Conservatives who hate Common Core are furious that Betsy DeVos is declaring it is “dead” while allowing it to flourish.
She spoke at the American Enterprise Institute and confidently asserted the end of Common Core but she knows that the Every Student Succeeds Act has cemented it into place in every state. If she really wanted to kill it, as Trump promised, she would ask the Republican controlled Congress to amend ESSA.
Taking a hands-off stand protects the status quo.
DeVos has a long history of supporting Common Core, as did her favorite candidates, JOHN Kasich and Jeb Bush.
Prominent conservative CC critics, Jane Robbins and Emmet McGroary, took her to task not only for weaseling on Common Core but for pushing “personalized learning” (digital learning), which is a Jeb Bush passion.
And this was before DeVos approved the hated PARCC tests.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I never looked at Breitbart before. I do not understand how this post can claim that Obama’s policies were mostly “carrot.” Perhaps they are referencing Gates’ RTTT money that was really a way to bribe states to adopt coercive policies.
I find it funny that Trump called the Common Core a disaster. I would like to see someone ask him to tell them five things about the Common Core when he knows nothing about public education. “Weaseling” is the appropriate term for this administration.
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Race to the Top was an abuse of federal power. It offered carrots ($5 Billion) to states that did what Arne wanted. It also included sticks. If test scores don’t go up, the staff is fired, the school is closed.
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And while it is hard not to blame the G. Bush years for NCLB, so many people do not know — or refuse to recolonize — that the RttT years under President Obama were NCLB on steroids.
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recognize
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Some common ground with the right wing! Let’s hope they can achieve some of their goals, in particular eliminating the std testing mandate under ESSA. We can help!
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You might be surprised at the many things all have in common. The sorting into a right/left dichotomy serves to conceal the commonalities that all have. The labels serve to isolate and reject others. I like to say “I’m so far left I’m right”.
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“Vander Hart asserts DeVos should heed her own advice. ‘…what is Secretary DeVos going to do about it?’ he asks. ‘If this is something she truly believed she would support the repeal of ESEA instead of touting it in its current form as the Every Student Succeeds Act.’”
I have to admit, I agree that it would be better to repeal the entire ESEA than allow mandatory annual testing to continue under the ESSA. The amount of time and money states spend on testing nullify and stultify the funding ESEA provided. How surreal it was to agree with so much of a Breitbart article. On behalf of the families I serve, I oppose Common Core test-based, digitalized, and depersonalized pseudo-education that much. Unreal.
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Who are the few who are making $$$$$ off the Common Gore?
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I live in a very conservative area and the conservative opposition to Common Core was almost non-existent, other than a small group who opposed everything Obama did including school lunches.
Most of the parents in our public school had no earthly idea what Common Core was. It was adopted at the state level with little or no debate and zero public input – I would bet 90% of parents here discovered “the Common Core” when they pushed the tests in and we got blaring headlines all over the state that students scores had dropped.
In addition, like all ed reform initiatives I have witnessed in our local public schools over the last 25 years, there was no follow-up. Our public school adopted the Common Core because it was dumped on them and they did the best they could to comply. They were given no additional resources or support other than more difficult tests for students. We still “have” the Common Core in Ohio although Republican political necessity meant they had to re-label it, but it really doesn’t matter because ed reformers lost interest in it the moment the tests went in.
They really could have achieved this objective much more cheaply by just moving the cut scores on the tests Ohio had up 20%.
It’s a shame. All that money and all that effort by teachers and students and for what? A higher cut score on standardized tests? Another stick to beat public schools with?
I don’t feel bad for ed reformers. I feel bad for all the teachers, students and parents who took them at their word that they were serious about this and would follow thru and stick with it longer than 3 weeks.
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My son is using a “personalized learning” platform in a science class and I think parents are probably not yet aware how much testing is conducted in these platforms. I estimate he spends about 25% of every science period taking short online tests. They’re directing their own class time, which means they’re reading and watching online and because the teacher needs to know if they’re actually taking any of this online content in the kids are tested CONSTANTLY.
When parents figure it out- and they will- there will be pushback to “personalized learning”. A class period is about 45 minutes here. If he’s reading or viewing (short) content and then taking a 7 to 10 minute test at the completion of each piece of content then he can easily spend 1/4 of each class period testing and it’s probably closer to half. They test A LOT on these platforms.
I think what probably happens is that because the tests are canned content and because they’re scored automatically and require no teacher input at all it’s easy to absolutely load each class period up with assessments, so the platform providers do just that.
I think kid’s test scores probably WILL go up with “personalized learning” simply because they’re essentially taking practice tests constantly. It’s very fancy test prep with a lot of bells and whistles.
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The online platform I refuse to use has students answering multiple choice questions most of the time. One big test is all it is. Waste of time.
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I went to parent/teacher and the personalized learning platform was explained by the teacher. So I’m there and I’m actually pretty impressed by all these progress lines and graphs and data points describing what my son “knows” and “doesn’t know yet” because it’s impressive! They’re collecting a massive amount of information on these kids and all of that can be compiled and presented in visual forms quickly and easily.
But then the school year goes on and I realize where it all came from- it ALL came from short online tests he is taking at the completion of each reading or viewing session. He’s spending 1/4 of his time producing this data. Is that a good value? Is that the best way he could be spending his time?
I have this incredibly granular picture of how he performs on these short tests, but, boy, that comes at a cost and HE’S paying the cost. He’s the one testing constantly. No one even reads or grades these tests. The platform spits the results right back at him – it’s a closed circle- boy to platform and then platform to boy.
He doesn’t like the class, but can you blame him? It’s like a year-long, chopped up standardized test with some groovy graphics added.
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Reminds me of sales people who say, ‘ A lot of numbers and a few graphs and people will buy anything.’
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Just in:
WWE match between “Hard Core Betsy” and “The Real Conservatives” (TM) tag team.
Break out the popcorn 🍿
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If DeVos is keeping the Common Core, I think it is only because the PARCC and SMARTER tests items are migrating into the depersonalized non-stop testing regime promoted by edtech. Gates is still funding Common Core initiatives and promoting “mastery” of little “chunks” of knowledge and tests for “mastery” of these. iThere is a move from standards-based grading to competency-based badges earned by computer-based education. CBE is where the big money is migrating. USDE is still subsidizing that effort. This article shows how naive some of the CBE designers are as they try to “train” computers to function as if artificial intelligence is the greatest thing ever…except for a human teacher.
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/My-Computer-Is-an-Honor-Student-but-How-Intelligen-Clark-Etzioni/390808617b277987999b6e8e0aa5742aab54a6a0 ALLEN INSTITUTE FOR ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
move t
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As mathematician Roger Penrose (who wrote a seminal paper with Stephen Hawking) has pointed out, computers can potentially do pretty much everything humans do, with one exception: understand.
How does a computer help someone to understand or even know if they understand if it cannot itself understand what it is teaching?
It not only can’t understand what it is teaching, but it also can’t understand whom it is teaching — or even that it is a “who” and not an “it”.
That’s a very big problem for teachers based on AI today.
And it might continue to be a big problem for AI in the future.
Penrose thinks the problem is actually intractable.
He has argued (based, among other things, on a famous mathematical theorem by Goedel) that “knowing” is actually the result of a “noncomputable” process and therefore outside the realm of possibility for ANY computer, no matter how advanced and powerful.
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This has obvious relevance to the whole “standardized testing” issue as well.
How does one know when a student really understands something?
A teacher can recognize it fairly quickly with some probing questions.
But the recognition comes not just from whether the answers that the student gave are “correct” but far more so from how the student answered, indicating the student’s thought process.
With all standardized tests using multiple choice questions, the decision about whether a student understands must be based on the number of questions answered “correctly”. Unless the students work is shown AND a knowledgable human reads it there can be no insight into the thought processes that went into the answer.
Those thought processes are far more important than “right” answers.
But neither standardized tests nor artificial intelligence can gauge such thought processes.
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