The College Board is in a position to create a de facto national curriculum
The writer is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
The College Board set off a firestorm last year by issuing what many saw as a left-biased curriculum framework for its Advanced Placement U.S. History course. This summer’s much-discussed revisions to that framework amount to less than meets the eye. The underlying bias remains, and few of the vaunted changes will filter down to the classroom.
The controversy, moreover, points to what will likely be our next great education debate. The College Board’s determination to issue detailed curriculum frameworks for all of its AP exams, in combination with the expansion of the AP program over the past decade or so, has brought the United States to the threshold of something nobody claims to want: a national curriculum.
Emerging around the time of the 1957 Sputnik launch, the early AP program highlighted the national interest in cultivating the very best students. In the 1980s and ’90s, worries about failing schools and an interest in maximizing opportunity for all spread AP courses from a few elite institutions to schools across the country. Initially, the focus was rightly on finding and educating talented students, regardless of income, ethnicity or race. Gradually, however, AP came to be seen as a method for quickly overcoming the achievement gap between poor and minority students and others, regardless of preparation.
In the 2000s, politicians of both parties jumped onto this expansion bandwagon. Federal and state governments began subsidizing AP testing fees. Several states mandated AP courses in all schools. Meanwhile, the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations moved aggressively to expand AP participation.
As a result, the proportion of public high school graduates who took at least one AP exam rose from 18.9 percent in 2003 to 33.2 percent in 2013. The College Board has argued that all students who score a certain minimum on the PSAT would benefit from AP classes, regardless of preparation and eventual performance on the test. By College Board reckoning, 42.6 percent of 2013 graduates ought to have taken at least one AP class. A few schools have even begun to automatically enroll most students in AP courses. There, as in Lake Wobegon, all children are above average.
A substantial body of scholarly literature now raises questions about the excesses of AP expansion. Yale University’s William Lichten, for example, describes whole schools in which not a single AP student passes an exam. He calls the AP surge in many places a “disaster.” The proportion of students earning the lowest AP score of 1 has doubled over the past 20 years. Of all AP exams taken during high school by the class of 2013 in the District, 51.9 percent received a failing grade of 1. Summarizing the critics’ findings, Harvard University’s Philip Sadler challenges the College Board’s claim that students who fail AP exams still benefit from having taken the course. Such students would be better served by less rigorous courses designed to strengthen their foundations, Sadler says. Yet the surge goes on.
And as a result, by replacing its traditionally minimalist course guidelines with detailed curriculum frameworks, the College Board is now in a position to create a de facto national curriculum.
The massive increase in revenue from government-subsidized testing fees has also allowed the College Board to take over the sort of teacher training once managed by states and districts. Since it writes the exams, signs off on every AP course syllabus, controls teacher training and manages the revision of approved textbooks, the College Board is capable of exercising exceptionally tight control over the curriculum. In effect, the College Board is becoming an unelected national school board, independent of district or state control. Critics have rightly warned that Common Core takes us far down the road to a national curriculum. The College Board, presided over by Common Core architect David Coleman, is swiftly transporting us to the terminus of that highway.
While this summer’s revisions in the AP U.S. History framework eliminate the most biased passages, the broader emphasis remains on themes such as gender and the environment, at the expense of military, diplomatic and political history. Equally important, textbooks and course syllabi were revised with the controversial 2014 framework in mind. They have not been redone in light of the 2015 changes, which would necessitate few additions in any case. So the 2015 revisions are largely cosmetic, designed to mollify critics while forcing minimal changes to the course itself. The College Board can stage-manage this response precisely because it controls every part of the curriculum.
The new AP European History framework reveals the College Board’s intentions more clearly. It is a virtual twin of the 2014 U.S. History curriculum, highlighting colonial oppression and the downside of capitalism, while playing down religion, democratic development and the failings of socialism.
So the debate goes on. But we are having a debate to begin with because, through a combination of runaway expansion and its unprecedented attempt to control course content, the College Board’s AP testing monopoly has broken all bounds. In the absence of competition from a company advised by top traditional scholars, the College Board will have nationalized the curriculum — and pulled it sharply to the left.
The decline of play in preschoolers — and the rise in sensory issues
By Stephanie McCrummen
September 12 at 4:18 PM
RED BANK, S.C. — The trailer where Dylann Roof found refuge is faded yellow with a thousand tiny dents. It is on the western edge of Columbia, S.C., along an unpaved road strewn with damp garbage, and it is where Roof briefly lived until the day he allegedly killed nine black church members at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston.
Now, a month after the June 17 shootings, the blinds are drawn at noon and the family that hosted Roof is inside, where the boom of gunfire and explosions is so loud the trailer vibrates.
“Ha ha. I just killed all them mothers,” says Justin Meek, 18, playing a video game in which blood and body parts fly across a 42-inch TV screen.
The trailer where the Meek brothers live with their mother in Red Bank, S.C. (Michael S. Williamson/The Post)
“You got enemy on the other side! Use a grenade!” says his brother Jacob, 15. “Kill yourself! Kill yourself!”
