The controversy over the Common Core standards has died down since so many states have renamed and rebranded them as if they no longer exist. But below the eye of public attention, Common Core does what it was intended to do: It has created a marketplace for vendors.
Alex Harwin, in her update of the marketplace, writes that more than two-thirds of district leaders say they are still buying CCSS products.
This is a good time to recall that Arne Duncan’s chief of staff Joanne Weiss wrote in the Harvard Business Review blog that building a national marketplace for vendors was one of the central goals of CCSS:
Technological innovation in education need not stay forever young. And one important change in the market for education technology is likely to accelerate its maturation markedly within the next several years. For the first time, 42 states and the District of Columbia have adopted rigorous common standards, and 44 states are working together in two consortia to create a new generation of assessments that will genuinely assess college and career-readiness.
The development of common standards and shared assessments radically alters the market for innovation in curriculum development, professional development, and formative assessments. Previously, these markets operated on a state-by-state basis, and often on a district-by-district basis. But the adoption of common standards and shared assessments means that education entrepreneurs will enjoy national markets where the best products can be taken to scale.
In this new market, it will make sense for teachers in different regions to share curriculum materials and formative assessments. It will make sense for researchers to mine data to learn which materials and teaching strategies are effective for which students – and then feed that information back to students, teachers, and parents.
If we can match highly-effective educators with great entrepreneurs and if we can direct smart capital toward these projects, the market for technological innovation might just spurt from infancy into adolescence. That maturation would finally bring millions of America’s students the much-touted yet much-delayed benefits of the technology revolution in education.
Weiss previously ran Duncan’s Race to the Top program, and before that, was CEO of NewSchools Venture Fund, which raises money for charter schools.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The governor of Florida says they’re getting rid of Common Core, but many districts in that state use iReady “Built for the Common Core.”
https://www2.curriculumassociates.com/Products/iready/iready-builtforcommoncore.aspx
over and over a new verse of the same old song: tech and testing companies always end up raking in their normal profits
Media reported that the Catholic school chain that has spread to 17 states and received funding from Gates and Walton heirs uses blended learning and buys Common Core curriculum. The Catholic schools for the more affluent kids, are they rejecting the model?
Theocracy’s association with colonialism…
Thomas Jefferson-“In every country and in every age, the clergy have been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot.”
If states truly seek to cut ties with the CCSS, they should get rid of all the CCSS based tests that drive curricula as well as products associated with the Common Core. Years ago school districts devised their own curricula, and some of them relied on their own assessment of students. The ‘destroy public education’ movement has always been a top down, punitive mess that tied teachers’ hands and hobbled comprehensive instruction. The goal has always been to undermine confidence in public education. Sometimes when you seek change, you have to stop playing the game. It is time from public schools to reject their Common Core chains and forge a new path to better serve students.
If a state or local community demands a standardized test, there are older norm referenced tests that are still on the market. Districts can still purchase the IOWA or the CAT(California Achievement Test). I am sure there are other normed tests on the market as well. These tests were administered to get a snapshot of how students are performing are still available. These tests never had any high stakes attached to them. They are currently being marketed to home schoolers as some states require home schooled students to participate in some type of standardized testing.
A homeschooled child, 10 years old, according to Dayton, Ohio police, was raped, tortured and killed this week. The father was charged. When the child was enrolled in school, teachers reported abuse concerns 17 times. While he was at school he was safe from his father.
Media always seek out Fordham spokespersons for positive spin about school reform but, apparently they can’t connect homeschooling to the right wing’s dismantling of schools as places of protection for kids.
A study by pediatricians found that 47% of school aged victims of abuse were removed from school to be home schooled. “When they were in school, parents knew there were certain lines that couldn’t be crossed.”
The child’s miserable life and death is on the heads of staff at right wing education deform tanks like Fordham and ALEC and, on the heads of the richest 0.1% who fund the dismantling of public education.
Home schooling may have ulterior motives like hiding abuse. Some reclusive people may have something they are trying to keep from public scrutiny. We shouldn’t accept the idea that parents always know best as the right wing wants us to believe.
