Last week’s Atlantic article focused on suburban parents simply because of space limitations. I couldn’t deal with ALL the controversy in one tiny magazine article.
Let’s talk for a minute about the problems in creating a system of national standards in a hugely diverse country. (I could use some feedback.)
The Common Core website has a cute video describing the ideas behind the Common Core.
The Common Core is all about kids making uniform progress and culminating at a common endpoint. It assumes that MOST kids learn at the same rate. Of course, there are outliers. Procedures can be set in place to deal with the super quick and the super slow learners, but this program assumes that most kids can handle fractions in 5th grade, for example.
What happens when a huge percentage of kids going into fifth grade in certain schools never mastered fourth grade math? The Common Core is set up like a staircase with an equal number of steps and with steps of equal height. Can we set up a model like that in a country with such huge diversity?
Apt. 11d 
I’m going to be really blunt here: as a parent of a child (with an IEP, no less!) in a heavily-impoverished urban school, I want my daughter held to the exact same standards as the children in the rich suburbs. Period. Exclamation mark. Holding all kids to the same standards is the only way schools like my daughter’s can get access to the resources necessary to raise their grades. Resources like free summer school, after-school tutoring, smaller class sizes. Those interventions really do work, and they aren’t cheap.
Creating a lower set of standards means de facto throwing kids who struggle in school out onto the garbage heap. I am completely mystified at the opposition to the Common Core. From my perspective, the curriculum has been improved. I think the classes my daughter has post-implementation of Common Core are better preparing her for the type of work she’ll encounter in college (which for us, means first two years in community college). Does she have to work harder? Yes, she does. But she’s going to graduate prepared.
I don’t want a watered-down education for my daughter. A less-rigorous or slower track isn’t going to be of any benefit to her. I fought in IEP meetings to get her placed on the top-track of classes where she was already getting As. If I hadn’t done that, if I hadn’t been there, they would have placed her in bottom-track courses. She’ll never do well on standardized tests. But she rocks on actual assignments, especially if it involves writing. The tendency is to throw away children like my daughter—slot them into “future broom-pusher” classes, and don’t bother. Don’t bother teaching them. Certainly don’t bother developing their strengths and using those strengths to improve their weaknesses. In fact, don’t even recognize their strengths—it just complicates matters. And costs money. And that’s really what we’re talking about here. Whose kids are worth spending money on, versus whose kids need to be shuttled off to a landfill.
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My friend (inclusion specialist in large city school district) said the only way to really fix it is to get rid of grades. The whole idea made my brain hurt so I didn’t press for details, but this is something for which the test could be really useful.
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That was suppose to read “grade levels” instead of “grades”.
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One of the complaints I’m seeing in the blogs I frequent, is a concern that the standards for the Common Core are sometimes not developmentally appropriate:
http://saveseattleschools.blogspot.com/2015/02/how-fast-did-you-read-in-kindergarten.html
The argument folks make is that the standards were developed, as you say, with an end point in mind and working backwards, and that the endpoint is “college readiness” which has only recently become a standard we’re expecting everyone to reach. Reaching that endpoint seems to have resulted in a gradewise staircase, as you describe, with equal steps. Kids certainly don’t work that way (that is, become ready for a new level of material on an arbitrary date in September every year).
In the blog post above, the debate on reading in Kindergarten. In my own personal experience, 5-6 was a big developmental jump, in me and my children, where we seemed to go from “sounding out” words and practicing reading to reading fluently (think, jumping from the “BOB” books to reading Charlotte’s web in a few months — and in my case, the “BOB” books were in a different language. Is it generally the case, though, that kids who aren’t making that jump between 5-6 need intervention? It’s possible.
That debate has also been an issue in language development, with parents describing kids who didn’t talk until they were 3 and then started talking in paragraphs as counter examples to the typical language development. With language development, I think the consensus is that if certain language development is missing at certain ages, most of those kids will benefit from intervention (even though there might be a few who are on an atypical path).
On the other hand, these standards haven’t been developed with a scientific consensus on the stage at which the typically developing child will be ready for certain skills, but with the endpoint in mind. So, it could be that reading expectations are completely unrealistic (or fractions).
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speaking from another heavily-impoverished school, I agree with lubiddu’s comments on the standards. I don’t want lesser standards for our school.
My fear is with what politicians and bureaucrats will do to punish the schools that don’t meet the test-score requirements. In our district, there is a direct correlation between test scores and poverty. If you make a list of the schools with the highest test scores, and then you make a list ranking the schools by inverse rates of poverty – it is the same exact list. (Our district ranges from schools with 18% free/reduced lunch to schools with 90% free/reduced lunch, so there is a wide variety.)
So far, the proposed solutions I’ve seen in WI aren’t “spend more money on the struggling schools”. So far, the proposed solutions in my state are “close or privatize the failing schools and give kids vouchers to go to private schools” – a solution for a few perhaps….but a solution that will leave a vast majority of our poor kids behind. Walker wants to grade schools A-F, based on test scores. (He also wants to throw out the common core and find yet another test, but that’s another story…)
So, yes, standards are great. But if we fail to deal with some of the underlying issues of poverty (lack of food, shelter, internet, books, etc.) and then blame the teachers/kids/neighborhoods/schools for low test scores, we really won’t get anywhere.
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Different standards for different schools is a terrible idea – but it makes sense to me to have different paths, with different speeds, for different kids, preferably paths with enough flexibility to move from one to another as needed.
Even if you accept that every kid should graduate ready for college (and I don’t), the assumption that all children must learn in lockstep is crazy, destructive and ignores the reality of how children learn. Sometimes kids take leaps and need to move on quickly, sometimes kids need extra steps and practice and sometimes kids need one speed in reading and another speedin math. Some kids are reading at five, others aren’t ready until seven or eight.
I like the content richness of Common Core and the common sense assumption that kids should master A1 before learning A2. I hate the willful ignoring of normal variations in development, and differences in preparation stemming from poverty and parental resources and worry that eventually, when enough kids have irreparably damaged and discouraged because they were late developers or came from poorer backgrounds, the baby will go out with the bathwater.
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Good summary of the issue.
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I agree with both Kristen and A.J. on their analysis. I’m happy to have the Common Core standards as a benchmark for all schools, and give all students regardless of school the means (financial and otherwise) to meet them if they possibly can.
In fact, we should already be providing this kind of support. So why aren’t we? Is it because we really don’t know just how far most schools have to go to accomplish this? My educator friends say no – in many economically depressed areas, the schools are underfunded, and teachers often know what they need to make the situation better: more staff (teachers and support staff) to support smaller classes and more individualized attention, more money for books and supplies. Better help at the top – calculus tutoring and AP courses for some – and better support at the bottom . Also: students who are safe, are well fed, have had a full night’s sleep, have a stable home life, whose parents have jobs but also time to help them with homework and otherwise support their life in school.
If PARCC and any other standardized tests took up a couple of hours and weren’t so incredibly frustrating for the vast majority of students (see article below), and if the results were used to actually channel funding to the schools that needed it, I would support it. But making teachers march their students through a 7-hour test that both the teachers and students know they will fail has no educational value. No kids need that, but especially not kids who are already way behind grade level.
This article gets conspiracy-theory-ish at the end but otherwise looks like a good study of the level of difficulty of the PARCC.
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A note about the Ravitch post link: at the beginning of the post, Ravitch says, ‘Look what I just saw on G. F. Brandenberg’s site,’ and then goes on to quote the Brandenberg post.
Most of the quote from Brandenberg’s post in turn, is a quote from Russ Walsh, who explains how he determined that the PARCC reading tests are aimed at reading levels two years higher than the test taker will be (e.g., the second grade test requires fourth grade level skills). Then, when he is finished quoting Walsh, Brandenberg adds a closing thought about how he thinks the test is aimed higher on purpose, in order to make the failure rates high. I think it is this last editorial comment by Brandenberg that af labels as “conspiracy-theory-ish.”
Take away this closing remark by Brandenberg, and just read what he quotes from Russ Walsh. Then read the Ravitch’s post’s comments, where Walsh drops in to respond to commentators and to expand on his method and thinking. And note that Walsh is not talking about what is supposed to be taught in any one grade, he is talking about how the PARCC tests for the elementary grades are structured.
