Leonie Haimson, executive director of Class Size Matters, interviewed scholar Tom Loveless about the failure of the Common Core on her weekly radio show called “Talk Out of School.” Loveless is a former teacher, professor, and researcher at the Brookings Institution.
Loveless recently published a book titled Tom Loveless’ book, Between the State and the Schoolhouse, Understanding the Failure of Common Core. [Use code BSSS21 to get 20% off when ordering from Harvard Education Press; offer expires 8/13/2021.]
It was one of the best discussions of Common Core I have heard. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I wrote both Leonie and Tom to commend them. I added a footnote to their conversation. At one point, Leonie asked Tom why the CCSS sets out percentages of literary and informational text that should be taught in elementary school, middle school, and high school. Neither knew the answer.
Here it is: the authors of the CCSS copied the percentages from the NAEP guidelines for test developers. in grade 4, instruction should be divided 50%-50% between literary sources and informational text. In grade 8, the CCSS recommended division is 45%/55%. In grade 12, it should be 30%-70%.
NAEP does not offer these percentages as guidelines for teachers, but as guidance for test developers. There is no evidence that students learn more from fiction or nonfiction. But as Loveless has already demonstrated in an earlier study, the teaching of literature in the nation (based on NAEP surveys) declined after the adoption of Common Core by more than 40 states.
So, Common Core failed to improve achievement as measured by test scores and it failed to reduce achievement gaps among racial and SES groups. Unfortunately its only “success” was reducing the time devoted to teaching literature.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Too much nonfiction in common core
Too much top down decision making in Common Core, period. When I plan lessons, I plan a few weeks ahead to begin the school year, and then I get to know my students before planning any more. That’s not something a pretest can accomplish, and certainly not something AI is or will ever be “intelligent” enough to accomplish. But yes, too much nonfiction too. Too much close reading wherein students never learn any context or content. And certainly not enough fun. Reading is fun, darn it!
As parent and as a woman, I don’t appreciate how common core has taken away teacher autonomy and creativity.
Bill Gates would undoubtedly say the goal is to add autonomy:
Autonomous teaching bots.
When teachers are all gone
The bots will teach the children
Shock them when they’re wrong
Like Doctor Stanley Milgrim
Well, one could also argue that there is too much fiction in Common Core — indeed, that the very name “State Sponsored Standards Initiative” is a fiction.
A Common Core of Fiction
Too much fiction in Common Core
Where fantasy is King
“Common Core will give us more”
Of nearly everything”
Common Core devastated math curricula. It’s been rebranded and lives on. CC is also deeply woven into the SAT. Public schools have been seriously weakened by this junk.
Yep. Coleman remade the SAT into The Common [sic] Core [sic] SAT, and produced a test both tortured and absurd. Alas, he did not take my suggestion to name the new version the Scholastic Core-y Assessment Turkey, or SCAT.
One man’s failure is another’s success.
CC has succeeded in facilitating “data driven” education with all that entails (computer based learning, standardized testing, VAM, SGP, sales of hardware and software, etc)
CC was never even intended to accomplish the things that were promised.
The CC$$ was a business plan, pure and simple. One ring to rule them all. One bullet list to which to key depersonalized education software and Orwellian databases that could be sold, like the Microsoft OS or Word, “at scale.”
One of the many flaws of Common Core was the assumption that if everyone at every grade studied the same things taught in the same way, achievement (test scores) would rise, gaps between groups would close, and everyone would be equal. Anyone who thought about teaching would realize that this is a silly idea. If students have the same teacher using the same methods and content, there is still a wide variation in test scores. A legion of social scientists have shown that home like has a far greater impact on scores than teachers. Ten years after th were adoption of CC, none of its goals was met. Scores remain the same, as do gaps.
Yes, absolutely.
the assumption that if everyone at every grade studied the same things taught in the same way…everyone would be equal.
Equally stupid.
Eessentially the Mao Tse-tung way
That’s why Conservatives hated it so much.
And I can’t say I disagree.
Diane: your comment about not everyone teaching the same way reminds me of a conversation I had with Bill Sanders, famed for VAM. He had delivered an explanation of his little plan to us teachers in our county where he grew up. I lingered (I bet you guys hate those kinds of students). What, I asked him, if you cannot get agreement on the precise topics treated by classes in different schools? Would that not invalidate the whole system?
Sanders seemed genuinely puzzled. He had no answer, of course, because test outcomes were like bushels of corn to him.
I suspect the purveyors of CC might be similarly befuddled by this obvious question.
Roy, I always point out that Sanders, the father of VAM, was an agricultural economist and he thought all the conditions could be controlled.
Students differ, and so what and how they are taught should differ. What, curricula. How, pedagogy. And it’s obvious enough, or ought to be, that an enormously diverse country with an enormously diverse economy needs differently taught students, not ones who were identically milled.
SomeDAM Poet
“That’s why Conservatives hated it so much”.
Yes we see how much “Conservatives ” appreciate diversity of thought. And conservatives always allow professional educators to decide the standards and curricula to be taught. Because “Conservatives” wanted their children exposed to literature that challenged conventional beliefs.
I suspect what “Conservatives” hated was the “Kenyan Born” Black man in the White House whose education department was pushing it.
I suspect us lefties were the ones upset with creating compliant automatons for American industry.
But as you said Bill sold a lot of software and hardware for the elements of CC that remain. And that may be the motive for most of his philanthropy. For his views on Higher Education or even Vaccines. He bragged about defeating the open sourcing of the Oxford(AstraZeneca) Covid vaccine . Intellectual property rights being more important than lives . After all where would he be without his Government enforced monopolies and daddies skills as a corporate lawyer. .
Lord of the Billyanaires
One Bill to rule them all
One Bill to fund them
One Bill to test them all
And in the schoolhouse VAM them
In the Land of Gates
Where the Billyanaires lie
“Sanders, the father of VAM, was an agricultural economist and he thought all the conditions could be controlled.”
Sanders thought all the cattle (aka teachers) could be controlled.
And the primary goal of his VAM was to do just that. And it had pretty good success for a while at least.
VAM Control
VAM controlled the “cattle”
Within the public school
Teachers waged a battle
To free them from his rule
Isaac Newton: if I have seen further than others , it is by standing on the shoulders of giants
William Sander (father of VAM): if I have see further than udders, it is by standing on the horns of cattle
LMAO, SomeDAM!
SomeDAM, this is one of your best! (Standing on the shoulders of giants vs cattle.)
CC Was Never Intended To Accomplish The Things That Were Promised: essential for knowing why we are where we are — too bad few people have your eyesight.
The Common Core failed because it was not an answer to a genuine need in education. It was never a grassroots movement. The origin of the Common Core was wholly a political top down imposition resulting from the collusion of politicians working for the interests of the ultra-wealthy class. The main objective of the tests based on the CCSS was to undermine public schools.
