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2NC/1NR — AT: CC Bad for Gender and Race

Standards implemented through Common Core provide a unique way to ensure quality education is available to lower income communities


Berry 14— Dr. Susan Berry ("Bill Gates: Common Core Attempt to Close Gap Between 'Low-Income' and Wealthy Students," Breitbart, Available Online at http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2014/06/08/gates-common-core-attempt-to-solve-problem-that-low-income-kids-get-less-good-education-than-suburban-kids/, Accessed 7-21-2015)

In an interview with the Washington Post that summarizes how Bill Gates pulled off the very “swift Common Core revolution,” the Microsoft founder stated, “The country as a whole has a huge problem that low-income kids get less good education than suburban kids get… and that is a huge challenge.” Gates’s statement underscores further the notion that the Common Core standards initiative is a social engineering project that places education standards ahead of parental and family influences as the major cause of poor student performance in low-income and minority communities. Regardless of the push by various Gates-funded organizations to boast the Common Core standards’ “rigor,” the real motivation to correct what is viewed as societal injustices was underscored even by U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan who said last November that it was “fascinating” that some of the opposition to the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) is coming from “white suburban moms who – all of a sudden – their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were, and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought they were.” According to the Post, Gates is “irritated” by the resistance to the standards from grassroots organizations who want to bar the federal government from overreaching into local education decisions. “These are not political things,” he said. “These are where people are trying to apply expertise to say, ‘Is this a way of making education better?'” “At the end of the day, I don’t think wanting education to be better is a right-wing or left-wing thing,” Gates said. “We fund people to look into things. We don’t fund people to say, ‘Okay, we’ll pay you this if you say you like the Common Core.'” Nevertheless, the federal government did offer funding through competitive grants to the states in President Obama’s Race to the Top (RttT) stimulus program in 2009, as well as waivers from No Child Left Behind restrictions if states adopted “college and career ready” standards. In addition, Common Core proponents have not provided any solid research that backs up their claims that the standards are indeed “rigorous” or have been “internationally benchmarked.” Ze’ev Wurman, visiting scholar at the Hoover Institution and author of the Pioneer Institute report, “Common Core’s Validation: A Weak Foundation for a Crooked House,” demonstrated the shoddy research that was performed by Common Core Validation Committee members who signed off on the standards. In the pro-Common Core studies Wurman examined, he found the research had been poorly executed and failed to provide evidence that the standards are internationally competitive and reflective of college-readiness. Similarly, the 2014 Brown Center report by the Brookings Institution found that the Common Core standards will have “little to no impact on student achievement.” Despite the lack of validity of the Common Core standards, the Post reports that after Gene Wilhoit, director of the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) and a former Kentucky education commissioner, and Common Core “architect” David Coleman met with Gates about funding the development of the standards, Gates’s foundation gave over $5 million to the University of North Carolina-affiliated Hunt Institute, led by former Gov. Jim Hunt (D). The Hunt Institute then coordinated more than a dozen organizations, including the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, National Council of La Raza, Achieve, Inc., the two national teachers’ unions, and the two groups that are the copyright owners of the Common Core standards – CCSSO and the National Governors Association (NGA). Talking points about the standards were then developed by GMMB, a communications firm owned by Jim Margolis, a top Democrat strategist and veteran of both of Obama’s presidential campaigns. In Kentucky, where Common Core caught fire first, the state’s Chamber of Commerce provided the link to a Louisville stockbroker who organized a coalition of 75 company executives across the state who lent their names to ads in business materials that supported the nationalized standards. Within months, states were signing on to the Common Core. “You had dozens of states adopting before the standards even existed, with little or no discussion, coverage or controversy,” said Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute, which received $4 million from the Gates Foundation since 2007 to study education policy, including the Common Core. “People weren’t paying attention. We were in the middle of an economic meltdown and the healthcare fight, and states saw a chance to have a crack at a couple of million bucks if they made some promises.” Sarah Reckhow, a philanthropy and education policy expert at Michigan State University, told the Post that the Gates Foundation’s decision to pay both for the standards themselves and their promotion was atypical. “Usually, there’s a pilot test – something is tried on a small scale, outside researchers see if it works, and then it’s promoted on a broader scale,” Reckhow said. “That didn’t happen with the Common Core. Instead, they aligned the research with the advocacy… At the end of the day, it’s going to be the states and local districts that pay for this.” According to the Post, however, Gates “sees himself as a technocrat trying to foster solutions to a profound social problem – gaping inequalities in U.S. public education – by investing in promising new ideas.” “I believe in the Common Core because of its substance and what it will do to improve education,” he said, though his children attend private schools that have not adopted the Common Core standards. “And that’s the only reason I believe in the Common Core.” “This is about giving money away,” he said of his support for the standards. “This is philanthropy. This is trying to make sure students have the kind of opportunity I had… and it’s almost outrageous to say otherwise, in my view.”

