Hypothetical. Why does mortgage credit enable them both equally . Im not sure how were going to do that. So rather than seeing a reform with much tighter regulations, limits on what their executives can make, with an acceptable rate of return and this make whatever you can and get rich structure, its about the famous line from winston churchill, it seems like its working until you consider the alternatives. I guess ive become an advocate of fixing what we have and recognizing that its not perfect. There are dangers in that system. There are dangers in every system. There is another side of false dichotomy with private capital. Fannie and freddie had to be bailed out by the government so we fix that now with dodd frank, if the big bank controls the Mortgage Market, one that undo everything weve done . Why is that private capital . So if we did that and we let franny and freddie start to build capital again and we release them into the market, do you feel there is any risk that we will have more financial crisis in 20 years . Huge risk. The financing of Home Ownership had a huge Political Base in washington and we would be concerned that they will go bad like they went bad before. Slowly but surely we will end up right back where we were before. I think that is risk. Im just not sure i can come up with anything better. There is a risk of having the big banks. There is a a risk without having the government in the Mortgage Market at all that would be such a radical shock to our economy and our economy is on a fragile threshold right now. What would it look like if we had private capital . No one knows. The system has been in place for 80 years. We dont know what it will look like and if ordinary americans would be able to get mortgages. Right. Thank you so much for this discussion. Ive really enjoyed it. Weve been talking about shaking ground. Its a compensated topic and thanks for your time. It was good read on that topic. Thank you very much. That was after words, book tv Signature Program in which authors of the latest nonfiction books are interviewed. Watch past after Words Program online apple tv. Org. Discuss the Education System in america next. The adoption of common core as a standard curriculum. Good morning, jim sturges of pioneer institute, the publisher of this book. Five years into common core, we are at a critical juncture. Polls demonstrate that common core is at a new alltime low and that its brand is toxic. There are one of two major Testing Consortium associated with common core and has dwindled from 26 states down to seven states. Its really no longer viable. The other National National test isnt doing much better. Its a little to say there is little comparability left in common core. This volume that we are releasing this morning, drooling through the the core, is definitely a timely release. Five years into this Great American education debate, its worth remembering what we are debating. Its not politics. It did it contest between two distinct views. The first is that common core standards are a a state driven effort to improve k12 Public Education and especially to help underperforming districts. The second view is the common core standards are of dubious academic quality and constitute an unworkable federal intrusion into what is historically, legally and financially a state and local issue. Drilling through the core is a book that strives to treat the first view fairly, but to argue that the second should prevail. A little on the pioneer institute. Pioneer has been called, in the media, the brains of the common core opposition when in fact pioneer really cut its teeth in massachusetts on issues of k12 education reform. We help the state make strides on improving schools and establishing the highest performing charter pub. School sector in the nation. Massachusetts for a decade has been at the top of every measure in academics in the country. We rank among the six Top Countries in math and science. We are proud of our state and our contribution to bringing about these results for our students. With the arrival of common core, pioneer realized we had to raise our sites beyond the borders of massachusetts. Unfortunately we have already seen the corrosive effect of the core on student achievement of massachusetts students. Its a combination of a multiyear Research Evaluation 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, are the common core standards academically rigorous. For states, how much would it cost to implement common core and the tests, and finally for congress, are the common core standards and the fund federally funded test legal . Two final comments before we hear from our experts. There are over 12 authors and scholars that contribute to this volume that has been edited within introduction from doctor peter wood. You have the biographies. Ill make two final comments. The first is contrary to what several scholars, and scholars that we respect, have argued, standards do matter. Pioneer takes a backseat to know organization. We advocate for the very best standards we can have for our students. This is not a paper debate. Standards are more than just a simple written document. Especially in the hands of states like massachusetts that took the goals seriously, implemented test that were aligned for their students as well as teacher certification tests among the best in the country. Finally i would like to recognize an individual whose name does not appear in this volume. He is a pioneers director of education research. He has been the driving force of pioneers work across the nation in developing the strategy that we have undertaken. He engages the best mine from whom you also here today and also making sure that we maintain a seriousness of purpose in all that we do. James fingerprints are all over this volume and much of the national debate. With that, let me me invite doctor peter wood, the editor and author of the introduction to step to the podium. Thank you. The common core has already touched the lives of millions of americans. I use the word touched cautiously in that it has been a rather hard touched in that it has left some bruises. The bruises are mainly what i want to talk about in the next 20 minutes. There are probably too many of them to fit in that amount of time so let me try to organize this in the form of Something Like this. The lower academic quality is, for me, the primary issue. Im an academic of a head of a National Organization called the National Organization of scholars. Im concerned the students to reach college be prepared for college and are ready to perform well 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, its meant to be College Ready. Its a false advertisement. It doesnt do that. Of lower standards. The other two areas are the enormous cost of the common core and its failure to be really good pathway to the sciences and stem area. Let me take care of those last 21st because i want to spend more time on the academic quality issue. The enormous cost are a bit hard to pin down but one of our Panel Experts is an expert on that. Weve 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 that we now know, was a few years ago that we came up with it, is probably a lowball estimate. It will be a lot more than 16 billion. You will not find any accounting of what these numbers are, what the actual costs are in the common core promotional material. This debate has gone on for almost six years and we are doing it blindly without much knowledge of the numbers. Surely some of those numbers are coming forth. In calvin, california, one of the states that has taken the trouble to break down the additional cost of the common core imposes, Something Like as follows, 2. 5 billion on additional textbooks. 5. 5 on professional development and 7 billion for technology. Now those are national numbers. I stand corrected. California has 12 of the u. S. Population so we can project on californias basis how this is going to look nationally within a few years. The numbers im talking about are not oneyear expenditures, they are expended over seven years and in most cases we are finding, in california, that the expenses are outrunning out running the projections already. The issue on science preparation really comes down to the fact that the common core, although it focuses on math and on link english Language Arts, that the basis on math is so basic that the sciences are crippled. By the time they graduate from high school, unless they have been in an accelerated program or taken after school program, there basis to exceed in the Science Program is very thin. The easiest way to point this out is that the teaching of algebra has been pushed back into higher grade so there is not enough room left in most High School Curricula for students to proceed even as far as precalculus. What this means for colleges admitting students on a stem track is that they arrive unprepared. They are unprepared in some on other ways as well. Thats where i will focus my attention. The common core, as i said, promotes itself for making Students College and career ready. To be College Ready means what it means, in the eyes of the founders of this educational reform, the students are prepared to engage in what they call Critical Thinking and that they have learned to do things such as read texts for their informational contact and to develop argument based arguments on the readings they get. Those things stated in the abstract sound wholesome. Wouldnt we want our students to be critical thinkers like marsh and they be able to read text in order to extract the relevant information . Should they be able to construct good arguments on the basis of that information question at the answer to those questions is a resounding yes, we want that for our students. How do we get there . Well, this requires me to do what academics are famous of doing and that is taking a relatively simple subject and making it a lot more compensated. So for a few minutes im going to complicate. The complications are Something Like this, the United States has over the past 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 probably with horace mann in the 1830s, wave after wave after wave of reform attempts that have almost, every single one of them, resulted in making some of the problems worse and inventing brandnew problems. Now, i dont dont have time to give a history on 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 1990s and back to the 1984 nation at risk report. All of these together have pointed to a deep dissatisfaction among americans on the way our schools proceed. When the common core started taking place, shape in 2007 it was building on pentup dissatisfaction. That dissatisfaction has a variety of forms but one of them is the dissatisfaction educational system had with the system of education serves students who dont perform very well. One of the very first steps of the common core was the idea that i was going to set higher standards, it was going to redefine the word higher to mean more inclusive of more different kinds of students. The common core begins, as the story begins, in 2006 when David Coleman and his partner, jason zimmer, a professor of mathematics get together and start thinking about how to recast to be standards. They were coming on the heels of a long series of efforts by people who wanted to nationalize our standards, make our schools something of a a National Project rather than a local and state project and they came up with a very clever way around this which was since the constitution and statutory law, for the most part, for bid the National Government from taking over the schools or setting a curriculum, they said lets do this at the state level but lets coordinate all the states so that at the same time they adopt the same standard and we will have de facto national standards. It sounded like a great idea and with the backing of bill gates 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 dont quite have that name right, and they made this pitch that heres a way we can finally get around the constitutional and Statutory Oil obstacles to have real education reform in this country. The officers convened a project called the common core state initiative. They drew in many other partners both corporate and other parts of the educational establishment, and we were off to the races. Now initially this proved to be very popular with governors and with states, some 46 states adopted it in principle as something they wanted to do or were willing to explore. But then we had the recession and in 2009 when president obama found himself with billions of dollars on hand as part of the stimulus package, he was looking for Shovel Ready Projects and the secretary of education told him he had one on hand which was lets put some of the stimulus number on it money into the common core. That was called a race to the top which was a pinata but the states could swing at. If they hid it they would get a lot of money. The states were desperate for money and suddenly within a matter of two months, we had states officially signing on to the common core standards. Trouble was, there were no such standards. They hadnt been written. They were still conceptual. The project of creating them was underway even as the states were saying we are ready to adopt them. The mass we are in right now, largely flows from that moment in 2009 and 2010 when the states rushed in to adopt common core without knowing what they were getting into in the hopes that this could mean a lot more money some of the states got some money but now we know that the cost of implementing the common core far outspent what the government was willing to put into it. Common core came with a a whole lot of promises. I can run through some of those. It was meant to be internationally benchmarked wit meant we were going to set standards at least equal with those the best in the world. That piece has been almost entirely forgotten that this part. Benchmarking just means that other countries have standards in ours arent quite as good, so what. The consistence on informational text turns out to be an issue with literature. We found out that informational text mean everything from reading repair manuals to government regulations and sometimes reading works of literature, oftentimes out of contacts or in forms of excerpt. As, core proceeds from kindergarten through 12th grade, there is less and less attention on literature. Why does this matter . If you are approaching education is simply a utilitarian thing, learning how to read and express yourself, maybe it doesnt matter very much. The literature is our key to most of the really important dimensions of reading. Getting the arguments across that involve imagination, world conception, the idea of what it means to be something rather than simply be an extractor of information gets scant it in the common core and that remains a problem to this day. The common core sets itself in an odd way against the american family. That is probably clearest when it comes to math instruction where in the early grade math has been turned into a torturous set of instructional procedures that parents cannot comprehend. One of the immediate effects of the common core is to put a wall down between parents and their children when you try to learn things and help your children as they proceed through this curriculum. Most parents, nearly all parents find themselves simply baffled by these new 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 have had a common Core Education as College Ready. What does that mean . It means they exempt those students from remedial courses. Now places like california state where over half the students in recent years have had to take remedial courses before they are eligible to take regular courses, cal state has now said we are going to stop that and let anybody who has passed common core in their Home High School bypass remedial courses and go directly into the curriculum. What does that mean if you are a College Teacher as i was from most of my career question market means you have students who are really ill prepared and that you have to now adjust your course downward to their level. How does common core make students College Ready . Not by improving the students by by dumbing down the colleges. Why are colleges willing to do this . For one thing, thing, if they are state colleges, when they are states agreed to do the common core, they agreed in principle 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 go on and on