Despite the efforts of the Gates Foundation and others to treat the Common Core standards as an iron-clad document, as tablets chiseled in stone, which may be added to but never changed, the American Federation of Teachers has awarded grants to its affiliates in New York and Connecticut to review, and where necessary, rewrite the standards. The same thing could happen in every state where teachers have concluded that the CC standards are developmentally inappropriate, misaligned with the needs of children with disabilities, or suffer from other defects. This move on the part of the AFT both bolsters the chances of CC to survive and undercuts its ability to be considered “national standards,” since teachers in every state will see different ways to revise them. Teachers will determine whether the standards need revision or whether the implementation was problematic. Let the revisions begin!
Here is the AFT announcement:
AFT Awards Grants for New York, Connecticut Teachers to Have Voice on Standards
WASHINGTON— The American Federation of Teachers announced today it has awarded AFT Innovation Fund grants for teachers in New York and Connecticut to offer solutions to problems with their state’s rollout of the Common Core State Standards.
The New York State United Teachers and AFT Connecticut were awarded the grants in a competition that was announced in July at the AFT convention.
“These grants are about giving educators some seed money to take their ideas about educational standards and convert them into practice. Many educators support higher standards but are concerned about particular aspects, especially the Common Core standards’ poor implementation and their developmental appropriateness, particularly in the early grades,” said AFT President Randi Weingarten. “We wanted to give the people closest to children a chance to do something different, as long as we were all focused on how to help students secure the critical-thinking and problem-solving skills that the Common Core standards are supposed to be about.”
Along with the AFT, the judges were Bianca Tanis, an elementary school special education teacher in New York state and a co-founder of New York State Allies for Public Education; Jeanne Oakes, a presidential professor emeritus of education equity, University of California Los Angeles; and Kevin Welner, a professor in the school of education at the University of Colorado Boulder.
“The grant applicants had wide latitude, including critiquing the Common Core standards or writing new ones. It’s significant that the judges thought the best ideas primarily involved finding better ways to make the standards work for teachers and students,” Weingarten said.
NYSUT will use its six-month, $30,000 grant to make recommendations to address the state’s botched implementation of both the Common Core State Standards and assessments. A union task force will review and critique the state’s math and English language arts curriculum materials, developed by outside vendors, which have received a torrent of critical comments from teachers. These materials are seen as developmentally inappropriate, too prescriptive, and frequently riddled with errors and inconsistencies.
The task force also will scrutinize the state’s process for developing standardized tests; probe whether practitioners were involved in the local implementation of the New York State Common Core Learning Standards and development of curriculum; and consider whether the state’s professional development afforded teachers enough support.
“Given the profound problems with the state’s materials used for the initial Common Core rollout—units that weren’t developed with educators—we’re anxious to roll up our sleeves and get to work on a critique aimed at improving the materials and making sure they are developmentally appropriate for students,” said NYSUT President Karen E. Magee.
The task force’s critique will be shared with state policymakers; the state legislature; parent organizations; student advocates; and education professionals.
AFT Connecticut will address the unmet need for developmentally appropriate instructional strategies for students in the primary grades. The union’s working group will also make recommendations for teachers on how to help students with special needs and students with disabilities reach the standards.
“Teachers have not had enough time to fully understand the standards and develop curriculum, and it’s been especially difficult for teachers with special education students and English language learners,” said AFT Connecticut President Melodie Peters.
The resulting report will be shared with state policymakers and teachers who are anxious to receive Common Core guidance.
Both of the grants announced today also support the AFT’s July 2014 resolution on the Common Core State Standards, “The Role of Standards in Public Education.” Among its recommendations is a call for state-level boards made up of a majority of teachers to monitor standards and to use feedback from parents, educators and students to evaluate and continuously improve the system.
About the AFT Innovation Fund:
The AFT Innovation Fund makes grants to support bright ideas for improving education, health care and public services by state and local affiliates of the AFT. It is funded by the AFT and several national philanthropies.
NOTE: The Connecticut AFT received $25,000 for a six-month period. The New York State United Teachers received a $30,000 grant for a six-month period.
A coauthor of Common Core standards just announced he wrote CCSS to get rid of alleged “white privilege.” That was his goal. So they are political from the start. Imagine if Rush Limbaugh wrote the standards. Would AFT revise them or would it toss it out completely? I’m happy AFT will change things for the better, but shouldn’t Common Core be tossed out completely?
Of course the standards were political. There’s no way they could not be.
