Howie Hawkins: Get Rid Of Common Core - And Standardized Testing

Here's why I am supporting Howie Hawkins for governor in next month's election:

ALBANY—Green Party gubernatorial candidate Howie Hawkins has entered the fight among liberals and conservatives over which side is more opposed to the Common Core standards.

Hawkins, during a conference call with reporters on Monday morning, said he wants New York to ditch the curriculum standards that New York adopted with the majority of U.S. states. But he also wants to get rid of statewide standards—and standardized testing—altogether, a position that he says sets him apart from his Republican opponent, Rob Astorino, who is running on a third-party line entitled “Stop Common Core.”

“My position is we need to opt out of Common Core because it’s dumbing down education,” Hawkins said. “It’s forcing our teachers to teach to the test. That whole high-stakes testing regime, which is part of Common Core, is a big drain on time and money in schools.

“We should let the local teachers and parents and school boards make the decisions about standards, curriculum and assessment,” he continued.

When asked about Astorino, Hawkins said: “He’s talking about setting up our own standardized assessments in New York. I think we’ve got to get away from that and let the teachers teach.”

During that conference call, a reporter noted that many of the state tests are part of a federal mandate:

“If the law says you gotta do it, you gotta do it,” Hawkins said, responding to a question about the federal requirements. “But we are adding to the tests by opting into the Race to the Top money.”

Hawkins' reference was to the Obama administration’s signature education initiative, a grant competition through which New York won $700 million in 2010. The funds required the state to adopt curriculum standards that aimed to boost college- and career-readiness, such as the Common Core.

The grant program also required New York to develop a statewide teacher-evaluation system that rates educators partly based on students' test scores. The evaluation system has resulted in more local testing in some districts, although some confuse that testing as being tied to the adoption of the Common Core.

Indeed, the mandates were made much worse by Race to the Top.

APPR?

Tied to Race to the Top.

inBloom?

Tied to Race to the Top.

Common Core?
 
Tied to Race to the Top.

All that testing added to every subject in nearly every grade in New York schools?

Consequence of APPR which is tied to Race to the Top.

It's true, the Obama administration has now tied some of the worst reforms to No Child Left Behind waivers, so even sending the RttT money back to the feds won't make some of the worst stuff go away overnight.

But the sun is getting ready to set on the Obama administration in a couple of years, so Arne Duncan and the rest of his merry men and women in reform aren't going to be in power forever.

There can be some post-RttT/post-NCLB waiver sanity.

Vote Howie Hawkins on Election Day.

Common Core Considered "Radioactive" And "Toxic" These Days

The AFT leadership may have decided that the Common Core still holds "promise" but much of the rest of America is looking to bury the standards in the same place they put nuclear waste:

The National Governors Association (NGA) owns the copyright – along with the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) – to the Common Core State Standards. When the nationalized standards are mentioned these days, however, many governors would rather change the subject.

In fact, the NGA, holding summer meetings in Nashville, had not even placed the controversial standards on its official agenda, a sign, as the Wall Street Journal states, “the bipartisan idea has become a political minefield.”

Much to the surprise of many Washington, D.C., pundits, the standards, and even the name itself, “Common Core,” have “become, in a sense, radioactive,” said Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad (R), according to the Associated Press.

...

 Indeed, for Republicans, the issue of the Common Core has also been described by former Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) as “toxic,” and has served to separate the GOP establishment, supported by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, from constitutional conservatives who oppose the federal government’s hand in pushing Common Core through President Obama’s Race to the Top (RttT) stimulus program and the promise of relief from federal No Child Left Behind restrictions.

Huckabee used to be a big supporter of CCSS.

Now he's against them.

Bobby Jindal used to be a big supporter of CCSS.

Now he's fighting to pull his state of Louisiana out of using both the standards and the tests associated with them.

Just last January, Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin defended the CCSS at a NGA meeting.

Last month, she signed a bill pulling her state out of using the standards, a move that a court backed up today as constitutional.

Even the pro-testing, pro-CCSS Chris Christie is reacting to the changed politics around the Core and the ancillary tests that go with it - he announced a review of the so-called effectiveness of the CCSS tests in his state of New Jersey.

Jeb Bush still loves the standards, as does Arne Duncan, Barack Obama, Randi Weingarten, Michael Mulgrew, Bill Gates and a host of editorial boards around the country.

But when you see all these governors (or former governors like Huckabee) who used to support the standards who are running from them as fast as they can, touting their opposition, that's when you know that the politics around the CCSS battle have really shifted.

Maybe Weingarten and Mulgrew think they've done their part to save the standards after engineering a pro-CCSS resolution at the AFT convention last weekend.

But it's pretty clear from what's happening outside of the Beltway that the trajectory in the CCSS battle is not positive for the CCSS.

That's what happens when a reform becomes "radioactive."

Is Randi Weingarten REALLY Getting The Message?

Stephanie Simon at Politico reports the AFT convention that opens today in L.A. is not going to be as reformer-friendly as in years past:

The American Federation of Teachers will open its annual convention Friday morning with a startling announcement: After years of strongly backing the Common Core, the union now plans to give its members grants to critique the academic standards — or to write replacement standards from scratch.

It’s a sign that teachers are frustrated and fed up — and they’re making their anger heard, loud and clear.

The AFT will also consider a resolution — drafted by its executive council — asserting that the promise of the Common Core has been corrupted by political manipulation, administrative bungling, corporate profiteering and an invalid scoring system designed to ensure huge numbers of kids fail the new math and language arts exams that will be rolled out next spring. An even more pointed resolution flat out opposing the standards will also likely come up for a vote.

...

Policy analysts see this weekend’s moves as an escalation — a stark signal that union opposition has switched into high gear, potentially threatening an initiative that both conservatives and liberals have supported for years and that has become one of President Barack Obama’s key education priorities.

Simon writes that the AFT convention may also consider a "Dump Duncan" resolution now that the NEA has passed one and that Weingarten will set the tone of the convention by starting the festivities off with "a speech passing harsh judgment on Duncan."

Dunno about you, but I remain skeptical about this so-called change in tone and "escalation" of "union opposition."

Remember, Weingarten just stood with Secretary of Education Privatization Arne Duncan this week as part of his "Education Excellence Equity Project."

As in, literally stood with him - and when asked if the AFT would join the NEA in condemning Duncan and calling for his ouster, Weingarten demurred, saying she "understood the sentiment," but stopped short of saying the AFT would join the NEA in its call for Duncan's firing.

Clearly in the days since, the AFT leadership has taken the temperature of the AFT rank-and-file and decided this is not the year to trot out Bill Gates to sell Common Core and teacher evaluations, as they did a few years ago (including exhorting members to jeer other AFT rank-and-file who walked out of the convention in protest over Gates' invitation to speak.)

So we're getting some words out of the AFT convention that are made to fool us into thinking the AFT leadership is ready to escalate their opposition to the Obama administration's education reform agenda, the Common Core standards, the tests that go with them, etc.

But I've been around Randi Weingarten, Leo Casey et al. for 14 years now, first as a UFT member when they were running the NYC local, and now as an AFT member as they run the national union, and the one thing I can tell you is, watch what they do, not what they say.

Weingarten's standing with Arne Duncan earlier this week as he trotted out another teacher bashing initiative that utilizes the rhetoric of the corporate education reform movement to further weaken teacher professionalism, work protections and autonomy in the name of putting an "effective" teacher into every classroom is more telling than whatever jive ass bullshit she spews in L.A.

Had this "escalation" in "union opposition" to the Obama administration's education reform agenda and the Obama administration figure most prominent in pushing it been honest and true, Randi Weingarten wouldn't have stood with him as he put out another reform agenda proposal just four days before she was to unleash "a speech passing harsh judgment on Duncan."

The leaders of the AFT, like the leaders of the UFT, play fast and loose with the truth all the time and the best policy when dealing with them is to remain skeptical when they trot out a new tone and promises of fighting against the ravages of corporate education reform and say "Okay, how are they bullshitting me now?"

Because you can be certain that's what they're doing.

Still, to end on a positive note, the one thing that is important to take away from this is, even Randi Weingarten and the AFT leadership realize defending compromise with the corporate deformers and their education reform agenda won't fly anymore.

