Archives for category: Common Core
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Parent on the Common Core: Here It Is, Ready or Not

By dianeravitch
April 18, 2013 //
21

This article in The Economist recounts the anxiety and confusion surrounding the adoption of the Common Core. Officials say it is a great thing, but parents are not so sure.

He writes:

“Why has New York decided to subject students to these exams well before the standards have been fully implemented in the classrooms? (Most states are holding off until 2015.) My daughter is a strong math student, and loves taking tests, but when she was given a practice test over the winter holiday that contained high-level work with fractions, division with three-digit numbers and even a dab of algebra, her eyes grew wide. Nothing like this had ever appeared in a lesson in her third-grade classroom. Her teacher has been scrambling to teach these concepts over the past few weeks to get the 8-year-olds ready, but it’s bound to be too little, too late. The teachers are not at fault: much of the content on the practice exams was a surprise to them as well. With school ratings and teacher evaluations hinging on the results, everyone has an investment in this perverse and premature exercise.”

Categories Common Core, New York, Testing

Duncan Urges US Chamber of Commerce to Defend Common Core

By dianeravitch
April 17, 2013 //
52

Arne Duncan is concerned about the backlash against the federal government’s heavy-handed imposition of the Common Core.

At a speech to business leaders in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, he urged their support for Common Core.

He probably forgot that the U.S. Department of Education is legally prohibited from being involved in any matters that prescribe curriculum or instruction to the nation’s public schools.

Categories Common Core, Duncan, Arne

Comparing Thoreau and Coleman

By dianeravitch
April 17, 2013 //
20

This blogger is not happy with the Common Core.

He says it discourages creativity. He thinks it is about preparing workers and consumers, not thinkers.

And there is this too:

“The Common Core is one reason my sixth-grade daughter has yet to read a novel in ELA. It’s also a reason she no longer has time to get to the school library. The Common Core’s emphasis on nonfiction would be fine if it emphasized good nonfiction. My favorite authors are nonfiction geniuses. Annie Dillard, Jon Krakauer, James Herndon, Jonathan Kozol, Robert Pirsig, David Sedaris, Natalie Goldberg, Anne Lamott, and, lest we forget, Thoreau. They write nonfiction at its best, but that’s not what my girls are being fed.

“The nonfiction of the Common Core consists of shorter pieces, often articles, much like what workers will be expected to read on the job. So, there’s no room for To Kill a Mockingbird, The Catcher in the Rye, Speak, or Of Mice and Men. What good is all that novel crap anyway?

“Creativity is a valuable commodity, but the Common Core does not promote creativity. My daughters are about to embark on eight days of testing. Eight days of pissing away ninety minutes at a time on tests that will teach them mostly to dislike school. I don’t want data from these tests. I don’t need it. I know my kids and so do their teachers.”

Categories Common Core

Problems with Common Core Tests

By dianeravitch
April 16, 2013 //
17

Technical issues plague the tests.

Not ready for prime time.

Categories Common Core, Testing

How to Prepare Children for Common Core Failure

By dianeravitch
April 16, 2013 //
4

This is a parody but it is uncomfortably close to reality.

The humorist known as Students Last has compiled a reading list to prepare children for failure on the tests.

Just listen to all the bigwigs warning about high failure rates, ripping off the Band-aid and sink-or-swim in the deep end of the pool. That’s enough to create a sense of dread and high anxiety.

The only thing missing from the reading list is a manual for nervous parents and an advice book on how to organize a mass resistance movement.

Categories Common Core, Humor

Pallas: What the Power Quartet of New York Left Out

By dianeravitch
April 16, 2013 //
3

Aaron Pallas, a sociologist at Teachers College, is a sharp observer of educational issues.

In this article, he comments on a joint statement by the leaders of education in New York City and State, hailing the Common Core and the new Common Core tests. Their article appeared in the New York Daily News, where they proclaimed the advent of the new standards and the joy they are bringing back to learning. And now the new Common a core tests will let everyone know whether our none-year-olds are college-and-career-ready.

For most parents of young children, this is doubtless a burning issue, especially since no one can be sure what careers will exist 10 years from now.

What did they forget to say: the introduction of new tests means there is no trend line, no way of basing teacher evaluations on scores. Pallas writes, in part, supplying his own version of the text that wasn’t there:

“Because this year’s assessments are a completely different baseline than previous state assessments, it would be inappropriate to treat the difference between last year’s scores and this year’s scores as evidence of student growth in achievement. Therefore, we are suspending the use of student growth percentiles and value-added models to estimate teachers’ contributions to their students’ learning as a required element of the Annual Professional Performance Review of teachers and principals across New York state for at least one year.”

Categories Accountability, Common Core, New York, New York City, Testing

NYC Official: “It’s Time to Rip Off the Band-Aid!”

By dianeravitch
April 15, 2013 //
21

Dennis Walcott and other city and state officials in New York announced that they expect test scores to fall by 30% this year because of the switch to the Common Core.

They keep saying, almost too gleefully, how hard the test is. (Reader, remember that the test is “hard” only because state officials decided to raise the passing mark.)

Walcott said, “It’s time to rip the Band-Aid off, and we have a responsibility to rip that Band-aid off.”

Readers, I have been trying to figure out what that statement means.

Clearly, the chancellor thought it was profound so he said it twice.

What is the Band-aid?

What wound is it protecting?

Why is it good to rip it off?

Doesn’t it inflict pain when you do that?

Why would the chancellor want to inflict pain on so many children?

I welcome your deconstruction of this deep exclamation.

Categories Common Core, New York, New York City, Students, Testing

Children in NYC Suffer Bouts of Test Anxiety, Officials Shrug

By dianeravitch
April 14, 2013 //
24

As this article in the New York Times explains, elementary schoolchildren are frightened by the tests that start this week, based on the Common Core.

The article points out that neither the students nor the teachers are prepared. Some of the material was never taught. “But the standards are so new that many New York schools have yet to fully adopt new curriculums — including reading material, lesson plans and exercises — to match. And the textbook industry has not completely caught up either. State and city officials have urged teachers over the last year to begin working in some elements of new curriculums, and have offered lesson plans and tutorials on official Web sites. But they acknowledge that scores will most likely fall from last year’s levels.”

Merryl Tisch, who head the state Board of Regents, toured a school and heard about how upset the students.

“Believe me, I relate to test anxiety,” she said during a visit last week to the Academy of Arts and Letters in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, one of several schools that city and state education officials visited to express support for the new tests. “We can’t wait,” she said. “We have to just jump into the deep end.”

“We” have to jump into the deep end? No, your child must.

Think about it. As a parent, would you throw your child into the deep end, even if he or she can’t swim?

Opt out.

Categories Common Core, NYC, Testing

Why Are the Néw Tests Harder?

By dianeravitch
April 14, 2013 //
67

School officials across the nation keep warning that the new tests are “harder,” and passing rates will drop by 30% or more.

Why?

The passing mark–or cut score–on tests is not determined by science. It is a judgment call.

Those who are in charge decide where to place the passing mark.

If the scores go down on a test that is new, it is because the officials set the passing mark with foreknowledge that scores and passing rates would fall.

In addition, the state education department piloted the questions, and they know with a high level of precision which are hard and which are easy.

If the scores fall, they were designed to fall.

This is what they want.

Why? I don’t know. Ask them.

Categories Common Core, Testing

Robert Shepherd: Why I Oppose the Common Core Standards, 1

By dianeravitch
April 14, 2013 //
4

Robert Shepherd is an experienced author, curriculum designer, textbook publisher, and assessment developer.

He writes:

Here’s why I oppose across-the-board standards that are, de facto, mandatory:

Standards tell us what we are supposed to teach at what grades and roughly in what order, and the require that the same material be taught to everyone. What’s wrong with that?

Well, for one thing, the single set of standards hamstrings textbook writers, curriculum designers, and teachers. They are no longer free to create new, innovative, learning progressions. Someone else has already decided for them what should be taught and when There are much more sensible learning progressions in the various domains than are instantiated in these standards [sic], but one can no longer even broach those. One has to follow the authoritarian prescription from on high. This mandate stifles innovation in curricular and pedagogical design. I am already seeing, all around the country, educational publishers turning out programs that slavishly follow the new standards as though they were a curriculum. Big, big mistake.

For another, there are no standardized kids. What is taught and when should be tailored to kids and their needs.

For another, the Common Core State Standards in ELA are themselves very poorly designed. They are extraordinarily regressive. They do not reflect what we now know about what works and what doesn’t in these various domains. Often, they seem to have been slotted very much at random. They combine apples and oranges and shoelaces into single standards. Some are extraordinarily broad. Some are extraordinarily specific. But we are stuck with them. We have no choice. That choice has been taken from us. This is what the standard says. This is what you have to teach, whether it makes sense or not.

Categories Common Core, Education Reform
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