But in any case, any sort of standards, unless written specifically by and for people of color, are going to increase, not get rid of white privilege.
What does one teach to get rid of white privilege? What is white privilege? What happened to the dream of treating people based on the content of their character instead of the color of their skin?
Getting rid of white privilege first involves people understanding that it exists. That involves understanding the perspectives of people different from you, which can be done by truly listening to other people, by reading works written by such people, immersing yourself in another culture, and/or relinquishing your power as one who “knows best” and allowing other people – including and especially “those people” to have control. As I said, if the standards were designed and written by poor people and people of color with the needs of poor students and students of color in mind, that would be a definite start in closing the “achievement gap”.
I think the achievement gap is a byproduct of the home, not the school. Kids from good homes do well and kids from bad ones do not do so well, generally speaking. There is plenty of evidence that throwing money at a school to reduce the achievement gap is not very effective. It makes us feel good, and it makes us not have to address the real problems, but that doesn’t make the real problems go away. Addressing “white privilege” will not make the real problems go away.
The “achievement gap” is a direct product of white privilege. America is and was from its founding built on white supremacy. Some people (whites) benefit from it, others (blacks, other minorities) lose. We then turn around and judge the losers for the situation that we as the dominant culture have imposed on them. Until whites as a collective recognize their own role in this cycle, we will never close the “achievement gap”.
So that’s the “white privilege” the Common Core author admitting making the goals of the CCSS?
I don’t think the author understands white privilege (or the Common Core for that matter) if he thinks that CCSS is a way of eliminating it.
Suppose you have two groups of people competing in athletic competitions – one group is naturally athletic and typically enjoys athletic activity enough to keep up with it, while the second group is not naturally athletic and not particularly interested in working at it. If someone were trying to close the gap between these two groups, making the competitions harder – raising the bar on the pole vault, making the races longer, making the basketball basket higher, etc. – would not be the way to do it. It would, in fact, make the gap wider, of course, because these sorts of challenges are the sorts of things that already appeal to those in the first group but would be more likely to further turn off those in the second group. But that’s basically what CCSS is doing. They’re based on things that affluent white people already tend to excel at because it’s been part of their culture since birth.
Closing gaps is never easy (because those in the upper group will always have the advantage of having started out ahead), but making things more “rigorous” is never the way to do it. I guess first you have to really look at how you’re defining the gap and whether it really matters. Is it really important that the slow runners catch up with the fast runners? Is it really important that everyone vault a 6 foot bar? Maybe some people just aren’t into running or pole vaulting. To the extent the gap does matter, you have to find ways to motivate the people in the lower group to want to improve. Why should I work to become a faster runner? What’s in it for me? Especially if there are emotional and identity issues that keep me from seeing myself as a fast runner. And you have to convince them that working at it will have a real effect in their lives and that the playing field will be level. If I’m convinced that I’ll never be allowed to win a race, why would I work at running?
I am, of course, being way to simplistic because I’m limited to a blog post. But if you’re really interested in the subject, there are dozens of books about white privilege. Tim Wise is a white guy who understands white privilege and seems to have a way to present it so that other whites can understand it. That might be a good place to start.
Your posts are excellent Dienne! There is nothing to salvage in the ELA CCCS. AFT is throwing good money after bad yet again.
The achievement gap is not a product of race; it is a product of socioeconomic level. Poor children enter kindergarten almost two years behind middle class students when vocabulary and language development are measured. The deck is stacked against poor children in the womb when you consider access to quality healthcare and nutrition. As it happens, many minority children are poor, live in substandard housing, and lack exposure to many things that will prepare them for school. See:http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-athletes-way/201402/tackling-the-vocabulary-gap-between-rich-and-poor-children
Race and socioeconomics can’t be really separated. There has to be a reason why blacks consistently make up large portions of the urban poor far out of proportion to their percentage of the population. There are only two possible reasons: (a) blacks really are inferior or (b) societal/structural factors that keep them stuck in poverty. I’d go with the latter myself.
African Americans are NOT inferior, and ,yes, discrimination is alive and well in America. A third reason why many black people remain poor is the culture of poverty. Since many poor people in urban areas don’t have any models of achievement, they often fall victim to drugs, gun violence,early pregnancy and other crimes. The hopelessness of one generation is passed down to the next. Consider Jonathan Kozol’s research into the culture of poverty.
Funny that neither he nor Gates nor Duncan have said a word about funding difference between the schools of the privileged and non-privileged. And someone pointed out that the co-author’s school, Deerfield Academy in NH, has not adpoted CC.
So, this looks like a lot of baiting in same vein as that used by the reformers claiming to be modern champions of civil rights.
Well, yeah. . . they want to magically erase years of racial prejudice in policies more related to lending practices, real estate and hiring. Also, if they magically eliminate white privilege in the schools, it conveniently puts the responsibility on teachers to carry out the magic. Nevermind that teachers have been trying to deal with the consequences of racial inequity for years—-there is no recognition for that; only the blame that we failed to stamp it out in schools. So they found a way for us to stamp it out, without anyone else having to get their hands dirty.
I think that’s why it appealed to many southerners, as I’ve written. We are still not much of an integrated culture here in the south (some places more so than others), and I think many people (with hearts in the right place) think/thought CCSS would level the playing field across the races. But come to find out, magic formulas rarely work as planned; especially when the folks expected to carry them out had no say in them.
Since when does an outside entity have to pay for problems with other companies’ products? Shouldn’t David Coleman, not the AFT, be responsible to pay for – and fix – the defects in the Common Core Standards?
Have to say, not a fan of this. Smells like snatching defeat from the jaws of victory…
Well said. Exactly. As Diane says in her intro comments, or as I imply from what she says. This is money thrown into preserving something which was created by the other side in the fight for our kids and our public schools, as part of their campaign. As an AFT member, I can think of far better uses of our dues money than throwing it into what should be considered lost causes. Of course we want the highest possible standards for our children. Of course, too, though, we know that the “reformers” who insist on CCSS have very different goals and methods than we. CCSS are not “somewhat flawed.” Any standards need to start with goals. Our goals are different from theirs. They want lockstep widgets; we want to help develop strong readers/writers/thinkers/actors/community-builders/poets/musicians/world-citizens who read for information and pleasure, who write to inform and inspect and delight, who get along with one another and help one another break out of the very boxes that the CCSS developers try to build around them. C’mon, AFT; we can do better.
agreed entirely, cyn3wulf
So… the hew and cry from government is that the CCSS are immutable and that if the states try to get rid of them, they’ll lose or have to return or repay RTTT money. If we take what government officials have said as true, how does this AFT initiative NOT upset that apple cart???? In other words, if a state is not allowed to repeal common core without consequences, why would the state be allowed to “rewrite” the standards? Isn’t rewriting and changing the original standards tantamount to getting rid of the original standards? Or is it just semantics????????????????
Deborah, I think a state can repeal them without consequences so long as RttT was expired. NC did so.
We still have them, though, in a practical sense (because it’s simply not realistic to switch everything over that fast). I think it makes financial sense to salvage what a state can from their investment (I think I remember even Linda Darling Hammond suggesting that, just in terms of being pragmatic and good stewards). A tremendous amount of expense went into implementing them in NC. AND had we not accepted RttT money, we would have stared down an entire restructuring of our public schools (with, like, half the personnel). NC, from what I understand, needed that money very much.
I think the larger issue is: can DOE continue to have contests with money? Was it allowed to do that only because RttT money was part of the reinvestment money (act)?
The philosophical discussion of CCSS is and has to be very different from the day to day discussion (baby steps, I think). I am a mother with three children who will be going to school each day, so we have to have practical, right now answers. . .not just “NO! To hell with CCSS”. . .(even though NC did vote it out through our G.A.)—-the children will still be coming to school tomorrow and we are still utilizing many of the systems we put in place with RttT. Namely. . .the fact that most of us still have jobs. (This does not mean I like CCSS, but it does mean that it is here. Kind of like having caught a disease in an epidemic. . .you deal with it and figure out how to keep it at bay or even away once you are healed). But also I suppose some people consider the actions of ACT to be like a relapse, in this case and with this analogy. . and I can understand that.
Because I like mental exercises in “what ifs,” I think not having RttT money and imagining not having had it, opens some important and significant questions about essentials in public education. I have been saying for two years I wish that we hadn’t taken it. I also suppose, had we not, that I would not have been teaching the last two years because I came back in in 2012, and I doubt they would have been hiring music teachers if we had been short $400 million. But at the same time, if we hadn’t spent so much of it on technology infrastructure and testing, I’d be more excited. As it were, I think it was probably a poison apple.
But really. . .what if we hadn’t had it? What if the other states who took that money had not? What would have happened? Did we put off inevitable and needed changes by accepting RttT money? Did we prolong situations that should not have been? Did we avoid important questions of priorities by accepting that money?
Oh how I would love to know what other North Carolinians and those in other states whose states took RttT money think about those questions.
White privilege, eh? OK..Then someone should tell my Asian students that they don’t have a chance. Of course most of them go to Ivy League schools and are enormously successful. They come from cultures that value education and don’t make excuses. Many of my Asian students don’t speak English at home, but they know how to work hard! How are they succeeding with all this white privilege? It’s a mystery! I don’t recall my Asian students (Chinese and Indians) complaining about “white privilege.” They just work. There could be a lesson there for you.
Your Asian students’ ancestors were never enslaved. They never suffered Jim Crow level of discrimination and segregation. They’re not likely to be jailed or shot for “resisting arrest” simply trying to talk to a police officer or walk on the street in front of their own home or come home from the store with Skittles and iced tea.
How familiar are you with the history of Asia and its countries? I’m thinking that perhaps there are many more people than you realize that are quite familiar with slavery and segregation. Comparing what people has suffered the most is probably not productive although I do not mean to take away from the shameful way African Americans have been treated. I think we all know that if racial and religious prejudice disappeared tomorrow, there would still be poverty. We can work together on ways to deal with that.
Busywork.
You’re succinct. I like that!
Great one word description to another folly.
I guess someone forgot to tell the Asians that they didn’t have a chance because of “white privilege.” You better get in contact with the Indian and Asian communities right away! Their kids could start disrespecting their teachers, cutting classes and complaining how unfair life is right away. They could also demand more social programs for themselves. All of that hard work, studying and respecting teachers and education is overrated! You guys got to get on this right away. They don’t have to do all that work and studying. How dare those Asians think that they can succeed through hard work and studying! They have to learn how things work in America.
White privilege? Common Core is about revenge?
Scary how many people on this thread are OK with that.
And such irony since the people most disadvantaged by Common Core are the underprivileged.
Anne, I agree. The biggest losers on CC tests are children who are poor, children with disabilities, children who don’t speak English well. CC will give more privilege and status to the most advantaged students. That is the nature of standardized testing. That is its DNA.
Diane,
Bob Braun’s Ledger Facebook page had entry w. link to The Record/northjersey.com Nov 10 article “Christie appoints members of panel to study school tests.” It took CC 3+ months to name panel (because he was out of state campaigning RepGovAssn) yet the panel is supposed to make recommendations re testing by end of year.
Panel includes state-appointed Superintendent Marcia Lyles, Jersey City, who is a Broad Academy alum. (Did she know Christopher Cerf, now at Amplify, when they worked in NYC Public Schools?) I noticed there’s 1 English teacher, 1 Social Studies teacher but didn’t see anyone identified as math teacher. Perhaps the community college person has math ed background?
I’m not OK with that.
But do you mean revenge on whites? or revenge on blacks? I’m confused.
Hi Deborah:
I do not understand that CCSS and states in your sentence below. Which is “THEY” that you mention to return money to WHOM? Is it the American Public Education FUND, or “SEVERAL national PHILANTHROPIES”?
“the hew and cry from government “officials” is that the CCSS are immutable
and that if the states try to get rid of them,
they’ll lose or have to return or repay RTTT money”
Please get back to the CORE of the principle in the process and procedure to create NATIONAL STANDARDS. These standards will need the input of all educational expertise, certain duration of time to be tested/implemented its effectiveness, and the SPECIAL CLAUSES to allow its revision according to the applicable need of students…
As a result, the last sentence in this thread is worth to critically examine:
“It is funded by the AFT and SEVERAL national PHILANTHROPIES.”
Also, as Deborah mention in her post that
“the CCSS are immutable”, and
“In other words, if a state is NOT ALLOWED to repeal common core without consequences, why would the state be allowed to “rewrite” the standards?”
“Isn’t rewriting and changing the original standards tantamount to getting rid of the original standards?”
Who will answer these questions for this website’s readers? Back2basic
So the standards aren’t national if AFT revises them? BTW- where are these funds coming from?
http://atthechalkface.com/2014/04/09/behind-the-ccss-corporate-curtain-gates-turn-and-the-aft-innovation-fund/
Am I reading this correctly? AFT wants to make the curriculum materials developmentally appropriate (a good thing) without changing the developmentally inappropriate standards that gave rise to the developmentally inappropriate curriculum materials (not a good thing)???
AND… So… does this go hand-in-hand with NYSED’s independent effort / grant to “hire” full-time educators to “enhance” the engageny curriculum modules in Grade K-12 Mathematics, and Grades 9-12 English Language Arts (ELA)? If so, won’t there be an overlapping of work? Bureaucratic waste and inefficiency at its best. http://usny.nysed.gov/…/common-core-institute/home.html
It appears to be about producing proposals for revisions to CC curriculum materials and professional development in connection with the CC rollout. It’s certainly not about “rewriting the standards.”
In terms of inefficiency, that’s probably not going to be a serious problem. We’re talking about a $30,000 grant, so I don’t see much actual work happening here.
The AFT is ever trying to be conciliatory. In the case of CCSS it is like putting lipstick on a pig. In the end you have pig wearing lipstick, nothing more.
Agreed. Just noticed that I used the same epithet.
And with CCSS the pig has the lipstick on the back end.
The phrase “You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear” came to my mind.
But this is kind of insulting to pigs, who are intelligent animals.
Reblogged this on National Mobilization For Equity.
Not impressed, especially given Randi Weingarten’s and the AFT’s behavior through all of this. I suspect this is nothing but way to put lipstick on a pig.
ridiculous
If I wanted to write a great work of philosophy, I don’t think I would take the tack of starting with The Secret and revising it.
If I wanted to write a great novel, I don’t think I would take the tack of starting with The Valley of the Dolls and revising it.
Bob,
I am curious about your reaction to this story about the ELA CCSS: http://www.npr.org/blogs/ed/2014/11/11/356357971/common-core-reading-the-new-colossus
Bob,
I am suspicious of analysis that portrays the previous approach as flawed and the innovation as the best thing since sliced bread. I was reading an Eric Carle book to a kindergarten class the other day. I asked if anyone had traveled anywhere and one kid replied, “Newark.” He had so little understanding of the concept of travel that he did not understand that travel usually involves going somewhere else. Poor children are at a disadvantage due to their lack of a variety of life experiences no matter what the experts come up with. In a seventh grade class, a student had to read an excerpt about a miller. He did not know what a mill was and my explanation was inadequate. I always refer back to The Little Red Hen for my introduction to grinding grains. There is no replacement for a home environment emersed in literacy.
Sorry! That comment was for TE! It is too early! So much for my reading comprehension!
My reaction, TE, is that this story was clearly written by someone who hadn’t a clue what English teachers have done for decades under the influence first of explication du texte and then of the New Criticism but had augmented in light of subsequent critical approaches and perceptive critiques of the New Critical approach (see, for example, E. D. Hirsch, Jr’s Validity in Interpretation and Stanley Fish’s “Is There a Text in This Class?”)
It’s amusing when these amateurs make comments about teaching English. To see why I am amused, imagine someone writing that because of David Coleman’s new standards, doctors are now basing their diagnoses on analysis of symptoms.
Bob,
When you say amateurs do you mean the reporter or the teachers that are mentioned in the story?
TE, by writing such a story and making such a claim–that this is some sort of sea change in English teachers’ practice–the reporter reveals complete lack of knowledge of what that practice, in fact, was. I have played major roles in preparing many of the most widely used K-12 literature programs in the country. This programs have ALWAYS contained text-dependent, close reading questions. The most common format followed was derived from Bloom’s taxonomy, starting with factual recall questions, proceeding to analysis questions, and ending with synthesis questions. These have been called by various names, but that has been the standard operating procedure for many, many decades. That Coleman and crew didn’t kno.w this is just another indication of the depth of their ignorance of the field that they usurped.
And that would be obvious enough if Coleman had been asked to write new standards for the practice of medicine (something that he knows just as much about). If some idiot came along and said that doctors should start making diagnoses based on symptoms, the reaction would be derision.
Textbooks are conservative. Even though New Criticism had come under blistering and well-deserved attack by literary scholars and theorists for most of the second half of the twentieth century, it remained the dominant mode, and that has long been reflected in our literature textbooks and in classroom practice, where the USUAL approach to a work was to go part by part through it and look for evidence to support claims. One can verify this experimentally. Simply do a question type count in any basal K-12 lit text.
But what Coleman and crew instantiated in the CCSS was not even New Criticism. It’s what I call New Criticism Lite or New Criticism for Dummies. It results in pointless formalism.
And so undercuts the whole purpose of written works, which is to communicate.
In “The Old Trouper,”” by Don Marquis, an elderly “theatre cat” turns to Mehitabel, that cat of ill repute, and says,
both our professions
are being ruined
by amateurs
These lines I think of every time I think of Coleman and the CCSS in ELA.
Meaning as intention on the part of an author and meaning as significance to a reader are, of course, very different things, and both rely heavily on context. Texts depend upon context. They do not exist in a world of their own creation, as New Critical dogma in its most extreme man”trainings” now happening around the U.S.) have it.
BTW, I used the word “idiot,” above, in its root sense. It derives from the Greek idios, “one’s own.” The hubris evinced by Coleman and crew is nothing short of breathtaking.
In other words, the CCSS did not invent close reading. Teachers have done this with students FOREVER. But it did introduce a lot of nonsense. Teachers around the country are now going to “trainings” in which they are being told that the context of a text is unimportant and should be ignored, which is a complete misunderstanding of how language works. If someone says, “You better tie up those loose ends,” it makes a difference whether that person is a macrame instructor or Tony Soprano talking about a recent hit. Texts exist in context, and they mean both in the sense of embodying intention and in the sense of having significance. The amateurs who wrote the CCSS hadn’t a clue about any of this, clearly. They knew nothing of actual practice and of this history of hermeneutics.
This is just one of the raft of propaganda piece being churned out by the CCSS propaganda mills.
This is like setting out to write a geology textbook by revising Ignatius L. Donnelly’s Atlantis: The Antediluvian World.
Ridiculous
This is just another of the innumerable (and well funded) efforts to keep the CCSS ticking.
One of the most absurd of the deformist claims is that the utter failure of the CCSS in ELA is due to “botched implementation.” Oh, hey, the problem was not that these “standards” were themselves prescientific and amateurish and backward. The problem was with how they were implemented. This would be darkly humorous if so much were not at stake for kids.
Bob Shepherd, people used to say that Communism was a great idea but it was never implemented correctly, anywhere or anytime.
: )
The Bush administration also claimed that the US debacle in Iraq was simply due to “botched implementation”
That seems to be a common excuse (you might even say the “Common Core” of excuses) for things that were a very bad idea from the getgo.
The common core is unfixable. The AFT throwing money at fixing it is ridiculous. The posts at the top that the common core was meant to address white privilege sounds absurd to me. From all that I’ve read about common core (and I’m not a teacher, not a parent to an active student) was that they were inappropriate for the grade levels being taught, but also that math was unnecessarily complicated while at the same time dumbed down. If affluent students attend private schools, like the Christie, Obama, Gates, Broad, Walton children, and they get to attend Princeton, Harvard, Yale – how do the common core standards which were dumped onto public schools address white privilege? By making public school kids dumber? This went part and parcel with attacking teachers, and teachers’ unions, and slashing school budgets to the bone, and states imposing a 2% tax cap so the difference could not be made up by municipal taxes, etc., and the testing contracts to Pearson, and the curriculum contracts to Pearson, and the tech fees to get the tech infrastructure – all of this went hand in hand. Also, the attacks on tenure and LIFO. All in tandem.
Common core should be dumped, not revised. The testing accompanying it should be dumped along with it.
This has been a long-running, long-standing, concerted effort by the billionaires, and our elected officials, who have often rigged the outcome, especially in instances like NJ were Cami Anderson was anointed to her position, and is like a steamroller, with the consent of the powers that be, turning the schools upside down.
TFA and TNTP and all of the usual players were and are responsible for the mess that is common core, the charters, the vouchers, the testing, etc. For the AFT to throw monies at revising common core, collected monies from its union members, is inconceivable to me.
Is the AFT going to take a stand on teaching to the test? On grading schools that can only fail under these policies so they can be closed and replaced by management or charters? Etc. I’m preaching to the choir here.
Bottom line: The bleeding has to stop, and AFT has been complicit, has it not?
When did the AFT become the propaganda ministry for the Common Core Curriculum Commissariat, and why does it miss no opportunity to advance this egregious nonsense?
Breathtaking in its condescension and profoundly ironic given the abysmal quality of the CCSS in ELA is this line from the statement above:
“Teachers have not had enough time to fully understand [sic] the standards.”
unbelievable
What I do not understand is why the authors of these “standards” have not long since been laughed off the national stage by people who actually know something about the teaching of English.
The proper response to the CCSS in ELA is not revision but derision.
I’m not finding the sense to any of this. How can anyone “rewrite” standards that are copyrighted? And, then, if you’re rewriting the modules to make them developmentally appropriate, how does that correlate with the assessments which will be aligned to the original standards? Anyone rewriting the assessments?? I also get a little (a lot) incensed when I hear someone say we want to “help students secure the critical-thinking and problem-solving skills that the CC standards are supposed to be about.” Seriously? Where’s the proof, the evidence, that that’s what CC is about? Also … are we to believe that none of our students ever before in time were able to secure those skills? Come on. Hope Mike Mulgrew doesn’t hear about this; somebody could get hurt!
