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CER President Jeanne Allen’s full response to a thoughtful piece by Michael McShane titled Dispatches from a nervous Common Core observer (part 3 of 10): Can’t anything be called ‘Common Core Aligned?’ is found below. Please see AEI’s blog for original commentary.

I’m still back on the diet analogy Mike. To me, reading your analysis and the other commentary since Monday, it’s sounding a little bit more like the Atkins diet, and you know what happened to him right? (He allegedly died of a heart attack, after doing what I’m doing right now at my desk as I type — eating only protein!)

Here’s the skinny, so to speak. The Atkins diet is apparently the worst thing you can do to yourself, according to traditional nutritionists who want us to eat major portions of grain and carb-rich veggies every day. They have attacked the Atkins followers, like me, through Doctors, and health plans, and in their pushing of nutra-this or that in a bottle, can or in an IV. They say if we follow this one approach to dieting we will lack valuable nutrients, increase our cholesterol and unhelpful fats and probably risk the fate of the diet’s author. Meanwhile, millions of us who follow the Atkins diet in whole or in part do very well in keeping our fats down and our tummies tucked.

Sadly, the same orthodox view we see toward dieting by traditionalists is the attitude I’m seeing from my friends and colleagues toward those who are challenging the conventional wisdom on Common Core State Standards. I’m not sure I know the answer, but what I am confident of is that many reformers and leaders are all too quick to dismiss as heresy, radicalism, libertarianism or stupidity anyone who questions Common Core.

So I welcome your delving deep into the issues, and presenting differing points of view, like the analysis today that reveals literally thousands of allegedly aligned common core curriculum and lessons and programs that – surprise – all cost money and have no validity per se in fact.

You know what it reminds me of? I can remember it like it was yesterday. When the “Reading Wars” finally appeared to be finished, those who believed phonemes are essential ingredients to be directly taught through true phonics-based instruction really won the day. Or so it seemed. When California woke up to scores right next to Mississippi, and then former CA Superintendent Bill Honig did a major mea culpa on what he had prescribed, the flood gates opened and suddenly the importance of ensuring reading be taught like the science it is broke through the whole language literacy crowd and took root. New charters cropped up “selling” a return to the basics, and entire states had phonics instruction at the core of their objectives. (What happened to those state standards is a lesson for Common Core, for another time). What’s more is that big districts starting boasting that they were doing phonics, too.

I’ll never forget the day these huge, 11×14 books arrived at my kids’ school, and the title of that famed publisher’s text was simply PHONICS. I was skeptical that this big, fat book really was filled with phonemes and exercises devoted to helping students learn to read phonetically, which requires more teacher led work than fancy, schmancy, colorful pictorials.

Sure enough, my skepticism revealed some of the nonsense the phonics movement sought to undo in American schools… pictures of Fishies and Factories and Fun with instructions to use the letter F in different ways in “constructed” sentences filled the book. If you used the letter F enough times, you were deemed, at least the teachers manual seemed to suggest, proficient in the letter and sounds of “F”.

If it was that easy to make stuff up on reading instruction, it seems it would be just as easy to make up that some book or program is “common core” aligned. And who’s to say it’s not? Who’s the judge and the jury? What’s the consequence for your book or program or technology not being common core when it says so? Who is going to look at the objectives and determine that a particular lesson doesn’t meet its essence. And who ensures that the arbiters are right?

It didn’t happen for Phonics and despite a temporary few clicks up in reading achievement initially, the nation’s report card began to fall flat again after the initial sense of urgency died down and everyone boasted that their reading instruction was Phonics-aligned! The same happened after Fuzzy math was supposedly killed. And frankly the same happened after the great states of Massachusetts and Virginia, and Colorado and finally California created remarkably high, rigorous evidence-based standards and after a few years the assessments created to determine progress were watered down and the standards themselves were avoided by districts who said they were too high.

History is a bit like dieting. If we could only remember what we ate that put all this weight on or created that double chin, we might actually not have to try so hard again.