Common Core Chaos Achieving Goal of Driving Parents Out of Public Education?

Aside from the Common Core Gates Standards [erroneously called States Standards -see the truth on how they were created and how they were funded] having been created in an objectionable process outside of representative government, the chaos of Common Core destructive innovation is alienating parents away from the institution of public education.

The Comments sections to blogs and video posts are chock full of statements of parents taking their kids out of school to avoid Common Core, or activists advocating the same.

By various means-- the privatizers are achieving their goals of weakening public support for education. One example of an activist exploiting the CCSS chaos to advocate withdrawal from public schools, in response to the admirably named post, "Data Addiction and Common Core Dictates Destroying Schools: Utah Teacher Diana McKay Speaks Out on Common Core:"

Well here are my two cents. GET KIDS OUT OF PUBLIC SCHOOL now. There is no beating what is happening. We have to starve the beast and watch it implode on itself. We have only one choice at this point. Either Home School or get your kids into a private school that takes no federal funding and teaches only classical education. Hey how about you start a school of your own?? Time take stock of your priorities. Those that say they can’t are really saying they don’t want to. See out [sic] new FB page……….GET KIDS OUT OF PUBLIC SCHOOL

Admittedly, the comments one encounters are anecdotal and their representative character unscientific. Yet, we can anticipate that they reflect a growing feeling among parents and that many of those with the means will withdraw their children from public schools. And once parents have taken their children out of public schools, we can anticipate that many of them will be less willing to pay taxes to support public education.
Yet, others have anticipated that all the chaos will undermine support for public education:
From a post two months ago, PARCC Common Core test tricks and the secrecy of the tests

Diane Ravitch mentions in "What is the Goal of Common Core testing?" that Rick Hess predicts that Common Core States Standards anxiety, prompting some parents "to demand “reforms” and an escape from their neighborhood schools." As she says, reformers will gloat over failing scores (no doubt to continue the "failing schools" line --schools that New York Governor Andrew Cuomo now says deserves the "death penalty").

Education progressives win big in Bridgeport, vs. machine Democrats and Paul Vallas allies

That was a busy week for New York City education.
First, there was Bill deBlasio's 40 percent primary victory in the Democratic mayoral primary (& UFT/Thompson's clinging to wish for a divisive run-off). Second, there was the whistleblower Francesco Portelos 3020(a) termination case at the Department of Education at 49 Chambers Street.
Other big news: in the progressives, the real reformers of education, for the people, for public education, against charter schools/privatizing profiteering, won big in Tuesday Board of Education elections in Bridgeport, the largest city in Connecticut.

This in from the Working Families Party of New York:

And in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in a truly astonishing result, a slate of Working Families-backed progressives swept the elections for the Board of Education against the "No Child Left Untested" corporate-funded education "reform" machine Democrats. We had the Connecticut Education Association, Diane Ravitch and some great volunteers. They had the privatizer-in-chief Paul Vallas. A very sweet win indeed, given the havoc he wreaked in Chicago, New Orleans, Philadelphia, Haiti...


You can read more on the dramatic electoral events up there in Jonathan Pelto's "Education Reform Industry goes down to stunning defeat in Bridgeport." His analysis:

In many respects the primary was really a referendum on the education reform efforts of Governor Malloy, Bridgeport Mayor Bill Finch, Malloy’s Commissioner of Education, Stefan Pryor and Bridgeport’s faux superintendent of schools, Paul Vallas.

The three endorsed candidates were supporters of Mayor Bill Finch’s failed attempt, last year, to change Bridgeport’s City Charter to do away with a democratically elected board of education and replace it with one appointed by Finch. Simon Castillo was the chairman of the political action committee that spent a record amount in the failed referendum campaign and Brandon Clark, a teacher the charter school, at Achievement First – Bridgeport, essentially served as one of the referendum campaign’s spokesman.

The reputation of the existing majority on the Board of Education, including its chairman, Kenneth Moales Jr. and their support for Paul Vallas was a driving force behind the challenges.

Read more of Pelto's article here.

The besting of the Vallas forces even drew the attention of the Atlantic Magazine: "Did This Little Election Strike a Big Blow to Education Reform? Progressives and unions say a primary in Connecticut last week shows momentum is turning against the corporate-backed charter-school movement."

Alas, Pelto's most recent story says, "Mayor Finch will hold onto Vallas as long as he can."

Common Ground vs. Common Core: Let Us Reach Across the Partisan Aisle

Common Ground against Common Core:
Reading the CC opponents' similarities, and the bi-partisan CC boosters' similarities.

Support NYS A.7994. Let CCLS equal “Common Cause of Lefties and the State Sovereignty Crowd.” 

Left	Right
Common Core is a Gates Foundation project	Common Core is a Gates Foundation project
The Common Core's dismissal of fiction is an outrage	The Common Core's dismissal of fiction is an outrage
There is too much emphasis on testing	There is too much emphasis on testing
The test emphasis is driving teachers to teach to the test	The test emphasis is driving teachers to teach to the test
Databases on students are creepy	Databases on students are creepy
Shared databases with questionable security guarantees are creepier	Shared databases with questionable security guarantees are creepier

Yes, we should be wary of the tin hats on the right, as this blogpost is concerned, as, among other things, they wish to cut school funding.
But we should not drink the Kool-Aid. Which side are you on? --the privatizers' side or the people's side? This is a tough fight against a massively well-funded bi-partisan coalition that is promoting an untested curriculum that being peddled with a train of mistruths, such as the lie that the standards are internationally benchmarked, a lie disproven here.

Don't get fooled by the privatizers' appeals to professionalism or progressivism.

Language that privatizers use to win liberals' complacency	Reality
We need strong standards	States have had strong standards. Conscientious teachers have matched their teaching to the standards.
The standards are progressive: they promote critical thinking.	Teachers have already practiced this in their classrooms.
	The bottom line: Privatizers and the Common Core writers have not taught in the classroom, so they would not have known the above truths.

Our mutual opponents:

The collaborators on the other side, the Common Core State Standards booster side

Neo-liberal, the 21st Century Whigs	Working both sides	Conservative
Gates Foundation	Broad Foundation, Walton Foundation	ALEC, Dick and Betsy DeVos' Mackinac Center, Koch brothers
Randi Weingarten, Dennis Van Roekel, Michael Mulgrew, Paul Krugman		Chester Finn of Thomas Fordham Institute America's Choice sponsored NCEE (funded by Walton)
Barack Obama, Arne Duncan, Andrew Cuomo, Merryl Tisch, John King, Cory Booker, David Coleman (the controversial Common Core architect), Kevin Huffman (Rhee ex, TN Comm. of Education and member of Chiefs for Change), Wendy Kopp (founder of Teach for America) and Democrats for Education Reform	Michelle Rhee, Joanne Weiss (formerly of the NewSchool Venture Fund), senior advisor to Duncan, architect of the Race to the Top, federal E.D. chief of staff	Jeb Bush, Mitch Daniels, Tony Bennett, Chris Christie, Rick Scott, Rick Snyder

Common Core, CCSS-related alums moving into other jobs, suggesting cronyism:

Michael Todd, formerly of McKinsey (of England –leading Common Core architect Coleman got a job there, after college, following his Oxford stint), now overseeing the newly created Office of Strategy Management (understood to translate into the chief of Common Core implementation) at Chicago Public Schools. 

DUNCANIAN DOUBLE-SPEAK DECONSTRUCTED

How Duncan sugar-coated the Common Core, as reported by the New York Times

The reality behind the double-speak

Speaking about the Common Core to the American Society of News Editors in June, Mr. Duncan said: “The federal government didn’t write them, didn’t approve them, and doesn’t mandate them. And we never will. Anyone who says otherwise is either misinformed or willfully misleading.”

The Obama administration endorsed the National Governors Association's and Council of Chief State School Officers' (Gates Foundation-driven) project of the Common Core. (Private associations, not governmental entities, created the standards.) Duncan's Race to the Top mandates that states implement Common Core and associated testing or jeopardize qualifying for RTTT grants. (Race to the Top is a U.S. Department of Education bureaucratic mandate. It was never passed by Congress.) Judge for yourself: who is misleading whom?

(Read my "The Common Core and Gates' Education Commercialization Complex" for more on the secretive, undemocratic way in which the Common Core was hatched and pushed forward by Gates Foundation proxy organizations. For more on the CCSS relationships, view this video by a United Opt Out activist, and read this transcript, "A Labyrinth of Corporate Interests in Common Core." See this State University of New York (SUNY) New Paltz report, by South Orangetown District Superintendent Ken Mitchell, "Federal Mandates on Local Education: Costs and Consequences --Yes, it's a Race, but is it in the Right Direction?" contending that "Without substantive validation of the Common Core, New York and U.S. taxpayers are funding a grand and costly experiment that has the potential to take public education in the wrong direction . . . .")

