Is Common Core just another avenue for failing schools to be taken over by private business. The bottom 5% each year will be exposed to exactly that. If CC is such a success then why are private schools not on board? From the CA this morning: The implementation of Common Core State Standards (CCSS) represents the most grand curriculum experiment in educational history with the least amount of evidence to back it up. Even so, Common Core enthusiasts often ridicule the detractors of cram-down curriculum reform and the supporters of local autonomy in education by pointing out that the standards are not federal in origin and are not driven by a national conspiracy to brainwash children with socialist ideas. Although the CCSS are not in themselves federal standards, no one disputes that they never would have been endorsed by 45 states almost overnight, had the Obama administration not incentivized their adoption with bonus points for states hoping to land part of the $4.3 billion in federal Race to the Top grants in 2010. The federal government’s goal for education — which consolidates years of work by the Business Roundtable, an organization made up of the CEOs of leading U.S. corporations — is for all states to have the same “state” standards and for new accountability tests to be developed and administered nationwide. If that makes them state standards, then surely, “what’s in a name?” Even though the Common Core standards carry the stamp of approval of the National Governors Association, they clearly represent corporate America’s goals for education reform. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation alone has provided more than $170 million for the creation and promotion of the Common Core since 2009. Following the election of President Barack Obama in 2008, huge sums of tax-sheltered donations were funneled through the organization Achieve, Inc., to consolidate earlier efforts at creating national standards. As a nonprofit 501(c) organization dedicated to increasing accountability testing across all states, the Achieve, Inc., board of directors is comprised of a handful of governors and a matching number of high-ranking representatives of major corporations, all of whom remain aligned with the agendas of the Business Roundtable and the American Legislative Exchange Council. The standards were written to Achieve’s specifications which demanded accelerated knowledge acquisition and tougher standards matched by more rigorous standardized tests. The standards were billed as the best way to prepare students for college and careers, even though no research studies have been conducted and no empirical evidence exists to verify this untested hypothesis. A research report issued this month by the Brookings Institution found states that have CCSS-like standards have not done as well as other states on the “gold standard” of testing, the National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP). In fact, “states with standards most different from the CCSS gained the most on NAEP.” In those states that have aggressively implemented CCSS, the report estimates that “it will take 24 years for a noticeable improvement to unfold.” Before we move forward with the Common Core State Standards, pilot studies should be conducted to ascertain the effectiveness of this scheme that may or may not result in higher test scores, although it will surely produce large numbers of children and schools labeled as failures (as occurred in New York last year). We need to ask independent educators and educational researchers their thoughts on these standards, so specific and prescribed that — despite claims to the contrary — they end up serving as the de facto curriculum. After 12 years of “No Child Left Behind,” we know that high-stakes testing does little to close achievement gaps, although it is an effective tool for labeling the poorest schools as failures and turning them over to private management at public expense. Haven’t we had enough of the NCLB test-and-punish strategy, which has isolated our most vulnerable students in corporate reform charter schools that aggravate the problems of segregation and low proficiency? How have such nonsolutions to educational inequality come to be labeled “the civil rights issue of our generation,” as “reformers” repeatedly intone? Finally, if Common Core is the best way to make children “career and college ready,” why aren’t the best private schools on board the Common Core standards and testing train? Why has the National Catholic Educational Association yet to endorse CCSS? Why did 132 Catholic professors and former professors last fall denounce the CCSS as “a recipe for standardized workforce preparation” that trades the study of the classics and imaginative literature for “informational texts”? If we stick with the other part of the federal blueprint that calls for lowest-scoring 5 percent of schools to be subject to charter conversion each year, the majority of public schools will have been privatized in less than 25 years. By then, perhaps we will know if Common Core has worked.
Posted on: Sun, 30 Mar 2014 12:27:10 +0000
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