If you have kids or grandkids and you’ve looked into their education curriculum at all, you’ve likely seen the term “Common Core” but do you know what Common Core Standards are? Do you know who developed them, where and for what purpose? If you’re anything like I was a few years ago, the answer is probably no. You might have even asked someone, a friend, relative or even a teacher or administrator at the school, “What is this Common Core Standards reference?” If you did, you probably either got a puzzled response or the teacher/administrator said, “Oh, that’s just how we ensure that kids at our school and kids at other schools are on the same page, and it allows us to judge how each student is progressing in their learning course (or some such phraseology).” And like me, you probably nodded and thought, “Well that’s not so bad, this school is great (or perhaps, “if we could be like <insert great school name here> that would really be great”) and why not share that success with other schools to lift all kids.” Then you probably went on about carting kids to practice and dance, getting dinner ready and making sure that your paying job was in order. In other words, you went back to living life, just like me. Until that is, I heard about “Race to the Top”. Having 4 kids, 2 of which are in public schools, I was always interested in their education and so when I heard at a meeting in 2009 that the new administration was going to offer a new program for US schools called “Race to the Top” where new nationwide curriculum and testing standards would be adopted, my Daddy sense tingled. “Nationwide standards”…whose standards? Where did they come from? When were they created? I didn’t even know where to start then, suddenly, there was a “Race to the Top” workshop that was open to the public right here in my Christina School District. So I grabbed a notebook and a pen, kissed my wife and kids and headed on over to see what I could find out. I published my findings from the meeting on the web and you can read them on the Examiner.com website here.
For the sake of time, I’ll summarize my findings. Race to the Top’s success depended on the State Department of Education getting the buy-in from the School Districts and that the money was, as it usually is, targeted at Title 1 eligible students and school (mostly inner-city schools and low income areas). Also, Education Secretary Dr. Lillian Lowery, who led the workshop, told us that many of the categories that Race to the Top addressed were already included in Governor Markell’s proposed education reforms that were published long before RttT was announced by President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan and this fact was used to counter the “myth” that Delaware made these up just to get the money from Race to the Top. It was bantered about that if we were just looking for money; the Vice President was from Delaware of course, we could get “money”. This was about “education reform”. As the “workshop” (more of a sales pitch really) progressed, it became more and more focused on “data”. In fact, the term “data coach” and the fact that before Race to the Top was even suggested, Delaware was working on a way to “track data” on children’s progress through their education journey were often cited. Dr. Lowery highly touted the new DCAS testing system that was electronic and designed and built to track student progress. All this led me to wonder, did Delaware KNOW about Race to the Top beforehand? I left there with more questions than answers but more determined than ever to find answers to my questions. Boy, was I in for a ride.
I started, as you will see from reading my post on my meeting findings linked above, with checking out some of the players. Who was Arne Duncan? What was “Vision 2015”? Where did Lillian Lowery come from? What about Jack Markell? Google, became my best friend. What I found was nothing short of shocking. Again, you can read my full list of findings here but I will summarize them for this piece. All of them were connected to one man, Eli Broad. Mr. Broad (rhymes with “road”) is a billionaire who made his money building houses and then parlayed it in life insurance companies. He now collects art and spends much of his time “reforming education”. It turns out that all of the named individuals above, as well as some other well known “educrats” came through Broad’s network of education reform tentacles. In addition, Vision 2015, a Rodel sponsored Delaware initiative to transform our school system, was setup and run by Broad’s own right hand man. Broad, along with Bill and Melinda Gates, Mayor Bloomberg and other high net worth education reformers have been infusing hundreds of millions and collectively potentially billions of dollars into Charter schools, curriculum reforms, teacher training and a myriad of other methods of reforming education as it exists today. Oddly, educators and administrators seem to be at odds with many of their intended reforms which seems weird until you really dig into why. What it comes down to is this, while some will attempt to politicize and polarize the scenario, the truth comes down to the fact that these big money education reformers don’t think the teachers unions are helping kids and they don’t put a whole lot of value into real academic pursuits like reading Shakespeare and “the Classics”, preferring instead to prepare kids for “the jobs of tomorrow”. Both sides SMACK of elitism and the progressive mindset. One simply wants to replace an emphasis on education for the sake of education with education for the means of training for certain skillsets. Both remove/reduce individual choice and condemn future generations to less than child focused education systems in favor of serving the whims of the developers of the system. But the relationship is more than simply a handful of really rich people arguing with a handful of academicians. You’ll see that when we talk about Common Core.
