Secretary Arne Duncan would have the world believe that the Common Core standards are opposed only by extremists and people who believe in flying saucers.

But it is not true.

While much of the energy against the Common Core has come from Tea Party people who fear a federal takeover of public schools, there are also thoughtful critics on the left side of the political spectrum. I would begin by mentioning Susan Ohanian and Stephen Krashen, for starters. And I would add myself, as I am appalled by the way the standards were imposed without any trials in real classrooms and without any real discussion or debate.

For a succinct summary of the progressive argument against the Common Core, read this editorial by Rethinking Schools.

The editorial looks at the Common Core through the prism of the disaster that is NCLB. The heavy emphasis on high-stakes tests succeeded mainly in labeling schools as failing when they had high concentrations of children with high needs.

It says:

“The same heavy-handed, top-down policies that forced adoption of the standards require use of the Common Core tests to evaluate educators. This inaccurate and unreliable practice will distort the assessments before they’re even in place and make Common Core implementation part of the assault on the teaching profession instead of a renewal of it. The costs of the tests, which have multiple pieces throughout the year plus the computer platforms needed to administer and score them, will be enormous and will come at the expense of more important things. The plunging scores will be used as an excuse to close more public schools and open more privatized charters and voucher schools, especially in poor communities of color. If, as proposed, the Common Core’s “college and career ready” performance level becomes the standard for high school graduation, it will push more kids out of high school than it will prepare for college.

This is not just cynical speculation. It is a reasonable projection based on the history of the NCLB decade, the dismantling of public education in the nation’s urban centers, and the appalling growth of the inequality and concentrated poverty that remains the central problem in public education.”

And the editorial concludes by saying:

“Common Core has become part of the corporate reform project now stalking our schools. Unless we dismantle and defeat this larger effort, Common Core implementation will become another stage in the demise of public education. As schools struggle with these new mandates, we should defend our students, our schools, our communities, and ourselves by telling the truth about the Common Core. This means pushing back against implementation timelines and plans that set schools up to fail, resisting the stakes and priority attached to the tests, and exposing the truth about the commercial and political interests shaping and benefiting from this false panacea for the problems our schools face.

Rethinking Schools has always been skeptical of standards imposed from above. Too many standards projects have been efforts to move decisions about teaching and learning away from classrooms, educators, and school communities, only to put them in the hands of distant bureaucracies. Standards have often codified sanitized versions of history, politics, and culture that reinforce official myths while leaving out the voices, concerns, and realities of our students and communities. Whatever positive role standards might play in truly collaborative conversations about what our schools should teach and children should learn has been repeatedly undermined by bad process, suspect political agendas, and commercial interests.

Unfortunately there’s been too little honest conversation and too little democracy in the development of the Common Core. We see consultants and corporate entrepreneurs where there should be parents and teachers, and more high-stakes testing where there should be none. Until that changes, it will be hard to distinguish the “next big thing” from the last one.”

Secretary Duncan, these are not the ravings of lunatics who watch for black helicopters in the sky. These are the observations of educators who are concerned about the well-being of children and the survival of public education. Attention should be paid.

A teacher sends this description of what passes for critical thought in his school. Read it through and ask yourself whether it makes any sense always to advocate someone else’s opinion. What if their opinion is wrong? What if they are spouting nonsense? If everyone advocates someone else’s opinion, will we be lost in a Tower of Babel where no one has any authority, and everyone is advocating someone else’s opinions, and ideas become fungible and meaningless?

The teacher writes:

“Fabricated and orchestrated grit! Yet we will do it with an appropriate expression on our face, and will do it through “consensus and collaboration.”

Our High School – which has been touting “Global Citizen” and “21st Century Skills” for a few years just created a rubric for “Respect of Another’s Opinion.”

The lowest level was “tolerating another’s opinion.”
The highest level was “Advocating and promoting another’s opinion.”

Not to be mistaken with promoting someones “right” to an opinion, but actually “advocating” their ideas!

Who gets to be the winner? This is consensus group-thinking to an extreme.”

This post by Peter Smagorinsky is spot on.

He is a professor at the University of Georgia, and he is amazed at the shrewd marketing of the Common Core.

Think of it.

Schools and teachers are overwhelmed by budget cuts, still reeling from the economic crisis of 2008, and are now trying to absorb new and flawed systems of teacher evaluation. In many states, teachers have lost all job security. At the same time, the proportion of students who live in poverty is one of the highest in the postindustrial world, and many children don’t speak English or have disabilities. These are real problems, and the answer is: the Common Core.

How did David Coleman manage to sell the business and government leaders on the idea that the very thing needed to address the nation’s social and economic problems was a set of national standards? Not voluntary national standards, but mandatory ones. Adopt these standards, spend billions implementing it, and all children will be ready to compete in a global economy; all children will be college-and career-ready; our very survival as a nation depends on these standards.

You have to admire a man who displays a genius for marketing.

This poem was suggested to me by a friend who does professional development for the Common Core in New York City.

This past week, by coincidence, Jason Griffiths, the founder of the Brooklyn Latin School quit  his job and went to work for a controversial charter school, because he was tired of being compelled to go to professional development for Common Core when his school already was the top ranked school in the state and used the International Baccalaureate program. He was tired of dealing with Bloomberg’s bureaucratic Department of Education.

“Over time I wasn’t able to lead the school in the way I wanted,” said Griffiths, noting that he was often stuck in full-day meetings with the Department of Education over the city’s new Common Core standards, which he said Brooklyn Latin’s curriculum already met and exceeded. “We’re working 12-hour and 16-hour days, and if you’re taking a full day out of a week [for a meeting] that’s a lot of time…It had a detrimental effect on me personally, on my ability to connect with teachers and with students.”

My friend, the professional development expert, suggested this poem as a metaphor for the work she does:

Jabberwocky

By Lewis Carroll

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”
He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought —
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.
And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!
One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.
“And, has thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!’
He chortled in his joy.

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

Robert Shepherd was pleased that Susan Ohanian joined the honor roll of the blog.

He wrote this:

“Susan Ohanian’s website is a garden of many, many delights. I love this bit she posted from Albert Einstein, who was a pretty bright guy (and who had some truly wonderful ideas about education):

“I believe in standardizing automobiles. I do not believe in standardizing human beings. Standardization is a great peril which threatens American culture. . . . Such men [as Henry Ford} do not always realize that the adoration which they receive is not a tribute to their personality but to their power or their pocketbook.

—— Albert Einstein, Saturday Evening Post interview, 10/26/1929”

David Coleman, the architect of the Common Core and now president of the College Board, once famously said–in a presentation at the New York State Education Department–that as you grow older, you learn that “people really don’t give a s–t what you feel or what you think.” And so students will be reading more “informational text”–not prose, not nonfiction, but “informational text,” which sounds like instruction manuals or textbooks. But it turns out that some very important people think that it matters very much what you feel. They even care what you think. One of them is the celebrated poet ee cummings.

You see, if we learn to think critically, we will think critically about the advice of those who tell us what to do and how to think and when it is appropriate to feel, or not.

“since feeling is first”

e.e. cummings

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don’t cry
—the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids’ flutter which says

we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life’s not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis