COMMON CORE HISTORY REVIEW

I wrote this and gave this as part of a series of anti COMMON CORE talks back in 2012/13.

A 16 year-old 8th grader I met 2 years ago was on the verge of being tossed out of middle school even though he was one of the brightest kids there. When I asked him why he was failing, he said… “Why should I be doing the same “frckn” thing since I was in 3rd grade? They took his passion, his curiosity, and his humanity, and replaced them with boredom.

– “Another kid who could comprehend the whole Harry Potter series before she was 11, now reads 2 novels a week, yet thinks she “sucks at English” because she is more nuanced in her thinking than the questions on tests allow. She learned to hate reading.”

WHY IS THIS? a little history..

“COMMONIZING attempts TO MAKE the U.S. MORE COMPETITIVE actually started with the use of Frederick Taylor’s Scientific Management in PUBLIC, not private schools during the industrializing economy of the early 20th century. (Think of the straight rows and total obedience model…)

However, outside of a few small attempts it wasn’t until the publication of “A Nation at Risk” in 1983 that Commonality sped up by spurring the creation of GERM (Global Economic Reform Movement) whose corporate and national leaders decided that the best way to create a global economy was to globalize and homogenize public education.

The nation refusing to join? #1 rated Finland, which, by the way, turned it’s very poor education system around in the early 1990s by emulating the kind of teaching we did here in the 60’s and 70’s.

In 2001, George Bush, with the help of Rep. John Boehner and Senator Ted Kennedy, brought us No Child Left Behind. A reauthorization of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act, NCLB supported standards-based education reform on the premise that setting high standards and establishing measurable goals can improve individual outcomes in education. How noble!

In offering more federal school funding, NCLB expanded the federal role in public education through annual testing, annual academic progress, report cards, teacher qualifications, and funding changes. All states were given the impossible goal of achieving 100% proficiency in ELA and Math by 2014. The net result was a huge standardized testing craze that was subsequently used to rate students, teachers, and schools. In 2009, also with bipartisan support, The Obama administration launched RTTT, a $4.35 billion United States DOE contest created to “spur innovation and reforms in state and local district K-12 education”.

As part of this, the creation of the Common Core was spearheaded by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers: D.C.-based associations funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and others. They, in turn, hired ACHIEVE INC. and lead writer David Coleman (now head of ETS).   Coleman, who was turned down in NYC for a teaching job credentials were that he worked for McKinsey Consulting, McGraw Hill, and Michelle Rhee’s Students First. Also lead writers: his partner, Susan Pimentel, Jason Zimba (a professor of Physics and math), Phil Daro (a Senior Fellow at America’s Choice owned by Pearson), and William McCallum, who was “born in Australia and came to the United States to pursue a Ph. D. in mathematics at Harvard University, a professor at the University of Arizona, working in number theory and mathematics education.” NOT ONE THEM WAS A K-12 TEACHER!

Forty-five states and the District have since adopted the Core because in addition to the $4.3 billion Race to the Top competition (BRIBE), The Education Department tempted states with waivers from No Child Left Behind whose 100% proficiency in ELA and math by 2014 was an impossible goal to begin with. What organization’s personnel are 100% proficient? Certainly not Congress!

The problem was and is that The RTTT carrot is poisoned with common standards, newer tests and is, actually, NCLB 2.0…as Diane Ravitch said recently… ON STEROIDS!

All of these were part of a plan that told adopting states that they had to:

1.adopt international benchmarked standards and assessments that prepare students for success in college and the workplace. (But according to whom?…measures are untested unreliable and invalid.)

2.Build instructional data systems that measure student success and inform teachers and principals on how they can improve their instruction (but not to the kids tested because the grades come back in the summer and without an item analysis to help teachers figure out exactly what needed to be worked on.)

3. Turn around the lowest performing schools based on these tests…(which led to controlled content, test prep, and cheating)

4. Lifting caps on Charter Schools. (and profit)

These led to further state mandates where NY led the way:

Most notorious is the Annual Professional Performance Review (APPR) based on predominantly flawed data from flawed tests.

A real Example: A teacher of the year inherited a gifted class whose collective score was 3.2 out of 4.0. For her to be graded as a competent teacher her class the following year had to average 3.7. However, when it came their turn to take their test, her new gifted students only averaged 3.5…so even though the scores improved .2 to 3.5 out of 4…she was declared incompetent.