As I said, Delaware’s been planning for this implementation for some time and likewise, Common Core is not exactly “new”. It was developed in 2009, by a group called “Student Achievement” after the National Governors Association approached David Coleman to create standards that could be adopted nationally. So in effect, the NGA engaged one man and his company to create a national standard for education. By 2009, 45 states had adopted Common Core Standards (Texas, Alaska, Minnesota, Nebraska, Virginia and Washington, D.C. did not participate) and Common Core led to new national markets for text book publishers and test developers (something that education reform activists and leftist “cause leaders” detest…capitalism). As of 2012, the number is up to 48 states and territories. Delaware will have full “Common Core” implementation in 2014-2015 when new standardized testing will be rolled into DCAS that specifically tracks Common Core goals. David Coleman, dubbed “The Schoolmaster” by the progressive magazine “The Atlantic” is an old mold “educrat” who was refined in the academic tradition of reading “difficult texts” (like Shakespeare) and who was so upset with America’s lack of attention to such classics that he began the Common Core Standards movement to restart it. His goal with the standards is to create an education system with college as the end goal. “Every child should go to college” is a phrase that speaks to what David believes and HE is going to make sure that we have a college prep educational system to do just that. In fact, he points to studies from the Minnesota College Readiness Center that show that almost 1/3 of college students enrolled in remedial writing courses earned high marks in high school English. The study also found that colleges and high schools valued different kinds of writing, “while high-school teachers rewarded students for the organization and wording of their essays, college professors placed greater value on strong thesis statements backed by evidence from the curriculum”. So in short, high school teachers were still looking at basic fundamentals with regard to writing while colleges were looking for cohesive arguments.
Common Core reforms are evident today in Delaware schools. Heard of STEM? Have you wondered why your children only take DCAS focused on Math and English (until middle school when Science and Social Studies are introduced)? That’s because Common Core is intended to focus on the two things that elite colleges really look for, Liberal Arts (English, Reading, etc.) and Math. Perhaps the most telling line in David Coleman’s interview with the Atlantic (the setting by the way is at an educators forum right here in Delaware) is this “Coleman was frustrated by the fact that “30 years after the civil-rights movement, none of these students were close—not even close—to being ready for Yale. They’d had so little practice with commanding difficult text.”” So let’s recap the process of how Common Core went from one man’s passion to a national standard. David Coleman is raised by intellectual elites in NYC, attends Harvard and goes to Oxford, looking back (and down) on the poor, unfortunate masses who are barely capable of understanding the beauty of Frost or the genius of Shakespeare and being the progressive intellectual elitist that he is, he tries to make a difference. First, he tries to get a job as a teacher after finishing his Liberal Arts degree and he is rejected. He then turns around and decides that he will make it his mission to change education and being enlightenment and the wonders of Liberal Arts to “the little people”. He even creates a company designed to promote his beliefs. He and that company go forth to lobby local education and government leaders to fix their education system by simply coming up with a plan to provide a core curriculum that can ensure that children in NYC are as prepared for college as children in Loudoun County, VA (America’s “richest county”). Simultaneously, he reaches out to education reformers with deep pockets like Bill and Melinda Gates and Eli Broad. He leverages the technical connections of Gates (and the billions of dollars he has) and education connections of Eli Broad (and again, his billions) to ensure that upcoming educators, administrators and government leaders are on board. Finally, he convinces the National Governors Association and State Education Leaders that he’s the guy to develop their Common Core Curriculum Platform. So they hire him and his company to develop the standards. Meanwhile, Eli Broad’s education connections rise to power in states (Lillian Lowery is Broad Superintendents Academy graduate and Jack Markell has attended Broad workshops) and even in the federal government (Arne Duncan is a Broad Academy graduate and often a feature speaker for new Academy classes) and “Race to the Top” is born using the exact educational process that Broad has taught based on Coleman’s platform. Suddenly, thanks to the Stimulus Package and this new Race to the Top program, billions of taxpayer dollars now join the hundreds of millions of dollars from the progressive elites, corporations and education reformers in implementing Common Core Standards. Race to the Top, developed based on Broad guidelines, includes direct provisions for testing standards (data collection), curriculum standards, Charter School support, teacher evaluations and improvement of Title 1 schools first.
So there you have it, Common Sense made of Common Core, one man’s dream becomes a national standard. If you, like me, are concerned about what this all means in the end and how it manifests itself, stay tuned. In future articles, I will continue to name names and show you who is doing what with your child’s data, what they’re teaching our kids and who is behind it all. If, like me, you are sufficiently fed up with this treatment of our children and are ready to take action, contact your local school board (repeatedly) and call your State Senator, State Representative and even your Governor and demand that they get your state OUT of Common Core. You’re going to be called names and labeled crazy but it’s YOUR KIDS. They’re worth some ridicule.
Next: DCAS - What is it? Is there something similar in your state?
Comments