Advocates of the Common Core standards have promoted the myth that only the agitated and uninformed extremists oppose the standards. But this is not true. Michael Deshotels is a respected veteran educator in Louisiana who explains here why he opposes the Common Core and the related high-stakes testing.
This is the heart of his dissent:
“Many educators who have carefully studied the Common Core Standards believe they are not practical for most classrooms, and are not age appropriate for most of our younger students. The standards may actually cause many children to fear school because they will be frustrated by some of the poor teaching practices required to teach the Common Core.
“Many of the math methods required by these standards are impractical. They are simply theories of teaching math that are not useful to most students.
“The types of reading and writing required by the Common Core are often boring to students and do not accomplish practical results. Young children are required to use a technique called “close reading” which includes detailed dissection of reading passages. These required readings may actually discourage the love of reading that is needed for most students to become excellent readers.
“Finally, the Common Core, even though it is claimed to be a system that will prepare students for college and careers, will do neither, compared to other alternatives. The standards are particularly not practical for students who wish to pursue technical or skilled careers.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Has anyone seen this New York Times article describing teaching methods? I think it connects to this comment
“The standards may actually cause many children to fear school because they will be frustrated by some of the poor teaching practices required to teach the Common Core.”
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This is the kind of article repeating the myth that Americans are failing academically and therefore, need new math reforms so that they might perform as well as Japan. Nothing is mentioned about income disparity in testing–a key piece in seeing the myth for what it is. See: https://dianeravitch.net/2013/12/05/daniel-wydo-disaggregates-pisa-scores-by-income/
One very practical problem is that most teachers in K-5 are not PhD level math scholars who deeply understand math theory. They don’t need to be. If basic math algorithms can be learned in K-5, higher level teachers can pick up the torch in middle school and high school–then those students showing interest and talent can take math to higher theoretical levels once in college. Pushing abstract theory onto elementary teachers and students is going to have a massive backlash–high teacher attrition and student pain/inconsistent learning environments etc. Elementary schools should lay the foundation of knowledge and foster curiosity, joy and love of learning.
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I would suggest that young students could learn set theory and basic logic.
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SWSX, Japan has high test scores and a stagnant economy. Go figure.
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I absolutely hated using close reading with my young students. There was no more making connections to their lives or to other literature. There was no more inferring or making meaning or pleasure. There was only, “Find the text evidence and PROOVE IT.” Reading was a job not a joy.
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How crazy is it to think that we should be using the same method with kindergarteners and twelfth graders? I don’t know how closely your teaching is being monitored, but you might want to read appendix A of the CCSS where it talks about the standards not including everything that is important. We should be able to do the things we know students need to become independent and passionate readers.
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I have read the article and have shared it with others in conversations regarding the teaching of math in American schools. It is an excellent article that points out why American students are so far behind their peers in counties like Japan.
I actually agree with much of what is written in the article. The example given of how the A&W restaurant chain set out to sell a better quality 1/3 lb burger to compete with Mcdonald’s 1/4 lb burger. They were actually selling the larger portion for less per pound but people were not buying. The company couldn’t figure out why people were passing up a better deal until they did some research and found out how many people thought that 1/4 is greater than 1/3 because 4 is greater than 3.
I have talked to too many people that do not understand that when an employer is earning three-hundred times as much as their employee that that means that they are earning $3,000.00 per hour to their employees $10.00 per hour. They don’t see a problem with extreme wealth disparity because they don’t understand the numbers or how the numbers game is played.
There are some very good ideas about how children learn math written into the Common Core Standards. Unfortunately if teachers are not trained adequately they make what should be a exploratory and enriching process into a frustrating and confusing mess.
We have been teaching math as a memorization, algorithmic process for years instead of approaching the subject through exploration and problem solving.
Children are turned on to math when they begin to discover how our base ten number system works and how it can be used to learn and talk about so many important aspects of our lives.
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:* on not proofing before posting.
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Betsy Marshall: I much appreciate your comments.
I am not afraid or ashamed to say that I too am still part of the vast majority of the population that comprises the “innumerati” [i.e., the innumerate].
But I have remedied my math faults a bit, at least to sufficiently understand many of the ways that the charterite/voucherite/privatizer movement uses mathematical intimidation to sell their fraudulent eduproducts.
One of the most galling rheephorm misleads: 100% or 98% or the like graduation rates—It’s a parting of the education sea by the self-styled leaders of the “new civil rights movement of our time”! Achievement gap be gone!
However, the elephant in the room or the fly in the ointment—30%, 40%, 50% attrition rate of the cohort that started at 9th grade and made it to the end point of 12th grade graduation. Picky picky…
But when it comes to accuracy and trustworthiness in numbers & stats, those in mad dog pursuit of counting up their $tudent $ucce$$ won’t budge an inch from their core Marxist principles:
“The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”
¿? Groucho. What are the odds* that there is any other Marx that is so famous?
😎
*A numbers/stats joke. Go figure…
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For SURE! For years, I’ve done homework with my sons. The eldest, who is now 25 and already a highly (in terms of pay and job satisfaction) computer engineer/ mathematician in San Francisco, graduated from high school in Chicago in 2007. And so he didn’t have the advantage of all the latest “disruptive” fads (like STEM) or the advantages of Common Core methods. His reading became widespread as he grew older because early on he began to love reading thanks to Stella Luna, Shel Silverstein, and Where The Wile Things Are — among many others.
And he learned math the “old fashioned” “computational” way — vertically for most of what we used to call “arithmetic.” He began “studying” statistics because of his interest in baseball, and was able to take statistics as a 9th grade (and score a 5 on the AP exam), then go on to calculus, using up all the high school math available in Chicago’s public schools by11th grade. Then when he got to Berkeley he did a lot more “advanced” math, which is still serving him well.
My youngest son, nowadays. is periodically being forced to do Common Core math, which I’m calling “horizontal” math. And it’s very frustrating — as in FRUSTRATING! I HATE THIS! — both to the child and to the parent who tries to help. I actually prefer the multiple choice worksheets because most of them are not as insidious.
I am transferring much of my library of CPS stuff and union stuff to the Chicago Teachers Union, which will have a research center when it moves into its new headquarters on the city’s West Side in two years. One of the problems we are all facing as researchers is that those in power are wiping out the historical memory by wiping out what they put on the Internet. Then they cynically act as if that stuff never existed. We at Substance have saved CPS curriculum guides going back 50 years and “standards” materials going back a quarter century. One of the most amazing things about this entire discourse (it’s never really been a debate until just recently; and we had a good time with the debate at the AFT convention, as we reported) is that it is so historically dishonest.
The reason why a lot of the growing resistance to the Common Core nonsense has begun in some of the more affluent school districts (Arne Duncan’s “suburban Moms”) is that we have had more time to see first hand how stupid this stuff is. Many of the working class and poor families in Chicago’s public schools are too busy surviving to add that resistance to their already overfilled lives. Until this year, when Chicago teachers began helping parents opt out — and being threatened by administrators for showing professional courage and integrity. When I get discouraged I read the stories about the 18th and early 19th Century abolitionists. They had to sustain a major faith, both here and in places like England, in the face of the organized power of the slave owning (or profiteering) Bill Gates types back then. These things have never been easy. Democracy is a difficult project to nurture and expand…
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Thank you, George, for your insightful comments. My father became a leader in the field of biochemistry after being schooled in traditional (vertical) math. I fared well, earning a masters degree in a liberal arts field and managed to successfully buy cars, understand amortization tables when computing my mortgage and work out sale prices of items in stores (practical math). My middle class community sends their children to tutors to learn math because the public school is struggling to teach mastery of basic math skills using constructivist (horizontal) methods. As a nation, we have had enough of this experience! I wish we could vote, as a nation, to abolish constructivist math practice in public schools!
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This morning, I’ve been working on my CCSS standards checklists in hopes of making them more coherent and easier to use. (This is a difficult job, as you can imagine.) Rereading the English language arts standards makes me think that the only goal here is to train worker bees who write business memos and reports for presentation to their bosses.
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I wonder if Michael Deshotels thinks that our current approach to teaching mathematics IS useful to most students.
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“our current approach” does not exist — many teachers do NOT follow the rote, memorize-this approach. Many districts do not — allowing instead to trust their teachers. So there hasn’t been, and is not, a “one size fits all” approach — “one size fits all” is one of the common core problems.
Beyond that, of course, the “let’s all go to engineering school” requirement that “all kids” take at least through Algebra II if not four years of math is just plain stupid. We should not be forcing this on all kids — common core, though, does exactly that.
We should be teaching data analysis instead (common core has very little).
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TeacherJulie,
How many teachers do you think follow a set curriculum determined by the district/state? How effective do you think the teachers who go off on their own are in teaching? What happens in down stream classes when students find themselves with a sequence of teachers that have different approaches to teaching mathematics?
My state require three units of math for high school graduation, though only specifically requiring algebra and geometry. Admission to any state university is a little stricter, requiring either three units of math and an ACT score of at least 22 in math or four credits of math (and a 2.0 average across all the academic courses required for admission) do you think those requirements to be excessive?
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I’ve never worked at a public school that had a set curriculum handed down by anyone. I don’t know any teachers in my area that work that way but I did meet some people once from another state who teach elementary who said they are given a scripted curriculum. I can’t imagine why any high quality teacher would agree to work in that environment, but maybe I’m just not that desperate for work.
Contrary to your suggestion, it is good for kids to have teachers that have different approaches to math. In a small school I once worked in, I had some kids through the progression of 10th, 11th and 12th. I did not think it was good for those kids to have the same teacher every year. Kids need different approaches. I do have students who WANT me to just give them steps they can memorize and not ask them to think. I know teachers who think math is just “plug and chug”. But — if math is about thinking and communicating (which is what I obviously believe), then it is GOOD for kids to experience a variety of teaching and teachers. So — having teachers with different approaches (not dictated top-down, not scripted) — is very good.
As to the effect on college, for example, in my community there are two local universities of some size. One is private, one is public. We send students to both — also, I teach dual credit classes through both. The two universities’ approaches could not be more different. One is very procedural, very shallow. The other is very conceptual, not procedural at all, really. I think these two schools probably represent extremes — at least as to the math department — but interestingly, these two universities literally SHARE an engineering program and students take their math courses in either of the two schools and converge in their engineering courses. Both types are successful. So — all of this militates directly and strongly against the idea that math is “one way” — it is good for students to experience different approaches.
Beyond that, in my state, we have more variety in college admissions requirements, for public or private schools. What you describe doesn’t necessarily sound “excessive”, although I intend to encourage my own high performing children to attend college and take our money to schools that don’t utilize standardized test scores. As to math requirements, the biggest problem is in the colleges themselves — at our open admission community colleges, the average grade in “college algebra” (regardless of whether kids were placed in remedial classes or not) is an F (the first time they take it), and most kids take it 3 times before they get the C they need to transfer. And yet, the college algebra curriculum is TOTALLY WORTHLESS. It’s just a money maker for the community colleges. Why do we have Common Core to fix a problem with “remedial classes” when the main reason we have “remedial classes” is so open admission schools can make money ?
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The question, of course, is how different the approach to mathematics a student can roll orate from one year to another. What I have in mind, for example, is one class teaching set theory instead of the traditional curriculum and the downstream teacher going back to the traditional curriculum .
It sounds like your experiences are different than my family. Let me quote a comment my middle son made about high school mathematics:
“I certainly agree that public school math classes are terrible, but for different reasons. The thing is, I never learned anything in those courses that I couldn’t have asked WolframAlpha or a calculator. While teaching these things made sense before we had those things, we have them now and it is thus simply a waste of time. When I point this out to people, I usually get one of two reactions. The first is “but then they wouldn’t know how what they’re doing works”, to which I respond that the classes I was in never addressed that and most of classmates didn’t know how these things worked either (often I found teachers unable or unwilling to explain as well). The second is “but then what is the point of learning math?”, which I answer by saying that that isn’t what math is. This flusters lots of folks. “What do you mean that isn’t what math is? That’s the math I learned!” is a typical response. What I find hardest to convey is that most people have absolutely no idea what math is (or rather completely the wrong idea)……..I apologize if this seems like an offensive and long-winded diatribe. I don’t mean to say that mathematics is something most people cannot grasp, but simply something they were never taught. If I seem angry, it is because the material that passes for math in public schools nearly turned me off mathematics forever, and had it done so I would never have realized the sublime beauty of the subject and never felt the peace and joy that has come with understanding it.”
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How does that apply to those in struggling poor communities with single parents who have a hard time trying to assist their children in learning the CCSS. Many parents themselves don’t understand how to help their kids with the requirements of the CCSS. Did the affluent education policy makers think about that?
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Madeline,
Do you think that those parents you are thinking about have an easy time trying to assist their children in learning the material mandated by existing state standards?
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I do think there are people who understand math and find the CCSS’s methods a little bewildering. I also have had the experience of a middle school teacher attempting to teach a CCSS method she did not seem to really understand — she put in a little of her own vocabulary — using words that have specific meanings in a completely different way — which threw my 7th grade daughter for quite a loop (this girl likes things to make sense).
I was able to untangle it but I am betting lots of my smart and good at math neighbors would have had a much harder time than I did. The idea that CCSS is unnecessarily confusing to parents (and provides no counterbalancing benefit to students) is totally legit.
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Were parents involved in helping their middle school children with math prior to the common core?
I am curious about what I should expect when my children are older. In my day, parents didn’t have to help middle school children with math, but I also know that even prior to the CC math has been accelerated.
Why?
I didn’t take algebra until 9th grade, I didn’t take Calculus until I went to college and I still managed to get a “STEM” degree.
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Students in low income communities will fall further behind. One variable that is keeping kids in upper income homes passing these tests is the access and money used for tutoring. CCSS will only increase the disparity between the haves and have nots.
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Pushing the “common core”? How many public schools do you know of who do not teach English, math, science – the “core curriculum”? How many different text books are used and how much difference is there between them. How much did we spend extra to grade tests when teachers made out the tests and graded them? How much is spent now when politicians are making out the tests and grading them and just as important, how good a job did they do? How often were there major problems in grading and getting the info out in a timely manner? How often did this happen when teachers made out the tests and graded them?
AND who knows students needs better: politicians far removed or teachers in the classroom with their students?
THIS, pushing the “common core” by politicians is a “step in the right direction”?
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Science ( and common sense) tells us that ADAPTABILITY is what determines future success. ADAPTABILITY comes from a child’s social and emotional development, as well as intellect. Common Core neglects children’s Social and Emotional development.
Bill Gates ignorance of how children learn has caused him to think children can be programmed like computers. His success is a result of his Aspergers Syndrome, and it does not make him an authority on education, nor does it allow him to empathize with the damage to children from CCSS.
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Take a look at today’s Washington Post. Two public officials with very little experience in education explain how teacher unions are threatening America’s kids by “weakening measurement and accountability.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/teachers-unions-sacrifice-high-standards-to-evade-accountability/2014/07/24/5858c1f8-0e19-11e4-b8e5-d0de80767fc2_story.html?wpisrc=nl_opinions
An excerpt:
“In classrooms across the United States, higher academic standards are inspiring students and teachers. Students are more engaged and excited in school, raising their hands more often, asking more questions, thinking critically and solving problems instead of just memorizing facts. Teachers feel more motivated, creative and empowered to develop new and better ways to reach their students.”
Huffman and Skandera could learn a lot from Coleridge, Tolkien, Lewis, and Rowling. For a fantasy narrative to earn the “willing suspension of disbelief,” it has to be grounded in reality. Making things up out of thin air while ignoring the mountains of evidence that contradict their spurious claims just isn’t going to cut it.
The Washington Post editors could do a little more truth-seeking on these issues. Instead they decided to prop up those claims by running an unflattering photo of Randi Weingarten below the headline. While I’m not a Weingarten fan, I am in favor of responsible journalism. The Huffman and Skandera piece is not responsible.
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At least they’re still letting Valerie Strauss engage with reality on her Answer Sheet blog:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/07/24/teachers-new-ny-common-core-tests-were-a-travesty/
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Also, congrats to Michael Deshotels for bringing the discussion down to earth. The platitudes of people like Huffman, Skandera, Arne Duncan, and yes, Randi Weingarten are worse than meaningless.
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I actually have few issues (the standards are quite rigorous, although I wish there were more focus on analysis and research) with CC when it comes to ELA 9-12. I do, however, take issue with the tests associated with the CC standards that students will be required to take in Florida. Supposedly, the essay section will be scored by a computer program! Currently, the directions describe 30 minutes to read 2-4 texts and respond in essay format on a computer. Most kids need time to write beyond the “standardized” acceptable time; in college, I never took a single class with a timed essay. Our kids will struggle, and it seems those in charge want students to not only struggle, but fail. Essentially, we are now all teaching AP classes, but students have no choice in whether to take the test or class.
When people say that teachers have known about the CC for years, that is true; however, the assessments required were not given to us, so we had no idea how to respond. Right now, there are only 9 questions and 1 prompt (no anchor sets) available to practice for the 9-11th ELA test. How is this sane?
Standards are neither here nor there; interpretation of what is expected is too varied and obscure. No one I know seems to know what is really expected of students.
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“Standards are neither here nor there. . .”
See below for why they shouldn’t be “neither here nor there.”
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Utah has scored its students’ essays by computer for years. And Florida is buying Utah’s tests. And be aware: If the test you buy is like our test this year, kids will get five or six different prompts. I fail to understand that, if the purpose is to compare everyone, how different prompts make any sense.
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Well, if we’re going to be talking standards we might as well bring in the expert who has completely destroyed any sense of validity in the educational malpractices that are educational standards and standardized testing, and those two go hand in hand, they are conjoined with no hope of separation. Who might that be? You got it! Noel Wilson and his never refuted nor rebutted “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)
1. A description of a quality can only be partially quantified. Quantity is almost always a very small aspect of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category only by a part of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as unidimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing the descriptive information about said interactions is inadequate, insufficient and inferior to the point of invalidity and unacceptability.
2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other word all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. And a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it attempts to measure “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
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