This letter by Stephen Krashen, professor emeritus of education and linguistics at the University of Southern California, will be posted today on the New York Times website. I just received it:
The common core movement seems to be common sense: Our schools should have similar standards, what students should know at each grade. The movement, however, is based on the false assumption that our schools are broken, that ineffective teaching is the problem and that rigorous standards and tests are necessary to improve things.
The mediocre performance of American students on international tests seems to show that our schools are doing poorly. But students from middle-class homes who attend well-funded schools rank among the best in world on these tests, which means that teaching is not the problem. The problem is poverty. Our overall scores are unspectacular because so many American children live in poverty (23 percent, ranking us 34th out of 35 “economically advanced countries”).
Poverty means inadequate nutrition and health care, and little access to books, all associated with lower school achievement. Addressing those needs will increase achievement and better the lives of millions of children.
How can we pay for this? Reduce testing. The common core demands an astonishing increase in testing, far more than needed and far more than the already excessive amount required by No Child Left Behind.
No Child Left Behind requires tests in math and reading at the end of the school year in grades 3 to 8 and once in high school. The common core will test more subjects and more grade levels, and adds tests given during the year. There may also be pretests in the fall.
The cost will be enormous. New York City plans to spend over half a billion dollars on technology in schools, primarily so that students can take the electronically delivered national tests.
Research shows that increasing testing does not increase achievement. A better investment is protecting children from the effects of poverty, in feeding the animal, not just weighing it.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Getting some clarity and focus here. We’ll probably spend billions of dollars on more tests. These tests will help inform instruction by? Well you and I know they won’t. So rather than spend the money on trying to solve the problem of poverty or employing solutions that may help those impoverished, we’ll just shovel money towards Pearson, McGraw-Hill, Rupert, charters and others. The ROI will still be zero and we’ll still have those pesky social and economic issues. No wonder we need cheap TNTP, Fellows and TFA labor. Two and done. Savings abound! Whew! No need to budget for salary increases, pensions, health care costs and expenses, bonuses and other assorted benefits. Everyone wins except the children. And that is all too pathetic.
The high school where I’ve taught math for 6 years in Seattle, Franklin, is appx. 70% FRL and has appx 1250 to 1350 students. My students need, needed and will need the kinds of support that kids would tend to get from family situations where someone has a family wage job, therefore there are adults around to hopefully provide support to the young.
Out here in Seattle, we’re afflicted by an alphabet soup of Astro Turfs funded by Gate$ – LEV, SFC, PFL, CRPE, NCTQ, A+ WA, … and when I go to ed deform events, I see the same social cla$$ I supported in prior careers.
I grew up on welfare in Holyoke MA, and cooked in fine dining (ex. Four Seasons Hotels, Boston) for 5 years during the 80’s. After risking my butt on Alaska tugs and fishing boats, I picked up a math b.a. at the U.W. Seattle, and worked as a support serf at Microsoft for appx. 5 years, supporting email servers and database servers. I know what people from fancy neighborhoods, with fancy degrees, with fancy job titles and with fancy paychecks look like – I’ve supported them for decades.
I know what corp-0-rat CON$ultant speak from this social cla$$ is about, I lived it for decades. Just as this social cla$$ has done little to improve health care access for the country, other than enhancing the current duct tape and coat hanger mess of AHIP-Care, just as this social cla$$ has allowed wall street to turn our retirments into Junk-Care –
this social cla$$ has done NOTHING to help me help my kids.
There are NO ideas which I get on a Monday and which I can use on Tuesday. The supports which do happen are underfunded and random. The touted ideas lack the details to implement the ideas, and the ideas certainly lack the resources to pay for the time needed to implement the details (oops! the details don’t exist!).
There are fancy powerpoints, There are slick soundbites. There are nice paychecks and there are nice cars and there are nice houses in nice ‘hoods, and there are nice junkets for the social cla$$ –
This is an elite social cla$$ who could come from the pages of Game Of Thrones, who could be the Ringwraiths of Sauron, who could come from the pages of Plutarch, The Guns of August, The Prince, Richard III or 1984.
This social cla$$ is a parasitic elite.
rmm.
He says, “But students from middle-class homes who attend well-funded schools rank among the best in world on these tests,”
Can he supply some evidence for this?
Read this report on PISA scores, http://www.hks.harvard.edu/pepg/PDF/Papers/PEPG11-03_GloballyChallenged.pdf , especially Figure A.3.
If you look at math proficiency rates for U.S. kids from college-educated families, they’re not doing as well as the OVERALL average (not just from college-educated families) in Germany, New Zealand, Belgium, Macao, Netherlands, Canada, Japan, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Taiwan, Finland, Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Shanghai. Clearly, if you restricted the comparison to kids from college-educated families in other countries, there would be even more countries out-performing the U.S.
http://nasspblogs.org/principaldifference/2010/12/pisa_its_poverty_not_stupid_1.html
That analysis is misleading. See http://www.amandaripley.com/blog/why_do_our_rich_kids_rank_no._23_in_math/
There are so many ways to respond to this. I can talk about growing up in Jersey City, in the 60’s in a poor working family, but getting an education because my family knew it was important and pushed all 5 children.
As a teacher I can talk about the poor students without meals, pencils, paper, etc., but with cell phones, sneakers, etc.
Yes, we are facing many different problems today and the answers need to be just as varied. We are spending so much money on poor cities and schools, but in the wrong way. Schools have to become part of the community and the solution. Schools should have health clinics with them, baby sitting, adult education, technical training, job counseling and placement, and political involment. Companies need to invest in these areas to reach potential workers.
The people attending these schools need to see the need for education. They need to see that they are valuable to the community, city, state, and country.
We are leaving the inner cities and the poor behind. If we don’t get them involved I’m afraid oth groups like terrorists will.
Sorry I ranted but had to.
Excellent comment.
Lucky me gets to spend the week at a conference with dr. Krashen. A great defender of quality Ed.
Thank you for naming the crux of the problem.
It is posted now and they are inviting reader responses to be printed Sunday.
Editors’ Note: We invite readers to respond to this letter for the Sunday Dialogue. We plan to publish responses and Mr. Krashen’s rejoinder in the Sunday Review. E-mail: letters@nytimes.com
“If I had an enemy bigger than my apathy I could have won.”
-Mumford & Sons
Just about sums it up. More parent involvement. Less of a general sense of entitlement. A greater sense of personal responsibility in the next generation. These are the things that will get our education system back on track. Tests simply monitor the situation, but do little to actually effect it besides divert funding. I worry that we won’t know what we should have been fighting for until it is too late.
Dr. Krashen and I had a short back and forth about this, ( http://tucsoncitizen.com/tired-tucson-teacher/2012/05/18/the-common-core-standards-and-unfunded-mandates/ ). He lamented my glorifying the idea of common objective goals across the nation. I explained my issue was that often children move from one state to another and they have been taught according to the curriculum in the state they have come from and it does not align with the state they are going to since those curriculums are set by each individual state. What genius came up with that idea?
While we did not agree on the Common Core, I believe we were both on the same page in saying that testing progress towards those core goals was unnecessary. ( http://tucsoncitizen.com/tired-tucson-teacher/2012/05/19/back-to-the-common-core-wait-wait-dr-krashen-dont-shoot-yet/ ). I still believe that developmentally appropriate objectives, set up sequentially (though not necessarily by age or grade), are a good idea, just as I believe standardized tests are not.
As long as they have adequate materials, sufficient support and a reasonable class size, good teachers delivering a curriculum know whether their kids are getting it. They will assess as needed, that’s why they are the teacher.
So why all the tests? How could policy makers possibly have gone in this direction? While I believe the tests have gone too far, there was a need for an impartial, third-party, objective look at how our schools/students/teachers were doing. Prior to the NCLB mandate for state tests our schools presented an ubiquity of social promotions and graduating everyone, especially in too many of our under performing urban schools. Students “graduating” while reading at or below a fourth grade level? Policy makers concluded parents, taxpayers, and school officials had to know how students were performing. Again, the tests have perhaps gone too far, but there was reasonable justification for it, and not so Pearson could realize outrageous profits from such an endeavor. If we’re going to discuss an issue why not present both sides of it?
Are you kidding? Kids are being pushed through now. Have you
heard about credit recovery and adminstrators changing our grades?Students cannot have below a 50 even if they do nothing. Students who score basic or below basic still advance to the next grade. Teachers are told to change grades or be written up for insubordination. Flunk a course and just retake it on the computer, an extremely watered down version…..guess, guess again until you get it right. Look into the adminstration and politicians and non-edcuator reformers for all this insanity. And you are defending Pearson?
How is my statement defending Pearson? They’re in the business for one reason and one reason only, the sheckles. They’re leeches in my book making enormous profits from a system gone wild.
And teachers need to make administrative practices known to the public and the media. Their actions are nothing short of fraudulent when they force teachers to push kids through regardless of effort or performance. Are you state legislators aware of these shenanigans? If they aren’t, they should be.
Professor Krashen locates the problem with American children’s aggregate educational achievement in the prevalence of poverty, and argues we can alleviate this by taking funds from too much testing and re-direct these funds towards nutrition, health care and more books. If only such a class biased culture of miseducation could be overcome this easily.
However, an unbiased cultural of learning is available. The components of this culture as identified by Hargreaves are “Slow leading” (2006, citing Hargreaves & Fink), “Slow schooling,” (2006, citing Honore) and “Slow forms of knowing” (2005, citing Claxton). Admittedly, a well fed healthy child should thrive if provided this kind of learning context:
Slow leading:
• Emphasize learning, then achievement, then testing
• Do not narrow the achievement gap by widening the learning gap
• Resist the karaoke curriculum
• Protect and promote deep learning in the arts, humanities and health education
• Devise ways for children to take tests individually, when they are ready, instead of all at once.
• Provide time for unstructured play and conversation with colleagues as well as children
• Act urgently for improvement; wait patiently for results
• Are evidence-informed
• Understand and communicate that deep change takes time
• Retain depth in staff development
Slow schooling:
• starts formal learning later
• reduces testing
• increases curriculum flexibility
• emphasizes enjoyment
• doesn’t hurry the child
• rehabilitates play alongside purpose
Slow forms of knowing
• are tolerant of the faint, fleeting, marginal and ambiguous
• likes to dwell on details that do not fit or immediately make sense
• are relaxed, leisurely and playful
• are willing to explore without knowing what they are looking for
• see ignorance and confusion as the ground from which understanding may spring
• are receptive rather than proactive
• are happy to relinquish the sense of control over the directions the mind spontaneously takes
• treat seriously ideas that come ‘out of the blue’
Hargreaves, Andy (2005). Seven Principles of Sustainable Leadership. Retrieved April
04, 2008, from
http://ssre05.educanet2.ch/info/pdf/Present/Hargreaves%20Andy%20-
%20Seven%20Principles%20of%20Sustainable%20Leadership.pdf
Hargreaves, Andy (2006, November).
Sustainable Leadership.
Speech presented at Literacy for All | Northeast K-6 Literacy Conference,
Providence, Rhode Island.
—
Charles H. Settles
255 Massachusetts Avenue, #808
Boston, MA 02115
617-267-3864
It is NOT poverty as much as it is “bad” areas = bad behavior!!!! And, the bad behavior goes back 6 generations in some areas!!! I have been able to inspire some of my impoverished students to want to read & learn, and sadly, they do not receive continued support at home. We need to instill the value of learning to the aliterate adults & delinquent older siblings in the HOME!!!!
Behavior is certainly an issue but I spent my last year as a behavior interventionist, dealing with children, and their caregivers. Poverty is an problem, at least as much as family upbringing is. Several of the children that I referred to privately as “frequent fliers” were being raised exclusively by grandparents, the parents having abdicated the responsibility. In the main I found the grandparents to be cooperative and willing to follow through on suggestions for consequences. And yet their own children, the parents were not in the picture. It is very troubling and not easily solved.
Significantly two other young friends of mine, in a professional sense, were students who were in foster care situations. Their openness about the reasons for their placement and the frustration they felt because of this was disheartening to both me and to them. I felt they had entirely too much knowledge about what should have been an adult’s problem.
We desperately need to reassess how we are raising children in this hyper-electronic, instant news saturated and ultra-culturally aware environment.
Join our group on FB. You would be such an inspiration and asset to our page. We are fighting common core. Thank you,
Regards,
Patricia Villella