A reader who works for a software company explains why it is so difficult to teach the standards effectively and so unfair to judge teachers by an impossible task: It takes 300 days to teach them, but there are only 180 days in a school year. Oops!
Here is the main problem with these tests. The FLDOE has absolutely no clue on how long it takes to teach each standard effectively. So the question is, “can a teacher teach the standards in the allotted time during the year?” As an educational software company we looked at the standards that a fifth grade teacher is required to teach effectively and stopped counting when we found it would take a minimum of at least 300 school days to teach the standards to an effective level. This does not include teaching a child how to type effectively if the state required typing on the writing portion of the test. The problem is, it’s impossible for an elementary school teacher or for that matter anybody including the testing companies to teach the standards that are on the test in a school year. In order for a teacher or school to score effectively on these tests you have to hope that the students that are coming into your classroom have at least some prior knowledge of the standards.
You have to understand that these tests are not built to test your child’s learning knowledge, they are built to evaluate the schools and teachers on their effectiveness on teaching the standards. Finally, ask yourself this question… “Who benefits if the teachers and schools FAIL teaching the standards effectively?” Teachers? Schools? Children? No benefit here!… Private Charter Schools? Testing Companies? Publishers? ED Tech Companies? Lobbyists and the list goes on and on and on…..
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Not only are these standards an issue, teachers can be required to add more to their lessons. I also must added themes and vocabulary words in addition to all the evaluation tool requirements when I teach.
Outlandish and diabolical.
Outlandish and diabolical and IGNORANT! That is about the only types of things that come out of Tallahassee.
Agree – this problem of “too much material and too little time” also exists with Texas TEKS (“Texas Essential Knowledge & Skills”). The TEKS, in the name of “rigor,” have pushed concepts to grade levels where they are not developmentally appropriate. ANY of it – no matter how much “in the weeds” of the TEKS it is- becomes fair game for the testers. It’s a monumental exercise in “Are you smart enough to trick a __th grader?” Not surprisingly, they have proved repeatedly that they are.
I worked for a while as a teacher in FL. This is a fact. They also expect teachers to teach the same standards to ESE students in a regular classroom.
I wonder how many days to complete the NYSCCS. If anyone has seen the models on Engage NY you know how long one lesson is. I can’t imagine how long it would take to complete all the standards for one grade.
It would be the same 300 days. The Florida Standards ARE the CCSS, just renamed. In fact, many of our districts, mine included, are using engageNY for math. It’s a nightmare!
ELA testing is moving to March in 2017. Be glad you still have the moratorium. Seventh and eighth grade teachers will have approximately 120 full, 40 minute periods to teach the ELA standards. That’s 80 hours of instruction – or about two 40 hour work weeks to turn your miracle.
And they’ll viciously blame, harass and dismiss teachers in poorest schools where kids often have minimal attendance records…and get nowhere near even that 80 hours of instruction.
A required miracle that assumes the test measures teaching, which
it
does
not.
You presume that EngageNy actually teaches the skills it purports to teach. It has never been beta tested.
In Philadelphia testing starts in March, which is 7 months into the year, even though the curriculum content is meant for a ten month school year. Students are being assessed on ten months of content after 7 months of school. This is a big disadvantage, particularly for math, since the skills learned in this subject are very specific. In order to cover all of the material assessed on the test we have to identify the “eligible content” (the common core subject matter assessed on the state test) and set up a scope and sequence that accommodates when the tests are given. Assuming students want to be prepared for the test, how can a teacher not teach to the test?
This creates a situation where the rate of teaching and content delivery outpaces any developmentally appropriate pace for student learning. Students who struggle academically, or assimilate content at a slower pace are further disadvantaged by this data driven approach to learning.
It seems to me, since so much is riding on the high stakes tests, that, by any real standard, this is a civil rights issue, and a human rights issue.
And who is “god” to determine how many days it takes to teach the standards to the students? Each child learns differently and some may take 400 days while others many take 175 days… I think of the image read from time to time that today’s “ed reformist” ways seem to treat children like they have “flip top” skulls that can be opened and very specific knowledge can be placed within and voila!
The post confuses standards with tests, and “days to teach a standard effectively.”
The writer seems to be counting standards, and to have a mental image of teaching one standard a day “effectively.”
