Although Peter Greene teaches in Pennsylvania, he decided to review New York state’s curriculum guides about the Common Core standards. He pulls them apart and shows that they tell teachers to do what they were already doing, or they make demands that have no evidence to support them.
It is a hilarious deconstruction of engageNY, the state education department’s prized curriculum.
Greene concludes:
“So there you have it, in brief. EngageNY’s interpretation of the Core– one part useless foolishness, one part stuff that isn’t actually in the CCSS, and one part pedagogy that any non-brain-dead teacher was already using. Thank goodness the CCSS are here to save us.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
New curriculum is the same as the old. The only difference is new jargon and its layout. Free material is enticing, but that should be a red flag. Engage NY is nonsense as it is too scripted and only demonstrates a narrow- minded view of math concepts. It is not suitable for the teaching of mathematics as math should allow students to discover problem solving not be told how to do it. CCSS reflects the same reasoning: Don’t tell us what we already know by complicating the situation and making matters worse.
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Remember that term “radical” from back when? Love the song; loathe the CCSS and its obligations. Should be an inspirational activist song. Ignites the heart and puts energy on full throttle.
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Someone should compile a list of textbooks labeled common-core aligned that are identical to the old textbooks but for added standard codes on some pages.
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And the sad part is that because EngageNY was one of the first out of the gate it was used as a template by lots of other districts.
My own district uses the materials in every ‘professional’ development class I’ve attended for the last 2 years.
Greene hit the nail on the head here — this is boring, ridiculous, and many of the videos that have been shown to us as exemplary are just downright embarrassing, with the children looking glassy-eyed and bored, the teachers rambling on and on, and the content inappropriate and silly. I’ve seen and done better teaching on the spur of the moment than some of these elaborately planned and executed disasters.
EngageNY was one of the reasons I abandoned my neutral position and became an active opponent of the CCSS.
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My reason also. I downloaded one math lesson for third grade and it was 34 pages long. I was unable to glean even one useful nugget for my instruction.
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The beatings will continue until teachers all come together and walk the hell out of the schools. Stop being part of your own termination process..
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You need to remember that it is illegal to strike in many states. And, YES, with the help of TFA and other reformy groups, they COULD fire us all.
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I don’t know. We’ll find out in the next year or two here in FL as the VAM firings/stripping of teaching licenses begin in all the Title I schools.
Funny thing — we have 200 positions open, over 100 of them teaching positions, in my district and school starts next Tuesday. I don’t recall ever having this many openings this close to Day 1 of the school year.
Where are all the supposed scabs that will replace us? Not applying here, that’s for sure.
Despite the state constitution’s mandate that I have 18 or less students in my primary class I have 24 on my roster as of today and there are no applicants for our 2 teacher openings on my grade level. Should be interesting.
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Mainly it takes sanity. Politicians and legislators pressured by parents increasingly in the know creates fast change, even better if they are increased in number and word spreads by true experts speaking out in a forcibly earnest mass media.
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And in Utah, teachers are not allowed to tell parents of their rights to opt out or speak up. And the union is backing the state up on that one. http://www.standard.net/Education/2014/04/24/25-SAGE-warning.html
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EngageNY is an absolute waste of federal and state tax money. Who wrote the P-12 curriculum scripts available for “free”? Were the Fellows involved?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alan-singer/new-yorks-secret-educatio_b_4368282.html
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I teach high school math in NY….despise engageNY. Our Regents standard used to be good before all this cut score nonsense started. Furthermore they still have a mile wide and mile deep curriculum ….even moved several Alg 2 topics into Alg 1 ….does completing the square really have to be a graduation requirement? Every time they make a new change in NY things get worse….and then they blame the teachers for the bad results of poor decisions from state ed
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Gah, I also teach high school math, and my district is doing the same: pushing a bunch of Algebra 2 and Pre-Calc material into Algebra 1. An Algebra 1 class was in my room during my prep this year. They worked on things like completing the square, domain and range, graphing rational functions, linear programming, and rational exponents, despite that many of the students still can’t do arithmetic with fractions, let alone solve any but the most basic linear equations.
Part of it is that state law declares that math below Algebra 1 does not count towards high school graduation, so most schools have stopped offering Prealgebra or Basic Math, despite many students needing that level of instruction. Another part is that there are no effects on individual students for failing classes, even in middle school. Fail math from 6th through 8th grade and you still go into Algebra 1 in the 9th. Yet another part is students use calculators starting in early elementary school, so they develop almost no number sense. And I don’t particularly blame elementary school teachers for that. Our state math test (being replaced with SBAC this year) allows calculators on all of it at all grades, so why wouldn’t elementary school teachers teach their students to use them when their schools rankings depend on students passing that all-important state test.
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Yep. Common Core only believes in two levels (with the exception of Special Education): grade level and above grade level. It’s very frustrating for those of us who have kids that struggle in the subject, but don’t qualify for special education. The special education director in my district told me that special education referrals have exploded since CC was instituted in my state two years ago.
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Threatened: Lots of kids are struggle, because CCSS is not developmentally appropriate and testing is the only measure. That doesn’t mean kids who struggle have disabilities and therefore belong in special ed program. Much of the blame is on the plutocrats who want all kids to go to college.
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In the (really bad) training I’ve had, we’ve been told that there are only two shifts in ELA. (Maybe it depends upon what standards you start with?) Those shifts are 1. teaching without giving any context, I.e. Don’t mention the Civil War when assigning The Gettsyburg Address and 2. Only use text- dependent questions. I have to say that following this would alter my instruction. I don’t believe my teaching would become more effective.
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English Teacher in California: perhaps this explains a posting on this blog of 3-23-14 entitled “Common Core for Commoners, Not My School!” The entire posting follows:
“This is an unintentionally hilarious story about Common Core in Tennessee. Dr. Candace McQueen has been dean of Lipscomb College’s school of education and also the states’s chief cheerleader for Common Core. However, she was named headmistress of private Lipscomb Academy, and guess what? She will not have the school adopt the Common Core! Go figure.”
The thread is worth reading too.
Link: https://dianeravitch.net/2014/03/23/common-core-for-commoners-not-my-school/
Perhaps Dr. McQueen knows something we don’t…
😎
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I am an experienced social studies teacher in a high achieving NY district. I feel I can ignore common core, engageNY, etc. There is no need to fix what isn’t broken, and I don’t think anyone knows my curriculum and how to teach it better than I do. I do feel bad for ELA and math teachers who are being forced to change…so far I haven’t had any pressure to change anything.
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What district? Not in NYC, I take it?
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The mom of one of the mainstreamed special ed kids in my history class told me that her kid is really understanding history for the first time-precisely because we are not a text-focused classroom I get up in front and labor hard to explain things well to the kids, draw on the board, bring in props, question kids, answer questions… She said in previous years they would read the textbook and he would glean nothing. I shy away from the text because, for most kids, it is a learning dead-zone. Yet Lord Coleman’s decree banishes kids to this dead-zone.
Love Peter Greene’s dissection of EngageNY!
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There are some fine comments on this thread, but I’m missing a choice verse or two from Some DAM Poet about the Plethora of Platitudes that is NYEngage’s CCSS Primer.
Doctor’s order. “A day without laughter is a day wasted.” [Charlie Chaplin, “Dr.” of Laughology with a minor in Smile-esthenics]
😎
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