We are a long way from 2010 when Weingarten brought AFT rank-and-file this dog-and-pony show:

FireDogLake: Time To Fight Corporate Democrats Who Shill For Education Privatization

DS Wright at FireDogLake:

While President Obama’s former spokesman, Robert Gibbs, manages a national public relations campaign against teachers unions, the National Education Association (NEA) has finally decided it has had enough of Team Obama’s union busting. The NEA has now called on Education Secretary Arne Duncan to resign.

...

Duncan may have made a misstep when he publicly supported a court decision in California that destroyed teacher tenure and job protections, a shill too far?

...


Though it is unlikely Duncan will resign, the call for his resignation from the NEA may be a turning point for the teachers unions who have largely refused to substantively push back against the privatization agenda that Obama has been pushing for five years. Unions typically go light on Democrats which is one of the reasons privatizers do everything they can to use them in their fight to wreck public schools.

The policies of “education reformers” – charter schools, merit pay, vouchers, drill and kill testing to evaluate teachers – that Duncan has promoted have consistently proved not to work. Though the reformers/privatizers constantly point to America’s poor rankings compared to other developed countries, none of those superior countries have adopted the policies the privatizers are promoting, in fact, most have strong unions and lots of public investment and control. So it is a rather strange argument to make, isn’t it?

Nonetheless, it is well past time for teachers to start educating corporate Democrats as to what happens when you try to destroy public education.

It is well past time to take on corporate Dems like Obama, Cuomo, Emanuel, et al. - unless you're Randi Weingarten, of course, in which case you send out a strongly worded letter, then appear at the next Duncan "Teacher Bash" fest to shill for "Excellent Educator Equity".

Yeah, that'll show 'em, Randi.

The Tide Turns On The Common Core

Imagine a story on Common Core a year ago and ask yourself, would the tone have been this skeptical?

Common Core was created in 2009 and is meant to even the playing field by giving every state a universal set of standards to measure learning. The program is incentivized with federal grant money that is given to states that implement the standards.

Massachusetts is typically held up as an example of how the Common Core is supposed to work. The state is considered a success story, with education officials noting improving test scores and reading skills.

But Michael Benezra, a legislative director for the Massachusetts Senate, told Business Insider that the tide is turning in the Bay State on both sides of the aisle.

"Inside the [legislature], the general attitude is that Common Core ... is institutionalized and it's not going anywhere," Benezra said. "I'm starting to see the teachers unions and the charter school people kind of agreeing on the issue that Common Core needs to go."

Common Core emphasizes critical thinking, and the tests are designed to test students' comprehension about what they read and how they come to solutions for math problems. The tests are so intense, taking the average student eight to 10 hours to complete. And teachers are under so much pressure to prepare their students to do well that instruction becomes less individualized and critical thinking in students can be hampered.

"The reliance on testing pigeonholes the teachers to teach only to the test," Benezra said. "So the kids are coming out and what they're learning might not be conventional. So they might know some obscure facts about American history, but they might miss why the revolution started."

Common Core tests could end up defeating the purpose of the standards themselves.

"I think it's kind of counterintuitive to students getting the big picture because they're required to test so much," Benezra said. "In order to perform well on the test, you have to memorize things. ... You can say we're trying to get them to think more critically and read closely … but at the end, the students take a test, they don't write a long essay where they're forced to think deeply about the issue."

Proponents of the Core thought they had won total victory when the Obama administration had forced Common Core, the Common Core tests and teacher evaluations tied to those tests to both the Race to the Top carrot and the No Child Left Behind waiver stick, forcing states to adopt the Obama corporate education deform agenda whole.

But as the opposition against the Core has mounted, so too has the opposition to the ancillary reforms that go with the reform, like the testing.

As Jay Greene noted:

As the Common Core effort crumbles, its supporters are not just failing, but losing ground on previous accomplishments.   If you liked accountability testing, Common Core has done more to set back your efforts than Randi Weingarten ever could have done on her own.

...

 Several states will soon have no high stakes testing while they adopt a moratorium on stakes in their supposed transition to new tests.  The Gates Foundation has backed a two year delay in the hopes of rescuing their effort from collapse.  Like a retreating army suggesting a cease fire, they will find their opponents have little reason to keep the delay temporary.

We've got a long way to go before there is a stake through the heart of the Common Core and it's buried in four different crossroads and I'm under no illusions that the attacks against teachers and public schools will cease because the corporate deformers lost the Common Core War.

