what do the standards say?
And what the standards typically say is something really hackneyed and unimaginative and, frequently, something not in keeping with contemporary scientific understanding of how learning occurs in a particular domain.
In other words, this standards-driven approach, though well intentioned, has had effect precisely opposite those that were intended. The intent was to ensure that materials would be of high, consistent quality. But the actual outcome has been mediocrity, groupthink, backwardness, an enormous drag on innovation in curricula and pedagogy.
The best new thinking about how to teach vocabulary, grammar, writing, reading, literature, etc., does not get instantiated in new materials from educational publishers because the incentive is not to give people newer, better materials. The incentive is to give them whatever they already know, based on those “standards.” If we had taken this approach to developing modes of transportation, we would all still be getting around by horse-drawn buggy.
I wish I had a dollar for every time some educational publisher said to me, when I explained to him or her how kids learn something, “You can’t do that; it’s not in the standards.”
That’s the reality today.
Having one set of mandatory standards, as opposed to competing, voluntary standards or broad frameworks, holds back real innovation.
read my reply to Sarah5565
Bob…love reading your comments. Very helpful. You are “value-added”! Thank you.
That is very funny, WarriorWoman!
Reblogged this on TN BATs BlOG.