Kathy Cordone is a retired teacher who taught for 37 years and was selected as Wolcott’s teacher of the year. In this post, she recommends that Connecticut abandon the Common Core.
She writes:
“I am an expert on children and I can make that claim because I have spent thousands of days with children, unlike the writers of the Common Core who never spent one day trying out their standards on actual children.
And my testimony is that current education policy, which started with No Child Left Behind, then went into overdrive with Race to the Top and now Common Core and SBAC testing, has turned our schools into test prep factories, sucking the joy out of teaching and learning.
Common Core is a very expensive experiment with no evidence to support the claim that it will make students “college and career ready.” It will fail just as No Child Left Behind failed to make all children “proficient” by this year.
My greatest concern is the pressure on our youngest students to perform in ways that do not match their brain development. The joint statement of Early Childhood Health and Education professionals, signed by more than 500 early childhood experts, explained how the standards were developmentally inappropriate for our youngest students.
Requiring young students to “discover” math algorithms and think abstractly ignores Piaget’s stages of cognitive development which state that most children are not able to think abstractly until they are 11 years old…..”
She adds:
“Play has disappeared from our kindergarten classrooms as teachers are forced to try to make 5-year-olds read and write before they are ready. Early childhood specialist and advocate Susan Ochshorn explains that intentional, make-believe play is where little ones develop the part of their brains that has to do with self-regulation. A child’s ability to self-regulate is a better predictor of academic success than IQ and social class…..
Young children cannot be forced to learn things before they are ready and play lays the foundation for academic success later on.
In Connecticut we have tens of thousands of experts on children, whether retired like me, or teaching in our classrooms every day.
Connecticut needs to withdraw from Common Core and replace it with standards written by those experts: Connecticut teachers.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
What I detected in the last few years of teaching before I retired in 2012 was that most of the “old school” determinations had been tossed aside … Piaget, Bloom’s, Maslow, Multiple Intelligences, IQ, Bell Curve, and on and on. We were told that what we had learned was no longer applicable in the 21st Century learning environment.
I do believe that some assumptions were incorrect for years. I do believe that changes were made and need to be made to continuously adapt to new findings as well as to using technology to assist learning. But, I don’t believe that we should throw out the old, but build ON it.
The changes as to what can be done to bring up those with learning difficulties and challenge those with advanced capacities need to be addressed. That is without a doubt. However, the expectation to deliver all these modes of delivery within one classroom, assume that the data bank in the computers will suffice to categorize and sort out all needs, and cram 30-50 students in a classroom built for 25, is insane. Students need personalized attention.
The problem I see has to do with the management of all this with HONESTY. There is no way to guarantee that the 15 minute groups that serve the students are adequate. There is no way to guarantee that the students left to their own self-direction are all on task or understand what they are to do or are even interested in the task at hand.
On paper it looks great. That is the so-called “accountability”. But, it doesn’ guarantee ANYthing. As in all endeavors, there will be a bell curve that results … Some will fluorish, some will comply and not really excel, and some will slough off. It might not be the same students who will slough off … but it will create an imperfect system, nevertheless.
We can pretend that people are computers and businesses are people. That doesn’t make it so.
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I couldn’t agree more with the concern for young children, and perhaps their sweet innocence makes them the most compelling and persuasive cases for the horror of corporate reform, the ccss, and all that goes with it. However, I teach 8th grade students and am wary that we are not rallying behind our middle schools kids, as well. Being in the middle often leaves kids overlooked, but our young adolescents are suffering, too. They are internalizing that they are not smart, they think that school is boring, they grow to dislike learning, and feel demoralized as data points. Middle school children are truly young kids sometimes stuck in semi-adult looking bodies. Just because they look older and are wise enough to question the system, doesn’t mean they don’t need us to advocate for them,too. My daughter has just taken the leap to 6th grade in a middle school. It seems that four months ago she was given sympathy as an elementary student, but now is a forgotten adolescent. The ccss and corporate reform movement are developmentally wrong for all kids – not just the youngest (though the heart break that starts there is shocking and absurd). In Pennsylvania, 8th grade testing is insane. The prep for it begins much earlier. Save our middle school children, too – they are in their formative years that will make or break the way the see themselves.
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Danielle, you are right that the middle schoolers are getting a bum deal with ccss. They are expected to have the K-8 cc knowledge that will be on their tests, yet have only had a year or two with the new curiculum.
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Curriculum.
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I have seen this SO much with my middle school students as well. CC is also not developmentally appropriate for middle level learners.
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You “may” have a plausible argument for students in elementary school but Common Core is definitely a good thing for middle and high school students. The best way to look at Common Core for students of all ages is like administering a Rorschach test (ink blot test), the interpretation is abstract and will progressively change as a child grows through each grade. I am not sure I totally agree with you that the Common Core State Standards should be completely scrapped. You have not offered a better alternative either and that makes me wonder, what is the point of your write-up. Imagine the horrors college professors face yearly with many freshmen being unable to think abstractly or write a complete sentence.
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…I guess it depends on whether one believes you can TEACH abstract thinking, particularly at early ages. It takes a while to process many things. Many, if not most, adults aren’t abstract thinkers. Whether they were never given opportunities to think as preschoolers or whatever the “cause” I just don’t think you can shove abstract thinking upon someone. And, then there is the situation of actually evaluating an abstraction. That is like evaluating a piece of art. Different people, with different levels of abstraction, see different things in a piece of artwork. And, that doesn’t make one smarter or less smart. It makes them different.
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I disagree that this is a “good” thing for middle school students. It’s developmentally appropriate–the kids haven’t achieved a lot of the abstract reasoning yet. Furthermore, WHY should an alternative be proposed by those who oppose Common Core? We didn’t ask for this, particularly those states, like mine, that had standards that were BETTER than the CC.
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inappropriate. Developmentally INappropriate.
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Cornelius, imagine you are holding a gun to my head in order to force me to hurt a child. If I tell you that I want to stop hurting that child, that what you are forcing me to do is wrong, your demand for an alternative action, beyond stopping, would be deemed absurd by any sane person.
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My husband is freshman English college professor. He is horrified that since NCLB the quality of student writing has declined. He and others who understand corporate ed reform don’t blame public schools or teachers, and they know these top down money grabs won’t fix a thing. They know the formulaic writing comes from teachers being forced to teach to the test. Children cannot be standardized – no matter how hard some try. If you want better writing, kids need to read a lot of books (not passages), and write in multiple genres, especially creatively. Let me know the next time you pick up an anthology of middle school or high school standardized essays to read for pleasure. You’d rather read fiction or a good memoir? Who will write them in the next generation? Intellectual freedom creates intellectuals.
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Upon having our 4th grade writing dumped in our laps via the Lucy Caulkin school of formulaic writing, we teachers just about had coronaries. The entire process is cumbersome, time-consuming, and does not work well for students with low language skills. Many don’t have the background knowledge or experiences to write anything interesting, no matter how many “small moments” we encourage.
As I try to tell the students: we first learn language by listening to those around us when we are children; we then mimic what we have heard and we are encouraged to speak correctly (if our mentors can do so); we then begin to learn lettrs, match letters to sounds, identify and match sounds to words, put it together and begin to read. Granted, some of us assimilate this more quickly than others, and some struggle for several years to make sense of it all. Sure, we begin to develop the fine motor skills to hold a crayon and then a pencil. Different students require more time to master each of those skills. And, to me, that is OK. Learning is and should be sequential. Skipping or rushing through skill development is not a best practice”. Pretending that all kids learn at the same rate and that they can be tested on the same skills on the same day, regardless of external and developmental factors is simply cruel and unfounded.
We are continuing down a path that is not good. Many of us thought that NCLB would fall flat. It did. But TPTB somehow haven’t noticed.
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I think the new Lincoln commercials featuring Matthew McConaughey can sum where we need to be going in education. “Sometimes you need to go back to see where you came from and to know where you are going.” Everyone of the new ed “reformers” seems to think that they invented the wheel. They are kind of like my history students, nothing happened until “THEY WERE BORN”.
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Instead of having LESS history, we need to teach MORE. I know that when I was in school, the teachers focused on their favorite eras.. We skipped WWI and II and dealt with Vietnam and current events. Not everyone has the same view of history or historical facts. If you read certain views, history is “inaccurate” if it points out any of the negative things that are historically TRUE. But, it is very apparent that they Orwellian ideas of “rewriting” history and even truth to meet the needs of what the controlling group wants them to be. That is frightening. Totally. Case in point. Colorado.
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And not have a bunch of standardized assessments. So I can’t focus on what I know my kids need. I have to focus on what someone else thinks my students need to know so that they can take EIGHT standardized assessments a year.
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True. All these assessments take time away from real learning. The only thing they learn is how to play the test taking game. In the end,c who benefits?
Right now, the job market seems to be full of jobs that are boring and mundane and require none of the skills from CC or even high school graduation.
Computer skills are needed but knowledge is not.
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How do you try standards on actual students, or test out a curriculum? How are the kids who “field test” standards or curricula compensated for it?
