Nicholas Tampio calls on the Regents of the State of New York, the state school board, to reject the rebranded Common Core standards.
Tampio is a professor of political science at Fordham University.
He writes:
“On Sept. 11-12, the New York State Board of Regents will consider adopting the Next Generation Learning Standards for English language arts and mathematics. The standards are nearly identical with the Common Core and keep the features that parents have loudly, and justifiably, protested. New York should not keep wasting time and money on low-quality academic standards. The Regents should vote no on the renamed Common Core standards.
“The New Paltz Board of Education made a public comment describing how the “new” standards are virtually indistinguishable from the Common Core. “Of the 34 ELA anchor standards, 32 are word-for-word identical when compared to the original anchor standard,” the board said.
“Here is the first Next Generation ELA anchor standard: “Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly/implicitly and make logical inferences from it; cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text.” This is the first Common Core anchor standard and the basis of Common Core’s emphasis on “close reading.”
“On assignment after assignment, assessment after assessment, Common Core close reading works the same way. Students provide verbatim evidence from a text to answer questions about the text. As a professor, I know that this pedagogy fails to prepare students for college, and as a parent, I see that it leads to a dreary school day.
“The Common Core standards train children merely to regurgitate other people’s words.
“For instance, the 2017 Regents ELA examination, based on Common Core, asked that students write an essay on whether school recess should be structured play. The exam provided four texts and instructed students to “use specific, relevant, and sufficient evidence from at least three of the texts to develop your argument.”
“Three of the four texts argued for structured recess. The three that argued for structured recess were two pages; the one that argued for free play was one page.
“Parents expressed outrage on social media that this exam provided a wealth of evidence for students who argued for structured recess and little evidence for students who thought that students might enjoy free play.
“This problem is baked into the standards. The Common Core standards give students few opportunities to share their own thoughts or responses to the material. New York can do a better job writing standards and showing the rest of the country that the federal Every Student Succeeds Act really does open a door to exiting the Common Core.”
New York had far superior standards prior to adopting the Common Core standards as a devil’s bargain to win Race to the Top money.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
A rose by any other name…
Sent from my iPhone
>
LikeLike
Or in this case, a corpse flower by another name would smell as foul. California standards have changed names a few times since I began teaching. And within the standards, there have been more plays on semantics. Persuasive writing became argumentative text. Same thing. Research reports became informative texts. No difference (except that research was replaced with googling). Works of fiction became narrative texts. That one actually has a different, marginalizing meaning. It doesn’t matter how much you water (down) the standards corpse flower, the OptOut rose will remain the sweetest, hardiest rose in the garden.
LikeLike
Myth is a peculiar thing. Like symbolic language, out of which it is built.
One rests on the other.
“Man gave names to all the animals, in the beginning, a long time ago…”
Was he right? Was he wrong?
“Read closely to determine what the myth says explicitly/implicitly and make logical inferences from it; cite specific mythical evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the myth.”
LikeLike
LOL.
LikeLike
“New York had far superior standards prior to adopting the Common Core standards as a devil’s bargain to win Race to the Top money.”
Disagree. Race to the Top wasn’t enough money in any one place to bribe anyone to do anything. Race to the Top didn’t come NEAR the cost of putting in any of the Race to the Top directives.
If they adopted Race to the Top directives because they made a “devils bargain” then they are idiots and they can’t add and subtract.
State lawmakers adopted Race the Top objectives because they backed them. When that became a political problem for them they all denied it and blamed DC.
If there was a “deal” made the deal was this- DC would take the blame for Race to the Top and hold state lawmakers politically harmless, because Arne Duncan doesn’t have to get re-elected and they do.
LikeLike
Chiara, the USDE threatened the withdrawal of federal education funds from any state that didn’t institute its program of education as Stairmastery based on standardized testing of these “standards.”
“In the 2004-05 school year, 83 cents out of every dollar spent on education is estimated to come from the state and local levels (45.6 percent from state funds and 37.1 percent from local governments).” –USDE
That leaves 17% from the feds. That’s a big chunk o’ change.
