Ordinarily, I don’t have too many issues with the reporting in the Washington Post. It’s one of our country’s great national newspapers. But an article Sunday went afoul of the facts so many times, someone needs to step in and set the record straight. The article opens as follows:
A team of teachers and the principal of Piney Branch Elementary School hovered over two math questions designed to test fourth-grade students on their understanding of perimeter.
One question came from the current Maryland standardized exam, asking students to select the right answer from choices A, B, C or D. The other came from the new test students will take starting in 2014. It had no multiple-choice options, and students have to explain their answers “using numbers, symbols and words.”
“How are we going to teach them to learn and think this way?” teacher Veronica Munoz asked.
The fact is, statewide standardized tests in Maryland, since the days of MSPAP (about 1991), have asked fourth graders to “explain” their math answers “using words, numbers and/or symbols” or some other combination of those three. See a few “brief constructed response” items released to the public from the fourth-grade assessment in mathematics, here or here.
I would answer Ms Munoz that she should teach her students to learn and think this way just as I hope she’s already doing. And that will, I hope, happen.
But there’s no way the paper should have allowed a factual misrepresentation to appear in the first three paragraphs of an article. The subject of “Educator Effectiveness Academies,” where the primary concern this year is, yes, preparing for the new Common Core tests in math and English/language arts coming from PARCC, is very important in Maryland, and getting the story wrong is just unacceptable.
The article’s author then writes, “Educators must teach math in a way that is strikingly different from how they, and their students’ parents, learned it.”
That would also be a terrible misrepresentation. Maryland’s math curriculum, as tested on the MSA, is similar enough to the Common Core State Standards in math that the ways of teaching should not be “strikingly different.”
Neither the Common Core itself nor the tests that are being developed for it specify a method of teaching the topics anyway. As long as the topics are taught, teachers are free to teach them in whatever way they feel is appropriate for their own students.
Teaching fourth graders to compute area, for example, doesn’t have to be any different using the learning objective found in the Common Core (Apply the area … formulas for rectangles in real world and mathematical problems. For example, find the width of a rectangular room given the area of the flooring and the length, by viewing the area formula as a multiplication equation with an unknown factor) from teaching it to them when the learning objective was found in the Maryland State Curriculum (Determine area … Use rectangles with the length of the sides in whole numbers [0–100]).
The same lessons that teach the standard under the Common Core can also be used to teach it under our State Curriculum, which is the source material for the MSA—and which teachers should already be using in their classrooms. Characterizing this as “strikingly different” is inaccurate.
To be fair, some topics are in lower grades than they were under the former State Curriculum, and elementary school teachers who need to brush up on their elementary school math are just as common in Maryland as they are in any other state. It’s just that any drastic changes affecting teachers under the Common Core have nothing to do with the Common Core itself. Adjustments need to be made and skills brushed up, but if it takes a new “curriculum” to cause that to happen, all the better for students.