Mercedes Schneider’s latest book has just been released. It is titled “Common Core Dilemma: Who Owns Our Schools?”
As you might expect from reading her posts here, the book is an incisive, well-researched account of the origins of the Common Core State Standards. She has peered deeply into the web of organizations and individuals who created the CCSS and analyzed the political controversies surrounding them. I think you will find it a fascinating read.
It was published by Teachers College Press.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Just picked up my copy this morning.
Nice dedication to Diane Ravitch and wonderful Foreword by Carol Corbett Burris.
Mercedes opens with a clear description of how the CCSS entered her life as a teacher and the many awakenings , some in blog posts, that became this book.
Thank goodness this book has an Index, a really good one and a glossary to make sense of the alphabet soup of agencies and many players in this campaign to standardize education in public schools. As expected, there are meticulous references. These include seemingly arcane sources such as IRS Form 990, where you can see that perfectly legal non-profits look like and can function as if they are for-profits.
Congratulations Mercedes. And since the phrase “Common Core” is tossed about freely in the rhetoric of candidates, I hope your publisher and some angel buyers will gift some copies your book to those candidates who are most likely to be in the final showdown (not all 300 + who have thrown hats in the ring). Few candidates seem to have any understanding of the Common Core beyond the on-going media sound bites and press releases still being churned out by the promoters of this really damaging campaign to transform public education into a cash cow for profiteers.
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Brown brought my copy yesterday. I plan a book report soon.
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Does it include solutions?
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One has to correctly articulate and identify the problem before one can begin to think about “solutions”. Every piece of writing need not have solutions as that may not be the purpose of a particular piece of writing.
May I suggest getting the book and reading it?
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TAGO
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To Cap Lee
I am very sure that you know THE SOLUTION well.
The simplest solution is that IMHO, educators and law makers should recognize the boundary between Public Education and Private Education.
As a result, all authority personnel, in Departments of Education and in Teacher Unions who abuse their power to misuse Public Education funds, should be punished severely with jail sentences and suspension of their educational /legal career for life.
However, it won’t bother public at all if all corporate volunteers donate as much as they want to Public Education Funds, local or state, speaker…as long as they have NO CONTROL OVER Public Education Policy and over all educators. Back2basic
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The solution to Common Core?
Simple
“Edit the Common Core (out)”
Edit it out of existence
Nothing less will do
Cuz Common Core persistence
Means public schools are through
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Hello! My name is Nikolett Jakab and I’m a junior at International High School at Lafayette. There are many issues concerning the U.S. today and I firmly believe that many of these issues wouldn’t exist if our students would receive a meaningful education. However, standardized testing has become a very big issue that widens the achievement gap between people who have the necessary resources and education for test prep and those who don’t. Those who don’t have those resources receive an education that doesn’t prepare them for the future or spark them intellectually. Standardized tests like the Regents and the SAT are worthless if they fail to set reachable standards across the country. No matter how many changes are made to these tests, they won’t change the statistics because they fail to resolve to original issue that causes those statistics to exist in the first place. Despite knowing that these standardized tests are useless in terms of measuring someone’s potentials and abilities, there is a great emphasis put on them both in high school and in college decisions. I want things to change for the better, I want my peers and I to receive a valuable and rich education where standardized tests don’t make or break teachers’ and students’ futures but are instead used to improve on student and school performance.
In hopes of showing my support for blogs like yours as well as to raise awareness to the issue, I’ve written an open letter to Merryl Tisch and David Coleman regarding the Regents and SAT requirements. By posting my open letter to blogs where people come together sharing a similar fact-based opinion around the issue, I hope my letter will reach and motivate people to take action. I think the power to transform our current education is in the hands of those who speak up and until I’m not in a position to directly change education, this letter serves as a call for anyone who feels ready to speak up next.
To Whom It May Concern,
For a nation to be strong, its people need to feel empowered. There are times, as there always were throughout history, when we needed to live up to our nation’s expectations. This time however, it is time for our nation to live up to our expectations.
In order for the people to feel empowered, the first step is through education. For many years now with the No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, that became a big issue specifically because of the increased use and significance put on standardized testing. Now tests are not used to help students and educators see what needs to be worked on but is instead used to see how much funding a school can receive, how good or bad the teachers are at that school, and make or break a student’s future and a teacher’s career.
Students are not taught for life-long learning anymore but how to pass one test after another. These tests many times lack individual qualities important in a person such as creativity, reliability, persistence, passion, curiosity, emotional intelligence, or just what kind of person the student is in general. The teacher evaluations don’t show how innovative and helpful a teacher is in the classroom and how supportive he or she is toward the students. The test score does not show how many hours the
student may have spent with that particular teacher, leaving the classroom inspired. It does not show the dedication of those who work with English Language Learners or students who struggle with disabilities or in areas ruled by poverty. With the very same formula teachers are evaluated with, a person who teaches nothing in a classroom but has students who study for the tests at home can still receive a shining evaluation if the students scored high through their own work.
