Tom Hoffman, a blogger in Rhode Island, took up the challenge to explain what is wrong with the Common Core ELA standards. He does it here. He goes through them in the spirit of “close reading,” and they read like a nineteenth century approach known as “parsing,” whereby the student analyzed a sentence or a paragraph or a story in minute detail, identifying its grammatical and syntactical features. Today, promoters of the Common Core call it “critical thinking,” but if you go through Hoffman’s analysis, it sure looks like parsing, in which students are expected to read not for the joy of ideas, words, and stories, but for the interpretation and interaction of minute (and dubious) details and (possible) literary devices.
After going through exemplar texts and the questions based on them, Hoffman writes:
I am not seeking out edge cases; I’m just trying to apply the standard as written to the exemplar texts provided. Try it yourself.
And I am not reading pedantic detail into the standard — pedantic detail was explicitly put there by the authors. They chose each word with specific intention (or with careless indifference, take your pick). The unambiguous message is that in third grade, precisely, teachers, textbook authors and testing companies should focus students on explaining how key details support the main idea.
Would you ever, while reading a book on dinosaurs with your child, pause to ask how a detail supports the “main idea” of the book? Could you blame her if she looked at you as if you were an idiot? What is the opportunity cost of steering 3rd grade teachers all over the country to spend time with their students not discussing the wonders of dinosaurs, medieval feasts, sprouting seeds and soap bubbles, but instead dragging their students through inane pseudo textual analysis? Does anyone really believe this is necessary to get them ready for college courses a decade in the students’ future?
In seeking more information about the author, Tom Hoffman, I found that he writes a blog and has a lot to say on subjects that interest me. His blog is called TuttleSVC. Here is a post about the issue of whether kindergartners should be expected to count to 100 (part of the Common Core). Frankly, I don’t see why it matters whether 5-year-olds learn to count to 100 or whether they learn when they are six, even seven. Hoffman seals the deal by posting the kindergarten expectations in Singapore, where students are expected to count to 10!
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on Kmareka.com and commented:
Rhode Island’s own Tom Hoffman featured on Diane Ravitch:
Diane, you are so awesome at getting the message out there about what is happening across this wide country in terms of the insanity of all of the REFORMS. What has to happen next??? What should we be doing as individuals and grass roots organizations! I feel like the information is out there and we need to act. Damn, enough already!
Sent from my iPad
>
Dpayne, join the Network for Public Education. Locate your state resistance group and help them. Write letters to the editor. Speak up. Stand up.
These questions and this analytical thinking would be good for teaching a child to write an essay, that is talking about the things a good 5 paragraph theme should contain. But as far as literacy goes, being able to read and understand literature, it would not matter what the story was about. The meaning of the story, the information presented becomes irrelevant. This type of analysis would not develop a love of reading or create a desire to read. You could use it on any type of article or story. It would teach a good bit about the mechanics of writing however, so I could see a ues for it, but not as a way to to teach reading and certainly not to young children. Second grade? Really?
Here is the version marketed as Personalized Learning. The asterisks refer to the CCSS compliant assignments. In addition to across-the-grades redundantancies, this personalization, illustrates how all subjects are made subserviant to a generic reading skill and seem to be “covered” by short snippets about various topics. The curriculum maker is, or is impersonating, an automatic generator of easy-to-score assignments with the really, really ingenious, truly remarkable, addition of two worksheets. This is an overview for the teacher or parent. Links go to the readings.
“The main idea, also called the central idea or main point, is the primary concept of a passage. It represents the essential point that the author is trying to convey. The main idea may be clearly stated as a sentence. The main idea is usually reinforced by a series of other points or details which support the premise of the main idea. These are called supporting ideas and may also be stated or implied. Please use any of the printable main idea worksheets below in your classroom or at home. Just click on the worksheet title to view details about the PDF and print or download to your computer.”
After reading a brief passage about STORMS, students are prompted to write the main idea and 3 details. Grade Levels: Kindergarten & 1st Grade, 2nd & 3rd Grade,
Students read a short paragraph about CARNIVALS, circle the main idea and write 3 details. Grade Levels: Kindergarten & 1st Grade, 2nd & 3rd Grade,
A short passage about SPOTS THE BARN CAT. Students circle the main idea from a list of options. Grade Levels: 2nd & 3rd Grade, Kindergarten & 1st Grade
A MAIN IDEA WORKSHEET about the book, ANNE OF GREEN GABLES. Students write the main idea and two supporting ideas. Grade Levels: 2nd & 3rd Grade, 4th & 5th Grade
Students read a passage about PLANETS and then write the main idea and supporting ideas. Grade Levels: 2nd & 3rd Grade, 4th & 5th Grade
**Students read a passage from Rudyard Kipling’s book, THE JUNGLE BOOK, and write the main idea in the large oval and two supporting ideas in the small, linked ovals. Grade Levels: 2nd & 3rd Grade CCSS Code(s):RI.3.2
**Students read about the fascinating MEERKAT and write down the main idea and supporting ideas. Grade Levels: 2nd and 3rd Grade CCSS Code(s):RI.3.2
**Students read about the DOLPHINS and write the main idea and two supporting ideas on the lines provided. Grade Levels: 4th & 5th Grade CCSS Code(s):RI.5.2
**Students read about the LOUISIANA PURCHASE and write the main idea and two supporting ideas on the lines provided. Grade Levels: 4th & 5th Grade CCSS Code(s):RI.5.2
**Students write the main idea and three supporting ideas after reading a short passage from the book, THE WONDERFUL WIXARD OF OZ. Grade Levels: 4th & 5th Grade CCSS Code(s):RL.5.1
A MAIN IDEA WORKSHEET about the book, 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA. Students write the main idea and two supporting ideas. Grade Levels: 6th – 8th Grade
A reading passage about BEN FRANKLIN. Students read and write the main idea and supporting ideas. Grade Levels: 6th – 8th Grade
From http://www.k12reader.com/subject/reading-skills/main-idea-worksheets/
This doesn’t relate specifically to this post but rather to the article on Huff post today, which I haven’t seen anywhere on the blog. I posted a comment there (assuming it got sent via FB – I haven’t gone back to check yet). It does relate to the general topics that I see so often here. I made one correction which is where I referred to her first book and somehow “on” appeared instead of first. Following is a copy of my post on Huff Post:
Diane Ravitch is to be commended for her tireless work and devotion to public schooling. Her ideas for a new accountability “system” sound wonderful and I couldn’t agree more with the sentiments behind them. However, these are not new by any stretch as she has documented in her first book, The Troubled Crusade”, published in 1983, over three decades ago. The Progressives she identifies in the book from as early as the second decade of the last century and the free school advocates of the late 1960’s through the early 1980’s, with some even surviving today have very similar objectives, although seldom spelled out in the same detail. She is repackaging some extremely old ideas to illustrate the barrenness of NCLB, Race to the Top, and the strategies of the privatization pushers, charter school proponents, and others who believe in testing non-stop, cutting out anything that isn’t strictly academic in nature.
Regrettably, I have to report that schools are not going to become “halls of joy and inspiration”, no matter how many people write such articles and fight for creativity, autonomy, inspiration, etc., etc., as long as people delude themselves, as Ms. Ravitch does, about the gap between schooling and education and the factors inherent in compulsory attendance. The sky is not the limit, unfortunately. When children are in school because state law allows no other realistic option and when schools MUST be authoritarian, bureaucratic, and politically lethal enclaves due solely to those intrusive laws, and when the mythology about schooling remains a powerful underlying force in society, schools will be immune to the kind of changes that we would all like to see.
Our systems are immutable because they are systems. False accountability schemes and competition between winners and losers will always be endemic to those systems under the current paradigm. Ms. Ravitch doesn’t want a wholly new paradigm because she is too enamored of and trusting in the old paradigm. That is very sad. She could be a great advocate for education instead of schooling that presumes to be education.
What are you saying in this comment? We should abolish the public school system?
Please see my comment to Diane, below (or above, or wherever it might be).
Barry Elliott, this sounds like the tired old song of “deschooling.” Letting each child decide whether they want to be literate, want to learn history, want to do anything is not a good idea. We raise up citizens–or try to–to sustain our society into the future and hopefully to make it better. You are describing an approach that would support the Matthew Effect, where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. It is not a new idea, and it is not a good idea.
I came across Tom Hoffman’s blog a while ago from some education blog’s link. What I love about his perspective is that he has worked with educational technology. The
tech boys in charge live in a dream world where all schools have up-to-date computers, enough bandwidth, and enough techs to keep things running. They also underestimate this tech generation, thinking they can stay one step ahead of the mischief these kids can do.
Cross posted at http://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Tom-Hoffman-Do-You-Want-t-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Challenge_Common_Sense_Core-Curricula_Diane-Ravitch-141113-77.html#comment519994
with comments taken from the Nov 13, Pelto post
Hoffman does a good job as a blogger, in pointing out what happens when non-teachers like Gates, plan curricula but veteran educator Ann Policelli Cronin explains in Connecticut Educator: The Common Core Standards Are Gobbledy Gook | Diane Ravitch’s blog there is much in the Common Core ELA standards that is just plain wrong and/or incomprehensible.
“The Common Core standards are a waste of time. For one thing, they were never tested on real students in real classroom, and no one can honestly say that they will prepare students for college or careers. That is sheer speculation or wishful thinking.
“First of all, the Common Core standards have never been tested in the real world for accuracy or effectiveness. No one has any idea if a high score on a Common Core-aligned standardized test will result in a student being successful in college or in a career. No work has been done to determine if those tests actually measure the capabilities and skills that professors in higher education and people successful in a wide variety of careers want college students and professionals to have. Those people were never asked. The standards were simply decided by employees of testing companies. All that we know for sure is that the Common Core standards are skills that testing companies can measure on their tests.
“The Common Core standards are also neither “high” nor “clear”. The Connecticut State Standards for English Language Arts are much more rigorous than the Common Core Standards for English Language Arts and have a strong and deep research base that is totally lacking with the Common Core. The Common Core standards require a way of teaching students to read and to write that has long been discredited. Not only will the Common Core approach severely restrict students’ development as readers and writers, it will discourage students from even wanting to become readers and writers. The Common Core standards are definitely not rigorous, as teachers who have required rigor of their students know.
“As for the Common Core standards being “clear”, they are not. There are 42 English Language Arts standards crammed with almost 200 different skills to be taught in each academic year. They are a mishmash of skills without a plan of developmental appropriateness and devoid of logic as to why some of them are in one grade and others in another grade. In a recent article in Education Week (September 23, 2014), Mike Schmoker reports that Gerald Graff, the former president of the professional organization of college English professors (Modern Language Association) said that most of the Common Core standards are unnecessary and nonsensical. For curriculum expert Robert Shepherd, the Common Core standards are “just another set of blithering, poorly thought-out abstractions.” Schmoker challenges any of us to make sense out of this 8th grade Common Core standard: ‘It’s gobbeldy gook.’ “
Well said Tom Hoffman! Every teacher cringes at having to dissect what should normally be enjoyable reading. And we wonder as a nation why students do not read anymore! Common core is not entirely to blame. Some “genius” at one point before common core decided that students should use sticky notes as they read, jotting down essential points. I thought that was equally as ridiculous. Who among us does not enjoy getting into a story just for it being a good story. It does not require dissection to understand what common core claims to instruct!
This is a great turn of the word.. thanks for writing it…
“Would you ever, while reading a book on dinosaurs with your child, pause to ask how a detail supports the “main idea” of the book? Could you blame her if she looked at you as if you were an idiot…?” This is ALL THAT READING IS ABOUT NOWADAYS!!
“kindergarten expectations in Singapore, where students are expected to count to 10”
Well, if we require that our kindergarteners can count to 100, surely that means our students will be 10 times as smart as those in Singapore by the time they graduate,
Shirley.
Our students’ scores will undoubtedly be so high that the PISAnos will have to make the scale logarithmic so America’s scores can be displayed on the same graph with everyone else.
“Hoffman seals the deal by posting the kindergarten expectations in Singapore, where students are expected to count to 10!”
