Common Core

For a wonderfully satirical take on the 21st century skills agenda, watch this video.

The make-it-yourself animated film short features a teacher decked out in a uniform and corporate badge and a corporate education guy (complete with a headset) at Compucon College Preparatory Academy.

It promises to entertain if you have ever wondered …

1. “If all these super rich technology corporations are just using their donations to push policies that will create more demand for technology in the classroom.”
2. Why teachers aren’t more involved in education decisions.
3. About “claims of evidence-based research.”
4. And finally, “[w]hat is this 21st century learning” anyway?

The video’s answers make for a laugh but are jarringly close to reality as policymakers push for schools to be more like corporations and drive education reform with iPad purchases. I couldn’t help but cringe as corporate education guy said, “decisions about education are best made by politicians and those with the money to influence them.”

Stephanie Porowski

P21 has new offices and a new executive director.  We’ve already expressed our concerns about P21 now ensconcing themselves within CCSSO’s offices.  The move appears as though it could renew (and potentially lend new institutional power?) an organization that, during previous director Ken Kay’s leadership, was running aground.  And now it has been announced that former CCSSOer Timothy Magner will be taking the helm soon.  Magner was director of educational technology in Margaret Spellings’ Dept. of Education.

As P21 followers know, the organization recently adopted a new motto that attempts to make P21 look as though its program emphasizes skills and core content equally.  P21 claims to want to “fuse” the three Rs (reading, writing, and arithmetic) and the four Cs (critical thinking and problem solving, communication, collaboration, and creativity and innovation).  P21′s website and press materials, including their new legislative guide, mention the three Rs and four Cs time and again.  But only the motto has changed.  P21′s actual program, including even their subject-based “21st century skills maps,” continues to promote an approach to teaching core content that is arbitrary and incoherent.

And Magner himself appears to be jettisoning any illusion that P21 is concerned with content.  The press release announcing Magner’s selection explains (and Catherine Gewertz at Education Week noticed this, too), that a “key focus” of Magner’s leadership will be on getting just the four Cs incorporated in ESEA.  Where did the three Rs go?  We’ve requested a meeting to ask.

Lynne Munson

We’re disappointed that the Partnership for 21st Century Skills decided to make their National Summit on 21st Century Readiness invitation-only this year.  Last year it was open to whomever wanted to pay the attendance fee.  Our entire staff attended and paid close attention.  In fact, we produced a dozen blogs documenting the one-day event.  We noticed, for example, that despite P21′s claim to promote content equally with skills these subjects were never mentioned by a single event speaker:

• History
• Literature
• Art
• Geography
• Foreign Language

Meanwhile, these subjects were mentioned only once:

• Social Studies
• English
• Science
• Math

No subject was mentioned more than once.

You can find all our blogs from last year’s summit here:

• We’re Out!
• P21 Panel #1
• West Virginia: It’s Not Easy Moving Away from Content
• Wagner’s Right!  Sort of
• West Virginia Education:  It’s the Marketing
• The Content Count
• P21 Panel #2
• Roberto?
• Roberto’s Back …
• Agreeing with Linda Darling-Hammond
• Updating the Count
• My Neighbor

We doubt much has changed.

Lynne Munson

“P-21’s disappearance would be a gain for America. The right kind of makeover could be a gain, too. But additional traction for the organization’s current agenda would be bad for the country, bad for the new “Common Core” standards and the assessments being developed around them, and possibly bad for CCSSO as well,” opines Checker Finn in the latest Education Gadfly.

He’s worried that the P21 / CCSSO partnership will increase the influence of the paid shills at P21. And his Gadfly op/ed is especially valuable for teasing out some of the most troubling implications of the merger. Will the strategic partnership affect the common standards as they’re adopted in districts around the country? Will P21 influence development of the common assessments being designed to measure student mastery of the standards? Will we begin to see “inter-personal, behavioral, attitudinal, and “life” and “innovation” skills” appear in CCSSO’s literature? And should we anticipate even more 21^st century nonsense from the president and his education chief?

It’s still too early to say. But CCSSO is, as Checker points out, a “pillar of the K-12 [education policy] establishment.” P21’s the outfit that pushes stuff like this. And, sure, model education commissioners like David Steiner and Deborah Gist wouldn’t sit around and talk about “global awareness” and “reacting positively to praise” with tech industry salesmen. Plenty of other members of CCSSO would. We’ve seen them do it. So forgive us for being skeptical of silver linings.

James Elias

Arne Duncan used an address to state policymakers this week to shill for 21st century skills.

He promised that new assessments would measure how students “analyze and solve complex problems, communicate clearly, synthesize information, apply knowledge, and generalize learning to other settings.” And Duncan’s speech blurred the line between the common state standards initiative and the 21st century skills agenda: “[M]any so-called experts questioned whether states could work together to set rigorous, globally competitive standards or collaborate to develop assessments of 21st century skills. But resolute governors, state education chiefs, and committed stakeholders across the country have proved the skeptics dead-wrong. Your collective courage today will transform educational opportunity for decades to come.”

The Secretary didn’t elaborate on what assessments of 21st century skills might look like, so allow us to offer you a preview: “For example, one possible assessment of 21st century skills would focus more on a student’s operational skills, such as her expertise in using multiple sources appropriately and efficiently, rather than on whether or not a correct response was submitted.” (Emphasis added; see full document here.)

Answering a question correctly: not a 21st century skill.

James Elias

This is strange. P21 is being subsumed into CCSSO. There’s nothing to be read about this on either CCSSO’s or P21′s websites. But according to Fritzwire the two organizations have formed a “strategic management relationship” that will commence December 1. The relationship sounds pretty one-way, though, with CCSSO providing “financial and resources management services as well as hous[ing] P21 employees” and CCSSO getting nothing in return. This all comes at a time when P21 continues to look for an executive director (Ken Kay will depart sometime this fall). It is difficult to believe, in light of the largess represented on P21′s star-studded board of tech foundations, that they have fallen on hard times. But stranger things have happened.

Lynne Munson