This is a very interesting story on NPR that pits one education expert against another.
On one side, David Coleman, the acknowledged architect of the Common Core standards. He thinks the standards will make all students ready for college or careers.
On the other, Karl Krawitz, the principal of Shawnee Mission East High School in Kansas. His school sends 98% of its graduates to college. He says his school doesn’t need Common Core.
Coleman: “The most important thing to know is that it was actually teachers who had the most important voice in the development of the Common Core standards,” he says.
Krawitz: “In fact, I think Common Core [is] going to set education back even further because you’re dictating curriculum,” he says, “what people are supposed to regurgitate on some kind of an assessment that’s supposed to gauge how well kids have learned the material and how well teachers have taught the material. The reality is tests don’t do either one of those things.”
Coleman: “Those kids who scored 30 percent lower, that’s the number of kids who are on their way to remediation in college,” Coleman says. “So they may have been passing previous state tests, those tests were presenting kids as ready who were not.”
Krawitz: “Kansas is struggling right now. I mean, my goodness, we’re still trying to figure out whether or not evolution should be taught,” he says.
Coleman: “Coleman says it is worth it because too many students, especially poor minority children, aren’t being challenged. “These standards are the most serious attempt this country has yet made to come to grips with those early sources of inequality,” he says.
Krawitz: He worries that the standards ran more testing. “I would do everything I can to keep Common Core out of this school,” he says.
What do you think?
I think the problem is not with the standards (the mathematics ones, anyway), but with the high-stakes tests that go along with them. And with the misuse of those test results.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not a big fan of how prescriptive they are, but I don’t see that as being terribly damaging or anything. Overall I think the math standards contain more positives than negatives. Now if they’d just let us teach them and support us in doing so rather than threatening and punishing based on test scores. That part is destructive.
Corey,
What exactly is a “standard”?
Thanks,
Duane
Ideally, it should be a guide. A set of goals to strive for in helping us decide what and how to teach. For that purpose, the Common Core Math Standards aren’t bad.
Children are not taught to write properly in the UK, I got so frustrated, I wrote my book. I presume the same issues is in the USA?
Why is Coleman lying about who wrote the standards?
Just what I was thinking…but look at NPR almost every story is sponsored in some way by the B and M Gates Foundation. No one was going to question him on the validity of his story.
The Standards (for mathematics, anyway) had some brilliant educators writing them. Dick Scheaffer, past president of the American Statistical Association, and an outstanding teacher (though he was a college teacher) and statistics educator. Skip Fennell (I’m not sure if he was part of the original author team or got on board to work on the Progressions Documents), past president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, former classroom teacher, later a teacher educator. Dick Askey, college mathematics professor. I know all three of these people. I have worked with Dick Scheaffer on a textbook. They care deeply about mathematics education and put a great deal of energy and expertise into the Common Core standards. And Bill McCallum, who I know by reputaition only, is also an outstanding voice for quality mathematics instruction.
Corey, why did you leave out Jason Zimba, who was the lead writer of the Common Core math team? He worked for David Coleman at Stipudebt Achievement Partners and was on the faculty at Bennington, where David’s mother is president. http://faculty.bennington.edu/~jzimba/;
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/rick_hess_straight_up/2013/02/rhsu_straight_up_conversation_sap_honcho_jason_zimba.html
Why doesn’t any ever talk about the fact that the Accuplacer test, which is used to determine the level of readiness for college (and the results of which are used in the argument for more testing), is created, graded, and benchmarked by the College Board – the company run by David Coleman.
I don’t think I see any public school teachers on the development list? Were there any?
David needs to be called out on his remediation rate… It is 34% of students in PUBLIC colleges, many of of whom are adults “brushing up” after being out of school for years. Read here http://www.ncsl.org/issues-research/educ/improving-college-completion-reforming-remedial.aspx
The 34% taking remedial classes is pretty accurate for first year students at my institution, and the vast majority of students here are traditional students just out of high school. 20% of first year students do not make it to the second year at my institution.
And why is that 20% a problem? Shouldn’t those who seek to learn have the opportunity, and then if they cannot complete the work in an acceptable fashion move on? Isn’t that what the “free market” would allow and encourage? And of those 20% is there any information from them as to why they may not have gone through to the second year?
Coleman lacks many facts to back up his argument. Apply the standards to yourself David.
In Michigan, I am being told that teachers are developing the Common Core standards that will be used here and that they are far more developmentally appropriate than the ones we are presently using. That sounds good, as the present standards are not appropriate.
Can someone clear this up for me?
Is Common Core just a series of benchmarks for our children, or if we adopt it, will our teachers be micro-managed? Does it come with additional high-stakes testing — or will our state test that is always given be changed to be aligned with Common Core?
Does Common Core have something to do with this issue of schools releasing students’ data?
Thanks for any words of wisdom from those states which are already using Common Core.
1. WHO are these teachers who wrote the Common Core standards? Names? Locations? Affiliations? School Dsitricts? In what ways do they represent all learners?
2. College Preparedness: So everyone is on the poath to college? How will this policy affect our global standing? How will this policy meet future economic demands? How is this equitable?
3. Math Standards: I must respectfully disagree with the previous comments about the new math standards. I am familiar with the changes in upper elementary and middle school, and I don’t see this as a move in a positive direction.
To answer your #2 questions:
NO!, that’s a diversionary tactic (all students should be college/career ready) to make it appear that the public schools are “failing”.
Who gives a crap about out “global standing”. It’s just another
diversionary tactic to make it appear that the public schools are “failing”. GO USA SIS BOOM RAH!!!
It can’t because educational practices (in the case of the Common Corporate Standards, malpractices) are not designed to address “economic demands”. Again, a diversionary tactic to make it appear that the public schools are “failing”.
“How is this equitable?” Can’t answer that one as I don’t know in what sense of the word you mean equitable?
I mean “equitable” in the sense of what is required to fairly meet the educational needs of each student. Is it fair to funnel all students, no matter interests, career goals, or ability- into one “track”?
And I ask about “global standing” because that is a rationale used by CCP (Common Core Pushers).
I agree. I don’t think it is fair to funnel all students into one school.
I would agree that it is not equitable to funnel all students into one “track” or perhaps even one “school” (per TE). Who should make that decision, that of deciding a child’s coursework? For me it should be the parents in conjunction with the student’s teachers and school.
Will NPR follow up and correct Coleman’s lie or are we to believe it is simply a difference of opinion?
More disgusting is Coleman equating CC standards with equality when in reality they are the mechanism for sorting, segregating, and excluding struggling learners.
Absolutely not, look at some of the National Propaganda Radio’s funders-they brook no compromise.
I agree with Karl Krawitz, the principal of Shawnee Mission East High School in Kansas. Most of us on in the Northeast or West Coast have never heard of Shawnee Mission East.
But I have. It’s the equivalent of the public high schools in Scarsdale, Greenwich or Newton. At my undergraduate college in Western Massachusetts, I had 3 of their quite brilliant and impressive graduates in my class. Given my myopic NYC-Northern New Jersey world view—I thought of it as superior/sophisticated back then :-)—when I heard these two young women and young man mention “Kansas”, I had visions of wheat and sunflower fields and imagined their little farmhouse in the middle of nowhere.
How naive I was. And, my experience was recounted by my friends at Princeton, MIT, Harvard, Smith and Dartmouth, just to name a few that come to mind; we all soon had stories to tell about the truly amazing people we met from Shawnee Mission East. (Think exclusive country clubs, gorgeous architecture, perfect lawns, high-income driven professionals driving a Lexus or BMW—not “Little House on the Prairie”.
This is the high school that most Americans dream of for their daughters and sons.
So, when their principal is so public and so vocal in his opposition to Common Core, it’s an indication of how the top-flight “suburban dream” high schools are going to react as the CC rolls out into the communities across our country.
And CC is even more unpopular in the vastly lower income, less affluent small towns across Kansas and in every state.
Conservatives are beginning to crow about Common Core—and this time they’re absolutely correct in their criticism.
And urban progressives like myself are feeling our blood boil about the imposition of yet another federal standard on our district, school and classroom. We hate it. And the only reason more of us don’t feel the same way is that they haven’t gotten the message…yet.
No wonder the panic about the justified, rational pushback against CC is starting to emerge—from the New York Times editorial page to National Review to Arne Duncan’s pathetic and bizarre pleading with Corporate America to fund his push for this idea.
You see, the opposition is beginning to take hold; and it cuts across ideological, geographical, and financial lines. I’d be nervous too, if I had already placed on my bets on the success of Common Core—and the companies hoping to profit from it.
The people pushing Common Core are The Privatizers—also pushing for things like charters and vouchers and union-free schools, with low-paid, rotating “teachers” who only stay 2 to 4 years.
But the ONLY people who The Privatizers truly fear are Parents & Taxpayers. We can and will continue to decimate their ranks, voting them out of office everywhere, if they continue with their vile and deceptive plan to privatize our public schools.
We WILL push back against the so-called “Common Core”; and we’ll hold our ground and keep our public schools, with real, respected, dedicated teachers.
And we won’t listen to these miscreants who insist that CC is “good for our students”, while invoking images of tearing off bandaids and causing “necessary” pain to small children.
I don’t trust them. And I don’t trust “Common Core”.
“So, when their principal is so public and so vocal in his opposition to Common Core, it’s an indication of how the top-flight “suburban dream” high schools are going to react as the CC rolls out into the communities across our country.”
I’ve been saying for years that when the NCLB and its insane prescriptions started to affect the wealthy suburban districts then there would be serious politcal backlash. Those districts and the people who run them didn’t (and really still don’t) give a rat’s ass when those policies negatively affected poor urban and rural districts made up of black thugs, illegal hispanics and white trailer trash meth heads (and I’m being facetious with those terms). I just thought it would affect them starting around 2010. RaTT bought the educrats and edudeformers more time with the wealthy districts but it eventually had to catch up to them.
And, Interestingly enough, the virtual charter schools (K12 owned, at that!) have come knockin’ round some very successful, well-off school districts in Illinois–15 of them, to be exact (three are 3 more on their victimization list, but those are districts with low-income students, as well). The districts have done their due diligence–came back with excellent information at the K12 (or Vitual Learning “Schools,” in some cases–different moniker, same company), could get neither good answers or subsequent responses from the pushy salespeople, and, thus far, two districts denied the charter apps. At this juncture, it looks like the rest will follow suit, & we will wait to hear from the IL Charter School Commission to see if they overturn the districts’ decisions. However, the point is that–like Common Core–the 15 districts have students who score well on ISATs & other tests (97% was cited in at least one district). That begged the question, “Why do we need virtual charters when our schools are doing so well? And don’t you take money out of our district?”
They could say the same for Common Core.
One reason to consider virtual classes even when the schools are doing well is to give students access to classes that are not taught locally and to resolve scheduling conflicts in local classes.
I am not sure it is in the same class as New Trier or Scarsdale, but it is a good public high school.
I couldn’t agree with you more! I beleive all this about the CC was started by those interested in pushing the right wing agenda…..private, religious schools with low paid teachers who are given curriculum, materials, etc. I am a public school teacher of 33 years and I saw it coming down the pike with ex president Bush II. It’s the reason that I will be retiring from a job that I used to love.
A. Spector
Monmouth County, NJ
Before teaching, I worked in software development. If our company released a major product revision with no quality assurance testing and no trial beta release, we would be out of business in a week as well as the laughing stock of the industry.
Common Core is a corporate initiative written from ivory towers. Teachers had little say. The standards are poorly written and suppress innovation and learning. We have no idea if they are effective or relevant. The logo for Common Core should be a picture of lemmings going over a cliff.
There is a disconnect between what Mr. Coleman says about the standards and the standards themselves. When he talks about them, or when he presents model lessons in videos, he draws upon ideas presented in pieces incidental to the standards themselves–ideas found in the Publishers’ Criteria, in the introductions to the standards, and in Appendix B of the ELA standards document. These ideas go to serious approaches to serious material. The materials around the standards call for
close reading of related, substantive, foundational texts in literature, history, science, and technical subjects
putting texts first and making instruction in abstract skills incidental to understanding particular texts (so, the point of the lesson becomes not “learning about the main idea” or “making inferences” but learning what Cervantes or Madison or Emerson or Billy Collins had to say)
When Mr. Coleman talks of the increased rigor of the new standards, it must be this incidental material, like the list of exemplar texts in Appendix B, that he has in mind.
But the standards themselves–the list of skills to be mastered–is something else altogether. It’s THOSE that will be tested. It’s THOSE that will be treated by publishers and curriculum designers as, alas, the curriculum.
And by publishing such a list, the CCSSI in effect overrules every curriculum coordinator, every textbook writer, and every teacher in the country, telling them, these are the skills that you must teach and at what grade levels. Their expertise becomes moot. Because it will be what is tested, the list of skills (the standards themselves) will become the curriculum, and so, in the actual implementation, the very philosophy on which the standards is based will be undermined by those standards. The texts and the ideas that they contain will become secondary. What will matter to people is whether students have “gotten” standard L.9-10.4a.
Mr. Coleman could do the nation a great service by making it very, very clear that the standards–that list of skills–should be taken as voluntary–one extremely flawed attempt at listing what kids might learn incidentally as they study those great texts. Doing so would allow curriculum coordinators, textbook designers, and teachers the autonomy and flexibility that they need in order to design sensible learning progressions that meet the overall objective (development of the ability to read, closely, related, substantive, foundational texts). It very much should be up to educators to decide what particular texts they consider foundational and what skills they should teach when as ways into those texts. Their expertise about this matters matters.
I’ve been teaching and writing textbooks and using various sets of standards for decades. I think that the list of skills and the learning progressions in the CCSS are deeply flawed. It’s more than a little presumptuous for Mr. Coleman to tell every educator in the country, this is THE LIST. What you think you know about what to teach, how, and when, is entirely moot. Do this, or else.
The or else is what will drive all of this in the actual implementation. That’s entirely predictable. It is entirely predictable that we’ll end up with more lessons on this skill, then that skill, and the whole point of reading–what is being communicated–will be lost.
Yep, increased rigor–RIGOR MORTIS.
Robert,
“. . .using various sets of standards for decades.”
Can you please define what an educational standard is?
What a great question!!! It’s one that people really should have addressed before they issued these. By “using various sets of standards” I simply mean that those of us who work as teachers and textbook designers have dealt with hundreds of lists, over the years, of what people (school districts, states, nations, various professional organizations) have called ‘standards.” Typically, these are lists of skills, by grade level. They encourage isolated drill on these skills, which is a horrible pedagogical practice.
It would have been of enormous value if the folks who developed these standards [sic] had asked the very question you pose, Duane. What should a set of standards be? Perhaps it should NOT be a list of skills. Perhaps it should be a list of recommended pedagogical techniques. Perhaps it should be a list of facts and theories that every educated person should know. Perhaps the whole idea of a MANDATORY set of standards, in a diverse, pluralistic culture, is EXTREMELY FLAWED. Perhaps. There was a whole lot of not thinking at all about what they were doing, of not backing up and asking such questions, going on when these standards [sic] were prepared.
Indeed, Coleman seems to have little interest at all in the standards themselves. They don’t sound like his voice at all. I think he’s more a lead author of the official commentary on the standards and a relatively minor contributor to the standards themselves.
cx: Their expertise about these matters matters.
I think if we were really concerned about “poor minority children”, we might find ways to lessen their poverty, to see that their schools had the same resources available to them as the wealthy suburban school district in which I live, to enrich their lives and learning experiences, not test them until they drop-out of school!!!
That’s the Koolaid talking right there. More resources. More waste. If there was a qualified teacher out there- give them a Lit Book (book from their subject), paper, pencils, pencil sharpener, world map, chalk board/white board, class set of dictionaries a copy machine and a class set of novels- that person if he or she is smart (that’s no longer important in this country) THEY CAN TEACH for a whole six months.
In the absence of the common core, would folks be comfortable with the Kansas Board of Education determining curriculum? Some of their decisions, especially in the sciences, have been controversial.
Of course not. That’s one reason why we should have competing models and NOT have any entity, state or federal, dictating standards and curricula for all.
So you would be more comfortable with local school boards determining the science curriculum in Kansas?
First.. I have to say I don’t view Coleman as an “education expert”. I think and education opportunists is more appropriate.
Second.. If remediation rates in colleges are a concern, why are college grad rates at all time highs?
Put those two points together.. Coleman and his cohorts are using invalid data to make a judgement regarding education in our nation. They claim their so called new standards would ensure our students and children know how to present an argument using facts. Unfortunately Coleman doesn’t live up to his own standards.
Look at the link provided by Carol Burris, t hat describes what the remediation rate is based on..
Check out the real data.. Here. http://rlratto.wordpress.com/2012/04/28/lets-drive-this-data/
The numbers in the blog entry are for number of degree granted. Given that more students are going to college, it is perfectly possible that we might be seeing a lower graduation rate and more degrees granted. The current nationa six year graduatiin rate is around 50%. I am not sure if that is an increase or decrease from the past.
In mathematics and in early reading, developmental differences among individual students are extremely important. People develop at very different rates and in very different ways. We now know, for example, that in most people, parts of the prefrontal cortex that deal with abstract reasoning and planning do not go through exponential development until about the age of sixteen and are not fully developed until their mid twenties. And we know that the brain is plastic and that neural structures that are being laid down get weeded out from disuse. It probably makes sense, for most but not all kids, to have them doing lots of pattern recognition activities (playing with patterns) in the early grades and to delay general instruction on abstract mathematical ideas (e.g., the notion of a variable or the concept of proof) until much, much later. But the math standards do not allow people to try out such ideas. They say, here is the script for everyone, and that script is, I believe, wildly developmentally appropriate in the early grades. We also now know that by far the bulk of vocabulary and grammar is not learned through explicit instruction but, rather, that kids have innate devices in their heads for intuiting semantic connections and grammatical structures from ambient SPOKEN language. We also know that most kids come from environments where that spoken language environment is impoverished, but there is NOTHING, NOTHING AT ALL, in the new standards that addresses this–what we have actually learned from scientific studies of language acquisition over the past fifty years–studies done mostly not by education people but by linguists, cognitive psychologists, and computer scientists working on natural language processing systems. Again, the new standards hamstring curriculum designers, making it impossible for them to implement new approaches based on this knowledge–something that is sorely needed.
If you are the entity writing the textbooks, resources, and assessments then you have to have CC so that everyone does well on the standardized test you wrote so ALEC, Gates, Coleman and friends can say, “Look, scores went up! right. This does work. We were right!” Then they keep the stats in their massive database so they can manipulate them however they want to show their stuff works, so states buy more of their textbooks, resources and assessments and by the time the public realizes it DOESN’T work they will already have made millions, destroyed public education, scattered students to the winds and no one will be able to really sue because with so many things happening no one can prove they caused the mess intentionally.
Then they move on to the next big profit area, pet care or the elderly.
Here, a bit of homework for the folks who developed the new math standards. Read this:
And the sections of this that deal with development of fluid (versus crystallized) intelligence:
http://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-How-Get-It-Cultures/dp/0393337693
Anyone who has read these two sources with understanding would have created a VERY different set of mathematics standards for the early grades.
Coleman’s logic: if you can’t jump over a 4 foot high bar you can solve the problem by raising it to a height of 6 feet.
Right? Coleman think the reason there is remedial college education is because the high school tests are too easy and making them harder will cause everyone to learn more. Yeah, he’s definitely the smartest guy in the room.
To the extent any teachers were involved in developing the Common Corporate Standards, it was done as in the business world: management has a pre-determined decision about what to do, and then has a series of scripted events for the underlings that are totally with the confines of that decision, to get them to “buy into” it.
If you want see genesis of these standards, check out the Boards of Achieve, Inc. and The Diploma Project. It will tell you what you need to know.
“Poor and minority students aren’t being challenged”……? Really?
Hi Diane–I love your blog. I noticed some people asking for someone to “please define what an educational standard is,” and I was wondering if you could offer a quick post clarifiying what specifically is meant by the term “content standards” and how such standards actually function in schools with regard to curriculum development, testing, etc. The word “standards” in K-12 lingo means something different than in ordinary discourse, and I think a lot of noneducators respond to the debate over standards as if it were a debate over “standards” in the popular sense of the term, so that a lot of people end up thinking to themselves, “Hey, standards are great! How could anyone be against standards! What’s wrong with all these teachers? Don’t they think we should have any standards?”
Krawitz is correct. “Teachers” having input on the CC is like saying “the prisoners are happy here. Because they stay”. I would challenge any thinking person to swallow the four year “teacher credentialling Koolaide program” in any state in the USA it defies thinking actually. It ill prepares immature 22 year olds for crowd control, does not hone and sharpen subject mastery nor does it teach to scaffold levels of thinking and learning according to a schema or system like Blooms Taxonomy which coupled with Socratic instruction is what makes a good class. NONE of these things are communicated in a Teacher Credentialing program so how would their feedback on anything make them qualified? The dumbing down starts there. Anyone who can stomach that should not be allowed to teach anything. They should in fact do something much more lucrative like sell phone systems.
This CC is clearly “teaching to the test” period. Inappropirate and unscaffolded subject matter at the wrong age, random and arbitrary in its nature. No smart person could or should even deliver this message. My sons Bilingual teacher from Argentina, seasoned at 50+ yrs old, I suspect after 6 days absent from school, may have quit over the agony of disseminating such garbage to unwitting little babies who need to learn to love literacy to embrace lifetime learning. My second grader’s class is using my beloved Charlottes Web like a Communist Manifesto. Not cherishing each line, each vignette, not digesting every rich vocabulary word and learning its meaning, its use, its place in the world. Having class discussion about Wilbur and Charlottes relationship, so much to be learned. They are making her do Literary Analysis of a text to text connection. WTF? A text to world connection. She cannot spell that yet…………..this country has nailed the lid on the coffin for its youth. They will become MORE disillusuoned, more disgusted, more angry and violent, drop out more- now that school really, officailly, SUCKS.
Common Core is not the problem. Standards help teachers — especially beginning teachers. The assessment of the standards is not even the problem if it is authentic assessment.
It is the punitive HIGH STAKES of the assessment that is the problem. That is what causes the cheating scandals and, worse, the tragic narrowing of the curriculum.
Hm, I am most disturbed by Coleman’s statement that common core standards will benefit “unchallenged minority students” – teachers are already working to provide best practices to reach every single student in the classroom. A national standard is not going to ensure the unchallenged minority in the classroom is reached – smaller class sizes, however, will.
That said, any professional can slap a standard on almost any lesson. Standards do not increase professionalism or student achievement. They increase loopholes and bureaucratic creativity.
Get us smaller classroom sizes and better books.
What are standards? Good starting point. They are performance goals announcing how folks should teach, learn, and perform. We can say that CC and standardized tests are externally imposed “output” standards, meaning “3rd grade curriculum will teach these mandated materials to students who will then be expected to show how much they know at the end(their output).” Official school reform in past decades has only discussed “outputs”–at the end of such a time period students will display knowing these materials. Status quo reform waves of last 40 yrs or so have evaded “input” standards. “Input” standards would address the teaching and learning conditions of students and teachers to establish a floor of minimums every teacher and child has a right to begin with. For example–all kids will have eaten a healthy breakfast before classes begin–that would be a crucial input standard to address the outrageous child poverty rate in America. Or, all kids will have access to dental, optical, and medical care. Or, all teachers will be assigned classes of no more than 18 students. Or, all classrooms will have child-friendly libraries and all schools full-time librarians, nurses, counselors, and fitness coaches. I could go on, but you get the point. The only discourse we have in America concerns OUTPUT standards dominated by Coleman, Gates, Broad, etc., which enable the billionaires to falsely claim that students, teachers, and parents have failed, just look at the numbers, ugh! In rejecting the top-down imposition of CC, we also need to speak up for input standards which put child poverty, large classes, low resources, etc., as the premier issues. Standards are okay to promote if we project democratic, child-centered, teacher-friendly standards which help level the vastly unequal playing field which is American education.
I’ve read a lot about the “Common Core,” but this comment is the first one I’ve seen that addresses “input standards.” It’s an important concept, and it reveals Secretary Duncan’s persistent (and frankly, misguided) “raising the bar” metaphor. Besides, a good teacher takes the students as they are and adjusts the material and teaching so that they have a chance to learn and stretch themselves. Imposing “rigorous standards” at each grade level is a recipe for disaster.
The notion of college readiness as applied to school children has its own obvious pitfalls. Follow Mr. Coleman’s insistence on academic rigor and endless repetition of what he calls close reading and argument, especially in the lower grades, and we will not only bore the kids to tears, we’ll stress them into poor health, even suicide. If you think this is an exaggeration, check out a very good documentary, The Race to Nowhere. http://www.racetonowhere.com/ Even before we adopted these misbegotten “standards,” the pressure to perform in “good” schools was completely out of hand. Isn’t anybody talking about the “affective domain” these days? Apparently not the authors and promoters of the Common Core.
When I say that the concept of input standards “reveals” Sec. Duncan’s metaphor, I mean “gives the lie to it” or “reveals the inaptness of it.” Basically I mean that the Secretary doesn’t know much about teaching, learning, or schools. Unfortunately.
The common core standards are not the problem. They represent a good beginning to define what basic skills are in a global economy. Using children and their test scores to evaluate teachers and principals destroys the altruistic nature of schools and can harm student and teacher development.
Although there are problematic elements of the Common Core, what is more troubling is the Publishers Guide, which Coleman has influenced. What will really harm students most significantly is the faulty translation of these standards, not necessarily the standards themselves.
The constant nagging by so many educators is the main reason that our students are failing in basic core ares.We continue to be very low performance overall:however, as a 73 year old retired educator (of 51 years), I can attest to the number of teachers that will not tolerate change.The reason that some teachers can not accept change , is that they have found a comfort level in repeating teaching and learning strategies that no longer work. T;he expiration date for outdated practices has come to a screeching halt teachers…we need to get rid of the old and bring in the new! PK and K students now are sitting in front of computers and can search,find and locate information,,videos, and some can even write their own stories and keep daily journals. How sad it is to see that some teachers refuse to use the modern technology at the tip of their fingers. The McAllen Independent School District in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas is one of the school districts that has become a “game changer” by providing a laptop for every student! Now,that is the kind of mentality we must transform to. What a blessing for young students to be able to learn in a quality teaching environment that promotes engagement of teachers and students by utilizing quality teaching and quality learning strategies.
Thank you for allowing me to comment .Maria Louisa Olivarez Garcia