At a meeting at Fordham University, Professor Nicholas Tampio slammed ESSA as the same old Common Core, with lipstick. If Nick sends me his speech, I will post it in full.
https://news.fordham.edu/politics-and-society/professor-slams-essa-common-core-another-name/
Here is the university press release:
Nicholas Tampio, Ph.D., associate professor of political science, made an impassioned plea for New York State to reject participation in the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), saying it does little or nothing to stem the growing takeover of education by the federal government.
Speaking at Fordham Law School as part of the Education Law Collaborative’s first education law conference, Tampio made the case that, despite ESSA provisions that allow states to opt out of Common Core, as a practical matter it is no different.
“ESSA requires states to remain within the standards, testing, and accountability paradigm . . . if they want Title I funds.”
That means that if a state wants to follow a more original model of educating, such as the John Dewey model, they forfeit federal funding. “John Dewey said standardized tests can only be useful to help us figure out how to help a particular child, but they shouldn’t be used to rank children, because children have all sorts of special gifts, talents, and interests.”
In his talk, “ESSA and the Myth of Return to Local Control,” Tampio traced the evolution of education reform in the United States, including the programs Nation at Risk (1983), Improving America’s Schools Act (1994), No Child Left Behind (2001), and Race to the Top (2009). ESSA, which was signed by President Obama in 2015, ostensibly reversed the trend toward federalizing education, but Tampio said it has not been effective.
That’s important, he said, because. A top-down approach squelches local control, and students should feel like their voices and opinions are valuable.
“Part of a democratic education is to get kids to learn about the world, and feel empowered that they have a voice in it,” he said.
Local control also benefits low income and minority communities, he said. He cited examples from Kitty Kelly Epstein’s A Different View of Urban Schools: Civil Rights, Critical Race Theory, and Unexplored Realities (Counterpoints, 2012).
“All the research confirms that when parents are involved, students do better. And yet, if they don’t have a voice other than what color cupcakes to bring to the PTA, they’re not going to be active in [local]school boards,” he said.
In New York, the Department of Education has renamed Common Core the “Next Generation Learning Standards,” but on issues of standards and accountability, Tampio said, they’re largely the same. Seventy-sevent percent of the existing Common Core standards will have no change whatsoever, and “clarifications” have been issued for just 15.9 percent of them. In order to receive $1.6 billion in federal funds, the state must comply with the changes and submit them to the federal government next month.
ESSA states that there is “no requirement, direction, or mandate to adopt Common Core standards,” but Tampio says that does not help states rid themselves of Common Core standards already in place. ESSA’s language on standards requires states to maintain “challenging academic content standards.”
“When ESSA was signed in 2015, most states already adopted Common Core. The question [should be]what is the federal government going to do to help facilitate states trying to exit the Common Core?” he said.
“[It] is an incredible burden for any state to choose an alternative, and I don’t think we’re going to see any.
“I’d be delighted if they did, because it would be a road map for every other state on how to do it,” he said.
Tampio, an education activist, claims that Common Core standards, with its test-based model, do little to develop creativity and independent thinking in developing children.
“John Dewey said standardized tests can only be useful to help us figure out how to help a particular child….”
Boy if Dewey could only have seen what standardized testing would turn into. Even if standardized testing were well intentioned (and I’m fully aware it’s not), there’s no way to help a kid when you get one numerical score (ranging from 1 to 4) months after you no longer have a kid in class.
Until we start embracing something grounded in content for profit is going to annihilate public school education. I like the common core and took my child out of private school because I liked the common core being taught in public school. A smart child is able to navigate the rules an succeed anywhere. However when the rules are smart child who cares does all the work and everyone gets reward with project-based learning it’s time for an introverted child to leave if they can. What I’m saying is develop a universe of shared content (a la Khanacademy) and let both fast and slower learners master it at their own speed. It doesn’t matter what it’s called. Common Core, ESSA, they are all the same. Once mastered, do the project based learning. Rally around something that doesn’t reek of slowing down the fast learners so the slow ones can catch up. Everyone is good at something. We should nurture their individual talents – that’s something we can all agree on.
A universe of shared content is what public school used to be BEFORE ed rephorm. Public school teachers used to nurture individual talents BEFORE ed rephorm. Common core= the same for everyone. I don’t know how you can like Common Core if you are all about nurturing individual talents? What you want is what public schools offered 25 yrs ago BEFORE ed rephorm took hold.
YES. So very, very importantly SAME is not EQUAL.
The main problem is the reliance on the concept of standards in the teaching and learning process. These supposed standards are a false and intellectually bankrupt concept. None of the protocols for the promulgation of standards of any major national or international standards organizations have been followed in the development of these supposed standards. See Chapter 6 “Of Standards and Measurement” of my book to understand the total bastardization of the use of the term standards by the edudeformers and edupreneurs.
It is too long to post here but one can get a copy of the book “Infidelity toTruth: Education Malpractice in American Public Education” through Amazon. In it I discuss the purpose of American public education and of government in general, issues of truth in discourse, justice and ethics in teaching practices, the abuse and misuse of the terms standards and measurement which serve to provide an unwarranted pseudo-scientific validity/sheen to the standards and testing regime and how the inherent discrimination in that regime should be adjudicated to be unconstitutional state discrimination no different than discrimination via race, gender, disability, etc. . . .
Benchmarks became standards, teaching became scripted ….and the BS test became everything. It almost seems like child abuse to send kids to any type of school.
There have always been curriculum goals and objectives. The push to replace those terms with “standards” is a calculated attempt to make the teaching and learning process into one of a “manufacturing” process wherein one can “measure” the output of a teacher/school against the supposed standard. Standards and measurement go hand in hand and cannot be separated out.
These are very false and misleading uses, a bastardization of the language and meaning, intentionally I believe to give a false sense of objectivity to something-educational assessment, that is by it’s very nature subjective.
The uses of standards and measurement is not only wrong but unethical and damaging to the teaching and learning process that occurs on a daily basis, minute by minute, hour by hour in each and every distinct classroom in the country.
Why, oh why do we continue these absurd and destructive of children’s minds malpractices?????? (there’s not enough room for all the question marks that need to be placed at the end of the sentence to show my frustration).
Benchmark is also a term from the business sector brought into education to give a certain sense of objectivity to a process-teaching and learning that defies being quantified and ojectified.
Agree 100% Duane.
“There have always been curriculum goals and objectives. The push to replace those terms with “standards” is a calculated attempt to make the teaching and learning process into one of a “manufacturing” process wherein one can “measure” the output of a teacher/school against the supposed standard. Standards and measurement go hand in hand and cannot be separated out.”
I have been around long enough to see the total infection of education with business concepts–distorting the meaning of “growth” to an increase in test scores, benchmarks are part of that. “Best practices” is another. The “productivity” of teachers estimated by value-added measures means nothing more than looking at increments in test scores and ratings schemes based on these. Now the hot-shot people in business think schools should pursue innovations with a vengence, be entrepeneurial (as if teachers have never been able to improvise and be innovative). The business theory of “disruptive innovation” applied to education is a crock, even worst when it migrates to the election of Trump and his campaign to discredit the judiciary, demean members of Congress who fail to support his agenda, lie, and all the rest.
Great post, Laura. Down here in the trenches, one feels powerless against this juggernaut. When the dictate comes from Sacramento, it’s bad enough. But when it comes from DC, it seems impossible to overturn, especially when the teachers and unions are mostly on-board with the program. I don’t have much faith in the grassroots here –they don’t read enough, as Albert Shanker once observed. My only hope is that elites who do read come to understand the egregious shortcomings of the Common Core regime.
When those far away from the classroom give us teachers the script to read, then I know there is something REALLY WRONG.