Hypothetical. Why does mortgage credit enable them both equally . Im not sure how were going to do that. So rather than seeing a reform with much tighter regulations, limits on what their executives can make, with an acceptable rate of return and this make whatever you can and get rich structure, its about the famous line from winston churchill, it seems like its working until you consider the alternatives. I guess ive become an advocate of fixing what we have and recognizing that its not perfect. There are dangers in that system. There are dangers in every system. There is another side of false dichotomy with private capital. Fannie and freddie had to be bailed out by the government so we fix that now with dodd frank, if the big bank controls the Mortgage Market, one that undo everything weve done . Why is that private capital . So if we did that and we let franny and freddie start to build capital again and we release them into the market, do you feel there is any risk that we will have more financial crisis in 20 years . Huge risk. The financing of Home Ownership had a huge Political Base in washington and we would be concerned that they will go bad like they went bad before. Slowly but surely we will end up right back where we were before. I think that is risk. Im just not sure i can come up with anything better. There is a risk of having the big banks. There is a a risk without having the government in the Mortgage Market at all that would be such a radical shock to our economy and our economy is on a fragile threshold right now. What would it look like if we had private capital . No one knows. The system has been in place for 80 years. We dont know what it will look like and if ordinary americans would be able to get mortgages. Right. Thank you so much for this discussion. Ive really enjoyed it. Weve been talking about shaking ground. Its a compensated topic and thanks for your time. It was good read on that topic. Thank you very much. That was after words, book tv Signature Program in which authors of the latest nonfiction books are interviewed. Watch past after Words Program online apple tv. Org. Discuss the Education System in america next. The adoption of common core as a standard curriculum. Good morning, jim sturges of pioneer institute, the publisher of this book. Five years into common core, we are at a critical juncture. Polls demonstrate that common core is at a new alltime low and that its brand is toxic. There are one of two major Testing Consortium associated with common core and has dwindled from 26 states down to seven states. Its really no longer viable. The other National National test isnt doing much better. Its a little to say there is little comparability left in common core. This volume that we are releasing this morning, drooling through the the core, is definitely a timely release. Five years into this Great American education debate, its worth remembering what we are debating. Its not politics. It did it contest between two distinct views. The first is that common core standards are a a state driven effort to improve k12 Public Education and especially to help underperforming districts. The second view is the common core standards are of dubious academic quality and constitute an unworkable federal intrusion into what is historically, legally and financially a state and local issue. Drilling through the core is a book that strives to treat the first view fairly, but to argue that the second should prevail. A little on the pioneer institute. Pioneer has been called, in the media, the brains of the common core opposition when in fact pioneer really cut its teeth in massachusetts on issues of k12 education reform. We help the state make strides on improving schools and establishing the highest performing charter pub. School sector in the nation. Massachusetts for a decade has been at the top of every measure in academics in the country. We rank among the six Top Countries in math and science. We are proud of our state and our contribution to bringing about these results for our students. With the arrival of common core, pioneer realized we had to raise our sites beyond the borders of massachusetts. Unfortunately we have already seen the corrosive effect of the core on student achievement of massachusetts students. Its a combination of a multiyear Research Evaluation initiative examining the key elements of common core. The book basically tries to answer three questions that apply to three different constituent groups. The first is, for parents, are the common core standards academically rigorous. For states, how much would it cost to implement common core and the tests, and finally for congress, are the common core standards and the fund federally funded test legal . Two final comments before we hear from our experts. There are over 12 authors and scholars that contribute to this volume that has been edited within introduction from doctor peter wood. You have the biographies. Ill make two final comments. The first is contrary to what several scholars, and scholars that we respect, have argued, standards do matter. Pioneer takes a backseat to know organization. We advocate for the very best standards we can have for our students. This is not a paper debate. Standards are more than just a simple written document. Especially in the hands of states like massachusetts that took the goals seriously, implemented test that were aligned for their students as well as teacher certification tests among the best in the country. Finally i would like to recognize an individual whose name does not appear in this volume. He is a pioneers director of education research. He has been the driving force of pioneers work across the nation in developing the strategy that we have undertaken. He engages the best mine from whom you also here today and also making sure that we maintain a seriousness of purpose in all that we do. James fingerprints are all over this volume and much of the national debate. With that, let me me invite doctor peter wood, the editor and author of the introduction to step to the podium. Thank you. The common core has already touched the lives of millions of americans. I use the word touched cautiously in that it has been a rather hard touched in that it has left some bruises. The bruises are mainly what i want to talk about in the next 20 minutes. There are probably too many of them to fit in that amount of time so let me try to organize this in the form of Something Like this. The lower academic quality is, for me, the primary issue. Im an academic of a head of a National Organization called the National Organization of scholars. Im concerned the students to reach college be prepared for college and are ready to perform well once they reach the college classroom. The common core has been sold as something that makes students in high school, college and career ready, the career ready part falls away pretty quickly, its meant to be College Ready. Its a false advertisement. It doesnt do that. Of lower standards. The other two areas are the enormous cost of the common core and its failure to be really good pathway to the sciences and stem area. Let me take care of those last 21st because i want to spend more time on the academic quality issue. The enormous cost are a bit hard to pin down but one of our Panel Experts is an expert on that. Weve come up with a figure of about 16 billion nationwide as the overall cost of implementation of the common core. That is 16 billion figure that we now know, was a few years ago that we came up with it, is probably a lowball estimate. It will be a lot more than 16 billion. You will not find any accounting of what these numbers are, what the actual costs are in the common core promotional material. This debate has gone on for almost six years and we are doing it blindly without much knowledge of the numbers. Surely some of those numbers are coming forth. In calvin, california, one of the states that has taken the trouble to break down the additional cost of the common core imposes, Something Like as follows, 2. 