Well, guess what?  This is exactly what the writing team assembled by Achieve with the help of other organizations, and departments of education in 26 states did to create the NGSS.  The NGSS has created standards based on traditional science content and added Engineering, technology and applications of science to the standards.

Standards to Improve Achievement

One could argue that organizing by content area is the right thing to do.  Why not create writing teams for each of the four areas: Earth and Space Sciences, Engineering-Technology-and-Applications of Science, Life Science, and Physical Sciences? Why not emphasize the disciplines of science, as well as engineering?

The argument goes that U.S. students are lagging in science achievement, as evidenced by average scores on PISA and TIMSS, two international tests in which the U.S. participates.  Furthermore, America’s competitive edge is at risk because of the poor showing of U.S. students on these tests.  Without emphasizing science achievement in K-12 schools, how do we expect U.S. students to career and college ready?  This is all part of the “reformers” playbook, and Achieve is one organization that uses this argument as a rationale for the Common Core State Standards, and now is using the argument to explain why we need the Next Generation Science Standards.  And it isn’t just Achieve and its partners that think this way.  The U.S. Department of Education and state departments of education around the country also use the same playbook, and cite the same statistics about America’s failing schools.

One  more thing.  The U.S. Department of Education has funded two groups to prepare computer based national assessments that will be used as high- stakes tests. The reformers obsession with testing is getting out of control? But the NGSS framework is assessment ready, and is to facilitate the testing mania.

The “reformers” argument sounds really good, doesn’t it.

Better Look at the Facts

But as Richard Rothstein argues, this argument relies on imaginary facts. Rothstein, a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute, reports that a careful analysis of the the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) data shows that there has been incremental improvement of student learning in math, reading and science, but the ones who argue that U.S. schools are failing ignore such data.  Dr. Rothstein puts it this way:

You may be surprised to learn that African-American elementary school student achievement, in Illinois and nationwide, has been improving so spectacularly that in math, the average black student now performs better than about 90% of all black students performed less than a generation ago.

What’s more, black elementary school math performance is now better than white performance was in the previous generation.

Let me repeat: black elementary school students today have better math skills than white students did only twenty years ago.

These data come from the  National Assessment of Educational Progress, a federal sample that is the only reliable source on  student achievement over time in this country.

The gains have been almost as great for middle-schoolers in math, and for elementary school students in reading,

Most gains were posted in the 1990s, before the test-obsessed accountability system called “No Child Left Behind,” a law whose flawed premise was that it was necessary to force educators to pay attention to minority students.

For Hispanic students, there are no data that can distinguish between very recent immigrants and children who have attended American schools throughout childhood. But my guess is that if we had data, we would conclude that Hispanic gains have been equally dramatic.

Policymakers, pundits, and politicians ignore these gains; they conclude that you, educators, have been incompetent because the test score gap hasn’t much narrowed.

But the reason it hasn’t narrowed is that your profession has done too good a job — you’ve improved white children’s performance as well, so the score gap persists, but at a higher level for all.

Source: NAEP, 2011 Science

And in science, the NAEP published its Science 2011 report for 8th grade, and the results showed the same incremental rise in scores.  The average eighth-grade science score increased from 150 in 2009 to 152 in 2011. The percentages of students performing at or above the Basic and Proficient levels were higher in 2011 than in 2009. There was no significant change from 2009 to 2011 in the percentage of students at the Advanced level.

Discipline Myopia

Dr. William G. Wraga, professor at the University of Georgia suggests that the Common Core State Standards contain two blind spots. Insufficient attention is paid to the need for  interdisciplinary curriculum and citizenship education.  This is caused, according to Dr. Wraga, by the”discipline myopia” that characterizes the standards.  School science standards are highly technical and steeped in disciplinary concepts (in physics, chemistry, biology) processes and practice.

The NGSS has created a set of standards that do not get us to “think outside the box” of the traditional science disciplines.  And even after adding engineering, technology and applications, they have treated this new domain as a separate, and new set of standards that students must learn and science teachers must teach.

For example, when I examined the standards in the Engineering, Technology, and Applications of Science, I found 19 sets of standards spread over the K-12 range of schooling.  They certainly didn’t reflect anything new about how engineering might contribute to the science curriculum that would make it appealing to science teachers whose curriculum is already bursting with science standards.  According to NGSS documents, it was important to integrate technology and engineering into science.  However, Achieve claims that this does not imply that separate courses or units need to be taught on this subject.  The fact that there 19 sets of Engineering standards, and the fact that teachers and students will be assessed on these standards, surely this stuff will have to taught within the science curriculum.

There is very little evidence of supporting interdisciplinary teaching in the NGSS.  The science standards to too confined to the traditional disciplines, and there is meager attention to “applications” in the new Engineering standards.  There seems to a lack of science-related social issues being embedded in the new standards.  The long history of science, technology, society and environment (STSE) education has largely been ignored in the new standards.  This is as expected.  When the teams are organized by content disciplines, the need or desire to give up some of limited space for your list of standards to write interdisciplinary standards is low on the priority list.

Science teaching should be in the service of the students in our classrooms, and it ought to be a responsibility of the writers to take into consideration the needs, desires, interests, and moral principles of our youth.  The principles of teaching drawn from STSE recognize the vital importance of interdisciplinary thinking and citizen science education, as Dr. Wraga so eloquently put it.

The NGSS has let us down in this regard.

Traditional Topics—>Traditional Standards

It is disappointing that the writers stayed in the traditional box and created one more set of standards that in the end will make very little difference in student learning.  We’ve shown over and over by citing research studies that the authoritarian standards model of teaching presents a barrier to teaching and learning.

I know that the long list of partners and the 26 states are clamoring for the NGSS, but they have their priorities in the wrong places.  U.S. students have done well with the science curriculum that has dominated school science for decades.  In fact, prior to the NCLB act, Rothstein points out that students were incrementally improving in math and reading, and then, once NCLB high-stakes testing kicked in, incremental improvements went down the drain.

Why have we invested millions of dollars in creating a new set of traditional standards at a time when education dollars are scarce?  A new study by the Pioneer Institute estimates that it will cost states $15.8 billion to align their state standards to the common core.  What will it cost the states to align its science standards to the NGSS?

It’s probably because the education is a multi-billion dollar enterprise and a cash cow for corporations that sell products and services for the education market.  Since we’ve been convinced that American schools are failing, raising the bar and writing more rigorous standards is just the ticket to pushing those test scores up.  And along the way, it will mean more millions in new text books that will have to be written, new online courses and resources, new assessments and monitoring systems, staff development training to explain the new standards, and on and on.

Do you think that the NGSS has produced another set of standards maintained the status-quo, and in the end will have little effect on teaching and learning science (and engineering)?  Is the NGSS old school?

The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) are the latest iteration of writing science objectives for the eventual purpose of testing students’ knowledge of science.  The objectives are developed by teams of experts, and rely on either their own domain analysis chart of science, or in this case the Framework for K-12 Science Education developed by another prestigious group of educators and scientists.

The NGSS, although they are presented in an overwhelming and distinctly powerful way on Achieve’s website, when you drill down to the actual standards, you find content statements that are not very different than standards that we’ve seen in the past.

This is what I mean.

A Bit of History

Roots of the Next Generation Science Standards

Note: A good part of this discussion is based on The Art of Teaching Science, Chapter 4. com

Astrolabe, invented by the Greek astron0mer Hipparchus, later improved by Christian and then Muslim scientists.

The roots of science education as it has developed in the United States, and many countries throughout the world, has its origins in the science of the Greeks.  The works of Archimedes, Eratosthenes, and Pythagoras have been carried forward and are a part of what we call modern Western science.  The roots of what we might call modern science education can be traced to the 19th Century in Europe and especially Britain.  At that time, what we know as science was natural philosophy, which emerged from the Greek term philosophy, the love of wisdom. Glen Aikenhead writes

This Greek philosophy radically advanced in Western Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries (after the Renaissance period) with the establishment of natural philosophy, a new knowledge system based on the authority of empirical evidence and imbued with the value of gaining power and dominion over nature. This historical advance is known as the Scientific Revolution

This is where modern science began, and where we find the roots of science education as well.

Committee of Ten. For science education, however, the standards that we use today were initially created to make sure that students would be ready for college (sound familiar).  But the standards I am speaking about were written by The Committee of Ten in 1895!  Of the nine committees that were formed, three dealt with the science curriculum:  (1) physics, astronomy, and chemistry; (2) natural history; and (3) geography. Each committee formulated goals for elementary and secondary science, and described what students should know and learn, and suggested methods of teaching.  Here is what the natural history committee had to say about elementary science:

In the elementary grades, the Natural History Committee recommended and worked out the details for nature study not less than two periods per week for all grades up to high school. The first purpose of nature study is not knowledge of plants and animals, but to interest children in nature. The second purpose was to develop students’ ability to observe, compare, and express ideas (in contemporary terms, the processes of science); to cause children to form habits (habits of mind in today’s language) of careful investigation and of making clear statements of their observations. Acquisition of knowledge was the third purpose. So interest, science process and content acquisition formed the goals of nature study.  Interestingly, the committee recommended that no book be used in nature study.  Students should be observing and discussing plants and animals in the classroom or out in nature.

In the early part of the 20th Century, the nature study movement, an interdisciplinary approach to elementary science teaching, the progressive education movement, and important NSSE Yearbooks published in 1932 and 1946, and 1959, identified goals of science teaching that ought to guide the teaching of K – 12 science during those periods in science education history.

In 1957, the launch of Sputnik accelerated a movement to “modernize” science teaching.  The Golden Age of Science Education emerged with the development of NSF funded alphabet science curriculum projects, including PSSC Physcis, Chem Study, BSCS Biology, Earth Science Curriculum Project, AAAS Elementary Science, and Elementary Science Study.  These projects greatly influenced science education in the U.S., especially traditional textbook publishers by upgrading their texts and resources based on the NSF projects developed during this period.

The Florida Project

In 1972 I was invited to Florida State University to be a writer for the NSF project, the Intermediate Science Curriculum Project (ISCP), and to work on the Florida Assessment Project, a research and development project.

The task of the Florida Assessment was to write standards and assessment items for middle and high school science for Florida’s initial attempt to develop state-wide standards in science.  When I returned to Georgia State University, a team of colleagues and I submitted a proposal to the Florida Department of Education to write the K-6 Elementary Science standards (we called them objectives way back then), and test items.

We used Robert Gagne’s cognitive theory of learning which modeled a 7 stage hierarchy of learning.  We used it to categorize the standards into the 7 levels of learning. Working with high school and middle school science teachers, and doctoral students in science education, our team created a domain chart of the disciplines of science: Earth and Space Science, Physical Science, and Life Science.  The domain chart and the Gagne categories guided our work.  For each standard or objective we wrote two assessment items.

Individualized Science Instructional System

From 1974 – 1978, I was a writer, and field test coordinator of the NSF project entitled the Individualized Science Instructional System (ISIS), which was a high school science program designed to develop nearly 60 modules of science teaching for grades 9 – 12.  In this project, objectives for the entire project were written and field tested (parents, school administrators and teachers were involved).  Objectives were grouped by content, and were assigned to an author (high school teachers and university professors) to write one ISIS Module, or a mini-course.

The Global Thinking Project

In the 1990s I worked with science teachers in the U.S. and Russia, and together we wrote and field-tested the Global Thinking Project, which was an environmental science curriculum designed for middle and high school students.  We created a telecommunications network by bringing Macintosh computers, printers and models to Russia and set them up in schools around the country.  The curriculum included objectives or standards, and each of the “projects” was designed for students to investigate an important local environmental problem, use scientific tools to collect data, as needed, and the GTP network to upload data and collaborate with peers in other countries (Spain, Australia, Japan, Czech Republic, Scotland, Brazil joined the project soon after it was up and running.

NSES and State-Wide Science Standards

In 1996, the National Science Education Standards were published ushering in a new era in standards-based education and then a few years later, high-stakes testing.  The NSES were developed in the same manner as the NGSS, and countless state-wide standards and assessments around the country.

The NSES project was primarily based on Science for All Americans as part of Project 2061 of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).  Soon after, AAAS released its Benchmarks for Scientific Literacy, and then the two-volume work entitled The Atlas of Science Literacy.

The Next Generation Science Standards comes after a long line of projects, all of which wrote curriculum, standards and objectives, and assessment materials.

Achieving the Next Generation Science Standards

Why New Standards?

In a e-Book published on this blog on the science standards movement, we argued that much of the movement to produce new standards is driven by the perception that American students don’t perform well on international tests, and on the NAEP science achievement tests.

But one can also make the argument that American students actually perform consistently and very well on these tests and have actually improved over the years.  In fact the results from the 2011 NAEP Science Assessment show that:

The average eighth-grade science score increased from 150 in 2009 to 152 in 2011. The percentages of students performing at or above the Basic and Proficient levels were higher in 2011 than in 2009. There was no significant change from 2009 to 2011 in the percentage of students at the Advanced level.

Achieve, Inc., the organization that will stand to benefit financially from the standards movement, makes it very clear that we need new standards to help improve America’s competitive edge, to boost the lagging achievement of U.S. students, to make sure students have the essential education for all careers in the modern workforce, to improve the literacy of Americans.  They fail to cite data that shows that a nation’s competitive edge is too complicated to even claim that student test scores have anything to do with; that NAEP data shows that American students have improved in science for a long time.

In whose interests is it to develop these new standards?  Try: Achieve, publishers, especially of online courses and texts, testing companies.

Who Wrote the NGSS?

According to Achieve, Inc., the writing team consisted of 41 members from 26 states.  To make sure that there is a connection between NRC’s Framework for K-12 Science Education and the NGSS, chairs of the NRC’s design teams were selected as chairs of the NGSS writing team committees.  Here is the breakdown of the writing team by field of expertise.  There are 14 teachers on the writing team, representing one-third of the writing team.  There are 12 curriculum & instruction specialists (29%), and 15 Non-K-12 educators (35%).  The panel is a distinguished group with links to their bios. But I found that one of the member identified as a high school teacher, is not teaching.  There certainly were many teachers in U.S. who would have been qualified to replace this team member.  I also note that the science education professors on the writing team do not represent a new cadre of science education professors that might bring fresh and novel ideas to the panel. Is having these individuals as chairs of the writing committees a good idea? I don’t really know. Just thinking.

I would like to know more about the process of actually writing the standards that appear online.  How were the teachers involved?  Did they participate directly in writing drafts, or did they review drafts written by others?  How did Achieve, Inc., interface with the writing team?  Did Achieve provide it own human resources to to the effort, and in what ways?

Table 1. NGSS Writing Team Members by Expertise Area

The Nature of the Standards

The NGSS are organized like standards from the past, into content domains including: (if you click on any of these links it will bring to the NGSS for that content area.)

• Earth and Space Sciences
• Engineering, Technology, and Applications of Science
• Life Sciences
• Physical Sciences

As you can see the standards are organized into four distinct disciplines or core areas.  If you click on any of the categories within the main content areas, you will then be at the level where you can read the standards, and also the information from the Framework for K-12 Science Education that was used to write the performance expectations.  Three columns of information are arranged to highlight these ideas:  science and engineering practices, disciplinary core ideas and crosscutting concepts.

Middle School Earth Space Science Performance Expectations

I’ve chosen the Middle School Earth Space Science (ESS) performance objectives as representative of the NGSS to evaluate.  There are Earth Space Science performance expectations at each grade level (K-HS).  Here is the complete list of Earth Space Sciences major categories extracted from the NGSS website here:

Each standard is written in the form of a behavioral objective.  A good behavioral objective ought to be a statement of what students are expected to do, learn or know.  The NGSS uses the term performance expectation to define its standards, and it seems to me that this is the definition of a behavioral objective, an ideas that was at its height in the 1970s.

Inside a NGSS Standard

I’ll give you two examples from the NGSS from the Earth and Space Sciences.  This is a performance expectation from the history of the earth (MS.ESS-HE or Middle School.Earth Space Science-History of Earth):

Students who demonstrate understanding can:

• Construct explanations for patterns in geologic evidence to determine the relative ages of a sequence of events that have occurred in Earth’s past
• Use models of the geologic time scale in order to organize major events in Earth’s history.

Each standard included the three dimensions that NRC and Achieve describe as a vision of what it means to be proficient in science.  The blue part of the standard are meant to be the science and engineering practices—-what scientists and engineers do—construct explanations, use models, use empirical evidence, etc.  This is the “action” part of the standard, and it is designed to make assessment of the standard straight forward.  The orange part of the standard is the disciplinary core idea (the content), and the underlined part of the standard is the crosscutting concept, ideas that have application across content area such as patterns, similarity, and diversity, cause and effect, scale, and so forth.

So the Earth Space Science domain of the NGSS has 17 categories or topics as shown in Table 2.  Generally speaking there are four objectives per topic, so in all the NGSS has about 103 Earth Space Sciences standards.  We might estimate that there are slightly more than 400 science standards in the NGSS.

One can be fooled by the way content is presented on the Web.  The organizers of the NGSS did a very good job of creating a Website that can be navigated fairly easily, and also provide supporting materials.

But, in my own analysis of the standard statements, the scope and sequence of the Earth Space Science section is not new, nor does it appear to based on any structural components that would lead us to think that this concept should be introduced at the elementary level, and this concept at the middle level.

I am also concerned that there are no graphics showing how ideas relate to each other.  Science educators, of all people, should have included graphic organizers and used them to get out of their linear mode of thinking.  There are certainly many examples, and conceptual approaches to do this.  The AAAS Atlas of Literacy would be good bet.

What Can We Expect?

There is no doubt that Achieve, Inc., and its long list of partners and financial supports will charge ahead and ready the draft documents for final presentation and publication next year (at least that’s their plan).  Their long term goal is to have all of the states adopt the NGSS.  There are 26 states that are ‘lead’ partners in this effort, and although they did not have to commit to the standards, there will be great pressure for these states to do.

However there is a serious push-back occurring in the States right now over the Common Core Standards.  School districts across the country are signing petitions refusing to participate in high-stakes tests, which of course are part of standards-based reform effort.

In previous blog posts I have argued using research in the field of science education that science standards present barriers to learning.  According to research published by  Dr. Carolyn S. Wallace,  a professor at the Center for Science Education, Indiana State University, science standards are barriers to teaching and learning in science. In her research, Wallace uncovers evidence that the use of standards by practicing science teachers pose barriers to meaningful teaching and learning.  She cites two aspects of authoritarian standards that cause this barrier:

1. The tightly specified nature of successful learning performances precludes classroom teachers from modifying the standards to fits the needs of their students.

2. The standards are removed from the thinking and reasoning processes needed to achieve them.

And then she adds that these two barriers are reinforced by the use of high-stakes testing in the present accountability model of education.  Dr. Wallace’s suggestions are significant with the release of the public draft of the NGSS, and the fact that most likely the 26 states that working as partners with Achieve will adopt the NGSS as their state standards.  If most of the states did this, as was done with the Common Core State Standards in math and English/language arts, we move the country closer to a national curriculum.  But what is worse yet, there are national assessments coming in math and English/language arts, and science.  These will be used to hold all teachers hostage to a set of standards developed by very few practicing teachers.

I agree with Chemtchr’s guest post over at Anthony Cody’s blog, Living in Dialog.  Chemtchr, a high school science teacher and she explains that the NGSS is using reverse engineering to produce a product that will be used for assessment purposes, with very little teacher education.

Then she says this, and we need to take heed to her insights:

I’m not willing to pretend this is a genteel dispute among contrary theorists of education progress. The “partners” in the Common Core development include many of our largest and most powerful corporations, several with long histories of fierce monopolistic battles. Pearson Education is one partner, and the Gates Foundation is functioning as a tax-exempt advocacy arm for Microsoft itself.

Through ignorance, arrogance, or the narrowness of their self-interest, politically connected corporatists are about to perpetrate a massive for-profit take-over of science education that will do long-term damage to the very foundation of our scientific and technical infrastructure, while they devour our local and state education tax money.

If you advocate or support the development of a vibrant information technology industry, and a scientifically capable people who can actually contribute to the health and welfare of society as a whole, join us educators in our struggle to stop this huge, backwards-engineered insider deal.

What is your take on the Next Generation Science Standards?  Are they going to impact science teaching so that we’ll be more competitive, and students achievement scores will soar?

This was written by Anthony Cody, who spent 24 years working in Oakland schools, 18 of them as a science teacher at a high needs middle school. He is National Board certified, and now leads workshops with teachers focused on Project Based Learning. With education at a crossroads, he invites you to join him in a dialogue on education reform and teaching for change and deep learning. For additional information on Cody’s work, visit his Web site, Teachers Lead. Or follow him on Twitter.

This post was initially published here.

By Anthony Cody

One of the oldest problems with the left or progressive movement is our tendency to drag ourselves down through internal struggle over who has the most correct political line. We are seeing some of this dynamic emerge in the movement against high stakes testing. Perhaps it is a coming of age – a sign of our success – that we have a strong enough movement that people are taking these issues seriously. But I am afraid we are going to squander our precious momentum by turning our anger on one another, when there are very clear assaults taking place on teachers and students across the country.

Our organizations are precious things. A group like Save Our Schools March is nothing more than a collection of volunteers working their hearts out to make a difference. They don’t always make the perfect tactical choices, but their intention is to build our ability to unite and resist the testing machine. And we all benefit when groups such as these create focal points for discussion or action.

I was one of the organizers of last year’s Save Our Schools march in Washington, DC. Most people now seem to view that as a success. Along the way, there were bumps in the road, similar to what we are seeing this year as the Save Our Schools convention approaches. We made some compromises not everyone was happy with. We focused our guiding principles on solid issues we felt we could unite people around – and we built a coalition. The direct involvement of the NEA and AFT in particular was critical in getting the turnout that we did. They did NOT mobilize their membership by the thousands, but their endorsement allowed teachers from around the country to get the support of their local union chapter to send them, and also allowed us to use union communications channels to publicize the events. Though the majority of our funding came from individual donors, support the unions also gave us an important financial boost.

This was a coalition we needed to pull off an event of this magnitude. Without a broad coalition, our march would have been much smaller. We did not get huge media coverage – but we got some, especially as a result of Matt Damon’s appearance. His speech buoyed teacher spirits across the country, and has been viewed tens of thousands of times on Youtube. We had a wide range of speakers – teachers from Wisconsin, activists from across the country, and well-known leaders like Diane Ravitch, Linda Darling-Hammond, Angela Valenzuela and Pedro Noguera.