Even though the Common Core has failed. Its remnants remain in the testing mandates across the states. Its message lives on in the annual testing that continues to be a vehicle for privatization. From a privatizer’s perspective the Common Core has been a relative success as privatization continues to hoover up public dollars at the expense of public education.
cx, Even though the Common Core has failed, its remnants remain…
Russian Dolls
The Core has failed
But core remains
The shell unveiled
The inner grains
You are right, Retired Teacher, Common Core remains as a failure. It actively continues to fail. 28 states still use meaningless SBAC tests with tiny fractions of students “passing”, and in my populous state, scores are still being used to “rate” and harm public schools. Meaningless test prep and counterproductive close reading teaching methods continue everywhere. What remains in place isn’t anodyne enough to be merely remnants of Common Core. I would call what remain not remnants but variant strains of Common Core. Let’s say one is like a Delta variant, for example, dangerous and difficult to get rid of. Common Core mutates just a tiny bit into CCSS, but is still the same plague, very much alive and constantly invading new hosts. That’s because someone campaigned on a promise to end standardized testing if we voted him into the White House, but, like Common Core, he FAILED to fulfill his promise.
“But as Loveless has already demonstrated in an earlier study, the teaching of literature in the nation (based on NAEP surveys) declined after the adoption of Common Core by more than 40 states.”
AND, it appears that the suggested increase in nonfiction caused no gain in the understanding our citizens have of topics like science and history!
Because they are based on false onto-epistemological premises.
And the NAEP suffers from the same false premises.
Example of garbage in, garbage out.
Why do so many defend using that rotten garbage for anything?
The tests are not based on any premises other than Bill Gates’ desire to have more profitable data on his premises, and his desire to open up more profitable charter school businesses on public premises. Oh, and no taxes. The epistemology is just unmitigated greed, as logical and intelligent as the epistemology of any cult. The leader just wants you to give him your income and belongings, and work for him for free, so he makes up some nonsense about UFOs, or about teacher quality as defined by test scores affecting future student income levels, or about listening to the Beatles’ White Album backwards.
I thought the most important premises were Epstein’s premises.
I think Melinda knows they were. But isn’t it sweet, the way rich and powerful men share with each other. So touching. So much touching.
Now I’ve gone and made myself nauseous.
I quoted JoAnn Weiss, who worked for Duncan, in one of my books. She said on a Harvard Business School blog was that the purpose of CCSS was to create a national marketplace for vendors, which produce better quality materials.
Capitalism run amok
Thanks for bringing up Weiss. She was an insider and really spilled the beans: the purpose of the CC$$, she said, was to enable products to be sold at scale (because all states would have the same standards that the products did). The CC$$ were, from the beginning, a BUSINESS PLAN backed by a monopolist.
Some of us wrote about his way back then, when the “standards” first appeared. The really shocking thing is that the entire K-12 system, just about, ignored what was really going on and bought into the drek that Gates and Coleman produced without subjecting it to any real scrutiny.
The states almost all bought into CC because every state had suffered because of the Great Recession of 2008-2009, and every state wanted to win some money. Almost every state agreed to Duncan’s terms (adopting national standards was one of them and CC were the only ones available). Only 18 states won “Race to the Top cash, but 45 states were stuck with CC and a bunch of other bad ideas that Duncan demanded. Textbook publishers revamped their books to reflect CC, and so did SAT and ACT, and the state tests produced by the federally funded consortia (PARCC and SBAC). Duncan got the whole of public education to bend to his will, and there was nothing to show for it.
Au contraire, there was certainly plenty to show for it, plenty of needless suffering to show for it when Arne Duncan left office.
As JoAnn Weiss revealed, there was also plenty to $how for it — for the small number of those who are privileged to raid the public trough. I could rewrite Animal Farm with Arne Duncan as Napoleon the pig. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.
In what sense did the CC$$ fail? They continue to determine, in detail, our K-12 ELA and mathematics curricula and pedagogy. It has caused a dramatic devolution in both. Almost all states either still follow the puerile Gates/Coleman bullet list or follow some version of the CC$$ that has been renamed in an attempt to pass it off as state developed.
The CC$$ are very much an ongoing disaster.
cx: They have caused a dramatic devolution in both.
CX: Almost all states either still follow the puerile Gates/Coleman bullet list or some version of the CC$$ renamed in an attempt to pass them off as state developed.
They failed to raise scores (to the “Top”) and they failed to raise scores. NAEP has been flat for the past decade.
Yes, That’s what Mr. Loveless means.
But, of course, he means that the CC$$ failed in that they did not achieve their objectives. About this he is right.
The Texas version of Common Core was strictly remedial resulting in 50% increases in pass rates while college completion rates of cohorts taught under Kress’s regime couldn’t hit national norms for high poverty campuses. Passing scores on Texas accountability tests increased while the ability to engage in college level work nose-dived. Common Core methodology results in illiteracy while the Texas methodology accomplished the same without Common Core. The neoliberal approach downgraded American public education and social mobility.
“Passing scores on Texas accountability tests. . . ”
Don’t give a damn about the mental masturbation that is “Texas accountability tests” except that they are malpractices that harm all students-even the ones who score at the top end.
Falsehoods are falsehoods and the standards and testing malpractice regime is based on undeniable onto-epistemological (foundational/conceptual) falsehoods.
Why did they [the CC$$) fail? I point to both organizational impediments and to the politics.
The notions that the CC$$ failed because of poor organization (and consequent implementation) and politics, as stated in the interview, are pernicious and dangerous. The Gates/Coleman bullet list failed because
a) it’s an ignorant list hacked together by nonexperts based on lowest-common-denominator previously existing state standards that were also backward and uninformed and based on profoundly ignorant notions about what the discipline of ELA does and might consist of;
b) it didn’t capture current scientific research about a lot of the matters that it supposedly sets standards for (like how kids acquire language), and so it is like new “standards” for the Navy warning about sailing off the edge of the flat Earth—breathtakingly uninformed, amateurish, unscientific, backward;
c) it’s a freaking vague and so untestable (because it can’t be VALIDLY operationalized due to the broadness and vagueness of the skills) SKILLS LIST and so leaves out almost all of the discipline of English Language Arts, including declarative content, or world knowledge, and specific procedural content, or knowledge about actions, about a huge amount of stuff, and even the skills list is woefully incomplete;
d) it completely ignores the essential, for pedagogical approaches, between acquisition and learning, a truly fundamental failure due to the profound ignorance about learning science and the disciplines of Math and English pedagogical design approaches of its creators;
e) it has been taken, despite ALL that it lacks, as the de facto CURRICULUM OUTLINE by ELA coaches and curriculum planners at the district level, by ELA department chairpeople, and by test and curriculum developers, leading to a dramatic devolution in curricula and pedagogy in which a great deal of important stuff is left out;
f) it stopped innovation in ELA pedagogy and curricula COLD (if something is not on the approved Thought Police list, it can’t be taught or implemented, no matter how important or valuable or engaging it is),
g) it became the basis for high-stakes tests and so turned ELA and math curricula into Common Core-y test prep, stole autonomy from teachers, led to completely absurd evaluation systems, and made teachers have to operate within a top-down, authoritarian regime , and
h) it met the goals of its creators (those who paid for it and those who hacked it together) in that it consumed everything in its path.