Criticism and the Common [sic] Core [sic]
The Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic] in ELA certainly are “common,” but in the pejorative sense of the word. They are received, vulgar, uninformed, base, mediocre, pedestrian. One would expect that folks putting together a single set of standards to be used by everyone would have consulted scholars and researchers with significant expertise in the many domains that the standards were going to cover. So, for example, you would expect that they would have talked to linguists about how people acquire the grammar and vocabulary of a language. You would expect that they would have talked to famous literature professors about what it would be useful for graduates of 13 years of general education to know about literature. You would expect that they would talk to folks who train actors and directors about what people need to know about speaking and listening, theatre, and film. None of this happened. Gates wanted a single national bullet list to key depersonalized education software. Lord Coleman presented himself as ready to do the job—an act of astonishing hubris, given that he had almost no relevant expertise himself. And, instead of thinking through, anew, what standards in ELA should look like, he and Susan Pimentel simply reviewed the lowest common denominator groupthink of existing state standards and created a new list based on those. Those standards were almost completely content free, and so is the CC$$ bullet list. It’s a list of vague, abstract skills.The doleful consequences for our nation are clear.
When I first reviewed these “standards,” it looked to me as though a group of small-town business guys had hacked them together based on their vague, inaccurate, wildly gap-filled memories of what was taught in their English classes back in the day. One would have gotten similar results if Gates had hired Lord Coleman to write new “standards” in medicine and had sent him to a cabin in Vermont with a copy of Galen and the 1859 edition of Gray’s Anatomy. In domain after domain, these “standards” are incredibly backward and full of holes and lack coherent, systematic development of bodies of knowledge in the student over time. If you look at the language “standards,” for example, you will find that they reflect PRESCIENTIFIC, folk theories of how vocabulary and grammar are acquired and aren’t informed by the vast amount of learning that linguists have done about these subjects over the past 60 years. It’s as though we had new “standards” for the Navy that warned about sailing of the edge of the Earth. It’s as though we had new “standards” for Physics instruction that tell us to teach that objects naturally seek their place, that light travels through the luminiferous ether, and that fire results from the presence of phlogiston in combustible bodies.
Accomplishment in English results from two distinct modes for gaining knowledge and ability. One is unconscious ACQUISITION. The other is conscious LEARNING. This is a fundamental concept in the contemporary cognitive science of learning. But these “standards” aren’t informed by such understanding. They treat apples as though they were carburetors. And what should students gain from their English classes? Well, they should acquire and learn DESCRIPTIVE KNOWLEDGE of the areas that English covers (examples of descriptive knowledge: what a couplet is, who invented the detective story [Poe], what the Puritans and Transcendentalists believed and how these beliefs affect the history of ideas in the United States, who Mary Shelley was and what she wrote and why it was important, what a pastoral poem is and what conventions it relies on, the elements of the hero’s journey, how a sonnet is structured, and so on)]. They should also acquire and learn PROCEDURAL KNOWLEDGE in these areas (examples of procedural knowledge: how to plan a fable [short, animal characters behaving like humans, a conflict, a moral], techniques for achieving sentence variety, how to put together a Works Cited page, how to speak melodically, how to format a play or a film script, and so on). And, of course, learning in the various domains would be scaffolded over the course of the 13-year period of instruction.
But choose ANY domain of ELA and ANY subdomain (e.g., literature: prosody, genre, literary motifs, conventional symbolism, styles and movements, critical approaches, film structure, etc.; writing: sentence structures, connections between ideas; rhetorical techniques; figures of speech; planning pieces of various types, etc.) and you will look in vain in these “standards” for systematic development of students’ knowledge and abilities over time. The “standards” are a randomized mess.
Let me give one example. Let’s consider ways of approaching or making sense of literary works. Collectively, those are known as critical approaches or critical lenses. There are many ways in and out of literary works, and the CC$$ in ELA teaches NONE OF THEM, though it makes lip service to ONE of about twenty-five major approaches (what I call the CC$$ New Criticism Lite). What is the value of learning a variety of ways of making sense of a story or poem or play or film? Well, among its many functions, learning procedures for doing various types literary criticism gives people toolkits for making accessible works that otherwise wouldn’t be.
So, for example, one approach to criticism involves consideration of the intellectual biography—Biographical Criticism (What experiences did he or she have? What ideas was he or she interested in?) So, for example, you will be able to read William Butler Yeats’s poems “Leda and the Swan,” “The Magi,” and “The Second Coming” with understanding if you know that Yeats was a mystic and believed that at various times in history, the spirit world intersected this world and disrupted everything, creating a new age. Zeus got with Leda, who gave birth to Helen of Troy, which led to the Trojan War and the Heroic Age. God became man, in the form of Christ, initiating a struggle between paganism and Christianity resulting in the Christian era. Something new and very destructive and disruptive is about to occur in our time, and we don’t know what it is yet.
Another approach to criticism looks at how literary works are informed by ideas, politics, social life, and so on at the time of their composition—Historical Criticism. So, what are we to make of Plato’s weird little Allegory of the Cave from the Republic? Well, it can only make sense if you have some background in ideas current in Plato’s time. Plato was impressed by Greek mathematics. He thought that one could conceive of/think about perfect forms like a perfect point or triangle that could not be found in the world. In Greek, there was one word, psyche, for both “mind” and “soul.” So, Plato decided that you couldn’t find perfection, of mathematical forms, of truth, of beauty, of virtue, or of anything else, by looking at the world but that you could discover these simply by thinking carefully—by using your mind/soul and making repeated stabs at the problem (the famous Socratic Method). Without this background, Plato’s little parable will be completely opaque because its basic ideas are foreign to us, which leads to a second function of criticism: it extends our range of understanding beyond our own conventional understandings derived from our current milieu.
Another approach involves learning about genres and their characteristics—Genre Criticism. When we know the type of thing a work is and the characteristics of that type of thing, we can see what we couldn’t before. So, from ancient times, there was fantasy literature involving nonordinary things—banshees and fairies, strange monsters, weird places, etc. But in 1817, an 18-year-old girl (!) named Mary Shelley created a new kind of story involving extremely weird, non-ordinary things, in this case. She borrowed an old fantasy/folklore motif—the creation of a Gollum, or artificial man—but she added a twist. She made the story SCIENTIFICALLY PLAUSIBLE, based on the science of her day, by creating a mechanism borrowed from what were for her contemporary scientific studies. The mechanism was “animal electricity,” or galvanism. In so doing, she created a new genre of literature (at 18!!!!), the science fiction story. Fantasy and science fiction are both about weird, strange occurrences. But the latter genre differs in two respects—it must be scientifically plausible, and it must present a warning about the possible negative consequences of scientific/technological hubris. Once a student knows this about sci fi, he or she will read or watch works in this genre with renewed understanding, and he or she will be more likely as an adult to follow Robert’s Rule: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2020/01/21/roberts-rule/
Now, all of this might sound complicated and irrelevant to teaching K-12 graders–kids. But it’s not. Most of the major approaches to criticism can be practiced at very, very simple levels. The great literary scholar Paul H. Fry, in his Theory of Literature, illustrates this by presenting very, very simple explanations of a picture book story, Tony the Tow Truck, using a wide variety of critical approaches. Or, have a look at Frederick Crews’s delightful books on criticism, The Pooh Perplex and Postmodern Pooh, in which he applies various critical approaches to Winnie the Pooh stories.
One could image a set of standards that was actually informed by expertise. Such a set of standards for ELA might contain a thread to develop students’ procedural knowledge of ways to make sense of literary works—a literary criticism thread. A subdomain. And that thread would start very simply and then build, systematically, over 13 years, knowledge of and ability to use the major approaches to literature. One of the fundamental distinctions in literary criticism is between interpretation as recovering the author’s intention versus interpretation as thinking about the significance of the experience of the work to the reader. This is the difference between “What do you mean?” and “What does this mean to me?” That’s a distinction that can be PRACTICED very, very early on—by very little kids.
If Lord Coleman and Lady Pimentel, appointed by Gates the deciders for the rest of us, had bothered to consult literary scholars, they might have learned some of this. They might have learned that EVERY SUBDOMAIN in ELA consist of a body of acquired or learned descriptive or procedural knowledge, and they might have set about producing a scaffolded, spiraled, systematic outline for teaching that knowledge over time. For example, the “standards” contain a speaking and listening strand/domain. So, what are the elements of speaking? Well, these include pitch and intonation, stress, length, rhythm, pace, volume, timbre, articulation, enunciation, diction, respiration, facial expression, eye contact, gesture, stance, posture, proximity, register, silence and pauses, movement, dialect, paralinguistic vocalization, body language, and resonance, to name a few. Trained speakers, such as actors, have command of all of these. They know that they can make their voices more melodic, and more pleasant to listen to, by lowering their average pitch and then varying their pitch around that center, slightly heightening the normal variations in pitch that are used in everyday speech. They know that they can use variation in pitch and rhythm to avoid sounding monotone. They know that they can make their speech more engaging by making strategic use of gesture and body language and eye contact and body language. They know that they can create surprise and interest by strategic use of pauses or unusual timbre or register or pitch. They know that they can control timbre in various ways so that they don’t sound shrill or nasal or otherwise awful. And all these things can be simply taught and practiced. One could imagine a speaking and listening strand that actually did that (and much else) over time and so produced adults who were good at public speaking and performance. But as with other domains and subdomains in ELA, look for these in the content-free CC$$ and they are not there.