But in the year prior to the rally, we were warned that certain people who were being invited to speak were “craven apologists for the Obama/Duncan regime.” After the NEA endorsed Obama for re-election a month or two before the march, some wanted us to spurn their support and return the funds they had contributed.

In recent days the discussion over the Common Core has taken on a similar tone, with some people demanding that Save Our Schools take an immediate stand against them. I am no longer part of the leadership of SOS, but I have some thoughts to share.

I personally have major concerns about the many negative impacts that the Common Core and its associated tests are likely to have. But my views are not the same as all of those we can count as allies in our efforts to defend schools and defeat the testing machine. We need to look at who we want to work with, and what we can ALL unite around to act.

So where is our movement? What are we able to unite around?
Take a look at three statements that have gathered regional and national support in recent months. These are a good reflection of where our movement is – they represent what people are actually uniting around.

The New York Principal’s Open Letter, which has been signed by 1,451 principals, almost a third of all in the state. This letter focused on concerns over the use of test scores for teacher evaluations, the narrowing of the curriculum that results from too much emphasis on test scores, and the diversion of funds into testing.

In Texas, more than 400 school boards have adopted a resolution against high stakes testing, which calls upon the state to:

…reexamine the public school accountability system in Texas and to develop a system that encompasses multiple assessments, reflects greater validity, uses more cost efficient sampling techniques and other external evaluation arrangements, and more accurately reflects what students know, appreciate and can do in terms of the rigorous standards essential to their success, enhances the role of teachers as designers, guides to instruction and leaders, and nurtures the sense of inquiry and love of learning in all students.

Just last month, a coalition launched a National Resolution on High Stakes Testing. So far 249 organizations have signed on, and more than 6500 individuals.
Here are the key resolutions:

RESOLVED, that [your organization name] calls on the governor, state legislature and state education boards and administrators to reexamine public school accountability systems in this state, and to develop a system based on multiple forms of assessment which does not require extensive standardized testing, more accurately reflects the broad range of student learning, and is used to support students and improve schools; and

RESOLVED, that [your organization name] calls on the U.S. Congress and Administration to overhaul the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, currently known as the “No Child Left Behind Act,” reduce the testing mandates, promote multiple forms of evidence of student learning and school quality in accountability, and not mandate any fixed role for the use of student test scores in evaluating educators.

These three statements are a strong reflection of where our movement is at this time. Note that there is no mention of the Common Core anywhere in these statements.As I said, I am personally very concerned that the Common Core will expand the number of tests, their frequency, and the negative impact of NCLB-type accountability systems. I am doing my best, through my blog, and with interviews and guest posts by various education leaders, to promote discussion and understanding of this. If some group or individual wants to put together a petition that opposes the expansion of testing associated with the Common Core I would be happy to sign it. I have not seen such a petition – and that should tell us something. We do not have a broad understanding of the Common Core among educators, much less the public at large. Making opposition to the Common Core a core demand is going to limit the ability of any coalition to gain participation by many groups and individuals who do not share this view.

This comes down, in large part, to how we view Save Our Schools as a group. Is it a broad coalition that brings together as wide an array of people and organizations as possible to fight high stakes testing? Or is it a sharply focused vanguard group that advocates for clearly defined positions on every issue before us? We were able to bring more than 5000 people together in Washington, DC, last summer by being a broad coalition. I think that sort of coalition is what makes such grassroots actions successful.

The Save Our Schools convention in Washington, DC, will take place this August 3rd to 5th, and is our chance to discuss these issues, as Deborah Meier explains here. I hope we come not focused on the few things where we might not agree completely, but with a goal of building the common ground on which we can make our stand. That is what the principals did in New York, and the school boards did in Texas, and many of us have joined to do in supporting the National Resolution. That is how movements are built. Focusing on where we disagree, and making these disagreements into tests of purity – that is how movements are wrecked.

What do think? Is it time for SOS March to take a sharp stand on the Common Core? Or is it more important to build the broadest anti-testing coalition possible?