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Don Allen
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This is written from my perspective here in Rhode Island but aside from a few state specific details, I believe this covers most of the concerns we all share across the country.
TWO YEARS OF COMMON CORE RESEARCH CONDENSED INTO ONE DOCUMENT. THIS IS THE WHOLE BALL OF WAX. THIS SHOULD HELP EVERYONE UNDERSTAND WHAT IS REALLY HAPPENING WITH EDUCATION. PLEASE TAKE THE 10 MINUTES. IT IS FAR MORE IMPORTANT THAN MOST OF US COULD EVER HAVE IMAGINED.
This journey of study has brought me full circle on the issue of school choice. When our governor signed the memorandum of understanding in 2009, we agreed to four components related to education in order to receive our stimulus money. 1) Adopt college and career standards (standards that had not been even seen much less written, 2) Establish and maintain a statewide longitudinal data system on every student, 3) Administer assessments aligned with the standards and 4) Support the expansion of charter schools.
My research began with standards and the flawed process of writing them and adopting them. Then the focus turned to the inappropriate standards for younger students and the inadequate standards for the later years. Questionable math, exchanging literature for informational texts and eliminating full works for excerpts were some of my concerns. We listened to Sandra Stotsky who wrote the fantastic Massachusetts standards as she pointed out all of the shortcomings. She, along with James Milgram, a mathematician from Stamford, were the only two members of the validation committee with any classroom experience and they both refused to sign off on the standards. Of course they were written by private trade organizations, supported with funds from "not for profit" groups like the Gates foundation and they have copyrights which prevent any changes from being made. This entire hasty effort was without transparency, without the inclusion of proper stakeholders and virtually ignored the input from the validation committee. According to James Milgram, standards were changed again after the final draft was produced. These standards were then adopted by the states either sight unseen or within 60 days of having been released. Massachusetts took 10 years to implement their outstanding standards but abandoned them to accept these.
It is preposterous what took place, but that still is not the real issue.
The next part was the assessments. They were designed to evaluate the teachers and the schools but not to provide important feedback to improve instruction. What we learned from Peg Luksik is that we are dealing with tests that no one can see and may contain questions about attributes and behaviors in addition to academic questions. She has been researching the subject for over 30 years. The older tests asked these questions but were anonymous. Now answers to these questions reflect the attributes of your child specifically. Remember these are standards for what students must learn, not what teachers must teach. If you have a classroom of disadvantaged students with poor nutrition, broken homes, chronic absenteeism, drug abuse etc., they are clearly not going to perform as well regardless of how well they are being taught. Those students with English as a second language or unfamiliar with the technology required to take these tests may also perform poorly. And for many students with learning disabilities or other difficulties suffer immensely by taking these tests. Math requires written explanations that can label a student that is actually good at math as needing remediation.
But our teachers and schools can be deemed to have failed based on the outcome of this one test. These tests are designed, implemented, scored and reviewed by the state and then cut scores are determined AFTER the test is complete. The future of districts can be made or broken by this arbitrary decision. The test contains both relevant questions along with experimental questions using our children as guinea pigs in the process. Teachers that have taken practice tests claim that this is an absolutely awful test. It is confusing and far more difficult than what should be expected of the children taking it. Of course all of these tests are taken on new devices designed to track every aspect of children's usage by using imbedded tagged content. The ultimate goal is to monitor and store every activity by every child. If you research a company called Knewton and their agreement with Pearson you will understand. Every email, chat room discussion, website visited, everything typed, read, clicked on is part of this student profile being compiled by these third party outside private organizations. This is in addition to the data collection. Of course remember, these tests are designed to determine how well our children are adhering to the flawed standards.
Again, preposterous but now even more concerning.
The data collection was a major concern of mine before Common Core came along and is far more in depth and disturbing than I could have imagined. Through the normal course of daily routines at schools, student profiles are uploaded to and stored by RIDE with their partnership with Provplan. The names, addresses, student identifier numbers, grades, classes, attendance and disciplinary actions are all combined and stored. In addition to these basic data points, there are many other pieces of information that are being collected. The results of surveys completed by students about drug use, other attitudes about school environment, bullying, perceptions about school and home and others. All of this data can be now married with data through the outside vendors like Pearson as it administers the PARCC exam through the student identifier. There are, of course, claims to privacy protection as they will commonly reference FERPA (Family Education Rights and Privacy Act). This law used to provide protections to the disclosure of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) without parental consent. However in 2011, the federal government relaxed the definitions within the regulations to redefine who may have an "educational interest" and decided that parental notification need not be obtained in sharing PII with those third parties deemed to have and educational interest. When you couple these facts with the push to administer more psychological health services in our school settings outside the auspices of doctor oversight, these records are now governed by the FERPA and not HIPAA! These records are being renamed "health records" rather than "medical records" to avoid HIPPAA. This is being done right now in the latest bill moving through Congress to re-authorize "No Child Left Behind" (replacing it with a new and improved version apparently). Our children's complete lives are being documented and shared and we as parents have no control over their data. Has anyone really made the case that doing all of this data collection will improve student learning? Teachers already know which children need help. It seems like something else is at play here.
Now I am livid. What does this have to do with children's learning?
Finally the fourth agreement in our Memorandum of Understanding is to support Charter Schools. Once the first three components are in place, this last step falls into place nicely. From a platform of uniform standards, assessments can be compared and results can be considered as a means by which to judge teacher and school performance. But again, as the results of these tests provide no meaningful feedback to improve instruction, they do provide a justification for opening new schools. This is where the rubber meets the road. Charter schools will offer parents a choice. Do you really want to let your child attend a failing school? (Remember failing is determined by a flawed test based on flawed standards and an arbitrary cut score provided by the state). Of course parents want to do what is good for their child, so they enroll in a "free" alternative to the public school. Of course these schools will be teaching to the same standards as the public schools. Some people claim that these schools don't have to follow the Common Core standards. This is being addressed as we speak. The way that these schools will be funded will dictate that they must follow the same standards. Under the Title 1 formula today, schools receive federal money based on student need in the aggregate. This is now being changed to allow the money to follow the child. Once this happens, all charters will have no choice but to follow the same standards.
Charter schools will open with bells and whistles promising so much more than the public schools. Slowly they attract more and more students and the public schools and local communities begin to suffer financially. The current state funding formula requires that the money (the average cost of educating a child in RI) follows the child. The districts are losing +/- $14,000 for every child that leaves the district. If the pool of applicants for these charter schools contains greater percentages of above average students (which cost less to educate), the percentage of students that remain in the public school with special needs or other specialized education requirements increases. So the average cost to educate a student in that district has now gone up but the funding has not. Add that burden to the fixed overhead of running the schools and this becomes a recipe for financial disaster. Struggling districts will be forced to close schools and layoff teachers and still remain underfunded. The local taxpayers will be forced to make up the difference. This can actually place the charter schools in a more favorable light as an alternative as they demonstrate how to run a school for less cost. That actually sounds pretty good right?
Wrong.
If the charter school initiative is successful, as it has been in other communities, eventually all public schools will close. The taxpayers of the communities will be directly funding schools that have no accountability. They are not accountable to voters at all. Local school boards and school committees have no jurisdiction of charter schools.
This is a direct threat to our representative government. As scary as all the other pieces are, this is what must concern us the most. We already know that these charter schools must comply with the demands of the government because they are the customer, NOT THE PARENT! Parents can move their children around from one charter to another, but the end result will be the same. Taxpayers can demand things that no charter school need comply with. There will be no one to vote for that can make any changes to education on a local level.
This is all by design.
I had no idea 2 years ago that these would be my findings. Stopping Common Core and protecting my children's privacy have now become an effort to preserve representative government. All of this is nothing more than an extension of education reform efforts that date back over 100 years. Carnegie and Rockefeller have made their contributions; today we find Gates and Walton doing the same thing. Their ideas about what constitutes a good education are vastly different from that which most Americans share. The most important resource for large corporations is a good workforce and if they can use taxpayer dollars to condition people to be part of that workforce, they have made a very wise business decision.
There is nothing sinister with these decisions unless you agree with the Constitution.
There is an unfortunate situation in Washington DC that has given lobbyists unfettered access to our elected officials. This corporate vision for education has become our politicians' vision for education. The goals that are common to both Washington and these corporations are a well trained and obedient citizenry and workforce. Individual thought, uniqueness and free will complicate this process.
The provisions in our state and federal Constitutions provide us with many remedies. The fact that people are not engaged and are not taking advantage of these protections is never a justification for abandoning representative government. When Americans become aware of these and many other injustices, the integrity of the framework that our political leaders have all sworn to protect must be preserved. If they won't preserve it, we the people, must.
TWO YEARS OF COMMON CORE RESEARCH CONDENSED INTO ONE DOCUMENT. THIS IS THE WHOLE BALL OF WAX. THIS SHOULD HELP EVERYONE UNDERSTAND WHAT IS REALLY HAPPENING WITH EDUCATION. PLEASE TAKE THE 10 MINUTES. IT IS FAR MORE IMPORTANT THAN MOST OF US COULD EVER HAVE IMAGINED.
This journey of study has brought me full circle on the issue of school choice. When our governor signed the memorandum of understanding in 2009, we agreed to four components related to education in order to receive our stimulus money. 1) Adopt college and career standards (standards that had not been even seen much less written, 2) Establish and maintain a statewide longitudinal data system on every student, 3) Administer assessments aligned with the standards and 4) Support the expansion of charter schools.
My research began with standards and the flawed process of writing them and adopting them. Then the focus turned to the inappropriate standards for younger students and the inadequate standards for the later years. Questionable math, exchanging literature for informational texts and eliminating full works for excerpts were some of my concerns. We listened to Sandra Stotsky who wrote the fantastic Massachusetts standards as she pointed out all of the shortcomings. She, along with James Milgram, a mathematician from Stamford, were the only two members of the validation committee with any classroom experience and they both refused to sign off on the standards. Of course they were written by private trade organizations, supported with funds from "not for profit" groups like the Gates foundation and they have copyrights which prevent any changes from being made. This entire hasty effort was without transparency, without the inclusion of proper stakeholders and virtually ignored the input from the validation committee. According to James Milgram, standards were changed again after the final draft was produced. These standards were then adopted by the states either sight unseen or within 60 days of having been released. Massachusetts took 10 years to implement their outstanding standards but abandoned them to accept these.
It is preposterous what took place, but that still is not the real issue.
The next part was the assessments. They were designed to evaluate the teachers and the schools but not to provide important feedback to improve instruction. What we learned from Peg Luksik is that we are dealing with tests that no one can see and may contain questions about attributes and behaviors in addition to academic questions. She has been researching the subject for over 30 years. The older tests asked these questions but were anonymous. Now answers to these questions reflect the attributes of your child specifically. Remember these are standards for what students must learn, not what teachers must teach. If you have a classroom of disadvantaged students with poor nutrition, broken homes, chronic absenteeism, drug abuse etc., they are clearly not going to perform as well regardless of how well they are being taught. Those students with English as a second language or unfamiliar with the technology required to take these tests may also perform poorly. And for many students with learning disabilities or other difficulties suffer immensely by taking these tests. Math requires written explanations that can label a student that is actually good at math as needing remediation.
But our teachers and schools can be deemed to have failed based on the outcome of this one test. These tests are designed, implemented, scored and reviewed by the state and then cut scores are determined AFTER the test is complete. The future of districts can be made or broken by this arbitrary decision. The test contains both relevant questions along with experimental questions using our children as guinea pigs in the process. Teachers that have taken practice tests claim that this is an absolutely awful test. It is confusing and far more difficult than what should be expected of the children taking it. Of course all of these tests are taken on new devices designed to track every aspect of children's usage by using imbedded tagged content. The ultimate goal is to monitor and store every activity by every child. If you research a company called Knewton and their agreement with Pearson you will understand. Every email, chat room discussion, website visited, everything typed, read, clicked on is part of this student profile being compiled by these third party outside private organizations. This is in addition to the data collection. Of course remember, these tests are designed to determine how well our children are adhering to the flawed standards.
Again, preposterous but now even more concerning.
The data collection was a major concern of mine before Common Core came along and is far more in depth and disturbing than I could have imagined. Through the normal course of daily routines at schools, student profiles are uploaded to and stored by RIDE with their partnership with Provplan. The names, addresses, student identifier numbers, grades, classes, attendance and disciplinary actions are all combined and stored. In addition to these basic data points, there are many other pieces of information that are being collected. The results of surveys completed by students about drug use, other attitudes about school environment, bullying, perceptions about school and home and others. All of this data can be now married with data through the outside vendors like Pearson as it administers the PARCC exam through the student identifier. There are, of course, claims to privacy protection as they will commonly reference FERPA (Family Education Rights and Privacy Act). This law used to provide protections to the disclosure of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) without parental consent. However in 2011, the federal government relaxed the definitions within the regulations to redefine who may have an "educational interest" and decided that parental notification need not be obtained in sharing PII with those third parties deemed to have and educational interest. When you couple these facts with the push to administer more psychological health services in our school settings outside the auspices of doctor oversight, these records are now governed by the FERPA and not HIPAA! These records are being renamed "health records" rather than "medical records" to avoid HIPPAA. This is being done right now in the latest bill moving through Congress to re-authorize "No Child Left Behind" (replacing it with a new and improved version apparently). Our children's complete lives are being documented and shared and we as parents have no control over their data. Has anyone really made the case that doing all of this data collection will improve student learning? Teachers already know which children need help. It seems like something else is at play here.
Now I am livid. What does this have to do with children's learning?
Finally the fourth agreement in our Memorandum of Understanding is to support Charter Schools. Once the first three components are in place, this last step falls into place nicely. From a platform of uniform standards, assessments can be compared and results can be considered as a means by which to judge teacher and school performance. But again, as the results of these tests provide no meaningful feedback to improve instruction, they do provide a justification for opening new schools. This is where the rubber meets the road. Charter schools will offer parents a choice. Do you really want to let your child attend a failing school? (Remember failing is determined by a flawed test based on flawed standards and an arbitrary cut score provided by the state). Of course parents want to do what is good for their child, so they enroll in a "free" alternative to the public school. Of course these schools will be teaching to the same standards as the public schools. Some people claim that these schools don't have to follow the Common Core standards. This is being addressed as we speak. The way that these schools will be funded will dictate that they must follow the same standards. Under the Title 1 formula today, schools receive federal money based on student need in the aggregate. This is now being changed to allow the money to follow the child. Once this happens, all charters will have no choice but to follow the same standards.
Charter schools will open with bells and whistles promising so much more than the public schools. Slowly they attract more and more students and the public schools and local communities begin to suffer financially. The current state funding formula requires that the money (the average cost of educating a child in RI) follows the child. The districts are losing +/- $14,000 for every child that leaves the district. If the pool of applicants for these charter schools contains greater percentages of above average students (which cost less to educate), the percentage of students that remain in the public school with special needs or other specialized education requirements increases. So the average cost to educate a student in that district has now gone up but the funding has not. Add that burden to the fixed overhead of running the schools and this becomes a recipe for financial disaster. Struggling districts will be forced to close schools and layoff teachers and still remain underfunded. The local taxpayers will be forced to make up the difference. This can actually place the charter schools in a more favorable light as an alternative as they demonstrate how to run a school for less cost. That actually sounds pretty good right?
Wrong.
If the charter school initiative is successful, as it has been in other communities, eventually all public schools will close. The taxpayers of the communities will be directly funding schools that have no accountability. They are not accountable to voters at all. Local school boards and school committees have no jurisdiction of charter schools.
This is a direct threat to our representative government. As scary as all the other pieces are, this is what must concern us the most. We already know that these charter schools must comply with the demands of the government because they are the customer, NOT THE PARENT! Parents can move their children around from one charter to another, but the end result will be the same. Taxpayers can demand things that no charter school need comply with. There will be no one to vote for that can make any changes to education on a local level.
This is all by design.
I had no idea 2 years ago that these would be my findings. Stopping Common Core and protecting my children's privacy have now become an effort to preserve representative government. All of this is nothing more than an extension of education reform efforts that date back over 100 years. Carnegie and Rockefeller have made their contributions; today we find Gates and Walton doing the same thing. Their ideas about what constitutes a good education are vastly different from that which most Americans share. The most important resource for large corporations is a good workforce and if they can use taxpayer dollars to condition people to be part of that workforce, they have made a very wise business decision.
There is nothing sinister with these decisions unless you agree with the Constitution.
There is an unfortunate situation in Washington DC that has given lobbyists unfettered access to our elected officials. This corporate vision for education has become our politicians' vision for education. The goals that are common to both Washington and these corporations are a well trained and obedient citizenry and workforce. Individual thought, uniqueness and free will complicate this process.
The provisions in our state and federal Constitutions provide us with many remedies. The fact that people are not engaged and are not taking advantage of these protections is never a justification for abandoning representative government. When Americans become aware of these and many other injustices, the integrity of the framework that our political leaders have all sworn to protect must be preserved. If they won't preserve it, we the people, must.
