This is a revised version of a talk on the
Common Core State Standards (CCSS) delivered in Portland, Oregon, Sept.
20, 2013. The CCSS have been adopted by 46 states and are currently
being implemented in school districts throughout the United States.
MICHAEL DUFFY
The trouble with the Common Core is not primarily
what is in these standards or what's been left out, although that's
certainly at issue. The bigger problem is the role the Common Core State
Standards (CCSS) are playing in the larger dynamics of current school
reform and education politics.
Today everything about the Common Core, even the brand name—the Common Core
State
Standards—is contested because these standards were created as an
instrument of contested policy. They have become part of a larger
political project to remake public education in ways that go well beyond
slogans about making sure every student graduates “college and career
ready,” however that may be defined this year. We're talking about
implementing new national standards and tests for every school and
district in the country in the wake of dramatic changes in the national
and state context for education reform. These changes include:
- A 10-year experiment in the use of federally mandated standards and
tests called No Child Left Behind (NCLB) that has been almost
universally acknowledged as a failure.
- The adoption of test-based teacher evaluation frameworks in dozens of states, largely as a result of federal mandates.
- Multiple rounds of budget cuts and layoffs that have left 34 of the
50 states providing less funding for education than they did five years
ago, and the elimination of more than 300,000 teaching positions.
- A wave of privatization that has increased the number of publicly
funded but privately run charter schools by 50 percent, while nearly
4,000 public schools have been closed in the same period.
- An appalling increase in the inequality and child poverty
surrounding our schools, categories in which the United States leads the
world and that tell us far more about the source of our educational
problems than the uneven quality of state curriculum standards.
- A dramatic increase in the cost and debt burden of college access.
- A massively well-financed campaign of billionaires and politically
powerful advocacy organizations that seeks to replace our current system
of public education—which, for all its many flaws, is probably the most
democratic institution we have and one that has done far more to
address inequality, offer hope, and provide opportunity than the
country's financial, economic, political, and media institutions—with a
market-based, non-unionized, privately managed system.
I think many supporters of the Common Core don't sufficiently take
into account how these larger forces define the context in which the
standards are being introduced, and how much that context is shaping
implementation. As teacher-blogger Jose Vilson put it:
People who advocate for the CCSS miss the bigger picture
that people on the ground don't: The CCSS came as a package deal with
the new teacher evaluations, higher stakes testing, and austerity
measures, including mass school closings. Often, it seems like the
leaders are talking out of both sides of their mouths when they say they
want to improve education but need to defund our schools. . . . It
makes no sense for us to have high expectations of our students when we
don't have high expectations for our school system.
My own first experience with standards-based reform was in New
Jersey, where I taught English and journalism to high school students
for many years in one of the state's poorest cities. In the 1990s,
curriculum standards became a central issue in the state's long-running
funding equity case,
Abbott v. Burke. The case began by
documenting how lower levels of resources in poor urban districts
produced unequal educational opportunities in the form of worse
facilities, poorer curriculum materials, less experienced teachers, and
fewer support services. At a key point in the case, in an early example
of arguments that today are painfully familiar, then-Gov. Christine
Whitman declared that, instead of funding equity, what we really needed
were curriculum standards and a shift from focusing on dollars to
focusing on what those dollars should be spent on. If all students were
taught to meet “core content curriculum standards,” Whitman argued, then
everyone would receive an equitable and adequate education.
At the time, the New Jersey Supreme Court was an unusually
progressive and foresighted court, and it responded to the state's
proposal for standards with a series of landmark decisions that speak to
some of the same issues raised today by the Common Core. The court
agreed that standards for what schools should teach and students should
learn seemed like a good idea.
But standards don't deliver themselves.
They require well-prepared and supported professional staff, improved
instructional resources, safe and well-equipped facilities, reasonable
class sizes, and—especially if they are supposed to help schools
compensate for the inequality that exists all around them—a host of
supplemental services like high quality preschools, expanded summer and
after-school programs, health and social services, and more.
In effect,
the court said adopting “high expectations” curriculum standards was
like passing out a menu from a fine restaurant. Not everyone who gets a
menu can pay for the meal. So the court tied New Jersey's core
curriculum standards to the most equitable school funding mandates in
the country.
And though it's been a constant struggle to sustain and implement New
Jersey's funding equity mandates, a central problem with the Common
Core is the complete absence of any similar credible plan to provide—or
even to determine—the resources necessary to make every student “college
and career ready” as defined by the CCSS.
Funding is far from the only concern, but it is a threshold
credibility issue. If you're proposing a dramatic increase in outcomes
and performance to reach social and academic goals that have never been
reached before, and your primary investments are standards and tests
that serve mostly to document how far you are from reaching those goals,
you either don't have a very good plan or you're planning something
else. The Common Core, like NCLB before it, is failing the funding
credibility test before it's even out of the gate.
The Lure of the Common Core
Last winter, the Rethinking Schools editorial board held a discussion
about the Common Core; we were trying to decide how to address this
latest trend in the all-too-trendy world of education reform. Rethinking
Schools has always been skeptical of standards imposed from above. Too
many standards projects have been efforts to move decisions about
teaching and learning away from educators and schools, and put them in
the hands of distant bureaucracies and politicians. Standards have often
codified sanitized versions of history, politics, and culture that
reinforce official myths while leaving out the voices and concerns of
our students and communities. Whatever potentially positive role
standards might play in truly collaborative conversations about what
schools should teach and children should learn has repeatedly been
undermined by bad process, suspect political agendas, and commercial
interests.
Although all these concerns were raised, we also found that teachers
in different districts and states were having very different experiences
with the Common Core. There were teachers in Milwaukee who had endured
years of scripted curriculum and mandated textbooks. For them, the CCSS
seemed like an opening to develop better curriculum and, compared to
what they'd been struggling under, seemed more flexible and
student-centered. For many teachers, especially in the interim between
the rollout of the standards and the arrival of the tests—a lot of the
Common Core's appeal is based on claims that:
- It represents a tighter set of smarter standards focused on
developing critical learning skills instead of mastering fragmented bits
of knowledge.
- It requires more progressive, student-centered teaching with strong elements of collaborative and reflective learning.
- It will help equalize the playing field by raising expectations for
all children, especially those suffering the worst effects of “drill and
kill” test prep.
Viewed in isolation, the debate over the Common Core can be
confusing; who doesn't want all students to have good preparation for
life after high school? But, seen in the full context of the politics
and history that produced it—and the tests that are just around the
bend—the implications of the Common Core project look quite different.
Emerging from the Wreckage of No Child Left Behind
In 2002, NCLB was passed with overwhelming bipartisan support and
presented as a way to close long-standing gaps in academic performance.
NCLB marked a dramatic change in federal education policy—away from its
historic role as a promoter of access and equity through support for
things like school integration, extra funding for high-poverty schools,
and services for students with special needs, to a much less equitable
set of mandates around standards and testing, closing or
“reconstituting” schools, and replacing school staff.
NCLB required states to adopt curriculum standards and to test
students annually to gauge progress toward reaching them. Under threat
of losing federal funds, all 50 states adopted or revised their
standards and began testing every student, every year, in every grade
from 3–8 and again in high school. The professed goal was to make sure
every student was on grade level in math and language arts by requiring
schools to reach 100 percent passing rates on state tests for every
student in 10 subgroups.
By any measure, NCLB was a failure in raising academic performance
and narrowing gaps in opportunity and outcomes. But by very publicly
measuring the test results against arbitrary benchmarks that no real
schools have ever met, NCLB succeeded in creating a narrative of failure
that shaped a decade of attempts to “fix” schools while blaming those
who work in them. The disaggregated scores put the spotlight on gaps
among student groups, but the law used these gaps to label schools as
failures without providing the resources or supports needed to eliminate
them.
By the time the first decade of NCLB was over, more than half the
schools in the nation were on the lists of “failing schools” and the
rest were poised to follow. In Massachusetts, which is generally
considered to have the toughest state standards in the nation—arguably
more demanding than the Common Core—80 percent of the schools were
facing NCLB sanctions.
This is when the NCLB “waivers” appeared. As the
number of schools facing sanctions and intervention grew well beyond the
poor communities of color where NCLB had made “disruptive reform” the
norm and began to reach into more middle-class and suburban districts,
the pressure to revise NCLB's unworkable accountability system
increased. But the bipartisan coalition that passed NCLB had collapsed
and gridlock in Congress made revising it impossible. So U.S. Education
Secretary Arne Duncan, with dubious legal justification, made up a
process to grant NCLB waivers to states that agreed to certain
conditions.
Forty states were granted conditional waivers from NCLB: If they
agreed to tighten the screws on the most struggling schools serving the
highest needs students, they could ease up on the rest,
provided
they also agreed to use test scores to evaluate all their teachers,
expand the reach of charter schools, and adopt “college and career
ready” curriculum standards. These same requirements were part of the
Race to the Top program, which turned federal education funds into
competitive grants and promoted the same policies, even though they have
no track record of success as school improvement strategies.
Who Created the Common Core?
Because federal law prohibits the federal government from creating
national standards and tests, the Common Core project was ostensibly
designed as a state effort led by the National Governors Association,
the Council of Chief State School Officers, and Achieve, a private
consulting firm. The Gates Foundation provided more than $160 million in
funding, without which Common Core would not exist.
The standards were drafted largely behind closed doors by academics
and assessment “experts,” many with ties to testing companies.
Education Week
blogger and science teacher Anthony Cody found that, of the 25
individuals in the work groups charged with drafting the standards, six
were associated with the test makers from the College Board, five with
the test publishers at ACT, and four with Achieve. Zero teachers were in
the work groups. The feedback groups had 35 participants, almost all of
whom were university professors. Cody found one classroom teacher
involved in the entire process. According to teacher educator Nancy
Carlsson-Paige: “In all, there were 135 people on the review panels for
the Common Core. Not a single one of them was a K–3 classroom teacher or
early childhood professional.” Parents were entirely missing. K–12
educators were mostly brought in after the fact to tweak and endorse the
standards—and lend legitimacy to the results.
College- and Career-Ready Standards?
The substance of the standards themselves is also, in a sense, top
down. To arrive at “college- and career-ready standards,” the Common
Core developers began by defining the “skills and abilities” they claim
are needed to succeed in a four-year college. The CCSS tests being
developed by two federally funded multistate consortia, at a cost of
about $350 million, are designed to assess these skills. One of these
consortia, the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and
Careers, claims that students who earn a “college ready” designation by
scoring a level 4 on these still-under-construction tests will have a 75
percent chance of getting a C or better in their freshman composition
course. But there is no actual evidence connecting scores on any of
these new experimental tests with future college success.
And it will take far more than standards and tests to make college
affordable, accessible, and attainable for all. When I went to college
many years ago, “college for all” meant open admissions, free tuition,
and race, class, and gender studies. Today, it means cutthroat
competition to get in, mountains of debt to stay, and often bleak
prospects when you leave. Yet “college readiness” is about to become the
new AYP (adequate yearly progress) by which schools will be ranked.
The idea that by next year Common Core tests will start labeling kids
in the 3rd grade as on track or not for college is absurd and
offensive.
Substantive questions have been raised about the Common Core's
tendency to push difficult academic skills to lower grades, about the
appropriateness of the early childhood standards, about the sequencing
of the math standards, about the mix and type of mandated readings, and
about the priority Common Core puts on the close reading of texts in
ways that devalue student experience and prior knowledge.
A decade of NCLB tests showed that millions of students were not
meeting existing standards, but the sponsors of the Common Core decided
that the solution was tougher ones. And this time, instead of each state
developing its own standards, the Common Core seeks to create national
tests that are comparable across states and districts, and that can
produce results that can be plugged into the data-driven crisis machine
that is the engine of corporate reform.
Educational Plan or Marketing Campaign?
The way the standards are being rushed into classrooms across the
country is further undercutting their credibility. These standards have
never been fully implemented in real schools anywhere. They're more or
less abstract descriptions of academic abilities organized into
sequences by people who have never taught at all or who have not taught
this particular set of standards. To have any impact, the standards must
be translated into curriculum, instructional plans, classroom
materials, and valid assessments. A reasonable approach to implementing
new standards would include a few multi-year pilot programs that
provided time, resources, opportunities for collaboration, and
transparent evaluation plans.
Instead we're getting an overhyped all-state implementation drive
that seems more like a marketing campaign than an educational plan. And I
use the word marketing advisedly, because another defining
characteristic of the Common Core project is rampant profiteering.
Joanne Weiss, Duncan's former chief of staff and head of the Race to
the Top grant program, which effectively made adoption of the Common
Core a condition for federal grants, described how it is opening up huge
new markets for commercial exploitation:
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.
Who Controls Public Education?
Having financed the creation of the standards, the Gates Foundation
has entered into a partnership with Pearson to produce a full set of
K–12 courses aligned with the Common Core that will be marketed to
schools across the country. Nearly every educational product now comes
wrapped in the Common Core brand name.
The curriculum and assessments our schools and students need will not
emerge from this process. Instead, the top-down, bureaucratic rollout
of the Common Core has put schools in the middle of a multilayered
political struggle over who will control education policy—corporate
power and private wealth or public institutions managed, however
imperfectly, by citizens in a democratic process.
The web-based news service
Politico recently described
what it called “the Common Core money war,” reporting that “tens of
millions of dollars are pouring into the battle over the Common Core. . .
. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation already has pumped more than
$160 million into developing and promoting the Common Core, including
$10 million just in the past few months, and it's getting set to
announce up to $4 million in new grants to keep the advocacy cranking.
Corporate sponsors are pitching in, too. Dozens of the nation's top CEOs
will meet to set the plans for a national advertising blitz that may
include TV, radio, and print.”
At the same time, opposing the Common Core is “an array of
organizations with multimillion-dollar budgets of their own and much
experience in mobilizing crowds and lobbying lawmakers, including the
Heritage Foundation, Americans for Prosperity, the Pioneer Institute,
FreedomWorks, and the Koch Bros.” These groups are feeding a growing
right-wing opposition to the Common Core that combines hostility to all
federal education initiatives and anything supported by the Obama
administration with more populist sentiments.
Tests, Tests, Tests
But while this larger political battle rages, the most immediate
threat for educators and schools remains the new wave of high-stakes
Common Core tests.
Duncan, who once said “The best thing that happened to the education
system in New Orleans was Hurricane Katrina” and who called
Waiting for Superman
“a Rosa Parks moment,” now tells us, “I am convinced that this new
generation of state assessments will be an absolute game-changer in
public education.”
The problem is that this game, like the last one, is rigged. Although
reasonable people have found things of value in the Common Core
standards, there is no credible defense to be made of the high-stakes
uses planned for these new tests. Instead, the Common Core project
threatens to reproduce the narrative of public school failure that just
led to a decade of bad policy in the name of reform.
Reports from the first wave of Common Core testing provide evidence
for these fears. Last spring, students, parents, and teachers in New
York schools responded to new Common Core tests developed by Pearson
with outcries against their length, difficulty, and inappropriate
content. Pearson included corporate logos and promotional material in
reading passages.
Students reported feeling overstressed and
underprepared—meeting the tests with shock, anger, tears, and anxiety.
Administrators requested guidelines for handling tests students had
vomited on. Teachers and principals complained about the disruptive
nature of the testing process and many parents encouraged their children
to opt out.
Only about 30 percent of students were deemed “proficient” based on
arbitrary cut scores designed to create new categories of failure. The
achievement gaps Common Core is supposed to narrow grew larger. Less
than 4 percent of students who are English language learners passed. The
number of students identified by the tests for “academic intervention”
skyrocketed to 70 percent, far beyond the capacity of districts to meet.
