Arthur Camins left the following insightful comment on Rick Hess’s analysis of “What Went Wrong with Common Core.” I agree with his claim that the purpose of setting a totally unrealistic goal was to make public schools fail, thus destroying public confidence in them and setting them up for privatization. It is also manifestly correct, based on Joanne Weiss’s comments posted here earlier, that the intention of the Common Core standards and tests was to create a large, unified national marketplace for products and consultants, thus spurring entrepreneurs to enter the “education market.”
Rick Hess highlights many important points about what “went wrong” with the Common Core State Standards, laying the blame on the Obama administration and inside the beltway technocrats. Missing from his analysis is exposure of any of the behind-the-scenes role for companies looking to profit from a more coherent and less fragmented market and the hopes of market ideologues searching for tools to undermine the power of teachers unions in particular and public education in general. The 100% proficiency demands were designed to undermine confidence in public education, as was the connection between teacher evaluation and common core testing in Race to the Top and School Improvement grants.
Absent from much of the media attention to the strident debates about federal v/ local control is the simple fact that no system in the world has made significant improvement based on standards and high-stakes testing. We are, I think stuck in a debate within an autonomy and control framework, while ignoring the great potential for mutual responsibility.
I wrote about this several years ago here: http://www.arthurcamins.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Past-Gets-In-Our-Eyes1.pdf
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Funny ho wit seems to stay in that language framework regardless of how many of us try to set the record straight. How many of us have, for years, referred to Pasi Sahlberg and how Finland stayed out of the standardized test fold to become what reformers call #1 in the world. How ironic? Again, and again, and again.
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The Common Core Standards are producing miraculous gains according to another former Obama Administration appointee:
http://www.realcleareducation.com/articles/2015/07/29/rising_to_the_challenge_of_new_tests_1214.html
If it’s true it’s remarkable considering how little support public schools have gotten during President Obama’s two terms. You guys working in our poor much-maligned public schools truly ARE miracle workers 🙂
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Diane it is so bad. You got it right when you said it is about creating a new marketplace for consultants and software companies. Professors of higher ed are being hit up hard by “consultants” trying to sell their learning software and textbooks. Some often pay up to 100.00 per textbook assigned. I hope you will explore this and write an article on it. Profs who already make too little are perfect candidates for this soft bribery.
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In too many education “battles” we sometimes forget that there are good people trying to do good things. Conspiracy theories abound, but sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. I have not been a big fan of CCSS, but I certainly understand the impulse to have national standards; in the same way that the 14th amendment to the Constitution protects citizens from bad state and local policies and practices — “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws” — the CCSS were intended to extend the right to a good education to all citizens, regardless of race or zip code.
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“No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws”
Please tell me pbmeyer can the feds do so then?
How can a law NCLB, that demands discrimination against students whose intellectual capabilities are not at the same level as some mythical X student at X age be considered constitutional?
Some students are rewarded, allowed to move on and/or graduate while others are punished, i.e., not allowed to move on in grade or not graduate. If indeed, individual’s intellectual abilities and capabilities are innate (and I think most would agree with that) to be shaped by his/her environment over which the individual child has no control, how does the sorting and separating that the mandated standardized tests (poorly and without validity which makes things even worse) come even close to passing constitutional scrutiny when some are favored and others excluded?
I await your response and TIA!
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Duane, if I’m reading your comment accurately, you would be against grading students (e.g. A, B, C, D, F) as well as against a system which passes students from one grade (first, second, third, etc.) to another since those things necessarily discriminates against kids who do not get good grades or who do not move from one grade to the next. The Constitutional question here is whether all children are given an equal opportunity to learn. And NCLB, among other things, offered previously ignored groups (such as the poor and minorities) the right to get the same education as their richer and whiter student colleagues were getting. But how does one know that every student has an equal opportunity to an education. If the object of an education is to learn, should it not be the responsibility of the educator (public or private) to see that students learn? And if it is, how then does one measure such learning? As a taxpayer, I would assume you’d like to know that your taxes are being used properly. I would be interested in knowing how you would go about distinguishing between a school that is spending your money wisely — and equitably — and one that isn’t. best, -pm
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Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education.
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Hess is not a trustworthy friend of public education and he champions the diversion of public funds to special interest private schools and unaccountable charters. — Edd Doerr (arlinc.org)
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I agree that Frederick Hess is no friend of public education. A month ago, the American Enterprise Institute published “An Education Agenda for 2016: Conservative Solutions for Expanding Opportunity.” Hess was a co-editor with Max Eden of the seven-chapter publication.
Hess and Eden’s “Introduction” (Hess is the primary author) starts off with talk about American “opportunity” thwarted by the welfare state, “lousy schools,” “overpriced mediocre colleges,” and “ill-designed pre-K programs.”
Solution: Dump federal action except for data gathering in the spirit of trusting states but verifying outcomes. Enable school choice and local control.
The Introduction highlights some “lessons” from federal policies in education beginning with the Eisenhower administration. Of special interest is the account of the failed antecedent to the Common Core. Here is that section with some opinions about that effort.
“The George H. W. Bush National Academic Standards. From the 1989 Charlottesville education summit involving Bush and all the governors, there emerged a set of national education goals to be attained by 2000. One of these called upon American youngsters to “leave grades four, eight, and twelve having demonstrated competency in challenging subject matter including English, mathematics, science, history, and geography.” A worthy-enough objective, absolutely, but a huge and mysterious challenge, too, considering that the US had no obvious way to define “competency,” nor did it have any gauge of whether “subject matter” in those five disciplines was indeed “challenging.”