Sorry, that first sentence, above, should be in quotation marks. It’s from the interview, and it’s wrong.
Bob says: It ‘leaves out almost all of the discipline of English Language Arts, including declarative content, or world knowledge’.
Interestingly, it’s precisely because there has been an attempt to build ‘world knowledge’ in students, especially those who do not live in print-rich environments and are not exposed to experiences at museums, nature centers, science camps, etc. that there is a progressive emphasis in CC on reading non-fiction rather than fiction. Here’s the explanation in ‘Building Background Knowledge’ by Susan Neuman, Tanya Kaefer, Ashley Pinkham:
https://www.readingrockets.org/article/building-background-knowledge
“Teachers can effectively build children’s background knowledge early on (Neuman & Wright, 2013). However, at the same time, we must recognize that knowledge is not just accumulating facts; rather, children need to develop knowledge networks, comprised of clusters of concepts that are coherent, generative, and supportive of future learning in a domain . . .
Encourage topic-focused wide reading. Reading builds knowledge, but wide reading has typically been interpreted as reading about a lot of different topics, demonstrating breadth rather than depth in reading. Try this variation: Encourage children to identify an interest and read as many books as they can on one topic. What you find is that children will develop a deeper knowledge and expertise on a topic. These interests will drive children to read more. . .
Without greater efforts to enhance background knowledge, differences in children’s knowledge base may further exacerbate the differences in children’s vocabulary and comprehension. The imperative to foster children’s background knowledge as a means for providing a firm foundation for learning, therefore, is greater than ever.”
I would be interested to hear what recommendations everyone has for building this background knowledge other than by prioritizing non-fiction over fiction.
Thank you!
Thank you for your comment, Ms. Janetos. Yes, the material AROUND the CC$$ gives lip service to substantive content, but the fact remains that the CC$$ in ELA are a vague, general, incomplete, received, backward list of SKILLS that has become, alas, the default curriculum in ELA, leading to incoherent, random, test preppy instruction instead of substantive, coherently organized, content rich curricula. Simply compare a high-school literature anthology from 1996 or so to a piece of garbage like one of the anthologies from the Pear$on MyPerspectives program, and what I am saying will be obvious.
This comment from Reading Rockets describes some of what the CC$$ in ELA don’t do.
Harriett Janetos: “I would be interested to hear what recommendations everyone has for building this background knowledge other than by prioritizing non-fiction over fiction”
So, this is an example of the kind of thing that was routine in my high-school classes. It’s early in the year. We are studying the Puritans. I am required to teach The Scarlet Letter. I’m doing selections from Bradford, Winthrop, and Cotton Mather. Here’s a background handout I prepared for my students: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2020/01/12/history-of-ideas-background-to-puritan-and-pilgrim-protestantism-in-north-america/
Bob, this is a great example of building background knowledge. Thank you!
Thank ypu, Harriett!
And here’s the gist of some of what I taught them as background to Hamlet: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2019/03/18/resting-hamlets-ghost-a-reading-of-the-play/
The best way to building background knowledge… (in addition to rich literature) is experiential learning.
Harriett Janetos: “I would be interested to hear what recommendations everyone has for building this background knowledge other than by prioritizing non-fiction over fiction”
With awareness that talk’s cheap and resistance will come from many parts of society and our ed. system, and that these ideas have long been advocated by out-of-fashion educators, I advocate in general terms for the following, tailored to age of students–
1) The “topic-focused wide reading” you quote. There would be plenty of time for this AND reading fiction AND pursuing hands-on earning if we got rid of all the scripts, pre-tests, post-tests, etc, etc and JUST LET KIDS READ in pursuit of their interests for much of each day’s reading time.
2) Every student who wants, should have access to “gifted and talented” time and materials to pursue those special interests and be introduced to other interests.
3) Part of #2 above should include a school shop staffed by a trained professional, and open after school, too.
4) “Home economics” updated to include healthy food, preparation, personal finance, making and repairing clothing, health and human anatomy, AND–
5) A school garden.
6) Other outdoor education opportunities.
7) Math with manipulatives, and connected to special interests, the garden, shop, etc.
8) Art, music, gym, science lab, history and writing taught/learned/experienced hand-in-hand with the above.
Great list, Mark. A lot of this, ofc, is teachers acting as guides to lit. Coleman’s CC$$ advances on, and one only, approach to literature, what I call Decider for the Rest of Us Lord Coleman’s New Criticism for Dummies, or NewCrit Lite. But there are, of course, many other approaches to literature, and many of these involve the teacher placing texts in context by providing background information. I taught American and Brit lit in high school and spent a LOT of my time doing precisely that. If someone says, “We need to tie up these loose ends here,” it makes a difference whether that person is a macrame instructor or Tony Soprano. Texts exist in context. But they are treated in Coleman’s blubbering CC$$ as though they existed on islands all by themselves.
See also
And this piece about how poetry means, which Diane was kind enough to publish a couple years ago:
Great stuff, Mark!
9) Community service and community exploration.
Mark, Zimba was the primary author of the CC$$ math “standards.” If you want to know what his ideas about teaching math were, well, there they are. He seems to think that 3rd graders should be learning THE CONCEPT of the variable (in other words, doing a lot of developmentally inappropriate stuff); that math class should almost always, EVEN AT EARLY AGES, be about conceptual learning via puzzling out key concepts and approaches while doing problems (as opposed to mastering algorithms via practice of those); and that ALL kids should proceed lock step through an invariant curriculum, even if they haven’t mastered prerequisites. An antidote for this toxic bs:
Click to access LockhartsLament.pdf
@ Mark. I love all these ideas. Shop and Home Ec are very important. Hands on learning experiences that are situated in real life experiences – that’s where most children thrive.
Taking kids outside even in city parks, where they can discover the natural world.
I once taught at an environmental ed center in NH (Otter Lake Conservation School) that was basically a camp where k-12 kids came with their classes and teachers for a week and learned about bogs, forests, swamps, marshes,etc and the creatures which live there. I’d have to say it was probably the best school I ever taught at.
But kids don’t need to stay at a camp for a week to learn about nature.
Teachers just need to be a little creative.