Common Core Standards are Comparatively Better for Minorities—This Directly Increases the Amount of Minority Women Who Pursue Careers in the STEM Sector


Toch 15— Thomas Toch is the author of In the Name of Excellence (Oxford University Press, USA, 1991). He is also the director of the Washington office of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. (“Common Core and Disadvantaged Students” Education Week, June 23rd, Available online at http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2013/10/23/09toch_ep.h33.html, Accessed 7/8/15)

It's no secret that there has been plenty of heated debate about the Common Core State Standards. Supporters say we need the standards to strengthen our workforce. Opponents contend that control over educational expectations should rest with local school boards and teachers, causing some lawmakers to back away from the standards. In May, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence signed legislation delaying common-core implementation in his state; funding for the standards has stalled in Michigan; and bills scrapping the common core are pending in Pennsylvania and elsewhere. But for all the talk about economic competitiveness, fidelity to federalism, and empowering educators, there has been hardly any discussion of the importance of the standards to the least-served students in public education, the lower-income, disproportionately African-American and Latino students who before too long are likely to make up the majority of the public school population. For those students, the new national standards represent a path to the demanding subjects that many local educators have long doubted they could or should study. The achievement gap in public education, unfortunately, is in no small part an expectations gap. —Chris Whetzel The common core is composed of things every student should experience. Drafted by two Rhodes scholars and a range of subject experts and teachers under the auspices of the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, the measures cover both high-quality literature (with recommended readings like The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and "A Raisin in the Sun") to absorbing nonfiction on topics ranging from planets to presidents, Puritans, painting, and prairies, and baseball players—a breadth of content that builds what the scholar E.D. Hirsch calls "cultural literacy," the background knowledge that allows students to comprehend more of what they read. With research revealing a troubling decline in the reading levels of high school texts, the common core proposes less Twilight and A Boy Called It and more of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Letter From Birmingham Jail" and Neil deGrasse Tyson's Gravity in Reverse: The Tale of Albert Einstein's Greatest Blunder. In writing, the common core downplays the simplistic sharing of feelings that's pervasive in public education classrooms today in favor of requiring students to explain things coherently and argue persuasively. And the new standards seek to strip redundancy out of the K-12 math sequence so students get further faster. Traditionally, few disadvantaged students have been taught anything resembling the common core in public education. Since the start of the expansion of public education beyond an ad hoc local activity a century ago (in 1900, only about 6 percent of students received high school diplomas), impoverished and minority students routinely have been routed into undemanding basic-literacy and vocational courses, where they've been taught mostly to use their hands rather than their heads. The historian Richard Hofstadter captured that reality in his 1963 Pulitzer Prize-winning book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, where he wrote that "professional education" had come to believe deeply that "in a system of mass education, an academically serious training is an impossibility for more than a modest fraction of the student population." A spate of national school reform reports of the 1980s rejected that strongly held orthodoxy in public education, and many states embraced the reformers' call for an expanded core curriculum known as the "new