Mercedes Schneider writes about Louisiana’s fake review of the Common Core standards. State Superintendent John White responded to protests against the CCSS by promising a thorough review by Louisiana teachers. But when the math committee assembled, the Louisiana teachers of math found that they would be joined by two members of the state education department’s Common Core committee. One of the math teachers, Brenda DeFelice, resigned, saying that she could not participate under these circumstances.
DeFelice wrote in her resignation letter:
During our last sub-committee meeting in Monroe, two people were introduced as experts and were invited to be seated at microphones to answer questions and to offer input to the sub-committee as we conducted the review. I have since learned that the two experts who were added to the group, Carolyn Sessions (LDOE standards coordinator and PARCC cadre) and Nancy Beben (LDOE curriculum director), were two of the original writers of the national Common Core State Standards in Mathematics. In my opinion, they had absolutely no place at the table or in front of a microphone as the sub-committee conducted our review. In fact, in the very first Standards Review Meeting in August, the Standards Steering Committee rejected a proposal to form a panel of experts to assist in this review process, saying that the work was to be done by the appointed committee members only.
This morning in Baton Rouge, in an effort to continue the high school discussions prior to the full sub-committee meeting tomorrow, several of the high school sub-committee members met to review the Geometry standards revisions, with the rest of the high school sub-committee members reporting in this afternoon to continue the review. Imagine my surprise to find, seated at the sub-committee table, Scott Baldridge (LSU math professor and author of Eureka Math) and James Madden (LSU Cain Center and another of the original writers of the national Common Core State Standards in Mathematics), both strong proponents of Common Core. We were also joined by Carolyn Sessions (LDOE and PARCC) again. Not surprisingly, all three spoke strongly against the sub-committee members’ proposed changes to the current Louisiana Common Core Geometry Standards, and once again, I feel very strongly that these people had absolutely no place at these discussions.
Why are we conducting a review if the same people who brought us Common Core are invited to a seat at the table and are encouraged to influence the committee in a particular direction in which they benefit?
As I read this account, I wonder why advocates for CCSS are so desperate? Why are they fearful of an independent review by qualified math teachers? Why do they try to control any honest critique? What do they have to gain or lose?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It’s like expecting the sports celebrity on the back of the cereal box to give an unbiased review of the product inside.
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Hillary Clinton is now exactly following the Bush/Obama recipe for ed reform:
https://www.the74million.org/article/clinton-praises-rewrite-of-no-child-left-behind-sees-essa-as-a-boost-to-charter-schools-pre-k-and-high-standards
Accountability and charter schools. Same old, same old. Same grim, joyless agenda for public schools coupled with the same cheerleading for expanding charter schools.
I guess she learned her lesson. Any real debate on ed reform is disallowed.
Do Democrats really think they can hide the fact that they have no positive agenda for existing K-12 public schools by pointing to the the small amount of pre-k funding they got? When do we get a real debate on DC-style ed reform? Never?
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Hillary is demonstrating waffling at its best. She’s making an appeal to the deep pocketed charter supporters to keep the cash flowing in. She learned her lesson when she made an authentic critical comment about charters. In true political animal form, she is responding to the corporate backlash.
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Conflict of interests $$$. Sad state of affairs. POLLY
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I do not understand how the NEA has backed Hillary Clinton. I hope informed members let the public know that she will put their local schools at risk of being over-taken by Corporate Reform! The carefully couched language, and the dirty tricks used to enliven the privatization movement is being carefully crafted and funded by the oligarchs and politicians who stand to gain the most – student (‘cash-cow’) public tax dollar$.
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If they prevented teachers from participating in the “reform” movement from day one, why would they want to let teachers evaluate the “reforms”?
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The fake arm of reform continues to be fake. The CCSS was never about helping children through “higher standards.” It never included parents and teachers. It was a corporate effort to feed the narrative of public school failure to make public school more vulnerable to takeover. Along with VAM, tests based on the CCSS were intended to deliver a “coup de grace” to public schools.
