This mom was taken aback by Arne Duncan’s put down of “white suburban moms” who are disappointed to learn that their child is not so brilliant.
This mom has actually read the Common Core standards and has serious doubts about them. She can’t understand why Duncan disrespects her ability to think and reason for herself.
TeacherKen, aka Kenneth Bernstein, posted this statement by a parent on his blog at the Daily Kos.
Arne Duncan unleashed a firestorm when he asserted that parent opposition to Common Core testing stemmed from the disappointment felt by “white suburban mothers” when they found out that their child was really not brilliant and that their public school was not so good after all.
The mother who wrote this post was told again and again that her child was not brilliant. She fought for him. He prevailed. She doesn’t want him or other children to be judged by Arne Duncan’s “rigorous” standards.
It is hard to unpack exactly what Duncan had in mind when he spoke disparagingly of America’s children, their teachers, and their schools.. He seems to think that American children have too high an opinion of themselves and he thinks most of them need to be brought down a few pegs. And he has a very low opinion of most public schools.
I wonder what kind of a coach Duncan would be. Would he tell the players day after day that they are terrible and consider that he was providing leadership?
The Internet is buzzing about Arne Duncan’s condescending and insulting comment about white suburban moms who oppose the Common Core because they discovered their child was not so brilliant after all and their local public school was not very good.
But meanwhile Mercedes Schneider found Arne’s message to the first Moms Congress, where he defined parental engagement in ways that would make ALEC and Jeb Bush happy. Most people think of parental engagement as getting involved to help your school, but Arne defined as as school choice, exercising your right to leave your school and go elsewhere.
Now we understand why rumors flew in 2012 that if Romney were elected, he might ask Arne to stay on. Race to the Top is completely congruent with No Child Left Behind. The main difference between them is that Democrats stood up to Bush’s NCLB.
A comment from a reader in response to Arne Duncan’s statement that white suburban moms are angry because the Common Core tests just showed them that their child is not so brilliant and their school is not so good:
“This angry, white, suburban mom IS angry–but it’s not because I was delusional that my children are “brilliant” or that our suburban public schools aren’t that good. We have funding issues, to be sure, but that has NOTHING to do with the amazing teachers, staff and kids. This angry mom gets the national and state agenda to try to get us to run away–FAST–from our traditional well-loved schools. And it’s not going to work if we keep pointing out their warped and sneaky agenda!
Nice part about insulting white, suburban moms is that we get ANGRY! And we love to gossip! And we love social media! So bring it on, Arne. You have just angered some pretty protective she-bears…”
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan told a meeting of the Council of Chief State School Officers that the suburban revolt against Common Core has a simple explanation: white suburban moms are discovering that their children are not as brilliant as they thought, and their schools are not as good as they thought.
Here is a description of his remarks and the rationale behind them.
According to blogger Rick Hess, the appalling results of the Common Core tests were supposed to set off a suburban uprising against their public schools and unleash a demand for vouchers and charters. Hess thought it was unlikely, and he was right. Suburban moms and dads of all races–not just whites–are angry at the Common Core, angry at the tests, angry at the state officials who seem determined to hurt their children and destroy their community public schools.
Duncan apparently thinks American students are mostly dumb, and US schools are awful.
Other supporters of the Common Core share his low opinion of our youth.
In July 2012, Jeb Bush–one of the strongest proponents of the Common Core–warned that when the states begin to release the Common Core test results, there would be a “train wreck” and “a rude awakening.” Since Bush is an avid proponent of charters, vouchers, and e-schooling, one may safely assume that he anticipated a flight from public schools to those alternatives, as failure rates were released.
In New York, the fly in the ointment was that with only a few exceptions, the charter schools fared even worse on the Common Core tests than the public schools.
Up until now, Duncan had been blaming the pushback to the Common Core on the Tea Party and extremists.
He really doesn’t get it.
Bottom line: Suburban parents–moms and dads of all races–blame the tests, not their kids or their teachers. They know this is a manufactured crisis (hat tip to Berliner and Biddle). Their kids are not failures. The Common Core tests are.
Jack Schneider here describes the frustrating and ultimate fruitless pursuit to create the perfect data system to measure the quality of schools and teachers.
The waivers from NCLB were supposed to provide greater flexibility but they provided no relief from the standardized testing mania.
While Arne Duncan and ex-Superintendent Tony Bennett were celebrating Indiana’s gains on the 2013 NAEP, researchers at Indiana University said the gains were no different from the state’s performance in past years on NAEP.
“Relative to the 1-point gains in mathematics and reading for the nation as a whole, the 5- and 4-point gains for Indiana fourth-graders appear impressive,” said Peter Kloosterman, the Martha Lea and Bill Armstrong Chair for Teacher Education and a professor of mathematics education. “However, state samples are relatively small, and thus scores tend to fluctuate more than national scores. In 2000, Indiana was 9 points above the national average in math, but that dropped to 4 points above in 2007 and 2009 before going back to 9. In reading, Indiana has fluctuated from 2 to 5 points above the national average since 2000.”
In addition:
“Regarding the latest Grade 8 results, Kloosterman said gains for Indiana students are comparable to recent years.
“Indiana is now 4 points above the national average in mathematics as compared to 2 points in 2011,” he said. “Since 2000, however, Indiana has been as high as 9 points above and as low as 2 points above. In reading, Indiana eighth-graders are now 1 point above the national average, the same as 2011 and within the window of 1 to 4 points above the national average for Indiana since 2000.”
Although Indiana remains above the national average, it is not in the top tier of U.S. students. “In brief, we see substantial gains in mathematics across the nation with fourth- and eighth-graders in 2013 achieving about two grade levels above their counterparts in 1990,” Kloosterman said. “There have been gains in reading at both levels, but they are much less than a grade level. Indiana is consistently above the national average, but not at the level of the highest-performing states. These trends have held throughout all the state and national education policy changes over this period.”
Kloosterman is available to respond to questions about how to interpret the latest NAEP results. He can be reached at 812-855-9715 or klooster@indiana.edu.
Jason Stanford listened to Arne Duncan’s put down of the “armchair pundits” who oppose Duncan’s obviously brilliant plan to reform American education. How can we forget how Duncan saved the Chicago public schools? But I digress.
Stanford, a veteran journalist in Austin, describes himself as an “armchair dad” of children in the public schools of Texas.
He has news for Secretary Duncan. Texans are sick of testing. They do not share the Secretary’s enthusiasm for the super-duper tests that will make all children college-and-career ready and tell us the truth that all the previous tests failed to tell.
Stanford points out that the Texas legislature reduced the number of tests needed for graduation from 15 to 5, in response to massive protests by parents and local school boards. The people of Texas said “enough is enough.”
But that’s not all.
Astonishlngly, the legislators “even made it illegal for testing lobbyists to give them campaign contributions, a rare move in a state notably hostile to limits on lobbying, business or giving them money.”
But that’s not all.
Stanford writes:
“The only thing wrong with these limits on school testing, say Texans in a recent poll, is that they didn’t go far enough. The Texas Lyceum polled 1,000 adults and found only 14% said the legislature should have left the 15 tests in place, and slightly more (17%) liked the changes. The shock of the poll is that 56% of Texans wanted either to get rid of standardized tests entirely because they encourage “teaching to the test” or leave accountability standards up to local school boards.
“That’s a lot of armchair pundits.”
Arne Duncan’s love of high-stakes testing has had real world consequences. It has hurt children. It has labeled them as dumb and caused many to give up. It has caused many youngsters to be denied a high school diploma whose lives will be blighted because they couldn’t pass one of the five mandated tests.
Stanford writes why this matters:
“More than a third of Class of 2015—a group of Texans equal to the population of Abilene—currently won’t graduate because the students have failed at least one state test and two subsequent retests. In elementary school, a quarter of the state’s fifth graders will be held back because they failed the reading test. In the eighth grade, a third of all black and poor students have failed the state’s math test.
“Either those scores are signs that two decades of test-based accountability has utterly failed to improve education for underserved populations, or they are proof that test-based accountability is a faith-based ideology with less credibility than believing that marking your child’s height against a wall causes him to grow. You don’t need to sit in an armchair to think that a system that excludes a third of a state’s population from public education might be a sign that you need to re-examine the basic assumptions underlying education policy.”
