Submitted by Elaine Magliaro, Guest Blogger
My attention turned toward public schools once again this week when I read reports about Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s apologizing for using “clumsy phrasing” when he made comments about some critics of the Common Core Standards—which he has championed. (Note: Common Core—a set of educational standards developed for public school students in kindergarten through twelfth grade—has been adopted by most of our states.) Duncan was speaking to a group of superintendents recently and just couldn’t help himself—it appears—when he said the following:
“It’s fascinating to me that some of the pushback is coming from, sort of, white suburban moms who — all of a sudden — their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought they were, and that’s pretty scary. You’ve bet your house and where you live and everything on, ‘My child’s going to be prepared.’ That can be a punch in the gut.”
A punch in the gut, you say? Here’s one right back at ya, Arne. Lots of people aren’t ecstatic about the “common core” effort to standardize curricula across this country and to institutionalize a “one-size-fits-all” cookie cutter approach to educating our children. It isn’t just “white suburban moms” who aren’t happy with the Common Core standards. There are myriad others who are also concerned about the them—including other parents who don’t belong to the cohort of “white suburban moms,” school administrators, teachers, other education experts, child development experts—as well as a number of liberals AND conservatives.
As DSWright (Firedoglake) wrote, Duncan exhibited “the kind of condescending attitude one expects from education privatizers. But when confronted with such an amazingly arrogant statement Secretary Duncan only apologized for the ‘clumsy’ phrasing, not the sentiment.”
In August, Mitoko Rich wrote an article for the New York Times about the Common Core standards, which have “been ardently supported by the Obama administration”—as well as by “many business leaders and state legislatures.” Rich said that there has been “growing opposition from both the right and the left” to the standards.
Philip Elliott (Associated Press) provided some of the reasons why people have been critical of the Common Core standards:
Some opponents of the standards say they are a one-size-fits-all approach that isn’t appropriate. Other critics say the standards put too much emphasis on high-stakes testing and punish teachers for students’ stumbles. Some oppose the standards because the Obama administration used them as a requirement for states to receive money from the economic stimulus bill.
Common Core Critics
Steven Elbow of The Capital Times wrote earlier this fall about the Tea Party’s organized attack on Common Core being well-funded, while the attack from the left had “been kicked to the sidelines.” Still, Elbow contends that “there’s a strong progressive push-back to the standards as well.” Mark Naison, a professor at Fordham University, told the Miami Herald why some liberals were critical of the new educational standards. Naison said they see Common Core as “a huge, profit-making enterprise that costs school districts a tremendous amount of money, and pushes out the things kids love about school, like art and music.”
Elbow reported that Naison is a co-founder of the Badass Teachers Association—an organization that was “formed to combat…a trend toward corporate-driven standardized testing.” Naison has said that creation of the association was “a reaction to high-stakes testing, backed by Democrats and Republicans alike, used to evaluate schools and teachers.”
According to Kathleen McGrory of the Herald/Times (Tallahassee Bureau), the Badass Teachers—or BATs—“are pushing back against the national standards with Twitter strikes, town hall meetings and snarky Internet memes. They have no qualms with the theory behind the new benchmarks, but they fear the larger movement places too much emphasis on testing and will stifle creativity in the classroom.”
Bonnie Cunard, a Fort Myers teacher who manages the Facebook page for the 1,200 Florida BATs, said, “It’s not just the Tea Party that’s skeptical of the Common Core. We on the left, like the folks on the right, are saying we want local control.”
McGrory wrote that the “BATs represent a new wave of liberal opposition to the Common Core standards, which includes some union leaders, progressive activists and Democratic lawmakers.” She said that they “are joining forces with Tea Party groups and libertarians, who want states like Florida to slow down efforts to adopt the new benchmarks and corresponding tests.”
Last December, I read a Huffington Post article titled Common Core Nonfiction Reading Standards Mark The End Of Literature, English Teachers Say. According to the article, there was growing concern among teachers and parents that literary classics would “go the way of the dinosaurs…” Evidently, there was good reason for their concern because the Common Core benchmarks “call for 12th grade reading to be 70 percent nonfiction, or ‘informational texts’ — gradually stepping up from the 50 percent nonfiction reading required of elementary school students.” “English-lovers and English teachers” were worried that excellent literary works such as The Great Gatsby and Catcher in the Rye could be replaced “with Common Core-suggested “exemplars,” like the Environmental Protection Agency’s Recommended Levels of Insulation and the California Invasive Plant Council’s Invasive Plant Inventory.” I have also read criticism of the Common Core math standards, which don’t introduce algebra to students until ninth grade.
Recently, opponents of Common Core spoke out about their concerns regarding the new standards at the Statehouse in Ohio. Bill Evers, former US Assistant Secretary of Education for policy from 2007-09 and a member of California State Academic Standards Commission in the late 1990s and in 2010 as the Common Core was under consideration, “called the math standards ‘sloppy and inadequate.’ His biggest concern was that the Common Core does not start algebra until ninth grade, when most high-performing countries start it in eighth grade.”
Last February, education expert Diane Ravitch explained why she could not support the Common Core standards on her blog:
I have come to the conclusion that the Common Core standards effort is fundamentally flawed by the process with which they have been foisted upon the nation.
The Common Core standards have been adopted in 46 states and the District of Columbia without any field test. They are being imposed on the children of this nation despite the fact that no one has any idea how they will affect students, teachers, or schools. We are a nation of guinea pigs, almost all trying an unknown new program at the same time.
Maybe the standards will be great. Maybe they will be a disaster. Maybe they will improve achievement. Maybe they will widen the achievement gaps between haves and have-nots. Maybe they will cause the children who now struggle to give up altogether. Would the Federal Drug Administration approve the use of a drug with no trials, no concern for possible harm or unintended consequences?
President Obama and Secretary Duncan often say that the Common Core standards were developed by the states and voluntarily adopted by them. This is not true.
They were developed by an organization called Achieve and the National Governors Association, both of which were generously funded by the Gates Foundation. There was minimal public engagement in the development of the Common Core. Their creation was neither grassroots nor did it emanate from the states.
