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common core
Near Silence on Education at First Democratic Debate
Oct 18, 2015
None.
Null.
Nada.
That's how many questions CNN anchors asked presidential hopefuls about America's public schools at the first Democratic Debate.
Imagine if Anderson Cooper and the company had remained silent on Climate Change. The candidates would have brought it up anyway. Bernie Sanders mentioned the environmental threat when asked about national defense.
Imagine if moderators had no questions about gun violence. Candidates competed with each other to demonstrate which took a stronger stance against the National Rifle Association.
Imagine if no one asked about finance reform. At that stage, each candidate tried to position himself or herself as the new sheriff of Wall Street.
But when it comes to one of the most important issues of the day—our children's struggling schools—the media apparently thought the viewing public was uninterested.
Admittedly, Hillary Clinton and Sanders briefly brought it up when asked about other things.
Clinton said we need universal pre-kindergarten and good schools, but she neglected to describe what those good schools would look like.
It's almost like saying nothing at all. Everyone wants good schools—even dunderheads like Chris Christie, Jeb Bush, and Donald Trump! However, their ideas of good schools differ greatly from those of most parents, teachers, and students. McCarter schools for the poor and Cadillac campuses for the rich aren't exactly what real progressives have in mind.
And universal pre-k? Great! But that's kind of the flavor of the month. Who disagrees that we should help toddlers prepare for school? It's like asking, "Who wants ice cream?" in a room full of little kids on a hot day. EVERYONE wants ice cream - even the kids who are lactose intolerant!
Sanders took a second in his diatribe about social services to mention the need to fund schools. However, he didn't say a thing about equity or whether that funding would have strings attached. President Obama talked about funding schools, too, when he ran for president in 2008. Once he got into office, those education dollars came at the cost of accepting untested and developmentally inappropriate Common Core State Standards. Equity meant closing poor schools to save them.
I wonder if CNN would have felt more pressure to ask even a single token education question if the largest national teachers' unions had not already endorsed Clinton. The American Federation of Teachers, representing 1.5 million members, and the National Education Association, representing 3 million members, have both backed Clinton.
Well, leadership has. Member outreach, polling, and even voting by the organization's largest representative boards have been almost entirely absent.
But now that teachers have been pigeonholed in Clinton's camp, what's the point of asking education questions? In the public eye, educators have already chosen their candidates. Why would they need to hear Clinton's thoughts on education policy? Why hear her opponent's thoughts? Their minds are made up.
Meanwhile, the Obama administration continues to run roughshod over teachers' concerns. For 7 years, education professionals from all walks of life have complained about the administration's failing school policies and its buffoonish education secretary Arne Duncan. But now that Duncan is leaving, the President replaces him with John King, an ex-New York State Commissioner of Education who enraged parents so much that he ran out of the state on a rail.
The media just doesn't care about public education. Nine times out of ten if they even print a story about schools, it's a puff piece spin doctoring a school reform policy that isn't working, never has been working and is - in fact - making things much worse for our nation's students. Otherwise, it's an expose of how teachers can't make these horrendous policies work, so it's their fault. don't even glance at the ballooning child poverty rate - that's completely irrelevant to the issue of all these lazy teachers who can't be fired because we'd have to prove they're bad first.
And what of the candidates? Do they care about public education?
The Democrats say they do and then zip their lips. They might make positive noises about preschools or universities, especially regarding funding, but they have next to nothing to say about K-12 schools. When the issue arises, they deflect to toddlers or the college campus.
Meanwhile, Republicans can't contain their glee about mentioning teachers during debates and stump speeches. They want prospective voters to know that conservative types like them want to punch teachers in the face. During the first Republican debate, at least half of the candidates in that crowd boasted how much they stood up to the teacher's unions.
And so there you have it, folks. That's what passes for a substantive Democratic debate of all the day's important issues. Now, voters can make an informed decision in the primaries. There will be a few more debates, but they'll probably be no different than this one.
And if you care about public schools, if you have children in the system, or derive your livelihood from it, or even if you just don't want to live in a society of uneducated dummies - you'd be better served using Tarot cards to determine where the Democrats stand on this issue.
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As the School Year Ends, Public Education is in Doubt
School is out for the summer, and kids are overjoyed. But across the country, the future of public education is in serious jeopardy.
Where will public schools be in a year?
