In an astute article at Salon.com, Gabriel Arana explains in Salon how the Common Core standards united both left and right in opposition.
Arne Duncan has tried his best to portray critics as wing nuts from the fringes of American politics whose views should be ignored or as whiny “white suburban moms” who mistakenly thought their child was brilliant, but it hasn’t worked. Most of those who speak out for Common Core are either paid to do so, or work for organizations funded by the Gates Foundation, which paid out between $200 million and $2 billion to write and promote the Common Core.
“There’s been a convergence on the left and right on Common Core,” says Pedro Noguera, an education professor at New York University. “A lot of the right-wing opposition is about Obama. … On the left, it’s about standardized testing and how high-stakes tests are going to be used to hold schools accountable.”
While defenders of the Common Core repeat the false claim that the standards were written by the nation’s governors (imagine that!) or by teachers, Arana notes that few teachers were involved in the writing of them and that there is no way to fix what’s wrong about them. They were written by a committee in which the testing industry was well represented but early childhood educators and teachers were not.
The standards were implemented with little forethought or preparation. Seventh graders were assumed to know everything that was in the standards in the previous six grades, for example. Teachers had minimal preparation.
This is a good article. Show it to your friends.
The implementation has been a disaster. For starters, the 27-member committee that wrote the standards had few actual teachers on it, but plenty of representatives from the testing industry. Because it is illegal for the U.S. Department of Education to exert influence over state curriculums, the Bill Gates foundation stepped in and funded most of the effort. Even worse, the committee that wrote the standards no longer exists, and there are no formal procedures for amending them.
That task has been left to the states. Some, like New York, adopted the standards and started testing students on them without bothering to train teachers — teachers there got a printout of students’ scores that don’t even tell them the areas where they performed well or poorly. “If you simply raise the bar and a whole host of schools were failing when the bar was lower, how is that going to be effective?” says Noguera, who supports national education standards….
Under ideal circumstances, national education standards would ensure students across the country are getting the instruction they need to prepare them for college, and help bring some uniformity to widely varying state curricula. But the effort has floundered for a familiar reason: Americans’ enduring distrust of the federal government. With the Department of Education unable to take a strong lead, Common Core has been hijacked by the for-profit school-reform movement. Whether Common Core ends up doing any good largely depends on what each state decides to do with the benchmarks, which sort of undermines the whole point of having national standards in the first place.
To make any sense at all, national education standards must be aspirational, saying this is what should happen under the best of circumstances. They must recognize that children are not widgets, and that they differ in rates of development and in other dimensions. They should come with the resources to make them possible. They should be phased in slowly. There should be a central organization that can make adjustments to the standards and fix errors. They should be written by experienced teachers and educators of established reputations, not by testing companies, consultants, and inside-the-Beltway bureaucrats.
We really must think more rationally about the value and purpose of standards. Common standards will not cause everyone to become proficient, nor will tests linked to the standards. If that were true, everyone in Massachusetts–not just 50% of students–would be proficient on NAEP. If we have “high” standards, “rigorous” standards, “challenging” standards, a large proportion of students will not pass.
Of course, we should constantly strive to make schools better. All children should have a full and varied curriculum taught by well-prepared teachers. Experience should be respected and valued. All schools should have principals who are experienced teachers. All districts should have superintendents who are experienced teachers and administrators. Schools should have nurses, psychologists, social workers, guidance counselors, and librarians. Teachers should have reasonable class sizes, especially in the elementary years and especially for the neediest children. Most tests should be written by teachers; standardized tests should be used solely for diagnostic purposes, to help children, not to rank them. If we were serious about wanting higher achievement, we would reduce poverty. Standards and tests don’t cure poverty, and if we don’t reduce poverty, there will be no change in educational outcomes.
It is good to have standards, but not to think of them as “one-size-fits-all.” Think about running. For many years, the idea of running a four-minute was held up as the highest possible standard. Wikipedia says that the four-minute mile is “the standard” for all male middle-distance runners.
In the sport of athletics, the four-minute mile is the act of completing the mile run (1,760 yards, or 1,609.344 metres) in less than four minutes. It was first achieved in 1954 by Roger Bannister in 3:59.4.[1] The “four-minute barrier” has since been broken by many male athletes, and is now the standard of all male professional middle distance runners.
Does that mean that all male middle-distance runners should aspire to running a four-minute mile? Yes. Does it mean that everyone, no matter what their personal health or ability or interest, should be judged by their success in running a four-minute mile? That’s absurd.
AMEN, Diane. It’s horrifying ABSURDITY. Follow the $$$$$. It’s about $$$$$…I say again and again.
Diane, could you place the following article from Salon on your blog. I know it has some pro statements about common core content but it does show how California has tried to divorce test-driven accountability from implementation efforts. Jeff Bryant interviewed me for the article. Thanks for considering this. Hope all is well. Bill
http://www.salon.com/2015/04/14/common_core_consequences_what_currently_passes_for_reform_has_caused_considerable_collateral_damage_to_schools_and_teachers/
Bill Honig, will do
Bill…so good to see you posting here. Hope we hear more from you.
Ellen Lubic in Los Angeles who has followed your valuable career in education for many decades.
“The implementation has been a disaster.”
Yes, of course. It’s the implementation, stupid (or is it “the stupid implementation”?)
“Poor Execution”
Iraq and school “reform”
Are really a success
It’s simply execution
That makes them seem a mess
Very few recognize the connection between our insane foreign/military policies and our insane educational policies.
Hint: It has to do with dogma, falsehoods, illogical thinking, lack of concern outside the tribe and the few who believe they are the bestest and brightestest.
You forgot money. 🙂
How about this one?
“Destroy the School to save it”
Destroy the school to save it
The school reformer’s motto
Destroy the road to pave it
And vocal cords for sotto
Damn, DamPoet,
There ya go making me look up another word. Whadda ya think you are a teacher or something:
Sotto voce (/ˈsɒtoʊ ˈvoʊtʃeɪ/; Italian: [ˈsotto ˈvoːtʃe], literally “under voice”) means intentionally lowering the volume of one’s voice for emphasis. The speaker gives the impression of uttering involuntarily a truth which may surprise, shock, or offend. Galileo Galilei’s (probably apocryphal) utterance “Eppur si muove” (“Nonetheless, [the Earth] does move”), spoken after recanting his heliocentric theory, is an example of sotto voce utterance. (from wiki)
A sotto voce is actually a great way to quite a loud class. Keep lowering one’s voice and the students eventually become quiet. Sure beats yelling and hollering.
To paraphrase KTA “Keep writing obscure words and I’ll keep looking them up! Thanks!”
When it comes to rheephorm policies, the last and best defense is “the implementation was horrible.”
Well, if the ideas are so great, why do they fail again and again and again when so many different rheephormsters try to put them to work in such diverse locations and under such a variety of circumstances?
KISS: KeepItSimpleStupid. If you keep recycling and rebranding massive failures and proven disasters, how can one expect anything but failure after failure?
The clichés of the self-styled “education reform” are so overused and overworked that they are—unintentionally, of course—wickedly vicious parodies of themselves that make “self-caricature” seem like an understatement.
😎
The so-called reformers are going to keep coming, because for them it comes down to a belief that the only way to improve something is to measure it, and then make corrections.
This is simplistic and dumb both about how to measure and about education. But it appeals to bosses at the head of corporations and governments.
And they are the bosses.
“Meet the new boss, same as the old boss”
Diane…as always I am in total agreement with your perspective. However, a different Diane, my State Senator Diane Feinstein, just sent me her diametrically opposite point of view. She has drunk the Kool Aid…and her billionaire husband continues to function on the U. of California Board of Regents.
See what you all think of this one?
Ellen Lubic
elubic@aol.com
—————————————————————————————————————-
—–Original Message—–
From: senator
To: elubic
Sent: Thu, Apr 16, 2015 8:15 am
Subject: U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein responding to your message
http://feinstein.senate.gov/
Dear Mrs. Lubic:
Thank you for contacting me to express your concerns about the Common Core State Standards Initiative. I appreciate the time you took to write, and welcome this opportunity to respond.
