When I began my journey addressing the Common Core State
Standards in my blog one year ago, I was quite naïve. I assumed that the Common
Core, for better or worse, was a fait accompli and so I focused on ways to help
teachers address the standards without sacrificing what I knew to be exemplary
practice in literacy education. As I dug more deeply into the Common Core
itself and as I heard statements about close reading, ignoring the role of background
knowledge and David Coleman’s famous decree that “nobody gives a shit” about
how you think and feel when reading, I began to see how fundamentally flawed
the Common Core was.
I investigated the people who wrote the Common Core and the
process they followed for implementation and my blog turned from criticism of
the standards themselves to concern that people who knew nothing about literacy
were telling professionals how to do their job. Finally, with the invaluable
help of my fellow bloggers, and after reading books like Reign of Error, by
Diane Ravitch and Test and Punish by John Kuhn, I came to the realization that
the Common Core is not merely a flawed document that needed to be tweaked, not
just a flawed process that now required a step back for educators to weigh-in, but a coordinated effort to coerce states to
adopt national standards that are tied to standardized testing of children and
teacher evaluation based on those test scores. The Common Core is a vital cog
in the corporate education reformers efforts to privatize public education.
The Common Core is wrong about literacy in many ways. The
call for greater text complexity ignores what we know about developing fluency,
especially in the early grades. As Hiebert and Sluys (2013) have pointed out, text
complexity is based on the erroneous notion that we must ramp up text
difficulty beginning in third grade in order to achieve “college and career readiness.”
Kylene Beers and Robert Probst excellent book, Notice and Note, worries that “text dependent
questions” in close reading will lead to student disengagement in reading.
Having students do cold reads of material without efforts to activate prior
knowledge flies in the face of decades of solid research in literacy. Finally,
the Common Core pushes overly academic instruction down to the kindergarten
where Fiano (2013) has shown that the elimination of work/play stations may
harm the development of oral language so vital for these young learners.
The Common Core is wrong in process. No classroom teachers
were included in the drafting process. When classroom professionals were
invited to provide feedback, the feedback was used to make minor changes, but
the Common Core pushers failed to make any substantive revisions. No early
childhood experts were consulted, with the resultant problems that I outlined
above. The Alliance for Childhood, in fact, drafted a letter of concern about
the Common Core while it was still in draft form. The statement said in part, the
standards “conflict with compelling new research in cognitive science,
neuroscience, child development, and early childhood education about how young
children learn, what they need to learn, and how best to teach them in
kindergarten and the early grades.”
But finally, we must see the greatest flaw in the Common
Core and its greatest threat is that it is tied closely to the corporate
education reformers agenda. The Common Core development was funded in large
part by the Gates Foundation. The public relations effort to get the public,
the business community and educators behind the Common Core is being funded by
the Gates Foundation. The Common Core is inextricably tied to the burgeoning
testing industry and the attack on teachers through value added models of
teacher evaluation, again promoted with money from the Gates Foundation. In the
minds of the corporate privatizers, there is no separating Common Core from standardized
tests and from the degradation of the teaching profession through spurious
evaluation designs and attacks on tenure and seniority.
The Common Core is of one with the corporate privatizers
efforts to destroy public education.
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