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Field tests happen all the time. Usually in a few classes across the country at a time. I helped field test lessons for UNICEF a few years ago. Teachers get to choose whether to do it or not, and make the best decisions for their students. They can generally adapt what they are teaching and send suggestions. It’s not all-encompassing like the CC standards are. They should have spread out the standards and had a few classrooms try a few standards. They should have had people with real teaching and curricula writing experience doing these standards. They should not have been rushed through, in the dead of night, without legislative approval and public commentary. They should have been voluntary. They should not be tied to high stakes, and they CERTAINLY should not be tied to this ridiculous amount of testing.
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It’s sad and shocking that Coleman and the Core have not been laughed off the national stage by folks who actually know something about how children acquire language abilities. Explicit knowledge of abstractly formulated skills of the kind called for by the extraordinarily prescientific, amateurish Common Core State Standards in ELA is ALMOST ENTIRELY IRRELEVANT to the acquisition of
the grammar and vocabulary of a language,
writing ability,
concepts,
logical reasoning ability,
familiarity with stock literary structures, archetypes, motifs, genres, and techniques
or anything else taught by English teachers in Grades PreK-12.
What matters, of course, is that students learn, early on, to love learning, through engagement with fascinating, semantically rich, connected content. The ridiculous list of skills that makes up the CCSS in ELA encourages, instead, the treatment of snippets of text in isolation. Coleman’s list encourages an approach to English studies that reduces texts to mere opportunities for applying skills and so misses the whole purpose of learning to read and write. We read and writing and speak because the CONTENT OF OUR COMMUNICATION MATTERS, and the Common Core in ELA ALMOST ENTIRELY ignores content and, worse yet, substitutes for the implicit learning of language abilities that children are build to do the explicit learning of a bullet list of abstractions.
The whole approach is purest idiocy and is based on complete ignorance of current cognitive science related to language acquisition.
KIDS WILL ACQUIRE SUPERB WRITING, READING, AND SPEAKING ABILITIES ONLY BY WRITING, READING, AND SPEAKING A LOT ABOUT MATERIAL THAT MATTERS TO THEM, and to an ENORMOUS EXTENT, the acquisition of those abilities will be AUTOMATIC, if the child is sufficiently so engaged over time.
No one ever taught you the rules for the order of precedence of adjectives in English–that “the green, great dragon” is incorrect but that “the great, green dragon” is correct. But if you are a native speaker, you know these rules–not consciously, not explicitly, but implicitly–because you have cognitive structures dedicated to intuiting those rules. In fact, teaching them explicitly WILL JUST GET IN THE WAY OF THE ACQUISITION, as teaching a four year old what muscles and bones he or she has to move when riding a bicycle will get in the way of teaching that child how to ride a bicycle. Hook a kid on reading and learning, early on, and most of language acquisition (though not, for all, learning of the written code) will take care of itself.
And where does that love of books and learning begin? With all the great stuff that we used to do with the little one who now, instead, are being subjected to a horror show of abstract skills instruction using texts that are developmentally inappropriate. All around the country now, elementary school teachers are being told not to read to kids but, rather, to have kids spend their time doing close silent reading of isolated, arbitrary snippets of complex text.
But, of course, anyone who knows anything about child language acquisition knows that grammar and vocabulary and familiarity with genre and motifs and structures and much, much, much else occurs, for the most part, automatically via exposure to engaging SPOKEN language and that that automatic learning, wedded to mastery of the written code, is what makes possible later sophisticated reading and that hooks kids so that they become self-motivated readers, learners, and thinkers.
It’s time for people who actually know what they are doing to take back the profession from these CCSS know-nothings with their absurdly formulated, amateurish lists of explicit, abstract skills and their completely invalid standardized tests.
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What is being done to children–to little children–under the banner of the CCSS can be summed up in two words: child abuse.
It’s child abuse. And it needs to be stopped.
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cx: We read and writing and speak because the CONTENT OF OUR COMMUNICATION MATTERS, but the Common Core in ELA ALMOST ENTIRELY ignores content and, worse yet, substitutes for the implicit learning of language abilities that children are built to do to do the automatically the explicit learning of a bullet list of ignorantly formulated abstractions (the CCSS ELA bullet list).
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Yikes. Let me try that again. Sorry, rushing here:
We read and write and speak because the CONTENT OF OUR COMMUNICATION MATTERS, and when we read and write and converse a lot, we acquire skills and knowledge of the world incidentally, largely automatically, because our brains do a lot of unconscious processing using inherited machinery for language acquisition, pattern recognition, concept formation, inductive and abductive reasoning, etc.,
but the Common Core in ELA ALMOST ENTIRELY ignores content and, worse yet, substitutes for the implicit learning of language abilities that children are built to do automatically the explicit learning of a bullet list of ignorantly formulated abstractions (the CCSS ELA bullet list).
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So true!!
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The written code, of course, is a different matter. Writing is a relatively recent human invention. There is no dedicated machinery in the head for interpreting sound-grapheme correspondences, as there is for intuiting phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic structures; doing pattern recognition; forming concepts of subordinate and superordinate categories via generalization from prototypes, etc.
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Reading aloud and even libraries are considered obsolete. If everyone must read the same books – why bother having a large collection of books for students to peruse. And why have a librarian to purchase and organize such books or read stories and do book talks for students?
That might lead children to actual learn to love reading instead of simply using it as another tool.
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Click to access ReadingAloud.pdf
It is primarily via oral language that people acquire the vocabulary and the grammar (using that term in its widest sense) of a language. Most concepts (e.g., the categories “furniture” and “happiness”) are not explicitly learned but are learned automatically via unconscious generalization from prototypical examples. Most knowledge of the world (e.g., “The sock goes on before the shoe”) is implicitly, not explicitly, learned. Most reasoning takes place at a level below that of conscious awareness, and the conscious mind works with the output of all that unconscious mental activity.
In linguistics, a distinction is made between “learning,” based on explicit processes, and “acquisition,” based upon inherited abilities and largely unconscious processes. So one might LEARN–consciously, explicitly–the names of the capital cities of the states, but for the most part, one ACQUIRES the grammar and vocabulary of a language. Far less than one percent of the vocabulary of an adult results from explicit instruction in vocabulary (think about that the next time you see a Word Wall), and every writer and speaker “knows” far, far more grammar than he or she is consciously aware of (and much of what people think they know consciously about grammar is, in fact, wrong).
Oral language is therefore extraordinarily important, for it provides the occasions for the inherited machinery of the mind to do its magic.
Another reason to read aloud to kids, of course, is to hook them, to get them interested in the piece to be read so that they will complete, as silent reading, the piece that they have become interested in because they have heard its opening. The teacher who says to his or her kids, “Now, finish reading the story on your own to find out how it ends” knows what he or she is doing.
But right now, all across the country, elementary school teachers are being told by their districts to discontinue doing “read alouds” and to concentrate, instead, on silent “close reading” of informational texts (snippets, really, of isolated text). Kids are given a piece of text and a set of “text-dependent questions,” in imitation of the CCSS standardized exams and told to do those. And many of the people issuing such ignorant directives are administrators in charge of language arts programs!!!! It’s shocking, of course, that people would become district-level language arts administrators and know so little about how language skills are acquired.
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And clearly, the authors of the CCSS knew nothing of this.
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The CCSS in ELA are almost entirely vague statements of abstractly formulated “skills” to be explicitly learned. The standards document is almost entirely content free. It doesn’t deal with world knowledge, and what procedural knowledge it addresses is addressed too vaguely to allow for operationalized instruction or valid testing.
And because the list of CCSS skills is what will be tested, people adapt their instruction to focus on explicit teaching of the list of skills and so don’t teach in the ways in which the brain is built to learn. But in fact, most learning occurs incidentally while people are engaged, in a sustained way, with material that is significant to them because of its content. You take a painting class at the local Y, and in the course of a week, you learn the terms filbert brush, gesso, titanium white, and stippling, and those terms were not explicitly taught to you. You picked them up in context.
To a large extent, we should be focusing on content and letting the skills acquisition take care of itself. We read not to find out what method of exposition is used in paragraph 14 but to find out whether Tiger Lily will escape from the pirates.
Of course, Lord Coleman did not invent this emphasis on abstractly formulated skills and this devaluing of content and knowledge. He had almost no experience in PreK-12 education before he was appointed lord and master of PreK-12 ELA education in the United States, so he did what others who have no experience do when called upon to perform–he copied. He put together a mishmash of existing state standards that themselves focused almost exclusively on abstractly formulated skills.
Wrong from the start.
We read and write and listen and speak because of the content. That purposefulness in our reading, writing, listening, and speaking should always be foremost. Skills instruction is rightfully subsidiary to, incidental to, engaging content. Skills are largely acquired, not explicitly learned, in the course of that engagement.
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And Robert,
All this mish mash is due to the disrespect shown to teachers. It’s as if we were still young, unmarried women teaching in a one room school house with nothing but a high school (or perhaps grade eight) education. Our expertise is being continually ignored. And we are in good company, because the educational psychology and child development research of experts in their field has also been disregarded.
In addition, these pompous fools refuse to listen to reason. They are unable to accept that their ideas might be faulty. If they were the husbands of education, they would be like overbearing oafs who keep their wives at home so they can have dinner waiting for them on the table – The old “barefoot and pregnant” mentality. Plus the kids would be “seen and not heard”.
The need to turn away from the past and move into modern times goes beyond purchasing technology. We need to have a new mind set for all the men who are making the decisions about the needs of women, children, and youth – trying to keep us in our place. The women in authority are often even more brutal than their male counterparts (as if they have to prove themselves worthy of their positions).
Selecting the types of materials we should read is just one example of their micromanaging.
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This is the paternalistic, authoritarian view that is dominating business right now. Only the few with the big dollars have the right to make the decisions for the rest. There has always been a backlash against teachers making a decent income. It has been viewed as a subservient extension of being a mother for a long,long time.
With our economy thrown into a downfall by greedy banks and hedge fund managers and with businesses backing away from jobs in the US and from paying a fair share of taxes, the environment is right for attacking public servants and stripping them of protections that others may not have in their jobs.
The use if these tests and the injection of standards into the wrong grade levels, there is a perfect alignment of their plan to decrease teacher autonomy, respect, and income. We have always been caught in the middle, but now it is easy to justify lower pay, more responsibility, bigger class sizes because so many others are financially strapped and don’t want to pay the local school taxes. In Ohio, Kasich has shifted the burden locally while continuing to smile and blame his victims for what he has done to them.
As for Dunca’s and Gates’ lack of understanding concerning developmentally appropriate teaching of reading, Bob is totally accurate. So much real learning takes place via serendipity. Those goosebump moments aren’t scripted. Reading only for the purpose of some standard, close reading, and scripted learning may have a place, but not a predominant one.
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We are all on the same page.
And the best leaning occurs when a random moment catches the students’ interest and the teacher is able to build all sorts of experiences around this one concept – not from the curriculum, but still life alternating.
What moments do you remember from your years at school? Most blend in together, but there are certain experiences which have forever influenced our views on life and shaped the people we are today.
Now, that’s true education.
(Thank you Mr. Larson, Mr. Reitz, Mrs Lamb, Mrs Leiter, and Mrs Hames)
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yes yes yes
There is definitely a sexist element in all this. Most teachers are women. Most of these deformers are men who think that they know better than these mere women do. This is unacceptable. It’s disgusting.
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Ellen, it’s awesome that you took a moment to remember and thank your teachers.
My eternal gratitude to Mr. Schimezzi, to that great 9th-grade Algebra teacher whose name I have forgotten, to Mr. Luckenbill, Mr. Long, Don Gray, James Miller, Murray Sperber, Charles Heiser, Alvin Rosenfeld, Michael Flanigan, Peter Lindenbaum, E. Talbot Donaldson, Dr. Machina (sorry, I have forgotten your first name, but I shall never forget your classes!), Douglas Hofstadter, and Paul Gebhard! Lucky me to have had such teachers.
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Being more conservative, I never realized how evil these corporations are. They are to blame; they are behind these standards, testing, and data, and the people in them must be heartless because they don’t care what they are doing to children. It isn’t even capitalism at this point. It is totally organized white-collar crime right down to the PAC/governement corruption and influence, at the expense of our kids. Nothing short of a revolution is going to fix this. Hand to hand combat – every child with a caring adult behind them.
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It is beginning to pass over into criminality, for there is an enormous amount of collusion between politicians and bureaucrats, on the one hand, and the testing companies on the other. We need a Congressional investigation, and I want to testify at the hearings.
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Congress needs to be investigated for passing a law that they knew could not be complied with. Name any other law that no entity under its jurisdiction can follow. Name any other law that is impossible to abide by – even if you try really hard to follow it.
For example, imagine a federal law that requires every single student to be able to run 100 meters in 12 seconds or less by June of their senior year. Even the physically handicapped, the over-weight, and the those who missed half of the training sessions. And imagine if that law punished every school that could not comply, threatening to withhold federal funding for being out of compliance. Well you don’t really have to imagine because that law was passed in 2002.
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Connecticut and all the other 44 states should withdraw from the Common Core hell hole dug by Duncan. They should simply accept the consequences of being out of AYP compliance on NCLB. Then each state should refuse to jump through the extra hoops and accept the loss of federal funding that, in a worst case scenario, would follow. In the long run that would be cheaper than complying with CC/RTTT/NLBW.
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