Going up the Common Core stair,
I met some knowledge that wasn’t there.
It wasn’t there again today.
How can I possibly learn this way?
But doing what I have suggested here would have required the deciders for the rest of us to have consulted experts who actually knew something about the various domains and subdomains that the “standards” purportedly “cover.” And it would have required rethinking what “standards” in ELA might look like and mean. Instead, the makers of the CC$$ relied on their own received, hackneyed, backward, uninformed notions and on the execrable existing state standards and produced an almost completely content free list of vague, abstract skills that has led to a dramatic devolution of ELA curricula and pedagogy because of the high stakes attached to tests on them.
For a brief outline of types of criticism (think: ways to approach a poem, story, play, film, etc.), go here: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2019/03/24/approaches-to-literary-criticism/
There is still a market for Common Core compliant curriculum materials.
The Gates-funded EdReports website offers reviews of “acceptable” instructional materials, based on a review process designed to screen for strict compliance with the CCSS. I looked at some of the approved materials. These are given numerical ratings in three categories of compliance. At least twenty grade-specific publications have been reviewed, some as recently as 2020. Among the publishers who submitted materials are Pearson, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and the College Board. https://www.edreports.org/search?q=Common+Core
EdReports criteria are derived from the June 2011 “Publishers’ Criteria for the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts and Literacy, Grades 3–12, written by
David Coleman and Susan Pimentel. I resurrected my copy of this 13-page set of directives to publishers. This includes the infamous claims about deriving meaning from the text and only the text, and distributions between informational and literary texts. The criteria were slightly revised in 2012. https://secure.edweek.org/media/k-2-criteria-blog.pdf
EdReports.org was launched in March 2015. A professional PR firm was hired to promote it and to forestall criticisms. You can see that the PR company is proud of its success in creating the brand and advertising it. This corporate report refers to Peter Greene’s early detection and criticism of the purposes of EdReports at his blog Curmudgucation.
https://www.widmeyer.com/work/edreports-org.html
EdReports reviewers are teachers. They are paid from $1,750 – $2,500 for their reviews. Reviewers have about 25 hours of online and in-person training along with weekly team calls (dubbed professional development). Content reviewers are expected to spend 5–10 hours per week reviewing materials, including team calls. Most reviewers work through one series over the course of 3–4 months working 5 to 10 hours a week. More details are at https://www.edreports.org/about/faq
EdReports is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Foundation, the Helmsley Charitable Trust, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Overdeck Family Foundation, the Samueli Foundation, the Charles and Helen Schwab Foundation, the Stuart Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York and Broadcom Corporation.
The IRS 990 form for 2018 shows assets of about $10.7 million with income of $15.3 million. This annual report from 2018 will give you more information about the history of EdReports and how widely it is used in making purchasing decisions.
Elsewhere on the internet you will see publishers who still push the Common Core proudly advertising an “all green” rating from EdReports. All green means the materials hit the compliance criteria in three main categories. EdReports,http://storage.googleapis.com/edreports-206618.appspot.com/annual-
Thank you, Laura, for this excellent summary of essential information re EdReports, the Deformer/Disrupters’ first stab at creating a national Curriculum Commissariat and Thought Police. As always, I am impressed by your dogged and insightful reporting.
BTW, EdReports gives a perfect rating to the new MyPerspectives literature program from Pearson. I guess this program now belongs to the equity firm that bought Pearson’s courseware divisions. A couple years ago, boxes of these books arrived in my classroom midyear with no warning, accompanied by a memo saying that I was required to use them going forward. I was teaching 11th- and 12th-grade literature (American and British survey courses). These books came with tons and lots of really difficult-to-maneuver online supplemental materials of very, very low quality, but it would have been difficult for the online junk to be worse than the basal texts themselves. These were organized chronologically, as is usual for survey courses, but
the introductions to the units on the various periods taught almost nothing about the ideas, politics, social norms, etc., of the time most relevant to the literature of the period, and almost nothing about the characteristics and types of literature of these periods. So, they didn’t provide any necessary context for reading literature from the period.
The same was true in the units themselves. One could read through the entire unit on the Anglo Saxons, the Medieval Era, the Puritan Era, the Transcendentalists, the Romantics, the Victorian Era, American Realism, Modernism, or whatever, and learn almost nothing of what made that era that era. And what little was taught was, as often as not, simply WRONG. The texts were absolutely riddled with factual errors and incorrect definitions of literary terms. They seem to have been put together by hacks with no knowledge of literary periods, styles, genres, techniques or much of anything else.
Most of the classics long found in high-school texts covering these literature were simply missing. In other words, these texts far more than decimated the canon. They cut about 75 percent of it. Why? To make room for snippets of contemporary pop culture fluff that was supposed to make the text interesting but were just ridiculous. No, Transcendentalism was not just about loving nature, and mentioning trees in a rap song or a public service announcement on the radio doesn’t make it an example of Transcendentalism.
The activities and exercises were absolutely random. There was no scaffolding or systematic building of descriptive or procedural knowledge any any of the domains treated. These were all random exercises and activities on random snippets of text meant to practice some randomly chosen item from the vague, abstract Common [sic] Core [sic] bullet list.
When literature from the canon was presented, it was typically in extremely truncated form. That is, it was excerpted, which is fine, except that the excerpts were rarely of the most important or interesting or representative material from the original work.
The Anglo-Saxon and Medieval English translations were uniformly dreadful and anachronistic. They really had to work to find ones this bad. The selections from these periods weren’t broad enough to represent the literature and ideas of these periods at all.
After my initial review of this execrable program, I opened to a spread at random and made a list of some 25 errors on this one 2-page spread and sent it to all my administrators and my colleagues.
And thereafter, I taught from novels, plays, and handouts of literature and exercises and background information that I posted on my teacher portal.
For many, many decades, literature textbook programs in the United States contained a world lit survey in Grade 10, an American lit survey in Grade 11, and a Brit lit survey in Grade 12. These surveys contained classic works from the canon. Here’s why they were important: brains are connection machines (this metaphor breaks down, but it’s very useful). New learning is more likely to take place if it can be connected to existing learning. These survey courses were a kind of timeline on which kids could hang future learning, in their college and adult lives. And, importantly, they introduced kids to the major authors, periods, styles, genres, and works in these traditions. So, later on, as adults, they would know who Plato and Ibsen, Emerson and Thoreau, Chaucer and Shelley and Yeats were and could return to them. In other words, these texts were substantive and foundational. Furthermore, these texts were an introduction to the history of ideas that shaped the past and the world we live in. Kids reading The Crucible would learn about Puritan ideas that shaped America (self governance, Protestantism, Puritanicalism, individual responsibility and punishment, etc) and about the period to which Miller was responding with this play (Communism v. Capitalism, the Red Scare, McCarthy, etc). But because the texts now deal almost entirely with vague, abstract Common [sic] Core [sic] “skills,” almost all the substantive content is gone. In fact, it has to be to get a good rating from EdReports.
But, of course, Lord Coleman, in his utter ignorance of what was actually being done in US classrooms and of actual US textbooks, called for teaching of substantive texts for a change (LOL) and for close reading, despite these texts the presented canonical works, each of them followed by close reading questions. He might as well have called on the Navy to start using ships, submarines, and airplanes or extolled to great value of wearing shoes for protection of the feet. Uh, yeah. Thanks, Lord Coleman, alternately Seer of the Obvious and Professor of That Which He Didn’t Understand (eg., the value of reading and producing narratives).
David Coleman offered thie following set of Guiding Principles for Teaching in the Arts.
He reveals his ignorance of the arts. The princples are not principals. They are more in the order of antiquated ideas about teaching, English and French academies well before the twentieh century. http://usny.nysed.gov/rttt/docs/guidingprinciples-arts.pdf
The so-called principles reveal his determination to get art teachers in NY to force close readings of “visual texts” on students. Beginning in the early grades students should also learn to learn to create art by imitating the masters.
The guy reveals that he has never been in a classroom. In part of this rant about principles Colemen says this:
“Shared topics and themes in the arts also offer opportunities to make comparisons across different mediums. For example, the 9-10th grade Standards in Literacy require students to: “analyze the representation of a subject or a key scene in two different artistic mediums, including what is emphasized or absent in each treatment (e.g., Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” and Breughel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus).
Well fine and dandy. This is a college-level assignment shoved down to grades 9-10. This exact example comes from an Introductory English Survey Course at Sam Houston University, Huntsville, TX. The assignment appears on pages 98-99 in Achieve (2004) American Diploma Project (ADP), Ready or Not: Creating a High School Diploma That Counts, available at pages 105-106 in the pdf at http://www.achieve.org/ReadyorNot
Sample essays are all over the internet.