Friends and foes of the Common Core standards packed a meeting room in Indiana to discuss its future.
This issue creates strange alliances. The new state superintendent Glenda Ritz opposes them. So does the Tea Party. But other hard-right conservatives like former superintendent Tony Bennett and Jeb Bush are strong advocates for CC.
Mike Petrilli of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute urged the legislators to stay the course because the CC will raise performance (how does he know?), the states started the standards (not really), and the states will get lots of innovation once there is a national marketplace (a new era for edu-entrepreneurs).
It is impossible to know how the CC standards will work, since no one knows. Most people think scores will drop, since that happened in Kentucky. New York state’s leaders have already predicted a big score decline. Will there be more and better academic achievement? No one knows.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I see no harm in running an experiment such as CCSS on an entire nation of children… if your goal is to dismantle public education.
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The coalition behind common core opponents in Indiana is bi-partisan. Many teacher groups who support public education were also at the rally which 500 people attended to support the bill to drop out of CCSI. There is so much to dislike about the CC standards, people from all points of the political spectrum oppose it!
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“It may come as a surprise to readers of popular media, but individuals like Mike Petrilli, Eric Osberg, Rick Hess (all listed on the USDOE resource web site) or Bryan Hassel wouldn’t generally be considered credible scholars in school finance or economics of education”
http://schoolfinance101.wordpress.com/2011/06/06/roza-tinted-reality/
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I recall Indiana’s ELA standards being very well designed, as American standards go, but now I can’t find a copy of the old ones. Anyone have a link?
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I was impressed with the Indiana standards too.
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Tom – here’s a link https://learningconnection.doe.in.gov/Standards/PrintLibrary.aspx.
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Common Core and the PARCC Assessment can only be described with one word in Illinois: daunting. Illinois school districts are losing resources yearly, state aid being among them. Last year the state prorated its aid to schools at 94%. This year it is expected to be at 89%, and next year it could be as low as 80%. All this as expectations go up. The little glimpses we’ve received in our numerous staff meetings of the possible PARCC assessment have left us feeling overwhelmed to say the least. Next week the Illinois State Board of Education will vote on whether to increase cut scores on the ISAT test to better align with the rigorous Common Core Standards. This will result in a significant decrease in the number of students meeting or exceeding state standards. I teach in an Illinois Spotlight School (defined as high poverty schools where high academic performance is closing the “achievement gap”). We have faced many challenges with the lack of funding coming into our school. We used to be on the cutting edge of new technology but now we are faced with an outdated computer lab where large groups of students will gather to take the future PARCC assessments. This will present a huge challenge not only with our infrastructure but with many of our students as well. Many students will not have the skills to take on-line assessments as they have been working in small RtI groups during computer classes (a sad reality). Many students still don’t have computers at home. I believe strongly that students need good, solid foundation skills and a wide range of experiences before they can think critically. The lack of funding has caused our school to limit field trips to one per year. I predict that number to go down to zero in the near future. I hope Illinois follows Indiana’s lead in having a serious discussion about the Common Core and especially the timing. Our teachers have been scrambling to find resources that align to the Common Core. And now our students will be tested before full implementation? I have no objection to high expectations for students and accountability for students and teachers. But we must be given time, resources, and a seat at the policy table. I feel like I’m on a sinking ship. A moratorium on any new assessments until we have implemented, developed resources, and made reasonable changes to the CC sounds like a good life raft to me right now.
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As with so many initiatives, I can see both good and bad things with the CC. I think it is good to aim high and have high standards, but having impossible ones means teachers will just make up their own standards given what their students need to learn.
Expecting 6th grade students to develop writing skills in argument, information, narration, and research could only be done by someone who has not taught 6th graders under our current kind of schedule (namely, four core classes, each 45-minute periods once a day). Given that the same teachers are also teaching reading and literature and speaking, something will have to give. I know the standards are meant to apply to all classes, so let’s say the research writing is done in science, the argumentative in social studies, and information in math, it might be reasonable to teach only one kind in that time frame (and grade it well). This will also mean that the math, science and social studies teachers will have to allow time in their standards for developing these skills, be good writers, and be good teachers of writing–something for which I don’t think they generally have prepared.
One of my old teaching manuals that I got over 30 years ago for my teaching license said the expectation was for students to be able to write a good paragraph by the end of Junior High. Isn’t that a hoot now? But the contrast tells us something about how we’ve condensed almost to the point of incompetence. If you taught 7th grade during the writing test years as I did, you know that just mastering a basic expository essay takes all year and a lot of focus and work–on sentences, paragraphs, and essay form (we actually even started in 6th since we had a looping model and still it felt like a great accomplishment). And still we only usually achieved, in a high performing district, a 70% pass rate. But our students left 7th grade writing well compared to what I see in the classroom today without that focus. Spread many standards so thin and you have a mess. I do wonder if grade level teachers were on the CC committee…
On the other hand, I agree with everything the CC writers say about their motivations based on how performance has declined, for example, in reading over the last decades. We quit teaching great books and allowed students to read anything they liked so of course their reading was rarely challenging and also rarely communal. We ceased taking on good books together to discover their meaning. We have modified to the point of very little critical thinking expectations. We did need a new plan–I speak for Language Arts, of course, I am not familiar enough with the standards in other areas.
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I’d ask, why aren’t the social studies teachers good writers? Didn’t they graduate from college and many even from graduate school? This is why all teacher should be well rounded scholars and well-educated. Why did anyone assume that they’d get to teach content without any other academic or life skills added in?
Part of the reason that we are in this mess is because this work has not been happening for a long time. Reading and writing levels went down, so teachers in non-ELA courses stopped fighting the battle. (this is, of course, a generalization, but it mainly true). How many courses are making students think mathematically? None.
Every teacher in every class should be able to add an interesting sidenote on virtually any subject that comes up. Is the reformers model going to fix this? No, it will be worse.
Still, it has, and should continue to be, our responsibility as teachers to fight to push our students’ learning in all directions, regardless of the nonsense going on outside of our control. It is just plain sad that we have to point out to subject teachers that they should be including reading and writing in their instruction.
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There are a lot of good reasons to adopt the Common Core Standards. They really do provide an excellent framework for what would would love to see our students doing: thinking, writing, finding evidence in text, justifying arguments, and persevering in problem solving. That being said, it is clear that there are some crazy problems that will require a lot more thoughtful implementation. There is no technology to prepare for the tests. There are no curricular materials to support teachers. There are serious problems with expectations for students in middle and high school (less so at the elementary level). There is incredible confusion over the extent to which informational text is to be integrated (do science teachers incorporate more text or do English teacher incorporate more content? Again, not as big of an issue at the elementary level.) The biggest problem is that we are doing this in an environment of hostility between states and teachers, totally ignoring the effects of poverty on background knowledge and performance, and it is all WAY TOO FAST! I truly view the Common Core as an overall positive development in a sea of horrific rhee-forms. It is correct to say that it is an experiment. We are still not sure if students will be able to rise to the challenge. If they do not, we fear that teachers will take the blame yet again. Standards by themselves are great but introducing them in a toxic environment with no money to back them up is not going to work.
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