Who wrote the Common Core standards? Advocates say that teachers did it but that is not accurate. .
Here are two useful descriptions of the process that created the Common Core standards.
This one is by Mercedes Schneider, who completed a book about the Common Core last summer; it will be published by Teachers College Press.
This one appeared on Julian Vasquez Heilig’s blog, “Cloaking Inequity.”
Both agree that the dominant voices in the writing of the standards were Student Achievement Partners (David Coleman, Jason Zimba, and Susan Pimentel) and testing companies. Classroom teachers were scarce.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Judging from the quality of the “standards,” it appears that members of a small-town Rotary Club–owners of car washes and insurance agencies–were asked to make a list, based on what they vaguely remembered from their own school experiences thirty years ago, of “stuff to learn in English class.”
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I do not, by this post, mean to demean the owners of car washes and insurance agencies, only to point out that these “standards” appear to be the work of amateurs.
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Right, because those Rotarian business owners would have more sense than to
1. Suggest reading Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address without context. (I definitely believe students should grapple w. unfamiliar, challenging text; teachers did that decades ago. A discerning teacher wouldn’t waste Gburg Adrs but would pick different reading for that purpose.)
2. Use that Fall of Icarus painting and poem combination for a sample PARCC question. It didn’t inspire advanced English/Humanities students forty years ago–shoot, there’s decades’ more literature to choose!
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Possibly the greatest American poet of the 20th century–Wallace Stevens–was an insurance executive, though I don’t think I would want him writing standardized tests. Come to think of it, I don’t want anyone writing standardized tests. A plague upon the Philistines who would “standardize” the “products” of our schools.
The pairing of Auden’s “Musee des Beaux Arts” or Anne Sexton’s “To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Triumph” with the Bruegel Icarus are both really old hat. Both have been staples in some of our basal lit texts for some thirty years now–which means, of course, that some students will have already done a lesson on this very material and some will not have, which is entirely unfair. Another of the innumerable examples of how little the PARCC (spell that backward) folks know about what they are doing.
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Yikes. What a mangled sentence I wrote there. At any rate, editors of basal lit texts have been putting those together for many decades now.
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And hopefully not memebers of Rotary
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I was a Rotary Club member for years. I loved it, and we did a lot of good in the world. I chose this as an example of a random collection of non experts.
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Hey take it easy on me. I taught ELA for ZERO years – I must know what I’m talking about!
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But what a payday you had! Go figure.
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By extrapolation, this gives Meryl Tisch the chutzpah to think she has the qualifications to be on the Regents….or the Chancellor….
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I don’t know who wrote the Common Core standards but the people promoting the Common Core standards are insufferable:
” PARCC is supposed to be a bracing splash of reality for a state educational system that doesn’t much care for such things.”
This tone they adopt is just incredible to me. We’re all just lazy slackers constantly dodging accountability and making excuses, and it is the duty of the ed reform movement to call us all to account.
The Chicago Tribune editorial board are of course speaking to all us from the great heights of excellence and rigor they’ve achieved in the “media sector”, right?
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/editorials/ct-parcc-test-illinois-edit-1122-20141121-story.html
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“We’re all just lazy slackers. . . ”
Well of course I’m just a lazy Swacker! OH! OOPs that says slackers.
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You might find this documentary interesting: Building the Machine
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjxBClx01jc
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Who wrote the Common Core? (The Monotones did. Really)
I wonder, wonder who, who-oo-ooh, who
Who wrote the common Core
Tell me, tell me, tell me
Oh, who wrote the Common Core
I’ve got to know the answer
Were they really just a bore?
Oh, I wonder, wonder who, mmbadoo-ooh, who
Who wrote the Common Core
I love Will Shakespeare
Really, you know I do
But I’ve got to see this Common Core
Find out why it’s true
Oh, I wonder, wonder who, mmbadoo-ooh, who
Who wrote the Common Core
Chapter One says to bore them
You bore ’em with all your gas
Chapter Two you tell them “you’re
Never, never, never, never, never gonna pass”
In Chapter Three remember the meaning of weird math
In Chapter Four they read close
Then you test ’em with all your wrath
Oh, I wonder, wonder who, mmbadoo-ooh, Who
Who wrote the Common Core
Students, Students, Students
I bore you, yes I do
Well it says so in this Common Core
The only one that’s true
Oh, I wonder, wonder who, mmbadoo-ooh, who
Who wrote the Common Core
I wonder who yeah
Who wrote the Common Core
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It’s a ditty job, but somebody’s gotta doo wop it …
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Faith no More, “We Care a Lot”
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Thanks! That brought back fond memories of 7th gr– in soc stud we learned the diff between liberal & conservative by studying the era’s perodicals, in Engl we had an extensive unit on Lat & Gr word roots to help us learn to define big words– & at lunch hr we had a choice of postprandial activities which included ‘dancing in the Butler Bldg’ to tunes like this one! How lucky for us & how sad for today’s 7th graders.
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Gettting the word out has been very, very hard. Many journalists won’t pay attention to e-mails correcting their repeition of the CCSS story; editors won’t often print letters; and even superintendents, teachers, and state education department officials, won’t listen. It’s very much whapt Upton Sinclair said: “It’s hard to get a man to understand something, when his paycheck depends on his not understanding it.”
Given this response, and the willful ignorane or lack of care in understanding the facts, what do we do when the betrayl by all of these public officials and employees—who often claim to be protectors of our children—can no longer be ignored. How can we continue to let them lead our schools and classrooms?
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I do my tiny bit by responding to a multitude of misinformed article-commenters w/facts & links like these.
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Here’s a prominent Common Core supporter. His entire speech was an extended rant bashing public schools:
“If we were designing our school system from scratch, what would it look like? I know one thing: We wouldn’t start with more than 13,000 government-run, unionized and politicized monopolies who trap good teachers, administrators and struggling students in a system nobody can escape. We would be insane if we recreated what we have today.”
This is how Jeb Bush views your local public school. I don’t even recognize this horrible place he’s describing.
This is the lead Common Core salesperson. He sees absolutely no value in existing public schools. None. How likely is it that someone who has absolute contempt for an existing system will work in good faith to improve that system? Why would I take advice on my local public school from people who spend a good part of every day traveling the country yelling “public schools suck!” That’s nuts. If Jeb Bush had his druthers, my public school would be a Rocketship franchise.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/jeb-bush-offers-nuanced-defense-of-common-core-education-standards/2014/11/20/b77330f4-70cc-11e4-8808-afaa1e3a33ef_story.html?wprss=rss_Copy%20of%20local-alexandria-social&utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter
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Thanks for this link. I provided a couple of comments.
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Chiara: ignorance and greed boldly go where angels fear to tread.
Meaning, to the Land of Lies on Rhee World where edupreneurs fantasize about the pot of $tudent $ucce$$ gold at the end of that rainbow of monetized children and privatized schools.
SomeDAM Poet: you and the Monotones? You outdid yourself!
In gratitude, I give you the opening verses from one of Bill Gates’s favorite songs, which he strangely claims isn’t a mangled version of a very well known Whitney Whitney song but penned by worshipful, er, grateful members of the Fordham Institute and US DoE:
the greatest love of all is ME
I am your children’s future
No doubt that I am destined to lead the way
Let them worship all the beauty & wisdom I possess inside
Remove a sense of pride to make it easier
To know that CCSS and ME is how it needs to be
Kids are searching for a parent substitute
They need ME to look up to
They never found anyone but ME to fulfill their needs
A lonely place to be
And so they need to learn to depend on CCSS and ME
I decided long ago, to buy up everyone else’s shadows
If I fail, if I succeed at least you’ll live as I believe
No matter what you keep from ME
Y’all can’t resist my foundation’s moneyyyyy
Because the greatest love of all is obvious—It’s ME!
You need to realize that the greatest love—IS ME!
And that greatest love of all is easy to achieve
Learning to love ME, it is the greatest love of all*
See? It’s all so naturally and divinely appointed. Resistance is futile.
Although that last bit came from a fictional tv show so maybe it’s not necessarily true…
Many thanks to you both.
😎
*P.S. I am not sure why, but Bill’s version differs in one respect from that presented to him by grateful beggars and employees, er, fellow thought leaders. The word “me” is in lower case in the original but always upper case in the version printed on the poster affixed to the ceiling over his desk. ¿?
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“Uh, oh, reform types. Ravitch is mobile again ”
Hey. Diane, they’re worried that there’s a single dissenter out there! God forbid there should be one prominent person who isn’t repeating the droning ed reform mantra.
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I recently listened to Prof. James Milgram who was on the writing team and validation committee for CCSS. I was shocked to hear that Milgram had to fight Achieve to add Geometry and Algebra 2 to the math standards. They were originally written to STOP at Algebra 1!
Milgram showed data that proves the higher math that kids take in high school the greater chance to finish college. By stopping at Alg. 1, kids have 15% chance to graduate college, but 80% chance with Calculus. Common Crap moves Alg. 1 to 9th grade, which leaves it impossible to get to Calculus senior year. Am I wrong in saying that CC does not have written standards past Alg. 2?
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I believe that is correct. I recently read of Westchester parents protesting next year’s line-up of math courses, which attempted to deal with this issue by squeezing trig & pre-calculus into jr yr so as to leave room for 12th-gr calculus. Math-types were commenting that such a course would be all but impossible for any but gifted math students, leaving good math students out of the running for the STEM college program of their choice.
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The CCSS math and ELA standards were in the works in 2001 with Achieve’s American Diploma Project. The America Diploma Project hired Educational Testing Service (ETS) researchers Anthony P. Carnevale and Donna M. Desrochers to identify which jobs pay enough to support a family well above the poverty level, would provide benefits, and offer clear pathways for career advancement. T
They researchers used data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to identify 22 occupations ( with benefits!) “worthy” of about 14.7 million public school students. They just wrote off the lowest paying and fastest growing jobs as suitable for any attention in terms of economic growth and education, most of these in low-wage services. That was 2001 before the economic down turn that very year and again in 2008. Most of those 2001 “good” jobs required more than high school. Not big news. Not noticed: US Labor projections are never made beyond ten years and they are corrected every other year.
Then the same researchers identified which courses people in these good jobs in 2001 had taken in high school and what their grades were. They used the National Educational Longitudinal Study data (NELS) from the late 1980s 1990s to get this kind of inference going. Big news was that taking Algebra 2 was a correlate with a getting a “good” job.
ADP staff and hired hands in five states then tried to identify the content in Algebra 2 and other courses taken by the kids who had “good jobs.” Result: First round of workplace expectations for English and mathematics.
Many steps later, with mostly college faculty involved, ADP had reconciled both collegiate faculty and employers expectations for high school students to enter into any post-secondary environment with some likelihood of success. The mantra of college and career ready was propagated.
By 2004, ADP had benchmarks drafted for high school (benchmark meaning grade level standard) for ELA and math. Then they just did some back-mapping to “deduce” what kids in the earlier grades had to know to move ahead–prerequisites, learning progressions.
The early work did not address ELA prior to grade 4 because ADP was focussed on high school and “learning to read” (K-3) was different from “reading to learning.
I have found four different versions of Achieve’s ADP project and how it morphed into the Common Core State Standards, aided by funds from a number of foundations and non-profits. The latest of Achieve’s websites just push the CCSS.
I found direct evidence of recycling content from the American Diploma Project (ADP) into one of the Common Core State Standards, specifically for “Integration of Knowledge and Ideas Standard RL.9-10.7”, which calls for students in grades 9-10 to “Analyze the representation of a subject or a key scene in two different artistic mediums, including what is emphasized or absent in each treatment (e.g., Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” and Breughel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus).”
This standard is identical to a benchmark assignment in the ADP project, which came from an Introductory English Survey Course at Sam Houston University, Huntsville, TX and appears on pages 98-99 in Achieve (2004) American Diploma Project (ADP), Ready or Not: Creating a High School Diploma That Counts, http://www.achieve.org/readyornot (see pages 105-106).
This standard and the “example” illustrate one meaning of “rigor,” namely, making 9th or 10th grade assignments the same as those in collegiate studies.
I became interested in the ADP project that spread from five to thirty five states because the Ideal curriculum they were pushing prevented any study in the arts except as an elective in the twelfth grade and lieu of a foreign language.
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“This standard is identical to a benchmark assignment in the ADP project, which came from an Introductory English Survey Course at Sam Houston University, Huntsville, TX and appears on pages 98-99 in Achieve (2004) American Diploma Project (ADP), “
I wonder how much of Common Core was taken from pre-existing materials — perhaps even plagiarizing and/or infringing on other copyrights. That kind of thing is actually all too common when the author knows little about the subject matter they are writing about.
Needless to say, one is not entitled to a copyright on material to which someone else already has the Copyright — to say nothing of the fact that using said material constitutes infringement if one does it without permission.
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Common Core and few, if any, of the state standards include Calculus because it is university level content that only a minority of high school students take. You don’t write a universal standard for a course that most students will not take.
The Common Core takes a reasonable approach to the high school sequence in offering model integrated or AGA sequences and noting topics that would need greater attention for students intending to continue their education at a four year college or university. The standards leave the upper grade math courses for local districts to organize based on the student needs and local preferences for mathematics offerings. That’s as it should be and no school in my region has dropped Calculus or any fourth courses.
The Common Core 8th grade math standards have significant Algebra I content. If a district chose, you could have Algebra I as the 8th grade course with modest supplentation of 8th grade topics not generally covered in Algebra I. We do.
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I am pretty sure you are correct. I was listening to our high school Math teachers at one of our meetings….I heard the Precalculus/Calculus teacher say that there were no Math Common Core standards for her subjects. That is ridiculous…I’m scared to see the results of being on Common Core for at least 5 years…There will be so many gaps. I honestly believe though that is the purpose of it all…to make our kids into robots who do not know what they should know. All of your blogs were so interesting to read.
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The CCSS in ELA can most charitably be described as a compendium of rules derived from ignorant folk theories about the fields of study covered–reading, writing, literature, grammar, speaking and listening, thinking, research, etc. They are common in the sense of being vulgar, uneducated, base. They are an almost entirely content-free, vague, random, and wildly prescientific mashup of previously existing standards done overnight by amateurs who had
a. no knowledge whatsoever of what we have learned in the past fifty years about how students acquire the grammar and vocabulary of a language;
b. no familiarity with enormously rich, varied, and productive approaches that have been developed through the centuries for the teaching of writing; and
c. almost no familiarity with the enormously varied approaches to literature developed over the past 150 years (beyond a debased and puerile version of New Criticism–what I call New Criticism for Dummies, or New Criticism Lite).
At the very least, Coleman and company should have been forced to read a few introductory surveys–say, Radford’s Minimalist Syntax, Tom Roeper’s The Prism of Grammar, and George Miller’s The Science of Words (on language and its acquisition); Davis’s The Two Keys (on reading instruction); Erica Lindemann’s A Rhetoric for Writing Teachers (on approaches to writing instruction); Paul Frye’s Theory of Literature (on approaches to literature); and E.D. Hirsch, Jr’s Validity in Interpretation (for its invaluable distinction between meaning as intent and meaning as significance)–so that they could have had a eunuch’s shadow of a clue what they were talking about.
The CCSS in ELA are most notable for what they leave out–for their lacunae–and for the brilliant pedagogical possibilities that they preclude. And therein lies the greatest tragedy in all this–that the CCSS in ELA stop all progress cold and undo most of the progress that we’ve made in ELA pedagogy.
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Here’s the thing.
Julian Vasquez Heilig points out in his blog post that ACT, the College Board, and Achieve were heavily involved in writing the Common Core.
Achieve says – like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and others – that the Common Core is necessary ““to ensure our long-term economic competitiveness.” The Common Core website said this too, until it was recently scrubbed. But as I’ve noted repeatedly, that statement is demonstrably false.
The ACT and the College Board have tied (“aligned,” they call it) all of their products to the Common Core. And even though there are those calling for a delay in Common Core testing, the fact is that this Spring there will be millions of aspiring college students who dutifully take the tests and courses offered up by ACT and the College Board. In essence, the Common Core is already here, alive and well.
It’s not enough to “stop” Common Core, or to delay briefly its testing component.
It’s way past time for educators to abandon the tests and products that come from ACT and the College Board.
But will they?
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They are all in it together. In the freshman year of college college professors refer constantly to the AP Curriculum. If a college student attended a high school that did not offer the AP Curriculum, the college student is already behind and will struggle until they can get caught up with the AP content.
My child’s high school did not offer any AP classes at all. Even though he took all accelerated classes and graduated with honors, the absence of AP training took its toll on him during his freshman year of college. He really had to dig down deep to catch up. Students sitting around him in college lectures of Chemistry told him that even though they did not pass the final AP test in high school, the college class was so much easier for them. It was a review from their AP high school class. It was in no way a review for my son.
Until my son went through this, I had no clue of the power of the AP curriculum for freshman college students. I now know. I am positive that they are all in it together.
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“Classroom teachers were scarce.” Really?
Both of those posts are political histories. They serve the purpose when advocates want to provide each other ammo for the battle they feel they are in.
But they don’t reflect the real world.
If 217 NH teachers participated and saw their feedback reflected in the standards – according to people who were there – I can only imagine how many there were nationally.
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There are 15,000 public school teachers in NH. There are over 3,000,000 public school teachers in the US. Assuming the CC founders actually listened to 217 NH teachers that extrapolates to 43,000 US teachers who participated and saw their feedback incorporated. Seriously? Keep dreaming Bill.
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Just sayin’…if you want to say teachers weren’t involved, you’ve got an uphill case to make.
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Oy–this topic again! Okay, let’s just say who DIDN’T write the common core (didn’t capitalize because the program doesn’t deserve caps)–real, credentialed, certified, experienced educators.
BTW, SomeDAMPoet, your song is the BEST!
And–The Monotones probably could have done a better job than Coleman & co.!
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I always assumed it was the Pearson Foundation who wrote the Common Core.
Click to access SAS_CCSS_Overview.pdf
Pearson really is one-stop shopping for all your CCSS needs. They can sell you the curriculum, test prep, deliver the test, grade the test. They can train your teachers and administrative staff on all things CCSS related. Why would you go anywhere else? Just bring in the Pearson team of consultants and life will be good.
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When asked to review CC ELA in 2009, I assumed I would be looking at content the NCTE & IRA had already been involved with, but that was not the case. Downhill from there…
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I LOVE Mercedes Schneider for making so comprehensible the story of CCSS and putting a human face on it.
I am SO much more educated now about how it got written.
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