States Receive a Reading List: New Standards for Education
New York Times June 2, 2010
[Fundless] Ohanian Comment: Note that the
teacher they rounded up to praise the Common Core Standards in English
and Math teaches neither subject. Also note that "call me Governor" Roy
Romer has a problem with subject-verb agreement, one of the Standards.
"Common standards ensure that every child across the country is
getting the best possible education, no matter where a child lives or
what their [sic] background is. The common standards will provide an
accessible roadmap for schools, teachers, parents and students, with
clear and realistic goals.
-- Gov. Roy Romer, Senior Advisor, The College Board
Press Release CoreStandards.org
June 2, 2010
A little history is important. Achieve was created in 1996 by the
nation's governors and corporate leaders (Lou Gerstner, CEO of IBM held
hands with Gov. Bill Clinton [vice-chair of the National Governors
Association] to get America 2000 passed, a forerunner of NCLB). The
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is a big funder pf Achieve.
Susan Pimentel, the lead writer on the Common Core English
standards, is a Standardisto's Standardisto. For starters, she is
English Language Arts Consultant at Achieve. She got her big start in
Standards setting with a grant in 1993 from the Walton Family
Foundation
Susan Pimentel has a law degree and has considerable history
consulting in district standards-setting, districts including Chicago.
Her state consulting includes Arizona, California, Georgia, Maryland,
and Pennsylvania.
Pimentel is co-author with Denis P. Doyle of Raising the Standard: An Eight Step Action Guide For Schools and Communities. This book was funded by The Walton Family Foundation to
lay out the process and content of standards-setting at the community
and state levels. The goal was to create a framework in which
communities, districts, schools and even states could participate in a
self-guided standards-setting process. [See StandardsWork.]
Know an organization by its links.
I've provided hot links to Standards Work bedfellows where I hope you
look at the board of directors. As you study this list, ask yourself
"Who's Missing?"
Triangle Coalition for Science and Technology Education
U.S. State Department of Education
In October 2007, Ms. Pimentel was appointed to the National
Assessment Governing Board (NAGB) that oversees the National Assessment
of Educational Progress (NAEP). She serves on the Assessment
Development Committee that approves the content of the NAEP frameworks
and NAEP assessment items.
Surely this is good positioning for the national test which will follow the Common Core.
Quoting directly from Ms Pimentel's bio: As senior policy
consultant to the America Diploma Project, Susan has provided research,
technical assistance and policy support to Achieve since the project's
inception. She also has served as a lead content developer, coach and
trainer in guiding two multistate adult education reform initiatives
under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Education to develop
standards-based education interventions.
Pimentel is listed as "collaborator" at Education First Consulting.
Current and recent clients include
Achieve Inc.
Advance Illinois
American Federation of Teachers Education Foundation - Innovation Fund
Battelle Memorial Institute
The Boeing Company
Boston Plan for Excellence
Chalkboard Project
The Cleveland Foundation
Complete College America
Deutsche Bank Americas Foundation
EdSource
Thomas B. Fordham Institute
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
The George Gund Foundation
William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
Iowa West Foundation
The Joyce Foundation
George Kaiser Family Foundation
Mass Insight Education and Research Institute
National Board for Professional Teaching Standards
Microsoft
Ohio College Access Network
Partnership for Learning
Seattle Public School
Stand for Children
Stone Foundation
Transition Mathematics Project
Washington Roundtable
Washington State Board of Education
Local press is positing the Common Core as a done deal. And something positive. Note that the New York Times piece below does not indicate that there is one shred of opposition to the Common Core.
Here is a very preliminary look at the Common Core. The bibliographies supporting the Common Core research base are a joke.
And remember: The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation gave the
National PTA $1 million in December 2009 to promote the Common Core.
They are starting a big push in Florida, Georgia, New Jersey, and North
Carolina.
We must fight back. Start reading the Common Core. Join Stop National Standards. Send me your findings: susano@gmavt.net
The nation's governors and state school chiefs released on
Wednesday a new set of academic standards, their final recommendations
for what students should master in English and math as they move from
the primary grades through high school graduation.
The standards, which took a year to write, have been tweaked and
refined in recent weeks in response to some of the 10,000 comments the
public sent in after a draft was released in March.
The standards were made public at a news conference on Wednesday in Atlanta.
