Actually, Louis C.K. was right about Common Core — Ravitch
Louis C.K. (Gus Ruelas/Reuters )
Louis C.K., the multi-talented entertainer, has suddenly found himself in the news for an unlikely reason. It has nothing to do with any of his projects but, rather, his comments on Twitter and the “Late Show With David Letterman” about how standardized testing and the Common Core State Standards are affecting his daughters, who attend public school in New York City. Not at all well, he has made repeatedly clear.
Suddenly, Louis C.K. is being written about in the New Yorker, Newsweekand on plenty of blogs (including this one). It started with a series of tweets (you can see them here), including one that said: “My kids used to love math. Now it makes them cry. Thanks standardized testing and common core!” On “David Letterman” on Thursday night, he said that his daughters, ages 9 and 12, were undergoing standardized testing during the week and that it was traumatic. Asked by Letterman about the consequences of the testing, Louis C.K. joked:
Well, the way I understand it, if a school’s kids don’t test well, they burn the school down. It’s pretty high-pressure.
Letterman responded that ” a lot of pressure” was being put on kids, and Louis C.K. continued:
…. And the tests are written by people nobody knows who they are. It’s very secretive…. They [teachers and students] prepare for these tests for a long time. A lot of the year is about the test. Teaching to the test they call it.… my kids kind of panicked, which is okay.… My mother was a math teacher and she taught me that the moment where you go ‘I don’t know what that is,’ when you panic, that means you are about to figure it out. That means you let go of what you know and you are about to grab on to a new thing that you didn’t know yet…. I am there for them in those moments. I go, ‘Come on, just look at the problems.’
And then he related one:
Bill has three goldfish. He buys two more. How many dogs live in London?
It was made-up and funny, but he’s making the same point that a lot of educators have made: Many of the questions seem nonsensical.
As it turns out, some Common Core supporters were upset with Louis C.K. for saying what he said. Alexander Nazaryan, a senior writer at Newsweek, took him to task in this piece and then, apparently, asked education historian and activist Diane Ravitch, the leader of the growing anti-corporate school reform movement, to critique what he wrote. Unfortunately for Nazaryan, she did, on her blog, and what she wrote is worth reading. Here it is:
By Diane Ravitch
I received a tweet from Alexander Nazaryan, the author of the Newsweek piece rebuking Louis C.K. and defending the Common Core standards, asking me for a substantive critique of his article.
OK, here goes.
He begins by saying that Louis C.K. has a professional habit of being angry, which I suppose is meant to scoff at his anger and say that he should not be taken seriously.
But then we get into Alexander’s views about Common Core.
The Common Core is “loathed” by Left and Right alike, for different reasons. This is true.
Then he makes the claim that the teachers’ unions oppose the Common Core, which is untrue. Both the NEA and the AFT accepted millions of dollars from the Gates Foundation to promote Common Core, and both have been steadfast supporters. The leaders began to complain about poor implementation only after they heard large numbers of complaints from their members about lack of resources, lack of professional development, lack of curriculum, etc.
Alexander goes on to say that educators oppose the Common Core because they fear they “will be judged (and fired) if their students don’t perform adequately on the more difficult standardized tests that are a crucial component of Common Core.” Here is where Alexander betrays an ignorance of research and evidence. Surely he should know that theAmerican Statistical Association issued a report a few weeks ago warning that “value-added-measurement” (that is, judging teachers by the scores of their students) is fraught with error, inaccurate, and unstable. The ratings may change if a different test is used, for example. The ASA report said:
Most VAM studies find that teachers account for about 1% to 14% of the variability in test scores, and that the majority of opportunities for quality improvement are found in the system-level conditions. Ranking teachers by their VAM scores can have unintended consequences that reduce quality.
Alexander also seems never to have read the joint report by the American Educational Research Association and the National Academy of Education, which spelled out why it is wrong to judge teachers by student test scores because of the many factors affecting test scores that are beyond their Actually, Louis C.K. was right about Common Core — Ravitch - The Washington Post: