Peter Greene: Why Teachers are Breaking Up with Common Core
Pennsylvania teacher Peter Greene has written a fine post on why he believes that the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) are going down the toilet in supposed “teacher popularity.”
What I appreciate about Greene’s post is that he became aware of the CCSS facade of “teacher created, state-led” several months following my own revelation (which was sealed with education historian Diane Ravitch’s February 2013 post, Why I Cannot Support the Common Core Standards). Now, several months might not sound like much of a time difference, but I had already been actively involved in confronting issues of punitive, test-driven “reform” in Louisiana for almost a year, beginning in March 2012 with Louisiana’s Act 1 and Act 2. So, in May 2013, when Greene was still unaware of the CCSS fraud, my pump had already been primed regarding the CCSS sales job, and my realizing that teachers were once again being sold off– now via CCSS– was a done deal for sure once I began examining supposed CCSS-teacher-endorsing survey results beginning with the suspect AFT survey “finding” of “75 percent of teachers overwhelmingly approving of CCSS” (see this link and this link and this link– all written in May 2013).
Even in this spring 2013 survey, the truth was that teachers did not “overwhelmingly” support CCSS. They did so with reservation– a finding that continues to be slighted in 2014 survey reporting on CCSS regarding both teacher and general public opinion.
In any case, Greene’s post entitled How the Common Core Lost Teacher Support is a fine read. I offer part of it here and the link to Greene’s Huffington Post printing at the end of the excerpt:
Today’s big headline from the new Education Next poll is “Teachers No Longer Love CCSS.”Support for the Core among teachers dropped like a stone, from 76% in 2013 to 46% in 2014. That’s a lot of love lost. Now, as we move from the “Holy schneikies!” phase into the “Got some splainin’ to do” phase, we’ll start to ask the big question.Why?Over at The Fordham, Mike Petrilli hopes he knows why — Note the phrase, “they will be used to hold public schools accountable for their performance.” Perhaps these words triggered the more negative response. I think Petrilli isPeter Greene: Why Teachers are Breaking Up with Common Core | deutsch29: