Archives for category: Common Core
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David Coleman, Please Speak Up!

By dianeravitch
December 8, 2012 //
22

An article appeared in a British newspaper claiming that such books as “Catcher in the Rye” and “To Kill a Mockingbird” will be dropped from the curriculum because of the Common Core standards.

Says the Daily Telegraph: “Suggested non-fiction texts include Recommended Levels of Insulation by the the US Environmental Protection Agency, and the Invasive Plant Inventory, by California’s Invasive Plant Council.”

I don’t think any of this is true, but there is only one person who can stop the nonsense, and that is David Coleman. Coleman was in charge of the development of the standards. He is now president of the College Board.

It was Coleman who decided that our students are not reading enough “informational text,” and too much fiction.

I don’t know of any national standards that set an arbitrary ratio of 50-50 or 70-30.

No standards are written in stone. They must evolve to reflect reality and wisdom.

Please, David, make a strong and unequivocal statement.

Abolish those arbitrary quotas for nonfiction and fiction.

They make no sense and they are becoming a national–and yes–an international embarrassment.

Categories Coleman, David, Common Core

Will the Common Core Standards Reduce Time for Literature?

By dianeravitch
December 3, 2012 //
25

According to a story by Lyndsey Layton in the Washington Post, English teachers across the nation are cutting back on fiction, because they have been told that the Common Core standards say they must.

The standards say that reading must be 50% fiction/50% nonfiction, and increase in high school to 70% nonfiction. Teachers are dropping novels and poetry and short stories to comply.

But David Coleman says that people are misinformed.

He points to a footnote on page 5 of the 66-page document. He says that English teachers can keep teaching mostly fiction, while math and history teachers teach more reading about math and history. (Had math and history teachers been teaching fiction up until now? Is this a change for them?)

But the math and history teachers say they have to keep teaching math and history. The history teachers always use informational text, and math teachers may not have time to have their students read what Euclid wrote in 300 B.C.

An English teacher in Massachusetts told the reporter, “Reading for information makes you knowledgeable — you learn stuff….But reading literature makes you wise.”

A note on the history of reform in U.S. education: There is many a slip ‘twixt the cup and the lip.

Fiction? Non-fiction? Greek legend? Myth? Fact?

Categories Common Core, Curriculum

TIME Columnist Mocks Common Core Standards

By dianeravitch
December 1, 2012 //
86

Uh-Oh. The decision by the authors of the Common Core standards to insist on an equal split between nonfiction and literature opens them up to ridicule. Why are they telling English teachers what to teach?

Bad move.

Educated people love literature.

Who are these guys who don’t?

Here is a column in the new issue of Time:

http://www.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,2130408,00.html

How I Replaced Shakespeare

By Joel Stein Monday, Dec. 10, 2012

I was not worried about the American education system until after I started writing a column, because that’s when I found out there are English teachers who assign my column as reading material. I regularly get e-mails from students asking about my use of anastrophe, metonymy, thesis statements and other things I’ve never heard of. To which I respond, “Transfer high schools immediately! To one that teaches Shakespeare and Homer instead of the insightful commentary of a first-rate, unconventionally handsome modern wit! Also, don’t do drugs!”

I can expect to be sending more of these e-mails thanks to the Common Core State Standards, with which public schools are encouraged to comply by 2014. The new curriculum standards dramatically shift about half the nation’s high school English reading lists toward an emphasis on nonfiction. In a speech last year, David Coleman, the new president of the College Board, who was one of the chief creators of the Common Core, worried about students’ focusing on opinion over analysis in their writing. “As you grow up in this world, you realize people really don’t give a s— about what you feel or what you think,” he said. “It is rare in a working environment that someone says, ‘Johnson, I need a market analysis by Friday, but before that I need a compelling account of your childhood.'” I agree with this, but only because no one has ever asked me for a market analysis.

Coleman’s idea is that by reading clear, tightly structured nonfiction, kids will learn how to write clear, tightly structured nonfiction, hopefully without hitting Reply All. And indeed, the first time I write in a new format–travel essay, screenplay, apology e-mail–I read a bunch of examples. But when I want my writing to improve, I read something that forces me to think about words differently: a novel, a poem, a George W. Bush speech. Sure, some nonfiction is beautifully written, and none of Jack London’s novels are, but no nonfiction writer can teach you how to use language like William Faulkner or James Joyce can. Fiction also teaches you how to tell a story, which is how we express and remember nearly everything. If you can’t tell a story, you will never, ever get people to wire you the funds you need to pay the fees to get your Nigerian inheritance out of the bank.

When I asked Gene Wilhoit, executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers–which, along with the National Governors Association, created the Common Core–he told me that CEOs and university professors championed the shift to nonfiction. Only a small, vocal group objected. “It upset people who love literature. That happens to be a lot of high school teachers,” Wilhoit said. But students aren’t reading nonfiction on their own, he added, and their history-class assignments tend to be short textbook summaries, not primary sources. “It’s not a good trend, ” he said. “I guess it’s a by-product of the media world we live in.” Students are clearly not getting examples of how to make a persuasive argument by, for instance, avoiding insulting the media world that is interviewing them
.
But if you ask me, that’s a failing of history classes, not English. Among the nonfiction the Common Core curriculum suggests are FedViews by the Federal Reserve of San Francisco. I’ve never read FedViews, but I know that unlike my late-night high school sessions helping other kids parse “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” no amount of discussing FedViews is going to get you to second base.

School isn’t merely training for work; it’s training to communicate throughout our lives. If we didn’t all experience Hamlet’s soliloquy, we’d have to explain soul-tortured indecisiveness by saying things like “Dude, you are like Ben Bernanke in early 2012 weighing inflation vs. growth in Quantitative Easing 3.” Teaching language through nonfiction is like teaching history by playing Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” or teaching science by giving someone an unmarked test tube full of sludge and having him figure out if the white powder he distilled is salt or sugar by making Steven Baumgarten taste it, which is how I learned science and how Steven Baumgarten learned to be more careful about picking people to work with. Something he could have learned by reading Othello
.
But if our nation is going to make this horrible mistake, I’d like to get something out of it, like selling c opies of my book. So I asked Wilhoit if he would consider including my writing in the curriculum, to which he said, “It would be interesting to take your article on a specific subject and compare and contrast it to another author writing about the same subject. That would be ideal. We will use it. I promise you.” Now I just have to find another writer who has written a compelling account of my childhood.

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Categories Common Core

Wireless Generation Wins Common Core Contract

By dianeravitch
November 30, 2012 //
27

From NYC Parent blog (by Leonie Haimson):

Wireless Generation, owned by Murdoch/run by Joel Klein, Wins the $4.9M Contract to develop the software that will be used to report & analyze results for the new #CommonCore Assessments – both the interim and “summative” exams being developed by the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium for 25 states (blue states in map below.)

Wireless is also developing the software/ infrastructure for the Gates-funded Shared Learning Collaborative, which is collecting confidential student & teacher data in states throughout the country, including NYS, & planning to turn this information over to for-profit commercial ventures, without parental consent, to help companies develop and market their “learning products.” The information will include among other things, names, addresses, grades, test scores, disciplinary and attendance records, and learning disability status.

The SLC has now named a new CEO, Iwan Streichenberger, who is going to direct SLC’s transition from a project to a nonprofit enterprise; to “ manage the technology and related services.”

Streichenberger was formerly the Chief Marketing Officer of a for-profit company called Promethean, where he was “responsible for product development, marketing, and sales strategy for the education technology company’s newest division.

He says he will “look forward to telling the story about the transformative technology we are building and how we are working with our industry partners to help education technology achieve its potential for students” and will be speaking about this at the SXSW Edu conference in Austin Texas March 4-7.

Here we go.

http://shar.es/6uSxE

Wireless Generation Wins Contract for Common Assessments

By Jason Tomassini on November 29, 2012 12:00 PM | No comments

As the two consortia developing assessments around the Common Core State Standards move closer to the tests’ adoption, for the 2014-15 school year, they are starting to award contracts that will shape how the assessments look and operate. On Wednesday, the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium announced that the software used to report and analyze results from its assessments will be developed by Wireless Generation, the education software company.

Wireless Generation will partner with Educational Testing Service (ETS) on the contract. The terms of the contract were not disclosed, but the Request for Proposal stipulated the project could not exceed $4.9 million. Smarter Balanced’s projects are funded through a four-year, $175 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education.

The reporting system will be used for the common assessments students will take in Smarter Balanced’s 25 member states (you can view those states in the map below). The system will collect data from interim and summative assessments given to students and also track their progress toward college and career readiness, as determined by the individual standards. The data will be available to administrators and teachers as well as parents, according to a news release from Smarter Balanced. Schoolwide and districtwide reports will also be available.

The entire system will be open source, which means other computer programmers can build applications using the software’s source code. For instance, Moodle is an open source learning management platform that is used as the framework for companies like Moodlerooms.

Early next year, the public will have a chance to provide input on the system requirements. You can read the Request for Proposal here, and Wireless Generation’s winning proposal here, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Some important notes regarding Wireless Generation. News Corporation, the international media conglomerate implicated in a widespread phone hacking scandal last year, owns 90 percent of Wireless Generation, which is part of the company’s new Amplify education business. Since the acquisition, for $360 million in November 2010, concerns over possible connections between Wireless Generation’s data operations and its parent company have arose. In response, Wireless Generation has pointed out that its data operations are independent from News Corp. and the company has always complied with the many laws governing student data, including the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. In August 2011, the company did lose a $27 million contract to develop assessment tracking software for New York state education department because of the scandal embroiling News Corp.’s newspaper division.

(Larry Berger, a co-founder and executive chairman of Wireless Generation, serves on the board of Editorial Projects in Education, the nonprofit corporation that publishes Education Week.)

In somewhat related news, the Brown Center on Education Policy, at the Brookings Institution, released a report Wednesday on the cost of state assessments around the country, including a recommendation for states to join testing consortia in order to lower costs. Read more about it here.

Leonie Haimson

Executive Director

Class Size Matters

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Follow me on twitter @leoniehaimson

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Categories Common Core, For-Profit, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Klein, Joel, Race to the Top, Testing

Rick Hess’s Startling Analysis of Common Core

By dianeravitch
November 30, 2012 //
36

Many of us had been under the impression that the goal of the Common Core standards was to improve the quality of teaching and learning in the nation’s schools.

As someone who spent years advocating for national standards–but has been agnostic about the new Common Core standards–it was always my hope that improving education would be, should be the goal. At least that was my hope when I worked in the US Department of Education in 1991-93 and expended a few million dollars so that teachers’ groups could write voluntary national standards in the arts, history, civics, science, foreign language, physical education, and economics (the math teachers had already written their own standards).

Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute has a completely different understanding of the Common Core. As he explains it, “reformers” expect that the Common Core standards will reveal to suburban parents just how awful their public schools are. This will set off the “reformers'” long-hoped for stampede for privatization among the smug and satisfied denizens of the nation’s suburbs.

Imagine the possibilities as everyone discovers their local school is failing and runs to the exits, demanding charters and vouchers.

Farewell, public education. Hello, free market.

Even Rick Hess has his doubts about this scenario.

Categories Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Privatization

Does Pearson Own American Education? UPDATE!

By dianeravitch
November 26, 2012 //
15

Pearson is clearly a major force in American education.

It is the dominant provider of testing and textbooks. It owns the GED. It owns Connections Academy, which runs for-profit virtual schools. It owns a teacher evaluation program being marketed to states and districts. It partners with the agates Foundation to develop online curriculum for the Common Core standards.

This article tries to assemble all the pieces. It builds on an earlier article by Alan Singer in Huffington Post.

Please, someone, time for in-depth journalism or a dissertation that documents how Pearson bought American education and what it means for our children. Standardized minds, indeed!

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Curriculum, Education Industry, For-Profit, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, On-Line Education, Pearson, Teach for America TFA, Teacher Evaluations, Testing

DC Voucher Schools: No Accountability

By dianeravitch
November 19, 2012 //
6

The Washington Post looked closely at the DC voucher program and found a shocking lack of oversight or accountability.

The reporters found that there was little or no oversight over curriculum, quality or standards, and parents got no information other than te schools’ advertising.

“…Washington Post review found that hundreds of students use their voucher dollars to attend schools that are unaccredited or are in unconventional settings, such as a family-run K-12 school operating out of a storefront, a Nation of Islam school based in a converted Deanwood residence, and a school built around the philosophy of a Bulgarian psychotherapist.”

Accountability, apparently, is only for public schools.

You can bet that the voucher schools won’t be required to adopt the Common Core standards or to evaluate teachers by test scores. If these schools fail, they won’t e forced to fire their staff or close or turn into a charter.

Double standards, anyone?

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Education Reform, Vouchers

Advice to a Mother about Common Core:

By dianeravitch
November 17, 2012 //
52

A mother in North Carolina wrote for advice. Her daughter in first grade is studying algebra. Her teacher said it was the Common Core. The mother is baffled. She asked for help. Here is an informed response:

“I am responding to the blog entry from the mother in N.C. who is concerned about the Common Core Standards and their effects on her first grade child. I am an early childhood teacher educator–I’ve taught teachers of young children at Lesley University for over 30 years. I can tell you that the Common Core Standards for young children are developmentally inappropriate, not based on how young children learn, and in my opinion, causing a great deal of harm to young children all over the country (the standards have been adopted by almost all states). The standards require young kids to master skills and sub skills that are isolated from meaningful contexts and not at the level of young children’s thinking. Teachers are responsible for teaching these inappropriate skills and facts to young children and do so through a lot of direct teaching. Instead of building their own ideas in ways that make sense to them, young kids have to memorize answers without real understanding. The Common Core Standards were not developed from the professional understandings and input of early childhood educators. As far as I can tell, few if any early childhood educators had input in writing these standards and thus they are not a good reflection of what children should know and do in the early years. We have to find ways to reject these standards by joining with other educators and parents, as they really will undermine the confidence and learning of our nation’s children and have serious implications for our future.”

Nancy Carlsson-Paige

Categories Childhood, Pre-K, K, Common Core

Standards for 0-5?

By dianeravitch
November 16, 2012 //
10

A reader wonders, when do we start assessing parents and caregivers?

http://www.sde.ct.gov/sde/lib/sde/PDF/CCSS/PreK_ELA_Crosswalk.pdf

Click to access PreK_ELA_Crosswalk.pdf

Let’s not laugh too hard. I posted the links above in response to Dr. Ravitch’s post called “What are we doing to the little ones?” The links take you to draft Connecticut documents relating to CCSS for preschoolers. The introduction states that the adoption of CCSS for K-12 “has naturally led to questions regarding standards for preschool and/or prekindergarten students.” The next section talks about a work group that has been charged with the task of creating comprehensive learning standards for birth to age 5.

I personally am interested in the learning standards for infants. What do you think? Should the first assessments be at 6 weeks or 3 months? We probably need both formative and summative assessments in math and language arts. Since Connecticut is launching new teacher evaluations, we should probably apply the same standards to parents and caregivers. A full 45 percent of a parent’s score should be based on the results of these assessments. If the baby naps during an assessment, we probably should wake him/her up. I’m not quite sure how to deal with the diapering issue though. Maybe Michelle Rhee or Jeb Bush have some thoughts on this.

Categories Childhood, Pre-K, K, Common Core, Connecticut, Education Reform, Parents

Should Computers Grade Essays?

By dianeravitch
November 15, 2012 //
17

Todd Farley is the scourge of standardized testing. His book, “Making the Grades,” is a shocking exposé of the industry. Todd spent nearly 15 years scoring tests, and he knows the tricks of the trade.

In this article, he skewers the latest testing craze: machine-scoring of essays.

Having demonstrated the fallibility of humans who score essays, Farley is no more impressed by computer scoring. As he puts it:

“…the study’s major finding states only that “the results demonstrated that overall, automated essay scoring was capable of producing scores similar to human scores for extended-response writing items.” A paragraph on p. 21 reiterates the same thing: “By and large, the scoring engines did a good [job] of replicating the mean scores for all of the data sets.” In other words, all this hoopla about a study Tom Vander Ark calls “groundbreaking” is based on a final conclusion saying only that automated essay scoring engines are able to spew out a number that “by and large” might be “similar” to what a bored, over-worked, under-paid, possibly-underqualified, temporarily-employed human scorer skimming through an essay every two minutes might also spew out. I ask you, has there ever been a lower bar?”

Farley quotes the promoters of automated scoring, who say that the machines are faster, cheaper and more consistent than humans. Also, they make money.

He concludes: “Maybe a technology that purports to be able to assess a piece of writing without having so much as the teensiest inkling as to what has been said is good enough for your country, your city, your school, or your child. I’ll tell you what though: Ain’t good enough for mine.”

One of the responses to Farley’s post came from Tom Vander Ark, who is a tech entrepreneur and a target of Farley’s post.

Vander Ark wrote: “The purpose of the study was to demonstrate that online essay scoring was as accurate as expert human graders and that proved to be the case across a diverse set of performance tasks. The reason that was important is that without online scoring, states would rely solely on inexpensive multiple choice tests. It is silly to suggest that scoring engines need to ‘understand,’ they just need to score at least as well as a trained expert grader and our study did just that.”

A reader of this blog saw this exchange on Huffington Post and sent me this comment:

“Diane–we use an automated essay scorer at my school, and I have seen coherent, well-thought out writing receive scores below proficient, while incoherent, illogical writing (with more and longer words, and a few other tricks that automated scorers like) receive high scores. The students who suffer the most are the highest level students, the verbally gifted writers who write with the goal of actually being understood, “silly” as that may be.”

“In fact, all standardized testing penalizes the brightest students–those who think outside the box. Standardized testing is the box.”

Categories Common Core, Education Industry, For-Profit, Testing
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