The New CCSS SAT

I just got a peek at the new Colemanized CCSS-enriched SATs.

Not a precise peek. I am a member on several take-a-survey sites (for a little click and scroll, I earn us some magazine subscriptions), and because I'm registered as a high school teacher, I just got to take a market survey about the SAT tests.

Understand that what I saw were market research questions, and therefor may represent things which may or may not come to fruition. But these were not "is this a good idea" questions-- these were "what's the most appealing way to word this" questions. Here's what I saw.

After making sure I knew what the SAT was and what it stands for (there seems to be some question about whether to keep having the letters stand for something, kind of like KFC), the first round of questions asked me to consider some naming possibilities for two new tests-- 

·  Grade 8/9 - a low-stakes college and career readiness assessment for early high school planning

·  Grade 10/11 - a college and career readiness assessment for mid-high school planning

So, two new products to roll out.

Then we moved on to some new language to consider for the revised version of the SAT test. There were questions that involved the same boilerplate language we've seen with CCSS. Most of these were asked twice-- first to gauge whether a description of the new test items was appealing, and second to consider specific language. Here's one sample:

The revised SAT will be based on the skills and knowledge that research shows to be essential for students’ college and career readiness and success. These are the same skills and knowledge that teachers focus on today in __________ classrooms. The revised SAT will be more focused than ever and support teachers in their work by encouraging students’ daily practice of the work that matters most.

Your four fill-in-the-blank choices are:

*the best

*the most effective

*the most challenging

*the most rigorous 

Another fill-in-the-blank question included this language:

We revised the SAT using a robust research base and in partnership with high school teachers.

Their point-- the revised SAT will reflect the best instruction going on in classrooms, so taking the very best classes will be the very best preparation. Remember that point.

More language about the new test:

The {new/revised/etc} SAT will be based on the skills and knowledge that research shows to be essential for students' college and career readiness and success. These are the same skills and knowledge that teachers focus on today in the most effective classrooms.

David Coleman (architect of the language side of CCSS) is doing his best to lock down the very definition of what good teaching is. Good teaching is what the SAT measures, and the SAT measures good teaching. The word you're looking for is tautology.

All of this was pretty much expected, but there were two fun wrinkles additionally.

One is simply marketing. Language of another question indicates that the PSAT (which will "help students take advantage of the opportunities they have created through their hard work") will also now include access to APO Potential, a service that will tell students about the AP course "in which they would be likely to succeed." Yes, the PSAT (a College Board product) will now include marketing for AP courses (another College Board product).

The other surprise for me was in that 8th grade PPPPSAT. Language in a question described it as a tool for determining if your child is on track to be college-ready. 

Got that? Somebody thinks they have a test that can actually predict whether a thirteen year old is going to be successful in college or not. 

Remember how we always argue that comparing US education to other country's is unfair because other countries track their students into college and career paths from an early age? Apparently the College Board has figured out how to fix that.

The overall picture is the same one I've expected since Coleman moved to the College Board-- their testing programs will be one more attempt to lock all of US public education into the CCSS worldview. Do we need more tests, aligned in unproven ways to the unresearched standards? No, no we don't. But I don't think it will be too much longer before the College Board folks are doing their best to convince us otherwise. Given the growing blowback on CCSS in general and testing linked to it in particular, these could be interesting times. Get your seat early, because the emperor is about to bet the farm on a motorcycle ride in his new clothes.

Why I'm Anti-Standard (TL;DR)

The school reformy landscape is wide. Toward the center you'll find "the CCSS are valuable, but must be delinked from testing." A bit past them is"the CCSS are good, but the implementation was bad." Further down the road you'll find "the CCSS are flawed, and we need a better standard to replace them." And way over there at the end of the dirt road and out in that left-most field, you'll find "no national standards, ever." I'm with those guys.

I'm not an anarchist. And I completely understand why reasonable, intelligent people would like the idea of national educational standards. I don't. My objections come in two flavors-- 1) why I think they can't work and 2) why I think they are wrong. I'll leave #1 for another day; today I want to explain #2. And to do that I have to explain what I think standards are.

Standards are an attempt to codify values. They want to look objective, but they are not. They are simple instructions for acting as if you shared the values of the people who created the standards.

