The Common Core is becoming increasingly controversial, but for many people the whole issue remains murky and poorly understood, so I was thankful to see Dr. Ravitch lay out the context, rationale, and criticisms of the Common Core in clear language, and I encourage you to download her entire speech here.

For those who don’t want to read the whole thing, here are some parts I found most insightful.

On how the standards were written:

“The Common Core standards were written in 2009 under the aegis of several D.C.-based organizations: the National Governors Association, the Council of Chief State School Officers, and Achieve. The development process was led behind closed doors by a small organization called Student Achievement Partners, headed by David Coleman. The writing group of 27 contained few educators, but a significant number of representatives of the testing industry. From the outset, the Common Core standards were marked by the absence of public participation, transparency, or educator participation. In a democracy, transparency is crucial, because transparency and openness builds trust. Those crucial ingredients were lacking.”

On why they were written:

“The advocates of the standards saw them as a way to raise test scores by making sure that students everywhere in every grade were taught using the same standards. They believed that common standards would automatically guarantee equity. Some spoke of the Common Core as a civil rights issue. They emphasized that the Common Core standards would be far more rigorous than most state standards and they predicted that students would improve their academic performance in response to raising the bar…What the advocates ignored is that test scores are heavily influenced by socioeconomic status. Standardized tests are normed on a bell curve. The upper half of the curve has an abundance of those who grew up in favorable circumstances, with educated parents, books in the home, regular medical care, and well-resourced schools. Those who dominate the bottom half of the bell curve are the kids who lack those advantages, whose parents lack basic economic security, whose schools are overcrowded and under-resourced. To expect tougher standards and a renewed emphasis on standardized testing to reduce poverty and inequality is to expect what never was and never will be.”

On who supports Common Core:

“Who supported the standards? Secretary Duncan has been their loudest cheerleader. Governor Jeb Bush of Florida and former DC Chancellor Michelle Rhee urged their rapid adoption. Joel Klein and Condoleeza Rice chaired a commission for the Council on Foreign Relations, which concluded that the Common Core standards were needed to protect national security. Major corporations purchased full-page ads in the New York Times and other newspapers to promote the Common Core. ExxonMobil is especially vociferous in advocating for Common Core, taking out advertisements on television and other news media saying that the standards are needed to prepare our workforce for global competition. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce endorsed the standards, saying they were necessary to prepare workers for the global marketplace. The Business Roundtable stated that its #1 priority is the full adoption and implementation of the Common Core standards. All of this excitement was generated despite the fact that no one knows whether the Common Core will fulfill any of these promises. It will take 12 years whether we know what its effects are.”

On the testing component of Common Core:

“The Obama administration awarded $350 million to two groups to create tests for the Common Core standards. The testing consortia jointly decided to use a very high passing mark, which is known as a ‘cut score.’ The Common Core testing consortia decided that the passing mark on their tests would be aligned with the proficient level on the federal tests called NAEP. This is a level typically reached by about 35-40% of students. Massachusetts is the only state in which as many as 50% ever reached the NAEP proficient level. The testing consortia set the bar so high that most students were sure to fail, and they did.

In New York state, which gave the Common Core tests last spring, only 30% of students across the state passed the tests. Only 3% of English language learners passed. Only 5% of students with disabilities passed. Fewer than 20% of African American and Hispanic students passed. By the time the results were reported in August, the students did not have the same teachers; the teachers saw the scores, but did not get any item analysis. They could not use the test results for diagnostic purposes, to help students. Their only value was to rank students.”

On the financial cost of Common Core:

“The financial cost of implementing Common Core has barely been mentioned in the national debates. All Common Core testing will be done online. This is a bonanza for the tech industry and other vendors. Every school district must buy new computers, new teaching materials, and new bandwidth for the testing. At a time when school budgets have been cut in most states and many thousands of teachers have been laid off, school districts across the nation will spend billions to pay for Common Core testing. Los Angeles alone committed to spend $1 billion on iPads for the tests; the money is being taken from a bond issue approved by voters for construction and repair of school facilities. Meanwhile, the district has cut teachers of the arts, class size has increased, and necessary repairs are deferred because the money will be spent on iPads. The iPads will be obsolete in a year or two, and the Pearson content loaded onto the iPads has only a three-year license. The cost of implementing the Common Core and the new tests is likely to run into the billions at a time of deep budget cuts.”

On the standards themselves:

“Early childhood educators are nearly unanimous in saying that no one who wrote the standards had any expertise in the education of very young children. More than 500 early childhood educators signed a joint statement complaining that the standards were developmentally inappropriate for children in the early grades. The standards, they said, emphasize academic skills and leave inadequate time for imaginative play. They also objected to the likelihood that young children would be subjected to standardized testing. And yet proponents of the Common Core insist that children as young as 5 or 6 or 7 should be on track to be college-and-career ready, even though children this age are not likely to think about college, and most think of careers as cowboys, astronauts, or firefighters.”

On the lack of process for revising the standards:

“Another problem presented by the Common Core standards is that there is no one in charge of fixing them. If teachers find legitimate problems and seek remedies, there is no one to turn to. If the demands for students in kindergarten and first grade are developmentally inappropriate, no one can make changes. The original writing committee no longer exists. No organization or agency has the authority to revise the standards. The Common Core standards might as well be written in stone. This makes no sense. They were not handed down on Mount Sinai, they are not an infallible Papal encyclical, why is there no process for improving and revising them?”

So there is some of what Diane Ravitch has to say on the Common Core standards. If you’re interested in reading more, one of my favorite pieces I’ve read is from my friend at EdWeek, Nancy Flanagan, who wrote this gem of common sense in which she warns that “disaggregating the good reasons [to oppose Common Core] from the outright baloney is important. When we join the crazies, we reinforce their craziness and further muddy the discourse.”

In my personal opinion, I think that Common Core – divorced from high-stakes testing – is just another problematic, primarily profit-driven “reform” scheme that won’t do much to improve public education. The main problem – and therefore the main target of our opposition – should be the high-stakes testing that actually represents a danger to the quality of our public schools, the ability of our teachers to engage their students, and the opportunities our students have to develop the love of learning they deserve.

“Won’t Back Down,” Diane Ravitch put it, “is a movie celebrating the ALEC-inspired ‘parent trigger, encouraging the public to think that parents should seize control of their public school, fire the staff, and hand the school over to a charter corporation.”

It stars Viola Davis, a product of the Central Falls schools. Shame on her for pushing propaganda, exaggerations and untruths about life in a public school, especially in the city where Commissioner Gist and Central Fall’s Superintendent Gallo fired the teachers in 2010.

The movie is full of misrepresentations, such as saying several times that the union forbids teachers from staying in the school where they teach after 3 p.m. This is factually untrue. In fact there was a new study done by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation called Primary Sources: America’s Teachers on the Teaching Profession that stated teachers work 10 hours and 40 minutes a day on average. That’s a 53-hour work week!

I encourage you to read Valerie Strauss’s Washington Post article explaining the survey and the hours teachers put in beyond the regular school day.

Leonie Haimson, a New York parent activist and co founder of Parents Across America, says the movie’s plot regarding parent takeover has no resemblance to reality and that parent trigger has a 100 percent failure rate and has pitted parents against parents. Interesting since Michelle Rhee and her school-reformer friends use techniques to pit teachers against teachers.

As Fall comes upon us tomorrow officially, there will be many movies for you to go and see. Don’t let this propaganda film for corporate profit makers be one of them…Don’t get caught up in the hype. Don’t let your movie money support such a misleading movie. Support your teachers by avoiding this corporate school reform distortion message. Don’t let the corporate rich and school reformers like Rhee, Jindal, Chris Christie, Mayor Bloomberg , Gates, Murdoch & others fool you into believing this anti union movie for that is exactly what it is…..

Both RI Future and Ravitch both wrote about parent trigger laws this morning, ALEC model legislation that allows parents to privatize public schools – here’s Ravitch’s piece and here’s Russ Conway’s. Ravitch notes that RI’s own Viola Davis, famous around the country for almost winning an Oscar and famous here in Rhode Island for growing up in Central Falls, will star in a new propaganda film about parent trigger laws.

Here’s what Ravitch writes about Davis:

It’s sad to see Viola Davis involved in this sneaky push for privatization. I remember when she won the Academy Award in 2010 and announced that she was proud to be a graduate of Central Falls High School, right at the time that all the corporate reformers were gloating about the threat to shut it down.

It should come as little surprise though that DAvis is shilling for the corporate education model … earlier this month even more famous Hollywood actor Meryl Streep, who beat out Davis for the Best Actress Academy Award, recent gave a grand total of $15,000 to the Segue charter school in the runner-ups hometown of Central Falls. According to the Projo, Davis “had introduced Streep to Segue and mentioned that the school was in dire need of a new building.”

Hundreds of mayors from across the United States this weekend called for new laws letting parents seize control of low-performing public schools and fire the teachers, oust the administrators or turn the schools over to private management.

The U.S. Conference of Mayors, meeting in Orlando, Florida, on Saturday unanimously endorsed “parent trigger” laws aimed at bypassing elected school boards and giving parents at the worst public schools the opportunity to band together and force immediate change.

Mayor Taveras, it’s worth noting, is part of the U.S. Conference of Mayors and a member of the Jobs, Education and the Workforce committee.

Parent trigger laws, popular with education budget hawks, allow parents to wrest control of public school from elected officials and either shut them down or outsource operations to a private charter school company. Lately, such laws have caused controversy in California and there’s a new movie about the concept, in the same vain as Waiting for Superman coming out in the near future. The parent trigger act is piece of ALEC model legislation (cached ALEC doc). RI Future correspondent Aaron Regunberg wrote about parent trigger laws this weekend for GoLocalProv.

Giving parents so much control over a school’s destiny is, frankly, nuts, as Diane Ravitch put it. Parents, of course, don’t own the public schools and more than picnickers own Central Park .

A parent trigger — a phrase that is inherently menacing — enables 51 percent of parents in any school to close the school or hand it over to private management. This is inherently a terrible idea. Why should 51 percent of people using a public service have the power to privatize it? Should 51 percent of the people in Central Park on any given day have the power to transfer it to private management? Should 51 percent of those riding a public bus have the power to privatize it?

Public schools don’t belong to the 51 percent of the parents whose children are enrolled this year. They don’t belong to the teachers or administrators. They belong to the public. They were built with public funds. The only legitimate reason to close a neighborhood public school is under-enrollment. If a school is struggling, it needs help from district leaders, not a closure notice.

Let’s hope this idea receives the reception in Rhode Island it deserves.