But you can see how much ground the CCSS proponents have lost in the last year even in how CCSS stories are framed in the media, let alone how people are talking about the Core at PTA meetings.

Core supporters and proponents once had the upper hand in this fight.

But no more.

The tide has turned and it's not turning back.

77% Of The Race To The Top Award Money In NYC Went To Pay For Consultants, Central Office Work, And Support Staff

Remember when they told us we had to win Race to the Top because that money was so desperately needed for the kids?

Yeah, turns out that was NOT what they planned on spending the RttT cash on:

Less than a quarter of the $107 million that the school system received in federal Race to The Top funds last year was sent directly to school principals.

The decision on how to spend most of the money — $83 million — was made by the central Department of Education, which channeled the federal funds to support staff, consultants and fringe benefits, according to a study by the Independent Budget Office.

This isn't a surprise to those who were paying attention to what was happening around the RttT reforms - they were NEVER supposed to help children or teachers.

Rather, RttT was always about the consultants, the accountability measures and data tracking programs - in short, a lot of the stuff the NYCDOE spent the RttT cash on.

Obama administration hacks and RttT supporters say that stuff DOES help children and teachers, but those of us working in schools and parents with children in the schools know better.

RttT brought CCSS, the Endless Testing regime, APPR teacher evaluations that mandate so many extra tests so that the scores can be used to fire teachers, and the data tracking programs that were meant to account for all this stuff.

If the politicians in charge really wanted to help children and teachers in schools, they would have used the money to lower class sizes, build new facilities, get the kids out of the mold-infested trailers, etc.

But education reform isn't about helping children or teachers.

It's about making it look like they're trying to help children and teachers while really spending billions on the pet projects run by their friends and cronies.

Quinnipiac Poll: Obama Worst President Since WWII

Heckuva job, Barry;

A new Quinnipiac poll finds President Obama is the worst president since World War II.

Key findings: 33% of American voters say Obama is the worst while another 28% pick George W. Bush

Congratulations, dude  - you've beaten out George W., the man who brought us the Katrina response and the Iraq war mess, as worst president since WWII.

That's a heckuva accomplishment.

Obamacore Implementation Just Like Obamacare Implementation

Parents and educators can't figure out what the new Common Core Federal Standards call for:

The 2013-14 school year began with the full implementation of the Common Core State Standards in Maryland, the District of Columbia and 44 additional states.

The new national standards in English/language arts and mathematics symbolize a shift in what it takes for students to be "college and career ready."

"It's very challenging," said Richard Weisenhoff, executive director of academics for Baltimore County Public Schools. "It's requiring a lot more out of our students. They're going to be more fluent in mathematics, and they're going to be better writers and readers based upon what the Common Core is requiring us to do.

"The National Governors Association was the driving force behind it. They decided that, in language arts and mathematics, there was a need for a national standard to be developed," he said.

"My take is, we're getting involved with this so that all the materials that are being developed across the country from educators would be available in our schools as well," he said. "If everyone's teaching the same thing, why reinvent the wheel."

In English/Language Arts, students must "demonstrate independence," "build strong content knowledge," "value evidence," "comprehend as well as critique" and "use technology and digital media strategically and capably," according to the Common Core State Standards website.

In mathematics, students must "make sense of problems and persevere in solving them," "reason abstractly and quantitatively," "attend to precision," "look for and make use of structure" and "look for and express regularity in repeated reasoning," according to the website.

The confusing language describing the standards has been met with much criticism by parents and educators alike.

"That's one of the real problems we've got," Weisenhoff said. "It's hard for a real person to understand.

"I wish it wasn't that way but education shoots ourselves in the foot with all the jargon we have," he said.

Just like Obamacare, Obamacore has been hyped and oversold to the public and it's becoming clearer and clearer that the standards are as half-baked, under-developed and problematic as the ACA program and website.

Given the incompetence with which Obama and his merry men and women rule, it's like President Bush and his merry men and women never left.

Although as Michael Fiorillo often says about the DOE and SED, it's hard to know where the incompetence ends and the malfeasance begins.

Same can be said of Barack Obama and his administration.

The Brazilification Of The United States

From Lloyd Green:

Five years into the Obama presidency, we are further from the Great Recession but also closer to a new normal—economic dystopia.

