Laura Chapman writes:
This is the new “public policy.”
I see that the Oregon backers of Achievement For All Children in North Carolina paid state politicians for the right to substitute charter schools for low performing public schools in a new multi-count “Innovative School District.”
I looked at the website for the Achievement for All Children franchise (http://aac.school). I think the word franchise is correct because there is a one-size-fits all basic curriculum, with non-trivial online deliveryof content—a boon for cost cutting and really attractive to charters. What’s more, much of the curriculum is free or low cost, so reimbursements for managing schools and hiring paraprofessionals may well be where much of the public money goes.
I took some time to look at the curriculum, the partners, and the funders of this operation. North Carolina schools in this concocted “Innovative School District” will have tightly sequenced grade-by-grade lessons from a ready-to use curriculum. The curriculum has significant on-line components, and/or practice workbooks. These materials also offer teacher handholding materials–what to do, when, and how.
The main curriculum will be E. D. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge® program with grade-by-grade mastery of content beginning in Kindergarten. This content is also organized to fit the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). In 2011, Hirsch endorsed the Common Core State Standards and changed the rhetoric of Core Knowledge® to accommodate the CCSS aims of college and career readiness. Substantial portions of the Core Knowledge program are now available on line and “aligned” with the CCSS.
The Hirsch’s Core Knowledge® program has tapped online services “for building Common Core-aligned reading and language arts skills.” One example is “Quill.”
Quill, is a two-tier service, one free, the other premium. The premium service requires a fee, but that fee can be waived for low-income schools. The Quill curriculum requires the application of grammar, writing and proofreading skills to Core Knowledge content (from Core Knowledge Language Arts® and Core Knowledge History and GeographyTM.). The online assignments, each about 10-15 minutes, are organized by the Common Core standards.
Quill gathers data on student performance in real time then steers each student into an improvement program. The premium program adds data gathering suitable for tracking progress on “national writing standards,” especially “sentence combining” for a logical presentation of ideas.
A second online program has been tapped for use in the Core Knowledge® program. It is free, and offered by ReadWorks.org. According to the ReadWorks website, the service offers “the largest, highest-quality library of curated nonfiction and literary articles in the country, along with reading comprehension and vocabulary lessons, formative assessments, and teacher guidance.”
ReadWorks is incorporating content from the Core Knowledge® program into their “Article-A-DayTM” feature—brief nonfiction texts intended to build students’ “background knowledge, vocabulary, and reading stamina.”
These ReadWorks services are paid for by private and corporate “partners” as well as the generosity of specific content providers.
Here are the private and corporate supporters of the content: Brooke Astor Fund for New York City Education; Frances L. & Edwin L. Cummings Memorial Fund; Cleveland H. Dodge Foundation; Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; Imagine K12; Amherst Foundation; William R. Kenan, Jr. Charitable Trust; NewSchools Venture Fund; Smith Richardson Foundation; Spotlight Fund; Tsunami Foundation – Anson and Debra Beard, Jr. and Family; and Travelers. The “partners” with Imagine K12; are venture capitalists as are those with NewSchools Venture Fund.
Readworks also has partners who integrate their content into the ReadWorks on-line program, especially the “Article-A-DayTM” feature. These content providers include: The American Museum of Natural History; Museum of Modern Art, The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History; New York Historical Society and Museum; Philadelphia Museum of Art; New York Philharmonic; Audubon; Exploratorium; The Wall Street Journal; New York City Ballet; Civil War trust; Learning Ally (for students with dyslexia and visual impairments) and Wordsmyth. (dictionary, thesaurus)
Imagine K12 is of special interest. This is an “investment accelerator” for startups in the tech industry. Educators are enlisted to test and help promote the products through the Imagine K-12 network. Participants in the network–tech-loving educators–are eligible for special invitations to Silicon Valley to be in on and test products/services from the latest tech startups.
Since 2011, Imagine k12 has launched more than 75 apps, online programs and services. Many of these de-school education, and remove educators from decisions in favor of algorithms. The website lists 18 apps, services, products for classroom management, 19 for curriculum, 11 for feedback and assessment, 17 for student learning, 15 for school operations, and 14 for postsecondary education. (These categories are not mutually exclusive).