Well, Singapore is, when it comes to education, a strangely enlightened place, whose education motto is: “Teach less, learn more.” I was shocked to learn this a couple of years ago, and wrote about it here:
http://literacyinleafstrewn.blogspot.com/2013/03/who-knew-singapore-is-den-of-dewey-eyed.html
Been hearing that “teach less learn more” bullshit at foreign language PD seminars for decades now. I think that has been said at every one I’ve been to. 100% disagree.
Why? I think the phrasing is awkward because the goal isn’t to teach “less” per se, but to teach fewer discrete areas, but teach each area in greater depth. Knowing a lot about an area one is interested in and being able to understand and describe connections to related areas is better than sort of knowing one vague thing about practically everything. I’d rather see a kid who really understands the causes and connections of, say, the Civil War than some kid who can spout off, “Indians”, ‘colonists”, “Revolutionary War”, “Washington”, “Lincoln”, etc. without understanding anything about any of those topics.
Very interesting piece and finally helped me understand why the Common Core is so standoffish as far as fiction is concerned. Those grade-level requirements just don’t apply to fiction, where the point of a paragraph is less a main idea and supporting elements and more an emotional moment, dialogue that helps our understanding of a relationship, or narrative that might explain how a character gets from point A to B. And many other things besides! Which, of course, does away with a huge amount of what high school English is all about. The CC obsessive focus on text also does away with contextual understanding that also should be a large part of the reading experience for students of all ages.
Having David Coleman write the ELA standards was no different than having a rookie TFA’er write them before they even started teaching. Bright, ivy league beginner who thinks they’re the smartest person in the room. Not smart enough, or experienced enough, to understand the number one rule for developing educational material: be ready to change it! A lot gets lost in the translation of adultish to kiddish. Without any skin in the game, Coleman probably didn’t even pause to think what would happen if his standards didn’t work. This is what clearly separates non-teachers from those in the trenches. Adapting and changing and eliminating and extrapolating ideas is part of our DNA as teachers. What many find just so frustrating is that our instinct is to change or revise, or simply start over has been removed from the picture by rank amatuers. We cant change or fix the fundamental problems with ELA and there is NO light at the end of this pitch black tunnel. We are stuck with bad standards/tests/curriculum/pedagogy.
Thanks for the post, Diane. I do tend to keep my web presence somewhat enigmatic.
Just to flesh out my background a bit more. I “wuzza” (as Fred Klonsky would say) English teacher in Providence for a few years after getting a MAT at Brown in 1999. That made me a third generation teacher on both sides of my family (i.e., both grandmothers, both parents). My wife teaches in Providence and both my daughters attend elementary school in the Providence Public Schools.
I gravitated toward the ed-tech side of things pretty quickly, in part because of excitement in the possibilities evident in free and open source software — which unfortunately are yet to be realized.
I was deeply involved in an early “turnaround” here. We redesigned a small high school in my neighborhood in Providence with Gates money in 2001. Just at the point when the schools test scores finally really started to climb, Deb Gist announced the first round of “persistently low-performing” schools, which included both our school and Central Falls High. Our school was closed, despite the fact that about a month after calling the school “persistently low-performing,” RIDE released NECAP test scores showing a 27% increase in reading proficiency and outstanding writing scores (see http://www.tuttlesvc.org/2010/02/feinstein-high-school-closes.html )
So… that was a horrible process, although much worse for my wife, who was still teaching there.
I had since had a somewhat random opportunity participate as a “practitioner” in a MacArthur Foundation Network that included some of the best known names in education and ed-tech research at the time. Basically for a couple years I was flown up to Chicago monthly to sit in a room listening to very influential people have candid discussions about education reform, which was an education in itself, believe me.
For about the past 10 years, I have managed a project called SchoolTool — http://schooltool.org — which creates administrative software for schools, primarily in the developing world. It is funded by a South African tech entrepreneur named Mark Shuttleworth. This has given me a position at some remove to US education politics — my boss has no interest in *American* education — so I have more latitude than many people working in education to speak my mind, and I’ve not hesitated to do so.
