Michael Paul Goldenberg, a frequent commenter here, has entered the blogosphere on his own by writing for the Chalkface, a site for lively and controversial opinion.
In his first entry, he questions the logic of introducing the Common Core to all grades simultaneously. Doing so, he cogently argues, defeats the purpose of assuring coherence and continuity across the nation.. The child in fifth grade will never be exposed to what was taught in fourth grade.
A sensible rollout would have started in first grade only, then added a grade a year.
But hubris knows no limits.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Thanks very much for the mention, Diane.
It serms that the only way to make a drastic change in educational curricula would be just as stated here. If the majority of students are to succeed, they need to be exposed to the initial or base ofcthe curriculum in the first grade or even kindergarten and each subsequent year receiving the appropriate curriculum. That would be sensible, which doesn’t seem to work for corporate bottom lines. They must sell their goods before it is proven that they don’t work.
The same has been true for textbook adoptions. Purchasing a k-6 series and never having the students “catch up” to what was taught in the previous year has never made sense. But this “accelerated” new Common Core is constructed to ensure failure for students from the beginning and to get teachers fired for being unable to get “unprepared” students to catch on. Nevermind that the objectives are developmentally inappropriate in the first place.
Yes, the issue of developmental inappropriateness really rankles. I’ve seen it dismissed going back to the early 1990s and the Math Wars because there’s a certain streak of anti-Piagetian sentiment (too fuzzy, too child-centered, etc.) among anti-progressive educators that I hadn’t fully realized until the 1990s through my attempts to discuss math education with such people.
At the same time, you can search the blogosphere and quickly turn up Tea Party types who swear that the Common Core is specifically designed to hold kids back. Take today’s entry on “Math Wizards,” a New Hampshire-focused blog that dislikes the Common Core, but rarely for reasons I find sensible: http://mathwizards.wordpress.com/2013/08/29/are-the-new-reforms-from-the-nh-dept-of-ed-holding-students-back/
What’s a well-intentioned reformer to do?
I don’t know, since I’m afraid that the big players with CCSSI are not well-intentioned and they’re deformers, not reformers (or maybe they’re Rheeformers). This is one reason that I have to detach myself from any alliances with extreme right wing opponents of the Common Core. While I’m happy that anyone stands up to challenge the juggernaut, I prefer to be associated with people who prefer truth to hyperbole.
Couldn’t it be both developmentally inappropriate (at the lower levels) and hold kids back (at the higher levels?) This math has been used in my district for years and I see how confused my youngest child is; she is literal, concrete. This math has done damage – all she wants to do is get numbers to their closest 10! I hate the emphasis in writing on opinion/argument early in their education. The knowledge base is not there to have a fully vetted opinion, nor should they be tied to validating an opinion at a time when their minds are evolving. At the later grades, I thought the math did not progress high enough.
The arguments coming from the blog I linked to are generally confused and highly politicized (everything can be tracked to Obama. Obama is bad. Hence, whatever is traced to Obama (legitimately or otherwise) is bad. Not the most cogent way to analyze mathematics education. Throw into the mix the fact that these folks are true believes in education conspiracy theories that have been thrown about in the Math Wars since the 1990s when I’m pretty sure that Obama wasn’t the POTUS (if you’re not familiar with the so-called Delphi Technique, it’s never too soon (or too late, I guess) to bone up on that and decide if it’s a form of mass brainwashing), and, well, forgive me for not being all that convinced by things these folks are serving up.
There’s little doubt that there is developmental inappropriateness in the math and literacy standards. But I find the other argument, that CCSSI is about “dumbing down” the curriculum much more difficult to sustain. However, that doesn’t stop some Math Warriors from trying to do so, as they’ve been doing since the Math Wars began to heat up. One such point of much heat and little light is when students “should” take first-year algebra. The Warriors are upset because they want it mandated that everyone (and I mean EVERYONE) be prepared to take “Algebra 1” in 8th grade AT THE LATEST. There has been arguing out in California since the ’90s in some quarters for mandatory 7th grade algebra. Please recall that in the 1940s, when my parents graduated high school, algebra was considered a college course).
If you get caught up in this argument, you have to buy into a host of things that I don’t. First, that we should judge US math education by scores on international tests and by what is done in countries that score very high on such tests. But education isn’t a race or a competition. It has never been proved or even vaguely demonstrated that US education correlates (let alone correlates causally) with our economic success, general prosperity, or world power and influence. Nonetheless, according to these Warrior types, the sky is falling (I’m not sure exactly when it wasn’t falling) and it’s all because of our lousy schools, lousy teachers, teachers’ unions, etc. (Economic downturns in the the previous decade that have carried into this one apparently had nothing to do with greed, corruption, deregulation, or criminal activity on the part of Wall Street, banks, etc. Amazing! It’s our schools and teachers that did it!) And you’ll wait a lifetime for credit being given to those schools or teachers for booms in the previous decade or any other time in our history.
Of course, if you ignore that, then you’re liable to fall for the “Sooner is better” argument, in which if we could teach algebra to fetuses (why not calculus?), we most definitely should, and we’d all be far better of for the effort.
Meanwhile, we have kids growing up in Detroit getting lead poisoning from paint chips in ancient buildings that pass for human domains, suffering from malnutrition, substance abuse and malnutrition during pregnancy, and a host of other ill effects of abject poverty, and those kids are supposed to come to school every day (few do) and learn at the same pace as upper middle class kids in Grosse Pointe (and by high school, compete equally with the relative cream of some of the countries against which we’re “competing,” given that the sorting process into various kinds of schools and educational programs starts early in many of these nations, and the ones taking those tests are NOT a cross-section of the population.
So I would take the “dumbing down the curriculum” arguments with big and many grains of salt. Our top kids do just fine on these tests, thanks. If apples were compared to apples, much of the “crisis” would diminish.
Of course, if people don’t want to address economic and social inequity (and few affluent folks do), then it’s crucial to label any mention of these issues as “making excuses.” Diane was recently accused of a callous and basically racist/classist set of beliefs about inner-city poor kids that she has never expressed as far as I can tell.
Bottom line for me: there are many issues with CCSSI but “dumbing down” really isn’t one of them for the most part. What’s far more problematic is the overall rigidity of the approach and the glaring corporate, for-profit agendas driving the whole sordid mess. Picking on how successfully the K-6 or K-7 standards on a point-by-point basis prepare EVERY US child for 8th or 7th grade algebra is, to my mind, a red herring of the smelliest sort and a complete waste of time.
On Thu, Aug 29, 2013 at 11:39 PM, Diane Ravitch’s blog wrote:
> ** > thenextlevel2000 commented: “Couldn’t it be both developmentally > inappropriate (at the lower levels) and hold kids back (at the higher > levels?) This math has been used in my district for years and I see how > confused my youngest child is; she is literal, concrete. This math has done > “
I can see the “dumbing down” comment coming from the fact that the standards are copyrighted, and theoretically states can add no more than 15%. That seems strange. And yes, while kids in rich towns will move up faster because they don’t come to school so far behind, why the limit or “perceived” ceiling on what states should be able to attain?
Theoretically, if there is a cap, public schools in highly affluent areas, could accelerate their students learning and get out of school faster; if higher education is aligned, they should be able to scoot right into college earlier. Anything over 15% in a district is (if you are an efficient person) kind of a waste of time in a way.
Either way, this whole movement is clearly meant to rattle education to the foundation – change standards and testing right at the same time we base teacher’s futures on the scores; release report after report about how incompetent and unprepared teachers are, market TFA and Charters as choice.
I’m not sure about the mass brainwashing, but I do now that many, many teachers tend to want to make things work and will give it their best shot.
My son’s 10th grade class was the first class for the 9th grade CC, and NOW is the first class for 10th grade CC, so they’re the guinea pigs for two years in a row. It’s like throwing the entire class off the deep end and watching 2/3 of them drown. It’s insane.
And don’t get me started on my state’s insistence that there is no such thing as remedial–only special ed, grade level and honors. It’s leaving a bunch of kids in the dust.
You mean that No Child Left Behind Turbo is leaving lots of children behind?
One of the dicey things about inclusion education is that while I fully understand why parents of some kids who in my school days would have been marginalized and (possibly) ill-served/ignored in self-contained classrooms would want those children both mainstreamed AND given needed additional services, but I see how full-inclusion has played right into the hands of the deformers.
High-stakes tests + full inclusion (in neighborhood public schools, but not in many charters) means lowering test scores for international and internal comparisons. What could be better for folks looking to undermine public confidence in our schools?
Please don’t get me wrong: I’m not suggesting that we do away with mainstreaming because it’s being used by some folks as a political football for very shady purposes indeed. On the contrary: what I want is a change in the whole insane assessment scheme AND more equitable funding to schools to ensure that we get services that are needed to as many people as possible (regardless of color or economic class). But then, I’m not scheming to play one ill-served group of people off of another for my own gain.
Good job, Michael. You will fit right in at with the talented guys and gals at the Chalkface .:-)
Thank you kindly, Peg. That’s high praise.
Get right to the point and hold no cards. I like it. It is about time that educators do what is required to save the profession before it is all TFA and worthless and our society is gone. Teachers have that responsibility by nature of their job. Keep up the direct factual work.
TFA is certainly a powerful part of the deform playbook. You need cheap labor that has no plans to stay in the profession, hence, no incentive to unionize the charters that hire them. Wendy Kopp might not have been thinking this far ahead, but someone was, and now she’s arm-in-arm with the worst of them.
ok
“In his first entry, he questions the logic of introducing the Common Core to all grades simultaneously.”
Is this not true anytime a state adopts new standards, whether it be CCSS or their own state-developed? Don’t get me wrong….I’m in total agreement that going forth with any initiiative simultaneously doesn’t make a lot of sense. I’ve often said that high school teachers (of which I’m one) are the best teachers in a school system because they have to know all of the various initiatives that students have been exposed to over the years (yes, this is tongue-in-cheak).
I remember very clearly Ebonics and stupid math as we called it. When California was considering this seriously I was one of the few people who went to the California State Board of Education (SBE) hearings on these subjects. Interestingly every educator there said that Ebonics, or making up any language you wanted to and how it was used, and stupid math where you made up your own math, said this was the best thing that ever happened. Thanks to a few people like Mathmatically Correct this insanity was beat back. Lucky for us in California the SBE listened to reason and sense and these insane programs were thrown into the trash can. I met Richard Arthur at a meeting on Ebonics. He was the only educator who made sense. He thought this was insane and the other panel members were on the other side along with many in the meeting. Totally insane. Now we have another insanity is it Ebonics II? Might as well be.
I’ll leave commentary about “Ebonics” to those with more information about it. As for “making up your own math,” pray tell, where exactly does mathematics come from if someone doesn’t make it up?
But then, what you’re trying to denigrate, along with those fine people at Mathematically Correct, is the notion that children should have the opportunity to think about mathematics and how they might accomplish some particular mathematical task or solve a problem BEFORE the current ‘standard algorithm’ is handed to them on a silver platter (whether they like it or not).
Instead of infantilizing young children, we might do well to let them have the space to think and grow. Pose interesting, relevant, and appropriate problems to them, give them just enough support to keep them going when they’re stuck, and you might find that down the road you don’t have classrooms full of kids who give up instantly on any non-routine task, who don’t believe that everything has to be explicitly taught to them in advance before they can spend time thinking about it, and who might indeed some day invent original mathematics.
What any of that has to do with “Ebonics,” I haven’t the slightest idea. But given the tenor of your comment and your praise of Mathematically Correct, I think I’ll live happily without hearing your explanation.
When did “reckless” and “innovative” become synonyms?
Excellent article and responses here Michael. Thank you. I have been a fan of your comments for some time (both here and on EDDRA). You have shed a great deal of light on the math (mis) education being foisted on our students.
A bit of topic, but related:
Article from Creative Loafing (Atlanta) pushing the Common Core. I found the opinion piece especially interesting because CL is our progressive, free newspaper around here. Seems the “children of the core” are really going all out to shore up support. The thrust of the article seems to be tying lack of support for CC to Glen Beck types, etc.
http://clatl.com/atlanta/why-common-cores-collapse-hurts-georgias-students/Content?oid=9114000
I have always been a fan of your work. Thank you for expanding your voice on behalf of us in the trenches.
Thank you. I’m in a prolific period, trying to take advantage of it while I have time and inspiration.