Carol Burris here describes how Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York legislature pulled a fast trick on the parents of the state.
Archives for category: Common Core
An invitation to join a new website and share your stories about the Common Core tests.
Hello friends,
I am writing with exciting news about testingtalk.org, a national website created to gather on-the-ground feedback about the new Common Core tests being piloted this spring.
Your help in spreading the word about testingtalk.org is critical. With this new forum, parents and educators across the country can share their real-life experiences with PARCC, Smarter Balanced, and other standardized tests.
Any decisions about the future of these new tests ought to be informed by the voices of those who have experienced the tests firsthand – that’s why testingtalk.org is so important.
I am asking for your help in two ways:
1. Visit testingtalk.org. Read what others are saying, and add your own voice to the mix. If you are the parent of a child taking any of these new tests, if you are a teacher giving the tests, if you are a superintendent leading the implementation of these tests – log in and tell us what you have observed. Remember: please be as concrete and detailed as possible when writing. The more grounded we can be in real-life specifics, the more accurate our emerging picture will be – and the more influence we will have in future policy discussions about standardized tests.
2. Spread the word. Share the link to http://www.testingtalk.org with anyone in your life who may have some connection to standardized testing in K-12 education.
Working together, we can generate a powerful and illuminating national discussion about PARCC, Smarter Balanced, and the other Common Core-aligned tests.
Thank you for spreading the word about testingtalk.org, and please feel free to let me know how I can help you join the conversation.
Patricia
One more note: testingtalk.org was developed independently by a steering committee of education leaders from across the country. The site is not supported by the testing industry, or to any departments of education at either the state or national level. As you can see when reading the biographies of steering committee members, there is quite a range of experiences and perspectives among the group. We sought out this range of viewpoints quite deliberately: the site is not intended to push the conversation in any predetermined direction. Instead, we hope to promote the most vigorous conversation possible, one grounded in details about real-life experiences with the tests.
The Steering Committee for testingtalk.org:
Richard Allington
Carl Anderson
Kylene Beers
Henry Braun
Lucy Calkins
Anthony Cody
Kathy Collins
Eric Cooper
Tom Corcoran
Smokey Daniels
Steve Leinwand
Mary Ehrenworth
Anne Goudvis
Stephanie Harvey
Julian Vasquez Heilig
Heidi Hayes Jacobs
Peter Johnston
Bena Kallick
Ellin Oliver Keene
Patricia Kinsella
Robert Marzano
Mariana Souto-Manning
Jay McTighe
Debbie Miller
Pedro Noguera
Nancy Carlsson-Paige
David Pearson
Robert Probst
Gary Rubinstein
Alan Schoenfeld
Rick Stiggins
Grant Wiggins
Rob Astorino, County Executive of Westchester County, announced today that he and his wife have decided to opt their three children out of state testing. Astorino opposes both the high-stakes testing and the Common Core as intrusions on local control imposed by Washington and Albany.
Astorino, a Republican, is running for Governor against Andrew Cuomo.
He has twice been elected as County Executive in a county where only a quarter of voters are Republicans.
Because Cuomo has raised $33 million for his re-election campaign, most political pundits think he will be re-elected easily. He is heavily favored by Wall Street and has made his reputation as a pro-business, anti-public education governor.
Education will be an important issue in this campaign.
Wow! How cool is this? You, me, and all of us are invited to join today’s thought leaders of education “reform” (aka, privatization and segregation) at a philophers” retreat.
I wish I were a thought leader in education, but apparently my thoughts don’t lead in the right direction (e.g., handing public money over to privately managed schools with no transparency or accountability, smashing unions, demoralizing teachers, eliminating pensions, making test scores the goal of education, firing teachers who can’t raise test scores higher and higher every year, stuff like that, which these days makes you a thought leader).
The meeting is billed as a three-day retreat, “a philosopher’s camp on education reform.” I wonder if the philosophers there will talk about Horace Mann or John Dewey or William James or William Torrey Harris or Sidney Hook? Somehow, I doubt they will. I kind of doubt that they ever heard of any of our eminent philosophers of education.
You too can attend for only $1,000. If you want to be a VIP, it will cost you $2,500.
Two other things: the meeting will be held at the Whiteface Lodge in Lake Placid. Is there a coded message here?
And for the benefit of the assembled philosophers, they might want to be reminded that they have a spelling error on the invitation. It is James Russell Lowell that once attended a meeting at that lodge, not James Russell Lowes. Do they know the difference? But when you are a thought leader in education, why bother with details?
Steven R. Cohen, the superintendent of the Shoreham-Wading River School District in Long Island, is unimpressed by the changes to the SAT.
They will still strike fear and terror in the hearts of students.
They will still be arbiters of access to higher education.
They will still be graded and normed on a bell curve, so that the same proportion of students are at the top and at the bottom.
They will no longer include an essay section.
They will be aligned with the Common Core, no surprise since David Coleman, president of the College Board (which sponsors the SAT), was “architect” of the Common Core standards.
He writes:
Among other things, Mr. Coleman tells us that to teach these important standards properly, students must have considerable time to read and re-read texts, time to discuss the words and sentences used in the text, time to write about the meaning of the words in the text and time to edit what they write. One problem with the “new” and “fairer” SAT is that it uses multiple-choice questions to assess whether students understand the meaning of words in texts instead of having students write about such meanings — the skill Mr. Coleman insists is the signature skill of the Common Core. To make matters worse, the new SAT has a writing section but it is optional. So the “new” and “fairer” SAT, one that will reflect what actually goes on in high school classrooms, will not, in fact, adhere to the new Common Core State Standards as described by the very person who created both.
Superintendent Cohen concludes:
….according to Mr. Coleman and the state Board of Regents, the “new” and “fairer” SAT is oriented to higher, better standards that will prepare students to be “college and career ready.” Common Core State Standards, we are told, are also a complete set of standards, in addition to being better. However, if one looks at assessments used by some of the most renowned universities in the world — schools like Oxford University in England — one finds that they adhere to standards ignored by “higher” Common Core State Standards. For example, if one wanted to study, say, history at Oxford, one would have to take a test that assesses not only clear and precise writing via a real writing test; the content would have to demonstrate what Oxford calls “historical imagination” as well as “originality.” Nowhere in our new, vaunted Common Core State Standards are teachers told to be concerned with nurturing young people’s imaginations or their original thoughts about the books they read, about the way nature works, about whether our government’s policies are good or bad, about whether the Pythagorean theorem could be used to help design a better bridge over the Hudson river, or whether “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Nor will the “new” and “fairer” SAT ask students to write about such matters.
The “new” and “fairer” SAT is neither. And the Common Core State Standards assessed by this new test do not include, contrary to what many seem to believe, nurturing young people’s imaginations or originality: yet another instance of the profound cynicism of contemporary education “reform.”
Up until now, Peter Greene has been a skeptic of Common
Core. But then he realized that Common Core really was written by a
bunch of teachers and parents. He realized that he never knew what
critical thinking was until now. He realized that one size really
does fit all. So
this post explains how he came to love the Common Core.
You too will be convinced if you follow his train of
thought.
Alan J. Singer of Hofstra University has studied the Common
Core closely and suggested not only flaws but ways it could be
improved. Unfortunately there is no feedback process to make
changes or to upgrade content. Michael Shaughnessy interviews Singer
here for Education News. Here is a good question and
answer: 2) What is this concept called ” text complexity ” and who
developed it? “If you look deeper you realize books are assigned to
the boxes based on something called “text complexity.” Text
complexity is defined on the Common Core website as a combination
of “levels of meaning, structure, language conventionality and
clarity, and knowledge demands”; “readability measures and other
scores of text complexity”; and “reader variables (such as
motivation, knowledge, and experiences) and task variables (such as
purpose and the complexity generated by the task assigned and the
questions posed).” Fortunately you do not have to worry if you
cannot understand what they are talking about, I certainly can’t,
because they start with the assertion that “A number of
quantitative tools exist to help educators assess aspects of text
complexity that are better measured by algorithm than by a human
reader,” although they also concede that “the tools for measuring
text complexity are at once useful and imperfect.” “One thing that
always makes me suspicious is that Pearson Education is marketing
the Pearson Reading Maturity Metric. They claim it is “a new and
more accurate measure of the reading difficulty of texts” that was
“developed by scientists at Pearson’s Knowledge Technologies
group.” It is supposed to be a “new computer-based technology” that
“measures how close an individual students’ reading abilities are
to what they will need to succeed in college and careers.” “Do you
remember the scene from the “The Dead Poet’s Society” when Robin
Williams’ character is trying to follow textbook guidelines for
measuring the value of poetry and ends up having students rip the
pages out of the textbook. He shouts “Rip! Rip! Rip!” I think we
need to do some ripping here.”
Journalist Sarah Darrer Littman in Connecticut wondered why the legislature was so eager to shut off debate about the Common Core. Connecticut is not a state with a big Tea Party presence. Parents are trying to understand the issues surrounding the sudden shift to national standards whose effects are unknown.
She knows that Arne Duncan and Governor Dannell Malloy and Connecticut’s commissioner Stefan Pryor want the public to believe that the only opponents of the Common Core are from the Tea Party, but she knows that isn’t true.
She writes:
Such diatribes are foolish and myopic. Common Core proponents need to face a very important fact: parents are not idiots. Those of us with older children can see the qualitative difference in curriculum since the Common Core roll out began — and we are not impressed. We’re angered by the loss of instructional time to testing for a benefit that accrues to testing companies rather than our children.
Common Core proponents claim that the standards raise the bar and will make us more competitive. But is this actually true?
I encourage parents and legislators alike to read the September 2013 study:Challenging the Research Base of the Common Core State Standards: A Historical Reanalysis of Text Complexity published by AERA (American Educational Research Association). The analysis focuses on the ELA components of the standards, but what it says about the assumptions driving them and how they were constructed is important: “The blanket condemnation made by the CCSS authors that school reading texts have ‘trended downward over the last half century’ is inaccurate” — particularly so, the authors of the study found, in the K-3 grades. Why this is dangerous is that “we may be hastily attempting to solve a problem that does not exist and elevating text complexity in a way that is ultimately harmful to students.”
She notes:
When the authors of the AERA study analyzed the literature used by Common Core writers to justify the need for more complex texts, what they found was: “a tight and closed loop of researchers citing one another and leading . . . to an artificially heightened sense of scholarly agreement about a decline in textbook complexity.”
At some point, the advocates for the Common Core–Arne Duncan, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, Michelle Rhee, Joel Klein, Jeb Bush, etc.–will have to wake up and realize that the standards were written without adequate participation by knowledgeable educators, without any consensus process, without transparency, and without any appeals process. These are not standards. They are a mandate, paid for by Bill Gates and imposed by Race to the Top.
The opposition is not going away. Nor will the questions.
Karen Wolfe, a parent in Los Angeles, tries
to understand why liberals and progressives find themselves
opposed to Common Core and lumped together with the Tea
Party, with whom they otherwise have no agreement. While the Tea
Party opposes the Common Core because they fear a federal takeover
of public education, liberals and progressives have different
reasons to oppose the Common Core. Karen Wolfe writes:
Ideologically speaking, it is baffling that any liberal
would adopt the education reform agenda with its call to deregulate
schools as a public good, and destabilize labor unions which have
historically been huge supporters of the Democratic party.
(Although one only has to consider neo-liberalism to understand the
call to privatize.) But, in education, for
liberal politicians, money trumps ideology. Politicians simply
cannot resist the money — or at least the possibility of preventing
the billionaires from filling the campaign coffers of their
opponents. When billionaires like Eli Broad pretend to be
Democrats, it’s a very effective way of infiltrating the Democratic
inner sanctum, long a champion of public education. (I say
“pretend” after a Common Cause complaint to the Fair Political
Practices Commission revealed that Eli Broad and other billionaires
had secretly funded opposition to Governor Brown’s tax proposition
while publicly supporting it.) Ideology only
explains a small part of the opposition to Common Core.
If liberals oppose Common Core for any ideological
reason, it’s probably less about an ideology than a distaste for
lining the pockets of giant corporations. It’s more likely that the
overwhelmingly negative reaction to Common Core isn’t ideological
at all. Many critics feel like the major
purpose of Common Core is to make teaching measurable. Even if one
is convinced that that goal is a reasonable one to cure what ails
our schools — and many of us are not — some
things are not easy to quantify. Think of the best teacher you ever
had. It’s doubtful that you conjure images of Scan-Tron
tests. Let me say for the record, if it need saying,
that I have no sympathy for the Tea Party. I want more government
support to alleviate social and economic problems. I want the
federal government to return to its role as a guarantor of equity,
not a force to compel states to enact policies that are harmful to
children and to public education. I want more funding for programs
that benefit needy children. I think their obsessive hatred for
everything associated with President Obama is absurd. I disagree
with President Obama about education, but I voted for him, and I
support him in other areas, especially if he is serious about
inequality, which is the cancer of our society. I oppose the Common
Core in its present form because I fear that it was designed to
make public education look bad, that it was designed as part of a
larger plan to measure every child and every teacher, and that it
was designed to enrich big corporations like Pearson and the dozens
of other entrepreneurs now sucking public money out of the schools.
Until teachers in every state have a chance to revise the Common
Core and make it developmentally appropriate, I will continue to
oppose it. Until the Common Core is decoupled from the Common Core
testing, I will continue to oppose it. The passing marks on the
federally-funded tests were set far too high for most students, and
we will see massive failure rates among our neediest students if
the cut scores are not readjusted to align with the reality of how
children learn and what they know and should know. The Common Core
will die a natural or unnatural death at the hands of parents,
teachers, school boards, and citizens if it is not open to
criticism and revision. As more states test the Common Core, the
opposition will grow bolder, as it has in New York. Given how toxic
it is now, it may be dead already. Politicians, who usually don’t
give a fig about education, now are distancing themselves from the
Common Core.
Robert Shepherd, a regular commentator on the blog, has a long career as an author and a developer of curriculum, textbooks, and every other aspect of education publishing. From his comments on this blog, we know he has strong feelings about the Common Core. Let’s be blunt: He is not a fan. He has seen the future and he does not like what he sees.
Shepherd writes:
Dear Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth:
Orwell did not mean for 1984 to be a public policy manual.
Democracy might be dead in the United States, but we intend to resurrect it.
We see through your Doublespeak.
We will resist your Philistine technocratic vision of the future.
We will resist standardization.
We will resist your fascist mandates.
We will call upon others to do so as well.
We will tell them to opt their children out of your data machine and to ignore your bullet lists of what is and is not acceptable for teachers to teach and students to learn.
We do not accept regulation of our freedom of thought. We utterly and completely reject that.
We do not accept your authority.
We will organize.
We will speak truth to power.
We will practice civil disobedience.
We will opt out.
We will not look kindly upon those who collaborate with you to usurp the autonomy of teachers and learners.
We will not feed our kids to your data maw.
Diane Ravitch's blog 