You comment that NCTE hasn’t done much in the way of the responding to the common core state standards. That’s not accurate. In fact, NCTE offered comments on the document at several stages, including participating in a face-to-face meeting with the Chiefs and the NGA as well as members of the drafting team and providing a very thorough critique of the July draft and providing names for another review. You can find my open letters to membership and NCTE’S critique of the JULY draft standards and my response to the revision at the NCTE website. NCTE continues to stand ready to provide information and assistance as the process continues to move forward.

Kylene Beers,
President, National Council of Teachers of English

I have several answers for you.

1) How have we survived with national and international comparisons up until now?

2) I’m assuming that you believe such measurement is important. Why?

3) The sampling of NAEP seems to work fine without terrorizing schools and school children.

4) Who cares? I am not the least bit interested in ranking and sorting children at any level – classroom, district, state, national or international.

5) I am under no obligation to offer an educational solution to a political problem.

Gary

Common Standards? End it! Don’t mend it!

No educator of conscience should spend one moment trying to improve upon such tyrannical delusions like national (core) standards. We should fight such mean-spirited stupidity with every ounce of our being.

Replacing one externally-created checklist with another undoubtedly more voluminous one will not help one child.

You cannot have “core” standards without additional standardized testing. Now districts already addicted to testing will have a more potent hallucinogenic with which they can poison public education.

National curricula and national testing are on the wrong side of history and are by their very definition anti-Democratic.

Such efforts are the work of Dickensian shopkeepers and any educator arrogant enough to believe that THEY are smart enough to improve such efforts should check their ego and think again.

None of the impulses behind NCLB, common standards or the other assorted failed policies of Duncan/Obama have anything constructive whatsoever to do with learning. These trends are about labor issues and economics. For example, “How can we bust unions and how can we privatize public schools?”

Those goals are best accomplished by reducing the public’s confidence in their local school. It used to be that people hated school, but liked theirs. Just a few years ago we were told, “Of course, you should not teach to the test.” Today, teachers are told, “Of course, you SHOULD teach to the test.”

If you create enough opportunities for demagogues to create hysteria by announcing that YOUR kids’ school is failing YOUR child, parents will eventually withdraw their support for public education.

Unqualified crackpots are running nearly every major urban school system in America. Teachers and students are terrorized by testing and externally-imposed curricular mandates. Mayors (like NY’s Bloomberg) have suspended democracy and eliminated community involvement in education and the Los Angeles Unified School District recently announced that they are surrendering 250 low-performing schools to any person or organization willing to be blamed for their failure.

THINK ABOUT THAT! A school board with a constitutional responsibility to educate all children is abandoning 250 schools so they won’t be blamed for low test scores in Obama’s sadistic “race-to-the top!”

Is this America?

In a nut shell:

There is no single solution to the obstacles we face. A good start is to ask what each of us wants for our own children. What are our standards? I want a teacher in the classroom who is thoughtful and caring, not a mindless clerk or deskilled bureaucrat but a person of substance, depth, and compassion. I want my child to be seen, understood, challenged, and nourished. I want to be able to participate in the community, to have some voice and choice in the questions the school faces.

We had a terrific drug store up the street from us. This store carried the posterboard that our local elementary school preferred for its projects, the black and white film used by the UC college students in their projects, and of course, their famous delicious ice cream. The best part was that I could ask the manager when he’d be getting X and he’d say he’d put it on the order form if there were enough calls for it and let me know, or he’d look it up and say “next week.”

Then this was taken over by a national chain, which shall remain nameless.

All the local variations that made that store so valuable went out the door. No one knows when they’re getting anything in. No one cares because after all, corporate runs the show and they live in New York. We’re in California. We still do have the ice cream, but I rarely go in anymore, shopping wherever its convenient, because now my corner store is just like the others.

While some benefit may come of national standards, I’d hate to think that “corporate” will run the show. (That’s already happening in my friend’s kindergarten classroom; they are not allowed to read any books not on the publisher’s reading list–contracts, you know.)

Thanks for this post. Interesting and something to think about.