Sturges, the publish of drilling through the core. Five years into the debate over common core we are at a critical juncture. It is shown to have the lowest approvals and it has dwindled from 26 states and washington to seven states and washington, d. C. It is no longer viable actually. Tests are not doing better. It is true to say there is Little Common purpose left in common core. So this volume we are releasing this morning, drilling through the core, is definitely a timely release. But five years into the this Great American education debate it is worth remembering what we are debating. It is not politics. But the debate is a contest between two distinct views. The first is common core standards are a state effort to improve k12 education and help children in under performing districts. The second view is the common core standard are of dubious academic quality and is a state and local issue. Drilling through the core is a book that strives to treat the first view fairly but argue the second view should prevail. A little on the publisher pioneer institute. Pioneer institute has been called the brains of the common core implication. But we cut issues on k12 reform and helped states make historic strides in approving schools and establishing the highest performing Charter School section in the nation. Massachusetts has been at the top of every measure in academics in the country. We rank among the top six countries on math and science on international testament we are proud of the state and contributions. With the arrival of common core we realized we had to expand the borders beyond massachusetts. Drilling through the core is a culmination of evidence and the book tries to answer three questions that apply to three different groups. The first is for parents of common core is academically rigorous, for states how much does it cost to implement common core and the aligned test, and for congress are the common core standards in the federalfunded test legal . Two final comments before we hear from the panel of experts. 12 authors and scholars contributed to this, a volume that has been edited and an introduction from peter wood. The first comment i have is contrary to scholars why respect is standards do matter. Pioneer is advocating for the best standards we can have for students. This is not a paper debate. Standards are more than just a simple written document especially in the hands of massachusetts that took the goals seriously and implemented tests that were aligned and teacher certification students. I would like to recognize the individual whose name does not appear in the volume. Jimmy gas, the pioneers director of education on research, has been the driving force for pioneer in developing the strategy we have undertaken, in engaging the best minds you will hear from today, and making sure we maintain a seriousness of purposeness on the issue. James finger prints are all over this volume. With that, let me invite dr. Peter wood, the editor and author, to step to the podium. Well, thank you. The common core has already touched the lives of millions of americans. I use the words touched cautiously here in that it has been a rather hard touch and left 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 into that amount of time so let me try to organize this a little bit in the form of Something Like this. The lower academic quality is for me the primary issue. I am an academic with an Organization Called the National Association of scholars and i am concerned the students who 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 careerready. The careerready part falls away quickly. It is meant to be collegeready. It is a false advertisement and doesnt do that. It lowers standards. The other two areas are the enormous cost and the failure to be a good pathway to the sciences s. T. E. M. Areas. Let me take care of the last two first 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 the Panel Experts here is an expert on that. We came up with the figure of 16 billion nationwide as the overall cost of implementation of the common core. That 16 billion figure we know is probably a lowball estimate. It is going to be more than 16 billion. You will not find any accounting of what these numbers are, what the actually cost are in the common cores promotional material. This debate has gone on in this country for five or six years and we are doing it without much knowledge in the numbers. But slowly and surely some of the numbers are coming forth. In california, one of the states that broke down the additional cost of common core, is Something Like 2. 5 billion in additi additional textbooks, 5. 5 billion for professional development, and 7 billion for technology. Those are national numbers. I stand corrected. California has 12 of the u. S. Population so we can project on californias bases how this is knowing to look nationally within a few years. The numbers i am talking about are not oneyear expenditures. They are expended over seven years in most cases. In california, the expenses are outrunning the projections already we are finding. The issue on science preparation, really comes down to the fact that the common core, although it focuses on math and on english Language Arts, lays the bases so thin in mathematics that the sciences are crippled. By the time students graduate from high school, unless they have been in accelerated programs or taken afterschool programs, the bases to succeed in science is thin. The simple way of pointing this out is the teaching of algebra has been pushed back into higher grades so there is not enough room left in most High School Curriculum for students to proceed even as far as precalculus. This means students are