Nicholas Tampio, a professor of political science at Fordham University, has noticed a strange silence about Common Core, which was the hottest issue in K-12 just a few years ago. The silence does not mean that the issue has gone away.
Tampio writes:
The Common Core lives, unfortunately
On June 16, Emily Richmond of the Education Writers Association led off a lively social media exchange by tweeting: “Hey, remember the Common Core?”
One special education researcher replied that the Common Core is “implemented now in every classroom in America just under another name.”
Another teacher tweeted: “You mean what NY conveniently rebranded as “Next Generational Learning Standards”? It’s never gone away. 😞”
People also responded with memes of actors saying “Shhh!” and “We do not speak his name.”
Here, I would like to explain how the Common Core is implemented in nearly every classroom in America, and why people rarely say its name anymore.
How federal law locked the Common Core into place
The federal government gives the states money for education, and they tie strings to that money. One of those strings is that states use standards that contain the key elements of the Common Core.
The country’s main federal K-12 education law is the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) and the law authorizes money to help states and districts fund education in high-poverty communities. In 2015, Senator Lamar Alexander explained, “the new law explicitly prohibits Washington from mandating or even incentivizing Common Core.”
This statement does not tell the whole truth. The law does say that secretary of education cannot make states use the Common Core, but the law also requires states to use standards that must resemble the Common Core.
The Every Student Succeeds Act is filled with stipulations about standards. Here is one of them:
Each State shall demonstrate that the challenging State academic standards are aligned with entrance requirements for credit-bearing coursework in the system of public higher education in the State and relevant State career and technical education standards.
State standards must be “challenging,” align with career technical education standards, and align with entrance requirements for credit-bearing coursework in the system of public higher education. If a state has found a way to satisfy these criteria and not use the Common Core or a facsimile of it, then I have not seen it. Texas famously did not adopt the Common Core, but researchers have shown that the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) overlap with the Common Core standards in writing and math.
In my book, Common Core, I argue that the main components of the Common Core are those that support online instruction and testing. The first English Language Arts (ELA) anchor standardrequires students to “cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text.” If students must use the exact words from the text in their answers, then computers can grade their essays.
To determine if your state uses the Common Core, see if the state standards include the phrase “cite specific textual evidence” or an equivalent. For example, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed an executive order eliminating the Common Core and adopting the Florida’s B.E.S.T. Standards. The firstELA standard is that students must “cite evidence to explain and justify reasoning.” Florida did not get rid of the Common Core.
Four years after the passage of ESSA, Senator Lamar Alexander wrote an essay explaining that his daughter moved from Tennessee to Westchester County, New York. When he asked how his grandchildren were doing, his daughter said: “Common Core here. Common Core there.” I believe that this holds true across the country.
Why won’t people discuss Common Core?
In the spring of 2019, I presented a paper at the American Educational Research Association conference and wanted to see what researchers were saying about the Common Core. Here is what I found.
Many people were presenting research that relied upon the Common Core. One paper discussed how “visual-syntactic text formatting classes found a positive effect on seventh and eighth-grade students’ annual state assessment ELA and writing scores.” Another paper was on how early childhood school attendance affected student performance on later math achievement. These are just two of many papers that used Common Core test scores as the dependent variable to see if an intervention worked.
There were few papers with the words “Common Core” in the title, and of those, the titles often did not indicate a critical stance towards the standards themselves. For example, the paper“Content Literacy and the Common Core” noted that literacy strategies often did not cover the full range of Common Core literacy standards. From what I could tell, few researchers were entering classrooms to research how the Common Core changed instruction from an earlier era.
There seems to be a tacit understanding among education researchers, policymakers, and journalists that the Common Core debate is over. In his new book, Tom Loveless primarily discusses it in the past tense: “Whatever happened to Common Core?” “What was the Common Core debate about?” “Why did Common Core fail?
I believe that there are at least two reasons why people avoid using the words “Common Core” if they can.
First, teachers, administrators, and researchers must go along with the Common Core if they wish to keep their jobs. A teacher once told me their thoughts about the Common Core but then asked me not to give anyone their name because they could be fired for insubordination for criticizing the district’s policies.Professors of education who wish to earn tenure and promotion recognize that journals publish quantitative studies using data from Common Core tests. Superintendents whose job includes generating support for school budgets are not likely to raise public concerns about the quality of the standards that the school is using.
A second reason is that Common Core proponents ridiculed critics. Take, for example, this video—made by the Center for American Progress and Funny or Die—that portrays Common Core critics as tin-foil hat wearing conspiracy theorists. Unfortunately, negative campaigning works, and many parents don’t want to be made fun of in public by people like Arne Duncan. I have many friends, often mothers, who stopped fighting the Common Core because they kept getting insulted on social media and in their communities.
As a parent, I watched the Common Core rollout harm my oldest son’s kindergarten experience. Based on my research, I believe that the standards lead to an education geared around mind-numbing regurgitating evidence from provided texts. I feel a responsibility to remind people that there are better, more humane ways to educate children.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Testing every child in grade 3-8 annually in reading and math, and high school testing programs tied to graduation that required testing outcomes be used to evaluate teachers dumbed down teaching to test prep. The Common Core Standards could have helped all teachers and students achieve higher critical thinking skills such as using evidence to analyze a problem for example “where do plastics in our ocean come from?” Testing, it’s overuse and wrongful requirement to use student scores to evaluate teachers hurt everyone. Might as well evaluate doctors by their patients’ X-rays. Read Making the Common Core Work Corwin Press by Hawkins and Manley.
Thank you for convincingly arguing that the mind-numbing “standards” as well as “curriculum” to be found in today’s schools are the result of the horrifically terrible Common Core. Thank you for pointing out that mothers have been shamed for objecting to what their children are subjected to. I guess the only hope for changing all this is Federal, with a different Secretary of Education???
Of course the Center for American Progress was doing the billionaires’ bidding.
Neo-liberal Larry Summers is a senior advisor at CAP.
Center for American Progress is described by the media as the think tank of the Democratic party mainstream. It is enthusiastically pro-charter.
Which explains why Democrats have lost so many governorships and state legislatures.
Dems AND Repubs want (and, maybe need) the billionaires’ money and influence. Both parties sidle up next to them. The GOP is cozier with the plutocrats’ noxious agenda.
Public education is an opportunity for Biden to win back political positions for Dems but, he’d have to sacrifice chits from tech billionaires. He’s unwilling. Main Street’s assets are for sale by both parties
It would be easier for Biden to do the right thing if he could get the conservative religious off of the school choice train or, barring that, diminish their political influence with legislators and voters.
You mean stink tank.
In addition to the problem of CAP’s billionaires, there is the Progressive Policy Institute, “an intellectual home of the New Democrats.” They claim they are “radically pragmatic”, in other words, plutocrats who latched onto the Dem. brand. They were Bill Clinton’s “idea mill”. Forty-one staff photos are at the site. Of course, the top 3 appear to be White guys, one from Trump’s alma mater, Wharton. Three Black faces appear. Of course, one is them is the outreach director. Two education policy staff include David Osborne and Curtis Valentine (Chiara referenced him in a thread for a different post.)
Again, no surprise, PPI doesn’t think community-owned broadband is a good answer for rural areas. I’m guessing community-owned anything is bad. They label as excessive, anti-trust actions against vertical integration of (profit firms in) biosciences. I’m guessing anti-trust action in any sector is bad. And, as is requisite, they love school choice. Too bad that the NAACP doesn’t agree with them nor with former Georgia Gov. Talmadge.
Just call PPI, AEI’s mini me.
I call the Common Core, the Common GORE.
I call it bullshit!
A standard by any other name smells just as rotten.
lol
Bill Gates paid to have the Common [sic] Core [sic] created as part of a business plan. The idea was to have a single set of “standards” to which to key educational software and Orwellian databases of student test scores.
And it didn’t matter much what was in the dumb list. Any list would have served his purpose. So, he enlisted the breathtakingly incompetent David Coleman to be the decider for the rest of us. Where once individual districts and schools followed de facto consensus pedagogy and curricula that nonetheless allowed for continual updating and improvement based on the input of classroom practitioners, scholars, researchers, and the like–curricula and pedagogy that EVOLVED, now the Common Core Commissariat dictates to all of us. The result? Well, in ELA a dramatic, tragic DEVOLUTION of curricula and pedagogy to make it Common [sic] Core [sic] test preppy. The brightest, most capable people I know in educational publishing have quit rather than be Vichy collaborators with the mind-numbing, curriculum-and-pedagogy destroying Common [sic] Core [sic] regime.
Ofc, Coleman and his pals didn’t have a freaking clue what they was doing. His list is full of mind-blowingly vague idiocies that he plagiarized from existing state standards of dubious merit, is almost entirely content free (it’s a freaking skills list), leaves out almost vast amounts of essential stuff, is incredibly backward (for example, it ignores almost a century of research-based insight and science in linguistics and language acquisition) and generally looks like what you would get if you asked a bunch of small-town insurance agency owners to make a list of stuff they remembered from high-school English cllass. One would have gotten a similar result if one had handed Coleman an 1858 copy of Grey’s Anatomy and some outtakes from Galen and told him t go write new “standards” for medicine based on these. But, unfortunately, the puerile Gates/Coleman bullet list has now become not only the de facto set of standards nationwide but has also become, in ELA, the freaking curriculum outline!!!!! Dumb. Dumb. Dumb.
And then, when the CC$$ proved to be an utter disaster, the oh-so-reverend Mike Huckabee went to the annual ghouls convention called CPAC and told everyone there that given how toxic the name “Common Core” had become, they should go back to their states and CHANGE THE NAME to something state-specific, which is precisely what they did.
cx: what they were doing, loll. The subject of that sentence was at first just Coleman. I edited the sentence but missed updating the verb. Oh for the ability to edit one’s comments in WordPress!
another cx: leaves out vast amounts of essential stuff
Perhaps the saddest thing about the Common [sic] Core [sic], after the fact that this puerile bullet list has stolen real education in their language and literature from a whole generation of students, is that educators did not laugh Coleman, Pimentel, and their ELA list off the national stage at the very beginning. That’s truly shocking and disturbing.
I taught first year college writing for 20 years or so. I was helping my grandaughter in the past year with writing assignments for her honors english class. What teachers follow is the 5 paragraph essay with thesis, 3 supporting points/examples with textual evidence and a conclusion. All reading material must have a main idea usually dictated by the teacher. THIS is not aligned with college writing. They use graphic organizers to fit into almost any assignment. All of this is just dumb and it kills any kind of creative thinking or experimentation with ideas. I hate the cliche “thinking outside the box” but that is exactly what graphic organizers are, forcing students to think inside the box. Why is there even a box? So what I see is the the CCC is a dumbed down curriculum and it is incredibly harmful especially in preparing students for college.
The graphic organizers are the way students are forced to think inside the box while “planning” what they write. After that, they are given frameworks for the writing, sentence starters and fill in the blanks paragraph maps. There are plenty of software products that do most of the “writing” for you. No thinking involved. The reason is that the standards, with constant deployment of standardized tests, are not intended to teach the students. The students are intended to teach the tests. As Professor Tampio wrote, “The first English Language Arts (ELA) anchor standard requires students to ‘cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text.’ If students must use the exact words from the text in their answers, then computers can grade their essays.” We are all being used to teach AI. In the process, we are becoming as unintelligent and uninspired as AI. I always tell my students, “Quality over quantity,” but that’s no longer accurate. It’s “Profit over people.”
All these years later, debate about the Common Core is still clouded by lack of clarity about control, autonomy, and goals… and of course profit. http://www.arthurcamins.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Past-Gets-In-Our-Eyes1.pdf
Great piece, Arthur! About this question posed in it:
Is it reasonable and worthwhile in our democracy to arrive at some common agreements about what we value in education?
Before we went all “standards” crazy in this country, there were “common agreements,” but these were de facto agreements, not de jure ones. They were habits of the tribe. So, for example, there were several competing 6-12 literature anthologies, and 95 percent (I would estimate) of the selections in competing programs were identical. “The Most Dangerous Game.” check “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.” check. “A Negro Speaks of Rivers.” check. “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” excerpt from Frankenstein. check
Almost all of the works in these anthologies used by almost all public schools in the U.S. were “classics” in the vernacular sense of that word–works that belonged to the unofficial but very real canon. And every 9th-grade book contained Romeo and Juliet. And every 10th-grade book contained Julius Ceasar. And almost all of the 11th- or 12th-grade ones contained Macbeth.
