You know those national standards that were “developed by the governors” and “state-led”?
A new poll shows that nearly half the public never heard of them.
When asked whether they like the idea of standards that are globally competitive and the same everywhere, 27% said they “strongly support” the idea.
Problems arise with implementation and testing. Also with early childhood education. And flawed teacher evaluation tied to test scores. Other than that…..
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“Problems arise with implementation and testing. Also with early childhood education. And flawed teacher evaluation tied to test scores. Other than that…..”
Love it.
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They are in trouble and they know it. Moratorium proposals are a sign of internal panic. The parent revolt here in NY is the tip of the iceberg that will sink the SSCC. When the two separate rounds of PARCC tests are rolled out next spring parents will resent the secrecy, the lack of transparency, the perceived stealth attack on their children and they will reject this punitive, tests based reform movement en masse. They made a very large bet and are watching their horse come up lame.
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The “Problems arise with implementation and testing.” caught my eye also-I had already “control C’d” it by the time I read Mercedes comment.
But the problems start way before the implementation and testing stages. The problem starts with the epistemological and ontological underpinnings/concepts. There are so many errors in the undergirding of educational standards and standardized testing that render those processes COMPLETELY INVALID, that it is INSANITY ITSELF to rely on those processes to inform us of anything.
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Hart research conducted a survey in July 2013 for AFT that shows how wording matters also the survey respondents. In the survey for AFT, all respondants were parents of public school students and the CCSS policy was stripped of its of brand identity. Overall, the AFT survey suggests parents are far more engaged in supporting public schools, teachers, and principals; a balanced curriculum; less testing; and less business involvement in setting policies than one might judge from media hype to the contrary, including other surveys from Hart.
Even so, paretns are generally suppotive of the idea of common standards.
“By a powerful 72% to 20% margin, parents feel that having most states adopt a common set of academic standards that establish what children need to learn has been a positive rather than negative step. Even self-identified Republicans agree (71% to 22%).” https://www.aft.org/pdfs/press/publicschoolparentsurvey0713.pdf
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“By a powerful 72% to 20% margin, parents feel that having most states adopt a common set of academic standards that establish what children need to learn has been a positive rather than negative step.”
Now let’s ask them what having common standards means or should mean.
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Imagine if we actually had standards that were globally competitive! Yeah, I might “strongly support” that as well!
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I wouldn’t because it is a meaningless statement. I seriously doubt that the 24% who strongly supported the statement could provide a coherent explanation.
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This is exactly why I keep on saying that the villainous politicians and overclass are NOT the problem nearly as much as the apathetic, uninformed, and often fearful public.
We are our own worst enemy. . . . When I say “we”, I am not necessarily referring to Diane’s audience.
But ignorance and avoidance will always be our worst enemy. And that is a pure choice, in a sense.
Of course, blogs like this, people like most of the writers on this blog, and Diane and so many others are starting to turn on the electric switch located under each persons cranium in the general pool of the uninformed and unaware.
A much deeper question we have to ask ourselves is, “Why are we so unaware?”
I remember years ago when a relative of mine, who is basically a very good person, wrote to me to say that she does not read up on or get involved in politics too much because she had three young children and a full time job, and all her focus was on her family.
This is someone who is a public school teacher for many years, and whose son, now 30, is ironically very politically aware as a result of travel, acquiring another language, and living and working in Central America for a number of years.
I’m very proud of him. He is attending school now for his doctorate. He is an amazing young man.
Anyway, I pointed out to my relative that being plugged into the realm of politics was all the more critical now that she DID have children, as her advocacy would enhance the chances of her kids having as good if not better a life than hers.
She absolutely did not get it.
She has a Masters degree and credits above it. I know of SO many highly educated people, and they really don’t understand the systems in place that make up the power structure of our country, and how in turn, they all directly or indirectly dramatically impact our lives. Think of ALEC, think of Gates, I tell them. Think of lobbyists and Citizens United.
Think.
She still teachers, I believe, but is near retirement age.
I wonder if she has changed . . .
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I have stopped contributing to the Democrats. Every week I receive a mailing. The last one requested a reason. I told them I am disgusted with Arne Duncan, Cory Booker and Andrew Cuomo. Let’s see if they do any follow up.
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Me too, except for Warren, Boxer, and Sanders . . . . I have stopped funding.
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This is no surprise to people who closely follow education. There was no public fanfare, although tens of millions was spent by Gates to begin the process, and by states who adopted without going through the legislative process.
The public would have been rightly suspicious (if they knew) of the method used for an education initiative equal to the health care legislation.
Govt. works in its own vacuum, doing the bidding of special interests rather than that of the American people. This is
nothing new and worsen the state of a free, democratic republic.
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It is nothing new, but the “nothing” part is on a spectrum, and in the last 7 years, the disconnect has progressed to the very high end of the spectrum . . . .
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I guess it depends on what “globally competitive” means. If it means that we are trying to emulate countries that pay “sweatshop” labor prices and teach children rote memorization and not creative thinking than we are on the way. HOWEVER….I always thought that American ingenuity was what made us globally competitive. That seems to be the problem. I told some teachers I work with years ago that I thought Americans were becoming too educated for our “aristocracy” to be comfortable with.
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Bloomberg’s Ranking for
MOST INNOVATIVE [COUNTRIES] IN THE WORLD 2014
TOP TEN COUNTRIES and their SCORES.
Note the US is a statistical tie for the #2 spot.
And somehow the United States is the only country on the list that can do this with failing schools and crappy teachers.
1
South Korea
92.10
2
Sweden
90.80
3
United States
90.69
4
Japan
90.41
5
Germany
88.23
6
Denmark
86.9
7
Singapore
86.07
8
Switzerland
86.0
9
Finland
85.86
10
Taiwan
83.52
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What have we innovated? Poverty?
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Nearly all of these so called high poverty kids have multiple pairs of sneakers I could never afford, IPhones and the latest video games. They were apalled that I do not have cable television.
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My wife and I don’t own a television. It’s been 15 years, about.
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Where have we NOT innovated, Robert? Clearly, we have innovated tremendously in industry, in technology, and in popular entertainment, but even if one considers only “high culture,” the innovations coming out of the U.S. have been breathtaking. Europe may have given the world atonalism, but we have it jazz. Europe may have given the world Deconstruction, but we gave it the New Criticism and the New Historicism.
If one considers ONLY the innovations in music made primarily by African Americans, one comes up with a list that includes the spirituals, ragtime, blues, much of jazz, gospel, rhythm and blues, soul, funk, rap, and hip hop.
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the New Criticism, the New Historicism, Reader Response Theory, and Intentionalism.
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When you correct for socioeconomic level, our schools are consistently among the top performers in the world in every area on the international standardized examinations, and certainly, ability to think creatively, innovatively, flexibly is of enormous value. We always rank high in patents and industrial design registrations, and no one can deny that the creations of Americans–in music, art, literature, graphic design, film, fashion, architecture, and in many, many other fields–have enormous influence around the world. We are a creative people, so we must be doing something right in educating our kids.
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You’ll never see this ranking in the headlines. Reformers only want to cherry pick their data. PISA scores are apparently a pretty poor predictor of innovation.
Bloomberg uses the following categories to make their judgement:
R & D intensity; Manufacturing capability; Productivity; H-Tech density; Tertiary efficiency; Researcher concentration; and Patent activity.
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“We are a creative people, so we must be doing something right in educating our kids.”
Common Core constraints, narrowing of the curriculum, and opportunity costs will jeopardize our standing as a world leader in technical innovation. And according to Billy Boy, we’ll have to wait at least 10 years to find out.
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People know about common core when they have kids in school, are educators, or are in a family of educators. If my kid didn’t teach, I wouldn’t know about what is going on in education. Often, I wish I didn’t know; it only upsets me, knowing that I am but a flea to the 1% who rule.
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“. . . knowing that I am but a flea to the 1% who rule.”
NO!
You are not “a flea”. . .
. . . but a herpetomonas flea parasite to the .1% of the 1% who rule.
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In response to myself above: “. . . that it is INSANITY ITSELF to rely on those processes to inform us of anything.”
So why is it INSANITY ITSELF?
Read and Noel Wilson’s never rebutted nor refuted destruction of “those processes” in “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)
1. A description of a quality can only be partially quantified. Quantity is almost always a very small aspect of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category only by a part of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as unidimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing the descriptive information about said interactions is inadequate, insufficient and inferior to the point of invalidity and unacceptability.
2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other word all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. As a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it attempts to measure “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
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