“The Common Core may actually fail”: Union chief sounds off on Christie, Rhee, and for-profit testing “gag order”
Randi Weingarten warns of "huge backlash," and tells Salon why she still believes in Common Core's potential
TOPICS: RANDI WEINGARTEN, AFT, PEARSON, EDUCATION, ED REFORM, MICHELLE RHEE, DIANE RAVITCH, ARNE DUNCAN, INNOVATION NEWS, BUSINESS NEWS, NEWS, POLITICS NEWS
Randi Weingarten (Credit: Reuters/Rebecca Cook)When executives at Pearson, the world’s largest for-profit education company, held their London shareholder meeting Friday, they were greeted by activists from the American Federation of Teachers, urging them to oppose so-called “gag orders” restricting teachers from revealing information about Pearson’s Common Core tests.
“The mask of test secrecy that is being used as an excuse for the lack of transparency has created growing distress and a huge backlash among parents, students and educators,” AFT president Randi Weingarten told Salon.
Interviewed Monday, the lightning rod union leader pledged further pressure on Pearson, expressed “big disappointment” with President Obama, and said her union’s controversial Newark compromise had “come crashing down” due to a Gov. Chris Christie-appointed superintendent. Weingarten defended “the promise and potential of the Common Core standards,” while warning the program “may actually fail” due to testing backlash, accountability and austerity hawks, and implementation worse than Obamacare’s. A condensed version of our conversations follows.
You wrote, “We’re concerned that Pearson is using gag orders to cover up — rather than address — problems with its standardized tests.” What led you to believe that could be the case? And who’s to blame?
Think about what you’re hearing. Test security is now being used as the rationale why questions are not released after the test, why parents can’t see the test after the test, teachers can’t see the test after the test … Issues that people have had: Ambiguous questions; whether it’s aligned to the Common Core; whether it’s developmentally appropriate. None of those things … can be even examined because we haven’t seen the questions from either last year or this year.
And what I found very illuminating was when [15-year teacher] Elizabeth Phillips, in her Op-Edin the New York Times, said that even after spending so much time with New York state, [whose officials] said, “Trust us, we will take your comments, and we will make sure that they are incorporated into the next iteration of testing,” what Phillips said was that that was not the “The Common Core may actually fail”: Union chief sounds off on Christie, Rhee, and for-profit testing “gag order” - Salon.com: