Archives for category: Common Core
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Breaking News: Randi Says AFT Will No Longer Accept Funding from Gates Foundation for Innovation Fund

By dianeravitch
March 10, 2014 //
62

This exclusive news appeared this morning on politico.com’s education site. When Randi spoke at the Network for Public Education conference in Austin, she told the audience for the Common Core panel that she would ask the AFT executive board for permission to do exactly what is described here. She understands that many members of the AFT do not trust the Gates Foundation, do not like Bill Gates’ public statements such as encouraging larger class sizes, or his unwavering commitment to measuring teacher quality by student test scores, despite the lack of evidence for its efficacy. I welcome this change and thank Randi and the AFT for severing ties with the Gates Foundation. Gates and Pearson have bought most of American education. Those who represent teachers should be free of their influence.

By Caitlin Emma

With help from Stephanie Simon

EXCLUSIVE: AFT SHUNS GATES FUNDING: The American Federation of Teachers ended a five-year relationship with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation after rank-and-file union members expressed deep distrust of the foundation’s approach to education reform. AFT President Randi Weingarten told Morning Education the union will no longer accept Gates money for its Innovation Fund, which was founded in 2009 and has received up to $1 million a year in Gates grants ever since. The Innovation Fund has sponsored AFT efforts to help teachers implement the Common Core standards – a Gates priority – among other initiatives.

– Weingarten said she didn’t believe Gates funding influenced the Innovation Fund’s direction, but still had to sever the relationship. “I got convinced by the level of distrust I was seeing – not simply on Twitter, but in listening to members and local leaders – that it was important to find a way to replace Gates funding,” she said. Weingarten plans to ask members to vote this summer on a dues hike of 5 cents per month, which she said would raise $500,000 a year for the Innovation Fund.

– The Innovation Fund isn’t the only AFT initiative funded by the Gates Foundation. Since 2010, the union has received more than $10 million. The AFT’s executive council hasn’t formally voted to reject Gates funding for other projects, but Weingarten said she would be very cautious about taking such grants. “I don’t want to say ‘never never ever ever,'” she said, but “this is a matter of making common bond with our members and really listening to the level of distrust they have in the philanthropies and the people on high who are not listening to them.”

– Vicki Phillips, who runs the Gates Foundation’s education division, said her team is “disappointed by Randi’s decision.” She called the AFT “an important thought partner” for the foundation. “We continue to applaud the work of the Innovation Fund grantees to engage teachers in improving teaching and learning in their local communities,” Phillips said.

Categories Common Core, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Unions

Burris: Will New York Legislature Choose New Members for State Board of Regents?

By dianeravitch
March 9, 2014 //
2

The New York Legislature will decide whether to reappoint four members of the New York Regents on Tuesday. All four have passively supported the botched implementation of the Common Core and CC testing. They should be replaced.

A message from award-winning Long Island principal Carol Burris:

 

This Tuesday, the NY legislature will vote yea or nay on the re-appointment of the 4 incumbent Regents.  Often New Yorkers hear that the legislature does not control education policy and therefore there is little that can be done to influence the course of testing and the Common Core.
This, the appointment of the Regents, is a NY representative’s  best and most direct opportunity to influence educational policy and be responsive to the thousands who came out to express their unhappiness at forums across New York State.  
The Regents cannot be allowed to shirk this important duty. Do not let them off the hook.
New Yorkers write to your representative and send a simple message: Vote “no” for the re-appointment of the four incumbents. Even if that means four seats not filled, it sends a powerful message of change. If teachers are to be held accountable, those who make policy should be too. Follow up with a phone call.
Let them know you will be watching.
You can find their contact information here:
Assembly: http://assembly.state.ny.us/mem/
Senate: http://www.nysenate.gov
twitter #RejectTheRegents
Categories Common Core, New York

Peter Greene: Brookings Institution Wins the Gold for “Most Clueless” CCSS Defense

By dianeravitch
March 9, 2014 //
40

Peter Greene, high school teacher and blogger in Pennsylvania, is a master analyst of rhetoric. He particularly excels at spotting vapid commentary by non-educators who want to tell him how to conduct his classroom. Fortunately or unfortunately, this might well be a full-time job since there is an education industry of non-educators fully prepared to tell him how to teach.