Although President Obama is a Democrat and former president George Bush is a Republican, there is one thing in common – that their approach in trying to close the achievement gap and make the U.S.A.’s education a globally competitive system has failed. The flaw lies in that the new, forced approach on schools, educators, parents and most importantly students toward standardized tests is corrupt and does not benefit the target it originally tried to reach out to.
The achievement gap on National Assessment of Educational Progress did not see a decrease since the 1990’s, despite the
promise that standardized testing will help to resolve the issue. Students of color significantly lag behind in all core subjects than whites. This is not because a certain race or ethnicity is smarter than the other but because our education system failed to fully end segregation. We already know that many people of color lack the resources that can get them to score higher on standardized tests, but there’s been nothing done to change that! Instead, there are more tests given to them, which is the same as trying to cure someone out of flu simply by measuring his temperature.
The only reasonable explanation for this is that although the tests have been changed, they did not change what caused them to segregate between minority groups and whites in the first place. For example, the Common Core Standards promised that students will reach 100% proficiency rate in Math and English within only a few years. The test over the years failed to increase proficiency levels, yet spreading Common Core Standards in all the states are still on the political agenda. If it doesn’t help our
students, then who does it help to? Why to keep adapting and reinforcing a standard that is not working? How could we solve any kind of problem if we keep repeating the same thing that failed every single time? Behind the starting of the Common Core lays David Coleman who convinced Bill Gates in 2008 to support the Common Core State Standards with over $200 million. Now, this very same person is the head of the College Board that is responsible for the SAT that can make or break hundreds of students’ college decision. With Coleman in power, I predict the revised SAT for the class of 2016 will be just as useless in closing the achievement gap as the Common Core Standards.
The SAT for instance was specifically created from the initial IQ tests written by a French psychologist named Alfred Binet.
During World War I, Lewis Terman and Robert Yerkes in the US used these IQ tests to segregate blacks from whites as well as to try to prove that intelligence is strongly tied to race. Carl Brigham worked with Yerkes to establish other IQ test for the same purpose and with a few adjustment, they named it the Scholastic Aptitude Test. Every single year, hundreds of students take this test and are sorted by their scores but the history of the test has never been taught in school curriculum. It has never been open to the public for questioning but it is now the time to change that.
Moreover, the acts also failed to comply to their other promise, which was to make the U.S.A.’s education a globally competitive
system. Since the introduction of the No Child Left Behind for 15 years now, America compared to other countries in Math from place 18th fell down to 31st. This is a significantly large fail that shows not that the children of America are not competent but that their schools don’t know how to work with diamonds in the rough. On the Program of International Student Assessment (PISA) that 15-year-old US and other 15-year-old students from 65 other countries participate, American students failed to score higher in any of the subject areas starting from 2000 and has a higher percentage of students performing at the lower levels of PISA’s proficiency scale in math than the OECD average as well as a smaller percentage of students performing at the highest level.
The senseless test preparations take away the time from students to actually learn and love to learn. Students don’t want to know more than what is tested, but when these standardized tests fail to test what matters, then aren’t we just wasting time? We are running in a devil’s circle but there is one thing to remember – we have the right to protest against these measures. We have the right to allow students not to take the tests if we rightfully believe it does not live up to its promise. Standardized testing does not equal to merit, potential, value, intelligence, and using it to judge these characteristics of someone is wrong.
Here lies many other issues that the new approach caused yet I did not have a chance to mention, such as how it personally impacts students both emotionally and physically, that it only benefits funders, tutors, and test prep tool companies, namely Pearson, that problems in some of the tests are nonsense at times, or how it leads to cheating. Yet I firmly believe that despite not touching on these topics, all that was said above should be more than enough to question our present educational system.
Having critical thinking skills is not bubbling in the right answer choice but being able to see what’s wrong with the education students receive now and put an end to it.
Sincerely,
Nikolett Jakab
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Nikolett, thank you for your cogent analysis of what ails our education system. You have once again demonstrated your critical thinking skills!
(Nikolett is a student in my 11th grade U.S. history class)
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Nikolett
Wow. That’s really excellent!
“The flaw lies in that the new, forced approach on schools, educators, parents and most importantly students toward standardized tests is corrupt and does not benefit the target it originally tried to reach out to.”
You have hit the nail squarely on its head.
“How could we solve any kind of problem if we keep repeating the same thing that failed every single time?”
You and Albert Einstein think alike!
“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” — Albert Einstein
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Anyone know where I can find out good info about how teaching staff retention was handled during segregation? Did minorities get pushed out from teaching positions? How can I find out?
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during integration, rather
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starting with Google, I found some interesting articles. Why don’t we talk about this more? It’s important, isn’t it?
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2004-04-28-brown-side2_x.htm
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Yaaaayyy, Mercedes! Thank you for all the sleep you’ve forgone, for all the other things you did not do.
The difference between us and the reformistas?
Mercedes and Diane do what they do because they are motivated by what is right, not because BillandMelindaWaltonBroad have funded them $12 million to do their bidding.
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Excellent point!!!!!!!!
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I look forward to reading it and passing it along to other parents. Let us just call the Common Core what it is, i.e. Crooked Knowing this we have a very good chance of beating it down.
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Just purchased it. Looking forward to reading it! Congrats!
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