Stephen Lazar, a National Board Certified Teacher in New York City, was an early and enthusiastic supporter of the Common Core. He is worried now about the speed other which the standards are being pushed into the schools.
Archives for category: Common Core
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.
Marc Tucker has written two posts on his blog saying that I am wrong not to support the Common Core standards.
Stephen Krashen, the eminent literacy scholar, disagrees with Tucker. He posted this response on Tucker’s blog and shared it with me.
Krashen writes:
We need to distinguish discussion (1) of the content of the standards and (2) whether we should have standards.
The content of the standards
Contrary to Tucker’s assertion, it is easy to field-test the standards. If standards are simply “what we want students to know and be able to do,” we could see if any students meet the standards. This is called “known-group” validity: Can those who experts regard as well-educated students pass the tests? Let teachers (or anybody else) select students at various levels considered to have the skills and knowledge considered to be satisfactory for students at that level. See if they can pass the tests.
The real issue
But the content of the standards is not the real issue. The real issue is whether we should have standards and tests based on standards. In his post of March 14, Tucker insisted that “We will not improve the performance of poor and minority students by suppressing standards.” I think we will.
The common core standards and the tests that are their spawn will cost billions. The big money is being spent on getting all students connected to the internet so they can take the tests. And there are a lot of tests and there will be a lot more, far more than we need (Krashen, 2012). And once the tests are set up, there will be constant upgrading, new equipment (remember Ethernet?), and of course revision of the tests when it turns out that the CC$$ are not improving achievement. This is one of the greatest boondoggles of all time (Krashen and Ohanian, 2011).
There is a great deal of evidence that the real problem in education in the US is our high level of poverty: When we control for poverty, our international test scores are near the top in the world (Carnoy and Rothstein, 2013). Poverty means food deprivation, poor health care, and lack of access to books (Berliner, 2009; Krashen, 1997), and improving diet, health care and providing access to books (libraries) improves school performance (for recent research on the impact of school libraries, see Krashen, Lee and McQuillan, 2012). The billions we are investing in testing should be used to help solve the problem, not just measure it. A most investment in food programs, school nurses, and school libraries will have a huge impact, not just on test scores but on children’s well-being as well.
Tucker’s position is that tough standards, tough-minded accountability, will finally get
educators moving, and force them to teach effectively. This is an insult to the teaching profession, and is not supported by the evidence: As noted above, when we control for poverty, our students do very well. Middle class students in well-funded schools score at or near the top of the world. This strongly suggests that the problem is not teacher quality (or schools of education, or unions). Of course we are always interested in improving teaching, but there is no crisis. The problem is poverty.
Some sources:
There are a lot of tests: Krashen, S. 2012. How much testing? https://dianeravitch.net/2012/07/25/stephen-‐ krashen-‐how-‐much-‐testing/ and: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/
Boondoggle: Krashen, S. and Ohanian, S. 2011. High Tech Testing on the Way: a 21st Century Boondoggle? http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in- dialogue/2011/04/high_tech_testing_on_the_way_a.html
Control for poverty: Carnoy, M and Rothstein, R. 2013, What Do International Tests Really Show Us about U.S. Student Performance. Washington DC: Economic Policy Institute. 2012. http://www.epi.org/).
Food deprivation, poor health care, lack of access to books, Berliner, D. 2009. Poverty and Potential: Out-of-School Factors and School Success. Boulder and Tempe: Education and the Public Interest Center & Education Policy Research Unit. http://epicpolicy.org/publication/poverty-and-potential; Krashen, S. 1997. Bridging inequity with books. Educational Leadership 55(4): 18-22.
Impact of school libraries: Krashen, S., Lee, SY, and McQuillan, J. 2012. Is The Library Important? Multivariate Studies at the National and International Level Journal of Language and Literacy Education: 8(1). http://jolle.coe.uga.edu/
A teacher in Virginia said this about her state’s standards:
“I teach in Virginia where we do not use Common core. Our standards are actually harder than common core.
“Here is the problem with both: these standards are not developmentally appropriate for children. I am teaching my LD (special ed.) students things like: order of operations (PEMDAS) and prime and composite numbers. I have found very few adults who know what composite numbers are, including West Point and Harvard grads. Do you know what a stem and leaf plot is? Do you know what a compression wave is? Do you know the difference between an expression and an equation? Do you know what an open sentence is (in math)? Can you name different rhyme schemes in poetry? Can you do MLA citations and computer powerpoints? These are 5th grade skills. I am teaching middle and high school skills to 10 year olds. Then when they have difficulties, it is my fault. Really?”
Kenneth Bernstein is an award-winning NBCT who recently retired as a teacher of government. He is now caring for his wife, who is recovering from a major illness. He usually blogs at the Daily Kos but has taken the time to share his insights here as a comment. Thank you, Ken.
He writes:
We have had a decade of the “reforms” of No Child Left Behind. The approach embodied therein actually is traceable back 30 years, to the release of A Nation at Risk, continued through Goals 2000 which claimed that it would result in America being first in the world in math and science by that date, has seen policy doubling down through Race to the Top and the proposals in the Obama administration’s “Blueprint,” and now we continue the insanity through Common Core and the common assessments. In each of these cases what was excluded in the making of education policy were the voices of those expected to implement the policy choices, professional educators – teachers and principals.
Instead we have had think tanks, we have had politicians, we have had organizations that stand to profit from the decisions – and that includes ostensibly non-profit organizations such as the College Board and ETS among others.
The results to date have not been as promised.
We have failed to address many of the real issues affecting our students, starting with the high percentage (compared to other industrialized democracies) of children in poverty, children who do not get proper nutrition or health care, whose teeth may be rotting, who need glasses but do not have them.
We have had imposed policies that have already been tried and found wanting – turning schools over to “educational management” organizations, converting them to charters, turning to mayoral control – or not yet piloted and evaluated – here the Common Core is one of the best examples. The “data” that has been produced is often either incomplete or in fact downright manipulated – such as graduation rates in Texas, from which we got No Child Left Behind. We ignore contradictions in policies – we have too many students dropping out so to fix that we are going to raise the bar and impose “standards” that are not based on what we know about brain development and differential development rates.
Unfortunately too often the media organizations which should serve to explain things jumps on board the bandwagon. Perhaps it should be expected when the corporation which owns one of the major national newspapers, The Washington Post, gets most of its profits from a for-profit educational venture, Kaplan, which benefits from policies such as increased emphasis on tests.
Fortunately modern means of communicating and organizing are allowing pushback – by parents, students, teachers, administrators, even school boards.
Slowly Americans are beginning to realize that the emperor of educational “reform” is naked – that is, what is being forced upon America’s public schools is less concerned about real learning by students and more concerned about political and economic power.
Perhaps it is time for major media organizations to be far more transparent in their presentations on education, to give equal voice to the voices that have not been heard.
I once had a conversation with a sitting governor, close to a decade ago. The governors had just had a conference on education. Each governor had brought a business leader, which he acknowledged. I asked why each governor had not brought a teacher, or some other educator. He was shocked and acknowledged he at least had never considered the possibility. That is symptomatic of what is wrong in how we make educational policy.
It is also why so many educators – principals as well as teachers – are so demoralized. They are excluded from the making of policy, they are demonized when they object and try to raise the issues that should be discussed. Meanwhile they continue to see the conditions necessary for serving their students disappear, what protections they had to enable them to do their jobs correctly are being taken away from them.
I once told Jay Mathews that I might not object to having my students assessed by quality tests at the end of a course, but I refused to be held accountable if you told me how I had to teach them, because then I had no ability to shape my instruction according to what I knew of my students, and how they were learning.
Increasingly we are trying to tell our teachers not only what to teach but also how to teach it. Sometimes we are even imposing scripted lessons.
Should not the real evaluation be of the results of what has been imposed by those who are not educators, who are not attempting to address the individual needs of the students in their classes, in their schools? And were we to evaluate that way, would w not find almost all of the “reforms” to be failures?
Except the ‘reforms’ have not failed in their other purposes
– increasing profits for testing and curriculum companies (often the same)
– breaking the power of teachers unions
– diminishing the professionalism of teachers, principals and superintendents
– effectively privatizing one of the most important public functions
– removing democratic control of public education and politicizing it in places where it becomes easier to impose the corporatizing agenda.
You know all this.
You have written and spoken out about this.
We need more voices speaking out, loudly.
Thanks for being an important voice.
Carol Burris, the principal of South Side High School in Rockville Center, New York, was an early proponent of the Common Core standards. She wrote a book about how to implement them to benefit students.
But as the standards are turning into reality, what she imagined is going sour. She recently wrote two articles (here and here) about why she has decided she cannot support the Common Core.
To her dismay, the Common Core has turned out to be a way to standardize curriculum and testing across the nation and to generate uniform data.
This is not what she hoped for.
She writes:
“I confess that I was naïve. I should have known in an age in which standardized tests direct teaching and learning, that the standards themselves would quickly become operationalized by tests. Testing, coupled with the evaluation of teachers by scores, is driving its implementation. The promise of the Common Core is dying and teaching and learning are being distorted. The well that should sustain the Core has been poisoned.”
In her second article, she expresses concern about the developmentally inappropriate nature of the standards in the early grades. She explains them in this way:
“The disconnect between the standards and childhood development is not difficult to explain. The standards were developed through backwards mapping, that is, standards for college readiness were established and then skills were walked backward through the grades. However, children move forward not backward through development, and as any pediatrician will tell you, they do so at individual, unique paces.”
A recent post reported that Rupert Murdoch’s Amplify business won a contract to develop the formative assessments for one of the two federally-funded consortia preparing tests for the Common Core standards. Joel Klein is head of Amplify. As in any conversation among knowledgeable adults, we often don’t explain every word to outsiders. Do you object to the Common Core? to the online assessments? to the contract going to Murdoch and Klein? to the profit-making at a time of budget cuts? This student has a question about that post. Please explain your concerns to him or her:
“So, question. I’m a student and don’t understand exactly what this is about? What I see it as being, given the comments, is that its like a boring sort of Leapfrog. Or mass produced education. Is this correct? Someone correct me if its not.”
Amplify, the company owned by Rupert Murdoch, won a $12.5 million contract to develop formative assessments for Common Core tests. The award was made by the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, one of two groups funded by the Obama administration to create national tests, administered online. Joel Klein runs Murdoch’s Amplify division.
When Murdoch purchased Wireless Generation in the fall of 2010, he said:
“When it comes to K through 12 education, we see a $500 billion sector in the U.S. alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed by big breakthroughs that extend the reach of great teaching,” said News Corporation Chairman and CEO, Rupert Murdoch. “Wireless Generation is at the forefront of individualized, technology-based learning that is poised to revolutionize public education for a new generation of students.”
Paul Thomas rejects Marc Tucker’s critique of my view on the Common Core.
I agree with Paul.
So there.
Marc Tucker says I am wrong for saying I cannot support the Common Core.
Unlike me, he says they need no field testing, no trial.
He doesn’t worry–as I do–that they are developmentally inappropriate for the early grades.
He doesn’t worry–as I do–that the rigor-rigor-rigor that is so widely hailed might widen the achievement gap and discourage struggling students.
He doesn’t worry that reactionary groups and entrepreneurs are excited about the prospect that Common Core will cause test scores to plummet. In every state.
How can he be so sure that the Common Core will do no harm?
I don’t know.
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