Laura H. Chapman is a consultant on arts education who contributes frequently to the blog. Here is her response to the Common Core standards:

Rather than simply “correcting” the inadequate Common Core standards, they should be reconstructed and redesigned from the ground up.”

NO. No. No. They should be tossed–folded, stapled, mutilated, burned. They are based on lies about “college readiness,” and they are based on lies about “careers.” They are based on lies about being “state led.” They are based on lies about “international benchmarking.” They are based on phony baloney ideas about “text complexity,” and a one-size-fits-all notion of grade-to-grade “learning progressions” and on-time “mastery” right out of a factory model of education–no child left behind on the assembly line.

These standards are the production of Bill Gates, Inc…., aided by for-hire workers and federal appointees in USDE who are so dumb they think standards do not have implications for curriculum.

The process of generating the 1,620 standards (including parts a-e) was so uncoordinated that nobody seems to have noticed that the only topic in math taught at every grade is geometry, with not an ounce of supporting rationale for that emphasis.

Prior to grade three the standards in English Language Arts (ELA) and math are off-the-charts wrong-headed, free of any this basic understanding: No one can simply reverse engineer back to childhood what someone may earnestly hope kids will “know and be able to do,” if they graduate from high school. Education is not an engineering problem. It is not the same as training.

These standards are intended to suck the vitality out of instruction in all other subjects, including the sciences, arts, and humanities. All are now subordinate to and are treated as if they must be “aligned” with the Common Core. Non-sense. Should be the other way around so students have a reason to read and calculate–content and problems and unknowns in these broad domains of inquiry. The CCSS distract attention from the historic mission of sustaining a democracy through education centrally concerned with informed citizenship, leaning what life offers and may require beyond getting a job and going to college.

Teachers and kids have been drowning in a sea of standards since 1997 with the “Goals 2000″ project on behalf of world-class standards, K-12. Standards were written in 14 domains of study, 24 subjects, then parsed into 259 standards, and 4100 grade-level benchmarks. Some scholars at McRel guessed it might take 22 years to address them all. And, of course, they were not coordinated or fact-checked–(I found some strange and wondrous errors and emphases, like a zillion history standards).

Right now in Ohio, counting the CCSS, we have 3,203 standards on the books, about 265 per grade. We also have “accountability year” that runs from pretest “data” reporting by November 1 to posttest “data” reporting by mid April so the “evaluators of the data” can be delivered well-organized reports from every teacher.

The typical school year is no longer 180 days, 36 weeks, 9 months. It has been severely truncated by the practice of data mongering, and time stolen for testing and test-prep.

Now add some insult to injury by DARING to define “effective” teaching as the production of “a year’s worth of growth;” by suppressing the fact that “growth” is a pretest to posttest gain in test scores. The concept of “a year’s worth of growth is one of many statistical fictions teachers are dealing with. Many of the others are a by-product of an extraordinary marketing campaign to install the CCSS in every school.

The CCSS is a profit-making bonanza. yesterday at OfficeMAx I had the opportunity to buy a grade-level set of the CCSS, $20 per grade, boxed and formatted for a teacher’s use to appease the principals and other evaluators who will have their checklists to see whether you have posted the “expected learnings” for the ELA and math standards. These poster-like cards of the CCSS are plasticized for durability and coded with the CCSS numbering system for easy data-entry on the accountability spreadsheets that each teacher will need to “populate” with data.

Just say no to the CCSS and the whole bundle of “worst practices” it has spawned.

In the first appearance of Anthony Cody’s new, independent blog, Cody and Alan Aja write about the cynical effort to brand Common Core as part of “the civil rights movements.”

No “reform” built on standardized testing can advance civil rights, they show. Common Core proponents recognize that they are losing the battle but attribute it to their failure to appeal to the emotions of the public.

Nothing could be further from the truth. They are losing because their facts and claims are weak.

As Cody and Aja write,

“Thus we have proponents of civil rights bringing us a set of standards and tests that – so far – are having the effect of WIDENING the achievement gap, and putting GEDs and high school diplomas out of reach for many of our students. And their justification for this devastating reform is that otherwise students will need to take a remedial class in college?

“Once again, we have a lazy, irresponsible approach to reform. Make the tests harder, and pretend you have done something to “bring students into the mainstream.” But we are stuck in this mechanistic, punitive, test, punish and reward paradigm. Forget about the myriad challenges facing students due to poverty and wealth inequality; realities that disproportionately affect blacks and Latinos. Forget about addressing the funding inequities within the schools themselves. Forget about the reality of “stereotype threat,” whereas students viewed by society as “cognitively inferior” (read: blacks/Latinos) are more likely to be come self-fulfilling prophecies, consciously or subconsciously under-performing on these very culturally-biased tests already pre-designed to set them up for failure. Forget about the real curricular atrocity, which is a dual, segregated “ability grouped” curricula, whereas white children are more likely to be taught in an enriched, inter-disciplinary setting. Focus instead on setting a “higher bar” through more high stakes testing, and demand that everyone clear it.

“Education is and always has been a civil rights issue. Children of color deserve far better than they are getting now. There is no halcyon era in the past when our schools were doing just dandy in this regard. But there was a time when we had a societal awareness that poverty was a pervasive and pernicious source of educational problems. There was a time when federal funds were not awarded based on competition between states, but on the needs of their students. There was a time when the Federal government promoted – even mandated desegregation, rather than promoting semi-private charter schools that accelerate it.

“Our challenge is not to go back to 1975, however. Our challenge is to learn from the successes and failures of the past five decades, and chart reforms that address the opportunity gap, and build success, self determination and stability in our communities.”

Over the years, I have had the pleasure of advising several states as they were revising their academic standards. The process was always carried out by the state commissioner, who selected teachers and scholars from across the state and sometimes from out of state. My own most exhilarating experience was in California, where I helped a committee of educators write the history-social science standards. No legislators were involved.

Now, many states are pulling out of the Common Core, which was imposed on them in a fast deal between the U.S. Department of Education, the Gates Foundation, and several D.C. Insider organizations. Lyndsey Layton of the Washington Post reports that legislators in a dozen states are stepping in to take control of academic standards.

This is a terrible idea. Legislators have no academic competence to write academic standards. This is a sure way to politicize Americann education. Politicians should do their work and let educators do their work. Educators are the experts on what students should know and be able to do.

Let’s hope that states have the good sense to rely on their best teachers and scholars to protect the interests of the state and the children.