Kramer Knipp

CIED 1003
Dr. Orr
7 September 2016
Google Scholar Assignment
I found three different scholarly articles related to Christian Z. Goering. They are as
follows:

1. Like the Whole Class has Reading Problems: A Study of Oral Reading Fluency
Activities in a High Intervention Setting. The article was written by Christian Z.
Goering and Kimberly F. Baker, and was published in Fall 2010. The articles URL is

http://www.jstor.org/stable/41406183.
2. Reclaiming the Conversation on Education. This article was written by Jason L.
Endacott and Christian Z. Goering, and was published in May 2014. The URL for this
article is http://search.proquest.com/docview/1523923458?pq-origsite=gscholar.
3. Robots Teaching Other Little Robots: Neoliberalism, CCSS, and Teacher
Professionalism. Jason L. Endacott, Ginney P. Wright, Christian Z. Goering, Vicki S.
Collet, George S. Denny, and Jennifer Jennings Davis wrote this article. It was
published online on November 13, 2015, and its URL is
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10714413.2015.1091258?
journalCode=gred20.
The article that I decided to read from Christian Z. Goering, was Reclaiming the
Conversation on Education. This article discussed the issues of No Child Left Behind
(NCLB), Race to the Top (RttT), and Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in the
countrys public school system. These changes came about from the publication of A

Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reformmore commonly known as

ANAR in 1983. Though it has been discredited in the last 30 years because of the
conditions in schools has been greatly exaggerated, self-proclaimed educational
reformersas Goering calls themhave convinced the public that corporate-style
educational reform is the only way to achieve educational reform. It was the corporations,
not educators that created CCSS, and the two primary writing teams for CCSS did not
include any classroom teachers. Another issue had with CCSS, is that it is funded with
private money, such as from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The Foundation
awarded millions of dollars to organizations involved in the creation of CCSS.
Additionally, the Secretary of Education Arne Duncan provided incentive to adopt CCSS
by limiting eligibility for RttT awards, and NCLB waivers to states that kept the common
set of college and career ready standards; this forced schools to either adopt CCSS or
lose millions of federal dollars.
The main issue with CCSS that teachers have is that it represents the values and
interests of big businesses, and therefore empowers softdomination. There is a lack of
empirical evidence that the standards of CCSS are evidence based, meaning that the
authors went off of what their corporate creators best guesses about what a K-12
education should produce in a child. The authors were given technical specifications,
specifically handed down from corporate writing teams and passed down to educators.
These specifications were never tested or had any validation that they would affect
student achievement. What teachers are seeing is that CCSS is producing what big
businesses value in its employees: emphasis on analysis, argument, and specialization.
The authors believe it is all at the expense of children learning beauty, empathy, personal

reflection, and humanity. CCSS is focused purely on what the students will need in a
business world, and the only thing the children are being taught, is specifically what is
being tested. Educators are not free to decide what gets taught, because the tests are in the
hands of corporations and venture philanthropists such as Gates, according to the
article.
The article interviewed several teachers to try and see how CCSS has affected
them personally in the classroom. One English teacher revealed that CSS has
significantly degraded the teaching of English in several ways, and they then go on to
list issues such as the denigration of literary studies, preoccupation with nonfiction, the
turn away from a students personal ideas and feelings, and the inappropriateness of texts
to student level and grade, to name a few. They went on to say that they felt as though I
am simply a placeholder. My individual worth and creativity has no value in this climate
of teach by numbers. After interviewing teachers, the authors of the article then went
on to say that they believed that if school districts were to implement CCSS in an open,
flexible, and positive manner, that then they could still work around the softdomination
and empower their students. The authors encourage English teachers to use their power to
reclaim the conversation, and to correct the misuses of language. They encourage
teachers to refuse to allow the CCSS to stand in the way of inspiring the next generation
of free-thinking students, and to remember that children are not products, numbers, or for
sale like a businessthe teachers need to take back what they can.