HT to David Bernstein, whose hilarious blog post takes Charlie Baker, Richard Tisei, and the rest of the goofy GOP gang to the woodshed over their absurd call for the Attorney General to investigate some sort of nefarious quid pro quo between Deval Patrick and the Mass. Teachers Association.
See, the Gov is recommending that MA sign on to the national “Common Core” education standards. Now, whether we should adopt those standards (which maybe would mean ditching MCAS) is a complicated issue, and reasonable people can and do disagree on it. There are Republicans and Democrats on both sides of the issue.
Oh, but surely there is skullduggery afoot! Surely, no one would even consider adopting national standards without being paid off to do it! Thank heavens for Lt. Gov. wanna-be Richard Tisei.
Sen. Richard Tisei, Baker’s running mate and a candidate for lieutenant governor, called on Attorney General Martha Coakley to investigate any link between the endorsement and policy change.
Coakley, a Democrat, refused, and the teachers association labeled the charge “absurd.”
Which, of course, it is. Bernstein’s take on this whole thing is well worth reading.
This is such a ludicrous contention that I honestly thought I misunderstood it. But no.
An excellent start. And where is the teachers union on this issue, anyway?
I’ve checked with a few people who I believe would know, and they tell me that the MTA has no particular interest one way or another in whether the state adopts Common Core. Pretty much the only effect the change would have on teachers would be that some of them might have to adapt some slight changes to their curriculum — not something they usually lobby for, let alone base their endorsement on, above-board or in secret emails.
Seriously, does anybody think that A) Patrick needed to buy the MTA’s endorsement in this race, or that B) THIS would be the quo the MTA would demand?
And then, the coup de grâce:
As for evidence… Well, I asked the Baker-Tisei spokesperson whether the campaign was aware of any evidence of any kind of this alleged illegal collusion. I mean, Mr. Fiscally Prudent Charlie Baker wouldn’t be trying to waste the AG’s taxpayer-funded resources on an investigation based on absolutely nothing, right?
No, that’s exactly what he was doing. “It doesn’t pass the smell test,” I was told; “We want to make sure there wasn’t anything fishy going on.”
Glad to know that the next Governor will consider “the smell test” grounds for an AG investigation. Honestly, guys, I love everybody — but you make it awfully difficult sometimes.
It’s good to know that AG Coakley has better things to do. It’s troubling that the guys who want to run the state don’t.
The new standards in English are atrocious, effectively doing away with English instruction as we know it. English, as its own core discipline, is essentially subsumed under History, Science, and Math. Care about literature? Gone. Care about poetry? Gone. Care about personalized instruction in creative and expository writing? Gone. Want your child to be exposed to multi-cultural experiences and authors from around the world? Gone. The DESE even admits that English classrooms may not even exist in this brave new world, with high school English teachers “retrained” to serve as support faculty to STEM, if the powers of industry and manufacturing get their way.
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p>I commented on the proposed standards months ago and raised the alarm bells then, both here and with my district Administration. We are on high alert in my school, but notice that the all the action is happening in the summer when teachers don’t have access to one another easily? It has been clear, though, in the intervening months since I attended that “workshop” on the proposed Common Core, that the tide is against us and the New World Order will be voted in.
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p>I, for one, will not endure the proposed “five-year intensive retraining” program that will teach me, as a high school English teacher, how to assess papers written in a physics class. There isn’t an English teacher alive who wants to grade papers in science, math, and history all day. I will not abandon the teaching of poetry, despite the DESE’s assertion that “poetry isn’t necessary in the work place.” Their fifteen percent? It’s a joke. If you want your child to read 85% nonfiction and 15% fiction/poetry/drama from the elementary grades to high school, these are the standards for you. If, however, you have a brain and value the arts, writing, literature, and the human experience, then you better start saving to send your little one to a private school because that’s where the people who value these things will send their kids. Who will be left in the public schools? Hmmm…..three guesses.
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p>Smarten up, people. This is one of the final nails in the coffin of public education. The old adage will soon look like this: those who can send their children to private schools where they receive a well-rounded, personalized education; those who can’t send their children to public schools to prepare them for lives on the assembly line of the future. You don’t need any Shakespeare or poetry for that.
With very little discussion we are dropping the test – why?
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p>I always thought the MTA just hated tests but they are for this one?
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Despite what Baker and Cahill are claiming, the Governor is committed to keeping the MCAS in place as a graduation requirement, and has said so repeatedly.
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p>Governor Patrick has funded our public schools at the highest level in state history even during the global economic crisis, worked with the legislature to pass a major education reform bill that will improve schools across our state and help us close the achievement gap, and helped keep MA #1 in the country in student achievement.
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p>Baker and Cahill, on the other hand, have proposed policies that would gut school funding, turn back the progress we have made, and threaten our status as the best in the country. Despite repeated statements from the Governor to the contrary, both Baker and Cahill have continued to play politics with this issue by claiming we are moving away from MCAS – which is false. Baker in particular has a record of cutting funding for public educaiton when he was in charge of the state budget, at one point filing a “reorg plan” the cut nearlly $100 million from our public schools.
for those of us (like me) who are less familiar with the ins and outs of education policy, could you clarify what it means to adopt Common Core but still retain MCAS as a graduation requirement?
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p>Thanks!
…explain in a nutshell what Common Core is.
link
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p>So my question is why is Charlie Baker saying otherwise?
told a group of high school teachers at Bristol Community College that the ultimate plan was to phase out MCAS and replace it with a test that is more refined and reflective of the new core standards–which she was 99% would be adopted in Massachusetts.
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p>Some people at the Governor’s office should sit down and actually READ the English standards and decide whether or not they really want THEIR children to experience an education that is essentially bereft of any valuing of literature, any individual creativity in the arts. An assessment of the quality of these standards can only be made if one is intimately familiar with the current ELA standards. The current standards are, in general, good but could use a little trimming. (Too much breadth; not enough depth.) Throwing the baby out with the bathwater is not a solution, though. Literature is valuable.
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p>The Core Standards are designed to make automatons out of American citizens. God forbid a child actually wants to WRITE for a living–like novels, remember those?–because s/he is NOT going to get the exposure to fiction/drama/poetry that children have received in the past.
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p>These standards are the wolf in sheep’s clothing. If you can’t smell big business and the private sector behind the 21st Century Skills curtain here, there is something dreadfully wrong. The purpose of American public education is no longer, apparently, to produce a well-informed citizenry; its purpose is to produce the worker bee.
I recommend you listen to On Point from yesterday on the “creativity crisis” in this country. Some scary implications.
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p>By “creativity” – we’re talking the very important ability to problem-solve, along with the exposure to culture and the arts.
curriculum and standards with the method of assessment. MCAS is still a lousy instrument, used badly for the wrong reasons. There would be no reason the state couldn’t take on the new standards and keep the MCAS. Teachers really wish they would keep the old standards and get rid of MCAS.
The surest way to destroy physics education is to have students writing about physics. Know who writes paragraphs about physics in high school? The kids who don’t know how to do physics. I’m not arguing against all writing in physics, but c’mon. The elegance of physics is in the equations. If you can’t create ’em, manipulate ’em, and solve ’em… you can’t do physics. All you’ll have is some physics essays and a golden shovel.
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p>As for the 85/15 — I’d expect that high school kids do something close to that now overall.
* history (100% non-fiction)
* science (100% non-fiction)
* math (100% non-fiction, though not much quantity)
* english (mostly fiction, though instruction is non-fiction)
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p>So far as I can tell, this is not different from the calls of “Jobs jobs jobs!” now. “Small business!” now. To me, it’s interrelated, and frankly I’ve always been uncomfortable with the intense pressure of the public, egged on by media and politicians, for interest in jobs jobs jobs.
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p>On a side note lightiris — do you think that if we had mo’better public vocational high schools that there’d be less pressure to eliminate the broader arts from ‘main-track’ public high school?
…of an exchange from “Mr. Holland’s Opus”, though somewhat in reverse. Budget cuts force Mr. Holland’s retirement as a music teacher and the principal explains that given the choice between writing and the arts he’ll take the writing. Mr. Holland responds, “Congratulations, eliminate the arts and kids have nothing left to write about!”