Nowhere in this post it there a sense of a curriculum into which standards get embedded and students encounter ideas, concepts, cases, exemplars of content and skills in a coherent program of study designed to make learning meaningful, memorable, and potentially available for amplification within a school year and well beyond it. Good teachers know plan chunks of instruction around time limitations and do the “standards” checklist rituals.
Apart from that, I note that Florida lists standards, by grade level (not for grade-spans) for for these subjects/special domains: English Language Development, Mathematics, Physical Education,Health Education, Science, Social Studies, Music, Dance, Theatre, Visual Art , and World Languages with additional standards for Gifted, and Special Skills.
With not much effort at the Palms website, I see that Florida has adopted the Common Core standards in mathematics and English language arts (and the literacy standards), also national standards in social studies (four sub-domains), national standards in the arts (four) and Next Generation Standards in Science (four sub-domains including STEM).
I also find no evidence that anyone has forwarded a coherent concept showing how all of these separate “school subjects” can be treated at every grade level, as required by the grade-by grade structure of standards (and tests).
In addition to not having a coherent concept of education–only lists of standards and resources for specific uncoordinated subjects–Florida officials should, in fact do a count of all of the standards on the books and then question why on earth that level of specify was thought to be necessary in the first place.
I think the answer lies in a mistaken concept of accountability tied to data, tied to specifications for learning at a level of detail for training, not education, and for programmed instruction of the kind developed in the 1950s around “behavioral objectives.”
At my last count, the standards movement has spawned over 3000 national standards with not a sign anywhere of an effort to eliminate redundancies, examine overlaps and contradictory expectations. There is not even an ounce of clarity about whether standards apply to students or to teachers or (as is commonly assumed) provide a reasonable basis for constructing tests. Sorry to run on and on, but the idea that “meeting a standard a day in each subject and grade” is really absurd, even if the pushers of end-of-class “exit tickets” insist that ispossible, if not a best practice.
The move toward the Next Generation Science Standards is selling the “deep understanding of scientific concepts, processes and principles” – over content. There is much missing from these standards as they favor vague skill sets over content knowledge. Remind you of a recent ed-controversy? NGSS is just a Common Core approach to a subject where knowledge and understanding are inextricably tied together. Removing too much of the content makes the skill sets impossible to master. The addition of engineering is unsettling to a lot of science teachers – and rightly so. Where and when will be trained? Where is the money for engineering supplies, lab equipment, and new textbooks coming from? Many of us see another “implementation” disaster about to unfold. The big question is why the change? Do we need to follow the money?
PARRC, SBAC, and NY Pearson tests have excluded all Common Core ELA standards that pertain to listening and speaking skills. These standards have of course been ignored my most teachers for this reason. If it isn’t tested, it isn’t taught. A philosophy that continues to harm students in public schools and charter schools alike.
Rage,
I could not agree more about your comments about the NGSS. While these standards were largely put together by educators, and while NYS (in my case) is very carefully and openly and slowly running them up the old flagpole for everyone to salute, I’ve found few science teachers truly enthusiastic about them.
I’m a NYS Master Teacher in science, and while I in no way speak for that group, I can safely say the majority of us are unhappy with the NGSS, both in the approach to teaching that it demands and the immense change in the content to be taught. So much content has been removed in the secondary levels (grades 7-12), especially in the earth sciences. The NGSS may indeed improve science literacy in the primary grades where science has gotten short shrift for 16 years, but it may seriously impair the education of those kids who really are interested in science as a career.
In NYS we have possibly the best science standards in the country. During the open comment period thousands of NYS science teachers pointed that fact out, but as you might guess those comments were ignored. The word we hear in NYS is that a third great BS (big standardized) exam for grade 3-8 kids will be added to the two given each April. How will those elementary teachers prepare their kids for three BS tests every year, especiLly when one of those subjects is to be taught experientially and experimentally?
Your questions are on point. Who is going to train the teachers, especially the elementary teachers in these standards? Where is the cash for all the required science equipment going to come from. How will you demonstrate and assess practical laboratory skills on a tablet computer?
I won’t have to change but 60% of what I teach. I’ll have to change how I teach it 100%. Watch my regents pass rate go from well over 90% to well below 70%.
But those that pass will be, what do you call it? Oh yeah, college and career ready, because the proponents of the NGSS are telling me they aren’t right now.