So “classic” literature. And it was in this environment, in which almost all schools used one of these anthologies full of these same acknowledged classics, that David Coleman started his Common [sic] Core-y rant about how English teachers ought to start teaching substantive classic works for a change, Shakespeare, for example. Another of the many, many, many examples of Coleman not having a freaking clue what he was talking about and not having bothered to learn anything about what was being taught and how by English teachers. Coleman writing standards for English is kind of like Tom Cruise giving a lecture on quantum chromodynamics.
Now, the fact that these were DE FACTO rather than de jure consensuses is REALLY important. Why? Because, since they were not dictated to teachers, they could be modified when better stuff came along. In other words, they provided the necessary freedom, the space, in which innovation could occur.
One of the worst consequences of the Common [sic] Core [sic] is that before these (and the execrable state “standards” that Coleman cribbed from), English teachers were able to pick up new, valuable ideas from scholars and researchers and from other classroom practitioners and implement them. This is how, for example, sentence combing and the writing process and reading circles and much, much more came to be part of K-12 English curricula. Back in the day, a lot of English teachers subscribed to the English Journal, and every issue was full of this kind of stuff–some scholar or researcher’s advice on the value of teaching motifs of the folktale, with references to Arne/Thompson, and suggestions for helping students to apply learning on that topic to contemporary literature. Oh, this is the Cruel Sister motif! Oh, this is the Wasteland motif! And English teachers, back then, would get together in their department meetings and share and discuss and critique these approaches and decide what they were going to implement instead of meeting simply to hear read out to them the latest administrative directive on Common [sic] Core [sic] Data Walls and Data Chats.
Real continuous improvement resulting from diverse input and engaged autonomy, not top-down directives from Lord Coleman et blasted al.
cx: sentence combining
To add encouraging note . . and to show that NH is doing 1 thing right. NH has passed a bill mandating play based K. This is a bill that veers from standardized K.
https://www.education.nh.gov/who-we-are/deputy-commissioner/kindergarten-tool-kit
problematically in so many situations, the ESSA push for “Pay For Success” school funding mandates test-based accountability no matter how the classes are set up
Myth is a peculiar thing, as is the symbolic language, out of which myth is built. It seems to be what sets us apart from the “lower” animals. The “lower” don’t gather around a
campfire telling tales imbued with symbolic meaning.
Man gave names to all the animals, in the beginning, a long
time ago. Was he right, or was he wrong?
( You MUST cite evidence to explain and justify your reasoning.)
Notoriety is a peculiar thing, as is the “din” out of
which notoriety is built.
Man concocted notoriety, in the beginning, a long time ago.
Was he right, or was he wrong?
Again, you MUST cite evidence to explain and justify your reasoning.
A score based avatar is a peculiar thing, as is the nonsense
(myth)upon which it is built.
The afflictions of this nonsense are obvious. They aren’t
“cured” by another “dose” of nonsense, such as
questioning the myth (score based reality)
and then AMPLIFYING it (giving tests).
How do you put a stop to a score based reality
by staying wed to a score based avatar???
How do you negate a score based reality
by implying other score based realities are the
real deal, ’cause they don’t have “standardized”
wanked in front of them?
I think one of the big issues was the politicized fight against Common Core. As a teacher I was against the developmentally inappropriate expectations/standards. I fought alongside many who were simply against “government controlled education”, the tinfoil hat nut jobs. Fox holes make for strange bed fellows. In the end their right wing politics pushed me away. I retired and my fellow teachers never really joined the fight. Teachers are a very compliant bunch who don’t make waves, especially at the lower end of the educational continuum. It saddens me that our children continue to be subjected to Common Core.
“Teachers are a very compliant bunch who don’t make waves, especially at the lower end of the educational continuum” . .
