Bill Gates, Arne Duncan, President Obama, and others who promoted the “Common Core State Standards” like to say that they were developed by the states, by governors, by teachers, by people at the grassroots.
Not so.
This article by Lyndsey Layton in the Washington Post explains that Bill Gates financed the CC from start to finish.
It was, as she writes, “a swift revolution,” though some might say a coup.
Gates put up an unknown huge sum. Some say $200 million, others think the total might be as much as $2 billion.
Two points need to be considered.
One, Gates and others wrongly assumed that the biggest problem in American education was its variation, its diversity, its lack of uniformity. Gates made several speeches about the need for uniform standards, comparing them to standards for electricity, allowing anyone to plug in an appliance anywhere. It never occurred to him that children are not toasters and teachers are not merely deliverers of content. He seemed to completely ignore the close correlation between family income and academic performance.
Two, the Common zcore Standards moved so rapidly that they became toxic. Trump ran against them, though he probably didn’t know what they were. In a few years, they will be forgotten, obsolete. Standards for electricity may be national and stable. Teaching and learning are dynamic, dependent on the social conditions of families and children, as well as changing knowledge of teaching and learning.
All that money down the drain.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Bill Gates is a sham.
You’re too nice, Yvonne!!
In Tennessee the common core was renamed and a sham procedure made it look like teachers had gotten to influence the adoption of new standards. CC stayed after this Orwellian revolution, but teachers were left looking as it were from pig to man without being able to tell the difference.
Roy, “left looking as it were from pig to man without being able to tell the difference” is a new one for me! Thanks for today’s laugh!
They are not going away. Schools are pushing ahead and now we have learning targets to post in each classroom based off these standards.
This is needed to have computers teach our children.
It is not going away but instead is on hyper drive.
Yep. Alive and well in Ohio. We have established rubrics for each standard where students are rated from novice, to intermediate, to mastery. Every reading and math standard. Every grade level K-12.
Forgot to mention, the continued alignment of instruction to the standards, here, is being driven by Battelle/Battelle for Kids under their program called FIP, Formative Instructional Practices. I still want to know the story behind why they have been given the power to take on this role. Any insight would be greatly appreciated.
I would love to get my hands on these rubrics!
Gates is still flushing money down that same drain. He refused to give up. He still thinks test and punish is the key to fix the allegedly broken public education system that was never failing in the first place.
No, he doesn’t think that. Gates knows perfectly well what’s going on in education. See Bob Shepherd’s and SDP’s posts below. It has never been about fixing education. It has always been about profit.
That was always obvious, that it was always about profit, but to get there, Gates convinced himself that to create a profit system, he could do it by improving improve education through a test and punish system. I think he had to justify in his own head why test and punish was the best way to fix an education system (that was never broken).
So, he believes that creating a profit system through test and punish is the way to go. He thinks this is a win-win agenda.
Profits are one win
Test and punish will be the other win
He was and still is wrong. He did the same thing to Microsoft and that odious agenda failed miserably and was canceled. because Microsoft couldn’t attract talent when morale was falling like an asteroid entering Earth’s atmosphere on its way to strike the planet and cause a massive extinction event.
Allowing Bill Gates to insert himself into public education policy with his invalidated beliefs was one of the most reckless acts of the Obama administration. Testing does not improve education; it only ranks and sorts. America’s children deserve better than being guinea pigs for billionaires. Sadly, we have not learned our lesson as the post above mentions. Now Gates has decided infiltrate our schools with invalidated cyber instruction, and he is doing what billionaires always do. They buy their golden tickets for the option to use our young people to sell their products. This is irresponsible governance.
“Heckuva job”
“Heckuva job, Brownie!”
New Orleans sings the blues
“Heckuva job, Arne!”
So do our public schools
“Brownie, you’re doing a heckuva job.” — George W. Bush to Michael D Brown, director of FEMA, who had already badly botched the response to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans
Um, i think you are referring to To Child Left Behind (before Obama). That brought testing to its fullest!
There was a reason for wanting a single set of rigid national standards:
For all the talk about “personalizing” education via computers, the truth is that computers are rigid and, as yet, stupid. Gates wanted one set of standards so that it would be easy to create software keyed to those standards. Otherwise, one has to correlate one’s product to a lot of different standards, which is complicated and spotty.
The problems with having a single set of national standards and with these particular standards are legion, however. A few of these:
The CC$$ in ELA are extraordinarily unimaginative. They draw a circle around the most mundane stuff in the design space of possible ELA instruction and say, in effect, do this and this only. And so innovation in curricula and pedagogy is stifled.This is a VERY serious issue. For an example, see this essay:
The CC$$ in ELA seem to have been written by amateurs with no knowledge of the sciences of language acquisition and little familiarity with best practices in the various domains that the standards cover. Gates would have got similar results if it had handed David Coleman copies of Galen and of the 1858 edition of Gray’s Anatomy and sent him to a cabin in Vermont to write new “standards” for the medical profession.
The CC$$ in Math barely tweak a long-existing consensus about the progression and approach to mathematics education, one that leaves most adult products of that education, a few years after they’ve happily put it behind them, basically innumerate and fine with that. (The preceding state standards were almost all based on the NCTM standards and so were remarkably similar.) Furthermore, the grade-by-grade math standards are forcing math teachers, all over the country, to teach and test whatever the standards [sic] say for that grade level, even when their students haven’t, at all, the necessary background for this study. So, for example, if you are a junior, you’re doing precalc, period, even if you can’t add and subtract fractions.
Having national standards creates economies of scale that educational materials monopolists can exploit, enabling them to crowd out/keep out smaller competitors. This is a HUGE issue with the new national “standards” that has received almost no attention. There’s a reason why the education materials monopolists kicked in a lot of money to create these “standards.”
Kids differ. Standards do not.
Standards are treated by publishers AS the curriculum and imply particular pedagogical approaches, and so they result in DRAMATIC distortions of curricula and pedagogy. Every publisher in the country–God help us–is now beginning every project in ELA by making a spreadsheet with the amateurish CC$$ in one column and the places in their program where these are “covered” in the next. So much for curricular coherence.
Innovation in educational approaches comes about from the implementation of competing ideas; creating one set of standards ossifies; it PRECLUDES potentially extraordinarily valuable innovation.
Twenty years of doing this standards-and-testing stuff under NCLB and its successor hasn’t worked. It’s idiotic to do more of what hasn’t worked and to expect real change/improvement.
In a free society, no unelected group (the CCSSO) has the right to overrule every teacher, curriculum coordinator, and curriculum developer with regard to what the outcomes of educational processes should be.
High-stakes tests lead to teaching to the test–for example, to having kids do lots and lots of practice using the test formats–and all this test prep has significant opportunity costs; it crowds out important learning.
A complex, diverse, pluralistic society needs kids to be variously trained, not identically milled.
The folks who prepared these standards did their work heedlessly; they did not stop to question what a standard should look like in a particular domain but simply made unwarranted but extremely consequential decisions about that based on current practice in state standards that were themselves the product of lowest-common-denominator educratic groupthink.
The tests and test prep create enormous test anxiety and undermine the development of love of learning.
Real learning tends to be unique and unpredictable. It can’t be summarized in a bullet list. The last thing that we need is this Powerpointing of U.S. K-12 education.
We are living in times of enormous change; kids being born today are going to experience more change in their lifetimes than has occurred in all of human history up to this point, so they need to be intrinsically, not extrinsically, motivated to learn; high-stakes tests belong to a nineteenth-century and older extrinsic punishment/reward school of educational theory and fly in the face of the prime directives of the educator: to identify the unique gifts of unique kids, to build upon those, and so to assist in the creation of intrinsically motivated, independent, life-long learners.
If we create a centralized Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth, that is a first step on a VERY slippery slope. Have we come to the point in the United States where we are comfortable with legislating ideas?
