Anthony Cody follows up his brilliant analysis of the flaws of Common Core with this thoughtful projection of what to do next.

Cody believes that the standards are fatally flawed by the absence of any democratic process or review or trial.

There is also the indisputable fact that the standards were adopted by 45 states without their review but because the federal government made the adoption of “college and career ready standards” a condition for eligibility to win Race to the Top millions. This, despite the fact that the federal government is prohibited by law from exercising any direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum, instruction, or textbooks used in schools. Promoting CCSS, as Arne Duncan does, is probably illegal.

Cody concludes:

“…there is a deeper principle at stake here. Standards developed in secret without the active participation of K12 educators, parents, students and experts from the start are not acceptable or legitimate. There may be elements of the Common Core that are worthwhile, as jpatten suggests. The trouble is, we have not had any real process to debate these standards, or try them out with real children. And as indicated before, there is no process available to alter the standards in any meaningful way. According to their sponsors, they must be adopted as is, or dumped. I say dump them. Start over. Go back and fix the process – and the new standards we end up with will be better as a result.

“And for those who just want to skip over the issue of democratic process, and take the standards as a starting point, I challenge you to stop and think about the precedent being set, and the prerogatives we are handing to both the Department of Education and the Gates Foundation. This is our chance to set a completely different precedent, which would undermine rather than reinforce the prerogatives of the powerful. Isn’t that worth doing?”

My view:

Stop the Common Core testing. The students and teachers have not been prepared for the tests.

Stop the Common Core tests. The cut scores are aligned with NAEP proficient, which is a high level of achievement and not a reasonable pass-fail mark. it is guaranteed to fail–unfairly–70% of students.

This is what I hope will happen after the testing is called to a halt.

States and districts should review the standards and see how they work in real classrooms with real students.

The K-2 standards should be dropped or revised.

The arbitrary division between literature and informational text should be eliminated. It has no basis in evidence, experience, or research. If teachers want to teach all-literature or all-informational text, that is their prerogative.

Tests should be prepared and scored by teachers, as they are in other countries. The teachers not only get instant feedback, but see what their students understood and did not understand, and also learn what they did not teach well enough for most students to understand. The current Common Core tests do not provide instant feedback or item analysis, and nothing can be learned from them other than to rank students.

Bear in mind that no one can enforce the standards as written. Will the National Governors Association or the Council of Chief State School Officers sue a dozen states to stop them from improving the standards? Not likely.

Let us not forget that the central conversation here is not about test scores. It is about children, teachers, and education. What is in the best interest of our society? The Common Core causes scores to collapse. Its boosters say that is a good thing. But in the meanwhile, they are causing havoc in the lives of children, teachers, and schools. That is not a good thing, unless you believe that disruption is a thing of beauty and that something good is sure to emerge from chaos, disappointment, outrage, crushed egos, and upheaval.

Count me skeptical.

Anthony Cody summarizes here the ten major reasons to be concerned about the Common Core standards.

Cody describes the closed-door process for writing the standards and the extremely limited review of them, which he rightly calls undemocratic.

He notes the exclusion of early childhood education experts (and might have also added the exclusion of language acquisition experts, disability experts, and regular classroom teachers), from the development of the standards. He points out that the standards are “market-driven” and aim for standardization of tests and metrics, and are indifferent to the varying and individual needs of students. They are “market-friendly,” not “student-friendly.”

And here are the clinchers:

“Error #9: The Common Core is not based on any external evidence, has no research to support it, has never been tested, and worst of all, has no mechanism for correction.

The Memorandum of Understanding signed by state leaders to opt in to the Common Core allows the states to change a scant 15% of the standards they use. There is no process available to revise the standards. They must be adopted as written. As William Mathis (2012) points out,

“As the absence or presence of rigorous or national standards says nothing about equity, educational quality, or the provision of adequate educational services, there is no reason to expect CCSS or any other standards initiative to be an effective educational reform by itself.”

Error #10: The biggest problem of American education and American society is the growing number of children living in poverty. As was recently documented by the Southern Education Fund (and reported in the Washington Post) across the American South and West, a majority of our children are now living in poverty.

The Common Core does nothing to address this problem. In fact, it is diverting scarce resources and time into more tests, more technology for the purpose of testing, and into ever more test preparation.”

This is a brief, succinct presentation by Regents Chair Merryl Tisch and State Commissioner John King in which they explain why scores plummeted across the state. The state tests were aligned with the Common Core standards, for which teachers and students had little preparation or resources. Nor had the standards previously been field-tested anywhere to see if they were age-appropriate.

It seems sort of odd to tell a third- or fourth-grade child that they failed the test and they are not college-ready. And predictably, more and more schools are giving tests to children in grades K-2 to get them ready for the Common Core tests.

I don’t really know any evidence showing that the Common Core tests measure college- and career-readiness, especially in the early and middle school grades. I do know they are aligned with NAEP achievement levels and wrongly so. New York’s definition of proficiency now produces the same proportion at that level as NAEP, but NAEP never defined “proficiency” as a pass-fail mark but as an indicator of solid academic achievement. It seems exceedingly cruel to tell three-quarters of the children in the state that they are failures by an untested and unreliable measure.

My suggestion: Suspend all state testing for at least three years until teachers have the resources and training they need. Continue to try out the standards and continue revising them so they are appropriate to the age of the students tested; so they take into account the needs of children with disabilities and English language learners. Revise the early grades and remove whatever is developmentally inappropriate. Let the teachers work with them, fix them, improve them.

Nowhere is it written that the CC standards must be adopted as written. The federal government doesn’t control them. No one is in charge of enforcing them. Let the teachers fix them.