Common Core and Career Readiness?, Common Core Is Not An Education Development Model, It Is A Workforce Development Model.

My colleague Jane Robbins during Family Research Council’s Common Core webcast last night said Common Core is not an education development model, it is a workforce development model.

Which is very true.  You see all of the buzzwords associated with workforce development.  Making kids college-and-career ready,” preparing kids to be competitive in “a 21st century global economy”, help reduce the skills gap that we are seeing… yada yada…

It is no coincidence that we see a lot of corporate buy-in on Common Core from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, etc. as they have swallowed the Kool Aid that is the promise of Common Core.  It runs hand-in-hand with the workforce development model that has been pushed for years.

What is behind this push?  This article from The Fiscal Times was emailed to me.  It cites a paperby Peter Cappelli who is a professor at the Wharton School’s Center for Human Resources.  He makes an interesting observation reported by The Fiscal Times.

He suggests that what is really driving the discussion about worker skills is a combination of employers seeking to hold down payroll costs by keeping wages as low as possible – and a longer-term effort to transfer responsibility for training workers from employers themselves to the taxpayer.

“The evidence driving the complaints about skills does not necessarily appear where labor market experts might expect to see it, such as in rising wages,” Cappelli writes. “Instead, it comes directly from employers – typically from surveys – who report difficulties hiring the kind of workers they need. The assertions explaining their reported difficulties center on the idea that the academic achievement of high school [graduates] is inadequate or that there are not enough college graduates in practical fields like computer science and engineering. The recommendations from these reports include increased immigration and use of foreign workers as well as efforts to shape the majors that college students choose.”

The article continues…

More telling, though, is that Cappelli, who is also the author of the book Why Good People Can’t Find Jobs, notes a disinclination among employers to train existing workers; he says they look instead to hire individuals who already possess a specific skill set. In many cases, he finds, the business community is pushing the public sector to provide the sort of training that workers used to receive through apprentice programs, professional development programs and other on-the-job training.

“The view that emerges from these arguments is one where responsibility for developing the skills that employers want is transferred from the employer onto job seekers and schools,” he writes. “Such a transfer of responsibility would be profound in its implications.”

While increased training programs could reduce businesses’ costs, Cappelli notes, the end result is likely to be a less efficient system in which key job-related skills are necessarily left out.

Common Core has been found wanting in preparing students for college.  It’s unlikely it will be successful preparing students for the workplace either.  And, according to Cappelli, we can thank this shift on corporations who want to shift their job training costs to taxpayers.

HOW COMMON CORE CAN DESTROY CHARTER SCHOOLS

As the epic struggle against Common Core rages on in school districts, towns, and states across the nation, a deeper, more insidious threat rests beneath the surface of national education standards that threatens to reverse decades of progress made by thousands of American charter schools.

Countless articles, testimonies, and videos now exist detailing the absurdity of various aspects of the Common Core national standards. In states that have made the mistake of taking federal dollars in exchange for adopting the standards, students will now be forced to navigate through a labyrinth of bewildering and illogical instructions in order to solve simple problems instead of the tried-and-true teaching practices that have worked for generations. This probably explains why getting “the right answer” in math no longer matters according to Common Core proponents.

Current Focus of the Debate

For many, the debate focuses on one of two issues. Either the need to eliminate Common Core comes from a utilitarian desire to have more effective teaching practices in place or because many view Common Core as a violation against the rights of parents, local school boards, and states to properly set educational standards as close to home as possible.

With either motivation, it’s not difficult to imagine why Common Core has become such a large target. The program is simply a disaster, and virtually the whole world already knows it.

Hidden deep within the debate, however, an even greater battle is being waged for the hearts and minds of America’s education system — a battle that could shape the future of the United States for generations to come.

The Real Battle

Common Core seeks to establish a national set of standards for what children ought to learn and how teachers should convey the material. In nearly every case where standards, of any sort, are nationalized, a select group of individuals end up creating unbending practices that reflect the ideology of a small, elitist band of academics who envision the whole of the nation operating in whatever manner the group sees fit.

Authors Joseph L. Bast and Herbert J. Walberg, Ph.D., explain in their upcoming book,Rewards: How to use rewards to help children learn – and why teachers don’t use them well,that one of the goals of the architects of Common Core is to eliminate free-market principles and the concept of rewards from education.

Bast and Walberg point out that the popular modern education theories promoted by America’s most influential education “experts” state, as Alfie Kohn did in a 1995 interview in Educational Leadership, that rewards in education are “manipulating,” “counterproductive,” and akin to “control through seduction.”

For academics like Kohn, students shouldn’t be bribed with pizza parties, gold stars, high letter grades, or, God forbid, money. Students can only be motivated by an altruistic internal desire for success. These principles do not apply to students alone. Teachers, principals, and whole school districts should also be exclusively motivated by a sincere desire to teach and learn.

As Bast and Walberg conclusively prove in Rewards, however, providing external motivation is an extremely successful strategy for producing positive educational outcomes. A plethora of studies show that students who are rewarded with cash, grades, awards, and a variety of other motivational tools perform better than they otherwise would, and teachers and administrators who are rewarded based on performance are also far more likely to improve and adapt than teachers who don’t.

Common Core Aims to Eliminate Competition and Rewards

Essential to an effective rewards strategy is the ability to adapt to continuously changing circumstances, a skill Common Core actively discourages.

Common Core proponents want every school in America, including charter and voucher-funded schools, to adopt the same general educational guidelines, a position that, by its very nature, aims to make all schools, and by extension students, as similar to one another as possible. This philosophy directly undermines the very purpose of charter schools, which is to be unique, revolutionary, and free from government restraint.

If your local successful charter school becomes a curriculum clone of the local failing public school, the list of reasons for a parent to send his or her child to the charter school becomes much shorter.

The Slippery Slope

Even more dangerous, however, is what Common Core could become in the future; today’s standards are not an indication of the standards to come. If liberty-minded Americans have learned anything from the current presidential administration, it’s that government programs are never what the first seem, and Common Core is likely to be no different in this regard.

Because so many academics, including many of those who support Common Core, also reject the strategy of providing students, teachers, and school systems with rewards, it won’t be long before a prerequisite for receiving federal education dollars will be eliminating letter grades and other rewards from classrooms. After all, we can’t have “winners” and “losers,” can we?

Some may think it’s a rather large leap to make, but history has proven that rewards have been steadily disappearing from public schools for quite some time now. When my parents were attending school in the 1960s, it was laughable to think children should receive trophies for coming in last place. Today, participation trophies are the norm.

Thanks to the tireless efforts of education reformers, charter and voucher-funded schools are revolutionizing American education. But, if Common Core becomes a reality, the differences between charter schools and their ugly bureaucratic-nightmare cousins (public schools) will surely be reduced until none remain.

http://humanevents.com/2014/09/09/how-common-core-can-destroy-charter-schools/

STOTSKY: BILL GATES' DECEPTIVE DRIVE TO CONTINUE COMMON CORE WILL WEAKEN PUBLIC SCHOOLS

The Gates Foundation has been very busy trying to figure out ways for governors, state boards, and commissioners of education to pretend they are giving up Common Core’s standards or tests, while ensuring these states still have warmed-over versions in place to satisfy Bill Gates’ ambitions.

We now have many examples of states that have gone through the motions to placate the still-growing army of parents, teachers, state legislators, and other citizens demanding a stronger, not weaker, public school system. But, instead of developing stronger alternative standards in place of Common Core’s misbegotten standards, some elected and appointed officials have deliberately played a trick on all of them by keeping Common Core’s tentacles in place while they use less toxic labels to describe the octopus strangling the education system. 

Why so many seemingly rational people want to believe that Common Core’s standards and the tests based on them are worth keeping is a subject for an in-depth psychological study. Why have so many, including reporters and others in the media, been so willingly fooled by a few Professor Harold Hills when they all must know they are harming the economic future of all children in our public schools, including the minority children they profess to care about the most?  

By now, five years after the release of Common Core’s final version of its mathematics and English language arts standards, it is quite clear to those who can read English that these standards cannot make our students ready for authentic college-level work -- and that they were not intended to. It should be clear by now that they were intended to get underperforming students into college (and then out with a diploma) in order to close the education “gaps” between students who are willing to spend some of their time paying attention to academic schoolwork and students who are not. 

Instead of letting young adolescents enroll in a course of studies they prefer in secondary school, Bill Gates, with the eager help of all the organizations he has funded to promote his image as an education saint, prefers to make our teachers accountable for young adolescents’ unwillingness to pay attention to what he thinks is good for them. The irony is that even he doesn’t think his own children should be enrolled in a Common Core-based curriculum.    

His scheme for doing an end-run around state legislators, parents, and local school boards was bought hook, line, and sinker by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce as well as by most state commissioners and boards of education -- and many governors. Didn’t they wonder why the Gates Foundation still refuses to fund discussions of the actual quality of the standards? And the meaning of college readiness? 

The “gaps” will be closed under Common Core, not by teaching all students more but by making sure that the most able students learn less at the high school level so that the Gates-funded and self-appointed policy wonks at Achieve, Inc. and the Fordham Institute can boast of equal (but equally low) expectations for all of them.

The latest problem for the Gates Foundation is the current implosion of Common Core even faster than it was hoodwinked into place in 2010 by unwitting state boards and commissioners of education. What should the new party line be: That states really don’t want demanding standards? That their teachers are afraid of more demanding standards? That those “white suburban” parents want only A’s for their brilliant offspring?

The issue for parents, of course, is that they won’t accept a system rigged to assess their progeny in a way that discredits discipline-based knowledge.

It’s tough to come up with a new party line that will keep Common Core in place. But maybe the latest ploy being pushed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce will do the trick: put out “loss leaders” from an inventory of Common Core-aligned lessons and get teachers to buy 50%-off “bargains” before school starts.  

Sandra Stotsky, Ed.D. is Professor Emerita, University of Arkansas.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/09/07/Stotsky-Gates-Deceptive-Drive-to-Continue-Common-Core-Will-Weaken-Public-Schools

Don Hirsch Hailed As A Founder of Common Core Standards, Says 'It's Not Going To Work'?

Proponents of the Common Core standards are hailing educational theorist E.D. “Don” Hirsch as a founding father of the education initiative and one who laid the intellectual groundwork for the controversial reform.

The problem is that Hirsch himself says, “I hate to be godfather of something that is not going to work.”











Peg Tyre, writing at Politico Magazine, presents a retrospective of the 86 year-old retired English professor who, ironically, is being praised by the developers and supporters of the Common Core as an inspiration for the standards, just as support for the initiative is plummeting across the nation and has abruptly grown into a “radioactive” political issue.




In 1987, Hirsch published Cultural Literacy, a book that recommended all public school students should receive instruction that includes literature, geography, history, math, science, art, and music, in order to have background knowledge in a variety of areas that would allow them to become successful learners and readers.




Hirsch’s book ultimately became famous for “The List,” – a 63-page index of 5,000 essential concepts that he believed should be taught in schools.




Though Hirsch told Tyre, “I’m practically a socialist,” she observes conservatives took hold of his message:

Immediately prominent conservatives such as Education Secretary William Bennett embraced the author as an antidote to what they saw as the multi-culti fad sweeping American schools. Cultural Literacy was compared to – and frequently reviewed with – The Closing of the American Mind, an attack on higher education by the late conservative darling Allan Bloom, which was published around the same time. “That was just bad luck,” Hirsch says. “Allan Bloom really was an elitist.”

The left, much to Hirsch’s chagrin, cast his work as a “manifesto for what one called ‘a new cultural offensive’ aimed at writing the common man out of history.” Liberal education elitists said Hirsch was a traditionalist who would “replace higher-order thinking in the classroom” with a set of irrelevant facts.




Hirsch told Tyre he was especially irked to find himself described by a Harvard education professor as “a neoconservative caricature of contemporary American education.”




Tyre, however, now believes the left has decided to give Hirsch another look, by using what Common Core supporters claim are his ideas for “a set of grade-specific guidelines developed by the National Governor’s Association in 2009 known as the Common Core State Standards.”




“Hirsch didn’t write the Common Core, but the guidelines match the expectations set forth in the rigorous public school curricula Hirsch developed with his Core Knowledge Foundation,” she writes, “and he is credited with laying the intellectual groundwork.”




“He showed the fundamental importance that knowledge plays to develop the foundations of literacy,” said David Coleman, considered to be the “architect” of the Common Core, and who refers to Hirsch’s research as “absolutely foundational.”


Similarly, Common Core supporter and former New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein said, “The foundational concepts of the Common Core are things Don Hirsch has been advocating for decades. I think we owe him a huge debt of gratitude for the key role he has played in this movement.”




“Hirsch’s ideas have not only survived the test of time, but people are coming back to his ideas from all sides of the political spectrum,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers.




Hirsch, however, seems reluctant to have his name associated with the Common Core standards.




“I wish the designers had recommended a curriculum – mine, sure, but others too,” he said. “Absent that, the [Common Core] leaves the door open for schools to do what they’ve always done.”




And what “they’ve always done,” he says, is forget about content knowledge that helps students to learn critical thinking skills.


“Don Hirsch has been a proponent of substantive knowledge-based curriculum for many decades,” Ze’ev Wurman, a visiting scholar at the Hoover Institution and a former senior policy adviser with the U.S. Department of Education, told Breitbart News.



The author of “Common Core English and Math Standards Not Properly Validated,” published by Pioneer Institute, Wurman said that Hirsch served as a commissioner on the California Academic Content Standards Commission that evaluated Common Core’s suitability for adoption in that state in 2010.



“I personally agree with him that content knowledge is critical to both successful functioning within a society, as well as successful functioning within any serious discipline,” Wurman added, and takes issue with the developers and proponents of Common Core using Hirsch to prop up standards that are anything but rigorous and content-rich.


Wurman continued:

I find harnessing Hirsch to prop the Common Core rather sickening. Hirsch argues the importance of content-rich curriculum, yet anyone with eyes in his head can quickly convince himself that Common Core is anything but. It has no recommended list of cultural works. It's English Language Arts (ELA) Appendix B suggests --but doesn’t even insist on -- a strange mix of reading material from short snippets of Kipling or Twain, through soft porn by Toni Morrison, to not-so-cultural EPA's "Recommended Levels of Insulation" and the Federal Reserve's newsletter. Whatever else, it is not a basis for shared cultural literacy of any kind. As Sandra Stotsky often points out, the Common Core ELA standards are promoting a set of context-less skills rather than a path for developing shared cultural literacy. Similarly in math, Common Core focuses on pedagogy while offering a diluted content for students.

“Peg Tyre uses Don Hirsch's name in vain,” Wurman asserts. “And, indeed, after singing glorious songs to Hirsch and the importance of content throughout the piece, Hirsch himself admits he will be ‘the godfather of something that is not going to work.’”




“Hirsch says the Common Core developers will ‘forget the content that students are supposed to think critically about,’” Wurman concludes. “Which is precisely what Common Core proponents already do.”


http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/09/07/Don-Hirsch-Hailed-As-A-Founder-of-Common-Core-Standards-Says-It-s-Not-Going-To-Work

Common Core Math Will Reduce Enrollment in High-Level High School Courses

Study Finds Common Core Math Standards Will Reduce Enrollment in High-Level High School Math Courses, Dumb Down College STEM Curriculum

Lower standards, alignment of SAT to Common Core likely to hurt low-income students the most

BOSTON – Common Core math standards (CCMS) end after just a partial Algebra II course.  This weak Algebra II course will result in fewer high school students able to study higher-level math and science courses and an increase in credit-bearing college courses that are at the level of seventh and eighth grade material in high-achieving countries, according to a new study published by Pioneer Institute.

Study Finds Common Core Math Standards Will Reduce Enrollment in High-Level High School Math Courses, Dumb Down College STEM Curriculum

Lower standards, alignment of SAT to Common Core likely to hurt low-income students the most

BOSTON – Common Core math standards (CCMS) end after just a partial Algebra II course.  This weak Algebra II course will result in fewer high school students able to study higher-level math and science courses and an increase in credit-bearing college courses that are at the level of seventh and eighth grade material in high-achieving countries, according to a new study published by Pioneer Institute.

Study Finds Common Core Math Standards Will Reduce Enrollment in High-Level High School Math Courses, Dumb Down College Stem Curriculum

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The framers of Common Core claimed the standards would be anchored to higher education requirements, then back-mapped through upper and lower grades.  But Richard P. Phelps and R. James Milgram, authors of “The Revenge of K-12: How Common Core and the New SAT Lower College Standards in the U.S.,” find that higher education was scarcely involved with creating the standards.
“The only higher education involvement was from institutions that agreed to place any students who pass Common Core-based tests in high school into credit-bearing college courses,” said Phelps.  “The guarantee came in return for states’ hoped-for receipt of federal ‘Race to the Top’ grant funding.” “Many students will fail those courses – until they’re watered down,” he added.


Perhaps the greatest harm to higher education will come from the College Board’s decision to align its SAT tests with Common Core.  The SAT has historically been an aptitude test – one designed to predict college success.  But the new test would become an achievement test – a retrospective assessment designed to measure mastery of high school material.  Many high-achieving countries administer a retrospective test for high school graduation and a predictive college entrance examination.


The new test will also be less useful to college admissions officers, since information gained from the retrospective test will duplicate data they already have, such as grade point average and class rank.  David Coleman, the lead author of Common Core’s English language arts standards, is now president of the College Board and announced the decision to align the SAT tests with Common Core when he became president.
The change in the nature of the SAT will be most harmful to low-income students.  An achievement test is far less useful as a vehicle for identifying students with high science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) potential who attended high schools with poor math and science instruction.  Retrospective tests are also more susceptible to coaching, which provides another advantage to students from families who can afford test preparation courses.


Low-income students will also be hurt the most by the shift to weaker math standards.  Since the Common Core math standards only end at a partial Algebra II course, nothing higher than Algebra II will be tested by federally funded assessments that are currently under development.  High schools in low-income areas will be under the greatest fiscal pressure to eliminate under-subscribed electives like trigonometry, pre-calculus, and calculus.


Research has shown that the highest-level math course taken in high school is the single best predictor of college success.  Only 39 percent of the members of the class of 1992 who entered college having taken no farther than Algebra II earned a college degree.  The authors estimate that the number will shrink to 31-33 percent for the class of 2012.


Two of the authors of the Common Core math standards, Jason Zimba and William McCallum, have publicly acknowledged the standards’ weakness.  At a public meeting in Massachusetts in 2010, Zimba said the CCMS is “not for STEM” and “not for selective colleges.”


Indeed, among students intending to major in STEM fields, just 2 percent of those whose first college math course is pre-calculus or lower ever graduate with a STEM degree. Proponents claim the Common Core standards are internationally benchmarked, but compulsory standards for the lower secondary grades in China are more advanced than any CCMS material.


