A Tale of Two NGA Press Releases, and Then Some
The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) are at the stormy center of unprecedented controversy regarding a supposed set of K-12 “standards.”
The closest “standards storm” that I can think of as being somewhat similar to the current CCSS uproar occurred in 1994, twenty years ago, and concerned the national history standards.
Let us pause and briefly consider that 1994 debacle.
Given the “state-led” origins of CCSS, this scenario, recounted in 1997 by UCLA history professor Gary Nash, sounds strangely familiar– but with no hint of “philanthropic” purchase or punitive, test-driven outcomes:
As with national standards in science, civics, geography, and the arts, the history standards originated in the National Education Goals adopted by the nation’s fifty governors in 1989; in these goals, state leaders specified one of the key goals as the creation of challenging discipline-based standards. Endorsed by President George Bush, these goals led to a Congressionally appointed National Council on Education Standards in 1992. As a result of this mandate, funding for writing the history standards came from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Department of Education, headed by Lynne Cheney and Lamar Alexander respectively. The task of coordinating the writing of standards fell to the National Center for History in the Schools at UCLA, earlier funded by NEH. [Emphasis added.]
The national history standards took time to compose:
It took the teacher-scholar task forces thirty-two months, five drafts, and mountains of critiques before the supervising National Council for History Standards decided that three books were ready for publication. [Emphasis added.]
Had CCSS taken this much care, then CCSS should not have been ready until early- to mid-2012.
Instead, those leading the CCSS charge pushed for a CCSS product cooked like instant grits– to be completed in December 2009. More on that to come.
Let us return to those never-to-be-adopted national history standards:
It so happened that what CCSS “lead architect” David Coleman is proud to proclaim– that he “sold” governors on CCSS– turned out to be the rumors of undoing for the national history standards. As Nash recounts:
Rush Limbaugh told his television followers that the National History Standards werecreated by “a secret group” at UCLA, and many other hostile critics of the standards, such as Lynne Cheney’s employee John Fonte, repeatedly called me the “principal author” of the guidebooks. This was a clever way of persuading the public that these were standards from hell. After all, it was much easier to convince people who had not read the books that the guidelines were deeply biased and unbalanced if they could be pictured as the product of one person’s mind or the minds of a small group rather than the laborious collaborative product of a large number of educators, classroom teachers being foremost among them. [Emphasis added.]
And so, the national history standards died.
The CCSS MOU and Ignoring All Established Standards
Let us now consider the CCSS MOU (memorandum of understanding) (see page 128), a document that predates the official, July 2009 announcement of President Obama’s and US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s “No Child Left Behind