The NEA released a survey yesterday purporting to show that the vast major it of educators support the Gates/Broad/Pearson test-fest that is the Common Core State Standards Initiative.
According to a new poll by the National Education Association, the Common Core State Standards are strongly supported by its members. Roughly two-thirds of educators are either wholeheartedly in favor of the standards (26 percent) or support them with “some reservations” (50 percent). Only 11 percent of those surveyed expressed opposition. Thirteen percent didn’t know enough about the CCSS to form an opinion. Overall, 98 percent of NEA members have heard of the standards. In addition, 79 percent of respondents said they were well or somewhat prepared to implement the new standards. The survey questioned 1200 NEA members and was conducted in July by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research.Wait, what?
When I read:
According to a new poll by the National Education Association, the Common Core State Standards are strongly supported by its members. Roughly two-thirds of educators are either wholeheartedly in favor of the standards (26 percent) or support them with “some reservations” (50 percent). Only 11 percent of those surveyed expressed opposition. Thirteen percent didn’t know enough about the CCSS to form an opinion. Overall, 98 percent of NEA members have heard of the standards. In addition, 79 percent of respondents said they were well or somewhat prepared to implement the new standards. The survey questioned 1200 NEA members and was conducted in July by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research.I don't see "strongly supported," I see "mostly distrusted." As well it should be. The goals of the CCSS are spurious (being more about reducing administrative costs and capital expenditures on things like textbooks than education), dubious (based on psychometric pseudo-science, magical thinking, and a misunderstanding of even the most basic educational terminology) and wholly disconnected from the history of progressive education (read Pedagogy of the Oppressed if you want to know more about what progressive education has meant over the last 50 years).
But as bizarre as NEA's reading of their own poll is (and dangerous, since their public position is at odds with their rank-and-file membership), it is indicative of a larger trend. A quick read of the Center for American Progress's website, shows that they too have bought into the corporatist claptrap on the need for ever-more testing and 'accountability.' Congressional opposition to the Republican's attempt to gut the ESEA showed the same slavish devotion to the same set of erroneous assumptions about education. Time and time again, supposed progressives seem to have been wooed by promises of educational equity (hint: equity has never meant giving everyone the same thing. Equity means feeding the hungry, not the already well-fed.) and by appealing but nonsensical rhetoric that schools can make someone both college and career ready (never mind if that should be our goal. One requires an academic mindset rooted in critical thinking, the other requires conforming to standards of performance and behavior. While they may not be mutually exclusive, they certainly are not synergistically aligned, either). Progressives may even see the blame-the-teacher-first movement as the salvation of school funding problems, but how this can ever be true with ever more money is diverted from teachers and students to national conglomerates (providing everything a school needs from assessment, to more assessment), is quite beyond me.
No one has actually tried to poll teachers in any meaningful way (1,200 attendees of a CC working group don't pass statistical muster to represent the will of some three million NEA members, and the CAP's videos of a few teachers here and there is even worse) and find out what actually works and what doesn't. Asking teachers whether they are prepared or think something could be implemented successfully has little to do with whether they think it should be and, to be fair, asking someone whose job is on the line whether they like their boss's decisions is nothing more than an exercise in toadyism. Somehow in the midst of all of this 'reform,' no one is actually bothering to ask progressive educators what progressive education is all about and what real progressive reforms would look like.
Instead, all we get is:
According to a new poll by the National Education Association, the Common Core State Standards are strongly supported by its members. Roughly two-thirds of educators are either wholeheartedly in favor of the standards (26 percent) or support them with “some reservations” (50 percent). Only 11 percent of those surveyed expressed opposition. Thirteen percent didn’t know enough about the CCSS to form an opinion. Overall, 98 percent of NEA members have heard of the standards. In addition, 79 percent of respondents said they were well or somewhat prepared to implement the new standards. The survey questioned 1200 NEA members and was conducted in July by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research.
I, for one, am tired of being lied about and lied to.