The highest-achieving countries have standards for different pathways based on curricular preferences, goals and levels of achievement,  and each pathway has its own exit examination.“A one-size-fits-all academic achievement target must of necessity be low,” Milgram said.  “Otherwise politically unacceptable numbers of students will fail.”


Richard P. Phelps is editor or author of four books—Correcting Fallacies about Educational and Psychological Testing (APA, 2008/2009);Standardized Testing Primer (Peter Lang, 2007); Defending Standardized Testing (Psychology Press, 2005); and Kill the Messenger (Transaction, 2003, 2005)—and founder of the Nonpartisan Education Review (http://nonpartisaneducation.org).


R. James Milgram is professor of mathematics emeritus, Stanford University. He was a member of Common Core’s Validation Committee 2009–2010. Aside from writing and editing a large number of graduate level books on research level mathematics, he has also served on the NASA Advisory Board – the only mathematician to have ever served on this board, and has held a number of the most prestigious professorships in the world, including the Gauss Professorship in Germany.
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Pioneer Institute is an independent, non-partisan, privately funded research organization that seeks to improve the quality of life in Massachusetts through civic discourse and intellectually rigorous, data-driven public policy solutions based on free market principles, individual liberty and responsibility, and the ideal of effective, limited and accountable government.

http://pioneerinstitute.org/featured/common-core-math-will-reduce-enrollment-in-high-level-high-school-courses/

Common Core is doing its bit to destroy the constitutional system that James Madison designed

STANFORD, Calif. – Editor’s note: This essay has been adapted from the testimony of Williamson M. Evers before the Rules & Reference Committee of the Ohio House of Representatives, August 19, 2014.



The question I would like to address is: Do the Common Core national curriculum-content standards undermine “competitive federalism,” which is a feature of our Madisonian system of federalism?


First, I want to discuss federalism under our Constitution as designed by James Madison. What is federalism? U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in a recent case that the allocation of powers as set forth in the Constitution sets legal “boundaries” between the federal government and the states and provides a way for each of them to maintain their “integrity.” But, just as importantly, having a system of federalism “secures to citizens the liberties that derive from the diffusion of sovereign power.”


Thus, there is vertical federalism between the states and the federal government, and there is horizontal federalism among, for example, water districts, countries, cities, school districts, and among states.


We can see that the debate about federalism continues in America. In another case, the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on ObamaCare, the court said that the federal government cannot use the threat of cutting off federal spending to coerce states into expanding Medicaid. (This decision may or may not apply to Common Core, but it shows the continuing importance of federalism.)


Now, I want to turn to the closely related matter of competitive federalism. Competitive federalism is horizontal competition among jurisdictions. We know that it works in education at the inter-district level. Economist Caroline Hoxby studied metropolitan areas with many school districts (like Boston) vs. metropolitan areas contained within one large district (like Miami or Los Angeles). She found that student performance is better in areas with competing multiple districts, where parents at the same income level can move—at the margin—from one locality to another nearby, in search of a better education for their children.


We have seen competitive federalism work in education at the inter-state level. Back in the 1950s, Mississippi and North Carolina were at the same low level. Over the years, North Carolina tried a number of educational experiments and moved well ahead of Mississippi. We have likewise seen Massachusetts move up over the years from mediocre to stellar (though under Common Core, Massachusetts is sinking back again).


We know that national standards are not needed for success in international comparisons. Back in the 1970s, the United States and Canada were both in the middling, mediocre ranks internationally. Both countries are rather similar in culture and level of commercial and industrial development. The United States has continued to wallow in mediocrity, even as we centralize K-12 education. Yet Canada (which has more competitive federalism in education than the United States and has no Ministry of Education in its central government) has climbed into the ranks of advanced nations in academic performance.


Why is this important? Because one of the pillars of the case for national curriculum-content standards is that they are necessary for individuals to succeed in a global marketplace and that all top-performing countries have them. The case of Canada refutes that.


Let’s turn to the background of the Common Core. Content standards, tests, and curriculum that had been provided by the states—thus far—will now because of Common Core be provided by federally-endorsed national curriculum-content standards, federally-funded tests, and curriculum (some of it federally funded) based on those tests and curriculum-content standards.


The Common Core national standards had their origins in several Washington, D.C.-centric lobbying and policy-advocacy groups—namely, the National Governors Association (NGA), the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), and Achieve Inc. Shortly after the Obama administration came to power, it adopted and endorsed the national standards. It used competitive grants to coerce states into adopting Common Core. It paid for Common Core national tests and intervened in the test-creation process. It created a panel to oversee and monitor the national tests. It granted states waivers from the burdens of No Child Left Behind (NCLB)—conditional on continued adherence to Common Core or a federally-approved alternative.


Central to the thinking (and rhetoric) of the advocates of Common Core on education reform was the idea that state performance standards were already on a downward slide and that, without nationalization, standards would inexorably continue on a “race to the bottom.” The name given to the Obama administration’s signature school reform effort, the Race to the Top program (RttT), reflects this belief. The idea is that to prevent states from following their supposed natural dynamic of a race to the bottom, the federal government needs to step in and lead a race to the top.


I would disagree. While providers of public education certainly face the temptation to do what might look like taking the easy way out by letting academic standards slip, there is also countervailing pressure in the direction of higher standards (especially, as long as there are competing standards in other states).
If policymakers and education officials let content stand
ards slip, low standards will damage the state’s reputation for having a trained workforce. Such a drop in standards will even damage the policymakers’ own reputations.


In 2007, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute looked empirically at state performance standards over time in a study called The Proficiency Illusion. The study showed that while states had a variety of performance standards (as would be expected in a federal system), the supposed “race to the bottom” was not happening. The proponents of the Common Core wrong in their claims that state performance standards were inevitably and everywhere on a downward slide.


Why is this important? Because the other case for national curriculum-content standards is that without nationalization there will be a race to bottom and that only national standards can reverse a supposedly already-existing “race to the bottom.” But the facts refute this. This topples the other principal argument for national standards.
To finance its Race to the Top program, the U.S. Department of Education took discretionary stimulus money that could be used as conditional grants, and then turned a portion of that money into a competitive grant program. It used the grants to encourage states to adopt the national standards. Policy analyst Michael Petrilli aptly called inducements to adopt the standards “the carrot that feels like a stick.” The department also paid for national consortia to develop national tests aligned with the national curriculum–content standards.