Jun 22, 2015
School is out for the summer, and kids are overjoyed. But across the country, the future of public education is in serious jeopardy.
Where will public schools be in a year?
Here is a quick primer on some of the key issues that relate to the fundamental question: Will America maintain or destroy that most basic democratic institution, the public school?
Are Public Schools "Failing"?
The idea that public schools have "failed" and that private market solutions are the answer to this problem is the heart of a campaign promoted by rightwing foundations, particularly the Bradley Foundation, over the last 30 years.
Recent cuts in school budgets by Bradley-supported politicians, including Wisconsin's Scott Walker, is creating more "failure."
As Wisconsin Public Education Network director Heather DuBois Bourenane observes, "The entire myth of the "failing school" depends on a refusal to acknowledge the ways that poverty impacts local communities, and how austerity policies and years of underfunding have led to the crises we see now."
New reports show that most states continue to put less money into public schools than they did before the recession, and about half put less money into schools that serve low-income students than schools that serve the wealthy.
"We can point to countless success stories of districts that adopted community schools models or established practices that help meet the needs of the whole child (with wrap-around services, peer tutoring, family-focused resources, etc.) Bourenane adds.
"Many of the schools labeled as "failing," in fact, can produce evidence of enormously successful programming and gains in student growth, but might not rank highly when standardized test scores are the primary criteria for success of their vulnerable student populations."
Opt-Out Meets #BlackLivesMatter
This year, the nationwide movement to opt out of standardized tests grew to become a massive phenomenon--especially on the East Coast. One in six students in New York refused to take standardized tests in 2015, The New York Times reports, "more than double and possibly triple the number who did so in 2014."
When large numbers of New York students were labeled "not proficient" on statewide tests--including kids in well funded suburban schools--a massive walkout ensued. Parents rebelled against a plan to tie teacher evaluations to test scores, and the threat of labeling schools as "failing" based on new, tougher standards.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan has derided parents whose kids opt out of standardized tests as a bunch 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."
But a broad and diverse opt-out movement is picking up steam all across the country. "We've had requests from all fifty states for our opt-out guides," says United Opt-Out co-founder Tim Slekar.
In Seattle, teacher-author Jesse Hagopian, who helped organize the successful MAPS test boycott at Seattle's Garfield High School, is leading a multiracial coalition of parents, teachers, local civil rights groups, and students who see the stripped-down, test-focused education as bad for all kids--including low-income kids and kids of color.
That's a big deal, because national civil rights groups have taken a position against opt-out, on the theory that kids of color need standardized tests to determine whether schools are failing kids who have been underserved.
Jesse Hagopian articulates a different view:
"The idea that our school system implements standardized testing in the early grades to make students "career and college ready" (in the language of the Common Core standards) is an utter absurdity--especially when you consider that one of the most popular career choices for a 5-year-old is being Spider Man."
"And yet high-stakes are attached to the the MAP test--already in kindergarten!--using it as an arbitrator of who will be placed on the advanced track," Hagopian writes.
"[T]he Opt Out movement is a vital component of the Black Lives Matter movement and other struggles for social justice in our region," adds Gerald Hankerson of the Seattle/King County NAACP. "Using standardized tests to label Black people and immigrants 'lesser,' while systematically under-funding their schools, has a long and ugly history in this country,"
Since standardized tests have been used to label students, teachers, and schools as "failing," and to trigger the take-over of public schools by private operators, the opt-out movement is focused on taking back local, democratic control of the schools.
As Slekar puts it: "We are not an anti-testing movement, we are a revolutionary movement against the corporate takeover of education."
Common Core Bait and Switch
As education writer and Public School Shakedown contributor Jeff Bryant writes, Common Core has become a toxic issue for Republican presidential candidates thanks to Tea Party opposition. Chris Christie is the latest candidate to turn his back on the national standards he once supported.
Democrats, on the other hand, have been busy mounting a dubious defense of Common Core, Bryant points out. But the issue of the standards themselves is a big distraction.
The real question on Common Core is not whether national educational standards are a socialist plot, as the Republican base seems to think, or whether they are doing wonders for kids, as the Democrats claim, with little real evidence. The real question is whether public education for all kids, especially poor kids, is adequately supported.
It doesn't help when assessments tied to the Common Core are used to label schools as "failing," fire teachers, shut down schools, and hand them over to private charter-school operators.