AND, the evaluation systems of teachers is meant to punish teachers who want to teach, not the TFA scabs. The TFA scabs will be long gone before they are fired. Oh, they’ll move on to greener pastures, or open up or head a charter school. Lookie here: http://louisianavoice.com/2013/03/05/teach-for-ame…
Great link Donna! You rock!
NJ Teacher. YOU rock. Thank you for teaching our kids. I’m hopeful things are going to change.
TFA could afford to re-hire Cami Anderson. What a blessing that would be to Newark’s school system.
TFA could afford to re-hire Cami Anderson. The best thing that could happen for Newark Public Schools!
Though Weingarten may claim that she is no longer accepting Gates money for the AFT Innovation Fund, the language of this press release shows that it is typical Randi-esque misdirection: the overwhelming references are to the implementation and rolltout of the Common Core, and have little or nothing to do with “revising” them.
Weingarten may or may not be accepting Gates’ money, but she’s still collaborating with him, and is as duplicitous as ever.
Yep…
This doesn’t seem to be much of a change from the previous AFT Innovation year. There were several grants then to folks working on ways to improve implementation of CCSS. Although this year’s RFP promo asked for more [“Do you want to critique standards and the research behind them? How about offering feedback on the implementation of standards in your state or community?”], the grants announced are both for more improvements to implementation. Perhaps that’s because a 6-mo $30000 grant would be insufficient to re-invent this particular wheel. Or perhaps AFT had no intention to actually confront the issue head-on.
As an administrator for ELA curriculum at the district level, I only wish I could be eligible for one of these grants. I spent all day today unwrapping the Common Core Standards for Reading Literature as part of my curricuum revision project for the district’s secondary schools. Everytime I read that narrow New Criticism lens through which the standards have been framed, I cannot help bemoaning that there will be an outright genocide of the experience of learning to encounter good literature that will occur if teachers adhere strictly to these standards.
One reasonably cannot remove the “human” from the humanities. A good poem, play, or story, is meant to be devoured until it permeates our very being and seeps out through our pores in all of its unmitigated glory. Sure, an appreciation of its aesthetics has its role and function, but it should not be looked at as the one almighty lens through which a proficient reader must experience work of literature and art. There is a quintessential, sometimes visceral, certain something that makes a piece of art in any of its form stick with us so that we carry it around through life as a good friend when we are in times of need. We read and have read throughout the centuries for an elemental quest to understand who we are–our strengths and our frailties–and our place in the world as well as the place of others who came before us. We should not read simply to perform an autopsy on a living breathing work and render it a pile of carrion on the butcher’s floor. For those of us who need further affirmation of my views on the issue, I can only point to poet Billy Collins, whose poem Introduction to Poetry has been the friend I’ve turned to today, so I could validate the burden of this stone I am carrying in my soul after wallowing in the narrow space of those standards all day long.
Introduction to Poetry
by Billy Collins
I ask them to take a poem
And hold it up to the light
Like a color slide
Or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into the poem
And watch him probe his way out,
Or walk inside the poem’s room
And feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to water ski
Across the surface of a poem,
Waving at the author’s name on the shore.
But all they want to do
Is tie the poem to a chair with a rope
And torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
To find out what it really means.
” There is a quintessential, sometimes visceral, certain something that makes a piece of art in any of its form stick with us so that we carry it around through life as a good friend when we are in times of need.”
Thank you, Jean! What a wonderful way to put this.
This one of Collin’s poems is a friend of mine, too.
Thank you, Jean! Yes yes yes
Bob,
How is it that I knew you would be my kindred spirit regarding my views as stated above? Thank you, my friend.
Jeannie
I have quoted that Billy Collins poem on this blog several times over the past couple years. Once, Dr. Ravitch picked up my post of the poem as a main entry on her blog. It was a great pleasure to see it again. I just finished reading Collins’s Aimless Love–his collected poems. I am convinced, now, that Collins is one of the greatest poets to have written in English. The collection stuns, again and again. So much beauty, so much humanity, so much craft, so much wit, so many insights, such technical virtuosity! Imagine a fairytale magical window. When you look through it, you see not through your eyes but through those of another subjective consciousness at moments of presentness, mindfulness. This is what Collins’s volume is. He lives up to his self-designation as our “Secretary of the Interior,” and he teaches us how to be secretaries of our own.
