Common Core Standards: Ten Colossal Errors Anthony Cody Nov 16, 2013

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Common Core Standards: Ten Colossal Errors

Anthony Cody Nov 16, 2013

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 Core 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 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 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, first grade, and second 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 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,

...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 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 first 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 fifth 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 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% of students who took Common Core aligned tests in New York last spring were rated proficient.  On the English Language Arts test, about 16% of African American students were proficient, 5% 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% -- 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 K12 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% 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!

What do you think? Is it time to end the reign of Common Core errors?

Continue the dialogue with Anthony on Twitter. 

Tale of two bordering states: New Mexico and Colorado

The following appeared in the same paper today, the Albuquerque Journal. The first is about how Colorado teachers accept the new evaluation system and the second is how neighboring New Mexico teachers reject it.

Colo. teachers on board with new system

T.S. Last / Journal Staff Writer7 hours ago

Posted: 12:05 am

After some initial resistance, teachers in Colorado are going along with a new teacher evaluation plan being rolled out this year.
Mike Wetzel, a spokesman for the Colorado Education Association, the state affiliate of the NEA, said the union originally opposed SB 10-191, the 2010 law that put the teacher evaluation plan in place. But since it became law, the union that represents approximately 30,000 Colorado teachers is moving ahead with the new plan.
“It’s the law now, and we believe we need to make this the best law we can for students, teachers, principals and everyone involved in the system,” he said. “We want this system to be a tool for teachers and principals to raise performance.”
Wetzel said teachers were at first concerned about how evaluations could be used against them, but the union has stressed the benefits of the feedback they get from them.
He said teachers still feel a fair amount of anxiety over the system, because it’s something new, “but what we’ve done is, we’ve tried to lessen that anxiety with training across the state. We find the more information teachers get, the anxiety lessens.”
The Colorado model is similar to New Mexico’s in that 50 percent of the evaluation is based on student academic growth using test scores.
But while classroom observations count for 25 percent of a teacher’s evaluation in New Mexico, under the Colorado model, observations are just part of the second half of the evaluation, which is supposed to measure “professional practice.”
“In order to fill out our rubric, there would be some measure of observation, but there’s really no way to quantify it as a percentage,” said Katy Anthes, executive director of educator effectiveness for the Colorado Department of Education.

Also factoring into the model are such elements as self-assessment, review of goals and performance plan, classroom observations, a mid- and end-of-year review, and planning for the next school year.

Colorado’s teacher evaluation system was piloted last year and this year is a hold-harmless year.
Anthes said there’s a learning curve for everyone involved, but it seems the state’s educators are beginning to grasp it.
Wetzel said one reason teachers have been accepting the new plan was that they were involved in the process of developing it. Input was taken from teachers and three teachers served on the state’s Council for Educator Effectiveness that helped design the system.
“If I had any advice for New Mexico, I think it would be that the teachers’ voices are critical,” he said. “This is not something that should be done to teachers, but something that should be done with teachers.”
Collaboration, helps create a system that “improves the practice of teaching … the results you get will be better for students, and that’s what everybody wants – what’s best for kids.”

Evaluating … the evaluations: Critics decry new system for rating teachers; supporters say it helps kids

by T.S. Last / Journal Northern Bureau | 6 hours ago

Copyright © 2013 Albuquerque Journal

While teachers and administrators at Albuquerque Public Schools have been vocal in opposing the state’s new teacher evaluation program – hundreds of APS teachers rallied at a protest attended by the superintendent last month – the reaction has been mixed elsewhere in the state.

At Santa Fe Public Schools, teachers are critical of the new evaluation system but without a major outcry, and the district is collaborating with the state as it moves forward with evaluations.

Down south, in the state’s second-largest school district, Las Cruces, the teacher’s union strongly opposes the new system.

Davida Garcia teaches an English class at Santa Fe High School. Although teachers in the district are critical of the state’s new teacher evaluation system, the district is collaborating with the Public Education Department in moving forward. (Eddie Moore/Albuquerque Journal)

And within Albuquerque, at least one state charter school says a similar teacher evaluation system has helped improve test scores and the quality of teaching.

Santa Fe just wrapped up the first of three rounds of classroom observations each teacher will undergo this school year. The observations make up 25 percent of teacher assessments under the state Public Education Department’s NMTEACH evaluation plan.

“We’re all scrambling to meet the Nov. 1 deadline the district imposed to have the first ones completed,” said Santa Fe High principal Leslie Kilmer, who had just left a meeting of district principals last week. “It’s been hectic.”

Reaching an accord with the state in mid-August, Santa Fe was one of the first districts to have its teacher evaluation plan approved by state Public Education Department.

Superintendent Joel Boyd said the district was initially “wary” of what was being imposed on it but decided to work within the rule in a collaborative effort with PED.

“This is a difficult process. It’s an extraordinary shift in how we go about evaluating our teachers,” Boyd said. “This is an extremely heavy lift for our district and is creating some anxiety among teachers. But we’re committed to doing it together and working side by side with our teachers because a change is definitely needed.”

In contrast, APS Superintendent Winston Brooks has been sharply critical of many of the system’s details and the state has rejected APS’ proposed alternatives, which varied greatly from the state plan.

Boyd said the Santa Fe school district collaborated with teachers before negotiating its plan with PED in which student surveys reduce the Standards-Based Assessment testing component value by 5 percent.

SBA and other test scores are used to measure student achievement growth under PED’s model and are supposed to count for 50 percent of the overall evaluation. Instead, the test scores in Santa Fe account for 45 percent of a teacher’s rating.

PED’s model also calls for 25 percent of the evaluation to be based on classroom observations by a school administrator and another 25 percent on locally adopted measures approved by the state.

Under its agreement with PED, Santa Fe’s evaluations break down this way: 45 percent based on test scores, 10 percent from the student surveys of teacher performance, 25 percent on classroom observation, and 20 percent on measures of teacher planning and professionalism.

Bernice García Baca, president of the National Education Association’s Santa Fe chapter, said teachers there are accepting of incorporating teacher evaluations into a system of “shared accountability” that the school district is working to instill.

But she thinks the plan put forth by PED is too rigid and places too much emphasis on testing.

“Teaching is a skilled art, it really is,” she said. “The creativity that we all remember being a part of teaching is really being limited by the system PED is subjecting us to. Trying to quantify it by sifting it down to numbers makes no sense at all.”

Education Secretary-designate Hanna Skandera doesn’t see it that way.

“I reflect on the old system, which was 100 percent subjective,” she said. “Also, it was binary, meaning either you met competency or you didn’t, which is rigid.”

Skandera said the art of teaching is captured by the new evaluation system. Through classroom observations and student surveys, teachers get feedback on how well they engage students and how well they are getting through to them.

“Through these evaluations, we can capture and acknowledge highly effective teachers, and for those teachers who are struggling we can capture where improvement is needed,” she said. “It gives us the opportunity to acknowledge good teaching while putting kids first.”

In October, a rally at Del Norte High School in Albuquerque heard speakers opposing teacher evaluations and more tests for New Mexico students. (Greg Sorber/Albuquerque Journal)

‘Going with the flow’

García Baca said teachers in the City Different are no different from their colleagues elsewhere in the state who have strong reservations about the evaluation plan. But there hasn’t been the kind of uproar there has been in Albuquerque, where 600 to 700 people attended a demonstration last month protesting the new teacher evaluation program and testing methods.

“This town is good at going with the flow,” García Baca said of Santa Fe. “It’s something we just have to deal with. We do the best we can and try to change things as we go along.”

She said Santa Fe’s teacher corps has had morale issues in recent years, but much of that can be attributed to wages. Santa Fe teachers hadn’t received a raise in more than five years until they received a 1.5 percent bump in August.

She said the biggest objection she and the union have with the new system is the emphasis on student achievement growth, measured by students’ SBA test scores.

She especially objects to the “group achievement growth” component contained within that measure. It factors in results from past years and in some cases uses test scores from students the teacher never had in the classroom.

García Baca’s biggest concern, however, is the emphasis on testing. She said teachers complain that they spend so much time testing, or preparing their students for tests, they don’t have time to hone their craft. She noted that in Santa Fe, there’s mandated testing going on somewhere in the district 15 days out of each month.

Skandera said that, over the course of an entire school year, about 1,100 hours are available for instruction. Her data suggested that the total time spent on conducting student assessments amounts to about 1 percent – a little more than that at the high school level and a little less at lower grade levels.

Skandera noted that teachers or union representatives were involved while the new evaluation system was being vetted. And she said teachers also provided input for what they thought was important for students to learn, and tests are designed to reflect learning.

“If we’re assessing what we want our students to learn, that’s a good thing,” she said.

Different unions

Most teachers in Santa Fe are represented by the NEA, whereas the American Federation of Teachers is the dominant union in Albuquerque.

García Baca speculated that more outcry might be coming from Albuquerque because it’s by far the largest school district in the state and AFT has more of a presence in the Duke City.

“The union in Albuquerque is more visible and has two full-time people working for them,” García Baca said. “AFT tends to be more obstinate. There’s more energy because of the full-time people, and they tend to be more aggressive with their opposition, especially with the new PED under Skandera.”

AFT New Mexico last month joined a small group of teachers and state legislators in filing a legal petition in state District Court in an effort to stop the PED from implementing its teacher evaluation plan.

NEA New Mexico may be headed down that same road. Late last month, its state board passed a resolution for its leadership to consult with general counsel to explore a legal course of action.

“So many of us think this will all blow over in a year or two – maybe if there’s a change in governors,” García Baca said. “But we can’t count on that, so it was decided to step things up a little bit.”

Despite her criticism of the PED’s evaluation plan, García Baca said she hopes it will eventually evolve into something that restores the art to teaching and better reflects the effectiveness of a good teacher.

“Maybe we have a false hope, but I think most of us are hoping that we will make worthwhile changes as time goes on,” she said.

Kilmer said there is some consternation over the evaluations. “With my teachers at Santa Fe High School, I’m sure there is concern because this is something new,” she said. “I’ve tried hard not to stress them out, because I know that there is that level of concern. But I know my teachers are working hard and doing the best they can.”

Kilmer said she thinks the evaluations can serve as a good tool teachers can use to improve, but it will take time to refine.

