Truth about the Utah Common Core
A group called “Utahns Against Common Core” is rallying
support for repealing the Common Core in Utah.
This article is to refute and explain why their “evidence”
is just plain wrong or misguided.
Below are their claims in Italic.
1. Utah did not seek out CCI; the initiative was presented as an eligibility
enhancement by the U.S. Department of Education in its The Race To The Top
grant. Joining the SBAC, too, improved eligibility in the grant
application. When Utah agreed to join the CCI and SBAC in 2009, the standards
had not yet been written.
Utah joined both the CCI and
the SBAC to win points toward getting the grant, and although Utah won no
money, the extremely expensive and educationally restricting consequences of
having agreed to sign up for CCI and SBAC remain.
Just because the Federal Department of Education supports
the Common Core doesn’t make it evil or bad. Even a broken clock is right twice
per day. The Common Core Standards should be evaluated on their own merit and
not dismissed because it improved eligibility for a grant.
Utah withdrew from SBAC in August of 2012. So, SBAC does not,
in fact, remain. This proves that Utah’s adoption of these measures is completely
voluntary and up to Utah.
2. Utah has two new, conflicting sets of educational
standards to juggle– the Utah Common Core, to which we currently teach, and the
CCSS, to which our tests are being written. Utah is not likely to stick with
the Utah Common Core when testing begins based on the federal CCSS in 2014. The
appendix to the SBAC states that the tests will be based on the CCSS (federal)
standards, and the SBAC project manager, WestEd, has affirmed:
“In order for this [testing] system to have a real
impact within a state, the state will need to adopt the Common Core State
Standards (i.e., not have two sets of standards.)” -April 2012 statement from
WestEd Assessments and Standards Senior Research Associate
Yes, we have two sets of standards in Math and English. This
would be the case every time we enhance, upgrade, or improve our standards. The
Utah Core Standards are always evolving and changing. While calling for enhanced or improved
standards this group also seems to feel that could happen without changing.
Whatever Utah did with its standards inevitably we would have to transition.
The new CCS are not that much different than Utah’s current
standards. We are not going to start to teach physics in the first grade, for
instance. It’s only a matter of moving some small subset of standards up a
grade or back a grade.
And of course, the testing system will have to align with
what is being taught, that is just common sense.
First, the CCSS is not a federal, meaning government,
standard. The standards are designed and agreed to by the people who sign up
for them. As long as Utah is a member of the Common Core Standards Initiative
we will have a voice in the standards.
4. There has been no cost analysis, legal
analysis, legislative input or public input regarding CCI/SBAC. Implementation of CCI has already
begun in Utah schools; full implementation of the initiative and its tests will
be completed in the 2014-2015 school year.
The Utah State School Board is a public body and is subject
to the same open meeting laws as all public bodies in Utah.
Is there a cost to changing standards? Yes, there is, but
that would have been the case for any new standard. The alternative would be to
never change our standards which no one is proposing. There are very low cost
ways of changing over to the new standards. Teachers can use current text and
curriculum and enhancing them with free resources. There are lots of ways to
use the web and free resources creatively to enhance classroom teaching. Most
teachers know how to do this because it’s what they do all day long.
6.
The U.S. Department of Education (through the America COMPETES Act, the American Recovery and
Reinvestment Act, and the Race to the Top competition) has required the
states to develop massive databases about school children.
If Utah doesn’t want to participate in these programs then
Utah should turn down the money from the Federal Government. But these acts
have absolutely nothing to do with the Common Core Initiative. They are
completely separate things.
The America Competes Act was signed into effect by President
Bush in 2007. If there was a requirement to create a massive Federal Database
of our children in this act, then we should have it by now. There is no such
database. Likewise the ARRA act and the
Race to the Top Grant were awarded in 2009, still no massive federal database.
In addition, only 12 states received the funds and Utah was not one of those
states.
If Utahans don’t want Federal intrusion into Utah schools it’s
quite simple to do that, just stop requesting and taking the Federal money.
As an educator, I can assure you that there has been no
request for any student identifiable information from the school to report to
the Federal Government.
All grants from the State of Utah and the Federal Government
require some form of reporting of how money was spent and how students were
served. This is not new to these grants. This reporting is always and
everywhere summary data and is presented in the form of a report not loaded into a database.
7. The Common Core initiative represents an
overreach of federal power into personal privacy as well as into state
educational autonomy. There will be personal student
information collected via the centralized testing-data collection, accessible
to the Executive Branch. SBAC assessments’ inclusion of psychometric testing
for database profiling purposes and is a violation of Utah law per code
section 53A-13-302.
Utah is not part of the SBAC so there will be no
psychometric testing. The Common Core initiative has nothing to do with
collecting information about students. It is just a list of standards in
reading and math.
If Utah doesn’t want federal involvement in Utah schools,
then Utah should stop asking for and receiving money from the Federal
Government.
8. Both of the CCI’s testing arms (SBAC and
PARCC) must coordinate tests and share information “across consortia” as well as giving the
U.S. Department of Education phone responses, written status updates and access
to information “on an ongoing basis.” Data will be triangulated with control,
oversight and centralization by the Executive Branch (U.S. Dept. of Education).
“Cooperative Agreement between the U.S. DOE and the SBAC”
Utah is not part of the SBAC and has contracted with a completely
different testing group. The "Cooperative Agreement" link above is with the DOE and Washington State. It has no affect on Utah. Further the grant was under the auspices of the Race To The Top grant which only went to 12 states and also does not have anything to do with Utah.
9. The Department of Education has eviscerated
the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) by issuing new regulations that allow
nonconsensual tracking and sharing of this personal data with other federal
agencies, with government agencies in other states, and with private entities.
