Archives for category: Common Core
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

An NBCT Listened to Bill Gates and Reacts Here

By dianeravitch
March 15, 2014 //
82

Bill Gates lectured the Nationally Board Certified Teachers on Friday about the joys of Common Core and why standardization unlocks creativity. Not being a NBCT, I was not there to hear him, but this teacher was there.

She writes:

“As a high school English teacher, one of the first things I taught my 11th grade students was to know their audience when speaking and writing; knowing about the expertise, hopes, fears, vision, etc. of the audience is essential for getting one’s message across and engaging in dialogue that can foster learning and evoke meaningful change.

“As an NBCT who came to the Teaching and Learning Conference to engage in meaningful dialogue to evoke change in the teaching profession, I was insulted to see that Bill Gates did not seem to “know” the expertise represented in the audience.

“I didn’t need to hear a history of, or plug for, Common Core standards. I know them backwards and forwards. The standards are actually pretty good – the demoralizing high-stakes strings attached, and the reason they came to be, not so much.

“I didn’t need to hear more about the miracles of the Khan Academy. I saw the TEACH film during the pre-conference where it was plugged plenty. I get it: technology is a useful teaching tool. Duh.

“I didn’t need to hear more about what a flipped classroom was. That’s called Tuesday in room 741.

“What I *needed* was a flipped-conference in which NBCTs could broadcast *their* expertise out to people like Bill Gates.”

Categories Common Core, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Teachers and Teaching

Big Business Fights Tea Party in Support of Common Core, with Questions

By dianeravitch
March 15, 2014 //
18

Stephanie Simon reports at politico.com that big business is launching a major campaign to counter Tea Party opposition to the Common Core standards.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable have endorsed a major advertising and public relations campaign on behalf of the Common Core.

Within days, Indiana will very likely become the first state to officially scrap the standards, though it is far from clear that they will be replaced with anything too radically different. Bills to undermine the Common Core are pending in at least a half-dozen other states as well. Major conservative organizations such as FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity have jumped in to help guide and grow the grass-roots opposition. And teacher unions, though they still back the standards in concept, are warning that their implementation has been badly botched.

“It’s a critical time,” said Dane Linn, vice president of the Business Roundtable and one of the architects of the Common Core. “State leaders, and the general public, need to understand why employers care about the Common Core.”

The Business Roundtable, he said, is urging members to work their connections with “governors, committee chairs, House speakers, presidents of Senates” to stop any bills that could undercut the standards.

This narrative may actually be part of the marketing plan for the Common Core standards.

By pitting business against the Tea Party, the voices of teachers, researchers, liberals, moderates, and non-ideological parents are silenced.

This is the same narrative that Arne Duncan presented when he spoke to the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

But this narrative doesn’t explain widespread opposition to the Common Core among people who have nothing to do with the Tea Party.

When I think of Stephen Krashen and Susan Ohanian, I don’t think Tea Party.

When I think of Carol Burris, the principal of the year in New York state, I don’t think Tea Party. She has been one of the most outspoken critics of the Common Core, but this new game plan ignores her.

When I think of expert teacher Anthony Cody, who taught in the impoverished schools of Oakland for more than two decades, I don’t think Tea Party.

When I think of Leonie Haimson, leader of Class Size Matters in New York City, I don’t think Tea Party.

When I think of the 500 early childhood experts who criticized the Common Core standards, I don’t think Tea Party.

When I think of the thousands of parents in New York who turned out for public meetings with State Commissioner John King to complain about the Common Core and the testing, I don’t think Tea Party.

And for the record, I do not belong to the Tea Party, nor do I have any sympathy whatever with its goals.

Nor does the narrative acknowledge that Common Core’s biggest supporters, aside from Duncan, are rightwingers like Jeb Bush, Bill Haslam, and Bobby Jindal.

This new narrative–big business vs. the Tea Party–is more smoke in our eyes to put across standards that need to be reviewed and revised in every state by expert teachers and decoupled from high-stakes testing.

Full-scale adoption without these changes will harm children and widen achievement gaps among racial groups.

I have a suggestion: How about if the leaders of our major corporations agree to take the PARCC tests and publish their scores?

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2014/03/big-business-takes-on-tea-party-over-common-core-104662.html#ixzz2vx3NloLj

Categories Common Core

Mercedes Schneider Takes Bill Gates to the Woodshed

By dianeravitch
March 15, 2014 //
22

Mercedes Schneider was not at all pleased that Bill Gates lectured teachers about teaching at the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards annual conference. He has never taught but he thinks he knows how to teach. Messing with education is his hobby.

Why was he invited? Schneider thinks he bought the platform by donating millions to the NBPTS.

She takes him to the woodshed and gives him a talking to or a paddling, I am not sure which.

Categories Common Core, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Teachers and Teaching

What Bill Gates Told National Board for Professional Teaching Standards about Common Core (Oops, Link added)

By dianeravitch
March 14, 2014 //
126

Bill Gates released an advance copy of his speech to the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, and as reported in the Huffington Post, he defended the Common Core standards as the key to creativity in the classroom.

The article says that the Gates Foundation had spent $75 million on the standards, but we know from Mercedes Schneider’s study of the Gates’ website that the foundation has spent nearly $200 million to pay for every aspect of the Common Core: the writing, the reviews, the evaluation, the implementation, the promotion and advocacy by numerous groups inside the Beltway and across the nation.

Gates told the teachers:

“Gates argued that America’s education system currently does not prepare students adequately for college, because it’s not asking enough of them. So the transition to the new standards is hard because it has to be, he said, and asked teachers to explain the standards to local families.

While the initiative was supported by most state schools chiefs and governors, a recentpoll from Achieve, a group that supports the Core, found that almost two-thirds of American voters have heard “nothing” or “not much” about the effort.

Gates went on to address critiques that the Common Core represents a national curriculum, a federal takeover or the end of innovation. He said these claims are false and distract from teaching — and that teachers can provide the most effective response to critics.”

This blogger created an infographic to show “how Bill Gates bought the Common Core,” relying on the information gathered by Schneider from the Gates Foundation website. She says the total spent by Gates was closer to $300 million.

Of course, $300 million is not much to a foundation as large as the Gates Foundation, but it is not peanuts either. Clearly, Bill Gates believes that if everyone in every school studies the same material, then there will be equity for all. That is a theory that has yet to be demonstrated.

And in any discussion of the rapid adoption of the CCSS by 45 or 46 states, it is best to be frank and acknowledge that this movement was not spontaneous; it occurred because the U.S. Department made adoption of the standards a requirement for states to be eligible for a piece of $4.3 billion in Race to the Top funding.

There seems to be a concerted effort on the part of Common Core advocates to halt the erosion of support that is occurring in states across the nation. In the past week or so, major editorials have appeared in many newspapers defending the Common Core, and the Chamber of Commerce and Business Roundtable have agreed to redouble their campaign to persuade opponents to support the CCSS.

What Gates’ presentation demonstrates is that he really doesn’t understand the reasons for the pushback in many states, some of it coming from the right (fearful of a federal takeover of local schools), some from the left (opposed to standardization), some from parents who don’t understand why it is a good thing to make standards and tests so “hard” that most students are bound to fail them. Nor does Gates understand that there is scant, if any, evidence that high standards alone are enough to produce either high achievement or equity. If we expect everyone to run a four-minute mile, that won’t make everyone run a four-minute mile. Some will, most won’t. What we know from the states that have tested the standards is that the majority of students fail the tests and that the failure rate for English language learners, students with disabilities, and children of color is staggeringly high. In New York state, for example, only 3% of English learners passed the ELA exam; only 5% of students with disabilities passed it; only 16-17% of African American and Hispanic students passed; and overall, only 31% of all students passed in grades 3-8. Will that change in years to come? Let’s hope so, or we will have a vast army of young people without high school diplomas.

Categories Common Core, Education Reform

My Interview with Salon about Education Reform Today

By dianeravitch
March 13, 2014 //
9

This is a wide-ranging interview with Salon that started as a discussion of the Network for Public Education, then went on to discuss budget cuts, high-stakes testing, Common Core, Race to the Top, privatization, and much more.

Categories Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Chicago, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Testing, U.S. Department of Education, U.S. education, Unions

Teachers in Connecticut Perplexed by NY’s First Grade Common Core Modules

By dianeravitch
March 13, 2014 //
72

For reasons unknown, Connecticut appears poised to endorse New York state’s odd lesson plans for Common Core.

This Connecticut blogger pulls apart the first grade lessons, previously discussed on this blog.

The blogger refers to a small portion of what first graders are supposed to learn (subjects that might well fit better in high school and/or college, that is, if one expects depth of understanding):

“A further examination of Domain 4 means reviewing its 81 student objectives. That number is not as intimidating as the language in the content area objectives. The first ten objectives state that “by the end of this unit, students will be able to….”:

“Locate the area known as Mesopotamia on a world map or globe and identify it as part of Asia;
Explain the importance of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers and the use of canals to support farming and the development of the city of Babylon;
Describe the city of Babylon and the Hanging Gardens;
Identify cuneiform as the system of writing used in Mesopotamia;
Explain why a written language is important to the development of a civilization;
Explain the significance of the Code of Hammurabi;
Explain why rules and laws are important to the development of a civilization;
Explain the ways in which a leader is important to the development of a civilization;
Explain the significance of gods/goddesses, ziggurats, temples, and priests in Mesopotamia;
Describe key components of a civilization…”

Why do six-year-old children need to learn the word “perplexed”? There is actually a good reason. The content of the first grade lessons will surely make them feel perplexed. Better: why should they know the word “apoplectic”? You know why.

Categories Common Core, Connecticut, New York

A Great New Blogger Disagrees with Corporate Reform–and with Me Too

By dianeravitch
March 13, 2014 //
39

This new blogger dissects Gerald Graff’s defense of the Common Core standards,and his second post says that I can learn a lot from Saul Alinsky.

The writer is a former high school teacher, who taught for many years in the Chicago public s hools.

Among other trenchant comments, he writes about Graff:

“Graff reduces education reform to a set of standards, but he’s not alone in doing so. He’s in good (loathsome?) company. In fact, he can now join the ranks of a long list of so-called education reformers, including our own Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, for whom the idea of actually teaching in our most difficult schools seems absurd. (His claim to his current post rests on the fact that his mother was a teacher.) This brings to mind a quip that made the rounds during the last CPS teacher strike: Those who can, teach. Those who can’t, pass laws (or write essays) about teaching.

“Of course, such a stance begs the question: How might Graff (or Gates or Duncan) feel if a group of folks, say a handful of successful people from outside their institution were to hijack their department or business or institution and tell them how they aught to run things? To take this a step further, why not apply the same logic that Graff deploys in his response to Ravitch to his own English department at UIC? According to Graff, in his own courses at UIC he sees evidence that the American education system has done little for “the great majority of students who are essentially confused about how to do academic work, about how to analyze a text and summarize its argument, or about how to make an argument of one’s own.” Then why doesn’t he simply compel his colleagues to raise their standards? Why doesn’t he just raise his own standards, for that matter?”

And in his advice to me, he knows I despise the “reformers'” efforts to disrupt the schools to impose their ideological and commercial agenda. So he writes:

“When it comes to creative disruption in our schools, though, I disagree with Ravitch. I understand that there’s a place and a time for stability in school; I understand that teachers and students need a space where they can think for themselves about their lives and decide what to learn and what to do. But now is not the time to dutifully follow the mandates in order to preserve some sense of stability and calm. It’s precisely because of the current instability in our schools that we have an opportunity to turn the tables on these reformers. By creating more disruptions, more chaos, and more upheaval, we can reset the reform agenda.

“And, this is the lesson of Alinsky. He reminds us that disorganizing communities can be a powerful tool; it’s exactly what so-called reformers like Arne Duncan, David Coleman, Michelle Rhee, and Joel Kline have been doing to teachers across the country. These people are disorganizing our schools and communities. They are running actions against us in order to make us feel powerless and disorganized. And, what’s worse, it isn’t just another empty exercise: this is real. They’re trying to change education forever. They want to hijack and narrow the curriculum. They want to give away public education to private corporations. They want to debase and deskill the profession of teaching. And, they want to reduce education to a test score.

“We can change this. Now is the time to organize and occupy our schools in order to disrupt and destabilize current reform efforts. We can go on the offensive—one grounded in creative disruptions that we design and produce. We can construct our own chaos and upheaval in ways that compel education reformers to stop what they’re doing and start listening to the people most affected by their decisions. And, as Diane Nash reminds us, we can opt out; we can refuse to participate in our own oppression.

“Only after we create enough disruption can we (students, teachers, parents, and community members) then demand the right to develop our own standards: ones that best address the needs, desires and aspirations of our communities, rather than the desires and aspirations of corporations and private foundations. Only then can we create stable schools that foster creativity and innovation, rather than conformity and obedience. Only then can we create schools that take as their starting point that building great schools and communities are reciprocal projects, not separate ones.”

Categories Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry

Peter Greene: When Good People Love Bad Standards

By dianeravitch
March 12, 2014 //
4

Peter Greene here respectfully disagrees with an advocate for the Commin Core.

He shares the same goals: to have students actively engaged, to encourage creativity and innovation, to promote “nuance, individuality and freedom,” to downplay bubble tests, etc., but Greene says that Common Core will advance none of these goals.

Are standards good in and of themselves? Greene says it depends.

Read on.

Categories Common Core

Robert Shepherd: Here is FUD in Education

By dianeravitch
March 11, 2014 //
68

In an earlier post today, I described the use of FUD (fear, uncertainty,and doubt) to destroy public confidence in public education and thus pave the way for privatization. The vendors of FUD say our education system, which made this country great, is failing; that it is obsolete; that we are losing the global race. It is a massive hoax, a fraud, a lie. They want to frighten the public and open the door to privatization and profiteering.

Robert Shepherd shows how FUD works in the marketing of Common Core, which was created to address our allegedly failing schools. Just remember: our schools are NOT failing. Our society is failing to address the real crisis of our time, which is that nearly one-quarter of our children live in poverty, and many are racially segregated as well. The Commin Core won’t change those scandalous realities.

Shepherd, an experienced curriculum developer, writes:

“And be these juggling fiends no more believed,
That palter with us in a double sense

–William Shakespeare, Macbeth

According to the amusing Wikipedia article on the subject, agnotology is the intentional cultural production of ignorance. It’s what advertisers and the leaders of oligarchical states do. They manufacture ignorance in order to further their goals. When it became clear to the cigarette companies that their product was extremely dangerous to people’s health, they started running ads that read “9 out of 10 doctors agree, there’s not a cough in a carload.” That’s agnotology.

One of the primary means by which the agnotologist works is equivocation. Equivocation is a kind of lying that SOUNDS as though it might be true. To see agnotological equivocation brought to the level of a high art, you need but look no further than the webpage from the Common Core State Standards Organization (the CCSSO) that describes the “myths” surrounding the Common Core. Each “myth” described on the Common Core page and in other Education Deform propaganda is, in fact, the unspun truth. In other words, the Education Deformers are highly accomplished agnotologists. A few examples will illustrate their technique:

“The Common Core State Standards were developed by teachers”

means that teachers had almost nothing to do with them, that a few teachers were selected to rubber stamp work done by amateurs from outside the profession who were hired with money from plutocrats and given the task of hacking those standards together based on the lowest-common-denominator groupthink of the state standards that preceded them.

“The standards were freely adopted by the states”

means that the USDOE gave the states no choice but to adopt them or suffer severe penalties that would come from not getting NCLB waivers. The “State” in “Common Core State Standards” is, quite simply, a lie. The standards were not developed by states but by a PRIVATELY HELD pair of organizations that hold a copyright on them.

“The new standards will unleash powerful market forces to encourage innovation”

means that the national standards will create markets at a scale at which only monopolistic providers of unimaginative educational materials can compete. It means the Walmartization, the Microsofting of U.S. education. It also means that in due time the CCSSO and the National Governor’s Association, or NGA, will start using the legal system to control the market for educational materials by deciding what materials will and will not receive its OK to claim alignment with its PRIVATELY HELD standards.

“The states are free to adapt the standards as they see fit”

means that the states can’t change them at all, that the most states can do is to add a few, but very few, standards to the CC$$ bullet list. The number of standards added can be no more than 15 percent of the total, and otherwise, the standards must be adopted without change (and without any mechanisms for change in the future other than the whim of the private organization that created the standards to begin with).

“The plutocrats have no seat at the table where educational policy is made” (Arne Duncan)

means that a small group of plutocrats paid for and directed the creation of the standards, the revised FERPA regulations, the new VAM systems, and the USDE technology blueprint. It also means that those same plutocrats are providing a lot of the money that is going into the development and marketing of the new national online bubble tests. It means that education policy is being made based on what serves the financial interests of the plutocrats. It means that the current deforms are the plutocrats’ business plan.

“The standards are not a curriculum”

means, in math, that they are a curriculum outline and in ELA that a) they dramatically narrow the possibilities for curricula and b) contain a great many items that clearly do specify curricula

“The standards don’t tell you how to teach” or “The standards do not specify pedagogical approaches

means that some pedagogical approaches are required in order for the standards, as worded, to be met and that MOST APPROACHES that might be conceived by independent teachers, scholars, researchers, and curriculum developers are precluded.

