Got a report over the weekend that the Utah GOP just adopted a resolution against the Common Core State Standards. To read it, go to this link and scroll down the page a bit to read:
“Utah GOP Anti-Common Core Resolution PASSES”
The Utah resolution is heavily researched and referenced. It is very interesting reading for anyone regardless of political affiliation.
First, view the marketing video for this Common Core State Standards aligned English Language Arts (ELA) instructional program for young elementary school students.
Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?
Next, play this You Tube:
Now, write a comment for us about what you think about this CCSS aligned English Language Arts material for first graders. Be sure to mention whether you believe CCSS protects students from such stuff. Use of emotional terms recommended in the CCSS aligned first grade material is optional.
Reacting to growing nationwide pushback on Common Core State Standards (CCSS), Kentucky Commissioner of Education Terry Holliday recently posted an item in his Doc. H’s Blog dealing with what he claims is:
“…a lot of misinformation being pushed by folks who are not supportive of more rigorous standards for students….”
In Part 1 of this blog series, I dealt with the silly assertion that those who oppose CCSS are all against higher education standards. Now, let’s talk about the Commissioner’s allegation that:
“These standards were developed by teachers, college professors, and national education organizations.”
The truth is the public has no way to know who REALLY created CCSS, what the real creators’ qualifications are, and if the CCSS fairly represent what Kentucky’s educators wanted from Senate Bill 1.
However, after examining two lists here and here that supposedly show the members of various CCSS work groups, I must note that all of the listed teachers, professors and national education organization members didn’t come from Kentucky – not a single one, as far as I can tell.
But, did the people on these lists REALLY create CCSS?
We know that the CCSS were created under the auspices of the National Governors’ Association (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), two private groups not subject to any sunshine laws such as the federal Freedom of Information Act or Kentucky’s own open meetings and open records laws. In fact, a July 1, 2009 press release from the NGA discusses the formation of the work groups that would create the CCSS. That press release admits:
“The Work Group’s deliberations will be confidential throughout the process.”
This secretive process used to create the CCSS is VERY different from the one actually contemplated in SB-1, which required the creation – not just adoption – of Kentucky’s new standards to be overseen by the Kentucky Department of Education and the Council on Postsecondary Education. Both of those Kentucky public organizations ARE subject to transparency rules and are far more accessible to Kentucky’s educators and citizens.
Furthermore, these Kentucky public education organizations certainly would have included KENTUCKY teachers and KENTUCKY college professors in any work they had performed.
By the way, the NGA’s press release also contains this very interesting comment:
“Additionally, CCSSO and the NGA Center have selected an independent facilitator and an independent writer as well as resource advisors to support each content area work group throughout the standards development process.”
That could have rendered the CCSS work group meetings wide open to manipulation by a well known process known as the Delphi Technique.
Since the NGA/CCSSO work group meetings were all kept secret, the public will probably never know if well-meaning educators on the work groups got Delphied during CCSS development. In fact – if this happened – many of the participants could still be unaware they were “Delphied” without their knowledge. After all, that is the whole purpose of this manipulative, group-think approach – fool the group into thinking they developed what was actually from someone else’s pre-ordained agenda.
So, we really don’t know who created CCSS. Was it really done by teachers, etc.? I honestly don’t know, and neither do you. But, it sure doesn’t look like whoever did it came from Kentucky.
Reacting to growing nationwide pushback on Common Core State Standards (CCSS), Kentucky Commissioner of Education Terry Holliday recently posted an item in his Doc. H’s Blog dealing with what he claims is:
“…a lot of misinformation being pushed by folks who are not supportive of more rigorous standards for students that will enable our high school graduates to compete on an international level and also achieve readiness for college and careers.”
Unfortunately, Holliday’s blog is mostly a bunch of straw man arguments that don’t jibe with reality. So, a bit of what Paul Harvey used to call “The Rest of the Story” seems in order, because the CCSS actually do have a LOT of baggage.
For starters, you deserve to know that five of the 29 members of the final CCSS Validation Committee refused to sign the report (compare signers’ list near back of report to members listed near front of this report).
One of those who refused to sign off on the CCSS is Dr. Sandra Stotsky, currently a professor at the University of Arkansas. She formerly was an associate commissioner in the Massachusetts Department of Education. In that position Stotsky oversaw the implementation of Massachusetts’ superb K to 12 education standards early in this century. They were far better than the CCSS and probably should have become the CCSS. In fact in 2011 testing with the National Assessment of Educational Progress, Massachusetts scored at the top in both fourth and eighth grade in both math and reading, a remarkable feat (Determined with NAEP Data Explorer).
Simply put, Stotsky knows real, high quality education standards!
So, consider a few of the many comments in her letter explaining why she would not sign off on CCSS:
• “In my judgment, Common Core’s standards for grades 6-12 do not reflect the core knowledge needed for authentic college-level work and do not frame the literary and cultural knowledge one would expect of graduates from an American high school.”
• “The ‘college and career readiness standards’ that govern all grade-level standards have no discernable academic level; for the most part, they are simply a set of poorly written, confusing, content-empty, and culture-free generic skills with no internally valid organization of their own.”
• “The two English-speaking areas for which I could find assessment material (British Columbia and Ireland) have far more demanding requirements for college readiness.”
• “Based on my experience in the Massachusetts Department of Education from 1999-2003, where I was in charge of the development or revision of Massachusetts K-12 standards in all major subjects, and on my extensive experience in local government on a variety of committees for different boards, my judgment is that almost every aspect of the process in which Common Core’s standards were developed profoundly violated almost all civically appropriate procedures for the development of what would become a major public document.”
• “Common Core’s standards are an unsound basis for the development of common assessments.”
By the way, Stotsky’s letter somehow never made it into the final report of the CCSS Validation Committee. Neither did another non-signer’s letter from Prof. Jim Milgram. That raises more interesting questions that touch on why Stotsky says the CCSS process, “violated almost all civically appropriate procedures for the development of what would become a major public document.” In most work of this type, letters of dissent are ROUTINELY included in appendices to the report.
I think that about covers the myth that anyone against CCSS is against higher standards. The truth is plenty of real experts in education standards don’t believe CCSS pass muster. I’ll have more in future blogs.
Education Week’s State Edwatch Blog just picked up on the major story we have been covering on the problems with Kentucky’s high school end-of-course exams.
As we reported last week here, here and here, the Kentucky Department of Education (KDE) has run into major problems with the state’s high school end-of-course testing program.
One major problem is the computer servers from ACT’s Vantage testing system became overloaded and crashed when students from Kentucky, Ohio and Alabama simultaneously tried to access tests on line.
Following a week of unsuccessful fixes, KDE News Release 13-049 admits the department has thrown in the towel and cancelled all attempts at on line end-of-course test administration for 2013.
KDE says paper and pencil testing packages for end-of-course tests are being distributed now, but the printed materials may not reach all of the approximately 60 percent of Kentucky high schools that formerly planned to test on line before May 13, 2013.
The on line testing failure thoroughly disrupts KDE’s plans to require counting end-of-course test results in each student’s final grade in English II, Algebra II, biology and US History classes. The news release says incorporation of all end-of-course results is now totally optional at local school district discretion.
This adds to other, very different, testing woes revealed by the Bluegrass Institute last week concerning the quiet collapse early this year of the constructed-response questions (sometimes called written answer questions or open-response questions) in the same end-of-course exams.
New ACT report casts SERIOUS doubts
The ACT, Inc.’s “ACT National Curriculum Survey” series just came out with a 2012 edition.
The findings raise serious questions about the validity of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) that Kentucky and many other states are now using to shape school curriculum from Kindergarten through high school.
Recent ACT Curriculum Surveys have shown a major disconnect between the opinions of high school teachers and college instructors. In general, K to 12 educators have a much more inflated view of the preparation of their students for college than is actually the case. Sadly, the results in the 2012 report proved no exception.
This very key ACT, Inc. finding certainly raises major questions about the validity of the new Common Core State Standards (CCSS):
• A large gap still exists between how high school teachers perceive the college readiness of high school graduates and how college instructors perceive the readiness of their incoming first-year students. This suggests a continuing lack of curricular alignment between the K–12 and postsecondary education systems that may be hampering the efforts of K–12 to prepare students for life after high school.
The report’s accompanying graph (below) makes the difference in those opinions much clearer and shows little change has occurred between 2009, one year before the CCSS were issued, and 2012, more than two years after the CCSS came out.
Here is the problem for CCSS validity. If high school teachers had a lot of input to the standards, this new ACT survey shows those teachers’ views of what is needed are very seriously out of line with what is actually expected in our colleges.
Thus, how could the CCSS process possibly have created an appropriate set of standards when one of the major participating groups continues to be so poorly informed about what those standards really need to include?
In fact, given the huge differences in opinions on college preparation shown in the graph above, I question how it could be possible for these two groups to reach a consensus on what was necessary for CCSS.
So, the ACT report raises more questions about the behind-closed-door process that was used to develop the CCSS:
• Who really designed them?
• Were all voices recognized in the process?
• Did the CCSS design team really know what was needed?
All of a sudden, it becomes a lot clearer why five members of the Common Core State Standards Validation Committee refused to sign their final report (Compare the list of members on the page before Page 1 to the list of those who signed on Page 4 in the CCSS Validation Committee’s final report). Four of those individuals, Alfino Flores, R. James Milgram, Sandra Stotsky, and Samuel DeWitt are college professors. The fifth person who refused to sign was Dylan William, from the Educational Testing Service, which creates the SAT college entrance test. They represent a significant proportion of the college members of the CCSS Validity Committee.
Were their voices even heard? Apparently, these college voices were not heeded.
The Herald-Leader and other news sources are reporting Representative Carl Rollins (D – Midway) has announced he is leaving the Kentucky Legislature to head the Kentucky Higher Education Assistance Authority and the Kentucky Higher Education Student Loan Corporation.
While Rollins shepherded a number of education bills during his tenure, he was instrumental in blocking key legislation submitted in multiple years that would have created charter school programs in Kentucky. Rollins’ actions leave Kentucky as one of only eight states that still have not adopted charter schools, thus denying the benefits of these special public schools to the state’s many disadvantaged students.
The Bluegrass Institute’s Richard Innes speaks tomorrow, April 25, 2013 on Kentucky’s education performance and “Common Core, Why the Uproar” at a Kentuckians Against Common Core Standards meeting in Louisville.
Meeting time: 7 pm to 9:30 pm
Place: Korea Saehan Church of Louisville
10409 Taylorsville Road
Louisville, KY 40299
Note: Registration Recommended. Do that here.
The Jefferson County Teachers’ Association (JCTA) seems to not understand who the other party is to their collective bargaining agreement. Instead, JCTA president Brent McKim keeps trying to suck Kentucky Commissioner of Education Terry Holliday into dealing directly with the union, but Holliday correctly points out that the union needs to work with the Jefferson County Public Schools (JCPS), instead.
As WAVE-3 TV points out, Holliday just reiterated his unwillingness to improperly step into the middle of that contract.
Instead, Holliday provided JCPS several days ago with an expanded, eight-page listing of the ways the contract between the union and the district has interfered with turn around efforts in many Persistently Low-Achieving Schools (now called Priority Schools) found in that district. Thus, Holliday continues to strengthen his case that the union is damaging children in Louisville.
Meanwhile, the union’s deny, deny, deny tactics about their interference are becoming more and more absurd, seriously undermining already seriously doubtful union credibility.