I think this is a good time to stop and remember that the PARCC tests and the Common Core curriculum, while very closely linked, are not the same thing. It is possible to see the strengths of a common curriculum WITHOUT liking the PARCC tests one iota. I think it muddies the conversation when we go back and forth between the two without discriminating. And yes, I just did that myself.
My excuse is that there’s been a lot of very good, sophisticated and deeply informed discussion on both these topics already, and we should avail ourselves of it. I like an anecdote as much as the next person, I think anecdote is a great starting place and can be a powerful illustration, but I think that data, like the information Walsh presents, elevates the discussion more.
I’ll close on this thought for now: One question I have not seen addressed anywhere is exactly how different each state’s standards were from each other’s before. One thing that has tickled me about my son’s experience in school, forty years later than mine and in a completely different state, is how similar the things he has learned in various grades has been to mine. In simple obvious ways, such as learning addition before multiplication, and on occasion, in eeriely coincidental ways, like his Ohio sixth grade social studies assignment to create an artifact — just like I had to do back in Queens in Mrs. Nahamies’ class.
That’s not to say that his curriculum hasn’t been ramped up in ways, and lacking what my schooling had in others, but just that there is a natural order to teaching many things, and that developmental levels are developmental levels. We’ve long known that some states have better educational outcomes but how much of that is attributed to their previous standards and how much to other factors? Even with the exact same standards, I wouldn’t bet Alabama is ever going to match Massachusetts.
P.S. Was anyone else struck by the Common Core cartoon having a very obviously African-American narrator? Not sure what to make of that but I find it curious.
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re: developmental appropriate. I talked to a mom of a kindergarten kid last week. She said that his homework was circling objects that began with the letter K. She complained that the homework also involved some scissor-work, but she didn’t think that the work was too hard for him. Circling objects that begin with the letter K sounds about right to me.
And while suburban parents had TONS of complaints about the common core and the parcc, they had no complaints about reading in Kindergarten. Why? Because these are the parents that are PUSHING for reading in kindergarten. Hell, they are pushing for it in nursery schools. They say that their kids are bored. It’s teachers and schools that are pushing back on these demands of parents.
But I want to stick to the issues of urban parents now. Entirely different problems and challenges.
We’ll see how the PARCC works out. Kids take it in three weeks. If it is too hard for everybody, then they’ll regrade it, so there’s some sort of bell curve. My guess is that some will pass and some will fail in roughly the same numbers as they have been doing for ten years on standardized tests.
But urban schools will do badly. Is there some value in knowing that aren’t doing as well as other schools?
Really open to commentary here….
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I’d hazard a guess that their preschool/kindergarten kids are bored because they have had too much screen time and actually don’t know how to play. Their “work” at that age is to play, not to do academic work.
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This is quibbling, but you’re talking about ‘bad’ schools, high-poverty schools, schools whose student bodies have various socioeconomic challenges.
Urban is lousy shorthand for that. There are poor suburbs. There are poor rural schools. There are good, successful, urban public schools (although whenever I say that, people explain to me that those schools don’t count for some reason.)
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Not a quibble. Point well taken.
The criticism that I’ve heard from middle school and high school teachers from lower performing, urban schools is that these standards state they are supposed to teach fractions or Shakespeare to students who haven’t mastered the early steps. These teachers say that they need to go back several steps. Before they can teach fractions, they have to make sure that the students know their multiplication tables. They say they appreciate the need to hold all kids to high standards, but the reality is that these kids are behind. The schools are unable to deal with the root causes of the problems in lower performing, urban areas.
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This is from a blogger I like, who used to teach in a lower performing urban school in Kansas City and now teaches at one in New York City. It’s from 2011 but could easily apply today as well.
“We have to learn that testing kids didn’t motivate teachers (the opposite happened), and that it didn’t reveal any secrets. We already knew poor kids, and minority kids, are behind. We knew that testing measures a teacher’s proficiency very imperfectly– a hundred other factors come into play when a student takes a test. We knew that testing takes time away from much more productive activities that can happen in school, and that it wears kids out. That doesn’t mean we don’t test. It means we test thoughtfully and as rarely as possible.