The administration created another inducement in the form of No Child Left Behind waivers. In return for adopting the national standards or a federally approved alternative, states could escape NCLB sanctions for not making timely gains in student achievement. U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan went beyond what the law allows, by substituting the Obama administration’s favored education reforms (including national curriculum-content standards and tests) for NCLB’s accountability measures. I would add that the new accountability systems under the waivers can all too easily hide deficiencies in the performance of children in previously closely watched sub-groups and may weaken incentives to improve performance of those children.


To some extent, federal officials have commandeered state curriculum-content standards and tests and substituted national standards and tests; to some extent, some state officials embraced the national standards-and-testing cartel as a relief from political pressure within their state and a relief from competitive pressure from other states. In any case, national standards and tests will change curriculum content, homogenize what is taught, and profoundly alter the structure of American K-12 public education.
Nationalizing standards and tests would, according to this analysis, eliminate them as differentiated school-reform instruments that could be used by states in competition over educational attainment among the states. Sonny Perdue, governor of Georgia at the time Common Core was created, did not like it when the low-performing students of his state were compared with students in other states that had different standards from Georgia’s. He became the lead governor in bringing the NGA into the national standards effort.


So, Yes, Common Core does undermine “competitive federalism.” Indeed, in part, it was designed to do so.


Federalism is not only distinction from and rivalry between the federal government and the states; it is also rivalry among the states and among local governments within the states. As economist Richard McKenzie writes, the Founders sought to disperse power “among many different and competing governments—at the federal, state, and local levels.”
The insight of competitive federalism is that fifty-one state school boards are better than a single federal Executive-branch office. Fifteen-thousand local school boards are better than either fifty-one state school boards or a single federal office. As political scientist Thomas Dye puts it, “intergovernmental competition” was seen by the Founders as an “auxiliary precaution” against the “monopoly abuse of power by a single centralized government.”


Competitive federalism encourages innovation, allows movement between jurisdictions that enhances liberty, and permits a better match between policies and voter preferences. Common Core’s national uniformity runs counter to competitive federalism.


Let’s turn to Alexis de Tocqueville, the most famous observer of American society in our history and see what he can tell us about national education standards. Tocqueville is famous for his portrait of nineteenth-century America and his philosophic insights on why the American society has flourished—and also where it might go wrong. It is worth reminding ourselves what some of Tocqueville’s insights were. Once we do, we can consider the current nationalization of K-12 public-school curriculum, with Tocqueville’s insights in mind.


One of Tocqueville’s major insights was that Americans have benefited from popular participation in the large number of churches, charities, clubs, and voluntary associations in our country, as well as in state and local governments, which stand between the individual and the national government in Washington, D.C.
In essence, Tocqueville believed that the civic health of America depended on popular participation in entities like associations to create and maintain religious, private, or charter schools, as well as in local authorities like school districts with fully-empowered schools boards. Such activity fosters civic virtue and “habits of the heart” and encourages everyday citizens to take on necessary social tasks that in pre-modern society lowly subjects were not allowed to undertake, but were instead the duty of the aristocracy.


When Tocqueville described nineteenth-century American society he spoke, for example, of township school committees that were deeply rooted in their local communities. In those days, state control of local public education took the form of an annual report sent by the township committee to the state capital. There was no national control.


Large sums (much of it taxed from laborers and farmers) were spent by these school committees, and their efforts reflected, Tocqueville thought, a widespread American desire to provide basic schooling as a route to opportunity and advancement. He admired the fact that in self-activating America, one might easily chance upon farmers, who had not waited for official permission from above, but were putting aside their plows “to deliberate upon the project of a public school.”


At the same time, Tocqueville observed in European countries that activities like schooling that had formerly been part of the work of guilds, churches, municipalities, and the like were being taken over by the national government of those countries.
Tocqueville feared that if either Americans neglected their participation in associations or local governments or Europeans lost their intermediate entities to the national governments, the tendency would be toward a loss of a liberty and a surrender to a soft despotism.


In Democracy in America, Tocqueville described how in Europe “the prerogatives of the central power” were increasing every day and making the individual “weaker, more subordinate, and more precarious.”Once, he said, there had been “secondary powers” that represented local interests and administered local matters. Local judiciaries, local privileges, the freedoms of towns, provincial autonomy, local charities—all were gone or going. The national central government, he wrote, “no longer puts up with an intermediary between it and the citizens.”


Tocqueville said that, in Europe, education, like charity, “has become a national affair.” The national government receives or even takes “the child from the arms of his mother” and turns the child over to “the agents” of the national government.
In nineteenth-century Europe, the national governments already were infusing sentiments in the young and supplying their ideas. “Uniformity reigns” in education, Tocqueville said. Intellectual diversity was disappearing. He feared that both Europe and America were moving toward “centralization” and “despotism.
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Tocqueville believed that in non-aristocratic societies (like America), there is strong potential for the national government to become immense and influential, standing above the citizens, not just as a mighty and coercive power, but also as a guardian and tutor. Tocqueville maintained that religion (as a moral anchor) as well as involvement in local government (such as school districts) and voluntary organizations could help America counter the tendency toward tyranny.


Joseph Califano, President Jimmy Carter’s Health, Education and Welfare Secretary, articulated Tocqueville-style concerns about a centralization of schooling: “Any set of test questions that the federal government prescribed should surely be suspect as a first step toward a national curriculum. … [Carried to its full extent,] national control of curriculum is a form of national control of ideas.”


Unless Common Core is stopped, its officials will dismantle what remains of state and local decision-making on classroom lessons and replace it with a new system of national tests and a national curriculum. This policy is Tocqueville’s nightmare: As in Europe, education “has become a national affair” and Common Core is the vehicle for imposing in America a one-size-fits-all centralization like that administered by the National Ministry of Education in France.


Federalism, including horizontal inter-jurisdictional competition, allows policies better matched to needs and preferences of voters. It allows individuals and families to “vote with their feet”—to move to jurisdictions that they like, where the authorities don’t act counter to their liberties and preferences.


Competitive federalism allows experimentation by alternative jurisdictions. One state can try one policy, while another state tries something else. This is why it is called the “laboratory of democracy.”


This feature of federalism is what brought Massachusetts, Indiana, California and several other states to have the outstanding curriculum-content standards that they had before the Common Core. This is the feature of federalism that facilitates an exit strategy from Common Core: It allows states that are leaving Common Core to repeal and replace the national curriculum-content standards with outstanding pre-Common Core state standards. This can be done on an interim basis, while those states design their own replacement standards for the long run. Then the rivalry that takes place under competitive federalism will go back to work to the benefit of teachers, students, and everyone who wants a well-educated citizenry—and also everyone who wants to have the freedoms that are protected by the U.S. Constitution’s Madisonian system of federalism.


This article was originally published under the title “Against Common Core,” in the Hoover Institution’s online publication “Defining Ideas.”

Common Core Standards: Ten Colossal Errors

A recent book described the "Reign of Errors" we have lived through in the name of education reform. I am afraid that the Common Core continues many of these errors, and makes some new ones as well.


The Business Roundtable announced last month that its #1 priority is the full adoption and implementation of the Common Core standards. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is likewise making a full-court press to advance the Common Core. Major corporations have taken out full-page ads to insist that the Common Core must be adopted. Many leading figures in the Republican party, like Jeb Bush, have led the charge for Common Core, as have entrepreneurs like Joel Klein. And the project has become a centerpiece for President Obama's Department of Education.


Yet in New York, the first large state to implement the tests associated with the new standards, students, parents and principals are expressing grave concerns about the realities of the Common Core. Common Core proponents like Arne Duncan have been quick to ridicule critics as misinformed ideologues or delusional


paranoiacs.  Defenders of the common standards, like Duncan and Commissioner John King in New York, insist that only members of the Tea Party oppose the Common Core. In spite of this, the opposition is growing, and as more states begin to follow New York's lead, resistance is sure to grow.


With this essay, I want to draw together the central concerns I have about the project. I am not reflexively against any and all standards. Appropriate standards, tied to subject matter, allow flexibility to educators. Teachers ought to be able to tailor their instruction to the needs of their students. Loose standards allow educators to work together, to share strategies and curriculum, and to build common assessments for authentic learning. Such standards are necessary and valuable; they set goals and aspirations and create a common framework so that students do not encounter the same materials in different grades. They are not punitive, nor are they tethered to expectations that yield failure for anyone unable to meet them.


The Common Core website has a section devoted to debunking "myths"  about the Common Core—but many of these supposed myths are quite true.  I invite anyone to provide factual evidence that disproves any of the information that follows. (And for the sake of transparency, I ask anyone who disputes this evidence to disclose any payments they or their organization has received for promoting or implementing the Common Core.)


Here are ten major errors being made by the Common Core project, and why I believe it will do more harm than good.


Error #1: The process by which the Common Core standards were developed and adopted was undemocratic.  
At the state level in the past, the process to develop standards has been a public one, led by committees of educators and content experts, who shared their drafts, invited reviews by teachers, and encouraged teachers to try out the new standards with real children in real classrooms, considered the feedback, made alterations where necessary, and held public hearings before final adoption.


The Common Core had a very different origin. When I first learned of the process to write new national standards underway in 2009, it was a challenge to figure out who was doing the writing.  I eventually learned that a "confidential" process was under way, involving 27 people on two Work Groups, including a significant number from the testing industry. Here are the affiliations of those 27: ACT (6), the College Board (6), Achieve Inc. (8), Student Achievement Partners (2), America's Choice (2). Only three participants were outside of these five organizations. ONLY ONE classroom teacher WAS involved—on the committee to review the math standards.


This committee was expanded the next year, and additional educators were added to the process. But the process to write the standards remained secret, with few opportunities for input from parents, students and educators. No experts in language acquisition or special education were involved, and no effort was made to see how the standards worked in practice, or whether they were realistic and attainable.
David Coleman is credited publicly as being the "architect" of the process.


 He, presumably, had a large role in writing the English Language Arts standards; Jason Zimba of Bennington College was the lead author for the math standards.


 Interestingly, David Coleman and Jason Zimba were also members of Michelle Rhee's StudentsFirst original board of directors.


The organizations leading the creation of the Common Core invited public comments on them. We were told that 10,000 comments were submitted, but they were never made public. The summary of public feedback  quotes only 24 of the responses, so we are left only with the Common Core sponsors' interpretation of the rest.


The process for adopting the Common Core was remarkably speedy and expedient.  Once the standards were finalized and copyrighted, all that was required for states to adopt them were two signatures: the governor and the state superintendent of education. Two individuals made this decision in state after state, largely without public hearings or input. Robert Scott, former state Commissioner of Education in Texas, said that he was asked to approve the standards before there was even a final draft.


The Common Core process could not have been directly paid for by the federal Department of Education, which is prevented by law from enacting or promoting national standards. So Bill Gates footed the bill. The Gates Foundation has, so far, paid $191 million to develop and promote the Common Core. Of that sum, $33 million was earmarked for the development of the Common Core. The remaining $158 million was spent on myriad organizations to buy their active support for the standards—with $19 million awarded just in the past month. Many of the voices in the public arena, including teacher unions, the national PTA, journalistic operations like John Merrow's Learning Matters, and the National Catholic Educational Association, have received grants for such work.


Although specifically prohibited from interfering in the curriculum or instruction in the nation's classrooms, the federal Department of Education has used threats and bribes to coerce states to adopt Common Core. Indeed, the active role of the U.S. Department of Education in supporting, advocating for, and defending the Common Core may be illegal,  as may the Department's award of $350 million to develop tests for the Common Core. The Department might reasonably argue that it was appropriate to encourage the development of "better" tests, but in this case the tests were specifically intended to support only one set of standards: the Common Core.
Public Law 103-33, General Education Provisions Act, sec 432, reads as follows:

No provision of any applicable program shall be construed to authorize any department, agency, officer, or employee of the United States to exercise any direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum, program of instruction, [or] administration...of any educational institution...or over the selection of library resources, textbooks, or other printed or published instructional materials...

In spite of this prohibition, Race to the Top gave major points to states that adopted "college and career ready standards" such as Common Core.
Here is what the Memorandum of Understanding that state officers were asked to sign said about federal support:

...the federal government can provide key financial support for this effort in developing a common core of state standards and in moving toward common assessments, such as through the Race to the Top Fund authorized in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Further, the federal government can incentivize this effort through a range of tiered incentives, such as providing states with greater flexibility in the use of existing federal funds, supporting a revised state accountability structure, and offering financial support for states to effectively implement the standards.

When the Department of Education announced Race to the Top there was a complex application process with a short timeline. The Gates Foundation created a process where their staff would assist states in applying for RttT grants. In order to receive this help, state leaders had to fill out a qualifying questionnaire. The first question on the qualifying criteria questionnaire is, "Has your state signed the MOA regarding the Common Core Standards currently being developed by NGA/CCSSO? [Answer must be "yes"]"


Thus, the Gates Foundation worked within the Race to the Top process to apply additional pressure on states to sign on to the Common Core.


Coming at a time when state education budgets were under great pressure, these inducements were significant in overcoming any hesitations on the part of most governors. The pressure continues, as NCLB waivers depend on the adoption of "college and career ready standards," which are most readily provided by the Common Core.


It is also worth noting that alongside the adoption of Common Core standards, both Race to the Top and NCLB waivers being issued by the Department of Education require states to include test scores in the evaluations of teachers and principals. This is a package deal.


Error #2: The Common Core State Standards violate what we know about how children develop and grow.


One of the problems with the blinkered development process described above is that no experts on early childhood were included in the drafting or internal review of the Common Core.


In response to the Common Core, more than 500 experts signed the Joint Statement of Early Childhood Health and Education Professionals on the Common Core Standards Initiative. This statement now seems prophetic in light of what is happening in classrooms. The key concerns they raised were:


1.            Such standards will lead to long hours of instruction in literacy and math.


2.            They will lead to inappropriate standardized testing


3.            Didactic instruction and testing will crowd out other important areas of learning.


4.            There is little evidence that such standards for young children lead to later success.


Many states are now developing standards and tests for children in kindergarten, 1st grade, and 2nd grade, to "prepare" them for the Common Core. Early childhood education experts agree that this is developmentally inappropriate. Young children do not need to be subjected to standardized tests. Just recently, the parents of a k-2 school refused to allow their children to be tested. They were right to do so.


Error #3: The Common Core is inspired by a vision of market-driven innovation enabled by standardization of curriculum, tests, and ultimately, our children themselves.  


There are two goals here that are intertwined. The first is to create a system where learning outcomes are measurable, and students and their teachers can be efficiently compared and ranked on a statewide and national basis. The second is to use standardization to create a national market for curriculum and tests. The two go together, because the collection of data allows the market to function by providing measurable outcomes. Bill Gates has not spoken too much recently about the Common Core, but in 2009, he was very clear about the project's goals.
He said that

...identifying common standards is just the starting point. We'll only know if this effort has succeeded when the curriculum and tests are aligned to these standards. Secretary Arne Duncan recently announced that $350 million of the stimulus package will be used to create just these kinds of tests - "Next Generation assessments," aligned to the Common Core. When the tests are aligned to the common standards, the curriculum will line up as well. And it will unleash a powerful market of people providing services for better teaching. For the first time, there will be a large, uniform base of customers looking at using products that can help every kid learn, and every teacher get better.

 This sentiment was shared by the U.S. Department of Education, as was made clear when Arne Duncan's Chief of Staff, Joanne Weiss, wrote this in 2011:

The development of common standards and shared assessments radically alters the market for innovation in curriculum development, professional development, and formative assessments. Previously, these markets operated on a state-by-state basis, and often on a district-by-district basis. But the adoption of common standards and shared assessments means that education entrepreneurs will enjoy national markets where the best products can be taken to scale.

In the market-driven system enabled by the Common Core, the "best products" will be those which yield the highest test scores. As Gates said: "The standards will tell the teachers what their students are supposed to learn, and the data will tell them whether they're learning it."


Thus, the overriding goal of the Common Core and the associated tests seems to be to create a national marketplace for products. As an educator, I find this objectionable. The central idea is that innovation and creative change in education will only come from entrepreneurs selling technologically based "learning systems." In my 24 years in high poverty schools in Oakland, the most inspiring and effective innovations were generated by teachers collaborating with one another, motivated not by the desire to get wealthy, but by their dedication to their students. 


Error #4: The Common Core creates a rigid set of performance expectations for every grade level, and results in tightly controlled instructional timelines and curriculum.
At the heart of the Common Core is standardization.  Every student, without exception, is expected to reach the same benchmarks at every grade level. Early childhood educators know better than this. Children develop at different rates, and we do far more harm than good when we begin labeling them "behind" at an early age.


The Common Core also emphasizes measurement of every aspect of learning, leading to absurdities such as the ranking of the "complexity" of novels according to an arcane index called the Lexile score. This number is derived from an algorithm that looks at sentence length and vocabulary. Publishers submit works of literature to be scored, and we discover that Mr. Popper's Penguins is more "rigorous" than Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath. Cue the Thomas B. Fordham Institute to moan that teachers are not assigning books of sufficient difficulty, as the Common Core mandates.


This sort of ranking ignores the real complexities within literature, and is emblematic of the reductionist thinking at work when everything must be turned into a number. To be fair, the Common Core English Language Arts standards suggest that qualitative indicators of complexity be used along with quantitative ones. However in these systems, the quantitative measures often seem to trump the qualitative.
Carol Burris recently shared a 1st grade Pearson math test that is aligned to the Common Core standards for that grade level.

Would (or should) a 6 year old understand the question, "Which is a related subtraction sentence?"  My nephew's wife, who teaches Calculus, was stumped by that one. 

Keep in mind that many New York State first graders are still 5 years old at the beginning of October, when this test was given.

You can review the first grade module for yourself, and imagine any five or six year olds you might know grappling with this.
 The most alarming thing is the explanation Burris offers for how these standards were defined:

If you read Commissioner John King's Powerpoint slide 18, which can be found here, you see that the Common Core standards were "backmapped" from a description of 12^th grade college-ready skills.  There is no evidence that early childhood experts were consulted to ensure that the standards were appropriate for young learners.  Every parent knows that their kids do not develop according to a "back map"--young children develop through a complex interaction of biology and experience that is unique to the child and which cannot be rushed.

Error #5: The Common Core was designed to be implemented through an expanding regime of high-stakes tests, which will consume an unhealthy amount of time and money. 
It is theoretically possible to separate the Common Core standards from an intensified testing regime, and leaders in California are attempting to do just that. However, as Bill Gates' remarks in 2009 indicate, the project was conceived as a vehicle to expand and rationalize tests on a national basis. The expansion is in the form of ever-more frequent benchmark and "formative" tests, as well as exams in previously untested subjects.


Most estimates of cost focus only on the tests themselves.  The Smarter Balanced Common Core tests require the use of relatively new computers. Existing computers are often inadequate and cannot handle the "computer adaptive tests," or the new Common Core aligned curriculum packages. This was one of the reasons given to justify the expenditure of $1 billion of construction bonds on iPads and associated Pearson Common Core aligned curriculum software in Los Angeles. The Pioneer Institute pegs the cost of full implementation of the Common Core at $16 billion nationally - but if others follow the Los Angeles model those costs could go much higher.


The cost in terms of instructional time is even greater, so long as tests remain central to our accountability systems. Common Core comes with a greatly expanded set of tests. In New York City, a typical 5th grade student this year will spend 500 minutes (ten fifty-minute class periods) taking baseline and benchmark tests, plus another 540 minutes on the Common Core tests in the spring. Students at many schools will have to spend an additional 200 minutes on NYC Performance Assessments, being used to evaluate their teachers. Students who are English learners take a four-part ESL test on top of all of the above.


Thus testing under the Common Core in New York will consume at least two weeks worth of instructional time out of the school year. And time not spent taking tests will be dominated by preparing for tests, since everyone's evaluation is based on them.


Error #6: Proficiency rates on the new Common Core tests have been dramatically lower—by design.


Given that we have attached all sorts of consequences to these tests, this could have disastrous consequences for students and teachers. Only 31 percent of students who took Common Core aligned tests in New York last spring were rated proficient.  On the English Language Arts test, about 16 percent of African American students were proficient, five percent of students with disabilities, and 3% of English Learners. Last week, the state of North Carolina announced a similar drop in proficiency rates.  Thus we have a system that, in the name of "rigor," will deepen  the achievement gaps, and condemn more students and schools as failures.


Because of the "rigor," many students—as many as 30 percent—will not get a high school diploma. What will our society do with the large numbers of students who were unable to meet the Common Core Standards? Will we have a generation of hoboes and unemployables? Many of these young people might find trades and jobs that suit them, but they may never be interviewed due to their lack of a diploma. This repeats and expands on the error made with high school exit exams, which have been found to significantly increase levels of incarceration  among the students who do not pass them—while offering no real educational benefits.


It should be noted that the number of students (or schools) that we label as failures is not some scientifically determined quantity. The number is a result of where the all-important "cut score" is placed. If you want more to pass, you can lower that cut score, as was done in Florida in 2012.  The process to determine cut scores in New York was likewise highly political, and officials knew before the tests were even given the outcome they wanted.


Error #7: Common Core relies on a narrow conception of the purpose of K-12 education as "career and college readiness."
When one reads the official rationales for the Common Core there is little question about the utilitarian philosophy at work. Our children must be prepared to "compete in the global economy." This runs against the grain of the historic purpose of public education, which was to prepare citizens for our democracy, with the knowledge and skills to live fruitful lives and improve our society.


A group of 130 Catholic scholars recently sent a letter expressing their opposition to the Common Core.  They wrote,

The sad facts about Common Core are most visible in its reduction in the study of classic, narrative fiction in favor of "informational texts." This is a dramatic change. It is contrary to tradition and academic studies on reading and human formation. Proponents of Common Core do not disguise their intention to transform "literacy" into a "critical" skill set, at the expense of sustained and heartfelt encounters with great works of literature.

Error #8: The Common Core is associated with an attempt to collect more student and teacher data than ever before.
Parents are rightfully alarmed about the massive collection of their children's private data, made possible by the US department of education's decision in 2011 to loosen the regulations of FERPA , so that student data could be collected by third parties without parental consent.


There are legitimate privacy concerns, for both students and teachers, as data, once collected, can be used for all sorts of purposes. The vision that every student's performance could be tracked from preschool through their working lives may be appealing to a technocrat like Bill Gates, but it is a bit frightening to many parents.
This is one aspect of the project that is already in big trouble. The Gates Foundation invested about $100 million to create inBloom, a nonprofit organization that would build a system to store the massive amount of student data their reform project requires. However, as parent concerns over privacy have grown, seven of the nine states that had signed up to  use the system have withdrawn. Only Illinois and New York remain involved, and in New York this week a lawsuit was filed to block the project.


Error #9: The Common Core is not based on any external evidence, has no research to support it, has never been tested, and worst of all, has no mechanism for correction.


The Memorandum of Understanding signed by state leaders to opt in to the Common Core allows the states to change a scant 15 percent of the standards they use. There is no process available to revise the standards. They must be adopted as written. As William Mathis (2012) points out,
"As the absence or presence of rigorous or national standards says nothing about equity, educational quality, or the provision of adequate educational services, there is no reason to expect CCSS or any other standards initiative to be an effective educational reform by itself."


Error #10: The biggest problem of American education and American society is the growing number of children living in poverty.  As was recently documented by the Southern Education Fund (and reported in the Washington Post) across the American South and West, a majority of our children are now living in poverty.
The Common Core does nothing to address this problem. In fact, it is diverting scarce resources and time into more tests, more technology for the purpose of testing, and into ever more test preparation.


In conclusion: Common standards, if crafted in a democratic process and carefully reviewed by teachers and tested in real classrooms, might well be a good idea. But the Common Core does not meet any of those conditions.


The Common Core has been presented as a paradigmatic shift beyond the test-and-punish policies of NCLB. However, we are seeing the mechanisms for testing, ranking, rewarding and punishing simply refined, and made even more consequential for students, teachers and schools. If we use the critical thinking the Common Core claims to promote, we see this is old wine in a new bottle, and it turned to vinegar long ago.
For all these reasons, I believe any implementation of the Common Core should be halted. The very corporations that are outsourcing good jobs are promoting the Common Core, which deflects attention from their failure to the nation's economy and their failure as good citizens. I do not believe the standards themselves are significantly better than those of most states, and thus they do not offer any real advantages. The process by which they were adopted was undemocratic, and lacking in meaningful input from expert educators. The early results we see from states that are on the leading edge provide evidence of significant damage this project is causing to students already. No Child Left Behind has failed, and we need a genuine shift in our educational paradigm, not the fake-out provided by Common Core.


The frustration evident in recent public hearings in New York is a powerful indicator of a process gone badly awry. The public was not consulted in any meaningful way on decisions to fundamentally alter the substance of teaching and learning in the vast majority of schools in our nation. This process and the content of these standards are deeply flawed, and the means by which student performance is measured continues to damage children.


This did not happen by accident. Powerful people have decided that because they have the money and influence to make things happen, they can do so. But in a democracy, the people ought to have the last word. Decisions such as this ought not be made at secret gatherings of billionaires and their employees. The education of the next generations of Americans is something we all have a stake in.
And so, fellow citizens: Speak Up, Opt Out, Teach On!