5 billion on additional textbooks. 5. 5 on professional development and 7 billion for technology. Now those are national numbers. I stand corrected. California has 12 of the u. S. Population so we can project on californias basis how this is going to look nationally within a few years. The numbers im talking about are not oneyear expenditures, they are expended over seven years and in most cases we are finding, in california, that the expenses are outrunning out running the projections already. The issue on science preparation really comes down to the fact that the common core, although it focuses on math and on link english Language Arts, that the basis on math is so basic that the sciences are crippled. By the time they graduate from high school, unless they have been in an accelerated program or taken after school program, there basis to exceed in the Science Program is very thin. The easiest way to point this out is that the teaching of algebra has been pushed back into higher grade so there is not enough room left in most High School Curricula for students to proceed even as far as precalculus. What this means for colleges admitting students on a stem track is that they arrive unprepared. They are unprepared in some on other ways as well. Thats where i will focus my attention. The common core, as i said, promotes itself for making Students College and career ready. To be College Ready means what it means, in the eyes of the founders of this educational reform, the students are prepared to engage in what they call Critical Thinking and that they have learned to do things such as read texts for their informational contact and to develop argument based arguments on the readings they get. Those things stated in the abstract sound wholesome. Wouldnt we want our students to be critical thinkers like marsh and they be able to read text in order to extract the relevant information . Should they be able to construct good arguments on the basis of that information question at the answer to those questions is a resounding yes, we want that for our students. How do we get there . Well, this requires me to do what academics are famous of doing and that is taking a relatively simple subject and making it a lot more compensated. So for a few minutes im going to complicate. The complications are Something Like this, the United States has over the past 200 years proven not to be a very good nation when it comes to figuring out how to educate its children. We have had, starting probably with horace mann in the 1830s, wave after wave after wave of reform attempts that have almost, every single one of them, resulted in making some of the problems worse and inventing brandnew problems. Now, i dont dont have time to give a history on american education, but the common core ought to be seen as the latest in a long series of these. It follows on from no child left behind, it follows on from reforms of the 1990s 1990s and back to the 1984 nation at risk report. All of these together have pointed to a deep dissatisfaction among americans on the way our schools proceed. When the common core started taking place, shape in 2007 it was building on pentup dissatisfaction. That dissatisfaction has a variety of forms but one of them is the dissatisfaction educational system had with the system of education serves students who dont perform very well. One of the very first steps of the common core was the idea that i was going to set higher standards, it was going to redefine the word higher to mean more inclusive of more different kinds of students. The common core begins, as the story begins, in 2006 when David Coleman and his partner, jason zimmer, a professor of mathematics get together and start thinking about how to recast to be standards. They were coming on the heels of a long series of efforts by people who wanted to nationalize our standards, make our schools something of a a National Project rather than a local and state project and they came up with a very clever way around this which was since the constitution and statutory law, for the most part, for bid the National Government from taking over the schools or setting a curriculum, they said lets do this at the state level but lets coordinate all the states so that at the same time they adopt the same standard and we will have de facto national standards. It sounded like a great idea and with the backing of bill gates money, they went to the National Governors association, they went to an Organization Called achieve which was founded in 1996, they went to the association of chief state school officers. I dont quite have that name right, and they made this pitch that heres a way we can finally get around the constitutional and Statutory Oil obstacles to have real education reform in this country. The officers convened a project called the common core state initiative. They drew in many other partners both corporate and other parts of the educational establishment, and we were off to the races. Now initially this proved to be very popular with governors and with states, some 46 states adopted it in principle as something they wanted to do or were willing to explore. But then we had the recession and in 2009 when president obama found himself with billions of dollars on hand as part of the stimulus package, he was looking for Shovel Ready Projects and the secretary of education told him he had one on hand which was lets put some of the stimulus number on it money into the common core. That was called a race to the top which was a pinata but the states could swing at. If they hid it they would get a lot of money. The states were desperate for money and suddenly within a matter of two months, we had states officially signing on to the common core standards. Trouble was, there were no such standards. They hadnt been written. They were still conceptual. The project of creating them was underway even as the states were saying we are ready to adopt them. The mass we are in right now, largely flows from that moment in 2009 and 2010 when the states rushed in to adopt common core without knowing what they were getting into in the hopes that this could mean a lot more money some of the states got some money but now we know that the cost of implementing the common core far outspent what the government was willing to put into it. Common core