Archives for category: Common Core
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Sarah Darrer Littman: Don’t Believe the Common Core Propaganda

By dianeravitch
March 28, 2014 //
9

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.

Categories Common Core, Connecticut

Karen Wolfe: Why Liberals Don’t Like the Common Core

By dianeravitch
March 27, 2014 //
60

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.

Categories Common Core, Obama

Robert Shepherd Does a Close Reading of the Common Core and Doesn’t Like What He Sees

By dianeravitch
March 27, 2014 //
27

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.

Categories Common Core, Education Reform

Peter Greene: Forget About Ridiculous Expectations

By dianeravitch
March 26, 2014 //
22

Peter Greene, always a font of common sense, explains
how we replaced “the soft bigotry of low expectations”
with the “hard tyranny of ridiculous expectations.” He writes: “We
have, for instance, substituted the expectation that every third
grader will read at grade level no matter what. In some states (I’m
looking at you, NY) we raised the standard for proficiency
arbitrarily. And we have just generally pushed the idea that all
students should be at grade level (as determined by anything from
data averages to a politician’s whim) all the time. “That seems
like a swell expectation. It’s not. It’s stupid. Let’s just apply
that reasoning some more. Let’s compute the average height for an
eight-year-old and declare that all third graders must be that
height. Let’s require all children to be walking by their tenth
month and potty trained by month thirteen. Let’s require all
seventeen-year-old males to be able to grow facial hair and all
fifteen-year-old females to fill a B cup. And let’s tell all young
men and women that they must be engaged by age twenty-two. “Let’s
take every single human developmental milestone and set a point by
which every human being must have achieved it. Because that is
totally how human beings develop and learn and grow– on exactly
the same path, at exactly the same speed, at exactly the same
time.” The bottom line: “The “promise of the common core” turns out
to be nothing more than threatening students “You’re going to pass
this high stakes test or we’re going to label you a failure, punish
your teachers, and keep you from graduating.” That’s not the soft
bigotry of low expectations, but the rather harsh bigotry of “Those
damn lazy kids just aren’t motivated enough. Threaten them.” They
don’t need help, support, resources, economic relief, or anything
else– just threats. “The cost of this bad threat is more than the
students should have to bear and certainly of no benefit to us as a
society. And the test results recall one more lesson from Basic
Teacher 101. If you have given a test to your class and a huge
percentage of the students have failed it, it’s a bad test.” What
Greene doesn’t understand is that there is a reason for these
wildly unrealistic expectations: They are supposed to make public
schools look bad so they can be closed and handed over to the
private sector.

Categories Common Core

Peter Greene: Connecting the Dots Between CCSS and Big Data

By dianeravitch
March 25, 2014 //
52

Peter Greene, in a serious vein, explains that the Common Core standards are integrally connected to the collection of data.

They can’t be changed or revised–contrary to the nationally and internationally recognized protocol for setting standards–because their purpose is to tag every student and collect data on their performance.

They cannot be decoupled from testing because the testing is the means by which every student is tagged and his/her data are collected for Pearson and the big data storage warehouse monitored by amazon or the U.S. government.

He writes:

We know from our friends at Knewton what the Grand Design is– a system in which student progress is mapped down to the atomic level. Atomic level (a term that Knewton loves deeply) means test by test, assignment by assignment, sentence by sentence, item by item. We want to enter every single thing a student does into the Big Data Bank.

But that will only work if we’re all using the same set of tags.

We’ve been saying that CCSS are limited because the standards were written around what can be tested. That’s not exactly correct. The standards have been written around what can be tracked.

The standards aren’t just about defining what should be taught. They’re about cataloging what students have done.

Remember when Facebook introduced emoticons. This was not a public service. Facebook wanted to up its data gathering capabilities by tracking the emotional states of users. But if users just defined their own emotions, the data would be too noisy, too hard to crunch. But if the user had to pick from the facebook standard set of user emotions– then facebook would have manageable data.

Ditto for CCSS. If we all just taught to our own local standards, the data noise would be too great. The Data Overlords need us all to be standardized, to be using the same set of tags. That is also why no deviation can be allowed. Okay, we’ll let you have 15% over and above the standards. The system can probably tolerate that much noise. But under no circumstances can you change the standards– because that would be changing the national student data tagging system, and THAT we can’t tolerate.

This is why the “aligning” process inevitably involves all that marking of standards onto everything we do. It’s not instructional. It’s not even about accountability.

It’s about having us sit and tag every instructional thing we do so that student results can be entered and tracked in the Big Data Bank.

And that is why CCSS can never, ever be decoupled from anything. Why would facebook keep a face tagging system and then forbid users to upload photos?

The Test does not exist to prove that we’re following the standards. The standards exist to let us tag the results from the Test. And ultimately, not just the Test, but everything that’s done in a classroom. Standards-ready material is material that has already been bagged and tagged for Data Overlord use.

The end-game is data-tracking, not standards. And that helps to explain why CCSS was written without consultation with educators; without participation by early childhood educators or those knowledgeable about students with disabilities; why there is no appeals process, no means of revision, why they were written so hurriedly in 2009 and pushed into 45 states and D.C. by Race to the Top.

Categories Common Core, Data and Data Mining, Privacy and Privacy Rights

Anthony Cody on the Common Core: Are They “Standards”?

By dianeravitch
March 24, 2014 //
35

Anthony Cody read my post this morning about why the Common Core standards fail to meet the most minimal procedural requirements for standard-setting–the requirements laid out in detail by the American National Standards Institute–and concludes that Common Core cannot be considered standards. They were written in secret. There was no transparency or openness in the process.

 

Another reader asked me, “so who is this ANSI?” As I explained in my original post, ANSI was established over 90 years ago by engineers and other professionals to begin the process of developing national standards and is now the accepted authority in many fields, including government agencies.

 

ANSI has no power to control or direct standard-setting. It is the organization that lays out the due process requirements for setting standards that have credibility and legitimacy. The Common Core effort violated almost all of these procedural requirements.

 

Anthony Cody documents the secretiveness of the process. That secretiveness and lack of transparency bother me, but I am equally disturbed that the Common Core does not have any means of appeal or revision. As the ANSI process explains, every set of genuine standards must have a process by which aggrieved parties may make their case and be heard, and by which those in charge may hear their grievances and make adjustments when necessary. In the case of the Common Core, there is no such process, nor is there anyone  or any organization to appeal to. We are expected to believe that the standards were written in stone and may never be changed.

 

So, I agree with Anthony. The absence of due process, the absence of transparency, the absence of participation by knowledgeable parties, the absence of educators with classroom experience and experience with young children and children with disabilities, the absence of any possibility for revision, invalidates the Common Core.

 

If you want to use them, go right ahead and use them. Consider them GUIDELINES. They are not standards.

 

 

Categories Common Core, Education Reform

Comment: The Common Core “Standards” Are Not Standards

By dianeravitch
March 24, 2014 //
15

I cross-posted my article about “The Fatal Flaw of the Common Core Standards” at Huffington Post and on Valerie Strauss’ The Answer Sheet, to reach the broadest possible audience.

This comment appears on Huffington Post:

  • 3
749 Fans·Jonah and Ahab had different perspectives
Thank you Diane Ravitch for bringing up a point which has never been mentioned previously.I’ve worked in international standards organizations representing various corporate and government interests in both the ITU-T and ISO and the points you raise are spot on. The Common Core “Standards” can be no such thing as they don’t even represent ‘defacto’ standards, let alone mutually agreed upon by all stake holders involved.Beyond their poor content, i.e. standards in math setting requirements 2 years behind the rest of the world, the fact that there is no process to amend them speaks worlds as to their lack of being a “standard”.

Standards are revised, updated and sometimes even redacted as new and better standards become available but with Common Core, they are essentially carved in stone as there is no provisions allowing for or supporting their change.