The standards-and-testing regime usurps local teacher and administrator autonomy, and no one works well, at all well, under conditions of low autonomy.
The standards and the new tests have not been tested.
The standards and the new test formats, though extremely consequential in their effects on every aspect of K-12 schooling, were never subjected to national debate, nor were they subjected to the equivalent of failure modes and effects analysis.
The legislation that created the Department of Education specifically forbade it from getting involved in curricula, but as E. D. Hirsch, Jr., once pointed out on this blog, the new math standards clearly ARE a curriculum outline, and the USDE has forced this curriculum outline on the country.
No mechanism exists for ongoing critique and revision of these standards by scholars, researchers, and practitioners.
The new tests—PARCC (spell that backward) and not-Smart imBalanced and AIRy nothings (collectively, the Common Core College and Career Ready Assessment Program, or C.C.R.A.P.) are just awful.
The ELA standards are a bullet list of abstractly formulated skills that barely touches upon knowledge of what (world knowledge) and that treats procedural knowledge (knowledge of how) so vaguely–without operationalization–that valid assessment based on the standards as written is impossible. I heartily approve of some of the general guidelines that surround these standards–read substantive, related texts closely–but I disapprove of the narrow New Critical emphasis of the standards generally (texts exist in context) and of the general formulation of the CCSSO bullet list as descriptions of abstract skills.
The creators of these standards did not seem to understand that much learning in ELA is acquisition–is not acquired by explicit means. ALMOST NONE of the vocabulary and grammar that a person commands was learned via explicit teaching of that vocabulary and grammar. It’s extremely important that English teachers understand this and understand how, in fact, grammar and vocabulary are acquired so that they can create the circumstances wherein this acquisition can happen, and they are not going to begin to do that based on this bullet list, which, in its treatment of acquisition of linguistic competence, can most charitably be described as prescientific–as instantiating discredited mythologies or folk theories on which it is counterproductive to build curricula and pedagogy. In their instantiation of prescientific, folk theories of language acquisition, the new “standards” are rather like having new standards for the U.S. Navy that warn of the possibility of sailing off the edge of the world.
Standardization lends itself to the uniform format of computer assisted instruction. This was always Gates’ intention. Now that DeVos and Trump have opened the flood gates to public money, Gates is ready to unleash his products on public schools.
Bravo, Bob, thanks for a sweeping reflection on the CCSS and all that came before it. Perhaps we will finally sometime infuse democracy and equality in school and society but neither the Democrats nor the Republicans can be counted on to help but rather are the obstacles who profit from mass miseducation.
“Having national standards creates economies of scale that educational materials monopolists can exploit, enabling them to crowd out/keep out smaller competitors. This is a HUGE issue with the new national “standards” that has received almost no attention. There’s a reason why the education materials monopolists kicked in a lot of money to create these “standards.”
Big companies don’t even consider it worth the effort to produce custom software for small niche markets like individual schools and districts.
But as soon as you say “one software version for millions of students”, their ears perk up.
And Gates is the unequaled master in monopolistic manipulation that drives out (or simply buys up) any and all small competition.
“Lord of the (software) Versions”
One Version to rule them all, One Version to find them,
One Version to bring them all and in the school-house bind them
In the Land of Gates where Deformers lie.
I was going to write a long essay about this issue. Thanks to you, Bob, I can rest on your laurels. The only thing you did not say was that the idea of standards was stifling to all education. Well, maybe you said hat and I missed it.
Tour de force, Bob. Thank goodness you exist. Where are all the education school professors who should be seconding your opinion? I fear that none of them are in your league.
“The CC$$ in Math barely tweak a long-existing consensus about the progression and approach to mathematics education, one that leaves most adult products of that education, a few years after they’ve happily put it behind them, basically innumerate and fine with that. ”
Here you seem to indict not just Common Core/Gates, but the math education establishment as equally benighted.
