Guest post by John Thompson.

Diane Ravitch was recently informed of the contents of the New York City Department of Education e-mails that the United Federation of Teachers gained information through a Freedom of Information request. The first thing that Ravitch recognized in the communications was "the chummy exchanges between the public officials in charge of the New York City public school system and the top dogs of the charter leadership." Ravitch then explained that the communications document "the collusion between those who are sworn to protect the public schools and those who are incentivized to privatize them."

Ravitch then explained what I believe was the most revealing part of the e-mails. They revealed an organization that is afraid of any criticism. New York "reformers" are especially afraid of Ravitch, Deborah Meier, and Jonathan Kozol. The exchanges labeled Ravitch and Meier as "moronic" and Ravitch and Kozol as "deranged crackpots."

By now, the boorish behavior of many "reformers" is taken for granted. Once, Michelle Rhee's firing of a principal on camera for PBS was the archetype of a self-righteous crusader who subordinated common decency to her opinions about the correct way to help poor kids. Then Rhee championed evaluations using value-added models that failed to account for the additional difficulty of raising test scores in the toughest schools. She thus imposed collective punishment on teachers who chose to teach in the schools where it is harder to raise test scores.

Rhee was trumped, however, by Los Angeles Superintendent John Deasy who replaced the entire staff of Miramonte school after a current and a former teacher were arrested on suspicion of lewd conduct. He thus imposed collective punishment that left the entire faculty tainted as if they were child molesters.

Even so, I was shocked that the Los Angeles Times' story on Deasy's impatience did not have legs. The Times reported that:

Deasy dropped unannounced into a senior composition class taught by substitute teacher Patrena Shankling. Deasy angrily criticized Shankling for carrying out the assignment left by the regular teacher, calling it busywork that disrespected students. Shankling asked him to leave and Deasy allegedly retorted, "You're the one that will be leaving," before storming out, according to written statements from Shankling and students.

John Deasy is "morally driven to give all students a quality education." But I question the situational ethics of Deasy and other non-educators who believe that can help kids by using any means necessary to destroy the "status quo." Their fatal flaw is being too impatient to take time to listen to dissenters. The views of educators who are not "on the same page" are seen as merely a speedbump.

Political scientist, Patrick McGuinn, in a sympathetic article in Education Next, helps explain the belligerent culture of the contemporary "reform movement. McGuinn reports that education reform advocacy organizations (ERAOs) meet every few weeks in Washington D.C. to discuss their fight with teachers and their unions, which they dismiss as the "blob." The ERAOs refer to themselves, only half in jest, as the "Fight Club." In other words, they are so convinced of the righteousness of their cause that they embrace "brass knuckle" edu-politics, as they demonize their opponents.

When I became an inner city teacher in the early 1990s, it was easy to become angry at our poor system's flaws. But nobody suggested that we should blow up our system in order to save it. Our district had less than $1,900 per student per year to invest in overcoming a century of economic oppression and Jim Crow. No rational person would claim that we had the resources necessary to overcome the legacy of poverty. Administrators and teachers also knew we had to compromise in order to keep the school doors open. Like it or not, we had no option but to "hang together." When we made a deal, our handshake had to be good. We did not have to agree with the person who we compromised with, but we honored our commitments.

Once education "reform" was redefined as a civil rights movement, educational novices like Rhee, Deasy, and the "Fight Club" claimed that they were on the side of the angels. Common decency was dumped as a trait that slowed their crusade. These accountability hawks did not take the time to learn that schooling is a people business, and trusting relationships are essential. They adopted the business model of "churn," where destroying the careers of educators was seen as a virtue. I guess they believe that education will always have an endless supply of talent that is willing to be chewed up and spit out in service of the righteousness of "reformers" ultimate goals.

What do you think? Why do "reformers" believe they can help students by abusing educators?

John Thompson was an award winning historian, with a doctorate from Rutgers, and a legislative lobbyist when crack and gangs hit his neighborhood, and he became an inner city teacher. He blogs for This Week in Education, the Huffington Post and other sites. After 18 years in the classroom, he is writing his book, Getting Schooled: Battles Inside and Outside the Urban Classroom.

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Guest poem by Bill Schechter.

So who dares criticize Private Equity?

Who has the temerity to malign Private Enterprise,
- or suggest that Bain actually was a bane?

But when it came to trashing Public Education & Unions

the businessmen were first in line, with their Roundtables, their Councils, their Chambers, their PACS, followed by their Hedge Fund and Equity colleagues, with their phony grassroots groups, their bought education commissioners, their for-profit charters, their testing companies feeding at the public trough, their dollars counting double our votes,

and the bashing of teachers -- fifteen long years now -- why not?

Let the mandatory assessments proceed:

Wasn't it teachers whose voracious greed drove the economy off the Wall St.

cliff?

destroyed democracy?

grade papers?

You say, no?

Perhaps one day, the mayor of an American city, let's

call it Newark, New York, or Boston, or a school committee

States will have the guts to speak out/say/state/declaim

that attacks on America's teachers are

"nauseating" and must stop.

Sitting here...waiting.

Bill Schechter

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In a comment on my recent post posing Critical Questions about the Common Core, one reader wrote: "I don't see any harm in requiring all students to be able to recite their multiplication tables from memory up to 12 X 12 by the end of third grade or they don't go to fourth grade."

In some ways this represents the epitome of standardization. Determine a standard that all students must meet, and make it into a "high bar" that they all must clear before they move on. This reader has suggested the times tables be used as that bar. Florida made reading proficiency the key criterion, and has held back third graders who did not meet the benchmark for the past decade. There is some research that suggests there have been gains as a result, leading other states to consider the policy.

If we begin using BOTH times tables AND reading proficiency as benchmarks that could result in retention, we will increase the number of students retained even more.

But big questions remain, especially about the long-term effects of retention. This is an area where there has been a great deal of research, stretching back decades. Larry Ferlazzo has gathered an array of articles on the subject.

This research review gives the big picture:

Systematic reviews and meta-analyses examining research over the past century (studies between 1911-1999) conclude that the cumulative evidence does not support the use of grade retention as an intervention for academic achievement or soci0o-emotional adjustment (Holmes, 1989; Jimerson, 2001). Recent comparisons of academic achievement (i.e., reading, math, and language) and socio-emotional adjustment (i.e., emotional adjustment, peer competence, problem behaviors, attendance and self-esteem) between retained and matched comparison students, reported in 19 studies published during the1990s, yielded negative effects of grade retention across all areas of achievement and socio-emotional adjustment *Jimerson, 2001).

Research also fails to find significant differences between groups of students retained early (kindergarten through 3rd grade) or later (4th through 8th grades). What is most important is that, across studies, retention at any grade level is associated with later high school dropout, as well as other deleterious long-term effects.

Typically, the test scores of students who are retained in the primary grades may increase for a couple of years and then decline below those of their equally low-achieving but socially promoted peers. The temporary benefits of retention are deceptive, as teachers do not usually follow student progress beyond a few years.

The National Association of School Psychologists prepared this concise report, which says in part,

Surveys of children's ratings of twenty stressful life events in the 1980s showed that, by the time they were in 6th grade, children feared retention most after the loss of a parent and going blind. When this study was replicated in 2001, 6th grade stu- dents rated grade retention as the single most stressful life event, higher than the loss of a parent or going blind (Anderson, Jimerson, & Whipple, 2002). This finding is likely influenced by the pressures imposed by standards-based testing programs that often rely on test scores to determine promotion and graduation.

Analysis of multiple studies of retention indicate that retained students experience lower self esteem and lower rates of school attendance, relative to promoted peers (Jimerson, 2001). Both of these factors are further predictive of dropping out of school. Indirectly, low self-esteem and poor school attendance influence adult outcomes. Students who ultimately drop out of school without a diploma face considerable difficulty finding and maintaining employment for self-sufficiency and experience higher rates of mental health problems, chemical abuse and criminal activities than do high school graduates.

I think we should be very concerned about the psychological effects of policies such as these, because the scars that are inflicted on 8 year olds may affect them for the rest of their lives. And these effects may not be visible in their test scores. They may take years to show up.

This is not to say that students who have not learned to read should simply be bumped along the path towards graduation. There should be interventions to address the issues we discover. My own sons were struggling readers in the second grade. The older one was passed along, and did not really learn to read until we took him to a private reading specialist. The younger one was identified by the school, and placed in the Reading Recovery program. He worked closely with an excellent reading specialist, Rupert Gomez, and after a few months was reading at grade level. But I think he would have not been well-served by retention, for all the reasons suggested above.

What do you think? How have you seen students affected by retention? Does it provide lasting benefits? Or does it do more harm than good?

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A newspaper report from Mobile, Alabama, describes the system clearly.

Color-coded sticky notes on a wall in the "data room" at Mobile's Gilliard Elementary School bear the names of every pupil who is struggling in reading or math, has been absent too often, or has gotten into trouble for misbehaving.

A yellow note, for example, shows a kindergartner who failed a reading test.

A lime-green note shows a second-grader who made a D on his report card.

A light-blue note shows a fifth-grader who fared poorly on the state's standardized math test.

In all, there are 125 names on a dry-erase board that takes up one long wall in a conference room at the school on Dauphin Island Parkway. Some show up in more than one category.

Earlier in the year, the board reflected the names of 280 students out of the total 713 at the high-poverty school. Now, more than half of the names are gone, following intensive intervention and, in some cases, counseling to determine whether something was amiss at home.

The data used for this wall of data is drawn from report cards and tests, lots of tests. There are quarterly standardized tests that count towards student report card grades. And now the school has also purchased the Star Enterprise testing system, which provides reading and math tests three times a year.

This is layered on top of the standardized tests in April, and the practice tests throughout the year, and the pep rallies when the tests approach.

The schools in Mobile County were flagged by an investigative series published by the Atlanta Journal Constitution, which suggested there might be cheating in places where test scores gains seemed unusually high.

Clearly there is intense pressure on these schools to improve their scores. And that pressure is being passed along to the children.

One thing confused me in the article. It says:

In the data room, the names of struggling students are placed in one of two categories: Tier 2 means they're almost performing up to grade level; Tier 3 means they have a long way to go.

These children don't know that they've been labeled as such, or that their names are on sticky notes in the data room.

Tier 2 students receive 20 minutes of focused help with their classroom teacher every day, either individually or in groups of two or three. That's known as a "dip," meaning the students get another chance to learn what the entire class is working on.

Those in Tier 3 get the same "dip" as those in Tier 2, and they also leave class daily to work individually with a reading or math coach, an interventionist, a counselor or a special-education teacher.

Students in these two groups also stay at school an hour longer each afternoon for further intervention, and they're tested every three or four weeks in a process known as "progress monitoring."

What I wonder about is how a student could experience almost an hour of daily focused instruction including a pullout, plus an hour of after school intervention, and not be aware that they are in some special category? They may not see the data wall in their classrooms, but this special treatment must be very apparent to the students and all their peers.

This school is high poverty - 98% of the students qualify for free and reduced price lunches. It is these schools that have the largest number of students that do poorly on tests, and thus are experiencing the greatest pressure to increase test scores. The scores are going up, but you have to wonder what has been the cost?

How are these students experiencing their school? What does learning mean in this environment? It appears that learning has been defined as one's ability to accurately fill in bubbles and answer questions.

I would love to hear from teachers who are experiencing this sort of measurement-centered learning environment. How have you found that it impacts your students? Are they being served by the prompt intervention? Are they aware that they are in some special category? How does this affect their attitude towards school?

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Educators in the United States are once again headed for a very big trap. We are being seduced by the idea that a common set of standards and assessments to match will deliver equitable outcomes from our schools. This is the siren call that draws us into endless top-down reforms that never work, but never stop promising that the next time, we will get it right, and ALL students will achieve at high levels. But this time, maybe we can learn from the last big national experiment along these lines, No Child Left Behind.

We are entering another round in the endless quest for equity. A whole new set of Common Core standards, with assessments and curriculum to match, will fix everything that was wrong with NCLB. We will get new tests that will be "smarter" than those dumb old bubble tests. They will be so "smart," we will have to take them on computers! And the computers are even smarter, and can grade them for us! So we can give the tests more often, and that will allow us to track student progress more accurately than ever. And we can pay teachers more for better results, which will reward the good teachers and weed out the bad ones. And everyone, from California to New York to Mississippi, will have the same standards, assessments and curriculum, so everyone will have the same opportunities, and we will at last reach that promised land of equity for all.

The fundamental premise driving all this is that our students in poverty suffer because of low standards that have been set for them. They suffer because the "bar" has been set too low, and if we can just manage to set one bar across the land, and all get on the same page, we will pull everyone up to the same level.

This is a faith-based system. I do not believe there is much evidence to support it. Here are some critical questions that we might ask to probe whether there is any reason to believe that new standards, tests and curriculum will take us to the promised land.

Many of our states are as large - or larger - than many nations of the world. Each state has a set of standards that all students are expected to meet, and that shape assessments and curriculum. If a common high bar will deliver equitable outcomes nationwide, why have we not seen equitable outcomes within states that have such systems?

Do our students in high poverty schools benefit when their curriculum is standardized? Do they learn better when they have readings drawn from a national list, and lessons from the nationally published curriculum guide? Or do they do better when teachers have the flexibility to tailor their instruction to the students' interests, and create projects centered on their local context? Is a national standardized curriculum going to help this? Or will it tend to narrow the curriculum?

Will a national system of curriculum and assessments tend to increase our reliance on test scores for high stakes decisions or relieve it? Will we continue to make teacher pay and evaluations dependent on test scores? Will assessments that have become nationally standardized now be used for even more purposes, such as the ranking of teacher preparation programs? If so, will this not increase pressure to teach to the test?

Will we be giving more standardized tests, or fewer? The introduction of a battery of tests in the fall to allow for the measurement of "growth" at the level of the individual teacher will effectively double the amount of testing. In addition, we have "formative" tests in the works, designed to be given at regular intervals through the year. And we see a tremendous expansion of computer-based assessments, often scored by computer as well. Will we have an educational process that is mediated at every step of the way by assessments and benchmarks, so that all our students are led through a carefully prescribed sequence of lessons, with benchmarked expectations frequently measured and reported upon?

Will professional development focus more on authentic collaboration driven by teachers engaging in active inquiry around questions arising from within their practice, informed by their attention to the nuances of student learning? Or will we see more attention paid to student data trends, and the implementation of packaged programs aligned with standards and benchmarks?

Will money flow towards the classroom, to support smaller class sizes and time for authentic teacher collaboration? Or will it flow towards more assessments, scripted curriculum, and pre-packaged professional development aligned with the standards?

Will continued pressure to raise test scores lead schools afflicted with poverty to impoverish their curriculum with narrow, test-driven instruction, continuing the practices we have seen under NCLB, thus harming the very students this drive is supposed to help?

Will we ever address the fundamental reasons we have inequities in educational outcomes, as Finland did, or will we continue to pretend that setting standards and punishing schools, students and teachers for failing to meet them will lead to anything but misery for all involved?

What do you think? Will the Common Core national standards succeed where NCLB failed? Or are we in for more of the same?

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Guest post by John Thompson.

Early in my career, I floated a naive idea with my union business representative. What if education embraced a school reform code of ethics?

The attacks on teachers by "reformers" who had declared war on the educational "status quo," were ramping up their attacks on teachers. I could already see that the blame game could spin out of control. And sure enough, the contemporary accountability movement eventually declared a war on teachers, who supposedly were complicit in schools' failure to overcome the legacy of generational poverty. Back then, however, I was still too trusting of the idea that we could all reason together and thus improve schools.

My rep was sympathetic with my question, but he shot me down with a reminder of the system already in place. If teachers pushed policies that they disagreed with, administrators could retaliate by enforcing the existing code for educators and teachers could lose their licenses for violating it by, say, yelling at a class.

Many non-teachers might be perplexed by the answer, as I also would have been when I first entered the classroom. I had worked in plenty of brutalizing non-union blue collar jobs, including roughnecking in the oil fields, so I understood the survival-of-the-fittest ethos which was created by cruel workplaces. Before teaching in the inner city, I would have been shocked at the idea that the same belligerence was ubiquitous in schools.

Of course, teachers are wrong when we raise our voices in anger, but we work in a dehumanizing system. In my high schools, adults shouting at students, kids screaming at each other, frustrated administrators and livid teachers yelling back and forth, and parents cussing out teachers, administrators, and their kids were common symptoms of a dysfunctional system. We needed to think twice before we got all righteous towards each other. Even so, I'd again like to float the idea of a more modest reformers' code of conduct as a step toward ending our educational civil war.

High Stakes Testing.
We need a code of ethics with #1 beginning, "No stakes shall be attached to standardized tests without the consent of the student or educator." Under such a code, high-quality standardized assessments, such as AP and SAT tests, would not be threatened. Charters could test to their hearts delight. Testing could be used for its proper purpose as an assessment. It would provide evidence to inform instruction and policy. It would simply disarm "reformers" who want to use bubble-in testing to destroy "the status quo," and prevent the imposition of educational malpractice on schools and students who don't want rote instruction and nonstop test prep.

Truth in Advertising.
When a school or a system presents numbers purporting to be about "student performance," the ethical code would require definitions and methodology to also be reported. For instance, it would be unethical to report the "pass rate" without revealing the "exclusion rate." Improvements in student outcomes reported in percentages should also include raw numbers, thus illuminating the attrition rate. Attendance numbers should include the numbers of students who did not attend class but whose absences were dropped or "worked off." Graduation rates should also indicate how many students were granted how many credits for classes despite failing grades and/or excessive absences.

The professional autonomy of teachers.
Micromanaging or imposing scripted instruction on a teacher must be seen as a very serious manner, especially when done by persons who have little or no experience in comparable classrooms and/or when a large body of social science and cognitive science evidence calls the wisdom of those mandates into question. There would be nothing unethical in giving teachers a curriculum pacing guide which calls for the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and comparable standards to each be covered in eight minutes. After all, our teachers and administrators shared a belly laugh about our pacing guide when it was passed down. It would be inappropriate to expect teachers to take such a guide seriously, however, or to order the teaching to benchmark tests that cover those standards on such a timetable.

Adult Interests.
It has often argued that the welfare of children should be placed above the politics of adults. In one sense, we can still agree with that ideal. The ethical position is to recognize, however, that adults hold different positions because they often have honest disagreements. It should be considered rude to characterize an opponent's position as defending "adult interests" without evidence.

Education "Papers."
It would be unethical for "research" papers presented by think tanks or policy advocates, using the trappings of scholarly papers, to mischaracterize the positions of their opponents. They should borrow the academic convention of accurately summarizing the arguments that they seek to refute. For instance, a paper on seniority would be honor-bound to honestly articulate the reasons for "last in, first out," and their opponents' proposals for reforming it, as opposed to just labeling the other side as "False."

Similarly, a researcher would be allowed to spin the findings in regard to his pet project, and characterize its results as "quite encouraging," even when most scholars would identify them as modest. But it would be improper to bury attrition rates in a table in at the end of the paper. For instance, if a researcher like Roland Fryer knows that readers have concerns about the attrition rate of students in "No Excuses" schools, and is studying neighborhood schools that adopt their methods, the number of students who begin the year should be reported prominently and the number of those students who stick it out until spring testing should be transparent. And, if a study (like "The Long-Term Teacher Impacts of Teachers" by Chetty et. al) excludes classes where 25% of the students are on IEPs, that should be revealed in the introduction. When using statistical modeling on a sample of students, the proper approach is to review the work of prominent scholars (like Aaron Pallas and Jennifer Jennings) who have shown why those samples may be unrepresentative or how an economist's algorithm might be missing the effects of real world dynamics.

Yelling.
Today, after years of failed "reforms," my old neighborhood schools are even more dehumanizing than they were when I started teaching. The gratuitous harassment of teachers is even more common, and the abuse is then re-directed towards the students. The scientific term for this dynamic is, "the feces rolls downhill."

When educators and/or students "lose it," the ethical response should be to follow an apology with an honest conversation probing the reasons why tempers were lost and making concrete plans to do better. The purpose of those discussions should be the creation of a respectful learning culture. Such an approach could provide a bonus, improving school climates enough that reformers do not need to demonize educators in order to help students.

My students' big complaint with me was that I held things in for weeks before blowing my stack. Is that an issue in your school? What do you think? Could we create a learning climate, even in the inner city, where adults and students do not raise their voices in anger? Why are "reformers" so confident that the ends justify their means? Could a code of ethics help deescalate our educational civil war?

What do you think?

John Thompson was an award winning historian, with a doctorate from Rutgers, and a legislative lobbyist when crack and gangs hit his neighborhood, and he became an inner city teacher. He blogs for This Week in Education, the Huffington Post and other sites. After 18 years in the classroom, he is writing his book, Getting Schooled: Battles Inside and Outside the Urban Classroom.

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A week ago I featured a guest post by Jack Hassard, Common Core Values: Do they include Authoritarianism? Today, in the spirit of promoting dialogue, I am sharing a response from a different point of view.

Guest post by David Musselwhite.

The Common Core State Standards and the values they espouse are not a threat to the tenets of progressive education. Far from reflecting authoritarianism, the true values of the Common Core movement are equity, competition, and collaboration.

Before the Common Core: Realities about Student Achievement
What do we really mean when we speak of the progressive education? According to Jack Hassard, this movement's trademarks are individuality, creativity, and innovation. In his article Common Core Values: Do they Include Authoritarianism?, he assails the Common Core and many other aspects of the American education system as undemocratic. But others define progressivism differently: Andrew Fong of the Center for American Progress stated it this way: "Progressives believe in maximizing human freedom and helping society and its individual members achieve their full potential." It is the latter purpose that drives educators and the Common Core State Standards Initiative.

Data from international exams like the PIRLS, PISA, and TIMSS reveal just how far from our students' full potential we are.

• In 2007, 4th graders in 8 countries participating in the TIMSS scored higher on average in mathematics than students in the United States.


• In 2006, 4th graders in 10 countries participating in the PIRLS scored higher on average in reading than students in the United States.


• In 2007, 8th graders in 9 countries participating in the TIMSS scored higher on average in science than students in the United States.


• In 2006, U.S. 15 year olds scored lower on average than students in 16 countries participating in the PISA science exam.

When compared to students from other countries, as our graduates more often are than at any previous point in history due to our increasingly global economy, our students leave much to be desired. Clearly, aspects of our education system need to be changed in order to produce results that will drive our continued economic prosperity and, as the recent report by Joel Klein and the Council on Foreign Relations made clear, our national security.

Can raising academic standards be a part of solving this problem? New research from Michigan State University indicates that it can. Dr. William Schmidt studied the Common Core math standards and compared them to states' previously existing standards and international standards. He found that the Common Core closely resembles the standards of high-achieving countries. He also concluded that states whose previous standards more closely resembled the Common Core performed better on the NAEP than states whose standards were inferior in rigor, clarity, and coherence. While emphasizing that implementation is the key to making any set of standards effective in raising student achievement, Schmidt's research clearly demonstrates the relationship between high expectations and high performance. "What is clear in the research," Schmidt stated, "is that the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics are an important improvement over the state standards that they replaced."

Values of the Common Core
When states voluntarily adopt the Common Core they are expressing a set of values and beliefs about American education, but authoritarianism is not among them. How can authoritarianism be involved when the states themselves were all involved in the development, review, approval, and adoption of the standards? The National Governor's Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers are not dictating the standards and their adoption from on high, they are responding to the needs of their members for a clear, consistent set of standards that will help more students be college- and career-ready.

Equity is the foremost value underlying the Common Core movement. For too long, inconsistencies have been allowed to persist in our education system. Disparate state standards have led to disparate achievement, with students being denied the kind of high-quality instruction they deserve simply because of their zip code. Yes, there are many other explanatory variables behind differences in student achievement, and those need to be addressed by educators, lawmakers, and parents. But the foundation of our education system must be high expectations for all students, and those expectations should be crafted so that American students are competitive not only in their home cities or states, but globally.

That is not to say that classroom instruction should not be individualized and driven by the interests of the students - of course it should. The Common Core simply tells all stakeholders what a child should be able to do by the end of a grade or course. Skilled educators know how to tailor their instructional materials and practices to the needs and interests of the students. Individuality and creativity must be important elements of the daily classroom, but they must be used in the service of achieving rigorous standards. It is through these rigorous standards that students develop the critical thinking skills and habits of mind that produce competent participants in our democracy.

Hassard's article derides the "competitiveness" argument for its capitalist overtones. Ideological differences aside, we cannot deny that we want our students to stack up well against other countries in terms of skills and knowledge so that they can continue to drive American innovation and progress. Competitiveness is a side-effect, however, of high-quality instruction that pushes children to use cognitively demanding thinking processes. The Common Core State Standards do just this, and competitiveness will not be the only result. If implemented properly we will produce a generation of students who are well-equipped not only for the workplace, but for the public arena. Creating competent citizens - through more relevant exercises, a heavier reliance on informational text, requiring more writing and development of argument, etc. - will engender competitiveness. It need not (and, I would agree with Hassard, should not) be our primary goal. But to decry the Common Core because advocates claim it will make our students more competitive is to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

As an educator, I am most excited about the potential for collaboration the Common Core State Standards present. No other profession faces the same barriers to collaboration that hinder educators under the current system of disparate standards. The current context creates a chilling effect on teachers' ability to collaboratively plan instructional strategies, create materials, share best practices, and experiment with innovative educational methodologies. Already I have seen efforts among mathematics teachers to develop open-source materials and lessons aligned to the Common Core. When you allow professionals to work together from a common set of blueprints, the innovation that Hassard so values will necessarily take place, helping us reimagine education for the 21st century. It is not publishing companies and business interests who will benefit most from the Common Core, but educators, parents, students, and ultimately our nation.

What do you think? Will the Common Core Standards bring us greater opportunities for collaboration? Will it make our schools more equitable?


David Musselwhite is the Common Core State Standards Initiative Team Leader for Michigan PTA. Through a generous grant from National PTA, the CCSSI Team seeks to educate parents and communities about the Common Core. A 2010 graduate of Cornell University, he currently teaches secondary mathematics in the Detroit Public Schools.

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Guest post by Chemtchr.

Last Friday afternoon, Achieve's "Next Generation Science Standards", as they're calling their Common Core, finally became available. Their "public comment" interval ends June first.

I'm going to argue this Common Core was specifically designed to narrow the scope of education to skills that can be (relatively) easily tested. I described my personal experience with the science core in a comment on Anthony Cody's blog last month. He asked me to expand it into a column, but I couldn't do that until readers could examine the actual Common Core science product.

I was serving a term as a volunteer on my state's Math and Science Advisory Council three years ago. I'm only describing my personal experiences, and can't speak for the rest of the committee, but some of those experiences were really frustrating for me. For instance, representatives of the DOE came to our meetings and asked us to "integrate" the inquiry strand of our state science standards into the testable bullets. We wrote a beautiful report on the role of inquiry, and the interaction of science and mathematics. The DOE then edited our report without our input, "correcting" our references to laboratory work so that virtual simulations could be substituted.

The Race to the Top application required my state legislature to hurriedly embrace the as-yet nonexistent Achieve Common Core effort, and we were asked for input. I noticed that when Achieve came to our meetings, they sat at the head of the table while the DOE liaison assisted our chairperson in administering their agenda. Then, during the Race to the Top application process, the Gates Foundation sent representatives to our meeting, who showed us the curriculum map which their grantees were creating for the new Science Core standards. The aim was to arrive, by high school, at a discreet set of testable skills.

An example was Newton's Laws of Motion. The testable outcome had been identified, and standards for the earlier years were being pruned. "Orphan standards" that didn't lead towards later desired assessment goals were removed, and replaced by preliminary work towards the eventual "higher-level" learning and assessment. One presenter referred to the process as "reverse engineering", or starting with a solution and working backwards from it.

It was clear the "solution" they were working towards was testing, not teaching.

I protested in helpless horror as double pan balances were removed from our primary schools, to be replaced by assessment criteria for the formalistic recognition by a young child that if she pushes on the table, it pushes back with equal force. There was nothing I (or anyone) could say or do to stop it. The Common Core was a done deal, about to be blindly legislated by state after state in the RttT juggernaut.

Why is this Reverse Engineering Approach So Wrong for Science Education?

One wise systems analyst made this comment on backwards-engineered solutions:
"I heard someone say, "backwards-engineer a solution" on a conference call today. I think he meant, "reverse-engineer," but it got me thinking about when we pass "backwards-engineering" off as "forward-thinking."
-Amusingly Moss

The "Next Generation Science Standards" have set out to backwards engineer the whole science curriculum into a coherent, self-validating tool. The goal all along was an instrument to market both teaching and assessment products to a captive education system, not to provide a framework for good teaching of the sciences. In addition to all the historical evidence for this interpretation, we can now examine the document itself.

Here's the vertically-integrated physics strand I witnessed as it was being formulated. As I foretold last month, this perfectly reasonable standard appears in Achieve's science standards for grades 9-12:

Plan and carry out investigations to show that the algebraic formulation of Newton's second law of motion accurately predicts the relationship between the net force on macroscopic objects, their mass, and acceleration and the resulting change in motion. [Assessment Boundary: Restricted to one- and two-dimensional motion and does not include rotational motion. Does not apply in the case of subatomic scales or for speeds close to the speed of light. Calculations restricted to macroscopic objects moving at non-relativistic speeds.]

And here are the standard's bizarre new primary grade antecedents, for grades K-2:

Investigate the effect of pushes and pulls of different strengths on the resulting motion of objects. [Assessment Boundary: Simultaneous pushes and pulls to be along a single line; pushes and pulls to be between objects in contact. Students not to be assessed on quantitative relationships.]

Construct an explanation for why an object subjected to multiple pushes and pulls might stay in one place or move. [Assessment Boundary: Pushes and pulls to be between objects in contact.]

For this, the children have lost their double-pan balances. Achieve is touting its opus as being "based on" input from its partners, including the National Science Teachers Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. They claim their standards "are promoting depth over breadth in science education, ensuring greater coherence in learning across grade levels, and helping students understand the cross-cutting nature of crucial concepts, such as energy and matter, that span scientific disciplines."

In fact, we can readily see that their standards are made out of picked bones. These standards actually don't span anything much, and connect nothing but assessment boundaries. In this case, less isn't more. We would be forced to devote all the formative, developmental years to consumption of standards-based learning products and assessments, in absurdist preparation for future standards-based product lines.

What Will We Lose if this Backwards-Engineered Core is Adopted?

Satisfactory decision-making in complex situations often requires keeping a number of possibilities open and adopting several solutions. Whatever the choice, pursuing one or more smaller, related problems and their possible solutions results in a large number of other problems and potential solutions ceasing to be considered. Particular difficulties arise when the solution takes on a life of its own in such a way that it begins to dictate the perception of the problem rather it being an answer to the problem.

The forward-looking possibilities we need to keep open are the stuff of education itself. In this closed-off, test-based approach, sponsored by the data-driven assessment industry, Achieve has produced an obstacle to teaching and learning.

Their real goal was a seamlessly integrated product line, and that blinded them to potential solutions inherent in a rich primary and elementary education experience. Test-based accountability has taken on a life of its own, and now its flagship, the Common Core, misdirects our efforts rather than offering any answer to our real challenges.

Wikipedia describes reverse-engineering like this:

"The purpose is to deduce design decisions from end products with little or no additional knowledge about the procedures involved in the original production."

