Alice G. Walton has written an important article in Forbes about the controversy over Common Core. (She is a Forbes contributor with a Ph.D., no relation to the Arkansas Waltons.)
She addresses three questions? Are the standards developmentally appropriate? Is the problem with the standards caused by standardized testing, and would the standards be fine if the testing were eliminated? What is the science behind the standards?
She interviewed several eminent experts in the field of early childhood education who agreed that the standards are NOT developmentally appropriate for young children. She interviewed one of the writers of the standards, Sue Pimentel, who insisted that nothing is wrong with the standards and blames the schools for poor implementation.
But this is what the leading experts said about pushing little kids to learn more faster and earlier:
“It’s not clear exactly where the current trend – of pushing more information on kids earlier – came from, but it seems to be a response to the idea that the U.S. needs to catch up to other countries’ education systems. The problem with this strategy is that there doesn’t appear to be much evidence that “more sooner” is the most effective strategy. “The real school starting age is 7,” says Alvin Rosenfeld, MD, faculty at Weill/Cornell Medical School and author of Hyper-Parenting and The Over-Scheduled Child. “It may be 8 or 6, depending on the child. This is all based on what we know about child development, starting from Piaget. Your brain isn’t sufficiently wired to do it before then. And you also have to keep in mind, all kids are different, and it’s very hard to predict what will happen with age. Some kids who were reading Harry Potter at 4 end up as career baristas. Others can’t read till they’re much older, and they turn out to be highly successful as adults.”
David Elkind, long-time child development expert at Tufts University and author of The Hurried Child, says that a related problem with the Common Core standards is that “children are not standardized.” Between ages 4 to 7, he says, kids are undergoing especially rapid changes in cognitive ability, but this neurological and psychological development occurs at all different rates. “Some children attain these abilities—which enable them to learn verbal rules, the essence of formal instruction—at different ages. With the exception of those with special needs, all children attain them eventually. That is why many Scandinavian countries do not introduce formal instruction, the three R’s until the age of seven. In these countries children encounter few learning difficulties. Basically, you cannot standardize growth, particularly in young children and young adolescents. When growth is most rapid, standardization is the most destructive of motivation to learn. To use a biological analogy, you don’t prune during the growing season.”
Could the standards be acceptable if they were decoupled from standardized testing? No, the standards and tests go together. There is considerable doubt among the experts she interviewed about whether standardized tests are good predictors of life success:
Gene Beresin, Executive Director of The Clay Center for Young Healthy Minds at Massachusetts General Hospital and professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, adds that the link between standardized tests and life success isn’t particularly clear. “The powers that be need to realize that there is not always a great correlation between high achievement on standardized tests and brilliant achievement in the workforce, in academics and in life,” says Beresin. “Some people, myself included, are notoriously bad multiple choice test takers… Good test takers know what is expected for an answer and give the test what it is looking for. But the most successful individuals may well do better on other measures of achievement, for example, writing, journaling, verbal expression, creative productivity, and group interaction. I can tell you as a medical educator there is notoriously poor correlation between results on standardized multiple choice tests and being a good doctor!”
By the time you finish the article, you realize that there is no science behind the Common Core. It is a cultural product, written by a small number of people who believe strongly in rigor and who see no problem either with standardization of children, as if they were widgets, or with setting cognitive demands beyond the reach of many–or most–young children.
This is an excellent article, not only because the author interviewed experts in child development and approached the subject with balance, but because it was published in Forbes and will reach people in the business world who need to hear these informed views.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Diane, you mention that CCSS is a cultural product…at this point,
it appears to be ‘A Cult Product’! Judging by the camps, humanists vs CorpProfiteers.
No it’s not! That’s my main problem with this curriculum — it doesn’t take into account the child’s development. I have one child that’s advanced and she gets it. The other is struggling. I hate this because it’s affecting my son’s self esteem. And it makes me feel helpless because I don’t know how to combat what it’s doing to him!!
It is very mysterious why so many people, some of them associated with the most prestigious institutions, have difficulty — or simply will not — accept these simple and uncontroversial facts. They are like the doctors who refused to wash their hands because they rejected the existence of germs: docti ignoranti (“learned ignoramuses”).
I’m not even college educated and I’ve already figured out the problem is the curriculum isn’t developmentally appropriate. Although it’s good to have experts confirming my own ideas, that’s not helping my son. I had to do battle with the schools last year because they wanted to medicate him — a five-year-old in pre-K — because he’d rather play than sit in a chair studying all day. And then they tried to make me think something was wrong with me too because I thought his behavior was normal. Done ranting now.
Sorry, that was kindergarten — not pre-K. It wasn’t until kindergarten that it all hit the fan.
Good for you, Sloan96.
sloan96, stick to your guns. Your instincts are sound. Show the teacher and administrators this article.
This has been illegal for a decade: fed law HR1350 passed in ’04 “Prohibits State and local educational personnel from requiring a child to obtain a prescription for substances covered by the Controlled Substances Act as a condition of attending school, receiving an evaluation under IDEA, or receiving services.” Many states introduced legislation between 1999-2003 prohibiting teachers or school personnel from even recommending psychiatric meds.
This won’t stop child study from convening a mtg of all your kids’ teachers to dance around the issue & say everything but the magic words. I stopped them in their tracks when youngest was in 6th gr by telling them my eldest was in psych hosp for psychotic reaction to antidepressants prescribed to turn around anxiety disorder caused by Ritalin. Told them they’d better find an educational way. And they did!
Heaven forbid medicating him! Put him on an organic diet – no GMO foods, plenty of sunshine, exercise and read literature to him every day – except the days you don’t eat. Let him have hands on with one to one matching, counting and verbal math problems when he sets the table, picks up his toys etc.
CCSS = CULT, is right. It’s politically correct even if TOTALLY wrong. $$$$$ TALKS…big time in this not-so-democratic country.
I have had the privilege of teaching ALL grades (k-12, inclusive) in 5 states, and from my, I think “informed” perspective, I can attest to the fact that CCSS is indeed developmentally INAPPROPRIATE.
Anyone remember PIAGET’s research?
“The Bell Curve Boys”
The Bell Curve Boys
Just love the tests
Like favorite toys
They tout their bests:
“A perfect score on SAT”
Is what I got in school, you see
And how successful I’ve turned out
The test tells all, there’s little doubt
***************
You can spot the Bell Curve Boys (and they are all boys) from a mile away because even at nearly 60, they are still bragging about their SAT scores from high school (on their wikipedia page and elsewhere)
Bill Gates purportedly got a near perfect score on the SAT (1590 out of 1600) so it should come as no surprise that he puts so much emphasis on tests.
To me this is one of the most upsetting developments since the Vietnam war.
Common Core has nothing to do with education. That is not why it is in existence. It is a business plan.
The follwing will be simply a review for most who comment here.
A Quick Summary:
I) WHAT IS COMMON CORE?
What many call ‘Common Core’ is really a set of initiatives that were introduced to states via the Race To The Top Funds.
In order for states to quality for the Race to the Top Funds, they were required to:
1) Implement the new Common Core State Learning Standards
2) Use new standardized tests to evaluate student and teacher performance
3) Set-up a longitudinal database which contains student demographics and performance data
Part of a larger political project to remake public education in order to implement new national standards and tests for every school and district in the country in the wake of dramatic changes in the national and state context for education reform
A well-financed campaign of billionaires and politically powerful advocacy organizations that seeks to replace our current system of public education with a market-based, non-unionized, privately managed system.
The CC standards were initiated by private interests in Washington, DC, without any representation from the states. Eventually the creators realized the need to present a façade of state involvement and therefore enlisted the National Governors Association (NGA) (a trade association that doesn’t include all governors) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), another DC-based trade association. Neither of these groups had a grant of authority from any particular state or states to write the standards. The bulk of the creative work was done by Achieve, Inc., a DC-based nonprofit that includes many progressive education reformers who have been advocating national standards and curriculum for decades. Massive funding for all this came from private interests such as the Gates Foundation.
II) WHO WROTE COMMON CORE:
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provided the funding to write the new standards.
Two Washington DC trade organizations: The national Governor’s Association (NGA) and the Counsel of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) worked with education industry partners to write and trademark the new standards.
Those principally involved in CCSS development, one views a listing of 29 individuals associated with Student Achievement Partners, ACT, College Board, and Achieve. In truth, only 2 out of 29 members are not affiliated with an education company.
Two years later, CCSS were released by the National Governors Association (NGA) Center for Best Practices and the Council of Chief State School. Development of the standards themselves was headed by David Coleman, labeled the “architect” of CCSS and now president of the College Board. Coleman’s background includes consulting and assessment, not education, and Coleman also represents the entrepreneurial backing CCSS have received, including funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
In all, there were 135 people on the review panels for the Common Core. Not a single one of them was a K–3 classroom teacher or early childhood professional.” Parents were entirely missing. K–12 educators were mostly brought in after the fact to tweak and endorse the standards—and lend legitimacy to the results.
III) Who Funds and Benefits from Common Core?
It is important to know that think tanks, CCSS developers, teachers unions and reform organizations have all received large grants from the Gates Foundation to promote Common Core. These Gates funded organizations span the political spectrum.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation pours money in support of the Common Core. Goldman Sachs contributes to the Partnership for Public Service committed to the Common Core.
All are part of “Big Philanthropy” and are taking advantage of draconian cuts to state education programs by privatizing what states used to provide.
The “nonprofit” Student Achievement Partners, founded by CCSS “architect” David Coleman, also benefits handsomely via Gates. All that Student Achievement Partners does is CCSS, and for that, in June 2012, Gates granted Coleman’s company $6.5 million.
In total, the four organizations primarily responsible for CCSS– NGA, CCSSO, Achieve, and Student Achievement Partners– have taken $147.9 million from Bill Gates.
IV) SUMMARY
In sum, CCSS has been developed by political and corporate leaders without expertise or experience in education. Top-down, standards-driven education de-professionalizes teachers, devalues the field of education, and reduces students to passive learners. And commercial interests, not students, will gain from implementing CCSS,
The capitalists have figured out how to open up public schooling to private capital and how to have public monies transferred to private companies. You get schools to “fail” by setting up ridiculous benchmarks (such as “No Child Left Behind” and now “Common Core”); and then when the school has failed, you take it out of local control and turn it over to charter school companies and other “reformers.” All federal funds are tied to these programs and each district will receive funding, or not, based on their performance.
Standardized testing is not about “assessment” of student “competency”; it is a big stick to whack teachers and break their unions
Common Core is an insurance policy for mega-corporations, and following close behind in the fine print is the proliferation of charter schools and vouchers, and all are to the detriment of our schools and our society.
The Common Core was a prerequisite for a particular BUSINESS PLAN for ed tech to be used for the training of the children of the proles (everyone else’s children). The Common Core is the engine that drives the education deform juggernaut.
They can’t even deny this. Excellent overview and summary, really well done.
Michael and N Teacher. The gist is OK. Some of the details are wrong. Mercedes Scneider will have a book out soon with some amazing back stories and meticulously documented sources for everything about the CCSS.
Hi Michael.
Where did you find the names of actual people involved in the basic research and development of Common Core? I looked and looked, both on their website and on the NGA website, and could not find the name of a single person.
Frankly, having read Orwell’s famous essay on Politics and the English Language, most of what I found on corestandards.org reminded me of it.
Thank you for your post.
Sonja, I will post on this question soon.
Here is information on the “Work Group ” and the “Feed Back” Group:
Common Core State Standards Development Work Group and Feedback Group Announced NGA Center, CCSSO Unveil New Web site; Outline Process to Develop Common English-language Arts and Mathematics Standards
July 01, 2009
http://www.nga.org/cms/home/news-room/news-releases/page_2009/col2-content/main-content-list/title_common-core-state-standards-development-work-group-and-feedback-group-announced.html
If you compare the Members of the English-language Arts Work Group and the Members of the mathematics Work Group you will find some of the same names on both the English and math group: Sara Clough, John Kraman, Sherri Miller. All three belong to a company. Other members on the “Work Group” are either one of the three founders of Act, Inc., Achieve, or are a member of the College Board. (Clough, Kraman, and Miller must be geniuses to be experts in both math and language arts.)
The Feedback Group have credentials for the job and are from reputable universities; however, the final decisions regarding the common core standards document were made by the Standards Development Work Group. The Feedback Group served as an advisory role, not a decision-making role in the process.
Susan Pimentel:
http://www.nagb.org/who-we-are/members/bios/b_pimentel.html
How can I copy this and share with others?
Considering many states adopted these standards sight unseen, before they were even completely written, the evidence is clear that extortion was involved. They are clearly inappropriate. How long will it be before we stop the destruction and realize the horrible mistakes we have made? Will the mendacious business people be held responsible? Of course not, teachers will be blamed once more. I predict future research topics will include the deleterious effects of inappropriate instruction inhibiting acquisition of basic skills. Reality of child development will not yield to the edicts of the reform testers. Piaget may be dead, but he isn’t wrong.
“Piaget may be dead, but he isn’t wrong.”
So right.
As Nobel prize winning physicist Richard Feynman wrote in his appendix to the official report on the space shuttle Challenger disaster:
“For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.”
Replace “technology’ with any human endeavor and it is just as true.
The reality of pursuing developmentally inappropriate education methods will eventually become evident to everyone — and painfully so to our students and teachers.
Unfortunately, the people responsible for imposing Common Core, standardized test-mania, charters and the rest on the American public (Gates, Obama, Duncan, Coleman, Broad, Rhee, etc) will never be held accountable for the damage they are doing. They will simply wash their hands of the entire thing and act like it never happened and move on to their next brilliant business idea.
Teachers (what teachers remain) will be the ones who will have to pick up the pieces of the exploded space shuttle and try to put the thing back together as best they can.
It’s shameful, but the folks responsible have no capacity to feel shame.
Cross-posted at http://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Forbes-Is-Common-Core-Dev-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Childhood_Core-Curricula_Diane-Ravitch_Education-141024-703.html#comment517190
MY comment at Oped News with a links: “Here is what Peter Greene says about accountability, because the conversations that are pushed by the ‘reformers’ and the billionaires who wish to control education, are bogus and meant to confuse everyone. ”
“As you may have noticed, we are getting swamped with messages from the corporate reformers about how it is time to restart the conversation. Presumably that is a recognition that the previous conversation wasn’t working.”
“The American public is fed up with high-stakes testing and increasingly suspicious of the grandiose promises about the miracles that privately managed charter schools will accomplish. Having noticed that the charter schools don’t want children with disabilities, don’t want English language learners, and are likely to encourage kids with low test scores to find another school, the public is waking up to the game played by corporate charters.
“It’s all about the test score, which takes us back to the overuse and misuse of standardized testing. This failed conversation seems to have gotten mixed up, inevitably, with the Common Core, and the public is overwhelmingly opposed to CCSS and federal takeover of state and local decision-making.”
To me, the debate about the developmental appropriateness of the Common Core in the primary grades is not just about the Common Core, but how our schools approach standards based education and age-based grades overall. We know that children develop at different rates and especially (but not only) in the primary grades benefit from playful learning. Common Core or no, you cannot have a successful learning environment with rigid instruction and goals in the classroom. We need to meet children where they are and differentiate to meet their needs. As communities, we need to work to make sure all children have good healthcare, nutrition, shelter, and access to child-centered preschool programs.
I do find some of the specific criticisms interesting. I read that the standard of Kindergarten students counting to 100 is now considered new and awful. I went back and looked up our kindergarten report card from 2000, predating Common Core and also NCLB. Right after “Can recognize numbers up to 20” is “End of year goal, can count to 110.” That was something most Kindergarten students could do by the end of the year and was not at all controversial. But we didn’t get there by keeping 5 year olds at a desk all day.
Stiles, some K students can count to 100, some can’t. By the time they are in second or third grade, they almost all will. It doesn’t make sense to say this is the standard that all K must meet.
Diane, this is perhaps a good argument for local control and decisions. We are suburban public school district and we serve a very ready group of Kindergarten students.
I am not familiar with the research base that shows that kindergarten students typically can count to twenty. I do know what our kindergarten students can do at the end of each trimester, which may not be generalizable.
At the end of the 2013-2014 school year, we had 253 students in Kindergarten. 236 could count to 100, 6 could count somewhere between 70 and 99, and 11 could count up to a number that was below 70. In the latter group most could count to around 50, but often would have some skips or mistakes in the teens. In our community, 93% of students can count to 100 by the end of the kindergarten year.
Maybe I’m approaching the concept of developmentally appropriate incorrectly. My view is there is no intrinsic obstacle to kindergarten age students learning to count to 100, but students without adequate nutrition, shelter, pre-school learning opportunities may not be able to count to 100 on average as students who have these available. And we need to continually strive to provide all children with this kind of developmental environment.
So smart… I have more to say about what I know from years of participating in our local nursery while my sons and his friends were growing up; after seeing them all progress through kindergarten in our suburban schools, and watching them grow up, attend college and become the brilliant men and women I know today.
For now, it is so simple… kindergarten is and has always been a socializing experience.
Learning is not merely about content knowledge, math and reading skills…. THAT is their narrative so they can sell tests and technology that teachers it.
It is all about LEARNING, and the appropriate learning for emergent human minds at that age is social skills. ANYONE WHO HAS RAISED A CHILD knows who they are at 5. It is not four, and it is not six… it is certainly not 7, where sentence writing skills are crucial the curricula for literacy.
MY sons’ nursery The Ramapo Cooperative Nursery, had sixteen kids, one teacher and four parents. I watched those kids for 2 years, and saw them again in my cub scout den when they were in kg and first grade.
One boy could write and read since he was 4, but all the others caught up by grade 3, and my son who did not learn to read or write much until he was 6 and 7, was the valedictorian in his HS and won many scholarships. Today he is a cardiologist. The other boy…well, he is a scientist at MIT.
There is a place for GENES!
This standards based education will keep a TON of kids from ever graduating. My district is implementing this. ONLY tests and quizzes count for the grade. My son, who has a learning disability that isn’t severe enough apparently to qualify for special education, will never be able to pass the tests and quizzes. He will fail and he will not graduate. I don’t even know what to do. The stress is literally causing me an ulcer and ruining my relationship with my son, as I have to constantly nag him to go in and retake and retake tests and quizzes.
I go to Starbuck’s frequently and I am very appreciative of the barristas that serve me. A lot of people would have less happy days without them. As long as status and financial success are of the highest value in floks like the “experts” quoted here, standarda that value only narrowly defined success will be with us.
They can painlessly learn to count to 100 at seven or eight, but there are certain things they need to learn for self care, empathy, and consideration of others that have to be learned at four or five — not to mention large muscle development which is the developmental task of this age. Without proper physical activity they will never develop a sense of balance or the strong bones that manufacture the cells that comprise the immune system that will serve them all life long. And the best physical activities for four and five year olds are play and musical activities. Laboriously teaching them to count to 100 at this age is a colossal waste of time that is of significance only to adults. This is the age where children learn from activity and imitation rather than from explicit instruction.
The “experts” that devised this fiasco are the same bozos — the so-called, self-described number obsessed “best and brightest” that got us into the Vietnam war. And this is even stupider — if that were possible.
The entire Common Core logic is stupid, as we’ve discussed. “Stella Luna” was the best informational text my three-year-old son could have had at that time, and so we read it more than a dozen times. Then he decided to learn everything there was to learn about bats, which took us a couple of years, while I had to compose a bat saga (featuring a bat named “Dannybat…” modeled after the kid) that brought a migrating colony of very intelligent bats across the USA and around northern Eurasia all the way back up through Africa (where the bats learned a lot from the dinosaurs they met and talked with until they reached Gibralter. At which time the young guy said, “Dad I think we’re finished with bats.” During those two years, he learned everything he wanted to know about bats, we explored bat caves in a couple of states (in Pennsylvania he got to pet a bat roosting on the low ceiling, and said “it felt like a wet puppy…” which was interesting, since he already understood that bats are mammals).
The saga of Batling, Dannybat and their families and friends led to his announcing at one point that he was going to become a chiropterist later in life (prior to that, he was going to become a paleontologist as many children do)…
All because of that informational text “Stella Luna.”
The people who are pushing Common Core don’t know batdung about real human children.
Oh, also. As to STEM. The son who explored every bat book available back then is now a successful computer engineer in San Francisco at age 25 with no student debt.
But reality has never interfered with belief, and every time I hear someone say the words “Common Core” with that tone of reverence, I realize we are not dealing with reality, but with the same stuff that brings people together on their days of worship…
“The Common Core-us”
The Common Core-us;
Praise The Lord
The pearly Gates
And MS Word
Commandments carried
From on high
To teachers buried
To the sky
In Common Core
And other voodoo
Tests and VAMs
And other doodoo
Developmentally appropriate standards and assessments do not produce a *70% failure rate in 1.2 million 8 to 14 year olds. Period.
(*80+% failure for Black and Hispanic; 95% failure rate for IEPs and ELLs)
That isn’t rigor. That’s cruelty.
They have to destroy them in order to “save” them.
Here here! My son just graduated from Navy Rescue Swimmer School. The attrition rate is the second highest in the Navy after the SEALs.
At 70 percent it is identical to the PARRC/Smarter Balanced failure rate.
This level of Rigor is one thing for the Navy when the stakes are life and death but in no way is it appropriate for eight year olds.
rigor mortis
Reblogged this on logging entries in my life and commented:
just had to share.
J
Many a genius has died poor because what they had in intellect, they lacked in common sense. A higher IQ does not a success make.
A long-time friend of mine, who had a reading disability, learned to read at the age of 11. He was one of seven children of a blue collar family. Reading English finally clicked for him when he started learning Spanish. He is also now a computer engineer and speaks and reads four languages in addition to English.
ANY TEST with 70% -80% Failure Rate is CRAP and should Be shredded and NEVER, EVER be used to determine ANYTHING related to ANY LIVING THINGS!
How does anyone tolerate or defend such CRAP?
Even if the CorpProfiteers have never set foot into a school, which many have not, how can they even logically support this?
Unless, there is tons of $$ to believe and support anything.
Yeah, that’s it!
No matter how often I explore such actions, I always conclude that $M must be the ONLY reason! Works for them, and not for children.
HA
And that’s for two years running. Millions of dollars and millions of teacher hours wasted. This should be a national scandal. The opportunity costs to the students of NY have been staggering.
The biggest problem I see with the Common Core is that students are being forced to learn in very unnatural ways. Ways that do not work for many. Many of the EngageNY activities are convoluted and confusing in the name of the false god, “Rigor”
Give me rigor or give me death! Oh, that’s right, I’ll have plenty of it later.
Help me out Poet, you have inspired me.
A sonnet to my heroes
Piaget is spinning
Common core’s a bore
Research in invisible ink
Reformers can’t be winning
Disaster is in store
This mess now really stinks
Common sense and reason
Give us a glint of hope
Discontent’s now in season
Reform may find the ropes
Results predicted mendaciously
are on milk carton sides
Money acts suspiciously
All will soon see the lies.
Feel free to tutor me Poet, you seemed a bit busy today.
Ms. Ravitch, thank you so much for your work.
At this point, I’m really confused. Let’s agree that the goal is to make sure that American students can do as well in school as their counterparts internationally.
It seems to me that our youngest primary grade students were always among the best in the world. I seem to remember reading that they had performed very well on all international measures of achievement, for decades.
Is this correct? When did our very youngest students need to become more “competitive” with those in other countries?
If there is a gap we need to close, doesn’t it first appear in young adolescents — middle school and early high school students? And doesn’t it generally widen during high school?
Has anyone seriously addressed why the gap appears when it does? Wouldn’t solid information about why it appears help us to understand what we might need to do to close it? Did anyone involved in the development of Common Core address this issue?
I just spent several hours on the Common Core website and could not find the name of a single consultant involved in developing the standards. I downloaded all the documents that give the standards and illustrations of how they may be implemented. If any of these materials are signed, they are not signed in the usual places. (Most of what I read on the website itself was nothing but self-praise, I am sorry to say. But who is this “self” being praised? And who is doing the praising?)
And apart from all that — the image of 6 or 7 year old kids coming home crying because they hate school and are befuddled by what is being asked of them breaks my heart.
Sonja, I’m not sure most of us really care about how we compare internationally, why would we? The “international” competition is a phony business construct. If wqe have the will to enact reasonable tariffs and tax business appropriately so as to care for our society and our people we need not participate in the race to the bottom that the oligarchs would manipulate us in to.
I don’t care ONE WHIT about how we compare internationally, esp on tests that aren’t applicable to every style of learning and proof of understanding.
I am so sick of the testing culture, of the professional development garbage, etc.
I have retired and now have returned to sub in my old school. Yes, I get to sub when they are out at these PD sessions, but … holy cow … these kids have subs so often that I don’t know how they deal with the continuity, esp in the early grades. Whole grade levels are out at a time. There is no one there who can tell the subs where to find what they need on those days. When you have a lot of kids with special needs, trying to keep up with all that is difficult even with good sub plans. It takes a while to digest their processes, know what is happening for each, and implement what is needed.
In any case, I care about the kids that I am teaching not about some stupid international ranking that is improperly used to compare students.
And I sure don’t care what Duncan or Gates think.
I agree with you, but this is one of their key excuses. Or “reasons.” Or “talking points.”
Yet their own story, based on their supposed “standards,” isn’t coherent. It’s not supported by any evidence whatsoever. It’s simply another scare tactic.
It isn’t the PISA initiative — which I agree is purely a phony business construct — or any other standardized measure of children and young people that is the real issue. What concerns me is that American consumer culture is harming kids, especially as they approach adolescence when they are most vulnerable to it. I think it is hurting them — academically, emotionally, financially, and socially.
There is a difference between an American adolescent and a French one, or German one, or Swedish one, or Finnish one, which has nothing to do with the educational “achievement” supposedly measured by international tests.
The reasons for that difference are the very LAST thing that Gates Foundation or Walton Foundation and other billionaires want to change.
The American is bombarded with consumerism and branding, his sense of self and his character is systematically undermined, and he is not taught any defenses against it at all. This is something they will never allow the schools to do. On the contrary! The schools are pushed to be part of this process of undermining the child. They are not allowed to be in the resistance to it.
(By the way, it’s hardly a surprise that the Language “Arts” that Common Core stresses have nothing to do with reading for pleasure and personal insight. The Chicago Teachers Union put out a great position paper where they analyze Common Core’s abysmal approach to reading. And no, I have no affiliation with them. I just happened to live in Chicago.)
So yes, I certainly am concerned, in a broader sense, about the real gap that does exist, and I hope you are, too.
But there is no gap, real or phony, in kindergarten through fourth grade. So why are they imposing this program on the youngest kids?
Did they consider that it could be harming the children cognitively to impose this on them? (Maybe they didn’t have enough money for consultants. Just kidding.)
we non wqe, fat fingers strike again!
These are just 3 kids in one class of 25. Kids are pulled out for varying services daily.