This test-and-punish approach, not the national standards, is the real threat to public education.
Charter Schools: From Good to Bad
This year marked the beginning of the great unraveling of the for-profit mass charter movement.
There were the financial scandals: We learned that Ohio poured millions into charter schools that don't exist. Across the country, there was story after story about charter school waste, fraud, and abuse.
And then there was the failure to produce results: in New Orleans, data show that the big claims about improved outcomes in a school district that went all-charter right after Katrina don't hold water.
Given these terrible results, Jeff Bryant has called for a national moratorium on charter schools.
Charter schools were first conceived decades ago as a progressive education innovation. Small, alternative schools, schools for the arts, and language immersion schools flourished and provided experimental models that traditional public schools could adopt.
But big charter-school chains like Rocketship have taken over in urban areas including Milwaukee and Washington, DC, and lobbied for new laws that exempt them from school-board oversight, as they drain public education dollars out of local districts.
Governor Andrew Cuomo has proposed taking away the cap on private charter schools for the entire state of New York, selling charters as the solution to "failing" public schools.
That plan ran into a major speed bump in New York, when parents rejected the idea that their children had suddenly become a lot less smart, and have not been eager to embrace the charter school "solution".
"It's really shock doctrine--where blow something up and then come in and say we need to fix this," Slekar says about the combination of tests that show mass "failure" and the charter-school expansion.
Nowhere is this more evident than in New Orleans, the nation's first all-charter school district, which just happens to be hosting the National Charter Schools conference next week. Stay tuned for more reporting from the Progressive on that.
Vouchers
School vouchers started in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 25 years ago as a "ticket out" for poor kids who could use the money spent to educate them in public school to attend private schools.
Today, a new sector of cheap, fly-by-night academies has popped up to take advantage of school vouchers.
Despite poor results, Republicans in Wisconsin have expanded the voucher program statewide, and the school voucher concept has spread to thirteen states and Washington, DC.
More than 75 percent of new voucher recipients are families that never sent their kids to public schools. School vouchers drain money from the public school system to provide a straight subsidy for private school parents who get a break on tuition.
I wrote about the shocking state of Milwaukee's voucher schools in crumbling office buildings, strip malls, and former car dealerships last year
I watched an eighth-grade science class learning creationism, and observed a school where kids are learning the Bob Jones curriculum.
An anti-intellectual current is part of the attack on schools.
Last fall, in Colorado, students walked out of Jefferson County schools over a rightwing revision of the AP history curriculum.
Attacks on teachers and schools
Likewise, the attacks on teachers we've seen from the likes of Chris Christie, Scott Walker, and Bobby Jindal draw on a deep strain of cultural antipathy toward education. Whether they are busting teachers unions, replacing professional teachers with Teach for America volunteers, or doing away with certification requirements so anyone can teach, there is a concerted attack on this female-dominated profession.
Defending Schools Drives Electoral Victories
One year ago, Ras Baraka, a high school principal and member of the Newark City Council, won election as mayor of Newark despite massive opposition from Chris Christie and the hedge fund managers and corporate education "reformers" who want to turn over more public schools to corporate charter school chains. On her blog, Diane Ravich quoted supporters who called it "the most important election in the nation regarding the future of public education."
This year, the Los Angeles school board elections pitted charter-school advocates against public-school proponents, and the results were mixed in the school district with the nation's largest number of charter-school students. "The billionaires dropped a few million into the L.A. race, principally to defeat [public-school defender] Bennett Kayser," Diane Ravitch pointed out. They succeeded in replacing him with charter founder Ref Rodriguez, but charter proponent Tamar Galatzan also lost her seat to a retired public school teacher.
Tom Wolf beat Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett in a race that focused on Corbett's failed educational "reforms." The new state budget in Pennsylvania includes more funding for schools that serve the neediest kids. Wolf has also signaled that he is ready to to end Pennsylvania's charter-school expansion.
In the California race for state schools chief, Tom Torlakson beat Marshall Tuck despte millions of dollars in support for Tuck from the charter school industry.
Now what?
In 2016, one of the biggest national political questions in the presidential election was what to do about public schools.
Will the rightwing assault on education succeeed, based on decades of propaganda funded by the Bradley foundation to spread the message that "public schools have failed"?
Or will Democrats and Republicans alike take a stand for public education?
A lot will depend on how much pressure a growing pro-public-school movement can put on the candidates.
All across the country, there are real signs of hope.
Superintendents, school boards, and administrators of local public schools have been writing letters and testifying against the privatization and defunding of public education.
Parents are engaged as never before.
Communities, from urban mostly black and brown districts to conservative, rural areas, are rising up against budget cuts and the threat of school closures.
"It's not too late," one impassioned letter from a group of school superintendents declared, urging citizens to stand up and resist the defunding of public schools and their privatization.
Let's hope they are right.
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Testing, Anxiety, and the ABC's: Kindergarten Under Common Core
New report finds Common Core mandate that kindergarteners learn to read forces 'inappropriate' instruction, blocks experiential learning, and causes harmful anxiety among children
Jan 13, 2015
The widely adopted standard that kindergarteners must learn to read has led to inappropriate drilling and excessive testing in place of important experiential learning, finds a new report published Tuesday by a panel of education experts.
The report, Reading Instruction in Kindergarten: Little to Gain and Much to Lose (pdf), put forth by early education groups Defending the Early Years (DEY) and the Alliance for Childhood, debunks the thinking behind the Common Core State Standard (or CCSS) thatchildren as young as 4 or 5 must be able to "read emergent-reader texts with purpose and understanding."
Report authors Nancy Carlsson-Paige, Geralyn Bywater McLaughlin, and Joan Wolfsheimer Almon say they could find no research to support the controversial guideline. Alternately, studies show that children exhibit greater gains from active, play-based learning experiences--the same activities that are being pushed out to make room for more academic instruction.
From the report:
As children engage in active learning experiences and play, they are talking and listening all the time. They attach words to their actions, talk with peers and teachers, learn new vocabulary and use more complex grammar. As they build, make paintings, and engage in imaginative play, they deepen their understanding of word meanings. As they listen to and create stories, hear rich language texts, sing songs, poems and chants, their foundation for reading grows strong.
Further, the authors note that many kindergarten-age children are not developmentally ready to learn to read and thus, the Common Core is setting "unrealistic goals" and forcing educators to use "inappropriate methods," such as drilling and excessive testing, to accomplish them.
The report cites a recent DEY survey of early childhood teachers (preschool to grade three) which found that 85 percent of the public school teachers who responded said that they are required to teach activities that are not developmentally appropriate for their students.
"When children have educational experiences that are not geared to their developmental level or in tune with their learning needs and cultures, it can cause them great harm, including feelings of inadequacy, anxiety and confusion," the report notes.
The authors cite a recent email from a concerned parent, who wrote:
My 5-year-old son started Common Core Kindergarten this year in California. Even though it's only been two months he is already far behind. His teacher asked, "What kind of preschool did he go to -- it must have been a lot of play." Of course it was a lot of play! That's what I wanted for him! She warned me he would probably be getting some "area of concern" grades come November... [W]e are required to do ... [worksheets] four nights a week. It's the same boring thing over and over again. (Especially the reading homework)... I know he's not stupid but I'm being told in not so clear terms that he is. It's very disheartening.
For kindergarten alone, there are more than 90 standards under the Common Core that young children are expected to meet. Some form of the standards have been adopted in 46 states as well as the District of Columbia.
"It puts an emphasis away from a child-centered curriculum, away from children and teaching and onto these requirements that are externally imposed," said Nancy Carlsson-Paige.
Under the Common Core standards, all children are expected to achieve the same benchmarks by the end of each school year. However, according to research, children in low-income and underserved communities do not receive the same educational resources that are given to their peers from wealthier communities.
"Attention to the Common Core is a diversion from addressing the underlying issues of economic inequality that contribute to the achievement gap between low-and high-income students," the authors note.
Among the recommendations put forth, Defending the Early Years and Alliance for Childhood are calling for an end to the high-stakes testing of children up to third grade. The groups are also calling for the withdrawal of the kindergarten standards from the Common Core until they are rethought along appropriate developmental lines.
The two groups released the video below to promote their research and are asking other critics of the Common Core to share their recommendations with the hashtag #2much2soon.
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The Problems with the Common Core
The CCSS have been adopted by 46 states and are currently being implemented in school districts throughout the United States.
Jan 24, 2014
The trouble with the Common Core is not primarily what is in these standards or what's been left out, although that's certainly at issue. The bigger problem is the role the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) are playing in the larger dynamics of current school reform and education politics.
Today everything about the Common Core, even the brand name--the Common Core State Standards--is contested because these standards were created as an instrument of contested policy. They have become part of a larger political project to remake public education in ways that go well beyond slogans about making sure every student graduates "college and career ready," however that may be defined this year. We're talking about implementing new national standards and tests for every school and district in the country in the wake of dramatic changes in the national and state context for education reform. These changes include:
- A 10-year experiment in the use of federally mandated standards and tests called No Child Left Behind (NCLB) that has been almost universally acknowledged as a failure.
- The adoption of test-based teacher evaluation frameworks in dozens of states, largely as a result of federal mandates.
- Multiple rounds of budget cuts and layoffs that have left 34 of the 50 states providing less funding for education than they did five years ago, and the elimination of more than 300,000 teaching positions.
- A wave of privatization that has increased the number of publicly funded but privately run charter schools by 50 percent, while nearly 4,000 public schools have been closed in the same period.
- An appalling increase in the inequality and child poverty surrounding our schools, categories in which the United States leads the world and that tell us far more about the source of our educational problems than the uneven quality of state curriculum standards.
- A dramatic increase in the cost and debt burden of college access.
- A massively well-financed campaign of billionaires and politically powerful advocacy organizations that seeks to replace our current system of public education--which, for all its many flaws, is probably the most democratic institution we have and one that has done far more to address inequality, offer hope, and provide opportunity than the country's financial, economic, political, and media institutions--with a market-based, non-unionized, privately managed system.
I think many supporters of the Common Core don't sufficiently take into account how these larger forces define the context in which the standards are being introduced, and how much that context is shaping implementation. As teacher-blogger Jose Vilson put it:
People who advocate for the CCSS miss the bigger picture that people on the ground don't: The CCSS came as a package deal with the new teacher evaluations, higher stakes testing, and austerity measures, including mass school closings. Often, it seems like the leaders are talking out of both sides of their mouths when they say they want to improve education but need to defund our schools. . . . It makes no sense for us to have high expectations of our students when we don't have high expectations for our school system.
My own first experience with standards-based reform was in New Jersey, where I taught English and journalism to high school students for many years in one of the state's poorest cities. In the 1990s, curriculum standards became a central issue in the state's long-running funding equity case, Abbott v. Burke. The case began by documenting how lower levels of resources in poor urban districts produced unequal educational opportunities in the form of worse facilities, poorer curriculum materials, less experienced teachers, and fewer support services. At a key point in the case, in an early example of arguments that today are painfully familiar, then-Gov. Christine Whitman declared that, instead of funding equity, what we really needed were curriculum standards and a shift from focusing on dollars to focusing on what those dollars should be spent on. If all students were taught to meet "core content curriculum standards," Whitman argued, then everyone would receive an equitable and adequate education.
At the time, the New Jersey Supreme Court was an unusually progressive and foresighted court, and it responded to the state's proposal for standards with a series of landmark decisions that speak to some of the same issues raised today by the Common Core. The court agreed that standards for what schools should teach and students should learn seemed like a good idea. But standards don't deliver themselves. They require well-prepared and supported professional staff, improved instructional resources, safe and well-equipped facilities, reasonable class sizes, and--especially if they are supposed to help schools compensate for the inequality that exists all around them--a host of supplemental services like high quality preschools, expanded summer and after-school programs, health and social services, and more. In effect, the court said adopting "high expectations" curriculum standards was like passing out a menu from a fine restaurant. Not everyone who gets a menu can pay for the meal. So the court tied New Jersey's core curriculum standards to the most equitable school funding mandates in the country.
And though it's been a constant struggle to sustain and implement New Jersey's funding equity mandates, a central problem with the Common Core is the complete absence of any similar credible plan to provide--or even to determine--the resources necessary to make every student "college and career ready" as defined by the CCSS.
Funding is far from the only concern, but it is a threshold credibility issue. If you're proposing a dramatic increase in outcomes and performance to reach social and academic goals that have never been reached before, and your primary investments are standards and tests that serve mostly to document how far you are from reaching those goals, you either don't have a very good plan or you're planning something else. The Common Core, like NCLB before it, is failing the funding credibility test before it's even out of the gate.
The Lure of the Common Core
Last winter, the Rethinking Schools editorial board held a discussion about the Common Core; we were trying to decide how to address this latest trend in the all-too-trendy world of education reform. Rethinking Schools has always been skeptical of standards imposed from above. Too many standards projects have been efforts to move decisions about teaching and learning away from educators and schools, and put them in the hands of distant bureaucracies and politicians. Standards have often codified sanitized versions of history, politics, and culture that reinforce official myths while leaving out the voices and concerns of our students and communities. Whatever potentially positive role standards might play in truly collaborative conversations about what schools should teach and children should learn has repeatedly been undermined by bad process, suspect political agendas, and commercial interests.
Although all these concerns were raised, we also found that teachers in different districts and states were having very different experiences with the Common Core. There were teachers in Milwaukee who had endured years of scripted curriculum and mandated textbooks. For them, the CCSS seemed like an opening to develop better curriculum and, compared to what they'd been struggling under, seemed more flexible and student-centered. For many teachers, especially in the interim between the rollout of the standards and the arrival of the tests--a lot of the Common Core's appeal is based on claims that:
- It represents a tighter set of smarter standards focused on developing critical learning skills instead of mastering fragmented bits of knowledge.
- It requires more progressive, student-centered teaching with strong elements of collaborative and reflective learning.
- It will help equalize the playing field by raising expectations for all children, especially those suffering the worst effects of "drill and kill" test prep.
Viewed in isolation, the debate over the Common Core can be confusing; who doesn't want all students to have good preparation for life after high school? But, seen in the full context of the politics and history that produced it--and the tests that are just around the bend--the implications of the Common Core project look quite different.
Emerging from the Wreckage of No Child Left Behind
The CCSS emerged from the wreckage of NCLB. In 2002, NCLB was passed with overwhelming bipartisan support and presented as a way to close long-standing gaps in academic performance. NCLB marked a dramatic change in federal education policy--away from its historic role as a promoter of access and equity through support for things like school integration, extra funding for high-poverty schools, and services for students with special needs, to a much less equitable set of mandates around standards and testing, closing or "reconstituting" schools, and replacing school staff.
NCLB required states to adopt curriculum standards and to test students annually to gauge progress toward reaching them. Under threat of losing federal funds, all 50 states adopted or revised their standards and began testing every student, every year, in every grade from 3-8 and again in high school. The professed goal was to make sure every student was on grade level in math and language arts by requiring schools to reach 100 percent passing rates on state tests for every student in 10 subgroups.
By any measure, NCLB was a failure in raising academic performance and narrowing gaps in opportunity and outcomes. But by very publicly measuring the test results against arbitrary benchmarks that no real schools have ever met, NCLB succeeded in creating a narrative of failure that shaped a decade of attempts to "fix" schools while blaming those who work in them. The disaggregated scores put the spotlight on gaps among student groups, but the law used these gaps to label schools as failures without providing the resources or supports needed to eliminate them.
By the time the first decade of NCLB was over, more than half the schools in the nation were on the lists of "failing schools" and the rest were poised to follow. In Massachusetts, which is generally considered to have the toughest state standards in the nation--arguably more demanding than the Common Core--80 percent of the schools were facing NCLB sanctions. This is when the NCLB "waivers" appeared. As the number of schools facing sanctions and intervention grew well beyond the poor communities of color where NCLB had made "disruptive reform" the norm and began to reach into more middle-class and suburban districts, the pressure to revise NCLB's unworkable accountability system increased. But the bipartisan coalition that passed NCLB had collapsed and gridlock in Congress made revising it impossible. So U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, with dubious legal justification, made up a process to grant NCLB waivers to states that agreed to certain conditions.
Forty states were granted conditional waivers from NCLB: If they agreed to tighten the screws on the most struggling schools serving the highest needs students, they could ease up on the rest, provided they also agreed to use test scores to evaluate all their teachers, expand the reach of charter schools, and adopt "college and career ready" curriculum standards. These same requirements were part of the Race to the Top program, which turned federal education funds into competitive grants and promoted the same policies, even though they have no track record of success as school improvement strategies.
Who Created the Common Core?
Because federal law prohibits the federal government from creating national standards and tests, the Common Core project was ostensibly designed as a state effort led by the National Governors Association, the Council of Chief State School Officers, and Achieve, a private consulting firm. The Gates Foundation provided more than $160 million in funding, without which Common Core would not exist.