In some districts, if she was a highly paid veteran teacher without union due process protection, that would be enough to fire her and replace her with a low skill, low wage, 1st year teacher…. bound to quit after 2-5 years. Hiring these newbies “justifies” buying more “fool proof” Common Core materials that are prescribed and scripted.

IMAGINE: Your heart surgeon is operating on you and must follow the book or lose his job. While you are on the table, he discovers an unforeseen problem that, because of his experience and practical wisdom, calls for a spontaneous change of plan, yet he can’t. You die on the table.

Common Core and its associated prescribed modules are creating the intellectual deaths of our teachers and the children we put in their care.

Another problem is that for every federal dollar received from this bribe, districts are spending countless more to pay for implementation. For example, in Rockland county NY, 6 districts report that projected a 4 year cost of implementing RRRT will be @$11Million. What will they receive from the Feds? $400k! In 18 lower Hudson valley districts, the aggregate cost just to get ready for RTTT in 2012 was @$6.5Million while the aggregate federal revenue was $520K.

Four years later where are we?

I READ THE NEWS TODAY, OH BOY

 March 22, 2016

After waving goodbye to his first graders at Malcolm X Academy, public school teacher Anthony Arinwine slings his backpack over his shoulder, gets into his Nissan Altima and becomes an Uber driver.

‘It’s something I never thought I’d have to do,” Arinwine said. “I have a college degree and a paycheck. I thought it would be enough.’

Arinwine teaches in San Francisco but lives in slightly more affordable Oakland, where his $1,700 monthly rent eats more than half his monthly paycheck. Four hours of Uber driving after the 8-hour school day helps bridge the gap.

Arinwine is one of many teachers struggling to live on a public service salary in the Bay Area, where housing costs rank highest in the nation. Many teachers share Arinwine’s frustrations. Bay Area schools have experienced high turnover rates amid an ongoing teacher shortage. The supply of new teachers is at a 12-year-low in California, according a recent study by the Learning Policy Institute, an education research group.”

 The situation irks Arinwine, who admits holding down two jobs is sometimes so exhausting that he had to remind himself why he became a teacher: “I wanted to work in a community and be a model for kids and show them you can do this if you put your mind and effort into it.”

“Emilee Hanson said she loved teaching math at a San Francisco middle school, but her living conditions eventually drove her out. She settled in a suburb near Sacramento, three hours from the disheartening housing prices of San Francisco that forced to into a shared two-bedroom apartment where she slept in the living room.

“I didn’t have doors,” she said. “If someone wanted to cook, it was in my bedroom since the kitchen and living room was all one room. If my roommates came home late, it would wake me up.” Hanson gave up at end of the 2015 school year, after four years of living room life.

‘I asked myself, why am I struggling this hard?’

She now pays $1,000 in mortgage for her house – nearly the same amount as her San Francisco rent.

USA TODAY

There is no reason this condition should still exist 100 years after the founding of the American Federation of Teachers, almost 60 years since the beginning of collective bargaining for public employees, ironically in Wisconsin, and 55 years after the founding of the UFT, the largest teachers local in the nation.

When I started teaching in 1970, it was common for teachers to have two jobs, even if one was a summer job. Many of my new colleagues drove cabs, did part time accounting, or tutored simply to be able to afford to live.

Today, in San Francisco the starting salary is @$47k for someone with a Bachelors degree and only slightly more with a Masters. After 28 years with additional masters and other credits the top salary becomes $91K. In NYC the starting salary is @$45K for someone with a Bachelors degree and @$51K for a masters. Over a period of 22 years and the accumulation of at least 30 credits over a master’s degree, the top salary in NYC is $100,049.

Nationally, it is even worse. For first year teachers the median is @$37K. For teachers with 20 or more years it is an abominable @$57K.

We hear talk of the need for recruiting the best and brightest to teach. How exactly does that work when the techies in the Bay area with a BS degree or a finance major in the NYC area can walk in with a 6 figure starting salary and after 22 -28 of work in their field can become one of the Masters of the Universe at Google or Goldman Sachs?

For example at Goldman, the average first year salary is @ $60K and with less than 5 years experience is @$72K. Nine years of experience for someone who has not made it to partner or other positions that add other revenues to salary is @$93K. All of these positions also provide highly sought after healthcare and pension plans along with huge annual bonuses, apparently even if the economy tanks as a result of your involvement. Oh, if you include executives regardless of years employed the average pay for a Goldman employee in 2011 was about $366,000.

In 1970, when I started teaching, the average salary in 2007-8 dollars was $48,343. Forty-five years later that number has hardly budged. In 2009 it was $53,168. For an Investment Banker in NYC that salary, including bonuses, profit sharing, and commission, can reach @$200K+.

