Oak Norton’s educational research story began when he asked his daughter’s third grade teacher why she hadn’t been learning the multiplication tables and was told, “We don’t do that anymore.” That day, he bought multiplication flashcards for his daughter, realizing that it was time to take education back into his own hands. This led to his many years of research on education reform, condensed in this one-hour presentation. Mr. Norton shares the concentrated top of his research iceberg, discussing the historical roots of compulsory (forced government) education and answering why there is such a defined socialist agenda for national education. That defined agenda includes teaching sex ed to five-year-old school children; officially tracking children from birth through the workforce; and central planning by the government of all education, including preschools.
The Domino effect is happening. States are getting free of Common Core.
First was Indiana. South Carolina and Oklahoma officially dropped out next. Now, here are two more immediately dropping dominoes, Louisiana and Mississippi:
Domino two: The Clarion-Ledger reports that Governor Bryant of Mississipi wants to be free of Common Core.
“I think Common Core is a failed program, and the United States is beginning to realize that,” Bryant said. “Governors all across America are realizing states can do it better.”
Professor Grabar’s essay comes to this pointed conclusion: “If all poetry, writing, “spoken word,” and gesture is equally valuable, we don’t need literature professors.”
This is the perversion of the concept of equality and the meat of current “education reform”. Ed reformers’ quest for social justice has taken over good judgment and even honesty.
But no matter what they say, the truth remains; and there are such things as beauty and truth. There is value in the study of classic literature. Equality of human opportunity never should have been confused with sameness of result, of effect, or mandated sameness.
The prime movers of education reform are unwilling to distinguish between the value of a book, of an academic disciplines, a tradition or even a fact— which facts are true, and matter a lot– enough to fight for? Which ones matter a little? Which “facts” and “studies” do not matter much at all, or are inappropriate –or are lies? Which academic departments are dismissable, replaceable, overvalued by past generations? And who gets to call the shots on what matters, anyway?
They ignore the wisdom of the ages and suddenly treat every every ink stain, every thought and utterance from any source, from grunts to glory, as belonging equally in our universities and schools and in the minds and hearts of our children.
This point of Professor Grabar’s meets up with with what I desperately hope is not a new ed reform trend, (which is happening in Boston now) –one I was shocked to learn about: they are doing away with history departments and no longer hiring real history teachers. History will be “incorporated” under the concept of informational text in language arts classes. It makes sense, when you look at the actual, long winded 18-word title of the language arts standards of Common Core: “The Common Core State Standards for Language Arts and Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science and Technical Subjects.”
Goodbye to classic literature departments, and to high quality history and science as well?
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Goodbye to English Departments
By Mary Grabar
English departments have pretty much given up on their mission of preserving a literary canon or teaching poetic form and rhetorical strategies. Decades ago, politics of race, class, and gender overtook any concern for preserving and perpetuating poetic art. In fact, to claim that there is such a thing as Literature was to align oneself with the right-wing Imperialists.
Today, “digital” is seen as dismantling the last vestige of literary hierarchy. James Pulizzi, in the New Republic, predicts, with no sorrow, that digitization will make literature departments “largely extinct.” His dismissal of traditional English departments is very casual: “As long as literature departments remain beholden to print culture, to the study and transmission of printed texts, they will continue to fade in relevance and prestige.”
English professors themselves have been ushering in this brave, new digital world. Georgia Institute of Technology Professor Richard Utz last year lectured “hidebound faculty members who continue to assign and study only pre-computer-based media,” telling the English professoriate that they should “embrace, accompany critically, and shape the new discourses its students sorely need to communicate and compete: blogs, video essays, Web comics, digital archives, data visualization, and the like.” The digital change is more profound than the transference of material from paper to screen.
The English Department home page of Georgia State University, where I earned my master’s in 1994, declares now, “We read the world.” The profiles of faculty hired since my days as a student there reveal the changes and are representative of departments across the country. Dr. Gina Caison’s work focuses on “southern and Native American studies.” Her work is “interdisciplinary” and “incorporates her interests in performance studies and American visual culture.” Dr. Caison seems to be doing very little analysis of the written word: her “book-length project” “explores the recurrent use of Native American history in literary and cultural texts of the U.S. South,” and she is co-producer of a documentary film about the history of “studying and collecting indigenous human remains.” Whatever she is doing–drama, anthropology, history–it is a far cry from literary study. But even American literature anthologies have scalp dances and rain dances crowding out William Bradford and Anne Bradstreet.
Caison’s colleagues are doing similar work. Dr. Lindsey Eckert “specializes in British Romanticism and Digital Humanities.” Dr. Mary Hocks does “digital rhetoric, visual rhetorics, and computers and composition studies.” Dr. Audrey Goodman writes about “the literary and visual cultures of the American Southwest,” and Dr. Scott Heath “specializes in 20th and 21st century African American literature, black popular culture, and speculative race theory.” He has a book contract on “hip-hop discourse.”
So what the University of Arizona is doing is only the logical conclusion in this move away from literature: they are eliminating the English department. They don’t say this, but by moving English from the Humanities Department to the College of Social Behavior, they are relegating literature to the purely utilitarian. They see the word as simply a means for persuading and transmitting information. Such moves in higher education parallel the focus under the Common Core K-12 program on “informational texts,” which, as it turns out, often are slightly disguised ideological texts.
Today, we have a digital miasma of information with college graduates trained to discernment only to the point of being able to distinguish politically unacceptable ideas from those that are. Anything that does not go along with the current political pieties is considered “far-right,” “extremist,” or “reactionary.” These are terms used by professors and in assigned reading material.
Poetry then becomes nothing more than self-expression of momentary impulses or fleeting observations without regard to form or tradition–kind of like Tweets or Facebook posts about the delicious overstuffed sandwich on the plate. Anyone can be a poet–as long as the message is acceptable politically. At poetry slams in coffee houses across the country the pencil-scribbling on the step to the podium garners as much applause as the carefully constructed (rare) villanelle. The subjects of the “poems” are usually the scribblers themselves–the outrages against them personally and the failure of the world to grasp their vision of justice.
If all poetry, writing, “spoken word,” and gesture is equally valuable, we don’t need literature professors–not even those specializing in “digital media.” It’s a sad day for those of us who love and teach literature.
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I hope you are screaming and pulling out your hair as you read this. I hope you remain one of the squeakiest and most annoying wheels in the ears of your local and state school board, and that they receive emails and calls from you often enough that they no longer smile when they hear your name. Their disdain doesn’t matter; the children do.
Our children deserve at least as high quality an education as we received. This ed reform movement ain’t it.
An interesting art exhibit now at the 464 Gallery in Buffalo, New York features the work of a teacher, Jennifer Scott. It’s receiving national attention because the art is an anti-Common Core protest. The central piece in Scott’s exhibit, “For the Love of Learning: Students First” stars a man in a crown of standardized test bubble sheets –a man exactly resembling NY Education Commissioner John King.
Another Jennifer Scott art piece with a privacy-invasion theme also features Commissioner King. This time he’s a giant, peering in through the school room window with a gleeful countenance at small, unhappy students.
Why does Jennifer Scott use King as the puppetmaster of Common Core? Why not Bill Gates, Arne Duncan, Sir Michael Barber, David Coleman or President Obama?
Commissioner King has been an longtime, outspoken defender of the indefensible in New York.
Recently, King has been more than just hotly criticized. The New York State Allies for Public Education (NYSAPE, a coalition of 45 parent and educator groups in the state) actually, publically condemned Commissioner King to termination last month in a press release.
NYSAPE cited too much emphasis on testing, problems with Common Core standards, “one-size-fits-all” statewide curriculum, and the casual dismissal of the concerns of parents and educators “to the detriment of their children for far too long.” (Stop Common Core New York, a parent-led group, had been calling for King’s resignation for at least six months previous to NYSAPE’s call.)
Still, can the art of an indignant teacher, or can a handful of legislators, or can the pressure of 45 educational coalitions in New York, or can the clear reasoning of remarkable, outspoken local professors– Diane Ravitch, Alan Singer, Christopher Tienken, Nick Tampio and others– really oust John King, his Board of Regents and the fed-ed reforms?
I don’t know. It’s so clearly wrong. More people need to know it.
Let’s hope Jennifer Scott’s art multiplies and influences millions of additional New Yorkers to take a long, hard look at the awful transformations happening in their school systems. Let’s hope the parents and educators in New York win the fight for their children.
Then, let’s have an early –very early– retirement party for Commissioner King.
Note to Utahns: Utah children are being tested by AIR, not by Pearson. So why post this article?
It’s no secret that Utah, as well as the federal government, has heavily invested in Pearson/Microsoft‘s philosophy and product. Pearson leads out in all Common Core implementation and student-data gathering products nationwide, including here in Utah (except for the SAGE/AIR test itself).
Alan Singer’s article adds to the growing argument against Pearson, period. My hope is that both Pearson’s products and its “one-global-governance-system” philosophy will be vigorously rejected and that Pearson will not receive one more penny of the countless Utah tax dollars it has already claimed, both via curriculum sales and via its creepy database building for our state’s school system.
Why Pearson Tests Our Kids
by Alan Singer, Hofstra University
(Posted with permission from the author and also published here)
Pearson invited me to breakfast. Well not just me. I received an email inviting Long Island educators to a free “Breakfast Briefing” promoting “Pearson Personalized Learning” that would empower me to “Turn your traditional student learning into Student-Centered learning by delivering the right curriculum to the right student, at the right time.” I checked out Pearson’s personal learning products online and then decided that the free breakfast and the opportunity to annoy them was not worth the trip.
Pearson is promoting GradPoint, “an easy to use web based solution for grades 6-12” that “includes over 180 rigorous courses (Core, Electives, AP and Foreign Language & CTE).;” iLit, “a tablet-based reading intervention for students in grades 4-10” which promises “it has everything your class needs to gain two years of reading growth in a single year;” and aimsweb, “the leading assessment and RTI solution in school today-a complete web-based solution for universal screening, progress monitoring, and data management for Grades K-12.”
I thought calling their literacy program iLit was pretty funny, but otherwise I find their promotion scary. “Pearson Personalized Learning” is not about supporting schools; it is about replacing them. And it is about replacing them without any evidence that their products work or any concern for the impact of their products on schools and student learning.
Pearson executives Sir Michael Barber, Saad Rizvi and John Fallon call their global market strategy “The Incomplete Guide To Delivering Learning Outcomes.” Fallon, Pearson CEO, has been with the company for most of his professional career. He is behind the push for “efficacy,” the corporate buzzword, which in practical terms translates into the constant assessing of student performance who are using Pearson products. The testing strategy tied into common core in the United States is neither an accident nor an accessory. Testing is the core of common core.
I find Barber and Rizvi even more interesting than Fallon for understanding Pearson’s marketing strategies. Barber is Pearson’s chief education strategist and leads its three-pronged assault on education around the world through what Pearson calls efficacy, affordable learning, and the Pearson Knowledge and Research Centre. Efficacy is supposed to be about what works in education based on research done at the research centre, but everything is actually organized around the Pearson goal of “finding business models for affordable schools” that they will be selling, especially in “developing areas of the world.”
If you want to know how Pearson plans to operate, you have to look at McKinsey & Company, a global management consulting firm and advisor to some of the world’s leading businesses, governments, and institutions. Before joining Pearson, Michael Barber had a similar role at McKinsey where he was a partner. Saad Rizvi, who is Pearson’s Senior Vice President for Efficacy and head of its Catalyst for Education team, was a consultant at McKinsey. McKinsey & Company’s clients include 100 of the top 150 companies in the world. It has advised the Bank of England, the Roman Catholic Church in the United States, and the German government.
The main job of McKinsey is to help companies maintain profitability by closing subsidies, selling assets, shifting production, and laying off workers. McKinsey has had its share of mishaps. Former employees include Jeff Skilling, the disgraced chief executive of Enron and Rajat K. Gupta, who was convicted of insider trading. Other disasters include advising Time Warner on its ill-fated merger with AOL, advising General Motors on how to compete with Japanese automakers, and advising AT&T not to be concerned about cellphones. A top McKinsey partner dismissed these failures saying “We are advisers, and it is management’s job to take all the advice they receive and make their own decisions. Not to say that McKinsey told me to do this.”
I think a fair question to ask is, do we want the business model that led to the Eron scam and these other corporate disasters employed in operating American schools and McKinsey’s no-fault attitude toward advising local, state, and federal governments on educational policy?
Pearson’s Affordable Learning division currently focuses on emerging markets in Africa and India, but it is the model for Pearson business worldwide. It includes eAdvance (South Africa), which sponsors a blended learning chain called Spark Schools; Omega, a chain of thirty-eight private schools in Ghana; Bridge International Academies in Kenya; and Zaya, an educational technology and service company contracted to operate twenty-seven schools; Suiksha, a chain of pre-schools; Experifun, which markets science learning products; Avanti, after-school test prep; and Village Capital (Edupreneurs) promoting private education start-up companies, all based in India. The blurb for eAdvance’s Spark Schools give some sense of what Pearson is trying to do in Africa, India and worldwide – under price the market to disrupt existing educational institutions so Pearson companies can move in, take over, and gobble up profits.
“SPARK Schools has bold aspirations to disrupt the South African education system through introducing an innovative learning methodology to the African continent. In the SPARK Schools model, students split their time between digital content that adapts in difficulty to their learning and classroom interaction based on best practice pedagogy. Importantly, the blended model also allows eAdvance to deliver high quality education at an affordable price.” It will “build eight low-cost blended learning schools over the next three years, and more than 60 in the next ten.”
Pearson is also using mergers to expand its markets and influence. In December 2013, Pearson agreed to purchase Grupo Multi, an English-language training company in Brazil, to accelerate growth in Latin America.
Pearson uses the desperation of Third World countries to modernize to get its foot in the door and to act without regulation or oversight. Up until now, about sixty percentof Pearson’s sales were in the United States, however expansion stalled in this country because of lower freshman enrollments in U.S. colleges and a slowdown in textbook markets. Sales also suffered in Great Britain because of curriculum changes and the company spent about $200 million organizing its push into foreign digital markets.
As a result of these issues, Moody’s Investors Service, a ratings agency, lowered its evaluation of Pearson from stable to negative. “We are changing the outlook to negative as Pearson’s debt protection metrics for fiscal year 2013 are likely to weaken considerably,” says According to Gunjan Dixit, a Moody’s Assistant Vice President-Analyst, “This view reflects Pearson’s tough trading conditions, particularly in North America and the UK; the greater-than-originally-anticipated spending on restructuring; and certain start-up costs for new contracts in higher education and increased provisions for returns.” According to Moody’s, key challenges for Pearson in the future include (1) the fiscal health of U.S. states and international government funding bodies, in its schools and higher education businesses; (2) difficult market conditions in the U.S. education market; (3) the vulnerability of its Financial Times group; and (4) the accelerating transition of trade book publishing to electronic formats. Pearson stockholders were so disappointed in the company’s financial performance that in April 2014, shareholders protested against excessive executive bonuses.
In the United States, Pearson faces other problems that may be related to over expansion, the inability to deliver what was promised, and possible under the table agreements on contracts. In Florida, state officials blamed Pearson Education when at least a dozen Florida school districts were forced to suspend online testing this April because students had trouble signing in for the test. for the situation. Other problems included slowness when students tried to download test questions or submit answers and an inexplicable warning message that students should notify their teacher or proctor about a problem that did not exist. “State Education Commissioner Pam Stewart complained to Pearson that the “failure is inexcusable. Florida’s students and teachers work too hard on learning to be distracted by these needless and avoidable technological issues.”
Pearson blamed the test problems on a third-party hosting service provider. However, in recent years Pearson has had similar problems with computerized tests in Florida before as well as in other states. In 2011, Wyoming fined Pearson $5.1 million because of software problems and then switched back to paper tests. In April, Pearson was also forced to acknowledge and apologize for “intermittent disruptions to some of our online testing services.” This time they blamed a different sub-contractor.
In the meantime, the American Institutes for Research is challenging the awarding of a lucrative common core test development contract to Pearson. While the complaint is being brought in New Mexico, it has national ramification. The contract is for developing test-items, test delivery, reporting results, and analysis of student performance for states that are part of the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC, one of two main consortia designing tests linked to the common-core standards. The plaintiff claims the process for awarding the contract was designed to specifically benefit Pearson, which ended up being the only bidder, and was therefore illegal.
In New York State, parents and teachers are outraged because teachers and building administrators are forced to sign statements promising not to discuss or release questions about new Pearson “Common Core” aligned high-stakes tests. In the past, questions from past state high school “Regents” exams were posted on the State Education website. Now Pearson, which is paid $32 million by New York State to create the tests is demanding a payment of an additional $8 million to permit the state to post the questions.
In New Zealand, a group called Save Our Schools NZ is protesting the misuse of PISA (Programme of International Student Assessment) tests and rankings by national education departments. They charge “Pisa, with its three-year assessment cycle, has caused a shift of attention to short-term fixes designed to help a country quickly climb the rankings, despite research showing that enduring changes in education practice take decades, not a few years, to come to fruition.” Pearson holds the contract to prepare PISA assessments starting in 2015.
For all its claims about efficacy, Pearson is not a very efficient company. For all its claims about valuing education, the only thing Pearson appears to value is profit.
Alan Singer, Director, Secondary Education Social Studies
Department of Teaching, Literacy and Leadership
128 Hagedorn Hall / 119 Hofstra University / Hempstead, NY 11549
I love to watch my favorite thinkers from the left and the right wing agree that “college- and career- ready standards” or Common Core– aka ObamaCore –along with its CEDS data-grabbing plot in cahoots with the CCSSO — is utterly unacceptable and has got to go.
Today I read Stanley Kurtz (conservative writer) who praised Diane Ravitch (liberal writer) for her public call for Congressional hearingson Common Core.
Both are must-read articles.
They explain why in recent cases of states dropping Common Core, leading events appear to be bipartisan efforts. Nobody likes to be micromanaged. And the Constitution protects us all.
Look at a few highlights of the Stop Common Core fight:
Last year, in February, liberal educator/historian Diane Ravitch announced that she could not support Common Core. In April, eight Republican senators wrote an open letter decrying Common Core. The same month, the national GOP met to discuss (and then passed) the anti-Common Core resolution. In August, Dr. Joseph Rella, a superintendent of Comsewogue District in New York, led 1,500 parents in a rally against Common Core. In October, Democratic Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey penned an open letter to Secretary Arne Duncan, also attacking federal-corporate education “reforms” in student data collection. The next month, 132 Catholic scholars wrote a letter to U.S. Bishops, voicing their concerns about Common Core. Following several governors who wrote executive orders” against Common Core, a group of Florida parents launched a parental national executive order against Common Core and student data mining. And the teachers! Look at heroic progressive Democrat teacher Paul Horton alongside conservative Republican teacher David Cox — two examples of thousands from both political camps, equally opposed to Common Core.
“The misguided notion of social justice that stands behind the Common Core excuses in the minds of its advocates… silly little things like the consent of the governed… Congress is obligated to investigate.”
Ravitch wrote: “The story about Bill Gates’ swift and silent takeover of American education is startling. His role and the role of the U.S. Department of Education in drafting and imposing the Common Core standards on almost every state should be investigated by Congress.
“The idea that the richest man in America can purchase and–working closely with the U.S. Department of Education–impose new and untested academic standards on the nation’s public schools is a national scandal. A Congressional investigation is warranted.
“The close involvement of Arne Duncan raises questions about whether the law was broken.
“Thanks to the story in the Washington Post and to diligent bloggers, we now know that one very rich man bought the enthusiastic support of interest groups on the left and right to campaign for the Common Core.
“Who knew that American education was for sale?
“Who knew that federalism could so easily be dismissed as a relic of history? Who knew that Gates and Duncan, working as partners, could dismantle and destroy state and local control of education?”
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Ravitch and Kurtz make me proud to be an American. This is what freedom of speech, freedom of political choice and the national tradition of lively debate can do.
South Carolina’s Governor, Nikki Haley, who signed South Carolina’s H3893 bill, has spoken out in support of educational liberty and against Common Core for years. The effort has now paid off for South Carolinians, and other states are ready to move: North Carolina and Missouri may soon join Oklahoma and South Carolina in dropping Common Core, according to Caffeinated Thoughts, which also reported that the North Carolina House of Representatives passed a bill similar to South Carolina’s on a 78-39 vote. Missouri also passed a replacement bill, voting 131 to 12 in the House and 23 to 6 in the Senate.
(Although Indiana was the first state to drop Common Core, it appears the new Indiana standards are simply a rebranding; Oklahoma’s and South Carolina’s new laws have language designed to prevent the drop-retrieve-rebrand trick.)
This is wonderful news for South Carolina and Oklahoma.
“We are capable of developing our own Oklahoma academic standards that will be better than Common Core… What should have been a bipartisan policy is now widely regarded asthe president’s plan to establish federal control of curricula, testing and teaching strategies.
“We cannot ignore the widespread concern of citizens, parents, educators and legislators who have expressed fear that adopting Common Core gives up local control of Oklahoma’s public schools…
“For that reason I am signing HB 3399 to repeal and replace Common Core with Oklahoma designed and implemented education standards…They must raise the bar – beyond what Common Core offers… I also ‘get it’ that Oklahoma standards must be exceptional, so when businesses and military families move to Oklahoma they can rest assured knowing their children will get a great education.
… While those new standards are being written, the state standards for English and math will revert to the Oklahoma Priority Academic Student Skills (PASS) standards used from 2003 to 2010. “
How I wish I could be a fly on the wall, listening to conversations in Oklahoma now! What is the local Oklahoma PTA saying? What are Oklahoma state and local school boards thinking? And what are Oklahoma’s chambers of commerce saying now to their members? All these figureheads have pushed pro-Common Core marketing on parents and teachers and businesses for several years, and now they are having to change their whole story.
What are the students in Oklahoma saying? What about the teachers!? Are they having big bonfires, using the worthless pro-common core pamphlets, professional development handouts and books?
This is truly an historic moment.
The withdrawal from Common Core by Governor Fallin –not only a member, but the chair of the National Governors Association –the same NGA to which Bill Gates has given millions upon millions of dollars to create and implement Common Core– is a very big deal.
And the elephant that’s been crowding the room for years now –Common Core’s pretense of academic excellence– has taken a serious hit with Governor Fallin’s acknowledgement that Oklahoma’s soon-to-be-written NEW standards “must raise the bar beyond what Common Core offers.”
Questions that will keep me up tonight:
Will Oklahoma’s new standards reintroduce Oklahoma’s children to mountains of stories and literature in unlimited amounts, re-igniting the love of language and reading?
Will Oklahoma’s new standards reinstate the traditional Algebra standards, and add higher math –beyond Common Core’s Algebra II? Will they drop the absurd constructivist math methodology and teach math in clear, classical ways?
Will Oklahoma’s new standards require creation of an alternate college entrance exam, since the ACT, SAT, GED and AP have become Common Core aligned (corrupted)?
Will Oklahoma drop the common educational data standards (CEDS) and the common database that tracks children (SLDS) as well?
Will Oklahoma’s precedent of saying “no” to the unconstitutional moves of Secretary Duncan and President Obama also extend itself to dismiss the federally partnered, solely Common Core-aligned, Pearson-Microsoft ed sales monstrosity?
How many thousands of not-from-Oklahoma teachers plan to move from other states to Oklahoma –solely based on this turn of educational events? How many parents in other states, who are exhausted from the effort of being endlessly dismissed by their state school boards and governors, are thinking what I’m thinking?
If the rest of our U.S. governors, legislators and school boards don’t see the light –and fast– it’s going to be wahoo, pack your bags and let’s move to Oklahoma.
These two excellent letters are written by two Utah dads, Oak Norton and Jared Carman.
If you would like to write to the state board, send an email to: board@schools.utah.gov -and if you would like to attend their meeting and speak during a two minute public comment allowance, email the board with your request.
If you would like to share your letter about Utah math and standards that you have sent to the board, please feel free to use the comments section below, so we can all read these letters. I’ll post mine there, too.
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Dear State School Board members,
I have reviewed the presentation the USOE has prepared for the math committee members on Thursday night (http://schools.utah.gov/board/Meetings/Agenda/docs/Tab11.aspx). I have a conflict and cannot come to make a public comment so I am emailing you my comments.
I see you are also discussing the search for a new state superintendent. I have honestly appreciated Superintendent Menlove’s outreach, particularly these last few months. He truly made an effort to be a good listener to concerns and also helped resolve them, particularly as families around the state had difficulty opting their children out of SAGE tests. That said, I believe it is time to hire from outside the education circles of Utah. There are people within the power structure that must be fired. It is very difficult for friends to fire friends. Political games are played to ensure their jobs. Hiring from out of state would allow someone to come in and clean house and give the USOE the course correction they need. Someone experienced with a top notch education system elsewhere would be an ideal candidate.
It is obvious from the USOE presentation to you just how biased they are toward maintaining CCSS in Utah. During the last legislative session they succeeded in getting a $2 million fiscal note attached to Rep. Layton’s bill to replace Common Core, so I am happy to see they have dramatically lowered that figure for your presentation. Replacing standards is not nearly as expensive as they want to make it look. In fact, I know they were telling people that adopting Common Core was free, while doing anything else was expensive. Common Core was not free, it was quite expensive, but since Bill Gates funded its multi-million dollar creation and we only had to spend some millions of dollars in Utah to implement it, I guess we can play the game that it was free.
There happen to be free or extremely low cost solutions that are far superior to Common Core.
In math, we could adopt California, Indiana, or Massachusetts’ pre-Common Core math standards which Fordham identified as clearly superior to CCSS. The wonderful thing here is solid textbooks were completely aligned for CA due to its population size, and assessments would most likely be available with a 100% match to those standards.
In English, we have the Massachusetts revision to their excellent ELA standards, which never got implemented due to MA adopting CCSS. We also have another set of “English Success Standards” written by teachers which is free and could be adopted for free. We also have a standing offer from Dr. Sandra Stotsky, one of the MA authors, to come to Utah for the cost of lodging and incidentals, and work with Utah teachers to create our own top of the nation ELA standards.
I was heavily involved in getting Utah the 2007 standards. In 2009, before the 2007 standards had even been fully implemented in the state, the USOE signed onto an agreement to develop CC. This caused a number of districts to slow or stop their roll out of the 2007 standards because they knew something else was coming. By 2010, CCSS was released and adopted so many districts never even fully rolled out the 2007 standards because of the speed with which they were replaced. For the USOE to say that only 44% of students on the 2007 standards would achieve the 66% college goal of the governor is a wild falsehood and a scare tactic. They have no idea. For them to say CCSS will achieve this goal is also a wild stab in the dark since these standards are an experiment that just begun. Fordham actually said our 2007 standards were clearer and stronger than CCSS. Further, the 2007 standards would have been even stronger if the USOE had not wholesale rejected the recommendations of Dr. Wu, the external reviewer from Berkeley, for those standards. Their disgust at having to replace our D rated prior standards showed through the process and we wound up with A- rated standards instead of what would have probably been A rated standards. What we had was superior to Common Core and what we would have gotten would have put us in line with states like CA, IN, and MA.
Further, it is a bald faced lie that CCSS were internationally benchmarked. That has been completely disproven. They are not “world class” standards. The only professional mathematician on the Common Core validation committee, who also writes standards and reviews international standards, refused to sign off on CCSS precisely for this reason –that CCSS leaves us 2 years behind international competitors. CCSS is already damaging our children by pushing them too hard in early grades and too slow in upper, particularly due to the awful implementation of the integrated method by the USOE in order that they could push their constructivist agenda into schools with the awful MVP program. Our 2007 standards were supposed to have been internationally benchmarked against Singapore and Japan. Nicole Paulson at the USOE told the committee this would take place, but to my knowledge she never did it.
Utah must have a complete break from anything tied to the federal government. CCSS, regardless of who you think actually created it, has clearly been hijacked by the federal government in an effort to consolidate the powers of education and control the system. The best decision, I believe, is to grant control of standards to the LEAs and shatter the ability for the feds or even the state to affect truly local control. Lets set up the laboratories within the state. There are no parents in this state who are going to want less than a wonderful education experience for their children. We always talk about increasing parental involvement. This would maximize it from the standards perspective. If you’re not willing to do this, then I would strongly recommend adopting the excellent [pre-common core] standards of California for which there are textbooks and a large test bank that could be accessed.
The USOE slide of supporters contains a practical who’s who of constructivist, Investigations math loving people, as well as others who are financially benefiting from the USOE. Of course they are going to support them in CCSS!
I wish there was time and space to comment on many other slides in their presentation, but it’s obvious they are biased on their perspective, and it’s obvious that there is a strong growing concern about the direction they are taking Utah. Nothing impacts someone like having their child who once loved math now hate it. It only hits home when it affects you, as several legislators have now had happen to them.
Please get Utah off anything close to CCSS and its one-size-fits-all “solution.” LEA’s controlling their own standards can innovate and do things they otherwise couldn’t do.
Sincerely,
Oak Norton
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Dr. Menlove,
I have read your June 6 memo to the USBE regarding Mathematics Standards. As a parent and citizen activist, I ask you to please restore control of standards and testing to local districts & charters (LEAs).
This will not be as costly or problematic as the table in the memo suggests. By engaging directly with parents, LEAs can adopt pre-common core standards from other states, and use time-tested, pre-common core textbooks.
‘Children are an heritage of the Lord,’ given to parents, not the state. By restoring LEA control of standards & testing, Utah would take an important step in support of this fundamental truth.
Restoring LEA control would not mean that the state does not have a role to play. In fact the state could help LEAs:
Build a culture of serving parents/guardians, who are the consumers of educational services on behalf of their children.
Create smaller districts that are more responsive to parents.
Work with parent/church groups to help mentor children with less than ideal home circumstances.
A smiling school board member, tired of me and unwilling to fight the Common Core monster, advised me to do what she does: focus on the positive parts of Common Core. Be an optimist, she said.
“The positive parts? –You mean the lies?” I thought, because I’ve not seen positive parts unless you count the positive–sounding parts.
There are lots of those– the Common Core advertisements, the school board’s website promotions and newspaper quotes.
Because the smiling board member knew many of these unsavory facts that she wished not to know, her advice reminded me of the part in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde when Dr. Jekyll tells Utterton not to worry about Mr. Hyde. How illogical, dangerous and self-defeating. But to some, it seems that being an optimist requires putting ourselves at the mercy of bullies and pretending to agree to things that are clearly not so.
This conversation exposed the wide gap between the pretty surface language versus the ugly facts under the belly of Common Core.
In response to that conversation, I’m promoting George Orwell’s brilliant 1946 “catalogue of swindles and perversions” entitled Politics and the English Language.
Orwell’s great at explaining how to cut through verbal jungles of lies. (Please read his whole essay here; I’m just borrowing highlights.)
My favorite image from the essay tops Orwell’s explanation of how manipulators make a bad situation sound grand by using language to cloud truth: as a cuttlefish clouds his intentions by squirting a lot of ink.
“When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns… to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink” … “the great enemy of clear language is insincerity,” he wrote.
Orwell’s essay does more than reveal how political language deceived listeners in 1946; it also foretells 2014 ed reform lingo. It could have been titled “Interesting Ways That People Cook Up Lies to Appear Not Only True, But Delicious.”
They can’t risk alerting Americans to the real direction in which ed reforms have taken our liberties. Speaking plainly would reveal everything, so they use language to conceal and cloud the sources of the power grab, banking on the fact that most people accept wordiness as if it were smartness and lawfulness.
As a cuttlefish squirts out ink to mask the direction in which he’s really swimming, so do Duncan, Obama, Gates, Coleman, Barber, Tucker, writers of grants, reports and publications try to cloud our minds to lull us, as school boards, governors, parents and taxpayers, to nod and hand over our keys– because we can’t see where the cuttlefish is going and the ink’s kind of pretty.
This is how they do it.
1. BORROWED WORDS OR PRIVATE DEFINITIONS
Those who are either lazy or liars continually borrow phrases and metaphors “tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house,” as Orwell called it, rather than to actually work to think of an original phrase, metaphor or image.
Keeping that henhouse in mind, watch for the repetitive phrases tacked together in education reformers’ speeches. The repeated handful of vague, positive terms include:
These terms have defined, mostly private second meanings. For one example, “world class education” does not mean the best in the world, as we might think –instead, it means noncompetitive, as in: the same as all the world –which is supremely ironic given the fact that the phrase “international competitiveness” is another prefabricated ed reform hen house phrase.
Orwell said that people use words of this kind “in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.” The trendy, pre-fab terms are re-echoed by the federal government, the NGA, CCSSO, Achieve Inc., the Chamber of Commerce, and top university leaders. Some high up officials do not even know that there are private definitions, and they parrot what they’ve heard from people who they may not even recognize as being liars; real, actual, ongoing, habitual, caught-in-the-act liars.
The prime example, of course, of an overused, overborrowed term with a private definition is President Obama’s “call for success in college and careers” also known as “college and career ready standards.” It sounds unobjectionable. But it’s not just a nice, vague term to Obama. It’s narrowly defined on the federal website as standards “common to a significant number of states.” That’s no definition at all except common, the same. Excellence doesn’t come into it. And the phrase is repeated seven times just in one short white house press release. It’s that important and weighty. Now I can’t hear the term “college and career ready” without groaning and rolling my eyes. The ed reformers stole its innocent meaning.
Another pet deceit among ed reformers is to misuse the word “back” by equating any attempt anyone makes (to restore freedoms previously held) to moving backward, or making unintelligent decisions. Bill Gates said that controversy around Common Core “comes from people who want to stop the standards, which would send us back to what we had before.” He did not define “what we had before” as freedom. He left that intentionally vague. But ponder it: would restoring text and test diversity really be a step backward? Would restoring student privacy by getting rid of common data standards (CEDS) and the common databases (SLDS) be a step backward or forward for lovers of freedom? Is all change positive change?
Of course, some changes are good and some are bad. But top ed reformers, including education sales giant Pearson, relentlessly push the idea that deletion of traditional education is good. Pearson CEA Sir Michael Barber said, “governments need to rethink their regulatory regimes for an era when university systems are global rather than national… standing still is not an option.”
Do you buy the idea that governments should give up their national constitutions and local systems and that holding fast to time-tested traditions in education is stupidly “standing still”? Me neither. But this gives us insight into the private definition of “globally competent”.
2. VERBAL FALSE LIMBS
Overuse of the quantity words, especially of overused and educratically vogue words, is usually deliberate snowing. Ed reformers cover up the sharp truths so people don’t recognize what they’re doing, nor fight back. But George Orwell pointed out that adding extra, unneeded words is as obvious and cumbersome –if you pay attention– as adding an extra limb to the body. Watch for phrases lacking usefulness but still commanding space and posing as credibile.
Remember: the motive is to conceal, not to reveal, truth. Orwell said that these excess words “fall upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details… ”
Indeed they try. But there are red flags that they themselves created, phrases that can signal to us that lies are afoot. One especially irksome phrase is “informed by” –such a trendy, snooty false limb. Its academic tone may intimidate some readers, but the phrase is often used as a spout near missing evidence. For example, the Common Core official website states that “Common Core is informed by the highest, most effective standards from states across the United States and countries around the world.” Not true!
Promoters used to claim, often and loudly, that Common Core was internationally benchmarked, but after critics pointed out that not a single country had math and English standards that matched Common Core, promoters changed to the term “informed by” which is so vague that it’s harder to prove it’s a lie.
Still, it’s a lie: top state standards-holders prior to Common Core were Massachusetts, Indiana and California, and they dropped their high standards and came down to common core. Common Core didn’t reach up at all. There’s nothing “internationally informed” about them. Just ask validation committee member Dr. James Milgram, who said that the reason he didn’t sign off on the standards was that “they did not match up to international expectations. They were at least two years behind practices in high achieving countries by seventh grade”.
A very wordy example of verbal false limbs running amok is seen in a federal Common Core grant called the “Cooperative Agreement.” It connects the federal government and the Common Core tester, Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC). The lengthy agreement applies to PARCC, too. And since SBAC partnered with Utah’s and Florida’s current testing group, A.I.R., this document still matters to me despite Utah’s dropping out of SBAC. Buried in its snowbanks of wordiness is a micromanaging federal bully. States must:
“Actively participate in any meetings and telephone conferences with ED staff… Be responsive to requests from ED for information about the status of the project… providing such information in writing… Comply with… ED staff … make student-level data that results from the assessment system available on an ongoing basis… [R]espective Project Directors [this means the testing arms] will collaborate to coordinate appropriate tasks and timelines to foster synchronized development of assessment systems…The Program Officer for the RTTA grantees [this means the Feds] will work with the Project Directors for both RTTA grantees [this means the testing arms] to coordinate and facilitate coordination across consortia.”
In other words, conform. But that sharp message is buried behind pleasant phrases earlier in the document, such as “the purpose of this agreement is to support the consortium recipient.” Support? The way that a jail supports those jailed inside it? This brings us to the next tool: pretentious diction.
3. PRETENTIOUS DICTION
Orwell said that pretentious diction tries to “dignify sordid processes” and to “give an air of scientific impartiality to biased judgments.”
Example: Read the pretentious, one-sided judgments underlying the highly controversial Obama-Duncan “Preschool For All Initiative”. For those who don’t know, this move puts four year old toddlers in federal preschools –based on supposedly settled scientific research that concludes that this will benefit little ones.
Yet, highly respected researchers oppose what Obama-Duncan tout; they say that it is best to keep young children free of institutionalization (not to mention keeping them free of data tracking and high stakes testing). Still, President Obama speaks about the federal Preschool For All, using “research” that serves his idea that government should rear children from the cradle.
Watch how he does it. He imposes the intimate, tiny yet very pretentious term “we” on listeners, and implies that “we” can simultaneously –and fairly– serve the child, the business interests, and the educational-political interests:
“Research shows that one of the best investments we can make in a child’s life is high-quality early education.”
Notice that the president omits any mention of governmental mandate. Elsewhere, we learn that Preschool For Allis to be mandatory. In an April 29, 2014 speech, Duncan called for mandatory preschool, saying, “The third major priority in the 2015 request is to continue the President’s commitment to expanding educational opportunity for millions of children through a $75 billion mandatoryPreschool for All program…”
A clue to detecting the lies that are hidden behind pretentious diction is to search for links to research that supports the claims being made. Usually, there are no references, no links; listeners are expected to be trusting and dumb enough to assume what is being said is truthful. On those rare occasions that links to evidence are provided, find out if the cited think tank/university/publisher is financially partnered with the politicorporate cuttlefish of Common Core. Invariably, they are.
We are left to realize that in Common Core ed reform, money now has a stronger voice than voters, teachers, parents, students or taxpayers in determining what will be policy. And that money is deeply committed to making more of itself. Case in point:
Gates’ company, Microsoft, wrote: “At Microsoft, we are deeply committed to working with governments… [blah blah blah] … learning for all.”
“Deeply committed” sounds good. It sounds noble. But why is Gates’ company so deeply committed to “learning for all”? Because they’re making money while altering political and educational policy. Making money is a good thing; I’m all for capitalism. The problem is that nobody elected Microsoft or Pearson; they have no authority other than the dollars they use as bait. We can’t un-elect them now or ever, and we’ve swallowed their baited hooks right and left in countless “partnerships” with our governments.
Deeply committed.
4. MEANINGLESS WORDS
Orwell pointed out that much of what passes for writing is “strictly meaningless, in the sense that they not only do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly even expected to do so by the reader.” Orwell despised “long passages almost completely lacking in meaning.” He would not enjoy the 26-transcript-paged speech by David Coleman, current president of the College Board, because it is a black hole that says nothing except for the part when Coleman admitted he’s unqualified for his office. That part would be funny if the education of children were some kind of laughing matter.
