Steven Singer is a teacher. This post comes from his blog. It was tweeted by the Badass Teachers Association.
He writes that the best evidence against the Common Core can be found in the classroom. The Common Core is based on close reading and the “New Criticism,” which discounts the thoughts, feelings, and life experiences of the reader.
Visit Singer’s classroom in this post and find out how his students interact with what they read. Close reading is meaningless to them. They react from their heart and their gut. They think and they feel, and that is how reading comes alive for them.
Singer leads a Socratic Seminar for troubled teens.
He writes:
“If Coleman and the architects of Common Core could be in my classroom, they might see the error of their ways.
“Allowing students ownership of the text – allowing them to take their proper place as part of a complex relationship between the text, author and the world – is so much more engaging an experience than just being an authorial archeologist.
“When we insist on strict adherence to the author’s message – and only that – we create a false objectivity. Language Arts is a subject that is at most times open to interpretation. But Coleman makes it a guessing game to get the “right answer.”
“Literature is not math. We shouldn’t try to turn it into something it isn’t.
“This is why at the beginning of the year, my students take my innocent questions about the meaning of a text as an affront. They see me as just another adult trying to trick them. They assume I’m trying to get them to guess what I’m thinking – about what the author was thinking. There has to be only one true answer, they suppose, and if they haven’t been good at guessing it in the past, why try now?
“It takes a while, but through lessons like the Socratic Seminar, I try to broaden their horizons, to show them that they have a vital place in this dynamic. Without a reader, a text is nothing but words on paper. Without a larger societal context, those words lack their full meaning……
“Coleman and the Common Core designers would know that if they had ever led a classroom of students. But hardly any of them are educators. They’re bureaucrats, politicians and millionaire philanthropists.
“They’re missing the true picture.
“Because the best evidence against Common Core is denied them.
“Because the best evidence against Common Core is in the classroom.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Singer goes right to the heart of the matter…to discount the experience of the
author and the reader assures a lack of heartfelt response…to say, for example,
that Hemingway’s World War I wounds or Steinbeck’s work on farms, or McCourt’s
years as a NYC public school teacher has nothing to do with their created work is
nonsense… likewise the notion that the reader should ignore his or her own
emotional response is to strip literature of its emotional power…but Coleman already
has told us that “no one gives a shit as to what teenagers think.”
Coleman and company do not understand how the humanities differ
from the hard sciences. They want a formula rather than an emotional encounter.
They not only don’t understand the humanities but they also haven’t the foggiest notion about real science.
You are right that they are looking for magical “formulas” for educating children, but these are not based on valid research, not even when they are applied to eduction outside the humanities (math, for example).
They pretend to be applying the scientific method to education but nothing could be further from the truth.
What they are actually doing (apart from using statistics and sciencey sounding buzz words in meaningless ways) is disregarding the large body of research and disregarding what scientific organizations (like American Statistical Association and National Research Council) are telling them (about VAMs, for example) and simply pursuing their own ideologically based crackpot “theories” (about tests, VAMs, early childhood ed, etc) under the mantle of “science”.
I agree that there are many problems with the “English” part of the CC. I think that the absurdities in the Elementary Math are much more atrocious and obvious!
Common Core has it’s flaws. It is less than year old, and we as teachers have known about it coming for more than 3 years. We embraced it when it was just ours, but now we oppose it at every opportunity. We have even let our own level of professionalism slide by allowing homework assignments with pore direction go home just to enrage parents rather than put child first and ensure that the instructions are clear.
If not Common Core, then what? Looking back on the last twenty years of our system we have shamefully let the child down. We claim to put child first and we all do it for the love of the child, but the evidence we put forth is saying something else. We teach our children that it is wrong to pick up their ball and leave when they don”t get their way on the field, but again the evidence is saying we do not do what we preach. Sticking with what we had IS NOT WORKING, either. We are 21 out of 35 nations in education and some of those are 3rd world countries. Think about that for a minute. We are in the 60th percentile. Our A+ students are D students against the rest of the world and last I checked our children need to compete in a global market and their success in that market dictates our country’s economy; so we are hurting the children on at least two fronts. It is time to embrace Common Core give it our all, lend our voice were we can to make it better. The other option is to keep bashing it and allow them to make us the scrape goat; which right now is very easy.
Go read REIGN OF ERROR and get back to us.
Q, forgive me but the international test scores say nothing about the quality of our schools or our teachers or our students. Don’t believe Michelle Rhee’s hype. Read Yong Zhao’s writings on this subject. Did you know that in 1964, our students participated in the first international assessment of math and scored dead last? Did you know that over the next 50 years, our nation outperformed the other 11 nations tested on every metric. Please don’t be fooled. You are simply mouthing the narrative of Arne Duncan, Bill Gates, Eli Broad, Joel Klein, and the others who want to turn public education over to market forces, setting them up for privatization and destruction. The Common Core does not respond to the two biggest problems in American society: poverty and segregation. So long as we ignore the nearly 25% of children who live in poverty, our schools cannot compensate for the burdens imposed on them. So long as we ignore segregation, our society and our schools will suffer. Why don’t you read “Reign of Error” and educate yourself before you mouth the reformers’ narrative?
Q, just to possibly save you some time and money: there’s hardly anything about segregation in “Reign,” other than an acknowledgment that it is bad and somebody ought to do something about it.
This vagueness was likely intentional. Segregation is a nasty side effect of the district model, and doing something meaningful about it would upset a whole hell of a lot of applecarts.
You are wrong, Tim. I cited the studies done by Gary Orfield at the UCLA Civil Rights Project. They show that segregation is growing in US schools, and that charters exacerbate segregation. The book cites the studies by Berkeley economist Rucker Johnson, who studied the life trajectories of African American men and women who attended desegregated schools and found that they benefited in education, health, and income, and their benefits were passed on to their children. Did you read the book or did you read the Cliff Notes version? Yes, segregation is bad, and it has been made worse by federal, state, and local policies. Read Richard Rothstein’s work (also cited) and you will learn that segregation did not emerge all by itself, but as a result of federal, state, and local policies. Our society made a commitment to decrease segregation in the 1970s and we did (at the same time, the achievement gap was reduced). In the past twenty years, with the rise of charters and vouchers, we have abandoned any commitment to desegregation. Do me a favor, Tim, and don’t tell me in the future what is in my book when you have no idea what is in it. I do. I wrote it.
Segregation aside (which Diane covered nicely and to which I have nothing further to add), what’s relevant about REIGN OF ERROR to Q’s post is Diane’s extension discussion in REIGN of international test scores, the U.S.’s historical comparative scoring thereon, and the relevance thereof to other political/economic factors. In short, Diane points out that the U.S. has never ranked at the top on international test scores, but that has never stopped us from being a world leader, politically or economically. Basically, international test scores mean little in the real world, especially considering that several of the countries that outscore us don’t test their entire population of students.
Diane, Chapter 31 is a relatively short chapter that does not propose much in the way of tangible solutions. The Orfield data is invoked mainly to smear charter schools–no one knows better than Orfield how deeply and extensively America was segregated before charters came along, and how inconsequential a role charters have played in making things worse. No mention is made of the fact that the low-poverty districts you so frequently champion in “Reign” and on your blog are often located near or next to districts besieged by segregation related poverty.
The work of Rothstein and Kahlenberg shows that many district schools are not educating their fair share of at risk learners. In densely populated metropolitan areas, this is truly a zero-sum game, and if there were solutions proposed to this dynamic in “Reign” that I’ve missed, please point me in the right direction.
My recollection is that Orfield compares charter schools’ demographics with the demographics of the district as a whole. That’s definitely what I remember from the Orfield’s report on New York that came out this year. It’s not the most instructive comparison to make in a city that, like New York, has very large districts with white student populations that tend to be concentrated in certain neighborhoods within the district. In districts like that, the district-wide statistics suggest a level of diversity that doesn’t actually exist in the neighborhoods many (or perhaps all, in the case of the Bronx) charter schools are drawing students from.
It is great that we moved the needle. Often when one thinks they are the best the tortoise pulls past to take the lead. As someone who had worked in both a leading country and ours I can not ignore the truth. We must, ” Accept the truth from whatever source it comes”. If we want to exam that closer we should break it down by state and then district. Yes, then we will see that some schools are on par internationally while others are dismal. I favor having one national exam and doing away with all others state exams. I don’t favor doing away with exams since without measuring you can not judge where you are and where one needs to move the needle. None of us would favor doing away with testing on cars, infant toys, seat….
I have my own mixed emotions on testing. As a former Engineer, business consultant and Human resource manager with deep talent management ties do in part to my teaching experience makes me a numbers guy. This will in part undermine my message above, but if a student gets straight A’s is the student actually being challenged? Did they show up already with the skill set being taught? Without measuring a students starting point we can not know their level of growth and understanding from our teaching. Our schools and thinking by themselves is flawed. We claim to put child first but then group by age. We teach to class and age rather than to child. Before you say, “I offer differentiated teaching….” did you establish bench marks by predefined grade/age standards or did you evaluate 2,3 or even 4 grades higher? Did you look for lateral knowledge…
We expect our students to take critique and yet we are adamantly opposed to it when it seems to undermine our concept of self greatness and worth. Compared to the school down the road, yes we might be awesome or another class or another district or state…But we no longer compete in small circles. We now compete internationally. Universities and businesses are now hiring a disproportionate amount of leaders from country’s that have out performed us in the PISA studies. Even news stations are now using international experts over our own; coincidence or reality? Do we really want to leave that to chance?
Yes, we have issues with poverty and it does affect many children as does single mother hood and un-engaged parents. They all contribute to the state of school more than any other factor, but to say that is politically incorrect. We don’t need band-aids we need cures. Blaming private, magnet or Charter schools for steeling the the children that are easy to teach does nothing for our cause. If anything we should be happy to have classes requiring less differentiated teaching allowing us to teach to a high common denominator and that should be to everyone’s advantage.
Lastly, in all this who is speaking for the TAG students who are being destroyed in our current school system?
“We embraced it when it was just ours”,
Considering teachers didn’t develop the program, I’d call that a bald faced lie.
@ Diane Ravitch, care to correct TC here?
Q,
Common Core was not written by teachers. The writing committe had more people from the testing industry than anywhere else. There is some dispute about whether there were zero classroom teachers or one or three, but there were never many. CCSS was not led by teachers.
Here is a documentary for Q to watch if Q has an open mind and is willing to learn: “Building the Machine – The Common Core Documentary”
What is a classroom teacher? When talking about public schools, that would mean that if you were retired, a university teacher, a former teacher turned school administrator that you would not qualify as a classroom teacher. It is semantics.
@Lloyd Lofthouse. Yes thank you, I have not seen that. It raises some interesting questions. They biggest of which is that it is produced by an organization that makes up almost 50% of American students. An organization that is exempt from having to use common core and an organization that believes the money should follow the student…Home School Legal Defense Association. Yes, you just plugged a film produced by an organization that wants it’s share of student money to follow the student back to mom and dad. BTW, they too are out performing us. They have better college scores, higher college graduation rates and the worst information, are you ready, “Many of their teachers (Mom and Dad) have high school educations and no formal teach experience. That certainly is not going to help our cause 😦
I have no idea what you are talking about when you claim that “Many of their teachers (Mom and Dad) have high school educations and no formal teach experience.”
Are you talking about substitute teachers, corporate charter schools or public schools?