LikeLike
Indeed they should.
An analysis of one of these puerile “standards”:
LikeLike
And another:
LikeLike
And a couple more:
LikeLike
RttT was 4.3 billion dollars, spread over the states who won the grants. I think Arne Duncan was terrible and RttT was a typical, arrogant “best and brightest” idea that wanted big changes with little or no investment but 4.3 billion split among 30 states isn’t a big enough bribe to “coerce” anyone to do anything.
Race to the Top COST public school districts. It was typical ed reform- they pay the “start up” costs to get their programs in and then whichever dope bought their pitch is stuck with the continuing costs.
They do this ALL the time. They’re doing it right now with the XQ high school program. Who will pay for the XQ schools when the grants run out? The public. The public pays the cost of each and every ed reform experiment. All they do is provide “seed money” and the seed money is an end run around the public.
LikeLike
You are certainly right about that. It cost them, and it cost them dearly. Practically every school in the country had to invest in computers to take state tests on, and their media labs were never available to their students because they were being used for pretests, benchmark tests, practice tests, and actual testing related to the state testing programs. But the really enormous cost was the opportunity cost for the students–all that they didn’t learn because of the dramatic ways in which these standards [sic] distorted their education. Under them, English class became ELA test prep class. Under them, kids who weren’t yet able to add and subtract fractions were forced, because of the grade level standards, to be in PreCalc. Insane. But you know all this. I am not attempting, here, to instruct you. But perhaps someone else will read this.
Race to the Top was, you are certainly right about this, a break-the-bank, unfunded mandate.
LikeLike
cx: largely unfunded mandate
LikeLike
Tampio: “This problem is baked into the standards. The Common Core standards give students few opportunities to share their own thoughts or responses to the material.”
Exactly. They encourage extremely artificial responses entirely antithetical to the actual PURPOSE of reading, which is to engage with what the author has to say. Mr. Tampio’s insight, here, is a profound one.
Imagine in class on the Civil War in which students were allowed only to discuss the relative sizes of Union and Rebel cannonballs. That’s what we get with the Common [sic] Core [sic]. The important stuff doesn’t even get dealt with. Work in English class becomes about trivialities.
LikeLike
BTW, if you disagree with my post, here, please frame your response as a five-paragraph informative essay addressing how my use of figurative language affected the mood and tone of my piece. Do not, under any circumstances, address what I actually had to say. This will put you well into the spirit of the Common [sic] Core [sci] State [sic] Standards [sic] in ELA.
LikeLike
I do think the Common Core approach to English is grim. The clipboard crowd managed to suck all the joy out of that. They have to take it apart to present it to an ordinary class where kids have differing abilities and it becomes ludicrous. It’s like WORD FOR WORD. Grim, grim, grim. Life is a hard joyless slog and then you die, seems to be the mindset.
My husband says they’re creating a generation of lawyers.
LikeLiked by 1 person
If only. They are killing curiosity and innovation in its cradle, and lawyers have to be able to read and write. Following a CC$$ curriculum will not give us people who can read and write, though it will produce, at the very top of the class, a few of the lawyers that your husband speaks of–the ones who were smart enough to play the CC$$ game and to learn how to read and write and do math IN SPITE OF the distorted curriculum handed them. For make no mistake about it, the CC$$ is being used as a curriculum map by every educational materials provider. Got an interesting, innovative, important idea for what we should be doing in class? Forget it. Lord Coleman has done your thinking for you.
LikeLike
I think it matters what state you’re in. New York may have had “better” standards than Common Core but in my opinion (as a parent-observer and not in any way an expert) Common Core is better than the standards we had in Ohio. It’s more challenging than what our ordinary working class Ohio public school had before.
Now, I know ed reformers won’t support it in any real and practical way- they’ve already abandoned the “support” promise they made- but in my opinion “more challenging” is okay.
I feel bad for the really earnest public school teachers and others who went along with it thinking the “support” would arrive because ed reformers screwed them (again) but I don’t object to the idea, or national standards. I’m fine with national standards. The idea that there is an “Ohio” set of things people should learn seems ridiculous to me outside of conservative politics. Only one of my grown kids lives in Ohio. It’s not 1870. They cross state boundaries.