In 2009, the National Governor’s Association, the Council of Chief State School Officers, and representatives from forty-nine states and territories formed the Common Core State Standards Development Work Group, which aims to create a uniform system of academic standards in order to better prepare students for college. The Common Core State Standards program establishes grade-by-grade learning expectations for elementary and high school students in mathematics and language arts. Currently, forty-five states, including California, have adopted the Common Core State Standards. To be clear, it is up to individual state legislatures to pass legislation adopting the Common Core State Standards.
I understand that you are concerned about the effectiveness of these standards, the methods by which they will be measured, and projected costs to taxpayers. On the other hand, I believe that Common Core State Standards play an important role in providing students and teachers a clear understanding of learning requirements.
I am a strong proponent of education and believe that every student deserves a quality education. Schools must target federal funding to services and programs which improve students’ learning and academic achievement, and which properly prepare them for college and successful careers. Please know that I have read your comments and will keep them in mind should the Senate consider legislation that would implement Common Core State Standards at a federal level.
Once again, thank you for writing. If you have any further questions or comments, please do not hesitate to contact my Washington, D.C., office at (202) 224-3841. Best regards.
Sincerely yours,
Dianne Feinstein
United States Senator
Further information about my position on issues of concern to California and the nation are available at my website, feinstein.senate.gov. And please visit my YouTube, Facebook and Twitter for more ways to communicate with me.
Ellen, feel free to call and tell Sen. Feinstein what you think.
I do that on a regular basis and have ever since she was Mayor of San Francisco. As you know, I am not shrinking violet.
Barbara Boxer does not hear from me nearly as often.
Ellen,
The letter from Feinstein was boilerplate swill. Don’t let her get away with it.
“boilerplate swill”
And we know what else those initials stand for eh?!?!
They always had the SAT and ACT. If they want a 4th grade test and an 8th grade test, they should have tried that first. The common core is a giant burden, like telling every student they have to carry around a 10lb bag of potatoes in their backpack for 12 years, who needs that?
We have one already. It’s called the NAEP.
I think there are two other realities we have learned in the last few years that the article did not address.
1. Many educators desire extensive autonomy and are not in agreement with the premise of educational standards and standards based education.
2. Many parents desire more choice in terms of what their children are taught and how their children are assessed in public schools. Yes, the current opt out phenomenon is framed around PARCC and to a lesser extent SBAC, but it shows that parents feel they should have more of a say on educational matters than has been previously the case with less deference to public school systems.
So for better or for worse, the concept of a system of public education as uniform as practicable is more frayed than many of us might have thought four years ago.
This is pretty incredible. It’s a pro-Common Core site; “Unicorns are not real”
Get it? If you question the Common Core, you believe in unicorns.
Another stern, scolding, patronizing lecture to the people in the cheap seats from The Ed Reform Movement. Do federal and state elected leaders back this approach? Because this is in no way “collaborative” or “cooperative”.
http://www.unicornsarenotreal.com/what-are-common-core-state-standards
I hope anyone who is unfamiliar with the history and makers of the Common Core will read Mercedes Schnieder’s forthcoming book on this subject. It promises to be an eye opener.
In the meantime you can see how Achieve, Inc., an organization created to serve business interests, forced the Common Core into existence for high schools. It dis so by tinkering around with some pseudo-researchy “alignment studies” of existing state standards in ELA and math. Achieve enlisted the states whose alignment scores were not good enough to participate ina corrective “institute.” Participants learned to tinker around with their alignmnet scores so the revised scores could plausibly point to a “common core” of standards. The resulting publication was called “Out of Many, One.”
This exercise came after many other pseudo-scientific venture, such as interviews with a convenience sample of employers, and some college teachers to gather examples of expectations for work and for college courses. Part of that work was called the American Diploma Project. Some of the college assignments have actually migrated down to grade 9/10 in the final Common Core Standards.
Example: ELA Standard RL.9-10.7, 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 Achieve’s American Diploma Project.The source is 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).
The ready-to-work examples relied up to claim that the Standards, if met, will help students be career-ready were not for entry-level positions. They were for “well-paying jobs such as being a loan officer or an RN. Mind you, all of the “career” expectations for high school were mapped starting in 2001/2002 and were they were already out-of-date at the point when the economy crashed–2008; they year before 2009 when the standards were made final and published.
This whole project is a case of forcing a common core into existence by a process that is demonstrable jury-rigged to invent a common core. If you have the stomach and the interest, that process is actually documented in the Achieve publication “Out of Many One.”
If you go to this publication, you can find that the next step after mappping high school standards was “back-mapping” (reverse engineering) from those phony college and career readiness standards, grade-by-grade, clear back to the Kindergarten. That work was completed in short order by people who were not competent to do it. I think that the writers had a mental lock on corporate training models as exemplary for K-12 education. In those models, you say; “This is the “target” to be reached, here are the specifications for competence, and please write up the training models that will get us there.”
Here is the hitch. The standards and the methods prescribed for meeting them assume that Kindergardeners, indeed all young learners, can be treated as if they are just miniature adults who can be trained to read, do math, chunk-by-chunk, grade by grade in lock-step, including close reading of texts with content they have never studied.
From the get-go, corporate and adult training models governed the development of these standards and lead to the invention of the common core. That so-called core has foisted 1, 620 standards on states, including parts a-e for the various standards.
Corporate America wants this generation to do as it says and hop to it. The PARCC and SBAC tests are designed to create winners and losers among our students. The whole project is not about standards so much as it is about standardizing education with a narrow focus on the 3R’s. The Common Core is a pathetic and unworthy set of expectations for a great nation. we can do better, and experienced educators are the experts, not persons hired to do the bidding of the chief funder of this effort, Bill Gates.
In other words: Common Core-Uncommonly Unconvincing
Unfortunately, Common Core was developed by the billionaires club (the Gates Foundation) with little input from teachers or other experts in the fields of child development and learning. Much of its design ignored what we know about child development. It’s time to take back education from the corporations and know-nothing politicians. If we continue to allow these people to have their way, they will destroy public education.
Very rarely will anyone witness the conservative right and liberal left be unified by a policy gone astray. Education is inherently politicized, however the Common Core has been the cause of such immense grievances that has forced the two dominant parties to extract politics from debate. It’s evident that the Common Core might have genuine intentions (maybe) however implementation has been far from flawless. It’s evident that the marginalizing students is something neither party truly wants to witness ever happen. No one wants to witness teacher creativeness, cultural authenticity, or other core values of education atrophy because some business man decided to conjure up the ideas of the Common Core.
“There’s been a convergence on the left and right on Common Core,” says Pedro Noguera, an education professor at New York University. “A lot of the right-wing opposition is about Obama. … On the left, it’s about standardized testing and how high-stakes tests are going to be used to hold schools accountable.”
Noguera makes (or is at least repeating) a false claim there about the ‘right wing’ — one which was initiated by Common Core supporters in an attempt to get opposition to shut up by hinting anyone opposing the core therefore opposes Obama and as such is racist.
I am on the right, my opposition to Common Core has never been about President Obama. This has been about my children and fighting a fundamentally flawed and experimental set of standards that have the capacity to have a damaging domino effect and which would put my kids and others into a ‘career and college’ silo.
My fight from day one has been about:
-Age/developmental inappropriateness; especially in K-3.
-The data collection and data sharing
-Over-testing (and the use of constant assessments in K-5)
-The predatory manner in which education companies are profiteering off our kids
-Lack of transparency in the creation and stealth adoption in the states
-The deep involvement of the never ending flood of unelected and unaccountable ‘non-profits’, NGO’s and big businesses.
-The loss of local control on multiple fronts
Lady..your ‘core’ values are similar to mine. I am now grandmother of two small boys, and am a public policy educator who views society and government from the Left. We assess the raison d’etre of CC from the same perspective. I urge my colleagues to coalesce with thinking parents whose voting patterns may differ but who have come to the same thoughtful conclusions.
Ellen,
I think when it comes to Education and CC related issues — Right and Left are both in the middle together. Thank you for your comment here. I appreciate it!