There is growing evidence that the Common Core standards are absurd in the early grades. They require a level of academic learning that is developmentally inappropriate.
Little children need time to play. Play is their work. In play, they learn to share and to count, to communicate, to use language appropriately, and to figure things out.
A story in a NYC newspaper shows just how ridiculous the Common Core standards are when imposed on 5-year-olds: Here is a story, well worth reading, about how Common Core is being implemented in kindergartens across New York City. The headline is. “Playtime’s Over.”
Says the story:
“Way beyond the ABCs, crayons and building blocks, the city Department of Education now wants 4- and 5-year-olds to write “informative/explanatory reports” and demonstrate “algebraic thinking.”
“Children who barely know how to write the alphabet or add 2 and 2 are expected to write topic sentences and use diagrams to illustrate math equations.
“For the most part, it’s way over their heads,” a Brooklyn teacher said. “It’s too much for them. They’re babies!”
“In a kindergarten class in Red Hook, Brooklyn, three children broke down and sobbed on separate days last week, another teacher told The Post.”
How did this happen?
This article by Edward Miller and Nancy Carlsson-Paige explains that early childhood educators were not included on the committees that wrote the standards, and their feedback was never incorporated.
It is as if a large group of business leaders were asked to write standards for surgeons, or if surgeons were asked to devise standards for plumbers.
When you learn what these standards expect little children to do, you have to wonder if any of the people who wrote them have small children or if they ever taught small children.
I am reminded of a book that came out last year by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl called Childism, about prejudice against children. These days, we don’t put them to work in factories at 5 or 6, and we don’t beat them in public, we just make them do things that they cannot do and make them feel like failures before they turn 7.
I believe REO Speedwagon said, “You can tune a piano, but you can’t tuna fish”
Wake up you technocrat bumbleheads, you can program a computer but you can’t program a child.
well said!
I think every individual involved in composing and promoting Common Core, from authors, to politicians, to financiers, should be required to demonstrate its effectiveness using themselves and their families as the pilot group.
That is a wonderful suggestion.
Interesting. I haven’t looked at them yet– there are usable elements at the HS level, at least in a College Prep context.
If the CCSS are structured in the same way for early grades, (which I also used to teach) that’s just crazy!
Deutsch29– Amen.
The problem I have with them, even in a college prep context, is that they take skills and content usually taught to 11th/12th and move them down to 9th. This is not developmentally appropriate for the majority of students.
I’m in my 50’s – feel beaten down; breaking down and sobbing; no time to play – sounds like the teaching profession.
You have accurately described many dedicated
educators–help us stop this assault. Please
Stories like this really enrage me.
Diane, Crazy. What are these folks thinking? Modern Taylorism? Doug Muzzio
Time for a little Howard Beale (Network) rant.
Thank you, Mark.
What we need to do now is not to yell out the window but to organize and mobilize.
Stop giving the tests.
Stop taking the tests.
Without data, the facade crumbles.
Then maybe we can get back to educating kids again.
What will it take for good people to believe we are already living under tyrannical rule? Instead of being rhetors we need to become actors and think of ways to stop cooperating with all that is clearly wrong and unethical!
‘DOE spokeswoman Erin Hughes said, “These are the types of activities and exercises that students need to work on to acquire the skills they need to be ready for middle school, high school, college and careers.”’ — Good luck with that! About to head off to volunteer in a kindergarten art class with a kid who cannot write his four letter name.
Diane, Our local NBC station has a show called “Sunday Square Off” with Brahm Resnik. This past Sunday, he had on someone from the State and someone from some place that has to do with education lauding Common Core. I emailed Mr. Resnik and told him I would like him to have someone from the opposing side come on his show. I also told him that I believe that the Common Core is just more testing and teaching to the test. I asked him to have you on his show. I received his reply, and he said several people had mentioned you; however, he thought that you live in NYC or D.C. I know you are busy and live in NYC. I also know you travel extensively. If you are in the Phoenix area, please consider appearing on this show. Arizona very seldom hears anyone from the other side. I would love to meet you and take you out for dinner. We need to shake this state up.
Ditto! Please think about an appearance in Arizona. We need you. Arizona is a model the rest of the states should not want to follow. Dottie is right that we need to shake things up here for the sake of Arizona kids and kids everywhere else whose leaders are ignorantly following in our footsteps.
Your blog post with the Vanity Fair article on Sunday said it all… David Elkind’s Hurried Child and Neil Postman’s Disappearance of Childhood saw this coming in the early 1980s… let’s see… the kids in elementary and middle school at that time are probably the parents of the kids who are being pressured to get into the right-pre-school-to-get-into-the-right-elementary-school-to-get-into-the-right-college-to-get-into…. WHAT? Oh… and the business folks who are advocating these standards for pre-school grew up in “hurried” households without a childhood and think that everyone else should grow up the same way if they want to turn out like they did…
How do we nominate Diane for Time’s Woman of the Year?
