Why is Diane Ravitch Ambivalent on Common Core Standards? Am I Missing Something?

Questioning if federal mandates are wise educational reforms? Why the ambivalence?

I don't understand Diane Ravitch's ambivalence on whether to support untested and underfunded common core state standards that will plunge states into millions of dollars of debt.  Am I missing the elephant in the room?

A National curriculum is illegal. The Pioneer white paper Road to a National Curriculum makes this very clear (pg 3).  Common Core standards and Race to the Top bypassed state legislators...and voters.  The standards and assessments are being crafted by private companies, not state educational departments.  The standards and assessment process is partially funded by the federal government.  

The federal government is promoting a national standards and curriculum agenda.  We should not be focusing on whether the standards are "good" or "bad" or need to be "tweaked".  We need to ask why the federal government has been given the power to drive standards and assessments through a process in which it threatened to withhold federal money from states if states did not adopt these standards.

Why should there be any discussion on the standards on their validity as standards?  The conversation should be on their constitutional validity and the stripping of state power to set educational directive and direction for citizens. 

From Ravitch's' My View of the Common Core Standards:

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I have neither endorsed nor rejected the Common Core national standards, for one simple reason: They are being rolled out in 45 states without a field trial anywhere. How can I say that I love them or like them or hate them when I don’t know how they will work when they reach the nation’s classrooms?

In 2009, I went to an event sponsored by the Aspen Institute where Dane Linn, one of the project directors for developing the standards, described the process. I asked if they intended to pilot test them, and I did not get a “yes” answer. The standards were released early in 2010. By happenstance, I was invited to the White House to meet with the head of the President’s Domestic Policy Council, the President’s education advisor, and Rahm Emanuel. When asked what I thought of the standards, I suggested that they should be tried out in three or four or five states first, to work out the bugs. They were not interested.

I have worked on state standards in various states. When the standards are written, no one knows how they will work until teachers take them and teach them. When you get feedback from teachers, you find out what works and what doesn’t work. You find out that some content or expectations are in the wrong grade level; some are too hard for that grade, and some are too easy. And some stuff just doesn’t work at all, and you take it out.

The Common Core will be implemented in 45 states without that kind of trial. No one knows if they will raise expectations and achievement, whether they will have no effect, whether they will depress achievement, or whether they will be so rigorous that they increase the achievement gaps.

Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institution thinks they won’t matter.

The conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute, which received large grants from the Gates Foundation to evaluate the standards and has supported them vigorously, estimates that the cost of implementing them will be between $1 billion and $8.3 billion. The conservative Pioneer Institute estimates that the cost of implementation would be about $16 billion, and suggests this figure is a “mid-range” estimate.

The Gates Foundation, lest we forget, paid to develop the standards, paid to evaluate the standards, and is underwriting Pearson’s program to create online courses and resources for the standards, which will be sold by Pearson, for a profit, to schools across the nation.

Of course, every textbook publisher now says that its products are aligned with the Common Core standards, and a bevy of consultants have come out of the woodwork to teach everyone how to teach them.

In these times of austerity, I wonder how much money districts and states have available to implement the standards faithfully. I wonder how much money they will put into professional development. I wonder about the quality of the two new assessments that the U.S. Department of Education laid out $350 million for.

These are things I wonder. But how can I possibly pass judgment until I find out how the standards work in real classrooms with real children and real teachers?

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This reminds me of the "we have to pass it to find out what's in it" argument.  It's rather astounding that public education is now regaled to taxpayers paying for standards, assessments and curriculum dictated by private companies, propped up by Federal mandates, and there is even a question of whether to support such a system.

I shouldn't be so surprised.  Since it appears we have become a nation based on the end justifies the means vs a nation based on principle and law, common core standards, longitudinal data systems and the private takeover of public education can be implemented with hardly a whimper from the politicians supposedly charged with upholding the Constitution. 

The readers' comments to the article illustrate this tension.  This comment illustrates one result of this multi-billion dollar unproven, untested and unconstitutional Nancy Pelosi style of "reform":

 in response to dianerav: 

I have neither endorsed nor rejected the Common Core national standards, for one simple reason: They are being rolled out in 45 states without a field trial anywhere. How can I say that I love them or like them or hate them when I don’t know how they will work when they reach the nation’s [...]

I retired two weeks ago, after 31 years as a public school teacher. I watched my school being infected with the ccss madness this year. It broke my heart.