I thought that would derail the Gates-fueled and Obama/Duncan enforced train, but it did not. As it turns out, states in the midst of a severe budgetary pinch are inclined to promise a lot in exchange for federal and Gates dollars now.
But all of those state promises to revise their standards, change their curriculum, change their professional development, and adopt new tests were all about steps that would occur far in the future. Now that the federal money was already handed out and new money is unlikely to be forthcoming given the midterm election, the states may change their tune. The states are like the kind of person who, when you stop buying her all of those flowers and expensive dinners, may not keep telling you how handsome and smart you are — and the wedding plans are probably in jeopardy.
With Rick Perry said to be a shoo-in for the head of the Republican Governors Association, the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), which was one of a handful of lead groups pushing states to adopt national standards, may find itself in deep trouble. In fact, Perry, as the head of the RGA, may force the National Governors Association, which together the CCSSO, Achieve Inc., and the Gates Foundation, acted as cheerleaders for national standards, to revisit its position in support of national standards….
The opening that Governor Perry has on this issue is obvious and rumor has it that he is thinking very seriously about actions that reassert state control over the education agenda (and leverage the RGA to do so). The clearest place for Perry to begin is with the dozens of states that did not participate in Race to the Top. There are also key states that did participate, and in the case of New Jersey, California and Indiana even adopted the national standards, but did not win any RTT money.
The key states to watch are California, Indiana, Minnesota, New Jersey, Texas and Virginia. In addition to being states that either did not adopt the national standards, or adopted them and did not win federal funds, they have one additional and important commonality among them: They have had higher standards than most other states in the nation.
I think Jim Stergios is spot-on. And as I’ve written before, getting agreement on national standards is almost politically impossible given that we are a large and diverse country with legitimate and competing visions of what schools should look like. You could get states to pledge their support but as we are now seeing, getting the details in place is inevitably very difficult.
Rob is not a researcher, but he is a very effective communicator of research. For the most part Rob was channeling the works of E.D. Hirsch and Dan Willingham. In particular, Rob was most effective in conveying the idea that reading is not a transferable skill. Once students have a basic understanding of phonics, which is not that hard, and once they have a few basic reading strategies, the greatest barrier to kids reading well is that they lack the content knowledge to understand what they are reading. Unless students know things it does them little good to spend more and more time focusing on abstract reading skills.
Check out this very handy illustration of why this is the case from Dan Willingham:
Unfortunately, the misconception that reading is a skill informs much of how elementary school instruction is organized. We are spending more and more time on reading, per se, but less and less on the content subjects, like history, science, art, and music, that would provide the knowledge to allow students to read with understanding.
To repeat, students don’t struggle with reading (for the most part) because they can’t sound out the words or because they lack reading strategies. They struggle because they don’t know enough about the world to put what they read into any context so that it would make sense to them. This is especially true for students from disadvantaged backgrounds who are exposed to less enriching content at home.
So what should we do to fix this? On this I think Rob Pondiscio hit a foul ball. Rob is doing the right thing in trying to convince people to focus more on enriching content and stop thinking of reading as a skill. But the Core Knowledge Foundation is making a mistake in backing national standards as a way to move their agenda forward.
Let’s think about the political logic of their strategy for a second. Ed schools and much of the rest of the edublob hate the idea of focusing on content. They think that content inevitably means an emphasis on dead white men. They think that expecting content knowledge sets some kids up for failure because they can’t or won’t learn it. They are more interested in advantaged kids who already possess a lot of rich content knowledge. For these reasons and more, the edublob is politically opposed to shifting the focus to content.
So how does Core Knowledge think we can sneak into national standards and the assessments a focus on content knowledge even while that approach is opposed by the edublob. The edublob will certainly control those standards and assessments over time. You can’t get the edublob to reform itself by sneaking your minority preferences into a regulatory regime that they dominate. If they don’t want to do it, they won’t. And they can either block your good ideas from national standards and assessment or alter them over time. Dan Willingham agrees that national standards are not a promising strategy.
