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The States Are Beginning To Say NO!
NO TO COMMON CORE
The Tantasqua Regional School District Committee in MA is pushing for state legislation to overturn the state Board of Education’s decision to adopt the National Educational Standards because committee members are concerned about the impact the Common Core (CCS) might have on its students.
State Committee Chairman Michael J. Valanzola stated, "the Common Core eliminates the local control and allows folks that are not really connected to or impacted by the district to make the decisions. He continued by saying, “anything that removes control from a local body and gives it to a big government bureaucrat is NOT something that should happen without discussion,”
State Committee Chairman Michael J. Valanzola stated, "the Common Core eliminates the local control and allows folks that are not really connected to or impacted by the district to make the decisions. He continued by saying, “anything that removes control from a local body and gives it to a big government bureaucrat is NOT something that should happen without discussion,”
English is the language of America and BUSINESS.
Any student not learning English is at a extreme disadvantage in the business community.
_ THE BIRTH OF THE COMMON CORE STANDARDS
David Coleman has a long record of innovation and leadership in the field of education. He was significant contributing author to the Common Core Standards. Mr. Coleman's most recent initiative is Student Achievement Partners, LLC, an organization which assembles leading thinkers and researchers to design actions to substantially improve student achievement. In this process, rigorous policy analysis, research, and design are integrated to focus on the most significant outcomes for students. Student Achievement Partners serves foundations and school districts. Previously, Mr. Coleman founded the Grow Network ‐ acquired by McGraw‐Hill in 2005 ‐ which has become the nation’s leader in assessment reporting and customized instructional materials. Mr. Coleman was a lecturer at the University of London before going to work in the pro bono education area of McKinsey & Company. He is a Rhodes Scholar and a graduate of Yale University, Oxford University and Cambridge University.
David Coleman has a long record of innovation and leadership in the field of education. He was significant contributing author to the Common Core Standards. Mr. Coleman's most recent initiative is Student Achievement Partners, LLC, an organization which assembles leading thinkers and researchers to design actions to substantially improve student achievement. In this process, rigorous policy analysis, research, and design are integrated to focus on the most significant outcomes for students. Student Achievement Partners serves foundations and school districts. Previously, Mr. Coleman founded the Grow Network ‐ acquired by McGraw‐Hill in 2005 ‐ which has become the nation’s leader in assessment reporting and customized instructional materials. Mr. Coleman was a lecturer at the University of London before going to work in the pro bono education area of McKinsey & Company. He is a Rhodes Scholar and a graduate of Yale University, Oxford University and Cambridge University.
In Florida,The Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts
which includes reading standards, were adopted by the Florida State
Board of Education on July 27, 2010. The Common Core State Standards in
Mathematics were adopted by the Florida State Board of Education on July
27, 2010. In the summer of 2010 the Florida Department of Education
convened a state committee to determine if additional content (up to
15%) was needed to satisfy English language arts and math requirements
in Florida. Based on the results of this study, in the fall of 2010 the
Department recommended no additions be made to the original Common Core
State Standards adopted in July 2010. These standards are to be fully
implemented with the beginning of the 2013-14 school year. These will be known in the future as "2010 Next Generation Sunshine State Standards (Common Core)" - for English, Language Arts and Math.
REASONS FOR CONCERN!
Despite the proponents’ claim that the Common Core Initiative is “state-led,” the Common Core (CC) standards were created by special interests in Washington and funded by entities such as the Gates Foundation. States had little to no input.
The federal government has coerced states into accepting the CC standards, by tying their adoption to Race to the Top funding, No Child Left Behind waivers, etc.
The federal government is funding creation of the tests that will be aligned with CC; the testing consortia explicitly link their federally funded work to developing curricula. The inevitable result will be a national curriculum controlled by the federal government. Federal control over curricula is not allowed by the Constitution and prohibited by three federal statutes. Thus, what the federal government is doing with CC is illegal.
A state that adopts CCS must accept the standards word for word. It may add a small amount of content but may not subtract anything. Anything it adds will not be included on the national tests. A state that wants to change any strand of CC may not do so on its own, but instead must persuade many other jurisdictions (and probably the federal Department of Education) to agree to the proposed change. This will be the end of Florida’s or any other state that played the game autonomy over the education of its students.
The English language arts standards in CCS de-emphasize the study of literature and have been found by a University of Arkansas expert as inadequate to prepare students for college. She writes: “The wisest move all states could make to ensure that students learn to read, understand, and use the English language appropriately before they graduate from high school is first to abandon Common Core’s ‘standards’ . . . .”
The math standards in CCS, by moving algebra I from 8th grade to 9th, will ensure that the large majority of students do not reach calculus in high school, as expected by elite colleges. They also require that geometry be taught by an experimental method that has never been used successfully anywhere in the world - nor are most teacher's aware of what that is.
Future national standards, which the federal government will likely coerce the states to accept as well, will contain potentially controversial content in history, civics, science, and health and sex education. Georgia will have no control over this content.
The costs of implementing and administering CCS are unknown but will be substantial. States will have to finance new textbooks, teacher re-training, technology for assessments, etc. One study estimates $16 billion nationwide in implementation costs alone. One expert estimates that, for South Carolina, the annual cost of administering the CCS - aligned computer assessments could reach $100/student.
What Can Be Done?
It’s not too late to stop Common Core!
The states legislature's can cancel the state’s coerced commitment to Common Core. Classroom implementation won’t begin until 2012-2013 (full implementation is projected to take 3 years), and the national assessments won’t be introduced until 2014-2015 at the earliest. A withdrawal, or at least a halt in funding until the issues can be studied, would put Florida in line with a gathering trend that is playing out in Delaware, Indiana, South Carolina, Utah, Virginia and possibly George (Texas and Alaska never signed on to Common Core in the first place).
The chief obstacle to legislative reversal is ignorance – most legislators have never even heard of Common Core, because the commitments were made by other entities when the legislature wasn’t in session.
We need:
Calls, emails, and letters to legislators to explain the dangers of Common Core
Meetings with legislators to discuss the issue
Appearances at town halls to ask about Common Core
Letters to the editor, calls to radio shows, conversations with friends and family to educate the public about the issue
Close monitoring of textbooks/instructional materials, aligned with Common Core, being introduced in your children’s schools (the Indiana withdrawal movement began when a mother examined her son’s new “fuzzy math” book, called the principal to ask about it, and ultimately met with her state senator to sound the alarm about Common Core)
The goal: To make sure that, before next year’s legislative session begins, every legislator who might be at all sympathetic to our position is educated about the problem and willing to help solve it.
The federal government has coerced states into accepting the CC standards, by tying their adoption to Race to the Top funding, No Child Left Behind waivers, etc.
The federal government is funding creation of the tests that will be aligned with CC; the testing consortia explicitly link their federally funded work to developing curricula. The inevitable result will be a national curriculum controlled by the federal government. Federal control over curricula is not allowed by the Constitution and prohibited by three federal statutes. Thus, what the federal government is doing with CC is illegal.
A state that adopts CCS must accept the standards word for word. It may add a small amount of content but may not subtract anything. Anything it adds will not be included on the national tests. A state that wants to change any strand of CC may not do so on its own, but instead must persuade many other jurisdictions (and probably the federal Department of Education) to agree to the proposed change. This will be the end of Florida’s or any other state that played the game autonomy over the education of its students.
The English language arts standards in CCS de-emphasize the study of literature and have been found by a University of Arkansas expert as inadequate to prepare students for college. She writes: “The wisest move all states could make to ensure that students learn to read, understand, and use the English language appropriately before they graduate from high school is first to abandon Common Core’s ‘standards’ . . . .”
The math standards in CCS, by moving algebra I from 8th grade to 9th, will ensure that the large majority of students do not reach calculus in high school, as expected by elite colleges. They also require that geometry be taught by an experimental method that has never been used successfully anywhere in the world - nor are most teacher's aware of what that is.
Future national standards, which the federal government will likely coerce the states to accept as well, will contain potentially controversial content in history, civics, science, and health and sex education. Georgia will have no control over this content.
The costs of implementing and administering CCS are unknown but will be substantial. States will have to finance new textbooks, teacher re-training, technology for assessments, etc. One study estimates $16 billion nationwide in implementation costs alone. One expert estimates that, for South Carolina, the annual cost of administering the CCS - aligned computer assessments could reach $100/student.
What Can Be Done?
It’s not too late to stop Common Core!
The states legislature's can cancel the state’s coerced commitment to Common Core. Classroom implementation won’t begin until 2012-2013 (full implementation is projected to take 3 years), and the national assessments won’t be introduced until 2014-2015 at the earliest. A withdrawal, or at least a halt in funding until the issues can be studied, would put Florida in line with a gathering trend that is playing out in Delaware, Indiana, South Carolina, Utah, Virginia and possibly George (Texas and Alaska never signed on to Common Core in the first place).
The chief obstacle to legislative reversal is ignorance – most legislators have never even heard of Common Core, because the commitments were made by other entities when the legislature wasn’t in session.
We need:
Calls, emails, and letters to legislators to explain the dangers of Common Core
Meetings with legislators to discuss the issue
Appearances at town halls to ask about Common Core
Letters to the editor, calls to radio shows, conversations with friends and family to educate the public about the issue
Close monitoring of textbooks/instructional materials, aligned with Common Core, being introduced in your children’s schools (the Indiana withdrawal movement began when a mother examined her son’s new “fuzzy math” book, called the principal to ask about it, and ultimately met with her state senator to sound the alarm about Common Core)
The goal: To make sure that, before next year’s legislative session begins, every legislator who might be at all sympathetic to our position is educated about the problem and willing to help solve it.
_ COMMON CORE STANDARDS! NO GOOD FOR AMERICAN CHILDREN!
Established in 2007, Common Core is a non-profit 501(c)3 organization formed to promote content-rich liberal arts education
in America’s K–12 schools. Common Core believes that a child who
graduates from high school without an understanding of culture, the
arts, history, literature, civics, and language has in fact been left
behind. To improve education in America, Common Core creates curriculum
tools and also promotes programs, policies, and initiatives at the
local, state, and federal levels that provide students with challenging,
rigorous instruction in the full range of liberal arts and sciences.
Click here for more information.
Common Core’s trustees are Erik Berg, a second grade public school teacher in Boston, Massachusetts; Barbara Byrd-Bennett, chief academic and accountability officer of the Detroit Public Schools; Antonia Cortese, secretary-treasurer of the American Federation of Teachers; Pascal Forgione, Jr., executive director of the Educational Testing Service’s Center on K–12 Assessment and Performance Management; Lorraine Griffith, a fifth grade public school teacher in Asheville, North Carolina; Jason Griffiths, headmaster of the Brooklyn Latin School; Joy Hakim, author of A History of Us and The Story of Science; Bill Honig, former superintendent of public instruction for the state of California; Carol Jago, high school teacher and former president of the National Council of Teachers of English; Richard Kessler, executive director of The Center for Arts Education; Lynne Munson, president and executive director of Common Core; and Juan Rangel, CEO of Chicago-based United Neighborhood Organization.
Common Core’s trustees are Erik Berg, a second grade public school teacher in Boston, Massachusetts; Barbara Byrd-Bennett, chief academic and accountability officer of the Detroit Public Schools; Antonia Cortese, secretary-treasurer of the American Federation of Teachers; Pascal Forgione, Jr., executive director of the Educational Testing Service’s Center on K–12 Assessment and Performance Management; Lorraine Griffith, a fifth grade public school teacher in Asheville, North Carolina; Jason Griffiths, headmaster of the Brooklyn Latin School; Joy Hakim, author of A History of Us and The Story of Science; Bill Honig, former superintendent of public instruction for the state of California; Carol Jago, high school teacher and former president of the National Council of Teachers of English; Richard Kessler, executive director of The Center for Arts Education; Lynne Munson, president and executive director of Common Core; and Juan Rangel, CEO of Chicago-based United Neighborhood Organization.
_ Common Core State Standards Content Concerns
Uses confusing language in some standards.
- Includes significant mathematical sophistication written at a level beyond understanding of most parents, students, administrators, decision makers and many teachers i.e., grade levels.
- Lack of coherence and clarity to be consistently interpreted by students, parents, teachers, administrators, curriculum developers, textbook developers/publishers, and assessment developers.
- Standards are inappropriately placed, including delayed requirement for standard well defined instruction's for a final result, which will hinder student success and waste valuable instructional time.
- Treat important topics unevenly. This will result in inefficient use of instructional and practice time.
- The standards are not well organized at the high school level. Some important topics are insufficiently covered. The standards are not divided into defined courses.
- Places emphasis on Standards for Mathematical Practice which supports a constructivist approach. This approach is typical of “reform” math programs to which many parents across the country object.
- Publishers of reform programs are aligning them with the CCS Standards for Mathematical Practice. The CCS will not necessarily improve the math programs being used in many schools.
- Unusual and unproven approach to geometry which I might add the teachers have not learned yet.
- Delay development of some key concepts and skills.
Uses confusing language in some standards.
- Are not always clear or measureable on expected student outcomes.
- Are not always organized in a logical way and are difficult to follow.
- Treat literary elements inconsistently.
- Have some writing standards that are general and do not specify what a student should be able to know or do.
- Focus on skills over content in reading.
- Do not address or require cursive writing.
- Comprehension form of reading is not taught
DAVID COLEMAN, COMMON CORE STANDARDS & A CROCODILE IN the BEDROOM!
I mistakenly assumed the Common Core Standards had been written by educators, presented to committee’s of educators to evaluate, but I was wrong. Yes, there were individual groups and organizations who had some input on the writing of the standards, but the document’s themselves were written by a team of two, among them, David Coleman, the dangerous one.
First a short Bio on Mr. Coleman! He is a Rhodes Scholar and a graduate of Yale University, Oxford and Cambridge Universities in London. . His first touch with education was when Coleman founded the Grow Network ‐ acquired by McGraw‐Hill in 2005 ‐ which has become the nation’s leader in assessment reporting and customized instructional materials. Mr. Coleman was a lecturer at the University of London before going to work in the pro bono education area of McKinsey & Company. Mr. Coleman's most recent initiative before writing the CCS, was his involvement with the Student Achievement Partners, LLC, an organization which assembles leading thinkers and researchers to design actions to substantially improve student achievement. In this process, rigorous policy analysis, research, and design are integrated to focus on the most significant outcomes for students. Student Achievement Partners serves foundations and school districts.
MR. COLEMAN HAS NEVER TAUGHT NOR HAS HE EVER BEEN CALLED AN EDUCATOR OR TEACHER, BUT HE DOES ADMIT TO ONCE ATTENDING PS 41 IN MANHATTAN!
Not being an educator myself, I do consider myself an expert on education, but as a researcher I do have common sense and the ability cipher what I read and hear. One thing that stands out for me is with Mr. Colman stating “in grades K-5, at least half of the material read by students must be non-fiction” or what he refers to as “informational text”.
In April, 2011 educators gathered at the NY State Department of Education to listen to Coleman present a few more of his proclamations supporting the CCS and you have to ask yourself if this is a man of deep experience or just a cuckoo bird let loose on a hapless bunch of educators who don’t know how to voice dissent. (VIDEO”S) Coleman presented for one hour 59 minutes in decreeing the new reality of teaching in public schools across America. No one in the audience challenged his bizarre declarations. Most I think were in a state of shock.
Coleman asked the audience, “Do most people know the two most popular forms of writing in the American high school today? … It is either the writing of a personal opinion or it is the presentation of a personal matter. The only problem, forgive me for saying this so bluntly, the only problem with those two forms of writing is as you grow up in this world you realize people really don't give a sheet about what you feel or what you think.” (His video will shows he actually says “shit”!)
What he is stating is true to a point! In writing about those things, we were never graded so much on the content of the story, but the use of grammar and its correctness.
You could also say our DOE and STATE DOE feel the same way about the educators responsible for teaching our children. Like everything else they do, they want to tell us how things should be done (they aren’t EDUCATORS either) though they never bother to ask us what we thought of it before adopting it.
Coleman insists that teachers must train students to be workers in the Global Economy. In his words, “It is rare in a working environment that someone says, “Johnson, I need a market analysis by Friday but before that I need a compelling account of your childhood.” Translation to the classroom: No more primary grade essays about lost teeth or middle school essays about pre- adolescent problems. Instead, students must provide critical analysis of the “Allegory of the Cave” from Plato’s Republic, listed as an “exemplary informational text” in the Common Core State Standards for Language Arts in New York. If that’s judged as over the top for 12-year-olds, there’s always Ronald Reagan’s 1988 “Address to Students at Moscow State University.” (which is listed as reading material for NY CCS).
Coleman talked about the shifts in teaching demanded by the Common Core primarily beyond that “learning to read” stage. At the end of each grade, students must be able to read developmentally appropriate complex text independently; and before they can read independently, they must have classroom experience in wading through complex text in order to make any meaning of it. Teachers, Coleman urged, need to spend less time preparing students to read and more time scaffolding the way they read complex text by tethering their thinking to the text. Rather than spend days back grounding a text or attempting to shorten reading time by summarizing the text, teachers need to dive into text, letting the author’s words wash over the reader, baptizing them not with water but with new ways of thinking.
Coleman urged teachers to read and think aloud only through the opening paragraph or two, modeling how the brain talks to itself, carrying on an inner conversation to question and make meaning of the text. He criticized teaching an over-dependence on explicit reading strategies such as making personal connections and predicting before, during and after. Paraphrasing Coleman, he explained that spending too much time on personal connections or how kids feel about a text is irrelevant to college and career readiness. He asked those present if we would sit by someone at a movie who constantly predicts what is going to come next in the drama. Coleman’s concept is though literacy we can prepare children only for a working environment and as though personal opinion isn’t vital in a working environment.
Coleman is on a mission to slash both the amount of personal narrative in writing and the amount of fiction in reading. This is based not on any experience teaching – except at the University of London – but because, he insists, readers gain “world knowledge” through nonfiction, which he calls “informational text.” Listening to Coleman evokes Kafka’s The Castle: “You have been in the village a few days and already you think you know everything better than everyone here.” The difference is that Coleman provides no evidence that he’s been in the public school village even for a few days.
Skeptics who might doubt that replacing Brown Bear, Brown Bear with a Wikipedia entry on the Brown bear you find in Northern America and Europe will stave off our nation’s economic woes might wonder: If fiction is no more vital than leftover turnips, why is there a Nobel Prize in Literature and not in lawyers’ briefs or material from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco’s Web site (listed as a Common Core exemplary text).
In presenting his notion of a model lesson for teaching Martin Luther King Jr’s “Letter to a Birmingham Jail,” Coleman snidely rejects such approaches as providing any biographical, cultural, or historical context for the letter — just as he rejects reader response theory which focuses on the reader as an active agent in the work’s meaning. Instead, Coleman champions what amounts to New Criticism on steroids, insisting that the reader’s sole focus must be only on the words in the text.
Although a multitude of expert readers show that the emperor of the Common Core Standards is naked, as long as such professional organizations as the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) and the International Reading Association (IRA) remain silent, David Coleman seems safe in shouting his absurd declarations from the rooftops. Instead of offering any informed resistance, they are occupied with figuring out how they can make money from embracing the Common Core — and staving off dissidents in their own ranks. Last year, NCTE resorted to technical excuses for squashing a proposed resolution against the Common Core.
The Common Core Standards exist because the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation wanted them. To help their aide-de-camps, the president and the U. S. Secretary of Education pretend that these are state and not national standards. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation sent buckets of money to the National Governors Association and Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education Chief’s for Change Council to act as sponsors along with tons of money to the National PTA to spread the good word. As I am sure you have noticed, there has not been much about this in our media, especially not pointing to the money source. In fact, very few media even bother to mention anything about the Common Core.
This Common Core den of thieves who are stealing the literary rights of our students should read Arnold Lobel’s lovely little fable, “The Crocodile in the Bedroom”, a cute story with a real lesson. A crocodile who loved the neat and tidy rows of the flowers on the wallpaper in his bedroom was coaxed outside into the garden by his wife, who invited him to smell the roses and the lilies of the valley. The crocodile couldn’t stand the “terrible tangle” of freely growing flowers, and went to bed, preferring to stare at neat and tidy wallpaper. There, “he turned a very pale and sickly shade of green.”
With David Coleman as their spokesman out on the stump, the National Governors Association, the Chief’s for Change, and the U. S. Department of Education, acting in concert with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, prescribe a very pale, sickly shade of green future for our vibrant and deliciously messy classrooms. Certainly, Lobel’s moral, “Without a doubt, there is such a thing as too much order, applies even more to the classroom than it does to wallpaper. And letting our corporate school reformers steamroll our schools into a neat and tidy standardized product puts our children in great peril.”
First a short Bio on Mr. Coleman! He is a Rhodes Scholar and a graduate of Yale University, Oxford and Cambridge Universities in London. . His first touch with education was when Coleman founded the Grow Network ‐ acquired by McGraw‐Hill in 2005 ‐ which has become the nation’s leader in assessment reporting and customized instructional materials. Mr. Coleman was a lecturer at the University of London before going to work in the pro bono education area of McKinsey & Company. Mr. Coleman's most recent initiative before writing the CCS, was his involvement with the Student Achievement Partners, LLC, an organization which assembles leading thinkers and researchers to design actions to substantially improve student achievement. In this process, rigorous policy analysis, research, and design are integrated to focus on the most significant outcomes for students. Student Achievement Partners serves foundations and school districts.
MR. COLEMAN HAS NEVER TAUGHT NOR HAS HE EVER BEEN CALLED AN EDUCATOR OR TEACHER, BUT HE DOES ADMIT TO ONCE ATTENDING PS 41 IN MANHATTAN!
Not being an educator myself, I do consider myself an expert on education, but as a researcher I do have common sense and the ability cipher what I read and hear. One thing that stands out for me is with Mr. Colman stating “in grades K-5, at least half of the material read by students must be non-fiction” or what he refers to as “informational text”.
In April, 2011 educators gathered at the NY State Department of Education to listen to Coleman present a few more of his proclamations supporting the CCS and you have to ask yourself if this is a man of deep experience or just a cuckoo bird let loose on a hapless bunch of educators who don’t know how to voice dissent. (VIDEO”S) Coleman presented for one hour 59 minutes in decreeing the new reality of teaching in public schools across America. No one in the audience challenged his bizarre declarations. Most I think were in a state of shock.
Coleman asked the audience, “Do most people know the two most popular forms of writing in the American high school today? … It is either the writing of a personal opinion or it is the presentation of a personal matter. The only problem, forgive me for saying this so bluntly, the only problem with those two forms of writing is as you grow up in this world you realize people really don't give a sheet about what you feel or what you think.” (His video will shows he actually says “shit”!)
What he is stating is true to a point! In writing about those things, we were never graded so much on the content of the story, but the use of grammar and its correctness.
You could also say our DOE and STATE DOE feel the same way about the educators responsible for teaching our children. Like everything else they do, they want to tell us how things should be done (they aren’t EDUCATORS either) though they never bother to ask us what we thought of it before adopting it.
Coleman insists that teachers must train students to be workers in the Global Economy. In his words, “It is rare in a working environment that someone says, “Johnson, I need a market analysis by Friday but before that I need a compelling account of your childhood.” Translation to the classroom: No more primary grade essays about lost teeth or middle school essays about pre- adolescent problems. Instead, students must provide critical analysis of the “Allegory of the Cave” from Plato’s Republic, listed as an “exemplary informational text” in the Common Core State Standards for Language Arts in New York. If that’s judged as over the top for 12-year-olds, there’s always Ronald Reagan’s 1988 “Address to Students at Moscow State University.” (which is listed as reading material for NY CCS).
Coleman talked about the shifts in teaching demanded by the Common Core primarily beyond that “learning to read” stage. At the end of each grade, students must be able to read developmentally appropriate complex text independently; and before they can read independently, they must have classroom experience in wading through complex text in order to make any meaning of it. Teachers, Coleman urged, need to spend less time preparing students to read and more time scaffolding the way they read complex text by tethering their thinking to the text. Rather than spend days back grounding a text or attempting to shorten reading time by summarizing the text, teachers need to dive into text, letting the author’s words wash over the reader, baptizing them not with water but with new ways of thinking.
Coleman urged teachers to read and think aloud only through the opening paragraph or two, modeling how the brain talks to itself, carrying on an inner conversation to question and make meaning of the text. He criticized teaching an over-dependence on explicit reading strategies such as making personal connections and predicting before, during and after. Paraphrasing Coleman, he explained that spending too much time on personal connections or how kids feel about a text is irrelevant to college and career readiness. He asked those present if we would sit by someone at a movie who constantly predicts what is going to come next in the drama. Coleman’s concept is though literacy we can prepare children only for a working environment and as though personal opinion isn’t vital in a working environment.
Coleman is on a mission to slash both the amount of personal narrative in writing and the amount of fiction in reading. This is based not on any experience teaching – except at the University of London – but because, he insists, readers gain “world knowledge” through nonfiction, which he calls “informational text.” Listening to Coleman evokes Kafka’s The Castle: “You have been in the village a few days and already you think you know everything better than everyone here.” The difference is that Coleman provides no evidence that he’s been in the public school village even for a few days.
Skeptics who might doubt that replacing Brown Bear, Brown Bear with a Wikipedia entry on the Brown bear you find in Northern America and Europe will stave off our nation’s economic woes might wonder: If fiction is no more vital than leftover turnips, why is there a Nobel Prize in Literature and not in lawyers’ briefs or material from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco’s Web site (listed as a Common Core exemplary text).
In presenting his notion of a model lesson for teaching Martin Luther King Jr’s “Letter to a Birmingham Jail,” Coleman snidely rejects such approaches as providing any biographical, cultural, or historical context for the letter — just as he rejects reader response theory which focuses on the reader as an active agent in the work’s meaning. Instead, Coleman champions what amounts to New Criticism on steroids, insisting that the reader’s sole focus must be only on the words in the text.
Although a multitude of expert readers show that the emperor of the Common Core Standards is naked, as long as such professional organizations as the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) and the International Reading Association (IRA) remain silent, David Coleman seems safe in shouting his absurd declarations from the rooftops. Instead of offering any informed resistance, they are occupied with figuring out how they can make money from embracing the Common Core — and staving off dissidents in their own ranks. Last year, NCTE resorted to technical excuses for squashing a proposed resolution against the Common Core.
The Common Core Standards exist because the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation wanted them. To help their aide-de-camps, the president and the U. S. Secretary of Education pretend that these are state and not national standards. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation sent buckets of money to the National Governors Association and Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education Chief’s for Change Council to act as sponsors along with tons of money to the National PTA to spread the good word. As I am sure you have noticed, there has not been much about this in our media, especially not pointing to the money source. In fact, very few media even bother to mention anything about the Common Core.
This Common Core den of thieves who are stealing the literary rights of our students should read Arnold Lobel’s lovely little fable, “The Crocodile in the Bedroom”, a cute story with a real lesson. A crocodile who loved the neat and tidy rows of the flowers on the wallpaper in his bedroom was coaxed outside into the garden by his wife, who invited him to smell the roses and the lilies of the valley. The crocodile couldn’t stand the “terrible tangle” of freely growing flowers, and went to bed, preferring to stare at neat and tidy wallpaper. There, “he turned a very pale and sickly shade of green.”
With David Coleman as their spokesman out on the stump, the National Governors Association, the Chief’s for Change, and the U. S. Department of Education, acting in concert with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, prescribe a very pale, sickly shade of green future for our vibrant and deliciously messy classrooms. Certainly, Lobel’s moral, “Without a doubt, there is such a thing as too much order, applies even more to the classroom than it does to wallpaper. And letting our corporate school reformers steamroll our schools into a neat and tidy standardized product puts our children in great peril.”