Are you talking about TFA recruits. Did you know that more than 97% of these TFA recruits are gone within two years from schools that have the most at risk kids and two-thirds leave teaching forever. Most of the few who stay in teaching, transfer to schools in affluent committees with low or no children living in poverty.
Here are a few more facts to consider:
The U.S. has the 4th highest college graduation rate in the World and by the age of 25, about 90% of Americans have a HS degree or its equivalent. In fact, the U.S. has almsot three college graduates for every job that required a college degree.
How about Finland and Singapore, countries that often rank at the top of the international PISA tests of 15 year olds? But what happens after the age of 15?
In Finland:
66.2% graduate from secondary school—that’s high school, and that breaks down by academic and vocational HS graduation. 54% of that 66.2% graduate with an academic HS degree and 45% of that 66.2% graduate with a vocational HS degree. In addition, only 25% of the population has a college degree.
That leaves 33.8% in Finland without a HS degree.
In Singapore:
66.6% graduate with a HS degree and 47% go on to earn a college degree.
That leaves 33.4% of people in Singapore without a HS degree.
In addition, we must ask ourselves, if the U.S. education system is such a mess and in need of corporate reform, why are so many international students flocking to U.S. Schools?
More than 800,000 international students, nearly half of them from China, India and South Korea, were enrolled in a U.S. college or university last year, a 7.2% increase over the previous year
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/11/11/international-students-and-study-abroad/3442733/
In addition, the corporate fake school reform movement is based on two frauds. I wrote about those two frauds here:
http://crazynormaltheclassroomexpose.com/2014/10/16/two-politically-correct-scams-supported-by-corporate-owned-media-that-threaten-democracy-in-america/
There is one more fact to consider. While it is true that many new teachers start out without much classroom experience—-that is true with any job that hires someone starting out in any field—-that changes with time. New teachers who survive and stay in teaching gain their experience by teaching and staying in the classroom in addition to the help they get from veteran teachers who have lots of experience. Within a few years, teachers who were fresh and new become experienced teachers. Every new job requires a learning curve.
In fact, I witnessed one 20-year veteran teacher from a private who came to the public high school–that paid more with benefits—where I taught. The shock of working with so many children in gangs and those who lived in poverty drove that teacher back to the mostly white, affluent, private school where she earned much less without benefits, before her first semester ended in that public school. Even with 20 years of experience as a private school teacher, she could deal with all of the challenges that children walked in the classroom with every day.
And that private school teacher had a college degree, because you can’t teach full time, under contract in California’s public schools without a college degree in the field that you teach in. In fact, even with that college education and teaching credential, California required teachers to keep going to school to add to their skill base and they have to take accredited courses and prove that they took them to keep their credential that they ave to renew every few years. To keep your teaching credential in California means you have to keep going to school and never get a break.
Then what? How about actual teaching? Your global rankings are meaningless and have no context. Perhaps Americans can put aside the paranoia and fear, then focus on administering an education system based on sound reasoning, peer reviewed evidence to conclusions, and trust with respect for educators, again.
Your argument is we are somehow “failing” and need to do something. That collective floundering around is magnified by the lemming-over-the-cliff approach of Common Core. Would you produce the same reasoning over, say, cancer treatments? Maybe medicine is failing, and some federal agency should walk into a Walgreen’s and just start pulling whatever looks good from shelves, mix it together, and inject into patients. Hey, at least we are doing SOMETHING! Right?
The other absurd argument is “just because we are already doing the wrong thing for x years, does not mean we stop doing what is wrong”. Why would you embrace something that lacks sound evidence, was developed in a vacuum without actual teacher input, and lacks the flexibility and legal means to modify and “make it better”?
“We have even let our own level of professionalism slide by allowing homework assignments with pore direction go home just to enrage parents rather than put child first and ensure that the instructions are clear.”
Are you sure that those aren’t directions for pouring it on????