Rather than centralize control over the education system via national standards and assessments and hope that your ideas will prevail, it is much smarter for Core Knowledge to push for greater decentralization over schools and the training of future teachers. They should want more vouchers, charters, and alternative certification. In doing so they could get kids and future teachers out of the edublob that still thinks reading is a skill and give them the freedom to pick schools where Core Knowledge’s good ideas have been adopted.
Yes, some people will pick bad schools with bad ideas. But at least Core Knowledge will be able to fight it out on the level playing field of the marketplace of ideas. With the status quo or even greater centralization, the edublob can enforce perpetuation of their bad ideas regardless of how effective your alternative is. They dominate the centralized institutions.
Members of a religious minority shouldn’t push for a state-sponsored church in the hopes that will embrace their minority view. They should push for religious freedom and try to make converts.
Herewith I offer my first attempt at a grand unified field theorem of education reform. It’s a first attempt. Critique, suggestions, praise, horror, abomination, or testimonies of reveltory epiphanies are all equally welcome.
Most of the education space is divided into two loosely congealed groups. There is a lot of diversity within each group, and sometimes there are nasty fights within the respective groups. But the big landscape is most fundamentally dominated by the dividing line between the two groups.
One group wants schools to focus on teaching basic skills first, and then a traditional liberal arts curriculum, to all students. The other group wants schools to be, in various ways, more “relevant to real life” – including everyone from down-to-earth, leathery-handed blue-collar voc ed advocates to pointy-headed, pie-in-the-sky, ivory tower touchy-feely progressives. Let’s call these groups the liberal artists and the pragmatists.
[Clarification: When I say “basic skills” I mean the three Rs.]
My formation and career have been entirely among the liberal artists. Ever since I read Dewey in college and recoiled in horror as if from the face of Satan himself – and indeed I can think of few intellectuals whose work has been more useful to Satan than Dewey – I have known that whatever else schools must be, they must not be what Dewey wanted.
For example, most of what’s in this video seems to me to be not only true, but urgently needed:
And I found myself troubled by something in this exchange. Boiled down, it ran like this: Checker Finn sounded the alarm that P21, a key pragmatist organization that wants to destroy basic skills standards, even to the extent of suggesting that schools should really teach less algebra, was being incorporated into the push for national standards. Jay responded more or less with, “yes, and you should have seen that coming, because we told you so.”
Jay was, of course, right. But both Checker and Jay seemed to take it for granted not only that P21 wants to destroy academic standards, which it does, but also that the very idea of anyone wanting schools to provide practical applications, teach critical thinking or “instill an entrepreneurial mindset” is dangerous. That strikes me as throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I want my daughter’s school to instill the entrepreneurial mindset.
And I don’t even buy the idea that applied or attitudinal outcomes are unmeasurable. We may not yet have an agreed-on way to measure them, but that doesn’t mean they’re not measurable. As Milton Friedman said, if you can measure it, measure it; if you can’t measure it, measure it anyway.
I think when Jay describes these things as “unmeasurable” what he really means is that they can’t be measured for accountability purposes, because that kind of measurement can be more easily manipulated. And there’s the rub; too many of us liberal artists have now reached the point where we’re only thinking about accountability, not about education.
Hence, my attempt to construct a grand unified field theorem.
I still think the liberal artists have a powerful historical case against the pragmatists. To speak in a fairly broad generalization, in the 20th century, K-12 public schools mostly gave a traditional academic education to middle-class (and above) white kids, and all the other kids were barely educated at all (if they were even in school). That problem was bad enough in the beginning, but it actually got worse over time, not better, even as the rest of society did a better and better job of including marginalized populations. That’s primarily because the school system fell under the thrall of the pragmatists, who didn’t value traditional academic education, and were even actively hostile to it because they thought it was inimical to learning practical application, critical thinking, creativity, the entrepreneurial mindset, etc.
The practical result of such thinking has always been the same. In the white suburbs, parents are rich and powerful enough to place limits on how far the schools go in gutting the traditional academic curriculum. Fail to teach a rich white kid algebra, and his mom and dad will notice, and they will make their presence felt. But in poorer and darker-skinned communities, while parents may want basic skills education just as much, they have less ability to make their demands heard. So the kids didn’t learn basic skills, and as a result, nothing else the pragmatists tried to teach them worked either.
The rise of standardized testing was the revenge of the liberal artists. They wanted to force schools to teach basic skills to every child. And bully for them! They’ve accomplished much good in doing so.
Yet it doesn’t work in the long term. Yes, to some extent you need to hit institutions over the head when they misbehave. But that alone cannot make an institution work. You can hit some of the people some of the time, but you can’t hit all of the people all of the time – as NCLB has shown. And if you try to make the club big enough to hit everyone over the head all the time, you’ll be giving way too much power to the people who hold the club – who watches the watchmen?
What’s needed to make institutions work is intrinsic motivation. People have to want to do what they ought to do, not primarily because of some extrinsic reward or punishment but because they understand it to be good in itself. No extrinsic motivations are strong and consistent enough to keep people doing what they need to be doing day after day after day.
And on that score, we liberal artists are not offering what we need to offer. We’re just hitting people over the head with basic skills tests. Watch that video again – that’s the voice of the professional educator who wants to educate the whole child, and doesn’t understand what basic skills tests have to do with that. He even affirms his desire for “higher standards,” but doesn’t understand why standardized tests are necessary for that.
I don’t think his view is adequate by itself. I think he’s missing the value of traditional liberal arts education. But if we want people like him to adopt what we have, we need to offer intrinsic motivation for liberal arts education – and that’s going to mean connecting our concerns to their concerns.
I’ll cut out the rest of the verbiage and come to the main point: Education needs to integrate the legitimate concerns of the liberal artists – basic skills and traditional academics – with the legitimate concerns of the pragmatists – a focus on active problem solving, creative thinking, and entrepreneurial innovation.
There are two main obstacles:
Liberal artists and pragmatists see each others’ concerns as mutually exclusive. To pragmatists, time spent on basic skills and liberal arts is time wasted pursuing a failed 19th century model of education, time that could be spent on teaching kids how to solve real-world problems and connecting with their real-world needs. Meanwhile, to liberal artists, time spent on all that practical stuff is time that will ultimately be wasted because it’s outside of effective accountability structures that will ensure the schools teach all children basic skills and traditional academics.
Some people have discovered that they can get credit for talking about integrating the two concerns without actually integrating them. See for example P21, which has been making noises about basic skills and 21st century skills being a “both-and” proposition. So are they now prepared to state for the record that schools should teach more algebra, not less? Eh, not so much.
The answer? School choice, of course. It solves both the liberal artists’ problems (how do we force schools to teach poor black kids how to read, and raise standards across the board for all kids?) and the pragmatists’ problems (how do we create new models of education that will prepare kids better for real life?) without a naïve reliance on changing schools through brute force systems (the most widespread fallacy among liberal artists) or neglecting to hold schools accountable at all (the most widespread fallacy among the pragmatists).
Coming next: where fighting the unions fits into all this.
In a new Flypaper post, Checker and Mike argue that the federal government takeover of schools implementation of common standards can follow one of three paths:
1. “Let’s Become More Like France.” Here, we picture a powerful governing board—probably via a new compact among participating states—to oversee the standards, assessments, and many aspects of implementation, validation, and more.
2. “Don’t Rock the Boat.” We keep the Common Core footprint as small as possible. An existing group is charged with updating the standards when the time comes, but everything else stays with states, districts, and the market.
3. “One Foot before the Other.” This middle ground foresees an interim coordinating body that promotes information sharing, capacity building, and joint-venturing among participating states. By the time the Common Core needs revising, this interim body may evolve into something more permanent or may recommend a long-term governance plan.
In other words, our options are:
Too big, strong, and heavy handed.
Too weak, limited and complacent.
Just right!
Guess which one they favor. No hints!
JPGB readers will recognize Fordham’s longstanding addiction to the hemisphere fallacy – making themselves look good by oversimplifying the landscape into two extreme errors held by the extreme extremists on either side of them, and the reasonable middle ground occupied by reasonable middle grounders like themselves.
Some people say the earth is flat and others say it’s round, so the reasonable middle ground is to say it’s a hemisphere.
Personally, I’d rephrase those three Fordham options as follows:
So big and bold that the federal government takeover of schools becomes obvious, provoking an inevitable backlash from Americans who have repeatedly made it clear they don’t want any such thing.
So weak and limited that the federal government won’t actually be able to take over the schools.
Just strong enough to hand all schools over to federal control, but not so strong that the handover becomes obvious.
While we’re on the subject, Neal McCluskey notices something interesting in the new Fordham report:
All that said, there is one, small part of the report that I find quite satisfying. A few months ago, Fordham President Chester Finn called people like me and Jay Greene “paranoid” for arguing that national standards would be hollowed out by politics. Well, in the report, while it is not explicitly identified as such, you will find what I am going to take as an apology (not to mention a welcome admission):
How will this Common Core effort be governed over the long term?…This issue might seem esoteric, almost philosophical in light of the staggering amount of work to be done right now to make the standards real and the assessments viable. But we find it essential—not just for the long-term health of the enterprise, but also to allay immediate concerns that these standards might be co-opted by any of the many factions that want to impose their dubious ideas on American education. You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to worry about this possibility [italics added]…
No, you don’t.
I’m not sure I would take it as an apology. If Checker wanted to apologize, he would. But he hasn’t.
Which leads me to wonder why he’s suddenly so anxious to make sure there’s something out there in print that shows him expressing exactly the same doubts we do. Something he could point to later, perhaps?
Checker just published a column on the incompetence of government. It’s a little bit weird; there’s not much connection to education policy here, and the piece doesn’t reach any conclusions or advocate any new policies. He just complains that government is really incompetent.
PEREGRUZKA: “OVERLOAD”
To which one can only reply: You’re just discovering this now?
Or is this one of those things like a coworker’s extension number, or your brother’s ZIP code – something you don’t need to know all the time, so you periodically remember it and forget it, remember it again and forget it again?
Like, say, you might remember it when conservatives are doing well in Washington, then forget it when liberals are doing well in Washington, and suddenly remember it again just before a wave election brings the conservatives back?
Let me begin by saying that I am no starry-eyed naif when it comes to the possible impact of the film. I wrote the other day that I am starting to entertain the idea that it might be a big deal. Union reactionaries do find themselves increasingly isolated in K-12 policy discussions, and many of their catspaws will be turned out of office in November.
Let me say in advance however that the unions are not going anywhere. They still control hundreds of millions of dollars, legions of organized activists and all the lobbyists that they care to employ. I’m not claiming that a tipping point has been achieved and it is all downhill from here for them, merely that they are in for what could prove to be a sizeable rough patch.
Where I seem to differ with Mike and Rick is with their seeming determined pessimism regarding the realm of the possible for improvement. Rick and I appeared on a panel together at the State Policy Network a couple of weeks ago, and discussed the same issue.
Readers of this blog find themselves subjected to my battering away with Florida’s NAEP scores on a regular basis. I won’t bother going into the litany because you already know it, so let’s take a couple of other examples where real reform agendas have been instituted, and what has been going on with their NAEP scores.
I pick a couple because, well, only a few exist. You have to be in a position to roll the establishment to do these things, and keep them rolled. Very few have pulled that off. However, the results are encouraging.
I am encouraged that New York City now outscores some statewide averages on NAEP, despite a student body that is 84 percent minority and 85% FRL eligible. NYC kids scored 217 on 4th grade reading in 2009, only 206 in 2002. That’s a meaningful difference, and should embolden Chancellor Klein.
Likewise, DCPS is still an academic blight, but has made substantial progress since the mid 1990s. When my coauthors and I tracked the learning gains of general education low-income students for the 50 states and DC from 2003 to 2009 in all four main NAEP subjects, Florida came in with the biggest gains and DC came in with the second largest gains. Coincidence? I doubt it- both Florida and DC have engaged in far-reaching reforms.
MA is justifiably proud of having the nation’s highest NAEP scores accompanying their standards-led reforms. It has been mentioned before that the usual suspects fiercely opposed their adoption.
Notice that there is no one path up the mountain here-but there are some common threads to the reforms: testing, accountability, choice. So maybe I’m like Ronald Reagan and I just think that there has got to be a pony somewhere in all that manure. It seems to me, however, that there is a pattern here: in the limited number of instances when jurisdictions take control of policy away from the reactionaries, keep it away from them for a sustained period, and implement reforms that they hate, NAEP scores make substantial improvement.
My own experience in interacting with lawmakers, candidates and philanthropists around the country is that they almost all like substantial improvement in NAEP scores. It doesn’t matter whether they are on the right or left or center. The funny thing is that everyone but those directly benefiting from the status-quo seem to not only want improvement, many of them are willing to fight for it.
So have we “cracked the code.” Yes, as a matter of fact, I think a few places have done so. Yes with fantastic difficulty and always imperiled sustainability. The success of reformers is limited and fragile, but very real. If the third largest state in the union doesn’t represent “results at scale” then what pray tell does?
We have learned a great deal over the past 20 years. Our decisions are being guided less by theory and more by experience. Less and less this is less about “Assume a can opener” and more and more about “You know, they did something like that in X, let’s see what we can learn about the results.”
If throwing money at schools, lowering class sizes, expanding preschool, open classrooms, whole language or <fill in the blank here> had produced these types of results, this blog would not exist. There would be no need for an education reform cottage industry, and no one would donate to it. They failed. It’s too bad, because I would much rather be spending my life an executive at Rhino Records putting together compliation CD’s of punk rock bands covering all of Dean Martin’s greatest hits. The cover would have a guy in a tux holding up a martini above a violent mosh pit.
Our ideas have barely been tried, and very rarely in sustained concert with each other. Unless someone is able to demonstrate the Florida NAEP, the DCPS NAEP, and the Trial Urban District Assessment NAEP for NYC and Miami have all been cooked, the only reasonable conclusion to reach is that unions hate policies that succeed in substantially improving the education of children.
There have been and will continue to be misteps. There will be gains and losses along the way. This is a war, and war is hell. The unions are not going away, but neither are we nor the evidence of our successes. As Dino’s pally Frank used to say, the best is yet to come.
Mark your calendars. September 9 was the date that Checker Finn and the Fordham Institute began to turn against the national standards movement they so enthusiastically championed. We’ve been predicting this reversal on JPGB, but who knew it would happen so soon?
Last week Checker noticed that the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), which directs the current national standards push fueled by Gates Foundation money and financial rewards and threats from the U.S. Department of Education, is merging with P-21, the 21st century skills nonsense organization. Checker noted that the incorporation of P-21 into CCSSO could provide “additional traction for the organization’s current agenda [which] would be bad for the country, bad for the new ‘Common Core’ standards and the assessments being developed around them, and possibly bad for CCSSO as well.”
Checker also suddenly became aware that even good standards may well be undermined by bad assessments:
Indeed, P-21 isn’t the only risk here. At least one of the two new assessment-development consortia could—probably in the name of “performance assessment” and “career readiness”—easily drown in the soft stuff, in which case the tests it is building may not do justice to the academic standards with which they are meant to be aligned. Which would also mean that implementation of the Common Core by states and districts could be distorted in the direction of the soft stuff that will be on the tests and for which schools and educators will be held to account.
And Checker has finally focused on the fact that the federal government might make mischief with the national standards machinery for which he and Fordham provided right-wing cover:
One hopes that Secretary Duncan is mindful of this risk, but his big assessment speech last week wandered all over the 21st century terrain. And those straying off the cognitive reservation can also invoke Duncan’s boss, whose March 2009 denunciation of “bubble tests” called for a new generation of assessments that would address not only “problem-solving and critical thinking” but also “entrepreneurship and creativity.” Yes, there is reason to believe that President Obama has drained more than a few steins of P-21 propaganda. Maybe his education secretary has, too.
Of course, Checker still holds out hope that vigilance could keep these negative forces at bay. But he is clearly laying the groundwork for his complete reversal, which will come as these negative forces gain control over the national standards infrastructure that Checker and Fordham helped create by down-playing these very dangers.
