Sunday, June 8, 2014
CCSS: Schooling for Wretched People in a Miserable World
The Council of the Great City Schools (yet another group apparently set up to make money by shilling for the Core) has created a marvelous promotional video for the Core. Done in the style of those high-speed marker-drawing videos that the interwebs love, and narrated by a possible-non-caucasian lady narrator, it does a fabulous job of distilling the world view embedded in the Common Core complex.
I'm not going to break it down second by second. Instead, lets look at some of the assumptions built right into the program
Education Is A Single Staircase
The central image of the video is the stairway. The stairway is a single path, always heading upward. It should be exactly the same for everyone-- in fact, every "problem" that the video brings up is visualized as ways in which two separate sets of steps aren't exactly the same. Differences are bad. We feel so strongly about this that we even lie about how the new CCSS staircase is just like the international staircase, because Same is Good.
It's a Dog Eat Dog World
"Like it or not," says the video grimly, the world is all about measuring and competition. We see athletic winners blocks with big piles of money going to the top spot. The world is all about competition. Here is a cartoon American competing with cartoon grads from Shanghai and look-- the Shanghai grads are getting all the money.
So it's clear that not only is life all about competition, but there is only one way of keeping score-- and that's with money.
But, Plateaus
The video highlights one of the oddly self-negating qualities of the Core Complex. Our students need to compete, but we've also got plateaus on the steps where we will gather all the students and make sure they're all on the same step. So it's like a race-- but a race where at the end of every lap, everyone has to sit and wait until all the runners have caught up.
Measures Are For the Fatherland, Not the Child
The video makes it clear that one of our big problems is that the different staircases, different tests and different measures make it hard for the Supervisory Other to see what's going on. I actually appreciate the honesty in this point of view-- it certainly beats the usual line that students and their teachers are somehow too boneheaded to know how the student is doing.
But here it's clear. They don't need to know. It's the bosses, the overlords, the fatherland, the high potentates of business and government-- these are the people who need a good, solid dependable report on how well the education system is doing and what kind of product it's churning out.
This video is worth watching because it captures just how small and meager and bleak is the world envisioned by the reformsters. Our students are to all toil away on exactly the same path, with exactly the same steps, to exactly the same destination, where the only measure of their success or worth in this upward rat race will be how much money they get. And that education, as flat and uninspiring as it is, is not being provided for the benefit of the students, but to benefit the uberclass that runs the schools and the factories and the government, the same uberclass to whom the students and the schools are accountable.
What a miserable joyless de-humanizing version of education. What a sad model of a pointless life for wretched people in a miserable world.
I'm not going to break it down second by second. Instead, lets look at some of the assumptions built right into the program
Education Is A Single Staircase
The central image of the video is the stairway. The stairway is a single path, always heading upward. It should be exactly the same for everyone-- in fact, every "problem" that the video brings up is visualized as ways in which two separate sets of steps aren't exactly the same. Differences are bad. We feel so strongly about this that we even lie about how the new CCSS staircase is just like the international staircase, because Same is Good.
It's a Dog Eat Dog World
"Like it or not," says the video grimly, the world is all about measuring and competition. We see athletic winners blocks with big piles of money going to the top spot. The world is all about competition. Here is a cartoon American competing with cartoon grads from Shanghai and look-- the Shanghai grads are getting all the money.
So it's clear that not only is life all about competition, but there is only one way of keeping score-- and that's with money.
But, Plateaus
The video highlights one of the oddly self-negating qualities of the Core Complex. Our students need to compete, but we've also got plateaus on the steps where we will gather all the students and make sure they're all on the same step. So it's like a race-- but a race where at the end of every lap, everyone has to sit and wait until all the runners have caught up.
Measures Are For the Fatherland, Not the Child
The video makes it clear that one of our big problems is that the different staircases, different tests and different measures make it hard for the Supervisory Other to see what's going on. I actually appreciate the honesty in this point of view-- it certainly beats the usual line that students and their teachers are somehow too boneheaded to know how the student is doing.
But here it's clear. They don't need to know. It's the bosses, the overlords, the fatherland, the high potentates of business and government-- these are the people who need a good, solid dependable report on how well the education system is doing and what kind of product it's churning out.
This video is worth watching because it captures just how small and meager and bleak is the world envisioned by the reformsters. Our students are to all toil away on exactly the same path, with exactly the same steps, to exactly the same destination, where the only measure of their success or worth in this upward rat race will be how much money they get. And that education, as flat and uninspiring as it is, is not being provided for the benefit of the students, but to benefit the uberclass that runs the schools and the factories and the government, the same uberclass to whom the students and the schools are accountable.
What a miserable joyless de-humanizing version of education. What a sad model of a pointless life for wretched people in a miserable world.
Posted by Peter Greene 
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