basics"—only to have local school systems channel many disadvantaged students and students of color into watered-down courses where they earned English credits for "typing," science credits for "auto body repair," and math credits for "commercial food preparation." I'll never forget a high school teacher in Florida telling me at the time how wrong-headed the state's new graduation requirements were. "What we really need for many kids," he said, "are courses in how to plant trees and such." Over and over, I heard educators define their expectations in terms of students' race and class. "Commentators' claims that we need to "go back to the days when we trusted teachers" to ensure their students are achieving high standards ring hollow." More recently, the federal No Child Left Behind Act demanded that states create "world class" standards, test students' mastery, and hold educators accountable for the results—an attempt to pressure educators to help underserved groups of students. But the well-intentioned law's hair-trigger penalties prompted many states to lower their expectations of students rather than have large swaths of their schools declared failures. The same pressure is mounting against the common core in the wake of discouraging (but hardly surprising) results on new tests based on the standards. The common-core expectations are "way too high," the historian and reform critic Diane Ravitch told The New York Times recently after New York education officials announced that more than two-thirds of the state's students had flunked common-core-linked tests. "Maybe [many students] don't need to go to college," she added. But who decides which students are tracked toward college, and at what point are those decisions made? Third grade? Ninth grade? Supporting lower standards today amounts to capitulating to the race- and class-based stereotypes of the past, half a century after the passage of federal civil rights laws and just as the nation is transitioning to a minority-majority school population. Given public education's history, commentators' claims that we need to "go back to the days when we trusted teachers" to ensure their students are achieving high standards ring hollow. They're a ticket back to second-class educational status for many students. Yet it's a common refrain among libertarians and public education defenders alike, who want to put power over standards back in the hands of local educators and school boards. Nor should we lose sight of students' views about standards. Majorities of them say that their courses aren't challenging enough. They want more rigor, not less. And it's also true that nearly every country in the world with a high-performing education system has common standards, even as they give educators lots of instructional latitude in meeting them (exactly the sort of "local control" we should embrace in this country). Importantly, most of the international high-fliers are built on the conviction that hard work is more important to student success than innate ability, that there should be high common standards because they're within most students' grasp and thus all students should have access to them. "In top-performing countries, rigor is synonymous with educational equity," writes Amanda Ripley in her new book The Smartest Kids in the World. That's not a widely shared view in American education. As a result, we're not going to get the nation's disadvantaged students where they need to be without explicit expectations. If we want students to perform at high levels, we have to set the bar higher, and that's what the common core does in most places. At this point, we need to focus on the hard work of implementing the new standards, not on whether we should have them.

Consistent Education Standards Present an Equal Opportunity for all Minorities—This boosts the amount of Minority Women Who Enter the STEM Field


Kenny 14— Jack Kenny is a writer for The New American (“Privileged "White Male" Teacher: Common Core Will Help Kids Read” The New American, May 24th, Available online at http://www.thenewamerican.com/culture/education/item/18335-privileged-white-male-teacher-common-core-will-help-kids-read, Accessed7/8/15)