Here’s more meaninglessness: Bill Gates said: “common standards could transform U.S. education.” It’s meaningless because nobody would argue it; it’s like saying rain could make your hair wet. Common standards could and ARE transforming education. But is it a disasterous or a delightful transformation? He left out that part so nobody could argue with him or criticize his sound byte. Except that I am criticizing it for its desperate spineless meaninglessness.
Sometimes Gates speaks so vaguely that he covers both ends of opposing concepts. He said that Common Core would “enable American students to better compete globally.” He didn’t explain how (considering the fact that the standards are only preparing students for nonselective colleges). But since it’s an established, defined fact that “world-class education” now means “noncompetitive education,” Gates’ statement passes neither the logic nor the meaningfulness test.
Why does the second richest man in the world, who probably has dozens of speech writers and image makers, deliberately choose to speak and write meaninglessly, vaguely? Because Common Core is a power grab and the truth would upset people. He can’t say so.
Neither can Arne Duncan or President Obama. So the cuttlefish use words that mean “we control; you submit” but that don’t sound that way. Look at the beige terms they use such as:
turning around schools
fostering rigor
supporting states
flexibility for states
federal accountability
sustainable reform
education pipeline
stakeholder
These terms support the top-down edu-politicorporate control system that boils down to “we are the boss of you.”
Orwell warned readers against such ready-made phrases, not only because they often veil corrupt power moves, but also because “every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion of one’s brain.”
Not to mention that they smell like lies from miles away.
I thought this post was so funny (and vital) that I had to ask the author for permission to repost it. It was previously published at Huffington Post.
How to Pass a Pearson Test or Peeling the Pearson Pineapple
by Alan Singer
On Tuesday, June 3, 2014, high school students in New York State take the first new series of math and English exams that are supposed to be aligned with the national Common Core standards. Anticipating that students will have difficulty with the new tests, the State Education Department plans to score exams so that approximately the same percentage of students pass who passed similar tests in the past. I hope it is not too late to offer students, teachers, and State Education some help.
I confess. I have a super-power. It is taking tests. I can pass any test on any subject without knowing anything as long as it is written in English. Other languages are my kryptonite. I figured out geometry on the tenth grade standardized final. I passed the AP bio test without doing any work. As with most super powers, taking tests is both a blessing and a curse. I do not get the highest scores and I do not learn very much, but I do pass.
I have been applying my super-power to analyzing the latest wave of Pearson-created Common Core aligned high stakes assessments for students and student teachers and I realize they are designed just for me. They are skills based tests that do not require any knowledge. In fact, knowledge interferes with your ability to pass a Pearson test.
The United States is its biggest market and Pearson makes a lot of money selling Common Core aligned tests, curriculum, and test review books and programs. It stands to make even more as it develops, markets, assesses new Common Core PARCC (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers) content area exams. Sixteen states, plus the District of Columbia, are scheduled to participate in PARCC testing.
As a public service these are my FREE test taking tips that will save parents and school districts a lot of money and students and teachers a lot of anguish.
1. Know the jargon they use in the instructions. For example, “selected-response items” means multiple-choice questions. I do not know why they do not just call them multiple-choice.
2. Do all the steps and read all the passages before looking at the choices. The answer, no matter how inaccurate or ridiculous, is in the reading passage. You are not looking for the best answer. You are looking or their answer.
3. In math, be confident in your answer. If your answer is not among the choices, figure out which of their answers has the same value as yours.
Most of us who followed the Pearson Pineapple controversy thought the reading passage on the 2013 8th grade reading test about the pineapple that challenged a rabbit (hare) to a race and questions about which animal was wisest were absurd. The problem, at least in my case, was that at the time I really did not understand what Pearson and the Common Core were trying to do. Now I think I have it figured out. The passage and questions were absurd on purpose.
Pearson and Common Core are not testing what you know, what you think, or what you can explain. They are testing what you can find in the passage and whether you follow directions. They select reading passages using a mathematical formula or algorithm based on what they call “text complexity” which measures the length of sentences and the use of obscure vocabulary. There is no meaningful content on a Pearson Common Core test, it is all about peeling the pineapple.
Ironically, I found the same approach on Pearson’s Academic Literacy Skills Test (ALST) for teachers. The sample question has an extended reading passage about Gertrude Stein from a book by Joshua Cooper Ramo, The Age of the Unthinkable.
The first question is: “In Paragraph 1, the repetition of the phrase “well-rounded, prosperous” emphasizes . . . ” I always think of “well-rounded” and “prosperous” as positive attributes and when I looked at the choices I leaned toward choice A, “the sophistication of Stein’s family.”
But Pearson says the correct answer is choice B, “the predictability of life Stein rejected.” Although well-rounded does not mean predictable, if you look at paragraph 1, “well-rounded” is equated with “stability,” boring sameness, qualities that Stein rejected.
In other words, if you know what well-rounded means, you get the answer wrong. Just as with the Pearson pineapple, the test is not about knowing the right answer, it is about finding their answer in the text. I can hardly wait for the new Pearson PARCC tests based on reading skills that I expect will be missing all content.
Actually I should not have been so surprised to discover that Pearson, PARCC, and Common Core ignore knowledge. In a promotional video for the national Common Core standards, David Coleman, who the New York Times described as an “architect of the common core curriculum standards,” discussed how James Madison explained the regulation of political factions in Federalist Paper #51. The only problem was that Federalist Paper #10 is about the regulation of political factions. Federalist Paper #51 is about checks and balances and the structure of the national government. But he was only off by forty-one essays.
I am a little concerned that it took me so long to figure out the problem with these Pearson tests. I just worry my super-power may be slipping.
Alan Singer, Director, Secondary Education Social Studies
Department of Teaching, Literacy and Leadership
128 Hagedorn Hall / 119 Hofstra University / Hempstead, NY 11549
(P) 516-463-5853 (F) 516-463-6196
COMMON CORE 