Good morning, the publisher of burlington court. Five years into the common core we are at a critical juncture. Common cores added alltime low it has dwindled from 26 states and from washington d. C. To seven states to washington dc. It is really no longer viable. In fact, the other national is not doing much better. It is true better. It is true to say there is Little Common purpose or competent ability left in common core. This volume that we are releasing this morning, drilling through the core is definitely a timely release. Five years into this Great American education today, it is worth remembering what we are debating. It is not politics, whether the debate of a contest between two distinct views. The first is that the common core standards are a state driven effort to improve k12 Public Education and especially to help children in underperforming districts. The second is that they are from dubious quality and what is historically legally, and financially as state and local issue. Drilling through the core is a book that strives to treat the view fairly but to argue the second view should prevail. A little on the publisher pioneer institute, pioneer has been called in the media the brains of the common core opposition, when in fact pioneer really cut its teeth and mashes to sits on issues k12 education reform. To help the state make a storks strides and become the highest sector in the region. Massachusetts has been at the top of every measure in academics in the country, we rank above among the Top Countries and National Tests. We are proud of our state and our contribution to bring about these results for our students, but with with the arrival of common core pioneer realize we needed to move our sites beyond the borders of massachusetts. Unfortunately we we have already seen the corrosive effect of the core on students achievement in massachusetts students. The core is a calm nation of multiyear research and 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 of the palm core it is academically rigorous. For states, how much will it cost to actually implement the common core in the online test. Finally for congress, are the common core standards in the federally funded test legal . Two final comments before we hear from our panel of experts, they are are over 12 over 12 authors, scholars who have contributed to this, a volume that has been edited and within introduction from doctor peter wood. You have biographies. I have two final comments. The first is, contrary to what several scholars and scholars we respect have argued, standards do matter. Pioneer takes a backseat to know organization, it is advocating for the very best standards we can have for students. This is not a paper debate. Standards are more than just a simple document, especially in the hands of states like massachusetts that took those goals seriously, implemented tests that were lined for their students, as well as well as teacher certification test which were the best in the country. I may want to recognize a name that does not appear, jeannie guest, she has been a driving force the pioneers work of the nation and developing the strategy we have undertaking in engaging the best minds from who you will hear today. Also making sure we maintain the seriousness of purpose and all we do on this. Jamies fingerprints are all over this volume and at the levels of national debate. With that, let me invite dr. Peter peter wick, the editor and author for the introduction to come up to the podium. The, court has has already touched the lives of millions of americans. I use the word touched cautiously here, it has been a rather hard touch and have left some bruises. The bruises are mainly what i want to want to talk about in the next 20 minutes. There are probably too many of them to fit into that amount of time so let me try to organize this a bit in the form of Something Like this, the lower academic quality is for me, the primary issue. I am an academic i had the National Association of scholars, i am concerned that the students who reach college are prepared for college and are ready to prepare 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. It is meant to be College Ready it is a false advertisement. It doesnt do that. At lower do that. At lower standards. The other two areas are the enormous costs of the common core and its failure to be a really good halfway to the sciences and stem area. Let me take care of those last 21st. I want us spend more time on the academic quality issue. The enormous the enormous costs are a bit hard to pin down, one of our Panel Experts here is an expert on that. We have 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, we now know a few years ago when we came up with its is probably a lowball estimate. It will will be more than 16 billion. You will not find any accounting of what these numbers are, what the actual costs are in the common course promotional material. This debate goes on for almost five or six years and we are doing it blindly without much knowledge of numbers. But slowly and surely those numbers are coming forth. We held in california one of the few states that is actually taken the trouble to break down the conditional costs the common core imposes. 2. 5 billion on additional textbooks, by . 5 . 5 billion for professional development and 7 billion for technology. Those are National Numbers i stand corrected. California has 12 of u. S. So we can project on their basis how this is going to looked nationally within a few years the talking about are not oneyear expenditures, they are overseas seven years in most cases. We are finding a california that the expenses are out running the projections are ready. The issue on science preparation really comes down to the fact that the common core focuses on math and english language. So on mathematics that the sciences are crippled. By the time students graduate from high school, unless they are an accelerated program are taken after School Programs their basis to proceed in the sciences is very slim. Probably the simplest way pointing this out is the teaching of algebra has been pushed back into higher grades so there is not enough room left in most High School Curriculum for students to proceed even as far as precalculus. What this means for colleges admitting students on the stem track is that they arrive on prepared. There are prepared in other ways too, that is that is what im going to focus my attention. The common core, as i said is making Students College and career ready. To to be College Ready means what . It means in the eyes of the founders of educational reform that students are prepared to engage in what is called Critical Thinking and they have learned to do things such as read text for informational context and to develop arguments based on the readings they get. Now, most things stated in the abstract sound pretty wholesome. Wouldnt we want our students to be critical thinkers . Shouldnt they be able to read text in order to extract relevant information . Shouldnt they be able to construct good arguments on the basis of that information the answer to those questions is yes, we want that for students but how do we get there. This requires me to do what academics which is taking a relatively simple subject and making it more complicated. So for a few minutes im going to complicate. The complications are Something Like this, the United States has over the last 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 with horse man in the 1830s wave after wave, after wave of reform attempts that has a list every single one of them resulted in making some of the problems worse and inventing brandnew problems. I dont have time to give a history of 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. To 1984 nation at 84 nation at risk report. All of these together. 2 a deep dissatisfaction among americans in the way our schools proceed. When the common core started taking shape in 2007 it was building on a pentup dissatisfaction. That dissatisfaction has a variety variety of forms, one of them is the dissatisfaction that the education establishment had with the way in which our system of education served students who dont perform very well. One of the very first steps of common core was the idea that it was going to set higher standards, it was going to redefined the word higher to include the more inclusive for more students. So the common core begins, the story begins in 2006 when David Coleman and his partner jason december, a professor of mathematics get together and start thinking how to read cast the standards. Theyre coming on the heels of a long series series of efforts by people who wanted to nationalize our standards, makers cool something of a National Project rather than a local estate project. They came up with a very clever way around this which is since the constitution and statutory law for the most part for bid the National Government from taking over the schools, or setting curriculum they said lets do this at the state level but lets cordon it all of the states of at the same time this we have the same standards and we will have to factor national standards. Sounded like a great idea with the backing a bill gates money, 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 find that name right, they made this pitch that here is a way that we can get around to the constitutional statutory obstacle to have a real education reform in this country. The National Governors association and chiba state School Officers convened a project called the common core state initiative, they drew in many other partners both corporate and other parts of educational establishment. We we are off to the races. Initially, this proved to be very popular with governors, with states, some 46 states adopted it in principle is something they wanted to do or at least they wanted to explore. Then we had the recession, and in 2009 when pres. Obama found himself with billions of dollars on hand as part of the stimulus package he was looking for shuttle ready projects, and secretary of education arnie duncan said he had one on hand which was to put some of the stimulus money into the common core. That created what was called a race to the top which was a type of pinata that states could swing at, if they hit it theyve got a lot of money. States were desperate for money and suddenly within a matter of two months we had states officially signing onto the common core k 12k12 state standards. The trouble was, there were not such standards. They were still conceptual, the project of creating them was underway even as the states were saying we are ready to adopt them. The mess were in right now largely flows from that moment in 2009 and 2010 when states rushed into adopt, Court Without knowing what they were getting into in hopes that this would mean a lot more money. Some of the states at some money but now we know the cost of implementing the common core far outspend what the federal government was willing to put into it. Common core came with a whole lot of promises, i can run through some of those. It was to be internationally benchmarked which meant we would set standards at least equal to those of the best in the world. In a National Benchmarking piece has been almost entirely forgotten at this point. Benchmarking now means simply acknowledging that other countries have a standards and are so not quite as good, so what. The insistence on informational text turns out to be a recipe for dissing literature. We found the common core to have shaped informational text meant everything from reading repair manuals to government regulations and sometimes reading works of literature, oftentimes out of context, oftentimes x hurts and as it proceeds from kindergarten through it gives less and less attention to literature. Why should should this matter . If you are perching education simply utilitarian thing, learning how to read, how to express yourself maybe it the recent matter very much. Literature is our key to most of dimensions are reading, getting the arguments of cross imagination, world conceptions, the idea of what it means to be something rather than be an extract of information, it gets canted in the common core and that remains a problem to the state. The common core sets itself in an odd way against the american family. But is probably clearest comes to math instruction, where in the early grades map has been turned into a torturous set of instructional procedures that parents cannot comprehend. One of the immediate effects of the common core was to put a wall down between parents and their children. You try to learn things and help your children proceed through this curriculum, most parents, really all parents find themselves baffled by these news 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 had a common Core Education as College Ready. What does that mean . It means they exempt those students from remedial courses. Places like california state were over half of the students in recent years have had to take remedial courses before they are eligible to take regular courses, cal state is now said we are going to stop that. We will let anybody who passed the common core their Home High School bypassed remedial courses and go directly into the curriculum. What does that mean if your College Teacher as i was for most of my career . It means you end up with students who are really ill prepared and you have to now adjust your course downward to their level. How does the common core make students College Ready . Not by improving the students but by dumbing down the colleges. Wire colleges ready to do this . For one thing, their state colleges when they states agree to do, core common core they agree to a principal 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 here go on and on. One might point to the disempowerment of teachers. The common cores advocates are fond of saying it is not a curriculum simply a set of standards. That is a distinction without really much of a difference of standards. The standards are so minute in many cases that it leaves teachers extremely little room on how to teach, what to teach, or went to teach it. It is not literally a curriculum, doesnt specify the exact text each teacher might use or what the lesson plans would look like for a given day of the week, but apart from that it is a straitjacket. Teachers are now turning out to be one of the biggest critics of common core. An interesting path because it recently the teacher unions were strong proponents of the common core, now there is but a big split between the leadership of the Teachers Union and the ranking file who find, core is unbearable. They. They did not like no child left behind, they like the common core even less. The common core fragments knowledge. It does that because it has built into it the proposition that it is unfair for to expect students to have background knowledge or contexts. The most famous example was the teaching of the gettysburg address. Without mentioning that gettysburg was the battlefield and a lot of people died there. It is simply treated as a pile of words. The treatment of techs as piles of words is signature movement of the common core. It takes history, takes the personalities, the understandings of human context simply out of the teaching. Teachers of course can try to smuggle it back in but it brings us to the next problem which is that the common core is not simply a set of standards of floating out there telling teachers what to do, it is aligned to a set of tests. In principle it is. To make the common core work, two testing consortia, one called, one called smarter balance and the other called parts, which i can never remember exactly what that stands for. These were created in order to set up National Tests marketed through the states so states could choose to be part of smarter balance or both. Initially states rushed in as you just heard in the introduction, states are now rushing back out. Leaving the National Consortia does not mean they get out of the testing game and means they have to develop alternative tests. This defeats one of the purposes of the common core which was to nationalize everything, now it is the nationalizing and going back in some sense to a state level, but level, but to a state level that is marred by its implementation of a set of rules that get in the world of state autonomy. The common core has a forensic approach to knowledge, everything is now knowledge. 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. It