A Manchester, New Hampshire, history teacher said earlier this week he helped write the standards for Common Core so minority students could have the same opportunity to learn to read as he had as a privileged "white male." Dr. David Pook, who chairs the history department at Derryfield School, a prestigious private academy in Manchester, offered that observation on May 19 during a debate on Common Core at Saint Anselm College in neighboring Goffstown. (See the end of this article for a video of his comment.) "The reason why I helped write the standards and the reason why I am here today is that as a white male in society, I've been given a lot of privilege that I didn't earn," declared Pook, as members of the audience groaned and booed. "I think it's really important that all kids have an equal opportunity to learn how to read." Pook said his thinking has been influenced by visits to "places like Roberto Clemente High School on the west side of Chicago." He added, "I think it's really important those kids learn how to read just as well as I had the opportunity to read. And in creating an equitable educational opportunity for all kids, I think this is actually the greatest civics lesson we could teach our kids." Though New Hampshire is one of the states that signed on to Common Core, controversy over the standards and testing requirements continues in the Granite State, as in others among the 45 states that have enlisted in the program and the five that have remained outside its orbit. Advocates argue passionately that the Common Core standards will remove barriers to inequality in education and better prepare all American students to compete in the global marketplace. Opponents contend that it will destroy local control over schools and that the "cradle to career or college" program will put content of school curricula in the hands of distant corporate and academic elites. "The Common Core State Standards hold promise for low-income students, students of color, English language learners, and students with disabilities, who traditionally perform significantly worse than their peers," claims the Center for American Progress, a non-profit organization dedicated to "progressive ideas and actions." Common Core "helps address inequity in education by ensuring all students are taught to the same high standards and held to the same rigorous expectations," the Center says. "This helps make sure that ZIP codes do not determine education quality." While no one disputes the goal of raising the academic performance of underachieving students, what has been debated since the Common Core program was launched in 2009 is whether Common Core standards make better learners of kids who aren't learning now. When President George W. Bush was promoting the No Child Left Behind Act, he often condemned "the soft bigotry of low expectations" for minority and disadvantaged students. With Common Core, as with No Child Left Behind, the expectation is that more demanding standards, frequent testing, and holding teachers and schools responsible for results will raise the performance levels. Education historian Diane Ravitch calls that wishful thinking dressed up in academic jargon. "We have a national policy that is a theory based on an assumption grounded in hope," Ravitch said in an address to the Modern Language Association. Testing, she argued, is a much over-rated tool for either motivating students or evaluating teacher performance. Our students are the most over-tested in the world. No other nation — at least no high-performing nation — judges the quality of teachers by the test scores of their students. Most researchers agree that this methodology is fundamentally flawed, that it is inaccurate, unreliable, and unstable, that the highest ratings will go to teachers with the most affluent students and the lowest ratings will go to teachers of English learners, teachers of students with disabilities, and teachers in high-poverty schools. To expect tougher standards and a renewed emphasis on standardized testing to reduce poverty and inequality is to expect what never was and never will be. Aside from whether the standards will produce better math or reading skills, there is concern among educators over what children ought to be reading in school. Writing in the New York Times in 2012, Newark, New Jersey, school teacher Sara Mosle noted that "the Common Core dictates that by fourth grade, public school students devote half of their reading time in class to historical documents, scientific tracts, maps and other 'informational texts' like recipes and train schedules. Per the guidelines, 70 percent of the 12th grade curriculum will consist of nonfiction titles. Alarmed English teachers worry we're about to toss Shakespeare so students can study, in the words of one former educator, 'memos, technical manuals and menus.'" But Mosle, who teaches writing to middle school students, also noted there are those in the education establishment who are quick to point out that neither a lasting appreciation of literature nor a student's creative writing skills is likely to be a highly prized attribute of a future employee. "It is rare in a working environment," said College Board President David Coleman, "that someone says, 'Johnson, I need a market analysis by Friday but before that I need a compelling account of your childhood.'" Common Core came about after years of widespread dissatisfaction with the standards and testing regimen of the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind Act. While federal law prevents the U.S. Department of Education from creating a national curriculum, states are urged to adopt as their own the standards developed by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers for the purpose of establishing consistent education standards throughout the nation. Since Common Core was unveiled in 2009, critics have faulted it for the way it was developed — in private sessions