When Dr. Sandra Stotsky was asked to become a member of the Common Core
Validation Committee, she assumed her vast experience in developing English
Language Arts standards would be useful to the design of the new academic
standards.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/01/14/Expert-Dr-Sandra-Stotsky-On-Common-Core-We-Are-A-Very-Naive-People
What she
ultimately discovered, however, was that she and other internationally known
scholars would be sworn to secrecy, then “ignored,” and finally left to serve
only as little more than “window dressing” to allow what many are now calling
one of the greatest deceptions over the American people.
A professor emerita at the University of Arkansas, Stotsky
is credited
with developing one of the country’s strongest sets of academic standards for
K-12 students, as well as the strongest academic standards and licensure tests
for prospective teachers, while serving as Senior Associate Commissioner in the
Massachusetts Department of Education from 1999-2003.
Stotsky’s experience with Common Core has left her
quite busy as she travels the country giving lectures and testifying before
state legislative committees about what she has come to refer to as the “propaganda”
that is the Common Core standards.
“We are a
very naive people,” Stotsky told Breitbart
News. “Everyone was willing to believe that the Common Core standards are
‘rigorous,’ ‘competitive,’ ‘internationally benchmarked,’ and ‘research-based.’
They are not.”
Stotsky continued:
Many people
were quick to believe that the standards were ‘all those things’ at least in
part because of the fact they were privately backed by corporations and,
primarily, by the Gates Foundation. In many ways, whoever is ultimately behind
the Common Core used private groups to their advantage. Because Common Core is
run by private corporations and foundations, there can be no Freedom of
Information Act (FOIA) filings or “sunshine laws” to find out who got to choose
the people who actually wrote the standards. It’s completely non-transparent
and rather shady.
“Everyone
bought into it, and now there is lots of damage to undo,” Stotsky
said:
Local school
districts should be suing their state Boards of Education for not insisting on
the ability to review the standards or on an authentic validation before
accepting them. There was no legal basis to accept the standards for the
states. The rights and responsibilities of local districts were reduced if not
taken away by the state board of ed's
vote to adopt Common Core with all its strings. They didn't consult with local
school boards first (so far as I know – certainly not in Massachusetts) and let
them know what they were up to before they voted to adopt Common Core. It
may be the case that the grieving party has to be a student, not a school
board. But the local level should be complaining loudly and someone should
be asking for the state board of ed
to resign or be put out of existence.
To parents, Stotsky gave
the following advice via Skype during the New York State Assembly Minority
Education Committee Forum on Common Core and Race to the Top in late December:
We have a
very honorable concept in American history called civil disobedience. I think
parents should be able to exercise their right to this concept in opting their students/children out of school on the day
either that Common Core testing is being done or pilot testing is being done.
Stotsky called for legislation at both the state and
federal levels to ensure parents could “exercise their judgment” to opt their
children out of the Common Core testing “without any penalty accruing for their
children’s absence from these tests.”
Asked why
she believes so many leaders and state board of education members signed onto
the standards so quickly, Stotsky said:
Part of it
is a misguided philosophy about what you think social justice means. Does that
mean you lower the ceiling so that everybody gets lower standards? If that’s
what you believe, then the only way to equalize is to reduce everyone to the
same low common denominator.
Stotsky said one of the mind-boggling aspects of the
Common Core dilemma is the number of industry and business leaders, such as the
U.S. Chamber of Commerce, that have supported the standards, even though they
are blatantly inferior:
How could so
many supposedly sophisticated industry and business leaders not understand that
Common Core Math will not prepare students for jobs in their fields? Surely
they have people on their staffs – engineers and technology people – who could
offer their opinion!
Stotsky has spoken and written extensively about
Common Core math standards’ inability to prepare students for STEM fields. Earlier in the month, she penned an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal in
which she quoted Jason Zimba, author of the math
standards:
Yet the
basic mission of Common Core, as Jason Zimba, its
leading mathematics standards writer, explained at a videotaped board meeting
in March 2010, is to provide students with enough mathematics to make them
ready for a nonselective college – "not for STEM,"
as he put it. During that meeting, he didn't tell us why Common Core aimed so
low in mathematics. But in a September 2013 article published in the Hechinger
Report, an education news website affiliated with Columbia University's
Teachers College, Mr. Zimba admitted: "If you
want to take calculus your freshman year in college, you will need to take more
mathematics than is in the Common Core."
Stotsky said that, while Zimba
served as Common Core lead math standards writer, David Coleman, the so-called
“architect” of the Common Core, became the lead writer of the English Language
Arts standards, along with Susan Pimentel.
Neither
Coleman nor Pimentel had any experience teaching English, said Stotsky.
“No one in
the media showed any interest in the lack of credentials of the people writing
the standards,” she added.
Historically,
as EAG News reported, Zimba and
Coleman were co-owners of a pilot program called Grow Network which was based
in New York.
In 2001, Grow Network negotiated a contract with the Chicago Public Education Fund, created in 1998 by
then-state Sen. Barack Obama and radical activist Bill Ayers on behalf of the
Chicago Public Schools (CPS),
which was headed at the time by current U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan.
Under CPS CEO Duncan, Coleman, and Zimba’s
Grow Network finalized a $2.2 million contract with the school system to
provide it with student performance data for the 2002-2003 school year. Members
of the CPS Planning and
Development Advisory Committee and discussion groups included Obama and John Ayers, brother of Bill Ayers,
and Mike Klonsky, Ayers’s associate.
After selling Grow Network to McGraw Hill publishers,
Coleman and Zimba then joined to form Student
Achievement Partners, an organization that has played a leading role
in the development of the Common Core standards and has actively supported
their adoption in the states.
In 2012,
Coleman was elected president of the College Board and has taken it
upon himself to ensure that the SAT,
ACT, AP, and GED exams are all aligned with the Common Core standards.
Stotsky said that as Common Core has become quite a
tangled situation, state legislatures don’t seem to know how to get out of it.
While some lawmakers are saying they cannot repeal Common Core because
their states are already heavily invested in it in terms of time and money,
state education departments are finding themselves having to defend it.
“They are
trying to save face,” Stotsky said. “After all, who
wants to admit they didn’t know what they were doing?”