Reader Akedemos writes:
“Breaking: AIR Loses All Exams for the State of Florida; Officials Walk Into Ocean in Support of Common Core
“Update: Revealed as Hoax; Subversive Ad Gimmick for Upcoming Pirates of the Caribbean Movie”
Archives for category: Common Core
I wrote before that I would support the nominee of the Democratic Party. Hillary Clinton won a decisive victory in California last night, and she will be the nominee, opposing the execrable Donald Trump.
I will vote for her.
Readers will say that she is too close to the people who are promoting charters, high-stakes testing, and the destructive policies of the Bush-Obama administrations. That is true. I have fought with all my strength against these terrible policies. I will continue to do so, with redoubled effort. I will do my best to get a one-on-one meeting with Hillary Clinton and to convey what we are fighting for: the improvement of public schools, not their privatization or monetization. The strengthening of the teaching profession, not its elimination. We want for all children what we want for our own.
Which is another way of saying what John Dewey said: “What the best and wisest parent wants for his child, that must we want for all the children of the community. Anything less is unlovely, and left unchecked, destroys our democracy.”
Hillary Clinton wants the best for her grandchildren: a well-equipped school in a beautiful building; experienced and caring teachers and principals (not amateurs who took a course in leadership); arts classes; daily physical education; the possibility of a life where there is food security, health security, home security, and physical security. That is what we want for our children. That is what we want for everyone’s children. I think she will understand that. Not schools run by for-profit corporations; not schools where children are not allowed to laugh or play; not schools where testing steals time from instruction; not inexperienced teachers who are padding their resumes. That is what I want to tell her. I think she will understand. If she does, she will change the current federal education policies, which are mean-spirited, demoralizing to teachers, and contemptuous of the needs of children.
Now we must turn our energies to fighting together to make clear that we are united, we are strong, and we are not going away. We will stand together, raise our voices, and fight for public education, for our educators, and for the millions of children that they serve. And we will never, never, never give up.
I am grateful to Bernie Sanders for pushing the Clinton campaign to endorse the issues of income inequality and economic fairness. I am glad that he made the privilege of the 1% a national issue. I am glad that he will continue the struggle to really make this country just and fair for all. Bernie has made a historic contribution. He has organized millions of people, enabling them to express their hopes and fears for our nation and our future.
We must work together to harness that energy to save our schools. We must remind the Clinton campaign that every one of the policies promoted by the privatization movement, ALEC, and the whole panoply of right-wingers and misguided Democrats have been a massive failure. They have destroyed communities, especially black and Hispanic communities. They have hurt children, especially children of color. They are destroying public education itself, which is a bedrock of our democracy. We can’t let this happen.
Our task is clear. We must organize as never before. We must push back as never before.
Start by joining the SOS March on July 8 at the Lincoln Memorial.
I will be on a <a href="http://“>webinar tonight at 8 pm to discuss the SOS March and the issues we now face. The timing is perfect to plan for the future.
Please join us at 8 pm EST. We need you. We need your energy and your voice.
“https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/8824328855840974852”
Our reader and amazing researcher draws a map of the covert networks that promote school choice, privatization, high-stakes testing, and the rest of the corporate reform agenda.
Chapman writes:
Third Wave is a new marketing package for ideas forged at the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE), aided by charter friendly Bellwether, field tested in Boston, New Orleans, and coming to other “Education Cities.” Third Wave is a planed tsunami intended to eliminate local school boards. Private foundations—the billionaire donor class—provides the impetus for the Third Wave. Themes in the pitch for donor-controlled education “seats” for kids, and nothing less than “great” schools.
Some remote links to this Third Wave brand can be traced to Alvin Toffler’s book with the same title, also “disruptive” narratives of many kinds in academe, with one example about “educational choice” in Great Britain: The ‘Third Wave’: Education and the Ideology of Parentocracy. Phillip Brown;Source: British Journal of Sociology of Education, Vol. 11, No. 1 (1990), pp. 65-85 Volume Information. (1990). British Journal of Sociology of Education, 11(1), 1-2. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/1392908
A key feature of the Third Wave brand is getting “cross-sector universal student enrollment” installed as a new norm for thinking about education, with an ever diminishing role for elected school boards in policy making.
Here is a Gates foundation launch in Massachusetts: Grant to Boston Private Industry Council Inc. Date: September 2014, Purpose: to support the design and launch of a cross-sector universal student enrollment system for the city of Boston, Amount: $100,000 Term: 34 months.
That is one small grant. But the big push for Third Wave comes from the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE). This organization is really a multi-state policy/advocacy group funded by The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Laura and John Arnold Foundation, Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, US Department of Education, Walton Family Foundation, and Anonymous. (Yes, USDE is a funder!).
The POLICY PARTNERS for the Center for Reinventing Pubic education are:
1. National Center for Special Education in Charter Schools funded by the Oak Foundation, Walton Family Foundation, Newark Charter School Fund, and Charter School Growth Fund.
2. Education Cities (100 of the largest cities, implicated in a rating scheme funded by the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation and connected to the GreatSchools rating and marketing website), and the
3. Policy Innovation Network (PIE). Let’s look at the connection of PIE to CRPE to Third Wave.
The PIE Network connects 48 “education reform groups” in 31 states and the District of Columbia. In addition to feeding information to these groups, PIE asks the groups to commit to policies formulated by its “policy partners” and work with “advocacy partners” including many national organizations “often active in state capitols, working in collaboration with network members or providing strategic advice and assistance as invited by network members.” Think Superpac.
Here are the MEMBERS of PIE by state: ALABAMA, A+ Education Partnership; ARIZONA, Expect More Arizona, Stand for Children Arizona; CALIFORNIA, The Education Trust- West, EdVoice; COLORADO, Colorado Succeeds, Stand for Children Colorado; CONNECTICUT, ConnCAN, Connecticut Council for Education Reform; DELAWARE, Rodel Foundation of Delaware; DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA, DC School Reform Now; FLORIDA, Foundation for Florida’s Future, GEORGIA, Georgia Partnership for Excellence in Education; IDAHO, Idaho Business for Education; ILLINOIS, Advance Illinois, Stand for Children Illinois; INDIANA, Stand for Children Indiana; KENTUCKY, Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence; LOUISIANA, Stand for Children Louisiana; MARYLAND, MarylandCAN; MASSACHUSETTS, Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education, Stand for Children Massachusetts; MICHIGAN, The Education Trust- Midwest; MINNESOTA, MinnCAN; MISSISSIPPI, Mississippi First; MISSOURI, Children’s Education Alliance of Missouri (CEAM); NEVADA, Nevada Succeeds; NEW JERSEY, JerseyCAN; NEW YORK, NYCAN, StudentsFirstNY; NORTH CAROLINA, BEST-NC, North Carolina Public School Forum; OHIO, KidsOhio!, Thomas B. Fordham Institute of Ohio; OKLAHOMA, Oklahoma Business and Education Coalition, Stand for Children Oklahoma; OREGON, Chalkboard Project, Stand for Children Oregon; PENNSYLVANIA, PennCAN; RHODE ISLAND, RI-CAN; TENNESSEE, State Collaborative on Reforming Education, Stand for Children Tennessee; TEXAS, Educate Texas, Stand for Children Texas, Texas Institute for Education Reform; WASHINGTON, League of Education Voters, Partnership for Learning, Stand for Children Washington. Surce: http://www.pie-network.org/who/network-members.
Then there are the POLICY PARTNERS for PIE—which is connected to CPRE— which is connected to Third Wave— with generous funding by with the mega-billionaire donor class behind the so-called Third Wave.
“Evidence and expertise play an essential role in forging public policy solutions to formidable institutional challenges; therefore, PIE Network partners with six leading national policy organizations that fuel reform on a national level, disseminate critical research, and offer guidance to network members.” These POLICY PARTNERS are: Center for American Progress, Center on Reinventing Public Education, Data Quality Campaign, Education Resource Strategies, National Council on Teacher Quality, and Thomas B. Fordham Institute. All are famous (infamous) for plots and policies and their obligations to the billionaire donor class. All are intent on eliminating elected school boards and pouring tax dollars into the coffers of private and religious schools.
Look again. Here are PIE’s ADVOCACY PARTNERS and what they do—The ”growing number of national reform organizations are also working at the state level to advance part of the network’s policy commitments. These organizations, which we recognize as advocacy partners, are often active in state capitols working in collaboration with network members or providing strategic advise and assistance as invited by network members. The current ADVOCACY PARTNERS include: 50CAN – national office, America Succeeds, Black Alliance for Educational Options, Democrats for Education Reform, Education Trust, Educators 4 Excellence, Families for Excellent Schools, Foundation for Excellence in Education, National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, Parent Revolution, StudentsFirst, Students for Education Reform – national office, Stand for Children – national office. You can learn more at
Click to access csa_ceo_jd-final.pdf
Now there is a bit more detail (if you can stand it) in how Bellwether aids and abets the Third Wave’s efforts to discredit and demolish elected school boards, silece teachers, parents, and citizens.
I live in Cincinnati. Local foundations with projects in education have been part of a STRIVE collaborative with the Cincinnati Public Schools, Some members in this group have become part of a foundation-led “Accelerator” with a recently hired CEO and a target of $48 million for eliminating every good school that is not a “great school.” The Accelerator is a pitch for cross-sector universal student enrollment for the metro area, and with a specific inclusion of Catholic schools.
Charter-friendly Bellwether handled the CEO recruitment. The Bellwether job description begins with the Gates mantra of college and career readiness for every child. It is filled with “business and charter speak”—the need for a talent pipeline to “create a total of 14,500 new high-performing seats in the city.”
Our local “Accelerator” is “committed to a three-part philosophy: 1. To focus on each school’s performance, not its operator; 2. To embrace and support all successful schools whether they’re District, public charter, or Catholic, and 3. To focus on the development and expansion of schools and school models that deliver outstanding results.”
Among other qualifications, the CEO of this Accelerator was to have: “political savvy, and instincts sharp enough to navigate and establish productive relationships across the Cincinnati educational, philanthropic and political landscape;” and the “ability to identify new sources of funding from foundations, corporations, investors, and/or individual donors, and the skills required to secure these resources through relationship-building.”
REPORTING STRUCTURE. This initiative “was founded with significant engagement and support from the local philanthropic community. Members of this community will play a key role on the Board of Directors.” Over the next three years, the Accelerator will build out the Board, including a focus on adding perspectives from one or more national funders and one or more local community leaders. The Board will not likely exceed nine members, will meet at least quarterly, and will focus specifically on providing strategic and financial guidance.“ See more at this ink, and note the long reach of CRPE. http://www.crpe.org/sites/default/files/csa_ceo_jd-final.pdf
The CEO of our Accelerator is Patrick Herrel. He seems to have held three prior jobs: a government and economics teacher in Charlotte, North Carolina; Teach for America manager of recruiters across the Midwest; and Vice President of The Mind Trust in Indianapolis, where he helped launch “autonomous schools,” and “in-district, empowered schools.” I guess he had the needed fast track tsunami stuff. In 2012, Herrel was named one of Forbes Magazine’s “30 under 30” in education.
I am not alone in questioning the Accelerator and presumptions of our local donor class, most of them speaking as if experts in education based on their great wealth accumulated from holding executive positions in corporations. They believe that the end—metrics for high performance” justify whatever means are necessary to get the intended outcomes. Operators of schools do not matter. What citizens and elected officials think is of no great importance. They think they can buy the “seats” for poor students in high performing schools and that will do the job. Sounds all too familiar.
I am very pleased to let you know about the publication of a newly revised edition of The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.
Perhaps you read it when it was first released in 2010. It was big news at the time, because I broke ranks with the conservative think tanks and policymakers who had once been my allies. I spoke out against the misuse of testing and the dangers of privatization. This was unexpected from someone who had been an Assistant Secretary of Education in the administration of President George H. W. Bush, who served as part of three conservative think tanks, and who had written many articles about the “crisis” in American education.
I thought I had made a clean break with the Bush-Obama agenda. But in time I realized that I had not completely escaped the old, failed way of thinking (like a state, tinkering with people’s lives from afar). The book continued my longstanding support for a national curriculum and predicted that it would be smooth sailing now that the culture wars were over. I was wrong again!
In this new revision of the book, I have removed any endorsement for a national curriculum or national standards or national tests, and I explain why. The controversy over the Common Core standards taught me that the U.S. will never have a national curriculum, and furthermore, should never have one.
I also explain why a national curriculum and national examinations will not reduce the achievement gap among different racial and ethnic groups and will not reduce poverty. The advocacy for them–from the same people who support privatization–continues to be an excuse for avoiding the issue of poverty. And I rewrote the chapter on “A Nation at Risk,” showing how it dodged the most important issues in our society, which were economic and social, not educational.
Yes, there is a “crisis” in education, but it is not a crisis of test scores or failing schools. The crisis is caused by policymakers, federal officials, foundations, and business leaders who are imposing failed ideas on the schools. These impositions are hurting students, teachers, principals, communities, and public education itself. They have failed and failed, again and again, but those who support the Bush-Obama agenda of competition, choice, testing, and accountability refuse to re-examine their assumptions. Their inability to recognize their own failure has created disruption (which they admire), turmoil, and massive demoralization among educators.
I hope you will consider reading the book. I think that D&L continues to speak with passion to the terrible and real crisis in American education, a crisis caused by non-educators who want to turn our schools into job-training units, who want to emphasize standardized testing to the detriment of students, educators, and public schools, and who foolishly think that privatization will improve education.
Reactions to the mea culpa of Sue Desmond-Hellman, the CEO of the Gates Foundation, continue to roll in. Sue D-H admitted that “mistakes had been made” in the education arena and promised to listen to teachers. Many who have read the memo think that the foundation still doesn’t understand why its promotion of test-based teacher evaluation is failing or why the Common Core is meeting so much resistance.
Susan Ochshorn hopes that the Gates Foundation will listen to early childhood education professionals.
At the bottom of the totem pole of influence are early childhood teachers. None of these stewards of America’s human capital weighed in on the design of the Common Core standards. They were back-mapped, reaching new heights of absurdity, including history, economic concepts, and civics and government as foundations for two-year-olds’ emergent knowledge.
Most importantly, the standards make a mockery of early childhood’s robust evidence base. Young children learn through exploration, inquiry, hypothesis, and collaboration. Play, the primary engine of human development, has vanished from kindergarten and first-grade classrooms, replaced by worksheets, didactic learning, and increasingly narrow curricula, in keeping with standards’ focus on literacy and math. Policymakers are talking about bringing rigor and the Common Core down to four-year-olds.
If all lives have equal value, the core belief of the Gates Foundation, then our most vulnerable kids must have access to the kind of education enjoyed by those with greater resources: teaching and learning that nurtures creativity and innovation, attuned to the whole child. Too often, they’re subject to rote, passive, and joyless assimilation of knowledge. Collateral damage of your initiative—all in the name of higher test scores.
What if the Gates Foundation undertook a course correction, and put education back in the wheelhouse of educators?
Ochshorn points out that poverty is an enormous barrier to school participation and engagement. She briefly reviews the research base that establishes the harmful effects of poverty (an idea that Gates has derided in the past).
It’s hard, indeed, to be deeply engaged when you’re hungry or homeless—or traumatized by the growing number of adverse childhood experiences that plague our little ones. (As an oncologist, you have a deep understanding of physiological damage.) Moreover, it’s challenging for educators to do their job, no matter how well they’re prepared. The schools in communities of concentrated poverty are segregated institutions starved of investment, places fit for neither children nor teachers.
The results of a recent survey of teachers of the year, conducted by the Council of Chief State School Officers, are illuminating. When asked about the barriers that most affect their students’ academic success, family stress, poverty, and learning and psychological problems topped the list. Anti-poverty initiatives, early learning, and reducing barriers to learning were the teachers’ top picks for investment.
The Gates Foundation has done remarkable work across the globe. How about taking some of your formidable resources and bringing them on home to America’s children and communities?
Larry Cuban writes on his blog about the most important inventions that have raised our nation’s standard of living. He poses the question that is the title of this post. He supposes that most people would respond “the smartphone,” but they would be wrong. His post is an intriguing review of a book by economic historian Robert Gordon, who contends that the century from 1870-1970 experienced greater growth and innovation than the past half century.
Cuban summarizes Gordon’s central argument:
Thus, an unheralded, stunning century of innovation and economic growth produced the telegraph, phone, television, house lighting, automobile, airplane travel, and, yes, indoor plumbing. These inventions networked the home and workplace in ways that raised living standards and increased workplace productivity considerably. It was in that same century that medical advances reduced infant mortality and lengthened life of Americans dramatically.
The half-century since 1970 has surely seen innovations that have enhanced these earlier inventions but the template for economic growth was laid down for that fruitful hundred-year period. In past decades, new technologies have clearly expanded communication and entertainment, making life far more instantaneous, convenient and pleasurable. But social media, immediate communication, and constant access to photos, video clips, and films have not increased the standard of living as had the decades between 1870-1970.
Cuban then segues to a discussion of the current reform movement in education, which traces its roots to the 1983 report “A Nation at Risk.” That report was “driven by an economic rationale–the human capital argument–for improving U.S. schools” and embraced by policymakers, business leaders, and foundations. If we didn’t improve education dramatically, we would lose our competitive edge in the world economy. And thus was born the “reform movement,” in which governors and “reformers” sought to raise curriculum and performance standards for both students and teachers, increase testing, and create accountability frameworks that included rewards and penalties in subsequent decades….
The current reforms in education and the pressure to raise test scores on international tests have not increased economic growth, stimulated productivity, or reduced inequality, writes Cuban.
In other words, reforms aimed at getting U.S. students to perform better on international tests for the past three decades–think No Child Left Behind, expanded parental choice in schools, more computers in schools, and Common Core state standards–was of little influence on growing a strong economy, raising median income, or lessening inequality, according to Gordon. These reforms, while aiding low-income minorities in many instances, overall, contributed little to improving productivity or raising standards of living
Gordon’s book concludes, writes Cuban, with a list of ten interventions that could raise the standard of living, like raising the minimum wage. Of his ten interventions three have to do with education. They are:
“…investing in preschools, state and federal school financing rather than local taxes, and reducing student indebtedness in higher education. Not a word about the dominant school reforms in 2016–Common Core standards, standardized testing, technologies in schools, charter schools, accountability.
In questioning the dominant beliefs in current school reform as essential to economic growth, Gordon’s argument and evidence are useful to those politically active decision-makers, teachers, parents, and researchers who know that a democracy needs schools that do more than prepare children and youth for the workplace.
The paradox, as Cuban suggests, is that the more we focus on test scores and workplace readiness, the more we sacrifice civic values that may be of greater importance in a democracy.
A reader writes:
“In the non-public special education field, we generally feel the residual effects of educational policies and changes. Right now we’re feeling the effects of Common core and PARCC and not in such a positive way. Common Core Standards “do not define the intervention methods or materials necessary to support students who are well below or well above grade-level expectations,” but our students with disabilities must participate at the same level and with the same rigor as their “non-disabled” peers in PARCC assessments.
Our IEP’s must be standards-based, aligned to their grade level and our teaching must be aligned to the Maryland CCR Standards at the students grade level. The problem, however, is that the majority of our students are functioning 3 to 4 grade levels below their non-disabled peers and our teachers are struggling to help them acquire and demonstrate a few skills successfully.
How then do we prepare our students effectively for an assessment that will test them on the very standards they fail to understand? Our students with ED, anxiety, depression, ADHD, and autism have already been formally tested by teachers and related services providers multiple times before even reaching PARCC season. When is enough enough? There has to be a better way to assess their learning.
This is a remarkable editorial that appears in the Los Angeles Times, of all places. The headline tells a story we did not expect to read on this newspaper’s editorial page:
Gates Foundation failures show philanthropists shouldn’t be setting America’s public school agenda
Read that again. Slowly.
The editorial recaps the serial failures of the Gates Foundation in education: Small high schools (abandoned); evaluating teachers by test scores (not yet abandoned but clearly a failure, as witnessed by the disasterous, costly experience in Hillsborough County, Florida); Common Core (not abandoned, but facing a massive public rejection).
