Like so many education reform initiatives that seem to arise out of nowhere, the Common Core State Standards is another of these sweeping phantom movements that have gotten their impetus from a cadre of invisible human beings endowed with inordinate power to impose their ideas on everybody.

For example, the idea of collecting intimate personal data on public school students and teachers seems to have arisen spontaneously in the bowels of the National Center for Education Statistics in Washington. It required a small army of education psychologists to put together the data handbooks, which are periodically expanded to include more personal information.

Nobody knows who exactly authorized the creation of such a dossier on every student and teacher in American public schools, but the program exists and is being paid for by the taxpayer. And strange as it may seem, it arose seemingly out of nowhere, like a vampire, to suck the freedom out of the American people. Unlike Santa’s elves who work behind the scenes to bring happiness to children, these subterranean phantoms work overtime to find ways of making American children miserable.

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) is another such vampire calculated not only to suck the freedom out of the American people, but also to suck out the brains of their children. And all of this is planned in the dark, away from the prying eyes of parents and writers like me. Ask any educator: “Who is the author of the Common Core Standards?” and they will not be able to tell you.

So I decided to look into the origin of the CCSS. It is said that it originated with the National Governors Association (NGA). When and where? At what meeting? At whose behest? The NGA’s Mission Statement says on its website:

The Common Core State Standards provide a consistent, clear understanding of what students are expected to learn, so teachers and parents know what they need to do to help them. The standards are designed to be robust and relevant to the real world, reflecting the knowledge and skills that our young people need for success in college and careers. With American students fully prepared for the future, our communities will be best positioned to compete successfully in the global economy.

Sounds wonderful. But why do we need it? Why are we re-inventing the wheel? Didn’t our public schools provide a decent education for the “greatest generation” when they were in school? That generation not only learned enough to win World War II but also enough to create the scientific foundation of our high-tech society. The only reason why we need the CCSS is because all of these graduate educationists need something to do to justify their degrees and the salaries that go with them. And of course the new curriculum will cost billions of dollars which will enable these vampires to live in the style to which they’ve become accustomed. By the way, if you object to my referring to these people as vampires, feel free to use your own designations.

The CCSS adds nothing to what we know about how to teach reading. It adds nothing to how we teach arithmetic and mathematics. It adds nothing to how we teach history, geography, and the “social studies.” In short, it is a fraud to get the American taxpayer to shell out big bucks for something that we already know how to do.  Yes, science has greatly expanded, but it also expanded from 1850 to 1950 and didn’t require a different methodology from the scientific method developed by the great scientists of the past. We may have better equipment which students of science must learn to operate, but the scientific method has not changed.

And of course, the CCSS were made to be as complicated as possible so that no parent or normal human being could understand them. For example, there is something called “Common Core State Standards Official Identifiers and XML Representation.” It states:

As states, territories, the District of Columbia, and the Department of Defense Education Activity move from widespread adoption of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) to implementation, there is a need to appropriately identify and link assets using a shared system of identifiers and a common XML representation. The Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) and National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (NGA Center), working closely with the standards authors, have released an official, viable approach for publishing identifiers and XML designation to represent the standards, consistent with their adopted format, as outlined below.

So now we know that there is such a body as “the standards authors,” who work closely with such bureaucratic organizations as the Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices. And to make sure that the Standards are being correctly implemented, we read the following in typical vampire language:

De-referenceable Uniform Resource Identifier (URIs) at the corestandards.org domain, e.g. http://corestandards.org/2010/math/content/6/EE/1 or http://corestandards.org/2010/math/practice/MP7. Matching the published identifiers, these dereferenceable URIs allow individuals and technology systems to validate the content of a standard by viewing the web page at the identifier’s uniform resource locator (URL). The NGA Center and CCSSO strongly recommend that http://www.corestandards.org remain the address of record for referring to standards.

What kind of human beings not only write such gobbledegook but also know what it means? And these educationists are among the well-paid elite who know how to make everything so complicated that only they are capable of understanding their own complexity. Here’s more:

Globally unique identifiers (GUIDs), e.g. A7D3275BC52147618D6CFEE43FB1A47E. These allow, when needed, to refer to standards in both disciplines in a common format without removing the differences in the published identifiers. GUIDs are unwieldy for human use, but they are necessarily complex to guarantee uniqueness, an important characteristic for databases, and are intended for use by computer systems. There is no need for educators to decode GUIDs.

Did you read that line, “GUIDS are unwieldy for human use, but they are necessarily complex to guarantee uniqueness”?  These people are masters at creating complexity for its own sake. The more complex, the more difficult it is for normal human beings to know what in blazes they are talking about.

What is the National Governors Association for Best Practices? Here is what their website says:

The National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (NGA Center) develops innovative solutions to today’s most pressing public policy challenges and is the only research and development firm that directly serves the nation’s governors….

The mission of NGA Office of Federal Relations is to ensure governors’ views are represented in the shaping of federal policy. Policy positions, reflecting governors’ principles on priority issues, guide the association’s work to influence federal laws and regulations.

The initiative for the Common Core State Standards seems to have arisen from a speech NGA Chairman Governor Paul Patton, Democrat, of Kentucky gave at the NGA meeting on June 12, 2002, in which he said:

Governors are constantly searching for solutions that will help all schools succeed, but some schools require more help than others. The long-term goal for states is to improve overall system performance while closing persistent gaps in achievement between minority and non-minority students. Fortunately, there are places to look for guidance. Although some schools continue to struggle, some have responded successfully to state reform efforts and others have gone far in improving student performance and closing the achievement gap. Current research also suggests there are ways state policies can effectively stimulate and support school improvement.

How that was translated into the need for Common Core State Standards, is not very clear. The Executive Director of the NGA is Dan Crippen, a Washington policy bureaucrat who was director of the Congressional Budget Office from 1999 to 2002. The Director of the NGA Center for Best Practices is David Moore, formerly of the Congressional Budget Office. The Director of the Education Division is Richard Laine. His profile states:

Laine directs research, policy analysis, technical assistance and resource development for the Education Division in the areas of early childhood, K-12, and postsecondary education. The Education Division is working on a number of key policy issues relevant to governors’ efforts to develop and support the implementation of policy, including: birth to 3rd grade access, readiness and quality; the Common Core State Standards, STEM and related assessments; teacher and leader effectiveness; turning around low-performing schools; high school redesign; competency-based learning; charter schools; and postsecondary (higher education & workforce training) access, success & affordability. The Division is also working on policy issues related to bridging the system divides between the early childhood, K-12 and postsecondary systems.

Well now we know who’s in charge of the Common Core State Standards. What is Mr. Laine’s background?

Previous Positions: Director of Education, The Wallace Foundation; Director of Education Policy and Initiatives, Illinois Business Roundtable; Associate Superintendent for Policy, Planning and Resource Management, Illinois State Board of Education; Executive Director, Coalition for Educational Rights; Executive Secretary, Committee for Educational Rights; School Finance Analyst, Chicago Panel on Public School Policy and Finance; Associate Director, California Democratic Congressional Delegation.

Education: M.P.P., M.B.A. and Certificate of Advanced Study in Education Administration and Public Policy, University of Chicago; B.A., University of California — Santa Barbara.

Obviously, Mr. Laine is one of those invisible bureaucrats who create policies for the governors, few of whom ever read them. He was Associate Director of California’s Democratic Congressional Delegation, which includes some of the worst left-wing members of Congress. He’s also in charge of “birth to 3rd grade access,” which the National Education Association strongly favors. Among Mr. Laine’s staff is Albert Wat, whose expertise is Early Childhood Education. His profile states:

Wat provides state policymakers with analyses and information on promising practices and the latest research in early childhood education policy, from birth through third grade. His work focuses on preschool education systems and alignment of early childhood and early elementary practices and policies, including standards, assessments and data systems.

Previous Positions: Research Manager, Senior Research Associate and State Policy Analyst, The Pew Charitable Trusts, Pew Center on the States, Pre-K Now.

Education: Master of Arts in Education Policy Studies, The George Washington University; Nonprofit Management Executive Certificate, Georgetown University; Master of Arts in Education, with focus in Social Sciences in Education and Bachelor of Arts in Psychology, with Distinction, Stanford University.

Like so many Washington policy wonks, Mr. Wat has to justify his bureaucratic position by thinking up new ways to create costly education reform that no freedom- loving citizen wants. Note his and Mr. Laine’s interest in “birth to 3rd grade” education, an area traditionally left up to parents. But then the totalitarian mind wants control over everything and everybody.

In other words, the Common Core State Standards have no more legitimacy than the plans of your local village idiot to reform education. They are the thought emanations of those who have nothing better to do. Yet, they will cost the American taxpayer billions of dollars and make American public education more confusing than ever.

http://www.thenewamerican.com/reviews/opinion/item/13412-whos-behind-the-common-core-curriculum

Common Core State Standards Initiative

The Common Core State Standards Initiative is a U.S. education initiative that seeks to bring diverse state curricula into alignment with each other by following the principles of standards-based education reform. The initiative is sponsored by the National Governors Association (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO).

Development

The past twenty years in the U.S. have also been termed the “Accountability Movement,” as states are being held to mandatory tests of student achievement, which are expected to demonstrate a common core of knowledge that all citizens should have to be successful in this country.^[1] As part of this overarching education reform movement, the nation’s governors and corporate leaders founded Achieve, Inc. in 1996 as a bi-partisan organization to raise academic standards, graduation requirements, improve assessments, and strengthen accountability in all 50 states.^[2] The initial motivation for the development of the Common Core State Standards was part of the American Diploma Project (ADP).^[3]

A report titled, “Ready or Not: Creating a High School Diploma That Counts,” from 2004 found that both employers and colleges are demanding more of high school graduates than in the past.^[4] According to Achieve, Inc., “current high-school exit expectations fall well short of [employer and college] demands.”^[5] The report explains that the major problem currently facing the American school system is that high school graduates were not provided with the skills and knowledge they needed to succeed.^[5] “While students and their parents may still believe that the diploma reflects adequate preparation for the intellectual demands of adult life, in reality it falls far short of this common-sense goal.” (page 1). The report continues that the diploma itself lost its value because graduates could not compete successfully beyond high school,^[5] and that the solution to this problem is a common set of rigorous standards.

In 2009 the National Governors Association hired David Coleman and Student Achievement to write curriculum standards in the areas of literacy and mathematics instruction. Announced on June 1, 2009,^[6] the initiative’s stated purpose is to “provide a consistent, clear understanding of what students are expected to learn, so teachers and parents know what they need to do to help them.”^[7] Additionally, “The standards are designed to be robust and relevant to the real world, reflecting the knowledge and skills that our young people need for success in college and careers,” which will place American students in a position in which they can compete in a global economy.^[7] Forty-five of the fifty states in the United States are members of the initiative, with the states of Texas, Virginia, Alaska, and Nebraska not adopting the initiative at a state level.^[8] Minnesota has adopted the English Language Arts standards but not the Mathematics standards.^[9]

Standards were released for mathematics and English language arts on June 2, 2010, with a majority of states adopting the standards in the subsequent months. (See below for current status.) States were given an incentive to adopt the Common Core Standards through the possibility of competitive federal Race to the Top grants. President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced the Race to the Top competitive grants on July 24, 2009, as a motivator for education reform.^[10] To be eligible, states had to adopt “internationally benchmarked standards and assessments that prepare students for success in college and the work place.”^[11] This meant that in order for a state to be eligible for these grants, the states had to adopt the Common Core State Standards or a similar career and college readiness curriculum. The competition for these grants provided a major push for states to adopt the standards.^[12] The adoption dates for those states that chose to adopt the Common Core State Standards Initiative are all within the two years following this announcement.^[13] The common standards are funded by the governors and state schools chiefs, with additional support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, and others.^[14] States are planning to implement this initiative by 2015^[15] by basing at least 85% of their state curricula on the Standards.

Standards

In 2010, Standards were released for English language arts and mathematics. Standards have not yet been developed for science or social studies.

English Language Arts & Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects

The stated goal of the English & Language Arts and Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects standards^[16] is to ensure that students are college and career ready in literacy no later than the end of high school (page 3). There are five key components to the standards for English and Language Arts: Reading, Writing, Speaking and Listening, Language, and Media and Technology.^[17] The essential components and breakdown of each of these key points within the standards are as follows:

Reading

• As students advance through each grade, there is an increased level of complexity to what students are expected to read and there is also a progressive development of reading comprehension so that students can gain more from what they read.^[17]
• There is no reading list to accompany the reading standards. Instead, students are simply expected to read a range of classic and contemporary literature as well as challenging informative texts from an array of subjects. This is so that students can acquire new knowledge, insights, and consider varying perspectives as they read. Teachers, school districts, and states are expected to decide on the appropriate curriculum, but sample texts are included to help teachers, students, and parents prepare for the year ahead.^[17]
• There is some critical content for all students — classic myths and stories from around the world, foundational U.S. documents, seminal works of American literature, and the writings of Shakespeare — but the rest is left up to the states and the districts.^[17]

Writing

• The driving force of the writing standards is logical arguments based on claims, solid reasoning, and relevant evidence. The writing also includes opinion writing even within the K–5 standards.^[17]
• Short, focused research projects, similar to the kind of projects students will face in their careers as well as long-term, in-depth research is another important piece of the writing standards. This is because written analysis and the presentation of significant findings is critical to career and college readiness.^[17]
• The standards also include annotated samples of student writing to help determine performance levels in writing arguments, explanatory texts, and narratives across the grades.^[17]

Speaking and Listening

• Although reading and writing are the expected components of an ELA curriculum, standards are written so that students gain, evaluate, and present complex information, ideas, and evidence specifically through listening and speaking.^[17]
• There is also an emphasis on academic discussion in one-on-one, small-group, and whole-class settings, which can take place as formal presentations as well as informal discussions during student collaboration.^[17]

Language

• Vocabulary instruction in the standards takes place through a mix of conversations, direct instruction, and reading so that students can determine word meanings and can expand their use of words and phrases.^[17]
• The standards expect students to use formal English in their writing and speaking, but also recognize that colleges and 21st century careers will require students to make wise, skilled decisions about how to express themselves through language in a variety of contexts.^[17]
• Vocabulary and conventions are their own strand because these skills extend across reading, writing, speaking, and listening.^[17]

Media and Technology

• Since media and technology are intertwined with every student’s life and in school in the 21st century, skills related to media use, which includes the analysis and production of various forms of media, are also included in these standards.^[17]

Preliminary “example” works to be studied by students include works by Ovid, Atul Gawande, Voltaire, Shakespeare, Turgenev, Poe, Robert Frost, Yeats, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Amy Tan, and Julia Alvarez.^[15]

Cursive and keyboarding

The standards do not mandate the teaching of cursive handwriting, although states are free either to add a cursive requirement or to permit individual school districts to require it. The standards include instruction in keyboarding.^[18]

Mathematics

The stated goal of the mathematics Standards^[19] is to achieve greater focus and coherence in the curriculum (page 3). This is largely in response to the criticism that American mathematics curricula are “a mile wide and an inch deep”.

The mathematics Standards include Standards for Mathematical Practice and Standards for Mathematical Content.

Mathematical practice

The Standards mandate that eight principles of mathematical practice be taught:

1. Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them.
2. Reason abstractly and quantitatively.
3. Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others.
4. Model with mathematics.
5. Use appropriate tools strategically.
6. Attend to precision.
7. Look for and make use of structure.
8. Look for and express regularity in repeated reasoning.

The practices are adapted from the five process standards of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and the five strands of proficiency in the National Research Council’s Adding It Up report.^[20] These practices are to be taught in every grade from kindergarten to twelfth grade. Details of how these practices are to be connected to each grade level’s mathematics content are left to local implementation of the Standards.

As an example of mathematical practice, here is the full description of the sixth practice:

6 Attend to precision.

Mathematically proficient students try to communicate precisely to others. They try to use clear definitions in discussion with others and in their own reasoning. They state the meaning of the symbols they choose, including using the equal sign consistently and appropriately. They are careful about specifying units of measure, and labeling axes to clarify the correspondence with quantities in a problem. They calculate accurately and efficiently, express numerical answers with a degree of precision appropriate for the problem context. In the elementary grades, students give carefully formulated explanations to each other. By the time they reach high school they have learned to examine claims and make explicit use of definitions.

Mathematical content

The Standards lay out the mathematics content that should be learned at each grade level from kindergarten to Grade 8 (age 13-14), as well as the mathematics to be learned in high school. The Standards do not dictate any particular pedagogy or what order topics should be taught within a particular grade level. Mathematical content is organized in a number of domains. At each grade level there are several standards for each domain, organized into clusters of related standards. (See examples below.)

Four domains are included in each of the grades from kindergarten (age 5-6) to fifth grade (age 10-11):

• Operations and Algebraic Thinking;
• Number and Operations in Base 10;
• Measurement and Data;
• Geometry.

Kindergarten also includes the domain Counting and Cardinality. Grades 3 to 5 also include the domain Number and Operations–Fractions.

Four domains are included in each of the Grades 6 through 8:

• The Number System;
• Expressions and Equations;
• Geometry;
• Statistics and Probability.

Grades 6 and 7 also include the domain Ratios and Proportional Relationships. Grade 8 includes the domain Functions.

In addition to detailed standards (of which there are 21 to 28 for each grade from kindergarten to eighth grade), the Standards present an overview of “critical areas” for each grade. (See examples below.)

In high school (Grades 9 to 12), the Standards do not specify which content is to be taught at each grade level. Up to Grade 8, the curriculum is integrated; students study four or five different mathematical domains every year. The Standards do not dictate whether the curriculum should continue to be integrated in high school with study of several domains each year (as is done in other countries, as well as New York and Georgia), or whether the curriculum should be separated out into separate year-long algebra and geometry courses (as has been the tradition in most U.S. states). An appendix^[21] to the Standards describes four possible pathways for covering high school content (two traditional and two integrated), but states are free to organize the content any way they want.

There are six conceptual categories of content to be covered at the high school level:

• Number and quantity;
• Algebra;
• Functions;
• Modeling;
• Geometry;
• Statistics and probability.

Some topics in each category are indicated only for students intending to take more advanced, optional courses such as calculus, advanced statistics, or discrete mathematics. Even if the traditional sequence is adopted, functions and modeling are to be integrated across the curriculum, not taught as separate courses. In fact, modeling is also a Mathematical Practice (see above), and is meant to be integrated across the entire curriculum beginning in kindergarten. The modeling category does not have its own standards; instead, high school standards in other categories which are intended to be considered part of the modeling category are indicated in the Standards with a star symbol.

Each of the six high school categories includes a number of domains. For example, the “number and quantity” category contains four domains: the real number system; quantities; the complex number system; and vector and matrix quantities. The “vector and matrix quantities” domain is reserved for advanced students, as are some of the standards in “the complex number system”.

Examples of mathematical content

Second grade example: In the second grade there are 26 standards in four domains. The four critical areas of focus for second grade are (1) extending understanding of base-ten notation; (2) building fluency with addition and subtraction; (3) using standard units of measure; and (4) describing and analyzing shapes. Below are the second grade standards for the domain of “operations and algebraic thinking” (Domain 2.OA). This second grade domain contains four standards, organized into three clusters:

Represent and solve problems involving addition and subtraction.

1. Use addition and subtraction within 100 to solve one- and two-step word problems involving situations of adding to, taking from, putting together, taking apart, and comparing, with unknowns in all positions, e.g., by using drawings and equations with a symbol for the unknown number to represent the problem.

Add and subtract within 20.

2. Fluently add and subtract within 20 using mental strategies. By end of Grade 2, know from memory all sums of two one-digit numbers.

Work with equal groups of objects to gain foundations for multiplication.

3. Determine whether a group of objects (up to 20) has an odd or even number of members, e.g., by pairing objects or counting them by 2s; write an equation to express an even number as a sum of two equal addends.

4. Use addition to find the total number of objects arranged in rectangular arrays with up to 5 rows and up to 5 columns; write an equation to express the total as a sum of equal addends.

Domain example: As an example of the development of a domain across several grades, here are the clusters for learning fractions (Domain NF, which stands for “Number and Operations—Fractions”) in Grades 3 through 6. Each cluster contains several standards (not listed here):

Grade 3:

1. ^ Gibbs, T. H. and Howley, A. (2000). “”World-Class Standards” and Local Pedagogies: Can We Do Both?” Thresholds in Education. ERIC Publications. 51 – 55.
2. ^ “About Achieve.” (2011) Achieve, Inc. http://www.achieve.org/about-achieve
3. ^ “Closing the Expectations Gap 2011: Sixth Annual 50-State Progress Report.” (2011). Achieve, Inc. <http://www.achieve.org/ClosingtheExpectationsGap2011&gt;
4. ^ “Ready or Not: Creating a High School Diploma That Counts.” (2004) Achieve, Inc. <http://www.achieve.org/ReadyorNot&gt;
5. ^ ^{a b c} “Ready or Not”
6. ^ NGA Press Release announcing the Common State Standards Initiative
7. ^ ^{a b} http://www.corestandards.org
8. ^ http://www.corestandards.org/in-the-states States adopting the Core Standards
9. ^ ^{a b} http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2012/06/12/daily-circuit-minnesota-adopting-common-core
10. ^ Department of Education. President Obama, U.S. Secretary of Education Duncan Announce National Competition to Advance School Reform. Ed.gov. 24 July 2009. Web. 10 Oct. 2011. <http://www2.ed.gov/news/pressreleases/2009/07/07242009.html&gt;
11. ^ “U.S Department of Education”
12. ^ Fletcher, G. H. (2010). “Race to the Top: No District Left Behind.” T. H. E Journal 37 (10): 17 – 18.
13. ^ ^{a b} http://www.corestandards.org
14. ^ Anderson, Nick (March 10, 2010). “Common set of school standards to be proposed”. Washington Post. p. A1.
15. ^ ^{a b c d} Walsh, Molly (14 September 2010). “Vermont joins 30 otherws in Common Core”. Burlington, Vermont: Burlington Free Press. pp. 1B.
16. ^ http://www.corestandards.org/assets/CCSSI_ELA%20Standards.pdf
17. ^ ^{a b c d e f g h i j k l m} “Key Points in English Language Arts. (2011). <http://www.corestandards.org/about-the-standards/key-points-in-english-language-arts&gt;
18. ^ “Hawaii No Longer Requires Teaching Cursive In Schools”. Huffpost Education. 1 August 2011.
19. ^ mathematics Standards
20. ^ Garfunkel, S. A. (2010). “The National Standards Train: You Need to Buy Your Ticket.” UMAP J 31 (4): 277 – 280.
21. ^ appendix
22. ^ ^{a b} Tienken, C. H. (2010). “Common Core State Standards: I Wonder?” Kappa Delta Pi Rec 47 (1): 14 – 17.
23. ^ Transcript and MP3 of part one:Should All US Students Learn the Same Thing?
24. ^ Part two: No National Standards: Strength or Weakness for Schools in US?
25. ^ In the States (Common Core Standards Initiative website)
26. ^ “Legislation would block Alabama from implementing national curriculum standards (updated)” Alabama Media Group, http://blog.al.com/wire/2013/02/legislation_would_block_alabam.html
27. ^ “Nebraska one of few states not adopting standards”. The Grand Island Independent. 2013-01-05.
28. ^ “Virginia’s stance against national standards is a blow for students”. The Washington Post. 2010-06-05.
29. ^ “Common Core State Standards and Assessment Coalitions.” Education Insider. 9 Sept. 2010. Web. 10 Oct. 2011. <http://www.whiteboardadvisors.com/research/education-insider- common-core-standards-and-assessment-coalitions>
30. ^ ^{a b} “Common Core State Standards and Assessment Coalitions”
31. ^ “Common Core State Standards: In the States”