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Thank you! Preaching to this choir member (forced retirement before my time School Counselor).
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“The CCSS was never about helping children through “higher standards.”
I beg to differ. I’m certain that some of those who served on the committees that created the mathematics standards were very much interested in helping children, whether or not they had the notion of “higher” placed squarely in front of “standards” when they wrote them. Other words they may have had in mind include: “consistent,” “clearer,” “more coherent,” etc., without necessarily thinking about “higher” or “lower,” which imply a different set of judgments, perhaps, than the ones I am suggesting.
I realize that at this point, in this space, it’s impossible for most people to have a conversation about any of the issues related to the Common Core without lumping the entire enterprise into one basket and stamping either “GOOD” or “EVIL” on it. That’s unfortunate. Because not only does that require, apparently, making sweeping value judgments about every word in the entire document and every idea apparently contained therein, but also about every person affiliated with their creation or even, after the fact, those weighing in on the standards and their authors.
Woe to the person who suggests that despite the flaws and errors in the standards, the motives of some or most of those behind them, and my personal concern with the very idea of creating common standards for all 50 states (or just for all the districts in a state or schools in a district or classrooms in a school or students in a classroom), we need to apply restraint when assessing what’s there, what’s worth keeping for the future, and what sort of nuanced lessons we can draw about what to do about improving the quality of schools, of teaching, of teacher training, of learning, and of assessment of any or all of these things as we move forward.
Such calls for nuance tend to fall on willfully closed ears and minds. Which is ultimately going to help virtually no one. The deformers will continue to hold all the good cards if those of us in the trenches aren’t proposing anything that captures the imagination and inspires the trust of the general public. Saying, “NO!” to everything, the current specialty of the Republican Party and its allies among neoliberal Democrats, is not a winning strategy in the long haul. Sooner or later, we have to have something constructive to offer and some evidence to support it.
Painting everyone with anything positive to say about anything whatsoever in CCSS as agents of Satan will, ultimately, prove to be just as unproductive as rolling over to the CCSSI juggernaut. Not everyone who disagrees with us in some way is evil, wicked, greedy, and child-hating.
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No one on that math committee was a k-8 math educator nor were any child development experts involved in the approval of these standards
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I am sure some of the people that worked on the CCSS did so with good intentions, and perhaps there is some merit in the standards themselves. However, when the tests based on the standards are about two years above the grade level of students taking the tests and they have an arbitrary cut score, I question the motives of those behind the tests.
As far as being open minded, it is the reformers that have tried to lie, cheat and steal everything for the public good into order to use public funds to make a profit. The “reformers” started the war on public education. with the false assertion,”All public schools are failures.” Nothing could be further from the truth!
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This is far beyond nuance, or what’s worth keeping. Far better to cut our loss,
learn some lessons and go back to a curriculum based on solid research.
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Expecting a nuanced response to what I wrote would be folly. And no one thus far has disappointed. It must truly be comforting to be able to take things as complex as the scope and depth of what’s actually written in the CCSS and reduce it all to a simply moral judgment.
My point remains: what are you going to offer when this, too, passes, as it inevitably will. I have heard several years’ worth of why we must reject the entirety of CCSS. But I’ve been doing my work long before there was even talk of a national set of common standards and I’ll be working until I can’t any longer. I’m not to blame if some of the ideas that made it into the Common Core happen to be good ones that I advocated for 25 years or more ago. And I am not going to let bigots reject those ideas because they can’t manage to attend to the fact that the ideas long predate these particular standards.
I don’t need lessons in who wrote the CCSSI, who backed them, who initially supported them, who subsequently rejected them, whose money is involved, why the testing is a disaster, why driving education with assessment intended to shock, awe, and punish people is a horrific notion, etc. I was “on it” before CCSS was written, have been “on it” throughout the entire Obama/Duncan era, and will be “on it” when Obama is hitting the rubber chicken circuit and Duncan is comfortably ensconced in the next high-paying job for which he’s utterly unqualified and unsuitable.
