BIPPS staff education analyst Richard Innes addressed the Interim Joint Education Committee today on transparency problems with the common core state standards.
The text from Innes’ presentation was posted earlier today in another blog, and you can learn still more about these issues and access the documents Innes mentions in the freedomkentucky.org wiki item on Common Core State Standards.
Transparency efforts seem to be a theme in Kentucky as of late. I, for one, like this trend and hope that it continues.
The Lexington Herald-Leader’s editorial page called for Auditor Adam Edelen to look into the spending practices of the Bluegrass Area Development District. I don’t know many specifics about their reasoning other than what they outline in the editorial. I will say though, that if there is a taxpayer funded entity not responding to open records requests, that is a problem.
I’m in favor of any call for transparency regarding taxpayer money. Now if we could only get calls for the pension system to be transparent…
Bluegrass Institute’s staff education analyst, Richard Innes, is on tap to testify today on one of the problems with the creation of the Common Core State Standards. Here is the text of his planned testimony:
Testimony to The Kentucky Legislature’s Interim Joint Committee on Education June 10, 2013
Richard G. Innes
Staff Education Analyst
Bluegrass Institute for Public Policy Solutions
Mr. Chairman, Members of the Committee, I want to alert you to some of the concerns the Bluegrass Institute has with the considerable lack of transparency in the recent development of the Common Core State Standards. We believe this lack of transparency is highly problematic in the development of public policy, and I think you will share our concerns after my following comments.
To begin, it is very clear to us that the legislature shares the overall desire in the commonwealth for transparency in government. The enactment of Kentucky’s open meetings laws and open records laws provide ample testimony of that commitment.
Unfortunately, the process that brought us the Common Core State Standards was not subject to any of Kentucky’s transparency laws. The Common Core process was not subject to any federal transparency requirements, either.
Instead, a July 1, 2009 news release from the National Governors’ Association (NGA) makes it clear that the Common Core State Standards were created by workgroups in Washington. DC. That news release specifically advised from the outset that:
The Work Group’s deliberations will be confidential throughout the process.
Because the major decisions about the Common Core State Standards were made by workgroups operating under confidential conditions – Webster’s defines that as secret – the lack of transparency precludes us from knowing anything about the processes actually followed. We don’t know if comments solicited from the public, our teachers and even the Kentucky Department of Education actually received fair and appropriate consideration.
We do know that NGA and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) documents don’t show anyone from Kentucky on the various Common Core workgroups. Thus, thanks to the lack of transparency, claims that Kentuckians had significant input into the Common Core State Standards simply cannot be confirmed, but appear unlikely.
The last work group to examine the standards before the release was the Common Core State Standards Validation Committee. A review of this work group’s report, titled “Reaching Higher,” reveals that five of the 29 members of the Validation Committee refused to sign the certification page.
Two who refused to sign are University of Arkansas Professor Sandra Stotsky, who is also a past assistant commissioner of education from Massachusetts, and mathematics professor Jim Milgram, who is from Stanford University.
After refusing to certify the Common Core State Standards, professors Stotsky and Milgram both sent letters to Common Core support staffers explaining why they could not certify the final documents. In a notable breech of normal procedure with such committees, neither of those letters is included in the final report.
Stotsky and Milgram asked the Validation Committee report’s editor why their letters were not included. The editor said he was never provided with those letters but that he would have published them had he known of their existence.
There is still more reason for concern. As announced in the NGA’s 2009 news release:
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.
These assistants proved problematic.
In a communication Professor Milgram has permitted me to share (Attachment 1), he says:
…the “facilitators” for the Validation committee meeting were virtually impossible to deal with.
… the facilitators were emphatically trying to not let us act according to our charter, but simply sign or not sign a letter when the charter said we had final say over the quality of the final CCSS product and could revise or rewrite it if we deemed it necessary. Incidentally, the facilitators succeeded, and I blame myself for allowing it to happen without fighting back.
Milgram also responded when I asked if the resource advisors were biased:
You’d better believe it.
Thus, the work of the Common Core State Standards Validation Committee was unduly and inappropriately influenced.
Due to the extraordinary lack of transparency in this process, there is no way you or I can know if the problems Milgram describes with the Validation Committee were present in other Common Core work groups, as well.
I would like to spend more time with you to discussing Stotsky’s and Milgram’s specific concerns about the quality of the Common Core State Standards, but my time today will not permit that. Time also precludes discussion of the implications for our state’s sovereignty over education and the frightening threat to our students’ privacy posed by Common Core related student database activities. However, the Bluegrass Institute will provide on line access to letters and other materials in our freedomkentucky.org Wiki site shortly.
So, in closing, the Bluegrass Institute finds the lack of transparency in the development of this extraordinarily important public policy to be highly objectionable. We simply don’t know a great deal about how the Common Core State Standards were developed, and there is no way to confidently determine if Kentucky’s educators and citizens really had much, if any, input into the final product.
Added Note:
Additional references, including the letter from Professor Jim Milgram explaining why he would not sign the Common Core State Standards Validation Committee report are available on line at the Bluegrass Institute’s Wiki Site.
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.
And, it isn’t nearly enough!
CN|2 reports that Kentucky House Minority Floor Leader Jeff Hoover, R-Jamestown, is furious about a plan announced in the Kentucky Board of Education meeting on Wednesday to pay $10,000 each to the first 57 school districts that adopt a minimum high school dropout age of 18.
Hoover correctly points out that this will cost well over $500,000 and he wants to know how the department just happens to have so much cash “laying around to offer and why legislators were never told it existed.”
Among other obvious unmet education needs in the commonwealth, Hoover points out that this money could have been used for textbook purchases instead.
In any event, if Age 18 is such a great deal, why does the Kentucky Department of Education have to offer bribes for local districts to adopt it? Under legislation passed in the recent regular session, adoption of an Age 18 Rule is left to each district to decide. However, when a majority of districts have adopted Age 18, then all remaining districts are automatically forced to do so.
Could it be that someone wants to rush every district to adopt so we don’t ever get a chance to compare graduation rate performance in districts that have Age 18 to those that don’t? After all, we have clearly pointed out before that Age 18 rules don’t work very well in the majority of states that have long experience with them.
By the way, providing only $10,000 per district is just a drop in the bucket compared to the total costs involved with moving to a minimum dropout age of 18.
Districts would be wise to consider the full bottom line before biting on any measly $10,000 carrots.
(Ditto for your school’s SBDM members)
In a huge, multi-page article the Kentucky Enquirer reported yesterday about the difficulty that parents in Northern Kentucky and Southwest Ohio encounter when they try to contact their local school board members.
Phyllis Sparks, a Boone County parent, made the general case:
“Boards are always crying out loud that they want parent involvement, but it seems as if they go out of their way to put up roadblocks.”
Roadblocks there are.
Some of the Enquirer’s statistics on how boards lack transparency are really disappointing:
• 21% of the region’s school board web sites don’t list upcoming meeting dates
• 52% of those board web sites don’t have phone numbers for all board members
• 25% don’t list all members’ e-mail addresses
• 11% of the boards broadcast meetings on local cable TV
• 0 – The number of the region’s 317 board members who list Facebook or Twitter contact information
• 3 minutes – Usual time limit imposed on members of the public who wish to speak at a local board of education meeting
And, the Enquirer finds that unacceptable, in no small part because of this statistic:
• $2 billion – Total amount of taxpayer money local school boards in the greater Cincinnati area administer!
In the aftermath of several shocking audits that found school superintendents in some systems such as the Dayton Independent School District improperly received significant and unauthorized extra payments well above any agreed to contract figures, the Kentucky Department of Education has announced it is creating an on line repository for every school superintendent’s contract, salary and benefits packages and evaluations.
This is exactly the sort of transparency improvement that the Bluegrass Institute has recommended for many years.
WFPL reports the Louisville Tea Party is pushing charter schools, a saner busing policy and more fiscal accountability in the school system – all items the Bluegrass Institute has supported for some time. The word about the need is getting out!
No, I didn’t write that. It is the title of this Washington Post article from reporter Jay Mathews about the lack of effectiveness in many past reform fads.
Of course, I did write “KERA (1990-2010) What Have We Learned.”
My report outlines specific failures in Kentucky of many of the reforms that Mathews writes about.
