Are Common Core Standards the ‘Ceiling’ or the ‘Floor’?

http://missourieducationwatchdog.com/are-common-core-standards-the-ceiling-or-the-floor/

Are Common Core Standards the ‘Ceiling’ or the ‘Floor’?

First the Common Core proponents told us Common Core was internationally benchmarked and researched based.  They withdrew the internationally benchmarked claim (now they are internationally ‘informed’) and we have yet to see any research presented to prove the claim that the standards were researched or even field tested before they were adopted and implemented.

For years we’ve heard how they are ‘higher and rigorous’ and they will prepare students for college and career.  The kicker in that statement is that the college that these ‘higher, rigorous’ standards will only prepare students for 2 year community colleges.

The more you hear about the standards and claims that have been withdrawn, it makes a truly critical thinker start thinking ‘something’s rotten in Denmark’ when what’s uttered as truth is exposed as a half-lie or half-truth, depending on your definition.

Early on, it was the contention of those common core facilitators (those individuals paid by school districts to provide the professional development necessary…even as we were told CCSS didn’t ‘tell teachers how to teach’) that the Common Core standards were not the ‘ceiling’, no, they were ‘the floor’.  They were the expectations all children should know.   From a NEA 2011 newsletter about Douglas Reeves, a professional trainer, explaining Common Core in 2011 in a presentation to teachers:

Reeves noted that the Common Core Standards are a floor, not a ceiling. Local teachers and administrators will need to add requirements to add value to the education of students.

That statement is quite interesting as Achieve (one of the NGOs involved in the creation of the standards) in 2010 stated something quite differently.  From:

on the road to implementation – Achieve
http://www.achieve.org/files/FINAL-CCSSImplementationGuide.pdf:

The K-12 Common Core State Standards (CCSS) represent a major advance … Adding to the Common Core State Standards: Addressing the “15%” Guideline.

Which concepts and skills required in your state’s standards are not included in the Common Core State Standards? At the end of the analysis, states should generate a list of their state standards that were not included in the CCSS. This list will identify the content unique to the state and the state needs to carefully consider whether any of this content rises to the level of consideration for addition per the 15% guideline based on the strategic priorities of the state. States are likely to find that most of the content not included in the CCSS is extraneous and easily discarded.

That does not lead one to critically think that these standards were ‘always intended to be a minimum’ with language ‘allowing’ states to add 15% and that most of the content that states would want to add would be, well, ‘extraneous and easily discarded’, now does it?

From the same document with references to the ‘floor’ and the ‘ceiling':

on the road to implementation – Achieve
http://www.achieve.org/files/FINAL-CCSSImplementationGuide.pdf

Achieve August 2010. Achieving the Promise of the Common Core State Standards. The K-12 Common … Association (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO). Achieve was a ….. situation where the floor becomes the ceiling and instead provide incentives for students who achieve the college and …

By creating a continuum of indicators, states can accomplish two things that most accountability systems today do not. First, they can ensure that students who are identified as off track get the attention and resources they need to get back on track before it’s too late. Second, they can avoid a situation where the floor becomes the ceiling and instead provide incentives for students who achieve the college and career readiness standard earlier in high school to continue to strive for more. This represents a new vision of the kind of information states should collect, report, and enable schools and districts to use.

Well, good Lord, in the same document Achieve has just told us that adding extra standards would not be in the state’s interest. So these statements directly contradict each other. Even if you had not read Achieve’s statements about the 15%, that statement about incentives is just babble and double speak.

As states are preparing for cut scores for the standards, they by defacto become the ceiling. By taking the scores from the CCSS ‘floor’ and making them the scores of proficiency, then they are indeed the ceiling. What else is being assessed? NOTHING. So all the double talk about ‘provide incentives’ for students who continue to strive for more is just nonsense. WHAT incentives?

Perhaps if the creators of Common Core would speak out on the initiative and their deliberations on the standards (such as Jonathon Gruber did with the ACA) we could put these arguments to a rest. However, we can pull from Achieve documentation and determine fairly well what the intent of the standards are in terms of if they are the minimum or the maximum.

Here is more on the ‘floor’ vs ‘ceiling’ by Dr. Yong Zhao, a respected educational researcher:

Chapter 1: The Wrong Bet
http://zhaolearning.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Chapter1.pdf
by A Einstein – Related articles
was born with the official launch of the Common Core State. Standards (Common … Officers (CCSSO). The press … [NGA Center] & Council of Chief State School Officers, 2010). ….. ated status and stakes, the floor usually becomes the ceiling.

It is clear that defining a common curriculum and enforcing it through high-stakes testing results in an educational experience aligned with the curriculum. The core curriculum, however defined, becomes the de facto full curriculum. The floor, that is the basic essential knowledge, becomes the ceiling. Perhaps this is what the reformers intend and expect to have.