What I want to hear is how folks here imagine things going were each of them in a position to run matters in public education. What will you do to improve schools, teaching, learning, etc.? I think anyone who has followed this blog for more than a couple of days gets that nearly every reader here rejects everything even marginally affiliated with the CCSS. So, what’s next? What will you offer American parents in its stead? If CCSS just picks up its ball and jacks and goes home, will all be well? Was all well before CCSS came to play? It didn’t seem like it to me in the early ’90s when I was observing middle school math teachers in low-income districts in Michigan. If didn’t seem well in 1955-68 when I was a student in a reasonably affluent, all-white suburban New Jersey school district that was considered one of the nation’s best when my family moved there in 1954.
Do we return to some Golden Age of American public education? If so, when, exactly, was that? I missed it. My parents, who were in school from 1929-1941 and 1932-1944, respectively, missed it. Was it in 1944-54? Before 1929? (My 95 year-old aunt doesn’t think so).
I’m of the opinion that while the corporate deformers are clueless about how to make things better, there aren’t a lot of folks in public education over the last 125 years who have a clearer vision than the least egregious of the deformers. The deform movement has united most teachers against the attack on public education, but when we win, is it back to business as usual? If so, we’re not really going to find things significantly better for kids. The disease runs far deeper than the goals of the ed deform movement, folks. Best start talking about that now.
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Rheephorm cannot stand the light of day…
😎
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I’m curious as to whom Mercedes Schneider would accept as an “objective” evaluator of the Common Core. Without wishing to weigh in on the issue of “objectivity” as a philosophical or political construct, I have to express skepticism as to finding such a person, but the first steps in that direction, if it’s possible to take any at all, would surely be a description of what she would consider the requirements, with perhaps an example or two of whom she’d find to have met them.
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Someone who has worked with children and who has training in Developmental Psychology at minimum. Not someone who is bought and paid off by corporate interests!
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Thank you, Cynthia, but I was quite serious about wanting to hear from Ms. Schneider.
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Has it occurred to anyone that there may not be an “expert” who can define what the common core should be?
It is very uncomfortable to confront the universe and not understand how it got to be. But perhaps that is why we have scientists investigating, forming hypotheses, and developing theories. And why we have religion.
Yesterday teachers on either side of me at my gym were discussing common core. The one to my right described how she ignored it because it dumbed down the curriculum for her students (high socio-economic), the other described how she used what she could but her students did not get it (low socio-economic/ESL).
Perhaps the one expert is the classroom teacher who sees what the students need to know to grow.
In my experience, the expert has to be able to teach the students in front of her. She must also be able to teach at every level of that grade level, not just the curriculum.
This of course makes untrusting and insecure people very uncomfortable. Let’s consult the science and drop our faith in a Common Core belief.
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Have you approached her on her blog? Your more likely to get a response from her there
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Why not try contacting her at her blog Michael?
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And I’m sure you remember your educational experiences quite well back in the 50’s and 60’s.
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You should contact her at her blog!
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To those wondering why I don’t contact Ms. Schneider on her blog: she doesn’t allow anything I try to post there to appear. I’m effectively “banned” because I have tried repeatedly to engage her in a detailed conversation about mathematics teaching in K-5. I did, however, send her an email with my comments from here. As of this moment, the silence has been as deafening as it was predictable.
She despises the Everyday Math curriculum and, apparently, anything and everything that I support in mathematics teaching (which does not include any particular set of math books: I long ago concluded that books are tools, not bibles, and teachers would do well never to follow the teacher’s manual like it had been written by God and Leonhard Euler with major input from Jean Piaget. Because it wasn’t. And the folks who didn’t don’t know your students as well as you do (I should hope). So you have to adjust the materials to fit the kids you have. Every year.
Ms. Schneider, who doesn’t like choice when it comes to charter schools v. neighborhood public schools (and I fully concur), seems very concerned that teachers and parents get choice when it comes to what books are used in math class and how math is taught.
