Marc Tucker has written two posts on his blog saying that I am wrong not to support the Common Core standards.
Stephen Krashen, the eminent literacy scholar, disagrees with Tucker. He posted this response on Tucker’s blog and shared it with me.
Krashen writes:
We need to distinguish discussion (1) of the content of the standards and (2) whether we should have standards.
The content of the standards
Contrary to Tucker’s assertion, it is easy to field-test the standards. If standards are simply “what we want students to know and be able to do,” we could see if any students meet the standards. This is called “known-group” validity: Can those who experts regard as well-educated students pass the tests? Let teachers (or anybody else) select students at various levels considered to have the skills and knowledge considered to be satisfactory for students at that level. See if they can pass the tests.
The real issue
But the content of the standards is not the real issue. The real issue is whether we should have standards and tests based on standards. In his post of March 14, Tucker insisted that “We will not improve the performance of poor and minority students by suppressing standards.” I think we will.
The common core standards and the tests that are their spawn will cost billions. The big money is being spent on getting all students connected to the internet so they can take the tests. And there are a lot of tests and there will be a lot more, far more than we need (Krashen, 2012). And once the tests are set up, there will be constant upgrading, new equipment (remember Ethernet?), and of course revision of the tests when it turns out that the CC$$ are not improving achievement. This is one of the greatest boondoggles of all time (Krashen and Ohanian, 2011).
There is a great deal of evidence that the real problem in education in the US is our high level of poverty: When we control for poverty, our international test scores are near the top in the world (Carnoy and Rothstein, 2013). Poverty means food deprivation, poor health care, and lack of access to books (Berliner, 2009; Krashen, 1997), and improving diet, health care and providing access to books (libraries) improves school performance (for recent research on the impact of school libraries, see Krashen, Lee and McQuillan, 2012). The billions we are investing in testing should be used to help solve the problem, not just measure it. A most investment in food programs, school nurses, and school libraries will have a huge impact, not just on test scores but on children’s well-being as well.
Tucker’s position is that tough standards, tough-minded accountability, will finally get
educators moving, and force them to teach effectively. This is an insult to the teaching profession, and is not supported by the evidence: As noted above, when we control for poverty, our students do very well. Middle class students in well-funded schools score at or near the top of the world. This strongly suggests that the problem is not teacher quality (or schools of education, or unions). Of course we are always interested in improving teaching, but there is no crisis. The problem is poverty.
Some sources:
There are a lot of tests: Krashen, S. 2012. How much testing? https://dianeravitch.net/2012/07/25/stephen-‐ krashen-‐how-‐much-‐testing/ and: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/
Boondoggle: Krashen, S. and Ohanian, S. 2011. High Tech Testing on the Way: a 21st Century Boondoggle? http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in- dialogue/2011/04/high_tech_testing_on_the_way_a.html
Control for poverty: Carnoy, M and Rothstein, R. 2013, What Do International Tests Really Show Us about U.S. Student Performance. Washington DC: Economic Policy Institute. 2012. http://www.epi.org/).
Food deprivation, poor health care, lack of access to books, Berliner, D. 2009. Poverty and Potential: Out-of-School Factors and School Success. Boulder and Tempe: Education and the Public Interest Center & Education Policy Research Unit. http://epicpolicy.org/publication/poverty-and-potential; Krashen, S. 1997. Bridging inequity with books. Educational Leadership 55(4): 18-22.
Impact of school libraries: Krashen, S., Lee, SY, and McQuillan, J. 2012. Is The Library Important? Multivariate Studies at the National and International Level Journal of Language and Literacy Education: 8(1). http://jolle.coe.uga.edu/
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It’s amusing to me that supporters of standards always express generalities about them (e.g., “These standards ask kids to read closely, to study challenging and significant texts across the curriculum”) and then say, “How could you be against that?”
Well, these general principles are indisputable. But the devil is in the details.
What I have NOT seen in the defenses of the CCSS is ANY EVIDENCE that those defending them have subjected the learning progressions that they entail or the specific standards to anything like rigorous examination and critique. I have examined the new ELA standards minutely, and I can only say that if these represent what the best and brightest think K-12 English education should be all about, we’re in big trouble.
The new ELA standards appear, to me, to have been hacked together by committees of people with little understanding of the complexities of the specific subdomains and what is now known about them–what is known, for example, about how kids develop vocabulary, how they learn grammar, how they acquire the large number of specific skills that it takes to read a novel or a history or a scientific paper with understanding, what one actually has to know in order to write a good poem or short story or magazine article or news story or research paper, to prepare a multimedia presentation, to hold a fruitful discussion or debate, etc. THE LEARNING PROGRESSION MUST COME FIRST AND MUST BE WELL VETTED–that is, based on actual current scientific understanding of the specifics of learning in the various subdomains and not on folk wisdom about reading and writing. Then, and only then, can one develop reasonable standards based upon that progression, ones that do not imply and promote counterproductive pedagogical approaches and that are not a) random. b) unscientific, and c) full of GLARING LACUNAE.
Robert,
You stated “Then, and only then, can one develop reasonable standards. . . .”
The concept of “standards” in education (which imply measurement) has been shown to be fraught with errors. Noel Wilson has identified 13 sources of error in the processes of making standards and standardized tests, the giving and disseminating of results of said tests in his “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error”. I implore you to read and understand how he has shown educational standards and standardized testing to be invalid, unreliable and the results/conclusions a chimera, duende and as he states “vain and illusory.” Please read the study at:
http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700 .
More people need to read and understand the implications of this study for current educational practices, especially rephormista but even what most teachers believe/do to harm students in day to day teaching and learning.
Question: When did teachers become diagnosticians?
Duane
Believe me, Duane, you are preaching to the choir. If I got started on the problems with high-stakes testing and VAM based upon standards docs, we would be on this thread for the next five or six years. Standards themselves are not a bad thing, as long as they are competing, well-vetted, voluntary, suggested guidelines. Harold Bloom writes a book and calls it The Canon. It contains his list of greatest hits from the world’s literatures. It’s a great list. A great starting point for all kinds of interesting discussion and debate. But turn Blooms list into a mandatory reading list, and all hell will ensue, even though he, unlike the authors of the CCSS, actually knew something in the area in which he was working.
The math standards also speak in positive generalities, but have no legitimate basis, are “hacked together”, and aren’t “internationally benchmarked”.
Brookings Institute just released a report that basically states although the US continues to lag far behind A+ countries, we shouldn’t even deign to study their curricula because they are not improving fast enough.
Common Core’s authors foreshadowed that assessment when they wrote the standards in a vacuum.
Right On Robert!!
The standards are largely designed by philosophy far more than cognitive research. This is a paradigm that reflects grave imbalances.
Well said, Robert!
Look, for example, at the specific grade-level language standards. One can only say that these appear to have been chosen for specific grade levels, completely at random, from some larger list. Or look at the writing standards. Very little breakdown into specific skills, concepts, techniques to be mastered–just broad generalities that will inevitably encourage the writing of unreadable but test-ready five-paragraph themes. Or look at the literature standards. Why allusions to myth at this one level and not at others? What about development across grade levels of deep familiarity with and understanding of a handful of recurring, standard archetypes embodied, to be sure, in myths and folktales but instantiated, as well, in all subsequent literatures?
Or look at the vocabulary standards. They include references to learning standard affixes and roots. What will this mean? Well, one of the worst practices in vocabulary instruction is giving kids lists of prefixes, suffixes, and roots to memorize. Brains are not made to learn vocabulary in that way. But that is inevitably what will be done because these standards exist and people write textbooks and plan lessons and test based on specific standards.
Where was the vetting of these by knowledgeable scholars who would revisit each domain in light of what is now known about best practices in teaching and learning in the various subdomains? Well, it was AWOL.
The new ELA standards give the impression of having been written by lay people with only their vague memories of what happened in their English classes, when they were in school, to go on. They don’t seem to me to have been prepared by knowledgeable professionals, people, for example, who know what we now know about how the grammar of a language is acquired.
“The billions we are investing in testing should be used to help solve the problem, not just measure it. A [modest] investment in food programs, school nurses, and school libraries will have a huge impact, not just on test scores but on children’s well-being as well.”
While I agree with this point wholeheartedly, I think the writer misses a bigger point: The real goal is to hide from the reality that poverty determines school and student performance far more than any other variable. Once we admit we have a poverty problem in America, then we have to admit that the past 30 years of neo-classical economics have been a failure. And when we admit that failure, then we have to further admit that we can’t have a viable society without strong public programs to ensure that every American has adequate food, clothing, housing, and medical care. And then we have to admit that we have to have an adequate system of personal and corporate taxes to pay for those programs. In other words, the whole Milton Friedman-Ayn Rand fantasy of a utopia in which everyone thrives by “taking care of themselves”, the world of the reformers’ bubble and their justification for destroying our public institutions and democracy in their pursuit of profits, falls apart like the old Soviet Union.
M&S,
“Once we admit. . . like the old Soviet Union”. Bingo! Why so many drink the Randian neoliberal koolaid is beyond me. Unregulated capitalism will always result in egregious social inequalities such as the ones we are experiencing now.
Duane
Oh, well said! It is not an accident or an oversight that poverty is ignored in the march to blame and destroy education.
And believe me, there are a lot of Education professors specializing in reading or language arts who don’t have the requisite background–who are not deeply (or even superficially) versed in the scientific literature on the acquisition of grammar and and vocabulary and who, therefore, carry lots of nutty, prescientific notions in their heads about how this happens.
Excellent analysis in the post and subsequent comments.
Sorry, Diane, for derailing your discussion of the underlying issue of poverty with my long rant about basing standards on science and not on superstition, but I’m concerned that no one seems to be raising this issue. Robert Rendo said it better than I: “The standards are largely designed by philosophy far more than cognitive research. This is a paradigm that reflects grave imbalances.”
Check out achieve.org. This site is loaded with tools GALORE to deal with “push back” on the common core agenda and its ensuing testing and national database. If these reforms are as amazing as the reformers claim then why would they need an arsenal of tools to persuade, trick, lobby, confuse, etc? Go under tools and resources. Just keep searching through it is deep with very telling tools. You will be amazed.
Given the times, should we have expected anything different from a testing entrepreneur (David Coleman) who has never taught K-12 for a single day in his life?
The standards, aside from being developmentally inappropriate, are at best based on truisms about what students should ideally learn in school. When their appropriateness, or their being a vehicle for ever-more testing, is questioned, their supporters respond with straw man arguments, accusing skeptics of wanting weak standards or none at all, and suddenly we are back to a recycled version of George Bush’s “soft bigotry of low expectations” talking points.
As this slow motion train wreck develops, people will be asking, “Where does the incompetence end, and the venality begin?”
As for the teachers (who are daily subject to the incompetence, and nastiness with which these are being imposed) and students who are being pushed into this forced march, hopefully the damage to individual lives and careers is limited, until it falls apart of its own corruption and unworkability.
DITTO MICHAEL!
Teachers are no longer teachers. They are testers and that is that!
They are clawed, their health is declining, the stress is overwhelming and the students know the Testers are the ones that are held totally accountable. A Tester has to bring loads of goodies to class to get on the right side of the students so they will do their best, They Bribe and Beg the apathetic students(not all) to do their best for the Tester..not the students..What a Joke!
Poverty seems to have different impacts in different countries. Carnoy and Rothstein found that
“At all points in the social class distribution, U.S. students perform worse, and in many cases substantially worse, than students in a group of top-scoring countries (Canada, Finland, and Korea). Although controlling for social class distribution would narrow the difference in average scores between these countries and the United States, it would not eliminate it.”
TE
Do you have a link for that?
Thanks,
Duane
The link is in the main post.
Thanks!
Just to satisfy those who may wonder:
What are the poverty rates in the top-scoring nations for international tests? Finland?South Korea? Japan? And, how do these compare to the U.S. poverty rate?
I don’t have time to check but I know that the U.S. has a child poverty rate far greater than those in other advanced nations. In Finland, it is under 5%, as is typical of most nations in Europe. In the U.S., it is currently about 23%.
You might look at my post above for information comparing performance across social class distribution. This is a quote from one of the studies cited in the original post.
The ELA standards certainly show all the signs of a job hastily done, under time pressure (remember that the states were being press-ganged into signing on to Common Core before standards even existed, a situation that could not be allowed to continue for long). They didn’t want it good, they wanted it Thursday, as they say in Hollywood…
Well, we got it Thursday, and by the time the powers that be figure out how deeply flawed these “standards” are (and I expect the same will be true of the other content-area standards as well), the testing regime will be entrenched like kudzu, and it will be virtually impossible to restore the educational ecosystem to its previous state…
… and it will be impossible to restore the educational system t t’s previous state.”
Yes, precisely the intention… and the euphemism used by so-called reformers for this hostile takeover of education is “transformational change.”
Michael–
The word “transformation” gives me the heebie-jeebies, as I noted in a comment over on EduShyster the other day:
“We…intend a principled transformation in the worldview of our entire society, a revolution of the greatest possible extent that will leave nothing out, changing the life of our nation in every regard.”
Who said it? Joseph Goebbels, August 18, 1933.
Thanks for the apt quote, Terence.
Yes, repressive regimes are very big on ham-handed attempts at social engineering and creating a “New (Communist/National Socialist/Free Market, etc.) Man.”
For an example of how that plays out in so-called education reform, look no further than the intense paternalism embedded in those Skinner Boxes for the Worthy Poor known as charter schools, especially KIPP and similar “no-excuses” sweatshops.
There are times when I wish the folks pushing the CCSS would just be honest. I put up a graphical version of what that might look like on my blog on Tuesday: http://tinyurl.com/atcvr3n
Ms. Ravitch, I read your book The Death and Life… and I was compelled by what seemed like an argument on your part for a national curriculum. My personal hero Albert Shanker also fought for a national curriculum. Have you changed your mind about this since Common Core? Or how does Common Core differ from what you belive is an appropriate curriculum?
Ironically, I came from an industry, newspapers, where the people gathering the news have almost been eliminated.
Having been a teacher for four years, and reading about online learning and how desperate legislatures are to cut costs, I am half expecting that the people doing the teaching will almost be eliminated.
Most students will get their content online from prerecorded video or free adult tutors. Textbooks will be open source and online.
The poor might be left with an Internet connection somewhere, but they will be lucky to have that.
This is very pessimistic to say, but they may end up like the Third World kids in “Beyond the hole in the wall,” who will seek learning at the Internet portal in their home or neighborhood if they have the motivation or the luck. The majority of poor students won’t have either, I fear.
John Stewart, you hit the nail on the head. The entrepreneur who is first to replace teachers with computers wins the brass ring and big profits!
The true flaw with all the standards and how we try to measure learning is that learning is not like length or volume or money or any other single property that you can measure with a well designed instrument like a ruler. All the standards, how people are talking about student growth, and the tests that are used treat student learning as if it is some single, measurable property. It is not. It is insane to even attempt to measure all the different qualities that work together that we refer to as student learning.
The bottom line for me is simple – there is no proof that every single child must know the same body of knowledge and have the exact same skills in order to be successful in life.
It is refreshing to hear Mr. Krashen share his thoughts and dispute the likes of Marc Tucker.
Surely there are some minimums. Literacy?
Your statement here to Mark Tucker explains why he will be Speaking next week at Stanford (SCOPE) with all of the other Destroy Public Schools advocates and you will Not be Speaking. So, the media will again report that the Educational Experts are All in agreement with CCSS and associated testing needed to get rid of All those Bad Teachers so Good Teachers will be hired to teach in Urban Schools so they will get a better education and be college and career ready. By the way, I have a piece of land in the Everglades that I would like to sell you if you are interested in opening up a snow ski lodge.