Whatever the strengths of the Common Core standards for the upper grades, they have received very negative reviews from educators experienced with very young children.
This teacher explains why the Common Core standards are startlingly indifferent to basic principles of child development.
In a stunning surprise, the federal Commission on Equity and Excellence dismissed the reforms of the Bush-Obama era and called for a fresh approach. What is remarkable about the commission report is that the members were appointed by Secretary Duncan. Its members include a solid bloc of corporate reformers, but clearly they did not prevail.
Quite frankly, I was expecting a reprise of the corporate reformer mantra: more charter schools, more vouchers, more competition, more inexperienced teachers, more testing, and more online learning will end the deeply rooted poverty in our society and lift all boats. Test more often, fire more teachers, lower standards for entry into teaching, close more schools.
But this commission did not echo the popular and failed nostrums of the past generation.. It demanded more resources for the neediest students, better prepared teachers, early childhood education, health and social services, and a deliberate effort to reduce segregation.
Since 1983, when “A Nation at Risk” was published by another federal commission, the policymakers at the state and national levels have followed the formula of testing, accountability (read: punishment), and choice. With what results? After three decades, we now have a raging, destructive movement to privatize public education, bash teachers, remove their academic freedom, replace them with temps, and use standardized tests to judge and punish teachers, principals, and schools.
The heroes of this “movement” are entrepreneurs, foundation executives, and think tank thinkers, who express contempt for public schools and those who work in them. We are on our way to creating (re-creating) dual school systems in cities across the nation and giving public dollars to schools that are free to exclude the neediest students. A “movement” that talks incessantly about results and data-based decision-making has become impervious to the meager results of its own policies and has now turned into an ideological war against public education.
Secretary Duncan should read the report of his commission. For the first time in 30 years, a federal commission tells the nation what it needs to hear. We can expect the corporate reform leaders to ignore the report.
This, quite frankly, is the agenda President Obama’s supporters had expected in 2008. Will he listen?
Kathleen Porter-Magee of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute explains here why the anti-testing movement is wrong. She describes what she calls four “myths.”
Myth #1: teachers should be allowed to teach what they want, or “let teachers teach.” This is a very bad idea, she says, because teachers will have low expectations if you don’t tell them what to do.
Myth #2: emphasizing testing causes “drill and kill” instruction. Nothing could be farther from the truth, she says, because the really successful students are those who get engaging instruction. Don’t pay attention to the hundreds of millions of dollars that districts and states are spending on test prep materials.
Myth #3: tests can’t measure what really matter. What they do matter is very important so don’t worry that they don’t measure everything. Of course, very few people say that tests should not be used, but that they should not be used for rewards and punishments. When used diagnostically, they can be helpful. When used for high-stakes, they corrupt instruction.
Myth #4: standardization doesn’t work. Porter-Magee likes standardization.
It would be easy to knock down each of these “myths” and her facile answers.
The real danger of high-stakes testing is that they ruin education. Children cannot be standardized. Each one is unique. Yes, standards are helpful as guidelines but not as rigid prescriptions. The greatest dangers of high-stakes testing are that they narrow the curriculum only to what is tested. They encourage states and districts to game the system. They promote cheating (e.g., D.C.). They are based on the pretense that standardized tests are scientific instruments. They are not. They are prone to statistical error, random error, human error, measurement error. No one’s life should hinge on these fallible instruments.
Porter-Magee should google Campbell’s Law and study it. Also, read Daniel Koretz’ book “Measuring Up.”
Robert Skeels is a pro-public school candidate in Los Angeles. He has raised $15,000. He will not get anything from Eli Broad or Michael Bloomberg.
He comments:
The LA Times asked me for a quote on Bloomberg’s $1 Million CSR donation. Here’s my response: “As a community candidate who has raised over $15,000 through myriad small contributions from local parents, community members, and classroom teachers, I find it dismaying that a single out-of-state billionaire has a greater voice in our school board election than all the working families of District 2. Where were these millions of dollars when the incumbent callously cut early childhood education, adult education, and K-12 arts last year?”
In this article, which appeared on Huffington Post, Alan Singer of Hofstra University in New York, nails the empty promises and misleading claims in President Obama’s State of the Union address. He calls it “Obama’s Mis-Education Agenda.”
Alan Singer writes:
I am a lifetime teacher, first in public schools and then in a university-based teacher education program. I think I do an honest job and that students benefit from being in my classes. I was hoping to hear something positive about the future of public education in President Obama’s State of the Union speech, I confess I was so disturbed by what Obama was saying about education that I had to turn him off. In the morning I read the text of his speech online, hoping I was wrong about what I thought I had hear. But I wasn’t. There was nothing there but shallow celebration of wrong-headed policies and empty promises.
For me, the test question on any education proposal always is, “Is this the kind of education I want for my children and grandchildren?” Obama, whose children attend an elite and expensive private school in Washington DC, badly failed the test.
Basically Obama is looking to improve education in the United States on the cheap. He bragged that his signature education program, Race to the Top, was “a competition that convinced almost every state to develop smarter curricula and higher standards, for about 1 percent of what we spend on education each year.” I am not sure why Obama felt entitled to brag. Race to the Top has been in place for four years now and its major impact seems to be the constant testing of students, high profits for testing companies such as Pearson, and questionable reevaluations of teachers. It is unclear to me what positive changes Race to the Top has actually achieved.
In the State of the Union Address, Obama made three proposals, one for pre-school, one for high school, and one for college.
Obama on Pre-Schools: “Study after study shows that the sooner a child begins learning, the better he or she does down the road. But today, fewer than 3 in 10 four year-olds are enrolled in a high-quality preschool program . . . I propose working with states to make high-quality preschool available to every child in America . . . In states that make it a priority to educate our youngest children, like Georgia or Oklahoma, studies show students grow up more likely to read and do math at grade level, graduate high school, hold a job, and form more stable families of their own.”
I am a big supporter of universal pre-kindergarten and I like the promise, but Georgia and Oklahoma are not models for educational excellence. Both states have offered universal pre-k for more than a decade and in both states students continue to score poorly on national achievement tests. Part of the problem is that both Georgia and Oklahoma are anti-union low wage Right-to-Work states. In Oklahoma City, the average salary for a preschool teacher is $25,000 and assistant teachers make about $18,000, enough to keep the school personnel living in poverty. Average Preschool Teacher salaries for job postings in Oklahoma City, are 17% lower than average Preschool Teacher salaries for job postings nationwide. The situation is not much better in Georgia. In Savannah, Average Preschool Teacher salaries for job postings are 12% lower than average Preschool Teacher salaries for job postings nationwide.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-to-work_law
http://www.indeed.com/salary/q-Preschool-Teacher-l-Oklahoma-City,-OK.html
http://www.indeed.com/salary?q1=Preschool+Teacher&l1=savannah+georgia
Obama on Secondary Schools: “Let’s also make sure that a high school diploma puts our kids on a path to a good job. Right now, countries like Germany focus on graduating their high school students with the equivalent of a technical degree from one of our community colleges, so that they’re ready for a job. At schools like P-Tech in Brooklyn, a collaboration between New York Public Schools, the City University of New York, and IBM, students will graduate with a high school diploma and an associate degree in computers or engineering . . . I’m announcing a new challenge to redesign America’s high schools so they better equip graduates for the demands of a high-tech economy. We’ll reward schools that develop new partnerships with colleges and employers, and create classes that focus on science, technology, engineering, and math – the skills today’s employers are looking for to fill jobs right now and in the future.”
Unfortunately, P-Tech in Brooklyn, the Pathways in Technology Early College High School, is not yet, and may never be, a model for anything. It claims to be “the first school in the nation that connects high school, college, and the world of work through deep, meaningful partnerships, we are pioneering a new vision for college and career readiness and success.” Students will study for six years and receive both high school diplomas and college associate degrees. But the school is only in its second year of operation, has only 230 students, and no graduates or working alumni.
http://www.ptechnyc.org/site/default.aspx?PageID=1
According to a New York Times report which included an interviews with an IBM official, “The objective is to prepare students for entry-level technology jobs paying around $40,000 a year, like software specialists who answer questions from I.B.M.’s business customers or ‘deskside support’ workers who answer calls from PC users, with opportunities for advancement.”
The thing is, as anyone who has called computer support knows, those jobs are already being done at a much cheaper rate by outsourced technies in third world countries. It does not really seem like an avenue to the American middle class. The IBM official also made clear, “ that while no positions at I.B.M. could be guaranteed six years in the future, the company would give P-Tech students preference for openings.”
Obama on the cost of a College Education: “[S]kyrocketing costs price way too many young people out of a higher education, or saddle them with unsustainable debt . . . But taxpayers cannot continue to subsidize the soaring cost of higher education . . . My Administration will release a new “College Scorecard” that parents and students can use to compare schools based on a simple criteria: where you can get the most bang for your educational buck.”
As a parent and grandparent I agree with President Obama that the cost of college is too high for many families, but that is what a real education costs. If the United States is going to have the high-tech 21st century workforce the President wants, the only solution is massive federal support for education. There is a way to save some money however I did not hear any discussion of it in the President’s speech. Private for-profit businesses masquerading as colleges have been sucking in federal dollars and leaving poor and poorly qualified students with debts they can never repay. These programs should to be shut down, but in the State of the Union Address President Obama ignored the problem.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alan-singer/higher-education-for-the-_b_1642764.html
The New York documented the way the for-profit edu-companies, including the massive Pearson publishing concern, go unregulated by federal education officials. These companies operate online charter schools and colleges that offer substandard education to desperate families at public expense.
President Obama, celebrating mediocrity and shallow promises are not enough. You would never accept these “solutions” for Malia and Sasha. American students and families need a genuine federal investment in education.
In this superb article in the New York Times, David Kirp shows how the public schools of Union City, New Jersey,succeeded despite all the obstacles of poverty.
The article summarizes his fine book “Improbable Scholars.”
Union City created excellent schools without charters and without Teach for America. And without Cory Booker or Mark Zuckerberg.
Let’s celebrate the good work of the teachers and principals of Union City!
There is growing evidence that the Common Core standards are absurd in the early grades. They require a level of academic learning that is developmentally inappropriate.
Little children need time to play. Play is their work. In play, they learn to share and to count, to communicate, to use language appropriately, and to figure things out.
A story in a NYC newspaper shows just how ridiculous the Common Core standards are when imposed on 5-year-olds: Here is a story, well worth reading, about how Common Core is being implemented in kindergartens across New York City. The headline is. “Playtime’s Over.”
Says the story:
“Way beyond the ABCs, crayons and building blocks, the city Department of Education now wants 4- and 5-year-olds to write “informative/explanatory reports” and demonstrate “algebraic thinking.”
“Children who barely know how to write the alphabet or add 2 and 2 are expected to write topic sentences and use diagrams to illustrate math equations.
“For the most part, it’s way over their heads,” a Brooklyn teacher said. “It’s too much for them. They’re babies!”
“In a kindergarten class in Red Hook, Brooklyn, three children broke down and sobbed on separate days last week, another teacher told The Post.”
How did this happen?
This article by Edward Miller and Nancy Carlsson-Paige explains that early childhood educators were not included on the committees that wrote the standards, and their feedback was never incorporated.
It is as if a large group of business leaders were asked to write standards for surgeons, or if surgeons were asked to devise standards for plumbers.
When you learn what these standards expect little children to do, you have to wonder if any of the people who wrote them have small children or if they ever taught small children.
I am reminded of a book that came out last year by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl called Childism, about prejudice against children. These days, we don’t put them to work in factories at 5 or 6, and we don’t beat them in public, we just make them do things that they cannot do and make them feel like failures before they turn 7.
There was a time in my life when I would have been opposed on principle to the sentiments expressed in this article. The author talks about how schooling has become a way of destroying childhood. I used to scoff at articles like this.
But no more. I see my grandson come home with the results of his spelling test. He has math homework. He is only in first grade. He goes to a wonderful public school in Brooklyn. He seems too young for the pressure. What’s the rush? He’s now doing what children in second or third grade used to do. Is this necessary? I wonder if the pressure will get stronger every year. I wonder. I wonder if schooling has changed or I have changed. Or maybe both.
We are all aware of the destructive policies that are being pushed into the schools, despite any evidence for their value and considerable evidence that they do harm.
The good news is that parents and educators are pushing back, in city after city and state after state. The resistance to overtesting, to attacks on educators, and to privatization is growing, as Mark Naison reports here
Next year, it will blossom and grow.
If you are part of a grassroots group supporting your public schools, please send me the name of your group and website.
We will continue the pushback.
From a reader who is passionate about child’s play:
Let’s talk to Arne about Play Science? We have schools in Asia setting up Play Science Institutes. They know that they need to innovate. The teacher is the one who can identify and scaffold upon the innate talents of the child. No computer program can see, feel, connect and mentor that deeply. Data is not knowledge. Metaphoric thinking is developed through three dimensional play, something one cannot develop from a two dimensional screen. It has everything to do with hand-brain co-evolution and the neuroscience of tinkering, object play, or other three dimensional forms of play. Real world problem solving necessitates nuanced metaphorical thinking, not rigid, scripted programming.
This published today in Richmond Times Dispatch
And I think everyone here will like this one, as scripted schooling kills innovation.
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2012/0124/Toddlers-to-tweens-relearning-how-to-play
