Nancy Cauthen on the Common Core: stop experimenting on my children and other people's kids!

Here is the testimony of Nancy Cauthen to the Governor's Common Core Task Force on Friday.  Nancy is a public school parent, a member of Change the Stakes and NY State Allies for Public Education (NYSAPE), and a sociologist.

My name is Nancy Cauthen and I’ve been a NYC public school parent since 2002, the year No Child Left Behind went into effect. Both of my sons, who are now in high school, attended a traditional K-8 school in Washington Heights in Manhattan.

Having had the opportunity to watch No Child Left Behind and then Race to the Top unfold, my first point to the task force is this:  I urge you to consider your charge in the context of the long process that got us here. This grand experiment with high-stakes testing and now Common Core has been going on for a long time.

Yet, instead of research or evidence, this experiment has been based on: (1) a hyped narrative about the “failure of public education”;  (2) the personal beliefs about “what works” on the part of rich and powerful people, like Bill Gates and David Coleman, who lack the qualifications to make education policy; (3) simple attributions of causality, such as “bad teachers create bad academic outcomes”; and (4) a blatant disregard for the expertise of educators and of decades of research on early childhood and how to ameliorate the effects of poverty on school performance.

I say this in part as a political sociologist who studies public policy and researches strategies to reduce child and family poverty and increase opportunity. But as a public school parent, I am sick and tired of federal, state, and local politicians and officials experimenting on my children and on other people’s children!

My second point is that you need to slow down. A sense of urgency has been used repeatedly to justify one untested policy change after another. Assemblywoman Nolan, I appreciate that you acknowledged at last week’s public hearing that the legislature has made 4 or 5 attempts in the last 5 or 6 years to get it right, yet here we are. As parents, we ask you to take your time until you know what you’re doing! Governor Cuomo has not given this task force nearly enough time to get it right.

We’ve now wasted well more than a decade on untested reforms that have enriched private interests, while turning schools into test prep factories. By narrowing the curriculum, taking autonomy away from teachers and engaging in non-stop test prep, our schools are turning out students who in many ways may be less prepared for college than the previous generation. There’s a good bit of anecdotal evidence to warrant concern.

My husband has been a college professor at the same institution for nearly 20 years. He says students are much more afraid of taking risks, much more afraid of “being wrong,” much less intellectually curious and much less capable of independent and critical thought than students 10 years ago. This is the exact opposite of what we are told the CC standards and testing is supposed to accomplish.

My third and final point is that we must get high stakes out of testing! The shrinking emphasis on science and social studies and the loss of music and the arts, physical education and even recess is a direct result of high stakes for students, teachers and schools. Here in NYC, test scores still matter for promotion, placement, middle and high school admissions, even though they are now less consequential.

Parents and educators in groups like Change the Stakes and NYS Allies for Public Education – two groups of which I’m a part – urge you to de-couple test scores from teacher evaluation and to stop punishing schools because their test scores reflect the demographics of high-needs populations. Test and punish doesn’t work.

I hope you get it right. It’s already too late for my kids and a whole generation of other students.

What we talk about when we talk about the Common Core

Several publications have recently picked up on the controversy over the way in which the Common Core standards prescribe 50% “informational text” for assigned reading in grades K-5 and 70% thereafter.  We have written about this silly and damaging quota ever since we heard about it last year: here, here and here.

Now the critique has gone main stream; in recent days, it has been written up in Time magazine, the Washington Post, and Salon.

First, this quota was weakly justified by its supporters that it reflects the distribution of questions on the national NAEP exams (which turns out not to be true.)  Now, Gene Wilhoit, Executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers and a supporter of the standards, claims that that the demand for more “Informational text” was made by “CEOs and University professors”. I doubt the accuracy of this statement too.

David Coleman, the main author of the Common Core, fiercely defends this directive by pointing out that the 70% rule is across subjects, and cites a footnote on page 5 of the 66-page standards in order to back this up. In other words, non-fiction or “informational” text could also be assigned in history, science, and math as well as English classes to make up the 70% quota.

As an example, he proposes that “math students could read Euclid’s “Elements” from 300 B.C.” I haven’t read much Euclid lately, but even if appropriate, this text would likely be very dense.  Only one or at most two pages of geometry can be absorbed per night, along with proofs, problem sets, etc. 

Coleman’s comments lead me to suspect that he and other supporters of the Common Core have not thought their prescription out carefully. Traditionally, in high school English classes, two novels, at least one play and several poems are regularly assigned; that works out to 700 pages of text or more. In order to achieve the 70% ratio without sacrificing huge chunks of literature that would mean that more than 1500 pages of non-fiction would have to be parceled out across all subjects.

And what about K-5 grades? Clearly, the 50% quota in these grades means that half of all assigned reading must be non-fiction in every classroom.  Starting in about third grade, for their independent reading, my son and his friends used to read at least four novels per year, each of them at least 350 pages. They would then have to be assigned 2000 pages of non-fiction in homework to “balance” this out – or else sacrifice the novels which absorbed them and drew them away from video games for at least 40 minutes a night.

David Coleman, who never taught a day in his life, yet was given the power to make these irrational and arbitrary prescriptions for the nation’s schoolchildren.  Who appointed him Czar: Bill Gates?

Now, Coleman says all this discussion of these quotas are a distraction and we haven’t yet got to debating the really difficult aspects of the Common Core, and he may be right.  For example, the Common Core exams are likely to be even longer than the endless tests that our children are already subjected to, and probably two to three times more expensive.  He correctly notes that parents and teachers have lost confidence in standardized testing, but then suggests that these “longer but more thoughtful” exams will “redeem assessment in the hearts and minds of teachers and parents.” Want to bet?  One wonders if he’s ever spoken to any of the parents who have risen up in anger about the amount of time that is already absorbed by testing in our schools.

And what is all this for?  What is the evidence that more informational text, more rigorous standards or more “thoughtful tests” help kids learn? In a recent column  in Ed Week, Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute compares the Common Core to the “Dr. Pendergast's miracle cure for everything that ails you”.  

He proposes that the real underlying purpose of the Common Core is to persuade parents in suburban school systems that after their children flunk these new exams, that their schools must be failing too: “Finally, newly convinced that their schools stink, parents and voters will embrace 'reform.' … Common Core advocates now evince an eerie confidence that they can scare these voters into embracing the "reform" agenda.” 

It is unlikely, Hess opines, that this will newfangled Shock Doctrine will work to persuade suburban parents to fall in line with the radical reform agenda of test-based teacher evaluations, free market competition, more charters, vouchers and the like.  Yet privatizing our urban school systems is not enough for the corporate reformers; they want to expand their grasp into middle class communities as well. Shall we talk about this, now, David Coleman?

Last night at the Panel for Educational Policy, we occupied the DOE!

Last night was inspiring as, for once, the 99% had their say at a Panel for Educational Policy meeting. 

The meeting, supposed to be a presentation of the Common Core standards, was very quickly taken over by teachers, parents, students and education activists, some of them from Occupy Wall Street.  We used the "people's mic" to drown out the speeches of Chancellor Walcott and David Coleman, who soon exited the stage to give their lessons upstairs.

Most of us remained in the auditorium for another hour and a half, talking about the rising class sizes, the overemphasis on high stakes testing, the way real learning is being squeezed out of the classroom because of the repeated budget cuts and damaging priorities of the  1% , including Bloomberg, Bill Gates and the Walton family, who are setting policies for our schools against the priorities of the 99% and the needs of our kids.

And the rest of the country and the world were able to watch, via Live Stream Occupy Wall St.  See below.

Join us at the next Occupy DOE event: a People’s General Assembly on Public Education on Monday, Nov. 7th at Tweed at 5 PM, when we will create a People's Agenda for our Schools!

And please leave a comment about some of your favorite speakers.  I loved the little girl at about 16 minutes in.

occupynyc on livestream.com. Broadcast Live Free

The Kick-off of "Parents as Partners Week": Who is David Coleman and why should we care?

DOE officials are working hard, trying to persuade us that they now have a different attitude towards parents.  Next week is called “Parents as Partners” week, starting off with a meeting on Tuesday at Seward Park High School.  Though today’s DOE press release calls this “a conversation” with the Chancellor, the prescribed topic is the new Common Core standards, and parents will only be “allowed” to submit their questions on index cards.  Clearly, this will be no “conversation”.

In reality, the Common Core standards are being imposed from above, pushed by the Gates Foundation and others, with no proof of efficacy and no input from parents.

David Coleman, who is going to give a presentation on the CC, gave one last April to “educational leaders” hosted by SED; here are  videos and transcripts .  As reported in EdWeek: 

Working under a contract with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, an avid backer of the standards, David Coleman and Susan Pimentel wrote a pair of documents highlighting the key ideas of the standards and describing the qualities of instructional materials they consider a faithful reflection of them.

As of  August 2011, 44 states and the District of Columbus adopted the Common Core, in exchange for the promise of being considered for Duncan’s Race to the Top funds – though by law, the federal government is supposed to stay out of the business of prescribing curriculum.

While Coleman is credited as one of the primary authors of the ELA standards for grades K-8, he apparently has no experience of teaching students either in elementary or middle schools, though he does brag that he once attended PS 41 in Manhattan.  Here is his bio from the SED website:

Mr. Coleman's most recent initiative is Student Achievement Partners, LLC, an organization which assembles leading thinkers and researchers to design actions to substantially improve student achievement. In this process, rigorous policy analysis, research, and design are integrated to focus on the most significant outcomes for students. Student Achievement Partners serves foundations and school districts. Previously, Mr. Coleman founded the Grow Network ‐ acquired by McGraw‐Hill in 2005 ‐ which has become the nation’s leader in assessment reporting and customized instructional materials. Mr. Coleman was a lecturer at the University of London before going to work in the pro bono education area of McKinsey & Company. He is a Rhodes Scholar and a graduate of Yale University, Oxford University and Cambridge University.

Coleman is also listed as on the board of The Equity Project, Zeke Vanderhoek’s hugely hyped but underperforming charter school; Vanderhoek bragged on 60 Minutes about firing teachers that the year before, he had gone to great lengths to recruit.  His mother is Elizabeth Coleman, president of Bennington College, who eliminated tenure in 1994 and fired one third of the faculty.

The details of the Common Core are beyond my level of expertise, but one fact stands out:  Coleman has rigidly prescribed that in grades K-5, at least half of the material read by students must be non-fiction, or what he calls “informational text”. 

 As pointed out by Susan Ohanian, he also disparaged the writing of personal narratives in his speech hosted by SED:

“Do people know the two most popular forms of writing in the American high school today? …It is either the exposition of a personal opinion or it is the presentation of a personal matter. The only problem, forgive me for saying this so bluntly, the only problem with those two forms of writing is as you grow up in this world you realize people really don't give a sheet  about what you feel or what you think.” 

 Only the video shows that he pronounced the word “sheet” differently from the way SED chose to spell it.

Similarly, one could say the same about the attitude of DOE and SED towards parents.  Like so much else of they do, they want to inculcate us with the value of the CC, though they never bothered to ask us what we thought of it before adopting it.