What many forget is that there is a long undercurrent of anti-corporate, anti-elitism among the conservatives. If one has the patience, the progressive reader of conservative sites (particularly the blogs by parents) will find plenty of common ground with conservative Common Core opponents, particularly in shared resentment at the corporate boondoggle feature of the Common Core plan. Both left and right will be concerned with the tremendous costs merely involved in Common Core implementation, costs that will in large part go to corporations involved in publishing, assessments and professional development. Superintendent Mitchell, in his policy paper, "Federal Mandates on Local Education: Costs and Consequences – Yes, it’s a Race, but is it in the Right Direction?" said that compliance costs could trigger deficits. And he reported that in eighteen Lower Hudson Valley school districts alone Common Core training, curriculum development and materials would in one school year amount to an estimated $4,094,820, far short of the $520,415 Race to the Top funding that the districts would receive. Further, he indicated that the mandates are so far reaching that they compel districts to "revise curriculum, restructure assessment systems, reopen union contracts, adjust ongoing strategic planning, modify long-term budget plans, and fund new mandates."

In the last last week a thousand blogposts on the left have bloomed, arguing against the Common Core or reporting on grassroots protests against the Common Core and associated tests. Perdido Street School blog wrote of a CCSS promoter's trembling at the "terrifying prospect" of left and right uniting against the Common Core. Well, in the wake of the disastrous New York State test results, that alliance is beginning to take form.  NYC Educator linked the Republican sponsored NY assembly bill A.7994 to withdraw New York State from the Common Core and the Race to the Top. (Here is the language of the bill, introduced, June 13, 2013.) More than 1,500 teachers, parents and students rallied at a football field in Port Jefferson, Long Island, New York, protesting the new Common Core tests. (Press report photos here.) 
Remember that Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Merryl Tisch, John King and Michael Mulgrew have all enthusiastically endorsed the new standards and praised the Race to the Top obligations. See here and here. Now that you have looked more closely at the Common Core what do you really think of their "leadership" now? 
[Postscript: This insensitive policy is what happens when corporate developers of assessments who have no experience teaching in classrooms with real students are allowed to have full, unvetted control of the testing regimen. A thoughtful counter-argument of the math standards was offered back in April when a blogger on Common Core math critique at the CCSSI Mathematics site warned, "Good Luck, New York's Children."]
Nationally, the House passed a resolution to strike the testing and teacher evaluation requirements out of No Child Left Behind, leaving that authority to states and localities. But the bill locked in $1.2 billion in sequestration cuts. Unsurprisingly, no Democrats voted for the bill. This hints at a rocky road ahead for bipartisan push-back against the Common Core.

If the Common Core is so good, then why is there a need for a multi-million dollar propaganda campaign to push for compliance? Exxon Mobil is running ads pushing it. An anonymous donor contributed toward the Fund for Public Schools for a $240,000 two language ad blitz campaign in New York City. The boosters are seeming a little desperate. Why is E.D. Secretary Arne Duncan setting up an operation trying to "monitor" Diane Ravitch? See here and here. Any wonder people are creating mash-up pictures of Presidents Barack Obama and Richard Nixon?

There have been plenty of instances of cooperation between people that are otherwise deeply divided. Many atheists made deep common cause with religious activists in the long fight for civil rights. Many civil liberties-minded progressives expressed appreciation over libertarian-minded Georgia Congressman Bob Barr's opposition to the Patriot Act. Many anti-intervention leftists have crowed with agreement when Kentucky Senator Rand Paul has denounced drone strikes of civilians in Pakistan. As the Perdido Street School blogger noted, Dennis Kucinich worked with Ron Paul to push for an audit of the Federal Reserve Bank. This cooperation led to an act requiring more transparency at the bank.

Two professors, Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, in a New York Times op-ed column found themselves agreeing with some central Tea Party criticisms of the Common Core:

“The anxiety that drives this criticism comes from the fact that a radical curriculum — one that has the potential to affect more than 50 million children and their parents — was introduced with hardly any public discussion.”

Their recitation of the Kentucky example presaged the calamitous New York State test scores released this month: “Students in Kentucky were the first to undergo the Common Core’s testing regimen; the state adopted the standards in 2010. One year later, its students’ scores fell across the board by roughly a third in reading and math.” Kentucky's 2012 and 2013 test news was full of more technical and contractual glitches.

This column earlier spoke to the potential boon to Republicans in the 2014 elections, in the wake of popular reaction against the Common Core, this year and next. Teachers unions should also be mindful that if they wish to be in good graces with parents they would do well to part from the Common Core cheerleading they have heard from Dennis Van Roekel and Randi Weingarten. As I warned in my blogpost on the Common Core August 8, with all the Democrats and unions behind the Common Core, they are handing a great selling card to the Republicans in 2014. 

THE CORE IS TEETERING
Note the states where the opposition to the Common Core is underway. The movement began in red states, but it is spreading to purple and even blue states. New York teachers looking to leave the insanity of the current New York State dictates might eventually find solace in Pennsylvania, as CCSS resistance gained headway there earlier than here. Virginia is the nearest state to the Northeast to have rejected the Common Core from the start. But if we compare the latest map of the Common Core getting rejected to the previous one, from just two months prior, we see that North Carolina and Pennsylvania are added to the states considering rejecting the Common Core. 

Let us reach across the partisan divide to the conservatives that oppose the Common Core. The most impoverished sections of the country are also some of the “reddest” parts of the country. Sectionally, they are suffering the most from the current economic policies. The deep discussions about power, government and the economy should happen eventually with our countrywomen and countrymen in those sections. Let us take this opportunity to discuss the corporate usurpation of political power and the moneyed manipulation of policy.

UPDATE on Frontline, Michelle Rhee: Highlights Cheating Scandal / Rhee critique goes mainstream?: Esquire skewers her record / Henwood weighs in

Tune in to Frontline on the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) tonight, January 8, 2013. Click here to find your local affiliate and broadcast time.

Michelle Rhee, former teacher, former Washington, D.C. schools chancellor, and tireless self-promoter of her brand of education reform, more properly called deform, will be the subject of a Frontline inquiry tonight.

"Standardized testing is a crack cocaine of education": CRITIQUE OF RHEE GOES MAINSTREAM?
The critique of Michelle Rhee and her record, which has been given a free pass by major newspapers and broadcast television, now has a stinging critique by Charles P. Pierce in Esquire, January 7, 2013, with gems like the crack coke parallel (with a link to Michael Winerip's writing in the New York Times on the follies of Tennessee's reach for the Race to the Top), and casting the education privatizer "movement" is "shot through root and branch with patent-medicine remedies pitched by for-profit grifters and hustlers."

One problem with the education "reform" industry is not merely that it generally looks at "education" as though it were a commodity, like soybeans, and that the problems with how we educate a great many children of our fellow citizens can be solved if we just refine the delivery systems for the product. In other words, most education "reform" proponents treat "education" as though it exists in a vacuum unaffected by the factors — like, say, joblessness and poverty — in the real world outside the classroom. (How many prominent school "reformers" have stepped up and said anything about the increasingly effective campaign by the NRA to arm public school teachers? Thought so.) Thus do we come to the second problem with the education "reform" movement — it is shot through root and branch with patent-medicine remedies pitched by for-profit grifters and hustlers.

They have their own genre of richly financed propaganda, like 2010's Waiting for Superman and this year's Won't Back Down. There are an awful lot of hedge-fund gunslingers involved in the movement toward charter schools, a phenomenon about which, to his eternal credit, Bob Somerby — who actually has taught in the public schools — has been banging his tin drum at The Daily Howler for some time now. (It should also be said that Somerby's knee does not jerk. He readily gives some reform programs, and even some of Rhee's work, the props he thinks they deserve.) Some of the hustlers, alas, have the ear of this administration, and one of those people is Michelle Rhee.

Rhee's entire (and very lucrative) career as a proponent of educational "reform" is based on her time as chancellor of the public schools in Washington, D.C. Between 2007 and 2010, she did everything that sends a thrill up the leg of the "reform" community. She bashed teachers, scapegoated principals, and shined up her own armor for public consumption every chance she got. She also instituted a system of standardized testing by which Michelle Rhee would be able to judge the awesome awesomeness of Michelle Rhee.

Standardized testing is a crack cocaine of education. It is rife with problems. It is also a multimillion industry without which might not exist, among other things, The Washington Post. A reliance on standardized testing as a metric for progress is generally a reliable "tell" that "reform" has ended and that the grift has begun. A reliance on standardized testing as a metric for progress — and, it should be said, as a Procrustean scoreboard to judge whether a teacher, an administrator, or a school system are doing their jobs properly — almost guarantees that some finagling with the numbers will take place. It is a sub rosa way to install a corporate model on public education and, since the corporate model for everything in this country right now is a moral and ethical quagmire, it encourages cheating on a massive scale. Hence, the very real possibility that the empire built by Michelle Rhee, tough-talking "reformer," may be built upon a wilderness of crib sheets.

Tomorrow night, the PBS investigative program Frontline will broadcast a show about Rhee's tenure in Washington, and it will seriously confront the notion that an insistence on standardized testing may have resulted in a scandalous level of cheating in the city's school system, as well as a deeply rooted attempt to cover it up.

Read the rest of the article: Rhee Finances - Esquire

The Washington Post, January 5, also did a review of Frontline's documentary on Rhee.

NYC Public School Parents blog has pointed out several points that have gained growing attention in recent years:

· How she most likely greatly exaggerated her own record as a teacher. · Evidence of widespread cheating in DC schools when she ran them, and her failure to investigate these allegations properly -- a special focus of a Frontline program due to air tonight;

· The voluminous research pointing out that evaluating teachers on the basis of test scores through value-added models, as she pushed for in DC and now in her state report cards, is unstable, unreliable and unfair. (See the most recent analysis from a group of statistical experts, concluding that “We cannot at this time encourage anyone to use VAM in a high stakes endeavor.”) The way she inflated the number of supporters of StudentsFirst, counting as members anyone who signed deceptively-phrased online petitions, calling for unobjectionable policies like paying good teachers more or stopping bullying in schools.

· How she fired more than more than 5 percent of the teachers in DC, though at least some of these teachers may need to be reinstated because she did this improperly.
· How the teacher evaluation system she relied upon, called IMPACT, was altered after she left by her successor to diminish its reliance on test scores, dropping that component from 50 to 35 percent.
· How a recent report from the organization she used to run, TNTP, though predictably positive in its spin, revealed that the IMPACT teacher evaluation system was one of the top reasons that even “top performing” teachers plan to leave DC schools. The report also cast further doubt on the system, saying that there may be a “flaw in the design or implementation of IMPACT [that] makes it easier for teachers working in low-need schools to earn top ratings.”
· The documented predilection of StudentsFirst to fund right-wing Republican candidates, despite claims of bipartisanship.
· Most recently, Rhee made a tone-deaf statement on the mass shootings in Newtown CT, calling such children “our most valuable assets”.
· Finally, her refusal to oppose a bill in Michigan that would allow concealed weapons in schools, until the legislation had already been vetoed by the Governor.

Ever self-righteous, she has taken to turning her guns upon state governments and their education policies. Refreshingly, California's deputy superintendent of education calls her branding of him "a badge of honor."

California got an "F" for refusing to sign onto the provisions of "Race to the Top", including test-based evaluations of teachers; Richard Zeiger, the state's deputy superintendent, called the state's failing grade a “badge of honor.”

Go to NYC Public School Parents for more of its Report Card for Michelle Rhee and StudentsFirst.

DOUG HENWOOD'S TAKE ON MICHELLE RHEE: CONTRASTS HER REPORT CARD WITH NAEP RESULTS: More bogosity from Michelle Rhee

StudentsFirst, the school “reform” outfit led by the notorious Michelle Rhee, is out with a state-by-state Report Card on the nation’s schools. Grades were awarded on the basis of states’ conformity to the standard reform agenda—ease of creating charter schools, ease of firing teachers, ease of hiring teachers who aren’t certified in the traditional fashion, and testing testing testing. In the past, there’s never been any evidence that this agenda actually improves educational outcomes—and this report is no exception. Despite Rhee’s love of testing, there’s no mention of how states that do well under her criteria do on standardized tests compared to those that score poorly. That’s no surprise, really, since states that get high grades from StudentsFirst do worse on tests than those that score poorly.

Rhee’s group gave letter grades to each state, along with a GPA that allowed them to be ranked from 1 to 51. (DC counts as a state here.) No state got a grade higher than a B-, and only two states made that grade. Eleven states got an F. Tough! But do these grades mean anything?

To evaluate the StudentsFirst grades, I got 8th grade reading and math scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, aka NAEP, the Nation’s Report Card. Testing can be a debased pursuit when it’s used to measure individual schools and teachers (sample sizes are just too small, and there’s too much statistical noise from year to year to base anything on), but the NAEP is as good as they come for measuring broad trends.

Here are the results. StudentsFirst has Louisiana at #1 in its rankings—but the state ranks 49th in reading and 47th in math. North Dakota, which StudentsFirst ranks 51st, comes in at #14 in reading scores and #7 in math. Massachusetts, which ranks #1 in both reading and math scores (and which is also the most unionized state for teachers in the country), comes in at #14 on the Rhee scale.

Looking more rigorously at the results, the correlation coefficient on the rankings in the StudentsFirst report card with state rankings on reading scores is -0.20. (The correlation coefficient is a measure of the similarity of two sets of numbers, ranging from -1.0, completely dissimilar, to +1.0, perfect similarity.) That’s not a large number, but the negative sign means that the correlation is in the wrong direction: the higher the StudentsFirst score, the lower the NAEP reading score. The correlation on math is even worse, -0.25.

More bogosity from Michelle RheeClick to Henwood's site for the remainder of the article including his link to the spreadsheet in question.