It’s as though the monolithic dunderheads who devise this nonsense think there is some kind of short cut. This determination to press ahead as though developmental stages can somehow be hurdled by teacher enforcement is simply awful – creating failure at the opportunity cost of allowing children to develop age-appropriate knowledge and skills. A double fail!
Iorek
We could just save a lot of time and effort by making childhood illegal.
Oooh sarcasm, I like it
FIRE Duncan! HIRE Ravitch!
As a parent with a daughter a year and a half away from starting kindergarten and a son not far behind her, the insanity of CCSS for elementary frightens me.
Wgersen wrote, “And the business folks who are advocating these standards for pre-school grew up in ‘hurried’ households without a childhood and think that everyone else should grow up the same way if they want to turn out like they did.” I’m picturing a 5-year-old David Coleman asking his mother, “Mommy, can we analyze one more complex text before bedtime?”
David Coleman and his cronies have no clue about child development. And as much as Coleman is flip-flopping on some of the finer points (and, wow, do I ever loosely interpret the meaning of the word “fine” in this context) of his Common Core [Federal] Standards, he hasn’t backtracked in the least regarding the K-2 standards.
Many of the CC expectations are utterly ridiculous, especially for our kids, like the one mentioned above, who is struggling with his own first name, our kids who have lived in poverty all of their lives and come to school with few skills or schema (background knowledge) and our ever-growing ELL/ESL population.
The idea of complex texts for little readers who haven’t memorized any sight words, don’t know their letter sounds and who may struggle with the most basic concepts of print, is not developmentally appropriate. And among many other concepts, the math standards don’t reflect the fact that some of my kids still can’t demonstrate one-to-one correspondence with numbers up to 3.
Coleman needs to visit some Title I kinder classes. I invite him or Arne Duncan or any of the de-formers to stop by and stay for a while. I sure could use the extra hands! Maybe Coleman could do a read-aloud. I’ll bet a few of my kids have never had the pleasure of experiencing Coleman’s “Letter from a Montgomery Prison” lesson. #drippingwithsarcasm
Every week my daughter in first grade has a book report sheet in her weekly homework packet (get it on Monday, return on Friday, 5-6 sheets long.) Currently, the book report consists of two questions: “What is a connection you made when reading this book?” “Why did you make that connection?” And below the questions is an explanation: “A connection occurs when a book you are reading reminds you of something. A text-to-self connection is when you are reminded of something from your own life. A text-to-text connection is when you are reminded of something you read in another book. A text-to-world connection is when you are reminded of something that happened in the world at large.”
As a parent with no background in education, I have no real basis for knowing this, but is this really appropriate for a class of 6 year olds (ok half of them have turned 7 now)? Isn’t first grade traditionally when kids were expected to learn to read? How much of the class can even read the instructions on this page and make sense of them? My daughter despises these book reports, declares them “boring” and refuses to even give answers to me that I can write down—not a great attitude to have at what is a foundational period in your educational career. And she’s probably the or one of the most advanced readers in her class. I can’t imagine what the kids who are only just starting to read (and their parents) think when faced with this stuff. There were kids last year in her kindergarten class at the same school (urban public school, 80% low-income) who literally had not used crayons before the first day of school…now they are supposed to be answering abstract things like “why did you make that connection?” Really???
I don’t think you need a background in early education to know that this is ridiculous, for the reasons you state. Kids that age should be learning to read at their own pace, and they should enjoy reading. They should be playing and socializing, not doing miniature versions of office work.
Based on my experience with public elementary school (in NYC), the early grades are too academic generally and don’t take enough account of the different times and rates at which kids come “on line” in terms of reading and math. And then around grade 3, right at the point where those differences have narrowed and kids should be acquiring the basic math skills that they’ll need the rest of their lives, the curriculum veers sideways into the horrific land of constructivist math. So the plan seems to be (1) beat kids into hating reading and school generally at an early age, and then (2) make sure that none of them know their multiplication tables.
The thing is that other parents I know rarely seem to complain about these things. Everyone seems to think it’s absolutely fine that first graders even have homework, for example. So it’s very hard to know based only on my foggy recollections of first grade and a little informal reading on early education what’s actually appropriate. And on top of that I’m already the crazy mom that has opted her child out of the “required” extra homework where they are supposed to spend an hour a week working on online math and reading programs (which are quite transparently test prep…for first graders!!!) which no other parents complain about either. It’s very hard to decide if you are being reasonable in an area where you don’t have expertise, and the social feedback you get (or don’t get) tells you that you should be accepting of these things…which is possibly why there aren’t more parents complaining.
“The thing is that other parents I know rarely seem to complain about these things. Everyone seems to think it’s absolutely fine that first graders even have homework, for example.”
I feel like I hear other parents complain about it all the time. But maybe I hear what I want to hear. Or maybe it’s something that entitled people who’ve been conditioned to see themselves as upper-middle class are more likely to say or think. Where I live, in NYC, it’s pointless to complain, anyway. The schools are pretty much all following the same curriculum mandated by the DOE. And the parents have to get to their job on time and they’re exhausted at night.
When I was on the National Assessment Governing Board, the reading framework had that jargon about text-to-text and text-to-self and I insisted on getting them out of the next version of the framework. If professionals want to talk that way to one another, that’s their right. But why should little children be expected to master professional jargon? It is ridiculous.
I’m disappointed that I’m forced to endure that stuff. I’m not too thrilled about my kids starting school next year. There aren’t many good options that aren’t too expensive. Hey, this is why so many inner-city parents are willing to try alternative forms of education.
The more that I learn, the more convinced I am that this is a political problem. That is where we should focus. At every level, from local to national, we need to put pressure on the politicians. We can blame reformers and pearson all we want, but our elected officials are the ones who invited them to the trough and let them gorge themselves at the public’s expense.
Obama needs support for whatever legacy projects that he has in mind. If a big chunk of his own supporters (and others) turn on him, he wouldn’t have political capital to push his agenda. Personally, I don’t care what else he does, what happened to education under his watch tells me all that I need to know about the man.
I’d prefer professionals lose the jargon and buzzwords as well. PD sessions are nauseating.
I can relate. I teach second grade. One of the concepts I am supposed to teach in language arts is the difference between fantasy and realistic fiction. We begin by reading the story of a talking dog and try to determine what genre the story is. We do this in September. You should hear the debate that rages in my classroom because so many of them believe that animals talk “when we aren’t around”. These kids are all into Santa, the tooth fairy, and the Easter bunny and somehow I am supposed to teach these genres effectively?
Text-to-self connections (plus their annoying friends text-to-world and text-to-text connections) have been around since at least 2000 when my child entered kindergarten. His school started this nonsense in kindergarten. I think it’s an attempt by education theorists to figure out what good, engaged readers do and then try to artificially recreate it for kids who are not good, engaged readers. But it doesn’t work for a host of reasons, including: 1. the word text is off putting and bewildering to most adults, let alone children; and 2. good, engaged readers are turned on by language and stories, not by “connections” – you don’t capture a child’s imagination or sense of verbal play by talking about text to anything connections.
This inappropriate content in elementary grades isn’t a matter of a bunch of privatizers not knowing what they are doing. They DO know what they are doing. They are trying to force children to fail when they can’t master the material, and they will be forced to drop out of school by the seventh or eighth grade to take jobs requiring few or no skills, just as is done in the third world. Make no mistake about it: Gates and company WANT children to fail, WANT to limit children’s opportunities, for education to these privatizers is a waste of money, of resources. Next thing coming down the pike will be a repeal of compulsory education and child labor laws to make their neoliberal vision come true.
You had me up until the NEOLIBERAL thing. Not sure about your logic here.
thank you thank you thank you!!I teach kindergarten and all they want to do is play. But if you are an experienced early childhood educator you already know that work is play for a five year old.
Reblogged this on Transparent Christina.
The powers that be who are doing this to our children need to read Sharp’s “Thinking is Child’s Play.” Or take a look at the Reggio Emilia approach to early child education.
This is the NEW Industrial Revolution for children! No play time, shorter recess, short lunch, no free time, orchestrated and rubric based “creative thinking” – little worker bees churning out all those “sassements” as my daughter calls them!
My husband has to design daily lessons that show that his first graders know how to do synthesis on a daily basis and the examples given in the curriculum are ridiculous. They are more suited for high school students than first graders!
Not about CCSS for elementary schools, but still enraging. My state has determined that in the CCSS in math, that in 9th grade there are NO remediation classes. Only when they fail in 9th grade can they get help in 10th grade. Today my son’s 9th grade math assignment was the same assignment as his tutor’s AP Calculus class. We drop these kids into the middle of these stupid standards that are developmentally inappropriate. The results will be predictable and appalling. I’m continually afraid that my son will not be able to graduate.
You’re right. “The results will be predictable and appalling.” But that was realized over decade ago. Nobody listened to ed. researchers who knew the consequences. It’s disheartening to think about the number of students and teachers being exploited by NCLB and now RttT and CCSS. I hope this is resolved before a whole generation of students are affected by policy driven by those who only have self-serving interest. Inform your friends. Parents are our best allies.
The promoters of the CCSS do not have to live with the consequences of their successful PR campaign to foist a deeply flawed version of one-size-fits all education in the three R’s on students in public schools.
From the get go, the promoters and the main writers of the CCSS have wanted to shove collegiate content down into high school and high school down into middle school, and so on down the line, The promoters and writers of the standards think that education is just a simple matter of reverse-engineering standards from college or job training all the way down to Kindergarten in one long and very tidy system of pre-requisites. In this theory of action (a phrase from the Department of Education) children are just miniature adults, with a blank slate for a mind, same as in 19th century education before Kindergarten, Dewey, and a bunch of other folks who think learning is more complex and purposeful than being able to pass a proctored and standard-based test. Kindergarten is just a waste of time, insufficiently demanding, rigorous, academic, and competitive, especially when the name of the game is Race to the Top. Pathetic thinking.
The CCSS architects and endorsers have determined that they can and will drive a stake through any ideas that have some connection to child-friendly educational history, philosophy, theory, research, and practical experience in teaching. The reification of scores on standardized tests is stupid, and also the prevailing ideology for students and teachers in public schools.
Laura H. Chapman: IMHO, today on this blog the line-up of postings and many of the comments are memorable for content and expression.
Yours is among the best. My mother was a preschool teacher and director. I read your comments and hear her voice.
Thank you for saying what the edubullies fear to hear.
Thanks for the affirmation. At 78, and a long time worker in arts education I have never seen this level of arrogant stupidity. And the hard part is the co-opting of academics and elite institutions such as Stanford, Harvard, and Vanderbilt… the list goes on. Diane has become the exception. There are others, but not many so wonderfully engaged.
Diane,
My grandniece turns 5 in September, but in her state she misses the cutoff and will start Kinder two weeks before turning 6. My niece in Tn. sent me a list of all the states cutoff for kinder which of course is not consistent. I also looked at the CC standards for K in Tn., and was appalled. So much of what I taught in the upper grades are now being introduced in Kinder.
There is much about the Tennessee school system I don’t like starting with their commissioner who still takes marching orders from his ex, but I agree with starting kinder at 6. Many families in NYC and other areas who can afford to do this are also holding back their kids a year. And I don’t blame them!!!
Yes, holding kids back a year before starting Kindergarten is called red-shirting and it has been controversial. However, at this point, with the CCSS being so developmentally inappropriate, it sound like a good idea.
In fact, in some states, compulsory education doesn’t begin until age 7, so parents could red-shirt their children for two years and then their kids would be tackling curriculum that used to be provided for primary aged students at a more appropriate age. When the system sets kids up for failure like this, that calls for gaming…
I must say that in the last data analysis meeting (looking over meaningless computer graded tests taken by my second graders on materials I had only partially covered at this point in the year) I did a little rant based on Dickens’ “Hard Times” and the term “gramnivorous quadruped”. That’s about what I am being asked to teach.
It seems to me that the actual problem is how states, districts, schools, and classrooms are implementing CCSS, and the actual misunderstanding that the CCSS are not curriculum. I have to repeat that again, the Common Core State Standards are not a curriculum. If you actually look at the standards for reading
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.K.1 With prompting and support, ask and answer questions about key details in a text.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.K.2 With prompting and support, retell familiar stories, including key details.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.K.3 With prompting and support, identify characters, settings, and major events in a story.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.K.4 Ask and answer questions about unknown words in a text.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.K.5 Recognize common types of texts (e.g., storybooks, poems).
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.K.6 With prompting and support, name the author and illustrator of a story and define the role of each in telling the story.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.K.7 With prompting and support, describe the relationship between illustrations and the story in which they appear (e.g., what moment in a story an illustration depicts).
(RL.K.8 not applicable to literature)
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.K.9 With prompting and support, compare and contrast the adventures and experiences of characters in familiar stories.
Range of Reading and Level of Text Complexity
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.K.10 Actively engage in group reading activities with purpose and understanding.
I do not see anything too overwhelming for Kindergartners. Yes, they need to play, and yes I would like to see a more play centered environment with these standards as a foundation to expose the students to.
Let´s stop directing our ire at these standards, and start actually creating reasonable discussions about how we, as educators, parents, professionals can create an environment where every child has a chance to feel success. Because that isn´t happening now, and it won´t happen with Schools blindly implementing these standards.
Thank you for your time. And before people start ripping too much into my post, I have taught 1st grade, 5th grade, middle school, and have been a classroom assistant in K4-K5 while I attended college. Also, I am currently teaching at an international school that started implementing the CCSS in the 2011-2012 school year.
Thank you again.
I agree with you to a point. However, the sample assignments/assessments provided with cccs standards – assumed to be reflective of coming tests – are NOT developmentally appropriate. This also does not address the issue of testing in general. AND – I have been doing these things for 28 years. I stand by my position that this was not necessary. It is about profits for testing and textbook companies and has NOTHING to do with improving education for children.
Then let us say no to textbooks and testing. I am all for that.
Ben: You only included the Reading Literature Skills for Kindergarten and you omitted the Reading Informational Text Skills and the Reading Foundational Skills.
The Reading Foundational Skills for Kindergarten state:
Fluency
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RF.K.4 Read emergent-reader texts with purpose and understanding.
THIS is the big one, in my opinion, as a veteran Kindergarten teacher. Not all 5 year olds are ready to become fluent readers, since in September, children come into the typical Kindergarten classroom with a developmental range spanning from 3 – 7 years old. Additionally, many Kindergartens are still only half day programs.
Maybe the source of the problems are too much credibility for learning from blogs and similar, and not by technocratics, but by traders. The fellow or woman who dispenses advice on the economy based on what he or she has learned talking to clients about aspirations for specific stock prices……
I’d suggest benefits from consultation with learned folks on international and comparative education, especially on this not-so-insightful observation:
One can take dozens of hours to get a small child to do something well when that same task is readily taught in an hour when the child is developmentally ready. (Think of drawing.) Similarly, we can push early literacy and numeracy when it will come much more easily a bit later in the child’s life. On what evidence? Well, look to see how late schooling, literacy, and numeracy are developed in provinces and nations where later academic attainment is universally high. Aren’t those achieved with “late starts” elsewhere?
The more thoughtful proponents of cramming curriculum downward to earlier ages would reconsider if the activities were sex, marriage, childbearing, paternity, and family formation. it would be tedious, obvious, and vulgar to recount the costs of forcing those on children, as happens in much of the world.
Call me crazy, but if one draws back from the fuss and fumes of the never ending storm troopers assaults of corporate educational czars, and analyzed for a moment what grand design would produce such lunacy, it might prove enlightening. Here we have an example of a malevolent, caustic response to the critics of a dumb ed down curriculum.
Give the critics an impossibly inappropriate regime that is not the noncritical rot, foisted off on the schools and slam them with this diametrically opposite, and equally absurd
garbage. “You want a better curriculum…try this one on for size!” In war time such strategies are called “False flag actions.” Then there are the “graders” who couldn’t
write a decent paragraph, but are paid Wendy’s wages to evaluate and jeopardize a student’s score and possibly affect his/her future, let alone their self-concept! Could this be done by chance and ignorance of it’s affect? I beg to differ! The list of the
blows to public, solid education are as numerous as weeds that pop out in the spring, and the “roots/reasons” are just as hidden as are the weeds! Yet, if one ponders
beyond the surface and quantifies the toll of destruction these nonsensical programs have taken to the students of America, it is hard to rack it up to “dumb luck!” Even
a dumb puppy will sometimes hit the grass instead of the rug in their training
period! But with the list of utter failures and consequential lies to cover the facts,
it is the impossible quest to find ONE “New concept” that actually is affective…think about it and a cold chill may overcome your psyche as you realize there is a
method to this madness and it is anything but benign or well intended! Just ask
an older, ousted teacher who is replaced by a non-affective, Teach for America”
guinea pig!
The NAEYC report about Common Core from Fall 2012 is pretty blatant about the importance of using evidenced-based practices for the education of young children. I hope they are able to influence things for the better but without a strong push from the public the CCSS power brokers will likely continue to do what they like.
Click to access 11_CommonCore1_2A_rv2.pdf
How can early childhood educators continue to conform to this nonsense passed from on high? Why do they not inform parents of what is going on?
Thanks for this post. I just wrote one like it. Please see my site. Want to connect. 🙂
Kidsontrackchecklists.com
Common core makes me sad for the children that have to learn non developmentally appropriate information from a educator stand point as the mother of a almost 5 year old it makes me angry because they took her love of learning and school away from her. She has been going to a school setting since 20 months old and now with this curriculum she tells me she hates school cause there is so much work and no time to play. She’s 4!
Reblogged this on Schools of Thought Hudson Valley, NY and commented:
Joint statement of early child development experts; we have grave concerns about CC.
Click to access joint_statement_on_core_standards.pdf