Climate Change Indoctrination? 13 States Adopt Common Core Science Lessons
Thirteen states and the District of Columbia have adopted Common Core science lessons that critics say will indoctrinate young children on climate change.
Here are the states that have signed on to the Next Generation of Science Standards:
While publicly billed as the result of a state-led process, the new science standards rely on a framework developed by the Washington, D.C.-based National Research Council. That is the research arm of the National Academy of Sciences that works closely with the federal government on most scientific matters.
All of the National Research Council’s work around global warming proceeds from the initial premise of its 2011 report, “America’s Climate Choices” which states that “climate change is already occurring, is based largely on human activities, and is supported by multiple lines of scientific evidence.” From the council’s perspective, the science of climate change has already been settled. Not surprisingly, global climate change is one of the disciplinary core ideas embedded in the Next Generation of Science Standards, making it required learning for students in grade, middle and high school.
Brian Kilmeade discussed the new developments with James Taylor, senior fellow for environment and energy policy at The Heartland Institute.
Taylor said the issue is that these guidelines push only one side of the climate change argument and don't provide necessary context.
For instance, elementary school students are taught that rising global temperatures will affect the lives of all humans. By eighth grade, students learn that greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels are a major factor in global warming.
Decline of Canadian students’ math skills the fault of ‘discovery learning’: C.D. Howe Institute
Canadian students’ math skills have been on a decade-long decline because rote learning was replaced by discovery-based methods that promoted multiple strategies and estimations, according to a new report that calls for a return to tradition.
“You know what’s the worst kind of instruction? The kind of instruction that makes kids feel stupid. And that’s what a lot of that discovery stuff does; their working memory gets overloaded, they’re confused. That’s bad instruction,” said Anna Stokke, an associate professor in the University of Winnipeg’s department of mathematics and statistics, who wrote the C.D. Howe Institute report.
The report draws on results from national and provincial tests as well as an OECD assessment performed every three years in more than 60 countries that measures how well 15-year-olds can apply skills in reading, math and science to real life situations.
Canada fell out of the top 10 countries for math in 2012. The report notes that all but two Canadian provinces also saw “statistically significant” declines in their math scores, compared with their 2003 performances. Alberta, once a math leader, and Manitoba saw the steepest drops, while only Quebec held its ground. Saskatchewan declined slightly but not enough to be considered significant. Beyond that, the pool of students at the lowest achievement levels grew while those at the very top shrank.
‘You know what’s the worst kind of instruction? The kind of instruction that makes kids feel stupid. And that’s what a lot of that discovery stuff does’
“You can look at it in terms of where do we rank et cetera, et cetera, but when we see that our students are doing worse, relative to 10 years ago, there’s no excuse for that,” said Stokke. She pointed out that even Sweden, whose 2012 drop in all subjects was so severe the OECD has warned the country must reform its school system, did not see as big a decline in its math scores as did Manitoba and Alberta.
The report puts a good deal of the blame on discovery or experimental learning approaches that encourage students to explore different ways to solve math problems instead of using a single standard algorithm and often promote concrete tools such as drawing pictures, or using blocks or tiles to represent math concepts. The idea is students will gain a deeper understanding of math and be better equipped to apply it to a variety of situations.
What really happens, though, says the report, is students’ working memories get overwhelmed if they don’t know their times tables and can’t quickly put a standard algorithm to work to solve a more complex problem, both features of what’s known as “direct instruction.” Key operations, such as addition and subtraction of fractions, are overly delayed until the middle school years, just as students need that facility to tackle algebra.
‘We all feel the urgency to correct the matter soon, before too many children are lost’
Such concepts should be introduced earlier, says the report. And while it stops short of throwing discovery learning out completely, it says the curriculum balance should be tilted in favour of direct instructional methods, recommending an 80/20 split as a rule of thumb.
“I’m fine with a bit of discovery learning … [but] you want to make sure that you’re getting the balance right, that most of the balance is going towards instructional techniques that are actually going to work,” said Stokke.
A petition calling for a back-to-basics math curriculum in Alberta, started by Edmonton-area mother Nhung Tran-Davies, has gathered more than 17,000 signatures. It was presented to the previous Conservative government last year, with some limited success, but Ms. Tran-Davies hopes she won’t have to start all over again with the province’s new NDP government.
To that end, she is holding a forum for the public and government officials this Friday evening in Edmonton to talk about how to advance reforms and hopes new education minister David Eggen will attend.
“We all feel the urgency to correct the matter soon, before too many children are lost,” she said.
Stokke’s report also suggests elementary school teachers in training should be required to take two semester-long courses at university in math with the aim of deepening their grasp of the concepts they will be teaching. Provinces should also consider making elementary teachers-to-be write a test in that same content before they’re licensed.
Those are good ideas, said Ann Kajander, an associate professor in math education at Thunder Bay, Ont.’s Lakehead University. But she strongly criticized the research basis for recommendations against discovery-based learning techniques.
“How can we have a report that makes significant recommendations in mathematics education when absolutely none of the major mathematics education journals … are included in the reference list?” she said. “As a researcher, that’s absurd.”
The report however does cite published research in science, psychology and neuroscience.
PUBLIC SCHOOLS CALLED 'GIGANTIC CRIMINAL ENTERPRISE'
It’s no accident that America’s education system is struggling, according to international journalist and educator Alex Newman, who believes American children are being intentionally dumbed down so they can be more easily controlled.
“Basically every tyrant in all of history has understood that to control and to enslave a nation, you need to control the education system,” Newman said in a recent appearance on “The Alex Jones Show.”
Newman extensively researched historical tyrants for his recently published book “Crimes of the Educators,” coauthored with Samuel Blumenfeld.
He also dug up a number of primary documents that he says prove socialist utopians are attempting to create a “new world order” of global citizens.
“They tell us they’re creating a global government, a global society, a single world religion – basically globalist everything on steroids, and really what they’re talking about is planetary totalitarianism,” Newman said. “They use nice words and that kind of stuff, but they’re very upfront about what they’re doing.”
However, the globalists understand an intelligent population would never go along with their schemes, said Newman. That’s why they need to dumb down Americans, and the rest of the world for that matter.
“Education is really at the heart of it, because if you don’t have a dumbed-down population, if you don’t have a population that’s sufficiently indoctrinated into this nonsense, it’ll never fly,” Newman said. “And so education, we consider, is really at the heart of this globalist effort to really, to be blunt about it, enslave the world. Without the education system, it would never be possible. Without mass-producing illiterates and collectivists, they could never build something like this.”
The host, Alex Jones, added his own historical parallel.
“If you go back to the different banking associations and groups in the 1890s and stuff … they were saying, ‘We’ve got too many smart people,’ and the robber barons said, ‘We need to take over education and dumb these people down,’ and boy, have they done it,” Jones said.
In “Crimes of the Educators,” Newman and Blumenfeld argue progressive education gurus have caused dyslexia and other learning disabilities by teaching children to read using the “whole word” method, which asks children to memorize words as whole units. The authors prefer a more traditional phonics-based method in which children learn which letters of the alphabet stand for certain sounds.
As a result of the whole-word method, says Newman, many children are functionally illiterate.
“So you won’t even be able to bypass the propaganda and get a book, get the Bible, get the Constitution, get the Declaration of Independence and read it, because they’re teaching the children to read using faulty methods that have been known to be quackery since the 1840s,” Newman told Jones.
He pointed to a 1993 government study that found as many as 51 percent of American adults were barely literate.
“This is crazy,” Newman exclaimed. “My 5-year-old can read after a few weeks of reading lessons using phonics. So something is seriously wrong in the schools, and it all comes together with the globalists and the big government scheming to enslave the American people.”
In their book, Newman and Blumenfeld claim “cooperative learning” is evidence of communist influence in the classrooms. Cooperative learning is a teaching method in which students work together in small groups and all receive the same grade for their work, even if they took a quiz or test separately. Such a collectivist mindset will come in handy in the new global society, the authors argue.
They also decry public schools for destroying children’s religious beliefs by teaching evolution and secular humanist doctrines. The authors note that lack of religion is a hallmark of totalitarian societies.
Their research also turned up evidence that the U.S. Department of Education is collecting massive amounts of personal information on every public school student in America.
“The Department of Education now, under the guise of improving education, is actually setting up massive dossiers on every student in the country, in the government schools, including information that parents wouldn’t imagine in their wildest dreams,” Newman told Jones. “We’re talking political beliefs, attitudes, values, views.”
When you put all of this together, says Newman, it’s not only horrifying, but it’s a crime against the American people.
“This is a gigantic criminal enterprise masquerading as a government school system, and it’s deliberately dumbing down the children,” Newman declared.
Although Newman regards the education system as criminal, he does not hold every teacher accountable for the crimes of the education establishment.
“There are plenty of teachers in the system who are very good people, who understand what’s going on, and who are defying the federal government and the Common Core and trying to teach students properly,” Newman told Jones. “By and large, teachers are just as much victims of this craziness as the students that are being dumbed down.”
Jones interjected: “Well yeah, because now they’re not humans that are excited about learning and know how to read. Now they’re dealing with a bunch of spoiled, rotten, drugged-up kids behaving like a barrel of monkeys.”
Newman hopes “Crimes of the Educators” will help destroy the globalists’ scheme by alerting people to what’s going on.
“If this information were more widely known, the entire edifice would collapse because all of it rests on a dumbed-down public that can’t read well, that can’t do math,” Newman said.
From what the author has seen lately, he thinks the globalists are accelerating their plans because they are nervous.
“They know that they’ve got to get this all done as quickly as possible because people are waking up right and left by the millions, and once we reach a critical mass of people who are awake, this whole thing is going to come crashing down,” Newman declared. “They’re going to end up in prison, and that’s serious stuff.”
Newman said it’s important for people to educate themselves about what’s going on and to organize within their communities, because as more Americans become aware of the globalists’ plans, they will be better able to resist.
“We’re going to have a great opportunity here to put a stop to all this,” Newman promised. “And if we miss it, it’s going to be a disaster for humanity, but if we seize it, it would be absolutely wonderful and amazing.”
Newman longs for the day when the American people collectively wake up, put their foot down and deliver this message: “Enough of this! We’re going to keep our rights. We’re going to keep our nation, thank you very much. We’re going to educate our children. We’re not going to let you dumb them down, and we’re not going to have your New World Order. Take a hike, you’re a criminal, that’s enough.”
Rebellions sometimes begin slowly, and Walter Stroup had to wait almost seven hours to start his. The setting was a legislative hearing at the Texas Capitol in the summer of 2012 at which the growing opposition to high-stakes standardized testing in Texas public schools was about to come to a head. Stroup, a University of Texas professor, was there to testify, but there was a long line of witnesses ahead of him. For hours he waited patiently, listening to everyone else struggle to explain why 15 years of standardized testing hadn’t improved schools. Stroup believed he had the answer.
Using standardized testing as the yardstick to measure our children’s educational growth wasn’t new in Texas. But in the summer of 2012 people had discovered a brand-new reason to be pissed off about it. “Rigor” was the new watchword in education policy. Testing advocates believed that more rigorous curricula and tests would boost student achievement—the “rising tide lifts all boats” theory. But that’s not how it worked out. In fact, more than a few sank. More than one-third of the statewide high school class of 2015 has already failed at least one of the newly implemented STAAR tests, disqualifying them from graduation without a successful re-test. As often happens, moms got mad. As happens less often, they got organized, and they got results.
Texas Education Commissioner Robert Scott, long an advocate of using tests to hold schools accountable, broke from orthodoxy when he called the STAAR test a “perversion of its original intent.” Almost every school board in Texas passed resolutions against over-testing, prompting Bill Hammond, a business lobbyist and leading testing advocate, to accuse school officials of “scaring” mothers. State legislators could barely step outside without hearing demands for testing relief. So in June 2012, the Texas House Public Education Committee did what elected officials do when they don’t know what to say. They held a hearing. To his credit, Committee Chair Rob Eissler began the hearing by posing a question that someone should have asked a generation ago: What exactly are we getting from these tests? And for six hours and 45 minutes, his committee couldn’t get a straight answer. Witness after witness attacked the latest standardized-testing regime that the Legislature had imposed. Everyone knew the system was broken, but no one knew exactly why.
Except for one person. Stroup, a bookishly handsome associate professor in the University of Texas College of Education, sat patiently until it was his turn to testify. Then Stroup sat down at the witness table and offered the scientific basis behind the widely held suspicion that what the tests measured was not what students have learned but how well students take tests. Every other witness got three minutes; it is a rough measure of the size of the rock that Stroup dropped into this pond that he was allowed to talk and answer lawmakers’ questions for 20 minutes.
A tenured professor at UT with a doctorate in education from Harvard University, Stroup isn’t frequently let out of the lab to address politicians in front of cameras. He talks with no evident concern that he might upset the powerful, and he speaks so quickly that his sentences have to hurry to keep up as he darts down tangents without warning. He taught in classrooms for almost a decade—it must have been a nightmare for his students.
But his testimony to the committee broke through the usual assumption that equated standardized testing with high standards. He reframed the debate over accountability by questioning whether the tests were the right tool for the job. The question wasn’t whether to test or not to test, but whether the tests measured what we thought they did.
Stroup argued that the tests were working exactly as designed, but that the politicians who mandated that schools use them didn’t understand this. In effect, Stroup had caught the government using a bathroom scale to measure a student’s height. The scale wasn’t broken or badly made. The scale was working exactly as designed. It was just the wrong tool for the job. The tests, Stroup said, simply couldn’t measure how much students learned in school.
Stroup testified that for $468 million the Legislature had bought a pile of stress and wasted time from Pearson Education, the biggest player in the standardized-testing industry. Lest anyone miss that Stroup’s message threatened Pearson’s hegemony in the accountability industry, Rep. Jimmie Don Aycock (R-Killeen) brought Stroup’s testimony to a close with a joke that made it perfectly clear. “I’d like to have you and someone from Pearson have a little debate,” Aycock said. “Would you be willing to come back?”
“Sure,” Stroup said. “I’ll come back and mud wrestle.”
But that never happened. Stroup had picked a fight with a special interest in front of politicians. The winner wouldn’t be determined by reason and science but by politics and power. Pearson’s real counterattack took place largely out of public view, where the company attempted to discredit Stroup’s research. Instead of a public debate, Pearson used its money and influence to engage in the time-honored academic tradition of trashing its rival’s work and career behind his back.
Dr. Walter Stroup
Standardized testing has been a part of American life since the U.S. Army used bubble tests to separate the officer material from the infantry during World War I. And accountability has been a part of public education since Lyndon Johnson’s Elementary and Secondary Education Act offered federal money to states with strings attached.
