Last November, Arne Duncan complained that the “white, suburban moms” were resisting the implementation of the Common Core. From the Washington Post,
U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan told a group of state schools superintendents Friday that he found it “fascinating” that some of the opposition to the Common Core State Standards has come from “white suburban moms who — all of a sudden — their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were, and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought they were.”
Last night, I went to a debate about the Common Core held at the local library run by the League of Women Voters. My town is Ground Zero for “white, suburban moms,” so I went to the debate to get a better understanding about why there has been so much push back from this group.
When I arrived, the parking lot at the library was already full. I had to park at the supermarket across the street. The auditorium completed packed with “white, suburban moms,” local officials, and grey haired Women Voter members. The mayor and the fire chief had to tell some people to leave. They opened outside doors, so people could stand in the garden area to hear the talk. I lucked into a seat in the second row. Someone shouted from the back of the room that this meeting should have been held in a larger auditorium. The League of Women voters speaker shrugged from the podium. “We didn’t know that so many people would be here.”
On the stage were six speakers. On the pro side was the head of the state’s school board association, the state’s school administrators association, and a head of the state board of education. On the con side was a school principal from NYC, an education policy expert, and a professor from an education school.
The pro people said that standards were needed. These tests weren’t that much different from other standardized tests that the kids were already taking. They offered the ability to show that NJ was definitely doing better than other states with weaker standardized tests, like Georgia.
The con people were all over the board. The principal thought the tests were too hard and that teachers and principals would be held responsible for unrealistic expectations. The education policy expert said that the tests were too easy and that the math PhDs should have been enlisted to write the questions. The ed school prof said that these tests weren’t preparing kids for critical thinking, and there probably shouldn’t be any standardized tests at all. (He had DATA to prove it.)
It was clear from the mood of the crowd — their claps and groans — it was not a Common Core happy group. From their questions, they had typical concerns about standardized tests, ie kids with special needs, privacy of results, the amount of time taking the tests, and teaching to the test. But we’ve had standardized tests in schools for years. The new Common Core tests aren’t going to be that different from the past. What’s different?
Teachers are more concerned about the Common Core tests than previous standardized tests, because these tests will cause a bigger shift in curriculum. It’s always a pain to change your curriculum. They’re also worried about accountability issues. However, I am not exactly sure how the Common Core is any different from previous standardized tests. We’ve been able to measure the difference between schools within a state for a long time. I’m not sure if there are sticks and carrots attached to the Common Core test results. Teachers have been vocally protesting the Common Core for the past year, and these protests have trickled down to the parents.
The State Education person said that one of the benefits of the Common Core is that we will know for sure that kids in New Jersey are performing much, much better than the kids from Georgia and how they compare to kids in Finland. From a social scientist perspective, that is useful and interesting data, but the parents in our school district don’t really care about those comparisons. They just want to get their kid into Harvard.
Kids in this town already score in the 90th percentile on state standardized tests. They ace the SATs. 90 percent or more go to four-year colleges. Together, the schools, parents, and the community make sure that kids get a good education. Nobody on the panel on either side of the debate could explain how the Common Core would help or hurt the kids in this town.
Who benefits from the Common Core?
1) State officials and political leaders in the winning states. The NJ governor will have bragging rights over the GA governor.
2) Maybe kids in mediocre school districts. The lowest performing school districts have problems too deep for any quick fixes like this. The highest performing districts don’t need this fix. Maybe kids in the middle will benefit from higher expectations.
3) The people who write and administer these tests.
4) Maybe mediocre students in good school districts. This group is always forgotten about.
5) Social scientists. Data is fun.
Tangentially, a number of people on the panel couldn’t agree on what skills that kids were going to need in the future. One or two said that kids didn’t need to memorize information anymore. They didn’t need to know the state capitals or the names of the presidents, because wikipedia exists. So, it was more important to teach kids how to critique information.
Apt. 11d 
I’m just going to say I moved from one state (CA) to another (MA) and I believe my CA school had not yet implemented the Common Core and the MA school has. The MA school is much better than the CA school. The curriculum is actually less intense, in my view, and they are not teaching cursive, which I think is a shame (I will try to teach my younger child this as my older one got it in her non cc school). But the math seems better, and there’s less drilling and more understanding. The English and writing is much much better. Now this could all be that the school is better and the teachers are better, so I am not sure. But so far, I’m not sure what everyone is so upset about! I looked at the standards and I think what I looked at is solid. I understand that teachers are upset and I feel they should have the professional development time and a number of years to implement this. I also understand someone’s pockets are getting lined. and it is definitely a bummer to not have enthusiastic teachers. But I’m also not sure why anyone thinks that they can teach the same thing for 20 years.
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Massachusetts schools are in general superior to most other states’ schools, except New York. 🙂
Are you Boston-area?
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yes I am. Just FYI, both schools have the same exact ranking on greatschools (ie the same number out of 10).
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I find it confusing when people conflate Common Core with PARCC. Are they the same thing? Is PARCC the only test available? I know teachers who love the Common Core as a set of standards, don’t mind PARCC (though its logistically challenging at the lower grades – kids, computers, long hours, etc.) but the overall trend of a gazillion tests drives them nuts.
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Reactions (particularly negative reactions) to education policy are kind of like Asperger’s in that they are all so individual. If you know one person with a problem with Common Core, you know one person with a problem with Common Core. They don’t really connect in any kind of ideology, the way, say, anti-abortion people do. I applaud Laura for trying to make sense of the opposition to it as I think that on a grass roots level, the reactions are so incoherent. I’m not saying each individual negative response is incoherent; I’m saying that the reax are all over the place and don’t seem to center on major shared values other than “Change! Waaah!” I’m also not saying that I love Common Core. I have lots of concerns. It’s the wild inconsistency of it all that drives me crazy. 🙂
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Are we just talking about the tests here, or the curriculum standardization? To me, the same issues exist with these tests as with all the tests (and they are many).
On the curriculum side, does the common core potentially benefit post-secondary institutions? Theoretically with the common core, all students should emerge having covered the same topics – and with the same holes. I would think that would be helpful.
My kids’ small parochial school just got a new principal, who has started the process of complying with common core. His thinking seems to be that, in a place like Chicago where so many kids flip between parochial and public and back again, it’s important to know that the kids are covering the same things. It minimizes the disruption. To me, it’s analgous to trends I see within the computer industry – introducing standardization to allow interoperability. Because that’s what you’re doing, essentially, is making sure that a kid can move from one school district to another.
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To me, the same issues exist with these tests as with all the tests (and they are many).
I don’t know enough about the topic to form an option about what should be tested, but I do have strong opinions about the number of tests. If it is going to take more than a few days of testing, screw it. Especially if there are other tests you still have to take for other requirements.
Full disclosure: I’m neither suburban nor a mom.
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Anecdatally, there is movement conservative and right-ish evangelical organizing around opposition to Common Core. It’s like Agenda 21, a buzzword that is supposed to elicit fear of, well, something. As Laura relates, opposition is inchoate and often without much knowledge of the actual program. It’s also likely to be impervious to facts and reasoned argument.
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That must explain the open letter criticizing Common Core signed by 130 Catholic scholars. Or not.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/11/02/catholic-scholars-blast-common-core-in-letter-to-u-s-bishops/
From the outside, it seems to me the Common Core may raise standards for the worst schools, but radically lower standards for the well-to-do suburbs. Moving algebra to high school will not win over suburban parents. Removing a large portion of literature from English class does not improve quality, rather the opposite in my opinion. Yes, students should practice writing, but the implementation of “fact-based debates” seems to have led to classroom exercises in which students write about their opinions on school rules (to judge from NPR). It’s just as self-involved as writing about one’s life. Close reading is fine in moderation, but students should be able to use their own base of knowledge when reading texts.
I regard Duncan’s statement as an opportunistic attempt to tar any opposition as ill-informed deluded women. He did retreat from that statement, IIRC, after the firestorm it provoked. Racial animus is never a good opening move.
Of course, at that time, very, very few white suburban mothers even knew the Common Core existed. I suppose the fun is just beginning.
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Common core does not require literature to be removed from English class–that would be an implementation problem. The standards are intended to require that high school students do more reading in non-English classes so that they are prepared for college reading, not that they do less in English class. And college students in the middle and bottom tier are arriving at college without the ability to read not only difficult nonfiction texts but also college level textbooks–the problem is real. Some colleges now have college-level reading classes to address it. We do, as do others in our state system. This should not be necessary. I love literature but the main use of reading in most people’s lives is not reading literature.
Secondly, there is nothing in common core that prevents students from taking algebra and geometry and even more in middle school. That is also an implementation problem. Our school is on common core, and my seventh graders are taking algebra right now, will take geometry in eight and algebra 2 in ninth. Some of the seventh graders in their school are already taking geometry. The really advanced ones are going to the high school to take the upper level math classes. You need to fight to improve how your district is implementing common core.
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I am completely in favor of Common Core as it was envisioned by ED Hirsch – a national curriculum that provides about 60% of curriculum in any given school. Interoperability is important. Plus, I am not in favor of leaving curriculum decisions strictly to teachers; even in our fantastic suburban Boston district, there were too many crappy teachers for me to be comfortable with the power they used to have in determining what (and if) my kids learned.
I am also in favor of standardized testing – as long as the tests don’t take up crazy amounts of time (three days a school year is the maximum I’m comfortable with) and they are good and fair tests.
I’m not in favor of Common Core as it’s implemented (although all my objections come from things I’ve heard from teachers and people whose kids are younger).
1) The testing is insane and cuts into instructional time
2) The testing is unfair – teachers are given masses of materials but not clear-cut learning objectives
3) The standards are not 60% of the curriculum – they are cutting into PE and arts and music in the interest of making kids do more earlier
4) They don’t allow for enormously diverse populations and so, in setting one goal for everyone, they make it impossible for some children and schools to pass, while wasting the time of children and schools who could do far more if they had the free instructional time.
5) They aren’t always developmentally appropriate – they have younger children sitting for excessive amounts of time to cover the curriculum.
Also the Common Core math is insane.
The whole thing is overly ambitious and doomed to fail and it’s going to suck, because the idea of a common curriculum is going to go with it.
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Removing a large portion of literature from English class isn’t in the Common Core. The reading of technical manuals and such is supposed to happen in places like Science class where you should read the manual for the Bunsen burner before you use it. However, because CC didn’t explicitly say “do it this way” idiot administrators saw the word reading and immediately assumed it had to do with English class. The biggest problem with CC is that it is not idiot administrator proof. But then, nothing is.
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Boy, having to read the technical manual for a bunsen burner before using one would be a pretty deep circle of hell. Not sure that reading one in science class would be better than reading one in English.
I do like the idea of a common core, for interoperability and having a shared cannon and some standardization. I think the idea of addressing the imperfectness of any core is to keep the core less than 50% of the learning day. And, I think testing is OK, if it’s limited to 3-5 days for the whole year.
I’m not sure I’m willing to throw out the concept because of weaknesses in implementation; implementation is always difficult. But, I haven’t been following the debate closely enough to give a formal opinion.
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I don’t know anything about the Common Core but I do know I am actually trying to set my son up to get into the International Baccalaureate programme, which sounds like the same idea…except that here it kind of becomes a self-selection into a more rigorous system, so you get the advantages of the peer group and the teachers who have chosen to teach it.
From my mighty 4 yr experience with Ontario/Toronto public education, I really think the core issue with education here is how teachers are educated, on-boarded, and keep their jobs. I am not sure test benchmarking students helps until you can use the data to get rid of teachers who don’t teach, and help teachers who don’t teach well but want to learn.
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I went to an IB school with a similar setup in Manitoba (a long time ago…) and I always encourage parents to pursue it if available. At my school there were 3 tracks, IB, French Immersion, and English. It was overall a good school, and on any track you got a solid education. The reasons you listed are the big points. It’s a lot of extra work for a school to setup an IB program, so it tends to attract good teachers. They could just stick to the provincial curriculum. Likewise the students tend to be a mix of academically inclined and pushed by their parents to work hard in school. Also, if your sons school is anything like the one I attended IB is probably a smallish program in a larger school and that tends to make for a tight knit class.
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Eldest was in the IB (also in Ontario) but it was a mixed blessing. The pre-IB experience was amazing. The grade 11 and 12? Not so much. She ended up opting for the certificate and had a great peer group but said that for some of her subjects, the non-IB teachers and courses were far, far, far superior. So make certain that your son checks out all of the options and can determine if the full IB at his school is the best for him or, if not, what are his other options.
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The nearest IB school to where we live is about 40 minutes away. And we live in Massachusetts. Crazy.
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I wish there was a way to get all that data without being creepy, invasive, violating privacy, and eating up the precious time of childhood, ’cause, yes, the data is lovely.
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People who object to the Common Core might do well to read it first. Its freely available. I’m shocked how many education professors I come across who object to the CC without having read the standards.
On literature: most kids arrive in college never having read a history book, or a book about science (not even a popular science book) or a serious journalistic work on contemporary society/politics/the world. English departments are the only departments that teach literature, as things stand, and they seem to think that only fiction counts as literature. The Common Core standards will change that.
I’m serious: at a good flagship state universities, my freshmen often refer to the first book they read in my class as a novel, and when I ask why they say they thought that “book” and “novel” mean the same thing.
The Math standards are great.
There won’t be more testing; the testing will replace existing testing. We could, its true, do with more instructional time. Maybe kids will leave school having watched Finding Nemo in class only 10, not 25, times.
Well, that’s all assuming it happens. If I were a Governor, I would be resisting it, because I wouldn’t want to be judged, at all, on something I have no control over (a 2-term Governor who really focuses on education in her first 3 years might possibly make real changes that will benefit her successor,; better for her to have her state evaluated in ways that can’t be meaningfully compared with other states).
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Ok, you’re engaging in throw away criticism, now, too. I’d challenge you to find one school system where a child would have watched Finding Nemo 10X in class on the way to graduation.
I think one of the changes we are going to see coming in education is, indeed, the use of video as part of what we need to teach. More information is going to be conveyed via documentaries, more film will be shown as part of what used to be “literature”, more animation will be shown for symbolic manipulation (i.e. series of math equations), more instruction will be shown as video (i.e. origami folding which has been revolutionized by video). That, semi-rant, in the defense of showing Finding Nemo, once or twice, as part of an educational curriculum (I think it’s a pretty good movie and on par with some children’s literature, though I am a thoroughly non-visual person and much prefer my stories in the form of words).
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“I’m serious: at a good flagship state universities, my freshmen often refer to the first book they read in my class as a novel, and when I ask why they say they thought that “book” and “novel” mean the same thing.”
OMG, that explains it! I’d noticed students doing that, too; in fact, last week we were reading essays about Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, and one of my students referred to Chua’s book as a novel. I chalked it up to misspeaking, but thinking about it, I suspect you are right.
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Yeah.
There’s also the temptation to use the most high-falutin’ term you know, even you don’t really know what it means.
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/education/2014/08/writing_clearly_in_student_papers_the_right_click_thesaurus_and_rogeting.html
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So, I just had a nice chat with the President of the School Board in town about the common core. She said that the superintendent and the school board have NO PROBLEMS with the Common Core. The teachers implimented the Common Core last year without any problems. The state has had standards and testing for a long time and this isn’t much different from previous standards or testing.
The problem comes from one element of this program. It’s the evaluation component. Teachers and the unions are very, very worried about that.
She also said that the religious right, the Eagle Forum, and the Tea Party types have big problems with it, because they are just opposed to all national legislation. She mentioned Bobby Jindal as leading that charge. I said that this is New Jersey. Certainly, that is not a big issue here. She said you would be surprised. She said that that represenatives from the Eagle Forum show up at every board of ed meeting to complain about the common core.
So, there are two big political problems — teachers unions who hate the evaluation component and tea party/small gov’t people who hate all national legislation.
Gotta write about this.
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I went to high school with Bobby; we couldn’t have known. That said, after his stint at McKinsey, he got plugged into local R circles plenty quick. The governor with the motorcycle — Foster? — put him in charge of the department where my stepmom worked, and it was in-over-his-head, government-by-press-release from the word go. That was definitely a preview.
Pretty much all the smarter people in my cohort got the fck out of Louisiana as soon as was practicable. I’m not really sorry about that on a personal level, but it did leave certain gaps.
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re: LA and political gaps…. http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/02/magazine/mag-oil-lawsuit.html?ref=magazine
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Reading it now … But wowsers, John M. Barry. He knows his stuff. If he’s got the resources, and lives long enough, this could get very interesting indeed. *Rising Tide* is an astonishing book. Barry and, presumably, his team of lawyers will know their stuff cold, and all of the background. They will be up against the best lawyers that Exxon and Co can buy.
Just got to this bit:
That would be a remarkably dumb thing for Bobby to have said, even by R standards.
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This is a rather artful attempted dodge:
Since the oil and gas industry has already conceded that drilling and canals are responsible for about 36 percent of wetland loss, it can be true that controlling the Mississippi with levees is the “primary reason for wetland loss” and that industry has a responsibility to cover about a third of the costs of recovery. John must think the reporter rather dim.
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But who needs artful dodges when you’ve got the line-item veto and legislators who own small oil companies?
That was depressing reading.
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