The Center for American Progress is a D.C. think tank that is closely aligned with the Obama administration and the Clintons. Recently it released a video making fun of people who don’t like the Common Core standards. The parents in the video express absurd views about Common Core and appear to be extremist wing nuts.
CAP doesn’t seem to understand the critics’ concerns and ignores them:
Early childhood educators say the standards are developmentally inappropriate.
The standards assume that all children, when taught the same material at the same pace, will learn at the same pace. They don’t.
The standards overlook children with disabilities and English language learners.
The standards were funded by one man, Bill Gates, who believes in standardization.
The tests for Common Core adopted a passing mark that dooms most children to fail.
Some educators sincerely like the Common Core. Some sincerely believe that the Common Core is harmful to students. Ridiculing those who disapprove of CC does not advance the discussion.
Peter Greene saw the video too, and he was not pleased. He is an experienced high school teacher in Pennsylvania and he is not a fan of Common Core.
He writes:
“The message here is literally that Common Core critics are the tin foil hat crowd. Sigh.
“I mean, who is this for? Satire is only effective for an audience that is familiar with what you are satirizing, but anyone who is familiar with Common Core or the criticism of it knows that CAP isn’t just taking shots at a straw man, but a picture of a straw man pinned to the straw lapel of a straw suit being worn by a straw man. I mean, I consider myself fairly familiar with the art of mockery, and you can’t mock somebody if your mockery doesn’t have some sort of root in reality. A good caricature has to be recognizable as the thing being caricatured. And, not to get all wonky, but it doesn’t even establish an internally consistent world– the Core is new, but their college age daughter went through it, although the parents who fear the Core never noticed what was happening with their older daughter, and all of these family members relate to each other as if they’re strangers?And what are we to make of the message that parents are dopes?
“This simply sidesteps every legitimate criticism ever leveled against Common Core and leaves it untouched, though it certainly does zero right in on all those people who say that Common Core requires you to throw out books or ignore math or has something to do with mutant armies. Really stuck it to those guys, let me tell you. I can’t imagine how they failed to lampoon all those people who say Common Core will make your houseplants die.”
Shame on CAP.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Teaching is, and has always been, an activity between the learned and the learners.
To suggest that there is some new formula, some new combination, some new matrix for educating a new generation is akin to rebuilding the ark because you believe in wood working.
Teaching is a thoroughly human activity … one requiring spontaneous moments mounded into a pyramid of astonishment. There is no undiscovered Holy Grail. And to suggest that all of mankind has been wandering around in some Dark Age of education since forever is the height of arrogance. And arrogance is exactly what these reformers have in overly-sufficient supply.
They are classroom-allergic theoreticians who seem to think that learning can be boiled down to some handsome algorithms. They ignore the vast human variables that classroom teachers handle each and every day. Their formulae fall apart when their theories are positioned in the real world, among real children being taught by real teachers.
No algorithm has the spontaneity required of a nimble teacher … nor the bulging bag of tricks that become so intuitive among the great classroom teachers we have all encountered. The interaction of human beings is what passes along education to the next generation … so that they, too, can make further discoveries and add to the knowledge base of all mankind.
This new whimsy with the mechanical and the automated is easily imagined. And these reformers think education should be a rather effortless endeavor as well. I wish it were so … but it is not. Human beings are complex creatures … and a classroom full of very different learners is, in truth, a challenge for the most talented and intuitive among us.
When will this society stops acting as though teachers are priests or ministers in disguise? Or stand-in parents? Or easily replaced educational adjuncts? Then perhaps we will be on our way to recognizing the importance of educators and the mission they embrace.
The sooner this nation recognizes what other nations have come to know, the better. Teaching is the essential societal glue … and it is time we acknowledge that … and stop with these hypothetical excursions into the absurd. They are no longer just sadly whimsical … they are wounding children.
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Muy bien dicho, Dennis.
Wow, do you mind if I pass this along (with proper citing of course)?
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To cleanse your palate of bad taste left by the CAP Funny or Die video, I suggest you watch this one:
and this one (excerpted in the video above)
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Well said, Denis Ian.
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Perhaps add—so that what you wrote so eloquently about won’t be viewed as just one side of a possible two sided coin—that those who disagree with your statement should furnish experimental evidence to the contrary. Because your story is supported by an enormous body of evidence throughout human history.
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Do you think these political consultants believe parents who Opt Out their children do not understand the high stakes nature of the tests or the consequences of their unreliability? The video shows their ignorance with great disrespect toward educated parents. I wouldn’t bring that attitude out on the campaign trail if I were them.
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No doubt CAP is using the “full court press” to try and fend off the opt-out movement by combining this with their Testbetter.org ads flooding the market.
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Diane
Please add CAP to the FAIL list. Thanks
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CAP has been a well-funded proponent of all Ed deform initiatives. It has the chutzpah to portray itself as “progressive.” CAP has provided cover for eight years for the destructive Ed policies Obama has pushed. A very bad actor! It’s leader was John podesta, now Hilary’s campaign manager. Just another reason why Hillary would be terrible for education — her team is deeply entrenched with the deformers. Be forewarned.
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Sadly CAP has been devolving into the establishment’s so-called “left” version of the Heritage Foundation. They use the term progressive as a slogan, not as a core principle.
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The “Center for Arrogant Propaganda” ridicules Common Core critics with absurd caricatures of parents.
My, what a surprise
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AMEN, SomeDAM Poet. The DEFORMERS are in this for $$$$$ and power, not educating our young.
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CAP = “Center for Arrogant Propaganda”
I already forgot what CAP originally stood for.
🙂
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The video was pointless — a useless contribution to the discussion on common core. But why does everything have to be all or nothing? There is a lot of good in the CCSS. One side needs to own up to both the flaws AND the positive attributes, or this is just plain politics on all sides where the children, parents and teachers suffer.
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Thinking and discussing is what people do on this blog. Antipathetic, fractious group-thinking and plotting is what corporations do in think tanks. Who is more in touch with facts and with the public? The answer is not Microsoft; the answer is not Goldman Sachs. It’s not the CAP. The answer is parents and teachers, the public — the ones in the tinfoil hats, the people CAP is ridiculing.
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Thinking and discussing are… Sorry.
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David,
“There is a lot of good in the CCSS.”
How can there be a lot of good in something that is epistemologically and ontologically fundamentally false and invalid as a logical concept?? Please see my post below and then read Wilson’s work completely and let me know if you have any arguments against what he has proven about the COMPLETE INVALIDITY of the concepts of “educational standards”. I’ve been looking, asking, pleading for a rebuttal/refutation for as long as this century has been around and have found nothing, zilch, nada.
Please explain the supposed good in concepts that are intellectually bankrupt. TIA, Duane
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8th Grade Reading Standard for Literature: By the end of the year, read and comprehend literature, including stories, dramas, and poems, at the high end of grades 6–8 text complexity band
independently and proficiently.
7th Grade Reading Standard for Informational Text: Determine an author’s point of view or purpose in a text and analyze how the author
distinguishes his or her position from that of others.
6th Grade Writing Standard: Write arguments to support claims with clear reasons and relevant evidence.
6th Grade Speaking and Listening Standard: Include multimedia components (e.g., graphics, images, music, sound) and visual displays in presentations to clarify information.
7th Grade Language Standard: Demonstrate command of the conventions of standard English capitalization, punctuation, and
spelling when writing.
Here’s a good one:
6th Grade Social Studies Standard: Distinguish among fact, opinion, and reasoned judgment in a text.
What’s wrong with these?
I am not saying that there aren’t things wrong with the CC, but like I said, I also think it includes ideas that have been missing with the standards experienced from the past. I’m a teacher, and I have modified the CCSS with tremendous results from the students.
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“What’s wrong with them?”
Let me answer with a few questions:
What’s so amazing, innovative, and groundbreaking about them that Gates and Co. had to disrupt the entire K to 12 math and ELA curricula for 50 million students? Why did Gates tell us it would take TEN YEARS to determine if they “worked”? Can’t seem to find a single standard that is a proven pre-requisite for college or career readiness. Can you? Can you provide the one most amazing, innovative, and Earth shattering standard that somehow escaped 70 years of post war efforts by all previous language experts?
Or maybe you just cherry picked the ordinary standards that English teachers have been teaching for decades.
Many of them, like, “author’s point of view or purpose” are just stupid the nano-second they get translated into test items. This one is typical of the many vague and subjective skill-based standards that pervade the Core.
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“Can’t seem to find a single standard that is a proven pre-requisite for college or career readiness.”
All of those standards address college / career readiness — also, civic responsibility. Like “Distinguish among fact, opinion, and reasoned judgment in a text.” Wouldn’t that one help deal with Trump?
“Or maybe you just cherry picked the ordinary standards that English teachers have been teaching for decades.”
Not all English teachers do them, that’s why they are standards — also, by including social studies, science and other subjects, students effectively achieve these standards. Teaching students these standards takes a lot of personalized attention, feedback and hard work. Without being standards, many teachers let these ideas slip by. Personally, I don’t blame them — it’s crazy work to do it right. So again, by making them standards, and spreading them across all subject areas, it is actually possible to do. And these are the skills colleges and careers care about. The only thing that connects practically every college course out there is the link to the library that addresses these skills. These are the skills that life is about. No one cares long term about the facts you learned in middle school science class. But with CCSS you gain facts plus skills. But the only way to do it, is school wide using the CCSS.
“Can you provide the one most amazing, innovative, and Earth shattering standard that somehow escaped 70 years of post war efforts by all previous language experts?”
Absolutely nothing. But that’s what makes the standards so wonderful. They have been around forever, but are skills most teachers skip. Again, with good reason. They are time consuming, extremely hard to do effectively, administrators usually do not support you (because it can hurt a school’s standing) and can easily get you in trouble (skills can’t be mastered by the end of a unit, and it can look like you aren’t doing your job — the shame of having grades) with parents or/and administrators.
“Many of them, like, “author’s point of view or purpose” are just stupid the nano-second they get translated into test items.”
Agreed. The tests are stupid. I “rage against the testocrazy” myself. An effective teacher is someone who personalizes a student’s needs to help teach these skills. That should be reviewed, not a test. But I’m afraid we will never get there.
“This one is typical of the many vague and subjective skill-based standards that pervade the Core.”
All the standards I’ve witnessed are vague and subjective — the CCSS less so. Do you remember previous standards in your state? I like these standards because they are actually about something — but they can are vague/subjective enough to be modified from the gifted and talented to the self-contained.
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Time for an informed view of rheephorm’s Common Core by a deeply knowledgable charter member of the corporate education reform establishment, Dr. Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute:
[start]
If the standards are better than those that many states had in place, swell. If more common reading and math standards make things easier for material developers and kids who move across states, that’s fine. But I don’t think that stuff amounts to all that much.
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]
For access to the original and much valuable contextual info, go to:
Link: https://deutsch29.wordpress.com/2013/12/28/the-american-enterprise-institute-common-core-and-good-cop/
And for an even weightier opinion by someone at the highest levels of corporate education reform:
[start]
But let‟s be rather clear: we‟re at the start of something here, and its promise – our top priorities in our organization, and I‟ll tell you a little bit more about our organization, is to do our darnedest to ensure that the assessment is worthy of your time, is worthy of imitation. It was Lauren who propounded 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. It is in my judgment the single most important work we have to do over the next two years to ensure that that is so, period. So when you ask me, “What do we have to do over the next years?” we gotta do that. If we do anything else over the next two years and don‟t do that, we are stupid and shall be betrayed again by shallow tests that demean the quality of classroom practice, period.
[end]
Google for David Coleman’s December 2011 speech “WHAT MUST BE DONE.”
Common Core is driven by high-stakes standardized tests. High-stakes standardized tests are driven by the mad dog pursuit of $tudent $ucce$$.
Spin, deflection, rebranding.
Yawn.
😎
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David,
Seems you may have misunderstood my request. I did not ask for a listing of those “standards” which are really curriculum objectives, goals and/or activities that you consider useable. What I asked is for an explanation of the “good” in a concept-educational standard that has been shown by Noel Wilson to be completely intellectually bankrupt. Please try again.
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Duane,
Just curious – are you Noel Wilson? Because when I googled the name, the only person who refers to him is you.
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I am confident that most people would be very impressed with student work at my school. Parents would want to send their children here. Hard-working educators would want to teach here. And I know, if it wasn’t for the CCSS, we wouldn’t have challenged ourselves to develop an ever-changing, detailed and innovative curriculum for our community.
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” There is a lot of good in the CCSS.”
Well, perhaps in some of the ideas behind it, yes. But the execution? The actual description of the standards? The actual implementation? The associated tests?
The only way to tell if there’s any good in any part of CCSS is to furnish research that shows the good stuff. Where is the research body that was conducted before the implementation of CCSS?
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I agree with the implementation and associated tests. The standards themselves for ELA and other content areas are very good.
It is a shame they did not do the research to help better implement the standards. But there is PLENTY of research on the skills addressed within the standards. These standards help student achievement. It is not that difficult to find.
If we truly looked at the standards, it is clear that you can’t successfully test them. The tests focus on only a few of them. The standards are not in order of importance (or should they be), and lose their value if we are to spend the year only addressing those few objectives.
If we accepted the CCSS, we can prove that standardized tests fail to address them.
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David: “It is a shame they did not do the research to help better implement the standards.”
I do not understand your statement above: you can ask any math prof to write down the stuff (call it skills, if you want) high school students need in college, and they would do a good enough job in a day or so. In fact, I can do a certifiably great job within a few minutes: I just copy the Finnish standards; here they are:
Click to access finland.pdf
Done.
These standards are universal, and they are pretty much the same in every country.
The real difficulty is how to teach the material, and that depends on the kids. It depends on the actual kids taking a given math class.
Any other claim to the contrary, such as “3rd graders can be expected to take the same math test in a given city on March 20”, needs to be proven by research. Yes, it requires years of patient, carefully documented research, starting with one willing class where the parents agree to the experiment. Lemme repeat, where the parents agree to the experiment .
As in any other research, impatient, immediately nationwide or just statewide or just citywide or even school-wide experiments are unacceptable.
Nobody would be allowed to conduct drug experiments with the whole population.
I suspect the reason why research was not conducted on CC was because they then would have had to face the fundamental question: How do I measure math knowledge?, and even before that What is math knowledge? These questions are mandatory in research—in fact they belong to Research 101.
Instead of doing research, reformers started immediately a nationwide implementation because they then could pretend, this was not research, this was not an experiment, but a policy. And for policy, you do not need experts, you do not need to conduct research, you do not need to publish your research so that the expert community could take apart, criticize, repeat, evaluate what you did. No, if it’s a policy, you just set up a task force and implement it.
So you see, the pushers of CC avoided the very requirements from their program they want kids to learn: rigor, critical thinking, careful analysis of facts, study of available resources. Some might even say, they neglected using proper English and replaced it with incomprehensible, repetitive jargon, but who am I, a foreign born, to make this claim?
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” But there is PLENTY of research on the skills addressed within the standards. These standards help student achievement. It is not that difficult to find.”
If it’s not that difficult to find, why didn’t they “find” it as part of the process? I can’t imagine ever turning in a plan on any subject and not providing documentation for it. It was their job to provide documentation, not ours.
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You if read my post clearly, I focused on the ELA standards.
I am not a math teacher, and cannot fairly judge them. Great math teachers I know have stated that the early years are ridiculous. Eventually, the ideas behind the math standards make sense starting around sixth grade, but it seems that PARCC and every other corporation has a hard time distinguishing “rigor” with just plain “tricky.”
“Tricky” should never be on any standardized test.
I know that english is not your first question. You seem to have opposed my saying, “It is a shame they did not do the research to help better implement the standards.” In that statement, I was just agreeing with you.
I continue to agree with you when mentioning that the very skills they are pushing, are the ones they didn’t do themselves. But again, there is plenty of research regarding every one of the skills in the standards, so doesn’t that count for anything?
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“But again, there is plenty of research regarding every one of the skills in the standards, so doesn’t that count for anything?”
What kind of skills and what kind of research about them are you referring to?
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Rereading David’s position, I do not see much to argue about in the standards themselves. He likes that education is discussed in terms of skills while many here think, a list of skills doesn’t adequately describe education. This is fine.
What’s really missing is the research showing that emphasis on these skills is in the best interest of children. For example, if one wants to change English education so that reading and analyzing nonfiction gets an enormous emphasis at the expense of fiction, research needs to show the benefits.
Supporting the emphasis on skills by claiming “As you grow up in this world you realize people really don’t give a shit about what you feel or what you think.” is a very good and clear description of the extremely pragmatic philosophy behind CC and hence, in particular, this shift of emphasis to life skills. But having a different view of education is not enough reason to change it for the whole country.
As Bill Gates himself said “you need a decade to see results”. Exactly, do patient research for about a decade involving kids with consenting parents, publish your results, have them criticized, replicate, evaluate by education experts, and if there’s a consensus that the new way to education is valuable, you can think about a wider implementation.
But conducting the experiment with 50 million kids without asking for permission from parents is criminal.
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Once again you have nailed it.
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Yes, you are right… sorta. I do believe education should be taught in terms of skills. I think skills provide students with the ability of lifelong learning. Like the old saying goes, we are teaching them how to fish as oppose to giving fish.
Again, there is a tremendous amount of research regarding the importance of these skills and how they improve student achievement. They are not listed as “common core” because the skills existed way before the CCSS ever was a thought.
I do take offense at the assumption that I am a nonbeliever in fiction. Fiction exists in the CCSS. Remember, the CCSS for ELA includes science, social studies, and other technical subjects. The 70/30 has always been misinterpreted. Nonfiction should be included in English education, but it does not need to be the majority.
You are also incorrect about CC’s view on opinions. Opinions are crucial to help formulate an argument. Re-visiting opinions as they evolve and develop when gaining new information — that’s what the CCSS is all about. Just listening to opinions without facts… well, isn’t that like listening to Donald Trump?
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David: “You are also incorrect about CC’s view on opinions.”
Not sure what you are referring to. The claim “As you grow up in this world you realize people really don’t give a shit about what you feel or what you think.” is from David Coleman, one of the main creators of CC.
To be more fair to him, here’s how Coleman suggests to teach
Watching the video, we can pinpoint all the problems with CC: many things he talks about make sense, but the objections of teachers from the trenches immediately pop up too.
For example, he compares reading an MLK letter to a movie: He recommends giving no background to the kids about the circumstances the letter was written, since, he says, you’d ruin the experience of discovery and the opportunity to form your own opinion. As in case of a movie: you ruin the movie if you receive much explanation before and during the movie. Based on the noise in the room, the audience thinks, the comparison with a movie experience is right on, but, in fact, both trivial and irrelevant: the appropriateness of the MLK letter, hence the kids’ opportunity to make any kind of discovery or just to care about the letter at all, depends on the kids’ prior background, knowledge—not to mention the crucial fact that kids don’t get to take a test about a movie.
It’s another, but related matter that one of the big reasons we go to see a movie is the possibility to hear an exciting story—the very thing Coleman warns us against when criticizing traditional education: too many stories
Educational theories don’t matter much without the accompanying research, but men of action like Coleman don’t like to fiddle with traditional stuff like that; they believe their theories are equal to reality and hence they believe they should be applied without delay and as widely as possible.
I think the correct description of Coleman is that he is simply full of himself, as it seems clear to anybody watching the above videos. In my opinion, this observation gives you the surest way to distinguish him and other neoliberal actionfigures from educators.
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Two explanations for CAPs goody and offensive video.
1. They actually believe CC critics are irrational .
2. They know that critics of CC have legitimate arguments, but don’t care because CAPs ideology is less concerned with what’s good for kids, and more concerned with supporting the ASSumption that standardization will improve education.
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Correction: goody meant to be goofy
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Check out the Center for American Progress (CAP) and their partnership with National PTA, the New York Urban League, the National Association of Secondary School Principals, or NASSP; Higher Achievement New York, or HANY; Educators 4 Excellence, or E4E; and America Achieves. They’ve launched the misnomered and misleading Testing Bill of Rights. Wolf in sheep’s clothing. Their spoof was definitely a jab at parents. Shame on them for ridiculing the pain and suffering of millions of school children. https://www.americanprogress.org/press/release/2016/03/24/133751/release-with-test-season-approaching-educators-civil-rights-and-education-groups-launch-a-testing-bill-of-rights-at-testbetter-org/
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‘ “Learning experiences like real-world projects, rich debate, and scientific experiments should be the test preparation our children experience, not hours spent on drill and kill. We have got to get this right for kids.” ‘
NO! They are not test prep! They are the root of useful assessment. Why add a bogus layer on top that pretends that it can assess what is happening in these learning experiences. Clearly there is no standardized instrument that can come close. I can gain all the information I need as a teacher as to what a student is learning and how they are growing from classroom work over time. No standardized, one shot (or even two or three shot) instrument is going to give me near as much information. I find the claim that we can use these scores to inform practice offensive.
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It’s also on YouTube:
I left a couple comments:
————————-
“Sad.
“Hollywood unwittingly co-opted by corporate education reform.
“The corporate ed reformers behind this video are out to privatize public education, putting it under the private control of corporations where unions will be busted, and current democratic control of schools by the public — via elected school boards — will be totally eliminated. In their endgame, schools will no longer be accountable to the public, transparent to the public, and because it’s run on cut-throat business principles, will not educate all the public, eschewing all those kids who are the most expensive and most troublesome to educate — Special Ed. kids, English Language Learners, homeless, foster care. etc. Common Core is a vehicle for making all that happen.
“Its design and developmentally inappropriate (for its respective grades) material leads to a great majority of kids failing, and then corporate ed reformers (who funded this video) will then use that failure as justification for privatizing public schools. “The public schools system just ain’t workin’. Common Core shows us that. Therefore, we need to convert it to private control.”
“To wit, the recently departed, and pro-privatization Secretary of Ed Arne Duncan even said, ‘The opposition to Common Core is mostly from white suburban moms whose feelings got hurt because the Common Core tests showed them how uneducated their kids really are in public schools.’ Condescend much, Arne.
“Here’s the kicker.
“Arne now sends his kids to the Chicago Lab School, which doesn’t even use the Common Core, and whose principal, Dr. Magill, has gone on record condemning the Common Core for all the above reasons.
“And now, we’ve got this pathetic video ridiculing those same “white suburban mom” Common Core opponents that Duncan had previously trashed. Hollywood actors being unwittingly exploited to promote corporate ed reform happened before with another Youtube video: popular young actors doing a skit for the failed candidacy of corporate reformer and Marshall Tuck for State Superintendent of Education, and now it’s happening again.
“Here’s a great reply from full-time teacher Peter “Curmudgucation” Greene:
http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2016/03/cap-tries-to-be-funny-and-dies.html
———————————————–
Some asked,
Laurie Mendoza2 days ago
+Jack Covey Are you sure it’s “unwittingly?”
And I added more
————————————————
“+Laurie Mendoza No, I”m not. Perhaps that’s just wishful thinking on my part.
“However, I suspect that most do not understand the macro-picture of corporate education reform, and the role played by Common Core. As with the dreadful corporate reform fiction film “WON’T BACK DOWN”, I don’t blame the actors. They’re just reading lines, and emoting as characters that they’re told to, and paid to. I would imagine “Meredith” from the Office doesn’t have a freakin’ clue about what’s really going on, or what’s really at stake. She’s just collecting a paycheck.
“As David Greene says below, it’s a contradictory reality being portrayed in the video. I mean, early on, it calls Common Core a “new” program that was just introduced, but later on, the college-aged daughter just spent her K-12 years being taught under the Common Core framework?
“Also, how was the college-aged daughter allowed to be taught Common Core on the sly all these years — surely against her parents’ wishes, had the known about it — without those parents ever being aware that Common Core was actually being taught?
“Also, why are parents who take an interest in a child’s education — however misguided one might argue they are for opposing Common Core — being portrayed as mentally ill idiots?
“That’s really insulting to parents, and is an attempt to undermine their legitimate right to dissent or express an opinion against Common Core… or even—God forbid—to opt their child out of Common Core testing.
“In short, this piece is stunningly inept, tone-deaf, and counter-productive to the goals of Common Core promoters.
“That … and it’s about as funny as a death rattle in a hospice.”
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CAP is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. In this recent press release, you’ll see that the Center for American Progress has partnered with National PTA; the New York Urban League; the National Association of Secondary School Principals, or NASSP; Higher Achievement New York, or HANY; Educators 4 Excellence, or E4E; and America Achieves to launch the misnomered and high misleading Testing Bill of Rights. Do not be fooled. CAP has its own agenda. Shame on them for making light of the educational harm being done to millions of school children across the country. https://www.americanprogress.org/press/release/2016/03/24/133751/release-with-test-season-approaching-educators-civil-rights-and-education-groups-launch-a-testing-bill-of-rights-at-testbetter-org/
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The standards this, the standards that. Ay, ay, ay!
Seems like someone named Noel Wilson totally destroyed the conceptual basis for educational standards and standardized testing back in 1997 (damn almost twenty years ago already) in his never refuted nor rebutted most important educational study of the last 50 years “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.
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Diane, they also came out with a “Testing Bill of Rights” on Thursday. It was supposed to be an event, but it was downgraded to a phone call. Participating on the call were Delaware Governor Jack Markell and National PTA President Laura Bay.
In reaction to this, I posted a “Parents Bill of Rights for Education”, seen here: https://www.change.org/p/parent-bill-of-rights-for-education
Yesterday morning I was posting the article to many education groups on Facebook, as I have done thousands of times before. As I was about halfway through, I got a notification from Facebook stating that I could not post on groups or join groups for two weeks, until April 8th. I immediately appealed the matter, but I have yet to hear back from them.
Emily Talmage caught on to the situation and posted a blog article of her own on it: http://emilytalmage.com/2016/03/25/opt-out-dad-sent-to-facebook-jail/
This had the opposite reaction of whoever caused my Facebook ban. It catapulted the “Parent Bill of Rights for Education” into the stratosphere. Last night, I started a change.org petition. The petition will go to Rep. John Kline (MN). https://www.change.org/p/parent-bill-of-rights-for-education
I have no idea who caused the Facebook ban, but I find it very ironic that this is the article I would get “punished” for, especially when a part of my bill or rights covers censorship of parents. Something must have really bothered one of the education reformers…
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Right wing nuts indeed. There are plenty in Ohio.
Common Core is up for review in Ohio, sort of.
The Ohio Department of Education (ODE) only wants comments from the public that will tweak specific standards, not reasoning that might warrant dumping them all. The press (in this case the Newark Advocate) repeats the myth that the standards were developed by a broad coalition and correctly raise the bar for U.S. students, who often lag their international counterparts.”
The ODE only wants to know which standards need to be tweaked and according to a spokesperson, the current review has nothing to do with controversies.
ODE has set up a website for “feedback” relevant to three questions:
1. Are these standards still appropriate for the students in each grade?
2. Do these standards still reflect what is most important in each subject area?
3. Do these standards still reflect what students need to know to be successful after high school?
In order to offer a response you must go to a website where you can enter the feedback system. It is structured with five entry points for 963 Common Core standards: K-8 Math (229), HS Math (156), K-12 ELA (32), K-5 ELA (250), 6-12 ELA Literacy (296).
The number of standards is daunting enough (the system as dropped subordinate parts (e.g., a-f ) attached to many of standards–the parts that steer instruction and complicate judgments. The feedback system is semi-structured. You can search for standards by grade level and major topics, or enter a key word and see what that turns up.
Casual comments are clearly ruled out. When you have identified one standard for a comment, you are asked to follow these steps. (Begin quote)
1. Type of Suggestion Select the type of edit being suggested for the standard above. —Clarity—Grade Level Appropriate—Content Error—Other
2. Claim. Provide a description of your content-focused issue or concern with the standard you identified. Characters 0/1000
3. Resolution. Provide a description of a possible resolution to the issue that you claimed above. Characters 0/1000
4. Research/Rationale* Provide research, information or data that supports the claim made above concerning this standard. Characters 0/1000 If you have none, enter “None” into the box. (End Quote.)
So far the state has received over 350 comments. I am trying to find out the ending date for the on-line comments and more about “a committee” that will meet after the on-line comment period is closed.
This on-line comment “opportunity” is inexpensive, limits responses, and demands more time than most people can devote to it. I think the CCSS will not be changed much. It is not just that educators played such a marginal role from the get-go, and that Bill Gates paid for the CCSS, and the rest.
Ohio already has 3,203 standards on the books, an average of 267 per grade level, including the existing Common Core (including parts a-e). There are no caps on standard-setting.
There are also brand new national standards that might be worthy of concurrent review—including National Core Arts Standards (2014) and Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS, 2013). In fact, the NGSS include 410 cross references to the Common Core: 203 in math, 96 in reading, 90 in writing, and 21 in ELA literacy—all before high school.
Apparently Ohio “continues to review the NGSS document for the purpose of identifying related resources and strategies that schools can use to support Ohio’s Learning Standards in Science, which began serving as the foundation for Ohio’s State Tests in Science in 2014-2015.”
It seems doubtful that Ohio ever intended to have a serious and “actionable” review of the CCCS. Why? Ohio has already contracted with the American Institutes for Research (AIR) for math and English tests that are supposed to be ready now (Spring 2016) having dumped PARCC. In addition, AIR already has contracts for science and social studies tests. The “feedback form” is at http://www.ohio-k12.help/standards
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Hi Diane,
After viewing the video, I left the following comment with the Center for American Progress on their website:
“I am particularly outraged about your ignorant “satire” about the Common Core that I just viewed. I have been supportive of CAP for some time and considered your work thoughtful and thought provoking. As a retired science teacher of 30 years experience I am shocked at the arrogance and stupidity of this cheap shot at those of us who question the common core. Here are a couple of reasons I DO NOT SUPPORT COMMON CORE:
– Common Core assumes that children arrive at school as a blank slate and can all learn at the same rate. These are false assumptions that cause children, especially children from poverty stricken areas, to become frustrated and loose interest in learning.
– Dictating the content of educational curriculum and the pace at which it is taught deprives teachers of the flexiblilty they need to address their students as individuals. Children arrive at school with their own isolated and divergent views of reality. The teacher’s challenge is to reach their students where they are and guide them into a broader more universal perception of the world. John Dewey explained this very well. Common Core, like the communist 5 year economic plans (remember they didn’t work well either), is a one size fits all concept that ignores the complex issues of learning.
– By declaring that all children throughout the country should learn the same information destroys the diversity of knowledge that can be offered at schools throughout the country. As it is, the knowledge content offered (in the science curriculum which I am familiar with) is way too broad and is presented with almost no depth (a mile wide and a millimeter thick) for children to absorb. Thus they often just memorize facts in preparation for tests, understand very little content, and quickly forget the information taught. This problem really goes back to the introduction of Standardized Testing, but is exacerbated by Common Core
Our children are the greatest asset our nation (or any nation) has. Their education is critical for the future of us all. Public Education issues are far to important to be treated in the shallow, derisive, satirical fashion that you have chosen to berate those of us who disagree with the Common Core.”
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Thank you for a great letter, “Altate.”
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I completely agree with you on the video — it was senseless.
But from my experience with the CCSS, I have to disagree with you on your arguments.
Your first two points are pretty much the same. You put it perfectly that children do not learn at the same rate and “arrive at school with their own isolated and divergent views of reality. The teacher’s challenge is to reach their students where they are and guide them into a broader more universal perception of the world.” The CCSS allows for flexibility. I have adapted these standards for the same grade level for both gifted AND self contained students. The standards are still getting addressed, but in different ways. The key is to have the teachers create the curriculum themselves, as oppose to purchasing curriculum materials from some company that has to have “a one size fits all” mentality in order to mass produce.
The common core does not ask children to learn the same information. They ask them to learn the same skills. The information and content is decided by the states and schools. Information should be adapted to your school population — to help reach the students. The skills in the CCSS are universal. Every child who wants to succeed in college, in a career, or at being a civic-minded individual needs these skills.
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I’m a retired teacher. I’m saddened by your statement that the CC, developed by non-teachers, is so helpful to you. Do you really need some outsiders with no/little classroom experience to show you how to teach and evaluate your students?
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What I appreciate is that they make these skills a priority. These skills are not easy to teach, and are often left behind. They should be spread out among the different subject areas. They are way too consuming for one content area alone. We have students do “research” with no clue on how they constructed the paper. Most of us would agree that we were forced to do our best learning these skills while in college — with only a handful of us perfecting them by the time we graduated. Students should know these skills entering college so they can make better use of their time making analyzing and evaluating the content.
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David “The skills in the CCSS are universal.”
Exactly. So why did we need CCSS, when other countries already wrote them down? Here are the math standards from Finland, written in clear, almost jargon free English
Click to access finland.pdf
What’s the big deal that prompted our own version?
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It would be unfair for me to comment on math standards. I do not teach math.
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