As a school administrator I can tell you that there has not been any
information promulgated to Utah Schools of any change to FERPA. I
believe this statement to be completely false.
As of today, May 5th 2013 the US Department of Education page
on FERPA has the following statement:
"FERPA
generally prohibits the improper disclosure of personally identifiable
information derived from education records. Thus, information that an official
obtained through personal knowledge or observation, or has heard orally from
others, is not protected under FERPA. This remains applicable even if education
records exist which contain that information, unless the official had an
official role in making a determination that generated a protected education
record."
The Department of Education can’t change legislation by Congress. Only
Congress can change legislation. If the
Department of Education is changing rules and regulations regarding FERPA then
Utah should sue them and have it changed back. But attacking the Common Core
because of what the Department of Education may or may not have done regarding
privacy laws is completely non-sensical. One has nothing to do with the other.
10. Utah has ceded her voice and
educational sovereignty because Utah’s top educational leaders are
persuaded that having standards and testing in common with other states matters
more than holding onto the state’s right to raise standards sky-high. To Utah
education leaders, the right to soar seems a freedom not worth fighting for,
and maintaining state educational sovereignty is not a priority.
In an April
2012 statement from the Utah State Office of Education’s legal department: ”
The whole point is to get to a place where there is a ‘common core’ – that
would mean the same standards for all the states that adopt it. If the
states had the freedom to ‘disagree’ and ‘change’ them, I guess
they would no longer be ‘common’.”
Utah also has agreed to standard
weights and measures and the width of railroad tracks and other standards that
exist across the country. Does this mean that Utah has ceded its sovereignty
over how many ounces are in a pound and how many inches are in a feet? Utah
didn’t cede its sovereignty because it can withdraw from the Common Core
Standards at any time, just like it withdrew from SBAC.
Frankly, Utah cedes its sovereignty
every time it takes a dollar from the Federal Government, not by agreeing to be
part of a completely voluntary non-government controlled program.
11. The effort to
nationalize and centralize education results in severe loss of state control of
education and pushes states into a minimalist, common set of standards. Dr. Sandra Stotsky, an official member of
the CCSS Validation Committee, refused to sign off on the adequacy of the
standards and testified that “Common Core has yet to provide a solid
evidentiary base for its minimalist conceptualization of college readiness–and
for equating college readiness with career readiness. Moreover…it had no
evidence on both issues.”
Ask a Utah educator if the standards are better than what
Utah has now. I believe they are. Naming one person who disagrees with them is
hardly an argument. We can move to this set of standards which are more precise
and higher than what we have now, then work to improve on them. Deciding to
stay where we are is not an option because most people agree we need better written standards that have higher standards.
This is not actual evidence, it is more of a statement of opinion. We are
not trying out a new vaccine for stupidity, we are just moving from our current
standards to a slightly better set of standards. Further the new standards, though better, are not radically different from our current state standards.
13.
Common Core standards are not considered among the best standards in the nation,
and there are clearly superior standards. Additionally,
the CCI robs states of the sovereign right to raise state standards in the
future. There’s no provision for amending the CCSS federal standards,
were we to choose to still remain bound by them.
They may not be the best standards, but we can’t allow
perfection to be the enemy of the good. We can choose to remove ourselves from
the Common Core Initiative at any time. The new standards are better than what
we have now. Let’s move from strength to strength and then work on improving
the standards through the completely voluntary and state based standards
organization over time.
14. The Common Core English standards reduce
the study of literature in favor of informational texts designed to train children in a
school-to-work agenda. The unsophisticated composition of those selected to
write the Common Core Standards and the lack of transparency about the
standards-writing process also raises concerns.
Not true. The English texts are a wonderful collection of
classical literature. The literature collection is not even part of the
Standards, it is only a suggested reading list. States can adopt their own
reading list. Also, some of the informational texts include: The Declaration of
Independence, The Constitution of the United States, etc.
15. CCSS states a goal to promote “career and
college ready standards,” a euphemism for “school-to-work” programs, diluting individual choice by directing
children where to go and what to learn. They make no distinction between
2-year, 4-year or vocational standards.
Untrue. The Common Core Standards is only a list of what children should
have learned by grade level in reading and math. No part of the Common Core
Standards directs children on how to lead their lives. If anything it increases
the standards so that children will have more choices.
The fact that states have voluntarily not agreed to the common core seems
to invalidate your argument. If states can pull out of it, then, by
definition, it is voluntary.
17. The Common Core Initiative, far from
being state-designed, is the product of the U.S. Department of Education
funding and directing special interest groups (NGA, CCSSO,
NCEE, Achieve, Inc., WestEd,
and others) via federal grants.
Let’s evaluate the Common Core
Standards on their own merit, not based on conspiracy theories. If you don’t like
the Federal Department of Eduction, then work to abolish it or stop receiving
the funding.
The Common Core Initiative is a
product of the State Governors Association belief in the need for common state
education standards to assist students and families.
18. The Common Core Initiative violates
fundamental laws that protect states’ independence. The Federal Government’s creation of
national curricular materials, through contractors, and its control and
oversight of testing and data collection, and its tests written to federal,
nationalized standards, are in violation of three existing laws:
NCLB, the Department of Education Organization Act, and the General Education
Provisions Act; States have a responsibility to protect the balance of powers
granted in the Constitution.
Again, then work against these things which are completely separate
from the Common Core Standards. Utah doesn’t have to accept Federal Funds.
Finally, the Common Core Standards in no way tell States or
Agencies what curriculum or texts to use.
19. Transparency and public debate
about Common Core are lacking. Utah educational leaders have a responsibility to encourage public
discussion and lively debate about Common Core, because the initiative will
impact children, taxpayers and teachers for a long time to come.
It seems like we are debating it right now.
