As parent resistance to high-stakes testing rises, so does public rejection of the Common Core. Several states are considering debating whether to drop the standards, and two–Georgia and Oklahoma–are dropping the testing because of its cost.

Stephanie Simon, who wrote many great investigative pieces for Reuters, has moved to Politico. There she questions whether Common Core is failing, a victim of hubris and cost. She points out that Georgia and Oklahoma have withdrawn from Common Core testing, and other states are debating whether to ditch the standards, the testing, or both.

But at the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, a conservative think tank that is a cheerleader for the Common Core, Checker Finn shrugs off the dropouts and says that Common Core is right sizing. Checker sees a great need to be able to compare individual students in different states who take common tests, a need that I don’t share. Common Core tests will demonstrate what NAEP has shown for 40 years: kids from advantaged homes get higher test scores on average than kids with fewer advantages.

And then what? Instead of spending $16-20 Billion to get data that tell us what we already know, couldn’t we think of better ways to spend those billions, ways that actually might help kids do better in school?

Checker implies that the states that drop out of Common Core or don’t fully implement it will see grave consequences in “unemployment rates, economic-growth rates,” and other indicators. It will of course be interesting to see whether there is any relationship between the Common Core and economic growth. There is no objective reason, none based on evidence or experience, to say that there is. No one can say with any certainty what the effects of Common Core will be. How do they know? All sorts of grandiose claims have been made for Common Core, but no one knows whether Common Core will make any difference, whether it will increase achievement gaps, or anything else. No one knows.

The curious thing about the Common Core is that both its most fervent advocates and its loudest detractors are on the right side of the political spectrum.

Its cheerleaders include Jeb Bush, Michelle Rhee, Joel Klein, Bill Gates, the Fordham Institute, major corporations, chambers of commerce, as well as Secretary Duncan.

Its fiercest opponents include Tea Party activists, the libertarian Cato Institute, Jay Greene at the University of Arkansas, and the Pioneer Institute in Boston. Some object to federal intrusion into state and local matters. Some object to national standards on principle.

Most of the heavy hitters on the right love the Common Core. Some gleefully anticipate the sharp decline in proficiency rates that Common Core testing will generate, since the tests are supposed to be “harder.” They eagerly anticipate the bad news that will prove their belief that public education must be privatized. Some see the coming bad news as an opportunity to market their eduschlock, others welcome it as a boost for charters and vouchers. Common Core, its allies on the right believe, will unleash the “creative destruction” in which they fervently believe. For Other People’s Children.

Amy Prime is a second grade teacher in Iowa and a parent of five children. She knows how different each of her children are.

In this article, she wonders how the Common Core will work, and she draws an analogy with farmers growing corn.

Her analogy begins like this:

“It is easy to like the common core in theory. We want all of our kids to have the same skills when they graduate, right? But the problem with this idea is that our children don’t start out life the same, they don’t learn the same, and they aren’t meant to grow up to be identical either.

“We all start out as seeds but, when grown, some of us become fruits or vegetables, some trees, and some flowers.

“Imagine that there is a company that makes corn-based products. So they donate a lot of money to politicians and then convince them that our farmers are doing a poor job of growing corn. The politicians agree and then recruit a research company to decide what an ideal crop of corn would look like when grown. The people in this research company have never actually grown corn before, but they come up with criteria for what this corn should look like anyway.”

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”