Anthony Cody wonders in this post whether the Common Core standards are designed to facilitate computer grading of student essays.
Cody includes a commentary by Alice Mercer, who describes a writing task on the Common Core test. She reaches the startling conclusion that the standards were written to accommodate computer testing, which explains the limitation on background knowledge.
She writes:
“Even if my assertion that the standards were written to accommodate testing, and more specifically machine scoring of writing are wrong, these are still lousy tasks that are very low-level and not “rigorous” or cognitively demanding.”
Cody, reflecting on Mercer’s observations, writes:
“This reveals one of our basic fears as educators and parents about the Common Core and associated tests. The project is an attempt to align and standardize instruction and assessment on an unprecedented scale. The future, according to the technocrats who have designed these systems, involves computer-based curriculum and tests, and frequent checks, via computer, on student performance. And as this report in EdWeek indicates, there is great deal of money to be made. Los Angeles Unified has already spent a billion dollars on iPads, and one of the chief justifications was to prepare for computer-based assessments such as these.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
My biggest fear with the Common Core is that it’s going to spawn skills-centered curricula; that content will take a backseat to the skills, and as a result, will be haphazard.
The standards do call for systematic teaching of content, but this call seems to be getting overlooked by almost everybody. I suspect one big reason is that everyone sees that the tests are going to be all about skills, so why teach content?
My fear is that the Common Core and educational deform is that the backers of these policies and curricula are interested in (a) making money and (b) pushing a skill-based system to train minimally educated, compliant workers, rather than genuinely giving children an education that will give them knowledge, skills and minds that can question.
Suppose that I found that to a very high degree of accuracy, simply counting the number of commas in an essay predicted the scores that human graders would give to that essay. Suppose, then, I dispensed with having any reader look at the essays written for a test and just had a computer count up the commas. Would that be acceptable? After all, the end result is the same–same scores.
That’s a great approach to grading essays if what you want is to produce students who approach writing as people who use “paint by numbers approaches” approach painting. And you end up with the same outcomes–mediocrity, the five-paragraph theme. And so the grading method ends up, as all this stuff does, distorting curricula and pedagogy. Learning to write becomes learning the formula. It’s easy to teach those formulas in test prep books and in online, computer-adaptive curricula offered, say, through the inBloom portal. And the whole purpose and value of writing is undermined–the notion that it’s about communicating not based on a formula but based upon what one wishes to say in order to bridge the ontological gap between persons. And teaching the formulas drives out all the important work that we SHOULD BE DOING when teaching writing, like giving kids practice in the hundreds of thousands of ways in which one idea can be connected with another. Curricula and pedagogy are distorted, and innovation in these grinds to a halt. People teach the bullet list. The formula.
The “standards” in ELA are a bullet list. “There’s no bullet lists like Stalin’s bullet list.” –Edward Tufte
It’s appropriate that you mention Comrade Stalin, Robert.
A frequent response CCSS critics get is an admonition that there’s nothing wrong with the standards – not true, but a discussion for another time – but rather with their implementation.
These folks should be asked to read the constitution of the Soviet Union – a document radically different from the behavior of the Soviet state – and then compare that with Stalin’s implementation of it.
Don’t listen to what they say; watch what they do.
The standards in ELA are embarrassingly bad. I have a litmus test for whether someone knows anything at all about the teaching of English: Does he or she support the mandating of these amateurish “standards” nationwide.
The dramatic distortions of ELA pedagogy and curricula because of these “standards” is already happening and was entirely predictable. And, of course, they will stop real innovation in pedagogy and curricula absolutely cold. We can think about alternatives to the proclamations of Commissars David Coleman and Susan Pimentel when the Politburo meets to reconsider its “standards” again for the next five-year plan. Until then, our job is but to obey.
So nice to have others to do all our thinking for us!
Robert D. Shepherd: if the entire case for education rheephorm rests on the notion that you fatten pigs by weighing them, then it is no surprise that the tail of measurement wags the dog of learning.
An apt quote from THE MISMEASURE OF EDUCATION (Jim Horn & Denise Wilburn, 2013, p. 1):
“What was once educationally significant, but difficult to measure, has been replaced by what is insignificant and easy to measure. So now we test how well we have taught what we do not value. —Art Costa, professor emeritus at Cal State-Fullerton”
$tudent $ucce$$, anyone?
😎
Well said, Krazy!
The problem with the Common Core is that it is so COMMON.
yup, as in base, ignorant, uneducated, plebeian, vulgar
Reblogged this on Roy F. McCampbell's Blog.
Excellent observation, Anthony. The testing industry cannot garner its mega-profits if it must hire scores of graders for Common Core tests. The real money is in machine grading. Never mind the shallow cognition such promotes in American schoolchildren.
Such greed!
What’s worse, their greed or their will to power?