In this post, he selects a pair of economists at the Brookings Institution for what he calls the “most clueless” commentary on the Common Core.

He writes:

“Their starting point is simple. The CCSS “are under attack from the right and the left. Liberals fear that policy makers will use the standards to punish teachers. Conservatives believe the Common Core is an attempt by the federal government to take over schools.” Oversimplified version of the opposition, but okay. Their goal is to mount “a fresh defense of the Common Core.”

“They explain how educational standards are supposed to work in paragraphs that seem designed to explain human schools to Martians (or, perhaps, economists). They summarize many of the objections to the CCSS, and get most of the major ones into a few sentences, including referencing the research that shows no connection between standards and student achievement.

“And then this “fresh defense” goes off the rails.

“Common Core will succeed where past standards based reform efforts have failed,” they boldly declare. Why, you ask? Sadly for this “fresh defense,” you already know all the answers.

“The CCSS were designed with teacher, researcher, and pedagogy expert feedback. This is duly cited with a reference to the CCSS website, so you know it must be true. A recent analysis of standards show that the Core are better than many states (citing the Fordham Institute research bought and paid for by CCSS backers).

“The CCSS assessments are better. You can even take them on computers! The authors argue that this is better because computer testing is cheaper (!), it eliminates written answers (hard to score!) and can include accommodations for special needs students (someday, probably). And those tests can be adaptive so that they match the skill level of the student. Not a word about test validity, but hey– at least they’re cheap, right?”

And he adds: “Eventually we arrive at a point. “Standards…are meant to simplify complicated problems.” And here’s our next standard talking point. “We ask too much of teachers. It is unreasonable to give them a classroom full of students and take full responsibility for teaching them on their own.” And I’ll take a moment here to get a glass of water so I can do a spit take. Yes, teachers– we need CCSS because our jobs are too hard for us. Why, gosh, thanks, boys.”

And sadly concludes:

“I actually scrolled back to make sure I wasn’t accidentally reading something from five years ago. But no– yesterday’s date. So with that, I award Brookings the gold medal for Most Clueless CCSS Commentary of 2014. Boys, sadly. your “fresh defense” is a collection of time-worn, over-used, discredited CCSS talking points. I mean, it does have the virtue of cramming as many of them into one space as I have ever seen. But fresh? I’ve seen fresher things on the Sci-Fi channel on a Saturday afternoon.”

Categories Common Core

Katie Lapham: The Failure of Common Core Testing in New York=Child Abuse

By dianeravitch
March 8, 2014 //
21

Katie Lapham, a teacher in New York City, here recounts the disaster of Common Core testing in New York state. 

She wonders why children who don’t speak English are supposed to pass a high-stakes exam, with only one exemption.

She wonders why she, their teacher, will get no information about student performance except a score–no information about what her students learned and what they did not learn, just a score for each of them.

She wonders why anyone thinks this regime is good for children or for education.

When Katie returned from the Network for Public Education meeting in Austin last week, she was shocked to learn about the state’s policy for testing newcomers to our country:

 

When I returned from Texas, I discovered that the New York State Education Department (NYSED) had released its School Administrator’s Manual for the 2014 Common Core Math and ELA tests for grades 3-8. It is a whopping 86-pages long, and its treatment of ELLs is  particularly draconian.  Here’s an excerpt.

page 9 – Testing English-language learners

  • Schools are permitted to exempt from the 2014 Common Core English Language Arts Tests only those English language learners (including those from Puerto Rico) who, on April 1, 2014, will have been attending school in the United States for the first time for less than one year.
  • Recently arrived English language learners may be eligible for one, and only one, exemption from the administration of the 2014 Grades 3–8 Common Core English Language Arts Tests.
  • Subject to this limitation, schools may administer the New York State English as a Second Language Achievement Test (NYSESLAT) in lieu of the 2014 Grades 3–8 Common Core English Language Arts Tests, for participation purposes only, to recently arrived English language learners who meet the criterion above. All other English language learners must participate in the 2014 Grades 3–8 Common Core English Language Arts Tests, as well as in the NYSESLAT.
  • The provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) do not permit any exemption of English language learners from the 2014 Grades 3–8 Common Core Mathematics Tests. These tests are available in Chinese (traditional), Haitian-Creole, Korean, Russian, and Spanish. The tests can be translated orally into other languages for those English language learners whose first language is one for which a written translation is not available from the Department.