came with a a whole lot of promises. I can run through some of those. It was meant to be internationally benchmarked wit meant we were going to set standards at least equal with those the best in the world. That piece has been almost entirely forgotten that this part. Benchmarking just means that other countries have standards in ours arent quite as good, so what. The consistence on informational text turns out to be an issue with literature. We found out that informational text mean everything from reading repair manuals to government regulations and sometimes reading works of literature, oftentimes out of contacts or in forms of excerpt. As, core proceeds from kindergarten through 12th grade, there is less and less attention on literature. Why does this matter . If you are approaching education is simply a utilitarian thing, learning how to read and express yourself, maybe it doesnt matter very much. The literature is our key to most of the really important dimensions of reading. Getting the arguments across that involve imagination, world conception, the idea of what it means to be something rather than simply be an extractor of information gets scant it in the common core and that remains a problem to this day. The common core sets itself in an odd way against the american family. That is probably clearest when it comes to math instruction where in the early grade math has been turned into a torturous set of instructional procedures that parents cannot comprehend. One of the immediate effects of the common core is to put a wall down between parents and their children when you try to learn things and help your children as they proceed through this curriculum. Most parents, nearly all parents find themselves simply baffled by these new procedures. The claim that this is going to make students College Ready just appears to be rather preposterous at this point. It is true that there is some 300 colleges that have now signed on and said yes, we will accept students who have had a common Core Education as College Ready. What does that mean . It means they exempt those students from remedial courses. Now places like california state where over half the students in recent years have had to take remedial courses before they are eligible to take regular courses, cal state has now said we are going to stop that and let anybody who has passed common core in their Home High School bypass remedial courses and go directly into the curriculum. What does that mean if you are a College Teacher as i was from most of my career question market means you have students who are really ill prepared and that you have to now adjust your course downward to their level. How does common core make students College Ready . Not by improving the students by by dumbing down the colleges. Why are colleges willing to do this . For one thing, thing, if they are state colleges, when they are states agreed to do the common core, they agreed in principle that they would abandon remedial courses and treat the common Core Education as everything you needed in order to attend college. As i said, the bruises go on and on. One might point to the disempowerment of teachers. The common core advocates are fond of saying that its not a curriculum simply a set of standards. Thats a distinction without much of a difference. The standards are so many in some cases that they leave teachers extremely little room to choose how to teach or what to teach or when to teach it. Its not literally a curriculum and that it doesnt specify the exact text that each teacher must use and what the lesson plans might look like for a given day of the week, but apart from that it is a straight jacket and teachers are now turning into the most prolific risk critics of common core. An interesting cast because initially the Teachers Union, union, the nea especially were strong proponents of the common core and now there has been a a big split between the leadership of the Teachers Union in the rankandfile who find common core unbearable. They didnt like no child left behind, they liked the common core even less. The common core fragment knowledge. It has built into it the preposition, the proposition that its unfair to expect students to have background knowledge or context. Most famous example of this one is the teaching of the gettysburg address. They dont mention that its a battle field and lot of people died there. It simply treated as a pile of words. The treatment of text as piles of words is a signature movement of the common core. It takes the history, it takes the personalities, the understanding of human context completely out of the teaching. Teachers of course can try to smuggle it back in but that brings us to the next problem which is that the common core is not simply a set of standards floating out there telling teachers what to do, its aligned to a set of tests and principal to make the common core work to testing consortia, one called smarter balance and one called part which i can never remember what that stands for. We had these created so test could be created and states could choose to be part of the smarter balance or the part or both. States rushed in, as you heard in the introduction and states are now rushing back out. Meeting these National Consortia doesnt mean they get out of the testing game, it just means they have to develop alternative tests. This defeats one of the purposes of the common core which was to nationalize everything. Now its d nationalizing and going back in some sense to a state level but a state level that has been marred by its implementation of a set of rules that get in the way. The common core has, what i call it, a forensic approach to knowledge. Everything is now evidence. You are teaching students to think not in terms of trying to put together a whole understanding of things, but to break them down into pieces in order to make arguments. We would like every student in the country to be a mini lawyer. This forensic approach has some merit and some benefit as they try to learn how to make arguments but if thats all they do in a k12 education, we are missing a great deal. This movement for the common core, i have depicted it as a falsely labeled statelevel initiative, it really looks like something that nationalizes and does have the fingerprints of the federal government on it through president obama and the department of education, but its really important to see that it arose from and remains, to a large extent, a, a private enterprise. The National Governors association is a private organization, and the copyright on the common core is held by the private organization. These two testing consortia are private organizations. Being being private means they do not have to disclose, are not subject to requests or anything else, the process by which they arrive at their standards, how they change their standards, the questions that go into their tests. Its all a black box. When i said earlier that this disrupts the family and put some kind of wall between the learning that Young Children are doing and how their parents can help, that wall is even higher. Its a wall that shuts off all of us. Public in general, teachers, parents, everybody from what actually now makes up the content of the american Public Education. In what sense do we have Public Education left when we have decided to privatize the whole enterprise by handing it over to a bunch of organizations that have names that vaguely suggest that they are public. The National Governors association. Whats that . They are not in fact public, they are private and they intend to keep their privacy. We know because because we have been trying to get information from them for the past five or six years and its hard to get. Now there are other components of this. One was that although it was not initially part of the scheme for the common core, when the federal government made the common core part of the race to the top, top, it added a demand that the states also adopt a state longitudinal data system, Data Collection or data mining as we call it. The idea was that students performance on the common core, from kindergarten through 12th grade should be measured and the data from that should go into a national database. Well, as soon as the database stuff goes out, one organization who was one of the original contractors and originally went bankrupt, the Data Collection mandate remains there. The state started to bridle it turning the data over to the federal government. The two private testing consortia just love the idea. In fact they extended it from k12 through prek through graduate school. That is to say on every american who attends school, every bit of data, every grade, every assignment, everything that you do in school, is in principle going to be is in principle going to be recorded and transmitted to a national database. Database. It sounds cruel that this could even be true, but this is what they wanted to do. This tells you something about the people who planned and implemented the common core. They heard the idea and thought it was great stuff. While the position that we are in at this point, i would say, say, is one that involves a certain amount of velocity as well as the pragmatics of the implementation of this set of reforms. To see the common core as a whole could take quite a while. In fact we have written a whole book that compiles the details on this. You wont find any other books like it around. I think we are the first to attempt something as systematic and dispassionate as this. It doesnt quite get to some of what i think needs to be said and that is that this common core is a division of what education should look like for this country. Its a vision that has four parts. One is a cult of expertise. This is education in the form of people saying we know best. Weve studied this, we have deep understanding, listen to us. That element of education that has always been involved with parents and teachers and local community to have some say in what education should look like has been part of this expertise. This has an experimentation element. Im not against that, i think its healthy, but this is an experiment that we dont have any safeguards. We are experimenting with the whole country at once. We are eliminating the local variability and we put all of our eggs in one basket. That kind of experimentation is dangerous. And ive used this word before but this is a utilitarian approach to education. I mention bill gatess money behind us. He has been a major financial supporter as well as an ideological advocate. What he would like and what many of the supporters would like is a form of education that prepares students to go into the workplace with a set of skills that they can immediately put to the task and earn a living. We want children to learn to grow up and be productive members of society and education is more than utilitarian. It has to do with trying to form whole people who will be good citizens and lead complete lights. Lives. Finally, it is decentralization. American education has never been successfully centralized. There have always been people who had like to see it centralized and have fought for it but there is ferocious pushback from the american people, actually from the term of George Washington on, because this debate in one form or another, how centralized we should be. The constitution leaves education to the states. The states, for a great part of their effort, leave most of their decisions to the local community. That is how we have conducted education for over 200 years. Common core puts a full to that. The founder of achieve, one of the partners to the common core, a few years ago called for the abolition of all local school boards. I dont believe that as part of the common core mantra at this point, but it is very much in spirit of what the common core brings. Centralization for its own good, standards by standards that lead to centralization. Why centralization . Because it leads to standards. Its a kind of circularity to this whole thing. Im not opposed to standards. I think it would be a great thing if i found freshman coming into college both literate and numerate and having read some good books. More and more have encountered what we called book surgeons who are students who have reach College Without reading a single book. This is not a curriculum that leads students onto the place they need to be in order to achieve in college the kind of education that we would like to see the young men and women of this country bring about. Thank you. [applause]. Let me introduce sandra. She is a Professor Emeritus and is one of the great reformers of this movement. Thank you. I come before you, not only as a retired professor from the university of arkansas, but also as one of the members of common cores Validation Committee 2019 mac 2010. We were two of the people on this less than 30 Member Committee who did not sign off on common core standards back in 2010 when they were first release. I will speak primarily about my involvement with the standards for the humanities, english language, arts and history. You will see that i have coauthored in the volume that we are introducing today several of the chapters that address the effect of common core standards on teaching of humanities and curriculum in english Language Arts reading and history in k12 we have heard that standards matter. I am organizing my talk focusing on english Language Arts about how standards literally matter. Here i draw on my experience in the Massachusetts Department of education, over ten years ago, where i was in charge of revising or developing all of our k12 standards and we were determined, with the help of teachers, and i will focus on english Language Arts primarily, primarily, with the help of the states english teachers in its high schools to develop a set of standards that focused on literature. The teaching of literature. The teaching and learning of literary text. Why . Because that in their judgment was what taught students how to read between the lines so they could become analytical routers readers, anchors and writers. Thereby, eventually become College Ready or whatever else they chose to do. The first influence of the standards that we created back in 2000 and the next few years was on the classroom curriculum. Standards are not the curriculud shape the curriculum. Here is