Archives for category: Common Core
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Why “Disruption” Is Not Good for Children, Families, Schools, and Communities

By dianeravitch
August 21, 2013 //
17

Earlier today, I published Judith Shulevitz’s brilliant essay on “disruption” as a business strategy.

As we know, mega-corporations believe they must continually reinvent themselves in order to have the latest, best thing and beat their competitors, who are about to overtake them in the market.

They believe in disruption as a fundamental rule of the marketplace.

By some sloppy logic or sleight-of-hand, the financial types and corporate leaders who think they should reform the nation’s schools have concluded that the schools should also be subject to “creative disruption” or just plain “disruption.”

And so we have the unaccredited Broad Superintendents Academy, underwritten by billionaire Eli Broad, sending out superintendents who are determined to “disrupt” schools by closing them and handing them over to private management.

Unfortunately, Secretary Arne Duncan agrees that disruption is wonderful, so he applauds the idea of closing schools, opening new schools, inviting the for-profit sector to compete for scarce funds, and any other scheme that might disrupt schools as we know them.

He does this believing that U.S. education is a failed enterprise and needs a mighty shaking-up.

First, he is wrong to believe that U.S. public education is failing. I document that he is wrong in my new book, Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and The Danger to America’s Public Schools, using graphs from the U.S. Department of Education website.

Second, “disruption” is a disaster for children, families, schools, and communities.

Think of little children. They need continuity and stability, not disruption. They need adults who are a reliable presence in their lives. But, following the logic of the corporate reformers, their teachers are fired, their school is closed, everything must be brand new or the kids won’t learn.  No matter how many parents and children turn out at school board meetings to plead for the life of their neighborhood schools, the hammer falls and it is closed. This is absurd.

Think of adolescents. When they misbehave, we say they are “disruptive.” Now we are supposed that their disruptive behavior represents higher order thinking.

But no one can learn when one student in a class of thirty is disruptive.

Disruptive policies harm families because after the closing of the neighborhood school, they are expected to shop for a school. They are told they have “choice,” but the one choice denied to them is their neighborhood school. Maybe one of their children is accepted as the School of High Aspirations, but the other didn’t get accepted and is enrolled in the School for Future Leaders on the other side of town. That is not good for families.

Disruption is not good for communities. In most communities, the public school is the anchor of community life. It is where parents meet, talk about common problems, work together, and learn the fundamental processes of democratic action.

Disruption destroys local democracy. It atomizes families and communities, destroying their ability to plan and act together on behalf of their community.

By closing their neighborhood school, disruption severs people from the roots of their community. It fragments community.

It kneecaps democracy.

City after city is now suffering a “disruptive” assault on public education. Mayor Rahm Emanuel closed dozens of schools in Chicago; Mayor Michael Bloomberg closed dozens of schools in New York City; public education in Detroit is dying; Philadelphia public schools are on life support, squeezed by harsh budget cuts and corporate faith in disruption and privatization.

But the disruptive strategy won’t be confined to urban districts. As the tests for the new national Common Core standards are introduced in state after state, disruption and havoc will produce what corporate reformers are hoping for: a loss of faith in public education; a conviction that it is broken beyond repair; and a willingness to try anything, even to allow for-profit vendors to take over the responsibilities of the public sector. That is already happening in many states, where hundreds of milllions of dollars are siphoned away from public schools and handed over to disruptive commercial enterprises. It doesn’t produce better education, but it produces profits.

Maybe that is the point of disruption.

Categories Closing schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Detroit, Education Industry, For-Profit, New York City, Philadelphia

How Did NYC Charters Fare on Common Core Tests?

By dianeravitch
August 21, 2013 //
20

We have often heard that charter schools will “save poor kids trapped in failing public schools.”

We have also often heard that NYC has the best charter schools in the nation because the city chooses the authorizers so carefully and monitors them frequently.

It is interesting, therefore, to look at the performance of the charter sector on the absurdly hard Common Core tests, where most kids across the state of New York allegedly “failed.”

Here is a link to the charter scores, as reported by the New York City Charter Schools Center.

Unfortunately, the Center can’t stop boasting about how many ways the charters “beat” public schools, an obnoxious habit those folks have, when they should be interested in collaboration with public schools towards a common goal.

