(b) NGSS were released in April 2013
(c) Examined by 9 scientists and mathematicians and the Fordham Institute for content, rigor, and clarity
(d) Fordham Institute gave them a "C"
(e) They promote a too simplified understanding of science
(f) Some central scientific concepts are ignored, such as acids and bases in chemistry.
(g) Some content was inaccurate.
(h) They criticized the "ceiling on the content and skills that will be measured at each grade"
(i) Content more advanced students can learn is excluded
(j) Failure "to include essential math content that is critical to science learning" in physics and chemistry
(k) Wording of standards is "confusing"
(l) Focus on students "performing" activities rather than learning a base of knowledge and information needed to engage in scientific reasoning.
(m) In spite of the focus on experiential learning no chemistry labs are required.
(n) There is a shift away from traditional biology, chemistry, and physics over to engineering, which has pros and cons
(o) Students will not be prepared to major in STEM subjects at a 4-year university.
(p) Focus on promoting political controversial topics of climate change, man's impact on the environment, and evolution that do not belong in a science curriculum.
-- They are taught under the guise of objective science.
-- There are plenty of other science topics to cover.
-- Teaching interdisciplinary topics is not appropriate for students at the K-12 level when they need to be learning the rudiments of the basic science disciplines.
-- Education Week: "The standards make clear that evolution is fundamental to understanding the life sciences."
-- Teaching evolution in this way means that a 'faith' is being taught in the classroom which amounts to indoctrination, not education.
-- Frank Niepold, a U.S. "expert" on climate change celebrated the new science standards for their potential to shift the nation's schools towards teaching the liberal view of climate change.
(B) The standards are not "internationally benchmarked" with those of high-achieving countries, but rather are only "informed" by standards of other high-achieving countries.
(C) Fordham Institute: a proponent of CC, admits that several states had standards superior to CC and that many states had standards at least as good.
4. Issue #4: Fiscal Responsibility. The only national study done of the potential costs of implementing the standards and tests estimates nationwide costs of almost $16 billion over 7 years. Continuing costs will be substantial, especially in: (a) professional development of teachers, (b) technology and infrastructure maintenance and upgrades, and (c) textbooks and instructional materials aligned to the Common Core.
5. Issue #5: Value of and Respect for the Individual and the Family. The Common Core program, in the two ways listed below violates the respect that is owed by the government to students and their families.
(A) The Common Core is a set of national education standards which presumes children from one area of the country have the same needs, interests, and/or aptitudes as children from another area of the country. This assumption is not true.
(i) Having to adhere to a set of national standards taught at the same pace in a one-size-fits-all fashion takes some of the creativity, initiative, resourcefulness and joy of learning away from the teachers and the students.
(ii) Putting students on either a "college" or "career" track early on is part of the Common Core program.
(a) Children are not cogs in an economic machine to be plugged into their "proper place" in a managed economy by educational bureaucrats.
(b) A student's future after school is determined by the student himself and his parents with input from the teachers and administrators of the school.
6. Issue #6: Student and Family Privacy. Mandating the states to construct a massive student database called the State Longitudinal Database System, is part of the Common Core program.
(A) This was done by the federal Dept. of Education requiring states to build their huge student databases in order to qualify for Stimulus Bill funding. Information suggested to be included is educational data, test scores, homework completion, extracurricular activity, health care history, disciplinary record, family income range, family voting status, political affiliations, religious affiliation, housing information, bus information, telephone information, family government assistance information, personality traits, work techniques and effort etc., over 400 data points in all.
(B) The Obama administration wants to share the student data with other government agencies and private entities.
(a) Partnering with the Department of Labor, the federal DOE wants to track individual students from preschool through graduation and into the workforce.
(b) The federal government wants to use this information to match the citizens to the workforce needs of industry and plan the future labor market.
(c) This is part of the vision of the Obama administration to manage the American economy, thus transforming our free-market driven, private enterprise-based economy into a managed, planned, command economy which more resembles a government-directed, socialistic economy.
(C) The federal Department of Education is doing this in violation of the federal student privacy law (FERPA), thus allowing transmission of students' personally identifiable information (PII) without student or parental consent.
7. Issue #7: Experience. Common Core is not evidence-based. Its effect on academic achievement is unknown and has not been field-tested anywhere.
(A) The claim that Common Core is "rigorous" by its proponents is unproven because it has never been piloted anywhere.