In fairness, advocates of internationally benchmarked standards are intelligent people with good intentions. They recognize that a child’s education should be much more than the core subjects, but what they fail to recognize is the reality that the subjects that carry the most stakes for students and schools are the ones that receive the most attention and resources. Other subjects become peripheral and disposable. It has also been argued that the core curriculum only prescribes the essential knowledge and skills and should be the foundational knowledge and skills a child needs, thus it is not the ceiling, rather the floor. Unfortunately, due to the differentiated status and stakes, the floor usually becomes the ceiling. The basic becomes the ultimate goal. This is what has been referred to as curriculum narrowing.

Does ‘curriculum narrowing’ mean ‘dumbing down’?  It sounds as if what is ‘one man’s ceiling is another man’s floor’.  Regardless of what paid consultants tell your teachers, use your common sense and know that 85% of mandated standards is the vast majority of what is covered in your child’s classroom.  Non-common core curriculum will not be assessed so how much focus will be applied to the 15%?  This small minimum ‘allowed’ for states to add to the 85% is frowned upon by Achieve.  This does not lend credibility to the current line of proponents that the standards are indeed the floor.  They are the ceiling with little to no room for addition or ‘incentives’.

Think of it as ‘you can keep your curriculum if you like it’ line of thinking.  Theoretically it’s correct, however in practice, it’s not happening.  Just look at the MSBA powerpoint on Common Core/MSIP5  changes, noting ‘local curriculum’ will align to The Missouri Learning Standards.  Sure!  You can use any curriculum…but, it must be aligned to the MLS, aka Common Core State Standards.   Some choice, eh?

So what do you think the next ‘misinformation’ from the proponents will be?

(This post evolved from a comment left in response to a previous post)

Published on November 22, 2014

DAVID CONLEY: DECONSTRUCTING COLLEGE READINESS

http://projectinfolit.org/smart-talks/item/80-david-conley-deconstructing-college-readiness

DAVID CONLEY: DECONSTRUCTING COLLEGE READINESS

 In educational circles, phrases like “college readiness” and “Common Core State Standards” can be fighting words, inviting debate and dissention among educators, librarians, students, and parents.

Then there’s David Conley. His life’s work has been to research college readiness and related policy issues. For decades he's asked, "What does it take to make students succeed in college?" A renowned policy analyst and researcher, David is Professor of educational policy and leadership at the University of Oregon and the CEO and CSO of the educational policy group, Educational Policy Improvement Center.

In October 2013 we interviewed David, asking him what it means to be college ready today, and how that definition will change in the coming years and decades. We also discussed his latest book, Getting Ready for College, Careers, and the Common Core (2013) and how he believes we can help students acquire the research skills they will need to navigate an increasingly crowded, complicated, and confusing web of information so they will succeed in college and in their careers.

PIL: Let’s begin with the sticky wicket of college admissions. In a 2012 interview, you said one of the shortcomings of the college admissions process is that it’s based on eligibility rather than readiness. What’s the difference? How do you define college readiness? You have recently called for a more comprehensive definition of college readiness. Why is it needed today?

David: Eligibility is established through grades, courses taken, and an admissions test score. Admissions officers use these to admit those who may be able to succeed. Then, historically, the general education intro courses, the Chem 101 or Psych 101-type courses, were used as the de facto admissions standard. Many students failed entry-level courses for a wide variety of reasons and ended up not continuing.

Readiness implies that the student’s preparation is well aligned with the full set of knowledge and skills necessary to succeed in postsecondary education. The emphasis here is on being able to succeed, not just on being admitted. Here’s my definition of college and career ready:

• A college and career ready student possesses the content knowledge, strategies, skills, and techniques necessary to be successful in a postsecondary setting.
• Not every student needs exactly the same knowledge and skills to be college and career ready.
• A student’s college and career interests help identify the precise knowledge and skills the student needs.

Note the importance of understanding student interests and aspirations when considering how ready for college and careers they are. Most current eligibility measures do not take the student into account very much, instead relying on common “cut” scores for all students on a few measures, generally English and math tests. We’ve found that much more than that is required to succeed in college.

In fact, my readiness model, the Four Keys to College and Career Readiness, identifies 12 components and 41 specific aspects that the college and career ready student needs to master to be fully ready. Here are the Four Keys with their aspects and components:

 

©EdImagine Strategy Group, 2013

The reason we need this more comprehensive and detailed specification of college and career readiness is that too many students are failing to be properly prepared for postsecondary studies at a time when more and more students are going on to such studies and when the economy demands that workers have higher levels of education and training. Today’s young people need both a sound academic foundation and a set of learning skills and techniques that allow them to acquire new knowledge and be adaptive to new situations throughout their careers.

PIL: In a 2012 presentation, you discussed the tendency of some educational policy makers to “encapsulate college-readiness and put it into a form that’s amenable to a solution by policy that’s fairly simple and then wash their hands and move onto the next policy problem.” What makes this tendency problematic? Why should we all, from educators to librarians to students, look more closely at things like “cut scores” and increased “certification” by educational agencies?

David: It would be nice if all we had to do was find the magical cut score on a placement test in English and math that deem all students ready to succeed in college. But the more we study readiness, the more we learn that the old measures aren’t really very good at all at yielding information on what it really means to be ready to succeed.

For policymakers, rules around remediation are things they can control, so that’s where they make changes. California adopted the Early Assessment Program, which says that students who achieve a specified score on a short test accompanied by a writing sample do not need to take remedial courses if they want to attend a campus of the California State University. Connecticut specifies that four-year colleges cannot offer remedial courses. These sorts of policies, well intended as they are, reflect more what policymakers can control than what perhaps needs to be done.

Determining readiness requires what I call a “system of assessments,” not an assessment system. Such an approach gathers a much wider range of information on more readiness aspects and components. Some of this information can be low stakes, such as student self-reports and teacher ratings of students on “non-cognitive” factors, what I refer to as metacognitive learning skills. Others can be more complex student work products, such as research papers, investigations, and capstone projects. This information can then be combined with the more traditional measures of GPA, course titles, and SAT/ACT scores. The resulting profile can be used to judge readiness in relation to student aspirations.

Knowing something about what students want to do in college is important to understanding how ready they are. Not all students need exactly the same knowledge and skills to succeed. The undecided student clearly needs a strong foundational set of skills in English and math. Students with defined interests may need to augment those foundational skills in certain ways, or may be able to overcome shortcomings in an area not central to their aspirations with added strengths in areas that are central to achieving their academic and career goals.

This more nuanced and complex approach to readiness is not easily mandated through a uniform set of policies regarding remediation or cut scores. It requires much greater involvement by everyone involved in and affected by the readiness, admissions, and placement processes.

PIL: In your latest book, you discuss the importance of teaching students “research skills.” Why are research skills a key competency? You focus on teachers and what they can do, but what about libraries—and librarians—how do they fit in and what’s their role?

David: The ability to research and investigate topics is a true 21st century basic skill. It’s increasingly obvious that recalling from memory or accessing information from known sources is not a sufficient demonstration of the thinking skills required to succeed in college and the workplace. Increasingly, the expectation is the ability to formulate a problem in the first place, and then solve it; to collect the information necessary to formulate the problem and pursue its solution; to distinguish the credibility, validity, and value of source information; to collect enough information from a wide enough range of sources; to interpret all of that information intelligently and with a value-added component, and then to communicate the resulting synthesis in the most appropriate format from among many options.

©EdImagine Strategy Group, 2013

Few teachers and students define research in this fashion. For most, it is the process of “solving” a problem following a series of largely predetermined steps that students have been taught already. This sort of procedural process may be useful for neophytes to practice the essentials of the inquiry cycle and to familiarize them with the basic aspects of the research process, but it is not sufficient to prepare students for complex, unstructured, “fuzzy” problems, the type encountered increasingly in college courses and in the workplace.

Libraries and librarians can clearly play a crucial role in helping students and teachers understand this new research paradigm. In particular, they can help teachers develop assignments whereby students must first formulate the problem before attempting to solve it. The formulation process involves hypothesis generation and examination, which in itself requires examining a wider range of options before reaching a conclusion about the nature of the problem and the specific type of strategy best suited to solve it.

Similarly, when searching for source material, students need to be making many more decisions about the type of material necessary to solve the problem as formulated and the value and quantity of the sources they locate. How much information at what level of credibility and validity is necessary based on the nature of the problem at hand? These types of more sophisticated forms of analysis help learners develop the skills they will need in college and careers. They also help teachers develop better assignments going forward.

PIL: For the latest PIL research study, when we interviewed first-year students at six different US colleges in Fall 2012 during their first few months, many freshmen said they were both “overwhelmed” and “excited” about finding and using information for completing college-level research assignments. They were relieved to be free of rigid high school curricula and excited by the prospect of diving into research on topics they found more interesting. At the same time, however, they were overwhelmed at the prospect of sorting through and comprehending the voluminous amount of information available to them. Why do so many freshmen lack the cognitive strategies needed to conduct college-level research? Why don’t more of them ask for help?

David: Take a look at the Key Cognitive Strategies model I presented above. How many high school students ever even see something like that as a tool to help them understand what the inquiry process consists of? Keep in mind that even our highest achieving students generally just follow directions and do what they are asked to do. It’s only in the most remarkable situations that schools really challenge students rigorously to think about the nature of research and what it takes to understand and solve problems.

My research indicates that high school students write very few research papers, and when they do, they might write one or perhaps two long papers, which their instructors feel represent what students need to know how to do in college. In fact, analyses that my colleagues at the Educational Policy Improvement Center (EPIC) in Eugene and Portland, Oregon, have found is that college courses and career training programs tend to expect students to complete lots of shorter assignments, in the 3-5 page range for college courses in particular.

High school students do not get much experience developing tightly organized, well structured, and thoroughly referenced papers or presentations of this nature. Instead, they may learn to write a six-paragraph essay based on the requirements of the state testing program or to prepare for the SAT or ACT writing sections. This type of formulaic writing does not in any way prepare students to undertake the more complex work they will encounter in college and many career-training programs.

As far as students asking for help, here, again, studies about students are informative. In fact, students most in need of help tend to be least likely to ask for it, for several reasons. First, many believe doing so indicates they don’t really belong in college in the first place, so they attempt to do it all by themselves. Second, some students simply have little experience asking for help, and colleges are far more complex institutional environments than high schools, which it makes it more difficult to get help. And, finally, some students do seek help only to be rebuffed or frustrated when a professor or campus advisor does not do what the student wants.

In all of these cases, students need to develop greater persistence and the skill of self-advocacy. This can be taught to high school students, although it rarely is. This characteristic is referred to by some as grit, determination, or tenacity. Regardless of the precise term employed, the principle is the same: students need to learn to become their own advocates and to take control of their lives by getting the help and assistance they need before it’s too late.

PIL: Our last question takes the long view. How will college-ready competencies change over the next decade as “disruptive technologies,” such as the MOOCs, make their way into college classrooms? Which competency is most overlooked today in the core standards that will matter later on? What should educators and librarians be doing today to better prepare students for tomorrow whether they go to college or start careers?

David: We are only at the dawn of competencies as legitimate and important measures of college readiness. In the mid-1990s, I developed a proficiency-based college admission system for the Oregon University System, called PASS, which was adopted and implemented on a pilot basis. We learned a lot about using competencies for admission purposes. I’m a little concerned that many of those lessons aren’t necessarily being reflected in discussions about competencies.

First, not everything important can be specified in a competency. High school teachers remain an important source of information on other aspects of student performance and understanding of material, and their expertise and observations should also be incorporated, but in ways that clearly complement competency determinations, not as the sole determinant of competency.

Second, competency systems favor students who take ownership over their own learning. This is particularly true of MOOCs and online learning in general. Students who know how to set and achieve goals, to manage their own time, to seek help, and to take initiative when necessary to go beyond the minimum generally fare much better than do students who lack these skills and attitudes. I fear that we might be leaving behind a whole segment of the student population if we over-rely on competencies without strong supports for those students who have not learned how to assert ownership over their own learning and who lack the personal management skills necessary to manage their learning.

Third, the whole needs to be greater than the sum of the parts. Competency systems need to be developed in ways that ensure the competencies do not become a checklist, but, instead, reflect a deep understanding of the course concepts as well as its content. This requires more sophisticated assessment measures than are currently used to gauge competency in many so-called competency-based courses currently. See the systems of assessment and profile models above for more details.

Librarians can and should become much more engaged as resources to help students not just demonstrate competency but to develop the kinds of deeper understanding necessary to truly master a course of study. Librarians can guide students toward materials that cast light on the big questions of the subject, and the organizing concepts necessary to connect and unite the specific competencies. They can suggest extensions and ways for students to get more deeply involved in what they are learning. And they can, of course, help the struggling student find resources that break down course content into simpler pieces that can be digested and integrated to reach the level necessary to demonstrate a competency.

David Conley lives in Eugene and Portland, Oregon. He is a professor of educational policy in the College of Education and founder and director of the Center for Educational Policy Research (CEPR) at the University of Oregon. In addition, he is founder, CEO, and Chief Strategy Officer of the Educational Policy Improvement Center (EPIC); and president of EdImagine Strategy Group.

His latest book is entitled Getting Ready for College, Careers and the Common Core: What Every Educator Needs to Know (Jossey-Bass, 2014). He is also the author of numerous books and reports, including College and Career Ready: Helping all students succeed beyond high school. (Jossey-Bass, 2010), College Knowledge (Jossey-Bass, 2005), and Rethinking College Readiness (Educational Policy Improvement Center, 2007).

Smart Talks are informal conversations with leading thinkers about the challenges of educating and preparing college students to succeed in school and as lifelong learners in the digital age. The interviews are an occasional series, produced by Project Information Literacy (PIL).

PIL is an ongoing and national research study about how college students find and use information for courses and for use in their everyday lives. PIL is conducted in collaboration with the University of Washington’s Information School.

This interview about college and career readiness was made possible with the generous support of a research grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences (IMLS), creating strong libraries and museums that connect people to information and ideas. Smart Talk interviews are open access and licensed by Creative Commons:

David Conley: Deconstructing College-Readiness (email interview), by Alison J. Head, Project Information Literacy, Smart Talk Interview, no. 17 (13 November 2013), is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Federalizing Education by Waiver?

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2485407

Federalizing Education by Waiver?

In the fall of 2012, the United States Secretary of Education told states he would use his statutory power to waive violations of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), but only on the condition that they adopt his new education policies — policies that had already failed in Congress. Most states had no real choice but to agree because eighty percent of their schools were faced with statutory sanctions and fund termination. As a result, the Secretary was effectively able to federalize two core aspects of public education over the next year. For the first time, school curriculum and the terms of teacher evaluation and retention came under the influence and control of the federal government. 

This Article demonstrates that this particular exercise of conditional waiver power was both unconstitutional and beyond the scope of the Secretary’s statutory authority. First, NCLB contained no notice that states might face waiver conditions when they first agreed to participate in NCLB, much less notice of the substance of those conditions. Spending clause doctrine requires both. Second, states’ inability to say no to these conditions raises serious questions of unconstitutional coercion. Third, the Secretary lacked explicit statutory authority to impose these conditions. At best, NCLB implies authority to condition waivers, but implied conditions would be limited to the scope of NCLB itself. The waiver conditions the Secretary imposed go well beyond the scope of NCLB. Fourth, to treat these particular waiver conditions as falling within the scope of the Secretary's authority would be to extend the Secretary the equivalent of law-making power, which separation of powers doctrines prohibit. The power to unilaterally impose open-ended policy through waiver conditions would be remarkable not just for its transformation of key aspects of education, but for the entire federal administrative state. It would open the door to the spread of a more expansive administrative power than ever seen before.Keywords: federalization, education, waiver, conditional waiver, federally funded programs, delegation doctrine, spending clause doctrine, national curriculum, tenure, teacher evaluation

COOMMON CORE COPY WRITE PRECEDENT

http://thecorestandards.com/faq/cc-copyright-misuse/

"New Copyright Precedent. In this excerpt from chapter 2 of What is Common Core?, Darcy Pattison explains how the Common Core has set new copyright precedent by creating a privately copyrighted document, then asking State Departments of Education to accept the document as a public policy document. To our knowledge, there’s never before been a public policy document that is privately copyrighted. This misuse of copyright law–intended to make sure that the standards are not modified at a local level–is a startling political development."  (Plus all this is tied to College Board testing that has implication for charter schools, private schools, faith based schools AND homeschool!)

Jeb Bush offers nuanced defense of Common Core education standards

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/jeb-bush-offers-nuanced-defense-of-common-core-education-standards/2014/11/20/b77330f4-70cc-11e4-8808-afaa1e3a33ef_story.html

Jeb Bush offers nuanced defense of Common Core education standards

Former Florida governor Jeb Bush (R) offered a nuanced defense of the Common Core State Standards during a speech Thursday in Washington, trying to mend the divide within the GOP over the standards as he weighs a 2016 presidential bid.

“I respect those who have weighed in,” said Bush, who is in the minority among the GOP’s top-tier potential presidential candidates when it comes to support for the Common Core, a set of K-12 standards in reading and math that has been adopted by 43 states and the District of Columbia. “Nobody in this debate has a bad motive.”

Bush, 61, spoke at the annual summit of the Foundation for Excellence in Education, which he founded after leaving office in 2007 to promote his education agenda around the country.

Bush and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) both back the Common Core standards, but opponents include Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Sen. Ted Cruz (R- Tex.) and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R). Jindal was once a strong supporter of the Common Core standards but now is fighting with his own state education leaders in an effort to drop them.

Jindal is also suing the Obama administration, claiming that the federal government coerced states to adopt the standards by making adoption of higher standards a requirement for states that wanted to compete for federal grants.

Among the general population, support for the Common Core standards has been mixed, according to several public opinion polls. Democrats tend to support them more than Republicans. Political strategists say if Bush can survive the GOP primary process, he could emerge a stronger candidate in the general election candidate if he stands by his education agenda.

A bipartisan group of governors and state education chiefs created the Common Core State Standards in math and reading in 2010 as a way to inject consistency into K-12 academic standards, which have varied wildly from state to state. The standards spell out the skills and knowledge students should possess by the end of each grade. They are not curriculum — states and schools decide how to teach to the standards and the kinds of materials to use.

Two GOP-controlled states, Oklahoma and South Carolina, have opted to drop the standards, while others are considering revisions.

In his speech Thursday, Bush didn’t address the specific criticisms of the Common Core but instead stressed that the nation needs to raise academic expectations for K-12 students.

“This morning, over 213 million Chinese students went to school and nobody debated over whether academic standards should be lowered to protect their self-esteem,” he said. “Yet in Orange County, Florida, that exact debate did occur. And so the school board voted to make it impossible for a student to receive a grade below a 50. You get 50 out of 100 just for showing up and signing your name. This was done, and I quote here from a local official, so the students ‘do not lose all hope.’ ”

“But in an international report card on education performance, students from Shanghai ranked number one,” he said. “Students from the U.S. ranked 21st in reading and 31st in math. The point is this: An overriding concern for self-esteem instead of high expectations doesn’t help you get to number one. It gets you to 21. So let’s get real.”

States that want to dump the Common Core standards should replace them with even more rigorous benchmarks, Bush said.

“There is no question we need higher academic standards and — at the local level — diverse, high-quality content and curricula,” he said. “And in my view, the rigor of the Common Core State Standards must be the new minimum in classrooms. For those states choosing a path other than Common Core, I say this: Aim even higher . . . be bolder . . . raise standards and ask more of our students and the system.”

As governor of Florida from 1999 to 2007, Bush remade the state’s education system, pushing through a law that assigned schools letter grades based on test scores and a requirement that third graders pass a reading test in order to advance to fourth grade. He also promoted a plan for taxpayer-funded private-school vouchers for low-income students, which was struck down by state courts. And he pushed to expand public charter schools and online learning.

After leaving government, Bush used his foundation as a lever to influence education policy and laws in scores of GOP-controlled states. The foundation receives heavy financial support from major education corporations including K12 Inc., the Reston-based for-profit online learning company and Pearson, the world’s largest standardized testing company.

“We have built a nationwide reform movement based on a set of proven principles,” Bush told the gathering of several hundred state policy leaders, charter school managers and executives from education companies. “Of course, choice is at the center of our reform efforts. But there are others:

“High standards. Rigorous, high-quality assessments. Accountability for school leaders.

“Early childhood literacy and ending social promotion. Digital and distance learning. Transparency for parents to see whether their schools are getting better or getting worse.”

He lambasted teachers unions, casting them as obstacles to progress that try to lock students in struggling schools:

“If we were designing our school system from scratch, what would it look like? I know one thing: We wouldn’t start with more than 13,000 government-run, unionized and politicized monopolies who trap good teachers, administrators and struggling students in a system nobody can escape. We would be insane if we recreated what we have today.”

Bush was introduced by Denisha Merriweather, who grew up in poverty in Jacksonville, Fla., and got a taxpayer-funded voucher to attend a private parochial school where she flourished. Merriweather, whose story was shown in a video before she appeared, recently graduated from the University of West Florida. About 70,000 students are attending private schools in Florida with vouchers from the program.

The program is under a legal challenge by a coalition including the teachers unions, the association of school administrators, clergy associated with Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, the PTA, the Florida NAACP and League of Women Voters. They argue the program funnels public money into unregulated private schools, diverting tax dollars that otherwise would support the system of free public schools required by the state constitution.

Bush took broad swipes Thursday at both the Obama administration and the expanded federal role in education that began under his brother, George W. Bush, who as president signed into law No Child Left Behind, the 2002 legislation designed to hold states accountable for educating children.

“So if the federal government wants to play a role in reform, it should stop tying every education dollar to a rule written in Washington, D.C.,” Bush said. “They should make more programs — IDEA, Title I, early childhood programs — into block grants that the states can deploy as they see fit, including vouchers to enhance state programs.”

“In my view, every education dollar should depend on what the child needs, not what the federal bureaucrat wants,” he said. “Where the child goes, the dollars should go as well. When that happens, we’ll see major reforms and major gains for America’s children and the federal government will go back to playing the supportive and completely secondary role it should be playing.”

THE FACTS ABOUT COMMON CORE EVERY PARENT IN AMERICA NEEDS TO KNOW

http://poorrichardsnews.com/post/64605802173/michelle-malkin-has-the-facts-about-common-core-every

MICHELLE MALKIN HAS THE FACTS ABOUT COMMON CORE EVERY PARENT IN AMERICA NEEDS TO KNOW

There has been a lot of discussion about Common Core lately and a growing swell of concerned parents across the country as public schools nationwide begin to apply the Federal standards to curriculums. But what are the facts?

Michelle Malkin has been doing tireless research and reporting on Common Core, and currently has an ongoing series of articles in which she breaks down Common Core into its essential parts.  The truth is that there’s more to Common Core than what you might think, and much of it is very alarming.  

Here are excerpts from her articles and links to each one. I would highly encourage readers to click read these in their entirety.  It’s important information, especially if you have kids in public schools.

• Part 1 - Common Core’s war on math standards

Stanford University professor James Milgram, the only mathematician on the validation panel, concluded that the Common Core math scheme would place American students two years behind their peers in other high-achieving countries. In protest, Milgram refused to sign off on the standards. He’s not alone.

Professor Jonathan Goodman of New York University found that the Common Core math standards imposed “significantly lower expectations with respect to algebra and geometry than the published standards of other countries.”

Under Common Core, as the American Principles Project and Pioneer Institute point out, algebra I instruction is pushed to 9th grade, instead of 8th grade, as commonly taught. Division is postponed from 5th to 6th grade. Prime factorization, common denominators, conversions of fractions and decimals, and algebraic manipulation are de-emphasized or eschewed. Traditional Euclidean geometry is replaced with an experimental approach that had not been previously pilot-tested in the U.S.

• Part 2 - Common Core’s deconstruction of English and literature

Take the Common Core literacy “standards.” Please. As literature professors, writers, humanities scholars, secondary educators and parents have warned over the past three years, the new achievement goals actually set American students back by de-emphasizing great literary works for “informational texts.” Challenging students to digest and dissect difficult poems and novels is becoming passe. Utilitarianism uber alles.

The Common Core English/language arts criteria call for students to spend only half of their class time studying literature, and only 30 percent of their class time by their junior and senior years in high school.

Under Common Core, classics such as “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” are of no more academic value than the pages of the Federal Register or the Federal Reserve archives — or a pro-Obamacare opinion essay in The New Yorker. Audio and video transcripts, along with “alternative literacies” that are more “relevant” to today’s students (pop song lyrics, for example), are on par with Shakespeare.

English professor Mary Grabar describes Common Core training exercises that tell teachers “to read Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address without emotion and without providing any historical context. Common Core reduces all ‘texts’ to one level: the Gettysburg Address to the EPA’s Recommended Levels of Insulation.” Indeed, in my own research, I found one Common Core “exemplar” on teaching the Gettysburg Address that instructs educators to “refrain from giving background context or substantial instructional guidance at the outset.”

Another exercise devised by Common Core promoters features the Gettysburg Address as a word cloud. Yes, a word cloud. Teachers use the jumble of letters, devoid of historical context and truths, to help students chart, decode and “deconstruct” Lincoln’s speech.

• Part 3 - Common Core’s mindless political correctness

Texas is a right-minded red state, where patriotism is still a virtue and political correctness is out of vogue. So how on earth have left-wing educators in public classrooms been allowed to instruct Lone Star students to dress in Islamic garb, call the 9/11 jihadists “freedom fighters” and treat the Boston Tea Party participants as “terrorists”?

Here’s the dirty little secret: Despite the best efforts of vigilant parents, teachers and administrators committed to academic excellence, progressive activists reign supreme in government schools.

That’s because curriculum is king. The liberal monopoly on the modern textbook/curricular market remains unchallenged after a half-century. He who controls the textbooks, teaching guides and tests controls the academic agenda.

That is how the propagandistic outfitting of students in Islamic garb came to pass in the unlikely setting of the conservative Lumberton, Texas, school district. As Fox News reporter Todd Starnes noted this week, a 32-year veteran of the high school led a world geography lesson on Islam in which hijab-wrapped students were banned from using the words “suicide bomber” and “terrorist” to describe Muslim mass murderers in favor of the term “freedom fighter.”

• Part 4 - Common Core’s invasive student tracking database

These systems will aggregate massive amounts of personal data — health-care histories, income information, religious affiliations, voting status and even blood types and homework completion. The data will be available to a wide variety of public agencies. And despite federal student-privacy protections guaranteed by the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, the Obama administration is paving the way for private entities to buy their way into the data boondoggle. Even more alarming, the U.S. Department of Education is encouraging a radical push from aggregate-level data-gathering to invasive individual student-level data collection.

• Part 5 - How to fight Common Core (and how not to)

In my home state of Colorado, dissent from both conservative and liberal parents forced Jefferson County to allow individual “opt-outs” from the inBloom data-mining machine. The Gates Foundation responded by pouring $5 million into the district for “innovative professional development systems to create personalized learning systems for teachers.” How do you spell special interest payoff?

Not only do these education emperors have no clothes. They have tissue-paper thin skin. Their arrogant, contemptuous and vengeful treatment of dissenting parents and teachers gets a world-class “F.” Listen up:
We parents of school-age children are all Robert Smalls and Natalie Adamses and Leonie Haimsons. We, not the Obamas or the Bushes or the Gateses or educrats in Washington, are our children’s primary educational providers. Control over our children begins and ends with us.

It is imperative that parents in America be familiar with Common Core’s different functions and how it affects your children’s education.  I would highly encourage our readers to pass these articles along to your friends who have kids in public school. 

Share these articles on Facebook or on Twitter.  Speak out at your local board of education meetings.  And stay informed and up to date with your information.

"BEST PRACTICES" IN LAYMAN'S TERMS

http://agile.dzone.com/news/death-best-practices

Death to Best Practices

Can we please put the whole term “Best Practices” to rest now? Apparently, according to this link (forwarded to me by John Dietz, thanks!), the very place where it originated (or was best popularized, depending on your interpretation of history) has now seen the whole concept basically debunked:

For example, Jim Collins’ blockbuster business book Good to Great, published in 2001, featured 11 supposedly great companies. All of them did extraordinarily well on the stock market for 10-20 years. But by 2008, when Steven Levitt posted Good to Great to Below Average on Freakonomics, two of them had died. 
(Read more: http://timberry.bplans.com/2010/07/the-sad-truth-about-best-practices.html#ixzz0wBOxDrkh)

The point is, best practices just don’t exist. They are an attempt to take a solution to a problem out of the context and apply them across the  entire spectrum, and that essentially invalidates the entire thing. A solution is only useful when considered in context.

Don’t believe me? Consider this challenge: when is it not a best practice to breathe? When you’re under water, of course.

(Unless you’re a fish. Or a frog. Or maybe a prince turned into a frog.)

Point is… context matters, folks.

Blind application of best practices don’t work, as Tim Berry’s article quotes from Jim Collins’ book (my emphasis):

Nine of the eleven companies remain more or less intact. Of these, Nucor is the only one that has dramatically outperformed the stock market since the book came out. Abbott Labs and Wells Fargo have done okay. Overall, a portfolio of the “good to great” companies looks like it would have underperformed the S&P 500.

Still think that the “best practices” idea might work? Prove it to yourself: do a detailed study of CEO performance across any given CEO’s career and across a variety of different companies who changed CEOs. In short windows, yes, you can find scenarios where a CEO had a stellar performance with a particular company for a particular period of time. But when you pan back and look across the CEO’s entire career (during which he/she practiced the same “best practices” at different firms), almost none of them have repeatable successes at a variety of different firms in any consistent manner (despite the millions handed to them).

In other words, for a good many of them, their success was nothing but blind luck. A monkey could have done just as well. The “superstar CEO” is generally a product of the five or so years in which his one firm was wildly successful.  Attempts to repeat the success at other firms (that is, in a different context) typically have failed or generated mediocre results. (Anybody know what Lee Iacocca is up to these days, he of “I will rescue Chrysler” fame? Come to think of it, can anybody name any of the 70’s or 80’s “superstar CEOs” that is still wildly successful today? Just one?)

How did this “best practices” thing get to be such a common meme? Because “best practices” mean, essentially, that the questioner doesn’t want to have to think. And it’s a seductive premise—if I just push the right buttons, type the right keywords, call the right methods and/or use the right classes, I can get something that “just works” without having to think about all those nasty little details that seem to trip people up: performance, scalability, security, blah blah blah.

Here’s the dirty little secret of our industry: Software development is hard.

Computer science is about tradeoffs and hard choices. Optimizing the code or design or architecture one way means taking hits another way. Trading static typing for dynamic typing means losing a set of already-written unit tests in exchange for a degree of flexibility in certain parts of  the design. Using inheritance instead of parametric polymorphism offers some benefits but also adds some restrictions, and vice versa. Choosing an agile approach gains you greater feedback and closer connection to your customer (which typically means you’re closer to budget and critical features being completed on time), but requires more work and expertise to pull it off over other, more waterfall-ish, processes. And so on, and so on, and so on.

Tim says this well:

Don’t ever just blindly follow. You always think about it, consider the options, how it might be different in your case, and then, if it still sounds good, try it. Carefully.

If I ever give you any advice, I want you to please never take it without thinking first, analyzing, and deciding for yourself whether or not, and how, and to what extent what I say fits your situation.

(Read more: http://timberry.bplans.com/2010/07/the-sad-truth-about-best-practices.html#ixzz0wBQU3yCB)

But it’s not just the questioners’ fault: speakers, in their zeal to prove that they were smarter than everybody else, bought into the idea, too, because if I’m the one holding the “best practices”, then clearly I’m  the one you want to come to with the development or consulting work. After all, who better to hire than the guy/gal with all the answers? In essence, we fed their addiction by tossing off “best practices” in pithy one-line answers (like “every class a service”) that turned out to be utter B/S pronounced by people who had, in some cases, never actually put that practice into practice for anything other than a demo or an example.

It’s time to say “no” to “best practices”.

Speakers: The next time somebody asks you for the “best practices” on a technology, respond with “The best practice you could possibly employ is to hire me.” That, or else with “There are no such thing. You cannot answer a question about a problem outside of its context.”

Attendees: The next time a speaker starts talking about “best practices”, walk out, because clearly the speaker is trying to feed you easy answers when in fact there are only hard choices.

It’s time for our industry to break the habit of taking hits off the crack best practices pipe, and start facing the fact that software development is hard.

References