In partial response, then–secretary of education Lamar Alexander, then–assistant secretary of education Diane Ravitch, and then–National Endowment for the Humanities chairman Lynne Cheney deployed federal dollars in the early 1990s to commission organizations of “subject-matter experts” to develop academic standards for schools in their respective fields. Unfortunately, the left-wing history standards that emerged were condemned by a near-unanimous vote of the Senate, and the English standards were so weak that Dick Riley, education secretary under Bill Clinton, terminated the federal grant to finalize them. The geography standards were fine but were also the size of the Chicago phone book and seemed to redefine all of human knowledge as part of geography, rendering this subject (seldom taught seriously in US schools, anyway) essentially unmanageable.”
Hess could have expounded on some other issues with standards produced under the under the Goals 2000 Educate America Act (H.R. 1804, 1994).
1. Studies in the arts were excluded from the vision of what counts as an ample education worthy of attention in this effort. Advocates succeeded in getting the arts included after the initial announcement of the effort to create “world-class standards.”
2. There was no discussion of possible models for “world-class education” and whether any of these models even required or were derived from “standards.”
3. Each group of subject-matter specialists approved for grants hoped to secure curriculum time because they had developed standards.
4. There were no opportunities or requirements for coordination among the separate efforts to develop standards.
5. At the end of this exercise, K-12 standards had been written in 14 domains of study, 24 subjects, then parsed into 259 standards, and 4100 grade-level benchmarks. I examined all of them and found countless duplications, inconsistencies in the granularity, (grade spans verse grade specific), errors of fact, and so on. A regional lab calculated that a program might be designed to address all of the standards but it would take a typical student 22 years to complete it.
6. None of the standards, except those in the arts, even envisioned connections across the various subjects. Standards for social studies were written but never formally part of the project—discipline-specific standards were the only option…and no one questioned whether there might be an alternative to territorialism among subjects.
Hess knows this history. He and his co-author say the problem with the Goals 2000 project was that “the US had no obvious way to define “competency,” nor did it have any gauge of whether “subject matter” in those five disciplines was indeed “challenging.” They fail to mention that the National Assessment of Educational Progress is, in fact, an established process for addressing this issue, and the process has been refined since 1969.
The authors go on to say “The flaws in these standards (Goals 2000) discredited an important reform initiative, and that discrediting persists today in the attack on the Common Core. In my opinion, it still makes sense in today’s mobile society for sixth-grade math in Portland, Maine, to resemble sixth-grade math in Portland, Oregon, and for a big, modern nation to have rigorous, minimum expectations for all its young people in the core subjects that every school teaches. But President Obama and Secretary Duncan weren’t the first to learn that touching a federal match to this barbecue invites a conflagration.” So, Hess seems to be asking for minimum expectations rather than world class standards, provided the minimums are rigorous, and there is a “family resemblance” of standards from state to state.
But there is a different story in Hess’s solo chapter “Moving Beyond No Child Left Behind.” Here he envisions the federal role in education as limited to these functions “transparency, choice, deregulation, trustbusting, and research.
Transparency means “continue to require annual testing and reporting in reading and math, with results broken out by NCLB-denoted subgroups. It should also continue using the NAEP to calibrate and compare results across states.” Transparency also means that “Federal reporting requirements should make schools and districts report per-pupil spending, enabling parents and voters to compare cost-adjusted performance and observers to calculate various return-on-investment metrics.” (So NAEP serves to standardize outcomes enough to compare states and in the process the NAEP frameworks morph into something like a kissing cousin to the Common Core in reading and math.)
Choice means money follows the student.
Deregulation means states should be free to “choose” how to exercise and implement choice.
Trust-busting means “craft a new bankruptcy-like mechanism that permits those school districts receiving federal Title I funds and deemed by their states to be performing inadequately to petition for relief from contractual obligations (to unions, vendors, and others) that constrain their efforts to improve schooling. “
Research means “high quality.” That means “….shift funds away from federal programs that seek to dictate state and local practices and toward basic research that offers long-term benefits, such as that examining how fast the adolescent brain can absorb languages and which areas of the brain are associated with specific learning challenges. Crucial is an insistence on rigor and funding models that steer investments into areas that offer genuine promise—like cognitive science, applied-reading techniques, and brain imaging—rather than to the usual suspects.” (Evidence-based practice is down the tubes except for reading?)
Hess does not name “the usual suspects.” His examples of basic research are strange and inconsistent.
Hess concludes this chapter with a blast at “education cartels” and the need to “open the field to new entrants and create room for meaningful competition.”
Hess is no expert on education. “An Education Agenda for 2016: Conservative Solutions for Expanding Opportunity” is all about opportunities for expanding markets for education, deregulation, wanting tax dollars to subsize entrepeneurs.
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Also missing is any mention of who funded the Common Core Standards and who paid big bucks to promote it. Hess and the outfit he works for received a good-sized grant from the Gates Foundation related to “teacher leadership” and the old “college-ready” canard.
I commented on Diane’s original post:
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No self-respecting scholar would work for the American Enterprise Institute
It’s like wearing a T-shirt that says “I’m an ideologue who ignores the facts” on it (and is almost always wrong, except when they get it right by pure chance)
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