This mom was taken aback by Arne Duncan’s put down of “white suburban moms” who are disappointed to learn that their child is not so brilliant.
This mom has actually read the Common Core standards and has serious doubts about them. She can’t understand why Duncan disrespects her ability to think and reason for herself.
The New York Times summed up the universally hostile response that Commissioner King has received from parents and educators in New York at an ongoing series of forums about Common Core and its botched implementation.
King should use these meetings to apologize for setting absurd cut scores (passing marks), aligned with “proficient” on NAEP, which is not a pass-fail mark, but represents solid achievement of a high order. He should have apologized for testing students on material they had not been taught. He should have apologized to teachers for threatening to evaluate them on the new scores when they had not been prepared to teach the Common Core.
Instead he made clear that he has no intention to change course.
Out comes the usual charge that the critics are led and manipulated by the teachers’ union, even though the union supports the Common Core. This is a variation on Arne Duncan’s claim that “white suburban moms” are disappointed that their child is not so brilliant after all.
The subtext is that suburban parents are dumb and are easily led by “outside agitators,” they don’t know what’s good for their children, they are being used, they don’t want high standards, etc.
Really, people in high public office should show respect for the public, not disdain. They should remember they are public servants, not bosses with unlimited power.
TeacherKen, aka Kenneth Bernstein, posted this statement by a parent on his blog at the Daily Kos.
Arne Duncan unleashed a firestorm when he asserted that parent opposition to Common Core testing stemmed from the disappointment felt by “white suburban mothers” when they found out that their child was really not brilliant and that their public school was not so good after all.
The mother who wrote this post was told again and again that her child was not brilliant. She fought for him. He prevailed. She doesn’t want him or other children to be judged by Arne Duncan’s “rigorous” standards.
It is hard to unpack exactly what Duncan had in mind when he spoke disparagingly of America’s children, their teachers, and their schools.. He seems to think that American children have too high an opinion of themselves and he thinks most of them need to be brought down a few pegs. And he has a very low opinion of most public schools.
I wonder what kind of a coach Duncan would be. Would he tell the players day after day that they are terrible and consider that he was providing leadership?
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.
New York is not known as a Tea Party state, but it does have large numbers of suburban moms and dads who care about their children and who are well-educated.
Here is an account of State Commissioner John King’s public forum in Mineola, Long Island, where hundreds of angry parents and educators turned out to reject the state’s Common Core testing.
How many more public beatings will John King subject himself to before he begins to admit he might be wrong? Is that possible? He listens but he does not hear.
A comment from a reader in response to Arne Duncan’s statement that white suburban moms are angry because the Common Core tests just showed them that their child is not so brilliant and their school is not so good:
“This angry, white, suburban mom IS angry–but it’s not because I was delusional that my children are “brilliant” or that our suburban public schools aren’t that good. We have funding issues, to be sure, but that has NOTHING to do with the amazing teachers, staff and kids. This angry mom gets the national and state agenda to try to get us to run away–FAST–from our traditional well-loved schools. And it’s not going to work if we keep pointing out their warped and sneaky agenda!
Nice part about insulting white, suburban moms is that we get ANGRY! And we love to gossip! And we love social media! So bring it on, Arne. You have just angered some pretty protective she-bears…”
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan told a meeting of the Council of Chief State School Officers that the suburban revolt against Common Core has a simple explanation: white suburban moms are discovering that their children are not as brilliant as they thought, and their schools are not as good as they thought.
Here is a description of his remarks and the rationale behind them.
According to blogger Rick Hess, the appalling results of the Common Core tests were supposed to set off a suburban uprising against their public schools and unleash a demand for vouchers and charters. Hess thought it was unlikely, and he was right. Suburban moms and dads of all races–not just whites–are angry at the Common Core, angry at the tests, angry at the state officials who seem determined to hurt their children and destroy their community public schools.
Duncan apparently thinks American students are mostly dumb, and US schools are awful.
Other supporters of the Common Core share his low opinion of our youth.
In July 2012, Jeb Bush–one of the strongest proponents of the Common Core–warned that when the states begin to release the Common Core test results, there would be a “train wreck” and “a rude awakening.” Since Bush is an avid proponent of charters, vouchers, and e-schooling, one may safely assume that he anticipated a flight from public schools to those alternatives, as failure rates were released.
In New York, the fly in the ointment was that with only a few exceptions, the charter schools fared even worse on the Common Core tests than the public schools.
Up until now, Duncan had been blaming the pushback to the Common Core on the Tea Party and extremists.
He really doesn’t get it.
Bottom line: Suburban parents–moms and dads of all races–blame the tests, not their kids or their teachers. They know this is a manufactured crisis (hat tip to Berliner and Biddle). Their kids are not failures. The Common Core tests are.
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.”
New York’s Teacher of the Year testified to the State Senate Education Committee that the education evaluation system made it impossible for her to be rated “highly effective” because of the “dysfunctional implementation” of the Common Core standards.
Kathleen Ferguson, the New York State Teacher of the year, was also the teacher of the year in her school district, and has won several awards for excellence in teaching.
Yet, she told a Senate Education Committee hearing on the state’s new Common Core standards, under the new rules, even she could not score a rating of highly effective in the new teacher evaluations.
The reason, she said, is that her marks were based in part on student test scores. She teaches second graders with special needs, who are often behind the level of other children in their grade. But the new standards permit no exemptions for her students.
“This system does not make sense,” Ferguson said.
Ferguson said her students were required to take pretests for almost the entire first month of school. The pre-tests are used to measure what students don’t know. They are used as a comparison for their performance on tests given at the end of the school year, after they have actually been taught the material. The test scores are then used as part of the new process of teacher evaluations required under terms of federal grants worth millions of dollars that the state has received.
At some point in the future, historians will look back on this era and remember it as a time of child abuse and teacher abuse by government diktat.
Dan Drmacich was principal of Rochester’s School Without Walls. He is now head of that city’s Coalition for Justice in Education. He read an opinion piece in the local paper by Xerox CEO Ursula Burns touting the virtues of the Common Core and decided he needed to respond. He concluded she had no idea what she was talking about.
He argued that her essay demonstrated why corporate executives like Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and Burns should stop telling educators what to do.
One by one, he took apart her flawed claims.
And he concluded by saying:
“To adequately implement any major education change, meaningful practitioner involvement must be a major part of the change process (in this case, teachers, curriculum experts and motivation researchers), along with field-testing and fine-tuning the processes, before it is fully implemented. I am sure Burns would not initiate any organizational change as complex as Common Core at Xerox without first using research-based processes.”