The problems with this latter notion are legion, and some follow from arguments against charter schools. But the big issues for me are what we know from studying how the vast majority of US math teachers, particularly in K-5, teach. They mimic the way they were taught in K-5 because it’s what they have been led to believe is the “right” way. If they are good at math, then the method ‘worked’ for them; never mind that it didn’t for many other kids; they don’t figure into the equation, so to speak. But those are the kids in classrooms today for whom those methods still don’t work. An unrelenting diet of direct instruction (most of it, or perhaps all of it, oriented towards computation, procedures, and “facts”) gives students a very distorted picture of what mathematics is (past a certain point, it’s barely about computation at all, but rather about patterns, structure, and – dare I say it – beauty! among other things) and what it means to do mathematics. Nothing against facts, procedures, and computation, but if you leave school with that and nothing else when it comes to mathematics, you got the booby prize. And that’s what most of our students get at best.
The assumption that high-needs districts are filled with kids who need the above approach even more than do kids in affluent communities is criminally wrong-headed. Yes, they need to be brought up to speed more frequently than kids from homes where parents know math well and ensure that their kids are exposed to counting and basic arithmetic early on, but being born into money is no guarantee of success in even basic math: there are still math-phobic parents with money, and still parents with money who fail to interact much with their kids. So then luck plays a role in whether those kids are exposed to what they need to be ready for primary grade math lessons. This isn’t new: lots of kids in my middle-class school district had problems with primary grade math and never recovered. And the teachers (c. 1955-1968) had few ideas about how to fix that except for the classic “louder and slower” approach that rarely if ever works, and almost NEVER turns a math-phobic or math-loathing kid into a high-end user of mathematics past what’s needed to graduate high school.
The hype of zillions of unfilled STEM jobs may be just that: hype. But there are many good careers that involve mathematics beyond basic algebra. And not all of that mathematics is calculus-prep or calculus. We need a minor revolution in this country in K-12 mathematics to get a discrete mathematics track in place: not all important mathematics requires a direct journey over Mt. Calculus (or even any such journey at all), but the attempt to get things like graph theory into K-12 in the ’80s was yet another victim of the testing mania that began to grip public education under Clinton, GWB, and Obama. However, it’s not too late to try again, building multiple paths to interesting studies and job opportunities via math, science, computer science, and technology.
For those who believe in “choice,” why not try to give kids real choices about mathematics? Not shoving deadly boring computation down their throats until they swallow or throw up, but giving them a balanced approach with many paths to choose among?
Schneider’s notion of choice, however, is ultimately a guarantee of almost no choice. We know from decades of research that teachers under any sort of pressure (from testing, from administrators, from kids who come in below grade-level knowledge in the basics, from kids who are unruly and/or otherwise challenging) is to revert to the “tried-and-failed” methods of direct instruction über alles. We don’t get balance. We don’t see kids given any choices at all about what “math” to study or how to learn: it’s just direct instruction, all the time. So the idea that if we just “democratize” the process for teachers and parents that we’ll get great results is grounded on false premises. Without balance, there are no choices for kids. Teachers, who are supposed to be trained, knowledgeable professionals, need to have more ways than one to get at mathematics for diverse students. Schneider makes clear that she doesn’t want to have to do things “my way,” but that isn’t what I want at all. I want her and every teacher to be able to teach to the real interests and needs of various students. That cannot be a non-stop diet of direct instruction on the rules for computation or anything else. At some point, kids need to be challenged to think mathematically. And that means getting the breathing room to do so. Which means teachers have to learn to SHUT THEIR MOUTHS once in a while. The direct instruction crowd thinks that’s a horrible idea. And so they invent a host of straw people and lies about progressive math teaching. Sadly, there are some well-meaning but wrong-headed folks who like the notion of student-centered math teaching/learning but don’t really have the knowledge or understanding or temperament necessary to do it at all well. They become the examples that the direct instruction crowd uses to terrify parents. “Constructivist” theories of learning are transformed into “mad scientist experiments” on innocent children. Kids are expected to “discover” everything in mathematics for themselves (a major distortion of what constructivism has to say or what people like me have been trying to get teachers to do more of – SOME OF – for decades).
So why don’t I write to Schneider? I did. Just not on her blog, where she lets my comments and questions wither unpublished. I wrote her directly, knowing that I’d get no reply. She has not disappointed. And so it goes.
So what about the other readers here? What would you do with K-12 education in any area at all were you empowered to make the call? Poof! The Common Core is gone on Dec. 31st. What do you do on January 4th? What should others be doing? How do we make our public schools the envy of the globe (and I’m not talking about our test scores)? You make the call. It’s time to stop blaming CCSS, the tests, the US DOE, Obama, Duncan, Gates, and the rest of those we blame. They weren’t there 20 years ago for the most part. And we still had deep problems in K-12 education. Let’s talk about those outside the context of the political arguments surrounding Common Core and get back to what we propose instead. It can’t be business as usual before 1980.
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I understand what you’re saying, Michael, in terms of dropping CCSS wholesale. It’s basically the same thing as what the purveyors of CCSS and charter schools have been doing to our public school system for about a decade and a half. “What your doing is worthless. Do this instead”. We, as a society, do tend to just dump or accept large scale programs without paying attention to the nuances.
Off the top of my head, there are three points that I think are critical regarding our rejection of the CCSS (wholesale or not):
1) CCSS was imposed upon us with minimal input from K-12 teachers and child psychologists. The value of experienced personnel in the field was squashed to a pancake. Not exactly a way to set up a solid rapport. Very bad starting point if you’re expecting professionals to give something a real look.
2) The CCSS was never field tested. Which made people in the field question it. The chances of a sustained effort suffered dramatically as more and more problems arose in the practical classroom setting and were aired publicly.
3) Something I know we’re in agreement with: testing, testing, testing. Once the link between CCSS/Curriculum (yes Arne: curriculum)/Testing was uncovered, the already strong resistance increased substantially.
These three points alone set the stage for rejection, to my view. I agree: we need more competent math teachers. Possibly a whole new approach to the subject (though Everyday Math was not that approach for my special ed kids). But that’s not my field of expertise…so I can’t weigh in too heavily on that subject.
This is all a matter of an extremely well earned distrust of the people who financed, created, and pushed the initiation and continuation of a complete change in a system that was not fatally flawed to begin with.
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@gitapik: With all due respect, those are irrelevant to the long-term questions I’m posing. I’m trying to make crystal-clear that I’m not arguing for the Common Core. I’m not arguing for “parts” of the Common Core. Rather, I’m arguing for ideas that made it into the Common Core through no fault of those who had them years, decades or perhaps centuries ago. If the principles of simple machines are in the science standards that are coming to be seen as part of the Common Core, would the harshest critics/opponents of CCSS propose that we reject teaching simple machines in K-8 science? After all, the Common Core wasn’t field tested. It was imposed with minimal (let’s not quibble and just say “zero” input from rank-and-file K-12 educators. And it anything in the Common Core is going to come with testing, testing, and more testing. So, REJECT, yes?
Obviously, I would say, “Don’t be absurdly dogmatic.” If Shakespeare is in some lists that are acceptable to the Common Core, time to dump Shakespeare? How far, exactly, are the anti-Common Core extremists willing to go? How many facial features must we cut off to spite David Coleman, Bill Gates, Arne Duncan, ad nauseam?