“We are 21 out of 35 nations in education and some of those are 3rd world countries. Think about that for a minute. We are in the 60th percentile. Our A+ students are D students against the rest of the world”
Perhaps you should think about averages for a minute (or two) and read
“You’ll Be Shocked by How Many of the World’s Top Students Are American”
There has been another PISA test since that article was written, but the key point is that there is a lot more to understanding test scores than meets the eye.
And then there is the question of whether test scores even mean anything, from an economic standpoint, for example.
If our A+ students are so poorly educated, why do international parents send their youngsters to US colleges and universities?
I think you just added validity to the facts. Parents send their children to US Universities because our Universities are highly regarded in the business world; note that doesn’t mean they are the best. Bands in Austria who play folk music love to play in America because once they do they are propelled to the front of the hiring line, could say the same thing holds true.
American universities number one complaint about incoming freshman…”They are ill prepared in high school and as a result they need to take classes that they should of already had in high school”.
I can’t change the performance of our schools of alter that data, so we need to accept it for what it is, as unpleasant as that may be, and dig in to make big advancements and catch up to the rest of the free world.
No matter the trillions of facts and evidence educators provide, the Coleman’s & CCSS for Dummies Crowd will NEVER…EVER… change their minds as long as the $M are rolling their way and the future looks bright and golden for their Reformer-Investors.
Nothing else matters.
Our experience, credentials, research and our children are harmed by this…nothing matters to them!
If Mother Theresa and the Pope were protecting our children, the Reformsters would dismiss them and make fun of the way they dress. Nothing we have ever known or experienced in our careers prepares us for this.
Sociopaths are UnReachable!
We keep trying, but the layers of the character onion just has more layers, tons of layers without a decent core. Ain’t there!
Hope for some unknown thing to stop this insanity! The end of Gates’ $B is not or never near, his need to control the universe is not or never near.
The one thing that could work is for parents, millions of them, to rise up and refuse the continued abuse of their children. Soon, Please!
I actually like the math, but the truth is the english is dead-boring for 6th graders. It’s dry as dust. They’re giving it the ‘ol college try at my son’s school, but I don’t think it’s going well.
He doesn’t understand why they’re chopping everything up and reading two lines at a time, and I can sense he’s fast losing patience with it. There’s a lot of sighing going on and he’s a fairly cheerful person, generally. I know his teacher, his older sister had her and she’s good, so that’s not it. It’s just grim, plodding stuff, which is a shame for him because he prefers math so he wasn’t oriented towards english and could have used something appealing and less dull there.
Sorry. I disagree, at least high school. The CCSS math standard is fragmented, inconsistent, and tells teachers what, when, and how to teach. That is a curriculum. Some standard material is in the introductions and not standards. The standards lack coherent threads of concepts throughout. For example, rigid motions are great, but some students need alternatives to learn congruence. Does that mean if they learn the concept but it is presented as rigid motion on the test, they are penalized? Hence, the tests are the true standards. And I cannot analyze them. Implementing the standards for my below grade level students is an exercise in frustration and futility.
The problem is that a small group of people decided in a vacuum what “other people’s kids” should know, then imposed their baseless ideas on a nation. So if math is OK, then others may say that close reading in first grade is OK to them. It is not the content (which is subpar), but the process and inflexibility imposed upon the teacher as the fundamental issue. Let me teach my students without some faceless politician or ivory towered expert telling me I don’t know what I am doing and need infantalized with the equivalent of an educational time-out corner.
I’ll defer to you, I’m just seeing what he brings home but it’s very much like what they were doing since about 3rd grade and he seems okay with the math.
I agree about the process and the heavy-handedness and lack of trust implicit in the heavy hand. I would resent that too if I were you, particularly coming from people who make it a habit to criticize teachers and use that as a political ploy to get what they want.
I’m playing around with opting out of the tests, because if I take the CC people at their word, it’s not about the tests, right? It’s about the standards!
Okay.
Then there shouldn’t be a problem if he doesn’t take the tests 🙂
It is not about the tests, it is about buying the technology to give the tests. Follow the money.
The fundamnetal flaw of the CC standards revealed for all to see. When something is clearly not working in our classrooms, teachers have a very strong instict to fix it, change it, revise it, tweak it. improve it, clarify it, To do whatever it takes to help students master facts, concepts, or skills. This is in our DNA. Yet CC – Cast in Concrete. So now what, the vast majority of ELA teachers in the country see thaty close reading isn’t working and are stuck with it forever? Ratios and per cents in 6th grade not working? Too bad; cast in concrete.Seriously? This is a policy that violates one of the things we do best as professionals – to fix what’s not working; and if it can’t be fixed we STOP doing it. Bear in mind that many ELA teachers are being forced to ignore very successful approaches in lieu of this failed pedagogy. Time to take a stronger stand against this nonsense. You can comply, or you can defy. The choice is yours
“Allowing students… to take their proper place as part of a complex relationship between the text, author and the world – is so much more engaging an experience than just being an authorial archeologist.”
“…Without a reader, a text is nothing but words on paper. Without a larger societal context, those words lack their full meaning……”
The above is long & well-established contemporary practice – read a NYT book review (of fiction or non-fiction), a respected work of literary analysis, op-eds in your daily newspaper. Coleman has reached back 75 yrs to a radically narrow form of lit-crit (which countered an earlier method that had roved far afield from the text)– he recommends observation & commentary more appropriate to a legal tract.
Coleman clearly had a bee in his bonnet about sloppy, self-indulgent writing, & backfit an entire standards structure to suit this whim, undermining in the process pedagogical practice crucial to the development of reading comprehension. This is what happens when one individual is given a free hand to ‘make things happen’. Let’s save gov by fiat for dealing with Ebolla.
“The best evidence against Common Core. . . ”
. . . is Noel Wilson’s never refuted nor rebutted “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.
By Duane E. Swacker
Drones, robots and computers have no thoughts, feelings, and life experiences. All the person sitting at the command center or key board has to do is click the right button to tell the robots or computers what to do, and these automation obey without question.
Consider this: Does Bill Gates want to be the one who controls the command center for the rest of humanity after they go through rigorous, grit induced CCSS programming to make sure they have no thoughts, feelings or life experiences of their own?
If it isn’t Bill Gates, will it be the Walton family, Eli Broad, Bloomberg, Murdock, the Koch Brothers or those hedge fund billionaires? Maybe they are all willing to share that job.
As a teen I was profoundly influenced by the great poets and writers. Lord help me if I had grown up learning how to “chunk” text into “digestible bites” and fill out templates for “argumentative” and “informational” essays based on bone-dry informational articles that I could care less about and were graded on cold rubrics devoid of any human component. Yet our youth are beginning to hate Language Arts classes so much that their joy of reading is Gone With The Wind. It doesn’t take long for even the novice teacher to know that when a child is motivated to learn, nobody needs to measure “growth.” It comes in its own nuanced way. And that reaching even the most poverty-stricken child begins when she connects to other people from other places through universal experiences. That’s the power and truth and beauty of literature. We mustn’t let this power go gently into the night . . .
How can we even engage with people who would have computers grade
essays, who use business and bottom line thinking as their guide, who analyze great
lit like a problem in Geometry…and who are elitist to the core and who have written
off kids from poor working and middle class schools in a futile race to the top.
And who have manipulated test scores and tests to celebrate perceived failure rather
than help at risk students and schools with lower class size, tutorial help and
physical protection.
Saxon Math author Stephen Hake has published 2 parts of a 3 part series to my blog regarding his views on Common Core. I think he brings a unique perspective by his past background as a teacher, text book author, and publisher. Remember John Saxon was ballistic against NTCM standards, so it is interesting to see his long time partner speak up about this subject.
I hope you find it interesting and don’t mind me linking it on your blog.
http://wp.me/p4nApj-1j