Nicholas Tampio wrote a book about Common Core and its threat to democracy.
It is the zombie of education.
In this article, which was distributed nationally by AP, he warns that Common Core continues to flourish under DeVos.
Arne Duncan hailed it as the greatest thing since the Brown decision; Lamar Alexander said ESSA had finished; education expert D. Trump said it was a disaster. But, said Tampio, it has merely shape shifted. It is wounded but it lives.
”In a speech in Washington earlier this year, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos called the education standards known as the Common Core a “disaster” and proclaimed: “At the U.S. Department of Education, Common Core is dead.”
“The reality, however, is that the Common Core is still very much alive. As indicated in a recent report from Achieve, 24 states have “reviewed and revised” their English and math standards under the Common Core. In some instances, such as in New York, the revised standards are known by a different name.
“This is worth pointing out because, as a political scientist and as I argue in my new book, the Common Core has soured many people on public education and civic life in general. When one group of people decides the national education standards, other people feel alienated from the schools and the democratic process.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
No, the Common Core is not dead. Not by a long shot.
The College Board and ACT, Inc. were instrumental in creating the Common Core and both organizations say they’ve “aligned” all of their products to it. But it goes deeper still.
ACT prominently touts that its “ACT’s Course Standards and College Readiness Standards successfully align with the Common Core State Standards.” The ACT also says that “the ACT Course Standards are empirically derived course standards that form the basis of ACT’s high school instructional improvement program.”
There’s an entire “alignment” package for sale:
Click to access CommonCoreAlignment.pdf
Meanwhile, the College Board says that it “has been a strong advocate for and played an active role in the development of the Common Core State Standards. As part of this collaboration, the College Board helped draft the standards…” The College Board has developed what it calls “the College Board Standards for College Success” which are “benchmarked against the Advanced Placement Program.” Oh dear lord.
Moreover, the College Board says that its “Readiness Pathway,” which includes “the PSAT/NMSQT and the SAT — college readiness assessments taken by millions of students annually,” is also “aligned” with the Common Core. It adds this:
“As new assessments emerge and existing assessments are enhanced, the College Board will conduct additional studies to understand the alignment of other forms of assessments that may be administered in support of the Common Core State Standards, including end-of-course and end-of-domain assessments.”
Click to access Common-Core-State-Standards-Alignment.pdf
The ACT and SAT are horribly bad at predicting success in college. College enrollment specialists and consultants find that the SAT predicts between 3 and 14 percent of the variation in freshman-year college grades. As one pointed out, “I might as well measure shoe size.”
The ACT is only marginally better than the SAT at predicting college success. The authors of a study in Ohio found the ACT has minimal predictive power. In their concluding remarks, the authors ask, in amazement,
“…why, in the competitive college admissions market, admission officers have not already discovered the shortcomings of the ACT composite score and reduced the weight they put on the Reading and Science components. The answer is not clear. Personal conversations suggest that most admission officers are simply unaware of the difference in predictive validity across the tests.”
The authors suggest ulterior motives on the part of college officials:
“An alternative explanation is that schools have a strong incentive – perhaps due to highly publicized external rankings such as those compiled by U.S. News & World Report, which incorporate students’ entrance exam scores – to admit students with a high ACT composite score, even if this score turns out to be unhelpful.”
We’ve known this for a long time:
“The ACT and the College Board don’t just sell hundreds of thousands of student profiles to schools; they also offer software and consulting services that can be used to set crude wealth and test-score cutoffs, to target or eliminate students before they apply…That students are rejected on the basis of income is one of the most closely held secrets in admissions; enrollment managers say the practice is far more prevalent than most schools let on.”
The net result is this: “More and more, schools are chasing the small number of students who have the money or the test scores that help an institution get ahead. As those students command higher and higher tuition discounts, they leave a smaller and smaller proportion of the financial-aid budget for poor students, who are increasingly at risk of being left out of higher education.”
So, here’s the situation. The Common Core standards are being touted as “necessary” to improve public education and American economic competitiveness and prosperity. The ACT and College Board are pimping for more testing and more “academic readiness pathways” in the lower grades. And it’s all a fiction.
It’d almost be laughable if it were not insidious.
So, why do so many politicians and public school educators – not to mention students and parents – buy into the nonsense, especially the ACT, SAT, AP nonsense?
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“That students are rejected on the basis of income is one of the most closely held secrets in admissions”
That’s precisely the reason why the acceptance rate (eg at Universities Iike Harvard) is much higher for students coming from many private high schools than for students coming from public schools.
The colleges and universities want students who can pay the full tuition and they conveniently use SAT and ACT to “weed out” those who can not. It gives them “cover” for discrimination based on family income, which is basically what the tests indicate.
RE Coleman: the fellow has one gigantic conflict of interest in this whole thing and I am really surprised how little attention it has received.
He was responsible for getting schools “hooked” on CC and is now literally cashing in on that addiction as head of the College Board.
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That is also why the University of Pennsylvania invited parents to meet with admission officers during alumni weekend. They are looking to see who has the cash among the legacy offsprings. If students get in on their own merit, why would parents need to meet in admission personnel? Jared Kushner may be the poster boy for the exchange of cash for admission, but other elite schools are guilty of the same practice.
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Thank you for this comment.
Philosophers such as Jacques Ellul have noted how technology drives human affairs. We like to think that we are in the driver’s seat, but technology sometimes makes decisions, as it were, for us.
For me, that it the key to the Common Core. It was designed to be tested on computers. All of the other claims–e.g. that it prepares all children for college, career, and life–conceal this fact.
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“Amazing that administrators still tout the Common Core party line.”
You misspelled administrators. It should be adminimals.
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I went to an “incoming” 7th Graders presentation last night where the Common Core was heavily promoted. Guess no one in my district got the memo to drop the name brand but keep the same bad ideas
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I work in the second largest school district in the country, and Common Core is still thought of by administrators as a perfectly formed miracle to save the world. Only people who have to endure the ridiculously flawed tests and people who care about those who have to endure the ridiculously flawed tests dislike Common Core. People in 7th grade who dislike Common Core are generally students, parents, experienced English teachers, and experienced math teachers.
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Thanks for the comment. Amazing that administrators still tout the Common Core party line.
I wrote a book, published by Johns Hopkins Press, to help parents fight the Common Core.
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They really do not care what I think, everything is computer based and everything is common core. It is pretty terrible. Mid sized district Orange County. Saddleback Valley USD
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I wish I could say almost all teachers care about students instead of their meaningless scores on Common Core tests. What high stakes testing has done to many is tragic.
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My teachers care, although most are retiring. My district drinks the Kool-Aid
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posted at Oped News https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Sorry-to-Say-the-Common-C-in-General_News-Common-Core_Core-Curricula_Diane-Ravitch_Public-Education-180329-135.html#comment695101
With this comment
Do you know what the common core does to the study of history?
The Common Core has promoted the message that History is nothing but a collection of “texts,” and it all should be studied as just language, not as knowledge dependent on the context in which it is embedded.Not only does this promote ignorance, it also encourages schools to form Humanities Departments, in which English teachers, who may or may not know any History, are assigned to teach History as “text.” This is already happening in a few Massachusetts high schools, and may be found elsewhere in the country.
David Coleman, of the Common Core and the College Board, have decided that any historical topic, for instance the Gettysburg Address, should be taught in the absence of any historical context–about the Civil War, President Lincoln, the Battle of Gettysburg–or anything else.
Here is a link to all the posts on THE COMMON CORE, at THE Ravitch blog. https://dianeravitch.net/?s=common+core
Go and discover what the oligarchs think citizens should know.
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“T’he Oilygarchs”
The Oilygarchs
Leave oily marks
On everything they touch
Their oily plan
To grease the hand
Of every such and such
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I’m no fan of Betsy DeVos but she said the Common Core was dead “at the US Department of Education”, which is true.
Also, it’s hardly a “Common Core” if 24 states out of 50 adopted it. It’s a slightly-less-than-half Core 🙂
Unlike everyone else on this site I have and had no problem with a basic set of standards for US public school students. I have no earthly idea why Ohio would have different math standards than NY, other than an ideological devotion to federalism.
My problem with the Common Core was I knew ed reformers wouldn’t put any resources behind it and I knew they wouldn’t stick with it – which they didn’t.
They’re not reliable partners with public schools. They don’t follow thru on any of their promises. No sooner did the Common Core tests go in than they all rushed lemming-like to “personalized learning” – no one should depend on these people for anything. They’re fad driven lightweights. Public schools go along with all this stuff and then they’re stuck with expensive ed reform policy and no money or support to do them well. Then ed reformers blame public schools and the cycle starts over.
Personalized learning will be a bust too. Public schools will invest billions and ed reformers will be off pushing the next gimmick before the ink is dry on the vendor contracts. Public school leaders need to stop being such gullible dupes and tell these people to get lost.
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People disagree about how to teach virtually every academic subject. If you allow one faction to write the national education standards, everybody else is going to be left in the cold. What you will have, then, is a lot of resentful people who have little recourse within the democratic process. It is not worth it.
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Education is too important to leave it to “democratic process”. Just gather the best of the best teachers, professors, researches, pedagogues and create the best of the best common curriculum. How hard is that?
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“No sooner did the Common Core tests go in than they all rushed lemming-like to “personalized learning” – no one should depend on these people for anything. They’re fad driven lightweights. ”
CC was not a fad. It was an integral part of the plan to turn schools into markets on order to sell software and hardware for stuff like “personalized learning”.
They understand that to keep development and maintenance costs down, they need to “standardize” the schools — so they could produce just a few versions of software rather than having to produce thousands of different custom versions for all the different states and school districts.
The obvious advantage of do called personalized learning is that the tests are all baked in, which makes it difficult ifnotimpossibld for students to “opt out”.
There was a well thought out plan involved in all of this, which was actually made quite clear by Bill Gates as far back as 2009 when he spoke to a conference of state legislators:
“Identifying common standards is not enough. We’ll know we’ve succeeded when the curriculum and the tests are aligned to these standards.
…
next-generation assessments aligned to the common core. When the tests are aligned to the common standards, the curriculum will line up as well—and that will unleash powerful market forces …”
Gates claimed it was “in the service of better teaching”, but that’s as much of a lie as the claim the CC was a “state (driven) standards initiative”
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Gates, like Koch, buys into the foul, narrow-minded idea that free market “forces” provide better service than democratic — uh, forces. He thinks he’s building a railroad monopoly in Atlas Shrugged. Kids, do not read that book. Gates believes that by monetizing people’s data, it will eliminate bad data. He cannot see the world for its non-data. For some reason, his extremist, corporatist, anti-democratic views are called “centrist” or “moderate” in the press. They are not.
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I don’t think Gates even believes a lot of what he says.
It’s actually quite telling that during that speech that I quoted from above, Gates said the words “State led Common Core State Standards Initiative” and then laughed.
It’s an inside joke, of course, because Gates knows full well that it was NOT State led.
And the joke is on the American public.
It happens right at the beginning of this video
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“State-led” is code word for “Not state-led.”
Typical reformspeak, where everything means the opposite.
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““State-led” is code word for “Not state-led.” Typical reformspeak, where everything means the opposite.” — Similarly, Columbus the discoverer of America actually is the plunderer, enslaver and murderer. Or the Department of Defense, which means Department of War. It actually was called the Department of War until the end of the Second World War, when it was renamed to soothe the lemmings’ feelings. After all, there are no reasons to have a Department of War during peacetime, but the Department of Defense is a totally different story. There is nothing new under the sun.
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If memory serves, there was a Cold War, during which we needed a Department of Defense, not that Owellian language has ever been justified.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=q02HcwGxllY
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I’m scared of the DC response to the student activists on school shootings for this same reason.
We know how this goes in ed reform. They promote policies based on their pet theories, put no funding behind them, and then public schools are stuck with them. Over and over and over.
I’ll save you some time and tell you how the US Department of Education “school safety plan” shakes out for public schools. They’ll be interested in this for 3 months in DC, promote a bunch of poorly considered “solutions”, provide no additional funding or support, which means public schools have to pull funding from their own priorities and needs to support the ed reform initiative, and then blame public schools when the problem isn’t solved.
Stop falling for it. Stop playing. They can’t play this game if public schools won’t fill the role of “rubes who believe everything they say”. They’re no smarter than you are. They don’t know more about schools than you do.
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The Common Core and tests for the Common Core developed by SBAC and PARCC have been supported by a campaign called “High-Quality Assessment Project” designed to capture the attention of policy makers in selected states. The aim: Shore up support for the SBAC and the PARCC tests in “targeted states,” by a national campaign and by sending grant money to supporters of the Common Core tests.
Begin quote: Between 2013-2017, the High-Quality Assessment Project—a pooled grantmaking fund created by the Bill & Melinda Gates, Hewlett, Lumina and Schusterman foundations as well as the Helmsley Trust—provided resources to policymakers and advocates around the country to support them in “making the transition to higher quality state tests.” Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors and Education First.com managed the fund.” End Quote
Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors serves as custodian for pooled funds from non-profits. The real manager of this project is Education First, a for-profit consultancy founded by Jennifer Vranek in 2006. Prior to founding Education First, Vranek was in charge of advocacy grants at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Her bio says she launched the American Diploma Project at Achieve (the forerunner of the Common Core). Education First’s major clients (according to the website) include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (nearly $2 million in the last two years), EdReports.org; High Achievement New York; Teach Plus; Thomas B. Fordham Institute; and William & Flora Hewlett Foundation.
Education First is still working to market the PARCC and SBAC tests as “high quality,” and to halt what is called the “hysteria” of the opt out movement. By 2014, well before the tests were fully implemented, an effort to save both tests was in the works. The deep-pocket support and PR savvy at Education First helped produce three-page talking points titled “MYTHBUSTERS: Busting the Top 10 Myths about PARCC Assessments, and a companion MYTHBUSTERS: Busting the Top 10 Myths about Smarter Balanced Assessments. https://education-first.com/library/publication/assessment-mythbusters-for-parcc-and-smarter-balanced/
Between 2013-2016, the High-Quality Assessment Project with help from Education First and from Achieve, Inc. sent grants to 21 states and 50 groups/coalitions to lobby state legislators, state school boards, governors, and to launch campaigns with the media and parents—all to save the Common Core and market the SBAC and PARCC tests as “high quality.”