If you scroll down to the list of charter schools and their scores, you will find they are spread out all over the place.

Some are high, some are very low. Most are in the middle.

Some saw their 2012 proficiency rates drop more than those of public schools, as much as 50-60%.

Deborah Kenny’s much-celebrated Harlem Village Academy Leadership Charter School, for example, fell from a proficiency rate of 86.5% to 33.7%, a drop of 52.8%. (Now I understand why my interview with Katie Couric–lasting 30 minutes–never was aired. She is on the board of Kenny’s HVA, as is publishing magnate Rupert Murdoch.)

I don’t mean to pick on charter schools as such. I just think it is ridiculous that they are seen as a systemic answer to the problems of public education when they enroll so few students, have high teacher attrition, and have the freedom to exclude or push out kids they don’t want. Some have high test scores, some have low scores, but they are a distraction from the needs and problems of a city with 1.1 million public school students. I wish they were all successful. I wish all the public schools were successful. What these rotten scores show is that what we are doing now (No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top) doesn’t work.

The status quo has failed.

We need education with a human face. 1.1 million of them.

Categories Charter Schools, Common Core, Education Reform, New York City

The Upside Down World of Common Core

By dianeravitch
August 21, 2013 //
41

This is a terrific article from an unusual source: George Ball, past president of the American Horticultural Society and chairman of the Burpee Seed Company.

Ball writes:

“Frequently, these days, I’m reminded of Edward Lear’s whimsical illustration, “Manypeeplia Upsidedownia.” The drawing depicts an imagined botanical species, with a half dozen characters suspended upside down from a flower’s bending stem. It is a product of the Victorian golden age of nonsense, but it is fitting today, now that we Americans seem to have landed in our own, darker era of nonsense, one in which we take our follies seriously and act upon them. To see folly in full flower, look no further than the Common Core State Standards.

“Now adopted in 45 states, including California, and the District of Columbia, this federal effort sets uniform standards on how math and English are taught in American schools. A top-down program imposed on states in order to qualify for Race to the Top funds, the curriculum is the fruit of a process tainted with politics, vested interests and a lack of transparency.

“The Common Core Curriculum is being implemented without empirical evidence of its value, and imposed hurriedly without consulting the very people most affected: students, teachers and parents.”

Mr. Ball is under the illusion that a massive change in federal policy should be based on trial and evidence, something he may have learned from studying plants. How curious.

He notes: “In July, the state of New York announced the results of its first tests based on the Common Core: The region hasn’t been this battered since Superstorm Sandy. Just 26 percent of students in third through eighth grade passed the English exam, and only 30 percent passed the math test. In one Harlem school, just 7 percent of students received passing scores in English, and 10 percent in math. We’ve gone from No Child Left Behind to Well-Just-About-Every-Child-Left-Behind: progress of a kind. If “learned helplessness” is the Common Core’s goal, it’s a stunning success.”

He concludes with the wisdom of an expert on growing plants from seed:

“What’s lost in Common Core is the human factor. Teachers, whose performance evaluations and salary are pegged to their students’ test results, are deprived of the freedom and creativity that is the oxygen of learning. In an ever-changing world, common sense would propose a broad range of educational approaches rather than a single one designed to ready all students for college. In education, as in gardens, a monoculture is doomed to decay and eventual failure.

“After genetics, the most advanced psychological research tells us a child’s development is determined by micro-relationships – the ever-present, barely perceptible gestures, expressions and glances – that are the soul of communication, nurture and empathy.

“Common Core sacrifices the magic of teaching and learning on the altar of metrics. Teachers, students and administrators are no longer engaged in an organic process geared to the individual. Largely designed by testing experts, not teachers, the monolithic curriculum is like detailed gardening instructions from someone who has never set foot in a garden. “Grow faster!” is the experts’ motto. Well, children are not cornstalks.

“Rather than embark on this Upsidedownia national educational experiment, let’s begin at the local, really local, level: the individual child. Hire smart, empathic teachers with depth and vision, and watch our children grow into a harvest of creative, thoughtful, articulate intellects and citizens. This is, one might say, the cure for the Common Core.”

Categories Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Teachers and Teaching

A Hero Educator Who Heads a Private School in Manhattan

By dianeravitch
August 20, 2013 //
24

What does it take to be a hero educator? It takes brains, courage, integrity, and a deep understanding of education and children.

Steve Nelson, headmaster of the Calhoun School in Manhattan, is a hero educator because he has all these qualities. He wrote a brilliant article about why the Common Core won’t work.

He knows that David Coleman, the architect of the Common Core, now heads the College Board. He knows that Coleman wants to align the SAT to the Common Core, so no one can escape his handiwork, not even students in prestigious private schools.

Here is a sample of Nelson’s article.

“Actual children, as opposed to the abstraction of children as seen in policy debate, are not “standard.” Anyone with a rudimentary understanding of child development knows that children learn in different ways and different times. Some children “read” (meaning a very limited ability to recognize symbols) at age 3 or 4. I have known many students who did not read well until 8, 9 or, rarely, later. The potential (or ultimate achievement levels) of these children does not correlate with the date of reading onset.

“It is rather like walking. Children who walk at 9 months do not become better runners than children who walk at 15 months. “Standardizing” the expectation of reading, and setting curricula and tests around this expectation, is like expecting a child to walk on her first birthday. If she doesn’t, shall we get our national knickers in a knot, develop a set of walking tests, prescribe walking remediation, and, perhaps inadvertently, make her feel desperately inadequate? In the current climate, Pearson is ready to design walking curriculum and its companion tests. The Gates and Broad Foundations will create complementary instructional videos.”

And he also writes:

“If policy makers and test writers had even rudimentary knowledge of rich individual differences, they would know that any standard test is unfair and, ultimately, useless. Just as children learn in very different ways, they express mastery in many different ways. The Common Core tests (and I’ve suffered the experience of wading through the many samples provided in the media) assume that all its takers process information in the same way, have the identical mix of cognitive and sensory abilities, and can, therefore, “compete” on level ground. This is nonsensical and damaging. Some of the most brilliant people I know would grind to a suffocating halt after trying to parse the arcane nonsense in a small handful of these questions. Even the math questions assume a homogeneous ability to understand the questions and a precisely common capacity for reasoning and concluding.

“I could go on: Stress inhibits learning, so we design stressful expectations; dopamine (from pleasurable activities) enhances learning, so we remove joy from schools; homework has very limited usefulness with negative returns after an hour or so (for elementary age kids), so we demand more hours of work; the importance of exercise in brain development is inarguable, so we eliminate recess and gym; the arts are central to human understanding, but we don’t have time.

“I have been accused of complaining but not offering solutions, so here’s a solution: Properly fund schools and allow good teachers to select the materials and pedagogy that serve the actual students in their care. The rest will take care of itself.

“And we can take the billions we’re wasting on NCLB, RTTT, Common Core and other nonsense and spend it to improve the lives of the shameful number of children who live in poverty in the “richest nation on Earth.”

Steve Nelson, welcome to the honor roll as a hero of American education.

Please someone, anyone: send this article to Bill Keller and Paul Krugman at the New York Times.

Categories Arts Education, Childhood, Pre-K, K, Common Core, Education Industry, Honor Roll, Students, Testing

Please Help the Brilliant Paul Krugman Understand the Problems with Common Core

By dianeravitch
August 19, 2013 //
60

Paul Krugman posted this commentary about the Common Core standards. Clearly he has never read them and has no idea about the legitimate concerns that teachers and principals have. Instead, he echoes the claim by Times’ writer Bill Keller that the opponents are nearly all rightwing extremists. I just left a short comment, which has not been moderated and approved yet. I expressed my concern about the lack of field testing and the now evident increases in achievement gaps. Raising the bar does not help kids clear it; it just increases the numbers who can’t clear it. You should add yours.

Categories Common Core

The New York Times Hearts Common Core: Susan Ohanian Calls Foul

By dianeravitch
August 19, 2013 //
34

This morning the New York Times published a lengthy defense of the Common Core standards by Bill Keller, previously executive editor of the paper.

Keller asserts that opposition to the Common Core comes from extremists on the far-right fringe. (He does say that there are critics on the left, and adds a link to my blog, but not to the post explaining my reasons for not supporting the Common Core.  My main reason: They have never been field tested and we have no evidence how they will work and whether they will do what they claim, and what their effects will be on real children in real classrooms).

Please take the time to read Keller’s article and add a comment, if you are so moved.

Susan Ohanian went postal when she read Keller’s article.

She titles her response: “Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire: War on the New York Times Embrace of the Common Core.”

She begins thus:

“Well, at least New York Times editorial remains consistent, proving once again that you can lead a reporter to evidence but can’t make him think. Keller was executive editor at the New York Times from 2003–2011, where he was a leading supporter of the Iraq invasion. Although he has since returned to his status as writer, he remains infected by the Times editorial bias on education policy. It seems significant that Keller’s father was chairman and chief executive of the Chevron Corporation. 

Keller employs a deliberate strategy of welding opponents of the Common Core with the lunatic fringe. Note that no progressive who opposes the Common Core is mentioned. No superintendent of schools opposing the Common Core is mentioned. No researcher opposing the Common Core is mentioned. No parent opposing the Common Core is mentioned.”

Keller says that the Common Core implies no curriculum, just standards. He quotes E.D. Hirsch, Jr., whose K-3 curriculum has been adopted by New York state as its official Common Core curriculum. Keller obviously didn’t know that Rupert Murdoch’s Amplify division (run by Joel Klein) bought the rights to the Core Knowledge curriculum for 20 years, meaning that every school in the state will pay a royalty to Rupert Murdoch whenever they buy the resources to teach the state curriculum.  Amplify and Core Knowledge plan to expand the curriculum to cover grades four and five. So this is quite a goldmine!

Categories Common Core, Klein, Joel, New York

Paul Thomas: Common Core and the Gravy Train

By dianeravitch
August 19, 2013 //
11

Paul Thomas points out that standardized test scores correlate closely with family income. He notes the lack of any evidence that more testing makes students smarter.

The driving force behind the demand for Common Core and more testing is profit.

Categories Common Core, For-Profit, Pearson, Testing

Anti-Testing Movement Grows in NY Suburbs and Towns

By dianeravitch
August 19, 2013 //
44

The collapse of test scores in New York following the first
tests of the Common Core standards is fueling the growth of the
anti-testing movement. A huge protest took
place in Port Jefferson Station on Long Island on Saturday.

Fifteen hundred people turned out to denounce the Common
Core and the tests that labeled most children as “failures.” To get a turnout of this size on a Saturday in August in a small town signals big trouble for Common Core and its cheerleaders in the State Education Department.

Hero educator Dr. Joseph Rella was one of the speakers.

Newsday, the most widely read newspaper on populous and politically
powerful Long Island, published a vivid photograph of the rally
(open the link) and wrote as follows: “Protesters carried signs and
cheered as they waited to hear from Comsewogue Superintendent
Joseph Rella, a vocal curriculum critic.

“All of us have been passengers on a plane being built in midair,” Rella said to the
crowd. “Today, we are canceling our flight reservations.” “He urged
the group to use social media to spread the word and demand that
state legislators re-evaluate the potential effects of Common Core
standards. “Stop it, fix it or scrap it,” Rella chanted with the
crowd.”

A blogger noticed this great sign held by a child: “I should be blowing bubbles, not filling them in.”

Meanwhile, the Suffolk Times and Riverhead News-Review, the
main newspaper for the North Fork of Long Island, ran
a blistering editorial denouncing the Common Core and the
tests, predicting that state officials would end up
dropping them and admitting their error.

The victims of the Common Core, he warned, “will likely be the poorest among us.”

Michael White, editor of the Suffolk Times and Riverhead News-Review,
understands that the engineers of the standards and tests are
detached from reality.

He wrote: “Consider that many children in
poverty-stricken areas will still be living in single-parent or
no-parent households in our new, Common Core world. They still
won’t be eating or sleeping properly. They won’t be getting proper
medical attention for physical or emotional issues that interfere
with school. They won’t be getting help with homework, or even
having their homework checked at home. In fact, extra attention for
such students will be increasingly funneled away from them, as the
focus shifts to teaching to the Common Core assessments.

“For these kids, school’s simply getting harder, with no significant amount of
funding set aside to provide them better access to school supplies,
computers and internet access, or any plans to expand the school
day or school year or bulk up after-school enrichment programs.
With higher test failure rates, there’s also sure to be a huge
spike in students in need of additional support through mandated
programs such as academic intervention services. Where does that
money come from?

“State officials keep arguing that we must adopt
Common Core because America’s education system lags behind those of
other industrialized nations. But they never acknowledge that much
of the disparity is accounted for by the performance of students in
poor and non-English-speaking immigrant communities, which aren’t
as prevalent in more homogeneous nations like Finland and South
Korea.”

White sagely concluded: “Locally, it was revealed by the
state last week that for the 2012-13 year, 74.7 percent of
Riverhead School District students in grades 3 through 8 failed to
meet the state’s math proficiency standard and 73.8 percent failed
to meet the ELA standard. “Those numbers will change very little
moving forward (at least not after some initial curriculum
adjustments). Here’s why. In Riverhead, scores will increase
somewhat for wealthier students but will fall at about the same
rate, with potentially disastrous results, for those who don’t have
the same support systems at home. Those in the middle will break
one way or the other. “When these disparate results between
wealthier districts and the rest of the state become apparent —
especially in New York City — the backtracking on these
numbers-driven policies will begin.

“Yes, it’s my prediction Common Core will be reversed. But it’s also my hope. My fear is that so
much money will be tied up in pricey books, testing materials and
other increasingly entrenched funding sources for this initiative
that the politicians and policymakers won’t ever budge. Meanwhile,
our teachers will remain handcuffed and will continue teaching to
tests, and more and more students who lack either a natural
aptitude for learning or parental support will disengage from the
classroom and the educational process in general.

“Eventually, we’ll be wondering how we slipped even further behind Finland and
South Korea.”

Wow.

When suburban parents have the visionary
leadership of men like Joseph Rella and Michael White, they will
not fall for the lie that three-quarters of their children are
failures. They will catch on: the kids did not fail. The tests were
designed to label them as failures. Suburban parents will see this,
rightly, as an assault on their children, not “reform.” And they
will tell their elected officials to stop these crazy policies that
hurt children.

Categories Accountability, Common Core, New York, Testing

Shepherd: Instead of Mandatory Standards for All

By dianeravitch
August 18, 2013 //
23

Robert D. Shepherd answers a fundamental question about the Common Core:

“Question: What should we have instead of a single set of mandatory standards for all?

“Answer: Competing, voluntary standards that can serve as guidelines to be followed, or not, by independent, site-managed schools in which teachers make their own decisions about what should be taught, when, and to whom.”

Categories Common Core

Who Should Go to College?

By dianeravitch
August 17, 2013 //
79

In a recent article in the New York Times about the Common Core, I was quoted saying that some kids don’t need to go to college. I was trying to explain to the reporter that the New York Common Core tests used absurdly high standards that resulted in a 70% failure rate. Not every child will make an A, I told her, and we should not fail B and C students.

This was the printed summary of our interview:

“Some critics say the new standards are simply unrealistic. “We’re using a very inappropriate standard that’s way too high,” said Diane Ravitch, an education historian who served in President George W. Bush’s Education Department but has since become an outspoken critic of many education initiatives. “I think there are a lot of kids who are being told that if they don’t go to college that it will ruin their life,” she said. “But maybe they don’t need to go to college.”

I have since heard that my remarks were elitist because everyone should go to college.

So, it is time to clarify what I believe.

Who should go to college? Everyone who wants to.

What prevents them from doing so? The cost of college today puts it out of reach for many students, and those who get a degree spend years paying back their student loans.

Education is a basic human right. Every state should have free community colleges for anyone who wants to go to college. In recent years, states have increasingly shifted the cost of higher education to students, when it should be paid for by taxation.

Does everyone “need” to go to college? No, and not everyone wants to go to college. Some people choose to go several years after high school, and some get on-the-job training.

Last week, a terrific auto mechanic fixed my car. He had not gone to college. He loves his work.

When my refrigerator broke down, two expert mechanics arrived, diagnosed the problem, and fixed it. They were proud of their skill. They were not college graduates.

In my professional life, everyone I interact with has one or several degrees. In my real life, where things break down and someone has to do work that is essential to my daily life, many–most–do not have a diploma. Should they? That should be their choice, not my compulsion.

In my ideal world, higher education would be tuition-free for those who can’t afford it. Then everyone who wants to go to a college would not be kept out by high tuition.

So to those who want a higher rate of college attendance and participation, I say “demand tuition-free colleges, open to all.”

Categories Common Core, Economy, Higher Education
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