Yes, the unemployment rate has edged down to 7.6 percent, but America is well on its way to becoming a nation of part-timers and full-time temps. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of  involuntary part-time workers rose by 322,000 to 8.2 million in June, while the ranks of temporary-help services employees have swelled to a record 2.68 million. Meanwhile, the employment-population ratio, the percentage of adult Americans who hold a job, has dropped nearly 2 percent to 58.7 percent since Barack Obama took office.

Remarkably, both political parties are accommodating to this new reality of “Brazilification,” a term coined by Douglas Coupland in his 1991 novel Generation X and defined as the “widening gulf between the rich and the poor and the accompanying disappearance of the middle classes.” On a good day, Brazilification looks like the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute Gala, a party for the well-heeled, well-dressed, and well-coiffed under the dazzle of blinding lights. But, on a bad day, Brazilification is bankrupt Detroit, post-Katrina New Orleans, or the shuttered mining and mill towns 24/7, except bleaker.

For now, see the grim world of Bruce Springsteen’s 2012 album Wrecking Ball. For the future, look for pockets of wealth surrounded by functional despair, where the “haves” are cocooned or walled-off from the “have-nots.” As Sherman McCoy said in Bonfire of the Vanities, “Insulate! Insulate!” And the Masters of the Met do just that.

 One might add the firing of thousands of Chicago public school teachers and the simultaneous hiring of Teach For America interns to replace them as another sign of Brazilification.

Not Adding Value: Obama Edition

From the Associated Press:

The ranks of America's poor are on track to climb to levels unseen in nearly half a century, erasing gains from the war on poverty in the 1960s amid a weak economy and fraying government safety net.

Census figures for 2011 will be released this fall in the critical weeks ahead of the November elections.

The Associated Press surveyed more than a dozen economists, think tanks and academics, both nonpartisan and those with known liberal or conservative leanings, and found a broad consensus: The official poverty rate will rise from 15.1 percent in 2010, climbing as high as 15.7 percent. Several predicted a more modest gain, but even a 0.1 percentage point increase would put poverty at the highest level since 1965.

Poverty is spreading at record levels across many groups, from underemployed workers and suburban families to the poorest poor. More discouraged workers are giving up on the job market, leaving them vulnerable as unemployment aid begins to run out. Suburbs are seeing increases in poverty, including in such political battlegrounds as Colorado, Florida and Nevada, where voters are coping with a new norm of living hand to mouth.

"I grew up going to Hawaii every summer. Now I'm here, applying for assistance because it's hard to make ends meet. It's very hard to adjust," said Laura Fritz, 27, of Wheat Ridge, Colo., describing her slide from rich to poor as she filled out aid forms at a county center. Since 2000, large swaths of Jefferson County just outside Denver have seen poverty nearly double.

Fritz says she grew up wealthy in the Denver suburb of Highlands Ranch, but fortunes turned after her parents lost a significant amount of money in the housing bust. Stuck in a half-million dollar house, her parents began living off food stamps and Fritz's college money evaporated. She tried joining the Army but was injured during basic training.

Now she's living on disability, with an infant daughter and a boyfriend, Garrett Goudeseune, 25, who can't find work as a landscaper. They are struggling to pay their $650 rent on his unemployment checks and don't know how they would get by without the extra help as they hope for the job market to improve.

In an election year dominated by discussion of the middle class, Fritz's case highlights a dim reality for the growing group in poverty. Millions could fall through the cracks as government aid from unemployment insurance, Medicaid, welfare and food stamps diminishes.

"The issues aren't just with public benefits. We have some deep problems in the economy," said Peter Edelman, director of the Georgetown Center on Poverty, Inequality and Public Policy.

Not a pretty picture.

But as usual with our elite overlords, President Obama refuses to be held accountable by the data.

You see, it's Bush's fault.

Really?

Obama wasted all that stimulus money on jive like Race to the Top.

There should have been national programs rebuilding the infrastructure of this country - the roads, the bridges, the rail, the electric grid.

We could have put Americans back to work and rebuilt the Third World infrastructure we suffer with.

Instead we got teacher evaluations tied to test scores.

Heckuva job, Barack "Hoover" Obama.

We need to add one more man to the unemployment ranks - Barack "Hoover" Obama.