YES
“The pair also argued that a fragmented education system stifled innovation because textbook publishers and software developers were catering to a large number of small markets instead of exploring breakthrough products. That seemed to resonate with the man who led the creation of the world’s dominant computer operating system.”
Of course it resonated, but not because catering to small markets stifles innovation. Just the opposite is true. With lots of different schools demanding lots of different things, innovation goes up, not down.
No, it resonated for quite the opposite reason: it ensured just a few software versions would need to be produced for the entire US school “market” and that those versions would be essentially “locked in” by a copyrighted standard.
That’s precisely why Gates underwrote the development of CC.
So “exploring breakthrough products” , in Gatespeak, means “cashing in ad infinitum on the sale to over 100 thousand American public schools (serving 65 million students) of just a few software versions that remain largely fixed (because CC was copyrighted) over time”
An Alternative to the CC$$
Education deformers love asking, “What’s your alternative?” But they expect stone-cold silence in response. Sorry to disappoint. Here’s an alternative to top-down, invariant, inflexible, mandatory, amateurish “standards” like those foisted on the country with no vetting whatsoever:
in place of the grade-by-grade bullet list, a few general guidelines (a very broad framework–perhaps four or five principles), continually revisited and critiqued, that provide the degrees of freedom within which real curricular and pedagogical innovation can occur
and
open-source crowd sourcing of alternative, innovative ideas. In other words, we could have
Competing, voluntary standards, frameworks, learning progressions, curriculum outlines, reading lists, pedagogical approaches, lesson templates, etc.,
for particular domains,
posted by scholars, researcher, curriculum developers, and teachers to an open national portal or wiki, and
subjected to ongoing, vigorous, public debate and refinement based on results in the classroom and ongoing research and development,
freely adopted by autonomous local schools and districts
and subjected to continual critique by teacher-led schools–teachers who are given the time in their schedules to subject those, and their own practice, to ongoing critique via something like Japanese Lesson Study.
General Objections to Standardization
Albert_Einstein_Head“I believe in standardizing automobiles. I do not believe in standardizing human beings. Standardization is a great peril which threatens American culture.”
— Albert Einstein, Saturday Evening Post interview, 10/26/1929
“There’s no bullet list like Stalin’s bullet list.”
—Edward Tufte, “The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint”
We can do this in the way that a free people would, or we can allow ourselves to be ruled by the masters of the universe at the head of the New Feudal Order. I would prefer the former.
We can do what we have always done. We can work with teachers to identify what is important to teach at various grade levels and across various disciplines I have worked on many curriculum projects in my time. The difference here is that trained educators, that understand human development and the local needs, are creating the scope and sequence. Teachers start with the needs of the students, not a product to be marketed, and they have insights into what will work from being a practitioner!
Q: What’s the alternative to crap?
A: Toilets.
Open source voluntary standards and curriculum that teachers can pick and choose from and change to fit their needs is a great idea and would actually be fairly simple to implement because it would start small and grow organically from the bottom rather than being imposed top down like Common Core was.
But it doesn’t give the big companies like Microsoft and Pearson what they want (quite the opposite) so they will do everything they can to keep it from happening.
Oh no. That was circa 1997. I remember those days. Classroom themes centered around “teddy bears” and “rainbows.” Big mistake. Standards bring rigor. And students rise to the higher expectations! 👍🏽 (20 year public school teacher)
You are assuming that “open source” means bad or poorly designed and developed or even childish : Teddy bears (rainbows have a lot of physics involved, by the way)
That’s a false assumption.
Open source software is a good example. Much of it is actually better ( in some cases far better) than it’s commercial counterpart.
The Linux operating system was developed thru such an open source process.
https://opensource.com/resources/linux
The reason open source is often better is that the people who develop it put pride in their work. What an old fashioned concept!
What I always get is the word accountability. If we do not all have the same standards, there was is no accountability. This is so much horse manure. The only thing that the A word means is that some individual up the food chain gets to hassle you.
Accountability is for accountants!
Gates didn’t think the differences were a problem, he thought that sameness was the route to using his software, algorithms, teaching to the test, blended learning, “personal learning,” judging teachers by test scores, closing schools by test scores and paving the way for charters and “turn key from the box” teaching, and whatever else he could profit from going forward once the kids and schools were made “pluggable.” Ka-ching. How much money was wasted on common core programs, books, software, computer infrastructure, and the like? How many students were harmed? How many teachers were maligned? Fired? Put in rubber rooms? How many schools were turned over? How many charters were closed after the schools were turned over? Shame shame shame.
“School Deform from A to Z”
A is for Avarice, driving the Huns
B is for Billions, from public school funds (B is for Betsy, for voucher school funds)
C is for Coleman, the Core of the trouble
D is for Duncan, who made it all double
E is for Eva, a charter school nut
F is for Failure, for those who are cut
G is for Gates, who has bankrolled
deform
H is for Hack, the Deformian norm
I is for Ignorance, willful and not
J is for Journey, to Plunderland spot
K is for Kopp and her front, TFA
L is for Loopy, the Common Core way
M is for Money, the ultimate goal
N is for Nihilist, standardized soul
O is for Onerous, testing in schools
P is for Pearson, for tests and for tools
Q is for ‘Quality’, gauged by a score
R is for Rigor, of zombies and more
S is for Standards, established by hacks
T is for Testing irrelevant facts
U is for Unicorns, fairies and rest
V is for VAM, which is random, at best
W’s for Winnowing, wheat from the
chaff
X is for X-out, of schools and of staff
Y is for “Y’all better do as we’ve said”
Z is for Zimba, quite clueless ‘bout ed
Clever one!
Thanks
I thought it would be useful to document Deform for posterity.
There were a few people left out, of course, but,hey, not everyone can be a star.
👍👏👍👏
Wasn’t it kind of a bust, though?
They put it in and then never mentioned it again. In another year it will be completely forgotten.
No. States across the country are using these “standards.” Many have followed Mike Huckabee’s suggestion and changed the name of them because the CC$$ name had become so toxic. YUP. The minister suggested that states lie about these, and that’s exactly what they did.
What’s in a name, that which we call a “Core”, by any other name would be as foul.
the important if carefully hidden reality: change the name, keep the same test creators/curricula makers
“Common Core renaming”
The name was changed
To protect the guilty
The Core renamed
To enrich the wealthy
Joanne Weiss is mentioned in the story as one of the driving forces behind a lot of Obama ed reforms.
She’s a consultant now and on the boards of a lot of ed tech companies.
If public schools don’t believe this stuff is beneficial to their students one thing they could do is to stop hiring these people as consultants.
Just a suggestion.
“Coup de Gates”
Coupe DeVille was great
Evil, coup de Gates
Coupe De Ville
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cadillac_Coupe_De_Ville_1950.jpg#mw-jump-to-license
Coup de Gates
Coupe DeVille
Coup de Gates image is from
“Weaponsofmassdeception.org”
“Poop de Gates” also works
Exactly! It seems “letthemlearn” is correct. Some one expose BATTELLE FOR KIDS. They are running without any governance in our district. What the heck is a seeming defense contractor doing in our schools? Oh that’s right, we have Northrop Grumman sticking their hands in the till too.
It’s clear that they are not serving the students. They cause huge disruptions to every class every school day. This will soon be brought to light just like the grade changing scandals that teachers have been complaining about for decades. Teachers need their own #metoo movement exposing the poor judgement of administrators, harassment of teachers and borderline criminal mistreatment of our most experienced educators. I swear every administrator has a sign in his office that reads “the beatings will continue until morale improves.”
I couldn’t believe that Northrop Grumman is in the education business until I read your post so I looked it up. They claim to be able to fix the “fake stem crisis.” Incredibly dystopian! Yikes!
