The Promises of Common Core Like Those For The Health Care Act - Fading Fast

"If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor. Period. If you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan. Period. No one will take it away. No matter what" President Obama addressing the annual meeting of the American Medical Association, 2009 WSJ

Now that the Affordable Care Act is being implemented we are beginning to see that what government promises is not always what is delivered. Sweeping reform, no matter how well intentioned, always has unintended consequences, collateral damage and a way of perverting the way we do our work. Just look at the increase in the number of part time jobs and the reduction in full time jobs that the PPACA incentivized. Doctors have stopped taking new Medicaid patients. Some doctors are even dropping out of the medical practice altogether because they feel they will not be able to give their patients the best care under the new guidelines. Health care plans are being discontinued at a dizzying rate. In our state alone we are down to only three providers and rapidly heading towards one because of the way the regulations are being written. The President's promises are quickly dissolving.

We are getting similar promises with common core.

• They are just a set of standards telling you what skills a child should master by what age.
• Local districts can still control curriculum. 
• They do not tell teachers how to teach.

However, just as with the new health care mandates, the associated regulations and weirdness that always happens at the point of implementation are starting to make a mockery of these promises.

"They are just a set of standards."  Well, not really. They come with associated assessments. As a set of standards alone they would be almost useless. The key is accountability and we can only achieve accountability through testing to "make sure" teachers are teaching these standards, so the standards must be paired with assessments. And what's the point of assessing if you don't do something with that information. Back to the accountability table. To make sure the teachers understand the importance of these standards and teaching them we will tie teacher evaluations to the student scores on these assessments. In addition, since almost every district has their Average Yearly Progress (AYP) tied to teacher ratings and student test scores, we have doubled down on the importance and effect of the testing.  Really they're not just a set of standards, they are an element of an incredibly important standardized testing and school accountability system.

"Local districts still control curriculum." They do and they don't.  They are able to choose whatever curriculum they want, so long as it leads to good scores on the assessments. That they have to do, or they risk losing their accreditation. DESE just reported to the House Interim Committee that the Missouri School Improvement Plan (MSIP) has shifted its focus from resource allocation to student outcomes (which is insider speak for test scores.)  Districts will have to choose their curriculum very carefully in light of this switch by DESE.

Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute wrote in a post for Ed Week about four questions that need to be asked regarding common core. One of the questions had to do with curriculum choices.

"Three, my AEI colleague Mike McShane has noted that an Amazon search yields more than 30,000 results, many of those claiming to be Common Core-aligned. How schools or systems are supposed to make sense of that is far from clear. Currently, no one can really tell which texts or resources are actually aligned to the Common Core, much less which ones are high-quality. I hosted a small gathering that included several prominent supes earlier this year; off the record, just about all conceded they were unsure how to move on this front. Who's going to help districts sort through all this or decide what constitutes alignment? (By the way, if a national outfit takes the lead, note that we're suddenly looking at a de facto national standard for materials.)"

Every district is in the process of shifting their curriculum in anticipation of the full implementation of common core next school year. That is a challenging proposition since they have not yet seen the assessments that they will be judged on and, as Hess noted, the field of those claiming to align to the standards is vast. Districts control the curriculum until those tests are out and they can see which materials align best to the test. Because such extreme emphasis has been placed on test scores, they will only pick curriculum that leads to higher test scores. It becomes the developers of the tests who ultimately choose the curriculum.

"They do not tell teachers how to teach." This statement in particular is fast being blown out of the water of truth. A teacher in Wyoming spoke of her experience with the new teacher evaluation system by McREL which is just one of a number of prepackage teacher evaluation systems being sold to districts around the country now. Their overarching philosophies are very similar. The products are differentiated by user interface and platform.

Teacher evaluations are tied back to the goals of the common core standards which are to produce students ready to compete in a 21st century global marketplace. This creates new goals for teachers. From McREL:

"Teachers must understand what comprises a 21st century education and how their practice must reflect the demands of the education in order to realize a new vision of teaching. 

1: Teachers Demonstrate Leadership
2: Teachers Establish a Respectful Environment for a diverse population of students
3. Teachers Know the Content They Teach
4.  Teachers Facilitate Learning for Their Students
5. Teachers Reflect on their practice

Teachers are rated as either: Developing, Proficient, Accomplished, or Distinguished

There are detailed explanations of these five goals in McREL's materials. Standard 4 Section f states "Teachers help students work in teams and develop leadership qualities. Teachers teach the importance of cooperation and collaboration. They organize learning teams in order to help students define roles, strengthen social ties, improve communication and collaborative skills, interact with people from different cultures and backgrounds, and develop leadership qualities."

This teacher had been teaching collaborative skills in her classroom for a number of years, but was informed by her principal that if she wanted to receive the top rating on her evaluation she would have to take a professional development course that used a "new" approach to teaching these skills. In other words, in order to keep her job, she was going to have to change they way she taught even if it went against her personal philosophy.

The majority of the teachers simply roll their eyes and just do whatever the administration tells them. They will jump through whatever hoops are put infront of them in order to keep their jobs. They won't speak up because the administrator stepping into their classroom a couple times a year doesn't have time to do an in depth analysis of their teaching and instead is looking to check boxes off on a form. They would prefer to have teachers who just go along to get a long under his or her control.

The promoters of common core who pat us on the head while reciting these promises are beginning to feel the heat from those in the field where the promises are being road tested and falling apart.

Take Back Our Schools Conferences Fall 2013

 

For those who want to learn more about Common Core, student data collection and what they can do to reclaim local authority over education, we have three regional conferences planned for this fall. Check out MOAgainstCommonCore.com for details and registration (coming soon.)

St. Louis - Sunday September 22, 2013 Wildwood Hotel (1-6:00)

Kansas City - Saturday October 5, 2013 North Kansas City Community Center (9-2:00)

Springfield - Saturday October 19, 2012 Holiday Inn Convention Center (9-2:00)

•  The History of Common Core Standards – How Did We Get Here?
• High Quality Standards For Everyone? Not so much. What about special needs kids? How could CC harm early learners?
• Testing Testing Testing
• Data Collection – The government wants to know everything about your children. How can you protect their privacy?
• What are your rights according to Missouri state law? How can you begin to assert those rights?
• What is happening at the federal level when it comes to Common Core, Data Collection and state’s rights to control education
• The future of education in Missouri – a common sense approach based on local assertion of rights already granted by our constitution and legislature.

There will be break out sessions for various interest groups to network with other grassroots activists.

School Board Members – Know your rights as a School Board member. Compare experiences and network with other board members who are trying to get their district out of the public/private system of common standards.

Grassroots Activists – For parents, taxpayers, teachers, legislators. We’ll talk about everything in our activist kit, answer questions and get you networking.

Non-Public Schools (Catholic/Private/Home Schools) – Whether or not CC is in or coming to your school, you need to know what to watch for and how to keep the quality education you are paying for or providing.

Learn more and receive your Grassroots Action Kit with everything you need to inform people in your district about Common Core and data collection.

Don't wait for government to hand you back control.

 Take back the control that has been yours all along.

Education - It's A Funding Problem

By now most people are familiar with the Melissa Harris-Perry video where she accused us of having an old fashioned notion of our children belonging to us, when in fact they belong to the collective.

I believe MS. Harris-Perry has it wrong.  We have been treating our children as belonging to the collective for a long time and that is one of the biggest problems with education.

We collectively pay for education. Ever since it was mandated in our country (and our state) we signed the social contract that says we will all pay for education because ultimately we will all benefit from preparing future generations.

While this payment was handled at the local level there were fewer problems.  If the locals didn’t like the school teacher they chose, they replaced her.  She was accountable to them because they paid her salary directly.

As we have expanded the means by which we pay for education, we have expanded the number of people who feel entitled to a say in what we at the local level are doing with their money.  Government has a responsibility to the taxpayer to be responsible stewards of our money and to demand accountability. That is what has led us to our current predicament with education - the concept that we are accountable to the federal government for the goals that they have set for the money they send us. The children belong to all of us in that we all pay for them. Yes it is our money, but once it goes through the fed’s hands they can claim responsibility to see that it is spent “wisely.”

That means that they will set standards (in the broadest sense) for how we operate our schools. The nature of a bureaucracy to justify and expand its existence guarantees that they will seek greater and greater control over what we do locally.  This sets up an imbalance.