“The new national tests introduce breakthroughs in question types in order to test high-order thinking”

means that some minor online variants of fill-in-the-blank, matching, ordering, and other stock bubble test questions types have been introduced. So, for example, instead of filling in a blank, the student clicks on and moves an item to a blank.

“US schools are falling behind on international tests, thus making the standards and new national assessments necessary,”

means that US schools appear to be performing poorly if one does not correct for the socioeconomic status of the kids taking the test. If one does correct for SES, US schools and students lead the world.

“The Secretary of Education is the chief officer of the national public school system”
means that he is the fellow whom the oligarchs have put in charge of dismantling that system and replacing it with online and brick-and-mortar charters, voucher systems, and private schools run by well-connected profiteers.

“We’ve seen great improvements due to the accountability system put in place by NCLB”

means that scores have been almost flat and that the more than a decade of standards-and-testing that was supposed to “Leave no child behind” hasn’t worked at all to change overall outcomes or to put a dent in the achievement gap.

Poverty is not destiny”

means that the powers that be are going to ignore poverty and use the whips of VAM and testing instead.

So, agnotology, and, in particular, agnotology via equivocation, has become the PRIMARY MEANS OF GOVERNANCE of our K-12 educational system. In other words, our national education policies are, cynically, being formulated and enforced via LIES and, in particular, via means of that variety of LYING known as EQUIVOCATION.

And the leaders (LIARS) doing this governance are counting on having made the public so ignorant, via such equivocation, that it will not oppose their complete circumvention of democratic processes.

They are counting on the fact that their plutocrats, the guys with the checkbooks, can buy all the PR that is needed to keep the people in ignorance.

That’s how things work in a banana republic. The plutocrats purchase the political muscle to carry out their plans. In time, that muscle, the leaders/liars don’t even try to hide the fact that they are lying. They do it completely shamelessly. In fact, being able to lie shamelessly without having anyone call you out on it is a sign of enormous power, and to such people, to quote Kissinger’s infamous line, “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.”

Categories Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Education Reform, For-Profit, Scandals Fraud and Hoaxes

Wendy Lecker: Arne Duncan and David Coleman Are Wrong About Standards

By dianeravitch
March 11, 2014 //
35

Civil rights lawyer Wendy Lecker writes that Arne Duncan has sold the American public a bill of goods, a false narrative. He and David Colemn think that national standards will fix all the problems of American education. She says they are wrong. Their bad ideas are the problem. They are wrong.

She writes:

“Before the Common Core, according to Duncan, high school success was a “lie” — it certainly did not mean that students were “college ready.”

“What a compelling, but false, narrative. A new peer-reviewed longitudinal nationwide study confirmed that the most reliable predictor of cumulative college GPA and college graduation is a student’s high school GPA.

“The study, co-authored by former Bates College Dean of Admissions William Hiss, examined more than 123,000 student records at public and private universities across the country, universities serving predominately minority students and art schools. It compared those who submitted SAT or ACT scores for admission to those who did not.

“The authors found students with strong high school records succeeded in college, despite lower standardized test scores. Strong testers with lower GPAs had lower college performance. Non-submitters tended to be women, first-generation college students, PELL grant recipients, students of color and students with learning disabilities. The authors found a broad geographic appeal to non-submissions.

“All of the students in this study attended school prior to the adoption of the Common Core State Standards. Many began school well before the No Child Left Behind Act. They graduated from a variety of schools across the country, learned different curricula in states with different standards. Their GPAs did not depend on standardized tests. Yet consistently, their high school GPAs were reliable predictors of college success. If these students succeeded in American high schools, no matter what the curricula, standards or assessments, they succeeded in American colleges, public or private, large or small.

“This fact undermines the claims that American students need national standards, standardized curricula and nationally standardized tests in order to be “college and career ready.” The high school teachers of students in this study accurately assessed their achievement, and taught them what they needed to know to do well in college — without common standards, scripted lessons or a nationalized test. In fact, the data show that the two national standardized tests, the SAT and ACT, were poor predictors of college success.”

Turns out that teachers’ grades are better predictors of college success than the SAT, the ACT, or other standardized tests.

Categories Coleman, David, Common Core, Duncan, Arne
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »