Peter Greene is well aware that one of every five New York parents opted their child out of the Common Core exams. Not even Governor Cuomo has publicly supported the Common Core; when asked about it during his re-election campaign in 2014, he dodged the question. His task force recently responded to parent outrage by promising to rewrite the standards and review the tests.
Yet here comes Center for American Progress with a poll claiming that New Yorkers really DO love Common Core!
And Peter picks the poll apart with his usual hilarious metaphors!
In an era in which even Jeb Bush has stopped saying the name out loud, no group has cheered harder for the Common Core than the Center for American Progress (theoretically left-leaning holding pen for interregnum Clinton staffers). No argument is too dumb, no data set too ridiculous. If that dog won’t hunt, CAP ties a rope around its neck and drags it.
So it’s no surprise that CAP is back with yet another Pubic Policy Polling poll announced with the breathless headline “NEW POLL: WHEN NEW YORKERS SEE SPECIFIC COMMON CORE STANDARDS, THEY SUPPORT THE COMMON CORE.” Partnering up on this raft of ridiculousness is High Achievement New York, a coalition of business groups like the Business Council of New York State and reformster groups like StudentsFirstNY.
The poll, found here in its entirety, is as fine an example of scrambled thinking used to fuel PR as you’ll find anywhere. In the world of polling, there are two types of polls– a poll that seeks to find out what people are really thinking, and a poll that tries to make it look like people are thinking what I want them to think. This would be the second type of poll.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The net result of this poll, in spite of its almost complete lack of validity, is that for many in the public with a passing interest in Common Core as well as politicians and the media, the poll’s results will be what are broadcast. The technical take-down of the poll will only be read by folks like us…..as so many of these things are….as the choir reading an inside-baseball paper on choirs.
This poll, in spite of its ridiculousness, is another loss for us here on NY. It’s part of how we are losing that whole narrative thing.
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I may be shunned from posting here ever again for saying this but why all the hate for the Common Core standards? Perhaps it is because my children attend school in a liberal California school district (where testing is downplayed and teachers are not assessed by test scores) but for the most part I am seeing positive and deep learning happening with the new standards.
Diane, I love your books and enjoyed hearing you speak when you came to my town 2 years ago but I am having a hard time getting aboard the “Common Core is Bad” Train. The teachers I respect the most tell me that for the most part they like the new standards and it has changed what is happening in their classrooms for the better.
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California Parent,
Please bear in mind that Tom Torlakson has protected the schools from the full force of the standards, for one thing, by suspending testing during the transition. You have not had the experience that other states have had. Actually, most parents are angry at the tests, not the standards (except for the fact that K-2 is developmentally inappropriate, the divide between literature and informational text is arbitrary, and the states agreed that they would not make any changes whatever to the standards, even if changes were necessary). If you have been reading the blog, you know that the passing mark on the CC tests were set absurdly high, setting up the majority of students to fail. And in every state so far that has administered either PARCC or SBAC, most students have failed. This is not because students are dumb, but because the passing mark is mistakenly aligned with NAEP proficiency, a mark that most students will never reach. In only one state, Massachusetts, has as much as 50% of students attained “NAEP proficiency.” Something’s gotta give.
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While I don’t often use the terms “thoughtful” and “sober” and “realistic” with respect to the spokespeople of self-styled “education reform” the following from two years ago is a thoughtful, sober and realistic portrait of CCSS and its aligned standardized tests by Dr. Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute:
[start]
In truth, the idea that the Common Core might be a “game-changer” has little to do with the Common Core standards themselves, and everything to do with stuff attached to them, especially the adoption of common tests that make it possible to readily compare schools, programs, districts, and states (of course, the announcement that one state after another is opting out of the two testing consortia is hollowing out this promise).
But the Common Core will only make a dramatic difference if those test results are used to evaluate schools or hire, pay, or fire teachers; or if the effort serves to alter teacher preparation, revamp instructional materials, or compel teachers to change what students read and do. And, of course, advocates have made clear that this is exactly what they have in mind. When they refer to the “Common Core,” they don’t just mean the words on paper–what they really have in mind is this whole complex of changes.
[end]
Link: https://deutsch29.wordpress.com/2013/12/28/the-american-enterprise-institute-common-core-and-good-cop/
*Go to the link for the original posting from which the excerpt is extracted and much valuable contextual info.*
I want to emphasize that although I disagree with Dr. Hess on many matters, I give him credit for something very important that is lacking in almost all the other “thought leaders” of corporate education reform: as a general rule, he says what he means and he means what he says.
And, IMHO, as a witness to the true intent and trajectory of rheephorm he is as well-informed and well-connected as a charter member of the education establishment can be.
That is how I see it…
😎
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Common Core, when fully implemented, is a hindrance in the classroom. The standards are coupled with tests in an effort to improve test scores by using test scores. Think of a puppy chasing its tail, spinning off, oblivious to the realities around it. Strategically, as a practice, the test and punish approach is counterintuitive at best.
More likely, the new standards are not driving positive learning experiences in your district, but a renewed focus on reflection and collaboration. But this could have been achieved without oppressive standards and punitive testing. Professional teachers and capable leadership are more impactful to success than top down, rigid policies.
In other industries, standards are created to LIMIT innovation and freedom. That is the very intent of standards. Whether internet protocols, quality controls, or car oil weights, standards dictate a very narrow, rigid domain of acceptable values and measures. Those implementing the standards are more concerned with conformance to a model, NOT experimentation and the individual. Held up to other industry standards, Common Core is subpar and would be laughed out of a true standards committee.
Learning requires, not inflexible standards, but a classroom freedom to experiment and innovate. Teachers must be fully supported as professionals, not demonized and devalued by America. Collaboration must be encouraged and budgeted. If we must have standards to appease those that require them, there should be many competing choices. Standardized tests may be diagnostic tools to help reach a student like a doctor orders various lab tests, based on a patient’s symptoms. Yet we do not threaten to fire doctors and close down entire practices because most patients have high cholesterol.
If you are interested in the full impact of the Common Core, I encourage you to first read the standards. Then look at other districts or read what teachers truly think when not expected to represent the district.
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Dear Diane, I have been following what is happening in other states very, very closely as I plan on being vocal if we ever get to the point in California where other states have gone. However, the constant conflation of the “Standards” with the tests and the teacher assessments etc that go along with them is what I find both confusing and frustrating. They are not one and the same but by all accounts the only message I see here is that we should hate it all and if we don’t we are being duped by some corporate interest.
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Sacramento is working on replacing our Academic Performance Index of schools with something based far less on test scores, hopefully not even a reductionist number for each school, but more a portfolio of accomplishments. We’ll have to see what the national school board permits Superintendent Tolackson to do. It would be even better if the SB Assessment Consortium online testing system, that went with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s adoption of the standards, were replaced with something better. The tests we have now are wrought with every kind of technical malfunction and questionably low quality content. (Unfortunately, we have to sign oaths not to go into detail.) Replacing the standards would not be necessary to replace the standardized assessments, but it might help dissuade the Big Data, testing industry corporations like Pearson from lobbying for their take, this time.
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Just adding a newbie’s perspective on the question asked-
About a month ago, a commenter at this site re-posted a link to a Bill Gates interview. As I recall, Gates described Common Core in the context of market creation. Standards, alone, do not make a market. Market profit maximization is achieved by a marriage of curriculum, testing and standards, with consistency across a substantial number of states. For Silicon Valley to gain, the model must employ as much technology as possible.
The reformers’ proposed, education package exists, in poorer countries, in the form of, for-profit, Bridge International Academies (schools-in-a-box), which are backed by Pearson, Gates and Zuckerberg. BIA’s are promoted to the exclusion of public education. The package is estimated to cost a typical family 1/3 of its income.
Reformer goals for a “human capital pipeline”, which is their description of schools for our children, are a dire threat to education and local economies. The value of K-12 learning, as a face-to-face experience, has many advocates, with whom I agree. But, shifting the discussion, to a different anticipated American consequence, where are Gates’ graduates going to work? The programmers writing code for the Silicon Valley, education boxes, will be employed at cheaper wages, overseas. And, the manufacture of hardware is already overseas.
Secondly, without the economic multiplier effect of education dollars spent in our communities, employment and property values will fall. Thirdly, more consumer dollars spent on Silicon Valley’s education
products, means fewer dollars spent on goods and services that provide jobs in our communities. All of the effects in total, some enumerated, some not, will be disastrous. Wealth will be further concentrated and, local towns, cities, villages, and rural areas, impoverished.
In the summer of 2014, Microsoft announced a deal with Pearson to develop Common Core curriculum.
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California parent,
I take it that your kindergartens have not been turned into first grades? Your teachers do not spend an inordinate amount of time collecting data that used to be collected using professional judgement instead of constant bubble tests? Your children are still allowed to read entire novels and not snippets heavy on nonfiction topics. Kids still get to write stories and are not restricted to five paragraph essays? Can your children still write or are they mostly good at swiping and typing? Do your kids still like going to school or are there more temper tantrums, tears, and stomach aches? I could go on and on with questions about activities that are disappearing and symptoms of stress that are growing under the reform regime. Why are your teachers so accepting of standards written by people who had no business/credentials for doing so? If your teachers are like the ones in my community, they have been working their tales off to turn them into something that makes sense while still being able to appear compliant.
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From a 2009 speech by Bill Gates re his massively financed and promoted vanity project called Common Core State Standards:
[start
When the tests are aligned to the common standards, the curriculum will line up as well—and that will unleash powerful market forces in the service of better teaching. For the first time, there will be a large base of customers eager to buy products that can help every kid learn and every teacher get better.
[end]
The above, with links and much valuable contextual info, can be found at—
Link: https://deutsch29.wordpress.com/2014/04/27/video-bill-gates-explains-common-core/
The test-to-punish part of CCSS is not an accidental byproduct or unintended consequence or unfortunate afterthought.
They are an indispensable feature, not regrettable bug, of CCSS.
And Bill Gates should know…
😎
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Theoretically speaking, the CC standards are separate from the tests and curriculum, but for all practical purposes, they are not.
Nor were they ever intended to be separate by those who authored (David Coleman) and funded (Bill Gates) the standards.
To think that the standards will ever be separated from curriculum and tests is just wishful thinking. There is far too much riding on their NOT being separated — not least of all, far too much money.
The Gates quote from KrazyTA above and the following Coleman quote basically say it all
Here’s what Common Core creator David Coleman said (in 2011)
“the great rule that I think is a statement of reality, though not a pretty one, which is teachers will teach towards the test. There is no force strong enough on this earth to prevent that. There is no amount of hand-waving, there‟s no amount of saying, “They teach to the standards, not the test; we don‟t do that here.” Whatever. The truth is – and if I misrepresent you, you are welcome to take the mic back. But the truth is teachers do. Tests exert an enormous effect on instructional practice, direct and indirect, and it‟s hence our obligation to make tests that are worthy of that kind of attention.”
///end quote
If you remove the standardized tests, you remove the driver and also effectively remove the mass “market” — or at least greatly reduce it’s size — because without a single set of national standards and tests, it’s no longer possible for companies like Pearson and Microsoft to (as Bill Gates has put it) simply “plug in” to students and take advantage of the very large (in this case captive) market.
They can produce thousands of different versions of “custom”software for the many different school districts but that is much more difficult and much less profitable than producing just a few versions for a mass market.
It’s not a coincidence that Gates has pursued this mass market strategy for schools because that’s precisely how Microsoft made all its money: selling a very large number of a relatively few operating system versions for what was effectively a “standardized” PC market.
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2old2teach –
No, my children do not go to school with stomach aches and throw temper tantrums. Yes, they can write. Kindergarten became first grade long before Common Core. In fact, since I have 3 children spread out between elementary, middle school and high school I have experience with curriculum standards pre and post Common Core and frankly there are things that both they and I appreciate about CC especially the approach to math (our District piloted The Story of Units). I am not ignorant of the reform agenda and in fact am hyper vigilant about keeping up with the latest…and I find your critique of the excellent and innovative teachers I know as “accepting the standards written by reformers” to be both insulting and unjustified.
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“The SPECIFIC COMMON CORE standards”
“SPECIFIC COMMON CORE”
Is better than the fuzzy
It’s something to adore
Instead of something scuzzy
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Here’s one parent’s experience with the NYSED Common Core survey. Did NYSED use the absence of criticism as “loving it”?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eZ9re7iRnI
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NB: The following comments deal with the ELA standards.
Rather than revisit how standards were being framed by the states, the committee established to write the new ELA standards simply reviewed existing state standards and put together a document that incorporated what committee members believed to be the best elements of those existing standards. This was a mistake, as many of the deepest problems with the ELA standards have to do with how ELA standards, in general, were being framed. So, while the critique below refers to the existing standards, it applies, as well, to most of the state standards that were replaced by the Common Core. I will limit myself to three observations.
Knowledge in ELA, as in other subjects, includes both world knowledge (knowledge of what) and procedural knowledge (knowledge of how). (It also includes, importantly, knowledge that is explicitly learned and knowledge that is acquired but not explicitly learned, but I am not going to go into that distinction here, as important as it is.) The standards ALMOST COMPLETELY IGNORE the former—the knowledge of what—on the theory that one can promulgate a list of skills and then leave it up to others to fill in the content—as though ANY content will do as long as it meets the CCSS content criteria of being on reading level as measured by Lexile. The standards are a list of skills, but without the specificity that would make them into rational guides for procedural learning. In practice, making standards into simply a list of vaguely formulated skills has some disastrous consequences. First, in many CCSS-inspired curricula that I’ve seen, texts are being treated at random. Students apply skill x from standard y to one random text after another—to this article about invasive species, to that poem by Robert Frost, and to that excerpt from Plato. I call this the “Monty Python ‘And Now for Something Completely Different’” approach to education in ELA. This doesn’t work because people’s minds don’t work in that way. We remember things when we place them into associative networks. Second, a lot of key knowledge (both particular and general, or conceptual, world knowledge) is simply left out of these standards. Try this exercise: Go through the ELA standards for a particular grade and make a list of the terms for describing literary structures, genres of literature, periods of literature, literary movements, approaches to texts, rhetorical techniques, figures of speech, major authors, elements of syntax, punctuation marks, organizational structures for discourse, or almost anything else treated in English classes. What you will end up with as a very short and extremely random list of largely disconnected topics with many, many key ones missing—a lot of glaring lacunae and a lot of missing links. This becomes important because curriculum developers, including those who make textbooks and online learning platforms, take the standards as a roadmap. From the point of view of the curriculum developer, who must show that his or her work “meets the standards,” if it’s not specified in the standards, it might as well not exist. Or consider this: one could put together an entire curriculum to “teach the standards” and leave out most types of literature, almost all syntactic and discourse structures, almost all rhetorical techniques and figures of speech, almost all approaches to texts, and almost all writers considered by, say, literature professors to be part of the canon.
The standards are incredibly vaguely and abstractly worded. Therefore, they cannot be consistently and rationally operationalized so that they might be validly tested. This is true even though they are being used precisely for that purpose—to drive the creation of tests of those standards. So, the process of testing these ELA standards validly is doomed to failure from the start. Consider the standard that says that students will “read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it.” What kinds of inferences are we talking about here? Inductive inferences? Deductive inferences? Abductive inferences? These are very, very different things—apples and oranges. And how sophisticated are those inferences that we are going to hold students accountable for supposed to be? Looking at Emerson’s poem “Brahma,” little Yolanda might infer that it is about a God because, well, it mentions a god. Looking at the same poem, I might infer that Emerson had read, before he wrote the poem, the Katha Upanishad and that he had confused Brahma with Brahman. The fact is that one can make an extraordinarily large number of more-or-less text-based inferences about the poem, inferences of extraordinarily various complexity and sophistication, so it is quite literally IMPOSSIBLE to test inference-making about the poem IN GENERAL. So, based on standards this breathtakingly vaguely worded, one gets a lot of completely incommensurate curricula to “teach the standard” and incommensurate assessments to “test mastery of the standard.” The curricula to teach the standard and the assessments to test it end up all over the place. No wonder the tests are such a mess. In order to test validly, one has to know, precisely, what is being tested, and the standards are too vague to provide that information. One cannot validly test standards this abstractly and vaguely worded. (In this very important respect, the ELA standards are vastly different from many of the mathematics standards, which are, in places, more specific and therefore rationally operationalizable. One cannot operationalize standards as vaguely worded as these ELA standards are, and that’s just what one has to do if one is going to test validly.
The standards treat all parts of ELA instruction in roughly the same way—representing them in these vaguely worded, abstract statements about what the student will be able to demonstrate that he or she can do. But the various parts of the vast subject that is ELA are not learned in the same way. One does not acquire a large and useful vocabulary in the same way that one internalizes a map of the main currents in American thought as represented in classic literary works produced by Americans (a traditional goal of the 11th-grade American literature survey course). One does not acquire a working grammar of a language in the same way that one learns the ability to employ, consciously, various heuristics for organizing an argument. And because the techniques for acquisition or learning differ, standards that specify what the student will be able to do would have to differ in ways that the ELA standards do not. A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, Emerson wrote. So, when a CCSS standard says that students will be able to explain how gerunds function, the authors of these standards believed that the standard was getting at acquired syntactic ability, but it was doing no such thing. The use of gerunds and of syntactic forms employing them is acquired in a completely different way than is knowledge of the functions of gerunds, and testing the latter doesn’t get at the former. This obliviousness with regard to differences in how learning and acquisition of different types of knowledge occurs is a major problem with the “standards,” but one that is not generally recognized. The result is predictable: one gets curricula that follow the roadmap of the standards and ignore those differences, which is disastrous because one has to learn something in the way in which we are built to learn that kind of thing.
So, what is one to do, practically, as a teacher of English? One must work with the standards as written. But it’s important that we have a substantive dialogue about matters like this so that we can do a better (much better) job of formulating standards in the future.
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Bob Shepherd: nicely put!
Helps me clarify the relationship between CCSS standards and curricula and the associated/aligned standardized tests.
😎
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Speaking of SCRAMBLED THINKING, there is an editorial I found in the Wall Street Journal, which publishes Pure lies… read by intelligent people, and thus, become facts.
Here it is, in its Orwellian way by quoting an ‘expert’ lies)
http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-school-voucher-surrender-1450397585
“Democrats oppose this program not because it is failing but because it is succeeding. They fear that as these choice programs succeed, poor and minority moms and dads are going to figure out the Democrats are selling their kids out to the teachers unions.” Now that Mr. Boehner is gone, there appears to be no comparable champion in the House GOP conference willing to fight for poor, minority children.”
Awww. No one to fight to give minority kids a ‘choice’ of bad privatized schools, as public money inspired into ‘vouchers’ the magic elixir, http://www.opednews.com/articles/Magic-Elixir-No-Evidence-by-Susan-Lee-Schwartz-130312-433.html
like others (i.e. Common core, and VAM) the destroyers foist on the public.
and not content with this lie, the WSJ adds:
“Speaker Paul Ryan’s office says, “It’s pretty simple. Democrats refused to accept a popular program to help low-income kids get a better education.” A spokesman for the House Appropriations Committee chaired by Hal Rogers, which helped negotiate the omnibus, says only that “as this was a compromise agreement, not all priorities could be retained. Democrats try to kill vouchers every year because unions demand it.”
Ohhh! Those bad teacher unions that represent those bad teachers.
By publishing such nonsense, the WSJ pushes the agenda of the EIU (educational industrial complex)…
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