A further attack on public education... Council of Chief State School Officers, a private corporation, is pushing Common Core against the wishes of a growing number of principals, teachers and parents...
As many readers know, the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) is responsible for implementing a lot of the corporate aims to narrow the content of public education, to select and train dutiful corporate employees and obedient soldiers, and to privatize public schools. To do this, CCSSO is doubling down on trying to make sure principals do not get out of line and ensure the corporate Common Core standards go forward as they intend.
Although they speak as if they were a public body, the "Council of Chief State School Officers" (CCSSO) is actually another example of rampant privatization.CCSSO, is a private corporation and not a governmental, taxpayer supported, body. It has been trying to ensure "deform" by partnering with the National Policy Board for Educational Administration, another private corporation, to rewrite the standards for principals, known as the "Interstate School Leaders Licensure Consortium Standards." In the course of this, CCSSO unilaterally and seized rewriting of standards from various professors and others who had been drafting the standards.
In the course of the CCSSO rewrite, they removed some standards on aiming for social justice, cultural responsiveness, and ethics -- which are not in the Common Core standards.
Some of this situation is revealed in an article in Education Week, "New School-Leader Standards Stir Dissent" by Denia R. Superville, published on-line on May 8, 2015 ( http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2015/05/08/new-school-leader-standards-stir-dissent.html).
The article includes: '''Very serious damage has been done to the standards' as a result of the recent changes, said Joseph F. Murphy, who wrote the original standards in 1996, led the revisions in 2008, and chaired the umbrella committee in charge of the updates in 2014.
"Mr. Murphy, an education professor and expert on education leadership at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., said that it was 'problematic and outrageous.' that those three sections and other key language were removed. Once the language is erased from the standards or the actions that accompany those standards, he said, they will not be incorporated into state laws and district policies or programs that build on the standards�
"After the period of public feedback, the CCSSO took the standards for focus-group testing to two different groups that included educators, as well as representatives from grant-making and research foundations, the federal government, and university researchers, Mr. Murphy said.
It was at this point, according to Professor Murphy, that the original writers were frozen out and a new process was used that was not done in a transparent way.
As readers if Substance may know, CCSSO has been one of those forces responsible for the imposition of the corporation-initiated Common Core standards and the associated standardized tests organized by the private organization PARCC (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers).
Both CCSSO and PARCC have copyrighted materials and kept them private and unable to be changed -- or even publicly discussed -- by teachers, parents, or professional educators.
This is true of the Common Core standards and of the PARCC tests (as well as those tests organized by Smarter Balance Assessment Consortium). The forces carrying out the aims that the national corporation grouping known as the Business Roundtable has had since the 1980s in carrying out No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and Common Core are still busily at work through "representatives of grant-making and research foundations, the federal government, and university researchers" that do not include Professor Murphy and some of his colleagues. We who oppose the Common Core standards have our work cut out for us to expose and oppose the corporate attacks on public education.