(B) The organizations who are receiving federal funds to develop the new standardized test aligned to the Common Core want the new test to have a greater reliance on open response test questions (i.e. short answer and essay questions) than the traditional multiple-choice test questions. This is a heavier reliance in these high-stakes tests on subjective questions where answers are not necessarily right or wrong and less reliance on objective questions that have definite right and wrong answers.
(a) In addition they want these test questions to be scored exclusively by a computer and not to use a trained human rater as is currently done for those tests that have open-response questions. This is an experimental approach on a high-stakes test that has not been perfected.
(b) Current tests only use open-response questions on a limited scale and computer-scoring of those tests is only done on a limited scale.
8. Issue #8: Students who Move. Students who move from state to state are less than 2% of the population. Most families who move do so within their state. 8) Issue: Comparison of Student Performance. We can already compare our students' performance with that of students from other states using the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and the SAT and the ACT. 9) Issue: Link between Standards and Student Performance. Brookings Institute found states with high academic standards scored about the same on standardized tests as states with low standards.
What is North Carolina doing with Common Core?
Being one of the first states, if not the first, to quietly adopt Common Core, North Carolina is now debating whether to scrap it in favor of home-grown standards. Unfortunately, it appears that lawmakers and the DPI may simply change the window-dressing. There is concern that the standards themselves will remain in effect while simply changing the name from "Common Core" to "North Carolina Standard Course of Study." An 11-member commission was created last July by our state legislators (Senate bill 812) for the purpose of "reviewing and replacing" the Common Core standards. But now there's a debate about what "review and replace" actually means. To supporters of the core, it means the standards may need a tweak here and there. To opponents, it means they must be scrapped.
The NC legislature established a research committee to study the Common Core standards. The committee was named: Legislative Research Commission (LRC) Committee on Common Core State Standards. It held a series of public meetings that began in December 2013 and continued through March 2014 to address the concerns voiced by an ideologically diverse group of parents, teachers, and citizens who were worried about the long and short-term effects of the standards on public education in North Carolina.
A report was filed last April (April 24, 2014) to summarize those meetings and to make public the Commission's recommendations. The report concluded by recommending legislation to replace the Common Core standards with state- appropriate and state-inspired standards. The bill, according to the report, would be entitled "A Bill to be entitled: An Act to Replace the Common Core by Exercising North Carolina's Proper Constitutional Authority Over All Academic Standards and to Ensure That Standards are Robust and Appropriate, and That They Enable Students to Succeed Academically and Professionally, as Recommended by the Legislative Research Commission." The Report can be accessed as a pdf file from the NC Legislature website
(www.ncleg.net):
The debate continues as to how the standards will be replaced and to what extend the Common Core standards devised and crafted by Achieve, Inc. will be merely "window-dressed." There is one thing that is for sure.. if the people take their eye off the ball and if they waiver in their attention to the subject, the standards will simply have a new name.
The John Locke Foundation has put together a very thoughtful, practice, and proactive paper on the subject ("Spotlight on Common Core: The Way Forward"). It can be accessed at:
http://www.johnlocke.org/acrobat/spotlights/Spotlight450CommonCore.pdf
What have other States being doing with Common Core?
1. 45 states have already adopted Common Core
2. Minnesota only adopted the English Language Arts standards.
3. Nebraska, Texas, Alaska, and Virginia have refused to adopt the Common Core.
4. Michigan Legislature has voted to withhold implementation funding of Common Core.
5. Missouri Senate called for statewide hearings on Common Core.
6. Indiana Senate called for slowing down the implementation of Common Core.
7. States pulling back or considering it: Alabama, South Dakota, and Georgia.
What other backlash actions have there been against Common Core?
1. The Republican National Committee passed a resolution opposing Common Core.
2. The NC state GOP passed a resolution opposing Common Core (authored, in part, by myself, Diane Rufino)
3. Several Congressmen are asking for an accounting from the Dept. of Education on the national student database.
4. Sen. Chuck Grassley and other senators are calling on their colleagues to stop implementation of the Common Core.
5. Presidential GOP candidates have called for the elimination of the US Department of Education, calling it an unconstitutional federal department.
Optional Legislative Action:
1. Repeal the NC legislature's action adopting Common Core. Then we would be back to what we had before any "core."
2. Override and repeal or rescind the State Board of Education, the DPI's 2010 action in which they adopted the Common Core. Note that the state Department of Instruction (DPI) had already invested a lot of time coming up with more rigorous and age-dependent educational standards? Why was that initiative even abandoned? Oh, I know why.... Because of the carrot that was dangled in front of its face - the "Race to the Top" funds to adopt Common Core!! The state can, at least in the interim, default to those standards.
3. Repeal the NC legislature's action making the Common Core curriculum mandatory and instead make it voluntary again. This would allow districts to use any or all parts of the Common Core they want to.
4. Remove the requirement that the core curriculum be aligned to a set of national or international standards.
5. Defund the Common Core program. [Michigan's state legislature did this in their Education Budget bill that funded their DOE. Other state legislatures have taken similar approaches with their power of the purse]
6. Strip the State Department of Instruction (DPI) of its authority to adopt or amend standards and curriculum.
7. Limit the State Department of Instruction (DPI) of its authority to a set of "lean" state standards. The rest of the standards can be "filled in" and curriculum can be determined by the individual school district. The districts can use as much or as little of the Common Core as they want.
8. Allow the State Department of Instruction (DPI) to be able to adopt or amend standards and curriculum but require legislative approval for all such action, with input from teachers, parents, and citizens.
9. Repeal the requirement that the students be administered an assessment aligned to the Common Core.
10. Repeal the requirement that the students be administered an assessment aligned to the Common Core. Let the school districts choose the standardized tests they want to use.
11. Exit the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC). There are provisions in the MOU for exiting the SBAC.
12. Limit the size and scope of the individualized student database by protecting the privacy rights of North Carolina citizens.
13. Limit sharing the student database with other agencies including the federal government. For example, require the written consent of a parent. (Oklahoma did this.)
14. Limit the database to "aggregate" student test data records (group statistics, for example)
15. Issue Tax Credits for Homeschool/Private School tuition/textbook/curriculum expenses.
16. Issue a Tax Credit for families with a stay-at-home parent.
17. Issue a Tax Credit for families who have a parent volunteer regularly at their child's school.
18. Continue to encourage charter schools, particularly by making it financially easier to establish them.
In 2014, I wrote of the many Criticisms of Common Core. I think they are worthwhile to re-address, lest anyone should forget them.
1). The government is bribing the states with funding to adopt and implement Common Core. Funding to the states from the federal government through the Obama administration's signature school reform initiative, Race to the Top, is effectively tied to state" adopting Common Core. Further, the White House threatens to deny funding to states through Title 1 of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) to states that fail to adopt "standards that prepare students for 'college and career.'" (Common Core is the only game in town when it comes to proposing wide national standards, so the general language fits the Obama administration's intentions just fine.) Indeed, as reported by Education Week, President Obama's proposal to tie reauthorization of the ESEA would require states to either join with their counterparts-as does the Common Core system-in adopting common standards or collaborate with state universities to establish education standards.
The ESEA is a United States federal statute enacted in 1965 as part of President Lyndon B Johnson's "War on Poverty" which funds primary and secondary education and is historically the most far-reaching federal legislation affected education ever passed by Congress. However, the act explicitly forbids the establishment of a national curriculum and all of the federal legislation affecting schools following the ESEA (The General Education Provisions Act, the Department of Education Organization Act, the No Child Left Behind Act) were all solidly aligned on forbidding federal control over the curriculum. These laws have been frustrating for would-be education reformers, Republicans and Democrats. The Obama administration's Department of Education, facing the same legal obstacles, worked with the NGA Center and CCSSO to develop standards states would be free to adopt but were tied to Race to the Top's hundreds of millions of dollars to states that chose to adopt the Common Core. In a nineteen-page analysis of the legal standing of the Common Core State Standards, The Road to a National Curriculum, Department of Education documents are quoted directly, explaining "The goal of common K-12 standard is to replace the existing patchwork of State standards that results in unequal expectations based on geography."
Worthy goal or not, the Department of Education's intentions directly contradict the last fifty years of Congress declaring the school curriculum off-limits to the US government.
2). It uses a one-size fits all approach. The Common Core standards were founded on a severely flawed idea - that every child can learn the same way and at the same pace. It assumes that every child across America will "be on the same page at the same time." Let's say, for example, that your child has a learning disorder. He or she will be left behind, as Common Core has no provision for helping those that can't keep up.
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