Is it any wonder that in today’s materialistic world so many young bright, ambitious men and women who formerly might have considered teaching now “vomit in their mouth” when someone suggests it to them?

According to the HERI-UCLA Survey of freshmen, in 1966 developing a meaningful philosophy of life was essential or very important to @85% of freshmen surveyed while being well off financially was essential or very important to @42 of freshmen surveyed. In the 2015 report 81.9% said being well off financially was essential or very important while 46.5 % said developing a meaningful philosophy of life.

In the 1960s many of the best and brightest though teaching was a way of developing a meaningful philosophy of life. Now that occurs but not that often. Today we often see it in Teach For America corps members who want to show some altruism, but then run off to high paying jobs after their two-year altruistic philosophic lifestyle experience.

Isn’t it simply common sense in our capitalist society to offer our young men and women salaries and benefits that compete with these other fields that do not produce anything but profit?

This is the value of the teacher, who looks at a face and says there’s something behind that and I want to reach that person, I want to influence that person, I want to encourage that person, I want to enrich, I want to call out that person who is behind that face, behind that color, behind that language, behind that tradition, behind that culture. I believe you can do it. I know what was done for me”.

—Maya Angelou

BEWARE AMERICA:

The Authoritarian Personality Type:

To have an authoritarian personality doesn’t just mean to be the one who dictates.

In 1950, Harper and Row published a book that had all the earmarks of a blockbuster in the field of psychology. The Authoritarian Personality was an attempt by a group of researchers to explain the conditions that allowed Naziism to gain a foothold in Europe.

The researchers, led by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, used various psychological scales to attempt to explain racism and the atmosphere that led to the slaughter of six million Jews and   others in psychological terms.

According to Theodor Adorno’s theory, the elements of the Authoritarian personality type are:

• Blind allegiance to conventional beliefs about right and wrong

• Respect for submission to acknowledged authority

• Belief in aggression toward those who do not subscribe to conventional thinking, or who are different

• A negative view of people in general – i.e. the belief that people would all lie, cheat or steal if given the opportunity

• A need for strong leadership which displays uncompromising power

• A belief in simple answers and polemics – i.e. The media controls us all or The source of all our problems is the loss of morals these days.

• Resistance to creative, dangerous ideas. A black and white worldview.

• A preoccupation with violence and sex

• A tendency to project one’s own feelings of inadequacy, rage and fear onto a scapegoated group

https://www.psychologistworld.com/influence_personality/authoritarian_personality.php

TAKE BACK OUR LANGUAGE

I am a teacher, so I will speak as one. For 38 years I taught Social Studies and coached football in the Bronx, Greenburgh, and Scarsdale NY. Since retirement, I have worked with high schools to create and run experiential learning programs for their seniors, mentored new teachers, authored DOING THE RIGHT THING: A TEACHER SPEAKS, and have been actively working to support Public Schools any way I can.

Marshall McLuhan tells us that the medium IS the message and that every medium influences how any message is perceived. McLuhan wrote the following during the era of film, TV, Radio, and Print way before social media was a dream…. or nightmare ….depending on who uses it better.

“The world is now like a continually sounding tribal drum where everybody gets the message all of the time.”

“A princess gets married in England and boom, boom, boom go the drums. We all hear about it. An earthquake in North Africa, a Hollywood star gets drunk—away go the drums again.” 

While we try to persuade the public differently, the drums constantly pound, much to our chagrin, as reformers have stolen our language of education and successfully use OUR vocabulary for THEIR own purposes.

For example:

REFORM: Customarily, when Local educators and communities make changes in local education in order to improve student learning.

Reform Usage: Lobbyists support National or State Education policy to theoretically save American Education… but in reality these policies provides for profits for a few. BOOM!

REVITALIZING SCHOOLS:  Customarily, when schools and their communities make improvements to their schools as they see fit to benefit their students

Reform Usage: Districts close public schools and reopen them as profitable charters. BOOM!

 ASSESSMENTS AND TESTS: Customarily, teachers use “authentic assessments” to evaluate whether students know, understand, can do, and communicate what they learned while teachers provide immediate feedback with means to improve work.

Reform Usage: Administrators collect non authentic standardized test data and use it to evaluate teachers, close public schools, then open charters for profit. BOOM!

 STANDARDS: Customarily a level of quality or attainment in what students are expected to know and be able to do at specific stages of their K-12 education…often accompanied by educator written, flexible syllabi, and sample, not mandated, lessons.

Reform Usage: Flawed COMMON CORE curricula and prescribed lessons not written by teachers is forced on school districts to supplement standardized testing evaluations. BOOM!

COLLEGE AND CAREER READY: Customarily, when students have acquired the various hard and soft skills, and traits, not merely content knowledge, to be able to adjust to and succeed at life after High School

Reform Usage: As in NYS: Students must graduate with at least scores of 75 and 80 on HS Regents English and Algebra Exams PLUS scores on grades 3-8 tests that are the equivalent to an SAT score of 1630, 80 points higher than the College Board’s own college readiness score. Any School that cannot produce enough of these students is a failing school and must be closed and replaced by a profitable charter. BOOM!

COMMON: Customarily relating to a community.

Reform Usage: “Common” public schools characterized by a “lack of privilege or special status” in need of reform that must be closed and replaced by charters. BOOM!

CORE: Customarily a basic, essential part…

For the purposes of describing it reformy use… the inedible central part of some fruits. I leave the conclusions to you. BOOM!

In this teacher’s humble opinion:

We must regain control of the narrative and OUR language.

We must be clearer in, not just our OBjections, but in our SUGGestions.

We know what works.

We know good teaching and teacher preparation.

We know what kinds of school environments work best for students and teachers.

We know our most powerful audiences – the people –  and must be sure we speak to  them, RATHER THAN PREACHING TO THE CHOIR, using clear, concise, and precise language.

In short, we must use every medium to inspire more parents, more teachers, and more students to rise up against the abuses of our education system by those claiming to reform it and create more positive public actions like OPT OUT and whatever else it takes.

Let’s keep banging our drums.

GRIT YOUR TEETH

We admire people and fictional characters from all walks of life who display courage, bravery, spirit, strength of character, fortitude, resolve, determination, endurance, and spunk. All of these words are synonyms for a now “hated” word…. GRIT. Why?

I believe it is because it is another word stolen from our positive vocabulary by “reformistas” and thus has been deemed anathema to use.

That’s letting the wolf tell us what to believe!

However it seems, that even within the wolf’s lair there is a dispute about “grit” and the stupidity to try to test and measure it.

In this NYT article entitled, Testing for Joy and Grit? Schools Nationwide Push to Measure Students’ Emotional Skills, Kate Zernike interviews people on both sides of the argument about whether or not to test for the social and emotional skills educators know kids need to succeed in school and post high school.

She writes,

“A recent update to federal education law requires states to include at least one nonacademic measure in judging school performance…. But the race to test for so-called social-emotional skills has raised alarms even among the biggest proponents of teaching them, who warn that the definitions are unclear and the tests faulty.”

In fact, Angela Duckworth who is either credited or discredited for popularizing the term a few years ago is now saying,

“I do not think we should be doing this; it is a bad idea.” “Our working title was all measures suck, and they all suck in their own way.”

She resigned from the board of the group overseeing a California project, saying she could not support using the tests to evaluate school performance. Last spring, after attending a White House meeting on measuring social-emotional skills, she and a colleague wrote a paper warning that there were no reliable ways to do so.

Adding to this is Camille A. Farrington, a researcher at the University of Chicago who is working with a network of schools across the country to measure the development of social-emotional skills.

She says,

“There are so many ways to do this wrong.” “In education, we have a great track record of finding the wrong way to do stuff.”

I believe, and have always believed, that social and emotional traits do help determine an individual student’s chances at success regardless of their socioeconomic status.

I taught poor, middle class, and wealthy high school kids over 38 years in three separate schools. I have seen what happens when students, regardless of their background, develop the confidence to become courageous, take risks, learn to work on something for extended periods of time instead of giving up immediately, and watched them leap frog forward as a result.

I don’t care what word you want to use for this. It is a damn good feeling for that kid, their parents, and the teacher who was part of this transformation.

However there is no reason for beliefs, statements, or actions like this:

“Social-emotional learning will count for 8 percent of a school’s overall performance score; no teacher will lose a job for failing to instill a growth mind-set.”

“This work is so phenomenally important to the success of our kids in school and life. In some ways, we worry as much if not more about the possibility that these indicators remain on the back burner.”

Not only should these tests be taken off the back burner, they should be thrown in the trash. There is no reason to test for these traits unless there is money to be made by doing so. We know the impetus.

LIFE is the test. Let teachers prepare kids socially and emotionally as well as academically for it the right ways for the right reasons.