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Peter Greene Reviews a Poll Claiming that New Yorkers Love Common Core

By dianeravitch
December 22, 2015 //
17

Peter Greene is well aware that one of every five New York parents opted their child out of the Common Core exams. Not even Governor Cuomo has publicly supported the Common Core; when asked about it during his re-election campaign in 2014, he dodged the question. His task force recently responded to parent outrage by promising to rewrite the standards and review the tests.

 

Yet here comes Center for American Progress with a poll claiming that New Yorkers really DO love Common Core!

 

And Peter picks the poll apart with his usual hilarious metaphors!

 

In an era in which even Jeb Bush has stopped saying the name out loud, no group has cheered harder for the Common Core than the Center for American Progress (theoretically left-leaning holding pen for interregnum Clinton staffers). No argument is too dumb, no data set too ridiculous. If that dog won’t hunt, CAP ties a rope around its neck and drags it.

 

So it’s no surprise that CAP is back with yet another Pubic Policy Polling poll announced with the breathless headline “NEW POLL: WHEN NEW YORKERS SEE SPECIFIC COMMON CORE STANDARDS, THEY SUPPORT THE COMMON CORE.” Partnering up on this raft of ridiculousness is High Achievement New York, a coalition of business groups like the Business Council of New York State and reformster groups like StudentsFirstNY.

 

The poll, found here in its entirety, is as fine an example of scrambled thinking used to fuel PR as you’ll find anywhere. In the world of polling, there are two types of polls– a poll that seeks to find out what people are really thinking, and a poll that tries to make it look like people are thinking what I want them to think. This would be the second type of poll.

Categories Common Core

Mercedes Schneider: Sure Is Hard Getting an Independent Review of Common Core

By dianeravitch
December 22, 2015 //
26

Mercedes Schneider writes about Louisiana’s fake review of the Common Core standards. State Superintendent John White responded to protests against the CCSS by promising a thorough review by Louisiana teachers. But when the math committee assembled, the Louisiana teachers of math found that they would be joined by two members of the state education department’s Common Core committee. One of the math teachers, Brenda DeFelice, resigned, saying that she could not participate under these circumstances.

 

DeFelice wrote in her resignation letter:

 

During our last sub-committee meeting in Monroe, two people were introduced as experts and were invited to be seated at microphones to answer questions and to offer input to the sub-committee as we conducted the review. I have since learned that the two experts who were added to the group, Carolyn Sessions (LDOE standards coordinator and PARCC cadre) and Nancy Beben (LDOE curriculum director), were two of the original writers of the national Common Core State Standards in Mathematics. In my opinion, they had absolutely no place at the table or in front of a microphone as the sub-committee conducted our review. In fact, in the very first Standards Review Meeting in August, the Standards Steering Committee rejected a proposal to form a panel of experts to assist in this review process, saying that the work was to be done by the appointed committee members only.

 

This morning in Baton Rouge, in an effort to continue the high school discussions prior to the full sub-committee meeting tomorrow, several of the high school sub-committee members met to review the Geometry standards revisions, with the rest of the high school sub-committee members reporting in this afternoon to continue the review. Imagine my surprise to find, seated at the sub-committee table, Scott Baldridge (LSU math professor and author of Eureka Math) and James Madden (LSU Cain Center and another of the original writers of the national Common Core State Standards in Mathematics), both strong proponents of Common Core. We were also joined by Carolyn Sessions (LDOE and PARCC) again. Not surprisingly, all three spoke strongly against the sub-committee members’ proposed changes to the current Louisiana Common Core Geometry Standards, and once again, I feel very strongly that these people had absolutely no place at these discussions.

 

Why are we conducting a review if the same people who brought us Common Core are invited to a seat at the table and are encouraged to influence the committee in a particular direction in which they benefit?

 

As I read this account, I wonder why advocates for CCSS are so desperate? Why are they fearful of an independent review by qualified math teachers? Why do they try to control any honest critique? What do they have to gain or lose?

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Louisiana, Testing

David Coleman Tells Newman Society to Go Slow with Common Core

By dianeravitch
December 21, 2015 //
27

This is an interesting development. David Coleman was the architect of the Common Core; Arne Duncan used Race to the Top to push it into almost every public school in the United States, without any prior field testing.

 

Now Coleman tells the Cardinal Newman Society that Catholic schools should not abandon their own core religious values. Did he ever tell public schools to go slowly?

 
Catholic is our core

 
Cardinal Newman Society

 

Editorial: Catholic Schools Should Proudly Keep ‘Catholic’ as Their Core

 

December 14, 2015

 

 

Common Core co-developer David Coleman says that Catholic schools should have the “moxie” to preserve and celebrate their Catholic identity and emphasis on the liberal arts — and The Cardinal Newman Society wholeheartedly agrees.

 

Today the Newman Society published two reports from our exclusive interview with Mr. Coleman , who not only helped write the Common Core Standards but also is CEO of The College Board, which is revising its college entrance exam (SAT) to reflect the Common Core. Although Mr. Coleman supports the Common Core, his comments to the Newman Society reinforce our consistent position that Catholic schools must have non-negotiable standards of Catholic identity and emphasis on the liberal arts. They should not compromise those standards for any reason, including conformity to sweeping school reforms.

 

Moreover, there is no need to rush into the Common Core Standards in Catholic education, even if educators find some value in them. Observe and see what works, reject what doesn’t. Mr. Coleman praises religious liberal arts education and says that students in traditional Catholic schools — even those in the growing number of classical education programs — have no need to worry about getting lower SAT scores on his revised exams. Certainly Catholic educators have no reason to fear falling behind public schools.

 

Changing curricula, textbooks, testing and literature standards in order to “keep up” with the Common Core is not in the best interest of Catholic schools and the students and families they serve. The Cardinal Newman Society works with wonderful Catholic schools across the country that continue to have great success providing a traditional liberal arts education with a strong Catholic mission.

 

It’s time for Catholic educators to “be proud of what you have to offer, which is different,” as Mr. Coleman said. Let’s stand in confidence with what we know and believe.

 

Please join with us in promoting faithful Catholic education by forwarding this email on to a family member or friend.

 

 

The Cardinal Newman Society
9720 Capital Court, Suite 201
Manassas, VA 20110

 

 

alert@CardinalNewmanSociety.org
Ph: 703-367-0333 Fx: 703-396-8668

Categories Common Core

Paul Lauter Explains the Original Purpose of Close Reading

By dianeravitch
December 20, 2015 //
24

Paul Lauter is an emeritus professor of literature at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. He is general editor of the Heath Anthology of American Literature.

He followed the discussion of Eric Brandon’s post about close reading and wrote this response.

 

 

 

It’s fascinating to me to see reproduced in this discussion much of the argument about the New Criticism that took place during the 1960s and 70s. In the dim past, I studied with Cleanth Brooks, one of the main architects of the New Criticism, and co-editor of “Understanding Poetry,” perhaps THE most influential of New Critical texts. Mr. Brooks did indeed teach us to read closely. That meant, first, understanding what the words meant, and that often required looking them up so that we could appreciate the range of meanings, and ambiguities, embedded in them. The Oxford English Dictionary was our main tool, but any dictionary was useful. Just to take one example, the word “deferred,” as in “What happens to a dream deferred?” I can imagine, indeed have had, an extended discussion about the relevance of the various meanings of “defer” to the Langston Hughes poem.

 
But second, Mr. Brooks also wanted us to be aware of what the “music” of the poetry suggested or revealed. Take Countee Cullen’s poem “Incident” (which I won’t reproduce here—it’s on line). It is quite deliberately set in a sing-songy, children’s rhythm and rhyme pattern. But then the last line and a half of stanza two shatters that childish peace: “but he poked out/ His tongue, and called me, ‘Nigger.’” That is, from my point of view, apparently “simple,” but in fact one of the most brilliant pieces of modern poetry in terms both of its diction and its implications with respect to racial politics.

 
That said, New Criticism had serious limitations and biases, and the attack on it insisted that we needed to reintroduce contexts, historical and cultural detail, in order fully to appreciate or more richly to understand a poem or a story or a movie. The last two weeks of the course I took with Mr. Brooks were taught by the poet Delmore Schwartz, and he wanted us to write a very different kind of paper, one that made use of historical contexts to explore a text. I wrote on Marvell’s “The Mower Against Gardens,” and to do so I learned more than I ever wanted to know about English and French garden styles, the enclosure movement, and how these shaped the ways people from different classes perceived gardens and gardening. I don’t recommend this as an exercise for most of our students, but it’s an approach that would be helpful in looking at a poem like e.e. cummings’ “Buffalo Bill’s/ defunct” or a story like Jack London’s “Koolau the Leper,” just to select two of thousands.

 
My point in this overlong post is that close reading is a valuable skill, whether we’re talking about poetry, a story, a lease, an indictment, or a political speech. It does not, in fact, lend itself to filling in test-bubbles and anyone who thinks it does is simply missing the point. It is also just one kind of reading skill; there are others that draw upon a variety of contexts and theories. As teachers, we should not be excluding anything that is useful in the classroom and helpful to our pedagogy.

Categories Common Core

Kindergarten as the New First Grade

By dianeravitch
December 19, 2015 //
75

Due to the Common Core and testing pressures, children in kindergarten are now expected to learn to read. Kindergarten, writes Erika Christakis in The Atlantic, has changed, and not for the better.

“One study, titled “Is Kindergarten the New First Grade?,” compared kindergarten teachers’ attitudes nationwide in 1998 and 2010 and found that the percentage of teachers expecting children to know how to read by the end of the year had risen from 30 to 80 percent. The researchers also reported more time spent with workbooks and worksheets, and less time devoted to music and art. Kindergarten is indeed the new first grade, the authors concluded glumly. In turn, children who would once have used the kindergarten year as a gentle transition into school are in some cases being held back before they’ve had a chance to start. A study out of Mississippi found that in some counties, more than 10 percent of kindergartners weren’t allowed to advance to first grade.

“Until recently, school-readiness skills weren’t high on anyone’s agenda, nor was the idea that the youngest learners might be disqualified from moving on to a subsequent stage. But now that kindergarten serves as a gatekeeper, not a welcome mat, to elementary school, concerns about school preparedness kick in earlier and earlier. A child who’s supposed to read by the end of kindergarten had better be getting ready in preschool. As a result, expectations that may arguably have been reasonable for 5- and 6-year-olds, such as being able to sit at a desk and complete a task using pencil and paper, are now directed at even younger children, who lack the motor skills and attention span to be successful.”

“Preschool classrooms have become increasingly fraught spaces, with teachers cajoling their charges to finish their “work” before they can go play. And yet, even as preschoolers are learning more pre-academic skills at earlier ages, I’ve heard many teachers say that they seem somehow—is it possible?—less inquisitive and less engaged than the kids of earlier generations. More children today seem to lack the language skills needed to retell a simple story or to use basic connecting words and prepositions. They can’t make a conceptual analogy between, say, the veins on a leaf and the veins in their own hands.

“New research sounds a particularly disquieting note. A major evaluation of Tennessee’s publicly funded preschool system, published in September, found that although children who had attended preschool initially exhibited more “school readiness” skills when they entered kindergarten than did their non-preschool-attending peers, by the time they were in first grade their attitudes toward school were deteriorating. And by second grade they performed worse on tests measuring literacy, language, and math skills. The researchers told New York magazine that overreliance on direct instruction and repetitive, poorly structured pedagogy were likely culprits; children who’d been subjected to the same insipid tasks year after year after year were understandably losing their enthusiasm for learning.”

Categories Childhood, Pre-K, K, Common Core

Peter Greene on Defenders of the Common Core

By dianeravitch
December 18, 2015 //
31

This is a golden oldie from Peter Greene that remains relevant today. Actually, it is only a year old. In this post, Peter takes apart an article by Charles Upton Sahm (yes, the same person who wrote a glowing article about Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy charter chain).

 

Peter takes apart the standard reformer narrative: the Common Core was written by experts (not); the tests are more rigorous, which is a good thing (not); the Common Core was handicapped by Obama’s support for it.

 

“These days The Test never leaves the house without “more difficult” by its side. The implication is always that these new tests are more difficult, more challenging and that’s why they bother people. “More difficult” is a useful weasel phrase because everybody assumes that it’s a legitimate “more difficult.” It’s more difficult to go into the boxing ring against an opponent who’s bigger and stronger than you are. Of course, it’s also more difficult to go into the boxing ring with ferrets crazy-glued to your eyebrows and a dozen angry hamsters in your shorts, but people don’t think along those lines because we wouldn’t actually describe the ferret-and-hamster option as “more difficult” but would instead call it “crazy unreasonable stupid.” By constantly describing the new tests as more difficult, writers keep directing peoples’ attention away from the ferrets and hamsters.

 

“Sahm says that “unfortunately” the debate about the Core is more about politics than education. Well, duh. The Core has been more about politics than education from day one. Why would today be any different. If the Core were about education, the conversation about it would have included educators. But it was created by politicians and businessmen for politicians and businessmen. Honest to Stallone, Charles– teachers have been trying to make the debate about education for several years now, but nobody in power seems to want to do …..

 

“Sahm does a quick recap of the Standard Issue History of CCSS, starting with “A Nation at Risk” and moving through the governors getting “curriculum experts” and as always I’m amazed at these folks who are unfamiliar with how the internet works. So click here to watch David Coleman explain that the Core was written by a “collection of unqualified people.” So, not curriculum experts. (Also– why do we need curriculum experts to create something that isn’t a curriculum?)

 

“This is also the CCSS story that notes retrospectively that President Obama’s support in 2009 was a Bad Thing that created a political liability with people on the Right. This part of the narrative is intriguing; I am wondering how, in a non-federalized CCSS alternate universe, the CCSS ever is adopted. First, in that universe, what mysterious force makes the corporate backers/writers of the Core sit back and say, “Yeah, we probably shouldn’t use every tool at our disposal to get every state to adopt these. If just a few adopt them, that will be good enough for us.” Second, in that universe, why do states adopt the CCSS? I mean– who would be selling it? Who would be going state to state saying, “Yes, it will make your schools awesome and only cost you a gazillion dollars to implement, and it’s totally voluntary!”

 

“CCSS supporters can complain about the damage done to their cause by federal push for CCSS adoption, but without that federal bribery (RTTT) and extortion (NCLB waivers), CCSS would be sitting in a dusty binder somewhere. This is why it’s a political debate, Charles– because it was politically created and politically pushed into states. CCSS has depended on political power for every breath it has taken in its short, wasteful life.

 

“Sahm goes on to tell us what the standards are supposed to do in math and English (he does not bother to say how we know that the standards will accomplish these things, but it’s a short article). He points out that they are not a national curriculum, just an outline of what students should learn. So, totally different things. And he grabs the low-hanging fruit of debunking the complaint about non-fiction vs. fiction…..

 

“For the finish, lets’ quote David Brooks’ lamebrained NYT piece and insist that people who don’t love the Core are misinformed and opposing a perfectly sensible program because of hysterical– oh, that word again. Let’s throw in an appeal to the sensible center, and return to our Rocky image of the Core being battered and bruised but still game.

 

“You know what everybody always forgets about the first Rocky movie? At the end of the big climactic boxing match, Rocky loses.”

 

 

Categories Common Core, Education Reform

John Thompson: A Closer Look at the “Success” in D.C. That Wasn’t

By dianeravitch
December 15, 2015 //
8

John Thompson knows that reformers point to the District of Columbia as one of their examples of success. After all, the district has been controlled by Teach for America alumnae Michelle Rhee and Kaya Henderson since 2007. They own whatever successes and not-successes that occurred over the past eight years. The centerpiece of their claims of success is NAEP scores, which are up.

 

In this post, Thompson identifies the flaws in the narrative of success. Thompson lauds John Merrow for critiquing the narrative of a district he once held up as an exemplar of successful reform. Merrow asked, in his post, why anyone was celebrating Kaya Henderson’s five-year anniversary in the wake of the disastrous scores on the Common Core PARCC tests, which showed a district where academic performance was dismal.

 

Thompson reviews the NAEP scores, using Rick Hess’s data.

 

Hess cites overall gains in NAEP growth under Rhee and Henderson, but those same NAEP studies actually support the common sense conclusion that the numbers reflect gentrification. Hess’s charts show that from 2005 to 2013, the percentage of D.C. students who are low-income dropped from 66% to 61.6%. (In my world, a 61.6% low-income urban school seems danged-near rich.) Per student spending increased by 40% during that time. (The new spending, alone, comes close to the total per student spending in my 90% low-income system.)

 

According to Hess’s chart, the percentage of the D.C. students who are black dropped by 1/8th from 2005 to 2013, and the percentage of students with disabilities dropped by 1/7th. And, the 2015 NAEP excluded as many as 44% of D.C.’s English Language Learners. The conservative reformer RiShawn Biddle calls that exclusion “massive and unacceptable test-cheating.”

 

Even so, as Merrow reminds us, the performance gap between low-income and more affluent students has grown even wider; for instance, from 2002 to 2015, the 8th grade reading performance gap grew from 17 to 48 points.

 

Before Rhee/Henderson, the growth in D.C. test scores was spread much more widely. Because I believe that 8th grade reading is the most important NAEP metric in terms of evaluating school performance, I will cite some of those metrics in support of Merrow. From 1998 to 2002, black 8th grade reading scores increased from an average of 233 to 238. By 2015, they were down to 236. From 1998 to 2002, average 8th grade reading scores for low-income students increased from 229 to 233. In 2015, they remained at 233.

 

Thompson says it is sad that the elites now re-engineering public education are utterly disconnected from the lives and realities of the children who attend those schools or the people who teach in them. They need a reality check, or maybe a course in sociocultural sensitivity training so that they stop stepping on the faces of children and adults whose lives they know nothing about.

 

 

Categories Billionaires, Common Core, District of Columbia, Education Reform, NAEP, Testing

Carol Burris: Will Governor Cuomo Actually Change Anything?

By dianeravitch
December 14, 2015 //
33

Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education and former principal at South Side High School in Rockville Center, Long Island, New York, has subjected the report of Governor Andrew Cuomo’s task force to a close reading.

 

But not the kind of close reading where you forget about context and prior knowledge. She notes that Governor Cuomo has no intention of amending or repealing the law he pushed through last June, which requires that teachers are evaluated by test scores that count for 50% of the evaluation.

 

There is the elephant in the room–the evaluation of teachers by test scores. When it comes to the damage done by APPR, the report is strangely silent. It is as though the committee never heard a complaint on how evaluating teachers by test scores increased both anxiety and test prep. The only place where it is addressed is in Recommendation 21 that states that until a new set of standards are phased in, the results of Common Core 3-8 assessments should be advisory only. Cuomo immediately seized on the ambiguity of that statement and issued the following:

 

[Cuomo statement] “The Education Transformation Act of 2015 will remain in place, and no new legislation is required to implement the recommendations of the report, including recommendations regarding the transition period for consequences for students and teachers. During the transition, the 18 percent of teachers whose performance is measured, in part, by Common Core tests will use different local measures approved by the state, similar to the measures already being used by the majority of teachers.”

 

The Education Transformation Act was the bill Cuomo pushed through the legislature to raise the percentage of test scores in teacher evaluations to 50 percent. Like a teenage boy who doesn’t get that the relationship is over, Cuomo cannot let go of his APPR, even though more researchers agree that evaluating teachers by test student scores makes no sense.

 

And more ominously, she describes the new testing corporation that New York has contracted with for the next five years.

 

Truth be told, no matter what recommendations the report made, at least half of the horse is already out of the testing barn. The new direction in assessment was set with the July approval of a $44 million contract with Questar that locks the state in for five years. If parents are looking for relief from test-driven instruction, they will not find it with Questar. You can read about the company’s philosophy of continuous assessment-driven instruction here. Below is an excerpt:

 

…after every five minutes of individualized tablet-based instruction, students would be presented with a brief series of questions that adapt to their skill level, much as computer-adaptive tests operate today. After that assessment, the next set of instructional material would be customized according to these results. If a student needs to relearn some material, the software automatically adjusts and creates a custom learning plan on the fly. The student would then be reassessed and the cycle would continue…

 

The practice of adaptive, computer-based learning, known as Competency Based Education (CBE), is a reincarnation of two other failed reforms from the last century — Outcomes Based Instruction and Mastery Learning. As the tests roll out, Questar will be marketing their CBE modules for test prep, and schools desperate to increase scores will buy them.

 

Thus far, Governor Cuomo has gotten the press he wanted: banner headlines in the New York Daily News and Long Island’s Newsday, proclaiming prematurely that Common Core is dead. No, it is not. What happens next is up to the Governor.

 

The good news is that he has an outstanding educator advising him, Jere Hochman, former superintendent in Bedford, New York. Hopefully, Hochman will help the Governor understand how to get out of the hole he dug for himself and how to take concrete steps to remove the disruption and constant churn that the State Education Department and the Governor’s interventions have imposed on schools. It is time for some stability and sanity at the helm. At the moment, teachers and students see a battle for control of the wheel, and the ship is lurching from side to side. I won’t torture the analogy any more. But I do hope that Governor Cuomo listens to Jere Hochman’s advice and takes the task force report seriously.

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Cuomo, Andrew, New York, Teacher Evaluations, Testing

Gary Rubinstein, TFA Critic, Will Attend the 25th Anniversary of TFA

By dianeravitch
December 14, 2015 //
20

Gary Rubinstein, the most thoughtful of Teach for America’s critical alums, plans to attend the 25th anniversary of Teach for America. Gary’s blog has punctured the illusions of TFA and other corporate reformers again and again. Will he be shunned? Will anyone speak to him?

 

When I read Gary’s post, my first reaction was that the party would be “a conclave of losers,” considering how many of the TFA stars have faded or failed or disappeared into obscurity.  Not to mention the fact that TFA has not–in its 25 years–closed the achievement gap in any district or turned any district into a paragon of excellence. “One day,” the TFA slogan (“one day all children will have an excellent education”) seems as far away as ever.

 

But what a meeting it will be!

 

Gary writes:

 

 

Of the 200 speakers listed so far, there is only one ‘reform critic’ I see, Los Angeles Board President Steve Zimmer. Then there are about 150 people I’ve never heard of, but who are mostly from different ed companies or charter schools, and then there are about 50 A and B list ‘reformers’ and charter leaders. These include Jeremy Beard (YES Prep), Karolyn Belcher (President of TNTP), RiShawn Biddle (Dropout Nation), Tim Daly (Former President of TNTP), Mike Feinberg (KIPP), Heather Harding (former VP of research at TFA, now with Gates), Kevin Huffman (former Tennessee Education commissioner and former husband of Michelle Rhee), Michael Johnston (State senator in Colorado who got a teacher evaluation law passed where 50% of the evaluation is based on value-added), John King (current acting Secretary of Education), Dave Levin (KIPP), Kira Orange Jones (New Orleans Board Member), Paymon Rouhanifard (Camden Schools Superintendent), Alexander Russo (Writer and reform cheerleader), Hannah Skandera (secretary of education for New Mexico), Preston Smith (CEO Rocketship Charter schools), John White (State Superintendent of Louisiana), Joe Williams (DFER and now Walton). Not yet on the speakers page, but listed on some of the panels are Joel Klein (Amplify and former chancellor in NYC), John Deasy (Former head of Los Angeles Schools), Jon Schnur (Architect of Race To The Top), Chris ‘Citizen’ Stewart (blogger who I’ve sparred with on Twitter), and, of course, Michelle Rhee (StudentsFirst and star of Waiting For Superman).

 

Many of the sessions also have a ‘reform’ slant. There’s a session called ‘Becoming an Education Influencer on Twitter’ that I think I’d be an ideal candidate to be on. But instead of me there’s ‘Dropout Nation’s’ RiShawn Biddle and Alexander Russo.

 

There’s one called “Alumni Trailblazers’ Perspectives on the Path to One Day in Our Lifetime.” The panelists are the queen reformer Michelle Rhee, the prince, Louisiana Education Commissioner (for now) John White, and KIPP founders Mike Feinberg, and Dave Levin.

 

Joel Klein is moderating a panel called ‘What Will It Take To Reach One Day?’ and on the panel are Kevin Huffman and Kira Orange Jones.

 

One with an intriguing title is “What should we do when the whole school fails?” It is moderated by the husband of TFA CEO Elisa Villanueva-Beard, Jeremy Beard, who has apparently left his post at Houston Independent School District leading their failed turnaround program ‘Apollo 20’ and is now the head of YES Prep Charter Schools in Houston. On this panel is Chris ‘Citizen’ Stewart, who has been known to accuse me of being a racist from time to time. This panel also has the one and only ‘reform critic’ that I know of, Steve Zimmer, who is the head of the school board in Los Angeles.

 

Michael Johnston is on a bunch of panels. One is called ‘What Works and What Doesn’t in Education Policy” I think he is an expert on the latter as his horrific ‘accountability’ plan in Colorado where 50% of teacher evaluation is based on value-added scores has accomplished absolutely nothing in terms of test score increases. On that panel is ‘Chief For Change’ Hannah Skandera, New Mexico Secretary of Education , and Jon Schnur, ‘architect’ of Race To The Top.

 

Perhaps the craziest session is called ‘Exploring the Role of Joel Klein as Mentor and Role Model: A Case Study.’ The CEO of TFA, Elisa Villanueva-Beard is actually the moderator on this one. Most of the people who Klein mentored are no longer in power, the most recent to be forced out was Cami Anderson in Newark. I’m hoping that John White in Louisiana will be out by then and then there will be a full turnover of the Klein mentees.

 

 

Categories Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Teach for America

Eric Brandon Explains the Origins of “Close Reading” in Common Core

By dianeravitch
December 13, 2015 //
110

We have all recently become familiar with the idea of “close reading,” which is highly recommended by David Coleman, the architect of the Common Core standards and now the president of the College Board. Simply, this means that the students should be able to interpret the text without reference to prior knowledge or context. The meaning is on the page and no background knowledge is necessary. On its face, this seems odd. How would a student understand the Gettysburg Address without prior knowledge of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln, “our forefathers,” slavery, and the nature of a democratic government (“of the people, by the people, for the people”)?

 

Reader Eric Brandon comments on the origins of “close reading”:

 

 

Close reading was definitely intended for fiction. The close reading that David Coleman espouses comes out of the New Criticism literary tradition, and it was definitely meant for poetry. The idea is that the meaning of the text is the words. As such, background knowledge, context, authorial intent, and so on just don’t matter much if at all.

 

Also, this type of close reading, since it instructs the reader to ignore context, history, etc. is not good for nonfiction either. Imagine students trying to make sense of the 3/5’s compromise while reading the US Constitution without references to history.

 

Textual analysis is very important, but it cannot be done in a vacuum. This is a huge problem with New Criticism. David Coleman has simply transported this problem right into the heart of the Common Core standards. What a monstrosity he hath wrought.

 

Finally, I disagree with the idea that the study of fiction and literature are extras that can be dispensed with because parents can fix this at home. If one of the goals of education is to give students the knowledge and tools to understand their own lives and cultures, then the study of fiction and literature should have a central, not marginal, place in education.

 

I would go further and advocate that students be exposed to film studies as a discipline before leaving the K-12 system. Just imagine all the videos and movies that students are watching, but no one is really giving them the sort of education that would help them truly understand what they are watching and how the creators of what they are watching are trying to affect and manipulate them.

 

There would be plenty of time to add this sort of content to the K-12 curriculum if we would just stop wasting so much time on excessive standardized testing.

Categories Common Core
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