The average school district only receives 7% of its funding from the Federal government, yet focuses more than 50% of its time on accountability measures to the feds: reporting, training, programs etc.  We should probably congratulate congress because that is one heck of a return on an investment.

The problem arises in terms of achieving consensus with an ever expanding group of stakeholders. Put seven teachers together in a classroom and have them agree on the best way to teach math. You will be there for days. Ask ten different school districts to agree on the definition of “critical thinking” and how to teach it and you may never get consensus. Common Core shines a spotlight on the extreme difficulty of developing agreement about education; what should be taught and how. Finding the balance between accountability and flexibility is a Sisyphean task .

Last week, as the House Education committee began debating the ESEA, they were only able to pay lip service to local control. After all, they must be responsible stewards of your money and therefore have to maintain some sense of accountability.  The public will never be fully satisfied with their work because it will still require them to set some standards and accountability at the national level that we will never all agree on. As long as we continue to send our money for education through them, we will answer to them. 

An audience member at a recent Common Core meeting said he would never vote for another bond issue or tax increase from his district so long as they were implementing Common Core and other federally pushed programs. The room erupted in applause.  Top down intervention is going to make life at the local level very challenging.

Wouldn’t it be far simpler to find 7% savings and just do what we can agree on locally? Wouldn’t that make the local taxpayer infinitely happier?

Another School District Declares its Independence from Federal School Guidelines

A school decides what's good and what's bad, not the federal government.

The Catlin (IL) school district doesn't want the money from the Federal Government for its lunch program.  From Catlin leaving federal school lunch program:

"We did some studies that showed it would take us about 83 days into the year to make up what we were being reimbursed from the federal government," Lewis said, adding the food service program lost money over the last three years. "We don't want to make money on it, but we want to break even, which will be a big plus."

Not only will the district save money, it will retain control of what type of food its students will be offered:

The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which sets federal nutritional standards for school lunches, revised meal guidelines for government-subsidized school meals, in an effort to address childhood obesity.

Under the new rules, which are still being phased in, participating schools must serve more whole-grain products, double the amount of fruits and veggies, serve more dry beans and peas and serve low-fat or fat-free milk and other dairy products, among other things. They also must limit the amount of sodium, saturated fat and trans fat in food.

"We had to not only offer vegetables but vegetables of a certain color, and we had to offer them so many times a week," Lewis said, adding it was difficult to meet the guidelines with selections the kids would eat. "I will eat kale. But if I tried to get my 11- and 7-year-old to eat kale, they will look at me like, 'What are you putting on my plate?'

This principal should be given a ribbon for food conservation as well.  Why pay for food that the students will not eat but the school is mandated to serve via Federal guidelines?  

School officials decided to pull out of the National School Lunch Program earlier this spring, after seeing a decline in the number of meals that were served and too much food going into the garbage last year.

Read more here.

Imagine that.  A school district making decisions for its students based on students' needs, rather than a centralized plan from this administration on what, how much and even what color the food needed to be in school.  Now only if districts would make the same decision on Common Core...wouldn't that be a glorious day when a school could/would determine how and what their students needed to learn instead of centralized consortia propped up by private organizations and federal stimulus money and federal guidelines?

Here is a story earlier this year about another school who pulled away from adhering to the federal lunch guidelines.


Remember this video from Kansas about school lunches?  Who would have thought schools would need to declare their independence from the Federal Government by supplying its own food to its students?





 

Does the Key To Correcting Common Core Lie in the Proposed Student Success Act

Representative John Kline of Minnesota, chairman of the House Education and Workforce Committee, has provided his solution to the overreach of the US Department of Education that has given us Common Core and a host of other education accountability programs that have robbed our states of their sovereignty over education. The Student Success Act, if passed, would empower local control of education, returning choices for what is best for our children to the closest possible authority: parents, teachers, districts, and state government.

From an Ed Week article on SSA,

There are currently more than 80 distinct federal programs that are supposed to promote student achievement. The Student Success Act would eliminate more than 70 of those programs and replace them with grant funding that states and school districts would have the flexibility to use to tailor programs to their local needs.

Instead of Washington bureaucrats making decisions, the legislation would allow superintendents, school leaders, and local officials to make funding decisions based on what they know will help improve student learning. In addition, the Student Success Act would require the U.S. secretary of education to identify and eliminate positions associated with those programs.

The Student Success Act would repeal the onerous No Child Left Behind requirement that districts employ teachers deemed “highly qualified.” This mandate has valued a teacher’s credentials over his or her effectiveness in the classroom. Instead, the Student Success Act would support state- and locally driven teacher-evaluation systems that provide states and school districts with the tools necessary to measure an educator’s influence on student achievement

These changes are consistent with the message being delivered by the Missouri Coalition Against Common Core. Accountability is all well and good, but it is important to be accountable to the right source for the things that are most important to the people actually paying the dollars. Our current system, and the one we will have going forward, moves that accountability further and further away from the local district and the local taxpayers.  We send our money to Washington and then have to do the dance they want to get a portion of it back (through IDEA, Title I and the other 75 programs.) Lesson plans and curriculums are designed around the goals of people far removed from the state. Even the goals of "college and career ready" laid out by CCSSI are not necessarily the goals of all school districts for all children. Yet 100% of the school's focus will now be those goals. With the average district getting on 7% of its funding from the feds (some as low as 2% and the high only being around 15%), it is absurd how much control the US Department of Education has over local school districts.

MCACC has pointed out repeatedly the existing federal laws that limit the authority of the USDoEd that are not being followed.

--> Department of Education Organization Act (1979) Sec. 103 (a) “It is the intention of the Congress . . . to protect the rights of State and local governments and public and private educational institutions in the areas of educational policies and administration of programs and to strengthen and improve the control of such governments and institutions over their own educational programs and policies . . . (b) no provision of a program administered by the Secretary [of Education] or any such officer to exercise any direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum, program of instruction, administration, or personnel of any educational institution, school, or school system, over any accrediting agency or association, or over the selection or content of library resources, textbooks, or other instructional materials by any educational institution or school system, except to the extent authorized by law.”

--> No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) (reauthorization of ESEA) Section 9529 “PROHIBITION ON FEDERALLY SPONSORED TESTING.(a) GENERAL PROHIBITION.-Notwithstanding any other provision of Federal law and except as provided in subsection (b), no funds provided under this Act to the Secretary or to the recipient of any award may be used to develop, pilot test, field test, implement, administer, or distribute any federally sponsored national test in reading, mathematics, or any other subject, unless specifically and explicitly authorized by law.” 

If it takes yet another congressional act to to force the USDoEd to adhere to the restrictions placed on it, then so be it. In the end it does not seem likely that DC will voluntarily back off. It will be up to the states and the local districts to stand up and assert the rights they already have, to say "We do not see the benefit to us in supplying you with all the reporting your program requires," "The seed money you want to dangle in front of us is pitiful compared to the lifetime cost of running this program.  Regardless of the benefits you claim the program will have, we will not establish and then accustom our taxpayers to a program we cannot afford to keep running." To the extent that Congress can cut off the funding of the people who would threaten to cut off the return of our money to us to keep us dancing their dance, we applaud the efforts of the House Education Committee. SSA will not completely stop that process. The department will still be doling out funds in the form of grants. SSA will only remove DoEd's ability to dictate the exact conditions to be met to receive the money. Beyond that, the solution lies in reclaiming our legal and rightful local control.

The National School Board Association and Bill Gates

We posted this morning on the puzzling legislation NSBA crafted pushing back against the Department of Education.  The NSBA wants to reclaim local control in school districts.  We couldn't figure out why the NSBA would push for more local control while supporting common core standards.

I tweeted the link and received a tweet in return from education researcher extraordinaire Susan Ohanian that many of you might find interesting:

It's been 3 1/2 years since NSBA got $755,603 from Gates. Maybe they're angling for more.

Maybe that explains the ambivalence?

NSBA Pushes Back Against Arne Duncan but Supports Common Core Standards?

National School Board Association issues press release:

Alexandria, Va. (Jan. 29, 2013) – More than 700 school board members and state school boards association leaders will be meeting with their members of Congress and urging them to co-sponsor legislation, developed by the National School Boards Association (NSBA), to protect local school district governance from unnecessary and counter-productive federal intrusion from the U.S. Department of Education.

