Diane Ravitch's Mutating Common Core Positions

As the opposition to Common Core has spread and deepened, Diane Ravitch's position has undergone a strange metamorphosis.  She had this to say at Huffington Post on March 24 in a piece entitled "The Fatal Flaw of the Common Core Standards:"

. . . .The complaints are coming from all sides: from Tea Party activists who worry about a federal takeover of education and from educators, parents, and progressives who believe that the Common Core will standardize instruction and eliminate creativity in their classrooms.

But there is a more compelling reason to object to the Common Core standards.

They were written in a manner that violates the nationally and international recognized process for writing standards. The process by which they were created was so fundamentally flawed that these "standards" should have no legitimacy.

Setting national academic standards is not something done in stealth by a small group of people, funded by one source, and imposed by the lure of a federal grant in a time of austerity. . . . .

By late May of 2014, Ravitch was not nearly so concerned about the lack of due process, lack of consensus, and the right to appeal that fatally flawed the Common Core in March.  In May, Ravitch says that if states want to use the Common Core, then they should go right ahead and do so. After all, "you shouldn't let your judgment be clouded by people who make hysterical claims about the standards or those who wrote them."  One may wonder if the Diane of March 2014 is implicated as a source of those "hysterical claims."

With Diane's permission for states to use them, Ravitch offers no advice for the hundreds of thousands of teachers who don't want to use Common Core or the millions of parents who don't want their children force fed the same technocratic utilitarian common denominator info bits across the entire nation. 

What are we do as Diane's views evolve?

Is Ravitch's "critique of Common Core just too sophisticated" for us to get our heads around because of its nuanced perspective, or is her movement toward a c'est la vie attitude toward CC just a sad example of ideological drift toward the AFT and NEA misleadership position of full-on support for the Gates agenda?

Meanwhile, Diane most recently at HuffPo has called for a Congressional investigation of Bill Gates, no less.  No doubt this will follow on the heels of the Congressional investigation of testing that she called for earlier this year.  Is this a bone thrown to the poor saps who still believe that Save Our Schools is a legitimate anti-CorpEd organization?

Here is a clip from the May Ravitch position:

. . . .The Common Core is not wicked, evil, or dangerous, nor are those who wrote it.

Perhaps my critique of Common Core is too sophisticated for those who want simplistic answers. I don't condemn those who want to use Common Core. I don't they are wrong or un-American. If they like it, they should use it.

My advice to states that want to use it, who think it is better than what they do now, is this:

1. Convene your best classroom teachers and review CCSS. Fix whatever needs fixing. Recognize that not all students learn at the same pace. Leave time for play in K-3.

2. Do not use the federally funded tests. Do not spend billions on hardware and software for testing. Let teachers write their own tests. Use standardized tests sparingly, like a state-level NAEP, to establish trends, not to label or rank children and teachers.

3. Do not use results of CC to produce ratings to "measure" teacher quality. Study after study, report after report warns that this is a very bad idea that will harm the quality of education by focusing too much on standardized tests, narrowing the curriculum, and forcing teachers to teach to the tests.

4. Do not let your judgment be clouded by people who make hysterical claims about the standards or those who wrote them. . . .

Notice here that Ravitch pretends that there is some autonomy for the 42 states that are signed on CC.  As long as there is a Common Core that your state has adopted, there are no state options to alter, fix, change, or to "use it" as a state might see fit.  Such latitude in curriculum, instruction, and assessment is available only to states that have said "no" to the Common Core testing delivery system that is being choked down the throat of the nation.  To suggest that states that have adopted the Common Core have such options to customize how they use CC is pure sophistry.