24 MAR 9:28 AM
You might wonder why I did not send that very important article about the Common Core to the New York Times. It is because the New York Times rejected my last submission with no explanation and continues to post editorials and articles endorsing the Common Core.  I have decided not to waste my time trying to please the editors of the New York Times’ Op-ed page. They accept what they want, and they don’t accept what I write. The last time I published there was in 2011. I don’t expect ever to publish there again, so I use the power of social media to bypass their editorial screen.
Categories Common Core, Education Reform

The Fatal Flaw of the Common Core Standards

By dianeravitch
March 24, 2014 //
67

Across the nation, parents and educators are raising objections to the Common Core standards, and many states are reconsidering whether to abandon them as well as the federally-funded tests that accompany them. Arne Duncan, Jeb Bush, Bill Gates, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the Business Roundtable vocally support them, yet the unease continues and pushback remains intense.

Why so much controversy?

The complaints are coming from all sides: from Tea Party activists who worry about a federal takeover of education and from educators, parents, and progressives who believe that the Common Core will standardize instruction and eliminate creativity in their classrooms.

But there is a more compelling reason to object to the Common Core standards.

They were written in a manner that violates the nationally and international recognized process for writing standards. The process by which they were created was so fundamentally flawed that these “standards” should have no legitimacy.

Setting national academic standards is not something done in stealth by a small group of people, funded by one source, and imposed by the lure of a federal grant in a time of austerity.

There is a recognized protocol for writing standards, and the Common Core standards failed to comply with that protocol.

In the United States, the principles of standard-setting have been clearly spelled out by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI).

On its website ANSI describes how standards should be developed in every field. The American National Standards Institute

“has served in its capacity as administrator and coordinator of the
United States private sector voluntary standardization system for
more than 90 years. Founded in 1918 by five engineering societies
and three government agencies, the Institute remains a private,
nonprofit membership organization supported by a diverse
constituency of private and public sector organizations.

“Throughout its history, ANSI has maintained as its
primary goal the enhancement of global competitiveness of U.S.
business and the American quality of life by promoting and
facilitating voluntary consensus standards and conformity
assessment systems and promoting their integrity. The Institute
represents the interests of its nearly 1,000 company, organization,
government agency, institutional and international members through
its office in New York City, and its headquarters in
Washington, D.C.”

ANSI’s fundamental principles of standard-setting are transparency, balance, consensus, and due process, including a right to appeal by interested parties. According to ANSI, there are currently more than 10,000 American national standards, covering a broad range of activities.

The Common Core standards were not written in conformity with the ANSI standard-setting process that is broadly recognized across every field of endeavor.

If the Common Core standards applied to ANSI for recognition, they would be rejected because the process of writing the standards was so deeply flawed and did not adhere to the “ANSI Essential Requirements.”

ANSI states that “Due process is the key to ensuring that ANSs are developed in an environment that is equitable, accessible and responsive to the requirements of various stakeholders. The open and fair ANS process ensures that all interested and affected parties have an opportunity to participate in a standard’s development. It also serves and protects the public interest since standards developers accredited by ANSI must meet the Institute’s requirements for openness, balance, consensus and other due process safeguards.”

The Common Core standards cannot be considered standards when judged by the ANSI requirements. According to ANSI, the process of setting standards must be transparent, must involve all interested parties, must not be dominated by a single interest, and must include a process for appeal and revision.

The Common Core standards were not developed in a transparent manner. The standard-setting and writing of the standards included a significant number of people from the testing industry, but did not include a significant number of experienced teachers, subject-matter experts, and other educators from the outset, nor did it engage other informed and concerned interests, such as early childhood educators and educators of children with disabilities. There was no consensus process. The standards were written in 2009 and adopted in 2010 by 45 states and the District of Columbia as a condition of eligibility to compete for $4.3 billion in Race to the Top funding. The process was dominated from start to finish by the Gates Foundation, which funded the standard-setting process. There was no process for appeal or revision, and there is still no process for appeal or revision.

The reason to oppose the Common Core is not because of their content, some of which is good, some of which is problematic, some of which needs revision (but there is no process for appeal or revision).

The reason to oppose the Common Core standards is because they violate the well-established and internationally recognized process for setting standards in a way that is transparent, that recognizes the expertise of those who must implement them, that builds on the consensus of concerned parties, and that permits appeal and revision.

The reason that there is so much controversy and pushback now is that the Gates Foundation and the U.S. Department of Education were in a hurry and decided to ignore the nationally and internationally recognized rules for setting standards, and in doing so, sowed
suspicion and distrust. Process matters.

According to ANSI, here are the core principles for setting standards:

The U.S. standardization system is based on the following set of globally accepted principles for standards development:*Transparency Essential information regarding
standardization activities is accessible to all interested
parties.* Openness
Participation is open to all affected interests.* Impartiality

No one interest
dominates the process or is favored over another.

* Effectiveness and Relevance


Standards are relevant and effectively respond to regulatory and
market needs, as well as scientific and technological
developments.

* Consensus
Decisions are reached through consensus among those
affected.

* PerformanceBased
Standards are performance based (specifying essential
characteristics rather than detailed designs) where
possible.

* Coherence


The process encourages coherence to avoid overlapping and
conflicting standards.

* Due Process
Standards development accords with due process so that
all views are considered and appeals are possible.
* TechnicalAssistance

Assistance is offered to developing countries in the formulation and application
of standards. In addition, U.S. interests strongly agree that the process should be:

* Flexible, allowing the use of different methodologies to meet the needs of different technology and product sectors;

*Timely, so that purely administrative
matters do not result in a failure to meet market expectations;
and

* Balanced among
all affected interests.

page7image15608

Lacking most of these qualities, especially due process, consensus among interested groups, and the right of appeal, the Common Core cannot be considered authoritative, nor should they be considered standards. The process of creating national academic standards should be revised to accord with the essential and necessary procedural requirements of standard-setting as described by the American National Standards Institute. National standards cannot be created ex nihilo without a transparent, open, participatory consensus process that allows for appeal and revision.

United States Standards Strategy
http://www.us-standards-strategy.org

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates

Common Core for Commoners, Not My School!

By dianeravitch
March 23, 2014 //
102

This is an unintentionally hilarious
story about Common Core in Tennessee. Dr. Candace McQueen
has been dean of Lipscomb College’s school of education and also
the state’s’s chief cheerleader for Common Core. However, she was
named headmistress of private Lipscomb Academy, and guess what? She
will not have the school adopt the Common Core! Go figure.

Categories Common Core, Tennessee

Mother: My Son Hates School, How Can I Help Him?

By dianeravitch
March 23, 2014 //
54

This comment came from “Albany Mom”:   I
agree with the writer that “if parents do not advocate for their
children, who will?” However, I need help
knowing how to advocate for my child. Who is going to
help? My husband and I have struggled with the
demons of Common Core this year, watching our 9 year old son sink
into what looks like depression. We can’t afford private school, so
I have coerced, offered rewards, and tried everything to encourage
him. He has developed sleep problems, moody and irritable, and
hardly eats. He has impulsive aggression with his younger sister.
He has lost his previous love of creative play, especially with
Legos, and now is chronically bored unless he has a video game. I
have banned video games since I think it is an escape and he is
becoming addicted. He is withdrawing from me, just as he is from
school. When his father is home on weekends, he tries to talk to
him, but it is more like “you don’t have a choice, just man up and
do your best”. It seems like we can’t change the school
environment, so we have to change our son to adapt to
it. Every morning is a struggle just to get
him out the door, and every night is another dismal episode of
boring homework (always worksheets with the “common core” logo at
the bottom). He cries frequently at home, and even broke down two
times at school this year when he became frustrated. I know that
caused a loss of dignity for him, and I met with his teacher to ask
for help. I can sense the teacher feels pressured too, and is
concerned about his test scores. He says son daydreams in class. I
was referred to take him to a child guidance center for counseling,
but that is not helping. A therapist can’t change the school
either, so is just trying to help him adapt to it.
I recognize it is not possible for me to make him like
school, and forcing him to go makes me feel like a bully. He may be
more sensitive than some children, but I think public schools need
to be happy welcoming places for children, and not like “work
camps” that make them feel worthless and trapped. This has caused
our family ongoing stress and fear, and it seems to be getting
worse. This is indeed a “psychological plague”
that is taking my child’s spirit, and I think there
are millions of other children out there experiencing
similar emotional distress from CC. Now I ask
this question to Arne Duncan: “Is it healthy
and realistic to expect the nation’s children to adapt to an
environment that is obviously causing them psychological
distress?”

Categories Common Core, Parents, Students, Testing
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