On a lopsided couch is Lindsey Fry, 19, flicking her tongue ring, eyes locked on a cracked cellphone for news about the shooting, which has lately included her boyfriend Joey, 21, the third Meek brother who lives in the trailer, which is in a town called Red Bank that the Meeks call Dead Bank.
“Wow,” she suddenly says and reads aloud what she is seeing on her phone: “The expanded scope of the investigation now includes people with whom Roof associated in the weeks before the June 17 shooting.”
She looks at Joey. Joey looks at his two brothers and his mother, Kim Konzny.
They are the people with whom Roof was associating in the weeks before the shooting, and this is the place he drifted into with little resistance, an American void where little is sacred and little is profane and the dominant reaction to life is what Joey does now, looking at Lindsey. He shrugs.
For several weeks, Dylann Roof slept on the floor here. He played video games. According to the Meeks, he showed off his new Glock .45-caliber handgun, drank heavily and retreated to his car to listen to opera. And sometimes he confided in his childhood friend Joey, who wasn’t the type to ask questions.
When Roof showed up asking Joey for a place to stay, Joey says, he invited him in without hesitation. When Roof told him that he believed in segregation, Joey didn’t ask why. When Roof mentioned driving two hours to Charleston and visiting a church called Emanuel AME, he didn’t ask anything about it. When Roof said that he was going to “do something crazy,” as Joey remembers it, he and Lindsey hid Roof’s gun but then gave it back, blowing it all off as a drunken episode.
“I didn’t take him seriously,” is what Joey says again and again to the people who keep asking the same questions again and again, including investigators who arrived at the trailer after one of the most notorious mass killings in recent American history.
Why did he do nothing? they asked.
What kind of people would do nothing?
The Meek brothers -- from left to right Jacob, Joey and Justin -- peek out the window of the trailer. (Michael S. Williamson/The Post)
The trailer, waking up:
It is nearly noon and the dogs are barking.
“Who’s here?” Jacob says, jumping up and peeking through the blinds, but the view is the same as ever — no people, an abandoned trailer next door, a skinny pine tree and some empty vodka minis in a patch of weedy grass. Beyond is the whoosh of highway traffic and the rest of Lexington County, a place that is roughly 80 percent white, the result of decades of white flight from neighboring counties and Ku Klux Klan activity, including a drive-by shooting of three black teenagers in 1996 — not that any sense of history filters into the trailer. “The KKK, that’s one thing I don’t understand,” as Joey says. “Was the KKK an actual violent thing?”
There are no books here, no magazines, and the wood-paneled walls are bare. A stained blue towel hangs over the window in the door. The only furniture in the living room is the couch, two side tables and a metal stool positioned in front of the TV, which is wired to two large speakers and the Xbox that one of the Meek brothers is always playing.
“Man, blew my car up,” says Justin, 18, a high school dropout who is sitting shirtless on the stool.
Kim, 41 and twice divorced, is cleaning. She is constantly cleaning. She wipes the kitchen counters. She straightens the blinds. She folds up the sofa where Lindsey and Joey sleep, folds the sheet and zebra blanket, and drops them in the corner where Roof often lounged, as Jacob does now.
“Mom, want to know my theory? Dylann stayed here to get revenge on Joey,” says Jacob, but no one pays attention.
He is 15, and wears long-sleeved T-shirts that flop over his hands, a habit developed in middle school, when he used to cut himself. He says he stopped doing that when Joey found out, held a knife to his arm and said, “You want to do it? Do it right. Let’s cut it open, let’s see your bone.” He wears a wristband that says “FEEL,” and he is pacing around the living room when Lindsey, who wound up here after running away from home with a heroin addict, comes out of the shower.
She adjusts a faded pink bra under a thin tank top. She yawns and steps over the floor vent where Joey had her hide Roof’s gun. She settles on the couch with her pit bull puppy, Daisy.
“Oh Daisy,” she coos to the dog. She lights a cigarette and starts scrolling on her cellphone. “It’s hot,” she says after a while. “Jacob, you cold?”
Christon Scriven, 21, looks out the door of the trailer as the FBI had pulls up outside. (Michael S. Williamson/The Post)
“I like the cold,” Jacob says, pulling his sleeves over his hands. “You don’t like the cold?”
“Yeah, well, kind of,” Lindsey says.
“You like lake water,” Jacob says mysteriously, but her attention is back to the phone, which she will look at for hours as she waits for Joey, who is out building a fence, an off-the-books day job of the sort available to a high school dropout with a record of juvenile delinquency.
In some ways, everything happening in the trailer is because of Joey. He has an amateur tattoo on his forearm that says “loyalty,” which translates into an open-door policy for whichever troubled friend happens to show up at the trailer. Lindsey was one of those, and so was Roof, a childhood friend who got back in touch this spring after a lapse of several years.
Joey was happy to hear from him. For one thing, Roof had a car and could take them places, including, one day, a lake. He dropped the Meeks off there and disappeared. The next day Joey and Lindsey were in the trailer behind theirs with friends when Lindsey saw the news alert on her phone.
“He did it,” Joey remembers thinking immediately.
They went back to their trailer. They locked the door and drew the blinds. They turned on the TV and watched the flashing red lights around Emanuel AME. A historic black church, Joey now learned. A Bible study. Nine people.
The Meeks stayed up all night, peeking through the blinds, hoping that the suspect still at large was not really the person who had just been in their trailer. But when the surveillance tape of the blond bowl cut came out the next morning, Joey cursed the TV and called the police.
He identified the Timberland boots Roof was wearing. He identified his thin T-shirt and the black marks on it, and with an urgency that startled the Meeks, FBI agents arrived at the trailer door within the hour — coming into the wood-paneled living room, taking two shirts Roof had left, his empty vodka bottles, and then taking Joey.
He says he was questioned about what Roof had told him, but that after a while, it seemed like the questions were beginning to dwell on the extent of his own involvement.
Why did he not alert police when Roof intimated his plans? If he suspected Roof on the night of the shooting, as Joey says he did, why did he not call police at that point? Why did he give Roof his gun back?
“People think it’s my fault,” he says now, home from work, talking with Lindsey. He looks at his cellphone.
“You think the FBI got my phone tapped?” he asks.
“I bet they have my phone tapped,” says Lindsey, who was also questioned.
Joey Meek, left, watches as his brother Jacob plays a video game while Lindsey Fry does dishes. (Michael S. Williamson/The Post)
“Would you believe your friend if they said something like that when they were drunk?” Joey says, shaking his head. “You can’t tell me you would. I didn’t believe it. I brushed it off.”
“Well, I said to the FBI, you don’t know what it’s like to be in this situation,” says Lindsey.
“Exactly,” Joey says, and once again he is going over everything that happened.
How he cursed Roof when he saw the surveillance tape.
How he cursed him again as he watched the court hearing where the daughter of a 70-year-old victim said to Roof, “I will never talk to her ever again,” and the mother of 26-year-old victim said, “Every fiber in my body hurts,” and “You have killed some of the most beautifulest people that I know.”
How he took away Roof’s gun that drunken night, and how he gave it back. Why had he given it back?
“I thought he was going to do something that night, in his drunkenness,” Joey says, and as he goes over it again, he starts thinking less about Roof than another friend of his named Shane, and what Shane had done in his own drunkenness.
Before the trailer, the Meek brothers lived in another part of Lexington, in a house in a subdivision called Ridgewood. A family photo from those days shows them smiling in front of a brick fireplace, the boys in button-downs and polos.
Roof had lived on an adjacent street, and Shane lived nearby. Shane boxed with Justin, taught Jacob survival skills and was closest in age and friendship to Joey. When he was a teenager, Shane made YouTube videos with titles such as “Shane on Ambien,” in which he stumbles through a disheveled house while several younger kids laugh at him, push him around and swat him with a drumstick. Shane often stayed with the Meeks, who liked having him around. “Hi, Mom,” he would say to Kim when he came through the door, making her laugh.
Daisy, a pit bull puppy, sits near the boots that belonged to Shane, a friend of the Meeks who killed himself in May. (Michael S. Williamson/The Post)
He would stay for weeks at the house in Ridgewood, and when Kim lost the house to foreclosure, he would stay at the trailer, even though he had his own trailer by then. He was around when Roof arrived in May, but the two didn’t interact very much. Mostly, Shane drank and played video games. He was 21 at that point and saying troubling things that none of the Meeks took seriously. One day it was about his sorrow over not seeing his newborn son, who was living with his estranged girlfriend in another state. One day it had to do with being evicted. One night he messaged Justin saying that he was going to drink a bottle of bug poison, and Justin didn’t believe him and went back to playing Xbox.
Kim was the first to find out. She called Joey to say that Shane had put a shotgun in his mouth and killed himself. Joey remembers getting teary, and he also remembers not believing it and asking Roof to drive him over to Shane’s trailer.
Lindsey and Roof stayed in the car, and Lindsey remembers Roof not saying a word or expressing any kind of emotion. Joey and Justin, meanwhile, walked up to Shane’s door, half-expecting to see Shane waiting for them, laughing that they fell for his joke. But then they were inside, seeing Shane’s blood all over the couch, and Joey was getting sick.
“Anyways, when I was in there I had grabbed his boots — they’re right over there,” Joey says now, pointing to a pair of worn cowboy boots he took from the trailer that night as a memento. The boots are mixed into a pile of shoes in the bedroom where sometimes Shane slept, and sometimes Roof slept, and where Justin now drops onto a twin mattress on the floor and closes his eyes.
A neighbor named Christon Scriven comes in and lays next to Justin. Christon, who is black, also knew Roof and says of him, “I still love him as a friend.” Then comes a friend they call J. Boogie, and a tattooed guy they call Gizmo, who sits on the carpet. A brown cigarette is rolled, lit and passed around.
“Joey!” Christon calls into the living room. “You’re stupid!”
Justin Meek, 18, sitting with neighbor Christon Scriven, motions for quiet as hears a car outside.(Michael S. Williamson/The Post)
Justin laughs and falls in and out of sleep. Gizmo stumbles to the mattress, drops and sleeps, and after a while, Christon says, “I have no sympathy for people. Nobody has any sympathy for me. I care for me and me only.”
He passes the cigarette to Justin, and Justin drops ashes in the bed, and in the chemical-smelling haze, Christon plays a country song on his phone. “Well I caught my wife with a young man and it cost me 99,” he and Justin sing.
He switches to Lil Wayne. “Family first, you get your family killed,” he and Justin rap, and the dogs start barking.
“The police here?” Christon says. Justin looks up. Joey comes in and looks through the blinds. Nothing. Christon aims a finger at him — “Bang,” he whispers — and Joey leaves.
“Joseph!” Christon yells after him.
“Hey!” Justin calls.
“Somebody! Anybody!” Christon yells, but nobody answers. Soon Justin is asleep again, and Christon is looking at him. He rubs the back of his hand on Justin’s cheek. He takes a lighter and flicks it at Justin’s hair.
Gizmo wakes up, goes to the kitchen, gets a bottle of syrup and squeezes it into his mouth.
It is nearly sundown when Kim comes home after being out all day.
“She’s here!” Jacob yells, and he gets up to make a frozen pizza.
Kim yanks up a crumpled hamburger wrapper off the floor. She grabs two plastic cups filled with cigarette butts and empties them into the garbage.
“Jacob!” she snaps when he drops the pizza carton on the floor. “Pick up that trash! Pick it up now!”
He picks it up.
“I’m so tired of these people over here, all day, every day,” Kim yells to no one. “I have no peace! I have no quiet!”
She goes into her bedroom on the other side of the trailer and shuts the door.
Kim Konzny checks her phone during a break from her job at Waffle House. (Michael S. Williamson/The Post)
When she comes out, her long, black hair is piled into a bun. It is near 10 p.m. She gets into her Toyota, a black Waffle House visor dangling from the rearview mirror, and turns onto the highway.
In the dark mile ahead, the Waffle House is bright and sharp, and this is where Kim found a job after her second husband left, and, as she says, “everything went backwards.”
“Hash browns?” she says at the start of a shift that will end near dawn.
“Scattered and smothered,” she calls to the cook.
She wipes the counters, refills the napkin holders, pours water into the Bunn Automatic, and when break time arrives, goes out into the muggy night. She sits on a curb and smokes, scrolling through the phone where she keeps photos of life before the trailer.
There is the mother and father she loved. A decent childhood in South Carolina.
The first husband, a military man. Joey, Justin and Jacob, who was born in Fairbanks, Alaska, where the husband was stationed and where Kim says he started saying things like “No one could ever love you,” and she left, eventually moving the boys back to South Carolina.
The second husband, Sean, her friend since kindergarten. He is the one in the photo by the fireplace where the boys are in pinstripes and polo shirts, where Kim is smiling, where Jacob, Justin and Joey are smiling, Joey’s chin tilted up slightly, an arm draped around Sean’s shoulder.
“My beautiful family whom I love greatly!” reads the caption.
This was at the house in Ridgewood. It was vinyl-sided with two stories and a decent yard. And though Joey had started climbing out of his bedroom window at night, Sean was trying to keep him in line. The boys had friends Kim liked, including the quiet one with a blond bowl cut, and the funny one with dark, curly hair. The family went to church, Kim got her degree as a medical technician and a job in her field, and this was how life was going, she says, until the Friday she came home from Aaron’s rent-to-own furniture store — “He said he wanted an L-shaped couch,” she says. “He said he wanted an ottoman” — and Sean said he was leaving her.
That fall was when Jacob started cutting his arms. Joey dropped out of high school. Kim lost her job, couldn’t afford the house and rented the banged-up trailer off the highway.
She lost 10 pounds, then 20 and went to a doctor who diagnosed her with anxiety and depression. She got the job at Waffle House. She got on food stamps. She started spending hours shut in her bedroom, posting self-help mantras on Facebook, and it was somewhere between “God can restore what is broken” and “Pray to have eyes to see the best in people” that the blond kid became an alleged mass murderer, and the curly headed one killed himself, and Kim became someone who tries hard not to think about much beyond the next cigarette, which she finishes now as she keeps scrolling in the last minutes of her break.
“Don’t let this world make you bitter,” reads one post.
“Hi Kimmy,” reads a text message from Shane’s mother. “I’ve been a wreck. I don’t know how he could have done it. Kimmy, I loved him so much and I can’t stop crying.”
Kim drops her phone. The screen cracks. “Dammit,” she says, and break is over.
She goes back inside, where a regular says to her, “Hello, little girl.”
“Hey,” she says.
“How’s Joey doing?” he asks.
“Working,” she says of the son she is constantly telling to “go out there and grow as a young man” and “get it together” and “stop hanging onto my coat feathers,” and whose video she now shows to the cook.
“Look, my son’s on TV,” she says, showing him a video of an interview Joey gave after the shooting, talking about Roof. The cook glances at the screen and goes back to frying. “My son called the FBI at 8:15 that morning — yep. He’s his best friend. Maybe his only friend.” She puts the phone back in her pocket and moves on to her tables.
Konzny sometimes hangs around at the Waffle House after her shift is over. (Michael S. Williamson/The Post)
After 2 a.m., it is quiet again, and she sits at the counter to eat a plate of scrambled eggs.
Two waiters, a young man and a young woman, are talking.
“I’m one drop away from killing everyone,” he says.
“My last day at McDonald’s I wanted to kill everyone,” she says.
“I can’t kill myself, because then I’d go to hell, so I’m stuck here,” he says, and fake punches her in the arm. She flinches.
“I’m very sensitive,” she says.
“I’m going to go home. Watch TV,” he says.
“No one cares,” she says. “I need a hug.”
He holds up a large steak knife and smiles. She winces and laughs weakly, and Kim finishes eating, drops the heavy plate in the sink and, three hours later, goes back to the trailer to see what is waiting for her there.
Clockwise from top left: Justin Meek, Lindsey Fry, Jacob Meek and Joey Meek. (Michael S. Williamson/The Post)
What is waiting is more of the same.
“You see that?” Lindsey says one day, looking through the blinds, the dogs barking. “They stopped in the driveway — a white Jeep,” she says, but the white Jeep leaves, and she goes back to scrolling on her cellphone.
Another day, Justin is playing Xbox, grenades exploding, bodies flying, and he says, “Mom, when did Shane die?”
“Why bring up that subject?” Jacob says, pacing, sleeves flopping. “Why?”
Another day, Kim goes into her bedroom, closes the door, smokes a cigarette and says, “It’s like we’re being punished for something, only I can’t figure out what.”
Another day, Jacob opens the door and stands next to Kim, who is in bed scrolling with one hand, smoking with the other.
“Mom,” he says.
“Mom, Mom, Mom,” he says, knees pressed against her bed.
“Mom?” he says, and lays in bed with her.
“Mom, Mom,” he says, nudging close to her, but she inches away, and he goes back to the living room, where Lindsey is hugging her puppy, who keeps throwing up.
Another day, Joey comes home from work with another friend in need of a place to stay for a while, this one named Brandon, who pours himself a glass of iced tea and sits on the living room floor.
The drinking continues. The smoking continues. The chemical haze continues. The cellphone scrolling continues. The blinds stay shut. The blue towel hangs, and the shrugging continues, too, right up until one night when, as they will recall later, there’s a knock at the door.
It is a man no one knows except Brandon, who had argued with him earlier and who now barges into the trailer, pulls out a handgun and cocks it.
He points the gun at Brandon. He points it at Jacob. He points it at Justin. He points it at Lindsey. He points it at Joey, who stands up in the middle of the living room and says, “Shoot me.”
As the others watch, Joey inches toward the gun.
“Shoot me,” he says again, moving closer, and he keeps saying it.
“If you’re going to shoot anybody, shoot me,” he says, and as he closes in on the man, the man begins backing up.
“Shoot me,” Joey keeps saying, and now the man is out of the trailer and putting his gun back into his waistband, and Joey is escorting him up the rutted road, and the man is walking toward the highway, disappearing into the dark, and now Joey is shaking.
He keeps shaking and is unable to stop. He tries to steady himself by sitting down on his knees. He tries to breathe. He curses.
He gets up, and as he walks back toward the trailer, he punches a tree trunk twice, hard enough to bloody his knuckles.
Kim Konzny vacuums as her son Jacob plays video games and Lindsey checks her phone. (Michael S. Williamson/The Post)
And now it is the next day.
“I could see the tip of his gun,” says Lindsey.
“He pointed it at me first,” says Jacob.
“He said, ‘This is a 9 millimeter,’ ” says Justin.
“I thought I was about to die. I thought we were all about to die,” says Lindsey, but the emotion is drained from her voice, and from all their voices, and Lindsey goes back to scrolling through her phone, where a friend has posted a photo of a blank white flag and the caption, “Welcome to the new U.S.A. — We stand for nothing.”
Kim is in her bedroom, the door shut. Jacob is pacing around the living room, sleeves flopping. Justin is on the Xbox, and the sound of explosions rattles the walls.
When Joey comes home, he lays on the plastic-covered twin mattress where Dylann Roof once slept, and now Lindsey and Daisy lay down next to him.
“I’m wondering how I can get away from all this,” he says. “If it was my choice and I had the money? I’d have a mile-long driveway surrounded by acres of woods. Have nothing to worry about. People’d be scared to walk down the driveway it’d be so dark.”
“What time is it?” Lindsey asks after a while, but Joey doesn’t answer. He is looking at the puppy, who has been throwing up again. He’s trying to see what’s wrong.
“Baby, what time is it?” Lindsey asks again.
“7:22,” Joey finally says, putting his hand on Daisy’s chest.
He holds it there. He looks at Lindsey. He looks at Daisy. He is startled.
“I don’t feel a heartbeat,” he says, even though it is there. “How come I can’t feel it?”
Stephanie McCrummen is a national reporter for The Washington Post. Before that, she was the paper’s East Africa bureau chief. She’s also written about the suburban housing boom and education reform, among other subjects.
Study: Common Core & 2 Testing Consortia Violate Federal Laws, Unlikely to Improve Academic Achievement
Study: Common Core and Two Testing Consortia Violate Federal Laws, Are Unlikely to Improve Academic Achievement
“Competitive federalism” doesn’t run afoul of federal law, would produce better results
Contact Jamie Gass, 617-723-2277 ext. 210 or jgass@pioneerinstitute.org
BOSTON – In the wake of the U.S. House and Senate’s passage of bills that would reauthorize the federal No Child Left Behind law, a new Pioneer Institute research paper finds that national English and mathematics standards, known as Common Core, violate three federal laws that prohibit the federal government from exercising any direction, supervision or control over curricula or the program of instruction in the states.
“Competitive federalism, under which states learn from and seek to improve on each others’ standards and tests, is both legal and would produce better results than monolithic national standards and tests,” says Dr. Evers. “Monopolies are hardly the best way to produce either academic quality or value for taxpayers.”
Prohibitions on federal control over curriculum and instruction can be found in the Education and Secondary Education Act of 1965, the General Education Provisions Act of 1970, and the 1979 Department of Education Organization Act, which established the U.S. Department of Education. But the Obama administration has, nonetheless, pursued a national policy on curriculum standards and directly funded two national testing consortia.
Common Core was developed by a group of Washington, D.C. education trade organizations and pushed out to the states by the federal government through the Obama administration’s Race to the Top (RttT) initiative, which gave out more than $4 billion in federal grants.
Adherence to Common Core was one of the criteria on which state funding applications were judged. Massachusetts’ application for the first round of RttT grants was ranked 13th out of 16 states. In the second round, the commonwealth made clear it would adhere to Common Core in an otherwise largely identical application and finished first.
The federal government is forbidden by federal law from favoring a particular set of curriculum-content standards over others.
RttT also drove the schedule for state adherence to Common Core. Applicants for the first round of grants had to agree to adhere to the standards before they were even published. During the second round, states had just two months to review the standards. States generally take about two years to develop and adopt academic standards. RttT was the way in which nearly every state adhered to Common Core.
The federal government has also spent more than $360 million to fund two consortia that have developed national Common Core-based assessments.
In addition to tying it to RttT grants, the U.S. Department of Education made adherence to Common Core a condition for states seeking waivers from the accountability provisions of No Child Left Behind, even though the secretary of education has no statutory authority to place conditions on such waivers. Secretary Duncan’s additional NCLB waiver conditions were never authorized by Congress.
Dr. Evers also describes the unusual way in which a majority of states adhered to Common Core. It was in almost every case adhered to via processes that bypassed state legislatures and other elected bodies. There were no bills, hearings or public debates in Congress relating to the U.S. Department of Education directing, incentivizing or funding the adoption of national standards or tests.
Federal law requires that state standards and testing be aligned. Dr. Evers argues, by controlling nationalized curriculum-content standards and assessments, the federal government gains de facto control over public school curricula.
Dr. Evers points out that Common Core dictates what is taught, when it will be taught, and how. For example, it prescribes that Algebra I should be taught in ninth and tenth grades, what technique should be used to teach geometry, and the split between fiction and informational texts (non-fiction) in English.
“Bill Evers’ scholarship is impressive in its scope and detail,” said Jim Stergios, executive director of Pioneer Institute. “He provides a history of the federal government’s attempts first to establish and then to deepen a directive role in K-12 public education. Along the way he underscores the pedigree of Common Core and the national testing consortia —and why they are poorly conceived education policy.”
The exhaustively researched, 60-page study includes a sweeping history of the federal role in K-12 public education.
For example, President Carter’s secretary of health, education and welfare, Joseph Califano, said “the pressures of local politics, close to the parents of the children in school, are far preferable to those of national politics.” Califano thought a national K-12 test would encourage “rigid uniformity” and that whoever had control of what went into the national test would unavoidably have too much power. Ultimately, Califano thought that “national control of curriculum” is “a form of national control of ideas.”
No Child Left Behind, passed in 2001 under President George W. Bush, required students to be tested in English and math every year from grade three through eight, but left it to states to develop curriculum-content standards and tests.
Williamson M. Evers is a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, where he specializes in research on K-12 education policy especially as it pertains to curriculum, teaching, testing, accountability, school finance, and the history of African-American education. Evers was the U.S. assistant secretary of education for planning, evaluation, and policy development from 2007 to 2009. He was a senior adviser to U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings during 2007. From July to December 2003, Evers served in Iraq as a senior adviser for education to Administrator L. Paul Bremer of the Coalition Provisional Authority.
“Federal Overreach and Common Core” is the latest installment in Pioneer Institute’s ongoing review of the academic quality, legality and cost of Common Core. Pioneer is the national leader in independent research on the topic.
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Pioneer Institute is an independent, non-partisan, privately funded research organization that seeks to improve the quality of life in Massachusetts through civic discourse and intellectually rigorous, data-driven public policy solutions based on free market principles, individual liberty and responsibility, and the ideal of effective, limited and accountable government.
If you think Common Core is just a set of academic standards that keep our children well educated, think again. This short 3-minute video pinpoints the legion of facts underlying why there is such a national uproar against Common Core and all that it represents. Please do "your" homework and research each of the statements in this video. Common Core is not education, it is without a doubt, indoctrination of your children and grandchildren, and your state and local governments are complicit. Why? There are huge, huge pockets of money tied to compliance with these public private/private educational partnerships. This, my friends, is ONLY the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Eduction pales in comparison to the corporate beast being created right under our noses and it's labeled "superior education". Don't be fooled.
South Dakota drops teaching high schoolers about American revolution, founding documents
PIERRE, S.D. – North Dakota students may or may not learn about the first 100 years of America’s history.
Important topics like the Declaration of Independence, the Revolutionary War and the framing of the U.S. Constitution may simply be ignored by teachers under new history standards approved by the state’s board of education last Monday, the Argus Leader reports.
Current standards do not allow history teachers to delve into topics before the Civil War, so the new standards open up the door but don’t require teachers to cover early American history, as many would have preferred. The recently adopted history standards are set to take effect in 2016-17 school year and whittle the current standards from 117 pages to 44.
“Our current history standards do not even give an option as to whether it’s comprehensive or modern,” board president Don Kirkegaard told the news site. “It’s strictly modern.”
The board decision concludes a yearlong public hearing process plagued by parental protests over the history question as well as opposition to Common Core social studies and science standards.
As part of that process, numerous history processors from virtually all of the state’s large universities sent a letter to the school board explaining why they believe that not requiring students to learn early American history will be a serious problem, both for higher education and the state in general.
“Incoming freshmen arrive unprepared for history because they aren’t learning early American history at the high school level, according to the letter, which was signed by instructors from (Dakota State University,) University of South Dakota, South Dakota State University, Northern State University, Augustana College, Presentation College, the University of Sioux Falls and Black Hills State University,” the Argus Leader reports.
“And the problem isn’t just a matter of college freshmen being ready to discuss Thomas Paine at a university level. A sound understanding of history and civics can help them when they’re in the voting booth, watching the news and making life decisions,” according to Dakota State University dean Ben Jones.
“It’s disabling their citizenship,” he said.
Harrisburg School District Secondary Curriculum Director Michael Amolins seems to agree.
“I think progress helps our students prepare for the 21st Century. So rather than just having them memorize a list of historical events on a time line, we’re trying to get them to use that information in context so that when they’re looking at current events they can make good informed decisions as citizens and voters,” he told KSFY.
Augustana history professor Michael Mullin told the site “history really isn’t about yesterday.
“History is really about understanding today. And I think they forgot that,” he said of the decision to make early American history optional. “They just want to think about today but without a context.”
The Argus Leader’s editorial board also chastised state board members for their vote, and urged them to “step back and take another look at this.”
Ben Jones, dean and associate professor of history at Dakota State University, has said he and his colleagues are “astounded by the level of ignorance” of U.S. history that they see in freshmen.
But there are other important reasons to teach high school students about our nation’s early history.
Constitutional topics are common in today’s political debate and students without a solid understanding and who do not have the appropriate level of context for these discussions are at a disadvantage. As citizens, we need to understand our rights and duties as well as appreciate how they came to be.
The Constitution is referenced in nearly every important election campaign. The separation of church and state, religious and press freedoms, the 2nd Amendment and gun rights are all popular political topics of our time. But without an understanding and appreciation of the early debates on these matters, young citizens are not able to accurately assess Constitutional protections and threats. Rhetoric and misinformation can easily fill the void.
CONSERVATIVE VICTORY ON AP US HISTORY FRAMEWORK? NOT SO FAST
Last week, Danniel Henninger, deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, cited recent changes the College Board made to the Advanced Placement U.S. History (APUSH) framework as a “victory” for conservatives. Experts on the framework, however, think that is quite a stretch.
Henninger asserts in his editorial that the College Board – which is led by its president, David Coleman, known to many as the “architect” of the Common Core Standards – has ditched its left-wing bias in its APUSH framework as a result of conservative backlash, an outcome Henninger describes as “an important political event.”
In May of 2014, Breitbart News contributors Jane Robbins, senior fellow of American Principles Project, and retired APUSH teacher Larry Krieger wrote about the College Board’s replacement of the traditional framework with one in which “George Washington gets one brief mention; other founders, such as Benjamin Franklin and James Madison, none.”
“The Declaration of Independence is referred to in passing in one clause of one sentence,” they continued. “The redesigned Framework inculcates a consistently negative view of American history by highlighting oppressors and exploiters while ignoring the dreamers and innovators who built our country.”
As Henninger aptly describes, the College Board’s APUSH framework “read like a left-wing dream. Obsession with identity, gender, class, crimes against the American Indian and the sins of capitalism suffused the proposed guidelines for teachers of AP American history.”
However, Henninger seems overwhelmed with the changes made this year by Coleman’s team.
“The College Board delivered on its promise,” he writes. “The new guidelines, which convey an understanding of American history to thousands of high-school students, are about as balanced as one could hope for.”
His announcement that the left-wing “tilt” in the guidelines has “vanished,” and that the rewritten framework is now “almost a model of political fair-mindedness,” is very much an overstatement to those who have been warning Americans about the dangers of liberal indoctrination of the nation’s young people and its consequences for the nation itself.
As Henninger notes, Stanley Kurtz, senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and contributing editor to National Review Online, has pressed for competition to the College Board, which has enjoyed a monopoly on the APUSH. Fears over calls for other testing companies to come up with an APUSH framework likely have led the College Board to make some changes that can be perceived as having responded to the conservative outcry.
Kurtz tells Breitbart News that while he agrees the APUSH battle is one of the few that has put the left on the defensive, the left-wing “tilt” of the framework has not “vanished.”
“I emphatically disagree that the recently revised AP U.S. history framework is a true victory for conservatives,” Kurtz states. “Yes, the College Board has removed the most biased phrases from the framework, and even thrown in a brief good word or two about the free enterprise system. But the changes are largely cosmetic.”
Kurtz continues:
The framework remains focused on trendy leftist themes like gender identity and environmentalism, rather than traditional themes like military or diplomatic history. More important, AP U.S. history textbooks and course syllabi have already been conformed to the controversial 2014 framework. There are no plans to change them again. Even if there were, there are really no significant changes to be made since the new framework simply removes a few controversial statements and does not insert fundamentally new themes. The real intentions of the College Board are revealed by the brand new AP European history framework, which shares all the leftist biases of the original 2014 AP U.S. history framework.
Similarly, Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars (NAS), explains that while he understands some want to declare a “conservative victory,” he views whatever changes the College Board made only as “a battle won in a long war.”
“The College Board played this beautifully,” Wood tells Breitbart News, and continues:
It made lots of conspicuous concessions of the sort that would persuade many smart, observant people that APUSH had been restored to mainstream ideas and good historical judgments. Dan Henninger is not alone in declaring it a conservative victory. There are also liberal and centrist academic historians (e.g. KC Johnson) who are breathing a big sigh of relief. And it is telling that historians who are on the radical left are upset that their 2014 APUSH victory has been snatched back.
Wood said he spoke to Coleman before the College Board released its latest APUSH revision.
“I want to give credit where credit is due,” he said, adding,
The College Board went through the whole 2014 document and attempted to scrub the political tendentious phrases, the silly identity-politics-style posturing, the sneers directed at conservatives and traditionalists, and the wild imbalance between favored progressive themes and disfavored traditional themes.
“But, unfortunately, there is a lot more to fixing the problem than this,” Wood asserts, citing, as Kurtz did, the problem that the standards are part of a larger initiative that includes the AP examinations, the textbooks, and teacher instruction.
“None of those other things have been changed,” Wood emphasizes. “That means the students taking APUSH are going to be tested on the 2014 standards. The new 2015 standards are, at least for the next several years, window-dressing.”
The problem is not much different from what has taken place with the Common Core standards initiative, and the method is likely one that Coleman borrowed from his experience in developing the nationalized reform, one that has grown tremendously unpopular even while it remains ingrained in public school classrooms.
Proponents of the Common Core initiative frequently demean its opponents, arguing Common Core is “just standards” and nothing more. In fact, the Common Core is far more than standards: it includes federally funded tests aligned with the standards, expensive textbooks and instructional materials, teacher training and rigid guidelines, massive student data collection, and teacher evaluation based on student performance on the tests aligned with the standards.
In states where the Common Core “standards” have been “repealed,” replacement standards are often little more than carbon copies or “rebrands” of Common Core. Similarly, some states, like Wisconsin, allow school districts to choose whatever standards they like – except that the required state standardized test is still aligned to the Common Core, making it highly unlikely that school districts would change out their entire curriculum and textbooks for other standards when their students will still be assessed based on the Common Core test.
How can Coleman and the College Board, then, really wipe far-left ideology out of the APUSH when the examinations students take, their textbooks, and the training their teachers receive still are operating under it?
“The only lasting solution to this problem is the creation of a company, advised by top traditionalist scholars, that can compete directly with the College Board,” argues Kurtz. “The College Board is desperately afraid of such competition, and such changes as it has made are only efforts to avoid that threat.”
“If we make the mistake of prematurely declaring victory, we will kill off the chance to restore true intellectual competition and local choice to education,” he adds. “And once the College Board is secure in its monopoly, it will be completely in the control of the leftist professors who already advise it and determine its basic direction.”