@SDP That’s exactly the type of education we need to tap into. Kids are interested in their environment… it’s a natural classroom. If we get them hooked and caring about the natural world early on they will be vested in protecting it.
Ha! So you want to “indoctrinate” innocent children to care about the world they live in?
There is background knowledge in fiction too, by the way. Literature reflects society.
There certainly is, LeftCoast, and not just in the historical fiction!
LCT, you are right. You can learn lots of background knowledge by reading “Moby Dick” or any novel by Edith Wharton.
Indoctrinating kids about the world they live in is called Critical Reality Theory.
Critical Reality Theory, like evolution, is not a theory in the vulgar sense of “something unproven.” It is, like evolution, an easily observable and verifiable body of fact.
These two meanings of the word “theory” are so fortunate. I have often wondered how much denial originates simply because of this ambiguity: “It’s a theory–that’s all I need to know.”
Correction: “UNfortunate.”
What do you mean “Critical Reality Theory” and “Evolution Theory” are not vulgar?
The idea that we came from monkeys and even further back from amoebas is pretty damned vulgar (if you will pardon my vulgarity)
What could be more vulgar than that?
And no sleight to amoebas is intended.
Shocked. Shocked,, SomeDAM, at your blatant Kingdomism.
Mark
I love your idea of giving everyone access to “gifted and talented” resources.
I know some parents want to hoard the resources for their own little Einsteins, but every child can benefit and the ones who can benefit most are arguably the ones who would probably never make the cut score to be classified as gifted and talented.
Yes, SomeDAM and Mark. Yes, indeed!
Regarding “gifted and talented” programs, it has always puzzled me that–in general– those students get more hands-on experiential learning opportunities, while those who struggle get more drill-and-kill.
Brilliant, Mark. Yes, it’s so backward.
“it has always puzzled me that….”
No, “puzzled” is not the correct word. More like “disappointed” and “aggrieved”.
cx: It completely ignores the essential, for curricula and pedagogy, distinction between learning and acquisition
The CC$$ also led to curricular incoherence in ELA as curricula materials came to be random CC$$ exercises strung together rather than carefully organized by editors based on principles rooted in content.
“it has been taken, despite ALL that it lacks, as the de facto CURRICULUM OUTLINE by . . . .”
This one really gets me. All these groups just blindly followed the money.
@Bob… I know you are retired…. but….you really should be teaching at the college level…. courses about teaching HS Lit. You need to be reaching and mentoring new teachers in a supervisory capacity.
Years ago, beachteach, I planned to do precisely that. But I landed a great job at a publishing house and it paid well, and I was getting married, so. . . . I took that road. Now, I lack the credential, the piece of paper, and so can’t pass the “Mother, May I” step toward teaching in a university. It’s a tradeoff I made when two roads diverged in a wood. . . .
But thank you, dear beachteach, for your kind comment. Means a lot to me.
So, it is of little importance in deciding whether I might teach in a university that I have engaged in a lifetime of scholarship.
I second that! I just read about a math teacher who taught for 78 years! No, he was not 78 when he retired! (Google NPR Paul Miller)
I agree with beach teach.
And, Bob, I bet you could get a job teaching at a community college, even if a university would not hire you for lack of crudentials.
Or you could even start your own online school for teachers over Zoom.
By the way, I think a lot of online schooling for kids is basically a joke but for adults it can be another story, especially where they can discuss things in real time.
Don’t get me wrong, beachteach, I am not denigrating PhDs. I know well how much is involved in getting one’s PhD and respect those who have done this and all that they have learned in the process. In other words, having the piece of paper is, I think, in most cases quite significant.
@Bob…. I value and respect ph.d’s too…. but I think the type of experience that you have and the writing you do on your blog should qualify you for one with just a small hoop to jump through rather than a full program. But that is not how Universities make money.
(Not that this is even what you want to do – just saying all this for argument sake). I have had great professors that I would consider experts and mentors. I also have had good ones… that were able to teach the course well…. but did not necessarily have the work experience or life experience that is at the level that I would consider them an “expert” on the subject they are teaching. If that makes sense.
Respect for Degrees
I respect the PhD’s
And even lower down degrees
Especially the ones below
The zero point, that augur snow
I never want to hear again the the Commmon [sic] Core [sic] would have been all that and marmalade on toast if it had just been implemented properly. No. Emphatically no. These were lousy standards put together by people who clearly weren’t experts on what they were writing standards about who didn’t bother to consult folks who actually did have a clue.
One of the big issues with them is that even though we had stupid, vague, skill-based state “standards” in ELA before the Gates/Coleman garbage, these were all over the place in ELA, so curriculum developers put together materials that made sense and then strained themselves to correlate to all those “standards.” After the Common [sic] Core [sic] Thought Police funded by Gates and run by Coleman created one ring to rule them all, there was a sea change. Suddenly, there was one nationwide bullet list, so curriculum developers took this execrable list AS THE DE FACTO CURRICULUM OUTLINE, leading to plummeting quality and an end to innovation so severe that most of the great curriculum editors I know quit the business rather than be a part of this.
But all this doesn’t make for sound bites, alas.
If they say it failed b/c of teachers….. my only answer is
Show us. Show us how it’s done. Come in for 5-10 years in a classroom and knock our socks off.
Well said, beachteach!
Here here!
They effectively faulted teachers for failure very early on, to cover their own a**es.
Jason Zimba, the fellow who developed the CC math standards (in his garage!) expressed frustration over what he characterized as poor implementation (which, of course, places at least part of the blame on teachers who didn’t understand Zimbas “genius” standards)
But hey, who can fault Zimba for being frustrated .
He worked SO hard for a year in his garage (and only made $300,000 for it!)
And then no one appreciated and thanked him for all his hard work.
All they did was complain( the ungrateful wretches!)
SomeDAM and others–please give me some more info on Jason Zimba, whom I have not heard about. A quick search shows degrees in math, physics and astrophysics from Williams, Oxford and Berkeley. This gives him a little more preliminary credibility than know-it-alls like Gates and Zuckerberg who seem to think their tech and business success qualifies them to talk, babble, and pontificate on anything and everything else.
What are Zimba’s ideas regarding math education? Could he be trying to “salvage” or set right the CC math curriculum by working within the system? Where do his ideas fit in all the math reforms of the last 50 years? What specifically does he fault about the way his ideas were applied in schools?
Lots of people scienggists, engineers, mmathematicians) know math and even have advanced degrees in it.
But knowing math and writing a set of national standards for math are not the same thing, not least of all because one has to know something about brain development in children to know what concepts they are ready for at certain ages.
Zimba managed to appoint himself the math standards expert because of his friendship with David Colenan, who had appointed himself expert on English/LA. They actually worked together at a company they had set up and made a pretty penny (hundreds of thousands) off the standards writing gig.
You really have to know the back story behind Common Core to understand how folks like Zimba and Coleman managed to wriggle themselves into the top positions the way they did.
