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The trouble with the Common Core is not primarily what is in these standards or what's been left out, although that's certainly at issue. The bigger problem is the role the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) are playing in the larger dynamics of current school reform and education politics.
Today everything about the Common Core, even the brand name--the Common Core State Standards--is contested because these standards were created as an instrument of contested policy. They have become part of a larger political project to remake public education in ways that go well beyond slogans about making sure every student graduates "college and career ready," however that may be defined this year. We're talking about implementing new national standards and tests for every school and district in the country in the wake of dramatic changes in the national and state context for education reform. These changes include:
I think many supporters of the Common Core don't sufficiently take into account how these larger forces define the context in which the standards are being introduced, and how much that context is shaping implementation. As teacher-blogger Jose Vilson put it:
People who advocate for the CCSS miss the bigger picture that people on the ground don't: The CCSS came as a package deal with the new teacher evaluations, higher stakes testing, and austerity measures, including mass school closings. Often, it seems like the leaders are talking out of both sides of their mouths when they say they want to improve education but need to defund our schools. . . . It makes no sense for us to have high expectations of our students when we don't have high expectations for our school system.
My own first experience with standards-based reform was in New Jersey, where I taught English and journalism to high school students for many years in one of the state's poorest cities. In the 1990s, curriculum standards became a central issue in the state's long-running funding equity case, Abbott v. Burke. The case began by documenting how lower levels of resources in poor urban districts produced unequal educational opportunities in the form of worse facilities, poorer curriculum materials, less experienced teachers, and fewer support services. At a key point in the case, in an early example of arguments that today are painfully familiar, then-Gov. Christine Whitman declared that, instead of funding equity, what we really needed were curriculum standards and a shift from focusing on dollars to focusing on what those dollars should be spent on. If all students were taught to meet "core content curriculum standards," Whitman argued, then everyone would receive an equitable and adequate education.
At the time, the New Jersey Supreme Court was an unusually progressive and foresighted court, and it responded to the state's proposal for standards with a series of landmark decisions that speak to some of the same issues raised today by the Common Core. The court agreed that standards for what schools should teach and students should learn seemed like a good idea. But standards don't deliver themselves. They require well-prepared and supported professional staff, improved instructional resources, safe and well-equipped facilities, reasonable class sizes, and--especially if they are supposed to help schools compensate for the inequality that exists all around them--a host of supplemental services like high quality preschools, expanded summer and after-school programs, health and social services, and more. In effect, the court said adopting "high expectations" curriculum standards was like passing out a menu from a fine restaurant. Not everyone who gets a menu can pay for the meal. So the court tied New Jersey's core curriculum standards to the most equitable school funding mandates in the country.
And though it's been a constant struggle to sustain and implement New Jersey's funding equity mandates, a central problem with the Common Core is the complete absence of any similar credible plan to provide--or even to determine--the resources necessary to make every student "college and career ready" as defined by the CCSS.
Funding is far from the only concern, but it is a threshold credibility issue. If you're proposing a dramatic increase in outcomes and performance to reach social and academic goals that have never been reached before, and your primary investments are standards and tests that serve mostly to document how far you are from reaching those goals, you either don't have a very good plan or you're planning something else. The Common Core, like NCLB before it, is failing the funding credibility test before it's even out of the gate.
Last winter, the Rethinking Schools editorial board held a discussion about the Common Core; we were trying to decide how to address this latest trend in the all-too-trendy world of education reform. Rethinking Schools has always been skeptical of standards imposed from above. Too many standards projects have been efforts to move decisions about teaching and learning away from educators and schools, and put them in the hands of distant bureaucracies and politicians. Standards have often codified sanitized versions of history, politics, and culture that reinforce official myths while leaving out the voices and concerns of our students and communities. Whatever potentially positive role standards might play in truly collaborative conversations about what schools should teach and children should learn has repeatedly been undermined by bad process, suspect political agendas, and commercial interests.
Although all these concerns were raised, we also found that teachers in different districts and states were having very different experiences with the Common Core. There were teachers in Milwaukee who had endured years of scripted curriculum and mandated textbooks. For them, the CCSS seemed like an opening to develop better curriculum and, compared to what they'd been struggling under, seemed more flexible and student-centered. For many teachers, especially in the interim between the rollout of the standards and the arrival of the tests--a lot of the Common Core's appeal is based on claims that:
Viewed in isolation, the debate over the Common Core can be confusing; who doesn't want all students to have good preparation for life after high school? But, seen in the full context of the politics and history that produced it--and the tests that are just around the bend--the implications of the Common Core project look quite different.
The CCSS emerged from the wreckage of NCLB. In 2002, NCLB was passed with overwhelming bipartisan support and presented as a way to close long-standing gaps in academic performance. NCLB marked a dramatic change in federal education policy--away from its historic role as a promoter of access and equity through support for things like school integration, extra funding for high-poverty schools, and services for students with special needs, to a much less equitable set of mandates around standards and testing, closing or "reconstituting" schools, and replacing school staff.
NCLB required states to adopt curriculum standards and to test students annually to gauge progress toward reaching them. Under threat of losing federal funds, all 50 states adopted or revised their standards and began testing every student, every year, in every grade from 3-8 and again in high school. The professed goal was to make sure every student was on grade level in math and language arts by requiring schools to reach 100 percent passing rates on state tests for every student in 10 subgroups.
By any measure, NCLB was a failure in raising academic performance and narrowing gaps in opportunity and outcomes. But by very publicly measuring the test results against arbitrary benchmarks that no real schools have ever met, NCLB succeeded in creating a narrative of failure that shaped a decade of attempts to "fix" schools while blaming those who work in them. The disaggregated scores put the spotlight on gaps among student groups, but the law used these gaps to label schools as failures without providing the resources or supports needed to eliminate them.
By the time the first decade of NCLB was over, more than half the schools in the nation were on the lists of "failing schools" and the rest were poised to follow. In Massachusetts, which is generally considered to have the toughest state standards in the nation--arguably more demanding than the Common Core--80 percent of the schools were facing NCLB sanctions. This is when the NCLB "waivers" appeared. As the number of schools facing sanctions and intervention grew well beyond the poor communities of color where NCLB had made "disruptive reform" the norm and began to reach into more middle-class and suburban districts, the pressure to revise NCLB's unworkable accountability system increased. But the bipartisan coalition that passed NCLB had collapsed and gridlock in Congress made revising it impossible. So U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, with dubious legal justification, made up a process to grant NCLB waivers to states that agreed to certain conditions.
Forty states were granted conditional waivers from NCLB: If they agreed to tighten the screws on the most struggling schools serving the highest needs students, they could ease up on the rest, provided they also agreed to use test scores to evaluate all their teachers, expand the reach of charter schools, and adopt "college and career ready" curriculum standards. These same requirements were part of the Race to the Top program, which turned federal education funds into competitive grants and promoted the same policies, even though they have no track record of success as school improvement strategies.
