David Whitman wrote a paper for the Brookings Institution called “The Surprising Roots of the Common Core: How Conservatives Gave Rise to ‘Obamacore.'” The goal of the paper is to persuade readers that conservatives, starting in the Reagan administration, laid the groundwork for national standards and tests. As a participant in some of the events he describes, I have a somewhat different take on the past.
Whitman was Arne Duncan’s speechwriter from 2009 to 2014. He is the author of a 2008 book for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute calling “Sweating the Small Stuff,” which praises “no-excuses” charter schools. His prime example was the American Indian Charter School in Oakland, whose leader subsequently resigned after $3.8 million went missing in a state audit. Given Whitman’s admiration for “no excuses” schools, it makes sense that he wrote speeches for Arne, who believes in them as an effective answer for the educational crisis of African American students who live in poverty.
There are several major differences between the advocacy for national standards in the Bush 1 administration and in the Obama administration.
First, the effort to develop voluntary national standards in the early 1990s did not take place in secret, as did the drafting of the Common Core standards.
Second, the mechanism of the Bush administration was not to convene a secret and unaccountable committee to write standards but to award grants to the nation’s leading organizations that represented teachers and scholars in each field. There was no federal involvement in the writing of the standards; each field wrote its own document about what students should know and be able to do.
Third, the Bush 1 effort was not limited to reading and math. It included the arts, science, foreign languages, history, economics, civics, and physical education.
Fourth, the Bush 1 effort did not direct any teacher about how to teach. The standards were guides, not directives.
Fifth, the Bush 1 strategy was a low-cost effort, as compared to the CCSS. The Bush 1 administration spent about $10 million, as compared to the $200+ million spent by the Gates Foundation to subsidize the CCSS.
Sixth, unlike CCSS, the Bush 1 push for voluntary national standards did not include any element of coercion. Teachers, schools, districts, or states could use them or not. The standards were truly voluntary. The theory of action was that if they were good, states would copy them, or parts of them, if they so chose.
Seventh, unlike the CCSS, there was no national public relations campaign to promote them on national television and in the print media.
Eighth, the Bush 1 voluntary national standards quickly failed after the U.S. history standards became a nasty, politicized national controversy in 1994. But when the standards failed, they didn’t drag anyone down with them, because so little was expended to create them. The Bush 1 standards did not take billions away from other purposes of schooling. They did not suck up education dollars as schools were forced to absorb budget cuts. They did not lead to increases in class sizes and billions spent on consultants and technology.
At the time the Bush 1 standards were written, Senator Lamar Alexander was Secretary of Education. He does not believe that the federal government should force states and districts to reform their schools to satisfy federal mandates. He has always opposed a “national school board.” Even as Secretary, he did not want that power. He believes in federalism.
Unfortunately, the Obama administration and the Department of Education do not understand federalism. They do not understand that federal laws specifically prohibit any federal official from attempting to influence or control curriculum or instruction. They recklessly promoted the Common Core standards, and they paid $360 million for testing the Common Core standards. Secretary Duncan pretends that the setting of national standards and the creation of tests aligned to those standards have nothing to do with either curriculum or instruction. What the federal government, and Secretary Duncan in particular, have done in trying to establish national standards and tests violates federal law. It is not only illegal, it is impractical. The theory seems to be that if everyone studies the same subjects and has the same tests, everyone will become equally successful. This is absurd. And the test results prove that the theory is absurd on its face.
Defend the Common Core standards if you wish. Use them if you choose. But please don’t say that they are a direct descendant of the failed effort in 1991-92 to create voluntary national standards, written by teachers and scholars. The Common Core standards will fail, not only because they cost billions to implement, but because of their indifference to teachers and to democratic processes.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“Duncan’s Speechwriter”
Putting words in Arne’s mouth
That’s my job, and man I’m proud
Speech about “surburban mom”
Man, that really was the bomb
I think you underestimate how patient they have been in implementing this plan. The standards are and have always been meaningless. It is the system that has been put in place… that has always been the goal. Standards in the hands of teachers give direction and shape to things. Standards in the hands of bureaucrats are weapons of control, used to line the pockets of crony capitalists and bring power to themselves.
Just as the supposed “Obamacare” was not his but a rehash of a rethuglican 1990s health insurance written plan so is this supposed “Obamacore” a rehash of neocon/neoliberal (certainly not conservative-conservatives seek to preserve/conserve what is good in society not destroy that good) edudeformers’ goals.
“But please don’t say that they are a direct descendant of the failed effort in 1991-92 to create voluntary national standards, written by teachers and scholars” (hope you don’t mean Eva’s scholars-ha ha!!)
Ah, but Diane, the Bush 1 “standards” were the proverbial camel’s head in the tent. Once the concept of educational standards supposedly became “legitimate” everything else (the testing, VAM, SLO/SGP, CBE, etc. . . ) that we see has followed.
With the conceptual basis, standards, being invalid (as proven by Wilson) all that has followed is invalid so that the current state of public education, in utilyzing these falsehoods can only cause much distress, harms and injustices. To believe otherwise is the height of insanity and we are almost there. Standards and the educational malpractices based on them will eventually fail, perhaps not while I’m alive but they will.
“Camel Scent”
The Bushy camel head
Was poking in the tent
And look at where that led
To Arne’s government
A now we’ve got the butt
Of camel in the tent
We’re really in a rut
With stinky camel scent
SomeDAM Poet:
TARGO!
😎
The arts were not included in the original Goals 2000 project. They were included only after intensive lobbying by the National Endowment for the Arts and professional associations of arts educators. Standards in the arts were the only ones to assert that interdisciplinary connections should be made. In other words, the whole initiative was an affirmation of discipline-based education as organizing structure for k-12 education.
I produced an analysis of the disciplinary structures and key concepts in all of the Goals 2000 standards, including those in history and the “left-behind” social studies standards.
Apart from Lynne Cheney’s pre-publication attack on the history standards, there were appalling inaccuracies. Among these was a standard that called for students to know that Mary Cassatt was an American regionalist painter–not a classification in any art history text or museum catalog. Additional references to the arts within the history standards were bizarre.
In addition to the absence of any fact checking, I found numerous redundancies, contradictory expectations, and additions beyond the formally funded disciplines.
McRel, a regional educational lab, became the repository for those standards. McRel’s analysis of all of the standards and benchmarks led them to conclude that it might take a typical student 22 years to meet all of the standards in about 14 domains for study.
I am in the process of doing a similar exercise with current standards on the books. That project began with spreadsheets showing the number and distributions of Common Core Standards by grade levels and topics within the ELA and Math standards and grades 6-12 Literacy Standards for History/Social Studies (the slash probably a legacy from the Goals 2000 effort) and grades 6-12 Literacy Standards for Science & Technical Subjects. That work is the source of my references to 1,620 standards, not counting high school courses.
In the CCSS, the arts are mentioned as “technical subjects.” I have found no evidence of consultation with anyone or reasoning about that classification. The suggested readings for the CCSS reflect a desire for students to encounter conventional histories of art (e.g., 15th edition of The Story of Art and biographies of famous artists).
One of the ELA literacy standards for grades 9-10 refers to an assignment from Sam Houston University, calling for analyses of a poem about and an imaginative painting depicting the flight of Icarus. This standard, recycled from the American Diploma Project, is one of the proof positives that the CCSS standards have been designed to shove collegiate work down at least two grade levels.
None of the substantive expertise available for thinking about standards, beyond ELA and Math, was tapped.
Now almost everyone who has been working to produce standards in the various domains or disciplines seems to have been coerced into offering proofs of concern with the CCSS and “alignments” of their standards with the CCSS.
That contamination extends to physical education, the arts, school social work, school counseling, social studies, and the new kids on the block–promoters of “social emotional learning.”
It is as if otherwise independent and well informed voices on behalf of education have been programmed to comply, to align, to shape up, to forget the meaning of academic freedom and academic integrity.
The damage done to education by the CCSS is far worse than has been reported.
Laura, during the time while I was in the Bush administration (1991-92), we funded MENC to lead a coalition of arts educators to develop standards in the arts. They were wonderful to work with, they had total autonomy. Their standards were mainly standards about resources and opportunity to participate in the arts. The Goals 2000 standards were the Clinton administration. I am not saying the Bush administration was better than Clinton; far from it. Just stating the facts.
And for those who don’t understand all the errors and falsehood involved in the concept of educational standards (and its concurrent standardized testing) I urge you to read and understand Wilson’s never refuted nor rebutted “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine.
1. A description of a quality can only be partially quantified. Quantity is almost always a very small aspect of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category only by a part of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as unidimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing the descriptive information about said interactions is inadequate, insufficient and inferior to the point of invalidity and unacceptability.
2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other words all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. And a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it attempts to measure “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self-evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
It seems to me the Bush 1 reforms died from natural causes due to resistance from citizens. Obama’s “reforms” are underwritten by billionaire interests that relentlessly seek ROI. These wealthy investors now have laws that are partial to the proliferation of charters so they have worked to create an “accountability” climate that tries to put public schools and teachers in a vice grip while the federal government continues to throw money charters with little or no accountability. These attacks will continue as long as public schools and students are monetized. As you stated in your post, this is an egregious example of federal overreach.
Retired teacher, the Bush standards did not encounter resistance until Lynne Cheney attacked the history standards for bias. Then all the voluntary standards went down, and no one wanted to touch the idea until 2008, when CCSS started, under the radar.
Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé and commented:
Why Conservatives should NOT support the Common Core
Diane posted an essay a while back critiquing Whitman’s book on education https://dianeravitch.net/2014/11/18/horace-meister-the-mass-hysteria-at-the-u-s-department-of-education/
Let me see if I understand.
1. The history standards became a political football because well … whoever writes history..
2. The science standards would have become a political football when climate change, evolution and other controversial topics (to some) were debated.
Discretion, being the better part of valor, was used to focus on the most relevant skills for success in life: math and reading/writing. And you are upset about that call? And upset that lo and behold somebody wanted to measure if we were achieving success?
I’m shocked. Shocked, I tell you.
Virginia, this will disappoint you, I know, but the Bush voluntary national standards were not aligned with any tests. There were no measurements. They were guidelines to resources and practices, coming from the field.
I stand disappointed.
” And upset that lo and behold somebody wanted to measure if we were achieving success?”
Indeed “I’m shocked. Shocked, I tell you.” That anyone could believe, no, could even begin to believe that anyone could “measure if we were achieving success”. Shocked, I tell you, shocked!
After reading and rereading the timeline in a moment of lucidity and clarity – it hit me. Arne operated ED as if it were a branch of the Chicago mob. Wow. Didn’t see that before. Now it all makes sense!
And with the Brookings’ imprimatur, I’m feeling very nauseous.
Maybe someone, or some organization(s), including parents and students, should sue President Obama and Arne Duncan over the fact that they’ve so brazenly flaunted the law regarding federal interference in public education.