the first problem with common cores ela. The standards are mainly skills, not content oriented standards. Very quickly, what do i mean by that . Heres a simplified skill base standard. Find the main idea and supporting details. It could apply to the three little pigs, it can apply to moby dick. It doesnt tell you where you go in terms of difficulty level, culture or history. It doesnt say what you choose for a piece in the classroom. Our standard which was selected for grades nine and ten, understand, analyze, become familiar with themes of classic poetry. It meant that teachers in grades nine or ten could teach iliad, the odyssey, whatever, whatever they chose, but that would be the. Or classical literature that they would choose from to help develop the base of knowledge, literary historical knowledge, that my coauthor and i talk a great deal about in one of our chapters. So the first effective standards would be on the classroom curriculum. The second would be on the student tests. That we were also developing in massachusetts at the time, because it was required by the Massachusetts Education reform act. A remarkable and wellwritten piece of reform, reform, true reform, legislation that came out in 93 or 94. The tests that were in massachusetts called massachusetts comprehensive assessment system, these are the test that had come as their major focus in the reading section, literary study because that was what teachers wanted. It was not imposed by a board, by Political Considerations or by even someone like me in the department who did favor literary standards. That is what teachers wanted because we passed out surveys to make sure that is what they wanted. May i ask you please, by the way, to give me a minutes warning so i know when to close up, if you can. So we had an effect on the standards, the standards had the effect on the student test begin with. But that wasnt the primary effect that i was concerned about. My concern went beyond student tests, as important as they seem to be in todays environment, and ill say more about that. We were also concerned with their effect on teacher training and teacher licensure tests and teacher professional development, because if you want more demanding, firstclass standards, you have to have teachers that can teach to them otherwise the standards are simply empty words on paper. So i will talk finally, a little bit more about those two final thrusts of what we did in massachusetts that produced the highest achieving students, not only on our National Report card but also in grade eight, we were tied in science for first place with singapore, because we entered as a separate country and we were among the Top Countries in math in grade four in grade eight on national tests. We had independent confirmation, something we couldnt duplicate and we were going in the right direction and all students were improving. Not just the top, not just the metal but the bottom as well in all demographic groups. Thats something we all wanted in massachusetts even though that doesnt seem to be where, core is going. Those are the four areas i will touch upon briefly. What are the major problems with common cores ela standards . As youve heard, there is a focus on informational reading. Ive mentioned that there is skillbased standards so we have almost no content in these k12 standards to guide the curriculum in the classroom which leaves it very open to manipulation by the student tests that are now coming through, but we have a problem in that more than half of the reading standards are for something called informational reading, something that english teachers were not trained to teach, have never been trained historically to teach, and frankly do not teach in general because information belongs in other areas of the curriculum, not in the english class, but over half of the reading standards or something called informational reading. Less than half are for literary reading which has always been a major content of the english class and in which of course was the major thrust in massachusetts by teachers own preferences. Why did they go in that direction . That is what i kept asking questions about because i come from the fielding graduate work of reading. Reading instruction in reading research. We know there is no basis in research or even historical or Empirical Research to even suggest that if the english class teaches something called informational text it will make students better ready for college. This is not the case. But nevertheless, what passed this board was something called informational text is a problem but the fact is this is not what teachers are trained to do and yet that is over half of the reading standards. Also missing from common core were lists of recommended authors and titles in massachusetts so i had a good basis for judging which was not in common core and that is what we noted and then when i did another paper with anthony asselin, a published poet at providence university, his concern was where is the poetry. Okay only have a minute to get into the others. We now have a poor set of standards in english Language Arts to look at the test because tests show how those standards are being used for students. When look at the test for this year which have hit School Systems across the country, whether they are partnership for assessment and readiness for college and career. It took me a while to learn what that acronym meant and then smarter balance. It turns out from our own analysis that it doesnt elicit the same writing that is done in college or the real world of work. So how did we buy into a flawed system that when it is implemented or substantiated informal test questions, questions, it doesnt get us where we want. It has a format for assessing vocabulary that is completely wrong. It missed guides or misleads teachers and what to do in their classroom. It features socalled innovated test items for which there is no support for the claim that they will have deeper thinking and reasoning and develop Critical Thinking. Where does this go . It goes directly to teacher training colleges who now must train their teachers for accreditation, thats a catch, to teach two common core standards and it then goes to professional development on which we spend billions of dollars in this country. We have an army of professional developers who are now further misguiding the teacher in the classroom. Training schools will take care of prospective teachers, professional development will take care of those already licensed in the classroom. So we have right now, an ongoing battle on what should be the nature of accreditation for teacher Training Programs and administrative Training Programs, and how do we cope with a set of standards that will effectively cripple our future Teaching Force . Thank you. [applause]. Thank you sondra. Next we will hear from Professor Emeritus of mathematics. Okay, let me apologize in the beginning. I can barely see you out there because in my world its 630 timemac with that in mind, ill try my best. I want to talk about doublespeak thats what were dealing when with when we talk about common core. Lets talk about the word vigorous. You hear every proponent of common core use to describe the standards and we want rigorous standards for our state, our previous standards rigorous and so on. Every state uses this kind of herbage. For me, as a mathematician and probably most of you, when we hear the word rigorous, we think careful, precise and above all, correct. It may have a connotation of boring, frustrating, but, but what we think specifically is above all correct. For educators, this is too boring. So for people who speak education ease, it has a different meaning. I think its very important to understand this different meaning. I put the whole definition into these notes that were being sent out, the incomprehensible, core math standards. Let me read one sentence. They may use the term rigorous to describe learning environments that are not intended to be harsh, rigid or overly prescriptive, but are stimulating, engaging and supportive. Now if you think about that for a minute you would realize that this is the debt opposite of what we in the real englishspeaking world think of as rigorous. So what youve got is this professional educator, typically a distinguished faculty member within the school of education, standing up in front of people and saying we have created rigorous standards. While youre thinking one thing, but what are they thinking . Their thinking creative, flexible, fun. Thats a different world. Of course this is only one of the many many examples where a a word is used in the context of the Education World to mean a debt opposite of what it means in standard english. Now i wont go on with other examples, but keep that in mind. I should say, i cant really handle reading my watch so please let me know a minute or two in advance when i should stop. Alright, so now lets look at the common core math standards. Now first thing, as was mentioned earlier, both of us were on this thing called the Validation Committee for common core. That is a committee selected by the governors of the various states and by achieve and by other people who are unknown to me to validate the common core standards. At least that was their charge. What we were asked to do was to check the Research Underlying the common core. Verify that it is correct and sign off on the standards as researchbased and standards that cover the topics that need to be covered. In fact, if we didnt like the way the common core was written, the final version, part of our charge was to rewrite it. When it became clear that i and sandy fully intended to take advantage of the charge, the charge was rapidly changed. The final charge that we were asked to do was simply to sign a letter saying the common core standards are excellent. There was no other option in that letter. The standard common core standards are excellent. We could sign or not sign. If we didnt sign, and there were five of us who didnt sign, then they tried very, very hard to erase our membership on the committee. Fortunately, some of us remember that we were on the committee and so that didnt work exactly. In mathematics, and ill talk about mathematics, the standards themselves are very low level. They are said to be internationally benchmarked. Well, they gave up on that after a while. Now if you read the website, they say they were compared to the International Standards of the high achieving countries. Compared. No implication whatsoever that they were comparable, just compared. In fact, overall in the common core standards, if you compare them against the standards of the high achieving countries internationally then by eighth grade, they are two or three years behind. But as bad as that sounds, something that i havent told people about, a lot of people have heard that, but i havent told people about is that its far worse for high school graduates. The High School Math curriculum stops with algebra two. Algebra two is barely beginning of the real subject. Moreover sitting in the middle of that is the standards for geometry. Those are interesting. The approach there, and i dont know that they emphasized enough the degree to which the common core standards prescribe pedagogy. They tell the teachers how to teach and what to teach. Standards, its not unreasonable that standards tell them what to teach, but its a new phenomenon that standards tell them how to teach it. In particular, the description of geometry that occurs in the common core standards, i i guess i would describe it as describing one of the strangest approaches of geometry in the world. Moreover, its one that we know has not worked a few times that has been tried in the past except, to be honest or fair, for one tiny little area in belgium. Thats it. There is no Research Basis between, in literature or an experience internationally for this particular form of geometry course. That is typical of the kind of research that is actually in the common core standards. Thank you. So as a a consequence, something that is also not commonly considered, a part of the duty of mathematics and the high school is to provide the background needed for the sciences so a a certain amount of algebra is needed in physics and thats provided about a year before the student would take the physic class. More is needed for chemistry and biology, but biology you see in the high schools is not biology anymore. So thats not true, but in particular chemistry and physics, you need a certain amount of mathematics in order to take those courses. Well common core is not supplying it. Its moving algebra one year later so the usual articulation between algebra and physics isnt there anymore. The geometry and other things that are needed in chemistry, again its simply not there. So the articulation between the sciences and mathematics is gone , well they anticipated that. They prepared for that. We now have something called the next generation science standards. Those are characterized as our common core as being content free. That is incomprehensible to me, to be frank. How can you have content free science . So, this is ironic in that my son has just started his second career as a High School Science and biology teacher. Im using his phd in molecular biology and his considerable work on his human genome background. Now he is telling me that the High School Teachers in science and some of mathematics are leaving in droves because they see the writing on the wall, and whats being planned this totally prescriptive courses that are content free, not only a mathematics but also in sciences. So the education that you are getting in your high school, to be career and College Ready becomes they really mean Little Things that just set up there and hopefully to prepare kids who are sufficiently bar behind for Real University courses. So i will stop there. Eight you for your attention. [applause] eight q. Professor. Im sorry coming up we have zeev wurman electrical engineers Silicon Valley entrepreneur also working in higher education. I live in california but my accent is not california. Somebody called me professor but i am not. I have a chapter because it is important some early estimates are done by pioneers with that implementation is about 60 billion nationwide. The institute that is a big proponent of common gore came out with lower numbers to dash end was 12 the low end is plenty but that was then and this is now. California is one of the few states edits explicit other states have it rolled into the of regular budget california has a separate budget over the last three years over the next fiscal year the budget did numbers 5. 2 billion just for california. California allocated 5. 2 billion to implement common core. Said the estimate that in other words, within three years, not seven more than three times higher than officials they claimed it would cost. Im sure the numbers are similar but which brings me to another point some School Districts are suing sacramento because testing is the Unfunded Mandate because they have to buy all the computers quickly but there is not be enough money. It is about 1 billion per year ongoing essentially for ever for technology. You think how did they come to these crazy numbers . If you assume you need a computer for every four students even if it is cheap 500 with software that is cheap probably cheaper than your from. And then if you include maintenance which is another 20 percent that is 1,000 over five years and another five years of maintenance which is 1,000 divided by four is 250 per student than that goes on forever just for testing. In the saving with testing computers. How much is 50 a year per student on average . It has more than doubled. And they have to do it immediately. If you dont have the money you could wait another year. So now the cost of testing so we pay the money. To spend so much money with implementation it is pretty awful. But to build that airplane it sounds very correct. Would you hire a contractor that says in the village a the middle of building your house . But stupid is one thing. So i touched on mathematics so let me point out in the elementary grades and the middle grades. Nevers arguing about it why should i view that they a professor of mathematics at stanford with the president ial mathematics abies three panel assembled by the president including though leading experts etiquette maliki him as accommodations. Ended came with basic accommodations. Is certain grades of elementary so i went to the report a and compared it to what common core expects one that is visible to anyone the expectations are between one in three years behind. With the Advisory Panel aims at providing algebra one at grade eight not highschool we should aim for that that is what common gore promised us and them we come back to say forget now highschool. They will say dont worry. That is better than the old algebra one. No. If this were true the why didnt they keep it instead of torturing the students . That is not true. Grade eight common core is barely the old algebra. So every situation with the elementary grades the are below the International Benchmark clearly theyre not compare ball in any amount. With this benchmark standing in the High School Rather than grade eight. That is it. Thank you. [applause] dr. Williamson evers at the Hoover Institution and assistant secretary of education. I am talking about centralization as a decentralized country with our government and education so what is the of federal government giving us in the way of education when it comes to your curriculum and what goes on in the classroom . It has given us social studies. History focusing on current problems this is a federal intention. Back to the time of world war i. They give as an adjustment in the forties teaching all the of glasses like how to bake a cherry pie and what to do on a date and how to fill out insurance forms of brilliant the idea from the federal government. And the new math of the 60s and i know he never heard the famous satirical song about how to do that only a child can do referring again to the breakup of the family because in 1965 the parents could not possibly understand what is going on with and some of the features are back here with common core. And most tragically the federal government gave us the emphasis that blacks should be prevented from having an academic education just vocational that is another brilliant idea of the federal government. In contrast what has the State Government given us . Charter schools came out of minnesota. Copied by a other states. Vouchers will have come out. Accountability and standards came down in the 80s so i think if you compare the two federal government is destructive and counterproductive. So what actually happened . We have a set of people and people do everything but people wanted National Uniformity in the classroom. There is a famous harsh character in france there on the same page on the same day in every subject. What about they wanted that in the United States they wanted the uniformity of curriculum and to make sure it happens so they won it policed by federally funded test so that is what common core is a and that is the project. There were people with various attempts to the h. W. Bush, bush 41 and the Clinton Administration to reduce some of this some of you may remember the National History standards were voted down 99 one that was part of the earlier effort to do this sort of thing. So the people letter common course they did state led it is not like a severe sending representatives with a mandate here in nebraska to put together, that is not what happened. So to talk about the validation and the secrecy but was not a big state conclave you should look at sonny perdue the governor of georgia and a major figure of the policy arm and did not like the fact that the students were not performing that well and were compared to students of other states with different standards. He was right in with those who wanted National Uniformity that would bring the entire country to the level of georgia so i personally dont agree with us and the georgia should climb its letter of achievement and not drag massachusetts town and also with mississippi and louisiana climbing but i dont think they should be brought up or massachusetts to california standards should be done down. Why do rehab federalism . Its not just that somebody wrote a piece of paper in the 1780s to engage in worship of that i am against thinking of the constitution it is a good thing those that stayed history and government of what but if you have decentralized institutions you can try different alternatives the to do the same thing more effective and efficient or try Different Things that is why brandeis called the state laboratories of democracy. You can match bader preferences, the situation the needs of people in different places. You can allow people to escape the federal like the jurisdiction there isnt it can go to a different place for Something Different is going on. If you have a common curriculum policed by testing and here one way to differentiate, it is extremely important this is what goes on in the classroom you were lost were deprived of trying Better Things were different thing some of those might end up not being good we could find out we wouldnt be stuck with the rigid way to do geometry the professor talk drought that has failed to around a the world with it has been tried in never successfully taught in any jurisdiction in the United States ever. Now we know in education competitor it would dash Competitive Federalism works. So one of the leading educational economist of the country studied different jurisdictions of places like miami or los angeles of a School District to encompass everyone in that area or boston with the multiplicity of School Districts in the geographical area. Lo and behold she had to lookit that confounding variables but she found a situation where parents could move their children to read different district and put pressure on the district to do better but is more awkward but against that same pressure for excellence in the performance and people need that. We can see if we look at mississippi and North Carolina theyre both doing terrible. There at the bottom in North Carolina made a huge effort to try to get better. They tried a variety of they are better than mississippi today. Mississippi did not make the effort massachusetts used to be in the middle ranks but with a teacher training and testing in a curriculum development, are breaking standards and testing students with a whole variety of areas, they went for excellence and they climbed to the top governors, people parole this date say come to massachusetts where education is meaningful but your company in massachusetts because the work force is welleducated if you are moving there your executives in work force will have good schools this is attractive. So we lose a certain amount of this so we really dont need centralization of we looked around the world United States of course, of american exceptionalism and a major part is we have more local authority and control for the individual others are much more central the stick like france. The people that promote common core will say things like countries that are doing better than the United States have a National Curriculum and national forcing of everybody to be in the same place they are right but also countries that do worse also have the centralized Education System because we are unusual we have a decentralized pattern of education and so we can use this to climb to the top so those letter fairly similar have less centralization of the United States broke canadas doesnt have a ministry your National Department of education they make all their efforts at the state level and they make mistakes but they also have climbed since the 1970s from the mediocre ranks to being be advanced country in terms of International Competition in fact, it seems at least in canada that you can do better without this. In conclusion i would like to say that this is a counter productive effort that runs against the salvatore patterns of american institutions it is unfortunate for our children and teachers and unfortunate for our parents. Thank you. [applause] my question is is there any empirical evidence whatsoever to support reedy across the curriculum . No. That was illfated attempt a number of decades ago i looked at the history of reading across the curriculum and riding across of curriculum. Both of them ended up fizzling out over the years because it simply didnt work at the highschool level. I am not aware of research at the College Level but it didnt make much sense except in the general sense that teachers beyond the english class should do more reading and writing but what will happen in the science lab class more rating or handson lab work . And math . Was is really to be focused on reading and writing about math . It just didnt work out there was no body of research whatsoever of these two. Could you talk about the the three federal laws and what are they . It is unjust the pattern of federalism that sits in the constitution, of but congress is concerned about the potential for federal interference and imposition of uniformity so going back to the eisenhower era when sputnik went up the federal government started to put in money so congress was concerned there might be serious interference with curriculum so there are three statutes that forbid the word any that is very important you give these guys, they will go in through any opening. It said any direction or control of the curriculum and the statutes that our applicable are the elementary and secondary education act that came to the Lyndon Johnson era now called notes child left behind them the general education provisions act so education provisions act so some is not done in the department of education and then under jimmy carter in his administration put u. S. Department of Education One so that Organization Act of three statutes have varieties of the same prohibition on any direction or control or supervision of curriculum. Clearly the federal government working to support a common core and those aspects is running counter to the spirit of the law. Commenting briefly about the Gates Foundation funding well on the other side of this when you have done a number of the events, i can you comment at all about the funding on the Opposing Side . [laughter] i am not sure there was any. Which you want to know about . The pro common core . We can talk about both. Let me take this we have groups separate dissipated the Cato Institute has been a big player the Heritage Foundation the state level think tanks but of those that have been active to organize whether public testimony or even ince we have made it a badge of honor not to take money from any explicit anticommon corridor order. For example, the book we put out today was funded by the foundation in part of a supporter of. Common corer organizations as well what they wanted will be applied for funding we want to put out a fact based, a less passionate but more fact based history in an analysis of common core across three dimensions. As dr. Wood said matters is the quality from the massachusetts perspective with the organization i have to tell you federalism matters a lot to us not wasting Money Matters a lot to us that we have developed as other states have come a high quality standards well beyond common court or a few states our rise from a the middle of the pack to have the best performing students in on the International Test of math and science, that is premised largely on doing all the other stuff right. To spend over five years it is about to of hundred thousand dollars they would spend on this. The gates foundatiofoundatio n does some good stuff also but it is well into the hundreds of millions of dollars by year is a good investment if anybody is watching. [laughter] the think tanks that are against common core have not had a special projects it rarely is part of their regular budget a and activities. Pro common core multiple times put more money into with and it is a failing project. The anticommon core people have just done as part of regular course of their public policy. Let me add something as big go all over the country to talk to family in state legislators about the issues of common for rehab unique perspective. But every single time we come into a state the parents have funded our trips. They have to scrounge dollars and we took no money because it was not there for everything for every video not one of those did we take 1 penny a never blood to charge speaker fees that they have no money for that kind of thing. Picked