Example: student in 3rd grade, receives Title I reading services, can’t move hands quickly, writes letters 3 lines tall, poor motor skills, slow processing, difficulty speaking clearly or fluently, needs directions repeated several times, easily frustrated, moved to tears. But he tries. What will happen with him?
Example: 3rd grade girl, trying to count backwards using intervals, counts forward even though she knows she needs to go backwards, catches herself, smiles, tries again, 92, 90, 91, oops, 92, 90, 88, 89, oops…whether oral or written… How is she going to do on her tests? Also goes to Title I reading.
Example: 3rd grade boy, triplet, Aspergers, has no aide, wears sound canceling earphones, takes sensory breaks as he wishes, makes demands, if challenged to comply starts screaming in high pitched voice, intelligent but disrupts class frequently, knows he gets his way, so he does little work because he can shriek when he wants, throws mulch at brother at recess, brother does as he demands, kid runs through the middle of a kickball game disrupting both teams, interferes with other kids’ play. In Art class he thinks using plasticine is gross, wants to use cutting tools when they aren’t available for entire class, starts screaming that he hates the sub, worst sub ever, doesn’t like having access to the tools blocked, wants to have run of the room, other kids try to calm him down, cutting into their time to do their work. Will he do well on PARCC?
Sure, there will be kids who do well, but will every child? No. Will most children? No!
What do these profit crazy test makers care about individuals? All kids have needs unique to them. But having disruptions and unequal exceptions for those needing constant one-on-one isn’t fair to the others.
Testing scores reflect adaptation to the learning environment on a daily basis. This may teach kids skills in empathy, but it cuts into academic time on task. Where does it end?
This particular class has 1, 2, 3, or 5 students at a time pulled out for services. Luckily they are graded on progress bands, not %age grades.
Irony does not carry so well over the Internet, does it?
I wasn’t confused at all about what real story is with the (nonexistent) “gap” that Common Core is supposed to close, or about at least some of the reasons behind the real gap that does emerge during adolescence (which Common Core is never going to address).
Young elementary school children don’t need a massive educational reform effort for the purpose of “catching up” to children in the rest of the world, because they are not behind.
The middle school and high school kids are behind, all right, but for entirely different reasons. They live in a propaganda soup, where commercial “values” and market “values” are the only values they learn. In fact, they are bombarded with them, no small thanks to the very same people who are pushing Common Core — as a solution to a problem they helped create, and that they profit from, to the tune of billions?
It seems to me that American high school students’ PISA test scores are great in light of the obstacles they face. Looking back on the more innocent time during which I had the good fortune to grow up, I really don’t know how the students today do it. They have so much more to contend with.
Sorry people didn’t catch my real point. I hope it was explained above. And yes, I do believe that you should care.
Thanks for the opportunity to clarify.
“”It’s not clear exactly where the current trend come from.”
It is clear to all of us who watched the testing mania begin. From the get-go , when the war on the real classroom professional sent tens of thousands of our top teachers out the door, a steady chant to replace learning curricula with tests. One must know that Rupert Murdoch owns a huge share of Pearson! The billionaires plutocrats are behind the rant.
Once the testing ball was rolling over the voices of the authentic educators, it was only a matter of time when they over-stepped even common sense, let alone decades of child development research.
The trend came from the media’s repetition of the rant… a media that was totally in the hands of those determined to take over education in America, not merely for profit, but to end democracy and re-write science and history. In Ohio, we see the tea-party doing its thing
Yes, the Tea Party in Ohio is doing its thing, all right. Geesh.
Vandykel@michigan.gov
Gene Beresin, “Some people, myself included, are notoriously bad multiple choice test takers. Good test takers know what is expected for an answer and give the test what it is looking for. But the most successful individuals may well do better on other measures of achievement, for example, writing, journaling, verbal expression, creative productivity, and group interaction.”
Sounds like a promotion for Common Core. Multiple choice tests CANNOT do adequate job of CC assessment. They are beneficial to tight budgets and are easy to create. Testing is not their job of any standards.