Shane Vander Hart recently wrote a piece for his very entertaining and thought provoking blog, Caffeinated Thoughts responding to my remarks at the 2011 SAI Annual Conference.
After gently letting left-leaning Jennifer Hemmingsen have it over her coverage of education policy in Iowa, I would stand to lose my “I don’t give a damn about politics, let’s improve schools” credentials if I didn’t give right-leaning Shane Vander Hart the same treatment.
Let’s first set the record straight about the Iowa Core and the Common Core. I don’t expect Shane and I to ever see eye to eye on this and that’s ok – in this country we are free to disagree and are better from an open exchange of ideas. As I understand it, Shane’s position is that the Iowa Core/Common Core is some sort of Obama-driven-federal-takeover-plot aimed at indoctrinating your children to love Chairman Mao and slowly transform this country into North Korea. OK, I may have embellished that last statement … slightly (apologies Shane – just having some fun at your expense!).
Where does this conspiracy theory drivel come from? The fact is that the National Common Core was and remains a STATE led (not a federal government) initiative. The Common Core represents student expectations in reading and math that are on par with the highest performing systems in the world and also represent the kinds of skills our students are going to need to be competitive in a global context. The fact is that a common thread among the highest performing school systems in the world is the adoption of clear and rigorous standards for all students (see example after example in Michael Fullan’s latest work and in Marc Tucker’s analysis of high performing school systems).
Shane goes on to (falsely) state the the Iowa Department of Education and the State Board had no authority from the legislature to establish the Iowa Core or merge it with the Common Core. This is just silliness about the authority to enact the Iowa Core (which contains the Common Core as its Math and English/Language Arts elements). The fact is that the Iowa legislature gave the Iowa Department of Education and the Iowa State Board the directive to establish the Core. To the point that this wan’t an open process, all of the State Board’s steps to include the Common Core in the Iowa Core were public proceedings, as is every action taken by the Board. Sorry Shane, this is within the lines.
Shane goes on to make the dreadfully predictable case that I am pushing for some sort of hyper-centralized school system. Actually, as I’ve stated many times before and stated in my remarks to the SAI Administrators, I’m calling for a reasonable balance of all the players in the education system. Each part has an important role to play, and Iowa’s schools will be best served if all the parts are working together and in symphony.
Governor Branstad was clear to me about my role in Iowa: Make these schools among the best in the world. That happens by building capacity at ALL levels and focusing the whole system on carefully selected strategies tailored to this context. It will not happen by closing your eyes and hoping all 350 districts in the state of Iowa spontaneously pull off becoming a world-class system on their own through some miraculous convergence.
Improvement to put Iowa on par with the highest performing systems in the world takes an intentional and focused effort. Raising useless and worn out rhetoric about government takeovers, “indoctrination,” and “educrats” just regurgitates political soundbites and does little to move Iowa forward to being a great school system.
We do need to build up and support local capacity – but we also need to focus our efforts in a way that makes this fractured patchwork of schools start to move as a system.
Jason Glass
Des Moines, IA
Jason Glass
7 comments
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August 5, 2011 at 12:50 pm
John C. Carver, Van Meter Community Schools
Dr. Glass I very much appreciate your comments and thinking. The dialogue you are facilitating and the move to find consent is crucial to moving Iowa back to the leadership positon in teaching and learning.
You are on the right track. The first and foundation question that needs to be answered is “what is it we want Iowa students to now and be able to do?”. Once that is established with “lazer sharp” focus, and we educators, parents stakeholders and policy makers can articulate it, we can them move forward to create a system to accomplish the task.
The momentum forward is building! Exciting!
August 5, 2011 at 1:42 pm
Ed Jones
National standards do indeed have the potential to indoctrinate, not to mention become thin and stale. Yes they seem fresh and democratic now, but mainly to people already part of the educracy.
Look, we got into this mess because education was being driven by a handful of national textbook companies and two national teachers unions. Switching the power to a handful of vocal state experts groups may well nail the standards at this precise moment. But it’s not a recipe for long term innovation and adjustment.
The world is changing too fast. How can one group know what is needed in times of such change?
Is math even the prime thing we should be teaching? You’ll find few in this game who understand the uses of math as I do; I took eighteen years of math with me to the development of the world’s most complex avionics system. I’ve used math from radar mapping to terrain following flight software to satellite positioning to communications, and down to land surveying and 120V power distribution in a park, and on into finance,
Yet maybe there’s study more appropriate than math. Maybe K-12 students should be learning more of computer science: arrays and stacks and hashes. Perhaps the should be learning these things in 8th grade while they are programming them in Ruby. And so perhaps they should be learning in 7th grade the basics of Ruby programming.
So, for example, standard 7.G.demands that students (in 7th grade) draw triangles and note that they have angles and sides. Isn’t that extremely boring for a wide swath of students? What if they were instead inputting code for dynamic geometric sketches over at SketchPad? Wouldn’t that be a step far ahead?
August 5, 2011 at 2:06 pm
Ed Jones
Funner triangles:
http://studio.processingtogether.com/sp/pad/iframe/ro.9KiUgTqFVNFPZ/rev.925?autostart=0
Check out the source.
August 5, 2011 at 4:39 pm
Grumpy Educators
The Common Core standards might have set a benchmark for States to meet or exceed, but that is not what happened. There has been reporting that some States already had standards higher than the common core. As a non-educator,community member, and taxpayer, I am most troubled by the so-called new generation of standardized assessments and longitudinal database – the rationale, value, and expense go unexplained. These efforts are linked to the common core standards. The influence of non-public entities on the entire process is ignored. Using the word “conspiracy” shuts down meaningful discourse. There is no accountability to the public and no effort to become accountable. Until this fact changes, the public has no confidence in yet another reform initiative. Why should we?
August 5, 2011 at 11:43 pm
Mark Ernst, Madrid CSD
Dr. Glass your ideas are exciting to many educators in Iowa. I’ve had the opportunity to hear you speak a number of times and the thing that impresses me most, a fact commonly overlooked by the main stream media and fringes alike, is the CONSISTENCY of your message. It is clear to see that you strongly believe in what you propose, and that is something that resonates with many but strikes fear in others.
Protectors of the status quo will always look at change as a conspiracy; it’s easy to blame the other guy (or gal). You hit the nail on the head when you indicated that Iowa has rested on past successes for far too long (in terms of education). For too long individual districts have been left to figure things out on our own with very little in the way of regional, let alone statewide cooperation and/or alignment of practice. I for one am excited to be an educator in Iowa right now.
August 15, 2011 at 4:00 pm
Brad Niebling
Well Jason, I commented on your post responding to Jennifer Hemmingsen’s reporting. So, I suppose it’s also appropriate for me to respond on this one as well, though I’m thankfully confident that my perspectives on things are not followed or scrutinized nearly as much as yours
.
I’ve been consistent in my support of both the Iowa Core and the adoption of the Common Core to serve as the majority content of the Iowa Core’s Literacy and Mathematics content. And your comments on the legality of the Iowa DOE and State Board developing the Iowa Core and subsequently adopting the Common Core are right on target. There is a multi-year legislative history that lays out the requirement that the Iowa Core be developed. I really hope we don’t try to drag that argument back out.
Although there is a danger of over-centralization of education when we have things like common standards and assessments that all schools need to adopt and use, I haven’t spoken to or worked with anyone from the Iowa DOE that wants centralized control of things.
What I am more concerned about is that we throw teachers and administrators a life preserver of some sort, because many or most are barely treading water. Teaching is really, really hard work, as is being a building or district administrator. And it’s not getting easier. We can yell and scream about the need for teacher autonomy. And to a large extent I agree. But it’s easy to yell and scream this. But it’s also easy to then walk away and feel good about our protestations to the man taking over our schools. Meanwhile absolutely nothing has been done to help teachers both survive and thrive doing what they so thanklessly do day in and day out.
I’m not saying that adoption of the Common Core alone is going to make life better. If that’s all we collectively do, it will do little to nothing. But it’s a start, and a positive one at that.
September 27, 2011 at 10:23 pm
ncooty
The entire process of adoption is entirely voluntary and the content is set by the states. States and districts that feel they have higher standards can participate in the process to improve the standards, choose not to adopt the standards, adopt a partial or modified version of the standards, or do whatever the hell else they want.
Facilitating the state-run process of collaboration and sharing of best practices does not constitute a federal conspiracy; it’s the exact opposite.
Of course, few people let ignorance dim their indignation and sense of victimhood.