This is my review of a blog post by Laura H Chapman on Diane Ravitch’s blog, here. Her words are in red and are reprinted under a Creative Commons license.
Rather than simply “correcting” the inadequate Common Core standards, they should be reconstructed and redesigned from the ground up. … They should be tossed—folded, stapled, mutilated, burned.
Either rebuilding the Common Core or burning it will cost a lot of money, which we don’t have. I don’t want to start from Square One. I would rather spend some time collecting information from teachers across America, in states that properly implemented the Common Core after a year or two, if there are any states like that to be found, and strengthen the standards that seem to be working while deleting or repairing those that haven’t been effective.
Besides, the real problem is the over-testing of US students, the time that robs from their teachers, and the learning it costs them everywhere. We need to fix No Child Left Behind, and then, we can talk about what standards teachers can teach. Right now, the standards are all but irrelevant, since teachers are teaching material that will be on a test, not the material found in the learning standards.
It is certainly not true that all the standards are ineffective. Liz Bowie, a star reporter for the Baltimore Sun, told columnist Don Rodricks, here, that in all her education reporting, she hadn’t talked to a single teacher who opposed the standards themselves. Yes, the testing is too much. Yes, the implementation in Baltimore County was completely botched in terms of getting a curriculum into the hands of teachers so they could prepare their lessons. But over all, the standards were OK, she said.
Why would we want to step back to 2009, when many states had standards that were so low, high school graduates hadn’t achieved literacy or numeracy?
They are based on lies about “college readiness,” and they are based on lies about “careers.”
Correct, with a qualifier. The standards don’t guarantee college-readiness, simply because different colleges and universities require different standards for admission and readiness. The same holds for careers. To be “career-ready” as a butcher clearly doesn’t require the same grasp of literature or trigonometry as being career-ready for a book reviewer or chemist.
These buzz words reflect terrible PR on the part of education advocates, including Lillian Lowery, Maryland state superintendent of schools, who has renamed the state’s standards in order to remove the words “Common Core.”
Bad marketing doesn’t make the standards bad, though. The standards were not, now or ever, even with the rebranding and renaming, “based on” college- or career-readiness. Those buzz words came after the standards were developed. But we should have just left them as “Common Core,” in my opinion. This attack on the Common Core is therefore irrelevant to education, and our old standards didn’t make students “college- or career-ready” either.
They are based on lies about being “state led.”
That depends on what you think the National Governors Association (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) are. These organizations are made up of the real governors and real school chiefs from each state. They’re professional organizations, and they do have agendas that don’t necessarily lead, in all cases, to a better education for US students, but each person’s ex officio inclusion in the organizations is bona fide. Each member was elected by people in the states or appointed by an official who was elected by the people in the states.
If you believe these are not legitimate representatives of our states, then there’s no talking to you. These two organizations came together to lead the charge five years ago to develop the standards that now make up the Common Core. I believe these organizations are legitimate, because people can only be in them if they are actually governors or top school officers in a state. You may have a different opinion about the legitimacy of these organizations.
They are based on lies about “international benchmarking.”
It’s not easy to determine what Ms Chapman means here. If on the one hand, she’s arguing that the standards “should” be based on international benchmarks and they aren’t, she’s probably mostly correct. There are many, many standards in the Common Core, and not all of them exist as learning benchmarks in other countries, probably. But some of them do.
If the “lie” she’s refering to, on the other hand, is that the standards in the Common Core are not found in the learning benchmarks put out by other countries, that’s false.
In either case, though, I don’t care what the standards are “based on.” Are the standards good or aren’t they? We can waste space and time talking about what they’re based on, or we can get to work implementing them, collecting information about them from teachers who are actually working with them in their classrooms, and strengthening them through additions or deletions.
They are based on phony baloney ideas about “text complexity”
The standards require us to raise the level of text complexity in textbooks and reading materials used by students across all grade levels. This requirement came from a large research base that showed that the difficulty of student reading textbooks over the last 50 years had gone down sharply.
But this may not be true. Research out of Penn State last year showed, based on an analysis of 117 textbook series issued by 30 publishers between 1905 and 2004, that “text complexity has either risen or stabilized over the past half century; these findings have significant implications for the justification of the CCSS as well as for our understanding of a ‘decline’ within American schooling more generally.”
However, US students still stumble with complex texts, we all admit. Is that really bad, though? Do we need to set the bar for every single student at the ability to comprehend complex texts? Probably not, and this is where the standards need a little revision, especially in the early grades.
[They are based on] a one-size-fits-all notion of grade-to-grade “learning progressions” and on-time “mastery” right out of a factory model of education—no child left behind on the assembly line.
No argument here.
Look, students learn at different paces. Ms Lowery recently said students should be measured on “growth,” not on an ability to meet a specified achievement level by the end of a certain grade.
She was, I believe, addressing teacher evaluation, but her gist was that not every student should be expected to advance to the same level of achievement by the end of their same grade level in school.
These standards are the production of Bill Gates, Inc., …, aided by for-hire workers and federal appointees in USDE who are so dumb they think standards do not have implications for curriculum.
The people who work at the Maryland State Department of Education are very smart. I don’t know how smart or dumb the people are who work at the US Department of Education. The claim that Bill Gates “produced” the standards is ad hominem. Again, I don’t care, really, how they got here. Are they good? How can we do better? These are the questions we need to ask. Whoever made them, made them. Let’s get to work.
I cannot find any reference to people not realizing that standards drive both the curriculum used in our schools and the tests the various states administer to measure students’ progress in those schools. The whole point, in fact, is that both the curriculum and the tests reflect the standards that have been adopted, accepted, signed and sealed, by our state boards of education or state legislatures with the advice and consent of the state boards, however it works in the various states.
I do not understand the comment about workers being “for-hire.” I myself was hired to be a worker. I don’t understand the comment.
The process of generating the 1,620 standards (including parts a-e) was so uncoordinated that nobody seems to have noticed that the only topic in math taught at every grade is geometry, with not an ounce of supporting rationale for that emphasis.
The process by which the standards documentation was created is irrelevant at this point. Are the standards good? How can we improve them? These are the relevant questions. Looking in the rear-view mirror is fine and makes for great writing, but I have to deal with people who are actually working in our schools. The argument about process is irrelevant to them and to our children.
Algebra can’t be taught in the lower grades, because kids’ brains aren’t wired for formal operational thinking, or abstract thought, until about fifth grade, in most cases. The notion of excluding algebra in the lower grades is supported in research going back a long time.
As for geometry, it can, in fact, be taught to young children, since shapes are concrete things. Kids can draw them in the younger grades and then, when algebraic thinking is accessible to them in middle school or high school, they can analyze those shapes.
Likewise, number operations in base 10 only get kids so far. There’s a vast world of number theory out there, waiting for them to be amazed about, and they’ll get to that in college, if they choose to pursue those studies. But the well for adding, dividing, and finding square roots for numbers in base 10 runs a little dry by the time kids get to high school, when they need to switch from operations in base 10 to operations with complex numbers. In elementary school, there’s no need to work with anything but base 10 numbers.
Finally, it’s not the purpose of the standards document to supply a “rationale” for doing something. That came as part of the public comment phase during the development of the standards.
Prior to grade three the standards in English Language Arts (ELA) and math are off-the-charts wrong-headed, free of … this basic understanding: No one can simply reverse engineer back to childhood what someone may earnestly hope kids will “know and be able to do,” if they graduate from high school. Education is not an engineering problem. It is not the same as training.
This blanket statement doesn’t give me enough space to evaluate it. The devil is in the details, as Ms Chapman knows, and I can neither support nor refute a blanket statement about the wrongheadedness of an entire grade level of standards.
But although “reverse engineered” is not the correct term, what Ms Chapman means—that the standards started with high school and then worked their way back to kindergarten in the development process—is probably true. I also believe this is how they were written. My support for this belief comes from the standards themselves.
In math, we find these two standards in algebraic thinking and algebra:
- 5th Grade.OA.A.2: Write simple expressions that record calculations with numbers, and interpret numerical expressions without evaluating them.
- High School.SSE.A.1.A: Interpret parts of an expression, such as terms, factors, and coefficients.
This is an example of a good reason for starting with the goal of high school in mind and working backwards to fifth grade. However, Ms Chapman is correct in suggesting it doesn’t come out so well every time you do this sort of writing.
Sometimes, it would have been better to write standards for elementary and middle school because those things are appropriate for elementary and middle school, not because some people would view those standards as some sort of stepping stone toward the high school standard.
Perhaps, the problematic standards would show up in a national review, as I keep hoping will take place, with collections of information from randomly selected teachers, working in real schools and teaching real students from a curriculum driven by the Common Core standards. The blanket statement, however, is rejected.
These standards are intended to suck the vitality out of instruction in all other subjects, including the sciences, arts, and humanities. All are now subordinate to and are treated as if they must be “aligned” with the Common Core. Non-sense. Should be the other way around so students have a reason to read and calculate—content and problems and unknowns in these broad domains of inquiry.
I do not know the intentions of the standards or of the people who developed them or encouraged their creation or funded the work.
All evidence suggests that learning standards aren’t powerful enough to suck the vitality out of instruction. Many of our schools are thriving and have a lot of vitality.
By counter-example, the argument is rejected.
However, it may be the case that in some schools, the vitality is gone. It would be interesting to see what the vitality levels were like in those schools before the Common Core standards were developed. It would be necessary, if such a study could be conducted on real children, to know how much of the Common Core has been faithfully implemented in those schools. No use blaming the Common Core if it hasn’t even been used in schools whose vitality levels dropped since 2012.
Without such evidence, I can neither confirm nor deny Ms Chapman’s point, but I agree it should be the other way around. Kids learn about numbers so they can use math in their lives. Kids learn to read so they can enjoy reading and learn in the information age.
The CCSS distract attention from the historic mission of sustaining a democracy through education centrally concerned with informed citizenship, leaning what life offers and may require beyond getting a job and going to college.
This statement assumes that schools will teach nothing but the standards in the Common Core. This has never been true, with any set of standards, now or ever. The argument is rejected due to a false premise.
The learning standards in the Common Core do not address democracy or citizenship. Because these are red herrings, the argument is also rejected. Nor do they address “what life has to offer.” Nor did our standards in reading and math that were in place before the Common Core.
… The CCSS is a profit-making bonanza. Yesterday at OfficeMax I had the opportunity to buy a grade-level set of the CCSS, $20 per grade, boxed and formatted for a teacher’s use to appease the principals and other evaluators who will have their checklists to see whether you have posted the “expected learnings” for the ELA and math standards. These poster-like cards of the CCSS are plasticized for durability and coded with the CCSS numbering system for easy data-entry on the accountability spreadsheets that each teacher will need to “populate” with data.
This is appalling, and I appreciate the fact that Ms Chapman echoes it here. I don’t believe kids have ever had to know the standards. Those are written for teachers, and kids just have to know the content. I am also appalled at AstroTurf groups, carpetbaggers, and know-nothings that have plagued our classrooms with worthless trinkets. If posting this junk is required to meet some evaluator’s checklist, that person is not an evaluator of educators but of corporate drones.
