Ten Reasons to Resist/Refuse Common Core

Anthony Cody, Education Week blogger (and definitely not a white suburban mom, Arne Duncan), offers a phenomenal take on the major faults of the Common Core State Standards. To sum up:

• CCSS were not developed in a democratic manner.
• No one who knows anything about early childhood development was consulted.
• It’s meant to encourage “market-driven innovation,” valuing profit for Pearson over teacher collaboration
• It claims to be rigorous, but it’s terribly rigid
• CCSS is all about high stakes testing
• Student scores will plummet – by design
• You think the NSA wants your info? Hah! CCSS is all about collecting info about your kids.
• It’s never been field tested. NEVER.
• CCSS centers around the misguided belief that an education is about “college and career readiness.”
• The biggest problem in education isn’t the curriculum; it’s the obscene level of poverty that our elected leaders choose to ignore.

Perhaps someone should call Arne Duncan’s mother. Her son’s not as brilliant as she thought he was.

NEXT: Why CCSS is making this blogger/AP teacher rethink his association with the College Board.

Common Stories of an Uncommon Corps

So this happened in the span of ten days at my public high school:

• One of my seniors received a call from Harvard. They want him to pursue a degree at their institution of higher learning.
• One of my students moved out of his home to live with another parent.
• One of my students ran away.
• One of my students moved out of his home to live with another relative.
• One of my students was taken from foster care and sent back to a group home.

Somehow, Common Core is going to help all of these kids “compete in a global economy.” Because it’s a corporation-backed, Race-to-the-Top-baited, never field-tested set of standards that will take care of what’s hurting so many of our students.

Are You Smarter Than a 5-Year Old? Kindergarten Common Core

Until Amazon’s Jeff Bezos – new owner of The Washington Post – realizes Valerie Strauss isn’t pro-corporate education reform and drops her like a bad habit, you need to read her blog, The Answer Sheet. Last week, she posted this gem about Common Core standards for kindergarteners:

To get an idea of what they say, below are the English Language Arts and math standards for kindergarteners. You should know that some early education experts have criticized the English-Language Arts standards, arguing that they do not square with what is known about early childhood development.

The one that may well be my favorite is this:

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RF.K.4 Read emergent-reader texts with purpose and understanding.

I can just picture a class of kindergarteners learning how to read emergent-reader texts with great purpose and understanding.

Whatever happened to playing? To drawing? To being a kid, for crying out loud?

Public School Parents! Please Read This!

The Common Core curriculum, approved by 46 states and Washington D.C., is knocking on our children’s classroom doors. The curriculum is incredibly challenging – not that there’s anything wrong with raising the educational bar – but the tests are ridiculous.

Carol Burris, winner of New York’s Outstanding Educator Award in 2010, offers this advice in today’s Washington Post:

New York’s Common Core tests, designed to measure whether 8-14 year olds are on the path to college readiness, will soon begin. The stakes have never been higher, since teachers and principals are now being evaluated in part by student scores. Like the teacher evaluation system, Common Core testing is a plane being built in the air — a plane in which the passengers are children.

So, what can parents do? Burris offers plenty of suggestions. Here are two of them:

*Understand that your tax dollars are being diverted from enrichment to instead sustain a bloated regime of testing, test prep, unproven standards and a teacher evaluation system designed to feed into the testing frenzy. Write to your governor and legislature and tell them, “no more”. This is an unprecedented assault on local school control.

*If you want to know how your child is doing in school, ask his or her teacher. Do not ever believe that your child’s potential for success in college and in life can be demonstrated by an elementary, or even a middle-school test. Even SAT’s have limited value in predicting college success. The rigor of the courses a student takes in high school is a far better predictor. Read the research.

Again, there’s nothing wrong with testing or having high standards. But in the case of the Common Core, it’s the implementation that should have every public school parent concerned. We need to close the door on the Common Core.

Open Mic Night in the Michigan Legislature

Stop it, Tom McMillin! You’re killing me! This GOP state rep is slaying ’em at the Lansing Laugh Hut with his rationale for opting out of the Common Core curriculum:

“We don’t want our kids to be common. We want our kids in Michigan to be exceptional. And this certainly lowers the bar, and makes it so that we have no ability to raise the bar.”

Dude, your party (and the people running it – ALEC, the Mackinac Center, the Koch Brothers), can’t wait to get the CCSS into public schools because of the incredible profit potential! Common Core doesn’t make the curriculum “common”, nor does it lower any bars. It’s incredibly challenging at all levels of instruction.

The punch line for school districts comes with the amount of money they’ll have to spend just to administer the tests! High school assessments must be administered online. Who’s going to pony up the money for the computers? The wifi? Who’s going to pay for the new textbooks? (Actually, who’s going to see more salary cuts to pay for them?)

The brilliant – in an evil genius cackling at a lightning storm kind of way – part of this is how our “failing” schools will be perceived once the first round of test scores are released. Scores will be lower than the nipple of a wet nurse at an orphanage.

I’ve seen a sample test. I’ll wager a year’s salary that less than ten percent of our state legislators could pass it.

And that’s no joke.