SKrashen: Why is California spending 1.25 billion to implement the common core?

SKrashen: Why is California spending 1.25 billion to impleme...: Why is California spending 1.25 billion to implement the common core? Sent to the Monterey Herald (CA), June 14 ...

SKrashen: Why is California spending 1.25 billion to implement the common core?

SKrashen: S Ohanian: How Gates gets the word out into the ed...

SKrashen: S Ohanian: How Gates gets the word out into the ed...: Susan Ohanian reveals: Here's how the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation get their word out into the education community: They fund...

SKrashen: S Ohanian: How Gates gets the word out into the ed...

SKrashen: Common core's claims are false

SKrashen: Common core's claims are false: Stephen Krashen PUBLISHED IN THE CINCINNATI INQUIRER, SUNDAY, JUNE 2, 2013 http://news.cincinnati.com/article/20...

SKrashen: Common core's claims are false

Wayne Au: Coring Social Studies within Corporate Education Reform

First published on @TCFKSM on May 20, 2013

---

"Teachers could stop #CommonCore tomorrow—if they joined hands and said 'Hell, No!' The alternative is loss of profession—and soul." — Susan Ohanian

A local university professor I'm friends with through The Association of Raza Educators (ARE) wrote me yesterday with the following message:

Hi Robert,

I hope you are well... You might be familiar with the work of Wayne Au.  He has developed solid critical work around curriculum theory and practice...  Attached is his latest article, a critique of CCSS..

Interestingly and predictably, Bill Gates is setting up "training" with teacher educators across the CSUs; I just got invited to attend and "learn" about "teacher effectiveness measures" and how they inform CCSS!

The last paragraph is terribly frightening. The paper he attached by Professor Wayne Au is outstanding. For those who don't know, Au is an Assistant Professor at the University of Washington Bothell. His widely cited Unequal By Design: High-Stakes Testing and the Standardization of Inequality is an excellent source for connecting the standardized testing with the eugenicist project. Au's newer book Critical Curriculum Studies: Education, Consciousness, and the Politics of Knowing also comes highly recommended.

Au's latest paper Coring Social Studies within Corporate Education Reform: The Common Core State Standards, Social Justice, and the Politics of Knowledge in U.S. Schools is certainly worth reading and sharing. I'm reproducing the abstract here to whet intellectual appetites.

Abstract

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) have been adopted in 45 U.S. states. Driven by a wide coalition that includes both major U.S. political parties, the business elite, for-profit education corporations, cultural conservatives, and both major U.S. teachers’ unions, the CCSS have mainly garnered glowing praise in mainstream U.S. media and widespread acceptance amongst political figures and public school districts nationwide. This paper undertakes a critical analysis of the origins and political tensions found within the CCSS, arguing that the CCSS will inevitably lead to restrictive high-stakes, standardized testing similar to that associated with No Child Left Behind. Further this paper specifically examines the treatment of the social studies within the context of CCSS and questions the likely outcomes of the recently drafted College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Social Studies State Standards within the current political and cultural context of the United States.

Wayne Au: Coring Social Studies within Corporate Education Reform

Teaching Beyond the Bubble: Take a Stand for Meaningful Teaching and Learning in LAUSD!

Teaching Beyond the Bubble: Take a Stand for Meaningful Teaching and Learning in LAUSD!

Thursday, March 21, 2013, 4:00—6:00 PM
LAUSD Headquarters
333 S. Beaudry Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90017

Teaching Beyond the Bubble: Take a Stand for Meaningful Teaching and Learning in LAUSD! by Robert D. Skeels

Our students are sick of mindless worksheets, decontextualized readings, and multiple-choice tests. They deserve access to a robust and meaningful curriculum that challenges them to think outside of the box, not just fill in bubbles!   John Deasy's unilateral directive to use student test scores for 30% of a teacher's evaluation will further intensify the destructive testing culture in our schools. Come out to rally for the schools L.A. students deserve!  

This fun action will include music performances, theater, and a Scantron art contest as well as student, parent, and teacher speakers. Bring signs that show how the testing mania is affecting YOUR school!

Sponsored by Progressive Educators for ACtion (PEAC). For more information, contact Jess at 213-572-8499 or j.kochick@gmail.com, or check out www.progressiveeducatorsforaction.com!

Teaching Beyond the Bubble: Take a Stand for Meaningful Teaching and Learning in LAUSD!

Common Core State Standards Primer

Disclaimer: The publishers of this document, Truth in American Education, have some very disconcerting right-wing membership and advisors. I mean really right wing, like Heritage, Koret, the Teabaggers, and other assorted birthers and Birchers. However, this Common Core State Standards Primer document appears on the Hoosiers Against Common Core site that Professor Ravitch mentions in her recent Two Determined Moms in Indiana Take On Common Core post. Like the old adage: "even a broken clock is right twice a day," this flyer provides factual information on the Corporate, er... I mean Common Core State Standards. While I have major ideological differences with their organization, I find their assessment of CCSS to be pretty much spot on.

Common Core State Standards Primer by Shane Vander Hart

Common Core State Standards Primer

Schools Matter: Continuing skirmishes with CCSS cheerleaders on Diane Ravitch's blog

First published on Schools Matter on December 26, 2012.

---

"There is no evidence that standards and tests improve school achievement. The money budgeted for standards and tests to enforce the standards should be used to protect children from the effects of poverty." — Professor Stephen Krashen

The following is my edited commentary in response to comments by a CCSS supporter on the Professor Ravitch post: A Teacher of Latin Writes In Defense of Fiction.

Kaye Thompson Peters, I've grown weary of the trite "apple and oranges" device that you employ everywhere in your stalwart defense of Corporate Core. You even used it in a gushing apology for Common Core State Standards (CCSS) on Hoover's fringe-right EdNext. While you might not be uncomfortable that Pearson Education, Inc. has been promoting your writings on CCSS, it does cause some of us consternation. When discussing CCSS in relation to NCLB and RTTT, we're not conflating apples and oranges, we're discussing a bushel of rotten apples foisted on us by a bunch of billionaires suffering from the Shoe Button Complex.

To be sure, the revenue minded corporate overlords who coined Corporate Core have never considered high-stakes standardized testing a separate issue from their imposition of CCSS. They are one in the same and they serve the same set of goals in the neoliberal project of privatizing public schools. The Gates Foundation and the Duncan led Department of Education (my apologies for that redundancy) have been quite effective in convincing surrogates (some even in the AFT and NEA, sadly) to crow that they aren't inextricably linked. Such propaganda is so transparent that astute people see right through it. Ms. Peters, CCSS isn't a solution to, but instead it is a deliberate doubling down of, the vile policies of NCLB and RTTT.

Privatizer Dr. Catherine Thome's explanation for the impetus of Corporate Core tells us all we need to know about who stands to gain from CCSS:

"All students must be prepared to compete with not only their American peers in the next state, but with students around the world."

David Coleman's contempt for literature in English classes (at least for working class children) reflects both his corporate pedigree and that of his plutocrat handlers. It is no "red herring" to point out this glaring fault of CCSS, but I do agree with Mr. Heller that there are other fundamental flaws to this nationally imposed corporate curriculum. We need far more "Grapes of Wrath" and far less "FedViews" in this society. Sandra Stotsky does an excellent job taking on Coleman's corporate aims in her piece reproduced on the Parents Across America site.

Ultimately we must resist CCSS. Susan Ohanian, Professor Stephen Krashen, and the Schools Matter camp are leading the way on this. My recent short on Schools Matter has some great resource links for fighting CCSS.

Schools Matter: Continuing skirmishes with CCSS cheerleaders on Diane Ravitch's blog

Debunking Common Core Curriculum's so-called Four C's

First published on Schools Matter on December 26, 2012.

---

"When you go to doctors, they don’t take all your blood, they only take a sample." — Professor Stephen Krashen

Professor Diane Ravitch had a brief comment entitled The True Goals of Education? this morning where a reader suggested a sort of whole child approach based on virtues as opposed to tedious test preparation. That in itself wouldn't merit much attention, but oddly one of the readers posted a comment suggesting that those self-same virtues were the stated intent of Common Core State Standards. The following was my response to that assertion:

For the plutocrat sponsors* of Common Core State Standards (CCSS) to suggest that it has any goals beyond imbuing corporate servitude, compliance, petty jingoism, and acceptance of austerity is nothing short of pernicious propaganda.

Certainly David Coleman and Co. coined their "four C's" well after the fact, and clearly this was in response to to cogent criticisms by actual educators including Susan Ohanian, Professor Stephen Krashen, and others.

• Common Core State [sic] Standards
• Stephen Krashen brings Common Core debate to pages of the Sunday New York Times in time for the testing debate at the AFT convention
• BOONDOGGLE!
• High Tech Testing on the Way: a 21st Century Boondoggle?

Everything in Corporate Core Curriculum is designed to discourage critical thinking skills, and this is why CCSS won't be required outside of public schools (eg. charters, parochial, and private schools). There definitely won't be any canned corporate curricula sponsored by the Gates Foundation inflicted on the children of privilege at schools like Sidwell Friends.

Like its fellow malignant projects "No Child Left Behind" and "Race to the Top," CCSS has goals directly aligned to neoliberalism:

• Cause the appearance that the public school school system is broken, and that market solutions (charters/vouchers) would fare better.
• Control the curriculum and combat any chance that "dangerous" curricula that might cause people to resist neoliberalism or question corporate dominance is taught.
• Further sort students by race and class, and further subject them to endless mind numbing test preparation. Ultimately discouraging any critical thinking skills in any class outside those running society.
• Serve as the perfect excuse for union busting and the total deprofessionalization of teaching. Ultimately leading to low cost, but highly profitable delivery of necessary information (informational texts anyone?) to those not deemed as needing critical thinking. Real teaching will continue to exist in the hallowed halls of elite private schools for scion of the ruling class.
• Obscene profits for charlatans like Pearson, Microsoft, Goldman Sachs, Gideon Stein, and everyone else associated with the diverse markets connected to school privatization, real estate, and the standardized-testing-industrial-complex.

We must resist Corporate Core by every means posible. Paris 1968 is a good model for us to follow. If we don't, we may as well begin writing our eulogies for public education today.

_____
* I'm not saying Mr. Mindlin is working for one of them. He did, after all, say the so-called "four C's" were "allegedly" at the heart of CCSS.

Debunking Common Core Curriculum's so-called Four C's

Schools Matter: Tami Abdollah and John Deasy gush that 'Size Matters'

"Just continue to follow the money. This Race to the Trough will make the Reading First crooks under Bush look like dopey Boy Scouts." — Professor Jim Horn

The neoliberal cabal at Southern California's KPCC can't cheerlead for school privatization loud or frequently enough. Not content with Pat Morrison lobbing softballs to Broad Superintendent Academy graduate and former Gates Foundation employee John Deasy once a week, KPCC's intrepid education beat reporters are always looking for the latest anti-public-school story angle.

See my Schools Matter post, Tami Abdollah and John Deasy gush that 'Size Matters', for the rest of this essay.

Published 2012-08-15 on Schools Matter, please read it there and share widely.

Schools Matter: Tami Abdollah and John Deasy gush that 'Size Matters'

On Democracy Now! "Poverty Is the Problem": Efforts to Cut Education Funding, Expand Standardized Testing Assailed

The Democracy Now! team discusses recent developments in New York's assessment plans, the U.S. Department of Education's controversial No Child Left Behind waiver extortion scheme, and other topics with celebrated education professor and author Dr. Diane Ravitch and New York City schoolteacher Brian Jones (The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman).



[click here if can't view this video]

I first posted the above on Schools Matter, but want to add that I just got done reading the transcript on Susan Ohanian's site, and was struck by the fact that the following exchange sums up the entire corporation education reform thrust in a nutshell:

JUAN GONZALEZ: Brian Jones, you're a teacher in the trenches. Can you talk about the pressures on teachers these days with this emphasis on standardized testing and what it means actually to the kind of work that you do?

BRIAN JONES: Well, to me, the students are cheated even before the test is taken. Look, the cheating, the real social cheating, happens in the way that the high-stakes standardized testing distorts school itself.

Let me tell one story. I was doing a science experiment with a group of fourth graders. We were in the middle of a week-long science experiment, and we had--everyone had trays out on their tables, and they were pouring and mixing and investigating. We were having all kinds of rich discussions. And an administrator came in and said, "You have to stop what you’re doing right now," handed—put down a pile of workbooks and said, "You have to begin doing this right now." I begged her, in front of the students, "Please, let us just finish this experiment right now, in the next few minutes, and then we’ll do that." She said, "No, you have to put all this away right now and get working on the workbooks." So, the kids are cheated ahead of time. It teaches teachers to jump through these hoops, to not encourage critical thinking. It teaches all of us that knowledge is somewhere produced by Pearson or by one of these test companies, and you can’t create it, you can't investigate it, you can't do any of that. All you have to do is, more or less, remember it.

Here's another way students are cheated. In elementary school, which I teach, we tend to go through genre studies. We take a genre of literature at a time and go through it. Well, now what more and more schools are doing is teaching the test itself as a genre--that is, studying the features of a test, as you would a novel, or as you would historical fiction or mysteries. You’re laughing, but this is very serious. Any teacher watching this knows what I'm talking about, that you, in elementary school, in many schools, especially the schools where that gun to the head is already cocked--in the poorest schools, in the schools that teach the most disadvantaged students, students of color, in schools in Harlem--you have to teach students how to take a test. You have to tell eight-year-olds about multiple choice, right? And the thing that gets me is that the, you know, wealthy individuals who promote these policies send their own kids to schools that look nothing like that, where inquiry is promoted, where they don't spend all day obsessing about how they’re going to do on someone else's test.

The entire transcript is worth reading, but both Ohanian and I were struck by Jones' powerful words.

On Democracy Now! "Poverty Is the Problem": Efforts to Cut Education Funding, Expand Standardized Testing Assailed