Common Core in Tennessee – Memphis Flyer

It should be obvious to our legislative minority that when Eagle Forum operatives are suddenly their new best friends, something is rotten in the state of Tennessee. I’m talking about Ron Ramsey and his recent successful campaign using Democrats to help defeat Common Core.

I know they’re outnumbered, but Tennessee Democrats are crazy to make common cause with conservatives on this issue, and the fact that they don’t understand this is troublesome.

Are Democrats so desperate for a legislative rapprochement that they’ll trust partisans who claim that commie pinko liberals are trying to destroy America, one capitalist cornerstone at a time? Or are liberals simply too busy “protecting” the public teaching profession to see that they are instead, helping to destroy it? Anyone who pays the slightest attention knows that America’s public schools are not getting the job done and major reform is necessary. Standards are lax in most areas of the country and a significant number of schools are either diploma mills or drop-out factories.

My experience in Memphis City Schools classrooms in the late 1990s taught me that there is virtually no rigor in many public schools that serve the disadvantaged. I taught history to 8th and 12th graders, and there were far too many students who could not pick out key facts in a textbook passage. How did they get that far without being able to read and interpret language at grade level? Colleges of Education and the teaching lobby have much for which they should apologize, as do parents who can’t or won’t see that few things in life worth having are easy or fun.

The conservative critique is that Common Core is “federal intrusion” into state matters and that local control is optimal. But what this is really about is best seen through Ramsey’s quote that our legislature needs to replace Common Core with “Tennessee standards based on Tennessee values.”

That, my fellow liberals, is code for teaching creationism as science and stripping history texts of any facts that cast America in a less than flattering light. All this in the service of turning our public schools into religious ones, brick by ideological brick — schools that will then serve Neocon Kool-Aid with lunch.

After that victory, vouchers for Christian schools (their real goal) may not even be necessary if they can use the concept of “Tennessee values” to convert public schools into shadow seminaries.

On the other hand, liberals complain that Common Core’s emphasis on testing of facts places too great a burden on educators’ energies and prevents them from stimulating creativity. This, too is nonsense. “Teaching to the test” is a tired shibboleth that ignores the fact that effectiveness of curriculum and instruction can only be measured if there is a testing mechanism.

Part of the testing criticism is the baloney about standardized tests not measuring everything a kid knows. Of course, they don’t. What tests do? When you took the driving test in your teens, were you asked absolutely everything you would ever need to know about operating a car? If you believe that testing gets in the way of learning, perhaps you’d like to dispense with those tedious licensing exams for attorneys and CPAs, not to mention medical school residents. I mean, how much creativity can there be in the process of learning human anatomy, although I’m guessing that your doctor knowing the difference between the sternum and the sacrum is pretty important.

Memorization and tests are not “creative,” but they are the foundation for the much-lauded idea of “higher order thinking skills.” Which, in any rational universe, must be preceded by lower order thinking skills, aka facts. The work world, for which we claim to be preparing our children, will not care if they’re having fun at their jobs. Employers will impose their own “tests” on employees’ knowledge, and there will be no one to intervene and save the workers from failure.

Democrats need to recognize that high standards will produce the ability to read, reflect, and write about “boring facts” and that fun should be a by-product of education, not its goal. Such rigor will then help to inoculate public education against conservative claims that the reason we have so much unemployment is that there is a skills gap. Which is just code for wanting to outsource or mechanize what they can and to pay lousy wages for what they can’t.

Wake up, Democrats, and smell the duplicity. Tennessee’s future depends on you.

It is hard to tell exactly how many members of the general public are worked up about the issue of Common Core educational standards, but there are clearly enough, on both sides of the political spectrum, to bedevil the Tennessee General Assembly as it prepares to wade into the issue.

Jackson Baker

Gresham at Dutch Treat

The most recent legislative pillar to find that out was District 10 state Senator Dolores Gresham, the Somerville Republican who heads the Senate Education Committee and, as such, has been entrusted with the introduction of bills supportive of Common Core, the set of educational standards that are due to become effective in 45 of the 50 states this year.

Tennessee is one of the 45 states, and Governor Bill Haslam and state Education Commissioner Kevin Huffman remain supporters of Common Core, but they and Gresham are now grappling with increasingly vehement resistance to Common Core from the political right and left.

Gresham found this out again Saturday, when she addressed a full house at Pancho’s on White Station for a meeting of the monthly Dutch Treat Luncheon. Ordinarily, the Dutch Treat group trends to a relative handful of Tea Party conservatives. The Tea Party and other conservative elements were well represented Saturday, but so were critics from left of center, and interruptions were frequent and sustained as Gresham attempted to present her legislative goals.

Essentially, she tried to assure the overflow group that the series of bills she has introduced, among other things, would attempt to minimize the imposition of national controls on Tennessee’s version of Common Core, block what she called “data mining” (i.e., sharing the state’s statistical results with the federal government), impose local controls on textbook content, and exempt science and social studies from the state’s version of Common Core.

That did not ally the critics, either of left or right. The former object chiefly to the reliance of Common Core on teaching-to-the-test techniques, especially in language and math, which they believe restrict educational breadth in favor of artificial results and inflict needless stress on both students and teachers. The latter object to the very idea of standards, which they fear smack of Big Brotherism and creeping statism.

As Gresham and others have explained, Common Core is an outgrowth of initiatives begun in 2009 under state, not federal auspices, specifically at the behest of the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and Council of Chief State School Officers. The Common Core standards have evolved with input from the participating states but also from major nonprofit groups such as the Gates Foundation and with support from the current secretary of education, Arne Duncan.

Tennessee’s involvement is tightly linked with its success in and subsequent funding from the Race to the Top educational-reform competition developed by Duncan. The state’s Race to the Top efforts began under former Governor Phil Bredesen and continue under Haslam.

In any case, there are now serious efforts in the legislature to delay implementation of Common Core in Tennessee, and, given the mounting turmoil across the political spectrum, the task of passing enabling legislation — Gresham’s or anybody else’s — is clearly going to be formidable.

• One of several hot primary races brewing on the Democratic side of this year’s countywide election is that for the new District 10 position on the Shelby County Commission.

As of early in the week, with Thursday’s February 20th filing deadline just days away, only relative unknown Curtis Byrd and Reginald Milton had filed, but of the three other Democrats who had picked up petitions — Jake Brown, Martavius Jones, and Louis Morganfield — two, Brown and Jones, have previously attracted considerable attention.

They, along with Milton, a community organizer whose previous campaigns for office have given him considerable name recognition, had been the subject of frequent speculation among local Democrats regarding the ways in which they might split the primary vote.

Jones, a prominent — even pivotal — member of both the old Memphis City Schools board and the provisional Shelby County Schools board that succeeded it, also has significant name recognition. At this point, he may not have as many rank-and-file party activists on his side as Milton (who has been endorsed by 9th District Congressman Steve Cohen, among several other influentials), but he has another ace in the hole.

That was demonstrated at a recent well-attended fund-raising affair on Milton’s behalf at the Side Street Grill at Overton Square.

Off to the side of Milton’s impressive crowd were J.W. Gibson, Aubrey Howard, and Osbie Howard, three prominent African Americans with both business credentials and political connections. They were there not as attendees of the Milton affair but in pursuance of a regular social ritual of their own, built around a love of good cigars.

But they were also, it turned out, leaning strongly not to Milton, the man of the hour that evening, but to Jones, whose profession is that of stockbroker, and their presence — though not intended as such — was a reminder that the former school board member has a potential claim on the loyalty of entrepreneurs in the black community.

Brown, on the other hand, is a young white man who has made something of a splash as a party activist and hopes to draw on a youth vote. In theory, he stands to benefit from a split in the African-American vote between Milton and Jones, but his problem from the beginning has been two-fold: He is a relative newcomer and, so far, lacks strong ties with the black communities that are predominant in District 10.

Worse, from the standpoint of his hopes, Brown also has gone through some recent changes in his professional life and campaign. Formerly associated with Liz Rincon and Associates as a consultant, he said this week he was on a “leave of absence” from that relationship and that Rincon was no longer directly supervising his campaign efforts.

That turned out to be an understatement. Liz Rincon, whose renamed consulting company, The Rincon Strategy Agency, continues efforts on behalf of several candidates — notably Mike McCusker, a candidate in the Democratic primary for Criminal Court Clerk — says emphatically that, as of December, she had dissolved her professional relationship with Brown.

In any case, Milton would at the moment appear to have the upper hand, with Jones remaining a strong potential challenger. Both he and Brown said early in the week they intended to file by Thursday’s deadline.

• Meanwhile, the gang’s all there in the Democratic primary for Shelby County mayor. County Commissioner Steve Mulroy‘s filing on Monday completed a roster of four candidates, all hopeful of opposing incumbent Republican County Mayor Mark Luttrell, who filed for reelection last week.

Mulroy claimed a $55,000 haul from one week’s worth of fund-raising and boasted an impressive endorsement list, including commission colleagues Justin Ford and Sidney Chism and former interim county mayor Joe Ford Jr.

Previously filing for the Democratic mayoral primary were former county Commissioner Deidre Malone, current commission Chair James Harvey, and former school board member, the Rev. Kenneth Whalum Jr.

• Another county commissioner, Henri Brooks, was scheduled to file for the Democratic nomination for Juvenile Court clerk this week in the company of her campaign chairperson, Ruby Wharton, wife of Mayor A C Wharton and the eminence behind the Ruby R. Wharton Award for Outstanding Women, which Brooks won this year for her work toward reforming Juvenile Court.