Archives for category: Common Core
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Duncan Says Gates Has No Seat at the Education Policy Table

By dianeravitch
January 24, 2014 //
83

Anthony Cody comments on a startling conversation between two teachers and Secretary of Education Duncan.

The conversation appears on a video.

One of the teachers asks him about the role of philanthropists such as Eli Broad and Bill Gates in setting education policy.

Consider this astonishing exchange:

“Lisa Clarke:

“One of the particular questions we’ve heard teachers ask is if corporate-based philanthropists are playing too heavy a role in public education, and if there’s a corporate agenda at the Department.

“Arne Duncan:

“I think that’s a very important question of what role does philanthropy or the corporate side have, and anyone who thinks that those who are major donors to education, or those giving a lot, have a seat at the table in terms of policymaking, nothing could be further from the truth.”

Read that line again.

“Nothing could be further from the truth.”

Then read Anthony Cody’s description of how Bill gates paid for every aspect of the Common Core standards that Arne vociferously advocates.

“Nothing could be further from the truth.”

Others can parse how many seats Eli Broad has at the policy table, but it would be hard to find someone who thinks he has none.

Categories Common Core, Duncan, Arne, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates

“What Are We Willing to Stand Up For?” Why Parents Opt Out of Testing

By dianeravitch
January 23, 2014 //
9

Rebecca Mead has written a brilliant blog post for “The New Yorker” explaining why parents plan to opt their children out of NewYork’s Common Core testing in 2014.

It Is as succinct an explanation as I have read, and it is vivid because the writer is a parent in a progressive public school that teaches students to think for themselves. The principal of the Brooklyn New School has spoken out against the cruel and unusual demands of the tests but she must comply, by law.

The parents, however, have a special interest: their children.

Mead begins:

“Anna Allanbrook, the principal of the Brooklyn New School, a public elementary school in Carroll Gardens, has long considered the period of standardized testing that arrives every spring to be a necessary, if unwelcome, phase of the school year. Teachers and kids would spend limited time preparing for the tests. Children would gain familiarity with “bubbling in,” a skill not stressed in the school’s progressive, project-based curriculum. They would become accustomed to sitting quietly and working alone—a practice quite distinct from the collaboration that is typically encouraged in the school’s classrooms, where learners of differing abilities and strengths work side by side. (My son is a third grader at the school.) Come the test days, kids and teachers would get through them, and then, once the tests were over, they would get on with the real work of education.

“Last spring’s state tests were an entirely different experience, for children and for teachers. Teachers invigilating the exams were shocked by ambiguous test questions, based, as they saw it, on false premises and wrongheaded educational principles. (One B.N.S. teacher, Katherine Sorel, eloquently details her objections on WNYC’s SchoolBook blog.) Others were dismayed to see that children were demoralized by the relentlessness of the testing process, which took seventy minutes a day for six days, with more time allowed for children with learning disabilities. One teacher remarked that, if a tester needs three days to tell if a child can read “you are either incompetent or cruel. I feel angry and compromised for going along with this.” Another teacher said that during each day of testing, at least one of her children was reduced to tears. A paraprofessional—a classroom aide who works with children with special needs—called the process “state-sanctioned child abuse.” One child with a learning disability, after the second hour of the third day, had had enough. “He only had two questions left, but he couldn’t keep going,” a teacher reported. “He banged his head on the desk so hard that everyone in the room jumped.”

Mead gets it. Read the whole article. Testing has spun out of control. It is consuming time and resources needed for teaching and learning.

This can’t continue. When little children are tested more than those who take the bar, you must know something is terribly wrong.

The school asks its fifth-grade students: “What are we willing to stand up for?”

The parents will answer this spring, not only at the Brooklyn New School, but in many schools and districts and states.

Categories Common Core, Parents, Pearson, Resistance, Students, Testing

Peter Greene: John King Said What??

By dianeravitch
January 23, 2014 //
10

I didn’t plan to say anything at all about Néw York Commissioner John King’s tasteless commentary on Martin Luther King Day. He twisted logic and common sense to claim that adopting Common Core was somehow a fulfillment of Dr. King’s noble vision of justice and equality. I thought it best to let it pass unremarked.

But Peter Greene, who has a keen sense of language, literacy, and simple decency decided not to let it pass. He was taken aback by our state commissioner’s ideogical posturing.

