Video: Coleman, Common Core Supporters, Publicly Joke About the Authors' Lack of School Teaching Experience

Paul Thomas at the Chalk Face blog has shared this latest Common Core States Standards outrage: David Coleman and others glibly joked about the standards authors' lack of experience teaching in schools. Read here about Coleman's inability to get a teaching job. Coleman as you will recall is the person that was the lead author among the five that wrote the CCSS. The person introducing Coleman is Lauren Resnick.
Bravo to Prof. Thomas for posting the video and excerpts of the transcript, the full transcript of which is here.

This Is the Common Core You Support?

December 23, 2013 by plthomasedd 11 Comments

You have plenty of Urban Legend and baseless conspiracy theories swirling around the Common Core, and none of that really serves anyone well.
But you also have evidence (and from what I can tell, that doesn’t carry much weight).
So for all those who support the Common Core, and tend to ignore the evidence-based arguments against CC, I really want you to respond to this from David Coleman 2 Years Ago: We Were a Collection of Unqualified People (from Truth in American Education):

Let me help you since the video is long.

Introduction of David Coleman, architect of CC (see full transcript):

And he was invited to a sort of staff meeting where we were beginning in the Institute to think about what our stance was gonna be on the fact that new standards were maybe going to come our way. It was before the Common Core State Standards effort announced, and another person we were working with, whom I won‟t name tonight, asked if maybe at our next meeting he could bring David Coleman with him. And I said, “Who’s David Coleman?” and he gave me something like what I have in my hand. Those characteristics didn't seem particularly relevant to what we were gonna do, you know, like being a Rhodes Scholar and having both Cambridge and Oxford degrees – all that kind of stuff. That’s nice, but it’s really not so relevant. …

Okay, so this is the kind of person we are gonna be privileged to here tonight. He has been involved in virtually every step of setting the national standards, and he doesn’t have a single credential for it. He‟s never taught in an elementary school – I think. You know, I actually don‟t know. He’s never edited a scholarly journal, but I think he has written scholarly papers. And a variety of other things that have – you know, everybody here has done some of, he hasn’t done. [Laughter] You told me you didn't want to do a standard – [Laughter] so he hasn’t done the standard things, and now he‟s gonna tell you what he has done, or what he probably will say he has not done others have done, but which he has helped others to want to do and to ______ do. And we’re all gonna be living with the fruits of that, for the next five years, so listen carefully.

I never knew no experience and no expertise was so funny!

And now, some remarks from David Coleman:

You know, you’d think someone with Lauren’s experience would understand you never tell the truth when you’re introducing someone. It’s kind of like a eulogy in reverse. I think the clear lesson from tonight is don’t ask Lauren to speak at your funeral. [Laughter] She clearly doesn’t understand what eulogy stands for….

One of them is the kind of humility she talked about, about qualifications. I actually think it’s really  important to try to base what I’m about to say to you on evidence I share with you rather than on the sands of my qualifications. So if I ask you or talk to you about doing something it should be evident that it makes sense to you to do, ’cause I have no other authority….

One of them is that these standards are worthy of nothing if the assessments built on them are not worthy of teaching to, period. This is quite a demanding charge, I might add to you, because it has within it the kind of statement – you know, “Oh, the standards were just fine, but the real work begins now in defining the assessment,” which if you were involved in the standards is a slightly exhausting statement to make.

But let’s be rather clear: we’re at the start of something here, and its promise – our top priorities in our organization, and I’ll tell you a little bit more about our organization, is to do our darnedest to ensure that the assessment is worthy of your time, is worthy of imitation. It was Lauren who propounded the great rule that I think is a statement of reality, though not a pretty one, which is teachers will teach towards the test. There is no force strong enough on this earth to prevent that. There is no amount of hand-waving, there’s no amount of saying, “They teach to the standards, not the test; we don’t do that here.” Whatever. The truth is – and if I misrepresent you, you are welcome to take the mic back. But the truth is teachers do. Tests exert an enormous effect on instructional practice, direct and indirect, and it‟s hence our obligation to make tests that are worthy of that kind of attention. It is in my judgment the single most important work we have to do over the next two years to ensure that that is so, period. So when you ask me, “What do we have to do over the next years?” we gotta do that. If we do anything else over the next two years and don’t do that, we are stupid and shall be betrayed again by shallow tests that demean the quality of classroom practice, period….

Student Achievement Partners, all you need to know about us are a couple things. One is we’re composed of that collection of unqualified people who were involved in developing the common standards….

This is a long talk, and it is always dangerous to offer excerpts of anyone’s speech. I do urge that you read or listen to this completely, but I want to stress that two key points are repeated in this from Coleman himself: the foundational architects of CC admit to no experience or expertise (causing me to wonder why I should consider any of this) and testing is central from the beginning (thus, claims that CC can be separated from the high-stakes tests is, again, without credibility; testing is part of the CC plan).

Coleman tends to run with common sense claims about education, such as faulty international comparisons, and appears to offer no acknowledgement of issues related to poverty and inequity. As a 31-year educator specializing in literacy and writing, I notice that his claims and supposed evidence-base are wildly off. Just as one example, his sweeping generalizations about what students write are powerfully refuted by the most recent analysis of student writing by Applebee and Langer, who clearly show with data that students write very little in middle and high schools primarily because of the negative influence of standards and testing (raising the question: How are new standards and testing going to alleviate that when the designers of those standards and tests themselves forefront the unavoidable influence of testing?).

Finally, all the laughter is important I think. Yes, CC is one big joke—but it has been pulled on politicians, the public, teachers, and students. And I find that not funny at all. And despite Coleman’s principles that appear to suggest CC isn’t intended to line anyone’s pockets, to use his own paradigm, we have abundant evidence that Coleman*, Pearson, test designers, and the like are themselves laughing all the way to the bank.

* Turn CC notoriety into position with College Board where you redesign and grow College Board built on the rise in importance of CC:

In 2007, David left McGraw-Hill and cofounded Student Achievement Partners, a nonprofit that assembles educators and researchers to design actions based on evidence to improve student outcomes. Student Achievement Partners played a leading role in developing the Common Core State Standards in math and literacy. David left Student Achievement Partners in the fall of 2012 to become president of the College Board.

Go to the original ChalkFace post for the ongoing comments.

Coleman, Gates, Gladwell, Rhee, Failures, But Bully Teachers Around

There is an interesting common thread: Titans of education policy or generalists of pop-philosophy gab, and yet when you poke back in their personal history, they were failures. An interesting dynamic is at play. The common thread: either wealthy parents (definitely upper class in the Gates case, and merely upper-middle class in the Rhee case) or university parents (the Coleman and Gladwell cases, a university president parent in Coleman's case, and a university professor in Gladwell's case.)

Bill Gates, Harvard College drop-out, devises operating system allowing personal computers to run software with easy start-up use by consumers, rips off essential features of Corel's WordPerfect word processor and Lotus' 1-2-3 spreadsheet, kills them off by monopolistic bundling, evades ant-trust prosecution (by the way, Joel Klein's Bill Clinton era prosecution of MS was too little --the emphasis on a web browser-- too late); and voila, as head of Microsoft, becomes one of the world's greatest millionaires. (For the short version read "Rise of Monopolies: Making of Microsoft"; for a more detailed account read Office Wars 3 - How Microsoft Got Its Office Monopoly and Office Wars 4 - Microsoft's Assault on Lotus and IBM.) Oh, by the way, he shoved his co-founding collaborator Paul Allen out of the way, as evident in this 60 Minutes interview; yes, Allen's living comfortably, but Gates shafted Allen out of billions in the process. So what does this college drop-out do during the 2000s and the 2010s? He bullies education policy, earlier with his initiative to break apart comprehensive high schools shedding them of nuisances such as arts, foreign language, or costly things such as guidance counselors or librarians; and lately by directing the Common Core States Standards Initiative, better named, Common Core Gates Standards Initiative, using his puppets from David Coleman, on over to Arne Duncan, down to your local superintendent and principal. Have you ever considered how all of the metrics to analyze student and teacher performance will run on Microsoft-run main-frame computers? Macs as mainframes? Don't make me laugh.

Next, we have Michelle Rhee. Failed with hallway management of young elementary students. So badly that she resorted to taping their mouths. Their lips bled; more recently, she has recounted the incident on stage with the applomb of a standup comic. And she touted her test score improvement, which after some sleuthing of a teacher, turned out to not be so illustrious.  This followed with her chancellorship of the Washington D.C. schools. Again she touted her metrics. Well, in too many instances far too many test scores got erased, which she knew more of than she let on to the media. Her career fall-out? --a rubber room? --a life of marginal survival after infamy? --Campbell Brown scolding on TV? No. Endless media fawning, overlooking her speeding sacking by the new D.C. mayor, a best-selling book and still endless media time as the head of her own teacher bashing empire StudentsFirst.

Then there's David Coleman. Smart and athletic enough to get a Rhodes scholarship at Oxford University. Yet, failed to get a teaching job. That's right. With all the schools in the U.S. available to pursue for a job, no teaching experience. Nobody would take a Yalie or an Oxford grad? Or maybe he wanted to teach only in Stuyvesant or a District 2 school (the Manhattan district that covers most of the borough's wealthiest sections). What does he do? Work his connections to leverage his way to write the national English standards, with typical elitism he shuts out open inquiry and discussion of the Common Core process. "Participants" are required to sign non-disclosure agreements, agreeing not to disclose any writing or discussion on the CCSS creation process. His pay-off? He sells his assessment baby the Grow Network for a cool $14 million (at least), gets picked by the College Board to be president, allowing him to continue to his plan to direct English education --all the while having no teaching experience or supervision training-- as he becomes positioned to rewrite the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) to fit his kooky Common Core concept, and get travels the media circuit telling the world what kids need to succeed. This from a man who could not get hired, who publicly has used profanity to ridicule students' personal expression.

Most recently we have Malcolm Gladwell. Smart, smart, smart. But unable to get into graduate school. So what does he do? First, fail then to break into the advertising field, a field suited to glib, but convincing writing. At last resort he works for a succession of two well-bankrolled right-wing news magazines (if they can be called such), American Spectator, and then Sun Myung Moon and the Unification Church cult's Insight on the News. Today, he's attempting to shake up the education discussion by implicitly pedaling Michael Bloomberg's slash the teaching force dream, attempting to sell Brian Lehrer (WNYC radio) his idea that many teachers tell him that small classes in the mid-teens of headcounts hurt students, and that all that kids need is a great teacher (which is determined by tests I presume?), claims that are not supported by research.

(And of course, we could continue this further with the out-going mayor, Michael Bloomberg, who the New York Times reported was a middling student in middle school. For Horatio Alger fans, they can rest happy that his failure at Salomon Brothers led to the rosiest future afterward.)

What hypocrisy, people that failed at school or failed to keep or retain a teaching position, people with little personal experience with life outside of the privileged upper or upper-middle class bubble, declaring what can and should work with the working class. What a shameful irony in the latter two cases, Coleman and Gladwell, children of academics, yet actively disparaging the school teaching workforce. Shameful also is how the corporate media just parrot their aggressively ideological statements as though they were commandments from above, with no parallel time from actual experts in the field, let alone statements by people that will be affected by such policies.  The sad thread is that if you wish to bash those working in the teaching field you will get ample support, whether in a foundation position or in lucrative publishing contracts. Experience or talent not needed.

UPDATE: Quite appropriately, Huffington Post has run the piece, "These 11 Leaders Are Running Education But Have Never Taught."

The list is a quite instructive reminder of the people that are ill-equipped to dictate "best practices" to actual classroom teachers. Note also, how many of these people are "progressive" Democrats or "moderate" Republicans:

Arne Duncan
Bill Gates
David Coleman
Michael Bloomberg
Tom Harkin
Janet Napolitano
Kevin Johnson
Wendy Kopp
Rupert Murdoch
Cory Booker
Mark Zuckerberg