A huge question now is, how much of the education budget do you want going to paying test graders and creating tests, and how much do you want going to books and music classes and smaller class sizes? You know, things that have actually been proven to enhance students’ learning?”
This just reiterates the same point, but it’s one I hear (and read) over and over again. You asked whether there is some value in knowing that urban schools are doing worse; yes, but we already know it. Again, it doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be some measure of how well they’re doing on the Common Core standards, but could it be accomplished with less testing time, some sampling rather than giving the test to every student? And could the stakes for the teachers and students and schools be low?
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The problem there is that system doesn’t give the schools the flexibility to go back and teach the basics. As far as I can tell, that’s no better or worse than than it ever was.
What do we do when 75% of the kids in a low-performing high school haven’t mastered 5th grade math? Even if Common Core theoretically prevents that from happening in the future, what do we do with those kids *now*? Do we punish them? Do we punish their teachers? What’s the return on that?
That’s what testing *could* help us with – if we test students at the beginning of the year and find they can’t construct a sentence or don’t understand fractions, it *could* empower schools to group those kids according to what they need and – crazy thought, I hope you all are sitting down – then teach them what they need to know before moving on. Meanwhile, kids who are ahead or are independent learners can learn independently if we allow them. (Remember SRA labs? God, I loved those things as a kid. In any case, I agree with Sargoshoe’s inclusion specialist friend that in many cases, grade levels should be de-emphasized in favor of specific units that address specific steps in the learning continuum. )
But again, people creating these policies need to face facts about how the world works when they create these policies and tests – if you have a bunch of kids who come from impoverished, single-parent, homes or who deal with addiction and violence, they may need more attention and more time to accomplish what they need to academically. Are we going to provide that attention and allow them that time or not?
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“Remember SRA labs? God, I loved those things as a kid.”
Google Images has pics of the more recent ones, which look a little like I remember but not totally, but I did them in the mid 70s. I would love to see the older ones. I loved those things. But then, I was in a program called “The Learning Center” from 4th-6th grades, an open room, relatively unstructured environment where we learned at our own pace. It was the 1970s and hippy-dippy and we did decoupage on Friday afternoons and I LOVED IT. It was good for the gifted kids but also the kids who had difficulty in regular classroom settings (probably ADD/ADHD).
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I loved SRA labs, too. Funny how many people have fond memories of those things.
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Me too. We got them in 3rd grade and I went through the whole set of cards up to 8th grade. I also used to read the dictionary we had in the room.
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I loved those too!
MH, I can SOOO imagine you reading the dictionary.
Wendy, I was in a hippy dippy school for grades 1-3. It was project-based but I do recall learning the basics as well. I remember my friend Bernard designing a nuclear powered subway in grade 1. Lots of clay work and decoupage too.
I was always getting into trouble for talking and remember when I was moved to sit by the teacher to keep me from bothering my classmates. I just thought, “yay, someone interesting to talk to!”.
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Most states will be administering either the PARCC or the SBAC test. The SBAC test is computer adaptive, meaning the test will adjust to the student’s answers. A wrong answer will generate an easier question. A correct answer will generate a harder question. http://www.smarterbalanced.org/smarter-balanced-assessments/computer-adaptive-testing/
That testing method sounds very useful. Thoughts?
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I think we’re taking SBAC next month – I’ll let you know. The computerized, computer-adaptive tests bring their own set of challenges. Our school doesn’t have enough computers, so the kids have to take them on chrome books. Some questions require kids to drag & drop blocks of text in order. Easy to do with a mouse…but it’s very frustrating on the chrome book. Will there be a “rich kid who got to take the test with a fast computer and a mouse” vs. “poor kid who had to figure out how to use a slow chrome book with a trackpad they’ve never used before” analysis of the test results?
We’ve been taking the MAP for years. It’s adaptive. In middle school, some kids purposely get questions wrong to get an easier test.
My own 6th grade kid had to take the last MAP test for hours (across multiple days) because his questions got so hard. They involved really advanced math that he hadn’t seen yet, but that he could figure out (with a lot of time). He missed lots of classroom instruction because the damn test wouldn’t end….kept kicking out a question. (there is a # of questions limit, but there is no time limit on MAP) He got a very high score, but his teachers already knew he was good at math, so it seemed silly to subject him to that. This test is 3x a year too.
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Adaptive tests are great. But you do have to have the right computers, and tech staff to make sure they work. (This is true for all the computerized tests, which is a whole other issue – is this how we want poorer schools to spend their money? How good do the computers have to be? Does the federal government cover these expenses for mandated testing? If that money is available, why can’t it be spent on other things? etc.)
I also have fond memories of the SRAs. The Khan Academy of the 70s and 80s, I guess.
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We use an adaptive test (MAP, too, I think), and one of the issues parents report is kids who figure out that the test will end faster and that they’ll get easy questions if they miss some questions early, and decide that’s the route they’d like to take.
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We use chrome books.
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…ask one of your teachers if you can try one of the drag/drop sample questions on the Chrome book…it’s hard!
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I loved the SRA cards too; I remember working my way through the deck, after finishing the assignment.
Had our local public school used the SRA system, we would have been much happier with it. It didn’t, in great part because they went to great lengths to create the illusion that every child was learning in the same classroom. (In part because they didn’t want parents to ask for their children to be tested for learning disabilities.)
I found the inventor’s obituary online. Guess what? The original SRA reading program was created to address the problem of different levels in the same classroom:
The method de-emphasizes grades and encourages students to learn at their own pace. A native of Syracuse, N.Y., Parker created the system while working as a reading teacher in rural Bradford County, Fla., in 1950. He noticed that the slower learners in his class fell further behind their classmates when he taught them all from the same textbook. In his program, students were encouraged to individually master beginning, intermediate and advanced lessons before graduating from one color-coded set of workbooks to another. The color-coding, Parker reasoned, would avoid embarrassing students who were at the beginning levels.
http://articles.latimes.com/2000/jul/02/local/me-47033
If some children progress much faster through the same curriculum, what happens next? Why not use the SRA reading program? It has years of proven success.
The Common Core standards, to me, are the equivalent of the NCLB goal of all children proficient by 2014. Who could be against that standard? Did we meet the standard? Not even close. This set of standards calls for sequential progress, but sets the baseline in kindergarten. The baseline it sets was not met by many children in my kids’ kindergarten class (affluent, mostly white, professional-class town.) Those children went on to read, to be successful, the majority will do well in 4 year colleges.
So the starting baseline is too high for some upper middle class children. Those children started reading in first or second grade, the traditional time for reading to be taught.
How in the world do they think all children will be able to keep to this timeline? They’ve set it up so that many kids will be playing catchup in first grade. The kids who are behind will be expected to learn more, at a faster pace, than the kids who are reading before first grade. Do you think that will work?
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Adaptive testing? Well, it makes it more difficult for school systems to cheat in an organized fashion, as has happened multiple times before–as in caught, charged, convicted. There won’t be rings of teachers furiously erasing wrong answers and filling in right answers.
http://www.propublica.org/article/americas-most-outrageous-teacher-cheating-scandals
So, there will either be teachers taking tests online for the students, or students will be forced to withdraw before the tests.
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I don’t remember having the SRA cards, but I too have heard multiple people talk about how they loved them when growing up. I don’t understand why that’s not a good system to have in place in every classroom. It’s conceivable that the system doesn’t work as well as our generation (or at least the academic subgroup of our generation) thought it did. I do know that a workbook system in math created competitive reporting in my kids’ school, even though it was color coded. I didn’t think this was a bad thing — I think some competition is good. But, I think there are some kids who do really poorly with competition and that competition can become more important than the learning.
I dealt with elementary school by ignoring what was going on until I was doing special projects. Highlights included reading other books while lessons were occurring (not with permission, I’d read them behind the books), randomly answering questions on work sheets, and completely unfilled reading workbooks. Somehow, none of this showed up on my report card in any significant way and did not prevent me from being part of the highest reading groups (we had a walk to reading plan, as I remember it).
I’m frustrated today with some modern learning practices, especially the one where people have to wait when others haven’t caught up.
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