Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute has written a smart article about the selling of Common Core. Its advocates use similar talking points, he says, but the most frequently heard lack evidence. You will hear these five points not only from corporate executives and Chamber of Commerce types, but from all CCSS supporters.
Hess lists five of what he calls half-truths or exaggerations.
1. He says it is an overstatement to say that the Common Core is “internationally benchmarked.”
2. The standards are not truly “evidence-based.”
3. No one really knows if the CCSS will make students “college and career ready.”
4. Are the standards “rigorous”? Hess writes: ” More often than not, the case for the Common Core’s superiority rests on the subjective judgment of four evaluators hired by the avidly pro–Common Core Thomas B. Fordham Institute. These four hired evaluators opined in 2010 that the Core standards were better than about three-quarters of existing state standards. Not an unreasonable judgment, but hardly compelling proof of rigor.”
5. We need national standards because leading nations have them. Hess notes that low-performing nations also have them.
I confess that I enjoy it when someone as smart as Rick Hess shows his independence from the Beltway consensus. A sentient person thinking for himself.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Rick Hess is a big half-truth. In November 2013, he published a book on CC, about how to “seamlessly integrate” it:
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Shows how the worm is turning!
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The worm is still a worm on this one:
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Still a worm, among worms:
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“5. We need national standards because leading nations have them. Hess notes that low-performing nations also have them.”
Given that most of the “leading nations” are the size of individual US states or even cities (e.g., Singapore), this statement only augers for state and local control.
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I don’t trust AEI. Hess may have yelled “the emperor has no clothes”, but this country has become a nudist camp.
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The fact that AEI is switching sides only shows how much the right hates CC. Like most rats, AEI is trying to elbow its way to get off the sinking ship first.
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CC will be rebranded and sold as something else with “new improved! 30% more learning inside!” snazzy labeling. It is all about American enterprise too these guys, not students and learning.
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AEI is not switching sides. AEI accepted Gates money to play the CC “critical questioning” game. And after taking that money, Hess published a book wit this promotional:
How can the Common Core complement and not conflict with school improvement efforts already at work across the United States? How can it be seamlessly integrated into accountability systems, teacher preparation and development, charter schools, and educational technology? This timely volume brings together prominent scholars and policy analysts to examine the pressing issues that will mark Common Core implementation. Whether or not you agree with the standards, the Common Core is coming, and this book will help policymakers, practitioners, and other stakeholders anticipate the challenges and take steps to address them.
In April 2014, AEI had Gates on to “explain” CC:
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Correction: Gates’ CC “explanation” at AEI was in March 2014.
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TAGO!
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“. . . this country has become a nudist camp.”
Only in my fantasies!
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Benchmarking is the new catch phrase now in reform circles. I see it popping up more. It sounds official, serious, and corporate-y without really saying anything. Benchmarking is a follow the herd mentality. Plus just comparing to another country does not mean 1) your measures of success are valid and relevant, 2) the benchmark criteria are the reasons for success, 3) the assumed reasons for success are transferable with the same results.
The standards on their face, to those of us who must use them, are disjoint, inconsistent, poorly written, and devoid of reality. They look like they were written after one too many beers.
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Hedge fund managers understand benchmarking. They’ve consistently failed over time, when benchmarked against performance and volatility of the market, which are the only measures that matter in the financial sector.
Peter Mallouk’s recent book exposes their “lies”.
The fact that they drag down GDP is their most significant abuse of the American people, with education tampering, as their second most egregious ploy at profit-making to enrich only themselves.
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In tribute to deutsch29, I remind viewers of this blog what Dr. Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute said on his blog about CCSS in December 2013:
[start quote]
In truth, the idea that the Common Core might be a “game-changer” has little to do with the Common Core standards themselves, and everything to do with stuff attached to them, especially the adoption of common tests that make it possible to readily compare schools, programs, districts, and states (of course, the announcement that one state after another is opting out of the two testing consortia is hollowing out this promise).
But the Common Core will only make a dramatic difference if those test results are used to evaluate schools or hire, pay, or fire teachers; or if the effort serves to alter teacher preparation, revamp instructional materials, or compel teachers to change what students read and do. And, of course, advocates have made clear that this is exactly what they have in mind. When they refer to the “Common Core,” they don’t just mean the words on paper–what they really have in mind is this whole complex of changes.
[end quote]
Link: http://deutsch29.wordpress.com/2013/12/28/the-american-enterprise-institute-common-core-and-good-cop/
[Note: the above link is to deutsch29, which contains a link to the original blog piece by Dr. Hess as well as other valuable information.]
Yes, a self-styled “education reformer” is trying to help other self-styled “education reformers” save their bacon. There’s just one catch…
His comments then, and his comments now, have one fatal flaw: he is actually expressing ideas that have a modicum of factual basis, experiential support, and logical consistency. Facts, experience, logic and consistency are not in the playbook of the vast majority of the leading promoters/advocates/beneficiaries of the business plan masquerading as an education model called “education reform.” Like their compatriots that ran the Potemkin Villages of the late Soviet Union, data will be subject to whatever enhanced interrogation wants it to say, as long as it meets the only metric that makes ₵ent¢: $tudent $ucce$$. Generally speaking, what they say and claim at any one moment is unimportant; what counts [literally] is that it moves them ever closer to that pot of gold at the end of the EduRainbow they claim as their own.
If nothing else, ya gotta admire their grit and determination. Win, lose, or draw, they will stick to their Marxist principles to the bitter end:
“Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them…well, I have others.”
¿? Yes, the famous one. Groucho. Not Harpo, Zeppo, Chico or Gummo, if that’s what you’re unsure about.
😎
P.S. But it is significant to hear a “canary in the mine” peep from inside the education establishment that all is not well among the “thought leaders” of the “new civil rights movement of our time.”
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Observing the behavior of so-called education reformers, their arrogance, condescension, deceptiveness,venality, opportunism and groupthink, the only “benchmark” that comes to my mind is of one creating a sinister hybrid clone of Enron and North Korea.
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I do agree that standards are an essential part of designing a curriculum for the various content area, but we should notice that CCSS do not address geology, biology, physics, chemistry, history, economics or geography content. They are focused on math, reading and writing. We still have a long way to go to make a complete set of standard for the whole country. And, yes, CCSS does not account for all the other factors than make significant learning happen: motivation, hard work, good nutrition and sleep, expert teachers, etc. For me, point #5 speaks the loudest. Even with perfect standards we still need to get our children to be proficient or master those standards.
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Eric, Ohio currently has 3,203 standards on the books, including 1,600 CCSS (counting parts a-e). That’s about 267 per grade level. We are drowning in standards created by discipline-centered groups who have written standards in the hope that grade-level (not grade span) standards will command more curriculum time.
It is instructive to take a retrospective look at the standards written under the Goals 2000 Educate America Act (H.R. 1804, 1994). At that time, K-12 standards were written in 14 domains of study, 24 subjects, then parsed into 259 standards, and 4100 grade-level benchmarks.
A dispute over the status of history versus social studies ended in no “approved” standards for the latter, but 1,281 grade level standards for history. In those history standards, facts are supposed to matter. Even so, students were (falsely) expected to know that Mary Cassatt was a famous American Regionalist painter. (Wrong. The artist lived in Paris for most of her life, is best known as an Impressionist). Source: http://www.mcrel.org/standards-benchmarks/docs/process.asp
If Ohio’s current standards are typical, there has been no crosschecking of the sets of standards for duplications, synergies, contradictory expectations, feasibility, developmental coherence, or simply dead wrong content.
The CCSS standards are surrounded with all of the mandatory rhetoric of the day. They are strictly academic. They are rigorous. Students must master them on time, grade-by-grade with no regard for incremental understandings that may later coalese as insights and understandings.
You seem to want national standards for every subject, as if the sum of all the separate standards that can be conjured by groups who have an interest in this or that form of knowledge will also make educational sense. You can never get from standards to any coherent and feasible curriculum by doing work on separate sets of standards. That should have been the lesson from the Goals 2000 project.
I am not in favor of national standards. I would like to see a lot more discussion about what’s worth knowing, and getting this generation to wonder about ,and try out under the auspices of public schools. I’d like to see more concern about who gets to be in on that discussion and whether the nation needs any one-size-fits-all standardized educational programming with perfected alignments between standards, instructional content, and tests. That’s the direction the standards and test mongers want to take us and that part that really bothers me.
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I am aware of Ohio standards, but the CCSS for math have a total of 387 standards from K – 12. High school has 159. That seems pretty reasonable to me.
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“I do agree that standards are an essential part of designing a curriculum for the various content area, but we should notice that CCSS do not address geology, biology, physics, chemistry, history, economics or geography content. They are focused on math, reading and writing. We still have a long way to go to make a complete set of standard for the whole country.”
You shouldn’t agree!! And I hope we never come close to arriving at the last sentence of that statement.
Eric,
You need to read and understand the complete vacuity that is the concept of “educational standards”. Noel Wilson has proven the COMPLETE INVALIDITY OF EDUCATIONAL STANDARDS AND STANDARDIZED TESTING. That invalidity renders any conclusions “VAIN AND ILLUSORY” as stated by N. Wilson.
Read and understand why in his never refuted nor rebutted 1997 work “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. And 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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Then to what do we hold our young people accountable. Don’t you think every child should be able to write a cogent essay that forms a reasonable argument and cites example from their own and other’s experience? I certainly want my own children to know exactly what is expected of them when they enter a class. If we just say you need to be able to do math when you graduate from high school that’s like saying a carpenter should be able to frame a house. If the construction industry had no building codes then contractors would make a home that is unsafe.
I am not talking about grades here. A grade is not a standard. It is not even an indication of mastery, at least when we use a % to indicate it. I grade whether or not a child can master a skill or process, whether he can keep working through a difficult problem despite not getting the correct solution even on the third or fourth time or whether she can use appropriate and effective resources to write a research paper. Standards are not the problem; it is how they are used to help students achieve mastery at something.
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Rick Hess shares a chapter with Fordham Institute former pres Chester Finn in my corporate reformer whistle blower, A Chronicle of Echoes
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Sorry the image above is soo large. I thought it would just post as a link.
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I am underwhelmed by the comments of Rick Hess. Anyone who had READ the CCSS all the way to the footnotes, or looked at the website, and otherwise done due diligence before buying the spin would determine it is a fraud.
Consider this: Between 2000 and 2002, Achieve conducted interviews with prospective employers and higher education officials in a few states to gather examples later cited as “evidence” to support various claims about college and career readiness.
This work, undertaken, under the banner of American Diploma Project, is dated and limited in scope. For information about Achieve’s Research see http://www.achieve.org/Research.
For the list of studies “consulted” in support of claims that the Standards are internationally benchmarked, see the CCSS for Mathematics (pp. 91-93). A high proportion of these studies are not peer reviewed publications, and some are not fully annotated. Comparable information on international benchmarking of the ELA Standards appears in Appendix A, p. 41.
The benchmarking is entirely for show and to boost the “credibility” of we must do more to be globally competitive. However, during the roll-out of the CCSS, the World Economic Forum published The Global Competitiveness Report, its annual ranking of over 130 countries on 12 “pillars” in an economy. The pillars are: institutions, infrastructure, macroeconomic environment, health and primary education (pre-collegiate), higher education and training, goods market efficiency, labor market efficiency, financial market development, technological readiness, market size, business sophistication, and innovation. In the 2010-11 report, Switzerland topped the overall ranking, followed by Sweden, Singapore, and the United States. The United States fell two places to fourth position due to the failure of financial institutions, not educational performance. See http://www.weforum.org/issues/global-competitiveness
I constructed a spreadsheet to map the major and subordinate categories in the CCSS and to place the quantity of the standards to be met at each grade level, in math and ELA, and the Literacy standards (including parts a-e).
The result was a total of 1,620 standards to be met, with absolutely no rationale for their distribution by grade level.
One of the examples for a grade 9/10 ELA standard was a direct lift from a community college assignment.
Geometry is the only math topic treated in every grade.
There is no explanation for labeling and grouping all studies in the arts under ” technical subjects”
The average number of standards to be met verbatim in just two subjects is 91 for grades K-2; 109 for grades 3-5; and 147 for grades 6-8. In theory, one lesson, unit, or course can treat multiple standards–but these standards were written with no regard for the rollout of new standards in the sciences, or the arts, or the disciplines grouped under social studies, or the incessant calls for more standards bearing on tech savvy and financial savvy, and so on.
Drowning the nation’s students and teachers is a sea of standards is not a solution to anything. We do not need more standards. We do not need the CCSS sucking up the time and resources for a complete education with a balanced program of studies in the arts, sciences, and humanities, including at least one foreign language still the gold standard for curriculum excellence.
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“Global Competiveness Report…U.S. fell two places due to failure of financial institutions.” Until the financial sector is disciplined enough to take responsibility for their drag on the U.S, economy and until the blind bureau economists admit their failures, both groups will be parasites on the productive people of our nation.
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And it doesn’t end there. The assessments that my district is implementing combine standards thoughtlessly, making them even more difficult. “After reading ( text) analyze how the author’s use of language contributes to the central idea of the text.” Oh, this is for seventh grade– and the sixth grade one is equally convoluted. I am waiting for the student who explains that the author uses language because she is writing a story; if she had been painting she would have used pictures.
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A perfect example of all that is wrong with CC English standards. A list of abstract and subjective skills that are un-teachable and un-testable.
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Though I used to lambaste him in the comments section of his old EdWeek column, I kind of admire Rick Hess –he does call out BS when he sees it. And he writes lucidly.
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The Common Core Kool-Aid Drinkers Challenge
Critical thinking skills, the very foundation and main selling point of the Common Core standards, I contend, are not only un-teachable, but un-testable as well. If you think I’m wrong, show me. Present just one amazing lesson, one fantabulous activity, or one earth shaking discussion that teaches students “how to think”. Just one. That really works. One that teaches thinking skills so amazing that they can be used successfully in almost any circumstance, for nearly any issue, or to solve just about any problem. Truly transferable thinking skills. If you’re convinced that I’m just an old dinosaur, yelling at David Coleman to get off my classroom lawn, please prove me wrong. Just copy and paste your best lesson plan for all us doubters to see. I won’t hold my breath. And please don’t post any constructivist/discovery activities. Presenting activities that require students to think outside (or inside) the box is not the same as teaching them how to think. Come on all you true believers, put down that glass of Kool Aid and give us your best shot.
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