Regarding standards, we built our turnaround on standards-based assessment. Really the whole school was meant to run on standards and performance assessment, so I had a lot of practical experience with how a whole body of standards works in a school. For SchoolTool, we’ve designed and implemented a fairly complex competency tracking system, so that gives me another reference point for being very analytical about the logical structure of a set of standards.
Here’s one of my first posts on the Common Core, from over FIVE YEARS ago!
http://www.tuttlesvc.org/2009/09/10-reasons-why-you-should-care-about.html
Welcome, Tom Hoffman.
Most practitioners are fearful of speaking out against Common Core, and most advocates are paid to support them.
Diane,
I’ve tried on many occasions on this blog and elsewhere to distinguish my position from that of people who want to abolish the public schools, regardless of what they might replace them with. Nowhere have I said in the last couple of decades that doing away with schools is feasible or necessarily a good idea, although I can imagine a society where there might be effective alternatives in a century or two, which would require lifestyles unlike anything ever experienced in history. Thirty years ago, I was a little more extreme in my beliefs about saving the schools. Still, I don’t imagine any utopian scenario or a world without people who are lacking in high intelligence or wisdom. What I have said quite emphatically many times is that education and schooling are two things that don’t really belong in the same sentence and that compulsory attendance anywhere defeats the possibility of an institution being the vehicle or location for education for more than a tiny fraction of fortunate children.
You write without ever making a meaningful distinction between school and education, except for when you are speaking about schools that are practicing in ways that don’t conform to your conceptions of what a school should be. We may never agree on this, but I believe that even the best school can only be an adjunct to the highly personal and mostly private educational process and I have a definition for education that has little to do with what one will ever experience in an institution designed to process and instruct large numbers of students for six hours a day in a restricted location and with a real-world budget.
I have to say that the list you included in your Huff Post article has the ring of utopianism much more than the suggestion that authentic educational opportunity might be much more common when schools are finally able to effect some degree of change and innovation once the bonds of coercion and authoritarianism are broken by eliminating laws that demean and demoralize children by their very existence. The educational wheel has been re-invented enough times in enough places, yet you are of the persuasion you offer something new and fresh with the “joy of learning”. Learning and joy are not easy to accomplish in a bureaucratic institution that is peopled with conscripts who can’t be convinced of the good intentions and benevolence or genius of their truancy officer teachers.
Schools should absolutely be concerned with the welfare of the whole child and education should be given top billing over ignorance and indifference. However, as you point out in your first book, asking schools to do too much or to be all things to all people is asking for big trouble. Some children will never be academically inclined or enthusiastic about the sort of learning that is associated with schooling. Some will lack the capabilities required. Others will be way out ahead and have no need for the drill and imposed discipline of the mass group experience. The first rule should be to “do no harm” and it is impossible in a hierarchical authority-based and legally mandated “system” to do no harm to the many, many children who are not cut out for the demands of that kind of system or who get ground up and spit out thanks to institutional needs and priorities.
If you care about the public system, then demand that schools provide a hospitable environment regardless of any ideology or academic expectations. Parents should be able and should be encouraged to choose the sort of training, orientation, indoctrination, and organizational milieu that they prefer, including the type of instruction and academic environment they want. Compulsory attendance automatically makes any such choices highly impractical. If they only want babysitting or if they want religious instruction, those should be possible options, in my opinion.
You had referred me to your first book several months ago. I got, The Troubled Crusade, recently and I have written a slightly longer opinion piece about that book and what I see as our essential disagreement, on which I expect to make a few final revisions in the next few days. I’m not 100% sure that is the book you referenced, but I believe it is. Unless I hear from you with an e-mail address where I can send my critique directly, I will post it here when finished. I hope you will read it and give me some feedback about your impressions.
Reply to Robert Elliot:
I just finished listening to this podcast in which Rob Kall * interviews John Taylor Gatto . I read Gatto’s little green book a decade ago! It sits on my desk. It’s tenants have been the focus of my writing about reform & education, so when Rob asked me to check the written transcript with the podcast, I said sure.
http://www.opednews.com/Podcast/John-Taylor-Gatto-author-by-Rob-Kall-100919-193.html
May I recommend that you listen to it for a while. You can play it in iTunes, so you can stop and start it, and can read along with the transcript on that page… or just read the transcript.
It is worth hearing him talk about the ways in which he taught kids in the ‘olden days’. ALL of us taught the same way, and had the same expectations for LEARNING for the kids who sat in our presence for 10 months. He sounds like Garrison Keillor channeling Jimmy Stewart! I could not stop laughing at this man’s odd voice as he talks with such clarity about big ideas, such as Darwin’s take on mankind — the “good stock and the bad stock.” There is a fine mind behind that old man’s ‘voice’!
Gatto puts forth, with barely a breath, some very complex CRUCIAL IDEAS: such as THIS ONE: We MUST KNOW, the PURPOSE and the methodology that lets ‘THEM’ reach their GOAL! Gatto gives us a crucial ‘take-away’ — AN ESSENTIAL TRUTH, a BIG IDEA “we” MUST GRASP the billionaire plutocrats’ “PURPOSE,” or we will be “disadvantaged, helpless fools”
Reading your thoughts about the difference between education and schools… reminded me of a conversation I had with Rob Kall, when he said that ‘schools were not a TOPIC’ he was interested in… despite his site’s mission to bring truth to the news. This has changed with the Gatto interview… and several years of my covering the news of this utter destruction of the road to opportunity that was PUBLIC EDUCATION.
* Rob is the publisher of Oped News — the site where I write,
http://www.opednews.com/author/author40790.html
and where I post Diane’s links —
I think that both conversations are crucial. Academic’s here, discuss the ‘schools’ and the policies, curricula, and people who administer these things. They are smart and see the methods that are being used to destroy the schools.
But I think that it is when the classroom TEACHERS TALK at this site, that we hear authentic talk about ‘education’ — education as it is enabled in their classroom, not just in their school! The academics talk about schools but the teacher/practitioners discuss ‘education,’ or WITTT…What It Takes To Teach!
The ways in which teachers educate the kids has, suddenly, been radically altered by the top-down SCHOOL administration. People are clueless about WITTT, and cannot parse the language. How is curricula different than standards? What is a rubric and criteria? Is a learning ‘objective’ the same as a ‘standard’ for as school?
Boy, has the media done a good job in confusing folks about what is happening in almost sixteen thousand separate school districts in 50 states.
Gatto explains WHY, and how the billionaire’s methods of influencing the public, undermines the education process, polarizing the society… which is their purpose.
and Robert, take a look at this…
http://www.endteacherabuse.org/
one educator who finds out what the school administration can do to her. This is no novel, but the actual story of Lorna Stremcha… and it is the story of what is happening in the schools, to teachers who try to educate kids in the ways that the human brain learns.
Susan,
It is already past my bedtime and I don’t have time or energy now to follow up on your links, but I will do my best to do so asap. I read two of Gatto’s books and I believe he is a great teacher and scholar. In one of his books, he claims that students can learn all they need to know of an academic nature in a fraction of the time allotted. If my memory serves, he estimated 100 hours total for the average kid. That’s in their school career, not in a month or year, if I remember correctly. That leaves a whole lot of time for more significant activities and suggests to me that teaching and school in general are much too highly correlated with what qualifies as real education as a rule and in keeping with school mythology.
I haven’t heard anything about Gatto for about ten years and supposed he wasn’t active anymore, since he was in poor health when I last followed his actions. He was trying to create a documentary back then I believe. While I believe I agreed with most everything he wrote and was fascinated by his knowledge and philosophy, I’m not sure his ideas square totally with all of his observations. By that I mean that one could logically conclude from his positions and experiences that the conceptions he has of education would require an end to compulsory attendance, as I harp on incessantly. He hasn’t to my knowledge identified the laws requiring attendance specifically as a core issue, however everything he says points to that in my estimation. All of the things that he finds unuseful or negative and counterproductive I associate directly with and can trace directly to the elements of coercion and to the de facto deprivation of initiatve. If we believe in children and are willing to trust them to seek education and find it we will be much less preoccupied with figuring out who has the right methodology and the right scientific approach and whether or not schools are public or private and instead try to create an environment for all children regardless of academic ambition that is free of paternalistic influence and domination under pretenses of salvation by instruction and indoctrination.