arriving unprepared on the s. T. E. M. Track and in other areas as well and that is where i will focus my attention. The common core promotes itself as making students career and College Ready. Being College Ready means what . It means in the eyes of the founders of this educational reform that students are prepared to engage in Critical Thinking and learned through reading text for informational content and develop evidencebased arguments on the bases of the readings they get. Now those things stated in the abstract sound wholesome. Wouldnt we want students to be critical thinkers, be able to read text, and be able to construct good arguments on the bases of that information. The answer to those questions is a resounding, yes, we want that. But how do we get there . Well, this i think requires me to do what academics are famous and that is taking a simple subject and making it more complicated. So for a few minutes i will c p 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 figure out how to educate its children. We have had, starting probably with horris man in the 1930s, wave after wave of reform attempts that have almost every single one of them resulted in making the problem worse and am venting new problems. I dont have time to give a recitation on the history of american education, but the common core should be seen as the latest in a long series of these following on no child left behind and reforms in the 1990s back to the 1984 nation at risk report. All of these together point to a deep satisfaction from americans on the way the schools proceed. When the common core started taking shape in 2007 it was building on pent up dissatisfaction and that dissatisfaction has a variety of forms and one of them was the dissatisfaction that the educational establishment had with the way in which our system of education serves student who dont perform well. One of the first steps of common core was it was going to set Higher Standards and redefine the word higher to mean more inclusive of different kinds of students. So the common core story begins in 2006 when David Coleman and his partner jason zimba, a professor of mathematics, got together and started thinking about how to recast the standards. They were coming on the heels of series of efforts from people who wanted to nationalize our standards and make the schools a National Project rather than local and state project. They came up with a clever way around this which was since the constitution and statutory law for the most part forbid the National Government from taking over the schools, or setting a curriculum, they said lets do it at the state level, but coordinate all of the states so at the same time they adopt the same standards and we will have de facto national standards. Sounded like a great idea and with the backing of bill gates money they went to the governors association, an Organization Called achieve that was founded in 1996, and went to the association of chief officers for schools and made the pitch of this is how we can get around the constitutional obstacles and have real educational reform in the country. The National Governors association and the School Council organizations convened the Common Core Initiative and we were off to the races. This was initially very poplar with governors and states. 46 states adopted it in principle as something they wanted to do or were willing to explore. 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 shovelready projects and the secretary of education, arnie duncan said he had one on hand and that was lets put some of the stum stimulus money into the common core. The states were desperate for money and within a matter of a few months we had states officially signing on to the common core k12 state standards. The trouble was there were no such standards. They had not been written, they were conceptual and the project of creating them was underway even as the states were saying we are ready to adopt them. The mess we are in 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 it would mean a lot more money. Some of the states got some money but we know the cost of implementing the cost of common core far outspend what the federal government was willing to put into it. The common core came with a lot of promises. It was to be internationally benched marked meaning we would set standards at least equal to those who are the best in the world. The International Benchmarking piece has been forgotten. Now it is we acknowledge other countries have standards, and ours are not as good, but so what . The information on informational text it is the opportunity for distancing literature. The text meant everything from reading repair manuals and sometimes reading literature out of context and in the form of x experts and it is on a sliding scale with less attention to literature as you go through the grades. If you approach education as a utilitarian thing, learning how to read and express yourself, maybe it doesnt matter much. But literature is the key to the most important dimensions of reading; getting the arguments across that involve imagination, moral conceptions, the idea of what it means to be something instead of an extractor of education is scanted in common core and that remains a problem today. The common core sets itself against the American Family in an odd way and that is clearest when it comes to math instruction where in the early grades math has been turned into a tortous set of instructional procedures that parents cannot understand. So it puts a wall between parents and children when you try to learn and help children. Most parents find themselves baffled by the new procedures. The claim this is going to make students collegeready just appears to be rather odd. There are colleges signing on saying we will accept students who have common Core Education as collegeready. Adjust your course to their. He how does common core make students college, ready . Not by improving students but dumbing down the colleges. If theyre state colleges, when their states agreed to do the common core, they agreed in principle they would abandon remedial courses and treat common Core Education as everything you needed in order to attend college. As i said, the bruises here go on and on. One might point to the disempowerment of teachers. The common cores advocates are fond of saying its not a curriculum, simply a set of standards. Thats a distinction without much of a difference. The standards are so minute in so many cases they leave teachers extremely little room how to teach, what to teach or when to teach it. So its not literally a curriculum in that it didnt speaks specify the exact texts and what the lesson plans might lock like, but apart from that, it is a straight jacket, and teachers among most vociferous critics of common core. The nea were strong opponents of the common core, and now theres been a big split between the leadership of the teachers inons and the rankandfile, who find that common core is unbearable. Didnt like no child left behind. They like the common core even less. The common core does that because it has built into it a preposition proposition that the simply treated as a pile of words. The treatment of texts as piles of words, the signature movement of the common core, it takes the history, it takes the personalities, the understanding of human context out of the teaching. Teachers can try to smuggle it back in, but that brings us to the next problem, which is that the common core is not simple play set of standards floating out there, telling teachers what to do. Its a line to a set of tests. In principle it is to make the common core work, two testing con shore should, one called smarter balance, the other called park, which i can never remember exactly what that stands for. Were created in tornado set up National Tests marketed through the states. The states could choose to be part of smarter balance or park or both. Initially states rushed in, as you just heard in the introduction, states are now rushing back out. Leaving these National Consortium doesnt mean they got out of the test games. The defeats the purpose of the common core to nationalize everything. Now its denationalizing and going back to in some sense a state level but a state level marred by its implementation of a set of rules that get in the way of state autonomy. The common core has what i call a forensic approach to knowledge. Everything is now evident. Youre teaching students to think not in terms of trying to put together a whole understanding of things but to break them down into pieces in order to make arguments, as though we would like every student in the country to be a minilawyer. This forensic approach again has some merit. Its a good idea that people learn how to make arguments. But thats all they learn how to do in a k12 education. We are missing a great deal. This movement for the common core, ive depicted it as falsely labeled as a statelevel initiative. It really looks like something that nationalizes. It does have the fingerprints of the federal government on it through president obama and the department of education. But its really important to see that it arose from and remains to a large extent a private enterprise. The National Governors association is a private organization, and the copyright on the common core is held by a private organization. These two testing consortiums are private organizations. Being private means they do not have to disclose or not subject to foia requests or anything else. The process by which they arrive at their standards, how they change their standard, the questions that go into their tests, its all a black box. When i said earlier this disrupts the family, puts some kind of wall between the learning that Young Children are doing and how their parents can help, that wall is even higher. Its a wall that shuts off all of us. The public in general, teachersparents, everybody, from what actually now makes up the content of an American Public education. What sense do we have Public Education left when he decided to privatize the whole enterprise by handing it over to a bunch of organizations that have names, that vaguely suggest theyre public in the National Governors association. Whats that . But are not in fact public. Theyre private. And they intend to keep their privacy. We know because we have been trying to get information out of them for the past five or six years, and its precious hard to get. Now if there are other components, one is that although it was not initially part of the scheme for the common core, when the federal government made the common core part of the race to the top, it added a demand that the states also adopt a state longitudal Data Collection or data mining, as we call it. The idea was that students performance on the common core from kindergarten through 12th 12th grade should be measured, and the data from that should go into a national database. Well, as soon as the database stuff got out, one Organization Called in bloom was one of the arm contractors. It later went bankrupt. But the Data Collection mandate remains there. The states bridled at turning the information over to the government but the two private testing con shore jump liked the idea. Park has extended it from k12 through prek through graduate school, which is to say on every american who attends school, every built of data, every agreed, every assignment,