The standards were drafted largely behind closed doors by academics and assessment "experts," many with ties to testing companies. Education Week blogger and science teacher Anthony Cody found that, of the 25 individuals in the work groups charged with drafting the standards, six were associated with the test makers from the College Board, five with the test publishers at ACT, and four with Achieve. Zero teachers were in the work groups. The feedback groups had 35 participants, almost all of whom were university professors. Cody found one classroom teacher involved in the entire process. According to teacher educator Nancy Carlsson-Paige: "In all, there were 135 people on the review panels for the Common Core. Not a single one of them was a K-3 classroom teacher or early childhood professional." Parents were entirely missing. K-12 educators were mostly brought in after the fact to tweak and endorse the standards--and lend legitimacy to the results.
College- and Career-Ready Standards?
The substance of the standards themselves is also, in a sense, top down. To arrive at "college- and career-ready standards," the Common Core developers began by defining the "skills and abilities" they claim are needed to succeed in a four-year college. The CCSS tests being developed by two federally funded multistate consortia, at a cost of about $350 million, are designed to assess these skills. One of these consortia, the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, claims that students who earn a "college ready" designation by scoring a level 4 on these still-under-construction tests will have a 75 percent chance of getting a C or better in their freshman composition course. But there is no actual evidence connecting scores on any of these new experimental tests with future college success.
And it will take far more than standards and tests to make college affordable, accessible, and attainable for all. When I went to college many years ago, "college for all" meant open admissions, free tuition, and race, class, and gender studies. Today, it means cutthroat competition to get in, mountains of debt to stay, and often bleak prospects when you leave. Yet "college readiness" is about to become the new AYP (adequate yearly progress) by which schools will be ranked.
The idea that by next year Common Core tests will start labeling kids in the 3rd grade as on track or not for college is absurd and offensive.
Substantive questions have been raised about the Common Core's tendency to push difficult academic skills to lower grades, about the appropriateness of the early childhood standards, about the sequencing of the math standards, about the mix and type of mandated readings, and about the priority Common Core puts on the close reading of texts in ways that devalue student experience and prior knowledge.
A decade of NCLB tests showed that millions of students were not meeting existing standards, but the sponsors of the Common Core decided that the solution was tougher ones. And this time, instead of each state developing its own standards, the Common Core seeks to create national tests that are comparable across states and districts, and that can produce results that can be plugged into the data-driven crisis machine that is the engine of corporate reform.
Educational Plan or Marketing Campaign?
The way the standards are being rushed into classrooms across the country is further undercutting their credibility. These standards have never been fully implemented in real schools anywhere. They're more or less abstract descriptions of academic abilities organized into sequences by people who have never taught at all or who have not taught this particular set of standards. To have any impact, the standards must be translated into curriculum, instructional plans, classroom materials, and valid assessments. A reasonable approach to implementing new standards would include a few multi-year pilot programs that provided time, resources, opportunities for collaboration, and transparent evaluation plans.
Instead we're getting an overhyped all-state implementation drive that seems more like a marketing campaign than an educational plan. And I use the word marketing advisedly, because another defining characteristic of the Common Core project is rampant profiteering.
Joanne Weiss, Duncan's former chief of staff and head of the Race to the Top grant program, which effectively made adoption of the Common Core a condition for federal grants, described how it is opening up huge new markets for commercial exploitation:
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.
Who Controls Public Education?
Having financed the creation of the standards, the Gates Foundation has entered into a partnership with Pearson to produce a full set of K-12 courses aligned with the Common Core that will be marketed to schools across the country. Nearly every educational product now comes wrapped in the Common Core brand name.
The curriculum and assessments our schools and students need will not emerge from this process. Instead, the top-down, bureaucratic rollout of the Common Core has put schools in the middle of a multilayered political struggle over who will control education policy--corporate power and private wealth or public institutions managed, however imperfectly, by citizens in a democratic process.
The web-based news service Politico recently described what it called "the Common Core money war," reporting that "tens of millions of dollars are pouring into the battle over the Common Core. . . . The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation already has pumped more than $160 million into developing and promoting the Common Core, including $10 million just in the past few months, and it's getting set to announce up to $4 million in new grants to keep the advocacy cranking. Corporate sponsors are pitching in, too. Dozens of the nation's top CEOs will meet to set the plans for a national advertising blitz that may include TV, radio, and print."
