May 19, 2010

Common Core Standards Released

Here they go.  Ta Da.




Some of these standards are incredibly silly.













Unknown said...


You and I have both seen both deliberately ambiguous language in contracts and inadvertantly unclear language.

There is no question that the Common Core standards are deliberately ambiguous. Specific enough to win political support as an improvement over the weak, content-free standards, too many states use.

Deliberate ambiguity then allows discovery oriented instructional frameworks, the new national assessment with LDH in charge, and the kind of fuzzy math textbooks deplored by so many parents to be the actual enacted curriculum.

I knew that's where they were going because that's the lesson they learned from the State of Georgia. The irony is that yesterday EdWeek did a story and said point blank that the instructional curriculum should reflect curriculum frameworks and the assessment, not the standards themselves.

We are nationalizing some of the worst ideas in American education.

Dick Schutz said...

This isn't the "third installment" of your story, is it Ken? I take it, you interrupted the story for "an important announcement."

The released standards reflect only cosmetic changes in the "draft standards"--that after receiving 10,000 "comments"--which have yet to be summarized.

Your take on the standards makes sense to me.

There are several easy "tests" of the integrity of the standards.

--Scramble parts of the documents and ask anyone to put them back together. It's impossible.

--Pick a statement at random and ask people at what grade the statement should be taught. The statements increase in syntactical complexity from grade-to-grade, but that's doesn't fit the way that expertise is acquired.

__Try to map the standards to any set of current core text series. There is no match.

--Ask people to draft a scenario for how they would go about teaching all the standards requirements at a given grade. It can't be done.

--Compare the "new standards" with the "old standards" from any state.
There's nothing superior about the "new" standards.

There are other ways, but these should be enough to show that "the dog won't hunt."

The folks who drafted the standards, backed into them. The "strands" are fictions, but they provide a matrix that can be "filled in" by grade.

People from the 1920's through the 1960's were doing the same thing--better--with curriculum guides" composed of "objectives" x "grades." Teachers didn't pay much attention to the guides then, which was a good thing. Now, with national tests tied to teacher pay, the gaming will be ferocious.

School people have no idea what's in store for them. Not only will they be "accountable" for teaching ambiguous/over-specific/trivial matters, look what's coming down the pike from publishers:

Pearson’s Promise
Pearson has the experience and resources to holistically
support our district partners and ensure success in this time of
transition. Professional development for implementing the new standards, powerful tools to reach all stakeholders, instructionalmaterials that evolve on each district’s timeline, and progress monitoring to provide a quick, but comprehensive view of
student performance will combine in a uniquely effective way
to help you realize a seamless and successful transition to the
Common Core State Standards.

More simply We promise to try to sell you anything and everything we can think of

Thank you, Pearson!

When the nonsense about "school turnaround" is factored in, with everything going into "data warehouses," it's a monstrosity of huge proportion.

The tragedy is that the "reformers" sincerely believe they're "doing everything right." The standards have been "vetted" by a whole passel of very prominent people.

It's scary from one perspective. But as you say, the whole matter is so feckless that it will have little effect. Teachers will go on trying to teach and kids will go on trying to learn.

KDeRosa said...



Also, I can say I disagree with anything you've written, Dick.

A lot of people are really overselling these standards. There's going to be a lot of backpedaling in the next few years.

Roger Sweeny said...


Uh, no. Some kids will try to learn. More will try to memorize enough to do well on assessments and forget soon thereafter, and some will just try to do well enough to pass and stay with their friends.

A major problem with school (at least high school, where I am) is that, in general, kids don't want to "buy" most of the knowledge we are "selling."

Dick Schutz said...


I'd bet it's going to be faster than that and more consequential than that.

Most everybody is interested simply in teaching kids to read. The NeoLib/NeoCon consensus considers that commitment "unrealistic." They're chasing the silly aspiration of "college and career readiness."

If we can't teach kids to read, how in the world are they going to be "college and career ready"?

The Race to the Top has now buried "Reading" under a pile of "English Language Arts." We don't need no stinkin language arts.

Mr President, "Tear up the Common Core Standards"

Secretary Duncan, "Call off the Race to the Top"

Unknown said...

Did you see this new white paper "The Emperor's New Clothes" on the standards from the Pioneer Institute?

It's all worth reading but for this discussion page 20 and then the Appendix are especially pertinent.

These standards are not sufficiently clear and these ambiguities mean that the new assessments are likely to drive the actual curriculum.


Did you see where Pearson has stated that it sees Common Core as a principal driver of its earnings going forward?

I especially like the quote from the Appendix that a good example is worth a 1000 hours of debate over what the standard actually means.

Dick Schutz said...

The Stotsky-Wurman paper came ou May 20. I guess that's "new." The paper reveals that the CCS have no clothes. But like Diane Ravitch, Sandra Stotsky fails to recognize that the Emperor of "standards and tests" is a paper/rubber Ruler.

The paper gives some good reasons why the CCS standards are fatally flawed, but they fail to see that these flaws apply to all "standards" statements.

Yes, the publishers are salivating over the CCS. But what is going to come out is that CCS is a cover for the BG Standards, which you can read as either Bill Gates or Gates-Broad.

If you navigate to the "Properties" of the CCS document, you see that the author is Susan Pimentel. Susan Pimentel is an Achieve hired hand.

The cover-letter of the doc is signed: Sue David Jim

That's Susan, David Coleman, (another Achieve-r, and Jim Patterson of ACT (American College Testing).


Unknown said...

Well isn't ACHIEVE busy.

Georgia's state school super decided belatedly, after qualifying closed, that she would not run again after all, and would become CEO in DC of the new US Education Delivery Institute. It was announced this past week.

It's being founded by Achieve and Education Trust.

Georgia was heavily involved in CCS from the beginning and is ground zero for the idea of having ambiguous content standards that win political support and are the curriculum's public face.

The instructional frameworks though are the basis for the textbooks pushed, the learning tasks, the pedagogy pushed, and the assessments used.

With Cox moving to DC, it really is hard not to see the ambiguities in Common Core as the basis for a stealth classroom curriculum.

Dick Schutz said...

Yep. Now we have Deliverologists, courtesy of Broad-Gates. And there is even more good news. Our kids and teachers are going to get SMARTER tests! Ta da, to borrow from Ken.

Here are excerpts from a News Release out of Maine:

Susan Gendron, who has overseen school district consolidation, a new standardized test's introduction and the expansion of Maine's student laptop initiative, said Wednesday she is resigning as education commissioner.

. . . Gendron, commissioner since March 2003, will leave her job at month's end to become policy director for a 35-state group -- the SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortium -- which is competing for $350 million in federal money to develop a set of common standardized tests.

. . .Gendron is leaving the education department at a busy time, as state education officials prepare Maine's application for Race to the Top, a national competition among the states for billions aimed at education reform. Maine could be eligible for up to $75 million if its application -- which will include a proposal to participate in the SMARTER consortium -- is successful.

Follow the money. This has all the makings of a broad EducationGate(s).

KDeRosa said...

That's a good paper, but doesn't address the underlying problem that standards are simply not capable of doing the things their advocates believe they can do. Aren't they really just the flip side of high stakes assessments? And, look how well they worked out.

Dick Schutz said...

Aren't they really just the flip side of high stakes assessments?

They're more like the wind behind the high stakes assessment than they are the flip side. It's an illusion that the tests can be "aligned" with the standards. That's an illusion that Ravitch and Stotsky still haven't seen through.

The illusion/delusion is why standards are simply not capable of doing the things their advocates believe they can do.

Standards statements also have other high stakes consequences.

For example, the CCS standards open the door for massive expansion of publisher sales.

This in turn increases the cost of education with the profits accruing to the Corporate sponsors who leveraged the standards.

By burying "phonics" deep within the standards, the CCS standards ensure the continued dominance of "Whole Language" ideology.

The standards essentially borrow the NAEP view of reading as "comprehension of meaning." This view justifies the "usual" test items that define "comprehension" and the salience of different text genres.

Advocates believe that Standards are the route for "reform." Actually they serve to maintain the instructional status quo.

NCLB didn't didn't bring any new test architecture or any different instructional architecture.

All of the new Fed money hasn't brought anything new either--only priorities and assurances. And the closer one examines the priorities and assurances, the flimsier they look.

The thing is, the standards have been vetted by very prominent people. Were the vetters paid for their service? Will their written endorsements become public information?

In applying for ARRA-ED funds, states "assured" that they would implement the CCS--sight unseen.

As Oliver Hardy used to say to Stan Laurel when they were in an impossible situation, "Well, here's another nice mess you've gotten me into."

Too bad it's real life and not an old movie.

Dick Schutz said...

For comedy relief/anxiety, take a peek at the standards side show on stage in Texas

Things really get heated when you get to "Social studies/history." This is where the "national standards" fell apart in 1996. But the CCS ELA standards will enjoy/suffer the same heat when people start to take a look at the "banded" books that the standards cite.

This raises another dilemma that the "reformers" haven't thought through. States have "assured" that they will evaluate teachers at least partially on the basis of test results. If the only tests available are in "English Language Arts" and "Math" and even these tests have yet to be constructed, how in the world can these "assurances" be "implemented"?

Unknown said...

You might be interested in reading Alfie Kohn's take on the folly of common core.