I conclude that the Innovation School District will be a profit-centered operation with little school-level control of decisions by educators My guess is that parents will have marginal engagement of the school staff unless that is accomplished with the aid of a mobile app. There is no doubt about this: The students will be sources of massive amounts of data for exploitation by venture capitalists.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Notice the use of the word: Innovation. Today UP means DOWN, so there is NO INNOVATION at INNOVATION School District. INNOVATION means being ‘hooked up” to some device, which is NOT learning. This is CALLED “DUMMING DOWN for ULTIMATE and TOTAL CONTROL.”
yes, exactly
Any form of tech is presumed to be innovative This is a false assumption as most of the content is low level stimulus. response, reductionist methodology because this is the format that works for computer assisted instruction. Most computer instruction is like an electronic workbook. Computers are a useful tool that can supplement, not supplant human interaction and instruction. The most meaningful learning is social, not electronic.
Here lies my support for including intro to computer science in K12 math courses. Not ‘coding’– just a basic intro to logic-paths & the binary-thinking mode. Kids need to graduate hisch w/an understanding of GIGO. They need that perspective, so as to have a healthy skepticism for the digitally-generated media that assails them from every direction– social media, & ‘innovative’ tech ed-assists.
This is one area where public schools really do have a lot of power.
No one is insisting public schools buy into “online learning”. They are allowed to refuse to purchase these products.
So refuse. Send the salespeople packing, whether those salespeople come from the ed tech companies, ed reform “consultants” or the US Department of Education.
There is absolutely no reason anyone HAS to jump on this bandwagon, other than sales pressure, and you CAN resist that.
Don’t join the US Department of Education “Future Ready” schools. Don’t let Facebook use your school to field test product. Don’t accept “free gifts!” that are not actually free.
Say no. You have the power NOT to play along.
They can’t blanket the country with these online programs unless public schools buy into it. There simply aren’t enough charter schools or “innovation” zones to support the business model.
If public schools start to ask real questions about value the whole industry will have to come along, for one simple reason- you ARE 90% of their potential market.
You don’t need them- they need you. Act like it.
I would love to see just ONE public school district that doesn’t follow the herd. Superintendents and principals have every incentive to be herd followers. I cannot imagine the supe in our district every deviating from the perceived norm.
Hirsch himself recognized this endorsement of the Common Core as a terrible mistake and has written publicly and forcefully about this.
He has spent much of his lifetime fighting against the skill-drill crap that Common Core encourages and for acquisition of knowledge. See, for example, his books The Schools We Need and The Knowledge Deficit.
What his foundation is up to now, I can’t say. If Doctors without Borders were to announce that it was going to start replicating the Tuskegee Syphilis experiments, this would not seem more BIZARRE to me than the Core Knowledge Foundation’s climbing into bed with Common Core advocates. I think that Dr. Hirsch was promised, before most people even heard of the CC$$ that along with the Core there would be a great return to the primacy of significant texts and that as brilliant as he is, he did not foresee what would actually happen–that our nation’s classrooms would be turned into test prep classes using random, isolated snippets of disconnected text as objects for practice of a profoundly limited and limiting laundry list of isolated, extraordinarily poorly defined skills (for that’s what the CC$$ in ELA are). Dr. Hirsch came to see that and has said so.
And yes, the plan of the puppeteers behind deform has been, all along, to replace the human undertaking that is the transfer of knowledge and skills from older people to younger people with computer-based training for the children of the proles. Much cheaper, and those prole children are only going to be service workers, anyway, and oh, the money to be made in software and hardware and computer data/command and control systems.
What will be done in those schools for prole children will never happen, of course, in schools attended by the sons and daughters of those at the top of the New Feudal Order.
yup such a tragic turn . . . aie yie yie
Bob Shepard. You said: I think that Dr. Hirsch was promised, before most people even heard of the CC$$ that along with the Core there would be a great return to the primacy of significant texts and that as brilliant as he is, he did not foresee what would actually happen.
I think you are correct. I have not seen Hirsch’s regrets. I do know that some of the workers on the Core Knowledge® program migrated to other programs where some initial work was being done, specifically by Lynne Munson of Common Core (predating the Common Core State Standards) and where Hirsch served on the Board.
In 2011, Munson was working on “curriculum maps for ELA” with a grant of about $800,000 from the Gates Foundation. Some of the workers on Munson’s curriculum maps had worked on the Hirsch program and on the American Diploma Project. I corresponded with Munson when I discovered the ELA maps included specific takings/recycled materials from the Hirsch program and from the American Diploma Project. In turn, examples developed for the American Diploma project migrated into the CCSS.
I found direct evidence of recycling content from the American Diploma Project (ADP) into one of the Common Core State Standards, specifically for Integration of Knowledge and Ideas. Standard RL.9-10.7, which calls for students in grades 9-10 to: Analyze the representation of a subject or a key scene in two different artistic mediums, including what is emphasized or absent in each treatment (e.g., Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” and Breughel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus).
Th e example in this standard is identical to a benchmark assignment in the ADP project, which came from an Introductory English Survey Course at Sam Houston University, Huntsville, TX and appears on pages 98-99 in Achieve (2004) American Diploma Project (ADP), Ready or Not: Creating a High School Diploma That Counts, http://www.achieve.org/readyornot (see pages 105-106).
You probably recognize this example. It is all over the internet. Even so,
this standard and its example illustrate one meaning of “rigor: in the CCSS: Make 9th or 10th grade assignments the same as introductory collegiate studies.
I edited a lesson comparing Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” and Breughel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus for a McDougal, Littell text way back in the 1980s, lol. By now, that one’s a chestnut.
Missed Diane’s link while writing a reply to Bob.
Love the quotation marks around “‘public’ policy,” BTW, in Dr. Chapman’s extraordinarily well-research note. Typical of her–this kind of thoroughness. She’s an extraordinarily diligent and reflective person, and it’s always a treat to read what she has to say.
This so-called innovation School District is a vomit rocket.
Shame on them for abusing the word “innovation” They still keep all children on the same artificial pathway leading them like lemmings into a sea of word games and math riddles. It’s time to subvert the current system of education from the bottom up. Let teachers show them what innovation really is.
U.S. teachers already have shown the world what innovation in education is but that all took place between the 1930s and NCLB in 2001.
The Chinese sent teams to learn from the US before NCLB and they took home what they learned and implemented it in Shanghai. The result: Shanghai was #1 on the last couple of PISA tests in all subjects areas tested.
But the corporate reformers of public education are not interested in improving education. They are only interested in all that money taxpayers paid to support community-based, democratic, transparent, nonprofit, public education. Even when the majority of the public protests and/or votes against vouchers and corporate charters, Betsy DeVos and other sea slugs like her find tricky ways to get what they want done anyway.
Another interesting result from that late ’80’s/ early ’90’s visit to our schools by the Chinese: their critique of our math pedagogy. According to what I read, they noted that our method was to introduce a math theorem as a fait accompli, then devote class time to memorizing the theorum & applying it many times over to varying data sets.
As opposed to their method, which was to present a set of data with a question, & encourage students to derive a theorum from the data. Classes were divided into teams, which would come up w/differing theorums. Then the class would test the competing theorums against various data sets & decide which worked best.
Somehow the Chinese pedagogy tho obviously superior made no dent in US math pedagogy– which to this day is compared unfavorably to math pedagogy abroad: I’ve read recent comments from Slavic nations [on Quora] criticizing our drill&kill methods which leave students w/o a deep understanding of concepts.
I’m not in a position to talk about how math is or was taught in US Public schools. I taught English, journalism, writing, and reading. Even when I was a K-12 student, my focus and interest was not in math. If the reformers held a loaded pistol to my head and told me as a small child that I better learn more than general math, I’d be dead now.
I’ll leave it up to career math teachers to respond to your allegations if any are reading this.
However, in college, I did have to catch up and take Algebra, Trig, Geometry, and Calculus to earn my college degree. I never used any of what I learned in those had-to-take classes for the rest of my life. Long hours of work long forgotten.
General math was all I needed to compute the grades of my students, and even build a desk, a table, a bookcase, an entertainment unit, a storage shed, a house, or a fence out of wood.
Common Core is leading us into the educational Dark Ages. Look at the types of curriculum that Common Core ELA is spawning:
https://www.smarterbalancedlibrary.org/content/characters-settings-and-major-events-story-clarify-intended-learning?key=064b82445ab21b486154bef42db68067
WTF does the title even mean? “Characters, settings and major events clarify intended learning”? George Orwell is rolling over in his grave –such a travesty of the use of language. The whole site is filled with this gobbledygook. And this opaque language is what teachers are told to use with their kids! We are leading kids into linguistic train wrecks and calling it state-of-the-art English/language arts education.
Education should be about elucidating the world of knowledge; instead it’s become about obfuscating it, or ignoring it. Futile mental labor in pursuit of chimerical skills is what school has become.
Interested but cannot access the site via this link?
Sorry. If you click the big gray “Learn more and register” button you’ll be on your way to educational nirvana.