I read “The Names” to my special ed reading classes. They were dead silent. He writes such powerful poems.
And I think, Jean, that that metaphor of the window that changes how one sees is a good one for describing, generally, what great literature does. Wallace Stevens challenges the conventional understanding of the idea that “Things as they are are changed upon the blue guitar.” We cannot check our impressions against some noumenal reality. All that’s available to us are those “sounds” that the guitar–the perceiving consciousness–makes. Sometimes, that music is heart-breakingly beautiful, as it often is in Collins. This is all stuff that Stevens learned from Husserl.
And thank you, Jean, fellow spirit!
I was a software developer for many years and one of the most important things I learned is that if something is poorly designed to begin with, it makes no sense to try to “fix” it because all you end up with is a hack and the more you try to “fix” it, the more of a hack it becomes.
Better to just chuck it and start over with a proper design.
But that’s really just common sense (to anyone who has any) and applies to pretty much any project one undertakes.
If the foundation of your house is cracked and sinking into the mud, there’s no point in sinking a lot of money into the upper floors.
I don’t know where else to put this, but oh my god – read this bit of nonsense rhetoric from some foundation think tank no doubt:
http://thefederalist.com/2014/08/18/how-community-organizing-busted-a-union-and-sparked-an-education-revolution/#disqus_thread
Donna, this article comes from a rightwing site. Anti-union, anti-public education.
Diane, did what the article state really happen or is it propaganda? You think these idiots would spend their time and money cheating on their wives instead.
“Would you like wings with that?”
We need to modify it
To give the thing a twist
You may think you can fly it
But wings do not exist
This is not the first time the AFT/UFT has done this. They did this when standards were first introduced in NYC. And it seemed a big waste of our dues because nothing major was changed. It also proves that the AFT is standing behind Common Core. So not impressed with this story given the track record of finding ways to spend our dues without asking us.
This is but one more attempt by Randi Weingarten to 1) appear relevant and 2) to masquerade the fact that she sold her constituency far, far down the Common Core river.
Way too little, and way too late.
This is all for show. The NCLB waiver agreement between NYS and the feds is still legally binding. CC standards + CC tests + CC (and local) test scores used to evaluate teachers + student test data harvesting. Not sure how the AFT thinks they can circumvent the LAW? Unless Arne has signed on to this, it is just an attempt to quell the backlash with patronizing actions. Opium for the teachers.
Today, there was a long report on “Common Core Reading” on NPR, which claims to be a news vehicle. The report claimed that before the Common Core, students only did low-level skill drills. Then, later, it claimed that before the Common Core, students only listened to lectures and took notes. Utterly false on both counts. But there was absolutely NO vetting of this press release from the Common Core Curriculum Commissariat that was passed off as a news report. A lot of money is being spent, right now, on such stories.
I sometimes think that it’s hopeless. There is just too much money behind this crap.
Even more troubling, for you, is that many of these stories are true….
The CCSS in ELA are like a crude, childish drawing. There are plenty of people squinting at them and pretending that they are a Vermeer.
You will notice that statements in support of this amateurish “standards” never discuss them in any detail. They always make blithe generalizations–under these standards, students now look at evidence in texts and do close reading, whereas before they simply [insert mischaracterization here–they gathered around the text and tried to talk to it, they ignored the text and wrote personal essays about their feelings]. Propagandists for the CCSS in ELA don’t talk about specific standards because these are indefensible.
Of course, the state “standards the preceded them were just as bad, but there were important ameliorations. They weren’t copyrighted and set in stone. There were competing standards people could look to. Because they weren’t national, curriculum developers didn’t take them as seriously and did not treat them as complete curriculum maps. People worked aggressively to change them. Open processes were followed in some states during periodic standards revisions. Today, if one dares critique Lord Coleman’s List, one runs the risk of being fired.
cx: “THESE amateurish standards,” of course
One of the terrible ironies of all this–and there are many–is that the CCSS in ELA have not been subjected to close reading. They don’t stand up to such reading.
The CCSSO could have simply released its six “instructional shifts”–broad guidelines within which true innovation would occur, but doing that would not have met the true objective of these “standards,” which was to create a single national bullet list to which to key educational software (teaching modules and tests). In other words, doing that would not have advanced the business plan, and make no mistake about this, CCSS was and is a business plan.
cx: nd make no mistake about this, the CCSS were and are a business plan.