LikeLike
The Common [sic] Core [sic] was hacked together based on a review of existing state standards [sic] that were themselves the product of lowest-common-denominator educratic groupthink. They are no better and no worse, but they are godawful nonetheless. The whole notion of what kinds of statements should constitute standards in ELA needs to be revisited and, importantly, the resulting documents should be suggestions, open to innovation and critique by informed classroom practitioners, curriculum specialists, researchers, subject-matter specialists, etc.
LikeLike
But, Diane! What about all those ready made trademarked tests?! How can they be recycled and profits be maximized if the standards are changed too much?
LikeLike
You’re right. Scrap all the foregoing objections. All test prep all the time!!! Because testing grifter profits.
LikeLike
I find the ed reform sloganeering on the Common Core tests amusing, with their whole scolding lectures on how standards have to be higher because “kids today” are so lazy and mediocre. I work in the real world. There aren’t more than 1 out of a hundred adults in this town who could pass the 7th grade math test. I would bet money neither Arne Duncan nor Betsy DeVos could pass it with their decades-old bachelor’s degrees.
There seems to be some fanciful notion among ed reformers that schools were much more difficult when THEY went and it’s just self-congratulatory nonsense. I went to school when they did. I remember the Iowa Test of Basic Skills. It was a walk in the park compared to the tests my son is taking.
When do Arne Duncan and Betsy DeVos “skill up”? When does Donald Trump? what are Trump’s 21st century skills? Lying a lot? Borrowing money? Filing bankruptcy?
These adults don’t walk the talk and they seem to be doing quite well in the 21st century economy with their liberal arts degrees. What gives with that? Why are they exempt?
LikeLike
Uncommon sense, Chiara.
LikeLike
standards are standards. NCTM, NCSS, NCTE.. go back to Cardinal Principles… How many ways can you write “know, analyze, apply, evaluate the three branches of government and the system of checks and balances?” (well, obviously the president missed that unit).
The problem? They used to provide guidance for a curriculum framework (locally / maybe state). Now they are a blue print to drive high stakes tests which in turn drives stick-to-the-script teaching. And, because of the tests, the teaching is low cognitive. How many state test questions begin with the word “WHY?” Very few. Why? 🙂
And that’s the problem.
And, when vendors who do not have the capacity to handle state tests get the state bid (look around folks) and profiteers get the others – problem exacerbated.
Ask your electeds (school, local, state, fed) “Would you rather have high test scores or un-rankable, non-point driven qualitative and authentic evidence kids are learning?” Too many would go for the former.
LikeLike
It is NOT the case that “standards are standards,” not anymore. Standards are supposed to describe what we are to measure. If they are so poorly written that they are not, in fact, operationalizable enough to be validly or reliably measured, and people do the measuring anyway, then enormous resources are wasted.
But that’s not even the biggest issue. In the old days of the NCTM standards, those to a large extent drove curricula, but that wasn’t the case in ELA. NOW IT IS. There has been a DRAMATIC CHANGE in this regard, and that’s important. Every ELA educational materials creator, these days, starts his or her project by making a list of the grade-by-grade CC standards on a spreadsheet and a list of the lessons covering those on the other. The tail is now wagging the dog. The CC$$ have become the ELA curriculum map. In the old days, people to a large extent ignored or simply gave lip service to the standards–I know because I worked in textbook publishing for 25 years. But now, the standards ARE the curriculum map, so you better care about what they actually say.
LikeLike
LikeLike
And as we move more and more toward computer-adaptive learning platforms, it will be even more the case than it is now that the standards will be the curriculum map. That’s why a certain computer mogul paid to have a single set of national standards created–so there would be one bullet list to correlate the software to.
LikeLike
I suspect that he also thought that he was doing the right thing–a confluence of interests, his and those of the students nationwide. But it wasn’t in the interest of the kids at all at all. The CC$$ in ELA have done incalculable damage.
LikeLike