Let's take the go-to metaphor for standards-- the yardstick.

When I hand you a yardstick to measure an object, it doesn't matter if you like to measure things in cubits or hands or meters or along the curved edge. You are going to measure that object as if you shared my value-- inches, feet, yards, and straight-line distances. As long as you use my yardstick, you will measure as if you value what I value. It's a standard, and it's consistent, but it's not some sort of objective values-free judgment, as anybody who lives in the metric-speaking entire rest of the world can tell you.

Standards throughout history have been set to codify both admirable and terrible values. Jim Crow laws were passed to set and preserve standards of racial behavior; so was the Civil Rights Act.

Now, standards are useful, even necessary, for communication (I told you-- I'm not an anarchist). If we all measured by whatever standard we wished, we wouldn't be able to have any meaningful conversations about the results. But we can't lose sight of what the standards actually are-- a way to get other people to act as if they value what we value.

Imagine, for instance, that we were going to write standards for that most universal of experiences-- marriage. Oh, wait-- never mind. We've already been having this argument forever. It's not just our most recent arguments-- is the standard that marriage must involve one man and one woman?-- but the arguments before then. Can marriage involve mixing races? Must parents be married? Must married people be parents? What sort of official is required to certify it? Does it involve two people who love each other? Do they have to be of a particular age?

Today, in 2014, if a man walks up to you and says, "Why, yes, I'm married," you can make virtually no assumptions about what situation is waiting for him at home. For some folks, that is a sign that we have lost our standards as a society, and it is a Very Bad Thing.

Should we have standards? For individual, I believe standards are absolutely necessary. To be a human being in the world, you need to have some idea of how you act out your values in your life. Having standards, a way of measuring your actions against your values, is the foundation of living with integrity.

But that's as an individual. As soon as you start creating standards for other people, you are telling them what values they should live by.

That's not automatically evil. I'm okay with imposing a value that says human life matters and taking it away is not okay. But imposing values on other people, particularly young, impressionable people, will always be operating close to a difficult moral line, and it takes deliberate thought to avoid drifting across that line.

The CCSS are bad because they encode bad values. From the very start, where they casually define education's purpose as college and career readiness, they impose a set of values that rub many of us the wrong way. Some of us choose to read them as if they say what we wish they said. Some of us deal by imagining that, as with NCLB, we'll be largely able to close our classroom door and disregard them. And some of us think that if we could revise, rewrite or replace them, we'd be okay.

I disagree. As soon as you try to write national education standards, you are deciding what every child in the country should value in his or her education. This is a guaranteed fail. You are not just declaring a one-size-fits-all set of school activities, but a one-size-fits-all set of values for every single living human being in the country. It cannot be done any more than you can set national standards for what marriage must be. And not only can't it be done, but it shouldn't be done.

"Don't we all need to use the same yardstick so that we know what we're all talking about?" Actually, no. Because once we settle on that yardstick for everybody, we've declared that project in art class must be one that can be measured along straight edges in increments of inches.

Standards become less useful the further away they move form the individual. Standards that exist to help me understand myself are valuable. Standards that exist so that somebody else can measure me for their own benefit are not valuable.

I know, I know. If the government can more accurately measure everybody with the same yardstick, the government will be able to do a better job of educating them. I disagree. The damage inflicted by trying to get everybody to line up with that yardstick, by the imposition of somebody else's values on each and every young human mind-- that damage far outweighs any possible benefit that might accrue from bureaucratic data management. It is killing the goose that could have laid a lifetime of golden eggs.

We could set a marriage standard in hopes of knowing what Mr. I'm Married means by that, but that would just take us back to a day when peoples' personal lives were all twisted up in order to fit the standards of their time. Who are we to demand that their personal values be pushed aside and mulched up so that we have the illusion of a tidier world to live in?

So while I get the desire for national educational standards, it's an area in which I always expect to be pushing in the other direction. I don't expect to win, but I don't expect to give in, either. Yes, we will always have to be accountable, and we should be, but that's a matter of transparency and reporting-- not a matter of standards. I respect your right to stand where you will on this issue (and I respect you even more if you actually read this whole post), but this is where I stand today.

