Jim Martinez decided to research the sources of the Common Core State Standards. Given their importance as a redesign of the nation’s highly decentralized education system, we can expect to see many more such efforts to understand the origins of this important document.
“Engaging the nonsense – a brief investigation of the Common Core”
A teacher asked me where the Common Core came from, another suggested that I “teach” the Common Core in my Master’s degree level courses.
So my curiosity got the best of me and I spent some time understanding something about Common Core from my perspective as a scholar and educator.
My first discovery is that the Common Core is a political document. That may seem fairly obvious, but what I mean is that there is an identifiable political ideology and history that has contributed greatly to the current document. I’ve attached a link to document that led me to this conclusion.
http://www.corestandards.org/the-standards – English Language Arts Appendix A
This document contains references to supporting representative research for the Common Core. As I read the document something caught my eye, it was the following quote from Adams (2009)
““There may one day be modes and methods of information delivery that are as efficient and powerful as text, but for now there is no contest. To grow, our students must read lots, and more specifically they must read lots of ‘complex’ texts—texts that offer them new language, new knowledge, and new modes of thought””
This bothered me. I don’t agree with the statement and so I decided to read Adams (2009) I did a Google search and found this:
http://www.childrenofthecode.org/interviews/adams.htm – The Challenge of Advanced Texts:The Interdependence of Reading and Learning.
From the text I figured out that Adams is a heavy weight in reading and literacy circles (pun intended) there’s just a style of writing and authoritative stance that gives you clues, I then looked her up in Wikipedia to confirm my suspicions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilyn_Jager_Adams
If you read the article you find that not only is she a heavy weight, she is politically connected as in, inside the room when policy decisions are made.
I Googled a little more and came to this document.
http://www.niu.edu/cedu_richgels/PDFs/Adams1991.pdf
It’s a critique on her work in the 1990s that refers to her government directed research on phonics instruction. The critique and her response are very informative. It took me a couple of hours to find these documents and read parts of them and I think I found some answers to some questions and was provoked to some other thoughts that I will share with you now.
Common Core includes in it’s history, No Child Left Behind and other national educational policy reports dating back to A Nation At Risk (1983). It’s important to remember that most research is government funded and so it is unfair to critique educational research for it’s funding source. However, it is absolutely fair to question who gets to decide what the research is about and how that research is presented and used.
I happened to pursue a line of inquiry that involved Adams (2009) but there were many other researchers cited (Beck and Mckeown, vocabulary development, are notable as well) in the Common Core. I disagreed with Adams and I wanted to explore the source of the disagreement, the critiques helped clarify my understanding of my disagreement. The critiques also provided valuable insights on the theoretical framework Adams uses in her research. I still disagree with her, but I am respectful of her efforts. Which brings me to my next point.
There are many researchers cited in the Common Core, with many research agendas, using many methodological approaches across many disciplines. There is no cohesive theoretical framework or agreement on what constitutes the best approaches from a scientific research perspective to teaching and learning being represented in the document. Critics of the representative research in the Common Core abound. Some of the representative research consists of laboratory trials with small numbers of students, some include longitudinal studies and some of the research includes significant limitations that should be considered carefully when considering the claims that are made in the research.
Given the ambition of a national educational policy it seems that the best policy makers could come up with are some “best practices” that have achieved some success. It is very helpful to publicize that kind information, however, we have to ask: Is it useful to claim that a patchwork quilt of research underlying a set of standards is a framework for a solution to the educational challenges this country faces?
When teachers are asked to implement standards that they feel “do not make sense” it is not that teachers are simply ignorant and require professional development, it is in my opinion, the initial reaction of a person engaged in a craft/practice that is highly dependent and responsive to local conditions.
The Common Core standards are derived, in part, from an abstraction (the patchwork quilt of research) and are being pushed on to practitioners. The research strands that I examined tended toward the notion that knowledge acquisition is the endgame of school-based learning. I would not be surprised if that were true of many of the other research strands as that sentiment is pervasive in education.
Knowledge acquisition learning is about remembering and being able to manipulate abstract knowledge. We determine that a student has acquired knowledge by testing or providing a task that can only be completed if the individual has the requisite skill or knowledge. The Common Core is intended to set the standard for this type of learning and so there must be tests. Let’s set aside for the moment that the standardized tests we already use are not calibrated to the Common Core. If we believe in an educational system that prioritizes knowledge acquisition in the service of a national security agenda (economic competitiveness, technology dominance, etc.) then testing is necessary.
We experience the consequences of this priority in classrooms every day. I don’t have to detail them here.
If we believe that education is about more than knowledge acquisition, and that national security can be achieved through other concepts such as healthy communities, sustainable resource uses, national unity, world peace, or the elimination of hunger and poverty. Then we need to take responsibility for our practices, assert our own understandings of those practices, expose those practices to peer-review and challenge “what does not make sense” collectively.
I am finding that engaging the “nonsense” has been a good learning experience.
Thoughts and comments are welcomed.
Correction -> E.D. Hirsch’s “Core Knowledge”, not Core Curriculum. Still need verification of that.
Hi Diane! Lots of varied reactions for the Common Core indeed. Well, here’s one great resource – https://www.opened.io/
OpenEd contains the LARGEST and MOST COMPLETE catalog of free educational videos available ANYWHERE.
It’s free and in private beta for now. Let me know if you need an invite.
As a teacher in Louisiana the biggest problem I’m having is the contradiction between was is necessary for the Common Core curriculum and what is necessary to do well on the new evaluation system, Compass. For my students to do well with Common Core, I need to break things down, hand-hold, and take baby steps through the curriculum; however, for me to do well onmy evaluation system, my kids need to teach themselves, correct each other, talk to each other, not me, decide how they should be graded— the list goes on and on. The two are incompatible, especially when you factor in my stduents come to 9th reading, on average, about the fourth or fifth grade level with on two or three per year reading at 8th grade level. Compass is based on the Charlotte danielson Framework which has been cherry-picked to only 4 or 5 of her components; I hope she hates what the state has done to her framework but I’m sure she doesn’t care since they paid her money to use it..
The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) are the outcome of a long-standing effort to position education as the key to our nation’s superiority and economic competitiveness (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983). The premise is misleading, but one account of the origin of the current Standards is in the 2008 report issued by Achieve and the Education Trust: Making College and Career Readiness the Mission for High Schools: A Guide for State Policymakers. This report includes commentary on the origin of the Common Core State Standards: “In 2001, we came together to launch the American Diploma Project (ADP), along with the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and the National Alliance of Business. The goal of ADP was to identify the skills and knowledge required for success after high school and use those to help high schools reset and anchor their K-12 goals and standards. In 2004, we published “Ready or Not: Creating a High School Diploma That Counts,” which found that all students, whether they are heading to college or embarking on a meaningful career, need the same rigorous academic foundation. We also identified a series of policies states could enact to increase the chances that students would be taught and would learn those essentials” (p. 7).
In 2008, the National Governors Association, Council of Chief State School Officers, and Achieve enlisted an advisory group to amp up PR for the Common Core. This report, Benchmarking for Success: Ensuring U.S. Students Receive a World-class Education (2008) was published with support of the GE Foundation and the Bill and Melina Gates Foundation. These reports like the CCSS advance a simple “theory of action:” Revive the old two-track system of moving students into college preparation or vocational education, but with a new spin; namely, a single set of standards for college preparation and entry into workforce training. The whole architecture for the CCSS is built on exaggerated claims and a lot of borrowed materials from the American Diploma Project. The Standards are supposed to be aligned with college and work expectations, but there is no recognition that: (a) criteria for entry into post-secondary programs differ according to the career one may pursue (e.g., plumbing, pre-med, music, or architecture) and (b) criteria for entry differ for highly selective universities, community colleges, trade schools, and on–the-job training.
The CCSS began with a one-size-fits-all agenda for high school. The image of a beefed up high school curriculum and tough “exit” exams started writers on a process of reverse engineering (back-mapping) to every prior grade, including Kindergarten. That’s why Kindergarten is now called a course! That’s why some of the ELA standards for grades 9/10 actually refer to college assignments. The Standards are intolerant of the idea that individual students may learn at different rates. Kindergarteners are now to be launched on a college/career path with scores on high stakes tests determining judgments about their progress. Being on track for college and a career at every grade is a different version of No Child Left Behind…with a lot less wiggle room because all 1,620 of the CCSS are candidates for the new on-line, multi-state tests in 2014. Meanwhile, all studies in other subjects have become subservient to, and constrained by, the requirements of the Common Core State Standards.
Martinez’s wrong use of the possesive its depressed me.
What does that mean?