That’s right niños, only ONE exemption is allowed from the ELA. After just 12 months in our school system, you will be subjected to the same horror show as the rest of the state’s public school students in grades 3-8. Don’t worry, the state has generously offered to give you extended time (time and a half) on the tests; instead of 90 minutes per day for six days (3 days for ELA, 3 days for math), 5th grade ELLs, for example, are entitled to 135 minutes each testing day. That’s a total of 13.5 hours! As for the Common Core math test, there’s no getting off the hook the first year you are here because state provides translation services! And after all that, in May we are going to assess your English-language proficiency level by giving you a lengthy, four-part test in speaking, listening, reading and writing. NYSED has been hard at work aligning the NYSESLAT (New York State English as a Second Language Achievement Test) to the Common Core State Standards. It’s now more rigorous than ever before!

 

New York state has already become the poster state for botched implementation. It looks like it will get worse, certainly for the students and teachers.

Categories Common Core, New York, Testing

Erin Osborne: Keep Profiteers Out of the Classroom!

By dianeravitch
March 8, 2014 //
54

Erin Osborne warns in this powerful article at Salon.com that the profiteers are invading the classroom. They aren’t just selling pencils and textbooks. They are creating business ventures to make millions from controlling and directing the curriculum and testing, supplying the software and hardware that the new curriculum and testing requires.

Tellingly, she titles her article: “Keep Fox News Out of the Classroom! Rupert Murdoch, Common Core, and the Dangerous Rise of For-Profit Public Education.”

Arne Duncan spins a narrative that the Common Core standards mark a brilliant new direction for American education, in which achievement gaps will disappear as every child learns the exact same lessons in the same sequence in every state and school district.

But Osborne sees something else:

America’s most recent education reform, the Common Core State Standards, has divided teachers and parents across the United States. Whether or not the standards mark a step in the right direction for the education system, one thing is for sure. For the first time in American history, businesses are able to freely tap into the K-12 market on a large scale, and they aren’t waiting.

Make no mistake, she writes, the Common Core standards were designed to create a national market for goods and services (Joanne Weiss, tapped by Secretary Duncan to run Race to the Top, said that this was the purpose of national standards). Now, entrepreneurs are devising plans to get rich from taxpayer dollars:

How have the authors proposed we track the success of this reform? Testing, and lots of it. Along with the Common Core come two new major testing consortiums called SmarterBalanced and Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers. Forget your No. 2 pencil; these aren’t the bubble tests you remember from school but adaptive computer testing that is required two to three times a year for every student in every grade. From the SmarterBalanced website, “The full suite of summative, interim, and formative assessments is estimated to cost $27.30 per student … These costs are estimates because a sizable portion of the cost is for test administration and scoring services that will not be provided by Smarter Balanced; states will either provide these services directly or procure them from vendors in the private sector.”

Big business in education isn’t new. Pearson and McGraw-Hill have dominated the textbook market while the College Board, makers of the SAT and Advanced Placement courses, are the veritable gatekeepers to higher education. The entire U.S. education system has been valued at nearly $1.5 trillion, second only to the healthcare industry. As media mogul Rupert Murdoch said after acquiring education company Amplify (previously known as Wireless Generations), “When it comes to K-12 education, we see a $500 billion sector in the U.S. alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed by big breakthroughs that extend the reach of great teaching.”

Until the creation of Common Core, businesses have found breaking into the K-12 market very difficult. States have historically written their own curriculums and standards, buying suitable materials and textbooks as they saw fit. Creating content that was accessible to multiple states was difficult and being able to approach the districts within their tiny budget window was nearly impossible. The nuanced field of state, local and federal funding and regulations that companies are forced to navigate takes years to master and states were the ones controlling the checkbook.

From a business point of view, why go to them when you can make them come to you? Many of the people who financially aided the creation of Common Core have investments in place in companies that would do quite well with the standards implementation. By using financial clout and political connections, billionaires, not teachers, were able to influence the landscape of our education system. If states wanted a chunk of the RttT money, they had to adopt Common Core. If they adopt Common Core, they have to pay for the assessments and proprietary materials that come with it. Products that are “Common Core Aligned” have flung the door to K-12 wide open. Still not convinced Common Core is more about money than education? Check out the American Girl back-to-school accessory set children can buy, complete with a mini Common Core-aligned Pearson textbook.

Osborne notes the number of start-ups that have jumped into the education business, seeing this lucrative market, and she also notes that most start-ups don’t survive:

Given the growing emphasis on technology in the classroom plus Silicon Valley’s affinity for gadgets, there are dozens of start-ups trying to cash in on the new market. Rupert Murdoch’s company Amplify has created its own tablet and Common Core-aligned games. According to CNBC, the amount of venture capital invested in education start-ups quadrupled, from $154 million in 2003 to $630 million in 2012.

Mick Hewitt, co-founder and CEO of education start-up MasteryConnect, said earlier this year, “I would be wrong if I said the Common Core and the dollars around it haven’t driven a lot of the activity for us.” MasteryConnect raised more than $5.2 million in investments, $1.1 million of which came from the NewSchools Venture Fund, which in turn has received more than $16 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation since 2010. Hewitt does not have an education background.

Note the investment in this particular start-up by the NewSchools Venture Fund. NSVF is the epicenter of the for-profit approach to education. Its CEO Ted Mitchell was nominated by the Obama administration to become Undersecretary of Education, the second most powerful job in the Department. NSVF is not known as a friend of public education, but as a source of funding and strategy for charter chains, charter schools, and for-profit ventures.

It should not be surprising, really, that Secretary Duncan picked the head of NSVF to become #2 at the Department of Education. In 2009, he asked Joanne Weiss, who was then the CEO of NSVF to run Race to the Top. Once the Race to the Top competition was completed, Weiss then became Duncan’s chief of staff. Weiss memorably described the rationale for the Common Core this way in a blog for the Harvard Business Review:

The development of common standards and shared assessments radically alters the market for innovation in curriculum development, professional development, and formative assessments. Previously, these markets operated on a state-by-state basis, and often on a district-by-district basis. But the adoption of common standards and shared assessments means that education entrepreneurs will enjoy national markets where the best products can be taken to scale.

This was certainly the first time in history that the U.S. Department of Education created a program whose purpose was to stimulate new markets for entrepreneurs and investment.

Erin Osborne is an active member of the Education Bloggers Network, a group of bloggers who support public education. These were her first reflections on the recent conference of the Network for Public Education.

Categories Common Core, Education Industry, For-Profit, U.S. Department of Education

Researcher: Most “Common Core-Aligned” Textbooks Are Shams

By dianeravitch
March 8, 2014 //
95

Professor Bill Schmidt of Michigan State University told the Education Writers Association that most textbooks claiming o be aligned to the Common Core are not. The publishers slapped a sticker on the book and changed very little or nothing. Most textbooks he reviewed were a “sham,” sold by “snake oil salesmen.”

“Hoping to boost their share of a $9 billion annual market, many publishers now boast that their textbooks are “common-core aligned” and so can help spur the dramatic shifts in classroom instruction intended by the new standards for English/language arts and math.
But in a Feb. 21 presentation of his research at a seminar in Los Angeles hosted by the Education Writers Association, William Schmidt, a professor of statistics and education at Michigan State University in East Lansing, dismissed most purveyors of such claims as “snake oil salesmen” who have done little more than slap shiny new stickers on the same books they’ve been selling for years.

“Mr. Schmidt, who also co-directs the university’s Education Policy Center, and his team recently analyzed about 700 textbooks from 35 textbook series for grades K-8 that are now being used by 60 percent of public school children in the United States. Of those that purported to be aligned with the new standards, he said, some were “page by page, paragraph by paragraph” virtually identical to their old, pre-common-core versions.

“University of Southern California professor Morgan Polikoff, meanwhile, reached a similar conclusion after analyzing seven 4th grade math textbooks used in Florida. Despite publishers’ claims, the books were “only modestly aligned to the common core” and “systematically failed to reach the higher levels of cognitive demand” called for in the new standards, Mr. Polikoff said in a presentation to the EWA.”

Categories Common Core, Education Industry

John Thompson: An Early Post-Mortem for Common Core

By dianeravitch
March 7, 2014 //
85

John Thompson, an experienced teacher and historian, is convinced that Common Core will die unless there is a moratorium on high-stakes testing.

The early returns from states that have tested the “rigorous” Common Core show high failure rates, especially among poor and minority youth.

Thompson writes:

Real world, there are only so many hours in a day, and time is running out on the opportunity to supply materials, training and, above all, the supports that low-income students will need to meet Common Core standards. Soon, we will face the logistical, political, and legal consequences of denying high school diplomas to students because they failed Common Core and “Common Core-type” graduation examinations, without having an opportunity to be taught Common Core or “Common Core-type” material.

How will we respond to failure rates of 50-60-70% of more among the neediest students?

But that’s not all.

Using the Common Core test results to evaluate teachers is causing massive demoralization among teachers.

The rush to implement Common Core–without proper preparation of students or teachers, with appropriate materials, without a massive investment in instruction–has caused a perfect storm of hostility, pushback, and resentment among both parents and educators.

Students are being hurt by this reckless experiment.

I won’t name names, but I will say that I recently heard a major national figure in education candidly state that “the Common Core is dead.”

Maybe yes, maybe no.

Maybe, like a chicken whose neck was wrung off, it is still running around in circles, unaware that it is dead.

To date, the course corrections have been phony.

The standards must be decoupled from the tests.

Teachers should not be evaluated by scores on tests that do not reflect their skill as teachers, but do reflect who was in their classroom.

The standards must be thoroughly reviewed by expert practitioners in every state, including early childhood educators and specialists in teaching children with disabilities.

Otherwise, the Common Core indeed will be a footnote in history.

Categories Common Core, Education Reform, Teacher Evaluations, Testing

Georgia: Legislators Dumbing Down the Kids and the State

By dianeravitch
March 5, 2014 //
7

There are people who hate public education and don’t care much about any kind of education. Some are legislators. Some have positions of influence in states like Georgia.

Here Maureen Downey writes about the latest legislative assault, which started as an attack on Common Core and grew into something far worse.

As one who has been critical of Common Core in its current form, I want to disassociate myself from this extremism. I think the Common Core should be revised by every state’s best teachers and improved. I think the early grades must be made developmentally appropriate. I don’t believe any set of standards is beyond improvement. I also hope they will be decoupled from high-stakes testing. What is happening in Georgia is legislative meddling at its worst.

Downey writes:

“In capitulating to extremists who consider Common Core the work of the devil and/or Barack Obama, the state Senate passed a bill last week that isolates Georgia from the rest of the nation, sets our students up for failure and reverses the progress schools have made over the last eight years.

“The main intent of Senate Bill 167 bill was to ban the Common Core State Standards in Georgia.

“It no longer does that, which is good considering Georgia has already invested years into putting the standards into practice, training teachers and rewriting curriculum. In a compromise with the governor who didn’t want a Common Core battle in an election year, the bill was changed so it doesn’t ban Common Core, but sets up a review of the standards.

“That compromise explains why the bill passed the Senate so easily last week and with little debate. But senators should have read the 18-page bill a little more closely as it still contains plenty of bad stuff, including a prohibition on embracing any new content or tests that even smack of national standards. Let’s hope that wiser minds prevail in the House and put the brakes on this bill, either killing it completely or rewriting it to get rid of all the mandates.

“The bill still states: On and after the effective date of this Code section, the state shall not adopt any federally prescribed content standards or any national content standards established by a consortium of states or a third party, including, but not limited to, the Next Generation Science Standards, the National Curriculum for Social Studies, the National Health Education Standards, or the National Sexuality Standards.”

“Imagine telling Georgia doctors they couldn’t use any cancer treatments developed by medical teams or labs outside the state. Patients would riot in the streets. So should parents over this piece of legislation.”

Categories Common Core, Georgia

Microsoft and Pearson Join Forces to Create Common Core Curriculum: Are You $urprised?

By dianeravitch
March 5, 2014 //
110

A reader forwarded the following story.

Microsoft and Pearson will join forces to build “the first curriculum…for a digital personalized learning environment that is 100 percent aligned to the new standards for college and career readiness.”

Now we see the pattern on the rug.

It begins like this:

New York, NY (PRWEB) February 20, 2014

Today Pearson announced a collaboration with Microsoft Corp. that brings together the world’s leading learning company and the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions to create new applications and advance a digital education model that prepares students to thrive in an increasingly personalized learning environment. The first collaboration between the two global companies will combine Pearson’s Common Core System of Courses with the groundbreaking capabilities of the Windows 8 touchscreen environment. The Common Core System of Courses is the first curriculum built for a digital personalized learning environment that is 100 percent aligned to the new standards for college and career readiness.

“Pearson has accelerated the development of personalized digital learning environments to improve educational outcomes as well as increase student engagement,” said Larry Singer, Managing Director for Pearson’s North American School group. “Through this collaboration with Microsoft, the global leader in infrastructure and productivity tools for schools, we are creating a powerful force for helping schools leverage this educational model to accelerate student achievement and, ultimately, ensure that U.S. students are more competitive on the global stage.”

“Personalized learning for every student is a worthy and aspirational goal. By combining the power of touch, type, digital inking, multitasking and split-screen capabilities that Windows 8 with Office 365 provides with these new Pearson applications, we’re one step closer to enabling an interactive and personalized learning environment,” said Margo Day, vice president, U.S. Education, Microsoft Corp. “We’re in the middle of an exciting transformation in education, with technology fueling the movement and allowing schools to achieve this goal of personalized learning for each student.”

In addition, iLit, Pearson’s core reading program aimed at closing the adolescent literacy gap, will be optimized for the Windows 8 platform. Designed based on the proven instructional model found in the Ramp Up Literacy program, which demonstrated students gaining two years of growth in a single year, iLit offers students personalized learning support based on their own instructional needs, engaging interactivities, and built-in reward systems that motivate students and track their progress.

Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/pr/1748922#ixzz2uLL0Nx7J

Categories Common Core, Education Industry, For-Profit, Pearson

Peter Greene: Why the “Reformers” Will Lose

By dianeravitch
March 4, 2014 //
21

Peter Greene writes here on why the “reformers” will lose.

The subject of my speech at the NPE conference was “Why We Will Win.” I will post it when I find the link in a few minutes.

Peter notes that no one espouses the “reformer” agenda unless they are paid to do so.

On our side, as we saw at the NPE conference in Austin, everyone is a passionate and knowledgeable volunteer, unpaid and deeply concerned first and foremost about children and the future of our society and the survival of a basic public institution–our public schools.

When I read his post, I was reminded of a brief exchange I had with the reporter from the Wall Street Journal, who stopped by our conference for a few minutes, on her way to SXSW, which enlists every imaginable corporate sponsor, from Pearson to Amplify, to dozens of others.

We talked about the issue of money and profits. She said, to my shock, “There are people on both sides looking to make money.” I waved my hand across the room of education activists and said, Who here is making money? The teachers making $40,000 a year? The parents? Everyone here paid their own way, or we supplemented their expenses. We have no corporate sponsors. We have no union sponsors. Who is making money?” I am still waiting for an answer.

Oh, I did admit that Randi Weingarten gave us money. She joined as an individual member and paid $20.

Categories Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Network for Public Education
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