.Richard Woods opposes Common Core for all the reasons cited in the
article below. His opponent supports
Common Core.
How the Common Core Lost Teacher Support
Support for the Core among teachers
dropped like a stone, from 76% in 2013 to 46% in 2014. That's a lot of love
lost. Now, as we move from the "Holy schneikies!" phase into the
"Got some splainin' to do" phase, we'll start to ask the big
question. Why?
Over at The Fordham, Mike Petrilli
hopes he knows why -- Note
the phrase, "they will be used to hold public schools accountable for
their performance." Perhaps these words triggered the more negative
response. I think Petrilli is hoping in vain. I think there's a much
more likely explanation for CCSS's bad year among teachers.
Let's think back to May of 2013. Personally, I'm a fine example of what teachers were like at that point. I didn't know a lot about the Core, and what I did know didn't sound all that bad. As far as I'd heard, a bunch of important people had called together a bunch of teachers to write some standards that could be used across the country to bring a little coherence to the higgledy-piggledy crazy-quilt that is US education. I'm not really a fan of national standards, but as long as they came from educational experts and were largely voluntary, it couldn't hurt to look at them. Heck, if you had asked me in May of 2013 if I supported the Common Core standards, I might very well have said yes. And though there were teachers out there who had already caught on, there were plenty of teachers like me who were perfectly willing to give the whole business a shot. So how did the reformsters lose all those hearts and minds?
Let's think back to May of 2013. Personally, I'm a fine example of what teachers were like at that point. I didn't know a lot about the Core, and what I did know didn't sound all that bad. As far as I'd heard, a bunch of important people had called together a bunch of teachers to write some standards that could be used across the country to bring a little coherence to the higgledy-piggledy crazy-quilt that is US education. I'm not really a fan of national standards, but as long as they came from educational experts and were largely voluntary, it couldn't hurt to look at them. Heck, if you had asked me in May of 2013 if I supported the Common Core standards, I might very well have said yes. And though there were teachers out there who had already caught on, there were plenty of teachers like me who were perfectly willing to give the whole business a shot. So how did the reformsters lose all those hearts and minds?
I think it's a measure of how detailed
and painstaking and inch-by-inch this massive debate has been that it's easy to
lose track of the big picture, the many massively boneheaded things that CCSS
supporters did along the way. Let's reminisce about how so many teachers were
turned off.
The lying.
Remember how supporters of the Core
used to tell us all the time that these standards were written by teachers?
All. The. Time. Do you know why they've stopped saying that? Because it's not
true, and at this point, most everybody knows it's not true. The
"significant" teacher input, the basis in solid research -- all
false. When someone is trying to sell you medicine and they tell you that it
was developed by top doctors and researchers and you find out it wasn't and
they have to switch to, "Well, it was developed by some guys who are
really interested in mediciney stuff who once were in a doctor's office"
-- it just reduces your faith in the product.
The involuntariness
In many places, it took a while for
it to sink in -- "You mean we're not actually allowed to change ANY of it,
and we can only add 15%??!!"
It
quickly became clear -- this was not a reform where we would all sit around a
table at our own schools and decide how to best to adapt and implement to suit
our own students. Session by session, we were sent off to trainings where some
combination of state bureaucrats and hired consultants would tell us how it was
going to be. We were not being sent off to discuss or contribute our own
professional expertise; we were being sent to get our marching orders, which
very often even our own administrators were
not "important" enough to give us (or understand).
Shut up.
Particularly in the latter half of
2013, we all heard this a lot. Phrased in diplomatic language, of course, but
on the state and federal level we were told repeatedly that this was not a
discussion, that our input was neither needed nor wanted, and that if we’re
going to raise any sorts of questions, we should just forget about it.
This was particularly true for
public schools. After all, the narrative went, public schools were failing and
covering it up by lying to students and their parents about how well they were
doing. It became increasingly clear that the Common Core were not meant to help
us, but to rescue America's children from us. "Just shut up and sit
down," said CCSS boosters with a sneer. "You've done enough damage
already."
The slander.
Arne
Duncan told newspaper editors to
paint core opponents as misguided and misinformed. Then he portrayed objectors
as whiny white suburban moms.
Opposition to CCSS was repeatedly portrayed as coming strictly from the tin hat
wing of the Tea Party. If you opened your mouth to say something bad about the
Core, you were immediately tagged a right-wing crank. There was no recognition
that any complaint about any portion of the Core could possibly be legitimate.
It had to be politically motivated or the result of ignorance.
The money.
The longer the year went on, the
more it seemed that every single advocate for the Core was being paid for it.
I've been wading into this for a while, and I'll be damned if I can name a
single solitary actual grass-roots group advocating for the Core. Instead, we
find a sea of groups all swimming in the same money from the same sources.
And at the school level, we also see
lots of money -- all of it outbound. Suddenly, with Common Core, there's a long
list of things that have to be bought. Can't get new books -- we have to buy
computers to take the PARCC. And let's watch a parade of consultants, all
making more money than we are, come in and tell us how to do our jobs.
The suffering children.
Many of us just finished our first
year of Core-aligned curriculum, and in many cases it was awful. We were
required to force students to operate at or beyond frustration level day after
day. We watched them have special classes stripped away to make time for test
prep. We watched school stamp out the spirit of the smallest students, whose
defining characteristic is usually that they love everything, including school.
While CCSS boosters were off sipping lattes in nice offices, we were there at
ground zero watching 180 days of exactly how this reform affected real, live
students.
The testing.
You keep saying that the tests are
separate from the CCSS. We keep telling you that, here on the ground, there is
no daylight visible between them.
The plan for failure.
There was a moment, even a day for
the strong-hearted, where it looked like the Obama administration was going to
release us from the educational malpractice that is NCLB. But no -- it soon
became clear that we were still trapped in the same terrible movie. Our fates
would still be linked to high stakes tests, just in more complicated and stupid
ways. You did not have to be terribly cynical to conclude that the goal was for
public schools to fail, so that reformsters could "rescue" the
students "trapped" in "failing schools."
The backpedaling
As support has crumbled, Core
boosters have retracted some of their pronouncements. "We have to build
the airplane as we fly it" becomes "we have to take our time and fix
these implementation problems." This has the effect of confirming what we
suspected -- that they didn't really know what they were doing in the first
place.
The implementation dodge was
particularly telling. Teachers have heard "That resource/program/widget
will work great. You're just using it wrong" a gazillion times. It
translates roughly as "This won't help you complete that task, but if you
do some other task, it might be useful."
But the thing about CCSS
implementation is that Core boosters got to do everything that they said they
wanted to. So if the implementation messed things up that either means 1) they
don't know what they're talking about or 2) the Core really are that bad.
Location location location.
Politicians have understood for at
least several decades that you can convince people if you lie deliberately and
sincerely, but sometimes (like this one) they forget an important detail. It is
easy to lie to people about what is happening in a faraway place like Iraq or
Siberia. It is much harder to pull of lies about what is going on right in
front of their faces.
Core boosters can tell stories all
day about what's happening on the business end of their pride and joy, but
teachers are actually at ground zero, and they have eyes and ears and brains
and professional judgment.
This was a big field test year for
CCSS as it spread into more schools than ever before. The drop in teacher
support is one more clear indicator that, in the latest phase of rollout, the
Core is failing. And as more and more teachers become entangled in this mess of
botched national standards, things are only going to get worse. The Core lost
support for the same reason that liver seems like a great thing to eat until
you actually take a bite of it.
In short, I believe the Core lost
teacher support because so many teachers spent the year face to face with it,
looking it right in its beady little eyes. They don't love it because they know
it so well. I'm willing to bet that by next May, when it's survey time again,
the Core is not going to be awash in a new wave of teacher love.
Cross-posted from Curmudgucation
Follow Peter Greene on Twitter: www.twitter.com/palan57
Comments
In Georgia, vote for Richard Woods for State School Superintendent or be
doomed.
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader
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