Laura H. Chapman is a consultant on arts education who contributes frequently to the blog. Here is her response to the Common Core standards:

 

Rather than simply “correcting” the inadequate Common Core standards, they should be reconstructed and redesigned from the ground up.”

 

NO. No. No. They should be tossed–folded, stapled, mutilated, burned. They are based on lies about “college readiness,” and they are based on lies about “careers.” They are based on lies about being “state led.” They are based on lies about “international benchmarking.” They are based on phony baloney ideas about “text complexity,” and a one-size-fits-all notion of grade-to-grade “learning progressions” and on-time “mastery” right out of a factory model of education–no child left behind on the assembly line.

 

These standards are the production of Bill Gates, Inc…., aided by for-hire workers and federal appointees in USDE who are so dumb they think standards do not have implications for curriculum.

 

The process of generating the 1,620 standards (including parts a-e) was so uncoordinated that nobody seems to have noticed that the only topic in math taught at every grade is geometry, with not an ounce of supporting rationale for that emphasis.

 

Prior to grade three the standards in English Language Arts (ELA) and math are off-the-charts wrong-headed, free of any this basic understanding: No one can simply reverse engineer back to childhood what someone may earnestly hope kids will “know and be able to do,” if they graduate from high school. Education is not an engineering problem. It is not the same as training.

 

These standards are intended to suck the vitality out of instruction in all other subjects, including the sciences, arts, and humanities. All are now subordinate to and are treated as if they must be “aligned” with the Common Core. Non-sense. Should be the other way around so students have a reason to read and calculate–content and problems and unknowns in these broad domains of inquiry. The CCSS distract attention from the historic mission of sustaining a democracy through education centrally concerned with informed citizenship, leaning what life offers and may require beyond getting a job and going to college.

 

Teachers and kids have been drowning in a sea of standards since 1997 with the “Goals 2000″ project on behalf of world-class standards, K-12. Standards were written in 14 domains of study, 24 subjects, then parsed into 259 standards, and 4100 grade-level benchmarks. Some scholars at McRel guessed it might take 22 years to address them all. And, of course, they were not coordinated or fact-checked–(I found some strange and wondrous errors and emphases, like a zillion history standards).

 

Right now in Ohio, counting the CCSS, we have 3,203 standards on the books, about 265 per grade. We also have “accountability year” that runs from pretest “data” reporting by November 1 to posttest “data” reporting by mid April so the “evaluators of the data” can be delivered well-organized reports from every teacher.

 

The typical school year is no longer 180 days, 36 weeks, 9 months. It has been severely truncated by the practice of data mongering, and time stolen for testing and test-prep.

 

Now add some insult to injury by DARING to define “effective” teaching as the production of “a year’s worth of growth;” by suppressing the fact that “growth” is a pretest to posttest gain in test scores. The concept of “a year’s worth of growth is one of many statistical fictions teachers are dealing with. Many of the others are a by-product of an extraordinary marketing campaign to install the CCSS in every school.

 

The CCSS is a profit-making bonanza. yesterday at OfficeMAx I had the opportunity to buy a grade-level set of the CCSS, $20 per grade, boxed and formatted for a teacher’s use to appease the principals and other evaluators who will have their checklists to see whether you have posted the “expected learnings” for the ELA and math standards. These poster-like cards of the CCSS are plasticized for durability and coded with the CCSS numbering system for easy data-entry on the accountability spreadsheets that each teacher will need to “populate” with data.

 

Just say no to the CCSS and the whole bundle of “worst practices” it has spawned.