It’s not always possible, but I always try my best to add something to the discussion that provides insight from the perspective of a practicing teacher. The above post, links, and comments, however, say it all. All I can add is my agreement. Bill Gates is a ____ who needs to ______.
Let me say that a different way, from the perspective of a classroom teacher: The emperor has no clothes.
Diane,
While I agree Gates largely bought the support of key people – this article is over 3 years old – certainly the perception of common core and the resistance has developed even more since its publication.
Thank you for all that you do though Diane!
M,
The age of the article doesn’t change the fact that Gates not only paid for the creation and implementation of the CC, he paid district’s to adopt it, he paid the unions, and every major education organization to promote it. Nothing there is dated.
Thank you for keeping this issue before the public, Diane. It is, indeed, current, and extraordinarily important. Kudos!
Way back in college, I took some sociology classes in one of which I was introduced to the concept of cultural lag. I’m sure someone else can describe it more accurately, but basically it says that new ideas take time to become accepted and embedded in the way a society does things. When you think about it that is not a bad idea. An original idea has time to morph into something that will work. There is time to work the kinks out. A lot of things have changed in my lifetime. The ones that have really stuck seem to be changes that took some time to develop. The faster things happen and the fewer people that have to rub up against the ideas, the less chance they have of becoming normative. Gates must have thought we would all get tired of fighting his manifesto. True, there have been many who have “drunk the koolaid,” but fortunately there are also a fair number of people who are tired of being manipulated into doing things that, at the very least, do not feel right.
You’re right that things take time to develop.
And even before that — and more important — is they take time to design. And before that specify what is most important.
Gates forgoes specification, design and development and even testing to just “get something (anything) out there”.
You can see it in everything he does.
The software that his company produces is a perfect example.
The result of following such a process (if you can call it that) is an inferior product that does not meet the customers wants and needs, is constantly breaking down, is full of bugs and full of security holes.
Other than that, it’s a great approach.
I used to work as a software engineer. One of the things I learned is that sometimes it’s not worth fixing stuff, particularly when it was poorly specified and/or poorly designed to begin with (Like Common Core)
Better to just scrap it and start from scratch following a proper development process.
SDP,
Exactly right. Dan Koretz agrees with me that CC was rushed into the classroom without taking the time to see how if affects real teachers and children. The FDA would never put a new drug out without field trials.
“I used to work as a software engineer. One of the things I learned is that sometimes it’s not worth fixing stuff, particularly when it was poorly specified and/or poorly designed to begin with (Like Common Core)”
Unfortunately, that is the argument that the reformsters like to use when talking about public education. In this case, easier for them might apply, but it certainly hasn’t been better! But of course, we all know that business practices trump the judgement of all professions from which money can be squeezed. (Snark)
This article, plus Mercedes Schneider’s work, are essential reading about the history of the Common Core. There is no need to generate conspiracy theories: Bill Gates and others have been explicit about their goals and intentions.
Cross posted a thttps://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/How-Bill-Gates-Financed-th-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Bill-And-Melinda-Gates_Bill-Gates_Billionnaires_Common-Core-180131-2.html#comment687654
with my comments and links to “LEARN WHAT IS A CURRICULUM, even AS NY Times Opinion Piece Lauds Common Core
https://www.opednews.com/articles/LEARN-WHAT-IS-A-CURRICULUM-by-Susan-Lee-Schwartz-Core-Curricula_FAILURE_LIES_Language-150828-728.html
Link to to my essay:
Magic Elixir: No Evidence required https://www.opednews.com/articles/Magic-Elixir-No-Evidence-by-Susan-Lee-Schwartz-130312-433.html
Privatized America, for the wealthy and by the wealthy: ” magical elixirs” and charter schools, sold to the public as genuine solutions by businesses who have appointed and anointed themselves the ‘experts!. for the education of children who will not be children for long. No classroom experience or evidence required to purchase the curricula and materials that ENABLE learning, and the voice of the professional silenced.
Bill Gates is perfectly happy with “variation” in education – between what his own children receive and what poor children endure.
