Our reader Bob Shepherd has his own blog. As you may have deduced, I’m just wild about Bob.
Here is a wonderful parody of Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” who was writing about the British troops who blindly followed orders in the Battle of Balaclava in 1854 in the Crimean War and perished.
Bob calls it “The Coring of the Six Hundred.”
My generation memorized the Tennyson poem. Thanks to the Common Core, this generation will be lucky to encounter any poetry.
Here is the beginning. Open the link and read it all.
Row on row, row on row,
Row on row stationed
Sick at their monitors
Sat the six hundred.
“You may now type your Username”
Said the test proctor.
Set up for failure
Sat the six hundred.
“Enter your password key!
“Mercy upon you!
“During the testing
“No one can help you.”
Someone had blundered.
The unspoken truth. But
Theirs was not to make reply,
Theirs was not to reason why,
Theirs was but to do or die,
Theirs was but to try and cry.
Set up for failure
Sat the six hundred.
Text to the right of them
Complex, out of context,
Bubbles in front of them,
Plausible answers,
Tricky and tortured,
Boldly they bubbled and well
Though smack in the mouth of hell
Sat the six hundred.
This is what reading means,
Now that Gates/Pearson
Has reified testing
Far beyond reason.
Pearson not persons.
Plutocrats plundering
Taxpayer dollars
Spent to abuse.
The children are used.
They bubble and squirm
To reveal their stack ranking
And never again
Will know joy in learning
Never again
Humane joy in reading
And writing, no never again,
Not the six hundred.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I cannot imagine how Bob got it all into that poem, awesome. And he’s said it all. Thanks for sharing.
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Bob, you should be a best-selling author on education right now!
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Thanks. I have been contemplating doing a book that tears about the puerile Common Core State “Standards” one by one. It’s a very large undertaking, though, because almost every one of them is incredibly poorly conceived, and explaining why this is so, for so many of them, is an enormous undertaking.
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*tears apart
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Have you had a chance to look into the Common Core attack on science instruction? The Next Generation Science Standards are all about replacing content knowledge with the discredited, debunked, and failed methodologies: discovery learning and constructivism.
A complete disaster in the making. Here are a 6 representative Next-Gen science standards:
A:
Analyze data to determine if a design solution works as intended to change the speed or direction of an object with a push or a pull.
B:
Read texts and use media to determine patterns in behavior of parents and offspring that help offspring survive.
C:
Make observations to construct an evidence-based account of how an object made of a small set of pieces can be disassembled and made into a new object.
D:
Use evidence to construct an explanation for how the variations in characteristics among individuals of the same species may provide advantages in surviving, finding mates, and reproducing.
E:
Generate and compare multiple solutions to reduce the impacts of natural Earth processes on humans.
F:
Represent data in graphical displays to reveal patterns of daily changes in length and direction of shadows, day and night, and the seasonal appearance of some stars in the night sky.
Now, try to guess the grade levels!
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This “all skills all the time” stuff is really damaging. I always think, “Lord, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” It’s especially bad when it’s very abstract, very vague, as many of these “standards” are. We would be much better served, I think, if we dropped the use of the term “skills” altogether and substituted “knowledge of who, what, where, when, and why” (descriptive knowledge) and knowledge of how (procedural knowledge). Reframed in this way, the latter tends to be treated a lot more substantively, and kids end up leaving their lessons actually having learned something.
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A: Kindergarten
B: 1st
C: 2nd
D: 3rd
E: 4th
F: 5th
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OMG. Noooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!! Tell me that this isn’t so.
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I kid you not.
Take a peek:
https://ngss.nsta.org/AccessStandardsByTopic.aspx
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Rage,
What pompous language in these standards, eh? Only cretins could oppose such beauteous, lofty goals! Alas, only experienced teachers can smell the BS. Teachers can only pretend to teach kids how to do these things. What passes for teaching is actually eliciting these behaviors in contrived, tortured activities that leave kids devoid of knowledge or any other added value. The same garbage is taking over in CA history classrooms with the new history frameworks. This is all make-believe, mutant education, but, because the results of education are invisible and nebulous (as in religion) educationalists, like huckster ministers or snake oil salesmen, can make pretentious claims like these and never be held to account for their failure. Honest, effective, valuable teaching is teaching smart-but-ignorant young humans what the world is; i.e. knowledge. But this truth is denied by the educationalists. Meanwhile, Rome burns because of the vast ignorance of the populace who think voting doesn’t matter and who don’t know the difference between Republicans and Democrats, much less what the red flags of fascism look like.
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Akademos and Ponderosa. Yes. Yes. Yes. Someone should write a definitive history of this skills-in-lieu of content hucksterism, which started with some legitimate concerns about trivial instruction and ended up scuttling knowledge altogether in favor of–what?–ignorance? It sometimes seems like it. Having worked in educational publishing for many years, I dealt with a lot of these hucksters–famous authors of skills-based programs who turned out, when one got to know them, to be profoundly ignorant of their subjects–who didn’t know the first thing about them.
To give a specific example, one famous writer of a very, very widely used writing program had, in every book, grades K-12, a multi-lesson “unit” on “inferencing,” but never, in any of the lessons in those books, did she show any indication that she understood that there are three very different types of inference–induction, deduction, and abduction–or that people have devoted centuries to studying these and have developed vast bodies of knowledge of concrete, practical methods for carrying them out sensibly. Never did students walk away from any of this huckster’s “inferencing lessons” with concrete, practical descriptive or procedural knowledge applicable to “making inferences” of various kinds or of any kind. Over twelve grade levels, students didn’t learn what a hypothesis is, the difference between a dependent and an independent variable, the importance of falsifiability in hypothesis formulation, how to make tallies, how to use an A/B split, any of the principles of elementary deductive logic, any elementary probability, how to construct probabilities from frequency or variability studies, any common logical fallacies, what a Gedankenexperiment is, and so on–ANYTHING that would actually be of use in “making an inference.” Instead, students were asked, again and again, vaguely, to read a passage and “draw a conclusion based on evidence.” Why? because the “famous author” hadn’t herself bothered to learn any of this stuff–anything concrete and practical–because she herself couldn’t tell an induction from an eruption, a truth table from a coffee table, or an a priori proposition from a romantic one. And not knowing any of this, ofc, so she couldn’t teach it.
Again, if educators would recognize the importance of imparting both descriptive and procedural KNOWLEDGE (the latter a replacement for the term “skills”), this would be a major breakthrough. We would get away from the inane, vacuous skills “instruction” (one hesitates even to use the word “instruction”) in supposed “finding the main idea skills” and general “inferencing skills” and other crap like that, from which kids learn nothing.
The current state of affairs is pretty abysmal. One would think, from a glance at the so-called “standards” in use today or from observation of current classroom practice, that my own field of English Language Arts is practically CONTENT FREE–that there is no knowledge at all to be fruitfully gained about literary movements, critical approaches, literary techniques, rhetorical tropes, genre characteristics, common archetypes, metrical forms, stanza forms, organizational principles for specific types of fiction and nonfiction, particular authors and works of value, and so on. Evidently, the geniuses in my field, today, believe that one can be an educated adult capable of reading and writing well without knowing anything about any of these matters (or anything else substantive). Instead, one encounters, again and again, as I did recently, the English Department Chairperson who asked me what a gerund is, had never heard of “the poet YEETS” (that’s how she pronounced the name), and told me that she hated poetry and never read it. Or one encounters, again as I did recently, the “Reading Coordinator” with a PhD who thought that “classical literature” meant any literature that was deemed great, thought that the Odyssey was a novel, and told me that she was far too busy, herself, ever to do any reading. These people don’t know why it is of value to understand what distinguishes a parable from a fable because they themselves don’t know the difference. They can’t teach their students how to write a couplet or reductio ad absurdum argument or an in medias res opening because they themselves don’t know what these are, and what you don’t know, you don’t see and can’t use and can’t help others to see and use. Obviously. Knowledge is freaking fundamental, and until we relearn that, we’re lost.
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Ponderosa
Science and Social Studies instruction at the elementary level was virtually ignored during the onset of Common Core hysteria. Five years of nothing but test-prep and AIS in math and ELA. Teachers in our fields encountered cohort after cohort entering middle level programs with knowledge deficits that left kids with absolutely no foundation to build on. And to make matters worse, they had none of the ELA or math skills promised by CC cheerleaders.
What do we get other than some new found attention? Content free science and social studies! Next-Gen standards that should be lining bird cages instead of being pushed like gospel. I am also seeing new wave of young teachers who are not just buying into these vacuous standards and empty methodologies, but celebrating them!
All of this crapola being peddled with the same, tired old tropes bemoaning the use of rote memorization, learning in silos, and poor kids trapped and strapped into rows of desks, being held back by lazy, old-school teachers who don’t realize that its the 21st century.
These same fools should be forced to read the likes of Hirsch and Willingham. Or better yet, attend small group sessions with serious young students who despise the skill-based. guide on the side onsense as much as we do.
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There are many, many young scholars coming up in other parts of the world–in China, in Africa, in Russia, who have not suffered under such delusional teachers. The idiot Ed Deformers worry about our competitive edge? LMAO. THEY SHOULD WORRY ABOUT THAT. There are young people studying math and languages and science and history and the arts by freaking cellphone in Africa and Latin America, today, who are going to rock the world. And guess what? They are not doing exercises on “inferencing skills.” They are acquiring substantive knowledge, becoming learned people.
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Rage: yikes. I would have guessed those not to be standards at all. They sound like a list of possible projects for middle-schoolers who have been learning scientific content and studying/ practicing lab experiments illustrating the factual context. And that would be a list for those who didn’t already have their own suggestions to present to teacher/ work out details. OK I’m just a for-lang teacher: how far off the mark am I?
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You sum up the situation perfectly, Rage. Today while canvassing for Democrats I was working to persuade a bright, low-income dad to vote. He wanted someone who would fix the schools, and he went on to describe what’s happening with his six year old daughter at the local public school: she has to read long paragraphs in order to do her math homework, but she can barely read –she’s six!. Math homework takes an hour every night. This struck him as crazy. In other words, this guy was telling me that what’s wrong with our schools is Common Core (he did not use this term, but I recognized what he was describing as the ubiquitous Common Core math). What should I do?, he asked. I said, Complain to the principal. When will principals and teachers believe the evidence of their own eyes?: Common Core doesn’t work!
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bethree
You pretty much nailed it. Its just that the NGSS are even more vague than a list of optional assignments that a science teacher might make available. The fact that this is a list of K to 5 “learning” standards is almost impossible for a human brain to process; the cognitive dissonance is very difficult to work through. “Yikes” indeed.
It is inhumane to expect elementary teachers to deliver impossible lessons requiring a highly nuanced expertise to five, six, seven year old children who don’t have any background or even the intellectual capacity to work and think at this level of abstraction. Ponderosa summed it up best, “What passes for teaching is actually eliciting these behaviors [science skills] in contrived, tortured activities that leave kids devoid of knowledge or any other added value.”
Under NGSS, elementary science students will not only be left “devoid of knowledge”, they will be filled with frustration, anxiety, confusion, and a strong dislike for what they will mistakenly believe is “science” as a school experience.
NGSS comes to us courtesy of the folks at Achieve. This the latest attempt by Achieve to profit from disruption. This “non-profit” entrepreneurial group is deep into the process of re-making the K to 12 science curriculum in the very image of Common Core math and ELA. Out with content and in with process skills. A formula for failure that will negatively impact US science education for every state that took the NGSS bait: the typical sky-is-falling mumbo jumbo nonsensical chain of misrepresentations and snake oil bullshit.
They are trying desperately to bring back to life the debunked constructivist/discovery methodologies and continue to conflate the way professionally trained scientists do science with the way children should learn science.
Here’s the worn out laundry list of reasons that current science instruction needs disruption and reinvention:
– We have to stop teaching science through rote memorization
– We are falling behind other countries on PISA tests
– We have to start teaching students to think like scientists
– We have to show important connections, unifying themes, and cross-cutting concepts
– We have to integrate disciplines like real scientists
– We have to engage students so that they can construct or discover their own knowledge
The Next Generation Science Standards will be a Common Core redux that wastes billions of dollars, millions of teacher hours, and a generation of innocent children fallen victim to all those duped by the entrepreneurs at Achieve, Fool us once shame on them. Fool us twice . . .
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Maybe you don’t have to take them all on, just the ones at greatest odds with your own recommendations. Of course, yes, it opens the door to critical whataboutisms about the standards left out of the shredder, but we can’t all be organizational maniacs, all the time.
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LOL. Good advice! But I certainly wouldn’t want anyone accusing me of sloppiness in a book about sloppiness.
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This might be the only poem in the world that includes the words, “stack ranking”…. wow. That’s some doing. I wonder if David Coleman ever read it, “gritfully”?
Thanks, Bob.
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LOL. It’s a first! (Though I bet that over the years a lot of wags at Microsoft came up with choice limericks about their dear leader’s love of stack ranking.)
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Thanks, Diane, for posting this. Much appreciated! Readers: The whole of the poem can be found at the link that Diane gave, above. The text in this post is, as Diane points out, missing the ending.
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I love the poem.
I did an analysis of the grade level distributions of the Common COre Standards by topic. The grand total of standards was 1620, with the numerical pile-on of ELA standards hitting Grade 3 (79 standards). As you know the literacy standards for content are for grades 6-12, and they address history/social studies and science/technical subjects.