This narrative of it’s the teacher’s fault for not revolting against the system is problematic. It’s very complex. I don’t want to minimize my defense of teacher by a quick response . . . but in short – the system and expectations are constantly changing. It wears a staff down to advocate for best practices when we are replied (by admin, general public and frankly our state and fed gov) with the basic response of teachers are resistant to change and don’t want to work hard or do what is best for children (best = new mandate).
Those at the “lower end of the educational continuum” need all their energy to be bright eyed and enthusiastic to nurture and teach very young children. How do you feel after spending 2 hours with 3 or 4 children between the ages of 5 and 7? What if if you spent 7 hours with 20-25 in that age category and were responsible for the continually engagement and productivity? And at the end of the day you needed to clean up and plan for their next day? Would you be able to focus your energy year after year ……. battling the system that in turn beats you down for advocating for best practices??
It’s not that we want to be “compliant.” It’s much more complex than that.
their continual engagement ….
and sorry for any other typos or grammatical errors.
beats you
That’s why they attacked teachers unions. Without strong unions, we are easily reduced to powerless automatons entering data, not professionals.
Unions are vital to informing teachers. Anecdotally, I find too
many teachers lack any knowledge about and therefore any fear of the organizations attacking public education.
Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé and commented:
Common Core is no more but it still lives by other names and continues to wreak havoc on OUR K-12 public education system while damaging children and driving want-to-be teachers into other professions. Common Core by any name is still the best weapon the enemies of the United States have to destroy America from within.
I suppose that “reformers” and the architects of the Common Core have ignored the fact that national test scores have not moved in the past decade, during and after the implementation of Common Core.
Thank you for this. Just ran into TX teachers who have had MATHia imposed upon their summer school curriculum with Common Core infused throughout. Double Devastating.
I’d be curious to learn more if you’d like to email me the details. tampio@fordham.edu
Bill Gates and Arne Duncan accomplished their goal, which resulted from a closely coordinated effort between the US Department of Education and the Gates Foundation.
Someone should file a FOIA request for all the emails and correspondence between Arne Duncan (and others at Department of Ed) and Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation.
“Common Corelusion”
Collusion with the Russians
Got nothing on the Gates
The Common Core discussions
Determined ALL our fates
The legacy of the Common Core standards (via RTTT and NCLB waivers) is carved in stone. Constrained de-facto K to 8+ curricula, limited almost exclusive to just two (!) subjects, and further narrowed by the small handful of standards that are actually tested.
Ridiculously framed as, “the civil rights movement of the 21st century”, the Common Core reform movement was more akin to intellectual chains and shackles for our poorest and most underprivileged students.
On: “In my book, Common Core, I argue that the main components of the Common Core are those that support online instruction and testing.”
Agree. Removing teachers and their professional, research-based understanding from the process has been an ongoing effort. It wasn’t that long ago that I was going to regional state test scoring with teachers from all over the region. I saw student work, their handwriting, and marks (ELA and Math tests)…the totality of the student as represented on those assessments. You could see the construction of answers from the least capable to the most adept. And you got to see hundreds to compare I came back to my district able to share the types of tasks/questions students handled well overall. The ones that were a challenge. The techniques and strategies that led to success and the mistakes common to the less successful.
Fast forward: teachers were no longer sent to regional scoring, tests were confiscated and sent to Long Island. In Long Island, ads appeared for certified teachers to get paid pretty well to come and grade state tests. I think that was the year a boasting forest pineapple lost a footrace and got eaten by his friends.
Fast forward to post-engageny modules and the switching between a few testing companies and field-testing a few versions of CCLS aligned tests…we end up signing on to begin the transition to computer-based. What a farce. Students who did little more than copy-paste earned unearned points. A clumsy first-round execution, but my bet is standardization, AI, deprofessionalizing, and de-unionizing the profession is the goal. What’s actually good for children and learners isn’t the top concern. The well-educated critical thinkers will still exist in the upper-income brackets. Followers and wage slaves will come from below, out of the Cored schools.
Excellent points.
The business plan for the for-profit schools-in-a-box business of Gates and Zuck cited an ROI of 20%.
The Harvard Kennedy School of Government and Harvard’s graduate school of education are where elites nest and groom the select to steal Main Street’s assets, to exploit the middle and poor classes and, where members of vulnerable demographic groups are taught to betray their communities.