When Good People Love Bad Standards

It's fun to write big ranty posts in response to people who I think are just full of it. But where I learn more is in reading and responding to people with whom I share some values. If you and I agree about many educational values, can I figure out why you think the CCSS are swell and I would rather dance with a one-legged zombie? That's when I can learn something.

Starr Sackstein guest-wrote a column for Peter DeWitt this week. Sackstein and I agree on many things, but Sackstein thinks the CCSS are just fine. I started to respond  in the comments section, but I have a verbal diarrhea problem, so the response is here instead. I think her column is meant to argue against bubble testing, but for me it runs aground on the shoals of CCSS Island and never quite recovers.

The intro ends with this: Creativity and innovation must be the end goal, nurturing the symbiotic relationship so we can all become better together. This cannot be assessed with short answers or multiple choice. And I am absolutely on board. But then we hit our first subheading:

Teach with purpose rather than complain about the test.

I agree absolutely that we must teach with a purpose (you know I believe it because I just blogged about it ), but how do you say "Don't worry about the test" to teachers whose professional future depends on those test results? "Value learning over test numbers" are words I'd like on a t-shirt or a billboard, but how do you propose to stand up for that value in the current climate? That's not a rhetorical question-- teachers need hard, practical specific ideas about how to main that value in a script-drill-test world. 

As long as there is meaningful, transparent learning happening, the test will take care of itself.

I think I've heard this roughly a zillion times. Teachers like to hear it from administrators because it means, "Your job is not test prep." But we already have our NCLB experiences to tell us that such administrative attitude lasts only until the test scores start coming in too low.

It's a point of view I appreciate and understand, but it involves a level of faith in The Test that I simply don't share. Badly designed tests get bad results, whether it's a matter of terribly-constructed reading questions, requirements for small children to use fine motor skills for unfamiliar tasks, or writing evaluations based on bad ideas about writing.

Learning is a life experience, not a cram session with a finite number of things to know; it is nuance and individuality and freedom to explore both of those however the student sees fit.

And boy do I ever agree with that. But the challenge for today's teacher is how to make that real in a classroom that is marching in rigid lockstep to the point where a high stakes test will decide the fate of any number of people (students, teachers, admins, etc).

Don't be a hater, understand the Common Core

The Common Core didn't do anything to you, why do you hate it so much? Standards are inherently positive and create a structure by which to assess our students. These particular standards are focused cross-discipline and skill based - what's bad about that?

Oh boy. First of all, standards are not inherently positive. Historically, policies from the Holocaust to Jim Crow rest on a foundation of standards.  The whole point of standards is to codify values, to create a yardstick so that even people who don't share the underlying values can act as if they do. So standards are only as positive as the values that they encode. And standards additionally codify one other value-- the idea that there is value in getting other people to follow the values that you want them to.

The Common Core codify values that, in my eyes, contradict much of what you've said so far. There is no standard in CCSS for "nuance and individuality and freedom to explore both of these as the student sees fit."


The challenges that have arisen are mostly due to poor implementation or vision myopically focused on excessive testing, closely tying teacher success to student success on these unbalanced exams.

And other than that, how did you like the play, Mrs. Lincoln? The implementation is not a bug; it's a feature. The base assumption of CCSS is that everyone MUST do this, and that means very tool in the bag MUST be used to FORCE them to do it. Again, nuance and individuality have no place here.

This is a central point, and it has been addressed all over the internet, so I'm not going to recap it to death here. But for me, CCSS and the bad implementation and the bad testing are no more separable than twins conjoined at the heart. 

Collaborate across content to insure skill development

Writing and reading skills don't just happen in an English classroom; students utilize these skills in all classes, so why not work together to scaffold and practice them. 

Absolutely dead on. I so want to work in a school where this happens, and we a\have been getting there step by step for the last twenty years. It is absolutely the right way to go.

Making students college and career ready

When are we going to accept as a society that testing and grading or any other quantitative means associated with learning will only quash the intrinsic value of curiosity and creativity? We keep saying that we want innovation yet we breed standardized clones studiously pursuing a meaningless number... the highest one which ultimately doesn't serve to actually tell us anything about what they know.

Again, I'm on the same page. A score on a bubble test tells us nothing useful at all about how ready a student is for college or career. So what do you think we should do about living in a world where the belief in the power of the test is central to the reformy education picture? What should we tell students whose scores will be tucked into their cloud-based data profile to follow them quite possibly for the rest of their lives, to be consulted by future colleges and/or employers?


Graduate students life ready

But that's not the goal set out by the standards. The CCSS are quite explicit on this point-- the purpose of education, as the standards have it, is to prepare students for college or career (and as further explained by some experts, a career is work that will support you well with more than minimum wage).

In one of your earlier defenses of CCSS, you wrote "If each of us is trying to prepare students for life, why not have a common set of standards nationally that help to define what those standards are?" My answer is that the CCSS is not that set of standards, and it doesn't even claim to be. The CCSS says nothing about preparing a student "for life."

I suspect that you, like me, have the privilege of working in a setting where circumstances and administrators have kept the heavy hand of CCSS standardization off teachers' backs. But you have to know that our circumstance is not everyone's. I also think you and I share many core values about teaching, and while it is important to take those out to examine and confirm them, these days we also have to be thinking and talking about how to live out those values in a system that is increasingly hostile to them.

If Not for Those Darn Kids

I was in a CCSS training, and the trainer stopped to make an observation about how Kids These Days lack discipline and order. She even illustrated it with a story about her own child. And  light bulb went on for me.

I have long considered that the Masters of Reforming Our Nation's Schools view children as widgets, as little programmable devices, as interchangeable gears, as nothing more than Data Generation Units. I had considered that these MoRONS were indifferent to children. What I had not considered was that reformers are actively hostile to children.

I have certainly heard people in the ed world complain about Those Darn Kids, and I have taught in the building with more than one person who blames all their classroom woes on terrible awful no good pretty bad students. I try to be understanding. If I hear it once or twice, I assume somebody is having a bad day. If I hear it many times, I assume somebody is a bad teacher.

But a hostile teacher is one thing. A movement that institutionalizes that hostility is a whole other level of awful.

After I wrote about my experience, other teachers shared more of the same. Tales of trainers talking about how Kids These Days need to be rigorously rigored into a state of rigor. And as I reread old materials, I could see the hostility bubbling beneath the surface.

Sometimes it is misplaced and out of date. There are still education commentators railing against the self esteem movement, and while I don't disagree with some of the criticism, it's like complaining that too many Kids These Days are spending too much time on their new computers and listening to the rap music. That ship has sailed, Grampa.

Sometimes it is not even beneath the surface. What is a "no excuse" school, except a school founded on the premise that Kids These Days are all hooligans that will take a mile if you give them an inch. Or even one of those new-fangled millimeters. And when Arne Duncan suggests that those suburban white moms have over-inflated images of the abilities of their coddled children, isn't he already suggesting that those over-protective parents need to step aside so their kids can be whipped into shape.

Or Frank Bruni's op-ed that unambiguously declared Duncan correct and opponents of CCSS a raft of child-coddlers:

Aren’t aspects of school supposed to be relatively mirthless? Isn’t stress an acceptable byproduct of reaching higher and digging deeper? Aren’t certain fixed judgments inevitable? And isn’t mettle established through hard work? 

The narrative here is not a new one. See if you can recognize some of the key points. We live in a meritocracy that rewards hard work and grit. Therefor, anyone who is poor and unsuccessful must have failed to show merit, hard work, and grit. If we have a lot of poor people, it's because they are all slackers-- and it starts when they're kids. If we could get to them when they were little and whip them into shape, then poverty would be gone. Fixing education would cure poverty.

So to fix poverty, we have to toughen these little slackers up. They need to be toughly uncoddled with rigorous excuse-free punches to their tiny brains. These children are one of the big obstacles to fixing our society (along with the teachers who won't properly kick their little asses). And just look at how dumb and lazy they are! Look at all the factoids about the things they don't know, and the low test scores they get! Back in my day, students got such much better scores and, buddy, we knew stuff. These kids have to be brought up to snuff.

Is your kid wasting time playing? Stop coddling. Did a lesson make him so frustrated he burst into tears? Good-- maybe he'll start taking school seriously now. Did he fail his big test? Let that be a wake-up call for you. Is his spirit being crushed? Then his spirit is too weak and whiny, and his spirit needs to get its act together.

That this sort of program should originate in the halls of power and privilege is unsurprising. These are men who must believe that their own vast success is the result of their own merit and awesomeness, not luck, timing, underhanded gamesmanship or simply the result of a privileged background. Nor is it surprising that they don't subject their own children to Reformed School, because they know that their own children already possess the qualities of virtue that they are so ardently trying to beat into Other People's Children.

Is this is some sort of bizarro generational theater in which Boomers are trying to fix the children they believe Millenials are unfit to raise? Are Americans having another Calvinist flashback?

I don't know. What I do believe is that the reformy movement carries a strong thread of anti-child fervor (or at least anti-Other People's Children), and that this belief that children should be beaten into shape rather than cherished and nurtured.

Look, if you ask my students if I coddle them, they will laugh at you and tell you that I am the least warm, most unfuzzy teacher they've ever dealt with. I believe in many of the virtues that these virtuous crusaders espouse. I even believe that sometimes love means facing hard, painful things.

But I had a superintendent once who used to tell a story about a horse trainer who was asked about the secret of his success. He asked his inquisitors what they thought the first step was, and they made many guesses, all dealing with technical horse trainy actions. Said the trainer, "First, you have to love the horse."

How we can possibly teach students we don't love or respect or value is beyond me. How we enter a classroom with a program that assumes they are unworthy, weak, and fundamentally deficient, and then teach effectively is a mystery. And how we start with the belief that our students are essentially worthless until a hero teacher fixes them-- well, that encompasses so much arrogant, wrong-headed, ineffective and just plain evil mess. If that's our attitude-- or the attitude that we are supposed to embrace-- I know one more reason that CCSS reformy stuff is destined to fail.

Dear PACE: No.

The annual appeal to contribute money to PACE, the political action arm of NEA, is in my mailbox again, and once again I will ignore it.

There was a time, when I was a young teacher who still believed in moonbeams and magic, that I actively ignored politics. "Politics is dirty and yucky," I would say. "I am pursuing a noble profession, and I don't want to get any of that political shmutz on me." I probably wrinkled up my nose, then closed the door to my room to teach.

What can I say? I was younger then. Over the intervening decades I have better realized that while teaching verbs and sonnets to high school students may not be a political act, it is politics that shapes the ground on which we teachers try to walk. It is politics that sets our agenda, writes our marching orders, and increasingly fashions our curriculum. It is politics that decides who enters our profession and how they get there.

There was a time when we could guard the doors to our classrooms and filter out the worst of the outside, protect our students from what was stupid and wrong circulating through the edusphere. But politics has steadily eaten away at our power to do that.

So I've been a union president through negotiations and strike. I've written my representatives in Harrisburg and DC. I am no longer too good to stick my spoon in the political soup (a line that probably sounded better in my head).

So why not contribute to PACE, the arm of my union that finances political action on the local, state and national level? Why not throw some of my monetary weight behind the union heft?

Because my union has shown a complete lack of ability to use its heft effectively or wisely.

Here in PA, we stumped for Smilin' Ed Rendell who was, I guess, better than the alternative because he did not actually assault teachers with baby seals that he had clubbed to death himself. And if our state level choices weren't terribly helpful, on the national level we decided to support Barrack Obama, even after it became clear that his education policies were just as bad as anything we experienced in the Bush era. Race to the Top has been revealed to be not just NCLB on steroids, but NCLB in a permanent fit of roid rage.

PACE is the coke addict swearing that he will absolutely spend the money you give him on food this time. PACE is the bad girlfriend who begs for to take her back after the third time you drop her for sleeping with your cousin. PACE is the brother-in-law who swears that if you just give him another $500, that chinchilla farm in Montana will finally start to pay off. PACE is the abusive husband who argues that you should forgive because he only broke one of your arms and it could have been much worse.

So no, PACE, no money for you. It's frustrating, because I sure would like to have my voice heard in the political world, but you, PACE, are just a bad game of telephone where "Stop beating me" somehow emerges as "beat me some more." I do not know what the answer is to the problem of inaudible and invisible teachers in the political world, but you are clearly not it.

The Heart of Instruction

In conversations about instruction with student teachers or mentees or other teaching colleagues, it always comes back to the question that is at the heart of all instruction:

Why am I teaching this?

If "heart of instruction" is too squishy, call it "the foundation of instruction" or "the philosphical underpinnings of pedagogy." The point is that all the decisions that we make in a classroom come back to this question.

All the questions surrounding instructional design-- What activities should I use? What questions should I ask? What pacing should I use? How should I direct discussion? What sort of assessment task should I use, and what should it include? -- all of these questions take us back to the heart of instruction.

Why am I teaching this?


Teachers of A Certain Age will remember the years in which we were encouraged to make our lessons relevant. "Make it relevant" is on my short list of Worst Advice Ever, because it assumes that the work has no relevance to begin with. Nobody tries to figure out how to make water wet. The material we teach should matter, and we should know why, and if we do not know why, we shouldn't be teaching it.

My students learn early on not to ask the eternal question "Why do we have to do this stuff?" unless they mean it, because I will answer them. Sometimes I answer them before they even ask. Thirty years ago, I might have struggled with this question, but today I can answer it for every unit I teach. But having an answer is not enough, because not all answers are created equal.

Consider Romeo and Juliet and all the reasons that teachers I have worked with have expressed, implicitly and explicitly, for teaching Shakespeare's classic contribution to the canon.

* I want students to grasp the soaring beauty of Shakespeare's language

* So that students can experience some of the process of turning words on a page into live theater

* The last guy to teach this class had it in his course plan

* So students can some day boast, "I have read a whole Shakespeare play and I know what it was about."

* To understand some of the literary techniques used in the play.

* I love these kids and I love this play and I want to share its awesomeness with them. It will be fun!

* All 9th grade English teachers are supposed to cover R&J

These disparate answers lead to entirely different units, and, of course, a few of them lead to really lousy units, because they aren't answers at all.

Here are some other bad answers to the question at the heart of instruction:

* Because it will be on the test, and if students don't do well on the test, we will all be punished.

* Because it's in the scripted lesson.

* Because somebody ordered me to.

These are bad answers because they don't help inform instruction. They don't give us purpose or direction; they don't help us make choices about instructional design or implementation. They lead to instruction that is bloodless, lifeless, joyless, pointless. They are the equivalent of kissing your wife "because that's what husbands are supposed to do."

It's an issue that's not new or uniquely related to the current reformy movement, but the bad actors of the reformatorium believe that these answers are not only not bad, but are actually admirable and worth pursuing. Why should we teach this? Because people with power say so, and because they'll punish us if we don't follow their orders. We don't need any other purpose other than financial threats and rewards, right?

Yet even the worst of reasons given don't fall to the level of "Because someone will give me money if I do and take away my money if I don't." Reform fails because it doesn't seem to understand why anybody does anything.

Teaching, like life, should have a purpose. Do it like you mean it. Move like you have a purpose. Know why you are teaching this, whatever this may be.Hold onto the heart of instruction.

Note to CCSS Supporter

This morning Rick Hess of AEI featured a guest writer on his EdWeek blog. Kathy Powers is a reading and language arts teacher in Arkansas, where she was teacher of the year in 2011. She offered a defense of CCSS, and there were many things I wanted to say to her. But of course here in Blogsylvania, we like to have these conversations out in public. So here's my reply.

Dear Kathy;

You open by suggesting that some critics of CCSS sound a little overwrought, and I agree with you. There are people out there who feel mighty passionate about this issue, and that passion can lead them to overstate their case sometimes. I think I'm what passes as a moderate these days; let me offer my perspective on your observations.

Celebrating Student Individuality

You say that you are "pleasantly surprised over the high level of sophistication and creativity students have shown in their writing and logical reasoning under the Common Core standards," and that meeting one of the standards about synthesizing multiple texts and evidence to support a point has empowered your students. Then you give some concrete details about what happened when you "tasked my fifth grade students with answering the question, 'How does imagination lead to discoveries in the real world?'" And you described a project that did, in fact, sound pretty exciting. I'm not going to deduct style points for your use of "task" as a verb, but I am going to ask you one simple question:

What the heck did you do before CCSS?

Are you saying that you previously did not know how to do such a project, or are you suggesting that previously your administration would have forbidden you to do this kind of work? Surely you're not suggesting that you could never even conceive of such a project before CCSS came along.

My students routinely do multiple text writing assignments, and they always have to support their statements with specific text evidence. I've done that for thirty-some years. My honors 11th graders have a research project that requires them to search out primary and previously unused sources to create original writing about local history; I've been doing that for twenty years. (You can buy last year's product on amazon-- custom printing is a new wrinkle). I say that not in the spirit of nanny-nanny-boo-boo, nor to suggest that I'm an awesome educator. I think I'm a pretty average teacher-- and THAT is my point. The work I've been doing is good, solid teaching, but not unusual in the field, and like all the good solid teachers out there, I've been doing it without CCSS. What do I need it for? How will it improve my teaching by giving me "permission" to pursue all the educational goals that I've already been going after?

Iron Teacher

With all due respect, this paragraph is a non-sequitor. You start by saying it's great that all teachers will have the same standards. Then you talk about Iron Chef and proteins. I am not sure of your point. Because all teachers have the same standards, they will now be better suited for a televised competition based on an entirely inauthentic unrealistic situation? Are you suggesting that all restaurant goers in the nation would benefit if federal regulation required all restaurants to serve dishes based on the same limited set of proteins?

Love Local, Teach Global

You suggest here that education is the great mobilizer, that a good education gives students more options to travel far and wide in search of their dreams. You apply this to college in particular; our students need to be ready to compete for spots.

I keep hearing this argument, but I don't really understand the connection. Do we need standards to predict college success? We already know the best predictor of college success, and it's high schools grades, no matter what high school, no matter what local standards. Even the SAT, king of the standardized tests, doesn't predict as reliably.

Do we have a problem with students getting into college who can't hack it? I can believe this might be true, though I think some of the problems are self-inflicted by the colleges. And what I still need to know is, by what process did somebody establish that the standards included in CCSS are the ones that will insure greater college success? I'm willing to be convinced here, but I have yet to see any evidence.

Standards vs Standardized Tests

I have read too many recent articles touting the problems of Common Core when the real focus of the author's frustration was not with the standards themselves, but with the testing process which will be used next year to measure students' learning of the standards. 

I agree (with the understanding that for some folks, "next year" is actually "last year"). People conflate the two frequently. You open by suggesting that some people hate tests because, like bathroom scales, they deliver news that nobody wants to hear. I would agree with that analogy if we assume that the bathroom scale is untested and uncalibrated. We have no reason to believe that the tests rolled out with CCSS measure what they claim to measure. Add the idea of an uncalibrated, untested scale that can get your pay cut or your job terminated, and surely you can see why people get a bit touchy.

You argue for waiting to test and properly implementing the standards, but here's my point-- as long as the tests are high stakes, determining the fates of teachers, administrators, schools and students, the CCSS simply don't matter. At all.

Look, the Core includes standards that we know will never be tested. Collaborative processes. Deep reading of long, complex texts. Things that will never, ever be on a standardized test. When all is said and done, we'll be right where we were under NCLB-- teaching to standardized tests that serve as de facto curriculum, depending on how hard our local administrators want to fight for us.

By Teachers, For Teachers

I agree absolutely that sharing and collaboration among teachers is a great thing. But as with the first point, I don't really see what it has to do with CCSS. Did we need CCSS in order to know how to share? I don't think so.

Kathy, I'm glad that implementation has not been a difficult adventure for you. If I judged strictly by my own experience, I would conclude that CCSS was a pretty harmless piece of bureaucratic ephemera. But I'm reading the stories from around the country. Stories about school systems shuttered and turned over to private charters because test scores are bad. Teachers who are disciplined because they are teaching Tuesday's prescribed lesson on Wednesday. Elementary students becoming discouraged and crushed because they cannot comprehend or meet the demands of their new curriculum. The implementation of that curriculum may be a local failing, or a state-level failing, or actually the fault of CCSS itself, but that doesn't matter to a child who, like any other abused child, assumes that the fault must lie in his own heart or head.

Unlike some of my more strident colleagues, I assume that many supporters of CCSS are pure in heart and intention, sincere in their support. I actually welcome hearing from those folks, because unlike the people who stand to make huge profits from reform, these sincere foot soldiers might be able to show me what there is to love in CCSS simply because I can trust their motives to be pure. But it hasn't happened yet, and it hasn't happened this time. Please understand that I say the following not with bitterness, anger or any metaphorical content. I say it as what I believe is literally true. You do not know what you are talking about.