Because federal law prohibits the federal government from creating national standards and tests, the Common Core project was ostensibly designed as a state effort led by the National Governors Association, the Council of Chief State School Officers, and Achieve, a private consulting firm. The Gates Foundation provided more than $160 million in funding, without which Common Core would not exist.
The standards were drafted largely behind closed doors by academics and assessment "experts," many with ties to testing companies. Education Week blogger and science teacher Anthony Cody found that, of the 25 individuals in the work groups charged with drafting the standards, six were associated with the test makers from the College Board, five with the test publishers at ACT, and four with Achieve. Zero teachers were in the work groups. The feedback groups had 35 participants, almost all of whom were university professors. Cody found one classroom teacher involved in the entire process. According to teacher educator Nancy Carlsson-Paige: "In all, there were 135 people on the review panels for the Common Core. Not a single one of them was a K-3 classroom teacher or early childhood professional." Parents were entirely missing. K-12 educators were mostly brought in after the fact to tweak and endorse the standards--and lend legitimacy to the results.
The substance of the standards themselves is also, in a sense, top down. To arrive at "college- and career-ready standards," the Common Core developers began by defining the "skills and abilities" they claim are needed to succeed in a four-year college. The CCSS tests being developed by two federally funded multistate consortia, at a cost of about $350 million, are designed to assess these skills. One of these consortia, the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, claims that students who earn a "college ready" designation by scoring a level 4 on these still-under-construction tests will have a 75 percent chance of getting a C or better in their freshman composition course. But there is no actual evidence connecting scores on any of these new experimental tests with future college success.
And it will take far more than standards and tests to make college affordable, accessible, and attainable for all. When I went to college many years ago, "college for all" meant open admissions, free tuition, and race, class, and gender studies. Today, it means cutthroat competition to get in, mountains of debt to stay, and often bleak prospects when you leave. Yet "college readiness" is about to become the new AYP (adequate yearly progress) by which schools will be ranked.
The idea that by next year Common Core tests will start labeling kids in the 3rd grade as on track or not for college is absurd and offensive.
Substantive questions have been raised about the Common Core's tendency to push difficult academic skills to lower grades, about the appropriateness of the early childhood standards, about the sequencing of the math standards, about the mix and type of mandated readings, and about the priority Common Core puts on the close reading of texts in ways that devalue student experience and prior knowledge.
A decade of NCLB tests showed that millions of students were not meeting existing standards, but the sponsors of the Common Core decided that the solution was tougher ones. And this time, instead of each state developing its own standards, the Common Core seeks to create national tests that are comparable across states and districts, and that can produce results that can be plugged into the data-driven crisis machine that is the engine of corporate reform.
The way the standards are being rushed into classrooms across the country is further undercutting their credibility. These standards have never been fully implemented in real schools anywhere. They're more or less abstract descriptions of academic abilities organized into sequences by people who have never taught at all or who have not taught this particular set of standards. To have any impact, the standards must be translated into curriculum, instructional plans, classroom materials, and valid assessments. A reasonable approach to implementing new standards would include a few multi-year pilot programs that provided time, resources, opportunities for collaboration, and transparent evaluation plans.
Instead we're getting an overhyped all-state implementation drive that seems more like a marketing campaign than an educational plan. And I use the word marketing advisedly, because another defining characteristic of the Common Core project is rampant profiteering.
Joanne Weiss, Duncan's former chief of staff and head of the Race to the Top grant program, which effectively made adoption of the Common Core a condition for federal grants, described how it is opening up huge new markets for commercial exploitation:
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.
Having financed the creation of the standards, the Gates Foundation has entered into a partnership with Pearson to produce a full set of K-12 courses aligned with the Common Core that will be marketed to schools across the country. Nearly every educational product now comes wrapped in the Common Core brand name.
The curriculum and assessments our schools and students need will not emerge from this process. Instead, the top-down, bureaucratic rollout of the Common Core has put schools in the middle of a multilayered political struggle over who will control education policy--corporate power and private wealth or public institutions managed, however imperfectly, by citizens in a democratic process.
The web-based news service Politico recently described what it called "the Common Core money war," reporting that "tens of millions of dollars are pouring into the battle over the Common Core. . . . The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation already has pumped more than $160 million into developing and promoting the Common Core, including $10 million just in the past few months, and it's getting set to announce up to $4 million in new grants to keep the advocacy cranking. Corporate sponsors are pitching in, too. Dozens of the nation's top CEOs will meet to set the plans for a national advertising blitz that may include TV, radio, and print."
At the same time, opposing the Common Core is "an array of organizations with multimillion-dollar budgets of their own and much experience in mobilizing crowds and lobbying lawmakers, including the Heritage Foundation, Americans for Prosperity, the Pioneer Institute, FreedomWorks, and the Koch Bros." These groups are feeding a growing right-wing opposition to the Common Core that combines hostility to all federal education initiatives and anything supported by the Obama administration with more populist sentiments.
But while this larger political battle rages, the most immediate threat for educators and schools remains the new wave of high-stakes Common Core tests.
Duncan, who once said "The best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans was Hurricane Katrina" and who called Waiting for Superman "a Rosa Parks moment," now tells us, "I am convinced that this new generation of state assessments will be an absolute game-changer in public education."
The problem is that this game, like the last one, is rigged. Although reasonable people have found things of value in the Common Core standards, there is no credible defense to be made of the high-stakes uses planned for these new tests. Instead, the Common Core project threatens to reproduce the narrative of public school failure that just led to a decade of bad policy in the name of reform.
Reports from the first wave of Common Core testing provide evidence for these fears. Last spring, students, parents, and teachers in New York schools responded to new Common Core tests developed by Pearson with outcries against their length, difficulty, and inappropriate content. Pearson included corporate logos and promotional material in reading passages. Students reported feeling overstressed and underprepared--meeting the tests with shock, anger, tears, and anxiety. Administrators requested guidelines for handling tests students had vomited on. Teachers and principals complained about the disruptive nature of the testing process and many parents encouraged their children to opt out.
Only about 30 percent of students were deemed "proficient" based on arbitrary cut scores designed to create new categories of failure. The achievement gaps Common Core is supposed to narrow grew larger. Less than 4 percent of students who are English language learners passed. The number of students identified by the tests for "academic intervention" skyrocketed to 70 percent, far beyond the capacity of districts to meet.
The tests are on track to squeeze out whatever positive potential exists in the Common Core:
This is not just cynical speculation. It is a reasonable projection based on the history of the NCLB decade, the dismantling of public education in the nation's urban centers, and the appalling growth of the inequality and concentrated poverty that remains the central problem in public education.
Common Core has become part of the corporate reform project now stalking our schools. As schools struggle with these new mandates, we should defend our students, our schools, and ourselves by pushing back against implementation timelines, resisting the stakes and priority attached to the tests, and exposing the truth about the commercial and political interests shaping this false panacea for the problems our schools face.
There are encouraging signs that the movement we need is growing. Last year in Seattle, teachers led a boycott of district testing that drew national support and won a partial rollback of the testing. In New York this fall, parents sent score reports on new Common Core tests back to the state commissioner of education with a letter declaring "This year's test scores are invalid and provide NO useful information about student learning." Opt-out efforts are growing daily. Even some supporters of the CCSS have endorsed a call for the moratorium on the use of tests to make policy decisions. It's not enough, but it's a start.
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The trouble with the Common Core is not primarily what is in these standards or what's been left out, although that's certainly at issue. The bigger problem is the role the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) are playing in the larger dynamics of current school reform and education politics.
Today everything about the Common Core, even the brand name--the Common Core State Standards--is contested because these standards were created as an instrument of contested policy. They have become part of a larger political project to remake public education in ways that go well beyond slogans about making sure every student graduates "college and career ready," however that may be defined this year. We're talking about implementing new national standards and tests for every school and district in the country in the wake of dramatic changes in the national and state context for education reform. These changes include:
I think many supporters of the Common Core don't sufficiently take into account how these larger forces define the context in which the standards are being introduced, and how much that context is shaping implementation. As teacher-blogger Jose Vilson put it:
People who advocate for the CCSS miss the bigger picture that people on the ground don't: The CCSS came as a package deal with the new teacher evaluations, higher stakes testing, and austerity measures, including mass school closings. Often, it seems like the leaders are talking out of both sides of their mouths when they say they want to improve education but need to defund our schools. . . . It makes no sense for us to have high expectations of our students when we don't have high expectations for our school system.
My own first experience with standards-based reform was in New Jersey, where I taught English and journalism to high school students for many years in one of the state's poorest cities. In the 1990s, curriculum standards became a central issue in the state's long-running funding equity case, Abbott v. Burke. The case began by documenting how lower levels of resources in poor urban districts produced unequal educational opportunities in the form of worse facilities, poorer curriculum materials, less experienced teachers, and fewer support services. At a key point in the case, in an early example of arguments that today are painfully familiar, then-Gov. Christine Whitman declared that, instead of funding equity, what we really needed were curriculum standards and a shift from focusing on dollars to focusing on what those dollars should be spent on. If all students were taught to meet "core content curriculum standards," Whitman argued, then everyone would receive an equitable and adequate education.
At the time, the New Jersey Supreme Court was an unusually progressive and foresighted court, and it responded to the state's proposal for standards with a series of landmark decisions that speak to some of the same issues raised today by the Common Core. The court agreed that standards for what schools should teach and students should learn seemed like a good idea. But standards don't deliver themselves. They require well-prepared and supported professional staff, improved instructional resources, safe and well-equipped facilities, reasonable class sizes, and--especially if they are supposed to help schools compensate for the inequality that exists all around them--a host of supplemental services like high quality preschools, expanded summer and after-school programs, health and social services, and more. In effect, the court said adopting "high expectations" curriculum standards was like passing out a menu from a fine restaurant. Not everyone who gets a menu can pay for the meal. So the court tied New Jersey's core curriculum standards to the most equitable school funding mandates in the country.
And though it's been a constant struggle to sustain and implement New Jersey's funding equity mandates, a central problem with the Common Core is the complete absence of any similar credible plan to provide--or even to determine--the resources necessary to make every student "college and career ready" as defined by the CCSS.
Funding is far from the only concern, but it is a threshold credibility issue. If you're proposing a dramatic increase in outcomes and performance to reach social and academic goals that have never been reached before, and your primary investments are standards and tests that serve mostly to document how far you are from reaching those goals, you either don't have a very good plan or you're planning something else. The Common Core, like NCLB before it, is failing the funding credibility test before it's even out of the gate.
Last winter, the Rethinking Schools editorial board held a discussion about the Common Core; we were trying to decide how to address this latest trend in the all-too-trendy world of education reform. Rethinking Schools has always been skeptical of standards imposed from above. Too many standards projects have been efforts to move decisions about teaching and learning away from educators and schools, and put them in the hands of distant bureaucracies and politicians. Standards have often codified sanitized versions of history, politics, and culture that reinforce official myths while leaving out the voices and concerns of our students and communities. Whatever potentially positive role standards might play in truly collaborative conversations about what schools should teach and children should learn has repeatedly been undermined by bad process, suspect political agendas, and commercial interests.
Although all these concerns were raised, we also found that teachers in different districts and states were having very different experiences with the Common Core. There were teachers in Milwaukee who had endured years of scripted curriculum and mandated textbooks. For them, the CCSS seemed like an opening to develop better curriculum and, compared to what they'd been struggling under, seemed more flexible and student-centered. For many teachers, especially in the interim between the rollout of the standards and the arrival of the tests--a lot of the Common Core's appeal is based on claims that:
Viewed in isolation, the debate over the Common Core can be confusing; who doesn't want all students to have good preparation for life after high school? But, seen in the full context of the politics and history that produced it--and the tests that are just around the bend--the implications of the Common Core project look quite different.
The CCSS emerged from the wreckage of NCLB. In 2002, NCLB was passed with overwhelming bipartisan support and presented as a way to close long-standing gaps in academic performance. NCLB marked a dramatic change in federal education policy--away from its historic role as a promoter of access and equity through support for things like school integration, extra funding for high-poverty schools, and services for students with special needs, to a much less equitable set of mandates around standards and testing, closing or "reconstituting" schools, and replacing school staff.
NCLB required states to adopt curriculum standards and to test students annually to gauge progress toward reaching them. Under threat of losing federal funds, all 50 states adopted or revised their standards and began testing every student, every year, in every grade from 3-8 and again in high school. The professed goal was to make sure every student was on grade level in math and language arts by requiring schools to reach 100 percent passing rates on state tests for every student in 10 subgroups.
By any measure, NCLB was a failure in raising academic performance and narrowing gaps in opportunity and outcomes. But by very publicly measuring the test results against arbitrary benchmarks that no real schools have ever met, NCLB succeeded in creating a narrative of failure that shaped a decade of attempts to "fix" schools while blaming those who work in them. The disaggregated scores put the spotlight on gaps among student groups, but the law used these gaps to label schools as failures without providing the resources or supports needed to eliminate them.
By the time the first decade of NCLB was over, more than half the schools in the nation were on the lists of "failing schools" and the rest were poised to follow. In Massachusetts, which is generally considered to have the toughest state standards in the nation--arguably more demanding than the Common Core--80 percent of the schools were facing NCLB sanctions. This is when the NCLB "waivers" appeared. As the number of schools facing sanctions and intervention grew well beyond the poor communities of color where NCLB had made "disruptive reform" the norm and began to reach into more middle-class and suburban districts, the pressure to revise NCLB's unworkable accountability system increased. But the bipartisan coalition that passed NCLB had collapsed and gridlock in Congress made revising it impossible. So U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, with dubious legal justification, made up a process to grant NCLB waivers to states that agreed to certain conditions.
Forty states were granted conditional waivers from NCLB: If they agreed to tighten the screws on the most struggling schools serving the highest needs students, they could ease up on the rest, provided they also agreed to use test scores to evaluate all their teachers, expand the reach of charter schools, and adopt "college and career ready" curriculum standards. These same requirements were part of the Race to the Top program, which turned federal education funds into competitive grants and promoted the same policies, even though they have no track record of success as school improvement strategies.
Because federal law prohibits the federal government from creating national standards and tests, the Common Core project was ostensibly designed as a state effort led by the National Governors Association, the Council of Chief State School Officers, and Achieve, a private consulting firm. The Gates Foundation provided more than $160 million in funding, without which Common Core would not exist.
The standards were drafted largely behind closed doors by academics and assessment "experts," many with ties to testing companies. Education Week blogger and science teacher Anthony Cody found that, of the 25 individuals in the work groups charged with drafting the standards, six were associated with the test makers from the College Board, five with the test publishers at ACT, and four with Achieve. Zero teachers were in the work groups. The feedback groups had 35 participants, almost all of whom were university professors. Cody found one classroom teacher involved in the entire process. According to teacher educator Nancy Carlsson-Paige: "In all, there were 135 people on the review panels for the Common Core. Not a single one of them was a K-3 classroom teacher or early childhood professional." Parents were entirely missing. K-12 educators were mostly brought in after the fact to tweak and endorse the standards--and lend legitimacy to the results.
The substance of the standards themselves is also, in a sense, top down. To arrive at "college- and career-ready standards," the Common Core developers began by defining the "skills and abilities" they claim are needed to succeed in a four-year college. The CCSS tests being developed by two federally funded multistate consortia, at a cost of about $350 million, are designed to assess these skills. One of these consortia, the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, claims that students who earn a "college ready" designation by scoring a level 4 on these still-under-construction tests will have a 75 percent chance of getting a C or better in their freshman composition course. But there is no actual evidence connecting scores on any of these new experimental tests with future college success.
And it will take far more than standards and tests to make college affordable, accessible, and attainable for all. When I went to college many years ago, "college for all" meant open admissions, free tuition, and race, class, and gender studies. Today, it means cutthroat competition to get in, mountains of debt to stay, and often bleak prospects when you leave. Yet "college readiness" is about to become the new AYP (adequate yearly progress) by which schools will be ranked.
The idea that by next year Common Core tests will start labeling kids in the 3rd grade as on track or not for college is absurd and offensive.
Substantive questions have been raised about the Common Core's tendency to push difficult academic skills to lower grades, about the appropriateness of the early childhood standards, about the sequencing of the math standards, about the mix and type of mandated readings, and about the priority Common Core puts on the close reading of texts in ways that devalue student experience and prior knowledge.
A decade of NCLB tests showed that millions of students were not meeting existing standards, but the sponsors of the Common Core decided that the solution was tougher ones. And this time, instead of each state developing its own standards, the Common Core seeks to create national tests that are comparable across states and districts, and that can produce results that can be plugged into the data-driven crisis machine that is the engine of corporate reform.
The way the standards are being rushed into classrooms across the country is further undercutting their credibility. These standards have never been fully implemented in real schools anywhere. They're more or less abstract descriptions of academic abilities organized into sequences by people who have never taught at all or who have not taught this particular set of standards. To have any impact, the standards must be translated into curriculum, instructional plans, classroom materials, and valid assessments. A reasonable approach to implementing new standards would include a few multi-year pilot programs that provided time, resources, opportunities for collaboration, and transparent evaluation plans.
Instead we're getting an overhyped all-state implementation drive that seems more like a marketing campaign than an educational plan. And I use the word marketing advisedly, because another defining characteristic of the Common Core project is rampant profiteering.
Joanne Weiss, Duncan's former chief of staff and head of the Race to the Top grant program, which effectively made adoption of the Common Core a condition for federal grants, described how it is opening up huge new markets for commercial exploitation:
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.
Having financed the creation of the standards, the Gates Foundation has entered into a partnership with Pearson to produce a full set of K-12 courses aligned with the Common Core that will be marketed to schools across the country. Nearly every educational product now comes wrapped in the Common Core brand name.
The curriculum and assessments our schools and students need will not emerge from this process. Instead, the top-down, bureaucratic rollout of the Common Core has put schools in the middle of a multilayered political struggle over who will control education policy--corporate power and private wealth or public institutions managed, however imperfectly, by citizens in a democratic process.
The web-based news service Politico recently described what it called "the Common Core money war," reporting that "tens of millions of dollars are pouring into the battle over the Common Core. . . . The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation already has pumped more than $160 million into developing and promoting the Common Core, including $10 million just in the past few months, and it's getting set to announce up to $4 million in new grants to keep the advocacy cranking. Corporate sponsors are pitching in, too. Dozens of the nation's top CEOs will meet to set the plans for a national advertising blitz that may include TV, radio, and print."
At the same time, opposing the Common Core is "an array of organizations with multimillion-dollar budgets of their own and much experience in mobilizing crowds and lobbying lawmakers, including the Heritage Foundation, Americans for Prosperity, the Pioneer Institute, FreedomWorks, and the Koch Bros." These groups are feeding a growing right-wing opposition to the Common Core that combines hostility to all federal education initiatives and anything supported by the Obama administration with more populist sentiments.
But while this larger political battle rages, the most immediate threat for educators and schools remains the new wave of high-stakes Common Core tests.
Duncan, who once said "The best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans was Hurricane Katrina" and who called Waiting for Superman "a Rosa Parks moment," now tells us, "I am convinced that this new generation of state assessments will be an absolute game-changer in public education."
The problem is that this game, like the last one, is rigged. Although reasonable people have found things of value in the Common Core standards, there is no credible defense to be made of the high-stakes uses planned for these new tests. Instead, the Common Core project threatens to reproduce the narrative of public school failure that just led to a decade of bad policy in the name of reform.
Reports from the first wave of Common Core testing provide evidence for these fears. Last spring, students, parents, and teachers in New York schools responded to new Common Core tests developed by Pearson with outcries against their length, difficulty, and inappropriate content. Pearson included corporate logos and promotional material in reading passages. Students reported feeling overstressed and underprepared--meeting the tests with shock, anger, tears, and anxiety. Administrators requested guidelines for handling tests students had vomited on. Teachers and principals complained about the disruptive nature of the testing process and many parents encouraged their children to opt out.
Only about 30 percent of students were deemed "proficient" based on arbitrary cut scores designed to create new categories of failure. The achievement gaps Common Core is supposed to narrow grew larger. Less than 4 percent of students who are English language learners passed. The number of students identified by the tests for "academic intervention" skyrocketed to 70 percent, far beyond the capacity of districts to meet.