“Something I’ve emphasized is that this is a process, not an event,” she said. “It’s not perfect, but we’re all learning, and we expect it to get better little by little. We’re trying to work through the process and work out the kinks.”

Las Cruces

In Las Cruces, NEA representative Patrick Sanchez said teachers’ reaction to the teacher evaluation system has been “close to nuclear.”

“Teachers feel they are under attack,” he said. “They don’t think this is going to do anything but exacerbate testing, and we’re already test crazy.”

Las Cruces Public Schools’ evaluation process has been approved by PED and is underway. One piece of the evaluation is being left to the teachers themselves.

Superintendent Stan Rounds initially planned to tell PED the district would use teacher attendance as a component to count for 10 percent of the evaluation, but backed off after hearing opposition from teachers.

Telling them he wants to be fair, Rounds last week told teachers they could decide for themselves what would make up that portion of their evaluation, either teacher attendance or a yet-to-be-developed student survey.

“The choice is yours,” he says on a nearly five-minute video memo to teachers posted on the district’s website.

Rounds explains that PED sets the rules that school districts must follow, and the district has control over a small portion of the composition of the evaluation.

He tells teachers he appreciates their hard work, trusts them and believes they should have an opportunity to decide the criteria to be used for the part of the evaluation the district can control.

“So we get to pick our poison,” Sanchez said. “But (the student surveys) haven’t been developed yet, so what kind of choice is that?”

PED already rejected the district’s first two evaluation proposals.

Jo Galván, spokeswoman for Las Cruces schools, said after receiving input from teachers, the district submitted proposals that included such things as professional development, pursuit of advanced degrees, service on committees or as a sponsor of a student club to count as part of their evaluations.

PED rejected those ideas, but Galván said PED told them it would accept teacher attendance or student surveys.

Nothing to fear

At left, Kathy Sandoval-Snider, principal of the Albuquerque Institute for Math and Science, cheers students participating in a PE activity while evaluating teacher Paul De Herrera, who is next to her. (Marla Brose/Albuquerque Journal)

In contrast to the harsh criticism by APS leadership, the union and many teachers, one Duke City school administrator can’t understand what all the fuss is about.

“A lot of the fear and complaints about the evaluation system that’s on the table are fraught with error,” said Kathy Sandoval-Snider, director of the Albuquerque Institute for Mathematics and Science. “I don’t know where people are coming up with some of this stuff. If their intent is to scare the crud out of teachers, they are doing very well.”

Sandoval-Snider attributes the teacher evaluation system her school implemented to playing a crucial role in the leap in student success that has occurred in recent years at AIMS, a state-sponsored charter school for grades six through 12 located on the University of New Mexico south campus.

She boasts that AIMS is the only charter school in New Mexico, and one of just 12 in the country, recognized as a 2013 National Blue Ribbon School by the U.S. Department of Education. “But we weren’t always very good,” she said.

The school has some built-in advantages – it’s small, with 312 students reported for 2013-14. Also, 30 percent of its students are eligible for reduced or free lunches based on income, compared to 64 percent in Albuquerque Public Schools. Families who send their children to AIMS are involved enough to enter a lottery seeking admission and there is a waiting list.

Still, Sandoval-Snider said it wasn’t until her school started implementing a teacher evaluation system five years ago that things started to improve.

Sandoval-Snider said that, in 2007, incoming sixth-graders at AIMS were measured to be 37 percent proficient in reading and 42 percent proficient in math.

“That same class (now in the 12th grade) is now 100 percent proficient in both reading and math,” she said. “I’m convinced, and my staff is convinced, that it’s because our teachers now have the tools they can use to help with instruction.”

Sandoval-Snider, who in 2011 was appointed by Gov. Susana Martinez to serve on an effective teaching task force, said one of those tools is a comprehensive system of evaluating the impact of teachers in the classroom, the framework of which she said was similar to the one introduced by PED.

Teachers are evaluated four times per year, twice by administrative staff, once by an experienced teacher and once by a neutral specialist affiliated with UNM. Together with test scores, these observations are used to evaluate teachers.

The teachers receive feedback after each observation, including suggestions for improvement and a framework of support. Teachers in each department and at each grade level meet to develop goals for professional growth, which are all data-driven and tied to student achievement. They then develop interventions and classroom strategies that can be applied in the classroom the next day. The results are reported back to their teacher groups.

Sandoval-Snider said the evaluations allow teachers to fine tune their teaching.

“We wanted (an evaluation system) that was objective and with multiple components, but also gave teachers scores that tell them this is what we’ve got to work on,” she said. “It gives them the power to make good decisions, and every decision is made with the classroom in mind.”

http://moinaturale.com/2013/09/20/the-problem-with-charter-schools/

The Problem With Charter Schools

Posted in activism, disabilities, education by Evan Seymour

In the fall of 2008, I decided I wanted to transition from journalism to education.  While I was in a master’s program studying broadcast journalism at the University of Southern California, I started volunteering at a local community center called the Jackie Robinson Community Center.  Through this experience, I realized I was passionate about working with young people.  I also realized that our young people in inner-city schools were being failed.
At the time, my ex-boyfriend was in his second year of law school at Tulane University, so I decided I wanted to do some research on opportunities for educators in New Orleans.
“You should take a look at KIPP,” suggested my mother.  She had seen a piece on KIPP on Oprah, and said she was thoroughly impressed with what she saw.
I watched the video, tears in my eyes before its conclusion.  What I saw was a video full of passionate students and hard-working teachers who were focused on getting students who many folks had long ago given up on to and through college.

The Brutal Truth
This is the truth when it comes to charter schools — they aren’t working like society has been led to believe they are.  There are a variety of problems with the country’s charter schools, including these:

• a lack of oversight
• exploitation of teachers
• non-compliance with Federal Law as it pertains to students with disabilities
• fiscal irresponsibility
• hiring practices (see: inexperienced teachers, teachers who aren’t interested in remaining in the classroom, teachers who do not at all represent the demographic make-up of the student population they serve)

New Orleans and the Charter School Movement
One of the cities at the center of the current wave of educational reform is New Orleans.  Historically, the schools in the Crescent City have been some of the worst in the nation.  Reform was already in the works in the city, but when Hurricane Katrina ravaged the city in 2005, reformers saw a perfect opportunity to come in and completely gut the city’s educational system.
I do believe that many of the folks who get into the educational reform movement do so with the best intentions in mind, but at this point, privatization is the name of the game.  Doing what is in the best interest of children is not at the epicenter of educational reform.

My Experience
As a journalist, and as an ethical individual, I would be remiss to neglect to mention that I am currently in the midst of a situation, shall I say, with KIPP New Orleans Schools.
In April of this year, I had a seizure episode, as those of you who have been reading Moi Naturale regularly already know.  After the seizure episode, I went to a neurologist who ordered an MRI, and I then discovered there was abnormal scarring for someone of my age on my brain.  So not only was I still recovering of the effects of my seizure, but I had to come face to face with the fact that I there was something abnormal about my brain.  Great…

I reached out to KIPP New Orleans Schools, and at first, they were incredibly supportive.  But that was just in the beginning.
During the summer, I reached out repeatedly to my school leader, requesting a meeting with him so I could discuss my future with the school.  Time and again, I received his full voicemail box.  Eventually, he got back to me via text message, making excuses about how busy he’d been, but promising to schedule a time for us to sit down and meet.  That meeting never happened.
On July 1, I received a text message from one of the higher ups at KIPP informing me that based upon a text message I’d sent to my boss, after almost a month of trying to get in touch with him, that they were going to start moving forward with “closeout procedures” on my employment with them.  In his message, Mr. K said that they wanted me to return my KIPP cell phone and KIPP-issued computer before the 4th of July.
My head was spinning.  I couldn’t believe that the principal of the school would take such steps without reaching back out to me, especially since I was out on disability.

I reached out to Mr. K, and explained to him my concern with how the situation had been handled (including an announcement made to the entire staff about the fact that I would not be returning).  He told me to reach out to the director of human relations for KIPP New Orleans Schools, someone who I had already called and emailed several times, to no avail.  Later, I was told she had been on vacation.  Must be nice to be able to go on vacation and not respond to emails or voice message for weeks at a time.  I have never worked a job that afforded me such a luxury.
Well, soon after that came the news that my health insurance had been cancelled.  Let me remind you, readers, that I still was out with an open disability claim, filed through MetLife.
So, now I find myself with no health insurance and a newly-diagnosed auto-immune disease.  This is what happens when unions are demonized and folks are left to fend for themselves against major corporate entities like KIPP.

After reaching out to an attorney, I sent an email to the COO of KIPP New Orleans Schools, my principal, the director of human relations at KIPP, and Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin, the founders of the schools that preach the motto “Work Hard. Be Nice.”  Not surprisingly, I never heard back from any of them.

For years, I have observed the inefficiencies of these charter schools, including KIPP, but not limited to KIPP, and I, as much as possible, turned a blind eye.  Though it turned my stomach to do so.  I have watched laws being broken, have worked at multiple schools that violated all sorts of laws (in regards to staff members and students), and I have had countless conversations with educators across the country about burn-out, broken laws, and broken spirits.

Waiting for Superman is the Disneyfied version of the charter school movement.  It is the story of Pocahontas minus the massacre and colonialism.

A couple of months ago, I decided I was no longer going to be a silent observer of our nation’s children getting left further and further behind.  I started performing research  (if you haven’t read the work of Dr. Diane Ravitch, former Deputy Secretary of Education and a huge opponent of the charter school movement, I highly recommend it!)

This decision came prior to my health insurance being cancelled, and prior to many of the other amoral, illegal actions carried out by KIPP in regards to my personal situation.  As a college-educated person with hustle out of this world, I know I can get another position.  And eventually, I will get MetLife to continue paying on the policy I paid into (another story of injustice for another day).  This has to do with my nagging moral compass, and my love of children.

As my mother could tell you, I have always wanted to make a difference in the world, and I have always loved children.  That being said, I am tired of seeing these charter schools touted in mainstream media as some silver bullet to the educational woes of this country.  If charter schools are so wonderful, then why are there charter schools that close every year?  Why is it that the higher-ups in these organizations do not send their children to these very same charter schools?  Why is it that you do not see these charter schools popping up in communities where there are already thriving, or even middle-of-the-road schools?  The answer is simple — charter schools aren’t the silver bullet.  The folks who’ve founded the schools don’t even believe in them.  That’s why they send their children to private schools, or buy properties in communities with tried-and-true successful public schools.

What Now?
I started Moi Naturale as a place where I could be authentic, and as a place where other folks could come to hopefully be inspired to live their best lives.
In an effort to keep it real, I will continue writing pieces about educational reform, facts and data included.
If you’re a teacher, former teacher, or someone with strong thoughts and feelings about educational reform, please feel free to leave comments, or to reach out to me via email.  As much as possible, I do respond personally to correspondences.
Have a Fab Friday, and an even better weekend, Moi Naturale Fam!
Xo,
Ev

Sol Stern Ravages Ravitch

Sol Stern

The Closing of Diane Ravitch’s Mind

A once-great education scholar rejects everything she previously believed.

OZIER MUHAMMAD/THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX

 

Ravitch sees school reform today as a plot by private interests to destroy public education.

Education writer and activist Diane Ravitch is very angry these days. She’s convinced herself and her followers that elements of the American corporate elite are working to destroy the nation’s public schools, the indispensable institution that has held our republic together for more than two centuries. According to Ravitch, these fake reformers—the “billionaire boys’ club,” as she calls them—are driven by greed: after destroying the schools and stigmatizing hardworking teachers, she says, they want to privatize education and reap the profits from the new market.
Heading Ravitch’s corporate enemies list are superrich philanthropists such as Bill Gates, Eli Broad, the Walton family, and Michael Bloomberg, who’ve promoted the hated ideas. Equally despised are the education officials and politicians carrying out their dirty work—reformers such as ex-Washington, D.C., public schools’ chief Michelle Rhee, former New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein, former Florida governor Jeb Bush, and education secretary Arne Duncan (and, by implication, his boss, the president, too).
A few years ago, Ravitch grew so troubled about the purported threat to the public schools that she went through an amazing life change for a 73-year-old historian, whose previous career had been spent writing scholarly books. She reinvented herself as a vehement political activist. Once one of the conservative school-reform movement’s most visible faces, Ravitch became the inspirational leader of a radical countermovement that is rising from the grass roots to oppose the corporate villains. Evoking the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King, Ravitch proclaims that the only answer to the corporate school-reform agenda is to “build a political movement so united and clear in its purpose that it would be heard in every state Capitol and even in Washington, D.C.” The problem is that Ravitch’s civil rights analogy is misplaced; her new ideological allies have proved themselves utterly incapable of raising the educational achievement of poor minority kids.
Ravitch first entered the education-reform wars in 1974 with her well-received The Great School Wars, a history of New York City’s public schools. She was then a research fellow and lecturer at Columbia University’s Teachers College. Teachers College was and remains a progressive-education bastion, but Ravitch brought a moderate, centrist perspective to exploring the public schools’ problems. She launched her writing career at publications such as the neoconservative Commentary and The New Leader. Politically, she was basically a Henry “Scoop” Jackson Democrat. The sixties New Left and counterculture seemed to have passed her by. In her book on the city schools, she scorned “limousine liberals” like New York mayor John Lindsay and the Ford Foundation for creating experimental, “community-controlled” school districts and turning them over to black nationalists, with disastrous results.

Ravitch gained wider prominence in the 1980s as she joined in the criticism of the public schools unleashed by the Reagan administration’s 1983 Nation at Risk report, with its frequently quoted warning: “The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and a people.” Five years later, she coauthored, with Chester E. Finn, What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know? The well-researched book’s answer: not much. The authors blamed American students’ ignorance partly on the fact that public schools lacked a “coherent literature curriculum.” Indeed, Ravitch began calling for voluntary national standards and championed the teaching of rich academic content knowledge, even in the early grades, and she became associated with E. D. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge movement. In his 1987 bestseller, Cultural Literacy, Hirsch credited Ravitch for providing “the single greatest impetus for writing this book” and for suggesting the title. Ravitch soon found herself facing nasty attacks from progressive educators for her “elitism” and for championing “dead white males.”
Though still nominally a Democrat, Ravitch accepted an offer from newly elected president George H. W. Bush to become his assistant secretary of education. Her official assignment was to develop voluntary national standards, but she also came to agree with the administration’s support for school choice. When Ravitch’s Bush stint was over, the Teachers College mandarins, offended by her making common cause with reactionary Republicans, told her not to bother reapplying for her old job. Instead, she became a fellow at the Brookings Institution and wrote a book on national standards. Though the federal government couldn’t require the states to adopt such standards, she concluded, students would benefit if the states voluntarily moved toward them.
Ravitch received financial support for her scholarly work from the conservative John M. Olin Foundation and eventually joined the Koret Task Force at the Hoover Institution. The education-reform movement had acquired a new star, a Democrat supporting almost the entire Republican education agenda—vouchers, more testing, teacher accountability, and higher standards. Ravitch even served on George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign as an education advisor, though she withdrew before the election.
Sometime around 2007, Ravitch began having second thoughts about the free-market components of education reform. In a public debate at Hoover, she teamed with Hirsch to argue in favor of a resolution affirming that “true school reform demands more attention to curriculum and instruction than to markets and choice.” In a controversial 2008 City Journal essay, I argued something similar, and Ravitch came to my defense, publishing a short City Journal piece endorsing “a coherent, year-by-year progression of studies in science, history, literature, geography, civics, economics, and the arts” in the public schools. In history, she explained, students in the early grades would “learn about the great deeds of significant men and women, study distant civilizations, and begin to understand chronology and the relation between causes and effects.” Ravitch also urged reformers “to view the evidence with open minds and be prepared to change course in light of new evidence.”
Ravitch elaborated on these arguments in her best-selling 2010 book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System. She explained there how “new evidence” had led her to change her mind on vouchers and on evaluating teachers by their students’ test scores, but she still expressed hope that the American people would support national standards and “a sequential, knowledge-rich curriculum.”
Ravitch had also initiated a series of written exchanges about key education issues with the prominent progressive educator Deborah Meier. “Bridging Differences” ran in Education Week for almost five years. Ravitch noted at the series’ outset that she “was wrong to support choice as a primary mechanism for school reform.” But throughout the colloquy, she held firm against the progressive-education agenda on issues such as curriculum and standards. It could not have been an easy situation for Ravitch. She now stood apart from both the Right and the Left, loyal only to the evidence—or so she claimed.
Then, Ravitch abruptly took yet another dramatic spin and wound up surrendering abjectly to Meier, champion of social-justice teaching and other progressive fads. For the progressives, it was similar to the defection of a top general from the enemy side. Ravitch later said that Meier had convinced her that she was wrong about everything. Not only had Ravitch changed her mind about school choice and testing; she had closed her mind to the possibility of any successful reforms, including national standards, curriculum, and classroom instruction. And anyone who persisted in supporting such “de-forms,” she maintained, must either be a reactionary or (like Duncan, presumably) a dupe of the reactionary corporate-reform movement. In Ravitch’s new lexicon, the word “reformer” became pejorative.
In April 2012, Ravitch launched a blog that today serves as a propaganda hub for the national anti–corporate reform coalition. By her account, over the past year and a half, she has had 6 million page views, published more than 5,000 posts, and received more than 100,000 reader responses. Her comments about the latest atrocities perpetuated against children in the name of reform appear up to ten times daily, seven days a week, and almost 52 weeks a year. She hammers reformers for backing teacher evaluations based on student test scores, closing failing schools, expanding charter schools, and trying to impose a “nationalized” Common Core curriculum on the states, among other policies.
The blog has all the subtlety of an Occupy Wall Street poster. This past Labor Day, for example, Ravitch posted the words of militant union songs like “Joe Hill” and “Which Side Are You On?” and lamented that teacher unions don’t have enough power or influence in America—though try telling that, say, to a California politician who dares oppose them. “In education, unions are being crushed,” Ravitch writes, “and there is no one to advocate for them when the Governor and Legislature cut the budget for education. Teachers get pink slips, kids get larger classes and lose the arts, library, and much else that used to be taken for granted as a basic in American schools.” “What is happening to our country?” Ravitch wailed in another post. “Why are the bankers and the major corporations blaming teachers and public schools for problems they not only created but benefit from? Why do they think that adoption of the Common Core standards or the privatization of public schools will heal the deep economic and social problems caused by the outsourcing of our manufacturing base and deep income inequality?”
Ravitch uses her blog to publicize and organize support for antireform school board candidates from Rochester to Los Angeles. She recently wrote an impassioned endorsement of Bill de Blasio, the most radical of the Democrats running in the New York mayoral primary and the eventual winner. (The United Federation of Teachers supported the more moderate Bill Thompson.) Ravitch’s self-important announcement came with a drumroll: “After much deliberation, I have decided to support Bill de Blasio for mayor of New York City.” It’s a reflection of Ravitch’s success in her activist role that the de Blasio camp coveted her support. Her endorsement likely influenced some voters, particularly teachers.
The latest incarnation of Diane Ravitch, then, depicts a Manichaean struggle for the future of America’s children. On one side are the forces of darkness, the malefactors of wealth, scheming to kill the public schools. On the other side are the forces of light, including all the courageous parents, teachers, and ordinary Americans struggling to preserve their precious schools. Any middle ground from which someone might offer an independent, case-by-case evaluation of the policies most likely to improve the schools is lost. As in the words of the union song, all Ravitch wants to know is “Which Side Are You On?”
This crude, politicized approach isn’t going to produce smart school policies. For starters, Ravitch’s central premise about the school-reform movement is absurd. The philanthropists financing the movement may have exaggerated the potential benefits of some reforms and taken some wrong turns, but there’s no conspiracy to destroy the public schools. The corporate reformers whom Ravitch sees as a monolithic force disagree with one another about many education issues. Some support vouchers; others don’t. Bill Gates went all in with hundreds of millions of dollars to support the Common Core State Standards; the Waltons demurred, suspicious of federal intervention in education policy.
Actually, it is Ravitch’s sudden and unwarranted attack on Hirsch and the Core Knowledge curriculum that will likely do the public schools real harm. Just three years ago, Ravitch blurbed Hirsch’s The Making of Americans as “the one book I would recommend to every legislator and school board member.” In her own book that year, The Death and Life of the Great American School System, she rightly observed that “students who have the benefit of [Hirsch’s] sequential, knowledge-rich curriculum do well on the standardized tests they must take. They do well on tests because they have absorbed the background knowledge to comprehend what they read.”
Soon afterward, in a sign of what was to come, Ravitch resigned from the Core Knowledge Foundation’s board, ostensibly because it entered into a licensing agreement with Joel Klein’s private education company, Amplify, to distribute its early-grade literacy curriculum to schools. She suggested that Hirsch made the deal with Klein’s company because “this is quite a goldmine.” She also decided that the Core Knowledge reading curriculum adopted by New York State was bad for young children. The curriculum’s requirement that children in the early grades learn key facts about ancient civilizations was, Ravitch contended, “developmentally inappropriate” and “a circus trick, an effort to prove that a six-year-old can do mental gymnastics.” But the lessons Ravitch found so disturbing were exactly the kind of curriculum she had praised for almost all her professional career. As her City Journal article proposed, young students should “learn about the great deeds of significant men and women [and] study distant civilizations.”
Ravitch now apparently agrees with the progressive-ed icon Jean Piaget that children in the early grades shouldn’t be pressured with too much academic learning. “I don’t care if my two grandsons—one now entering second grade, the other not yet 1—have higher or lower scores than children their age in California, Florida, Iowa, Finland, Japan, Korea, or any other place you can think of,” she recently declared. “I don’t think their parents care either. They care that their children are healthy; are curious about the world; are loved; learn to love learning; are kind to their friends and to animals; and have the confidence to tackle new challenges. . . . Let’s all read Walden, read poetry, listen to good music, visit a museum, look at the stars, and think more about what matters most in life. Let us see our children not as global competitors, but as children, little human beings in need of loving care and kindness.”
Too bad that poor minority parents can’t afford Ravitch’s newly discovered educational romanticism. Their kids often enter school far behind Ravitch’s middle-class grandchildren, and if they aren’t taught lots of content knowledge in the early grades, they’re doomed to fall further behind. They will never be able to read Walden or understand poetry.
After Ravitch first announced her “change of mind” on free-market reforms, she complained that some former colleagues had launched ugly attacks against her. She was right to object, but these days she engages in scurrilous denunciations of anyone—liberal or conservative—not on board with her current antireform positions. She was outraged, for instance, when New York Times columnist Bill Keller (no right-winger he) came out in favor of the Common Core Standards, which she thinks the Gates Foundation forced on states, and she struck back by posting (approvingly) the rant of a leftist education blogger, Susan Ohanian:

Well, at least New York Times editorial remains consistent, proving once again that you can lead a reporter to evidence but can’t make him think. Keller was executive editor at the New York Times from 2003–2011, where he was a leading supporter of the Iraq invasion. Although he has since returned to his status as writer, he remains infected by the Times editorial bias on education policy. It seems significant that Keller’s father was chairman and chief executive of the Chevron Corporation.

This is the classic ad-hominem style of radical-left political discourse.
Another tenet of the far Left is that progressives should have “no enemies on the left,” and Ravitch apparently agrees. Thus, she has praised the former Weather Underground terrorist and radical educator William Ayers for his contributions to the anticorporate insurgency. (She concedes that Ayers made some political “mistakes” in the sixties.) Ravitch has also had kind words for leftist education activist and onetime Ayers ally Mike Klonsky. On her blog, she recounted visiting two universities in Chicago in 2010, with Klonsky as her host. “For me, the fallen-away conservative, it was a trip getting to know Mike, because he had long ago been a leader of the SDS, which was a radical group in the 1960s that I did not admire. So meeting him and discovering that he and his wife Susan were thoughtful, caring, and kind people was an experience in itself.” Ravitch apparently didn’t know, or preferred not to disclose, that Klonsky broke with Ayers’s Weather Underground faction to create a Maoist-oriented party in the U.S. and then spent several years in China during the horrific Cultural Revolution, attending state dinners with the Great Helmsman.
Onetime admirers of Diane Ravitch recall her as a careful scholar and a moderate. They may find it hard to make sense of her slash-and-burn polemics and new political alliances. What they haven’t yet appreciated is how much this rhetorical aggression is part of a deliberate strategy. After all, there’s a new people’s education movement to build in America, and nothing grows a movement faster than indignation directed against the enemy.
Notwithstanding the time and energy she devotes to her blog, Ravitch has managed to write another book about the calamities of the school-reform movement: Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools. Published by Knopf, the book has a huge first printing of 75,000 and one week after release reached the New York Times bestseller list. It contains all the appropriate scholarly apparatus—hundreds of footnotes and dozens of charts on student-achievement trends from the federal government. But make no mistake: this is primarily a political tract.
In a 350-page volume on twenty-first-century American education, neither the Core Knowledge curriculum nor Hirsch bears mentioning. This is no mere oversight; it’s a calculated omission that lets Ravitch frame the current school-reform debate as a winner-take-all struggle between those avaricious privatizers and the heroic defenders of the public schools. While writing the book, Ravitch was surely aware that, as part of its implementation of the national Common Core Standards, New York had contracted with the Core Knowledge Foundation to develop the state’s pre-K–2 reading curriculum. That project is now completed. Every New York school will be able to use the Hirsch curriculum, and state officials are strongly encouraging them to do so. The entire grade-by-grade curriculum is also freely available on the Internet for any school in the United States to utilize. The Diane Ravitch of old would have welcomed all this; today’s version has written Core Knowledge out of history and denounces the Common Core Standards as a gigantic “hoax” that the privatizers have perpetuated on the American people (how, exactly, the adoption of standards benefits privatization remains fuzzy).
Reign of Error starts off with 20 short chapters detailing and “correcting” all the reformers’ supposedly fraudulent claims. Anyone reading Ravitch’s blog will find little new in her catalog of errors, though school reformers should take some of her arguments seriously—including that inner-city school-voucher programs haven’t yet delivered on the promise of improved student achievement and that evaluating teachers based on student test scores has encouraged cheating and other undesirable classroom side effects.
Ravitch does add one new count to her indictment of school reform. In a chapter called “The Facts About Test Scores,” she disputes the reformers’ “crisis narrative” of declining academic performance, which began with the Nation at Risk report, whose conclusions she accepted until three years ago. The Ravitch of 2013 argues that test scores for American students in all age groups have steadily improved for the last 40 years and today stand “at their highest point ever recorded.” To support this bold assertion, Ravitch cites data from the highly respected National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)—in particular, NAEP’s “long-term trend assessment,” which tests a sample of the country’s nine-year-olds, 13-year-olds, and 17-year-olds in math and reading every four years.
Ravitch’s claim of across-the-board improvement on NAEP tests is definitely new—and it’s also wrong. Even the NAEP graph included in the book shows clearly that 17-year-olds showed no improvement in their unimpressive scores from 1971 (when the tests began) to 2008. Further, a new NAEP long-term assessment was released in June 2013 (probably too late to be included in the book), adding four more years to the dismal trend. According to the official NAEP report, “average reading and mathematics scores in 2012 for 17-year-olds were not significantly different from scores in the first assessment year.” Ravitch bases her case for improvement solely on higher scores for nine-year-olds and modest improvements among 13-year-olds. But these aren’t significant if the gains disappear in high school and if students about to enter college or the workforce—the end product of the public school system—still can’t read or write very well, or at all.
Aside from the NAEP data, we can confirm that graduating seniors these days know very little from the countless reports by universities about the extent of remediation needed by entering freshmen, as well as from books like Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation. Just three years ago, Ravitch emphasized the same point. “Many reports and surveys have demonstrated that large numbers of young people leave school knowing little or nothing about history, literature, foreign languages, the arts, geography, civics or science,” she wrote in The Death and Life of the Great American School System.
Ravitch’s own recommendations for improving the schools, laid out in Reign of Error’s second half, are basically the same prohibitively expensive, pie-in-the-sky programs that the education Left has advocated for decades: smaller class sizes, universal prekindergarten, after-school programs, and comprehensive health and nutrition services. Ravitch doesn’t even try costing out her suggestions—the price tag would be in the billions—or indicate where extra school funding might come from. After all, the United States already ranks first in the world in K–12 education spending. Considering her politics these days, she probably would begin with major cuts in the defense budget. If test scores are at an all-time high, though, as Ravitch contends, why would we need to pour billions more into the schools?
The widespread sense of how “dumb” the country’s college freshmen are nowadays was a big reason the nation’s governors called for the development of the Common Core Standards. It’s also why it is imperative that the standards get implemented in the states with fidelity to the Common Core document’s call for a curriculum “intentionally and coherently structured to develop rich content knowledge within and across grades.” Ravitch once knew why content knowledge is so important to improving literacy. In her book on the appalling lack of knowledge of the nation’s 17-year-olds, she wrote that “students who know the mechanics of reading but lack background knowledge are handicapped as readers.”
Many valid criticisms can and have been made of the manner in which the standards were adopted in many states, including the undue influence of the Obama administration. As well, there’s no guarantee that states and school districts will be successful in creating coherent, content-rich school curricula. But these considerations are now somewhat academic. A dramatic struggle is unfolding over the content that teachers should actually be teaching in their classrooms. Educators who support teaching strong content knowledge might have benefited from the constructive criticism and wisdom of the Diane Ravitch of the not so distant past. This could have been her moment, just as it is Hirsch’s.
But Ravitch has walked away from the struggle for a knowledge-based curriculum. Instead, she is standing outside the schoolhouse doors with her angry insurgent army of education progressives, protesting that the Common Core is a fraudulent reform, a creation of the hated corporations. (Ironically, just down the street, Tea Party activists are also denouncing the Common Core, which they have renamed “Obama Core.”) With strange new allies such as Deborah Meier, Susan Ohanian, and Mike Klonsky, Ravitch is trying to tear down this once-in-a-lifetime national effort to improve instruction, which could give disadvantaged children, in particular, a better chance of meeting the challenge of higher education.
After Ravitch’s many years of intellectual zigzagging, it’s a travesty that she has ended up in solidarity with the destructive radicals of the education Left. For poor kids, it’s a tragedy.

Sol Stern is a contributing editor of City Journal, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and the author of Breaking Free: Public School Lessons and the Imperative of School Choice.