Gates was funding CC develoment so basically, he could hire anyone he wanted and since Coleman was the one who proposed the idea to Gates, naturally Gates went along with Coleman’s pal Zimba for the math standards guru position.
None of the traditional processes were followed simply because they didn’t have to be.
Garbage in, garbage out as they say.
Diane: So you want to “indoctrinate” innocent children to care about the world they live in?
LOL. Diane, you are on a roll today! Perfect!
Shocking, eh?
If we accept Jason Zimbas claim that he developed the Common Core math standards in his garage, ghat means the Common Core version of ” Garbage in/ Garbage out” is “Garage in/Garage out”
Common Core failed in every way as I document in my book Brainstorming Common Core. If there is any doubt, The Coronavirus cleared that up. Children’s skills are all over the board. They had always been all over the board but politicians could ignore it since it was mainly black and brown students and those in appalachia that were affected.
Now it’s in their face.
I knew ed reformers wouldn’t stick with the Common Core over the long haul.
You would need years of effort and a real commitment to make it work at all and they all lost interest the minute they put the more difficult tests in, which is what I predicted.
They were really only interested in the tests. They could have saved billions of dollars and just moved the cut scores on the tests they already have.
They don’t take any responsibility for it at all- the explanation for why it didn’t work is public schools and public school teachers didn’t do it correctly.
Their ideas are always perfect. It’s always the execution that is the problem 🙂
We will never again hear about the Common Core. They bury the failures.
It’s very much alive, Chiara, alas. Almost every state is using the Common Core, though many are pretending that they are using state-specific standards when they have actually simply given the Common Core a state name (The By Gosh Buckeye State Standards, or whatever).
Certainly true in NJ, Bob. You can hold the two side by side [I’ve done it] and find only judicious tweaks.
“They could have saved billions of dollars and just moved the cut scores on the tests they already have.” I love this, Chiara 😀 Actually, I gather that’s what states were doing on pre-CCSS NCLB tests. Enter tech giant funding for as Bob says ‘one ring to rule them all’ – greed motive modestly veiled with the edumeretricianal argument.
edumeretricianal . LMAO!!! I’m going to have to start using that one!
She said “anal” huh huh huh huh
“They started at the end. They started with what students at the end of K-12 should know.”
No. That’s not what they did. That’s what they said they did. But they didn’t even bother to outline “what a 12th grade graduate should KNOW.” Now, ofc, that’s what the great E.D. Hirsch, Jr. attempted to do. I have some issues with his list, but at least he made a stab at actually outlining what preschool-12 kids and adults SHOULD KNOW. Coleman et all were too clueless about the subject matter to be able even to begin to do this, they didn’t bother to do this, and they didn’t consult people who were capable of helping them do this.
Instead, they said garbage like, kids must now read substantive texts. He was so ignorant, however, that he didn’t know that almost every schoolchild in the US, in K-12, was using a lit anthology that consisted of recognized selections from “the canon”–the very kinds of texts that the ignorant Coleman was talking about. Like a lot of folks with breathtaking hubris, he thought he was capable of being the decider, by virtue of his anointment by Master of the Universe Billy Gates, for his betters.
The OptOut movement being centered in New York was discussed at the end of the podcast, and from my perspective in California, the reasons why my blue state failed to get moving were two: Tying wildly unreliable and dubitable scores to teacher evaluations was dropped in collective bargaining at the district level here making fewer people desperate and angry, and Reed Hastings made it illegal in California for teachers to really inform parents about the tests. Different population density also, maybe.
As best I can recall, Opt-Out in NY State was not initiated by teachers, but started as separate movements among parents and among teachers. (My memory is vague because, as an arts teacher, testing did not directly effect me.) Here is a common response from a parent, in this case to a NY Times article—
Heather Roberts
Shandaken NY
May 22, 2015
As one of the parents quoted in this article I was deeply disappointed that the true reasons parents are refusing these particular tests were not clearly identified. We did not initiate a test refusal movement because we are supporting teachers or because we don’t want our kids to be over tested. The NYS common core tests in math and ELA are leading to a trend that is ruining public education as we know it. Because they are liked to 50% of teacher evaluations they are forcing teachers to teach to the tests. Our children are learning that there is only one right answer to a question, they are being taught how to take a test, not to ask questions, and science and social studies are disappearing from our children’s curriculum due to these high stakes tests that emphasize math and ELA. The children in our district in grades 3- 8 take over 15 other standard tests over the course of the year to track their progress. Those other tests are shorter in duration , age appropriate and teachers have actually found the information in those tests valuable . The NYS common core tests are non transparent and therefore useless tools for teachers to see where they need to improve, not to mention they are developed by corporations, not educators, and they take over 3 weeks of time out of our children classroom that could be used for meaningful instruction. In all fairness, these reasons for test refusal should be more clearly identified to the general public.
You’re right, everything I’ve read and heard about OptOut suggests it was entirely parent led. But I know that active parents are dedicated to their children’s teachers and communicate with us. OptOut parents are active. Teachers and parents care about each other. They bring us water when we Red4Ed-march across the state, and march with us when we go on strike. I know, I’ve seen. Test score based evaluations made teachers upset and I have no doubt the teachers’ pain was heard by parents. I, in California, must keep my mouth firmly shut. OptOut New York is an example of education working well, with parents protecting teachers because the test scores were going to take good teachers away from caring parents’ children. OptOut isn’t teacher led; it is, though, teacher appreciated and teacher supported.
Well, this interview gets much better tin its second half.
Much better
Yikes. Make sure to listen to what Mr. Loveless says from 52:89 forward. It’s REALLY insightful and important. Don’t miss this!!!
Very refreshing to hear both a knowledgeable person interviewing the very knowledgeable author. This seems to almost never happen. Excellent interview!
Exactly.
I call the CCSS, the Common GORE!
Why do billionaires get to determine curriculum? Oh, I forgot … so that the billionaires can get even richer, and off the backs of kids and teachers. Sick.
“In Education… there seems to be this persistence of magical thinking,” Leonie…. meaning… just put the initiative out there and it will magically work. Yes.
I just finished the entire interview and it was so worth listening to. I think it should be required for educators and anyone with a vested interest in education to listen to – or to read books that are recommended on this blog – in order to move beyond sound bites to really being informed about what is shaping our schools.
It’s our duty to understand the forces behind these mandates and decisions and how they really impact children and learning.
From the interview: “They started at the end. They started with what students at the end of K-12 should know.”
Well, yes they did start with Grade 12 and work down, but, no that’s not what they did–starting with what 12th graders should know. That’s what they said they did. But they didn’t even bother to outline “what a 12th grade graduate should KNOW.” Now, ofc, that’s what the great E.D. Hirsch, Jr. attempted to do. I have some issues with his list, but at least he made a stab at actually outlining what preK-12 kids, at every level, and adults SHOULD KNOW. Coleman et al didn’t know the the subject matter well enough to be able even to begin to do this, they didn’t bother to do this, and they didn’t consult people who were capable of helping them to do this.
Yes, yes, yes! It really bugs me when I hear people say this about Common Core. It doesn’t specify knowledge; it specifies skills. It should be called the Ill-conceived Common Core of Skills while Hirsch’s curriculum could be called the Well -conceived Common Core of Knowledge.
Yes. The CC$$ in ELA is a skills list like the state “standards” that it was cribbed from, but even as a skills list, if that had been all it claimed to be, it was and is terrible–incomplete, uninformed, backward. A huge problem however, as you note, is that it is almost completely content free, other than the fact that it pays lip service to reading some Shakespeare and some foundational texts in American history, an entirely (unbeknownst to Coleman) moot point because K-12 schools were already doing that. See any pre-Core standard 6-12 literature anthology program for confirmation of this. The CC$$ for ELA stopped innovation in ELA curricula and pedagogy cold. No one could do anything that wasn’t on the stupid list. It led to curricula and pedagogy that imitated the ridiculous state standardized tests. It cost billions and billions and led to ZERO improvement in educational outcomes. What a scam. What a debacle.
“Hi. I’m not an ELA education expert and know almost nothing about any of the domains that ELA covers and even less about what was being done in ELA classrooms, but I was hired by Master of the Universe Bill Gates to play on the national stage THE GRAND ARCHITECT AND DECIDER FOR EVERYONE! Quite a wasteland I left behind me, but I was paid well, really, really well, to perpetrate this scam, which Billy wanted so he would have one national list to key his Orwellian database and excruciatingly dull depersonalized education software to. And, hey, people actually bought this ——.”
BTW, one of the MAJOR problems that I have with the Core Knowledge Sequence is that it slights procedural (as opposed to descriptive) knowledge. Another is that it doesn’t take into account that a great deal of what we act upon is not consciously known but unconsciously acquired, and we must carefully arrange experiences for children to ensure this (something that, in fact, a Core Knowledge education does partially do). The latter is especially the case with regard to vocabulary and the rules of a language. I have spoken about both these matters with Dr. Hirsch, whom I greatly admire, but the existing Sequence, by that time, was entrenched in Core Knowledge Foundation materials and schools and couldn’t be easily or majorly modified. Of course, both those problems are found in the CC$$ as well, and many more besides. At least the CK Sequence addresses knowledge learning.
As an illustration of the breathtaking hubris with which the Gates-appointed decider for the rest of us, approached his job, consider this: Lord Coleman made a HUGE deal, when introducing his new [uh, recycled old, skills-based] “standards,” about how under these, students would now finally read substantive texts. He was so ignorant of what was actually being done by ELA teachers that he didn’t even know that almost every schoolchild in the US, in K-12, was using a lit anthology that consisted of recognized selections from “the canon”–recognized “classic” works of the very kinds of texts that Coleman was calling for–stuff that had been staples of U.S. English classes for many, many DECADES. Chaucer. check. Shakespeare. check. Plato. check. Emerson. Thoreau. Dickinson. Whitman. check. If he had ever taught or consulting a single English teacher or K-12 ELA curriculum developer, he would have known better. But no, he was PROFOUNDLY IGNORANT of the field he was chosen to rule.
cx: or had consulted
On an entirely different note, this from the brilliant Jon Awbry (SomeDAM, you will appreciate this):
Poems and Programs
Words that do …
A trendy misunderstanding has reared its head as to what the discipline of computing, indeed the logic of science, are all about. I blame Penrose, of course, but he is only the most recent promulgator of the recurring misunderstanding.
There are only a countable number of computable functions, so it’s no surprise a natural system picked at random will have non-computable functional features. Saying not all natural systems are computable is like saying not all poems are sonnets. Writing a program to model a significant aspect of a natural system is like writing a sonnet to express a significant aspect of human experience. It’s a voluntary limitation programmers and poets accept for the sake of their elective-effective art.
And both have their uses.
The last thing I wish to do is take a side in a debate between two high caliber mathematicians, especially on a subject I know next to nothing about.
Noncomputable processes, that is
I suspect that, as a computer scientist, SomeDAM, you are familiar with noncomputable propositions like the Halting Problem.
You and me both, but Jon is a world-class logician, the sort of fellow who would have opinions about subjects like whether P = NP that other logicians and mathematicians might be interested in. So, when he ventures on opinion about a subject, in this domain, especially if that opinion seems so obviously to be true and so significant and fascinating, I am quite willing not only to hum but to sing full-throatedly my admittedly amateur (in the common and root sense) assent.
I am a computer programmer, not a computer “scientist” (which is actually an oxymoron in most cases. Computer science is not science in the traditional sense of the word because it deals with arbitrary human constructs and not discovery of fundamental laws)
And I have never been able to make heads or tails of the sort of stuff Penrose talks about (Gödel’s theorem and the rest) , certainly not because it is bogus (because Penrose is no slouch in the mathematics department) but simply because I lack the mathematics background to judge it.
I should say “most of what us called computer science” deals with arbitrary human constructs.
The small part that deals with discovery is really mathematics and even that is not really a science in the traditional sense of doing experiments to uncover fundamental laws.
To P or NOT NP
That is the question
To P or NOT to P
That is the question
Makes more sense
Maybe
Has the mighty Pearson fallen so far they cannot even get a mention in a CCSS conversation? They might not have written the book on CC, but they wrote a few chapters I bet. Pearson was once your cradle to grave CC source. Sell the core curriculum, write , deliver and score the test, provide the test prep materials. All they had to do was create the content once, then cut and paste and repackage it over and over, yet John Fallon, aka the Mr Magoo of Education couldn’t even pull that off. I was once in a public school in a state that uses the PARCC test, a teacher was being trained on Peasons System of Courses (PSOC), she was delighted to find out that PSOC was exactly like PARCC. Who knew? Also, PSOC was the product that brought down Pearsons non-profit foundation.
I did mention, above, Pear$on’$ abominable Common Corey literature program MyPerspectives. Very glossy and full of pictures.
One day, boxes of these were dropped off in my classroom, followed by an email saying that I must use them going forward. I reviewed them. Then I wrote a scathing 20-page email about them to my administrators and all my fellow teachers. Then I taught from handouts for the rest of the year.
As Bob knows well, most of today’s textbooks are filled with zippy photographs, artwork, and other non-instructional stuff. Publishers think that kids won’t pay attention to text unless it has many illustrations. Yet millions of children read Harry Potter books because of their vivid stories, nut no illustration.
Love this, Diane. Yes. The current crop of Common Core-y K-12 lit texts lack coherence–a progression, and scaffolding–in the presentation of concepts, lack most the substantive content that such texts used to contain, are filled with junk selections from the popular culture and exercises modeled on the mind-blowingly stupid Common Core state standardized tests. And on top of that, they are full of errors in grammar, usage, mechanics, fact, and sense, as though the only edited done on them had been a spell check. Garbage, for the most part.
And not just illustrations. You doubtless remember the Vonnegut short story “Harrison Bergeron,” in which all high-IQ people have to wear a headset that blasts noise into their ears every few minutes to make them “equal” to others. Well, contemporary textbooks are like that. They are filled with “special features” that literally interrupt the text or the main sequence of instruction every couple of minutes in the name of motivating students! I call it the “Monty Python and Now for Something Completely Different Approach to Instructional Design.” The current textbook designers seem to think that it’s best to treat students as though they have the attention spans of gerbils on methamphetamines.
And sadly, people look at these textbooks as blithering idiocy and say, oh, how wonderful! This is going to really interest the kids. but it doesn’t at all. They see through the crap. they have excellent crap detectors. What they see is textbooks that are like adults who Try to dress and talk like teenagers to be cool and relevant. This larding of texts with supposedly high-motivation junk simply annoys them. They emphatically don’t find it motivating. But there is so little sustained, scaffolded content that it’s quite difficult to see how anyone ever learns anything from them.
most of today’s textbooks are filled with zippy photographs, artwork, and other non-instructional stuff”
But I thought a picture was worth a thousand words.
By that gauge, there should not be any words in textbooks at all.
By the way, a scientific equation is probably worth at least a million words, but every equation that is included in a book cuts the readership by half, so there is a basic problem with including equations in texts.
That’s why no one ever reads physics textbooks , by the way. Not even physics majors.
Given the large number of equations in the average text, the readership is vanishingly small.
If not zero, it’s damned close.
In my opinion, the best way to learn physics is from cartoons like the Road Runner.
Everything I need to know about physics I learned from Road Runner
Totally. If you tread air fast enough. . . .
I think Roger Penrose is probably the only one who ever read a physics text and only because he wanted to check for mistakes.
When I lived in Arizona, I learned all about road runners and coyotes.
And everything in the cartoon is true.
lol
“But I thought a picture was worth a thousand words.”
True in many cases, but good literature should generate the pictures in the mind of the reader. At a different time, when they do not interrupt the reading, pictures of locales, authors, and things mentioned are valuable.
Regarding physics (high school), that was one of my favorite classes! Why? No textbook; taught instead by notes and drawings on the board and items on the teacher’s desk; labs twice a week; and think of the subject matter of physics! Car collisions; inertia, acceleration, momentum and the hazards of gravity; light and color; the Doppler effect, music and noise; freezing & expansion; mechanical devices,…
Examples from Roadrunner cartoons would have made it even better!
“good literature should generate the pictures in the mind of the reader”
Yes, as the great critics Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brookes, Randall Jarrelll, and others put it back in the New Criticism days, It creates a world. that’s the trick, the literary writer’s slight of hand. As Archibald MacLeish famously put it:
For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf.
People who don’t understand how good literary writing works tend toward thinking of it as hiding generalities behind examples. Nope. Not the mechanism. In general, good literary writing enables the reader to create in his or her mind a quite concrete world that the reader enters into, experiences, and has reactions to, and those reactions are the significance, one type of “meaning,” of the work..
Great literature is great without the words.
Take Dr. Sense, for example.
True, the words are fun, but most young children are perfectly happy to look at the pictures* and nothing is even really lost.
For example, in Cat in the Hat, they can get the story line from pictures alone. In fact, that’s how they learn the meanings of the words.
*As am I, SomeDAM I am.
Dr Seuss
Very funny that autocorrect changed it to Dr. Sense
Who says computers dont have a sense of humor?
“Great literature is great without the words. Take Dr. Seuss, for example.”
Now you’re talking about the broadest, most holistic meaning of “literature”! It can be printed words alone, pictures alone, storytelling, song, drama, puppetry, combinations thereof……any means by which one person or group communicates to and expands the experience and knowledge of others.
“Computer with a Seuss of humor”
Computer with a Seuss of humor
That is quite a thing
Computer that can spread a rumor
That would have a sting
Computer with invective
A’raging’and a’fumin’
Computer that’s vindictive
That would be a human
What isn’t in the puerile Common [sic] Core [sic] for ELA, treated, in part, here:
Example of a contemporary Common [sic] Core [sic] K-12 literature text, exemplifying these texts’ Monty Python And Now for Something Completely Different approach to textbook design:
It was the best
–Collaborative/Group Activity! Brainstorm other words with the -st ending. Strive for at least 20. Higher-Order-Thinking Exercise: What do these words have in common?
of times,
–News You Can Use: The New York Tmes, a newspaper headquartered in New York, New York, was founded in 1851!
it was
–Mathematics Connection! It is a personal pronoun! (See Module 143 in your Grammar Connections Online Handbook.) Identify the personal pronouns in the first paragraph of A Tale of Two Cities and count the number of these. Display your results in a poster/bar graph.
the worst
–Multicultural Connection: Fascinating fact! Wurst is a kind of sausage originating in Germany or Austria,
of
–Writing Workshop!: Did you know you can contract the word of as o’, as in o’clock? Try this is your next Responding in Writing to Common Core Prompts on Tiny Snippets from Literature exercise!
Times, it was the age
–Reading Connection! Yes, we know you might be bored reading Dickens. So, here’s a cartoon strip about age—turning six, to be precise—to motivate you to enjoy this classic text! Deep Dive: how do both texts, the comic strip and the Dickens excerpt, explore the concept of age? Write a five-paragraph composition on this topic, following the rubric on page 666.
of wis-
End of Selection
–Science Connection! Taking a whiz, also known as urination, micturation, uressis, or emiction, is the process of release of urine (see Glossary) to the outside of the body. Ewww! Language extension: This is not just urinalysis. It’s the general consensus.
–Assessment/Test Preparation. As you have seen, in A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens uses the word age in a figurative, metaphorical way. Evidence-Based Selective Response (EBSR): In Part A, below, choose from the sentences provided the one that uses age most metaphorically. Next, in Part B, choose the sentence that best describes why the choice you made in Part A was the metaphoryist! CCCSS Writing Practice: Then, write a paragraph about how Dickens’s use of metaphor affects the mood of the overall piece (CCSS.$$$.ELA-Literacy.RL.666.9-10.4).
Now that you have studied Charles Dickens’s immortal A Tale of Two Cities, here’s exciting piece of Wonder Woman fan fiction.
In the argot of the educational publishing industry, iinterpolations of the kind that I have parodied above are called Special Features. Contemporary K-12 texts, in print and online, are larded with such garbage on the theory that it will be interesting/engaging/motivating to kids. Ofc, it’s the precise opposite.
