Editor’s note: This op-ed is by Susan Ohanian of Charlotte, a longtime teacher and author of 25 books on education policy and practice. Her website is at www.susanohanian.org.
North Carolina Lt. Gov. Dan Forest asked his state Department of Public Instruction 67 questions about the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). Now he’s on YouTube showing what he got in reply: 12 boxes with about 40,000 sheets of paper, a cover letter referring him to 134 websites, linking to over 100 pages, 320 reports, hundreds of original source documents, 40 presentations, one blog post and a thumb drive.
Forest says his questions remain unanswered.
I guess I should thank Gov. Peter Shumlin, Education Secretary Armando Vilaseca, members of the State Board of Education, and members of the House and Senate committees on education for not wasting much paper in the one reply I received to my 28 questions about the Common Core. Secretary Vilaseca’s reply is just two pages long plus a three-page resource list, but as happened in North Carolina, my questions aren’t answered. Secretary Vilaseca referred me to lots of documents produced by groups funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to develop and promote the Common Core State (sic) Standards (CCSS). I use the (sic) to indicate that states had no more participation in the development of CCSS than they do in minting the coin of the realm. But try to get a state official to admit that.
• I asked: the names of Vermonters “actively involved” in CCSS development.
Secretary Vilaseca directed me to the Vermont CCSS Implementation Guide, which is a schedule of what happens now that CCSS is a done deal. Huh?!
• I asked: What was inadequate about Vermont’s previous standards?
Secretary Vilaseca replied that governors across the country decided all states need the same standards. Huh?!
• I asked: What is the cost of providing teachers with resources to make the change to CCSS?
Secretary Vilaseca said CCSS will not affect local costs. Huh?!
If true, this makes Vermont unique in the nation.
I asked Gov. Shumlin, Secretary Vilaseca, members of the State Board of Education, and members of the House and Senate committees on education specific questions about the democratic process in education policy-making in Vermont, and what I got is the belief systems of Jeb Bush, colossal hubris, and text-rating gimmickry.
Most of my questions were ignored, including: Were local school boards consulted before CCSS adoption? When Vermont adopted CCSS, what convincing information superseded the fact that the radical CCSS, written by non-educators, was not research-based, not field-tested, not proven effective? How will the CCSS tests affect students in alternative programs such as the Walden Project? What data points will be collected on Vermont public school students and shared with “contractors, consultants and volunteers?” And so on.
This question — Do you think that the fact that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation spent several hundred million dollars to create and promote the CCSS, shutting teachers out of the process, puts the democratic process in jeopardy? — is answered with the list of additional resources referring me to 20 websites, a 2007 conference presentation, a 2002 journal article (which I can access online for $37), two books, and the highly controversial National Reading Panel Report Summary, which excludes the minority report carefully detailing its flaws.
I asked Gov. Shumlin, Secretary Vilaseca, members of the State Board of Education, and members of the House and Senate committees on education specific questions about the democratic process in education policy-making in Vermont, and what I got is the belief systems of Jeb Bush, colossal hubris, and text-rating gimmickry.
In examining the recommended resources, first I followed the money:
• An article by Jason Zimba, lead author of CCSS mathematics standards and co-founder, with CCSS architects David Coleman and Susan Pimentel, of Student Achievement Partners (SAP), a major player in CCSS implementation (Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation money: $6,533,350). Zimba’s article was published by the neo-conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute (Gates money: $6,711,462).
• An Education Week (Gates money: $7,232,037) commentary by Richard Laine, the education division director of the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (Gates money: $26,524,137), formerly with the Illinois Business Roundtable, and Chris Minnich, executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers (Gates money: $79,033,200), former Strategic Initiative Director of Standards, Assessment and Accountability, where he led the development and adoption of the Common Core.
• A report from ACT (Gates money: $2,145,269), an organization staking its future on declaring our students inadequate, whose K-12 commercial products include: ACT Aspire, ACT Explore, ACT Plan, The ACT.
• Five papers from the Alliance for Excellent Education (Gates money: $12,077,880). The eminent researcher Gerald Bracey referred to the alliance leader Bob Wise as a leading propagandist and professional fear monger, noting “there’s good money in fear.”
• A report from the International Benchmarking Advisory Group — produced and copyrighted by National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (Gates money: $26,524,137), the Council of Chief State School Officers (Gates money: $79,033,200), and Achieve Inc. (Gates money: $36,708,822). The report itself was financed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the General Electric Foundation and written by Craig D. Gerald of Break the Curve Consulting — formerly a principal partner at Education Trust (Gates money: $43,889,597), senior editor at Education Week, (Gates money: $7,232,037) and in Teach for America (Gates money: $12,672,884).
Another resource recommended by Secretary Vilaseca appears on Common Core letterhead from the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers. It includes “sells” for a number of commercial enterprises offering formulas for figuring text complexity. My published research on ATOS by Renaissance Learning shows they label both Beatrix Potter’s “The Tale of Peter Rabbit” and Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple” with a text complexity score of grade 4. Real damage is done when this scoring system takes over schools.
Just for fun, I spent a day putting texts through another outfit — Easability Indicator by Coh-Metrix, a non-profit endeavor whose authors claim, “An automated analysis is unquestionably more reliable and objective than approaches that involve humans annotating and rating texts by hand.” (“Coh-Metrix: Providing multilevel analyses of text characteristics.” Educational Researcher, 40 (5), 223-234).
Let’s see. Coh-Metrix rates James Joyce’s “Ulysses” “high in syntactic simplicity,” with a reading grade level of 3.3. “Finnegan’s Wake” rates 82 percentile in deep cohesion, and when the text is entered backwards it reaches 86 percentile deep cohesion. Its syntactic simplicity ranking is 28 percentile (both forwards and backwards), which is within a couple of percentile points of such CCSS exemplar texts as “Crime and Punishment,” “The Great Gatsby,” and “Little House in the Big Woods.” Huh?!
Finally, there’s the report from Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education Inc. (Gates money: $3,152,553) on why Phyllis Schlafly is wrong and the Common Core is right. Secretary Vilaseca offers no explanation of what Schlafly’s concerns have to do with my concerns — or why I should believe anything Jeb Bush says. When I tried to follow the url provided by Secretary Vilaseca, Firefox informed me “This Connection is Untrusted.”
Since the resources I received are entirely faith-based, I suggest that Vermonters who care about public education heed this New Testament warning: “And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.” (Coh-Metrix Deep Cohesion 61 percentile).