In fact, it was well understood by states that they would not be eligible for Race to the Top funding ($4.35 billion) unless they adopted the Common Core standards. Federal law prohibits the U.S. Department of Education from prescribing any curriculum, but in this case the Department figured out a clever way to evade the letter of the law. Forty-six states and the District of Columbia signed on, not because the Common Core standards were better than their own, but because they wanted a share of the federal cash. In some cases, the Common Core standards really were better than the state standards, but in Massachusetts, for example, the state standards were superior and well tested but were ditched anyway and replaced with the Common Core. The former Texas State Commissioner of Education, Robert Scott, has stated for the record that he was urged to adopt the Common Core standards before they were written.
In 2012, Anthony Cody interviewed scholar and author Alfie Kohn about Common Core for Education Week. Here is an excerpt from that interview titled Will the Common Core Benefit Children?:
Question 1. Where do you think the drive for Common Core standards is coming from?
Alfie Kohn: I don’t think we have to speculate; the answer is pretty clear: While some educational theorists have long favored national standards — and got nowhere with the idea in the ’90s — the current successful push has come principally from corporate executives, politicians, and testing companies. This time they managed to foster the illusion that because the federal government, per se, isn’t mandating it, they’re not really “national” but just “core” standards, even though all but four states have signed on. It’s rather like the effort to reframe vouchers as “choice.” They’ve also been very shrewd this time about co-opting the education organizations by soliciting their counsel. These groups are so desperate for a “seat at the table” of power that they’ve agreed to confine the discussion to the content of the standards rather than asking whether the whole idea makes sense for children.
If your question is read more broadly — not just “Who are the players?” but “What’s the ideological underpinning?” — then all you have to do is look at the rhetoric on the Core Standards website, read the defenses published elsewhere, listen to the speeches: This move toward even greater top-down control and uniformity is almost always justified in terms of “competing in the global economy.” It’s not about doing well, but about beating others. And it’s not about intellectual depth and passion for learning, but about dollars and cents.
Question 2: Supporters believe these new standards will move us away from the narrow focus on reading and math tests that has been the downfall of NCLB. What do you think?
Alfie Kohn: Clearly it will encompass more than reading and math, but the question is whether that leads to the narrowing of other disciplines as well, particularly since these new standards will be yoked to some sort of one-size-fits-all test. That’s been the dilemma of the whole corporate-styled, test-driven approach to “accountability” and school “reform” for some time now: If you teach English-language learners or kids with special needs, or if you’re concerned about social studies, science, or the arts, you’re tempted to say, “Test us, too, so we won’t be neglected!” But it’s like a dysfunctional family, where the main alternative to neglect is abuse. To impose overly specific, prescriptive standards — enforced with standardized tests — is to lower the quality of any field or the education of any population of students.
Question 3. What’s wrong with making our curriculum more rigorous?
Alfie Kohn: My dictionary defines “rigorous” as harsh, burdensome, rigid. How is that beneficial? In most educational contexts, the word is basically equated with difficulty: A more rigorous school, classroom, text, or test, is merely one that’s harder — that is, one in which more students will not succeed. As I’ve argued elsewhere, it’s not just that something can be too hard as surely as it can be too easy, although that’s surely true (and not always acknowledged). The more important point is that difficulty level shouldn’t be our primary basis for evaluating something. I’ve visited classrooms where the assignments weren’t particularly hard but were incredibly rich, engaging, and valuable. And I’ve been to classrooms that were rigorous-with-a-capital-R that I wouldn’t send my dog to.
Common Core and Early Childhood Education
John T. Spencer, a book author and sixth-grade ELL teacher in an urban, Title One School, listed what he believed were some of the pros and cons of the Common Core Reading standards. One con that jumped out at me was the following:
The adoption process bothers me. They were forced through politically as a bailout of the unrealistic No Child Left Behind. And, while the standards tend to be good, they relied more on “experts” and wealthy business people rather than asking for input from educators.
Edward Miller, a writer and teacher who lives in Wellfleet (MA), and Nancy Carlsson-Paige, professor emerita of early childhood education at Lesley University in Cambridge, wrote an article for the Washington Post earlier this year titled A tough critique of Common Core on early childhood education. They said that much of the criticism of the “process for creating the new K-12 standards involved too little research, public dialogue, or input from educators.” They continued, “Nowhere was this more startlingly true than in the case of the early childhood standards—those imposed on kindergarten through grade 3. We reviewed the makeup of the committees that wrote and reviewed the Common Core Standards. In all, there were 135 people on those panels. Not a single one of them was a K-3 classroom teacher or early childhood professional.” They added, “It appears that early childhood teachers and child development experts were excluded from the K-3 standards-writing process.”
That is indeed troubling. Why would early childhood teachers and child development experts not have a seat at the table when the education standards for young children were being written? Who knows what is most appropriate both educationally and developmentally for children in kindergarten through the third grade?
Stephanie Feeney—as well as many other early childhood educators and researchers—were “shocked” when the standards were first released in March 2010. Feeney of the University of Hawaii, who is chair of the Advocacy Committee of the National Association of Early Childhood Teacher Educators, said, “The people who wrote these standards do not appear to have any background in child development or early childhood education.”
Marion Brady—a veteran teacher, administrator, curriculum designer and author—said the standards development process was “done with insufficient public dialogue or feedback from experienced educators, no research, no pilot or experimental programs — no evidence at all that a floor-length list created by unnamed people attempting to standardize what’s taught is a good idea.” Add to that another criticism from Miller and Carlsson-Paige that the Common Core standards “do not provide for ongoing research or review of the outcomes of their adoption—a bedrock principle of any truly research-based endeavor.”
Alliance for Childhood Statement
The following statement was issued by the Alliance for Childhood in March 2010:
WE HAVE GRAVE CONCERNS about the core standards for young children now being written by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers. The draft standards made public in January conflict with compelling new research in cognitive science, neuroscience, child development, and early childhood education about how young children learn, what they need to learn, and how best to teach them in kindergarten and the early grades. We have no doubt that promoting language and mathematics is crucial to closing the achievement gap. As written, however, the proposed standards raise the following concerns:
• Such standards will lead to long hours of instruction in literacy and math. Young children learn best in active, hands-on ways and in the context of meaningful real-life experiences. New research shows that didactic instruction of discrete reading and math skills has already pushed play-based learning out of many kindergartens. But the current proposal goes well beyond most existing state standards in requiring, for example, that every kindergartner be able to write “all upper- and lowercase letters” and “read with sufficient accuracy and fluency to support comprehension.”
• They will lead to inappropriate standardized testing. Current state standards for young children have led to the heavy use of standardized tests in kindergarten and the lower grades, despite their unreliability for assessing children under age eight. The proposed core standards will intensify inappropriate testing in place of broader observational assessments that better serve young children’s needs.
• Didactic instruction and testing will crowd out other important areas of learning. Young children’s learning must go beyond literacy and math. They needto learn about families and communities, to take on challenges, and to develop social, emotional, problem-solving, self-regulation, and perspective-taking skills. Overuse ofdidactic instruction and testing cuts off children’s initiative, curiosity, and imagination, limiting their later engagement in school and the workplace, not to mention responsible citizenship. And it interferes with the growth of healthy bodies and essential sensory and motor skills—all best developed through playful and active hands-on learning.
• There is little evidence that such standards for young children lead to later success. While an introduction to books in early childhood is vital, research on the links between the intensive teaching of discrete reading skills in kindergarten and later success is inconclusive at best. Many of the countries with top-performing high-school students do not begin formal schooling until age six or seven. We must test these ideas more thoroughly before establishing nationwide policies and practices. We therefore call on the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers to suspend their current drafting of standards for children in kindergarten through grade three. We further call for the creation of a consortium of early childhood researchers, developmental psychologists, pediatricians, cognitive scientists, master teachers, and school leaders to develop comprehensive guidelines for effective early care and teaching that recognize the right of every child to a healthy start in life and a developmentally appropriate education.
You can check out the names of the five hundred signatories to the above statement here.
*****
“Part of the problem is that the enterprise of raising standards in practice means little more than raising the scores on standardized tests, many of which are norm-referenced, multiple-choice, and otherwise flawed. The more schools commit themselves to improving performance on these tests, the more that meaningful opportunities to learn are sacrificed. Thus, high scores are often a sign of lowered standards–a paradox rarely appreciated by those who make, or report on, education policy.”
~ Alfie Kohn (Education Week—September 15, 1999)
SOURCES
White Suburban Moms Unite! A Letter to Arne Duncan (Huffington Post)
How Common Core is Slowly Changing My Child (Mrs. Mom Blog)
Arne Duncan: ‘White suburban moms’ upset that Common Core shows their kids aren’t ‘brilliant’ (Washington Post)
The biggest weakness of the Common Core Standards (Washington Post)
Arne Duncan reflects on ‘white suburban moms’ comment (MSNBC)
A white suburban mom fires back at Arne Duncan. ‘Common Core is a one size fits all approach.’ (Atlanta Journal-Constitution)
A parent’s response to Arne Duncan (Daily Kos)
A Parent’s Letter to Arne Duncan (Diane Ravitch)
Arne Duncan Doubles Down On “White Suburban Moms” Comment, Promotes Economic Ignorance (FDL/Firedoglake)
Arne Duncan is clueless, if he thinks Rhode Island School Board made right decision (Daily Kos)
Arne Duncan is Just Plain Clueless. . . (The Tempered Radical)
Clueless in Seattle (Schools Matter)
Education Secretary Duncan’s Failure to Connect (Education Frontlines)
Arne Duncan Sics His Flying Monkeys on Diane Ravitch (NYC Educator)
Chicago Tribune says ‘Renaissance 2010’ has failed (Substance News)
What big drop in new standardized test scores really means (Washington Post)
A tough critique of Common Core on early childhood education (Washington Post)
Buying Support for the Common Core (Huffington Post)
Battle Lines Solidify Over Common Core (The Catholic World Report)
Ohio’s Common Core opponents vent their concerns with the new education standards (The Plain Dealer)
Debunking the Case for National Standards: One-Size-Fits-All Mandates and Their Dangers (Alfie Kohn/Education Week)
Confusing Harder With Better (Alfie Kohn/Education Week)
Alfie Kohn Interview: Will the Common Core Benefit Children? (Education Week)
What Arne Duncan Can Learn From Texas Moms (Huffington Post)
Common Core standards criticized (The Buffalo News)
School Standards’ Debut Is Rocky, and Critics Pounce (New York Times)
Common Core standards also under attack from the left (The Capital Times)
Why I Cannot Support the Common Core Standards (Diane Ravitch)
Is the Common Core an Attack on Progressive Education? (Huffington Post)
Children of the Core: American Students at Risk (The Innovative Educator)
Critics speak out about new Common Core standards (WKRN-TV)
Education chief says he regrets ‘white suburban moms’ comment about Common Core critics (StarTribune)
Common Core Nonfiction Reading Standards Mark The End Of Literature, English Teachers Say (Huffington Post)
A critical analysis of Common Core math standards (Washington Post)
Math professor: Common Core “will set our children back one to two years.” Governor in retreat. (Atlanta Journal-Constitution)
For Common Core, a new challenge — from the left (Miami Herald)
Eight problems with Common Core Standards (Washington Post)
Common Core Standards: Ten Colossal Errors
By Anthony Cody
November 16, 2013
http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2013/11/common_core_standards_ten_colo.html
Excerpt:
Error #3: The Common Core is inspired by a vision of market-driven innovation enabled by standardization of curriculum, tests, and ultimately, our children themselves.
There are two goals here that are intertwined. The first is to create a system where learning outcomes are measurable, and students and their teachers can be efficiently compared and ranked on a statewide and national basis. The second is to use standardization to create a national market for curriculum and tests. The two go together, because the collection of data allows the market to function by providing measurable outcomes. Bill Gates has not spoken too much recently about the Common Core, but in 2009, he was very clear about the project’s goals.
He said that
“…identifying common standards is just the starting point. We’ll only know if this effort has succeeded when the curriculum and tests are aligned to these standards. Secretary Arne Duncan recently announced that $350 million of the stimulus package will be used to create just these kinds of tests – “Next Generation assessments,” aligned to the Common Core. When the tests are aligned to the common standards, the curriculum will line up as well. And it will unleash a powerful market of people providing services for better teaching. For the first time, there will be a large, uniform base of customers looking at using products that can help every kid learn, and every teacher get better.”
This sentiment was shared by the U.S. Department of Education, as was made clear when Arne Duncan’s Chief of Staff, Joanne Weiss, wrote this in 2011:
“The development of common standards and shared assessments radically alters the market for innovation in curriculum development, professional development, and formative assessments. Previously, these markets operated on a state-by-state basis, and often on a district-by-district basis. But the adoption of common standards and shared assessments means that education entrepreneurs will enjoy national markets where the best products can be taken to scale.”
In the market-driven system enabled by the Common Core, the “best products” will be those which yield the highest test scores. As Gates said: “The standards will tell the teachers what their students are supposed to learn, and the data will tell them whether they’re learning it.”
Thus, the overriding goal of the Common Core and the associated tests seems to be to create a national marketplace for products. As an educator, I find this objectionable. The central idea is that innovation and creative change in education will only come from entrepreneurs selling technologically based “learning systems.” In my 24 years in high poverty schools in Oakland, the most inspiring and effective innovations were generated by teachers collaborating with one another, motivated not by the desire to get wealthy, but by their dedication to their students.
Error #4: The Common Core creates a rigid set of performance expectations for every grade level, and results in tightly controlled instructional timelines and curriculum.
At the heart of the Common Core is standardization. Every student, without exception, is expected to reach the same benchmarks at every grade level. Early childhood educators know better than this. Children develop at different rates, and we do far more harm than good when we begin labeling them “behind” at an early age.
The Common Core also emphasizes measurement of every aspect of learning, leading to absurdities such as the ranking of the “complexity” of novels according to an arcane index called the Lexile score. This number is derived from an algorithm that looks at sentence length and vocabulary. Publishers submit works of literature to be scored, and we discover that Mr. Popper’s Penguins is more “rigorous” than Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. Cue the Thomas B. Fordham Institute to moan that teachers are not assigning books of sufficient difficulty, as the Common Core mandates.
This sort of ranking ignores the real complexities within literature, and is emblematic of the reductionist thinking at work when everything must be turned into a number. To be fair, the Common Core English Language Arts standards suggest that qualitative indicators of complexity be used along with quantitative ones. However in these systems, the quantitative measures often seem to trump the qualitative…
Error #5: The Common Core was designed to be implemented through an expanding regime of high-stakes tests, which will consume an unhealthy amount of time and money.
It is theoretically possible to separate the Common Core standards from an intensified testing regime, and leaders in California are attempting to do just that. However, as Bill Gates’ remarks in 2009 indicate, the project was conceived as a vehicle to expand and rationalize tests on a national basis. The expansion is in the form of ever-more frequent benchmark and “formative” tests, as well as exams in previously untested subjects.
Most estimates of cost focus only on the tests themselves. The Smarter Balanced Common Core tests require the use of relatively new computers. Existing computers are often inadequate and cannot handle the “computer adaptive tests,” or the new Common Core aligned curriculum packages. This was one of the reasons given to justify the expenditure of $1 billion of construction bonds on iPads and associated Pearson Common Core aligned curriculum software in Los Angeles. The Pioneer Institute pegs the cost of full implementation of the Common Core at $16 billion nationally – but if others follow the Los Angeles model those costs could go much higher.
The cost in terms of instructional time is even greater, so long as tests remain central to our accountability systems. Common Core comes with a greatly expanded set of tests. In New York City, a typical 5th grade student this year will spend 500 minutes (ten fifty-minute class periods) taking baseline and benchmark tests, plus another 540 minutes on the Common Core tests in the spring. Students at many schools will have to spend an additional 200 minutes on NYC Performance Assessments, being used to evaluate their teachers. Students who are English learners take a four-part ESL test on top of all of the above.
Thus testing under the Common Core in New York will consume at least two weeks worth of instructional time out of the school year. And time not spent taking tests will be dominated by preparing for tests, since everyone’s evaluation is based on them.
Who is David Coleman?
By Diane Ravitch
May 19, 2012
http://dianeravitch.net/2012/05/19/who-is-david-coleman/
Excerpt:
A few years ago, I met David Coleman for lunch and we talked about education. At the time, I didn’t know much about him, but I knew that he was deeply involved in the writing of the Common Core standards, which were then in the formative stage. We had a wonderful conversation about books and education, and David reminded me that he was a classicist, that he loves ideas and reading, and that his values were the same as mine. I left the lunch feeling that I had met a kindred soul.
I saw him once briefly since then, at a meeting of the Albert Shanker Institute, where he encouraged the AFT to endorse the CC standards. The board agreed, though I demurred. I remain agnostic.
I thought I knew David Coleman. I knew that he had created a data and assessment company that he sold to McGraw-Hill. I knew that he had been a Rhodes Scholar. I knew he had all the right credentials. I came to realize that David was the architect of the Common Core standards, not just one of many hands. I also knew—from the accounts of others—that he disdains fiction and personal writing. I don’t like the idea that some disembodied national agency tells teachers to cut back on the novels, poetry, and short stories and focus on informational text. That shows not only a hostility to imaginative literature but a disregard for teachers’ professionalism. I mean, he can have his opinion but why foist it on the nation?
Last week, the College Board announced that David Coleman will be its new president. One assumes that David will integrate the AP assessments with his prized Common Core standards.
But I just discovered that I don’t know David Coleman at all. I just discovered that he was the treasurer for Michelle Rhee’s Students First. (http://kenmlibby.com/?p=300) I assume that means he supports what she advocates. One doesn’t join the inner circle of a group with which you are not in sympathy. So I assume he supports her well-publicized war against collective bargaining. He supports her opposition to seniority and tenure. He supports her battle to base evaluation on test scores. He supports her efforts to privatize public education. He supports her contempt for experienced teachers.
Eight problems with Common Core Standards
By Marion Brady
8/21/12
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/eight-problems-with-common-core-standards/2012/08/21/821b300a-e4e7-11e1-8f62-58260e3940a0_blog.html
Excerpt:
Four: So much orchestrated attention is being showered on the Common Core Standards, the main reason for poor student performance is being ignored—a level of childhood poverty the consequences of which no amount of schooling can effectively counter.
Five: The Common Core kills innovation. When it’s the only game in town, it’s the only game in town.
Six: The Common Core Standards are a set-up for national standardized tests, tests that can’t evaluate complex thought, can’t avoid cultural bias, can’t measure non-verbal learning, can’t predict anything of consequence (and waste boatloads of money).
Seven: The word “standards” gets an approving nod from the public (and from most educators) because it means “performance that meets a standard.” However, the word also means “like everybody else,” and standardizing minds is what the Standards try to do. Common Core Standards fans sell the first meaning; the Standards deliver the second meaning. Standardized minds are about as far out of sync with deep-seated American values as it’s possible to get.
Eight: The Common Core Standards’ stated aim — “success in college and careers”— is at best pedestrian, at worst an affront. The young should be exploring the potentials of humanness.
I’ve more beefs, but like these eight, they have to do with the quality of education, and the pursuit of educational quality isn’t what’s driving the present education reform farce.
An illustration: As I write, my wife is in the kitchen. She calls me for lunch. The small television suspended under the kitchen cabinets is tuned to CNN, and Time cover girl Michelle Rhee is being interviewed.
“On international tests,” she says, “the U.S. ranks 27th from the top.”
Michelle Rhee, three-year teacher, education reactionary, mainstream media star, fired authoritarian head of a school system being investigated for cheating on standardized tests, is given a national platform to misinform. She doesn’t explain that, at the insistence of policymakers, and unlike other countries, America tests every kid — the mentally disabled, the sick, the hungry, the homeless, the transient, the troubled, those for whom English is a second language. That done, the scores are lumped together. She doesn’t even hint that when the scores of the disadvantaged aren’t counted, American students are at the top.
If Michelle Rhee doesn’t know that, she shouldn’t be on CNN. If she knows it but fails to point it out, she shouldn’t be on CNN.
More states delay Common Core testing as concerns grow
By Valerie Strauss
November 24, 2013
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/11/24/more-states-delay-common-core-testing-as-concerns-grow/
Excerpt:
Massachusetts and Louisiana, both seen as important in the world of school reform, have decided to delay the implementation of high-stakes standardized tests aligned to the Common Core State Standards in the face of growing concern about the initiative. The two states follow nearly 10 others — including Florida, the pioneer of corporate-influenced school reform — to slow or rethink Core implementation, actions coming amid a growing movement led by educators and parents who have become skeptical of the standards and the new related standardized tests.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan has been defending the Core — a set of common standards adopted by 45 states and the District of Columbia designed to raise student achievement —for months before various audiences, most recent recently getting himself in trouble with remarks about “white suburban moms” becoming Core critics because the new, harder exams have shown suddenly that “their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were.” (He apologized, blaming “clumsy phrasing.”)
But the opposition has grown, from the left, the right and the middle, expressing different concerns about the Core and its implementation. Though Duncan has said repeatedly that the Core is a state-led, voluntary initiative, the Obama administration has supported the standards, and critics on the right charge that the federal government has used it to develop a national curriculum. Critics on the left and the middle have argued that the Core standards are not based on substantive research, that they ignore what is known about early childhood development and/or that reformers have rushed implementation before teachers have had time to absorb them and create materials to teach them. One prominent Core supporter, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, recently blasted the implementation, saying:
“You think the Obamacare implementation is bad? The implementation of the Common Core is far worse.”
The state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education last week approved a motion (see below) to use 2015, when Massachusetts had agreed to start using the new exams in schools around the state, as a pilot year and to assess whether the current standardized tests should be abandoned and replaced after all. Mitchell Chester, commissioner of education who came up with the idea to slow down the testing implementation, told Catherine Gewertz of Education Week:
“Our system isn’t ready to deliver a college-ready education to all our students off the bat. I don’t want to get there by having students punished by not meeting that bar.”
If Massachusetts, which has been known for having the most rigorous education standards of any state, doesn’t feel like it is ready to hold students — and teachers — accountable by Core-aligned test scores, it raises questions about what other states can reasonably do.
Massachusetts was an enthusiastic supporter of the Core, becoming a founding “governing state” in the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, one of two multi-state consortia that — with some $350 million in federal funds — promised to develop standardized tests aligned with the Core that were supposed to go beyond current exams and more deeply assess what students have learned. (As it turns out, the new Common Core exams from PARCC and the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium won’t be the “game-changing” exams that Duncan has repeatedly said they would be because of a lack of enough development time and money, which you can read about here.)
The moves by Louisiana and Massachusetts matter because both states have big profiles in the school reform world.
Louisiana, whose governor, Bobby Jindal, has been a leader in standardized-test based school reform, announced late last week that it would delay the way students, teachers and schools are held accountable under the standards, the Times-Picayune reported. The high stakes for students that were supposed to be linked to the test scores of new tests designed to assess student progress under Core standards will not take effect in 2015 as previously planned, meaning that younger students won’t be held back based solely on a score and high school students won’t take the tests in 2015. Furthermore, until at least 2016, students in third and fourth graders will no longer be required to take Core-aligned tests on a computer.
Massachusetts has long been at or near the top of rankings of states with excellent public schools and high curriculum standards, so its adoption in 2010 of the Common Core State Standards and its agreement to use Core-aligned standardized tests were seen as boosting the Core initiative’s credibility. Now, a decision by state officials to slow down implementation of the new tests and assess whether they should be used at all could have a different effect on the Core.
Those who can- do.
Those who cant- teach.
Those who cant teach- teach teachers.
Those who cant teach teachers- preach.
Those who can preach- do.
The best at fleecing a flock are preachers.
A totally fleeced flock has not preachers, teachers, and has some who can do. Which runs us full circle. Don’t be mad- get even.
Elaine, I agree.
As a student whose education was screwed up by the mish-mash of the ‘each school district for itself’ form of education, I think we do need some national standards. Not micro-management but standards that say what should be learned in what years.
I went from new math to fractions when we moved from MA to NY in the 5th grade. I had no idea what a fraction was at that point. I’ve got my American history down pat since every time we moved, I got to learn it all over again.
We have become a transient society and consistency in school curriculums is necessary for kids to stay on track. That being said, I agree with Sir Ken Robinson, we shouldn’t be beating the creativity out of teaching or children.
Common Core Standards: Ten Colossal Errors
By Anthony Cody
November 16, 2013
http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2013/11/common_core_standards_ten_colo.html
Excerpt:
A recent book described the “Reign of Errors” we have lived through in the name of education reform. I am afraid that the Common Core continues many of these errors, and makes some new ones as well.
The Business Roundtable announced last month that its #1 priority is the full adoption and implementation of the Common Core standards. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is likewise making a full-court press to advance the Common Core. Major corporations have taken out full-page ads to insist that the Common Core must be adopted. Many leading figures in the Republican party, like Jeb Bush, have led the charge for Common Core, as have entrepreneurs like Joel Klein. And the project has become a centerpiece for President Obama’s Department of Education.
Yet in New York, the first large state to implement the tests associated with the new standards, students, parents and principals are expressing grave concerns about the realities of the Common Core. Common Core proponents like Arne Duncan have been quick to ridicule critics as misinformed ideologues or delusional paranoiacs. Defenders of the common standards, like Duncan and Commissioner John King in New York, insist that only members of the Tea Party oppose the Common Core. In spite of this, the opposition is growing, and as more states begin to follow New York’s lead, resistance is sure to grow.
With this essay, I want to draw together the central concerns I have about the project. I am not reflexively against any and all standards. Appropriate standards, tied to subject matter, allow flexibility to educators. Teachers ought to be able to tailor their instruction to the needs of their students. Loose standards allow educators to work together, to share strategies and curriculum, and to build common assessments for authentic learning. Such standards are necessary and valuable; they set goals and aspirations and create a common framework so that students do not encounter the same materials in different grades. They are not punitive, nor are they tethered to expectations that yield failure for anyone unable to meet them.
The Common Core website has a section devoted to debunking “myths” about the Common Core—but many of these supposed myths are quite true. I invite anyone to provide factual evidence that disproves any of the information that follows. (And for the sake of transparency, I ask anyone who disputes this evidence to disclose any payments they or their organization has received for promoting or implementing the Common Core.)
Here are ten major errors being made by the Common Core project, and why I believe it will do more harm than good.
Error #1: The process by which the Common Core standards were developed and adopted was undemocratic.
At the state level in the past, the process to develop standards has been a public one, led by committees of educators and content experts, who shared their drafts, invited reviews by teachers, and encouraged teachers to try out the new standards with real children in real classrooms, considered the feedback, made alterations where necessary, and held public hearings before final adoption.
The Common Core had a very different origin. When I first learned of the process to write new national standards underway in 2009, it was a challenge to figure out who was doing the writing. I eventually learned that a “confidential” process was under way, involving 27 people on two Work Groups, including a significant number from the testing industry. Here are the affiliations of those 27: ACT (6), the College Board (6), Achieve Inc. (8), Student Achievement Partners (2), America’s Choice (2). Only three participants were outside of these five organizations. ONLY ONE classroom teacher WAS involved—on the committee to review the math standards.
This committee was expanded the next year, and additional educators were added to the process. But the process to write the standards remained secret, with few opportunities for input from parents, students and educators. No experts in language acquisition or special education were involved, and no effort was made to see how the standards worked in practice, or whether they were realistic and attainable.
David Coleman is credited publicly as being the “architect” of the process. He, presumably, had a large role in writing the English Language Arts standards; Jason Zimba of Bennington College was the lead author for the math standards. Interestingly, David Coleman and Jason Zimba were also members of Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst original board of directors.
The organizations leading the creation of the Common Core invited public comments on them. We were told that 10,000 comments were submitted, but they were never made public. The summary of public feedback quotes only 24 of the responses, so we are left only with the Common Core sponsors’ interpretation of the rest.
The process for adopting the Common Core was remarkably speedy and expedient. Once the standards were finalized and copyrighted, all that was required for states to adopt them were two signatures: the governor and the state superintendent of education. Two individuals made this decision in state after state, largely without public hearings or input. Robert Scott, former state Commissioner of Education in Texas, said that he was asked to approve the standards before there was even a final draft.
Common Core’s odd approach to teaching Gettysburg Address
BY VALERIE STRAUSS
November 19, 2013
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/11/19/common-cores-odd-approach-to-teaching-gettysburg-address/
Excerpt:
Imagine learning about the Gettysburg Address without a mention of the Civil War, the Battle of Gettysburg, or why President Abraham Lincoln had traveled to Pennsylvania to make the speech. That’s the way a Common Core State Standards “exemplar for instruction” — from a company founded by three main Core authors — says it should be taught to ninth and 10th graders.
The unit — “A Close Reading of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address“ — is designed for students to do a “close reading” of the address “with text-dependent questions” — but without historical context. Teachers are given a detailed 29-page script of how to teach the unit, with the following explanation:
“The idea here is to plunge students into an independent encounter with this short text. Refrain from giving background context or substantial instructional guidance at the outset. It may make sense to notify students that the short text is thought to be difficult and they are not expected to understand it fully on a first reading — that they can expect to struggle. Some students may be frustrated, but all students need practice in doing their best to stay with something they do not initially understand. This close reading approach forces students to rely exclusively on the text instead of privileging background knowledge, and levels the playing field for all students as they seek to comprehend Lincoln’s address.”
The Gettysburg Address unit can be found on the Web site of Student Achievement Partners, a nonprofit organization founded by three people described as “lead authors of the Common Core State Standards.” They are David Coleman, now president of the College Board who worked on the English Language Arts standards; Jason Zimba, who worked on the math standards; and Susan Pimental, who worked on the ELA standards. The organization’s Linked In biography also describes the three as the “lead writers of the Common Core State Standards.”…
I ran a post last year by an English teacher who was getting professional development in teaching the address to students. Jeremiah Chaffee wrote in part:
This gives students a text they have never seen and asks them to read it with no preliminary introduction. This mimics the conditions of a standardized test on which students are asked to read material they have never seen and answer multiple choice questions about the passage.
Such pedagogy makes school wildly boring. Students are not asked to connect what they read yesterday to what they are reading today, or what they read in English to what they read in science.
The exemplar, in fact, forbids teachers from asking students if they have ever been to a funeral because such questions rely “on individual experience and opinion,” and answering them “will not move students closer to understanding the Gettysburg Address.”
(This is baffling, as if Lincoln delivered the speech in an intellectual vacuum; as if the speech wasn’t delivered at a funeral and meant to be heard in the context of a funeral; as if we must not think about memorials when we read words that memorialize. Rather, it is impossible to have any deep understanding of Lincoln’s speech without thinking about the context of the speech: a memorial service.)
Kraaken,
There are plenty of students in this country who are getting an excellent education in public schools in this country.
My state of Massachusetts lowered some of its educational standards when it accepted Common Core.
There is too much emphasis placed on testing children these days. That is not the fault of teachers–but the powers that be and the school reformers. My fear is that Common Core will bring with it even more of an emphasis of teaching to the test. That will narrow the curriculum even further.
Sorry Elaine, I think I left off one or two lines. My point is that no matter WHO your are, there are still ‘standards’ that need to be met in an educated society, and if these Common Core Standards are a way to insure that there is at least some standard which ALL students must meet, then so be it. Our schools seem to be turning out a group of functionally illiterate graduates. Today’s classrooms seem to be more interested in making everyone feel warm and good about themselves rather than seeing to it that they learn what they need to survive in this society.Rather than dumbing down the majority of the class, why not try raising the two or three kids that are lagging behind? I see the results every day of ‘less than adequate’ education; the cashier who, if the register goes down doesn’t know how to make change, the kids who can’t manage to put two sentences together in order to make a coherent thought, these are the true educational problems, not trying to see to it that at least SOME basic standards are met.
I do not know if this is related to the education problem but I lived in the State of North Carolina in my last incarnation as a human. There they had to import doctors from overseas to fill spots in their hospitals and clinics. The education system there with all those universities did not graduate enough doctors. They were good in football and basketball and proud of it. Maybe itShay goes downhill.
Kraaken,
I agree that there are things that children need to learn/know. Not sure what you meant by your comment. Do you think that students in states that don’t adopt Common Core Standards won’t learn about the things that you mentioned?
Very interesting, Elaine. However, the bottom line to me is that students STILL need to learn to read, know how to add 1+1 without a calculator or a computer, know that 1789 was an important year for France, that J.S.Bach wrote fugues, Martial wrote epigrams, Democracy was born in Greece and, yes, how to spend an hour sitting at a desk with a book open, a note pad and pencil at the ready. These are, as far as I am concerned, BASIC things that every educated person should know.
Elaine & Mike S.,
Would you like to know that both of your articles (Mike’s Walmart article) are related?
DESIGNED TO FAIL-EDUCATION IN AMERICA: PART ONE (http://speedchange.blogspot.com/2010/09/designed-to-fail-education-in-america.html)
BY
IRA SOCOL
“Before Barnard saw schools as a path to fame and eventual fortune, he was a mercantile-oriented state legislator in Rhode Island with no interest in education. And yet before the 1840s would end he had seized the Public School Movement from Mann and had twisted that father of public education’s words into something quite different. In the end Horace Mann became the Geoffrey Canada of the 19th Century. A man who set out to make a real difference, but whose image ended up licensed to people with an entirely different agenda.
Barnard, like Mann, looked at schools, education, and childhood from ‘way above.’ But his was not the view from heaven of Horace Mann. Rather, his view was from the banker’s office and the factory foreman’s post, and the mine supervisor.
At first, he sounds a bit like Mann – without the learning. “The primary object in securing the early school attendance of children, is not so much their intellectual culture, as the regulation of the feelings and dispositions, the extirpation of vicious propensities, the pre-occupation of the wildeiness of the young heart with the seeds and germs of moral beauty, and the formation of a lovely and virtuous character by the habitual practice of cleanliness, delicacy, refinement, good temper, gentleness, kindness, justice and truth.” But quickly the purposes behind this desired docility are apparent. “By means of such schools, the defective education of many of the youth of our manufacturing population would be remedied, and their various trades and employments be converted into the most efficient instruments of self-culture.”
In Barnard’s world education was training, not learning. And in pursuit of this he imports the Prussian Model of education to simulate the assembly-line (recently appearing in the gun factories of his native New England) with age-based grades. He introduces rigid time schedules to schools in order to prepare the students for the emerging shift-work of textile mills. He also pushed to lower teacher pay (through replacing male teachers with women) and status, and to standardize both school buildings and instruction. (Mann had brought a dualism to the “women teacher issue” – “That females are better fitted by nature than males to train and educate young children is a position, which the public mind is fast maturing into an axiom. With economical habits in regard to all school expenditures, it is a material fact, that the services of females can be commanded for half the price usually paid to males. But what is of far higher moment is, that they are endowed by nature with a stronger affection for children; they have quicker sympathies, livelier sensibilities, and more vivid and enduring parental instincts.” – Common School Journal (Boston), vol. 1, no. 6 (March 15, 1839), p. 85 – Barnard would use Mann’s words while emphasizing the savings and ensuring that women never held decision-making positions within the system.)
Why this matters
From this beginning with see two fundamentally different ways of viewing the purpose of education, or, perhaps, two and a half. And these visions persist today and explain our current battles over schools.
Teachers, and most teacher educators, are, as Dr. Becker says, “blindly focused on their classroom and kids.” From Linda Darling-Hammond to Lisa Parisi, Dan McGuire, Patrick Shuler, Punya Mishra, Pam Moran, Dave Britten, Dave Doty, and tens of thousands more, are working with students every day, trying to make the changes we can in the lives and learning of our students. “We” are the William Alcotts of today, the Maria Montessoris of today.
At the other end are today’s Henry Barnards (or Andrew Carnegies). Those building careers or reputations by making education work for American capitalism. Arne Duncan, Michelle Rhee, Bill Gates, Eli Broad – they look down from corporate suites and see that education is not producing the kinds of compliant worker/citizens their businesses need. These are education’s industrialists, with absolutely no sense that a student is different than any other industrially processed part, and no sense that a teacher is any different than any industrial worker. For this group, education is measured as industrial processing is measured, parts (students) which are not successfully processed in any industrial step (grade) are re-processed (retained), and unions for the line workers (teachers) interfere with cost structure.
These two groups cannot conceivably understand each other because they simply do not see the same thing when they look at “school.”
That half step – Horace Mann or Geoffrey Canada or Cory Booker or African-American leaders who sign-on with the industrialists – are the missionaries. Their heavenly view, however well meaning, plays into the industrialists hands, giving moral cover to brutal capitalism.
And brutal it is. We cannot really understand why American schools use age-based grades and standardized tests, and why two-thirds of students do badly – consistently – unless we understand why Barnard and his successors built the system they did. Because the system they built endures, operating, as Cubberley noted, “factories in which raw products, children, are to be shaped and formed into finished products,” and discarding “defective” raw materials along the way.”
Thanks Elaine,
When someone like Duncan starts promoting anything for the schools, it is always prudent to follow the money.
Common Core as a brand name. Who is making money off the new standards?
By Maureen Downey
8/25/13
http://www.ajc.com/weblogs/get-schooled/2013/aug/25/common-core-brand-name-who-making-money-new-standa/
Excerpt:
A lot of you have asked, “Who benefits financially from the new Common Core State Standards?”
The AJC examines that question in the Sunday AJC, and finds that it is not easy to separate out school system spending on Common Core.
The story by AJC education reporter Wayne Washington is subscriber only on MyAJC.com, but here is a snippet. (Check out the MyAJC site today as it has a lot of good education stuff, including a piece on school security in the wake of the McNair drama in DeKalb.)…
Achieve Inc., a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit group that has been heavily involved in writing the standards, receives funding from corporate titans such as Microsoft, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Chevron and DuPont.
Achieve’s five highest-paid executives received an average annual salary of $198,916 in 2011, tax records show. The company’s president, former Clinton administration official Michael Cohen, had a salary of $263,800 in 2011.
Two national consortia, the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers and Smarter Balanced, having gotten a combined $346 million in federal education grants to create a pair of new standardized tests tied to Common Core.
“These people all know each other,” said Michael T. Moore, a literacy professor at Georgia Southern University who has written extensively about Common Core. “It is a private club.”
pdm,
I began to have questions about Common Core when I read about the high school English standards and about my state of Massachusetts “dumbing down”/lowering some of its state standards in order to accept the CCSS some time ago. I really didn’t do much research into the subject, however, until I read about Secretary Duncan’s recent comments about Common Core critics…and his semi-apology
Elaine, thanks for covering this. I’d heard about the controversies but didn’t know what was spinning and what was fact. And having the right opposed made it especially difficult to take a position. Having you as an honest and reliable reporter here is a real asset. Thanks.
Common Core Is Curriculum, Contrary to Advocates’ Claims
By Joe Giganti, Matthew Archbold
Catholic Education Daily
November 19, 2013
http://www.cardinalnewmansociety.org/CatholicEducationDaily/DetailsPage/tabid/102/ArticleID/2688/Common-Core-is-Curriculum-Contrary-to-Advocates%E2%80%99-Claims.aspx
Excerpt:
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has made grants totaling more than $10.5 million to develop Common Core-compliant curricula—including by the non-profit group Common Core, Inc.—demonstrating the foundation’s intent to reach far beyond broad educational standards with its Common Core initiative to remake America’s schools.
Responding to parents and educators who have expressed concerns about the academic quality and experimental aspects of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), Common Core advocates have often claimed that the initiative seeks only to nationalize school standards, allowing total freedom over curriculum.
At the same time that the Gates Foundation was funding curriculum development, Bill Gates himself was publicly speaking as though no curriculum needed to be intentionally developed. “When the [standardized] tests are aligned to the common [core] standards, the curriculum will line up as well,” Gates said in a talk at the 2009 National Conference of State Legislators.
But The Cardinal Newman Society has discovered 13 grants from the Gates Foundation amounting to more than $10.5 million to develop Common Core curricula, some even apparently made before the nationalized standards were released.
“The claim that Common Core was all about standards but not curricula was never believable, because standards can only impact education when they influence teaching methods and curricula,” said Patrick J. Reilly, president of The Cardinal Newman Society. “And for the Gates Foundation to effectively nationalize education, it can’t stop at broad standards and testing. These grants prove this, and anyone who claims Common Core is simply a standards initiative should be challenged with the facts.”
Several state departments of education received multi-million dollar grants to adopt “high-quality curriculum to accelerate common core state standards implementation.”
Grants also have supported a wide variety of smaller programs, including $25,000 to Filament Games for “a web-based tool for teaching well-structured argumentation that will allow teachers to effectively and efficiently meet Common Core literacy standards across the curriculum and grade levels,” and nearly $700,000 to JUMP Math “to support aligning its K-12 mathematics curriculum to the Common Core State Standards.”