A Post Wherein I Say Something Good About Lora Hubbel

I've been critical of Lora Hubbel for having the tendency to go off on tangents about babies being implanted with tracking chips while sleeping in incorrect positions in FEMA camps. (That's hyperbole, an accepted literary device for both fiction and non-fiction.) In this Common Core discussion with Tonchi Weaver, however, she stays does a good job of laying out some of the problems with how the Core has been implemented.

Using Sex Appeal To Sell The Common Core.

This poster is attached to a stall door in a men's staff  restroom of a Kansas City middle school. Perhaps it's ironic. If not, it does seem to illustrate the truism that lower quality products or ideas have the highest need to sell with sex or at least double entendre.

Common Appeal for Common Core

Quotation Of The Day: Common Core And Brute Force Edition

From this Jay P. Greene post:

But some of us have been warning of the political naivete of the Common Core effort for some time now.  Rick Hess and Mike McShane at AEI have also done an admirable job of describing the political weakness of Common Core, regardless of what one thinks of the merits of the standards themselves.

Supporters of Common Core may draw the wrong lesson from this post and increase efforts to convince the public and train educators to love the Common Core.  Not only will these re-education efforts be too little, too late, but they fail to grasp the inherent flaw in reforms like Common Core.  Trying to change the content and practice of the entire nation’s school system requires a top-down, direct, and definitive victory to get adopted.  If input and deliberation are sought, or decisions are truly decentralized, then it is too easy to block standards reforms, like Common Core.  Supporters of CC learned this much from the numerous failed efforts to adopt national standards in the past.

But the brute force and directness required for adopting national standards makes its effective implementation in a diverse, decentralized, and democratic country impossible. This can’t be solved by more professional development and a belated marketing campaign.  Even the Chinese re-education camps couldn’t make the Cultural Revolution reailty — and they invested a whole lot more energy and resources in trying to do so than the Common Core folks ever could.

HT: Andrew Sullivan

Tweet Of The Day: Corporate Education Complex Strikes Again Edition

From the "This is why we can't have nice things", #CCSS department. #edchat pic.twitter.com/m9HaBMDMIi
— Mike Thayer (@gfrblxt) March 9, 2014

Does The Tea Party Want To Win On The Issues Or Does It Want To Insult Liberals?

Constant Conservative has a recent post entitled "The Common Core is about Power." I have no quarrel with the title. I agree that the Core is about established elites maintaining power. The post has a video of someone named Bill Whittle, whom I had never heard of, asserting that the Common Core will produce cookie cutter students. Again, I agree with the assertion. Whittle urges conservatives to look at the big picture and not elements of the standards that they find personally objectionable. Here again, I agree.

Whittle, however, seems more interested in tossing red meat sops to his tea party audience than he does stopping the Core. In fact he acts more like a stereotypical smarmy insurance or used car salesman than he does in making the case against the Core. Washington DC is a den of "scum and villainy." Liberals are stupid, and Whittle is so much smarter than anyone else. Throughout the video, Whittle seems more intent on skewing his political opponents than making the case against the Core.

Whittle's desire to place slime above substance and ConCon's proclamation that Whittle's video makes the case in "excellent fashion" prompts a simple question: does the tea party want to produce policy or does it want to skewer political foes?

The answer is important because there are issues including NSA abuses and the Core that could have broad support across the political spectrum. The recent NSA march in DC had both liberals and libertarians. It seems, however, that some tea party conservatives don't want to win. They just want to insult perceived political foes.

A Couple of Other Things About Lora Hubbel's Common Core Concerns Event

In my post last night, I forgot to mention a few thing.

First, Stace Nelson was the only candidate for any office to have literature there. Someone photocopied a letter on Nelson letterhead referencing South Dakota Republican Party Platform Plank 4.3 and touting his support for HB 1204 during the past session.

Second, although several speakers mentioned getting support from teachers and public school parents, all of the sign up sheets were for parochial schools, private schools, and Christian schools.

Third, handouts bemoaning the graphic nature of The Bluest Eye were on the tables. They apparently were a hard copy of this blog post.

SHHH! Don't Tell Anyone, But Lora Hubbel Let A Non-Conservative Attend Her Common Core Concerns Event

This morning, my long-suffering wife had errands in Sioux Falls and Brandon, so I donned my dressiest chambray shirt and blue jeans and had her drop me off at the Lora Hubbel organized Common Core Concerns event. To blend in, I put my laptop and some quizzes that I wanted to correct in my Liberty Manics NSA field bag. (I really need to work on live blogging.)

I arrived fashionably late, but in time hear Dr. Sandra Stotsky, one of five people on the Common Core's Validation Committee who refused to sign off on the standards. Stotsky hit on many of the concerns that I've expressed about the Core in other posts. She won me over by telling the 100+ in attendance that the Core will reduce the teaching of fiction. She also correctly asserted literary texts are necessary for writing and critical thinking skills.