The tests are on track to squeeze out whatever positive potential exists in the Common Core:
This is not just cynical speculation. It is a reasonable projection based on the history of the NCLB decade, the dismantling of public education in the nation's urban centers, and the appalling growth of the inequality and concentrated poverty that remains the central problem in public education.
Common Core has become part of the corporate reform project now stalking our schools. As schools struggle with these new mandates, we should defend our students, our schools, and ourselves by pushing back against implementation timelines, resisting the stakes and priority attached to the tests, and exposing the truth about the commercial and political interests shaping this false panacea for the problems our schools face.
There are encouraging signs that the movement we need is growing. Last year in Seattle, teachers led a boycott of district testing that drew national support and won a partial rollback of the testing. In New York this fall, parents sent score reports on new Common Core tests back to the state commissioner of education with a letter declaring "This year's test scores are invalid and provide NO useful information about student learning." Opt-out efforts are growing daily. Even some supporters of the CCSS have endorsed a call for the moratorium on the use of tests to make policy decisions. It's not enough, but it's a start.
The trouble with the Common Core is not primarily what is in these standards or what's been left out, although that's certainly at issue. The bigger problem is the role the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) are playing in the larger dynamics of current school reform and education politics.
Today everything about the Common Core, even the brand name--the Common Core State Standards--is contested because these standards were created as an instrument of contested policy. They have become part of a larger political project to remake public education in ways that go well beyond slogans about making sure every student graduates "college and career ready," however that may be defined this year. We're talking about implementing new national standards and tests for every school and district in the country in the wake of dramatic changes in the national and state context for education reform. These changes include:
I think many supporters of the Common Core don't sufficiently take into account how these larger forces define the context in which the standards are being introduced, and how much that context is shaping implementation. As teacher-blogger Jose Vilson put it:
People who advocate for the CCSS miss the bigger picture that people on the ground don't: The CCSS came as a package deal with the new teacher evaluations, higher stakes testing, and austerity measures, including mass school closings. Often, it seems like the leaders are talking out of both sides of their mouths when they say they want to improve education but need to defund our schools. . . . It makes no sense for us to have high expectations of our students when we don't have high expectations for our school system.
My own first experience with standards-based reform was in New Jersey, where I taught English and journalism to high school students for many years in one of the state's poorest cities. In the 1990s, curriculum standards became a central issue in the state's long-running funding equity case, Abbott v. Burke. The case began by documenting how lower levels of resources in poor urban districts produced unequal educational opportunities in the form of worse facilities, poorer curriculum materials, less experienced teachers, and fewer support services. At a key point in the case, in an early example of arguments that today are painfully familiar, then-Gov. Christine Whitman declared that, instead of funding equity, what we really needed were curriculum standards and a shift from focusing on dollars to focusing on what those dollars should be spent on. If all students were taught to meet "core content curriculum standards," Whitman argued, then everyone would receive an equitable and adequate education.
At the time, the New Jersey Supreme Court was an unusually progressive and foresighted court, and it responded to the state's proposal for standards with a series of landmark decisions that speak to some of the same issues raised today by the Common Core. The court agreed that standards for what schools should teach and students should learn seemed like a good idea. But standards don't deliver themselves. They require well-prepared and supported professional staff, improved instructional resources, safe and well-equipped facilities, reasonable class sizes, and--especially if they are supposed to help schools compensate for the inequality that exists all around them--a host of supplemental services like high quality preschools, expanded summer and after-school programs, health and social services, and more. In effect, the court said adopting "high expectations" curriculum standards was like passing out a menu from a fine restaurant. Not everyone who gets a menu can pay for the meal. So the court tied New Jersey's core curriculum standards to the most equitable school funding mandates in the country.
And though it's been a constant struggle to sustain and implement New Jersey's funding equity mandates, a central problem with the Common Core is the complete absence of any similar credible plan to provide--or even to determine--the resources necessary to make every student "college and career ready" as defined by the CCSS.
Funding is far from the only concern, but it is a threshold credibility issue. If you're proposing a dramatic increase in outcomes and performance to reach social and academic goals that have never been reached before, and your primary investments are standards and tests that serve mostly to document how far you are from reaching those goals, you either don't have a very good plan or you're planning something else. The Common Core, like NCLB before it, is failing the funding credibility test before it's even out of the gate.
Last winter, the Rethinking Schools editorial board held a discussion about the Common Core; we were trying to decide how to address this latest trend in the all-too-trendy world of education reform. Rethinking Schools has always been skeptical of standards imposed from above. Too many standards projects have been efforts to move decisions about teaching and learning away from educators and schools, and put them in the hands of distant bureaucracies and politicians. Standards have often codified sanitized versions of history, politics, and culture that reinforce official myths while leaving out the voices and concerns of our students and communities. Whatever potentially positive role standards might play in truly collaborative conversations about what schools should teach and children should learn has repeatedly been undermined by bad process, suspect political agendas, and commercial interests.
Although all these concerns were raised, we also found that teachers in different districts and states were having very different experiences with the Common Core. There were teachers in Milwaukee who had endured years of scripted curriculum and mandated textbooks. For them, the CCSS seemed like an opening to develop better curriculum and, compared to what they'd been struggling under, seemed more flexible and student-centered. For many teachers, especially in the interim between the rollout of the standards and the arrival of the tests--a lot of the Common Core's appeal is based on claims that:
Viewed in isolation, the debate over the Common Core can be confusing; who doesn't want all students to have good preparation for life after high school? But, seen in the full context of the politics and history that produced it--and the tests that are just around the bend--the implications of the Common Core project look quite different.
The CCSS emerged from the wreckage of NCLB. In 2002, NCLB was passed with overwhelming bipartisan support and presented as a way to close long-standing gaps in academic performance. NCLB marked a dramatic change in federal education policy--away from its historic role as a promoter of access and equity through support for things like school integration, extra funding for high-poverty schools, and services for students with special needs, to a much less equitable set of mandates around standards and testing, closing or "reconstituting" schools, and replacing school staff.
NCLB required states to adopt curriculum standards and to test students annually to gauge progress toward reaching them. Under threat of losing federal funds, all 50 states adopted or revised their standards and began testing every student, every year, in every grade from 3-8 and again in high school. The professed goal was to make sure every student was on grade level in math and language arts by requiring schools to reach 100 percent passing rates on state tests for every student in 10 subgroups.
By any measure, NCLB was a failure in raising academic performance and narrowing gaps in opportunity and outcomes. But by very publicly measuring the test results against arbitrary benchmarks that no real schools have ever met, NCLB succeeded in creating a narrative of failure that shaped a decade of attempts to "fix" schools while blaming those who work in them. The disaggregated scores put the spotlight on gaps among student groups, but the law used these gaps to label schools as failures without providing the resources or supports needed to eliminate them.
By the time the first decade of NCLB was over, more than half the schools in the nation were on the lists of "failing schools" and the rest were poised to follow. In Massachusetts, which is generally considered to have the toughest state standards in the nation--arguably more demanding than the Common Core--80 percent of the schools were facing NCLB sanctions. This is when the NCLB "waivers" appeared. As the number of schools facing sanctions and intervention grew well beyond the poor communities of color where NCLB had made "disruptive reform" the norm and began to reach into more middle-class and suburban districts, the pressure to revise NCLB's unworkable accountability system increased. But the bipartisan coalition that passed NCLB had collapsed and gridlock in Congress made revising it impossible. So U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, with dubious legal justification, made up a process to grant NCLB waivers to states that agreed to certain conditions.
Forty states were granted conditional waivers from NCLB: If they agreed to tighten the screws on the most struggling schools serving the highest needs students, they could ease up on the rest, provided they also agreed to use test scores to evaluate all their teachers, expand the reach of charter schools, and adopt "college and career ready" curriculum standards. These same requirements were part of the Race to the Top program, which turned federal education funds into competitive grants and promoted the same policies, even though they have no track record of success as school improvement strategies.
Because federal law prohibits the federal government from creating national standards and tests, the Common Core project was ostensibly designed as a state effort led by the National Governors Association, the Council of Chief State School Officers, and Achieve, a private consulting firm. The Gates Foundation provided more than $160 million in funding, without which Common Core would not exist.
The standards were drafted largely behind closed doors by academics and assessment "experts," many with ties to testing companies. Education Week blogger and science teacher Anthony Cody found that, of the 25 individuals in the work groups charged with drafting the standards, six were associated with the test makers from the College Board, five with the test publishers at ACT, and four with Achieve. Zero teachers were in the work groups. The feedback groups had 35 participants, almost all of whom were university professors. Cody found one classroom teacher involved in the entire process. According to teacher educator Nancy Carlsson-Paige: "In all, there were 135 people on the review panels for the Common Core. Not a single one of them was a K-3 classroom teacher or early childhood professional." Parents were entirely missing. K-12 educators were mostly brought in after the fact to tweak and endorse the standards--and lend legitimacy to the results.
The substance of the standards themselves is also, in a sense, top down. To arrive at "college- and career-ready standards," the Common Core developers began by defining the "skills and abilities" they claim are needed to succeed in a four-year college. The CCSS tests being developed by two federally funded multistate consortia, at a cost of about $350 million, are designed to assess these skills. One of these consortia, the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, claims that students who earn a "college ready" designation by scoring a level 4 on these still-under-construction tests will have a 75 percent chance of getting a C or better in their freshman composition course. But there is no actual evidence connecting scores on any of these new experimental tests with future college success.
And it will take far more than standards and tests to make college affordable, accessible, and attainable for all. When I went to college many years ago, "college for all" meant open admissions, free tuition, and race, class, and gender studies. Today, it means cutthroat competition to get in, mountains of debt to stay, and often bleak prospects when you leave. Yet "college readiness" is about to become the new AYP (adequate yearly progress) by which schools will be ranked.
The idea that by next year Common Core tests will start labeling kids in the 3rd grade as on track or not for college is absurd and offensive.
Substantive questions have been raised about the Common Core's tendency to push difficult academic skills to lower grades, about the appropriateness of the early childhood standards, about the sequencing of the math standards, about the mix and type of mandated readings, and about the priority Common Core puts on the close reading of texts in ways that devalue student experience and prior knowledge.
A decade of NCLB tests showed that millions of students were not meeting existing standards, but the sponsors of the Common Core decided that the solution was tougher ones. And this time, instead of each state developing its own standards, the Common Core seeks to create national tests that are comparable across states and districts, and that can produce results that can be plugged into the data-driven crisis machine that is the engine of corporate reform.
The way the standards are being rushed into classrooms across the country is further undercutting their credibility. These standards have never been fully implemented in real schools anywhere. They're more or less abstract descriptions of academic abilities organized into sequences by people who have never taught at all or who have not taught this particular set of standards. To have any impact, the standards must be translated into curriculum, instructional plans, classroom materials, and valid assessments. A reasonable approach to implementing new standards would include a few multi-year pilot programs that provided time, resources, opportunities for collaboration, and transparent evaluation plans.
Instead we're getting an overhyped all-state implementation drive that seems more like a marketing campaign than an educational plan. And I use the word marketing advisedly, because another defining characteristic of the Common Core project is rampant profiteering.
Joanne Weiss, Duncan's former chief of staff and head of the Race to the Top grant program, which effectively made adoption of the Common Core a condition for federal grants, described how it is opening up huge new markets for commercial exploitation:
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.
Having financed the creation of the standards, the Gates Foundation has entered into a partnership with Pearson to produce a full set of K-12 courses aligned with the Common Core that will be marketed to schools across the country. Nearly every educational product now comes wrapped in the Common Core brand name.
The curriculum and assessments our schools and students need will not emerge from this process. Instead, the top-down, bureaucratic rollout of the Common Core has put schools in the middle of a multilayered political struggle over who will control education policy--corporate power and private wealth or public institutions managed, however imperfectly, by citizens in a democratic process.
The web-based news service Politico recently described what it called "the Common Core money war," reporting that "tens of millions of dollars are pouring into the battle over the Common Core. . . . The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation already has pumped more than $160 million into developing and promoting the Common Core, including $10 million just in the past few months, and it's getting set to announce up to $4 million in new grants to keep the advocacy cranking. Corporate sponsors are pitching in, too. Dozens of the nation's top CEOs will meet to set the plans for a national advertising blitz that may include TV, radio, and print."
At the same time, opposing the Common Core is "an array of organizations with multimillion-dollar budgets of their own and much experience in mobilizing crowds and lobbying lawmakers, including the Heritage Foundation, Americans for Prosperity, the Pioneer Institute, FreedomWorks, and the Koch Bros." These groups are feeding a growing right-wing opposition to the Common Core that combines hostility to all federal education initiatives and anything supported by the Obama administration with more populist sentiments.
But while this larger political battle rages, the most immediate threat for educators and schools remains the new wave of high-stakes Common Core tests.
Duncan, who once said "The best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans was Hurricane Katrina" and who called Waiting for Superman "a Rosa Parks moment," now tells us, "I am convinced that this new generation of state assessments will be an absolute game-changer in public education."
The problem is that this game, like the last one, is rigged. Although reasonable people have found things of value in the Common Core standards, there is no credible defense to be made of the high-stakes uses planned for these new tests. Instead, the Common Core project threatens to reproduce the narrative of public school failure that just led to a decade of bad policy in the name of reform.
Reports from the first wave of Common Core testing provide evidence for these fears. Last spring, students, parents, and teachers in New York schools responded to new Common Core tests developed by Pearson with outcries against their length, difficulty, and inappropriate content. Pearson included corporate logos and promotional material in reading passages. Students reported feeling overstressed and underprepared--meeting the tests with shock, anger, tears, and anxiety. Administrators requested guidelines for handling tests students had vomited on. Teachers and principals complained about the disruptive nature of the testing process and many parents encouraged their children to opt out.
Only about 30 percent of students were deemed "proficient" based on arbitrary cut scores designed to create new categories of failure. The achievement gaps Common Core is supposed to narrow grew larger. Less than 4 percent of students who are English language learners passed. The number of students identified by the tests for "academic intervention" skyrocketed to 70 percent, far beyond the capacity of districts to meet.
The tests are on track to squeeze out whatever positive potential exists in the Common Core:
This is not just cynical speculation. It is a reasonable projection based on the history of the NCLB decade, the dismantling of public education in the nation's urban centers, and the appalling growth of the inequality and concentrated poverty that remains the central problem in public education.
Common Core has become part of the corporate reform project now stalking our schools. As schools struggle with these new mandates, we should defend our students, our schools, and ourselves by pushing back against implementation timelines, resisting the stakes and priority attached to the tests, and exposing the truth about the commercial and political interests shaping this false panacea for the problems our schools face.
There are encouraging signs that the movement we need is growing. Last year in Seattle, teachers led a boycott of district testing that drew national support and won a partial rollback of the testing. In New York this fall, parents sent score reports on new Common Core tests back to the state commissioner of education with a letter declaring "This year's test scores are invalid and provide NO useful information about student learning." Opt-out efforts are growing daily. Even some supporters of the CCSS have endorsed a call for the moratorium on the use of tests to make policy decisions. It's not enough, but it's a start.
"The victory of freeing Leonard Peltier is a symbol of our collective strength—and our resistance will never stop," vowed one Indigenous organizer.
Just minutes before leaving office, Joe Biden on Monday commuted the life prison sentence of Leonard Peltier, the elderly American Indian Movement activist who supporters say was framed for the murder of two federal agents during a 1975 reservation shootout.
"It's finally over, I'm going home," Peltier, who is 80 years old, said in a statement released by the Indigenous-led activist group NDN Collective. "I want to show the world I'm a good person with a good heart. I want to help the people, just like my grandmother taught me."
While not the full pardon for which he and his defenders have long fought, the outgoing Democratic president's commutation will allow Peltier—who has been imprisoned for nearly a half-century—to "spend his remaining days in home confinement," according to Biden's statement, which was no longer posted on the White House website after Republican President Donald Trump took office Monday afternoon.
🚨BREAKING🚨 Leonard Peltier Granted Executive Clemency After 50 years of unjust incarceration and the tireless efforts of intergenerational grassroots organizing and advocacy, our elder and relative Leonard Peltier has been granted executive clemency.
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— NDN Collective ( @ndncollective.bsky.social) January 20, 2025 at 9:02 AM
"Tribal Nations, Nobel Peace laureates, former law enforcement officials (including the former U.S. attorney whose office oversaw Mr. Peltier's prosecution and appeal), dozens of lawmakers, and human rights organizations strongly support granting Mr. Peltier clemency, citing his advanced age, illnesses, his close ties to and leadership in the Native American community, and the substantial length of time he has already spent in prison," Biden explained.
Biden Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Indigenous cabinet secretary in U.S. history, said in a statement: "I am beyond words about the commutation of Leonard Peltier. His release from prison signifies a measure of justice that has long evaded so many Native Americans for so many decades. I am grateful that Leonard can now go home to his family. I applaud President Biden for this action and understanding what this means to Indian Country."
Congressman Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.), who last month led 34 U.S. lawmakers in a letter urging clemency for Peltier, said in a statement that "for too long, Mr. Peltier has been denied both justice and the pursuit of a full, healthy life at the hands of the U.S. government, but today, he is finally able to go home."
"President Biden's decision is not just the right, merciful, and decent one—it is a testament to Mr. Peltier's resilience and the unwavering support of the countless global leaders, Indigenous voices, civil rights and legal experts, and so many others who have advocated so tirelessly for his release," Grijalva added. "While there is still much work to be done to fix the system that allowed this wrong and so many others against Indian Country, especially as we face the coming years, let us today celebrate Mr. Peltier's return home."
NDN Collective founder and CEO Nick Tilsen said Monday that "Leonard Peltier's freedom today is the result of 50 years of intergenerational resistance, organizing, and advocacy."
"Leonard Peltier's liberation is our liberation—we will honor him by bringing him back to his homelands to live out the rest of his days surrounded by loved ones, healing, and reconnecting with his land and culture," Tilsen continued.
"Let Leonard's freedom be a reminder that the entire so-called United States is built on the stolen lands of Indigenous people—and that Indigenous people have successfully resisted every attempt to oppress, silence, and colonize us," Tilsen added. "The victory of freeing Leonard Peltier is a symbol of our collective strength—and our resistance will never stop."
Amnesty International USA executive director Paul O'Brien said that "President Biden was right to commute the life sentence of Indigenous elder and activist Leonard Peltier given the serious human rights concerns about the fairness of his trial."
While Peltier admits to having participated in the June 26, 1975 gunfight at the Oglala Sioux Reservation at Pine Ridge, South Dakota, he denies killing Federal Bureau of Investigation agents Jack Coler and Ronald Williams.
As HuffPost senior political reporter Jennifer Bendery recapped Monday:
There was never evidence that Peltier committed a crime, and the U.S. government never did figure out who shot those agents. But federal officials needed someone to take the fall. The FBI had just lost two agents, and Peltier's co-defendants were all acquitted based on self-defense. So, Peltier became their guy.
His trial was rife with misconduct. The FBI threatened and coerced witnesses into lying. Federal prosecutors hid evidence that exonerated Peltier. A juror acknowledged on the second day of the trial that she had "prejudice against Indians," but she was kept on anyway.
The government's case fell apart after these revelations, so it simply revised its charges against Peltier to "aiding and abetting" whoever did kill the agents—based entirely on the fact that he was one of dozens of people present when the shootout took place. Peltier was convicted and sentenced to two consecutive life terms.
American Indian Movement (AIM) activist Joe Stuntz Killsright was also killed at Pine Ridge when a U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs agent sniper shot him in the head after Coler and Williams were killed. Stuntz' death has never been investigated.
Some Indigenous activists welcomed Peltier's commutation while also remembering Annie Mae Pictou Aquash, an Mi'kmaq activist who was kidnapped and murdered at Pine Ridge in December 1975 by her fellow AIM members. Some of Aquash's defenders believe her killing to be an assassination ordered by AIM leaders who feared she was an FBI informant.
Before leaving office, Biden issued a flurry of eleventh-hour preemptive pardons meant to protect numerous relatives and government officials whom Trump and his allies have threatened with politically motivated legal action.
However, the outgoing president dashed the hopes of figures including Steven Donziger, Charles Littlejohn, and descendants of Ethel Rosenberg, who were
seeking last-minute pardons or commutations.
"Today marks the beginning of an administration dominated by billionaires and corporate interests."
Donald Trump was sworn in Monday as the 47th president of the United States with some of the richest people on the planet standing close behind him on the inaugural platform—a symbol of what observers described as the nation's slide toward oligarchy.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai were granted "prime seats" at the event, positioned in front of many lawmakers and Trump Cabinet nominees. Amazon, Google, and Meta each donated $1 million to the president's inaugural fund, and Musk—the world's richest man—spent over $250 million backing the billionaire president's bid for a second White House term.
Tim Cook, Apple's billionaire CEO and a donor to the inauguration, was also in attendance at Monday's event, which was financed by Wall Street banks, tech giants, the pharmaceutical lobby, fossil fuel companies, crypto firms, and other corporate interests.
"Donald Trump's inauguration today is a coronation of our country's descent into oligarchy: billionaires and corporations spending hundreds of millions of dollars lining the pockets of another billionaire—now president—to usher in a presidency governed for and by the wealthy elite," Justice Democrats, a group that works to elect progressives to Congress, wrote in an email to supporters after Trump was sworn in.
"They're buying influence," the group continued. "And they can expect a massive return on their investment. Crypto is already seeing one with Trump promising an executive order handout to the Wall Street-backed Big Tech corporations on Day 1. Banks and developers are already winning out as Trump and Republicans put conditions on aid to desperate Americans who have lost their homes and need immediate disaster relief in California. This administration will be a boon for the already wealthy few and will be crushing to everyday people struggling to get by."
Nabil Ahmed, economic and racial justice director at Oxfam America, described a photo of Zuckerberg, Bezos, Pichai, and Musk standing together on the inaugural platform as "a defining photo for the new Gilded Age."
Trump's inauguration, Ahmed added, "makes clearer than ever the triumph of oligarchy—one that isn't incidental but intrinsic to the politics and policies that we're seeing set out."
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk cheers as U.S. President Donald Trump speaks after being sworn in on January 20, 2025. (Photo: Saul Loeb/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)
Trump's second administration, which could be staffed by at least 13 billionaires, is expected to bring a fresh push for large-scale deregulation and another round of tax cuts for the rich and large corporations—a giveaway that's expected to be funded in part by cuts to Medicaid, federal nutrition assistance, and other key programs.
"Today marks the beginning of an administration dominated by billionaires and corporate interests," Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) executive director David Kass said in a statement. "Unsurprisingly, a billionaire president and his top adviser—the wealthiest person on earth—will prioritize passing $5 trillion in new tax cuts benefiting themselves and their wealthy allies, all at the expense of everyday Americans."
"Let's be clear: The next four years will be a tremendous challenge," said Kass. "We are committed to fighting back against a second Trump Tax Scam because the first one helped to double billionaire wealth and exploded the deficit. ATF and its coalition members will stand on the front lines pushing back against these deeply harmful measures and fighting for a tax code and economy that works for everyone, not just the wealthy few."
Trump's return to the White House comes days after former President Joe Biden, in his farewell address to the nation, belatedly warned of the threat posed by "an oligarchy... of extreme wealth, power, and influence."
According to an Oxfam report released Monday, the world's billionaires saw their wealth surge by $2 trillion last year as progress against global poverty remained stagnant. The United States has more billionaires than any other country, and its campaign finance laws allow the ultra-wealthy to pump unlimited sums into elections.
"With the inauguration of President Donald Trump and the installation of his team of billionaires, we must prepare for an administration that's set to pour fuel on already extraordinary inequality," Abby Maxman, president and CEO of Oxfam America, said Monday. "Our country and the world today are extremely unequal; for too long, big corporations and an ultra-wealthy few have rigged the system in their own favor, at the expense of ordinary families."
"The Trump-Musk inequality agenda is not the only threat we are facing around the world, as leaders seek to divide us and conflict and climate change increase the number, severity, and duration of humanitarian crises," Maxman added. "But together, we can and must continue our fight against inequality here in the United States and globally."
"To honor her legacy and life, let's do everything we can in this moment to create the just world that everyone deserves," said former Texas lawmaker Wendy Davis.
Cecile Richards, the former president of Planned Parenthood and longtime champion of women's rights and other progressive causes, died on Monday at the age of 67. The cause was an aggressive brain cancer that had been diagnosed in 2023.
Richards' husband and three children confirmed her death in a statement posted on social media.
Richards, the daughter of forner Democratic Texas Gov. Ann Richards, had an early introduction to progressive politics. At 16 she worked on a campaign to elect Sarah Waddington, the lawyer who argued in favor of abortion rights before the U.S. Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade, and in college she helped push Brown University to divest from companies that supported apartheid in South Africa.
After years of labor organizing work, Richards became the president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America. She sat at the helm of the organization for 12 years, leading it as it became more vocal in electoral politics and fought state-level battles against abortion restrictions.
She was the national face of the organization and spoke frequently on its behalf at political events and galas, but also stood shoulder-to-shoulder with abortion rights supporters at pivotal moments in the fight against right-wing efforts to attack reproductive justice.
In 2013, after then-Texas state Sen. Wendy Davis (D-10) made national headlines by spending 13 hours filibustering an omnibus bill that contained a host of anti-abortion measures, Richards rallied supporters in the state Capitol to yell loud enough to halt the Senate debate over the legislation—a move that Republican lawmakers later blamed for the bill's failure.
"That was vital," Dave Cortez of Occupy Austin told The Texas Tribune. "Her support really helped put it all together."
Davis called Richards "a light, a champion, a force for good" on Monday.
Calling her death "a heartbreaking loss," Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) said the former Planned Parenthood leader "spent her life on the front lines, fighting for women's rights throughout this country."
After leaving Planned Parenthood in 2018, Richards co-founded the progressive political mobilization group Supermajority and toured the nation speaking out against President Donald Trump's nomination of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
She also cofounded the chatbot Charley, which connects people seeking abortion care with reproductive health organizations, and Abortion in America, a project that publishes the personal stories of people who have obtained abortions since the Supreme Court overturned Roe in 2022.
"The only thing people respond to and remember are stories," Richards told The New York Times last October. "We have to figure out: How do you catch the attention of people that, even if they could find the article, don't have 20 minutes to read it?"
Richards' death was announced just hours before Trump, who has bragged about his role in overturning Roe and mocked the family of one woman who died after being unable to receive standard care under Georgia's abortion ban, was to be sworn in for his second term in office.
"As if today wasn't bad enough, the passing of Cecile Richards, former Planned Parenthood leader, is beyond tragic for all women in U.S," said former Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.). "Her powerful voice for women's freedom has been silenced. Rest in power, dear friend."
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) said Richards "modeled guts and grit in public service, showing courage and fortitude beyond words as a champion of women's reproductive freedom."
In their statement, Richards' family asked that supporters who wish to honor her listen to "some New Orleans jazz, gather with friends and family over a good meal, and remember something she said a lot over the last year: It's not hard to imagine future generations one day asking, 'When there was so much at stake for our country, what did you do?'"
"The only acceptable answer is: Everything we could."