- Wikipedia, Reverse Engineering

Education isn't an alien starship we're trying to replicate, though. We educators and researchers possess a great wealth of knowledge about the processes and procedures involved in children's intellectual development and in science learning. Instead of using that knowledge base, the Common Core developers essentially outlawed it in favor of the longest, narrowest test-prep regimen in history.

One Core to Rule Them All

I'm not willing to pretend this is a genteel dispute among contrary theorists of education progress. The "partners" in the Common Core development include many of our largest and most powerful corporations, several with long histories of fierce monopolistic battles. Pearson Education is one partner, and the Gates Foundation is functioning as a tax-exempt advocacy arm for Microsoft itself.

Through ignorance, arrogance, or the narrowness of their self-interest, politically connected corporatists are about to perpetrate a massive for-profit take-over of science education that will do long-term damage to the very foundation of our scientific and technical infrastructure, while they devour our local and state education tax money.

If you advocate or support the development of a vibrant information technology industry, and a scientifically capable people who can actually contribute to the health and welfare of society as a whole, join us educators in our struggle to stop this huge, backwards-engineered insider deal.

What do you think? Has the Common Core started with what is testable and worked backwards? Is this a dead end?

Chemtchr teaches science and advises a student service club at a public high school in a diverse low-income community. She is a graduate of UC Santa Cruz and MSU Bozeman, and has taught in urban community-based programs and at a tribal college, as well as in public districts. She's active in Citizens for Public Schools, and in local and state councils.

Posted by Anthony Cody at 7:57 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Guest post by Tim Slekar.

About a year ago I published a blog that detailed how Pennsylvania governor, Tom Corbett, was using the shock doctrine to dupe the citizens of Pennsylvania into believing that a $1 Billion dollar cut to public education was necessary to help with the state's budget deficit. I quickly pointed out that these cuts would actually weaken public schools and help push Corbett's real education agenda (dismantling public schools) and that in the end, no money would be saved anyway. However, these cuts would hinder real learning and create the appearance of failing schools.

So what has happened since last year? A large portion of schools "furloughed" teachers to start the 2011-2012 school year to help balance budgets that were dramatically reduced by Corbett's cuts to public schools. In fact, I also personally introduced readers to one of the furloughed teachers last year.

Across the state all public schools had to deal with less. However, some districts felt the pain more than others. For example, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia were hit harder because of the inability to raise revenues from other sources. Therefore the number of furloughed employees was higher in these urban areas.

That was then and this is now. As school districts plan their budgets for the 2012-13 academic year, most are finding that the $1 billion dollar cut from last year and this year's proposed new cuts from Corbett have made financial equilibrium impossible. In fact, as I mentioned above Pittsburgh and Philadelphia were already struggling. Now however, Philadelphia has decided to auction off 40 schools to charter operators and in the next five years Philadelphia residents will probably lose their entire public school system to a network of private charter school providers. Pittsburgh needs to layoff hundreds of teachers to balance their budget. And this has resulted in a ridiculous discussion about teacher effectiveness vs. teacher seniority as furlough criteria.

Let's take a quick look at Pittsburgh first. Understand that the discussion of teacher effectiveness is the goal of the Corbett administration. Instead of focusing on the governor's budget cuts to public schools, the discussion is on how to make furlough decisions (effectiveness vs. seniority). This is classic shock doctrine. Create a financial crisis and then implement reform practices that mask the real issue. So, in Pittsburgh, students, teachers, and citizens are being torn apart debating the method for furloughing teachers instead of demanding fully funded public schools.

What about the disaster in Philadelphia? This truly is a sad story, but maybe even more important is how what is happening in Philadelphia actually allows us to vividly see into the future. You don't need a palm reader or tarot cards, just look here. The dismantling of the public school system in the city of Philadelphia is happening right in front of our eyes. What about New Orleans, New York City, Cleveland, Los Angeles, etc?

Corbett declared war on public education and he is going after the most vulnerable first--low income, minority-serving schools in urban areas. Why? Because these are the districts that already serve our most vulnerable children with the least political capital.

Of course the "failing schools" rhetoric is used along with the need for drastic changes--like charters (Even though the research on charter school demonstrates that they provide no real advantage). However, bring up the fact that these are the districts with the highest concentrations of poverty (Research has demonstrated poverty has a profound influence on learning) and you're considered to be making excuses or your accused of claiming that poor kids can't learn. This is also part of the plan--appear to be an advocate for poor and minority students.

However, how does cutting funds from schools with the most need do anything positive for the children, teachers and their communities? It doesn't! It's just shocking!

Today they declared the end of public education in Philadelphia.

And with this crime, they have surely murdered the last hope for democracy. Mr. Johnson

Timothy D. Slekar is an Associate Professor of teacher education and Head of the Division of Education, Human Development, and Family Studies at Penn State Altoona. He has also worked as an elementary school teacher. He is a co-host of the @The Chalkface radio show, which takes a critical look at education reform.

Posted by Anthony Cody at 10:07 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

One of the oldest problems with the left or progressive movement is our tendency to drag ourselves down through internal struggle over who has the most correct political line. We are seeing some of this dynamic emerge in the movement against high stakes testing. Perhaps it is a coming of age - a sign of our success - that we have a strong enough movement that people are taking these issues seriously. But I am afraid we are going to squander our precious momentum by turning our anger on one another, when there are very clear assaults taking place on teachers and students across the country.

Our organizations are precious things. A group like Save Our Schools March is nothing more than a collection of volunteers working their hearts out to make a difference. They don't always make the perfect tactical choices, but their intention is to build our ability to unite and resist the testing machine. And we all benefit when groups such as these create focal points for discussion or action.

I was one of the organizers of last year's Save Our Schools march in Washington, DC. Most people now seem to view that as a success. Along the way, there were bumps in the road, similar to what we are seeing this year as the Save Our Schools convention approaches. We made some compromises not everyone was happy with. We focused our guiding principles on solid issues we felt we could unite people around - and we built a coalition. The direct involvement of the NEA and AFT in particular was critical in getting the turnout that we did. They did NOT mobilize their membership by the thousands, but their endorsement allowed teachers from around the country to get the support of their local union chapter to send them, and also allowed us to use union communications channels to publicize the events. Though the majority of our funding came from individual donors, support the unions also gave us an important financial boost.

This was a coalition we needed to pull off an event of this magnitude. Without a broad coalition, our march would have been much smaller. We did not get huge media coverage - but we got some, especially as a result of Matt Damon's appearance. His speech buoyed teacher spirits across the country, and has been viewed tens of thousands of times on Youtube. We had a wide range of speakers - teachers from Wisconsin, activists from across the country, and well-known leaders like Diane Ravitch, Linda Darling-Hammond, Angela Valenzuela and Pedro Noguera.

But in the year prior to the rally, we were warned that certain people who were being invited to speak were "craven apologists for the Obama/Duncan regime." After the NEA endorsed Obama for re-election a month or two before the march, some wanted us to spurn their support and return the funds they had contributed.

In recent days the discussion over the Common Core has taken on a similar tone, with some people demanding that Save Our Schools take an immediate stand against them. I am no longer part of the leadership of SOS, but I have some thoughts to share.

I personally have major concerns about the many negative impacts that the Common Core and its associated tests are likely to have. But my views are not the same as all of those we can count as allies in our efforts to defend schools and defeat the testing machine. We need to look at who we want to work with, and what we can ALL unite around to act.

So where is our movement? What are we able to unite around?
Take a look at three statements that have gathered regional and national support in recent months. These are a good reflection of where our movement is - they represent what people are actually uniting around.

The New York Principal's Open Letter, which has been signed by 1,451 principals, almost a third of all in the state. This letter focused on concerns over the use of test scores for teacher evaluations, the narrowing of the curriculum that results from too much emphasis on test scores, and the diversion of funds into testing.

In Texas, more than 400 school boards have adopted a resolution against high stakes testing, which calls upon the state to:

...reexamine the public school accountability system in Texas and to develop a system that encompasses multiple assessments, reflects greater validity, uses more cost efficient sampling techniques and other external evaluation arrangements, and more accurately reflects what students know, appreciate and can do in terms of the rigorous standards essential to their success, enhances the role of teachers as designers, guides to instruction and leaders, and nurtures the sense of inquiry and love of learning in all students.

Just last month, a coalition launched a National Resolution on High Stakes Testing. So far 249 organizations have signed on, and more than 6500 individuals.
Here are the key resolutions:

RESOLVED, that [your organization name] calls on the governor, state legislature and state education boards and administrators to reexamine public school accountability systems in this state, and to develop a system based on multiple forms of assessment which does not require extensive standardized testing, more accurately reflects the broad range of student learning, and is used to support students and improve schools; and

RESOLVED, that [your organization name] calls on the U.S. Congress and Administration to overhaul the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, currently known as the "No Child Left Behind Act," reduce the testing mandates, promote multiple forms of evidence of student learning and school quality in accountability, and not mandate any fixed role for the use of student test scores in evaluating educators.

As I said, I am personally very concerned that the Common Core will expand the number of tests, their frequency, and the negative impact of NCLB-type accountability systems. I am doing my best, through my blog, and with interviews and guest posts by various education leaders, to promote discussion and understanding of this. If some group or individual wants to put together a petition that opposes the expansion of testing associated with the Common Core I would be happy to sign it. I have not seen such a petition - and that should tell us something. We do not have a broad understanding of the Common Core among educators, much less the public at large. Making opposition to the Common Core a core demand is going to limit the ability of any coalition to gain participation by many groups and individuals who do not share this view.

This comes down, in large part, to how we view Save Our Schools as a group. Is it a broad coalition that brings together as wide an array of people and organizations as possible to fight high stakes testing? Or is it a sharply focused vanguard group that advocates for clearly defined positions on every issue before us? We were able to bring more than 5000 people together in Washington, DC, last summer by being a broad coalition. I think that sort of coalition is what makes such grassroots actions successful.

The Save Our Schools convention in Washington, DC, will take place this August 3rd to 5th, and is our chance to discuss these issues, as Deborah Meier explains here. I hope we come not focused on the few things where we might not agree completely, but with a goal of building the common ground on which we can make our stand. That is what the principals did in New York, and the school boards did in Texas, and many of us have joined to do in supporting the National Resolution. That is how movements are built. Focusing on where we disagree, and making these disagreements into tests of purity - that is how movements are wrecked.

What do think? Is it time for SOS March to take a sharp stand on the Common Core? Or is it more important to build the broadest anti-testing coalition possible?

Posted by Anthony Cody at 3:19 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend