Please read my commentary on what Louis C.K. has done to expand the debate about Common Core.

It was just posted on Huffington Post at the top of the page.

In my view, he has just smashed the carefully crafted narrative that the only critics of Common Core standards and tests are extremists of the right and left.

Being a comedian with 3.3 million followers on Twitter gave him a platform.

Being a parent of two children in public school gives him legitimacy.

His intervention changes the conversation. Maybe now we can have an honest debate instead of name-calling of anyone who dares to raise a voice in criticism of the CCSS.

Please leave a comment, if you choose.

Robert Shepherd, experienced writer of curriculum, assessments, and textbooks, left the following comment on the “Newsweek” site in response to an attack on Louis C.K.’s critique of the Common Core standards. Instead of covering the commentary over Common Core, as one would expect of a newsmagazine, “Newsweek” has decided its role it to defend the standards and attack their critics. Shepherd has posted the comment repeatedly and says that “Newsweek” will not publish it. So, read it here.

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I left the following comment on the Newsweek page. A moment or two later, they had deleted it. I reposted it again. Waiting to see if they will delete it again (Diane’s note: they did delete the comment again).

I laugh a bitter laugh every time I hear someone refer to the Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic] as “higher.” These were hacked together by amateurs, overnight, without any professional vetting. They were paid for by plutocrats who wanted one national bullet list to tag their educational software and assessments to. The ELA “standards” are backward, hackneyed, unimaginative, often prescientific, and dramatically distorting of both curricula and pedagogy. And one could drive whole curricula through their lacunae. Learning involves acquisition of both world knowledge (knowledge of what) and procedural knowledge (knowledge of how). The Common Core in ELA contains ALMOST NONE of the former and expresses the latter so vaguely that, not being concrete or operationalized, they cannot be validly tested, and so the new tests being put together based on the Core are completely invalid. The lead author of these “standards” had absolutely ZERO relevant experience. The authors hacked these together based on a quick review of the lowest-common-denominator groupthink of the state standards that preceded them. Educational publishers are now taking these amateurish, puerile “standards” as a de facto curriculum, producing texts filled with activities that model the egregiously narrowed activities on the new Common Core College and Career Reading Assessment Program (C.C.C.C.R.A.P.) tests. Basically, these “standards” have turned K-12 education in the U.S. into low-level test prep. The “standards” are invariant. Kids are not. These “standards” belong to an extrinsic punishment and reward theory of education that is entirely discredited, for extrinsic punishment and reward is inherently demotivating for cognitive tasks. The “standards” are the product of a takeover of U.S. education by know-nothing plutocrats and business people and politicians who have decided to micromanage U.S. education based on dangerous, backward ideas, and these “standards” will have, are having, precisely the opposite of their intended effect. However, they are making and will make a lot of money for a few software vendors and testing companies. This piece by Nazaryan is clueless. Teachers oppose these “standards” not because they fear being held accountable but because the “standards” themselves are very, very badly conceived and are doing enormous damage, every day, in classrooms around the United States.

Thank goodness at least one prominent journalist in the mainstream media sends her child to public school!

At Rebecca Mead’s public school, two-thirds of the children opted out of the state tests aligned to Common Core.

So Mead understands the frustration of the comedian Louis C.K., whose tweets about the Common Core tests went viral.

Louis C.K. had more than 3 million Twitter followers so when he spoke out, his voice was unheard, unlike the voices of countless other parents.

The advocates of the Common Core insist that the problems that parents object to are not part of the Common Core but caused by faulty implementation.

(That is the same refrain we always hear about great ideas that fail: faulty implementation.)

Mead notes:

Plenty of parents and educators agree with him. After last month’s state tests for English language arts, teachers citywide protested, calling the problems tricky and developmentally inappropriate—as well as questioning the need for three long, consecutive days of testing, no matter the quality of the test materials. Elizabeth Phillips, the principal of P.S. 321, a highly regarded public school in Park Slope, called on members of the State Board of Regents to take the exams themselves: “Afterward, I would like to hear whether they still believed that these tests gave schools and parents valuable information about a child’s reading or writing ability,” she wrote.

This happens to be my most fervent wish: that all legislators and policymakers would take the tests they mandate and publish their scores.

Mead writes:

It seems likely that if more parents with the wealth and public profile of Louis C.K. showed their support for public education not by funding charter-school initiatives, as many of the city’s plutocrats have chosen to do, but by actually enrolling their children in public schools, there would long ago have been a louder outcry against the mind-numbing math sheets and assignments that sap the joy from learning. The majority of children in the school system sit in classrooms with far fewer resources than those enjoyed by C.K.’s children, or by mine. The concentration on testing is only another way in which students are short-changed. Educators have been arguing since last spring that the tests are flawed, and that the achievement gap in New York is widening rather than lessening: in 2013, there was a nineteen-per-cent gap between the scores of white and black third graders in the E.L.A. exams, and a fourteen-per-cent gap in math. “Students who already believe they are not as academically successful as their more affluent peers, will further internalize defeat,” Carol Burris, a principal from Rockville Centre, wrote in the Washington Post last summer, calling on policymakers to “re-examine their belief that college readiness is achieved by attaining a score on a test, and its corollary—that is possible to create college readiness score thresholds for eight year olds.” This week, teachers at International High School at Prospect Heights, which serves a population of recently arrived immigrants from non-English-speaking countries, announced that they would not administer an assessment required by the city. A pre-test in the fall “was a traumatic and demoralizing experience for students,” a statement issued by the teachers said. “Many students, after asking for help that teachers were not allowed to give, simply put their heads down for the duration. Some students even cried.” When a comedian points out the way in which the current priorities don’t add up, it earns even the attention of those who haven’t thought much about school since they graduated. But the brutal math of the New York City school system is no laughing matter.

Louis C.K. Is a comedian with a huge following. He has more than 3 million followers on Twitter. More important, he has two young daughters in the New York City public schools. He vented his rage against the Common Core tests in. Series of tweets that have now been reported in many new après. This one appeared in Salon

Here is a story in the New York Daily News.

Here is the New York Post.

I noticed the flare-up on Twitter but had no idea of Louis’s following. Sometimes it takes the righteous indignation of a celebrity to get the attention of the mainstream media. Otherwise, they just print Arne Duncan’s press releases.

This was his first tweet, which appeared yesterday morning.

“My kids used to love math. Now it makes them cry. Thanks standardized testing and common core!”
9:00 AM – 28 Apr 2014

When the comedians get angry at Common Core, watch out!

Mercedes Schneider continues in her task to determine who wrote the Common Core State Standards. The first work group had 24 members; the second had 101. Very few in either group were teachers. The standards were produced in remarkably short order. Typically, it takes years to write state standards when major stakeholders are part of the process. So was ther. Secret 24? A secret 101? Or, as some think, a secret 60? Many unanswered questions, but one fact stands out: very few classroom teachers were involved in writing the nation’s presumed academic standards.

Someday we will have the answers to all these questions.

But for now, we will have to rest content with the likelihood that the national standards were written with large input GotMichal the testing industry, and small input fro working teachers.

For what it is worth, I think the CCSS are dying the slow death of a thousand cuts. This sad denouement illustrates the necessity of transparency, inclusion, and a democratic process. Just becauseBill Gates and a handful of other powerful people want national standards is not enough to put them over. What they lack is legitimacy. And that is a big problem.

Jeff Bryant is a marketing and communications expert, and he understands why Common Core is in deep trouble.

The “education reform movement” is not really a movement. It has no mass base. It is a public relations campaign created by a very small number of people with deep pockets. They thought they could pull a fast one.

But the American public is not buying.

The fake “reformers” made claims that aren’t true, and their campaign is floundering.

Please read his article to find the many links he uses to sustain his argument.

He writes:

For years, elites in big business, foundations, well-endowed think tanks, and corporate media have conducted a well-financed marketing campaign to impress on the nation’s public schools an agenda of change that includes charter schools, standardized testing, and “new and improved” standards known as the Common Core.

These ideas were sold to us as sure-fire remedies for enormous inequities in a public school system whose performance only appears to be relatively low compared to other countries if you ignore the large percentage of poor kids we have.

But the “education reform” ad campaign never got two important lessons everyone starting out in the advertising business learns: Never make objective claims about your product that can be easily and demonstrably disproven, and never insult your target audience.

For instance, you can make the claim, “this tastes great” because that can’t be proven one way or the other. But when you claim, “your kids will love how this tastes,” and parents say, “my kids think it tastes like crap,” you’re pretty much toast. And you make matters all the worse if you respond, “Well, if you were a good parent you’d tell your kid to eat it anyway.”

Those two lessons seem to be completely lost on advocates behind the menu of education policies currently being force-fed to classroom teachers, parents, and school children across the country. As more Americans take a big bite of the education reform sandwich, more choose to spit it out.

The Common Core was presented and sold as some sort of historic miracle cure, but the evidence is lacking, says Bryant.

What is happening now, he says, is the collapse of a very badly thought out marketing scheme:

It’s now obvious that advertising claims behind current education policies like the Common Core were never based on strong objective evidence. More Americans are noticing this and objecting. And politicians are likely to get more circumspect about which side of the debate they lean to.

So what’s an education reformer to do?

So far, the strategy is to churn out more editorial, along the lines of what David Brooks wrote, to exhort Americans to “stay the course” on what is becoming a more obviously failing endeavor.

But as this sloganeering wears thin, we’re likely to get a new and improved “message” from the policy elite – a Common Core 2.0, let’s say, or a “next generation” of “reform.”

What’s really needed, of course, is to see the marketing campaign for what it really is: a distraction from educational problems that are much more pressing. Why, for example, focus on unsubstantiated ideas like the Common Core rather than do something that would really matter, such as improve instructional quality, reverse school funding cuts that are harming schools, or address the inequities and socioeconomic conditions that researchers have demonstrated are persistent causes of low academic performance?

But that would require something much more than another marketing campaign. It would mean developing a whole new product.

So maybe in a few years, people will think about the Common Core standards and put them in the same category as the Edsel and the New Coke, products that were heavily sold by their creators but had a poor marketing campaign and failed.