I received a letter from Randi Weingarten. Yes, from the I am a zealot about the Common Core. . . . AFT president, Randi Weingarten. 



Oh my.



I've been sharing occasional items from the Share My Lesson site since June 2012. Not many. Mostly I glance at a lesson, roll my eyes, and move on. They are an embarrassment. There's just no other way to put it.



I joined AFT's Share My Lesson and read the first thing I saw: Tips for Student Discipline. Appearing under AFT letterhead, Just about the only lesson I found note written by AFT's British partner TES, here's one tip: Establish rigorous academic standards and assessments that measure whether the standards are being met. All schools should become places where high grades stand for high achievement and where promotion truly is earned. This preachiness goes along with the AFT's devotion to the Common Core and it also illustrates the vacuousness of their claim to be offering a service to help teachers. 



What a tip: "Establish."



I'd rank it second only to the tip: "Teach."



In 2010, the U. S. Department of Education gave the AFT $5 million as an Investing in Innovation grant. Our tax dollars at work. Yours and mine. Maybe this was a reward for the AFT putting muscle and money behind the Common Core.



I would just emphasize that this $5 million is money out of my pocket--and yours. 



The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation kicked in $one million. 



Recently on Twitter I asked why Share My Lesson was sending out "Get ready for Easter" lesson plans, but I didn't get an answer.



Share My Lesson claims The Share My Lesson team has searched more than 250,000 resources to find free aligned lesson plans that will help you implement the Common Core State Standards in your classroom. 



Here are some sample Common Core-aligned lessons offered at Share My Lesson for middle schoolers. You will note they are all by TES, the AFT's British partner in this endeavor. It is clear that these lessons were written without any clue about CCSS. Someone has just decided to put already-existing lessons into this category. 



• Lady of Shalott(TES)
• Macbeth's Famous Soliloquy (TES)
• Midsummer Night's Dream Scheme of Work (TES)
• Monkey's Paw (TES)

Here's a worksheet. See if you can detect any shred of Common Core recommendations:

Questions:

1. Identify the four main characters in the story. How does each one contribute to the plot?
2. Describe the tone of the opening scene in which Herbert and his father are playing chess. Identify how the tone changes when the sergeant-major visits. Why do you think the author changes the tone of the story?
3. Explain the end of the story. What is the old man's last wish?
4. How does the story overall reinforce the holy man's message that people should not interfere with fate?

• Informational Text for 9th grade is Of Mice and Men: John Steinbeck's letter to Claire Luce (TES). 

  

(For the curious, here's Claire Luce's obituary. 



  There is a marginal notice on this and other items that it was updated Exam Board: Common Core, but search for this critter on the AFT site and you don't come up with anything. 



  I wonder if the AFT is trying to convince teachers not to worry about Common Core, that they don't have to give up the crap they've been doing all along to be in compliance. I can't think of any other reason to present such a lesson as part of the Common Core-aligned package. And so far I haven't seen anything in the package that is even remotely related to the Common Core.

On March 1, 2013, Share My Lesson published an interview with David Coleman:

David Coleman and the Common Core State Standards

by Jon Marcus

David Coleman is a principal architect of the Common Core as a founding partner of the non-profit Student Achievement Partners, which pushed for and helped to write the standards.

A product of the New York City public schools, Coleman went to Yale, where he started a community-service program for students at an inner-city New Haven high school and won a Rhodes scholarship to study English literature at Oxford and educational philosophy at Cambridge.

Coleman worked at McKinsey & Company, where he specialized in education, and founded the Grow Network, later acquired by McGraw-Hill, which looked for ways to make assessment test results useful to teachers and parents.

In October, he was appointed president of the College Board, the organization best known for administering the Advanced Placement program and the SATs. He has been and continues to be an advocate for teacher voice in the Common Core State Standards.

We spoke with Coleman about the Common Core:

Why do we need the Common Core -- and why now?

We need these standards because teachers need a body of work that focuses on the most important things that truly prepare students for college. We see in this country that students who pass their high school courses and get their high school diplomas still, in their first year of college, are not ready for the demands of college-level work, and many of these kids do not [stay in] college or they fail. So teachers were vehement that these standards have to meet the demands of those first-year college courses so their students would succeed.

You've talked about college readiness. Aren't the standards also meant to beef up workforce skills?

I want to be careful to not make education a narrow force aimed only at readying students for careers. While that's an important dimension, post-secondary education is also an opportunity to educate the soul.

What we're after is equipping students with the skills that do, in fact, prepare them to compete at a high level in the global economy, but also to learn as much as they can about such things as how to follow civic debate.

Have you been surprised by the political pushback against the Common Core by people who criticize it as an attempt to impose centralized, national control on local schools, and how do you answer them?

The remarkable story here is the political consensus in this country behind the core standards at a time of no small amount of partisan bickering. The political debate is very much at the edges of this conversation, magnified by the media’s interest in controversy. The simple and overwhelming fact is that states came together to draft and adopt these standards. It was a wonderful collaboration, building on state standards and working with talented teams from states across this country.

Possibly the most remarkable act of political courage of our time is teachers standing up for higher standards for their kids.

There have been at least two moments since the 1980s when policymakers have pushed for dramatic reforms, once after A Nation at Risk and then in the No Child Left Behind Act. Why didn't those work?

What makes the Common Core promising is the focus on the evidence of what is most essential for college and career readiness. So, in other words, before you ask what the standards should be for kids, you might ask, what does the evidence show is the work they most need to be doing to be ready for college and career?

I'm no expert on prior reforms like No Child Left Behind or A Nation at Risk, but what I can tell you is that the evidence behind this reform is powerful and solid.

How do we produce the teachers we need to get this to work?

You already see teachers helping one another. What the Common Core allows is the kind of sharing of craft that can allow teachers to excel. We must not lose this opportunity to do better through sharing than we could do alone

We have the exciting prospect in this country that K-2 teachers can become experts in the addition and subtraction of whole numbers. Why? Because that’s the math that matters most for their students.

But in a time when resources for schools are stretched, and teachers are already overextended, are you confident they'll get the support and professional development they need?

It's crucial for success that the Common Core represents both an eraser and a pen. What I mean by that is that we would have failed before we began if the Common Core was one more thing added to what teachers are already doing. They already have too much to do. What the Common Core must do is to give teachers the permission and ability to focus on fewer things done well. Yes, it is more demanding about those fewer things. It allows focus and depth. This generation of reform must not be one more thing. It must be stopping doing things that are less crucial to kids’ growth, and taking the time to focus on the core

The hot topic of the moment is the debate over the Common Core's attempts to balance the reading of literary fiction with informational texts. There's a lot of controversy over and confusion about this. How do you see that balance?

Any confusion about the role of literature is more in the province of some bloggers than in the hearts of minds of most teachers. There are only 10 standards for literature in ninth and 10th grade, and they explicitly include Shakespeare twice. Suggested texts within the standards include The Great Gatsby.

There is no rational reason for any reader to be confused. What does shift in the English language arts classroom is some attention to literary non-fiction, including very high-quality works such as the founding documents. And you might ask, why not just read those in a history classroom? Because they're some of the finest expressions of English that this country has. They're some of the finest American contributions to the literature of this world.

The other shift in these standards is [to] a much greater focus on reading and writing in science and technical subjects, and not just in English and history.

If you think about a school day, and English as one period out of six, that's about 16 percent of the day, and the Common Core requires that 30 percent of reading time be devoted to literary fiction. So wouldn't standards result in students actually reading more rather than less fiction?

You're reading them correctly. It's in black and white on page 5. [Opens standards and reads.] Let us quote: Because the ELA classroom must focus on literature -- stories, drama, and poetry -- as well as literary non-fiction, a great deal of informational reading in grades six through 12 must take place in other classes.

I can only say it would perhaps be better if people read more carefully.

There's a hard truth that has stymied educational reformers over time, and that is that change in education takes time. How will we know whether the Common Core has accomplished what it's supposed to accomplish, and how long do you think that will take?

It's a wonderful question. Because candor demands that we admit that such changes do take time. It will take time for curricula to fully align. It will take time through practice for students to learn to read more complex texts. The final acid test of these Common Core standards will be a substantial reduction in remediation rates in this country. And then we will know that we've made progress.

And that will take how long?

I think it will be very different in different situations, so I don't have one number in my mind. I'm going to leave that to others to speculate on. What I think is most important is to recognize that we'll get better and better. That is, to not throw up our hands when the first generation of instructional materials isn't perfect. We can't stand still. We have to keep returning to it

I tend to be an impatient person, so I'd love to see substantive change within a 10-year period.

So describe the way teaching and learning will be different under the Common Core than it is now.

First, teachers will be sharing their best work and improving their profession, and doing it across state lines.

Second, teachers will have time to teach and students will have time to practice the most important work they need to be doing for readiness for college and career.

Third, students will gain the essential knowledge they need, including, in elementary school, the rich knowledge of history, science, and the arts that gives them the vocabulary they need. In math, [they'll get] a true command of the knowledge and skill of fractions, of measurement. Another misinterpretation of these standards is that they're just about the practices by which you do math.

And fourth, they will use technologies that now can achieve scale. We have a chance to build beautiful tools, but while the platform is the same, it's personalized for each kid, what standards they might need.
 

Jon Marcus, a contributing editor for the Hechinger Report, is U.S. higher-education correspondent for the Times (U.K.) Higher Education magazine.

Someone at TES, AFT's British partner, gave this item top rating--five stars. Curious, I check out who this is: Senior Community Producer who has "worked on the Web for 12 years and at TES since 2008. Here to help with technical difficulties, feedback, bugs, abuse reports and I check the Welcome forum several times a day."

Somehow, I think quite a few U. S. teachers would appreciate having someone familiar with the Common Core in general and David Coleman in particular rate the quality of this performance.

Although there is a comment button, it didn't work when I tried to use it.

As to David Coleman's claim that some of us dissident bloggers don't read "carefully" enough, I'd suggest he take a look at what the AFT has put up on the Share My Lesson site: Common Core State Standards: ELA fiction/non-fiction, Feb. 15, 2003--almost simultaneously with his interview.

Between Kindergarten and Fifth Grade, educators are asked to split literacy teaching 50:50 between non-fiction and fiction texts. From Sixth Grade to the end of High School, that ratio changes to 70:30 in favor of non-fiction.

One More Lesson

In January 2013, AFT 'Share My Lesson' Offers 10 Power Point Activities on Novel as Common Core Informational Text I asked what they smoking smoking at the AFT. Here's just one bit from my critique:

To meet the Common Core Standards for Informational Text, grades 6-8, the American Federation of Teachers Share My Lesson site brings teachers lesson plans written by someone in the United Kingdom-- for a novel. The novel, Two Weeks with the Queen, is billed by its publisher as aimed at the 8 to 12-year-old set.

One Power Point slide shows a picture of the Queen, complete with tiara, and directs students to fill in a comic strip bubble. What would the queen say?

Randi mentions Common Core State Standards Information Center. People paying dues to AFT should take a look.

Randi's letter

March 7, 2013

Dear Susan,

"My only wish is that I had Share My Lesson sooner" 

Everywhere I go, teachers, classroom paraprofessionals and other educators are telling me how helpful Share My Lesson is and how it's helping them and their students find the resources they need. And it's no wonder:

• Already, close to 200,000 U.S. educators have subscribed to the site, making it the fastest-growing online learning community for those working with students.
• More than 260,000 K-12 classroom resources have been uploaded to the site, tagged by content area and grade level for easy searching.
• A growing Common Core State Standards Information Center points teachers to useful resources that model approaches for teaching to the new standards.
• More than 1.5 million resources have been downloaded, the average user taking 10 on each visit.

I want to personally invite you to sign up for Share My Lesson and take advantage of this incredible resource.

The site's basic content is free, and always will be, and you can be 100 percent certain that your e-mail address and personal information is safe and will never be sold. Once you sign up, within minutes you’'l receive an activation e-mail. Follow the instructions in that e-mail, and you're all set. Hundreds of thousands of resources developed by colleagues will now be at your fingertips.

You asked your union to actively support you in your daily efforts to make a difference for students. Here it is—Share My Lesson, a concrete example of solution-driven unionism. Hundreds of teachers have had a hand in developing Share My Lesson, and we look forward to your participation as well. Please sign up and share this message with a friend.

In solidarity,
Randi Weingarten

AFT President
 

Dear Randi,

Man the barricades.

Yours for revolution,

Susan