But it’s not all bad, says the editorial:
It was a remarkable admission for a foundation that had often acted as though it did have all the answers. Today, the Gates Foundation is clearly rethinking its bust-the-walls-down strategy on education — as it should. And so should the politicians and policymakers, from the federal level to the local, who have given the educational wishes of Bill and Melinda Gates and other well-meaning philanthropists and foundations too much sway in recent years over how schools are run.
That’s not to say wealthy reformers have nothing to offer public schools. They’ve funded some outstanding charter schools for low-income students. They’ve helped bring healthcare to schools. They’ve funded arts programs.
This is not the whole story, of course. They have funded a movement to privatize public education, which drains resources and the students the charters want from public schools, leaving them in worse shape for the vast majority of students. And they have insisted on high-stakes testing, thus leading schools to eliminate or curtail their arts programs. As for healthcare in the schools, there should be more of it, but it should not depend on philanthropic largesse. Two children in the Philadelphia public schools died because the school nurses were cut back to only two days a week, and there were no philanthropists filling the gap.
Knowing how destructive the venture philanthropists have been–not only Gates, but also Eli Broad and the Walton Family, and a dozen or two other big philanthropies–one could wish that they would fund healthcare and arts programs, and perhaps experimental schools that demonstrated what public schools with ample resources could accomplish.
Still we must be grateful when the Los Angeles Times writes words like these:
Philanthropists are not generally education experts, and even if they hire scholars and experts, public officials shouldn’t be allowing them to set the policy agenda for the nation’s public schools. The Gates experience teaches once again that educational silver bullets are in short supply and that some educational trends live only a little longer than mayflies.
Allowing Bill Gates or Eli Broad or the Walton Family to set the nation’s education is not only unwise, it is undemocratic. The schools belong to the public, not to the 1%.
Since the editorial mentioned Bill Gates’ devout belief that teachers could be evaluated by the test scores of their students, it is appropriate to recall that the Los Angeles Times was the first newspaper in the nation to publish ratings for teachers based on test scores; it even had hopes of winning a Pulitzer Prize for this ugly intervention by non-educators who thought that teaching could be reduced to a number and splashed in headlines. Let us never forget Rigoberto Ruelas, a fifth-grade teacher who committed suicide shortly after the evaluations were published by the Los Angeles Times, and he was declared by the Times to be among the “least effective” teachers. There followed a heated debate about the methodology used by the Times to rate teachers. That was before the American Statistical Association warned against using test scores to evaluate individual teachers. But the Los Angeles Times was taking Gates’ lead and running with it. It was not worth the life of this good man.
Students at two high schools in Palo Alto, California, opted out of the tests of the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, the Common Core test funded by the US Department of Education.
“For the second year in a row, both Palo Alto and Gunn high schools failed to meet the government’s required participation rates for new standardized test, the Smarter Balanced Assessment, with about half of the junior classes choosing to opt out.
“About 47 percent of Gunn juniors and 61 percent of Paly juniors submitted exemptions, with their parents’ permission, to opt out of two days of testing the week of May 16, according to Janine Penney, the district’s manager of research, evaluation and assessment.
“At the elementary level, approximately 1 percent of third through fifth graders opted out, according to Penney, and less than 3 percent of middle schoolers.
“California schools are required by federal law to meet a 95 percent participation rate. Schools with federal Title I status, meaning they have high percentages of low-income students, could face losing federal funding if they don’t meet the participation threshold. Paly and Gunn are not Title I schools.”
California high school students are smart. Don’t believe anyone who says otherwise.
Mercedes Schneider noticed something curious in the reports of the Gates Foundation:
Despite the CEO’s pledge to “double down” in shoving CCSS on unwilling schools and teachers, the Gates Foundation has not handed out a single CCSS grant in 2016.
Oh, also, Sue Desmond-Hellman cites ACT data. As Peter Greene pointed out in another post, the student who is gifted in music and the humanities is not “college ready” unless she also gets high scores in science. And the brilliant young scientis is not “college ready” unless his test scores in the humanities are equally stellar.
Standardization has downsides.
Diane Ravitch's blog 