I just sent this to the members of the RI Senate education committee: The Impending Threat of the Common Core [allegedly] $tate [$tealth] $tandards What is of more importance to families than the current and future well-being of their children. What is of more importance to a society than the nurturing of the next generation, the nurturing of young people who will embrace their world with competence and confidence, and participate in it with creativity and compassion. Unfortunately, the current education reform juggernaut, financed by billionaires such as Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and the Walton family, and those aspiring to billionairehood, is perpetrating the opposite. In the name of fewer/clearer/higher, of rigor, critical thinking, and global competitiveness, the Common Core [allegedly] State [Stealth] Standards and their accompanying incessant testing are undermining the integrity and autonomy of teachers across the country. They are oppressing young people from pre-K to grade 12 with inappropriate, unrealistic, often nonsensical and slapdash tasks and tests. They will result in the further closure of neighborhood schools to be taken over by charters whose CEO’s rake in hundreds of thousands of dollars of tax-payer money and simultaneously deprive the most vulnerable children of the resources they deserve. They are deprofessionalizing and marginalizing dedicated teachers, and are costing school districts many times the paltry but tempting money coming from the federal Department of Education via Race to the Top funds. This agenda, taken in total, amounts to nothing less than a coup, replacing a publicly funded system of schooling, answerable to the public, benefiting the vast majority of our nation’s children, which respects the talents and needs of each and every child (an ideal which regrettably has not yet been realized but which is enshrined in law) with a technocratic, inflexible, monolithic enterprise. This enterprise is controlled by those who are obsessed with data and who will profit financially from the endless educational resources that will be mass-produced, and from the data-mining that goes along with the package (and which taxpayers will pay for exponentially). All of this to satisfy the demands of non-educator officials, administrative and political, who are impervious to the outcries of the children, teachers, and parents who are being harmed. Much of this agenda as it is being put forward relies on advances in computer technology. Certainly the new technologies hold much promise for enriching the educational journey of students and teachers. However, the dogmatic adherence to the cult of the computer to “personalize” education must be seen for what it is—a dehumanizing process that has no problem with setting even very young children into a row of computer cubicles to toil away at decontextualized tasks presented to them with bells and whistles and alleged to assess their moment-by--moment learning, while adjusting questions up or down as indicated by clicks of the mouse. This is not the vision of education that parents or teachers can embrace or that our society and democracy can withstand. So, what specifically are the facets of the Common Core [allegedly] State [Stealth] Standards agenda that are seriously problematic? • The bias of those who conceived the need for national standards • The bias of those who decided what qualifications would be used to select those who would produce the standards • The bias of those who actually wrote the standards (primarily employees of Achieve and the College Board), as well as which stakeholders were left out • The secrecy in which the standard writing and “validation” were conducted • The poor quality of the standards for English Language Arts and math instruction* • The heavy-handed way the standards were pushed on the states by the federal Department of Education via promises of Race to the Top money and waivers from NCLB • The self-interest of those who are developing the testing (especially Pearson) • The problematic nature of the curricular materials that are aligned to the standards and assessments (again Pearson, the College Board, and EngageNY) • The problematic nature of the PARCC and SBAC assessments: still primarily multiple-choice, with the computer-friendly addition of drag and drop • The financial cost of the entire CC$$ package: professional development, curricular and testing materials, computer hardware and software, data systems and analysis • The short-term and long-term effects of standardization of expectations when children and youth in our diverse country come to school with a huge variety of ethnic backgrounds, linguistic experience, special needs, talents, and interests which need to be respected and fostered** • The dubious purpose for the vast amount of data to be collected on each student, pre-K to college and beyond, *** and the watering down of the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) protections by a federal agency, the Department of Education, rather than by any amendment to the law Regrettably, the mainstream media has done virtually no investigative reporting to expose these matters for the general public. Fortunately, many experienced and thoughtful educational professionals have done the investigations and the reporting. They present a powerful case that the full reality of the situation is alarming and needs attention. Their findings are based on extensive knowledge and years of authentic experience regarding how children actually learn best in school and what is worthwhile for them to learn. They focus a clear eye on the actual ramifications for children, and their conclusions are irrefutable and must be confronted and acted upon. These findings are eloquently and passionately delineated in articles and testimony, on blogs and in blog comments, on Facebook and on Twitter. Some of the most admirable critiques are presented by: Anthony Cody ‘s “Living in Dialogue” blog on edweek.org Diane Ravitch (blog and books) Susan Ohanian.org Mercedes Schneider’s EduBlog: deutsch 29 Valerie Strauss’s “The Answer Sheet” blog at washingtonpost Dr. Sandra Stotsky: reports, commentary, and testimony, uaedreform.org/sandra-stotsky/ Robert D. Shepherd: bobshepherdonline.wordpress/ plus numerous posts on Diane Ravitch’s blog Morna McDermott at educationalchemy The well-orchestrated and bountifully-funded, corporate-aligned assault on our children’s well-being, on our public education system, and on our democracy must be countered with cogent arguments, and with “grit, tenacity, and perseverance” (ironically, traits which the CC$$ and federal Department of Education purport to foster), but also with heart, with artistry, and with empathy (traits which the technocrats pushing a relentless, creativity-withering agenda of pointless data-manufacture and data-collection and analysis have the utmost disdain for). Americans must not allow this agenda of reductio ad absurdum to dismantle our public education system and replace it with a heartless, soulless caste system in which the children of the elite learn to data-mine, and other people’s children have their inappropriately extracted and uploaded data mined for the ill-considered goal of global competitiveness. *For a review by an engineer of how lacking in validity the math standards are, see: educationviews.org/engineer-common-core-mathematics-standards/ Significantly, Henry Burke writes, “R. James Milgram is professor of mathematics emeritus, Stanford University. He was a member of Common Core’s Validation Committee 2009-2010. Sandra Stotsky is professor of education reform emerita, University of Arkansas. She was a member of Common Core’s Validation Committee [for English Language Arts] 2009-2010. Professor Milgram … refused to validate the Common Core Math Standards,” and Dr. Sandra Stotsky also refused to validate the ELA standards. Dr. Stotsky has written and testified numerous times about the poor quality of the ELA standards and the misleading way that the Common Core boosters promote the standards. For a glimpse of the wrong-headedness of the premises of the ELA standards, particularly the stance of fostering a close reading of text, and focusing on informational text, see several articles critiquing the Common Core exemplar lesson on the Gettysburg Address: breitbart/Big-Government/2013/12/01/Common-Core-Teaching-Gettysburg-Address-Without-Teaching-About-the-Civil-War washingtonpost/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/11/19/common-cores-odd-approach-to-teaching-gettysburg-address/ Also see the scathing review of the first draft of the ELA standards by the National Council of Teachers of English, who were not involved in the writing of the standards. Their feedback did not seem to influence the revisions to the standards. web.archive.org/web/20131212205548/ncte.org/library/NCTEFiles/Resources/Standards/ReportCoreStdsRefs9%2019%2009.pdf **For a statement by early childhood specialists about the negative impact of the standards on the youngest students, see: allianceforchildhood.org/sites/allianceforchildhood.org/files/file/Joint%20Statement%20on%20Core%20Standards_(418%20).pdf *** curmudgucation.blogspot/2014/03/who-puts-scary-in-pearson-meet-knewton.html curmudgucation.blogspot/2014/03/why-ccss-cant-be-decoupled.html
Posted on: Fri, 28 Mar 2014 18:43:54 +0000
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