They were wrong about the CCSS and they are wrong about the NGSS.
rockhound2
I teach science just upriver (Hudson) from you. I imagine that NYSED will have to re-write all of the Regents exams to align with the NGSS. I imagine the current 4th and 8th grade science tests will be revamped as well. They just can’t leave well enough alone. mark my words, the integration of STEM in the NGSS is going to become an embarrassment. Expecting thousands of science teacher to suddenly teach engineering in a meaningful and effective way is a fool’s errand.
The Next Generation Science Standards are not developmentally appropriate for early childhood grades. They expect students to have background knowledge that many of them don’t have, especially if you are teaching in an inner city school. Lots of concepts and vocabulary are just gone.
Actually Rage, I’m well west of you in central New York in the Syracuse area. Downriver maybe, down the Mohawk?
Alabama Teacher- “not developmentally appropriate”.
Hmmm.
Where have I heard that before?
I covered this very point at a Florida Board of Education meeting this past year.
“State Board of Education Meeting
October 28, 2015
Heide Janshon, Parent Advocate, Pasco County
Honorable Ladies and Gentlemen of the State Board of Education,
At your last meeting on September 21, you called for as high as possible cut scores for the Florida Standards Assessments — even tougher levels than the FLDOE review panels have recommended. You suggested that more Florida students might pass the test with lowered standards, but in the long run they wouldn’t be as competitive nationally and internationally as they should be.
As far as the cut scores are concerned, you can make them say anything you want them to say.
Isn’t that manipulating the system…manipulating the numbers….lying to the students who are taking the assessments…moving the bar??
The definition of INSANITY is to continue to do the same things expecting different results. Studies have shown that incessant testing does NOT improve test results because tests do not provide instruction! Tests STEAL instruction from our children. The FLDOE is FAILING our children by inundating them with tests and robbing them of real instruction. Testing will not make them smarter. It really won’t. Our most impoverished kids will die on the vine.
In September, I asked Vince Verges, Assistant Deputy Commissioner and FSA Project Manager, why the FSA was so lengthy and what determined the number of test items on the FSA. His response was “Shorter tests use less time, but provide less information about student ability, address fewer standards, and generally have lower reliabilities.” When Dr. Owen Roberts, Superintendent of Alachua County Schools asked Commissioner Stewart, during the last Keep Florida Learning Committee meeting, if there exists a study showing if it is even possible to teach, and for students to learn, all of Florida’s recommended educational standards in a single school year, the Commissioner replied that no such study exists. Dr. Roberts said he felt he was wasting his time on the committee and resigned.
Is it possible that the FLDOE is asking the impossible? Are there more Standards than there is year?
I also asked Mr. Verges, “Why are the FSA exams given in March and April disturbing and halting valuable instruction time? How can they possibly reflect mastery of standards that encompass an entire year’s instruction?
And how can teachers be given adequate time to instruct a year’s worth of standards and be fairly evaluated?”
To date, I have received no answer.
The FSA does not inform instruction. What it DOES is demand that teachers teach to the test. Don’t you wonder why there is such a severe teacher shortage? Why WOULD they want to teach in Florida?
Tests used for the sheer purpose of evaluating teachers and determining school grades WILL NOT EVER SUCCEED!
I am requesting that you not only do away with the FSA scores, but that you do away with the FSA.
Parents in Florida will continue to opt their children out of the FSA. Our Opt Out movement is growing. It is the only thing left for us to do to protect our children from you, the Legislature and the DOE.
Respectfully,
Heide Janshon
Parent Advocate, Pasco County”
RH2 and Rage,
In MD we begin High School NGSS Science testing next year and students will take the giant Test after three science courses have been completed. We are a PARCC state as well so we will be dedicated to two solid months of state required tests by the spring of 2018. But the nightmare only begins there. The tests are supposed to be 1/3 Earth Sci, 1/3 Bio, and 1/3 Physics and Chem. Most counties pulled most Earth Sci out of their schools a few years ago inexplicably so now they’d don’t know what to do. The truly ignorant solution is to “sprinkle” a bit of Earth Sci into Bio, Chem, and Physics and hope students pick it up. But it may all be a moot point if they Common Core up the tests to include no content and just make it reading and writing about science and or interpreting graphs, etc. . .
See what I mean? This is how to create scientifically illiterate people. A complete disaster created by Reform!
Is MD really planning on combining chemistry and physics into one high school course? And where do they plan on integrating engineering? This is a major fustercluck in the making. I hope someone plans on warning college science professors that a generation of know-nothings is heading their way.
