Robert Shepherd, experienced writer, textbook developer, curriculum designer, and loyal reader posted some interesting critiques of the way a Common Core will affect teaching and teaching materials:

He writes:

The fact that the “standards” are entirely highly abstract descriptions of skills to be demonstrated, that they are content free, will be ENORMOUSLY distorting in their effects on curriculum development. Instead of presenting a coherent, progressive body of knowledge having to do with some subject like the short story, literary archetypes, Romanticism, the oral tradition, Greek history and thought, etc., we shall see curricula that present materials pretty much at random to teach x set of abstract skills. Even those Common Core standards that are process related are at such a high level of abstraction that they do not encourage the operationalization of those processes, and when one attempts to create a lesson that does operationalize them, that, for example, steps students through the process of, say, writing a press release, one will find that the necessary specific processes that students must learn are nowhere even suggested by the “standards.” Educational publishers will reject manuscripts with this extraneous material and insist that every lesson “cover” some number (six or seven, for example) of standards, whether it makes sense to deal with these together or not. That’s because, over the course of the year, all the standards will have to be “covered.” So, the abstract standards will drive the curriculum development. It’s the tail wagging the dog, and it is entirely predictable that this will be the case because that is what has largely happened with materials developed to meet state standards.

Think of it this way: What is the difference between sitting down and saying, I want to develop a unit that teaches kids about the Civil War or mythology or whatever and saying, I want to develop a unit that teaches kids standards L.3.1 through L.3.6. The curriculum designer starts making decisions based on whether the standard is covered rather than on whether the subject being studied is.

And the point about learning something so that one then has something to write about is KEY. Content must drive instruction. The CCSS have this exactly backward.”

In another comment, Shepherd adds:

“One can already see how distorting this stuff is. Look at an American lit book from one of the big basal publishers. Turn to the units on, say, the Puritans or the Transcendentalists. Ask yourself, how much does the student actually learn from this unit about what happened during that time and what those people actually thought? The answer is, precious little. The emphasis is not on learning about the thoughts and behaviors of the Puritans and Transcendentalists but on learning some abstract set of skills. The content is WAY down the list of concerns in each lesson. The result: These units are, in current texts, incredibly dumbed down. The student who does the unit on the Puritans does not come away knowing about original sin, election, predestination, salvation through Grace, local governance, individual responsibility, the Protestant work ethic, the direct relation without intermediaries between people and God, the significance of the Word as a direct pipeline between people and the divine. But all of these were incredibly important to the development of American thought. Much in our current culture is a direct consequence of this stream that has run through our history, and if people don’t understand it, they won’t understand a lot of why things are as they are today. If one goes back to textbooks written twenty years ago, all of this stuff is dealt with in the unit on the Puritans. Now, that stuff is considered too difficult, and besides, the emphasis is supposed to be on this or that set of abstract skills described by this or that subset of the CCSS in ELA. That’s what will be one the only test that matters–the high-stakes test. It will be a test of isolated “skills.”

And he concludes:

“The Common Core will be the final nail in the coffin of coherent curriculum development in the English language arts.”

A comment from a reader:

I have a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in English Lit, and I find the Common Core to be only tangentially related to the teaching and learning of literature, culture, history, etc. If one knows literature or history or whatever the subject, there is a richness in the material that cannot be turned into formulaic lessons and checklists. Furthermore, it is turning into another load of how-to-ism and bureaucratic nonsense. And we’ve seen the how-to-ism and culture of testing kill off students’ interest in literature. Our “professional developments” only focus on strategies and cute little random teaching moments that would be suitable for elementary school but not high school where I am. It was the same with the state standards. It is really an insult to the intelligence of teachers and students. All anyone seems to be looking for is a Pavlovian response.

Paul Thomas of Furman University (one of the four institutions that the National Council on Teacher Quality awarded four of its dubious stars) here gives Secretary of Education Arne Duncan a lesson in evidence. Duncan ridiculed the critics of Common Core in a speech yesterday to the American Society of News Editors.

