Archives for category: Common Core
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Follow the Money: A Handy Guide to Some of the Organizations on the School Choice Gravy Train

By dianeravitch
September 6, 2017 //
35

The One Wisconsin Institute compiled a list of the organizations that have been funded by the far-right Bradley Foundation of Milwaukee. It is a remarkable documentation of the largesse that is showered on advocates for privatization of public schools.

You will notice the relationship with Betsy DeVos’ American Federation for Children, adding more shekels to the school choice honey pot. DeVos’ AFC has pumped millions of dollars into Wisconsin legislative races to assure that its privatization agenda is protected by the legislature. We are reminded again that our Secretary of Education is an extremist who opposes public schools.

Bradley-funded activities work to prevent any accountability or audits for private schools that receive public funds. And they seek every opportunity to siphon money away from public schools to benefit voucher schools.

Among the notable recipients of Bradley funding:

*American Enterprise Institute (where EdWeek blogger Rick Hess is education director) received $4.3 million from their Bradley paymasters.

*Black Alliance for Educational Options (founded by Howard Fuller) got $1,475,000. BAEO sends speakers to black communities to try to persuade them that charters and vouchers are best for black children. You can be sure that BAEO does not tell its audiences that its activities are funded by a rightwing foundation run by reactionary white men.

*Center for Education Reform, run by former Heritage Foundation aide Jeanne Allen, which exists to smear public schools and promote privatization. 620,000.

*Center for Union Facts, led by PR man Rick Berman, whose goal is to defame teachers’ unions: $1,550,000. About 10 years ago, I attended a meeting of the rightwing Philanthropy Roundtable, where Berman gave a pitch for funding, based on his campaign to demonized the New Jersey Educational Association. When I asked him to explain why the top-performing states are unionized, and the lowest are not, he answered: I am a PR man, not an educator.

*Charter Growth Fund: $28 million. Not familiar with this one, but it serves to remind us that charter schools are high priority for the extremists of the right.

*Donors Trust, $3.1 million. An organization assembled by the Koch brothers and Dezvos family to funnel money to pet causes while hiding the donors’ identity. Dark money.

*Foundation for Excellence in Education, $435,000. Jeb Bush’s pastime.

*Heartland Institute, $647,500. Rightwing think tank.

*Heritage Foundation, $623,500. The senior citizen of far-right think tanks.

*Hoover Institution, $1.6 million. Sponsor of Education Next and other school choice initiatives.

*Marquette University, $1.7 million. This may be another subsidy for Howard Fuller and the Black Alliance for Educational Options, since Fuller is based at Marquette.

*National Council on Teacher Quality, $445,000. This organization was founded by the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute with the explicit purpose of harassing traditional teacher education programs. Started as a maverick, this rightwing group now grades teacher education institutions for US News & World Report and is quoted by the mainstream media as if it were a credible source.

*Partnership for Educational Justice, $200,000. This is Campbell Brown’s organization, whose goal is to eliminate teachers’ rights and unions.

*Rocketship Education, $375,000. The charter chain that piputs poor kids on computers.

*Thomas B. Fordham Institute, $522,000. One rightwing foundation funding another.

*University of Washington, $500,000. This would be a subsidy for Paul Hill’s Center on Reinventing Public Education, which promotes portfolio districts. You know, like stock portfolios.

That’s a sampling.

Think about this list of handouts the next time some rightwingers complains about unions subsidizing civil rights groups. No equivalency.

The report can be found here.

Categories Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Hoax, Propaganda, School Choice

From the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics: Here are the Jobs of the Future!

By dianeravitch
September 4, 2017 //
26

An official projection of the new jobs that will be available, from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, from 2014-2024.

Notice how few require any post secondary education. Notice that you don’t need a high test score or the Common Core for most of them.

Education raises wages and prospects for the future. But most new jobs are low-wage, low education.

Categories Common Core, Economy

Nicholas Tampio: The New York Regents Should Reject the Failed, Renamed Common Core Standards

By dianeravitch
September 2, 2017 //
27

Nicholas Tampio calls on the Regents of the State of New York, the state school board, to reject the rebranded Common Core standards.

Tampio is a professor of political science at Fordham University.

He writes:

“On Sept. 11-12, the New York State Board of Regents will consider adopting the Next Generation Learning Standards for English language arts and mathematics. The standards are nearly identical with the Common Core and keep the features that parents have loudly, and justifiably, protested. New York should not keep wasting time and money on low-quality academic standards. The Regents should vote no on the renamed Common Core standards.

“The New Paltz Board of Education made a public comment describing how the “new” standards are virtually indistinguishable from the Common Core. “Of the 34 ELA anchor standards, 32 are word-for-word identical when compared to the original anchor standard,” the board said.

“Here is the first Next Generation ELA anchor standard: “Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly/implicitly and make logical inferences from it; cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text.” This is the first Common Core anchor standard and the basis of Common Core’s emphasis on “close reading.”

“On assignment after assignment, assessment after assessment, Common Core close reading works the same way. Students provide verbatim evidence from a text to answer questions about the text. As a professor, I know that this pedagogy fails to prepare students for college, and as a parent, I see that it leads to a dreary school day.

“The Common Core standards train children merely to regurgitate other people’s words.

“For instance, the 2017 Regents ELA examination, based on Common Core, asked that students write an essay on whether school recess should be structured play. The exam provided four texts and instructed students to “use specific, relevant, and sufficient evidence from at least three of the texts to develop your argument.”

“Three of the four texts argued for structured recess. The three that argued for structured recess were two pages; the one that argued for free play was one page.

“Parents expressed outrage on social media that this exam provided a wealth of evidence for students who argued for structured recess and little evidence for students who thought that students might enjoy free play.

“This problem is baked into the standards. The Common Core standards give students few opportunities to share their own thoughts or responses to the material. New York can do a better job writing standards and showing the rest of the country that the federal Every Student Succeeds Act really does open a door to exiting the Common Core.”

New York had far superior standards prior to adopting the Common Core standards as a devil’s bargain to win Race to the Top money.

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Education Industry, New York, Teachers and Teaching

Nicholas Tampio Slams ESSA As Common Core in Disguise

By dianeravitch
August 30, 2017 //
11

At a meeting at Fordham University, Professor Nicholas Tampio slammed ESSA as the same old Common Core, with lipstick. If Nick sends me his speech, I will post it in full.

https://news.fordham.edu/politics-and-society/professor-slams-essa-common-core-another-name/

Here is the university press release:

Nicholas Tampio, Ph.D., associate professor of political science, made an impassioned plea for New York State to reject participation in the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), saying it does little or nothing to stem the growing takeover of education by the federal government.

Speaking at Fordham Law School as part of the Education Law Collaborative’s first education law conference, Tampio made the case that, despite ESSA provisions that allow states to opt out of Common Core, as a practical matter it is no different.

“ESSA requires states to remain within the standards, testing, and accountability paradigm . . . if they want Title I funds.”
That means that if a state wants to follow a more original model of educating, such as the John Dewey model, they forfeit federal funding. “John Dewey said standardized tests can only be useful to help us figure out how to help a particular child, but they shouldn’t be used to rank children, because children have all sorts of special gifts, talents, and interests.”

In his talk, “ESSA and the Myth of Return to Local Control,” Tampio traced the evolution of education reform in the United States, including the programs Nation at Risk (1983), Improving America’s Schools Act (1994), No Child Left Behind (2001), and Race to the Top (2009). ESSA, which was signed by President Obama in 2015, ostensibly reversed the trend toward federalizing education, but Tampio said it has not been effective.

That’s important, he said, because. A top-down approach squelches local control, and students should feel like their voices and opinions are valuable.

“Part of a democratic education is to get kids to learn about the world, and feel empowered that they have a voice in it,” he said.

Local control also benefits low income and minority communities, he said. He cited examples from Kitty Kelly Epstein’s A Different View of Urban Schools: Civil Rights, Critical Race Theory, and Unexplored Realities (Counterpoints, 2012).

“All the research confirms that when parents are involved, students do better. And yet, if they don’t have a voice other than what color cupcakes to bring to the PTA, they’re not going to be active in [local]school boards,” he said.

In New York, the Department of Education has renamed Common Core the “Next Generation Learning Standards,” but on issues of standards and accountability, Tampio said, they’re largely the same. Seventy-sevent percent of the existing Common Core standards will have no change whatsoever, and “clarifications” have been issued for just 15.9 percent of them. In order to receive $1.6 billion in federal funds, the state must comply with the changes and submit them to the federal government next month.

ESSA states that there is “no requirement, direction, or mandate to adopt Common Core standards,” but Tampio says that does not help states rid themselves of Common Core standards already in place. ESSA’s language on standards requires states to maintain “challenging academic content standards.”

“When ESSA was signed in 2015, most states already adopted Common Core. The question [should be]what is the federal government going to do to help facilitate states trying to exit the Common Core?” he said.