The tests are on track to squeeze out whatever positive potential exists in the Common Core:
- The arrival of the tests will pre-empt the already too short period
teachers and schools have to review the standards and develop
appropriate curriculum responses before that space is filled by the
assessments themselves.
- Instead of reversing the mania for over-testing, the new assessments
will extend it with pre-tests, interim tests, post-tests, and
computer-based “performance assessments.” It's the difference between
giving a patient a blood test and draining the patient's blood.
- The scores will be plugged into data systems that will generate
value-added measures, student growth percentiles, and other imaginary
numbers for what I call psychometric astrology. The inaccurate and
unreliable practice of using test scores for teacher evaluation will
distort the assessments before they're even in place, and has the
potential to make Common Core implementation part of the assault on the
teaching profession instead of a renewal of it.
- If the Common Core's college- and career-ready performance levels
become the standard for high school graduation, it will push more kids
out of high school than it will prepare for college. The most vulnerable
students will be the most at risk. As FairTest put it: “If a child
struggles to clear the high bar at 5 feet, she will not become a
‘world-class’ jumper because someone raised the bar to 6 feet and yelled
‘jump higher,’ or if her ‘poor’ performance is used to punish her
coach.”
- The costs of the tests, which have multiple pieces throughout the
year and must be given on computers many schools don't have, will be
enormous and will come at the expense of more important things. The
plunging scores will be used as an excuse to close more public schools
and open more privatized charters and voucher schools, especially in
poor communities of color.
This is not just cynical speculation. It is a reasonable projection
based on the history of the NCLB decade, the dismantling of public
education in the nation's urban centers, and the appalling growth of the
inequality and concentrated poverty that remains the central problem in
public education.
Fighting Back
Common Core has become part of the corporate reform project now
stalking our schools. As schools struggle with these new mandates, we
should defend our students, our schools, and ourselves by pushing back
against implementation timelines, resisting the stakes and priority
attached to the tests, and exposing the truth about the commercial and
political interests shaping this false panacea for the problems our
schools face.
There are encouraging signs that the movement we need is growing.
Last year in Seattle, teachers led a boycott of district testing that
drew national support and won a partial rollback of the testing. In New
York this fall, parents sent score reports on new Common Core tests back
to the state commissioner of education with a letter declaring “This
year's test scores are invalid and provide NO useful information about
student learning.” Opt-out efforts are growing daily. Even some
supporters of the CCSS have endorsed a call for the moratorium on the
use of tests to make policy decisions. It's not enough, but it's a
start.
It took nearly a decade for NCLB's counterfeit “accountability
system” to bog down in the face of its many contradictions and near
universal rejection. The Common Core meltdown may not take that long.
Many of Common Core's myths and claims have already lost credibility
with large numbers of educators and citizens.
We have more than a decade
of experience with the negative and unpopular results of imposing
increasing numbers of standardized tests on children and classrooms.
Whether this growing resistance will lead to better, more democratic
efforts to sustain and improve public education, or be overwhelmed by
the massive testing apparatus that NCLB left behind and that the Common
Core seeks to expand, will depend on the organizing and advocacy efforts
of those with the most at stake: parents, educators, and students.
As
usual, organizing and activism are the only things that will save us,
and remain our best hope for the future of public education and the
democracy that depends on it.
Core Connection
The administrators
stuffed in suits strut
through our school clenching
clipboards, nod plastic smiles|
Speak words like “common core,”
like “standards” & “benchmarks”.
But those of us who live in these rooms, who know each other's
stories & share apples and granola bars because there was no food in
the house after dad was arrested–
We nod & smile back–
Our secret knowing:
Core is community
Core is complex
Core is connection.
After bullshit banter,
The suits slip out, sip
bad coffee, fill out rubrics
on clipboards.
We close classroom doors,
Proceed to spin magic
uncommonly connected
at the core.
– Maureen Geraghty
Maureen Geraghty teaches at Reynolds
Learning Academy in Fairview, Oregon. She wrote this poem during a visit
to her class by slam poet Mosley Wotta.