A lot of very smart people are woefully abysmal in this regard. Many academic papers are virtually unintelligible. Of course writing about math or science shouldn’t replace actually learning math and science, but it needs to be part of the curriculum as well.
proposed is for the English classroom. Eighty-five percent nonfiction. WTF? Wheltle from the DESE said that we need to teach kids how to detect bias in magazine articles.
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p>What I think is happening is that industry is making educational policy, and because industry does not value novels, drama, and poetry, they are expendable and can be replaced with the study of math, science, and history. That’s essentially what is happening here.
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p>As for writing in physics, at the conference I attended, one English teacher asked the obvious question: why don’t we just teach math, science, and history teachers to teach writing. The DESE’s answer? “They’re often not good at it.” IOW, we will force English teachers to undergo a retraining program that will enable them to 1) teach writing in STEM and history and 2) assess writing in STEM and history. I asked, very pointedly, where they thought they would find the rare breed of English teacher who didn’t want to teach or write about literature but wanted to read physics and history papers for a living? Susan Wheltle didn’t answer me.
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p>As for our vocational schools, they seem to be out of the loop. They don’t really seem to fit into the puzzle in any meaningful way from what I can tell.
without a full reading of the breadth of English literature???? Reading about people whose worlds are different than yours??? Gaining a perspective isn’t done by magic.
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p>MORons.
Small business people in the state want the MCAS. My staff and my kids should have a well rounded education.
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p>I can’t think of any better way of discouraging future scientists or engineers than having them write about Physics rather than learn about it
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that MTA had very little to say about the curriculum frameworks that could be construed as negative. Teachers are more likely to look askance at the national “standards” than anyone.
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p>The fact that Baker and Tisei and the radio nitwits (take your pick) assume that this is some grand conspiracy of the teachers and their union shows only that they confuse “conservative” with “knee-jerk naysayer.” And rather than find out if they might actually have some common ground on this issue, they attack.
I can understand how the MTA might be reticent on the content issues, but I am disappointed nonetheless. What didn’t really help matters was the stealthy approach to sliding the national standards in. The National Governors’ Association has no business deciding what is taught in the nation’s schools, and the poorly conceived and thoroughly counterproductive product that was developed under its auspices is a disservice to this nation’s students.
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p>When this nation learns to trust and empower teachers the way that every other nation in the world whose graduates outperform ours does, then we’ll have something. I firmly believe the failure of this nation to treat teaching as a respected profession has much to do with the incessant wheel-spinning and lack of progress. I wonder what people would think about letting plumbers, secretaries, politicians, insurance executives, middle managers, etc., decide the standards of performance for thoracic surgeons? Or safe building design? Or bridge engineering?
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Are not professional organizations, but teachers are professional.
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p>Maybe there should be a separate organization for teachers (maybe there is) that would just advocate on the professional side. The professional engineering organizations would be a good example. There is no tenure for a structural engineer, if the building he/she designed falls down they lose their license.
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my wife included. Why carry the liability? Heck, her company doesn’t want her to be a PE because then she’s liable too if a building falls down which she didn’t design nor engineer but simply built.
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p>More to the point, your comparison is nonsensical because engineers tend not to be unionized, which means that they don’t map well to the situation you suggest for the teachers.
start behaving like immoral shmucks when they get chosen to fill out tickets for top seats? Other than his real estate agency, most people never heard a thing about him, then Baker decides Republicans should choose him for his Lt Gov, and every other word out of his mouth is like an echo of John Boehner. Why is that?
An elected official possibly changing positions to affect an endorsement; an endorsing body reconsidering their stance based on different actions of said official. Even if this were true and spun the worst possible way how is this any different from members of Congress changing their tune when word gets around that lobby X is “watching this vote very closely”?
When the police unions endorse Baker, will that be quid pro quo since he supports their monopoly on construction details?
Since Lt. Gov. wanna-be Richard Tisei is quick to put demands on the AG’s time, maybe he should ask her to investigate his running mate’s ties to the Swampscott College, Marian Court College. With the highest student loan default rate in the State for nonprofit colleges (almost 20 out of a 100 students who walk through the door end up leaving with no degree and thousands of dollars of debt they cannot pay back), there’s bound to be something real to sink her teeth into.
Well, what a shame. Should be an interesting ride, I guess. Glad my son will have graduated high school before the read damage is evident.