“[It] is an incredible burden for any state to choose an alternative, and I don’t think we’re going to see any.

“I’d be delighted if they did, because it would be a road map for every other state on how to do it,” he said.

Tampio, an education activist, claims that Common Core standards, with its test-based model, do little to develop creativity and independent thinking in developing children.

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Education Industry, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), Testing

Erik Mears: Why I Teach My Students in the Bronx About the Awesomeness of KIPP

By dianeravitch
August 29, 2017 //
25

A few days ago, I posted a story about a high school teacher in the Bronx who was annoyed because he felt compelled to teach his public school students a story in a textbook that celebrated KIPP and put down their neighborhood.

The story attracted a lot of attention, and the teacher Erik Means wanted to answer your questions in this follow up post.

On August 25th, you linked to my Counterpunch article, which criticizes HMH for publishing a pro-charter essay in its 12th Grade Collections textbook. In part because of comments that a few of your readers posted, I feel obliged to make some clarifications:

When a school such as mine purchases HMH Collections, they buy textbooks for Grades 9-12, as well as electronic resources and supplementary materials – including a 180-day pacing guide. A set of scripted, Common Core-aligned questions follows each text. You buy these books because they are Common Core-aligned, and because they feature an array of shorter fiction and non-fiction texts that will help students practice for the Regents exam.

My administrators expected me to stick to this textbook, and use few “outside texts,” for these reasons. If I raised an issue with any text, they would tell me to teach it alongside a “counter-text” that provides a differing point of view. (I wrote the Counterpunch piece, in part, to create such as “counter-text” – since none really existed to suitably counter Gladwell’s claims and omissions).

To their credit, my administrators allow me to script my own questions. They respect me, my colleagues, and our academic freedom. They are also hard-working, good-hearted professionals who care deeply about the students and teachers in our building.

Do they require me to teach “Marita’s Bargain?” Given that they expect me to make my way through the textbook, as the year progresses, and only exclude certain texts because of time constraints, the answer is “yes.” You do not omit the first text in a textbook (it appears on pages 3-14) because of time constraints.

But the major reason why I teach “Marita’s Bargain” is because it is so glaring, in a literal sense. Throughout the year, all of my students will eventually leaf through the textbook, and see, in prominent letters, on page 5, “Just over ten years into its existence, KIPP has become one of the most desirable public schools in New York City.” They will see a photo of blighted South Bronx buildings on page 9. And they will see “Our kids are spending fifty to sixty percent more time learning than the traditional public school student” in prominent letters, on page 12.

My students would rightly wonder why I am skipping an article about schools in their community, when it appears as the first text in our textbook. If they read the most salient parts of the article, they might even suspect that I am skipping “Marita’s Bargain” because I am a self-interested public school teacher who wishes to obscure the miracles that KIPP charter schools are performing in their own community.

Thus, the fact that “Marita’s Bargain” appears so early in my textbook demands that I address it in some way. And if the text were not so prominent, I would not teach it; not in 100 years.

For my own part, I guide my students through “Marita’s Bargain” as critically as possible. But anyone who suspects that HMH would encourage teachers to do so can read its scripted questions, and judge for themselves (see pages 15-16):

Click to access maritas_bargain.pdf

Moreover, although most NYC ELA teachers are excellent, few of them are as knowledgeable about education reform as I am. “Pushing back” against Gladwell, as I do in class, requires a certain esoteric knowledge that many teachers lack – and this hardly discredits them as ELA instructors.

In this letter, I have written more about myself and my school than is my wont in a public forum. I have done so in order to make clear that my administrators acted, more or less rationally, in purchasing HMH Collections, and defensibly, in expecting me to teach most of its texts. I do not believe that they deserve much blame.

In my Counterpunch piece, I wrote primarily about the flaws and omissions of Gladwell’s piece itself. I attempted to demonstrate that the text failed to achieve a certain standard of quality, and that by deduction, HMH must have selected it for propagandistic purposes. This text should not be in my, or any, textbook, unless it is to be used as an example of certain defects. HMH did not wish this latter, if its scripted questions are any indication. I fault HMH for including the text in its Collections textbook, and for selling it to many schools throughout New York City. I fault Gladwell, to a lesser extent, for writing it in the first place.