Thomas now gives him a tongue-lashing for his indifference to evidence about test-based accountability. He includes a brief list of sources (read them) on the failure of testing and accountability as drivers of better education.

Another point that Duncan failed to mention: The Common Core has never been subjected to a field trial in any state. No one knows how it works. There is no evidence for its efficacy. No one knows if it will push struggling children further down, whether it will widen the achievement gap and harm children.

That would be nice to know, wouldn’t it?

Arne Duncan has been vigorously defending the Common Core standards and vigorously insisting that they were created by the governors and the states. Of course, he must do this because it is illegal for the U.S. Department of Education to interfere in curriculum and instruction in the nation’s schools.

But his version of how the Common Core came to be adopted by nearly every state since 2009 is not accurate. It would be interesting to ask the nation’s governors what they know about the Common Core and even more interesting to ask them to take one of the two federally-funded tests of the Common Core. If that seems a stretch, how about having the nation’s chief state school officers–who are cheerleading for the Common Core–take the test?

As for the states “leading the way,” as Duncan often claims, that’s not quite right. Earlier this year, Robert Scott, who was Texas Commissioner of Education until Governor Perry canned him for his criticism of out-of-control testing, said bluntly that his state was asked to adopt the Common Core before they were finished. Texas said no. Most other states said yes, because they wanted a chance to win Race to the Top funding.

For the real story behind Common Core, read what Valerie Strauss wrote here.

Here is a key section:

“The Core initiative was started in 2007 by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, a bipartisan effort to come up with a common set of K-12 standards in English language arts and math across states that would better prepare students for colleges and careers than in the past.

“The standards were written by school reformer and entrepreneur David Coleman, who now heads the College Board, and Susan Pimental of Achieve Inc., an organization created to advance “standards-based” education. Starting in 2009, the Obama administration, in its main education initiative, required states that wanted to compete for Race to the Top reform dollars to adopt the standards. It also gave some $360 million to two consortia of states developing standardized tests aligned to the Core, exams whose results would be used to evaluate teachers, another controversial part of the Obama reform agenda.”

And more:

“There is some irony in the fact that Arne Duncan keeps saying that the Core is not the work of the federal government while he, the federal secretary of education, goes around attacking its critics. In fact, he just bowed to those critics, agreeing to give states an extra year to comply with federal mandates on using Core-aligned standardized tests to evaluate teachers.”

Another angle: the Gates Foundation plowed more than $100 million into every aspect of the Common Core: the development, the evaluation, the implementation, the advocacy, on and on.

It seems that most of the nation’s grassroots are growing in Seattle, then watered inside the Beltway.

Arne Duncan spoke to the American Society of News Editors yesterday, where he strongly defendedthe Common Core and caricatured its critics as extremists and fringe groups from the far-right.

An article about his speech on the Huffington Post says:

Duncan will give a full-throated defense of the Core in his ASNE speech. The Obama administration has been sensitive about the Core because its perceived closeness to the initiative can be seen as dampening Republican support. But Duncan is expected to relate what he calls the “powerful” Core to America’s future prosperity.

“Today, for the first time in American history a child in Mississippi will face the same expectations as a child in Massachusetts,” Duncan’s speech says.

This is an odd defense. There is already a common measure for children in Mississippi and Massachusetts. It is called the National Assessment of Educational Progress. NAEP shows that children in Mississippi are far behind children in Massachusetts.

His insistence that the federal government had no role in the Common Core is less than honest. He didn’t mention that his Race to the Top told states that they had to adopt something that looked just like the Common Core if they wanted to be eligible to win a share of the $5 billion prize. But since it is illegal for the federal government to attempt to influence curriculum and instruction in the nation’s schools, Duncan must stick with his fiction about non-interference and having no role at all. The gentleman doth protest too much.

Other than treating critics of the Common Core as an assortment of rightwing nut-jobs, Duncan never explains how adoption of a common set of standards and tests will assure America’s future prosperity. How does he know? What is his evidence? Or is it only extremists who demand evidence before spending billions of dollars and leaping into new practices?