State boards of education are generally viewed as dull or weak citizen boards when compared with local school boards–which tend to be much livelier and far more involved with educational issues (often to the chagrin of local school administrators). There are many reasons why state boards do not have a reputation for being active or strong guardians of the public interest in their state. They tend to consist of people who work full-time and don’t have the time or energy to delve into the details of all the regulatory or policy matters that state boards must approve by statute. They tend to meet only once a month–which doesn’t allow time for finding all the devils in the details of any important policy-laden issue. In addition, the recommendations of the commissioner or state superintendent of education are too easy to rely on if the person was appointed by the board on the basis of professional credentials, in contrast to being elected or a governor’s political appointment. And in many states, board members themselves are appointed by the governor and are often chosen for reasons other than having a reasonable familiarity with K-12 education or a reputation for asking enlightening questions instead of grandstanding, pontificating, obsessing over a few specific issues, or expressing stream-of-consciousness ruminations.
Yet, despite their flaws and weaknesses, there is a case to be made for revitalizing and strengthening state boards of education, especially at a time when efforts are being made to leave both local and state boards of education in the dust on vital matters of curriculum and instruction in the name of equalizing academic expectations for all students and obtaining comparable test scores across states. These are desirable educational goals in themselves but not to the exclusion of goals that take cognizance of differences in students’ interests, talents, and abilities. At the least, we should not enfeeble state boards of education by structural changes that centralize educational decision-making and minimize the possibility of getting corrective feedback from informed public discussion of proposed or implemented policies. In what follows, I offer an analysis of how the Patrick administration in Massachusetts effectively silenced what was once known as a strong state board.
In November 2006, I was appointed by outgoing Governor Romney to the nine-member Massachusetts Board of Education. In January 2008, the legislature passed the bill Governor Patrick wanted establishing a cabinet-level position of secretary of education and expanding the board to eleven member–with almost no opposition registered. My term of office was specifically shortened by a year and a half. But, three and one-half years on the board was enough to discern the effects of these changes on statewide educational decision-making.
It is worth noting that in testimony at a 2003 hearing for an ultimately unsuccessful bill proposing a similar position for a different governor, Paul Reville, then director of the Center for Education Research and Policy at MassINC, warned that an education secretariat…seems to create “three masters” for the commissioner of education: the governor, the secretary of education, and the board of education including its chair. How wrong Reville was. The position of secretary of education created in January 2008, to which the governor appointed Reville several months later, did not create confusion for the commissioner of elementary and secondary education. It in effect created one new boss for him: the secretary of education, who was to oversee the budgets and coordinate the policies of the state’s three education agencies as well as serve as a voting member on their boards.
Expansion was the key to minimizing independent thinking on the K-12 board because it required alteration of all members’ terms of office. These changes were carefully spelled out in the 2008 bill to enable the governor to control the majority immediately and, by appointment, re-appointment, or non-re-appointment, all but the student member within a few years.
To reduce potential power plays between Secretary Reville and the board chair (whose appointment was already in the governor’s power), someone who could run meetings on time and had no political ambitions was needed and quickly found. Indeed, the regular presence and seating of Secretary Reville at board meetings came to symbolize his role; newly appointed Commissioner Mitchell Chester was sandwiched between him and the chair, Maura Banta, at the head table. Banta, in turn, was flanked on her other side by the board’s union representative. Not much wiggle-room for Commissioner Chester.
The first clear sign that the governor’s office, not the board, was Commissioner Chester’s boss was his appointment of Karla Baehr, former Superintendent of the Lowell Public Schools, as a second deputy commissioner within two months after Chester’s appointment in 2008. The governor had wanted her for commissioner of elementary and secondary education, but the board had selected someone else for other reasons. The board knew nothing officially about the addition of a second deputy commissioner to the department of elementary and secondary education until the media announced it.
Since spring 2008, the board has voted on very few significant policies for K-12. Indeed, when asked to note for the 2009 summer retreat what important decisions they had made in the previous year, hardly anyone could think of even one. The bulk of the board’s time has been spent discussing (in excruciating detail) and voting on charter school applications or issues, as evidenced in its monthly agendas.
Almost all meeting agendas have been determined by the secretary of education and commissioner, with no board input desired. Secretary Reville told the board directly at a 2008 summer retreat that meetings would be too long if every topic members wanted discussed became an agenda item.
Because the governor controlled a majority of board members from 2007 on, discussion was minimal on most, especially non-charter school, issues. The secretary of education rarely asked questions at board meetings because he didn’t need to; the chair usually asked none. Although the board regularly received brief updates on the Common Core initiative, there was clearly no need to waste time discussing the implications of national standards for Massachusetts or the quality of Common Core’s evolving standards. Patrick-appointed board members knew they were going to adopt these standards no matter what condition they were in. The draft copy placed in an appendix in its January Race To The Top application (explicitly noting the commissioner’s intention to consider adopting them in the future) was of such inferior quality that it had to be completely revised for the public comment version released in March. The chair was the only board member who saw that application before it was sent off, and no board member raised a question about it after hard copies were sent to all board members in response to my request for a copy.
With the non-re-appointment in June 2010 of the two board members appointed by former Governor Romney (Tom Fortmann and me) and their replacement by more Patrick appointees, the board has become little more than a facade satisfying a statute that requires a citizen board to provide oversight of the department of education.
The ostensible results of the 2008 legislation have been exactly as intended–complete control of the state’s educational agenda by the Executive Office of Education, with minimal public discussion of important matters. But, by centralizing policy-making and appointing a politically partisan board with little understanding of K-12, the administration has prevented its own officials as well as the public from learning about flaws in the policies it proposes or adopts. The bill for that hubris will begin to come due when teachers in the Bay State start implementing the inferior national standards this year. And what will the fallback explanation be to parents when high school students deemed “college-ready” by grade 10 or 11 state tests based on those standards go to college and fail some of their college courses? Or will they not be allowed to fail? These are questions that all state boards adopting Common Core’s standards should discuss and need to be prepared to answer.
I had to laugh when I saw thisNew York Times story. They’ve discovered that the existence of multiple “learning styles” has no sound basis in empirical evidence:
Take the notion that children have specific learning styles, that some are “visual learners” and others are auditory; some are “left-brain” students, others “right-brain.” In a recent review of the relevant research, published in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest, a team of psychologists found almost zero support for such ideas. “The contrast between the enormous popularity of the learning-styles approach within education and the lack of credible evidence for its utility is, in our opinion, striking and disturbing,” the researchers concluded.
Wow, those daring journalists at the Times and scientists at Psychological Science in the Public Interest aren’t afraid to buck the conventional wisdom!
Imagine how daring they’d have been if they’d been reading Education Next . . . in 2004?
(Admittedly, the Ed Next article is framed in terms of “multiple intelligences” rather than “learning styles,” but when you come right down to it, “multiple intelligences” was just the fashionable early-aughts buzzword for the same cluster of fallacies that goes by “learning styles.”)
Below, Sandra Stotsky observes that the new national standards demand a reduction in the amount of literature taught in K-12 in order to facilitate more reading of nonfiction.
Stotsky makes a strong case that this demand is equally unnecessary (since schools have already pushed out literature in favor of nonfiction), unjustified (since there are no grounds for the view, being adopted in the name of national standards, that assigning more nonfiction in K-12 English classes will help prepare students to read college textbooks in math, economics, physics, psychology, etc.) and disastrous for real education (because literary and imaginative education is as essential to decent human life as it is neglected by the government school monopoly).
But let’s not overlook a more fundamental point: when we decided to have national standards, nobody told us that it would mean forcing schools to assign less literature. But that’s what’s happening.
Why? Friedrich Hayek outlines it in The Road to Serfdom. Even a small amount of government planning must – must – inevitably either metastasize both quantitatively and qualitatively, or else fail to accomplish its purpose.
Government planning, however small, must metastasize quantitatively. Government gets our consent to plan A. But if A must be planned, that requires control of B. And that requires control of C…
It must also metastasize qualitatively. For government to plan A, government must determine the scheme of values that governs A. This requires not only a mandatory, government-imposed view of the value of A; it requires a mandatory, government-imposed view of the value of everything. In order to plan A you must determine where A stands relative to everything else, and that means government controls not just your view of A but your view of everything.
To the extent that we prevent planning from metastasizing, it fails. To the extent that metastasizes, it succeeds – and we lose our freedom.
Posted by Jay P. Greene 
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