Sincerely,

Erik Mears

Categories Charter Schools, Common Core, Education Industry, KIPP Charter Schools

Robert Shepherd: How the Common Core Killed Teaching and Learning

By dianeravitch
August 26, 2017 //
179

Robert Shepherd, teacher, author, curriculum developer, assessment expert, etc., left the following comment on the blog about the deadening effects of the Common Core on teachers and students:


The biggest tragedy that has occurred in the last few decades in our schools is that they have been to an enormous extent turned into test prep organizations under the standards and testing regime. This is true in both public and charter schools. “Reformers” successfully rebranded the national standards by simply changing their name. So, for example, in Florida, the Common Core State Standards–unchanged–are now called the Mathematics Florida Standards and the Language Arts Florida Standards, but make no mistake about it, these are the CCSS.

The public largely believes that the standards and testing have been a good thing, and that’s because simple arguments can be made for them: who doesn’t want “high standards”? Who doesn’t want “accountability”? These phrases are easily promulgated sound bites. But go into K-12 classrooms, and what you find is that where in the past students were writing essays and reading novels and nonfiction books and short stories and plays, they are now doing exercise sets based on the questions on the standardized tests.

An English department chairperson recently told me that this is ALL she does until the kids take the test in April or May–test prep exercises, every day, for almost the entire school year. This teacher’s approach is now the norm.

Traditional materials for teaching English language arts have been largely replaced by ones that emphasize exercise sets in which each exercise is narrowly focused on practicing one skill described by one standard. What particular readings are involved has become largely irrelevant under this regime–any reading will do as long as it is accompanied by an exercise for practicing standard x or y. The content of these readings is often completely random–a piece about Harriet Tubman here, one about invasive plant species there–and so there is no sustained work in a particular context–that of a novel or a unit on some nonfiction topic–even though brains are connection machines, learning happens when it is connected to previous learning, and comprehension is largely contextual.

Where in the past, a teacher would announce that he or she was starting a unit on Robert Frost or the literature of the Civil War (Crane, Bierce, etc.), now it’s, “OK, class. We’re going to work on our recognizing the main idea skills.” But there’s a problem: There is no such thing as a generalized recognizing the main idea skill. Such a thing is entirely mythical, like the fairies that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle believed in. Meaning is contextual, and arriving at the main idea or main ideas (for often, there are several) depends upon particular knowledge of the text’s aims and context.

The CCSS for ELA give lip service to substantive reading and content knowledge, but the truth is that on the ground, where it matters, the national standards and testing regime has replaced traditional instruction in English with test prep exercises, and this has been a calamity of enormous proportions. It’s meant the end of the profession of English teaching as I knew it. I know many, many English teachers who have quit or changed fields because of this. They are sick of being pressured by administrators to do all test prep all the time. But the administrators are simply doing what they are incentivized to do. They are evaluated primarily on the test scores that they deliver, for who doesn’t want to be principal of an A school?

With this going on, worrying about other matters is like spending one’s time polishing the bright work on a sailboat when there is a hole in the hull.

Except in isolated classrooms where brave teachers are continuing to teach despite the standards and testing regime, the teaching of English in K-12 is dead.

RIP

Categories Common Core, Teachers and Teaching

Bianca Tanis: Don’t Let New York Destroy Early Childhood Education with 75 Standards

By dianeravitch
August 26, 2017 //
7

Bianca Tanis teaches young children in New York. She is a founding member of NYSAPE, New York Dtate Alliance of Parents and Educators. She is also a teacher of children with special needs.

Frustrated by the state’s indifference to the needs of young children, she wrote this post and interviewed teachers about what matters most for teaching and learning: PLAY.

Categories Accountability, Childhood, Common Core, Education Industry, Play, Teachers and Teaching, Testing

Leonie Haimson: Test Scores in New York State Are Meaningless, Again

By dianeravitch
August 25, 2017 //
28

Leonie Haimson assesses the latest test scores from New York. New York is still using the Common Core, but with a new name, so of course the majority of students in the state “failed,” which was the purpose of the Common Core standards, to make public schools look bad so that privatization would be easier to sell to the public.

Leonie has something that no one in the New York State Education Department has: a historical memory, clear knowledge of the frequent changes in cut scores, constant manipulation of the data.

Leonie writes:

“The NY state and city test scores were released this week. Proficiency rates statewide increased again though by a smaller amount than last year. In English Language Arts, the percentage of students in grades 3-8 who scored at proficient levels increased by an average of 1.9 percentage points; from 37.9% in 2016 to 39.8%. In math, the students who scored at proficiency rose to 40.2%, up 1.1 points from 29.1% last year.