Texas first linked standardized testing with accountability in education in the 1980s. H. Ross Perot suggested running public schools like private businesses when he chaired the Legislature’s Select Committee on Public Education, and since Perot made money in the punch-card business it made sense that standardized, fill-in-the-little-oval-with-a-No.-2-pencil bubble tests offered the best way to measure classroom learning.
That led four years later to the North Dallas business community putting a young Democratic lawyer named Barnett A. “Sandy” Kress in charge of the Committee on Educational Excellence. Kress’ committee devised an elaborate system that offered schools incentives and punishments based on their standardized test scores. Kress and other businessmen lobbied then-Gov. Ann Richards to expand the program statewide, but it only really took off when George W. Bush succeeded her. Bush took Kress with him to the White House in 2001 as a senior adviser to sell the “Texas Miracle” to Congress as the No Child Left Behind Act.
A dozen years later, standardized tests have become the pre-eminent yardstick of classroom learning in America, and Pearson is selling the most yardsticks. Besides selling tests to Texas, Pearson has the contract for the National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as the “Nation’s Report Card.” Pearson writes the tests for the Program for International Student Assessment, the tests that always show the United States lagging behind Singapore and China. Pearson also handles the writing portion of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT).
That’s all good news for Kress, now a lobbyist for Pearson. But to paraphrase George W. Bush, no one ever checked whether these tests answered the question, “Is our children learning?”
That was precisely the question Stroup started asking after he thought he found a way to use cloud computing to expose poor, minority children to basic math concepts using calculus. Stroup’s work with a program called the Algebra Project—the reason UT recruited him in the first place—earned him a National Science Foundation grant a decade ago to design a cloud-computing simulation to teach children math. Texas Instruments heard about the program and asked Stroup to use it’s TI Navigator calculator to work with younger students who had failed the state math test. In 2006, he implemented the curriculum at a Dallas-area middle school with impressive results. The same kids branded as failures by the state tests embraced the project, using the cloud technology collaboratively to learn basic math concepts. This was the breakthrough that everybody—Kress, Perot and lawmakers in Austin—had been looking for.
Stroup needed only to measure the improvements to show how successful his methods had been. And for that he had the state math test. As Stroup later explained in a plenary address to the 2009 convention of the North American Chapter of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education, the teachers and a former official with the Texas Education Agency (TEA) “were very sure, based on some practice tests and also based on what they observed in class, that the students were ready to ‘rock’ the tests.” However, the students’ scores rose only 10 percent, a statistically valid variance but hardly the change that he had observed in the classroom.
Using UT’s computing power, Stroup investigated. He entered the state test scores for every child in Texas, and out came the same minor variances he had gotten in Dallas. What he noticed was that most students’ test scores remained the same no matter what grade the students were in, or what subject was being tested. According to Stroup’s initial calculations, that constancy accounted for about 72 percent of everyone’s test score. Regardless of a teacher’s experience or training, class size, or any other classroom-based factor Stroup could identify, student test scores changed within a relatively narrow window of about 10 to 15 percent.
Stroup knew from his experience teaching impoverished students in inner-city Boston, Mexico City and North Texas that students could improve their mastery of a subject by more than 15 percent in a school year, but the tests couldn’t measure that change. Stroup came to believe that the biggest portion of the test scores that hardly changed—that 72 percent—simply measured test-taking ability. For almost $100 million a year, Texas taxpayers were sold these tests as a gauge of whether schools are doing a good job. Lawmakers were using the wrong tool.
The paradox of Texas’ grand experiment with standardized testing is that the tests are working exactly as designed from a psychometric (the term for the science of testing) perspective, but their results don’t show what policymakers think they show. Stroup concluded that the tests were 72 percent “insensitive to instruction,” a graduate- school way of saying that the tests don’t measure what students learn in the classroom.
This claim earned Stroup a rebuke from the TEA, which stated that his findings betrayed “fundamental misunderstandings” about the way tests were constructed. The idea that most of a student’s test score carries over almost automatically, with little variance, year to year, was new, but it shouldn’t have been. After three years, STAAR scores have not budged much at all, and the TEA’s own recent report on the STAAR test results largely agrees with Stroup’s finding: The state agency declared that about 58 percent of middle school test scores showed little change from year to year.
Pearson wasn’t going to let Stroup’s findings go unchallenged. The company’s pushback against Stroup glossed over his most compelling findings and focused instead on what the company perceived as a mislabeled column in one of Stroup’s spreadsheets. In a public statement posted on the Pearson website, Dr. Walter “Denny” Way, senior vice president for measurement services at Pearson, said the 72 percent number was “not supported through valid research and will not stand up to a rigorous review by qualified experts.” After correcting what Pearson interpreted as the mislabeled column, Way wrote, the tests were “only 50 percent” insensitive to instruction. This alone was a startling admission. Even if you accepted Pearson’s argument that Stroup had erred, here was the company selling Texas millions of dollars’ worth of tests admitting that its product couldn’t measure half of what happens in a classroom.