That is probably one of the most repugnant aspects to me
How many children could be afforded the sort of quality education he demands from elite Lakeside, for all of the money he poured into this unaccountable debaucle?
Lakeside has a lovely campus that looks kind of like a college campus:
– Faculty is nearly equally balanced between men & women (i.e. Lakeside pays well);
– 79% of faculty have advanced degrees;
– 17% are “faculty of color” (half the students are “students of color,” cough, Asian)
– Student/teacher ratio: 9 to 1
– Average class size: 16
– High school library = 20,000 volumes
– 24 varsity sports offered
– New sports facility offers cryotherapy & hydrotherapy spas
– Full arts program with drama, various choruses, various bands including jazz band and a chamber orchestra.
https://seattleducation.com/2012/06/18/bill-gates-tells-us-why-his-high-school-was-a-great-learning-environment/
All children should have what Gates’ children have in school.
The money Bill Gates spent on CC might seem like a lot, but it’s really a drop in the bucket compared to what his Company Microsoft has avoided in income taxes by keeping $100 billion offshore.
Congress and Trump just brokered a cherry deal that allows companies like Microsoft and Apple to pay just 15% tax on their offshore holdings as opposed to the normal 35%.
So Microsoft just saved about $20 billion dollars.
That would have paid for 1000 brand new 20 million dollar schools.
Apple saved even more, over $40 billion because they had over $250 billion offshore.
And that would have paid for 2000 brand new 20 million dollar schools.
For a reference, $20 million is roughly the cost of the median elementary or middle School in US and about twice that for the median high school.
https://webspm.com/Articles/2015/07/01/School-Costs.aspx?m=1
Companies like Microsoft and Apple are American only in name. Their owners and CEOs don’t give a damn about this country, despite the fact that these people would be nobodies if they grew up in most countries.
We The People made them rich.
And the way they repay us is not only screw us over, but also rub our faces in the dirt.
I just didn’t have the money to send my friends daughter to the school she needed. So after leaving a school with an incompetent abusive principal, she ended up in online school as they call it. She didn’t get the special attention she needed, she just got her GED, and now runs a restaurant. Good for her because the system, struggling as it was under privatization constraints, money again, completely failed her.
It would be difficult to overstate how disastrous the Common Core State Standards have been for instruction in ELA. Our textbooks, online educational materials, and classroom instruction have all devolved to align with Lord Colemen’s amateurish list of skills. Every educational publisher hauls off every lesson with the list of CCSS skills “covered” in the lesson. And so the amateurish skills list has become a de facto curriculum. Horrible. Sickening. Tragic.
cx: that would be Lord Coleman
“so the amateurish skills list has become a de facto curriculum”
All according to the plan, my son.
”
When the tests are aligned to the common standards, the curriculum will line up as well—and that will unleash powerful market forces…”
— Bill Gates, in 2009
Mission Accomplished!
By the way, you should really call them the Common Core Gates Standards because that is what they are and always will be.
Some day archeologists will be doing a dig at one of the many millions of dumps in the US and come across Common Core … And think it was a cruel and unusual type of torture visited on the most vulnerable in American society by some two bit dictator named Gates.
And they will be right, of course.
The damage has been so extensive that we now have a new generation of young English teachers so ignorant of linguistics, composition, and literature that they think that their field actually consists of “applying” the “standards” from Lord Coleman’s amateurish list to snippets of text. What we’re witnessing is the death of English language arts. It’s been replaced with mediocre test prep–good training for the children of proles to inure them to doing inane, meaningless tasks, day in, day out.
“The damage has been so extensive that we now have a new generation of young English teachers so ignorant of linguistics, composition, and literature that they think that their field actually consists of ‘applying’ the ‘standards’ from Lord Coleman’s amateurish list to snippets of text.”
This is the approach the Chinese have used in Tibet to advance their goal of sinification. Replace the older folks with historical knowledge with young people lacking any cultural awareness. It’s the long game, but it’s effective.