And the destruction of American education continues…
This is rather simple math:
How many hours are in a day? It is 24
How many hours are at night? It is 12
Therefore if you cannot finish teaching during the day you must also teach at night, you get 36 hours in each of the 180 days. That is more than enough isn’t it?
“t takes 300 days to teach them, but there are only 180 days in a school year. ”
No vacation then for the kids, and the weekend will be restricted to Sundays: If kids went to school without vacation but 5 days a week, they’d have only 52×5=260 schooldays which apparently is 40 days short of the required number of days to learn all the important stuff in the standards.
But I think this is ok. Kids need to learn the concept of hard work as early as possible so that it would never occur to them to question its value and utility.
Three hundred days, eh? Let’s see. That equals 60 weeks of school. Methinks we need a new calendar! Add it to the silly pile.
Defeat by distraction. That’s the Common Core game plan.
Every new school year renews the resistance to the Common Core reform. And parents new to this experience find themselves slathered in information and fear. Once upon a time we were the tenderfoot class … now we should act as sweet sages.
Every day brings another avalanche of studies, statistics, findings, and stuff. More babble. More white noise. More jargon. More junk-speak. All on purpose.
The strategy is simple. Complicate the reform issue with fleshy gibberish and endless jabberwocky. Scare ordinary folks. Make the issues seem too, too deep and too, too heavy for folks busy enough with all that parenthood demands.
The greatest fear of the reform mob is parents.
Parents own infinite passion when it comes to their children. And if lots and lots of parents glue themselves together, well, this reform morphs into mighty. That’s not the sort of muscle educrats, politicians, and local board members want to confront. Remember that … they fear you.
And parents new to this resistance should remember this.
Don’t be seduced by every morsel of information that gets dressed in glitter-words. Don’t be intimidated by edu-blather or fat-words.
Stay simple and stay on the issues that matter: Resist federal control. Protect childhood. Refuse the testing trap. Reclaim your schools.
Remember: No children, no reform. Your cooperation is your trump-card. If you don’t play, the game ends.
A caveat to the old-timers in this resistance.
Embrace newcomers as you were once embraced. Soothe new and nervous parents with warm reassurances that they have saddled-up with a child-centric confederacy of warriors who protect children … theirs included. And then tutor them slowly … and warn them of nonsense-overload.
The reformists are deceivers. Their strategy is to dazzle us with nonsense-junk. To unbalance us and to blur the simple truths.
They want our schools. They want our children. They want to politicize and profitize education … and have you foot the bill … and have your children pay the price. No way.
Avoid the information over-load … and listen to your heart. That drum in your chest always speaks the truth. Follow that beat.
Denis Ian
The problem with suggesting that Common Core standards require 300 days of instruction is that this implies a rich and varied language arts experience. The reality of Common Core ELA instruction in NYS is that it is no more complex than the four years of Pearson testing have revealed. The standards tested (in NY) can be taught in 300 minutes. Only one theme predominates testing in ELA: Finding text-based evidence to support claims. End of story. Repeat ad infinitum. Teaching to bad tests is a really bad idea.
“Teaching to bad tests is a really bad idea.”
Lemme correct your typo for you:
Teaching to tests is a really bad idea.
Thank you.
At the height of NCLB, it was estimated that in order to “cover” all the standards, schooling would have to go from K-12 to K-25 or 26! Yet people are still talking about “extending” the school year so that children don’t “lose” what they’ve gained over the summer! And of course, pushing standards into pre-school to get children “ready” for Kindergarten, where all the “authentic learning” they’ve done up to that point (through play and interaction with the real world) comes to a screeching halt!
This is just going to lead to the DOE’s insistence for year round schooling with less time off. Kids are never going to have time to be kids and both kids and teachers are going to be more stressed.
There will never be year round schooling in New York. Too many businesses like camps, amusement parks, hotels and stores along the lakesides or shore–not to mention the New York State tourism industry in general–depend upon summer family vacations.
Not to mention lack of air conditioning and a general unwillingness to pay teachers more for working year round.
In almost 30 years of teaching in Brooklyn, I have not ONCE had an air conditioned room! Last year the outside temperature on the first day of school was 96°!!! Can you imagine what the INSIDE temperature must have been?! If that’s not abusive, I don’t know what is!!!