“In NYC the increases were a little larger: a gain of more than two points in ELA proficiency to 40.6% and 1.4 points to 37.8% proficiency in math.

“Commissioner Elia, Mayor de Blasio and Chancellor Farina claimed that the increase in proficiency since 2013 was strong evidence that our students and schools are making progress.

“Yet the reality is that the trends over the last 15 years have not matched any of the trends on the more reliable national test called the NAEPs, for either NYC or the state as a whole.

“In fact, the NY State Education Department has appeared unable since 2002 to produce a reliable test and score it consistently enough to allow one to assess if there’s been any sort of improvement in our schools. Instead, Commissioners and their staff have repeatedly changed cut scores and set proficiency rates to make political points.

“There are many ways to show increases in proficiency — a metric notoriously easy to manipulate — including making the tests easier, shorter, giving them untimed, and/or changing the scoring by lowering the raw scores to scale scores or the cut scores need for proficiency. The state has used all these tricks over time.”

Read it all. She nails the fraud perpetrated by the state and ignored by journalists.

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Education Reform, Fraud, New York, Standardized Testing

Bookshelf: Steve Nelson’s “First Do No Harm: Progressive Education in a Time of Existential Risk”

By dianeravitch
August 24, 2017 //
38

You know how you can pick up a book, start reading, start annotating with underlining and exclamation points, then realize you are marking up almost every word?

That is Steve Nelson’s “First Do No Harm.” It is chicken soup for the educator’s soul.

Nelson recently retired as head of the progressive Calhoun School in New York City. He also just joined the board of the Network for Public Education because he wants to devote his time to the fight for better public schools for all children.

He describes progressive education as ways to engage children in thinking critically, asking questions, and engaging creatively in play and work. He knows it is endangered, even though children thrive when given the opportunity to love learning.

He recognizes the soul-deadening approach of no-excuses charters and suggests that they exhibit unconscious racism. Maybe not always unconscious.

He points out that affluent communities think they have great public schools, without recognizing that their schools are gifted by the privilege of parents and the community. The same is true of elite private schools, whose students are drawn mostly from wealthy families with every financial advantage.

Every effort to standardize education–whether it is NCLB or Common Core– robs children of the chance to think for themselves. Such top-down programs demand conformity, not critical thinking or creativity. Indeed they punish students who think differently.

Nelson goes into great detail about the harm inflicted on children by no-excuses charter schools like KIPP and Democracy Prep.

He stands strongly against vouchers, which typically are used in religious schools, where children are subject to indoctrination.

Nelson understands the link between education and democracy, education for freedom.

I recommend this book to you.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Childhood, Common Core, Creativity, Discipline, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Testing

Nancy Bailey: Don’t Fall for Common Core Infomercials

By dianeravitch
August 16, 2017 //
32

Nancy Bailey did not like Dana Goldstein’s article in the New York Times About teaching writing. It sounded to her like an infomercial for the Common Core. In this post, she offers 15 experienced-based ways to help children learn to write and express themselves.

“New York Times journalist Dana Goldstein, who isn’t a teacher but likes to write about them, recently wrote “Why Kids Can’t Write,” an infomercial for Common Core.

“A takeaway from the article is that Common Core may not be working to teach writing, but it’s the teacher’s fault. The real danger here, however, is the idea that student words don’t matter–that writing instruction is only about mechanics.

“Goldstein highlights Dr. Judith C. Hochman who founded a nonprofit called The Writing Revolution. Hochman believes in teaching children writing mechanics and she poo poos student self-expression. She just doesn’t think it’s necessary.

“If that sounds eerily like the College Board’s David Coleman, chief in charge of Common Core, who said no one gives a “shit” about what students write, well, surprise! Coleman sits on The Writing Revolution’s Board of Trustees.

“Goldstein has gotten pushback by Furman education professor P.L Thomas in “Why Journalists Shouldn’t Write About Education,” and Jim Horn’s “Bad Writer? Blame a Teacher, Says Goldstein.” Those authors especially note the disgraceful way Goldstein slams teachers.

“Kate Walsh, who also doesn’t like teachers or student self-expression, is mentioned in the article. Walsh is with the National Council of Teacher Quality (NCTQ), highlighted in Goldstein’s article. This is a group supported by Bill Gates that pretends to know what makes good teachers.

“I have known many career English teachers. I don’t remember one of them not being confident in their ability to teach writing.”

If you want some sound ideas about teaching writing, read Bailey’s post.

Categories Common Core, Teachers and Teaching
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