Secondly, I’m asking for a vision of what schools should look like if the folks here who agree that Common Core is irredeemably evil were in charge? My implied challenge is that I don’t think very much about our cultural notions of school. I think K-12 public education really was broken, but mostly for reasons that the deformers don’t care about and don’t mention. I think we stifle creativity and imagination of countless kids via our K-12 system. I think we do the same to thousands of teachers. It’s a self-replicating virus that has been an unfortunate disease we imported from the 19th-century Prussian military in order to produce docile factory workers. It’s not hard to see why people in power would have wanted that 125 years ago. But it wasn’t a very good thing for individual kids, for democracy, for keeping corporate capitalism from growing unchecked until we now have a tiny oligarchy that owns more than the vast majority of the rest of us put together and where the gap between rich and poor grows dramatically while the bulk of the middle class that built the wealth of this nation in the last century is eliminated. Maybe our parents or grandparents got to live the American Dream from then end of WWII to the beginning of the 21st century (maybe), but it’s gone and it’s not coming back if we keep doing business, education, and everything else as usual.
My fear isn’t that the Common Core folks will win, but that they will lose and what will ‘replace’ it will simply justify the next wave of deform. You can’t really educate people in the 21st century with 19th-century content and pedagogy. It doesn’t work and hasn’t been working for a long time, even assuming that it ever really did. How many of those who decry the Common Core are ready to go back to the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, or even ’90s, as long as they are rid of the test-o-crats and whatever things in the Common Core that we can widely agree are unlikely to ever be acceptable to most of us? What’s the Golden Age of US public education to which we should strive to return?
Again, obviously, I don’t think that era ever existed, any more than I believe in the mythical Golden Age of US mathematics teaching and learning, when “all” children left school numerate enough to do whatever it is that was supposed to happen in relation to “math” when dealing with someone with a public school education (maybe not a high school graduate, because once upon a time, those were not the rule in this country). I know too many of my contemporaries (baby boomers) who hate and do poorly in mathematics, even before high school algebra.
My mother and aunt (class of ’44, and ’38, respectively, in the New York Public Schools; Lafayette and New Utrecht high schools), are two bright women who graduated without knowing algebra. The very word gives them hives. My aunt was an effective bookkeeper. My mother let my accountant father keep track of the money until she started working in the early 1970s and finally had an income she wanted to have some say in the spending of. Both are very bright women, but they were enculturated to see themselves as not “mathy” and no one in the school system bothered to disabuse them of that false belief.
I graduated high school in 1968 have slept through my last two years of mathematics. I now have a masters in mathematics education from the University of Michigan, earned in my forties after earning he equivalent of a BS in mathematics in NYC in my thirties. Something deeply wrong with a system that could simply ignore the choices I was making (often by default) and let me wallow. And I wasn’t in some wasteland but in a highly-regarded district in northeastern New Jersey. Does anyone really believe that things were better in rural or urban poor districts of that era? I started school only a year after Brown v. Topeka Board of Education. I’ll go out on a limb and suggest that a hell of a lot of black kids were getting crappier educations while I was getting my “premium” one. So I know it could have been worse. But that doesn’t mean it was good. Or that things got better for most American kids in the subsequent 50 years, before the rise of NCLB & CCSSI.
So where are the folks who defend public education against the Common Core/Testing/Publishing juggernaut seeing our schools headed, assuming we slay the Beasts? Is that such a ridiculous question? Or is it just a hard one to grapple with once we stop focusing so much on how bad the deformers are (and they indisputably are).?
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“So where are the folks who defend public education against the Common Core/Testing/Publishing juggernaut seeing our schools headed, assuming we slay the Beasts? Is that such a ridiculous question? Or is it just a hard one to grapple with once we stop focusing so much on how bad the deformers are (and they indisputably are).?”
Not a ridiculous question at all, Michael. A good one.
I don’t agree with all you say here. For one: I think we’ve come quite a ways from the Prussian military style of the 19th century. Could and will do more…but I’m not with you on the idea that we’re still living in the age of the dinosaurs. Not from what I’ve seen in both my teaching and my daughter’s student public school experiences, at least.
I think the deformers would like to move us back in the direction, personally.
I definitely would like to talk more about it. Right now I’ve got a few things going on that are going to have to put that on hold, though.
Enjoy.
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