without public input — and for the lack of any "field testing" on a small scale before it was launched as a national program. Though state participation has been called voluntary, joining the program makes states eligible to receive federal grants through the Obama administration's Race to the Top program and waivers from the requirements of No Child Left Behind. Common Core has been backed by grants from a number of private foundations, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has put a reported $75 million behind the effort. But Ravitch argues that too little attention has been paid to the costs the program imposes on states and school districts. All Common Core testing will be done online. This is a bonanza for the tech industry and other vendors. Every school district must buy new computers, new teaching materials, and new bandwidth for the testing. At a time when school budgets have been cut in most states and many thousands of teachers have been laid off, school districts across the nation will spend billions to pay for Common Core testing. Los Angeles alone committed to spend $1 billion on iPads for the tests; the money is being taken from a bond issue approved by voters for construction and repair of school facilities. Meanwhile, the district has cut teachers of the arts, class size has increased, and necessary repairs are deferred because the money will be spent on iPads. The spending spree — for textbooks and tests as well as computers and iPads — is an acknowledged goal of the Department of Education in promoting Common Core. In a 2011 article in the Harvard Business Review, Joanne Weiss, chief of staff to Education Secretary Arne Duncan, wrote: The development of common standards and shared assessments radically alters the market for innovation in curriculum development, professional development, and formative assessments. Previously, these markets operated on a state-by-state basis, and often on a district-by-district basis. But the adoption of common standards and shared assessments means that education entrepreneurs will enjoy national markets where the best products can be taken to scale. On a Fox News panel on May 5, Juan Williams defended the program. "This was something the governors initially did and most Republican governors were on board at that time," Williams said. "The military is on board, the Chamber of Commerce is on board. Even Condoleezza Rice and the Council on Foreign Affairs — on board." The Council on Foreign Relations (where Rice, the former secretary of state, and Joel I. Klein are co-chairmen of the Task Force on Education Reform) is an organization advocating a one-world government. In the Fox News May 5 program, co-panelist George Will argued that [Common Core is a] thin end of an enormous wedge of federal power that will be wielded for the constant progressive purpose of concentrating power in Washington so that it can impose continental solutions to problems nationwide. Will warned that the danger in the following argument is in the verb "align": They're going to align the SAT [Student Achievement Testing] and ACT [American College Testing] tests with the curriculum. They're going to align the textbooks with the tests and sooner or later, you inevitably have a national curriculum that disregards the creativity of federalism. Will added that instead of states developing different and creative educational approaches, there will be "one creative constant permanent Washington bureaucracy overlooking our education." Though they are called State Standards, the label is misleading, since it suggests each state independently develops its own standards. Yet the whole purpose of Common Core is to establish a uniformity of standards, as indicated by the following statement from the Common Core State Standards website: For years, the academic progress of our nation's students has been stagnant, and we have lost ground to our international peers. Particularly in subjects such as math, college remediation rates have been high. One root cause has been an uneven patchwork of academic standards that vary from state to state and do not agree on what students should know and be able to do at each grade level. [Emphasis added.] In a video cartoon on the site ("Learn About the Common Core in 3 Minutes"), the narrator explains that with Common Core, "The standards are consistent from school to school and they match up with international standards, too." In other words, the states may develop their own standards, as long as they are the same. While they may sound alarmist to some, warnings about a national curriculum may be understating the case if the goal is to bring the instructional guidelines into conformity with "international standards." Addressing the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 2010, Education Secretary Arne Duncan spoke of education as "the key to eliminating gender inequities, to reducing poverty, to creating a sustainable planet, and to fostering peace," adding: "Today, education is a global public good unconstrained by national boundaries.... It is no surprise that economic interdependence brings new global challenges and educational demands." While today's school systems were unknown and perhaps unimagined at the time the nation's Constitution was drafted, it is nonetheless significant that the Constitution makes no mention of education and delegates no power to the federal government regarding it. The Constitution leaves most matters to, in the words of the Tenth Amendment, "the States respectively, or to the people." In that way, as Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis observed a century and a half later, "a state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country." Common Core is the latest in a series of experiments in education (Goals 2000, No Child Left Behind) that pose a risk to the nation's students, teachers, and schools.


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