Read it and….well, do. Close reading.

Categories Common Core

A Video of My Talk in Bedford, NY, about Common Core, Teacher Evaluation, and the Mess Caused by Federal Policy

By dianeravitch
January 22, 2014 //
21

I spoke at Fox Lane High School in Bedford, New York, on January 16.

Here is a video of my talk. 

I explain how federal policy has taken control of every public school in the nation, promoting policies that have no research or evidence behind them, closing schools, and causing demoralization among teachers and administrators.

I recommend a moratorium for testing of the Common Core.

I recommend regular reviews of the standards by the state’s teachers and scholars. No standards are perfect. These are not. They should be reviewed and revised where appropriate.

Be not afraid of authority.

We live  in a democracy. Take responsibility for your schools and your children.

I suggest that there is one way to fight back and restore sanity in education: Contact your legislators. Now.

Categories Common Core, Testing

Diana Senechal: How NOT to Read a Poem

By dianeravitch
January 19, 2014 //
60

Diana Senechal demonstrates how the Common Core standards may be misinterpreted. She gives the example of a video lesson purporting to teach students how to interpret a poem, in this instance William Wordworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” familiarly known as “The Daffodils.”

Students are supposed to summarize each stanza in their own words and write it on a sticky note, according to the instructor on the video. This almost makes Diana scream, “No!”

She writes:

“I question the premise that this is a helpful activity. The reason poetry is worth reading in the first place is that it makes singular use of language; it cannot be translated into prose. Restating a stanza in your own words takes you away from the language of the poem itself. Yes, some poems have complex constructions that need to be teased apart, but that does not have to involve restatement; or when it does, one can restate the specific construction, not an entire stanza. To restate a stanza is to stop it at the border and say, “You may not cross over into my mind with your own goods; you must exchange them for mine.”

And she explains that there are far better ways to teach poetry.

Is this a problem inherent in the Common Core standards or the implementation or something else? All three, she argues.

Categories Common Core, Curriculum

Paul Horton: Why We Need to Tell Stories About Our Lives

By dianeravitch
January 19, 2014 //
40

Paul Horton, who teaches history at the University of Chicago Lab School, here ponders a famous remark by David Coleman, architect of the Common Core standards. Coleman said, while giving a speech in New York that was taped, that students need to learn that no one gives a s— about what you think or feel, which was his way of saying that your opinions and feelings matter little in the world, as compared to the ability to write or read a memo or informational text.

He writes:

Perhaps more studies are needed to determine whether there is a similar bundled connection between exposure to narrative stories and creative writing and the development of social and emotional intelligence, empathy, tolerance, and sensitivity to the needs of others. To take things a step further, our codes of ethics, morality, and connection to the spiritual dimensions of experience have always been intertwined with our reading and writing about sacred texts, great poetry, and great literature.

When we marginalize storytelling, literary fiction, and creative writing within K-12 language curricula in favor of nonfiction documents and the construction of analytical memos that might please Pearson Education, McKinsey consulting, and Bill Gates; we risk losing something more important than the ability to construct analytical memos.

To do so would be to risk severing our connection to the rest of humanity, to fall away into the cold, endless, zero gravitational space: the existential reality of the jackhammering of human connection that is the object of uninhibited capitalism.

Categories Common Core

Peter Greene Reviews Fordham’s Wacky Video

By dianeravitch
January 18, 2014 //
21

Peter Greene, an English teacher and blogger in Pennsylvania, reviewed the wild and wacky video made by the staff at the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Apparently the kids there wanted the world to see them as fun-loving buddies who can laugh at themselves, but Greene thinks it didn’t work. Despite the high production values, there is something unfunny about Fordham’s policy ideas (no to smaller classes, yes to Common Core).

Greene, you will note, updated his post at a time when he was teaching William Faulkner’s Light in August to high school students, a task we may assume is as valuable (more valuable?) to society than having a desk job in Washington and telling the nation’s teachers what they ought to be doing.

He writes:

“Final effect? People making wacky shenanigans out of policy ideas that are being used to destroy public education? It’s a hard thing to parse– how would “Springtime for Hitler” have come across if it had been staged by the Nazis themselves? I am not meaning to suggest that Fordham = Nazis, but I do wonder what we’re to make of people making themselves look more ridiculous that we could make them look on purpose.

“It is part of the tone deafness problem. I want to shake them and say, “Did you not see this? Do you not know how you look, both awkward and opposite-of-cool, while making jokes about policies being used to destroy peoples’ careers?” Somehow while shooting for cool and relaxed and with it, they’ve hit uncool and callous, thereby suggesting that they are imbued with so much hubris and arrogance that they either can’t see or don’t care (because only unimportant people will be bothered, and they don’t matter). This is the education industry equivalent of those bankers’ videos of obscenely wealthy parties, the Christmas cards from wealthy apartments, the total lack of understanding of what things are like out there on the street, because the street is just for the commoners who don’t matter.

“It’s an oddly fascinating train wreck. Is it awesomely funny because it’s so awful, or is it too awful to be funny. Whatever the case, it gives a strong 2:20 feel for what sort of attitude permeates Fordham, and it is just as bad as we ever imagined. maybe worse.”

Categories Class size, Common Core, Corporate Reformers

Maryland: Common Core Testing Will Cost $100 Million

By dianeravitch
January 18, 2014 //
32

According to a report by Valerie Strauss of the Washington Post, Maryland will spend at least $100 million for Common Core testing.

The testing is wreaking havoc in states like Néw York, where absurd failure rates have outraged parents across the states. Now we learn that the cost of all-online testing are likely to cause fiscal strain, larger classes, and cuts to necessary programs and courses. Los Angeles alone has committed $1 billion to buy iPads for Common Core testing even though class sizes are growing and the arts programs have been decimated by previous budget cuts.

Who had the brilliant idea that all testing had to be online? The vendors? Ka-Ching.

This may turn out to be the innovation that ate American education.

Categories Common Core

My Speech about Common Core to MLA

By garyrubinstein
January 18, 2014 //
36

On January 11, I spoke to the annual meeting in Chicago of the Modern Language Association about the Common Core. My talk was titled “Common Core: Past, Present, Future.”

I think readers of this blog will find it of interest.

It is about 17 pages long, so sit down.

I explain the background of the standards and explain why they have become so controversial, with critics and supporters on all points of the political spectrum–right, left, and middle.

I recommend decoupling the standards from the testing. And I recommend that the standards be reviewed, corrected, and updated on a regular basis by panels of teachers and scholars. No set of standards should be considered so sacrosanct that they can never be revised. These arrived encased in concrete.

To open the speech, click here.

Categories Common Core, Education Reform, Testing

Los Angeles: Deasy Refuses to Restore Arts Funding

By dianeravitch
January 17, 2014 //
33

Despite a board resolution in 2012 calling for a restoration of arts funding in Los Angeles, Superintendent John Deasy has refused to prepare a budget complying with the resolution.

“In 2012, the Los Angeles Unified School District board voted to make arts education a core subject in its curriculum.

“Four months ago, the board gave district officials a Dec. 3 deadline to produce a budget for the school district’s Arts Education and Creative Cultural Network Plan, which aims to prepare students for work in creative and technology-based fields by increasing arts-related course offerings and increased faculty support.

“That deadline, however, came and went without so much as a “the check’s in the mail”— leaving public school officials and parents to wonder whether music and arts funding is coming at all.

“I see this as an absolute conflict between two opposing views on what public education should look like: Those who want to see arts as a core subject, and those who are only concerned about test scores and offering students a limited education,” said Karen Wolfe, a Venice Neighborhood Council Education Committee member whose daughter attends Marina Del Rey Middle School.

“Last year the school hired a ballet teacher and began requiring all of its students to take dance classes, said Marina Del Rey Middle School Performing Arts Coordinator Nancy Pierandozzi.

“Venice High School, Mark Twain Middle School and Grand View Boulevard and Broadway elementary schools have also begun integrating performing arts content into English/language arts classes.

“That combination has for some students resulted in a drastic turnaround in attendance and academic achievement, said LAUSD board member Steve Zimmer, whose district includes schools in Mar Vista, Westchester, Del Rey and Venice.

“Author of the September resolution calling for an arts budget, Zimmer has pledged to push Supt. John Deasy for answers when school is back in session later this month.

“Deasy could not be reached.”

The district has committed to spend $1 billion to give an iPad to every student and staff member, to prepare for Common Core testing.

Categories Arts Education, Common Core, Los Angeles
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