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In 2013, Gallup reported that 62% of Americans had never heard of the Common Core. The anti-Common Core documentary “Building the Machine,” released a few weeks ago, begins with a narrator intoning, “Before the fall of 2012, very little was known about the Common Core. The media wasn’t covering it. It wasn’t part of the national discourse. It wasn’t even on parents’ radar.”Democracy deficit.
If true, that’s a significant claim. The Common Core state standards are no small change. Forty-five states and D.C. adopted the K-12 reading and math standards, and promised to modify their tests, textbooks and teaching accordingly. In hot pursuit of federal Race to the Top funds, states hurriedly agreed to what proponents celebrated as a landmark change. The New York Times termed the Common Core “a once-in-a-generation opportunity” and Duncan said it “may prove to be the single greatest thing to happen to public education in America since Brown vs. Board of Education.”
Change of this magnitude are typically hashed out in robust public debate. The Common Core was not.
In a recent study, we used the news search engine Lexis-Nexis to track media coverage of the Common Core during its five-year history. The results show just how little attention the Common Core received when it was being unveiled and adopted. In 2009, the year the draft standards were first released, there were 453 mentions of the “Common Core.” For comparison’s sake, that year, there were 2,185 mentions of Disney actor Zac Efron. Not a single reference to the Common Core mentioned “controversy,” “critic,” “opponent,” “supporter” or “defender.”
[snip]
By 2013, the issue exploded into the national consciousness, with 26,401 mentions. Of course, by that point, most states had been implementing the standards for years. Some criticism of the Common Core has been hyperbolic and rife with dubious claims. But today’s seemingly “misinformed” pushback may be mostly a case of frustrated citizens waking up to a fait accompli.
What does this all mean?
First, it’s hard to look at these numbers and not conclude that the mainstream media dropped the ball. The standards were rarely covered even as states planned to alter instruction for tens of millions of students.
Second, these results reflect a strategy of supporters seeking to stay below the radar in 2009, 2010, and 2011, while relying on the helping hand of the federal Race to the Top program. The thing is, stealth is a dubious strategy for pursuing fundamental change in 100,000 schools educating 50 million children.
Third, the democratic process relies on information. A lack of familiarity has proven to be fertile ground for all manner of rumor and uncertainty. Ultimately, informed consent is the key to policy durability.
The Common Core was foisted on students, parents and teachers with precious little open debate
BY FREDERICK M. HESS , MICHAEL Q. MCSHANE
12 months ago, you could raise funding for your startup overnight if you were doing "big data" for education (even though the data was quite paltry in size). The future hope of a Diamond-Age like mechanism to have kids worked in flipped classrooms at their ZPD ["zone of proximal development"] all without teachers needing to do anything to differentiate instruction was the holy grail.On the one hand, people habituate: the bad gets normal, as Temple always said. So this may blow over.
6 months ago, the perfect storm of Anti-Common Core backlash, NSA domestic spying, and IRS abuse of 501c4 citizen groups meant Bog Data for Ed was in serious jeopardy.
I first realized this at a talk I was giving at a school that had chosen in May of 2013 to improve their math program: a goal of Singapore Primary Math in K-6, Shoseki in 7, Dolciani in 8, complete with real math training for all teachers and a FT BS math degreed teacher for 6-8. Oh, and state standrads-based standardized tests for the first time ever to measure student progress relative to their peers and state requirements.
The parents were on board in May. I gave the same talk in September, and the climate had changed.
Parents were so anti-data that they wanted no standardized test. Never mind that there was no way to measure student progress without a benchmark.
In order to make some basic determination about where these students were mathematically that first May, MSMI had devised a test based on state sample item. In September, I actually had a parent say to me "I know you took data on my child."
Another parent who stood by as I spoke to a family asking for how I could help their child get a bit of higher content in their math class said "I heard you ask that family for their child's name and grade."
The paranoia was rampant. The push to "opt out" was so great that we were in serious jeopardy of having any way of measuring if we'd done any good, let alone if kids had learn a year's math in a year's time.
Parents no longer trust their schools. This is perhaps the biggest legacy of the politicization of civic institutions. It is earned in many cases, but probably is worse in result than even lousy curricula. It will take a long long time to fix.
"Houses the idea safely in the ‘this will never be agreed to’ cabin."We need that cabin in my district.
"Never. It’s now a moth in amber–preserved in perpetuity. They ought to send it to the national archives and put it under glass."On PARCC and SBAC: right track or wrong track?
"At this point, there is zero leadership on this at ED, and zero interest on the Hill."
"As many predicted, this is turning out to be one of the greatest boondoggles of all time."On Randi Weingarten's proposed moratorium on high-stakes testing:
"It is the beginning of the end for both. States are going to start running for the door. To many reasons to get out. The Administration ultimately spends ~$350 million for something states didn’t want and the market took care of."
"Smarter Balanced is headed in the wrong direction educationally; PARCC is headed in the right direction but is afflicted with grievous problems of organization, management and delivery."
“The Common Core is having a PR problem, very generally.”
“They were artificial constructs that didn’t have any actual support behind them other than a way to spend money. It would have made more sense to give the money to states and encourage them to build their own consortia so that they actually wanted to participate and be part of it.”
“Over the last 60 days, the entire CCSS architecture has gotten wobbly. Anything is possible now. Opponents smell blood in the water.”And Arne Duncan, unbeloved:
“The centrist, compromise position will become ‘delayed.’ Those who support it will go out of their way to show they are not ditching accountability.”
“Arne Duncan has blinders on and thinks that he is the nation’s superintendent, chief school board, and principal for every school. He doesn’t understand or accept criticism, and doesn’t see how poorly this is going. States will freak out when they see the assessments and their cut scores and will do everything and anything to back away from this land mine as quickly as possible.”I wonder what nuggets I'll find in the report from April 2013.
We're great because 10 kids do spectacular things by senior year. The other 150 will get by and there are no glaring inadequacies.Today is a new beginning.
Assemblywoman Nancy Calhoun, a Republican of Orange County, introduced a measure mandating that school textbooks of all subjects be authored by current or former New York schoolteachers. The bill memo says that such a law would help "provide equal and balanced learning opportunities for K-12 students" and cut down textbook costs by up to 80%.A law that would actually make it illegal for New York school districts to adopt Singapore Math.
No Elephant in the Room With These Laws
by Jacob Gershman
APRIL 25, 2011
I have found that using "automaticity" in place of "memorization" lets me get around the stigma of the latter word while retaining its basic meaning. And "automaticity" sounds cool, so people don't press.Guerrilla teaching or marketing --- !
Guerrilla teaching forever!
I keep thinking the politics of choice will be affected by the economy. Charter schools (and vouchers) are cheaper than public schools, and parents are happier (or at least spend fewer years of their lives being unhappy - pdf file).
Same academic outcomes for less money, with less stress on the family: put it that way, some of us are going to take that deal.
The guests sipped wine and nibbled sushi, guacamole and Gruyère — lawyers, bankers, preschool teachers, managers and consultants of various kinds, bound by the anxious decision they must confront in the months ahead: where their 4-year-olds will go to school in the fall.
Downstairs, a flier by the doorman’s desk had greeted them with a provocative question: “Why should you have to spend college tuition on kindergarten?” Back upstairs, in the stylish apartment on West 99th Street, Eva S. Moskowitz, a former City Council member who runs a network of charter schools in Harlem and the Bronx, delivered a tantalizing sales talk.
“Middle-class families need options too,” she said.