Here are the participants in the lobbying…”advocacy” project all aligned with efforts to privatize education and increase “choice.” Noteworthy are many groups on this list well-funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (PTA, $3.3 million; Latinix, over $8 million; African American over $18 million; Stand for Children about $19 million), as well as business groups.
ALABAMA-Alabama Graduate Ready Impact Tomorrow coalition. ARIZONA-Expect More Arizona coalition; Stand for Children; Arizona PTA; Greater Phoenix Chamber; Arizona Chamber. ARKANSAS-Trace Strategies, LLC. CALIFORNIA-Children Now; California PTA; California Alliance for Continuous Improvement coalition. COLORADO-Colorado Succeeds; Colorado PTA; UnidosUS. CONNECTICUT-Connecticut PTA. GEORGIA-Better Standards for a Better Georgia coalition. ILLINOIS-Advance Illinois; ISBE Stand for Children-IL; Teach Plus; Latino Policy Forum; Illinois PTA, the Core Coalition. LOUISIANA-Stand for Children; Urban League of Greater New Orleans; Geaux Higher Louisiana coalition. MASSACHUSETTS-Massachusetts Alliance for Education; Massachusetts PTA; League of United Latin American Citizens; Stand for Children, MICHIGAN-Education Trust- Midwest; Michigan PTA; Michigan Core Standards coalition. MISSOURI-Missouri Chamber of Commerce. NEVADA-Nevada PTA. NEW HAMPSHIRE-Reaching Higher New Hampshire coalition. NEW JERSEY-Black Alliance for Educational Options; UnidosUS; Foundation for Educational Administration; NJ PTA; We Raise NJ coalition. NEW YORK- High Achievement New York; New York Urban League (+ Rochester and Buffalo); League of United Latin American Citizens; UnidosUS; America Achieves; Buffalo ReformED
NORTH CAROLINA-BEST NC; North Carolina Chamber of Commerce; HIRE Standards coalition. OHIO- Ohio Business Roundtable; The Ohio Standards Coalition; Ohio PTA. OREGON-Stand for Children; Oregon Department of Education; Strategies360; WestEd. TENNESSEE-Tennessee Expect More, Achieve More coalition. WASHINGTON-Partnership for Learning/Ready Washington Coalition; Community & Parents for Public Schools of Seattle; Southwest Youth and Family Services (Seattle); Strategies360
Click to access HQAP_SummaryBrief.pdf
With the help of Education First, the self-appointed guardians of the Common Core and aligned tests have published an up-to-date status report here.
https://education-first.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Education-First-What-Happened-To-State-Tests-Feb-2018-6.pdf.
The Common Core, the tests “aligned to those standards,” and the ridiculous meme and criteria for “college and career readiness” are clearly about expanding market-based education by trapping public schools into a false narrative about “high quality” education hinging on those 1,025 Common Core standards and the online tests.
The supporters of that false narrative are still at work, and many are paid shills of billionaires. Meanwhile all of the Common Core Standards are being merged into an international database, reframed as “competencies” and assigned computer codes for a new age of algorithmic delivery of instruction–with major funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and eLumen (an instructional management system for higher education that is expanding services to K-12), and some support from the Common Education Data Standards project at the National Center for Education Statistics. https://www.imsglobal.org/cc/guiddetail.cfm%3FID%3D9
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Sounds like another Opt Out movement is in order. These people (ACT, CollegeBd) are not part of public education, they are businesses which have cornered a market, consumers’ move is to boycott. The market is premised on fictions: that kids can leapfrog dead-end, low-paid jobs with a college degree, & that non-rich folk can send their kids to college w/o bankrupting their own &/or their kids’ financial futures.
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Thank you for this thorough post. I’ll read it again and follow the links.
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Laura is one of the most astute researchers/analysts/writers who contribute on this site (and others). One would be wise to read and comprehend what she has to say!
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I second that.
Laura Chapmsn knows more about the tangled web of the Deformers and their organizations than they know about themselves.
If Bill Gates wants to know what he is up to, he should ask Laura Chapman.
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This made me chuckle…as someone who is currently attending university to become a secondary level English teacher, the majority of what I have been taught is how to plan lessons that revolve around the Common Core State Standards. That being said, I’ve quite enjoyed doing so, while trying to add fun twists on these activities. It is most definitely not dead, and realistically will not be for quite some time. So, might as well try to make it bearable for the students, since they have no say in the matter and it is in no way their fault. My mixed emotions surrounding this topic remain.
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