Determining whether the number was 50 percent or 72 percent is one thing, but the real question is what that percentage meant. Stroup thought it quantified the portion of the test that measured test-taking ability. Another theory, from James Popham, emeritus professor in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California-Los Angeles, was that these types of tests measured innate intelligence, a morally dubious deduction when the results neatly correlate with race and ethnicity.
Way hypothesized that the 50 percent correlation “most likely reflects the fact that students are retaining what they’ve learned in previous years’ instruction and are building on that knowledge in the expected way.” But if that were true, then some students would do better in math than in reading, for example.
But that’s not what the research showed. A student in the third grade did as well on a math test as that same student did in the eighth grade on a language arts test as the same student did in the 10th grade on a different test. Regardless of changes in school, subject and teacher, a student could count on a test result remaining 50 to 72 percent unchanged no matter what. Stroup hypothesized that the tests were so insensitive to instruction that a test could switch out a science question for a math question without having any effect on how that student would score.
Recently, the American Statistical Association condemned the use of student test scores to rate teacher performance. In a statement last April, the association cautioned that most studies find that “teachers account for about 1% to 14% of the variability in test scores,” largely confirming Stroup’s apparently controversial conclusion.
If it’s true that the test measured primarily students’ ability to take a test, then, Stroup reasoned to the House Public Education Committee in June 2012, “it is rational game theory strategy to target the 72 percent.” That means more Pearson worksheets and fewer field trips, more multiple-choice literary analysis and fewer book reports, and weeks devoted to practice tests and less classroom time devoted to learning new things. In other words, logic explained exactly what was going on in Texas’ public schools.
When business lobbyists and legislators desired tests that measure whether a student was “college and career ready,” they didn’t dramatically reform the curriculum. They needed harder questions based on the same curriculum, a trick Pearson managed by incorporating logic puzzles into questions about knowledge.
“My son came home from the third grade, and he said, ‘You know daddy, someone is out there trying to trick me, and all I have to do is figure out how they’re tricking me,’” Stroup told the legislators. “I’m not sure if it translates all that well to society if we teach kids gaming. All right, we end up with adults and professionals spending most of their time gaming the system.”
Regardless of the substantial agreement that the TEA, Pearson and the American Statistical Association had with Stroup, the whisper campaign worked. Pearson kept pointing out the error on his spreadsheet, a bit of minutiae that caused even anti-testing academics to begin privately talking about “Stroup’s mistake” and reporters to promptly lose interest.
Stroup disagreed with Pearson’s analysis—vainly pointing out the agreement in his findings overshadowed the relatively insignificant error—but his 15 minutes of fame were up.
Rep. Eissler never called another hearing to have the debate between Stroup and a Pearson representative as Rep. Aycock had suggested. Eissler retired from the Legislature and now lobbies for Pearson.
Expecting part-time legislators to understand the implications of misusing standardized tests to hold public schools accountable is a tall order. In fact, Stroup had largely faded from public view by the time the Legislature came back into session in January 2013, but that’s when his real problems started.
In retrospect, Stroup might have anticipated that the UT College of Education wouldn’t celebrate his scholarship on standardized tests. In 2009, the Pearson Foundation, the test publisher’s philanthropic arm, created a $1 million endowment at the College of Education, which in turn engendered the Pearson Center for Applied Psychometric Research, an endowed professorship, and an endowed faculty fellowship.
Tax law allows corporations to establish charitable foundations. What tax law doesn’t allow is endowing a nonprofit to supplement the parent corporation’s profit-driven mission. Last December, Pearson paid a $7.7 million fine in New York state to settle charges that the Pearson Foundation “had helped develop products for its corporate parent, including course materials and software,” reported The New York Times. There is some evidence that the same thing is going on at UT, mainly because Pearson said so in a press release posted on the College of Education’s website:
“Pearson Foundation’s donation underscores the company’s dedication to designing and delivering assessments that advance measurement best practice, help ensure greater educational equity and improve instruction and learning in today’s global world,” wrote Steve Dowling, Pearson executive vice president. “Through our endowment with The University of Texas at Austin, we are investing in technology-driven assessment research that will promote and personalize education for all.”
Here’s how that works in practice: Sharon Vaughn, Ph.D., is the H.E. Hartfelder/Southland Corp. Regents Chair and executive director of The Meadows Center for Preventing Educational Risk at the University of Texas College of Education. For the last four years, she has been simultaneously consulting for Pearson Learning, for an undisclosed sum, “to serve as an author to promote a K-6 reading program,” according to disclosure forms she filed with the university. Having written 35 books, Vaughn is unquestionably qualified to “serve as an author.” One of them, Teaching Students Who Are Exceptional, Diverse, and At Risk in the General Education Classroom, is an e-textbook published by Pearson and is now in its sixth printing.
Last August, she was the presenter on a webinar aimed at teachers to tout Pearson’s iLit, “a comprehensive literacy solution designed to produce two or more years of reading growth in a single year.” The website for Pearson iLit lists Vaughn as a member of the “authorship team,” though it’s unclear whether the product originated at UT or Vaughn helped create it off campus. And though she told UT that she would be serving “as an author,” the webinar promo touted her academic job at UT. And lest anyone miss the point that this was the pedagogical equivalent of a timeshare pitch, John Guild, the senior product and marketing manager for Pearson iLit, moderated the webinar. In short, it’s the kind of arrangement that got Pearson in hot water in New York.
Most of what UT’s Pearson Center does seems more promotional than productive. The Pearson Center invites pro-assessment scientists to give lectures at UT. The center’s website has long lists of research presentations it has funded, indicating that the center is less a think-tank for groundbreaking research and more a mouthpiece in the marketplace of ideas.
In January 2013—six months after his testimony and less than a week after a story featuring Stroup aired on the Austin ABC affiliate—he received the results of his post-tenure review. It was bad news. The committee gave Stroup an unsatisfactory rating. Under state law, a public university in Texas can remove a tenured professor if he or she gets two successive unsatisfactory annual reviews. A Post-Tenure Review Report dated Jan. 10, 2013, dinged Stroup for “scholarly activity and productivity.” In sum, the committee found he was publishing too little and presenting at conferences too seldom. Of his infrequent conference presentations, the committee members wrote, “Further, and equally concerning, is the paucity of presentations at research conferences. Dr. Stroup lists no presentations (competitively reviewed) at research conferences over the past six years (none since 2005).”
That was a curious conclusion, because Stroup had been presenting. When a professor undergoes post-tenure review, he or she completes annual reports using a form published by the Office of the Executive Vice President. Stroup’s annual report lists four conference presentations, including two plenary addresses.
Regarding the overall charge of lack of productivity, the review committee failed to note Stroup’s work with cloud computing, which led him to a group approach to education technology called “cloud-in-a-bottle” that is being implemented now at Lamar Middle School in Austin. In addition, his work with Texas Instruments on the math intervention program had led the company to create its Navigator system. All of this was in his annual report.
Stroup protested, citing these omissions, misstatements and errors. On Jan. 16, Committee Chair Dr. Randy Bomer submitted the post-tenure review report to the dean of the College of Education after changing Stroup’s rating from “unsatisfactory” to “does not meet expectations.” Bomer did not, however, correct any of the errors in the committee’s report.
This does not mean Stroup’s job is safe, however. The department has put Stroup on an aggressive publishing schedule, and forced him to move offices three times.
In a cover letter to the dean, Bomer explained the change from “unsatisfactory” to “does not meet expectations” as the result of a misunderstanding about the rating definitions. No mention was made of the first draft’s supposed mistakes. In fact, Bomer wrote that the review committee did not even consider the omissions Stroup pointed out because “these things were not on his [curriculum] vita,” even though they were on the forms provided by the university.
Bomer’s cover letter indicates that the subject of Pearson came up with the review committee when Stroup requested a meeting after receiving the original unsatisfactory rating. “At that meeting, Dr. Stroup asked whether any member of the review committee or I had any relationship to Pearson publishing,” Bomer wrote. “None of us has any such relationship.”
Maybe Stroup’s “emperor has no clothes” rebellion against UT’s generous benefactor has nothing to do with his post-tenure review. For its part, Pearson Education said through a spokesperson that the company had no contact with UT about Stroup.
Maybe Stroup and his cloud computing and networked calculators don’t fit neatly into an academic world, so his colleagues think he’s slacking off. Maybe there’s another explanation for why the UT College of Education is seemingly trying to get rid of a tenured professor.
But if Pearson were trying to strike back against a researcher who told legislators that they were paying $100 million a year for tests that mostly measure test-taking ability, it would look an awful lot like what is happening to Walter Stroup.
Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported that Dr. Randy Bomer’s book was published by a Pearson subsidiary. The book was published by Heinemann. Pearson is the parent company of Heinemann’s divisions and related companies in the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand and Australia, but not the U.S. division that published Bomer’s book. The Observer deeply regrets the error.
Gates Foundation pours millions more into Common Core
Bill and Melinda Gates (Photo by Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images for EEM World)
Bill Gates famously spent hundreds of millions of dollars to develop, implement and promote the now controversial Common Core State Standards. He hasn’t stopped giving.
In the last seven months, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has poured more than $10 million into implementation and parent support for the Core, according to grant details on the foundation website (see below). That includes $3.7 million to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to support the Core at a time when it has come under increasing attack across the country, for both educational and political reasons.
Gates is the leader of education philanthropy in the United States, spending a few billion dollars over more than a decade to promote school reforms that he championed, including the Common Core, a small-schools initiative in New York City that he abandoned after deciding it wasn’t working, and efforts to create new teacher evaluation systems that in part use a controversial method of assessment that uses student standardized test scores to determine the “effectiveness” of educators.
Such philanthropy has sparked a debate about whether American democracy is well-served by wealthy people who pour part of their fortunes into their pet projects — regardless of whether they are grounded in research — to such a degree that public policy and funding follow.
The Common Core State Standards several years ago were fully adopted by 45 states and the District of Columbia with unusual bipartisan support. But support began to wane when critics from all sides of the political spectrum began to emerge with concerns on a variety of fronts, including problems with the content of the standards and the developmental inappropriateness of those for the earliest grades, the design of the new tests, how the new exams were written and by whom, and the federal government’s funding of new standardized tests aligned to the Core.
Opposition to the Core has grown stronger this year with the rise of the opt-out movement, in which hundreds of thousands of parents around the country are opting their children out of Core-aligned standardized testing. The attacks on the Core — which include moves by some states to repeal them and create new standards — have alarmed supporters, some of whom have been pushing back against the criticism. That explains a letter that a nonprofit group called Children Now just released, disseminated via e-mail that had a subject line that says, “At critical juncture 500 California organizations affirm support for Common Core.” Not so incidentally, Children Now has received at least $2 million from the Gates Foundation since 2011.
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Even with the growing opposition, however, most states are still implementing the standards or similar standards.
Here are the grants directly related to Common Core from last November through April as shown on the foundation website:
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West Ed
Date: April 2015 Purpose: RFP for teacher networks, designed to deepen the implementation of the Common Core by leveraging effective tools and strategies; teacher leaders capable of scaling them to teachers in national and local networks; and network/system partnerships Amount: $3,510,000 Term: 21 Topic: College-Ready Regions Served: GLOBAL|NORTH AMERICA Program: United States Grantee Location: San Francisco, California Grantee Website: http://www.WestEd.org
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Children Now
Date: March 2015 Purpose: to provide support to parents in California to understand the transition to new Common Core aligned assessments Amount: $150,000 Term: 6 Topic: College-Ready Regions Served: GLOBAL|NORTH AMERICA Program: United States Grantee Location: Oakland, California Grantee Website: http://www.childrennow.org
[Children Now also received a grant in March 2015 for $700,000 for general operating support. It has received more than $2 million from the foundation since 2011.
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LearnZillion, Inc.
Date: March 2015 Purpose: to support conferences to deepen teacher understanding of the Common Core standards Amount: $500,000 Term: 4 Topic: College-Ready Regions Served: GLOBAL|NORTH AMERICA Program: United States Grantee Location: Washington, District of Columbia Grantee Website: http://learnzillion.com
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U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation
Date: March 2015 Purpose: to support Common Core implementation Amount: $3,701,180 Term: 24 Topic: College-Ready Regions Served: GLOBAL|NORTH AMERICA Program: United States Grantee Location: Washington, District of Columbia Grantee Website: http://education.uschamber.com
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Consortium for Educational Change
Date: November 2014 Purpose: to support the high-quality integration of Common Core State Standards and new teacher feedback and evaluation systems Amount: $7,500,000 Term: 38 Topic: College-Ready Regions Served: GLOBAL|NORTH AMERICA Program: United States Grantee Location: Lombard, Illinois Grantee Website: http://www.cecillinois.org/
(Correction: One of two references to Gates grants to Children Now was incorrect in a previous version. It is now fixed.)
"The schools retain some of the traditional school organization, but are working toward replacing standard grading with a detailed, competency-based matrix that lets students know at all times where they stand and helps them understand their own strengths and weaknesses."
Grade levels could be a thing of the past in schools focused on competency
Some educators says grouping students by age is too important for social-emotional development to give up grade levels altogether. Photo by Fuse/Getty Images
In a suburb just outside of Denver, Principal Sarah Gould stands outside a fifth-grade classroom at Hodgkins Elementary School watching students work. This classroom, she explains, is for students working roughly at grade level. Down the hall, there are two other fifth-grade classrooms. One is labeled “Level 2 and 3,” for students who are working at the second and third-grade levels. The other is for students who are working at a middle-school level.
But some of these students won’t necessarily stay in these classrooms for the whole school year. The students will move to new classrooms when they’ve mastered everything they were asked to learn in their first class. This can happen at any time during the year.
“We have kids move every day. It’s just based on when they’re ready,” Gould said.
Six years ago, Hodgkins Elementary worked the same way most schools and districts do: Students were assigned to a class for a fixed amount of time and were promoted when the time ended, assuming that they had gained the skills they needed for the next class — and sometimes even if they had not.
Now, the school is part of a growing movement toward “competency-based education,” which replaces “seat time” with skills as the main standard for whether students are promoted. Competency-based education goes by many names — mastery-based, proficiency-based and performance-based education — but the idea is the same: Students are measured by what they’ve learned, not the amount of time they’ve spent in the classroom.
Innovations in technology and how teachers can monitor students’ progress, along with changes to regulations about how long students must spend in class, have made it possible for schools and districts to adopt competency-based systems in an effort to use students’ time in school more effectively.
At least 40 states have one or more districts implementing competency education, and that number is growing, according to a 2013 KnowledgeWorks report with the most up to date numbers on the trend.
But competency-based education doesn’t look the same across the country. In fact, advocates say schools and districts fall on a “competency continuum,” based on which aspects of competency education they’ve implemented.
When advocates talk about a “pure” model of competency education, they describe a model that isn’t bound by grade levels or the Carnegie unit, a measure of the amount of time a student has studied a subject in class. At that end of the spectrum, schools like Hodgkins or New York City’s Olympus Academy have essentially gotten rid of standard K-12 grade levels and only move students to the next learning level if they’ve proven they’ve mastered the concepts. (The schools generally must track students by grade level for funding and state testing purposes, even if their classes are not designed for single-age cohorts. Some advocates, including officials in Hodgkins’s district, want state policies changed to allow competency-based learning schools to track students differently.)
“Education systems in the past have been notorious for jumping on bandwagons but nothing substantially changes under the surface. In our model everything has changed under the surface,” said Oliver Grenham, chief education officer of Hodgkins’s district, Adams County School District 50 in Colorado.
But at the same time, advocates acknowledge that the “full system overhaul” is a heavy lift and that schools need to start from a place that makes the most sense for them based on their time, resources, and community support. For some districts, the clearest path has been to create new schools based on the model, as Philadelphia did this year when it opened three high schools that assign students to “workshops” rather than classes.
The schools retain some of the traditional school organization, but are working toward replacing standard grading with a detailed, competency-based matrix that lets students know at all times where they stand and helps them understand their own strengths and weaknesses.
Traditional letter grades don’t give students much information about what they know and can do, said Thomas Gaffey, the technology coordinator at Building 21, one of the three Philadelphia schools. The competency-based evaluation he helped design “makes the learning process transparent,” he said.
More often, schools have nestled a competency-based philosophy within their existing operations, maintaining their grade-level arrangements while adapting how they assess student learning.
“We’re a hybrid, which is what I think appeals to people who look at our model,” said Brian Stack, principal of Sanborn High School in New Hampshire. “It’s not vastly different from what they do with a traditional model, but it’s not so far out on the spectrum that it’s unattainable for them to get to where we are.”
At Sanborn, students are still enrolled in traditional classes and still receive credit for class at the end of the year. But all the courses have defined core competencies and if students don’t gain those competencies, they have to do extra work in order to earn credit for the class, rather than simply accepting the lower grade. The school is also in the process of doing away with numerical grades in favor of a scale that ranges from “limited progress” to “exceeding expectations.”
“We grade kids every day,” Stack said. “The difference is, what are you doing with that grade? Are you using that as feedback to tell students how they’re doing and to inform instruction or are you just using it as a determination to say did they know it or not?”
Stack said as much as he would like for his school to be totally unbound by seat time, its model is still dictated by the school calendar.
“If we can’t move kids when they’re ready, we can at the very least try to personalize instruction to the extent possible when they’re with us,” he said.
Other schools offer their own reasons for maintaining grade levels while rolling out a competency-based approach.
After a competency-learning pilot in math yielded major gains for California’s Summit Preparatory charter schools, the network adopted the approach in most academic subjects — and considered going further.
“We thought eliminating grades was the gold standard ideal,” said Adam Carter, chief academic officer. “We thought, ‘Those stupid grade levels are holding us back.’”
That changed when Summit officials thought through what they would lose by doing away with grade levels and realized that students benefit by belonging to a fixed cohort that advances together. “If students can plug into a project that is rich and full of layers, we don’t need to get rid of grade levels,” he said.
Schools operated by Rocketship, a national charter school network, regroup students four to six times a day based on their academic skills, in a robust example of how educators can use student data to foster competency-based learning.
“But we still have grade levels because of the social-emotional needs of students, especially early elementary,” said CEO Preston Smith. “Five-year-olds need to be with 5-year-olds most of the day so they can develop the life skills they need to be successful.”
Advocates of competency-based learning say the diversity among schools’ approaches should be expected — and appreciated — as more experiments take shape.
“Each school and each district is on its own journey and they’re going to have different entry points,” said Susan Patrick, president of the International Association for K-12 Online Learning, which champions online and blended learning models that are often part of competency-based programs. “Most school leaders who are implementing this well … had been working on the building blocks for three to six years.”
Lillian Pace, senior director of national policy for KnowledgeWorks, said, “Naturally, you’re going to see a tremendous amount of diversity in implementation. … That’s healthy. We need to try different approaches. We need to figure out ultimately which methods are the most effective.”
For now, the experience of schools like Hodgkins suggests that competency-based education might help engage students in their learning.
When kindergarten teacher Jenn Dickman recently asked for volunteers to share their “data notebooks” with a visitor, her students rushed en masse to grab the binders.
Jayleen Vasquez was first in line. She flipped quickly through the pages—each a mini-progress report of her skills. At the top were headers such as, “I can read a Level D book with purpose and understanding” or “I can read 50 sight words in 100 seconds or less.”
Underneath were columns shaded in colorful crayon hues showing whether she’d met the goal, and if not, how much farther she had to go.
“I passed these. I got those two right and this one I just forgot one. I did not pass this one,” she said, gesturing to one page. Then she concluded with pride: “I passed all this.”
This story was produced as a collaboration among all news organizations participating in the Expanded Learning Time reporting project. Reporting was contributed by Sue Frey for EdSource California, and Dale Mezzacappa for the Philadelphia Notebook.
Chalkbeat Colorado is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.
