Common Core roots are tangled and fascinating

As North Carolina cannonballs into the political battle over Common Core standards,  I came across two in-depth pieces that helped me understand the roots of the current conflict.

Retired teacher Lou Nachman steered me to a recent Washington Post article on  "How Bill Gates pulled off the swift Common Core revolution."

Gates

Reporter Lyndsey Layton chronicles how the Microsoft founder's billions pushed the quest for academic standards from obscure wonk talk to a national craze in just a couple of years,  "one of the swiftest and most remarkable shifts in education policy in U.S. history."

Layton outlines how Gates money brought together state leaders and groups on the right  (such as the American Legislative Exchange Council and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce) and left  (teachers unions and the Center for American Progress) to find common ground on Common Core.

Hunt

 There's a fascinating section on the role of The Hunt Institute,  founded by former Democratic N.C. Gov. Jim Hunt and affiliated with UNC Chapel Hill.  According to the article,  the Hunt Institute got $5 million in Gates money in 2009,  "more than 10 times the size of its next largest donation,"  and used that money to coordinate more than a dozen organizations,  convene weekly conference calls and hire a strategist to create  a  “messaging tool kit that included sample letters to the editor (and) op-ed pieces that could be tailored to individuals depending on whether they were teachers, parents, business executives or civil rights leaders."

Last week's mail also brought the Southern Poverty Law Center's  "Public Schools in the Crosshairs:  Far-Right Propaganda and the Common Core Standards." It also goes deep on the origins of Common Core,  as well as the various sources of opposition that have emerged.

Image from SPLC report

To state the obvious: SPLC,  an Alabama-based civil rights group,  has a strong point of view.  But you don't have to agree with those views, or the premise that some Common Core critics are striving to undermine public education and turn the system over to for-profit interests, to learn something from the 36-page report. It itemizes a number of concerns the group considers valid,  including the influence of the Gates Foundation and testing companies and the link between Common Core and a "toxic testing culture."

The report attempts to track the basis of claims that some might dismiss as  "the rantings of extremists"  --  that Common Core promotes socialism,  anti-Americanism and homosexuality,  for instance,  and is anti-Christian.  It notes that the standards specify only one set of required readings,  for high school students:  The Declaration of Independence,  the preamble to the Constitution,  the Bill of Rights and Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address.  Most of the objections are based on selections from "exemplar texts,"  or suggested readings,  the SPLC report says. 

No matter your views,  if you care about education and take the time to get through these two pieces,  you're almost sure to come away with more perspective on the debate  --  and to find something that'll make you crazy. 

CarolinaCAN targets N.C. teacher pay, tenure

A national education-reform group is launching a North Carolina branch to push for changes in teacher pay, tenure and evaluations.

The N.C. Campaign for Achievement Now, or CarolinaCAN, is the seventh state spinoff from 50CAN, a national group trying to create like-minded organizations across the country. CarolinaCAN will formally debut today with an analysis of shortcomings in student achievement,  followed by a "Year of the Teacher" push for evaluations,  pay and layoffs to be linked to student results and other measures of effectiveness (find the issue brief at the CarolinaCAN web site above).

"Our state has an honored tradition of education leadership,"  the introduction says. "But there is so much more needed to support and leverage our great teachers. Three reforms will help us get there: improving our statewide teacher evaluation system, reforming the state’s outdated tenure and layoff systems, and creating meaningful rewards for excellence. This brief outlines the shortcomings of the current evaluation, tenure, layoff and compensation policies, and proposes reforms to re-position North Carolina as a national leader in teacher excellence."

Kowal

Julie Kowal,  a North Carolina native formerly with the education consulting firm Public Impact,  is the new group's executive director. Public Impact is working with the Charlotte-based Project LIFT to design new "opportunity culture" jobs that give highly effective classroom teachers higher pay for taking on more responsibility.

Figuring out how local this new group is takes some teasing out.  50CAN,  which originated in Connecticut,  has a plan to spend almost $7 million on education policy campaigns in the seven states (Rhode Island,  Minnesota,  Maryland,  New York,  Pennsylvania and New Jersey are the others).  That money comes from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation,  the Walton Family Foundation and other major donors,  says Fiona Hoey,  the group's media and marketing director. So far the site lists no donors specific to North Carolina,  and the advisory board has yet to be named.

The CarolinaCAN site says the national group recruited "a group of independent, nonpartisan organizations dedicated to top-notch schooling to consider joining forces to help improve the education landscape" in North Carolina, with those organizations helping 50CAN  "and local partners" create CarolinaCAN and launch "The Year of the Teacher."  The N.C. founders,  in addition to Public Impact and Project LIFT, are  listed as KIPP charter schools in Charlotte and Gaston; the Charlotte office of New Leaders (recently joined by former CMS Chief Operating Officer Millard House);  Parents for Educational Freedom in North Carolina; and Teach For America offices in Charlotte and eastern North Carolina.. Teach For America President Matthew Kramer chairs the 50CAN board.

In other states,  including Minnesota and Rhode Island,  CAN political action groups have pumped money into state legislative and local school board campaigns.  Hoey says there's no plan for CarolinaCAN to get involved in this year's Charlotte-Mecklenburg school board race,  though she says she's not in a position to rule anything out for a group that's just getting off the ground.

Gates Foundation launching new CMS PR blitz

To those of you concerned about big-money foundations and their influence on local schools, hold onto your hats: the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation today is announcing a new public relations campaign on behalf of Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools. Given all the uproar over expanded testing, performance-pay and other initiatives critics see as being driven by foundations like Gates and Broad, this one is sure to attract a lot of attention. You can read some of what we've written about the influence of foundations on school reform here.

The news release that landed in my in-box says the effort's called "Educating Change," and aims to teach the general public about the broad palette of reforms CMS has launched within Strategic Plan 2014, the school system's overall school reform blueprint. There will be TV, radio and internet ads, printed and digital materials, and a web site at http://www.educatingchangenow.org/. You can get a sense of what the TV stuff will look like here:



It's all funded by a grant from the Gates Foundation, and will be overseen by the Charlotte Chamber and a local committee of parents, business owners, clergy and civic leaders, the news release says. A local PR firm, Carolina PR, is on the case, and the campaign is to be completed this fall. The timing raises some obvious questions: Will the campaign impact the school board elections and the hunt for a new superintendent? Is it aimed at countering the groundswell of opposition that cropped up this spring in reaction against the reform-related expansion of testing?

I'll be seeking answers to those and other questions during a conference call with the organizers this afternoon. I'll update you with what I find out.

UPDATE: The Chamber folks say the PR campaign costs $200,000, but no money will go toward the school board election campaigns. They say it's not specifically aimed at countering the groundswell against expanded testing, but rather is aimed at getting people educated about school reform generally in Charlotte. Natalie English, an official with the chamber, said she wrote the grant for it after Gates folks called her asking how the chamber's managed to be so successful at helping get bond campaigns passed. She said the PR campaign will teach people the various components of Strategic Plan 2014.

School board chair Eric Davis told me the school system's PR staff has been decimated by cuts, and CMS needs the kind of help Gates is offering: "This is nothing more than trying to get factual information out to the community about our efforts to try to improve student learning."

Will Bill Gates come courting me?

Parent activist Pam Grundy shared this link to a Washington Post education blog about the Gates Foundation's latest quest to "win over the public and the media to its market-driven approach to school reform."

According to Valerie Strauss's blog, a grant proposal outlines plans to build “strong ties to local journalists, opinion elites, and local/state policymakers and their staffs” and ensure "frequent placement ... in local media coverage" of stories about teacher effectiveness, performance pay and value-added ratings.

Well! I had a front-page article about Charlotte-Mecklenburg's push toward performance pay in last Sunday's paper, with another coming out this Sunday looking at value-added ratings. I'm tempted to post an address where the Gates folks can mail a big ol' check.

Seriously, this is just another glimpse of the tangled world of education reform. You've got a billionaire philanthropist not only paying to promote his vision for better schools, but sponsoring a group to drum up "grassroots" support. Meanwhile, a local mom who's moving onto the national stage is keeping an eye on such developments and alerting the local media about the plan to woo us.

I may get confused, but I will never get bored on this beat!