I have written several books about the rise and fall of fads in education. One that has risen and should have fallen by now is the Common Core. Why does it persist? Trump promised to kill it, but Betsy DeVos has done nothing to discourage states that use it. Many states have rebranded the CC and call it something else like “Florida Standards” or “New Generation Standards.” But it is the same old Common Core.
Richard Phelps, testing expert, explains why the Common Core persists. As long as Bill Gates keeps funding it, it survives. He points out that the Gates Foundation has been the source of funding and advocacy for the Common Core standards. If CC were a normal educational fad, it would have died by now due to overwhelming opposition from parents and its demonstrated ineffectiveness.
But Bill Gates not only funded the creation of the Common Core, he has funded advocacy groups to support it and funded news media to write favorable articles, even if they have to beat the bushes to find a supportive voice.
Gates is not ready to write off his investment yet, as he did with his failed effort to impose cookie-cutter small schools ($2 billion) and his failed effort to evaluate teachers by test scores of students (full cost unknown, but surely hundreds of millions, mostly passed on to taxpayers by embedding the Gates quixotic idea into the Race to the Top).
Yet Common Core lives on, even if on life support. The life support is dollars.
“The amounts are huge. A search in the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation website for grant awards with the keyword “Common Core” returns 257 results accumulating more than $300 million.
Substituting the Common Core euphemism “college and career readiness” uncovers another $130 million for another 52 grantees.
Even more Common Core money has been sent under vague explanations such as “for general operating support” to organizations whose only relationship with the Gates Foundation is to promote Common Core…”
“Journalism in general may be suffering, but coverage of education issues has grown, in part thanks to you know who.
Gates generously funds all of the mainstream education press: Education Week, the Hechinger Report, the Education Writers Association, Chalkbeat, and EdSurge, as well as National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting System…”
“(Common Core) is so unpopular and unwieldy it would probably have expired a few years ago if not for Gates Foundation support.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I was wondering what the heck a “testing expert”. Apparently, it’s someone who can defend standardized testing:
“Richard P. Phelps is the founder of Nonpartisan Education Group, and is the author and editor of Correcting Fallacies about Educational and Psychological Testing (APA), Defending Standardized Testing (Psychology Press), and Standardized Testing Primer (Peter Lang).”
This is just another volley in the “it’s the tests” vs. “it’s the standards” battle, Mr. Phelps being on the “it’s the standards” side. A plague on both their houses. The tests and the standards are all useless, invalid and harmful.
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Duane Swacker is a testing expert, ie, someone who recognizes that standardized tests are bunk.
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The title of testing expert belongs to Noel Wilson not me.
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Oh, Duane, don’t be so modest.
Besides, we all know you are really Noel Wilson in disguise.
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Interesting, SDP. Have you ever seen Duane and Noel together? Hmmm….
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Dienne
I’ve never even seen them on the same blog together.
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Except in the split personality sense, that is.
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Noel would be insulted by your all’s insinuations 🙂
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Diane This narrative suggests another question: Why does so much of this abundance of wealth move “up the chain,” to owners and the stock holders? INSTEAD of being recycled (more equitably) into (a) the people who do the work in these complex corporations, and those who, but for them, the corporations would not and could not even exist; AND/EITHER/OR (b) the tax base which supports the many goods and institutions that make our national culture even possible? Is this what happens when “freedom” becomes totally manifest? Taking bites out of its own tail?
Instead, the abundance of wealth has gone to Wall Street couch potato/stock holders (“I got mine”) and singular owners who turn around and try to become politico-techno-oligarchs, cutting away at the very people and institutions who constitute and maintain their own success in the first place. These people, for all of the good that they sometimes actually do, are not only blind and ignorant, they are mean-spirited and, ironically, educationally ill-equipped to say ANYTHING about education.
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Exactly.
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The common core is so freeking important I can’t believe we are having this conversation still. Khanacademy has outline EVERY math topic student needs to address to gain prociency. The only reason some teachers keep bashing this is based on self interest rather than closing the achievement gap. Common Core math is already set on a worldwide basis. Make it more challenging if you wish. But free khan is the great equalizer. Get with the program to help LES students succeed in math. Just saying.
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“Con Academy”
There. Fixed it for you
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Just because the CC$$ contains some of what a true set of standards would contain does not make it an actual set of standards. The CC$$ is nothing more than a product designed to leverage the production and sale of other products. No true set of standards is copyrighted or contains an indemnity clause that holds its owners harmless as a condition of the use of the product the way the CC$$ does. A true set of standards is created by those who will be using it, the CC$$ fails on that point as well as it was not created by K-12 educators. Why would you need to indemnify a set of standards against yourself since you created and then used it? Same question for the copyright.
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I appreciate this response. There are positive and negative aspects to Common Core. Like Diane Ravitch said earlier about the rise and fall of fads, it seems no one documents the positive — we just replace. This keeps us going around in circles. I just wish standards were no longer replaced and instead they evolved. I understand Common Core has copyright, but they are still universal ideas that can be laid out differently.
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A math teacher who used to comment here (and who, I believe has left teaching because of Common Core, endless testing and all the other nonsense hoisted on teachers) once suggested that there be an open standards project, not unlike open source software , which provided a set of changeable standards that could be molded and used as teachers saw fit.
John is right. An Immutable set of standards is inimical to education.
As Bill Gates let on very early (2009), the point of national standards like Common core is to standardize schools and students in order to create markets — so that companies companies could create products to “plug in” to schools.
He claimed it would serve teachers, but it was much more like the relationship of parasite to host, where Gates and his company are the parasites.
People should have listened to him because he was broadcasting the true reasons for Common Core.
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Must be a Khan academy franchise owner.
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Huge coordinated push to privatize every public school in the country going on right now.
“In remarks before a cross-section of the city’s elite, author David Osborne argued Friday that to improve education for poor students, cities such as Philadelphia should create more charter schools – as long as the expansion is accompanied by meaningful accountability.”
It’s combined with an anti-labor union campaign.
Doesn’t Philadelphia have lots and lots of charter schools already? Why didn’t that work?
Wow, ed reformers are really taking the gloves off in their lockstep, ideological opposition to labor unions:
“They’re actually doing what George Wallace did, standing in the schoolhouse door, denying opportunity to poor minority kids,” he said. “And that really bothers me. But that’s their political activity.”
I commend the ed reform monolith for finally, finally telling the truth about their goals.
That wasn’t so hard, was it? Simply tell the public the goal is to privatize every public school in the country and abolish labor unions. Run on that. That’s how competition works- you state your ideas and plans honestly and then we vote on them. We can’t vote on them if no one has the spine to admit what they are.
http://thenotebook.org/articles/2017/09/08/well-regulated-charters-improve-education-for-low-income-students-author-says
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Chiara and Diane Here is some push-back that came in from EdWeek today:
ALL QUOTED MATERIAL BELOW: (My emphases)
“COMMENTARY
“How to Define Public Schooling in the Age of Choice?
Five responsibilities schools must meet to truly be called ‘public’
By Sarah M. Stitzlein
September 5, 2017
“. . . In fact, it’s in the interests of those advocating for private and alternative schools to redefine the nature of public schools in ways that will enable more of the annual $600 billion spent on public schools at the local, state, and federal levels to flow their way. Vouchers, according to a July tweet from DeVos, are ‘an investment in individual students.’ This thinking argues that providing direct funds to students’ families is equitable. But it downplays the limited nature of voucher schools, which can hold meetings behind closed doors, impose admissions criteria to block out certain students, and submit minimal accountability data. What’s more, emphasizing financial investment in an individual child is directly the opposite of long-standing views on what public schools should be doing—serving our democracy through the common good.
In this changing terrain, there are five responsibilities schools should have in order to truly be defined as ‘public’:” END QUOTED MATERIAL
**MORE BELOW–interesting five responsibilities/criteria for defining public schools:
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2017/09/06/how-to-define-public-schooling-in-the.html?cmp=eml-enl-eu-news2-rm&M=58187142&U=1182129
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Democrats have tried to have both ways by making vague statements like “strong public education,” but it does not mean strong authentic public schools. These are the same people that keep trying to call charters public schools. “Public charters” is the term they use. The only thing public is the funding.
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Imagine being a public school family in Philadelphia and finding out today that David Osborne has determined your school will be “wound down” and replaced with his preferred model.
Boy, I’d get my kid out of that school as fast as I could. It’s clear the best and the brightest are bailing on it. The decent thing to do would be to tell the families these decisions have been made, so their school doesn’t end up on the “ignored” list without their knowlege. They won’t know they’ve been designated collateral damage for years. Tell them now.
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Echoing Dienne’s comment above. Phelps a testing expert? Really?
Take into considering the following:
“Richard Phelps, a staunch standardized test proponent (he has written at least two books defending the standardized testing malpractices) in the introduction to “Correcting Fallacies About Educational and Psychological Testing” unwittingly lets the cat out of the bag with this statement:
“Physical tests, such as those conducted by engineers, can be standardized, of course, but in this volume , we focus on the measurement of latent (i.e., nonobservable) mental, and not physical, traits.”
Notice how he is trying to assert by proximity that educational standardized testing and the testing done by engineers are basically the same, in other words, a truly scientific endeavor. The same by proximity is not a good rhetorical/debating technique.”
Phelps is in the “teaching and learning can be measured” camp. In the book mentioned above he never once addresses Noel Wilson’s many concerns with the onto-epistemological errors and falsehoods that are rife in the standards and testing malpractices that render any usage of any test scores for anything to be “vain and illusory”.
Now Wilson’s critique (“Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700) is from 1997 and Phelps’ book is from 2008. Perhaps he never read Wilson’s dissertation, the most damning piece of evidence against the standards and testing malpractices. One would think that a supposed testing “expert” would have read and known about Wilson’s work. As it is, it seems that, perhaps, Phelps is as not much of a testing “expert” as it appears.
Most of his listed fallacies are strawman arguments that very few, perhaps only one person-Phelps himself, would argue as being legitimate critiques. I had to force myself to read the tripe in that book. Nothing substantial there at all. Same ol same ol obsequies
mealy-mouthed magniloquent drivel.
But it sure must be nice to be a “testing expert”, eh!
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Some people only read what supports their case.
And you are right about the proximity trick.
But lots of people play this trick by adopting terms from science and engineering and applying them to things for which they were never intended.
It lends them an air of credibility when that is all it really is:air.
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Reading this, I imagined Bill Gates with a Hitler mustache and that serious, psycho expression Hitler had plastered on his face most of the time.
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I’m confused. I was told the free market solved all problems.
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A while ago, someone did a back of the envelope calculation on Gates spending on the whole common core debacle and decided that further digging and analysis wasn’t worth their time after the total crossed the 2 billion dollar mark. When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. All Gates understands is data and market share. With his level of wealth, it’s no surprise he has not yet succumbed to the sunk cost fallacy.
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I think it was Jack Hansard of Georgia who calculated the true cost to Gates as $2 billion for CC
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It did not really cost Gates that much because a significant chunk of that would otherwise have eventually been “lost” to taxes.
And in that case, Gates would have had no control over how the money was spent.
Philanthropy for people like Gates is little more than a way of maintaining control over money that would otherwise go to the government.
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Also, Gates thought he could leverage a relatively small (to him) amount of money to “create markets” that companies like his could “plug into” and profit from.
Personal ROI may not have been his primary intention, but Microsoft was certainly poised (in cooperation with companies like Pearson) to profit handsomely off of a national standards project like Common Core.
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The money Gates put forward was small potatoes compared to the amount shelled out by schools to adopt Common Core and all the textbooks, curriculum, tests, hardware and software that went along with it.
Common Core was like the product you get for free, only to realize that you need all sorts of expensive “accessories” to make it work
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I’ve read that the Gates Foundation only has to spend 5-percent of its total net worth annually on alleged nonprofit ventures like the money he donates to support Common Core’s test and punish agenda. The rest of that vast ocean of money (almost $40 billion in 2012) can be invested inside that foundation’s tax shelter to grow the fund.
That’s why Gates has investments all over the world in industries that pollute the environment and prey on people.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was formed in 2000 with an announcement that Bill Gates was planning to give away most of his fortune. That was great PR – made him look like a saint.
But …
In 2001, Bill Gates was worth $58.7 billion.
By 2016, his net worth had grown to almost $80 billion.
How does someone give away most of his fortune and 17 years later, his net worth has increased by more than $21 billion.
Bill Gates has already failed to achieve his public goal to give away his fortune. It was a lie from the start to mislead people.
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Diane,
ACT CEO: Current Education System Is Not Working Well Enough
SEPTEMBER 8, 2017 BY SHANE VANDER HART
ACT released their 2017 scores, and we still have yet to see any noticeable improvement in students’ college readiness. In fact “underserved students” lagged behind.
Two promises we received from Common Core advocates. The first was that the standards would improve college readiness. The second was that Common Core would help decrease the achievement gap. So far the standards have failed to deliver on both counts.
From the ACT press release:
Underserved students lag far behind their peers when it comes to college and career readiness, and the more underserved characteristics that students possess, the less likely they are to be ready. These findings are reported in The Condition of College & Career Readiness 2017, ACT’s annual score report, which was released today.
Underserved students, who represent nearly half (46 percent) of ACT-tested 2017 U.S. high school graduates, are defined as students who would be the first generation in their family to attend college, come from low-income families and/or self-identify their race/ethnicity as minority. Research suggests students with any of these three characteristics are less likely than others to have access to high-quality educational and career planning opportunities and resources.
Only 9 percent of ACT-tested graduates who possessed all three underserved characteristics showed strong readiness for college coursework, meeting three or four of the ACT College Readiness Benchmarks (English, mathematics, reading and science). Even among students who met only one of the underserved criteria, just 26 percent showed strong readiness. In comparison, the majority (54 percent) of graduates who were not underserved showed strong readiness for college.
Conversely, the majority of underserved students—including 81 percent of those with all three underserved characteristics—achieved only one or none of the four ACT benchmarks. Those students are likely to struggle in college-level coursework.
“That kind of shocked us,” ACT CEO Marten Roorda told The Washington Post. “We knew it was bad, but we didn’t know it was this bad.”
ACT reported that they found overall scores remained steady, but that a large group of students still are not college ready.
Readiness levels have remained fairly steady over the past several years among ACT-tested graduates overall.
Thirty-nine percent of the 2017 graduates met three or four of the ACT College Readiness Benchmarks, up from 38 percent in 2016, but down from 40 percent the year before.
The proportion of graduates showing virtually no readiness for college coursework remained sizable. Among 2017 graduates, 33 percent met none of the four ACT College Readiness Benchmarks, suggesting they are likely to struggle in first-year college coursework in all four core subject areas. That compares to 34 percent last year and 31 percent in each of the three previous years.
Roorda notes that the current system isn’t working (which would be Common Core and its assessments). Unfortunately, the conclusion he draws from this is that schools should double down on more data less education fads.
“What our education system is doing now is not working well enough for far too many of the country’s young people,” he said. “ACT has invested significant money and resources to explore innovative ways to improve learning and assessment. Our goal is to positively impact student outcomes, not only in terms of their academic skills but also in terms of their social and emotional learning skills. ACT urges schools, districts and states to take a holistic approach to college and career readiness.”
And gee, ACT happens to have a social-emotional learning assessment schools can use.
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And yet, the United States is ranked annually as one of the 10 most educated countries in the world.
The Hill reports, “Census: More Americans have college degrees than ever before”
“Just over a third of American adults have a four-year college degree, the highest level ever measured by the U.S. Census Bureau.
“In a report released Monday, the Census Bureau said 33.4 percent of Americans 25 or older said they had completed a bachelor’s degree or higher. That’s a sharp rise from the 28 percent with a college degree a decade ago. …”
http://origin-nyi.thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/326995-census-more-americans-have-college-degrees-than-ever-before
Yet, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that only 18-percent of the jobs require a BA.
https://www.bls.gov/careeroutlook/2014/article/education-level-and-jobs.htm
Conclusion, a lot of high school graduates that don’t read enough and don’t work hard enough K-12 think they can go to college without working to get ready for college, and does that really matter when 15.4-percent of college graduates with BA’s can’t find a job that matches their education level because those jobs don’t exist.
These facts say that the US public education system is doing a better job than what is needed for the country considering that 1 in 4 children live in poverty and those children are the most difficult to teach so they learn. This isn’t true just for the U.S. It’s a fact for every country that participates in the international PISA test.
Stanford report says, “Poor ranking on international test misleading about U.S. student performance, Stanford researcher finds …
The report also found:
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/january/test-scores-ranking-011513.html
This old proverb is correct.
“You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.”
Translated to fit the K-12 education system in the U.S. or any country in the world, that means:
Teachers can teach students but teachers can’t force students to learn what they teach, because people, like horses, will only do what they have a mind to do.
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