A group of early childhood educators explain here why the Common Core is inappropriate for children in grades K-3. This statement is an excerpt from their joint publication “Defending the Early Years.”
The first mistake of the Common Core is that it “maps backwards” from what is needed for high school graduation and ignores the kind of learning that is developmentally appropriate for young children. “An example of a developmentally inappropriate Common Core standard for kindergarten is one that requires children to “read emergent reader texts with purpose and understanding.” Many young children are not developmentally ready to read in kindergarten and there is no research to support teaching reading in kindergarten. There is no research showing long-term advantages to reading at 5 compared to reading at 6 or 7.”
The second mistake is that the CCSS assumes that all children learn at the same rate and in the same way. However, “Many of the skills mandated by the CCSS erroneously assume that all children develop and learn skills at the same rate and in the same way. Decades of child development research and theory from many disciplines (cognitive and developmental psychology, neuroscience, medicine and education) show how children progress at different rates and in different ways. For example, the average age that children start walking is 12 months. Some children begin walking as early as 9 months and others not until 15 months – and all of this falls within a normal range. Early walkers are not better walkers than later walkers. A second example is that the average age at which children learn to read independently is 6.5 years. Some begin as early as 4 years and some not until age 7 or later – and all of this falls within the normal range.”
Part of the second mistake is that young children are being assessed in ways that make no sense: “The CCSS are measured using frequent and inappropriate assessments – this includes high-stakes tests, standardized tests and computer-administered assessments. States are required to use computer-based tests (such as PARCC) to assess CCSS. This is leading to mandated computer use at an early age and the misallocation of funds to purchase computers and networking systems in school districts that are already underfunded.”
A third mistake was that those who wrote the CCSS did not include anyone knowledgeable about early childhood education: “The CCSS do not comply with the internationally and nationally recognized protocol for writing professional standards. They were written without due process, transparency, or participation by knowledgeable parties. Two committees made up of 135 people wrote the standards – and not one of them was a K-3 classroom teacher or early childhood education professional.”
A fourth mistake was that “There is a lack of research to support the current early childhood CCSS. The standards were not pilot tested and there is no provision for ongoing research or review of their impact on children and on early childhood education.” Those of us who urged field testing of the standards were ignored.
Read the rest of the article to read the other mistakes that CCSS made in writing standards for K-3. Then you will understand how foolish it was for a kindergarten class to cancel the annual class play because the children needed more time for rigorous academic studies. If educators think that CCSS cancels out the well-researched principles of child development, they make a terrible mistake.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Can someone plese post a response to Hess in the Indy Star concerning their rewrite of Charter School history and their plea for more money, less central planning government oversight, no vam teacher assessments, no limited and narrow test score evaluations of charter schools, etc for their charter funders? http://www.indystar.com/story/opinion/2014/05/11/loving-charter-schools-death/8919555/
Heartland is also posting pieces concerning the need for more money for these poor charter schools that are doing such and outstanding job. Mindtrusters are at work, spreading half truths and well spun lies about how credo found charters to outperform, on average, public school students (seems like what they found was that most perform only as well, some perform better, and a growing third or more score less well).
These people promised soaring test scores, happy involved parents, innovation (note that hess decries the lack of such innovation) that could serve as models for public schools, and this all for less money. Now that the test scores are proven false, nobody is innovating except in ways to pull more money from legislatures and to deny access to low performing, high needs students, and research is showing that the only thing soaring is dropouts from these schools and high profits to the corporate privateers, they are trying to get absolution from their test accountability rankings, vam, and government audit oversight, even as research is finding they are stealing hundreds of millions. Tests and vam and A-F rankings are only good for public schools, not for free market privateers. That information just confuses the parents as they try to make their best choice in how and wher to spend their education dollars.
Please start posting comments in rebuttal to the Star and get some opinion pieces full of research to them asap. They may not print it, the star is fully in the pocket of the ed reformers and mindtrusters.
It may not matter.
The disparity in funding between the charter schools ed reformers in government prefer at the state and federal; level is getting coverage at the state level in both Florida and Ohio.
They were never agnostics. The funding preferences for charter schools over public schools at the state and federal level proves it. Ed reformers at the state and federal level prefer charter schools over public schools. The only way that will change is to stop hiring ed reformers to run public schools at both the state and federal level.
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education.
So if I understand the timeline, Randi Weingarten supported Common Core Standards before fully comprehending them? Interesting that a teachers union headed by a non-educator would have to hear complaints from both parents and teachers after the implementation of something she rubber stamped. One would think she would have realized the consequences before hand but this is what happens when you form agreements without thinking. And now to team up with Nancy to help her regain her credibility in this is appalling because Nancy was the first to point out the pitfalls that fell on Randi’s deaf ears.
The new contract has the same pitfalls. It’s going to allow public schools to be more “charter like” (see today’s NYTimes) but teachers would have to give up “rights” under the contract. What does this say about a union who is supposed to support public school education? It says that the union sees charters winning the battle and is now setting all public schools up to become dues paying members but offering no rights or protection in return.
And as for the raise, it now looks like it will be going towards health coverage. Look for cuts to be made to benefits as well. You see, this was outside the contract for good reason…the rank and file would have wanted input.
It’s not just Randi, either. Dennis Van Roekel and NEA in general are jumping whole-hog into CC, to the point that the Representative Assembly last year pushed through a $3.00 per month increase in dues to support CC (basically propaganda). I wish BOTH major unions would realize what they’ve done.
The great irony of this is that the plutocrats funding the Common Core very much see it as a means to enable to creation of technologies to replace teachers–a national bullet list to tag computer-adaptive curricula to. Imagine a room full of 400 kids, all working at tablets, and a single low-level aide walking around, helping with problems, and making sure the tablets are working. That’s the vision, folks, and Gates never stops hinting about it–talking about how EXPENSIVE education is and how,
“Teaching, there’s an app for that.”
But this flew right over the heads of the “leaders” of the unions.
Frightening that that should be so, but it is.
Give the CCSS credit where it is due, though, Diane — when it comes to getting public dollars into the private pockets of a few, they do EVERYTHING right!
Why, if they had been designed with THAT goal in mind, they could be said to be a resounding success!
CCSS is developmentally inappropriate, yeah, but from my vantage point here in California, it doesn’t seem like much of a change. I’ve been subbing in schools here in the Central Valley, ever since a horribly ill-timed career change led me into teaching right before the districts started shedding jobs the way my white cat sheds fur. We’ve been teaching Kinder-kids to read (AKA trying to teach them) at least since 2009. We’ve been demanding well-planned paragraphs out of them by the end of the year (with varying success), and requiring 5+ hours of quiet seatwork. None of this makes any sense whatsoever. All it does it give struggling kids a reputation for being “bad” that they’re never going to shake, and may eventually try to live up to. Why do we do it? I don’t have the faintest clue, but it didn’t start with CCSS.
All in the name of setting high standards.
Slogans!
Banners!
Repeated by legislators, non-educators, foundations and millions of pressured people who seem to forget that children have not changed, parents have not changed, but we treat them as if they are broken before they even enter school. Having to ‘bone up’ to enter Kindergarten sets the tone and it gets worse and more damaging for years.
We as a nation appear so uneducated and ignorant – we don’t even know what is best for our children. We don’t protect our children.
Oh, I forgot, it’s all about money.
So true. If anyone takes the time to analyze critical K-3 math skills they will find that there are so many developmental skills ignored-symbolic grasp; symbol/quantity recognition; spatial awareness and set theory. Add to that the lack teacher fluency in math at the early elementary grades and it’s no wonder that our children still function with algorithms, without ever really understanding the conceptual design of mathematics. Math is probably the easiest of the “languages” to teach–perfect construction, concrete, discrete and sequential, but we need to help our teachers so they truly understand what and how to teach math, as well as how children learn at an early age. The textbook publishers don’t even begin to understand the developmental needs of children learning this language we call math.
Interesting analysis Andrew. What is your suggestion for the early grades (assuming teachers are mathematicall fluent)?
CC RIGOR—Kindergarten students are being required to pass timed math tests of 18 factors in one minute. My grandson must pass 18 math facts 0-5 in addition,subtraction and a combination of both in one minute. Developmentally many 5 and 6 year old’s do not have the processing speed to accomplish this. This is causing students to feel inadequate and defeated in math in kindergarten. Is this really how we want students to approach math skills and learning??? My children did not have timed math tests until second and third grade.
CC math standards and the even worse methodologies combined with the impossible grade level demands will destroy a generation of math students if this goes unchecked.
They also don’t take into account that younger students hand are just too small to type with any fluency. They should NEVER take tests online. You don’t expect first graders to play a full sized guitar but we routinely expect them to type on an adult keyboard. Many younger students have just learned their alphabet, then how to read and eventually how to comprehend what they just read, well. Can we also be expecting them to take all this information, digest it and then type about it? As far as CCSS testing goes it is physically cruel/inappropriate to do this to children K-3rd grade.
Slightly off topic, but note interesting article in latest issue of the New Yorker about educational “reform” in Newark. where “The going rate for individual consultants was a thousand dollars a day”.
Excerpt: ..[M]ore than twenty million dollars of Zuckerberg’s gift and matching donations went to consulting firms with various specialties: public relations, human resources, communications, data analysis, teacher evaluation. Many of the consultants had worked for Joel Klein, Teach for America, and other programs in the tight-knit reform movement, and a number of them had contracts with several school systems financed by Race to the Top grants and venture philanthropy. The going rate for individual consultants in Newark was a thousand dollars a day. Vivian Cox Fraser, the president of the Urban League of Essex County, observed, “Everybody’s getting paid, but Raheem still can’t read.”
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/05/19/140519fa_fact_russakoff?currentPage=all
“Many of the consultants had worked for Joel Klein, Teach for America, and other programs in the tight-knit reform movement,”
Good for them. The “tight-knit” nature of ed reform is never explored, and it should be. The claims of “data driven” are really brought into question by how clubby and insular it all is.
It goes to the revolving door between government and ed reform orgs and industry, too. The Obama Administration revolving door should be a stand-alone story.
They’re not hearing any dissenters, because they all hire one another. I’m sick of it just as a taxpayer and citizen. These are conflicts, and I don’t know these people and I don’t think they should be given such ethical leeway based solely on their own assertions that they’re “unbiased”.
Ed reformers in government promote charter schools to the detriment of public schools. That’s not fair, and it’s not what we hired them do nor are we paying them for that.
It’s as if there were a huge group of people in HHS who were promoting the privatized Medicare Advantage over Medicare, the public program. Medicare would suffer for that bias.
Nice work, too. I’d like a thousand dollars a day.
Speaking of the “tight-knit nature” of the ed reform movement:
Arne Duncan @arneduncan · May 8
Ted Mitchell has been confirmed as the new Under Secretary for @usedgov ! We are thrilled to have him on board. http://ow.ly/wDFNy
Would it kill the Obama Administration to hear from someone OUTSIDE this clubby little circle?
Give me a break. This is a bubble. Public school supporters need not apply. I find it particularly offensive given the lofty claims of “data driven” and this sort of veneer of “science”. There’s no dissent at all, and they move from the ed reform orgs to the ed reform industries to government. Is it any wonder public schools have fared so poorly under the Obama Administration? They hire people who seek to dismantle and privatize the system, people who see no value at all in existing public schools. We don’t stand a chance.
There is a special place in the Other Place for our defense contractors who did this to us- sought to destroy our children.
https://twitter.com/PARCCPlace
So that is the PARCC Twitter feed. Say you’re an outsider, a public school parent, and this was presented to you as an experiment that will be data-driven and informed by evidence and subject to modification and collaboration.
So why does the Twitter feed read like marketing for a commercial product launch?
If we’re going to outsource K-12 education policy that affects every public school kid in the country to non-governmental private entities, can we at least show some commitment to critical analysis and dissenting views?
I don’t find the sales job at all comforting. If we are going to be given marketing, let’s at least be clear about that.
Louisiana is already spinning the results of student surveys that were given in conjunction with this test. They’re claiming 80% of kids liked the test, when it’s 80% of the 50% of kids who responded. They’re claiming the kids responses “validate” the adult decisions.
Let’s not tell kids we want their opinion then use their responses to sell product, okay? That’s a breach of their trust. It’s using them to promote an agenda, and it’s not fair.
It’s a “green” bubble. Of cash, that is.
It’s amusing, because that was the rap on public schools, right, that “self interested” middle class wage earners like teachers were taking money from children.
Glad we solved that problem. We took money from teachers and handed it to consultants. HUGE improvement. Lotta “value added” there!
Privatization always ends this way. It always pushes public money UP and front-line wages go DOWN.
From their twitter feet, they are like robots — or Stepford wives, or something. The Daleks.
Reblogged this on Centerville United for Responsible Education and commented:
Do you think raising the standards will make children more developmentally ready to read and write? Or will it frustrate them while neglecting age appropriate skill development?
Wonderful article! It is spot on!
See Gary Stern’s article, “New York’s school reform sidelined by Common Core,” for the tale of how New York’s effort to re-write standards — the correct way — was derailed by the Regents’ decision to go for RTTT funds. (Journal News, May 11: http://www.lohud.com/story/news/education/2014/05/10/common-core-derailed-ny-standards/8918925/)
The CCSS rollout is one mangled confused mess. My district was not ready and we ended up creating units on the fly, not always successfully, I might add. The kids were not ready for this jump into higher standards, slowing down our pace, for which we were yelled at by our curriculum coordinator, because “Second- graders should be able to do this!” She, of course, has never taught second grade, but knows exactly where the problem lies: the teachers, of course! Any defense of our pacing is seen as an excuse. In her world-view, formal instruction should begin in earnest on the second day of school: no more building classroom community and developing routines. We have to get these 6 and 7 year-olds ready for college and career! If only we believed that all children can learn! Meanwhile, the kids are turned off. They now take math tests that rival the tests I took in middle school a bazillion years ago: SIX pages of complicated directions on a wide array of concepts. They can’t hold that much information in their heads if I review the test in its entirety and let them work at their own pace, so we go page by agonizing page together. The last test took two hours to complete (in two separate sessions.) Some cry and don’t want to come to school. One student now has anxiety attacks. I wonder what will happen to these children as they slog through their school years with this nonsense.
You know they won’t continue to slog on and on. It’s not human nature to persist for long in an endeavor that seems too hard, too hopeless. I don’t believe my third graders have it in them to continue to “just do their best” for nine more punishing years.
You are so right. At what point do we as teachers say, enough is enough. When its too late?
Being a homeschooling mom, I’ve researched Common Core’s requirements for a Kindergartener. Honestly, none of them are above what a child that age can do. The problem is that people don’t think they can learn certain concepts at a younger age when in fact they are more capable when they are younger. Take second language acquisition for example. A young child will pick up a second language more quickly than a high school student. It has to be taught a little bit differently, but they can learn it none the less. Part of the problem is that many children are going into Kindergarten without knowing their numbers or letters. That puts them at a disadvantage. It’s not that these children are incapable of learning it sooner it’s that no one has tried to teach it sooner (this does not apply to students who learn more slowly or have disabilities of course). Many people think that Kindergarteners are incapable of learning how to write stories and form ideas, but my son (who won’t be 5 years old for another month) has already done that because we started his Kindergarten work earlier. I don’t see how these standards make it more difficult for students who are slower learners (in reference to the comment about how some kids walk at 12 months and some at 15 months). Children have been taught how to read in Kindergarten for at least the past 10 years so that’s nothing new. Yes there are those students who will understand the concepts a bit later, but that’s the way it has always been in education. There are some students who consistently stay ahead, some who are right on track, and some who are consistently behind. The only way to fix that is to educate one on one on that students particular learning pace (which is one of the reasons I homeschool). As far as standardized testing goes, I disagree with the way the testing has been done in the past. Requiring children as young as third grade to sit around quietly and take a huge test all day long for several days is ludicrous and I don’t think it is an accurate representation of the child’s knowledge. Our culture focuses too much on teaching to the test rather than making sure the child knows the material. I think one of the biggest problems today is that the teachers are spending more time doing administrative junk than teaching and parents are expecting teachers to do all the work without supplementing and supporting the child’s education by working with them at home.
Of course, beorganicandhealrhy, the curriculum can be adapted and taught to the kindergartener. The question is why? What was wrong with the old curriculum? And why does the sheer volume of topics to be taught have to interfere with traditional K activities such as painting and coloring and cutting and larger motor activities?
With one on one instruction and home schooling, you can deal with the development of the whole child. Now imagine dealing with thirty four and five year olds, all with different needs.
All I have to say is that their teachers have a hard task ahead of them, made more difficult by the CCSS.
OMG This is so true. I teach K-5 Art and the a Common Core for literacy
It is so confusing to write a rubric on for 4 th grade—expository writing piece.
Yes, you heard me I teach Art. I have had so many people asking me, why are
you writing this? Well, I am. Worst year hands down of my 23 yrs of teaching
and it is not over yet. Thanks, ALEC, did you not know there are people behind
all your boughten educational reforms!!!!!! Thanks Diane, please get well. Kath
I’ll add a thought that applies to all ages, but specifically to the young.
The assessments are a snapshot in time. They assess what a child can do at the moment of the test. What it fails to test is what they can learn.
So testing an eighth grader on algebraic problems when he has never been exposed to a
algebra, does not mean that he cannot master the subject after taking a course in that subject.
Nor does it mean that a five year old who cannot recognize a single sight word won’t be able to read fluently at a future date.
Perhaps an assessment, such as the SAT or GRE has it’s merits. Perhaps!
But an elementary assessment? Or even those in middle school?
Better to let the individual teacher, school, or district design the summation exams to test individual progress which can be tracked and improved via specified instruction.
Tests for tots!
Test them until the scream!
Teach them a little rigor!!!
Plug them in and monitor their gritful compliance!!!
You can’t start too early to turn the children of the proles into perfectly obedient little drones!!!
Bob Shepherd: this is where the rubber hits the road—
Go to the websites of Lakeside School [Bill Gates], U of Chicago Lab Schools [Rahm Emanuel], Sidwell Friends [Barack Obama], Harpeth Hall [Michelle Rhee], Delbarton Schools [Chris Christie], and the like and notice a most telling clue, the “dog that didn’t bark in the night”—
It’s like CCSS doesn’t exist. I-KID-YOU-NOT!
Or to quote Tennessee’s #1 Kommoners Kore promoter/defender/advocate, Dr. Candace McQueen, when she announced that she would be the head of the private Lipscomb Academy:
[start quote]
First, the Common Core State Standards have not been adopted by Lipscomb Academy. While the standards have been adopted by the state of Tennessee along with 44 other states, private schools have the freedom to determine if they will use all, some or none of the CCSS. To date, Lipscomb Academy administrators have not adopted the standards, but have encouraged the faculty to learn about the math and English/language arts Common Core State Standards that are changing the expectations of students not only in Tennessee but also across the nation.
Second, I have also not been in any discussions about formal adoption of the CCSS at Lipscomb Academy. Currently, Lipscomb Academy draws from a variety of quality national and state standards selected by the school leadership and faculty to set a vision for what content, instruction and curriculum will be used at each grade level. This has proven to be effective; thus, I don’t anticipate any changes to this process now or in the future. As is current practice, all standards available will be reviewed at set intervals by leadership and faculty to determine the direction of Lipscomb Academy.
Third, some of you have voiced concerns that the academy will adopt the PARCC test that will soon replace the current Tennessee standardized test or TCAP. Lipscomb Academy uses the ERB test, not the TCAP, and there are no plans to replace the ERB test with PARCC.
[end quote]
Link to the above is included at: https://dianeravitch.net/2014/03/23/common-core-for-commoners-not-my-school/
For the self-styled “education reform” leaders of the “new civil rights movement of our time” the CCSS is for OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN. For THEIR OWN CHILDREN, it’s education a la Lipscomb Academy all the way. Of course, what they say doesn’t match what they do.
“Hateful to me as the gates of Hades is that man who hides one thing in his heart and speaks another.” [Homer]
Nailed over two thousand years ago by an old dead Greek guy.
😎
“Hateful to me as the gates of Hades is that man who hides one thing in his heart and speaks another.” [Homer]
yes yes yes
Thank you, Krazy, for pointing out, and one cannot point this out often enough, the vast differences between what these criminals want for their children and what they want for everyone else’s kids. This says more clearly than does anything where the deformers are coming from and how they actually put the world together. Their vision is for the training for the children of the proles, utterly unlike the education that children of the oligarchs are to get.
Robert, your words screamed poetry. Forgive me for putting your thoughts into a little ditty. I added a few ideas of my own. I hope you enjoy.
Tests for your Tots!
Let’s give them all lots.
Test til they scream
Out in their dreams.
Teach them with rigor
Make their minds figure
Their dutiful compliance
In Math and in Science,
Until their minds click
And souls fill with grit.
Too early to start
To force to impart
Like obedient drones
Until they are crones?
Then smile the proles,
With their perfect control.
At last we have won,
Our work is all done.
Now on to another
Way to ensmother
Others small ones
But not our own sons
Or daughters, too.
This fun’s just for you.
Great! One small suggestion. Change “proles” to “trolls” in line 15. “Proles,” you will remember, is short for “members of the proletarian, or working, class,” and comes from Orwell’s 1984, so it refers to ordinary people, not to the oligarchs. Of course, you might have meant to be saying that the oligarchs believe that their work will lead to smiling proles who enjoy being controlled, in which case, you can ignore my suggestion.
Again Robert, we are on the same page. I awoke this morning realizing I had used the word prole incorrectly and should have used the word troll.
We make a good team.
🙂
The Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic] in ELA are an a dangerous, backward, unimaginative, often prescientific, curriculum-and-pedagogy-distorting, amateurish joke at EVERY grade level.
The new “standards” in ELA prepared by that highly experienced educator and profound learning theorist Lord David Coleman are almost exclusively a list of very vaguely and abstractly and generally formulated “skills.” As such, they were misconceived at their most fundamental level. Please read the following carefully, as I have presented these ideas in a highly condensed form:
1. For the most part, the new national “standards” in ELA neither cover world knowledge (knowledge of what) nor formulate procedural knowledge (knowledge of how) in ways sufficiently operationalized to allow for transmission by teachers or valid testing. So, these “standards” almost entirely ignore much of ELA (knowledge within the subject area) and misconceive the rest of it (skills within the subject area). So, the “standards” strike out on both counts.
2. The new national “standards” describe outcomes for whole domains of ELA as though these domains primarily involve explicit learning of skills, when, in fact, those domains, for the most part, involve largely automatic acquisition that occurs given appropriate inputs, motivation to engage with those, and guidance in that engagement. Almost all the vocabulary, grammatical competence, ability to reason cogently, and command of specific tools and techniques for writing and speaking fall into this nonexplicit learning, or acquisition, category. The “standards” thus reveal profound ignorance on the part of the standards’ “authors” of the crucial distinction, for ELA, between learning and acquisition and lead to (and often explicitly endorse) extremely counterproductive curricula and pedagogy.
for a more detailed discussion, see this:
http://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2014/02/25/a-brief-analysis-of-two-common-core-state-standards-in-ela/
and this:
http://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2014/04/10/on-developing-curricula-in-the-age-of-the-thought-police/
Thank you breaking this down. The argument presented seems to be more concerned about the assessments that will be used to determine student achievement, and not necessarily the standards themselves. I believe there are two issues here, and they each need a more thorough analysis so these conversations doesn’t devolve into punditry.
There will always be standards. Look at Indiana. They are going to replace the Common Core with standards that are…very similar to the Common Core (Source: http://blog.heritage.org/2014/04/22/indiana-education-standards-common-core-trojan-horse/). What a colossal waste of energy, time and public dollars.
What the CCSS got right was laying out what can be expected of learners at each grade level. We tested this out in our school by focusing on informational writing this year in all content areas. Each grade level built rubrics around that standard, and then provided lots of modeling, scaffolding, and practice for students to attain proficiency.
What were the results? You be the judge: https://www.evernote.com/shard/s55/sh/51185e18-88dd-431d-8aed-638786566303/396f9c4174372f88b54f1fb20396e39a We had each grade level submit two or three pieces of exemplary work (anonymous), along with the students’ reflections. As students now walk the hallway, they can see what is expected of each learner K-5.
Of course, not every student made the mark at mid-year. We get that and continue to help each learner meet their potential. So why not strive for excellence? When I hear “not developmentally appropriate”, I cringe, because I believe it is a slippery slope toward low expectations schoolwide.
If the argument made here were more about the high stakes tests and how they are inappropriately aligned, administered, and misused, then I would agree 100%. But to lump the CCSS with high stakes tests, or with one person’s decision to cancel a kindergarten play, does few in education any favors.
Indiana and other states are following the Reverend Mike Hucksterbee’s advice: The name “Common Core” has become toxic. So lie about this. Say you are dropping the Common Core. Then adopt the same “standards” under a different name: “The Happy Hoosier Hucksterbee State Standards.”
My gradeschooler told me he cries at school every day. He hates school and thinks he is no good at learning. He loved math, and he amazed me with his creative solutions to problems. Now he says he hates math and the “tricky questions” at the end of each worksheet. He WAS reading above grade level and had made less progress this year. Instead of focusing on getting him reading more and more, to increase fluency, he has to stop and analyze character traits and how they changed over the course of a story, . In a chart. Yikes, he’s 8. He is completely turned off from school. The pace and focus of Common Core are just wrong.
Teachers and principals who thought the NYS tests did not reflect the Common Core didn’t read the Common Core, because the types of inappropriate questions they described are part of the Common Core curriculum. CC has a focus on meta-analysis of reading and writing that is not appropriate for grade school. The math curriculum seems to try to jump years ahead and cover “tricky questions” on a math topic before making sure kids have grasped the fundamental math topic at hand.
CC seems to take the joy out of learning. Coupled with the stress of this testing culture, which enforces compliance to the standard curriculum, regardless of kids’ needs, and teaching to the test to protect schools and teachers from turnaround and firing, it is making many kids in the classroom feel like failures, alienated from their school and learning. And this is in a “high-performing” school. I cannot imagine the harm that is occurring at schools where kids are even further away from the new standards and are not getting as much support from home.
We need to bring back child-centered education and joy of learning. It will never happen with the CC, no matter how tweaked. It will never happen within our current test and punish regime, no matter how much test prep is “dialed back,” no matter that test scores will not be a “primary” factor for promotion.
Our school system is like an addict that craves good test results and gave up every other value in pursuit of its addiction. Test results have become the overwhelming goal for which everything else can be sacrificed. All past beliefs about what it means to educate and learn have been thrown out, We are like the addict losing his moral compass and doing whatever it takes to get to our testing goal. More difficult (but not BETTER) CC standards are like an even stronger dose of even harder testing.
Communities see their school systems that once embraced ideas about democratic governance, racial integration, teaching each and every child, building community, and attempted to meet them, however imperfectly, give all those goals up in favor of standardized test results. Communities remember how vibrant our schools used to be, how different before testing took control, the way we might remember how the addict was before the addiction hit. Wistful for the old person to emerge, but hopeless for change. Our leaders are hooked on “reformer” campaign donations, our teachers have come to see high scores as imperative, our students think their purpose in school is to score well on a test.
When the system has become controlled by testing, we cannot simply cut back our dose of testing. We are now so accustomed to top-down direction and testing governing teaching, that we will only be able to get better by quitting testing and CC cold turkey!
(And just think of the money we’ll save once we are no longer paying reform pedlars for our addiction.)
I am there with you Lehrer. I have second graders, and I am tired of non educators telling me what they should be able to do. My coursework in Psychology tells me they need concrete experience and practice. They will do better in the long run with solid concrete skills to apply to abstract situations. The powers that be do not understand this. I predict this Quixotic push for higher thinking skills will inhibit mastery of basic skills and gaining higher order skills. Bloom himself never advocated this nonsense. They are trying to turn 6 and 7 year olds into 10 and 11 year olds. They should review the story of King Canute. Reality is not impressed with their decrees. I will at least be able to spare my grandchildren (when I have any) this indignity. Our generation will be among the few left that will actually know how to teach. My principal could not respond when asked at a meeting today about the testing, he admitted he had never read any of Piaget’s works. All they know is the company line.
The vast majority of middle school students still cannot operate effectively beyond the concrete. Abstract abilities just start to appear for most by the end of 8th grade. That’s 9 years of wasted effort trying to accomplish the impossible. We owe it to our younger students to simply ignore these ridiculously inappropriate demands for higher order/critical thinking.
Old Teacher – I guess we are too old. All that Ed Psych we took in college is passé. Piaget who? You mean there are reasons why children can’t read in kindergarten? Or do complex, multi step word problems in third grade? No, that can’t be true. Americans can do anything. It must be those lousy teachers.
Who am I to make these decisions? Why I’m an expert.
I once was a student.
lol well said
Kids differ. The Powerpoint bullet list of national “standards” purchased by a few plutocrats so that they could have a single national list to tag their assessment and computerized learning software to do not.
Kids are not widgets to be identically milled by schools as factories working to numerical quotas and invariant, short-term timetables. And fMRI studies have shown that parts of the brain that do certain kinds of abstract thinking do not even start developing until kids are around 16 years old and are not fully in place until they are in their mid 20s!!! And much, much learning is not learning at all but acquisition that occurs incidentally in stimulating, rich environments that many kids do not have before they enter school and don’t get there now that we’ve turned our schools into institutions for delivering test prep exercises. And the brain is an extraordinarily plastic organ. And motivation for cognitive tasks is generally actually DECREASED by external punishment and rewards like summative test scores (though studies have shown that the simple expedient of giving kids M&Ms to reward them for correct answers on IQ tests is sufficient to wipe out the differences on those tests shown by kids from differing socioeconomic groups)–external punishments and rewards work as motivators only for purely physical tasks and for exceedingly narrow, onerous cognitive tasks for which children undertaking those tasks have vastly differing levels of motivated attention.
I did not speak a word until after my 2nd birthday. Not a word. My mother was wise enough not to be overly worried about this. The tiger mom and testing for tots crowd of today, had they been around then, would have labeled me slow or linguistically challenged or something like that. Fast forward a few years, and I was winning writing contests and acting in plays. I received a perfect score on the verbal section of the GRE. My publications list now runs to twelve pages, single spaced. I am an accomplished public speaker–the very model of an intellectual song and dance man. So, my linguistic abilities are just fine, thank you.
Kids develop differing propensities at differing rates. And they have differing gifts.
And the amateur authors of the CCSS had no clue about any of this.
I’m right there with you Robert. I went to elementary school in Brooklyn. The ultimate one through four distribution of students, with one being the brightest and four being the slowest.
My birthday is December 10th, so I was a half year or more younger than most of the other students in my grade. I was placed in the four class in first and second grade because I couldn’t read. Well, actually, I started to read in second grade. My first book was Father Bear Comes Home by Minerak, then onto Betsy’s Little Star by Carolyn Haywood, and then by the end of the year The Bobbsey Twins. I was moved to the three class in third grade. I as reading everything I could get my hands on. My favorites were series such as Nancy Drew by Carolyn Keene and Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I placed our of the Reading Class. I was allowed to read whatever I wanted. I read every anthology in the classroom. In fourth grade I was moved to the two class. At that time I was reading Dickens, Alcott, Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, Kipling, etc. in fifth grade I added in Shakespeare (from my father’s book collection)and every fairy tale I could get my hands on, no matter how obscure. By sixth grade I was out of the children’s section and read in the same books as my mom. We moved to Buffalo when I was in 7th grade. If I had stayed in NYC I would have been in the SP or advanced Program.
I continued to read any book recommended by relatives and teachers as well as from that pesky suggested College Book List. I graduated in the top 5% of my class and did very well in college (Phi Beta Kappa, Magna Cum Laude).
Luckily I wasn’t judged on what I could read at age five or six.
The assessments can only measure a moment in time. They can’t measure the ability to learn. They can’t measure a child’s potential, especially at this tender age of development.
For shame!
Thank you, Ellen, for advocating for kids on differing timetables. This is really important stuff. A lot of damage is done by people who aren’t OK with those differences.
Go to a kindergarten class to observe the mechanical instruction, tots sitting in chairs most of the time, and already learning that they are failures if they don’t score a 3 or 4 on the rubric. Some don’t have number sense that high, but somehow 1 and 2 are bad numbers as they mean not meeting standard and expectation. What happened to paper and scissors, play doh, weaving, etc.–activities to strengthen their little fingers? What happen to the pretend play area? No time to nap these days when most Kinders attend all-day K. Don’t know about your kinders, but behaviors are out of control for some. That’s what happens when they don’t have time to socialize and “play” in an appropriate environment. It’s a shame when most of the walls in schools are covered by higher-education posters and banners to promote college readiness, when it should be covered in students’ work or art. Art teacher doesn’t have space to hang students’ work. CCS doesn’t promote development of inherent qualities, self-confidence, and self-regulation. If kids who don’t come from supportive homes, their chances are greater of falling through the cracks even more so than ever.
We need to call this what it is. Child abuse.
Jon, the Common Core doesn’t outlaw bad teaching. It just promotes good teaching.
Erikson Institute in Chicago is currently involved in a project helping pre-k – 3rd grade teachers with math. They are trying to help them navigate the CCSS. It will be interesting to see the results in a few years.
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