...“We must ensure that the decisions made at the federal level will best support the needs and goals of local school systems and the communities they serve,” said Gentzel. “Local school boards must have the ability to make on-the-ground decisions that serve the best interests of our school districts.”

The NSBA is pushing back against Arne Duncan's policies mandating school district policies.   It has prepared draft legislation stopping the increasing Federal encroachment into local districts and states:

The proposed legislation would ensure that the Department of Education’s actions are consistent with the specific intent of federal law and are educationally, operationally, and financially supportable at the local level. This would also establish several procedural steps that the Department of Education would need to take prior to initiating regulations, rules, grant requirements, guidance documents, and other regulatory materials.

“In recent years, the U.S. Department of Education has engaged in a variety of activities to reshape the educational delivery system,” said Thomas J. Gentzel, NSBA’s Executive Director. “All too often these activities have impacted local school district policy and programs in ways that have been beyond the specific legislative intent. School board leaders are simply asking that local flexibility and decision-making not be eroded through regulatory actions.”

This press release sounds encouraging for those against CCSS.  I particularly like this on page 3:

Ensure that national policy in education is established by Congress
through specific legislation.

Congress wrote a blank check to the Obama administration for education reform but legislation for this reform was circumvented. This proposed legislation would ensure such massive federal programs like RTTT would not occur again without legislative approval and sounds promising.  But take a look at this NSBA powerpoint presentation, Getting Ready for the Common Core.  It is not a presentation on how to resist CCSS.  It doesn't urge districts to not implement the standards/assessments.  It is a presentation for districts on how to use CCSS and promote them in your school district and business community.  

I'm curious.  How can NSBA want less federal intrusion into local school district policy and programming and then support CCSS which mandate standards, assessments and ultimately the curricula necessary to use with these standards and assessments?  The two consortia are supported by Federal funding and contain federal mandates.  Should states/districts be able to choose what Federal intrusion is "good" and which should be resisted?  Or should the Federal Government be involved in a state's educational direction/delivery for any reason?

Diane Ravitch's readers had quite a lively discussion on her blog about the role of the Federal government in education and federalism.  Perhaps it's time for NSBA to rethink its support of these national standards that aren't really "state led".  Private corporations own the copyright to the standards and assessments that the "states" were allegedly crafting.  The school districts/states can't change them even if they prove destructive to student learning and achievement.

Shouldn't the NSBA be supporting the revocation of the CCSS since they have been proven to be the blueprint of private organizations using taxpayer money to create a managed workforce?  How can the NSBA support CCSS when it strips local districts of autonomous decision making abilities and governance?   We applaud NSBA for the proposed legislation but urge them to call for the rescinding of CCSS as well.
********************************


Susan Ohanian Tweets - "It's been 3 1/2 years since NSBA got $755,603 from Gates. Maybe they're angling for more."

NY School District Regains Local Control and "Opts Out" of the Food Line

The real fight is between federal control and schools reclaiming local control.

A school district says "no thanks" to Federal policy and gives up federal money for its school lunch program.  Life goes on, the food is better and the district has control over its own lunch menu. The district is actually a better steward of resources as students probably won't be throwing as much food away that was uneaten (but forced upon lunch trays) from the mandated Federal menu.  It took the district four months into the Federal program to decide it wasn't worth it financially or nutritionally.

Students stopped buying food because it was not tasty and the school was $59,000 in the red for this budget item. 

From The Huffington Post:

New York's Niskayuna Central School District is severing ties with the National School Lunch program, tossing out its adherence to federal regulations for more fruits and vegetables on lunch trays.

"You are going to be heroes among a lot of kids," Board member John Buhrmaster said, according to Spotlightnews.com. "The program you had before was better than the one dictated by the federal government and the kids understood that, and they will be very appreciative."

Read more here.

From Missouri, you can read here the rules on what children must take to eat via the Federal guidelines.  For example:

Under The Offer Versus Serve Provision for Lunch, LEAs must offer students at
least three menu items as described. Senior high school students must select at
least two menu items; one menu item must be the entree. When more than three
menu items are offered, students may refuse only two items. Again, the entree
must be selected. At the discretion of the LEA, students below the senior high
level may also participate in offer versus serve.

So the lesson learned....is?  Force food and rules upon students that they don't like and don't want, they will throw the food away and stop paying money for a product that is substandard.  There must be an economics/political science lesson or two in this example for the Niskayuna School teachers to use in their classroom. 

Those kids in Kansas are probably hoping their school district makes the same decision.  Remember the clever youtube video the kids produced, "We Are Hungry"?

Indiana Legislation Opposing Common Core Gets a Hearing

On Wednesday the Indiana Senate Education Committee heard testimony on SB 193, sponsored by Senator Scott Schneider, which calls for Indiana to withdraw from the Common Core Standards.

A crowd of close to 300 people showed up to the rally before the hearing to voice their strong support for this legislation. Among those speaking at the rally were former Secretary of Education Bill Evers and former TX State Superintendent Robert Scott, in addition to Heather Crossin and Erin Tuttle, the two moms who started digging in to Common Core when they noticed their children's math education had changed, and not for the better.

Tuttle recounted for the audience her frustrating search for someone accountable for how math was being taught in her child's school. This fuzzy math was confusing for both child and parent. It did not contain the standard algorithms most of us grew up with. More disconcerting than just the poor choice of teaching methods was the way responsibility for the math program was kicked down the road from teacher, to principle, to superintendent, to their state department of elementary education and finally to PARCC, the government funded assessment consortia that their state had signed on to with their No Child Left Behind Waiver application.  While Tuttle was able, with increasing difficulty, to get meetings with each successively higher office to find out why her child's school was using fuzzy math, she could not get a meeting with anyone at PARCC.

That's because PARCC is not accountable to the parents who ultimately have to deal with their children's experience with Common Core Standards. PARCC and SMARTER Balanced Consortia are private corporations, who are selling trademarked assessments to their forty five member states.  They are accountable to their governing states only in the aggregate. If any one state has an issue with the assessments they produce, neither consortia is obligated to do anything about it.  There are various rules for what form of majority is necessary for change to take place in each consortia, but that is not the point.  The point is that Indiana, and also Missouri are no longer in charge of their own state education standards. They must now negotiate them with a number of other states. If you as a parent or a school district want something different in your schools you cannot have it.

This is the core issue (if you'll pardon the pun) that we have with Common Core State Standards.  There is zero local control. Teachers may not deviate from or alter the standards in any way. They are trademarked. There is no path for correction, even for obvious mistakes like a simple math error that was identified early on in the draft phases, but was still not corrected three drafts later. There is no path identified for this because the roll out of these standards has been so fast there has been no time to consider everything that is needed for them to operate. That means that an error on the assessment will be repeated in 45 states and count against teachers in those states whose performance reviews now take into account how their students score on these assessments. 

Contrast that to the way MO DESE has handled our GLE's in the past. Yearly, teachers and districts were able to submit complaints or suggestions to DESE for ways to add clarity to our standards or identify errors that needed to be fixed. DESE had been reasonably responsive to this input and made most changes in a timely manner. That process will be completely gone by 2014 when Common Core is supposed to be fully implemented.

The one thing each district, and ultimately tax payer, will be accountable for is the cost of implementing the Common Core standards and assessments. No one really know what this cost is going to be for a number of reasons.  Missouri's DESE was not required to estimate this cost to each district, nor inform them that such costs were coming. If you ask your local shcool board or superintendent what their cost will be to implement Common Core, most of them will not know. More shocking will be the number of them who do not even know what Common Core is or that it is coming. 

Opponents of the legislation in Indiana said most implementation costs would be replacement cost for things already in each district's budget like professional development or materials. Proponents disagree, noting that teacher training will be far more extensive than traditionally done, possibly including out of town sessions in regional training centers. There is currently only one approved vendor for textbooks, Pearson. One teacher has looked into buying a replacement ELA book for the new CCSS in her fourth grade class and found the new book to be two and half times as expensive as the one she had been using for the last several years.  Districts will have little control over these costs, because they have virtually no control over the standards or assessments.

The assessments are an even larger portion of these costs as they are supposed to be done on line, which not only requires input devices like comptuers or tablets, but also sufficient broadband to accommodate all the students taking them at once. Once you add technology, you must also add a host of support staff to maintain and troubleshoot that technology, adding further cost to a district. In Missouri, we have no room in our state budget for these extra costs. That means local districts will have to find the money because the foundation formula is not going to give it to them.

Representative Kurt Bahr will be introducing legislation again this year to get Missouri out of Common Core. If Indiana's experience this week was any indication, he ought to find tremendous support for his bill here in Missouri, not only from public school families, but also from private school and homeschool families. Common Core is reaching in to all these education venues. As the realities of Common Core, which is being rolled out in various districts right now, come to light, our representatives in Jefferson City should start hearing a lot more from their constituents who want us out of this federally pushed national standards program.

Wading Into The Standards Weeds

This week Diane Ravitch took on David Coleman (drafter of the CCSS English Language Arts [ELA] standards and President of the College Board) over his explanation of the Common Core ELA standards. Advice to David Coleman: Revise the Common Core Standards At issue is some confusion and angst over the 70/30 requirement in the ELA standards which states that teachers use 70% literary text and 30% informational text when teaching. Does it mean out with The Great Gatsby and in with GM's manual on do-it-yourself oil changes?  There is great wailing and gnashing of teeth from some that this is "anti-intellectual, anti-literary, anti-the things of the mind that can’t be quantified." There are equally vociferous claims from the other side, e.g. Coleman, that informational texts would instead include things like the speeches of Lincoln and MLK and that a significant portion of them would be used in other classes like science and social studies. Many experts and pundits have weighed in with different conclusions. Welcome to the morass that is the Common Core Standards themselves.

Ravitch notes that state and district officials have no way of monitoring whether teachers are complying with any type of category split. Are we going to assign yet another administrative staffer to count the number of books in each category being used by each teacher to make sure there is compliance? Let's hope not. If we did, would that counting to be done by teacher or across an entire school, or district wide? Should teachers, principals, school boards be spending time deciding whether or not a written piece falls into one category or another? The literary category has been under debate for years. What constitutes quality literature? Do we really need to add, what is good informational text?

A few examples of the latter have been bandied about and debated about whether they would fit into this category. One is EPA guidelines which Coleman quickly, almost too quickly, dismissed. Stanley Kurtz of the National Review looked at what is actually given as examples in the Common Core documentation. One of the suggested texts is Executive Order 13423: Strengthening Federal Environmental, Energy, and Transportation Management.You must read Kurtz's piece to understand why this is not nearly as propagandistic as it appears on first blush. The important thing is that CC actually cited environmental regulation as an appropriate informational text.

Stepping further into the weeds, we uncovered a presentation given by EPA Region 3 (mid-Atlantic states) that says EPA's goal is an increased understanding of how their Environmental Education
"integrates with common core standards," (p. 2) and how EE can "support common core." (p. 3)  Does this not show an assumption on EPA's part that they will be producing materials for schools to use in Common Core?  They also see a role for themselves in providing Formal and Non Formal Educator Professional Development (p. 6). [Sidebar: EPA will also be concerning themselves about the greenness of our schools p. 7]

Of greater concern is the assertion  that EE will "integrate with emerging new science framework/ standards." If it will be so easy to integrate EPA's view of the environment into science standards, is there any doubt what those standards will look like? Put another way, which is more likely to change for the other - EPA to conform to peer reviewed scientific standards or classroom science standards to change to align with EPA's ideology?

The likes of Coleman, Duncan and Bennett can say that the specifics of what is actually used in the classroom are up to the individual teachers or districts. Technically this is true. But as Kurtz points out, in the real world many schools will simply adopt the recommended Common Core exemplars as the path of least resistance. The mere existence of a national set of standards, prepackaged and ready to go, is all that is needed for many schools to adopt them. Pushing them through RTTT just gave them a nudge under everyone's nose.

It is easy to get lost in the argument of whether the standards themselves are good or not.  Are they too easy, too rigorous, to heavily weighted this way or that, better or worse than what schools use now? Once set in place, with everyone used to where their marching orders come from they will be hard to dislodge. The crafters knew this. Whether we like or dislike them now is not the point. If they change in the future because, say, more federal departments are having a say in how they are written, we will have lost the right to change them locally. The focus must remain on where the locus of control for our schools resides.