In addition, Stotsky also pointed out that the claims about the Core being international benchmarked and research based are specious. The standards have not been field tested. More importantly, she asserted rather convincingly that the math standards and English standards are not necessarily more rigorous than those that preceded them because the Core standards are divorced from content. She pointed out that the standards ask high school students to discern theme, but one can discern theme in both The Cat in the Hat or Moby Dick.  Finally, she pointed out that the standards were not developed by math or English teachers or college professors who teach those subjects. They were developed by testing experts and textbook publishers. In the main, Stotsky's presentation echoed concerns raised by Diane Ravitch and other educators who have concerns about the Core.

If Stotsky presented a prima facia case that the Common Core will likely do more harm than good, Jenni White, President of Restore Oklahoma Public Education (ROPE) confirmed some of my worst fears about the conservative Core opponents. While White did not invoke the UN, she went through various ways that the Core is part of a federal government effort to data mine and data bank family and student information. I started correcting mythology quizzes during her speech, but had to give up when she violated Godwin's Law and invoked Hitler as an early fan of data collection. She also told the crowd that opposing the Core is her Christian duty. I'm all for folks doing their Christian duty, but opposing these standards seems to fall under a civic obligation. I'm not sure if it was White's high energy approach, her Hitler comparison, or her call to Christian civil disobedience, but the crowd responded to White more enthusiastically than they did Stotsky.

During the breakout sessions, Representatives Bolin, Stalzer, and May discussed a bit of legislative history and the need to revisit the Core during the upcoming session. Some in the audience seemed eager to begin an initiated measure. Several other legislators, including Manny Steele, spoke from the audience.

To sum up, I'll give a few random observations. First,attending the event reminded me of being a visitor at a small town church. Many seem to have been together for other political and cultural battles. They had a certain comfort with each other and felt confident that everyone there would share not only the goals but also the underlying reasons for those goals. As one who is politically displaced, that atmosphere felt a bit cloying.

Second, I regret missing the opportunity to meet Steve Sibson whom Lora asked to help with one of the other breakout sessions. I should have been more social, but the farm boy that's still in me just doesn't do the social well.

Finally, however correct and well-intentioned those attending audience may be or not be, the effort to have the South Dakota Department of Education reverse the Core's adoption is a long shot at best.

A Minor Musing On Jim Bolin's Decision To Concentrate On Opposing Common Core

I'm a day late with this, but I wanted to muse a bit about Jim Bolin's decision to abandon his bid to be elected Commissioner of School and Public Lands in order to concentrate on opposing Common Core implementation.

Jim is both honest and passionate, so I take him at his word when he says he "put aside personal desires for political advancement [to] instead concentrate on matters of greater lasting impact."

As one who has concerns about the Core, I welcome Bolin's engagement on the issue. That said, this new campaign seems quixotic.

First, the bureaucrats know that that they can quiet the populace by instituting the same standards under a new name. Perhaps they will be called the "Mundane Marrow Standards" that have been designed to help students get the meat of education and more. (Apparently all standards must now be alliterative.)

Second, whatever citizens think about their local schools, they all agree that education needs to be "reformed." It matters little if the reforms being considered have been developed by testing companies and billionaires instead of education experts. People like reform even if it's merely for the sake of reform.

Third, some of the Core opponents are too fond of recycling their "The UN is coming!  The UN is coming!" chants. Jim is a conservative of the Russel Kirk tradition. Many of the anti-Core folk claim conservative credentials, but they are imprudent and demand a cloying uniformity. Further, they may possess the conservative distrust of government, but they give too free of a rein to passion.

Finally, I remain convinced that the Core will be replaced in four or five years so that textbook publishers and testing companies can sell new textbooks and tests. If the Core is stopped in 2013, it will be instituted in the new textbooks and tests in 2017.

Even with these concerns, I am reminded of a Star Trek: The Next Generation Episode "All Good Things . . ." Captain Picard was passing through various possible futures and landed on a ship captained by Beverly Crusher Picard, who in this particular timeline was Picard's ex-wife. During the episode, Crusher Picard says, ". . .he's Jean-Luc Picard, and if he wants to go on one more mission, that's what we're going to do.

Jim Bolin spent a lot of years being a great educator. If he wants to go on one last campaign to prevent educrats, bureaucrats, and billionaires from doing more harm than good, then I wish him well.

I Think This Will Be My Last Common Core Post

Michael Larson reports that there was a bit of sturm und drang at a Common Core meeting tonight.

My previous Common Core posts can be summed up with the following sentences:

1. Folks who worry about the Common Core being a U.N. conspiracy are wrong. 
2. The standards are neither markedly better nor worse than the ones South Dakota used prior to the Core's adoption. 
3. The amount of time students spend testing will increase.
4. Because administrators will hold English departments responsible for all of the reading standards, the teaching of fiction will be dramatically reduced to students' detriment.
5. Some short sighted administrators will use the Core as an excuse to eliminate speech and debate, once again to the students' detriment.

The Core is backed by corporate entities including testing companies, textbook publishers, and tech gurus. All are producing product designed to "help" teachers and schools implement the Core. Seven or eight years from now, it's going to be hard for these businesses to sell "New and Improved Common Core" materials.Customers will rightly ask why the previous products needed to be improved.

Because public education is an untapped cash cow, these companies will do what good business people do; they will create new demand. The easiest way to create that demand will be to have a new set of standards. In about three years, there will be another education crisis. Some business leaders will write pompous editorials that will be deemed "important" or "serious" or some new buzzword indicating that the author is indeed an expert, even if that person hasn't been inside an elementary or secondary school for thirty years. Some quasi-official groups will bring some testing experts and tech folks together, and a set of new standards will emerge. The federal government will be lobbied, and states will be blackmailed to adopt the "reforms." It's a proven method that worked for NCLB and Common Core. 

Maybe students will "Flesh Out the Core" or "Layer the Learning Onion" or "Engage The Newest New Tomorrow." It doesn't matter. Corporate backed reform will last as long as there's a profit to be made.

How Much Did Bill Gates Pay For The Common Core?

When I was in high school and Watergate was in the news, the maxim was follow the money. That premise holds up well when it comes to education as well.

Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, the company that is losing the tech wars to both Apple and Google, has invested a lot of money to shape and implement the Common Core. Mercedes Schneider has many of the details. The whole post is worth reading, especially since it is all about following money not the U.N. or black helicopters.

I'll cut and past one section that shows Gates's support of the Council of Chief State School Officers:

As for CCSSO: The Gates amounts are even higher than for NGA. Prior to June 2009, the Gates Foundation gave $47.1 million to CCSSO (from 2002 to 2007), with the largest amount focused on data “access” and “data driven decisions”:

March 2007 Purpose: to support Phase II of the National Education Data Partnership seeking to promote transparency and accessibility of education data and improve public education through data-driven decision making Amount: $21,642,317 [Emphasis added.]

Following CCSS completion in June 2009, Gates funded CCSSO an additional $31.9 million, with the largest grants earmarked for CSSS implementation and assessment, and data acquisition and control:

July 2013 Purpose: to CCSSO, on behalf of the PARCC and SBAC consortia to support the development of high quality assessments to measure the Common Core State Standards Amount: $4,000,000

November 2012 Purpose: to support the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) in helping States’ to build their data inoperability capability and IT leadership capacity Amount: $1,277,648

October 2012 Purpose: to support strategic planning for the sustainability of the Common Core State Standards and the two multi-state assessment consortia tasked with designing assessments aligned with those standards Amount: $1,100,000

June 2011 Purpose: to support the Common Core State Standards work Amount: $9,388,911

November 2009 Purpose: to partner with federal, state, public, and private interests to develop common, open, longitudinal data standards Amount: $3,185,750

July 2009 Purpose: to increase the leadership capacity of chiefs by focusing on standards and assessments, data systems, educator development and determining a new system of supports for student learning 

Amount: $9,961,842  [Emphasis added.]

Gates money also flowed to Achieve, Inc.; prior to June 2009, Achieve received $23.5 million in Gates funding. Another $13.2 million followed after CCSS creation, with $9.3 million devoted to “building strategic alliances” for CCSS promotion:

 June 2012 Purpose: to strengthen and expand the ADP Network, providemore support to states for CCSS implementation, and build strategic nationaland statewide alliances by engaging directly with key stakeholders Amount: $9,297,699  [Emphasis added.]

CCSS is not “state led.” It is “Gates led.”

How foolish it is to believe that the man with the checkbook is not calling the CCSS shots.

I didn't pull out the calculator, but a quick look at the numbers suggests Gates has spent around $40 million since 2009 to help just one organization implement the Core.

Giving "The Bluest Eye" A Black Eye Won't Stop Common Core Implementation

Bob Ellis, the angriest man in the South Dakota blogosphere, turns his ire on the Common Core. In particular, Mr. Ellis takes umbrage at the Core's suggested lesson over Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. Inherent in the tone of his post is an intimation that the Core will mandate the novel be taught and that including it in a school's curriculum is something new:

South Dakota Governor Dennis Daugaard may think Common Core standards are just dandy, but in addition to a number of reasons we should be cautious about embracing these nationwide standards, the crud and moral rot included on the Common Core reading list for 11th graders should disturb parents who value the innocence of their children.

The Bluest Eye is hardly a newcomer to controversy. The American Library Association keeps a record of banned and challenged books; Morrison's novel was the 15th most challenged book from 2000-2009, right behind The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. 

The novel has also been praised for its literary merit. It has been an option on the open response section of the Advanced Placement Test in 1995, 2008, and 2009. Even the Mike Opelka post that Ellis cites concedes Morrison is a talented writer:

Again, when you read the selected passage, a couple of things stand out — Morrison’s powerful command of the written word cannot be denied and the story appears to teach that over-the-top devotion to physical beauty is “one of the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought."

Condemning a novel widely respected for its literay merit and has been taught and challenged for decades is not going to be an effective challenge to the Core.

I'm extremely skeptical that Core will do anything to help students learn. To the best of my memory, the Core represents the third set of reading standards South Dakota has used since 2001. Most of the Core's standards are mundane, neither markedly better nor markedly worse than their predecessors. There is, of course, the notable exception that the Core mandates that fiction comprises only 30% of a high school student's reading. That requirement should offend nearly every educated person in the country. I, therefore, recommend Ellis read this George Ball editorial. Ball succinctly explains the Core's flaws:

Now adopted in 45 states, including California, and the District of Columbia, this federal effort sets uniform standards on how math and English are taught in American schools. A top-down program imposed on states in order to qualify for Race to the Top funds, the curriculum is the fruit of a process tainted with politics, vested interests and a lack of transparency.

The Common Core Curriculum is being implemented without empirical evidence of its value, and imposed hurriedly without consulting the very people most affected: students, teachers and parents.

In essence, Common Core is a vast educational experiment - making America's public school students into pedagogic guinea pigs. The program emphasizes the development of critical thinking over subject matter, yet its development and implementation manifest a conspicuous lack of reflection. Critical thinking calls for a balanced, impartial, methodical process of conceptualization and analysis built upon careful observation and experience. The way the Common Core standards are being implemented is more imperial than empirical. As education reformer Diane Ravitch notes, the standards have been adopted "without any field test ... imposed on the children of this nation despite the fact that no one has any idea how they will affect students, teachers, or schools."

Ball concludes with a quick agriculture analogy that should resonate with South Dakotans:

Common Core sacrifices the magic of teaching and learning on the altar of metrics. Teachers, students and administrators are no longer engaged in an organic process geared to the individual. Largely designed by testing experts, not teachers, the monolithic curriculum[*] is like detailed gardening instructions from someone who has never set foot in a garden. "Grow faster!" is the experts' motto. Well, children are not cornstalks.

The Bluest Eye and the controversies that accompany it predate the Core. Teachers who taught the novel before the Core will continue to do so. I highly doubt anyone will decide to teach it because it's included in a sample lesson. The Core's proponents frequently claim the Core's standards don't mandate the teaching of a specific work.

 The fact that the process was producing the Core was not transparent and the fact that there's no evidence it will produce more learned students should be the focus of anyone challenging the new "imperial" standards. Little will be gained focusing on a novel that has had its strengths and weaknesses debated for decades.

*Those who maintain that the standards are not a curriculum can feel free to substitute the word standards here. They are monolithic and prepared by people who have not set foot in the classroom as a teacher.

Michelle Malkin Provides South Dakota Conservatives 'With A Model Of How To Confront The Common Core

I generally find Michelle Malkin shrill. I find her arguments in favor Japanese Internment Camps wrong on moral and intellectual levels. With that predicate, it follows I must say something good about her: she expertly uses the Bennett debacle to take down Common Core.

First, she takes on everyone, including the Core's corporate backers:

These good ol’ boys bonded over their zeal for the top-down racket known as Common Core. As I’ve reported previously, this Fed Ed program is supported by both big-business interests (Microsoft founder Bill Gates and News Corp. founder Rupert Murdoch’s education arm) and government educrats. Progressive activists in both parties have worked on nationalized standards, tests, and curricula for decades under previous names: outcome-based education, national school-to-work, Goals 2000, and No Child Left Behind, for example. Obama-administration bribery through “Race to the Top” greased the wheels for adoption of the Common Core program by cash-strapped states, many of which had more rigorous standards than the fed-imposed system.

She reserves some special venom for conservative astroturf organizations:

Bush’s foundation has now joined with the Common Core–peddling Fordham Institute under a new phony-baloney umbrella group: “Conservatives for Higher Standards.” While its list of supporters includes federal bureaucrats, politicians, and business interests, there are no grassroots groups of conservative parents or teachers. So beware of this “conservative” front. And remember: Astroturfing runs in the Bush family. Under George W. Bush, the federal Department of Education paid GOP mouthpiece/columnist Armstrong Williams to shill for No Child Left Behind.

Finally, she uses a personal touch to illustrate the big picture and show how Core and other corporate reforms violate conservative principles:

Cronyism and corruption come in all political stripes and colors. As a conservative parent of children educated at public charter schools, I am especially appalled by these pocket-lining GOP elites who are giving grassroots education reformers a bad name and cashing in on their betrayal of limited-government principles.

I'm not sure what I think of charters, but I agree that much of the Core and Race to the Top reform is about lining pockets. Too often, South Dakota conservatives attack Common Core by leading with an alleged U.N. conspiracy. Malkin shows that the there's no need to look for shadowy conspiracies when the corporate and political folk are engaged in obvious cronyism and cheating.

HT: Diane Ravitch

Quotations Of The Day: Common Core History Edition

First, there's this history lesson from Valerie Strauss who responds to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan:

The Core initiative was started in 2007 by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, a bipartisan effort to come up with a common set of K-12 standards in English language arts and math across states that would better prepare students for colleges and careers than in the past.

The standards were written by school reformer and entrepreneur David Coleman, who now heads the College Board, and Susan Pimental of Achieve Inc., an organization created to advance “standards-based” education.  Starting in 2009, the Obama administration, in its main education initiative, required states that wanted to compete for Race to the Top reform dollars to adopt the standards. It also gave some $360 million to two consortia of states developing standardized tests aligned to the Core, exams whose results would be used to evaluate teachers, another controversial part of the Obama reform agenda.

Later she writes,

Duncan, in his speech to the newspaper editors, said the federal government didn't start or write the standards, and that is true. He said that it wasn't mandated either, though critics argue that it was coerced. He was also right when he said the Core is not a curriculum (even though the Core authors released a book of criteria to education publishers about what should be in Core curriculum).

But he didn't mention the rushed implementation, nor the hundreds of millions of dollars the federal government has plowed into the testing creation effort. He has said for years that the Core-aligned tests would be “game changers” and be able to assess students much more broadly,  but he didn't say Tuesday that that isn't true. It turns out there wasn't enough time or money to create those kinds of tests.

Diane Ravitch quotes Strauss and then sums up the Core's history:

Another angle: the Gates Foundation plowed more than $100 million into every aspect of the Common Core: the development, the evaluation, the implementation, the advocacy, on and on.

It seems that most of the nation’s grassroots are growing in Seattle, then watered inside the Beltway.

Quotation Of The Day: Reading Literature Helps One Deal With Ambiguity Edition

From this Tom Jacobs piece at Salon:

Are you uncomfortable with ambiguity? It’s a common condition, but a highly problematic one. The compulsion to quell that unease can inspire snap judgments, rigid thinking, and bad decision-making. 

Fortunately, new research suggests a simple anecdote for this affliction: Read more literary fiction.

A trio of University of Toronto scholars, led by psychologist Maja Djikic, report that people who have just read a short story have less need for what psychologists call “cognitive closure.” Compared with peers who have just read an essay, they expressed more comfort with disorder and uncertainty—attitudes that allow for both sophisticated thinking and greater creativity.

Researchers offer the following reasons why fiction has this effect on readers but non-fiction does not.

“The thinking a person engages in while reading fiction does not necessarily lead him or her to a decision,” they note. This, they observe, decreases the reader’s need to come to a definitive conclusion.

“Furthermore,” they add, “while reading, the reader can stimulate the thinking styles even of people he or she might personally dislike. One can think along and even feel along with Humbert Humbert in Lolita, no matter how offensive one finds this character. This double release—of thinking through events without concerns for urgency and permanence, and thinking in ways that are different than one’s own—may produce effects of opening the mind.” 

Common Core Done Properly Weakens Ability To Read Literature

I just finished The Sherlockian, an enjoyable novel that combines historical fiction with a contemporary detective story. The historical fiction features Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes novels and short stores, and Bram Stoker the author of Dracula.

The fictionalized Doyle and Stoker have the following  exchange.

"My stories,"said Arthur. "The science of deduction. The reasoning detective. The solution delivered partly in a satisfying denouement. They're all horseshit."

Bram smiled. "I know," he said. "That's why we need them."

Arthur considered this. "I've moved on," he offered after a long pause. "I've been working on realism. History."

"Realism," Bram repeated. "Realism, I think, is fleeting. It's the romance that will live forever."

Earlier, the character Stoker had taken the long view:

Because in a hundred years, no one will care about me. Or you. Or Oscar [Wilde]. We stopped caring about Oscar years ago and we were his bloody friends. No, what they'll remember are the stories. They'll remember Holmes. And Watson. And Dorian Gray."

To test Stoker's theory, let's do a little quiz. Does anyone remember Philander C. Knox or Robert C. Vessey? They were kind of big deals in 1913. The former was the American Secretary of State and the latter South Dakota's governor in 1913. On the other hand, early everyone knows about Pollyanna, the character brought to life in 1913.

I could pass off the novel's dialogue as an author's Romantic musing about famous authors and characters, but this Robert B. Shepherd post on Diane Ravitch's blog sums up why reading the "horseshit" is important and why the Common Core will harm the reading of literature:

Amusingly, the new Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic] are totally schizoid on this issue of abstraction and generalization in education and social engineering. On the one hand, the supporting materials around those standards [sic] call for a great RETURN TO THE TEXT—for having our students read substantive works with higher Lexile levels and having them do close reading of those texts. The supporting materials around the new standards also call for subordinating skills and strategies instruction, for making these incidental to emphasis on the text. Well and good. But the standards themselves are more of the same. They are lists of abstract, general skills and strategies, and they encourage the continuation of a kind of schooling that focuses on form rather than on content (knowledge of the world and knowledge of procedures). And so the new [sic] standards [sic] are, sadly, more of the same. However, lists of abstractions have appeal to those who think that they can confidently implement their social engineering based upon their own abstract principles like “you get what you measure,” so it’s not surprising that the social engineers would LOVE the new CCSS in ELA.

We need to return to reading “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”—to focusing on this poem, this essay, this novel, and what it communicates, and we need to retreat from having our students read to practice their inferencing skills or their identifying the main idea or context clues skills. We read because we are interested in Hedda Gabler or Madame Bovery and the plights they are in, not because we wish to hone our understanding of the structure of the novel IN GENERAL. That will come, but it can come ONLY as a result of first READING the novels. In our rush to make ELA education scientific, in our emphasis on abstract form over content, we’ve forgotten why we read. We don’t read to hone our inferencing skills. We don’t read because we are fascinated by where, in this essay, the author has placed the main idea. Our purpose in reading is not to find out how the author organized her story in order to create suspense. We read because we are interested in what the text has to say, and the metacognitive abstraction about the text is incidental. It grows out of and relates to what this particular text does and takes meaning from that. The Common Core State Standards in ELA is just another set of blithering, poorly thought out abstractions. And starting from there, instead of starting with the text and its content, is a mistake.

Beware the social engineer and his or her abstractions.”

In short, the Common Core, when implemented properly, reduces Sherlock Holmes to the status of Philander C. Knox. Shepherd concludes,

“One could implement the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts perfectly and have students entirely miss what reading literature is about. They would not come away from their literature classes with the understanding that when they read a literary work well, they enter into an imaginative world and have an experience there, in all its concreteness and specificity, and it is then THAT experience that has significance, that matters, that has “meaning.”

You can’t skip the experience and go directly to the meaning, and that’s what students are encouraged to do if their lessons concentrate on abstract, formal notions from some list of standards rather than upon reading as experiencing. Now, when I say that reading literature is experiencing, I do not mean that all readings are therefore equally good. Literature makes use of conventions and inventions designed to give people particular imaginative experiences that will be common to readers, with, of course, some variation, experiences that will mean something, not mean anything at all that the reader takes away from it. Literature counts on the fact that when people have an experience like this, they will take away common learnings. Like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, a person tells a story because there is something that he or she wishes to communicate. The Vietnam vets used to say, “You wouldn’t know because you weren’t there, man.” Well, reading literature well is about going THERE. It’s about having that experience, carefully arranged so that you will come from it with certain learnings, often with wisdom.

Find THAT in the Common Core State Standards for literature.

Good luck.” 

I've written  before about the Core's misplaced emphasis on non-fiction. Shepherd's analysis points out something that may be more important. The Core will not only decrease the amount of fiction students read. It will also weaken their ability to read, understand, and learn from the fiction they are assigned.

An Open Memo To Common Core Opponents

To: Common Core Opponents
From: The Displaced Plainsman
Subject: Anonymous Letters
Date: June 3, 2013

I too have serious misgivings about the Common Core and what its implementation might mean. Some of you are making it much harder for rest of us to be taken seriously.

Let me give you an example. Today, while I was sitting in a workshop that I'm taking so that I can keep my teacher certification, the professor told us that she and her husband, who is also an educator, had received a letter filled with cut and paste anti-Core rants. The letter also contained links to anti-Core sites.

As a teacher, I'm supposed to provide some positive feedback. In this case, those who sent this letter should be commended for not using letters physically cut from assorted newspapers and magazines. It's always good to avoid having one's anonymous letter resemble a kidnapper's ransom note.

Now for the negative but helpful criticism. I will to start gently as I can. HOW CAN YOU BE SO STUPID AND STILL BREATHE?

Tactics like this marginalize people who have practical reasons for opposing the Core. Any criticism is now waved off as the rantings of lunatics who fear black helicopters and believe the Core is going to usher in the mark of the Beast.

Perhaps you have been indoctrinated by Nike and its "Just Do It" campaign. Nike made a lot of money from that campaign, but sometimes it not enough to just do something. How one does something is frequently as important as what one does. In this case opposing the Core may well be the right thing to do. How you're doing it, however, is so wrong that it's actually hurting your cause.

Yet Another Common Core Musing: Josh Verges Must Read This Blog Only Once A Week Edition

Josh Verges takes issue with the following statement I made on a May 23, 2013 post:

South Dakota uses Pearson to write its tests. The tests I have seen when I have been asked to administer them in the past ignore many skills that aren’t easy to test in favor of those that are easy to fit in a multiple guess format.

Apparently that statement is so egregious Verges doesn't care I posted an update shortly after it was written.

Verges stopped by to remind me that South Dakota will not be using Pearson to write Common Core Tests:

Pearson won't be writing the CCS-aligned tests. That task falls to two consortia (S.D. joined Smarter Balanced) that got huge federal grants. The ACT folks also are writing tests in hopes states will pick them, as Alabama already has.

Thirty minutes later, I responded with the following comment:

Thanks for the reminder. I had forgotten about Smarter Balanced.

After typing the comment, I also added the following update to the body of the post:

Update: In the comments Josh Verges stops by to remind me that Pearson will not be doing the tests South Dakota uses. I stand by my comments about their past work.**

Pearson did write the Dakota Step tests. They also provide SDDOE technical reports about the Dakota Step

I also maintain my concern that the Core tests will focus on minutia. For example, South Dakota's Core standards demand that basic students be able to "identify active and passive voice." Advanced students are to be able to "creatively apply active and passive voice and justify their choices." I work to get students to use active voice and avoid passive. I have no problem with the standard or testing it. I should proof my own work to write more actively.

The South Dakota Core Standards also ask students to be able to use hyphens properly. Word wrap has made hyphenation far less necessary than it was when I took a high school typing class. (Yes, it was typing not keyboarding.) I worry that the new tests will spend more time testing hyphenation than they will active voice; the former may be easier to test, but the latter is more important.

I also maintain another worry expressed in the May 23rd post: the biggest harm the Core will have is that  English departments will  teach non-fiction at the expense of meaningful fiction. Let me use the following David Mendelsohn paragraph as an example:

It was hard not to think of all this—of the Iliad with its grand funereal finale, of the Odyssey strangely pivoting around so many burials, and of course of “Antigone”—as I followed the story of Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s unburied body over the past few weeks. I thought, of course, of canny politicians eyeing the public mood, and of the public to whom those politicians wanted to pander. I thought even more of the protesters who, understandably to be sure, wanted to make clear the distinction between victim and perpetrator, between friend and foe, by threatening to strip from the enemy what they saw as the prerogatives of the friend: humane treatment in death. The protesters who wanted, like Creon, not only to deny those prerogatives to an enemy but to strip them away again should anyone else grant them—to “unbury the body.” I thought of Martha Mullen, a Christian, who insisted that the Muslim Tsarnaev, accused of heinous atrocities against innocent citizens, be buried just as a loved one might deserve to be buried, because she honored the religious precept that demands that we see all humans as “brothers,” whatever the evil they have done.

Mendelsohn assumes readers will be familiar with the literature to which he alludes. More importantly, literature helps one make sense of the world. It is an especially powerful tool in a world with more questions than answers. Core advocates claim the Core will focus on classics like the Iliad and Antigone. I love the classics, so I have no qualm with the Core on that issue. Those same advocates seem willing to sacrifice regional works and 21st Century works such as Gilead, The Road, The Life of Pi, or The Amazing Adventures of Kavilier & Clay. I question the benefits of non-fiction replacing or preventing the adoption of contemporary fiction.

Verges also takes issue with Cory Heidelberger's posts about the Common Core. I will let Cory speak for himself, so that I can mention a couple of other concerns that I have with with Verges's post.

First, he quotes Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and refers readers to defenses of the Common Core without adding any balancing commentary or links to Core critics. His post focuses on testing, so he could have linked to some Diane Ravitch commentary about testing. The implication that Cory and I are the only ones concerned about testing is erroneous.

Further, Verges ignores that some Core supporters are beginning to argue that the Core and whatever tests accompany it illustrate "the Common Core needs a common curriculum."

I am not a conspiracy theorist. I don't think the Core is a U.N. conspiracy. South Dakotans do seem fond of local control. A common curriculum would weaken if not eliminate local control.

I erred; I posted an admission of that error. Verges, however, chooses to focus on the original error and ignore the correction. He also ignores any other testing or Core critics.

**Update: Verges does respond to tweets. He has updated his post to reflect the fact that I edited my original post after he commented. (8:53 pm 5/28/2013)

Wanting More Than Just The Facts

Over at Madville, Homeschool Dad (H.D.) makes a comment asserting the Common Core will threaten how history is taught:

Yes, the logic is the important thing, but so are the political ramifications. We cannot allow big government to change our history books to say something other than what actually happened.

H.D. seems to be saying he's a fan of Joe Friday and wants "just the facts." Facts, however, rarely exist in a vacuum. Writing at Ten Miles Square, Keith Humphreys gives the following quiz that illustrates the point:

Which US President dramatically cut federal criminal penalties for marijuana possession, was a forceful advocate for expanded food stamps and affirmative action, and worked closely with Congress to create the Environmental Protection Agency?
(a) John F. Kennedy
(b) Lyndon Johnson
(c) Jimmy Carter
(d) Richard Nixon

The share of GDP devoted to social spending increased from 22% to an unprecedented 26.7% in just the first three years of what UK Prime Minister’s Rule?
(a) Clement Atlee
(b) Ramsay MacDonald
(c) David Lloyd George
(d) John Major

As governor, he signed a bill that expanded access to legal abortion, over two million of which subsequently occured [sic] on his watch. He also passed the biggest tax increase in the history of his state. Who was he?
(a) Mario Cuomo
(b) Patrick Lucey
(c) Terry Sanford
(d) Ronald Reagan

As President, he delighted the wealthiest Americans by pushing for a decrease in the top income tax rate from 91% to 65%
(a) Ronald Reagan
(b) Gerald Ford
(c) Calvin Coolidge
(d) John F. Kennedy

After their election in 2010, the UK Conservative-LibDem coalition inherited a record annual government spending level of about 670 billion pounds. They introduced what was widely termed “austerity” fiscal policy, with government spending in the first year doing what?
(a) Decreasing by about 70 billion pounds
(b) Decreasing by about 40 billion pounds
(c) Decreasing by about 10 billion pounds
(d) Increasing by about 20 billion pounds

The correct answer to each question is (d). Kennedy cut taxes; Nixon increased government aid to poor people, and Reagan made it easier to get abortions. None of the facts mean anything without some context. All can be used or twisted to prove political points.

I'm not a fan of the Core, but the assertion one must teach only facts has always troubled me just as much as the Core does. Knowing what happened without knowing why an event happened or the implications resulting from the event is just as dangerous as knowing nothing

A Few Musings About Common Core Failures

Josh Verges reports that Rick Melmer, late of the University of South Dakota and a former South Dakota Secretary of Education, will began working for the Common Core. I have little hope that Melmer will do anything to fix any of the Core's problems. I do hope he takes note of some of the Core's detrimental effects of education.

Valerie Strauss uses this Answer Sheet post to reprint a letter from New York City principals discussing flaws with Common Core tests. The letter identifies Pearson "a company with a history of mistakes" as part of the problem. The principals seem more positive about the Core than I am, but they point out a key problem that arises when the Core is tied to a standardized test:

In both their technical and task design, these tests do not fully align with the Common Core. If one was to look closely at the Common Core Learning Standards (www.corestandards.org) and compare them to the tests, it is evident that the ELA tests focused mostly on analyzing specific lines, words and structures of information text and their significance rather than the wide array of standards.

As a result, many students spent much of their time reading, rereading and interpreting difficult and confusing questions about authors’ choices around structure and craft in informational texts, a Common Core skill that is valuable, but far from worthy of the time and effort given by the test. Spending so much time on these questions was at the expense of many of the other deep and rich common core skills and literacy shifts that the state and city emphasized. The Common Core emphasizes reading across different texts, both fiction and non-fiction, in order to determine and differentiate between central themes—an authentic college practice. Answering granular questions about unrelated topics is not. Because schools have not had a lot of time to unpack Common Core, we fear that too many educators will use these high stakes tests to guide their curricula, rather than the more meaningful Common Core Standards themselves. And because the tests are missing Common Core’s essential values, we fear that students will experience curriculum that misses the point as well. [emphasis mine]

South Dakota uses Pearson to write its tests. The tests I have seen when I have been asked to administer them in the past ignore many skills that aren't easy to test in favor of those that are easy to fit in a multiple guess format.

I still believe the biggest harm the Core will is having English departments teach non-fiction at the expense of meaningful fiction. The fact that the tests that Pearson produces will cause schools to narrow their curricula further exacerbates that problem.

Update: In the comments Josh Verges stops by to remind me that Pearson will not be doing the tests South Dakota uses. I stand by my comments about their past work.

Pearson's Product Placement: States Pay For Tests And Advertising?

The following comes from a New York Post exclusive, and some of their exclusives haven't been accurate lately, so there might be a bit more to this story. If true, it's yet another example of the Common Core's corporate nature:

At lest a half-dozen companies got an unexpected boost in marketing their brands to New York’s children this week — with free product placement on the state’s English exams.

Teachers and students said yesterday’s multiple-choice section of the eighth-grade tests name-dropped at least a handful of companies or products — including Mug Root Beer, LEGO and that company’s smart robots, Mindstorms.

IBM, the comic book and TV show “Teen Titans” and FIFA — the international soccer federation — were also mentioned in the test booklets, some of them with what educators referred to as out-of-place trademark symbols.

“I’ve been giving this test for eight years and have never seen the test drop trademarked names in passages — let alone note the trademark at the bottom of the page,” said one teacher who administered the exam.

I'm not too concerned that the tests mention Legos or the Teen Titans. I'm not sure there is a generic term for Legos; I'm not sure kids would understand the term "interlocking bricks." Superheroes are part of the public consciousness. Mentioning Robin or one of the other Teen Titans is no different than mentioning Barack Obama, Michael Jordan, or Bill Gates.

I have a larger  problem with logos being placed at the bottom of the page. The tests are paid for by tax dollars. States give corporations tax breaks; the corporations don't need free advertisements that are shown to a captive audience.

I wonder if the tests Pearson will write for South Dakota will mention Hy-Vee, Wall Drug, Sandford, or Citibank. We know they won't mention Chromebooks.