Robert D. Shepherd, curriculum writer and author, left the following comment following Andrea Gabor’s post about the data collecting and data mining business called inBloom.
He writes:
“There were 55,235,000 K-12 public school students in the US in 2010. At $5.00 apiece for inBloom, that would amount to $276,175,000 a year. And if inBloom had a large existing database, it would become a monopoly provider. Switching from it would be next to impossible.
But that’s just the beginning. The whole point of gathering this real-time data on student responses is to link it to online adaptive curricula, with inBloom 2.0 as the gateway, the portal, for delivery of that curricula–
serving up the mind-blowingly inane online worksheet on the schwa sound to little Yolanda and the Powerpoint-like online worksheet on the foil method for factoring to little Kwame. The fans of this online adaptive curricula are the sort of people who think that all learning can be reduced to bullet points on a screen.
At any rate, when the inBloom database becomes the portal for curricula, that’s when the big bucks start rolling in, from inBloom’s “partners,” like Murdoch’ and Klein’s Amplify, for example. And inBloom has made it VERY clear from the start that that’s their plan. That’s the “promise” of having such a database.
Quite a promise.
In short, inBloom is a strategic powerplay for the education market.
I dearly hope that people will have the sense to stop this Orwellian operation before it sinks its data-gathering tentacles into our nation’s children.
Think of it, a nationwide portal for delivery of curricula, a gateway with inBloom as toll-taker.
As Arne Duncan’s office put it, “The new standards are about creating a national market for products that can be brought to scale.”
Bill Gates earned his billions by selling a small amount of stuff to practically EVERYONE.
It appears that inBloom has a very similar long-term business model.
It gets even worse. Read the Department of Education’s Report on “Promoting Grit, Tenacity, and Perseverance: Critical Factors for Success in the 21st Century.” This report envisions hooking kids up to real-time monitors of their affective states and feeding THOSE into the database as well so that grit, tenacity, and perseverance can be measured continually.
This kind of thing goes WAY BEYOND Orwell’s Telescreens in 1984. The whole concept is sickening.
And Arne Duncan’s Department of Education is serving as the facilitator for the creation of this Orwellian Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth (Minitrue).
You have to give it to these guys for cooking up such a diabolical strategic plan. And almost no one seems, yet, to be hip to what this national data-gathering is really about over the long term. Such plans could be carried out only if people weren’t really paying attention. So far, that’s worked well for the, ahem, “reformers.” We have new NATIONAL “standards” even though most U.S. citizens have never heard of them and haven’t a clue what they are, what’s in them, who paid for them, who created them, what consequences they will have for curricula and pedagogy, and so on. All that new standards and testing stuff was done with NO national debate and with no vetting.
I’m sure that the inBloom folks were hoping for the same here. And the truly frightening thing is that their hopes might well be fulfilled.
Totalitarianism can come about through violent revolution. It can also come about because no one is paying attention.”
Crazy Crawfish blogs from Louisiana. His friends know him
as Jason France. He worked in the assessment division of the
Louisiana Department of Education until he couldn’t stand it
anymore.
He wrote a comment for this blog in which he critiques Arne Duncan’s critique of critics who
live in “an alternate universe.”
Crazy Crawfish writes:
I may not know the secret to fixing every school, but I know what doesn’t
work: Arne Duncan.
Also: Closing the schools
Firing all the teachers
Busing all the kids hours away to new schools
Putting 50+ kids in.a class
Virtual schools
Common core
Stripping funding from them
Handing then over to profit centric people
TFA
Handing everyone an ipad instead of a good teacher
Continued testing
Vouchers
Forcing all disabled kids to take ACT
Charters with fascist mandatory marches
Narrowing curriculum to exclude arts, history, science
USED
Resegregation
Schools that teach creationism
Schools that treat kids like products instead of people
Mass school closings Etc
(Basically anything Arne Duncan does)
By opposing Arne Duncan, if we do nothing else, we are improving schools by delaying
him from destroying them.
Diane Ravitch's blog 