At the same time, opposing the Common Core is "an array of organizations with multimillion-dollar budgets of their own and much experience in mobilizing crowds and lobbying lawmakers, including the Heritage Foundation, Americans for Prosperity, the Pioneer Institute, FreedomWorks, and the Koch Bros." These groups are feeding a growing right-wing opposition to the Common Core that combines hostility to all federal education initiatives and anything supported by the Obama administration with more populist sentiments.
Tests, Tests, Tests
But while this larger political battle rages, the most immediate threat for educators and schools remains the new wave of high-stakes Common Core tests.
Duncan, who once said "The best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans was Hurricane Katrina" and who called Waiting for Superman "a Rosa Parks moment," now tells us, "I am convinced that this new generation of state assessments will be an absolute game-changer in public education."
The problem is that this game, like the last one, is rigged. Although reasonable people have found things of value in the Common Core standards, there is no credible defense to be made of the high-stakes uses planned for these new tests. Instead, the Common Core project threatens to reproduce the narrative of public school failure that just led to a decade of bad policy in the name of reform.
Reports from the first wave of Common Core testing provide evidence for these fears. Last spring, students, parents, and teachers in New York schools responded to new Common Core tests developed by Pearson with outcries against their length, difficulty, and inappropriate content. Pearson included corporate logos and promotional material in reading passages. Students reported feeling overstressed and underprepared--meeting the tests with shock, anger, tears, and anxiety. Administrators requested guidelines for handling tests students had vomited on. Teachers and principals complained about the disruptive nature of the testing process and many parents encouraged their children to opt out.
Only about 30 percent of students were deemed "proficient" based on arbitrary cut scores designed to create new categories of failure. The achievement gaps Common Core is supposed to narrow grew larger. Less than 4 percent of students who are English language learners passed. The number of students identified by the tests for "academic intervention" skyrocketed to 70 percent, far beyond the capacity of districts to meet.
The tests are on track to squeeze out whatever positive potential exists in the Common Core:
- The arrival of the tests will pre-empt the already too short period teachers and schools have to review the standards and develop appropriate curriculum responses before that space is filled by the assessments themselves.
- Instead of reversing the mania for over-testing, the new assessments will extend it with pre-tests, interim tests, post-tests, and computer-based "performance assessments." It's the difference between giving a patient a blood test and draining the patient's blood.
- The scores will be plugged into data systems that will generate value-added measures, student growth percentiles, and other imaginary numbers for what I call psychometric astrology. The inaccurate and unreliable practice of using test scores for teacher evaluation will distort the assessments before they're even in place, and has the potential to make Common Core implementation part of the assault on the teaching profession instead of a renewal of it.
- If the Common Core's college- and career-ready performance levels become the standard for high school graduation, it will push more kids out of high school than it will prepare for college. The most vulnerable students will be the most at risk. As FairTest put it: "If a child struggles to clear the high bar at 5 feet, she will not become a 'world-class' jumper because someone raised the bar to 6 feet and yelled 'jump higher,' or if her 'poor' performance is used to punish her coach."
- The costs of the tests, which have multiple pieces throughout the year and must be given on computers many schools don't have, will be enormous and will come at the expense of more important things. The plunging scores will be used as an excuse to close more public schools and open more privatized charters and voucher schools, especially in poor communities of color.
This is not just cynical speculation. It is a reasonable projection based on the history of the NCLB decade, the dismantling of public education in the nation's urban centers, and the appalling growth of the inequality and concentrated poverty that remains the central problem in public education.
Fighting Back
Common Core has become part of the corporate reform project now stalking our schools. As schools struggle with these new mandates, we should defend our students, our schools, and ourselves by pushing back against implementation timelines, resisting the stakes and priority attached to the tests, and exposing the truth about the commercial and political interests shaping this false panacea for the problems our schools face.
There are encouraging signs that the movement we need is growing. Last year in Seattle, teachers led a boycott of district testing that drew national support and won a partial rollback of the testing. In New York this fall, parents sent score reports on new Common Core tests back to the state commissioner of education with a letter declaring "This year's test scores are invalid and provide NO useful information about student learning." Opt-out efforts are growing daily. Even some supporters of the CCSS have endorsed a call for the moratorium on the use of tests to make policy decisions. It's not enough, but it's a start.
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