In addition to the Common Core, we have national standards beyond any capacity for students to reach them—over 3500 from 16 groups in 20 subjects just for Pre-K to grade eight (my analysis is available on request).
That does not include the standards conjured by Ken Kay, a tech lobbyist who coined the phrase “21st Century Skills.” Kay was launching his meme and scheme at about the same time as the Common Core was being inflicted on schools.
There are several things too rarely discussed about Kay’s project.
First, most of the skills in this scheme are not unique to this century (e.g., critical thinking, communication, collaboration, creativity—the 4 C’s).
Second, the expectations multiply…like rabbits. These are presented in a sort of (aborted) rainbow and reflection of the rainbow. The plan calls for students to master
TEN Life and Career Skills (red),
SIX Learning and Innovation Skills (yellow),
FOUR Information, Media and Technology Skills (blue),
These skills are then united by a green arch that represents
ELEVEN “key” subjects and
EIGHT 21st Century themes.
At least on paper, twenty-one states were pursuing these aims/standards in 2018. (Ken Kay tried twice to get his scheme and meme into federal legislation with a corporate tax break to businesses that would support it).
Meanwhile, all standards on the books dating back to about 2002 are in the process of being stripped of any coherent rationale and morphed to fit the needs of computer coders. Some of this work is being done under the auspices of the National Center for Education Statistics “Common Education Data Standards” project (CEDS). That work is coordinated with IMS Global. IMS stands for Instructional Management Systems. What is the aim of these coding projects? They will enable data retrieval and computer training needed in order to delegate instructional decisions to artificial intelligence–decisions made by computers.
It should be no big surprise that a conspicuous “platinum” sponsor of IMS Global is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Another is eLumen. The eLumen system claims to integrate curriculum and tests, with learning outcomes monitored for individual students. IMS Gobal and CEDs are intended to make “plug and play” systems of instructional delivery uncomplicated (if products services are interoperable). IMS Global has a catalog of certified products/services. Several US school districts are using IMS Certified products.
The IMS Global Consortium is also supported by about 180 vendors for the education market, including Google, IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle. In addition, IMS Global has information sharing relationships with computer-centric education agencies in Japan, the Netherlands, the European Union, United Kingdom, Canada, Norway, Sweden, and Spain.
In other words, a future for education is being written as if online platforms should be the new normal and shaped by transnational alliances. This is an example of what Pasi Sahlberg has called GERM: the Global Educational Reform Movment.
https://ceds.ed.gov/whatIsCEDS.aspx
https://ceds.ed.gov/relatedInitiatives.aspx
https://www.imsglobal.org/background.html
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Laura,
I wasin DC when Ken Kay began hawking “the Partnership for 21st Century Skills” and tried to get it turned into federal legislation. He got all sorts. Of endorsements, even the NEA. I did some research and quickly learned that he was a PR guy for the tech industry with no background in education. At the time, I. Did a parody, offering up the “Partnership for 19th Century Skills,” Which are timeless.
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The parody is wonderful. Achieve and CCSSO sent Ken Kay to southern states to work up enthusiasm for tech- delivered Common Core. He was making trouble and to appease the people who were enamored of Kay’s very mention of ” creativity” and ” problem solving” the CCSSO also set up a ridiculous online research program called EdSteps, purporting to develop a world-class consensus on examples of these “skills.” The pity is that Howard Gardner lent his name and views to the project.
That (stupid) project was also offered up in response to a Newsweek report on a radical decline in scores on creativity tests designed by E. Paul Torrence mid- century last. The CCSSO was caught in public relations disaster, with Ken Kay playing a role in that.
The online research program failed for many reasons, among these a demand that parents and others who submitted examples of “creativity” would give EDSteps the all rights to edit, republish, the examples and more. Also the examples were solicited from anyone, any age, world wide. Responses were so few and slow that awards were offered for participation. The ” research” was really nothing much more than a popular contest,…Which is the best example of creativity? Is it A, or B, or C, or D. Then put up another array of submissions, which is the best example and so on.
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“Meanwhile, all standards on the books dating back to about 2002 are in the process of being stripped of any coherent rationale and morphed to fit the needs of computer coders.”
That’s precisely what this was about. All this had its genesis in a speech Gates gave many years ago in which he argued that the big expenses in schools were facilities and teachers, both of which could be replaced by computers. He paid for a single set of national standards to make it easier to produce aligned products “at scale.” The idea of basing instruction on a standards list dovetails quite nicely with the algorithmic nature of computerized, programmed learning.
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Yes. Plug and play instructional delivery parading as personalized learning… As if learning is 100% guaranteed from ” exposure” to programmed content and tasks.
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