Leah Lechleiter-Luke, a Spanish teacher from Mauston, Wis., who is
that state's 2010 teacher of the year, said at the conference that the
new standards were preferable to her home state's. "It's not that the
standards in Wisconsin are so bad, it's just that there are so many of
them," she said. These are more user-friendly."
The Obama administration hopes that states will quickly adopt the
new standards in place of the hodgepodge of current state benchmarks,
which vary so significantly that it is impossible to compare test
scores from different states. The United States is one of the few
developed countries that lacks national standards for its public
schools.
Students whose families move from New York to Georgia or
California, for example, often have difficulty adjusting to new schools
because classroom work is organized around different standards. The
problem has become worse, since many states have weakened standards in
recent years to make it easier for schools to avoid sanctions under the
federal No Child Left Behind law.
The new standards were written by English and math experts convened
last year by the National Governors Association and the Council of
Chief State School Officers. They are laid out in two documents: Common
Core State Standards for Mathematics, and Common Core State Standards
for English Language Arts and Literacy in History/Social Studies,
Science and Technical Subjects. With three appendices, the English
standards run to nearly 600 pages.
Under the new math standards, eighth graders would be expected to
use the Pythagorean theorem to find distances between points on the
coordinate plane and to analyze polygons. Under the English standards,
sixth-grade students would be expected to describe how a storys plot
unfolds in a series of episodes and how an author develops the
narrator's point of view.
"The standards define what all students are expected to know and be
able to do, not how teachers should teach," the introduction to the new
English standards says. "They do not -- indeed, cannot -- enumerate all
or even most of the content that students should learn. The standards
must therefore be complemented by a well-developed, content-rich
curriculum."
In keeping with those principles, the English standards do not
prescribe a reading list, but point to classic poems, plays, short
stories, novels and essays to demonstrate the advancing complexity of
texts that students should be able to master. On the list of exemplary
read-aloud books for second and third graders, for instance, is James
Thurber's "Thirteen Clocks." One play cited as appropriate for high
school students is "Oedipus Rex," by Sophocles.
Five English texts are required reading. High school juniors and
seniors must study the Declaration of Independence, the Preamble to the
Constitution, the Bill of Rights and Lincolns Second Inaugural
Address. Also, said Susan Pimentel, a consultant in New Hampshire who
was lead writer on the English standards, "Students have to read one
Shakespeare play -- that's a requirement."
In a joint letter, Joel I. Klein, the New York Schools chancellor,
and 54 other big-city superintendents who are members of the Council of
the Great City Schools urged adoption of the standards.
==============
The Dominant Corporate Vision of Education
More than any other
single work, The World Is Flat
articulates the dominant corporate vision of education today. The concepts,
language, and ideas Friedman presents can be heard in the media, in government
policy statements on education, in NGO statements about education, in
discourses circulating within established educational organizations, and in
dinner conversations with non-educators, who always seem to feel that since
they attended school or their kids have, their opinions about education are
informed. No better guidebook exists on these views about the current state of
education or about the neoliberal influence on the transformation of education.
. . Friedman warns the parents that today, more than at any other time in
history, people need to wake up and realize that they have to think of
themselves as individual competing against other individuals all over the
planet: and that [e]very young American today would be wise to think of
himself or herself as competing against every young Chinese, Indian, and
Brazilian. Here in a nutshell is both the source and the result of our obsession
with testing. . . .
The crisis then is the U. S. kids don't work hard enough, attend schools that don't push them, aren't as competitive as those "other" kids from around the globe, and need to buckle down. Where have we heard this before? And so, to prepare our students with all those twenty-first-century skills that educators warn will be needed in the global market place, we need standards. "Once a standard takes hold," Friedman claims, "people start to focus on the quality of what they are doing." (83) Once we have standards what should teachers do and what should students do? First of all, "[w]e should be embarking immediately on an all-hands-on-deck, no-hold-barred, no-budget-too-large crash program for science and engineering education." (359) Second, and here Friedman approvingly refers to Marc Tucker's Tough Choices or Tough Times, we should institute national, standardized exams. Third, teachers need to motivate their students. According to Friedman, teaching is all about motivation. . . .
[There's more. Read the book.] Peter M. Taubman, Teaching
by Numbers: Deconstructing the Discourse of Standards and Accountability in
Education (2009), p. 100-102
from EdWatch, Feb. 5, 2010
The absolute requirement of RTTT is that states must adopt national standards. Forty-eight of the fifty states, with Alaska and Texas being the only exceptions, have signed on to the Common Core Standards Initiative. This initiative is funded and promoted by the National Governors' Association (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO). They are developing common core standards in math and English that are 'internationally benchmarked.'
Although touted as "state-led" and "voluntary," all of these severely cash-strapped states (41 as of the January 19th deadline) that hope to receive RTTT funds MUST adopt these standards (national curriculum). Part of the competitive application process requires states to show the largest number of school districts agreeing to take on these national/international standards. That is not voluntary. Rather, depending on one's point of view, it is either bribery or economic and ideological blackmail.
It is also important to note that these same two ostensibly state government-associated groups (NGA and CCSSO) developing RTTT also produced America 2000 under the Bush 41 administration that morphed into Goals 2000 in 1994 under President Clinton. Goals 2000 and that year's reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act combined for the first time to require that states and school districts comply with federal standards listed in Goals 2000 in order to receive federal education dollars.
Quotable
--Pres. Bill Clinton, State of the Union, Jan. 25, 1994: Our Goals 2000 proposal will
empower individual school districts to experiment with ideas like chartering their schools to be
run by private corporations or having more public school choice, to do
whatever they wish to do as long as we measure every school by one high
standard: Are our children learning what they need to know to compete and
win in the global economy?
Goals 2000 links world-class standards to grassroots
reforms and I hope Congress will pass it without delay. Our school to work
initiative will for the first time link school to the world of work . . . --Pres. Bill Clinton, State of the Union, Jan. 23, 1996: Every diploma ought to mean something. I challenge every
community, every school and every state to adopt national standards
of excellence; to measure whether schools are meeting those standards; to
cut bureaucratic red tape so that schools and teachers have more
flexibility for grass-roots reform; and to hold them accountable for results. That's
what our Goals 2000 initiative is all about. --Pres. Bill Clinton, State of the Union, Feb. 4, 1997: Tonight I issue a challenge to the nation. Every state should adopt
high national standards, and by 1999, every state should test every 4th
grader in reading and every 8th grader in math to make sure these
standards are met.
Raising standards will not be easy, and some of our children
will not be able to meet them at first. The point is not to put our
children down, but to lift them up. Good tests will show us who needs
help, what changes in teaching to make, and which schools need to
improve. They can help us end social promotion, for no child should
move from grade school to junior high or junior high to high school
until he or she is ready.
With our support, nearly every state has set
higher academic standards for public schools and a voluntary national
test is being developed to measure the progress of our students. With
over $1 billion in discounts available this year, we are well on our
way to our goal of connecting every classroom and library to the
Internet.
--Pres. Bill Clinton, State of the Union, Jan. 27, 2000: [A]ll successful schools have followed the same proven formula: higher
standards, more accountability, and extra help so children who need it
can get it to reach those standards. I have sent Congress a reform plan
based on that formula. It holds states and school districts accountable
for progress, and rewards them for results. Each year, our national
government invests more than $15 billion in our schools. It is time to
support what works and stop supporting what doesn't. (Applause.)
-------------------------------------
The Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) and the National
Governors Association Center for Best Practices (NGA Center) have
initiated a state-led process of developing and adopting a common core
of state standards.
As
part of this process, they have convened a National Policy Forum
composed of signatory national organizations (e.g., the Alliance for
Excellent Education, Business Roundtable, National School Boards
Association, Council of Great City Schools, Hunt Institute, National
Association of State Boards of Education, National Education
Association, and others) to share ideas, gather input, and inform the
common core state standards initiative.
What will make this process different from other efforts to create common standards?
Both the timing of this initiative as well as the process give it a
high probability for success. There is a growing belief among state
leaders, education leaders, and business leaders that differences in
state standards, in an era of increasing student mobility and global
competition, no longer make sense.
This
process is different since it is a state-led, vs a federal effort, and
has the support of several major national organizations, including
CCSSO, the NGA Center, the Alliance for Excellent Education, the
National Education Association, the Hunt Institute, and the Business
Roundtable, and involves participation of leading standards developers
from Achieve, ACT, and the College Board. [Emphasis added]
States have
been the leaders of standards-based reform efforts. The proposed
adoption process respects and takes into consideration unique state
contexts and encourages states to adopt the common core state standards.
Are these national standards?
No. [sic] This initiative is driven by collective state action and states
will voluntarily adopt the standards based on the timelines and context
in their state.
[And based on the buckets of money Secretary of Education Duncan is passing out to states that toe the line.]