As it turns out, our school district is using a controversial math curriculum called Everyday Mathematics, also known as "Reform Math." EM, as Everyday Mathematics is referred to by teachers, was developed by the University of Chicago, and according to their website, it is in use by about three million students nationwide. Here is one example of how simple addition "can" be performed using EM:
An example of what EM calls the "lattice method" for performing multiplication:
What becomes immediately clear is that several extra steps are now necessary to accomplish simple beeline computations. More steps will result in more errors -- only an idiot would claim otherwise. Eventually, EM students are taught four ways to add, five ways to subtract, four ways to multiply, and two ways to divide (traditional long division has been eschewed completely). Rote memorization is de-emphasized, and calculators (as well as estimating) are introduced in grade two.
Here is the basic rationale behind EM, directly from the University of Chicago website:
Research has shown that teaching the standard U.S. algorithms fails with large numbers of children, and that alternative algorithms are often easier for children to understand and learn. For this reason, Everyday Mathematics introduces children to a variety of alternative procedures in addition to the customary algorithms.
Links to or excerpts of said research are not provided -- we are to simply take these statements as fact. EM further claims to "make mathematics accessible to all students" by:
Incorporating individual, partner, and small group activities that make it possible for teachers to provide individualized feedback and assistance.
Encouraging risk-taking by establishing a learning environment that respects multiple problem solving strategies.
What's worse, the methods purportedly being used to convince school boards to adopt EM reek suspiciously of Rules for Radicals: *Never thought of these tactics in terms of Saul Alinsky
State that the traditional approach hasn't worked
Disparage testimony from those against the adoption as ideological and politically-motivated arguments
State that the success of any program depends on the teacher
Bring in teachers from affluent school districts as witnesses
Bring in a witness from a university
.Town, county and state governments no longer have much independent political identity. They are mere “conduits for federal mandates,” as CodevillaA couple of years ago, when busing costs were at issue here in Irvington, we learned that at some point in NY history the state 'incentivized' (hate that word) districts to consolidate by picking up some of the transportation costs. I no longer recall the details, and the story doesn't make sense given the fact that the town is paying transportation costs, not the state.puts it. He notes that the 132 million Americans who inhabited the country in 1940 could vote on 117,000 school boards, while today a nation of 310 million votes in only 15,000 school districts.
The State of Conservatism
By CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL
Published: October 21, 2010
This past week the NAACP, the National Urban League and other civil-rights groups collectively condemned charter schools. Claiming to speak for minority Americans, the organizations expressed "reservations" about the Obama administration's "extensive reliance on charter schools." They specifically voiced concern about "the overrepresentation of charter schools in low-income and predominantly minority communities."
[snip]
The truth is that support for charters among ordinary African-Americans and Hispanics is strong and has only increased dramatically in the past two years.
[snip]
For the past four years, Harvard's Program on Education Policy and Governance, together with the journal Education Next, has surveyed a nationally representative cross-section of some 3,000 Americans about a variety of education policy issues. In 2010, we included extra samples of public-school teachers and all those living in zip codes where a charter school is located.
I think the figure from parents is huge.African-Americans for Charter Schools
- Support for charters among African Americans rose to 49% in 2009, up from 42% in 2008. This year it leapt upward to no less than 64%. Among Hispanics support jumped to 47% in 2010, from 37% in 2008.
- Opposition to charters is expressed by 14% of African-Americans and 21% of Hispanics. Twenty-three percent of African-Americans and 33% of Hispanics take a neutral position.
- Among the public as a whole, charter supporters currently outnumber opponents by a margin of better than 2 to 1. Forty-four percent say they are in favor of charters, while 19% stand in opposition.
- Parents in general are even more supportive of charter schools: 51% like them, 15% don't.
- [P]arents in communities with charter schools favor them by a margin of 57% to 16%.
- [C]harter support among public school teachers has slipped to 39% in 2010, from 47% in 2008.
By PAUL E. PETERSON AND MARTIN R. WEST
Also take in to account that a large minority of potential voters are employees of the school district and that the union is actively ensuring that particular candidates be put up for election. An independent candidate has a lot of work to do to counteract the organization and get out the vote in my area.This is one of the main reasons why we have mayoral control of the schools, right?
just arrived.