Three phenomena drove the evolution of the current monstrously confusing, constantly digressing, incoherent textbooks: First, state departments of education with textbook adoptions loaded up their specifications with tons of requirements (e.g., must contain a science connections strand, must have multicultural connections to all lessons, must make connections between grammar and reading literature, must teach making inferences–hundreds and hundreds of these), and interrupting texts with Special Features provided a means for meeting all these requirements relatively easily. Second, educational publishers conducted an arms race using Special Features. Every time one publisher introduced one, others would follow suit. Third, the features made the programs an easier sell to district administrators who had axes to bear but neither the knowledge nor the work ethic actually to review materials carefully. The salesperson could find out that the administrator’s thing was, say, collaborative learning, and point to the many collaborative learning Special Features.
the result of all this? Incoherence. Randomness. Textbooks as the pile of stuff left after you break a piñata.
Ever since the Gates/Coleman drek first appeared, I have posted critiques of pieces of it on my blog. And, interestingly, these puerile, irredeemable “standards” keep getting silently changed to fix howlers that I have identified them. I’m not sure at all that I have influenced these modifications, but I would like to think so, that I have at least done so indirectly. However, my general assessment: lipstick on a pig.
Gates probably has bots scraping your site that proceed to fix mistakes you gave found.
You should “correct” things to gibberish that don’t need correcting and see if it changes those too.
Computers dont understand meaning, so they would not know the difference .
Must be annoying to K-12 print and online text creators, who key everything, now, to the exact wording of the puerile, backward Gates/Coleman bullet list. Their texts are doubtless full, now, of descriptions of “standards” that have been silently changed with no admission or discussion of the stupidity of the original. Ofc, that’s what academics with integrity do–they print a retraction and/or correction.
But, ofc, these changes are at their whim, not in response to robust, ongoing critique by researchers, scholars, classroom practitioners.
And these things are, in fact, lipstick on a pig, because the biggest problems with these “standards” affect most of them and the fundamental ways in which they were conceptualized.
And then there is the issue of having, at all, one ring to rule them all, which is a TERRIBLE idea because it stops ongoing, continuous improvement based on the work of researchers, scholars, and classroom practitioners. We did more than just fine BEFORE drek like these state [sic] standards was introduced. What existed then were de facto habits of the tribe (of English teachers, of math teachers, etc) reflected long, long practice and refinement in the crucible of experience AND the ability to modify that stuff in response to knew insights, discoveries, etc. So, what junk like the CC$$ effectively does is to imprison this living, growing thing in a matrix of shackles that deforms it and prevents it from growing normally.
We have gone so far down this road to perdition that teachers often, now, don’t even know that there was a time when these “standards” didn’t exist in which schools THRIVED.
Imagine, instead of these junk “standards” a national wiki of COMPETING K-12 curriculum progressions, outlines of specific courses, assessment and lesson and instructional design models and templates, frameworks, benchmarks, teaching materials, and so on, to which working scholars, researchers, and classroom practitioners could continuously add, No more top-down mandates, but, rather, these competing models, continually being updated and refined and expanded.
What would happen, ofc, is that you could have continuous improvement and those generally accepted habits of the tribe instead of the LUDICROUS business of someone like David Coleman being the decider for everyone.
It’s long past time that the autocratic know nothings were deposed. No more Lord Colemans, no more Master Gateses.
Note to graduate students searching around for a dissertation topic: A. Compare the CC$$ as introduced to the version now online, identify the changes silently made in them, and analyze the possible reasons for these. B. Analyze representative ELA textbooks before state standards versus contemporary Common Core-y ELA textbooks for amount and quality of instruction in a) descriptive knowledge and b) procedural knowledge. C. Study K-12 literature the time of the introduction of the Common [sic] Core [sic] for inclusion of canonical texts in American, British, and World literature and provide a critique of David Coleman’s claim that American schoolchildren should start reading substantive works of literature. NB; This will require coming up with means to objectively determine whether works were/are considered canonical. Hint: look at the standard college-level lit anthologies.
D. Do a critique of the Language strand of the CC$$ for ELA in light of what linguists now know and routinely teach about the acquisition of a language (of syntax, semantics, phonetics, morphology, vocabulary, etc). Hint: Before you begin, go back and read the great English language scholar Otto Jespersen on the weaknesses of traditional (i.e., folk) grammar. Then read Andrew Radford on contemporary grammars. These will provide a good springboard for your research.
Such studies (A-D, outlined above) and many others that could be readily devised would amply illustrate what a pathetic, amateurish, backward scam the CC$$ for ELA have been and were.
The shocking thing is that the Coleman and the CC$$ were not laughed off the national stage when this junk was first introduced. Here’s why that didn’t happen: Too many ELA folk had become used to the inane state standards that the CC$$ so closely resembled.
Even E.D. Hirsch, Jr., went along of the joy ride, having been promised that the new “standards” would emphasize classic literature and knowledge acquisition, which they didn’t. But soon enough he saw the error of this and the mess that Gates, Colleman, et al. had actually made. That would make a great dissertation E, but be careful. Much of the truth there was never spoken. Hint: start with the facts that Hirsch had long railed against the stupidity of skills-based standards and that Hirsch’s Core Knowledge Sequence on the CC$$ in ELA are as different from one another as, say, New Zealand today and Pol Pot’s Cambodia.
Cx: Critique David Coleman’s claim that American schoolchildren were not being challenged by substantive texts by studying K-12 literature TEXTBOOKS at the time of the introduction of the CC$$ for inclusion of canonical texts from throughout the history of American, British, and World literature. Critique is claim that they weren;’t being asked to read closely by looking at the step-by-step questions for guided study and analysis following all of those selections in all of those literature textbooks in all of those programs. Conclusion: Coleman knew nothing of the field he was pontificating about, even stuff he would have learned by glancing at any K-12 lit text or visiting any K-12 English class.
A math teacher — retired engineer who posted under the Handle Mathvale — who used to comment here (before he left teaching because of VAM , Common Core and all the rest of the stuff driven by the “One who met multiple times with the pedophile” (TM)) once proposed that standards be developed as an “open source” project that teachers and other actual experts could contribute to. He proposed that the standards be entirely optional and that teachers would be free to use and change them as they saw fit.
Like do many other teachers who comment here, Mathvale was very smart and had a lot of great ideas, unlike the “One who met multiple times with the pedophile” and all the rest of the clowns involved with Common Core and school deform in general.
By the way why do you suppose a 100-billionaire would feel inclined to meet with Epstein after Epstein’s conviction and jail term for sex with a minor?
Because Epstein knew a lot of rich people? And the billionaire didn’t?
Sure.
cx: that I have identified inthem
Mathvale was spot on, SomeDAM!