May I post your reply on the interview page?
So few educators carry on dialogue about education at this wonderful new site.
If you read it (it is very, very long) you can comment there, too.
I hope Rob will interview Jerry Mander, next.
He tells me that he met Jerry Mander a few weeks ago, at Cooper Union in NYC, where he had organized a conference bringing together Chris Hedges, Ralph Nader, Bill McKibben, Helena Norberg Hodge and a good group of other excellent speakers.
I hope all the conversations among the intellectuals will make a difference.
Sometimes I feel as if we are just preaching to the choir, and that Gatto got it right… we are all helpless fools.
Thank you for your reply. I hope you got a good night’s sleep.
Susan,
You may repost my comments as you see fit. I am all about engaging and enlarging the dialogue. Many educators find my skepticism and negavitism about changing the “system” offputting and my time is extremely limited. However, I do my utmost to respond when someone sticks to issues and is reasonably attached to reality. I’m going to copy here my response to another commenter from DR’s blog with whom I’ve had a dialogue in the last couple of days. She has established an alternative school and provided links to sites that she has found edifying and I don’t doubt that she is changing things where she lives for the better, although I tried to make clear that I find such efforts to be of limited usefulness in the grand scheme of things. As with Diane’s terrific conception for leaving no child out, it does in fact leave out millions of children, since the message is not transmissible within the existing “system” for reasons I hope I have made less mystifying in the following reply:
Jackie,
Your idealism and enthusiasm are inspiring. Your energy is amazing. I have no doubt that you are accomplishing fantastic things for your students. But, it appears that you missed my newsflash. It doesn’t matter how much of a genius you are. It doesn’t matter if you are creating a wonderful model for others to follow. It doesn’t matter that you are kind, indefatigueable, loving, and liberal. If Montessori, Dewey, Holt, Dennison, and hundreds of others haven’t fazed the establishment in over a century, I can guarantee you that your wisdom and hard work are not going to be the things that enlighten and enliven the rest of the educational universe in another century.
I don’t take any pleasure in being negative or cynical. However, we all have to grow up and recognize reality at some point. There was a show on TV last year about a dome that suddenly descended over some part of the continent and cut all the towns and cities and areas inside off from the rest of the world. It was an incredibly silly concept and I refused to watch a single minute of it, but it seems an apt metaphor for the circumstances created by compulsory attendance laws. The best ideas and the best people are prevented from affecting people outside the dome or protecting others inside and those who are outside can’t help those trapped inside. It is an impenetrable barrier and it isn’t there for the benefit of anyone we might care about.
Almost no one has any awareness of just how profoundly people and institutions are affected by certain kinds of laws. Laws can in some instances radically alter the way whole generations perceive reality and the way they live their lives. A law such as this may appear on the surface to be well-intentioned and benign, but it spawns a never-ending series of requirements and demands that insinuate themselves into the entire society and produce situations that are immutable and unresponsive to any outside influence. The unconstitutional compulsory attendance laws are not and will not be “irrelevant” unless and until they are actually struck down. I believe it was the communists who imagined that the state would wither away once their ideas got enough attention. We can see how that worked out.
Everyone may examine your splendid school and the accomplishments of its extraordinary graduates and be astonished. Yet, the public schools will be under their transparent dome and there will be virtually zero effect on their day-to-day operations. Decades, generations, and centuries can pass, and the tiny minority of lucky students who somehow escape the dome will have a chance to feel freedom and experience the thrill of unrestricted learning. The millions of others will have no clue about life outside that poisoned atmosphere.
Everyone has their own role and their own areas of interest and I get that very well. I don’t want to discourage anyone from doing what they do best or from fulfilling the mission they have identified as their own. However, if you truly care about more than just a handful of kids in CO and if you want the world to change for your grandkids, then you should be trying to understand how the law creates domes that deprive the masses from any semblance of an authentic education. Slow revolutions are surely preferable when there is time and the crisis isn’t beyond dire. But, revolution requires some possibility for change within the existing paradigm for more than just a token few. Laws that control youth in their every movement do not and cannot allow change.
Barry