Jan Resseger is upset that the New York Times posted an article seeking to revive the moribund Common Core standards.
Some states dropped the CC standards; some kept them but gave them a new name. Most dropped the CC-aligned tests.
In her view, the CCSS died because it was hated by significant numbers of teachers and parents. It launched the Opt Out movement in New York State, which annually enlists the non-cooperation of nearly 20 percent of the state’s test-eligible students.
They were hated because it was not “developed by governors, educational experts, state superintendents, and teachers,” as the founding myth claims, but by a small number of people who wrote them with minimal consultation of classroom teachers.
They were hated because they were funded by one man–Bill Gates–and never validated by any field trial in real classrooms.
They were pushed on the states not by consent but by the lure of $5 billion in Race to the Top funding. The only state officials who had to agree were the governor and the state superintendent, and most of those have since moved on. The states that did not agree to accept the CCSS were not eligible to compete for RTTT billions
They fell into disfavor because activists on the right saw them as federal overreach and activists among teachers and parents in the center and on the left disliked the standards and hated the tests.
They lost support when the testing consortia that Arne Duncan funded with $360 million arbitrarily decided to align the CCSS test standards with those of the NAEP, which was totally inappropriate. The NAEP standard for “proficiency” is not grade-level, nor is it pass-fail. It represents a high level of achievement, like a B+ or an A-. Massachusetts is the only state in the nation where as much as 50% of students score NAEP proficient, yet the Common Core testing groups expected that most American students would reach that high mark. They did not, and the CCSS tests wrongly generated headlines that inaccurately labeled students, schools, and districts as “failing” when they did not reach an impossible benchmark.
In this incisive, meticulously researched book, Ravitch (education, New York Univ.; The Death and Life of the Great American School) argues persuasively that the U.S. school privatization movement has resulted in poor test scores, the closure of public schools, and attacks on the teaching profession. Ravitch blames the so-called school reformers, whom she renames the disruptors, such as Bill Gates, Alice Walton, Michelle Rhee, Mark Zuckerberg, and Eli Broad, who spend millions to replace public schools with charter schools and private institutions that are run like businesses. Though disruptors view themselves as opposing the status quo, Ravitch contends that they are doing everything they can to maintain it. She devotes most of her book to the resisters, or the teachers, parents, and union leaders who have taken on the disruptors and are working to keep their local public schools open. Through this lens, Ravitch discusses the Common Core teaching standards, standardized testing, the Obama administration’s Race to the Top grant program, and Teach for America.
Diane Ravitch's blog 