Are the new national academic standards rotten to the (Common) Core?
Here is another compelling and passionate piece from Pelham City, Ga., school chief Jim Arnold. (You can search the blog for other Arnold essays.)
Arnold takes on the new Common Core Standards, in which former Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue played a pivotal leadership role through the National Governor’s Association.
By Jim Arnold
I must state from the outset that I am innately suspicious of the underlying motives or educational benefits of any initiative – Common Core included — supported by the Georgia governor who instituted austerity cuts in 2003, led Georgia to be one of the only states to use teacher furloughs to balance the state budget and consistently under funded public education in order to promote quality fishing.
Common Core is a standardized national curriculum. Why is this problematic? From an historical context, a centralized school curriculum serves the goals of totalitarian states. Jefferson warned us about that.
There are additional issues:
1) There are few interdisciplinary connections between subjects. Research for many years has shown the positive effects of interdisciplinary connections on student learning and achievement;
2) Citizenship, personal development and the promotion of democratic values is ignored.
The rationale given by the GADOE behind this mandated implementation of Common Core was threefold:
1) An answer to the problem of student mobility;
2) An opportunity to create an economy of scale, and;
3) An opportunity to compare “apples to apples” when ranking schools, systems or students between and among states.
Student achievement seems to be missing from that particular continuum. Adopting a curriculum to solve societal mobility issues is like measuring flour with a yardstick. There are easier solutions. “Economies of scale” mean little when our Legislature continues to under fund public education. When you can’t afford textbooks the opportunity to not buy new ones at a cheaper price is hardly an advantage. It is rather troubling to note the number of educational “reforms” that ignore educational research, as if invoking the magic word “reform” is enough to allow any imposition however implausible.
With adoption of the Common Core standards, you can rest assured that Common Core standardized testing is not far behind. How can we expect a single, nationwide standardized “pick-a-bubble” machine scored test to effectively measure what is taught in practically every school system in the United States? The documented testing issues we already see with state assessments will increase exponentially.
The June state Board of Education minutes listed over $25 million in state contracts for testing and test development for 2013. Whether these investments are educationally justifiable or wise never seems to be the question.
Standardized tests were designed, once upon a time, to serve as prescriptive tools to help teachers help students. Presently, they serve as autopsy reports that include first time test taker results whose primary purpose is not to assist teachers in improving student achievement but to rank schools and systems. Teachers cannot effectively use data provided at the end of the school year to assist students that leave their class two weeks later. If we were serious about using these tests to measure achievement – and there’s a mighty big “if” about whether they do – we would give them at the beginning of the year to provide substantive data for teachers.
In a time when parents –and, as an extension – the public – are demanding more and more personalization for their child’s education, Federal and state educational agencies continue to insist upon more and more standardization – falling once again into the fallacy of “what’s good for one child is good for all children.”
The Common Core standards will ultimately serve not to improve student achievement but to increase the profits of standardized testing companies. The effects of poverty, family and socio-economic factors on education will continue to be largely ignored in our infatuation with the misguided belief that student achievement will improve through intensified measurement.
The “teach the test” and “test prep” and “testing pep rallies” environment will grow stronger through the implementation of annual growth measurements (annual growth = 100% – 2011 proficiency rate of first time test takers divided by six) for schools and flawed teacher evaluation models tying teacher ratings and salary to student scores that together will serve as almost insurmountable incentives for teachers to teach to the test, by the test and for the test.
The United States has, since the 1950’s, been rated in the bottom 25% of every educational rating system imaginable. The fact that our country has set the economic standard for the rest of the world, that our creativity, achievements and scientific progress far overshadow the nearest competitors would seem to lead us toward the beginnings of a discussion about the efficacy and reliability of the ranking systems we seem to trust as infallible measurements.
Sooner or later, even legislators must see it’s not about race, it’s about poverty; it’s not about a test score, it’s about student achievement; it’s not about a standardized curriculum, it’s about good teaching; it’s not about the business model, it’s about personalization; it’s not about competition, it’s about cooperation. Until that time, we will continue to get the kind of Legislature and public education system we vote for.
Relevant content and applications of knowledge through critical thinking, problem solving, modeling and higher order thinking skills should be the focus and goal of our educational process. Education is not supposed to be about determining or defining a specific amount or trove of material that must be learned in order to advance to the next level, but a matter of cultivating and growing inquisitiveness and curiosity in students that eventually grow into life skills. None of these skills or processes can be measured with any degree of reliability, accuracy or validity by a multiple choice machine scored test.
My suggestion is that we trust teachers enough to give them the freedom to do what they do best – teach children on a personal and individualized level. Micromanagement is an egregious sin and an almost irresistible temptation for state and Federal officials.
I predict a period of extensive frustration on the part of teachers before they get to the point they must eventually reach to decide that if anything is to be done to effectively implement the Common Core curriculum they must do it themselves at the local school level. Teachers, in this case as in so many others, are not the problem, they are our unrecognized salvation. Just as with Georgia Performance Standards, the efforts of teachers will eventually – in spite of everything politicians can do to make them look like scapegoats for what are truly societal issues – be the salvation of Common Core implementation in spite of state and Federal mandates and implementation schemes and not because of them – until, of course, the next big reform comes around the corner.
–From Maureen Downey, for the AJC Get Schooled blog
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107 comments Add your comment
I love teaching. I hate what it is becoming...
July 1st, 2012
4:08 pm
@GM “My kids were constantly taught IN SCHOOL by their teachers to memorize sight words.
That IS NOT reading.”
GM, I doubt very much that ALL your children were taught in reading was how to recognize “sight words. ” Nice that you helped them to learn how to “sound out” words, but that would not help them with words like: was, through, of, have, they, what, there, etc. That is why we teach them as “sight words”. Did you actually ASK of of your children’s teachers about this?
crankee-yankee
July 1st, 2012
4:32 pm
It never ceases to amaze me that the same people who espouse “local control” in government are so willing to jump on a national band-wagon that, ostensibly, aligns with their beliefs in spite of the fact they end up losing control.
Should not local control over education, where the needs of the local community are addressed, take precedence? With room for state/national standards but not in lieu of them.
There is no ONE way to do it and we would be wise to look askance at those who tell us so.
David
July 1st, 2012
4:46 pm
Have to agree….Sonny Perdue and his education and budget advisors were complete failures!
Dr. John Trotter
July 1st, 2012
4:48 pm
Mr. Arnold, you and I both know that it is all about the money.
http://www.theteachersadvocate.com
Tabitha
July 1st, 2012
4:49 pm
When we havea major recession and people produce less of the valuable things that governments like to tax like income, profit, property values and sales, then there is less money to spend on education, parks, police, fire and even fishing. There is not some magic money pot that the government needs to reach into to keep from cutting budgets in the face of massive declines in tax revenue.
Failure to recognize this fact eviserates your opinions.
Guiding Light
July 1st, 2012
5:14 pm
One point missed. The CC was funded by Bill Gates, who also participated in it’s development. It is an example that with enough money anything can be bought.
bootney farnsworth
July 1st, 2012
5:58 pm
here’s a question, not taking sides on the politics of it
since the state is constitutionally obliged for K-12, is it legal for the state to continue to dump its fiscal responsibility on local communities? can the state continue to cut its spending and force local communities to pick up its slack?
2 cents
July 1st, 2012
6:00 pm
@ Tabitha. Mr. Perdue quit funding QBE in 2003, waaaaay before the recession.
Mac Bogert
July 1st, 2012
6:03 pm
Bravo. Teachers have been at the bottom of the food chain starting in the 70s, I guess because of the backlash against the counter-culture/hippie flash that lumped them with other of the ‘effete’ class, as Spiro Agnew pronounced. I think I was a pretty good public school teacher, and in five years saw my autonomy vanish as parents, administration, and the central office decided that they needed to make not just strategic but tactical decisions about the classroom. I quit shortly after my principal, a man not much troubled by thought (some principals are excellent so I’m not trying to brand a class), upbraided me for giving too many A’s.
I much prefer Sudbury schools, where EVERYTHING is decided and managed by the entire population, with No specialized administrators.
I enjoyed the article
Have fun,
mac
http://www.azalearning.com
2 cents
July 1st, 2012
6:05 pm
@GM. My kids could read before they started school. But the sight words aren’t to memorize, it’s about an automatic response much like multiplication tables.
Good Mother
July 1st, 2012
6:08 pm
Crankee yankee says “There is no ONE way to do it and we would be wise to look askance at those who tell us so.”
Not true.
There is ONE way to do it. That way is to prepare the kids for the SAT and ACT tests and to prepare them for college.
Kids in GA have to compete with kids all over the country for the same jobs and the same colleges. ONE way IS the right way.
We speak English in this country. Everyone must learn to read and write and undunderstand English.
We all need to add, subtract, multiply and divide.
The core standards are just plain common sense. We all need to learn those standards for whatever we do in life and at home.
crankee-yankee
July 1st, 2012
6:23 pm
Tabitha
July 1st, 2012
4:49 pm
I do not disagree the recession has had an extreme effect on education funding.
However, recent history will tell us that is not the whole story.
1) The state legislature passed a law limiting & capping millage rate increases BEFORE the recession which had a negative effect on revenue once local property assessments declined.
2) The billions of dollars cut from the state education budget started long BEFORE the recession, (Perdue’s first year in office) not as a result of it. Yes some cuts originated afterwards but certainly not ALL.
http://gareport.com/blog/2011/09/27/our-sat-scores-stink-but-at-least-we%E2%80%99re-saving-money/
‘Perdue also signed a series of budgets that cut the state’s formula funding for K-12 education by a combined amount of nearly $3 billion during his two terms. These funding reductions were also known as “austerity cuts.”’
http://gbpi.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/fy2013_Budget-Analysis_Ed_k12_01232012.pdf
Adjusted for inflation, GA state funding per student dropped from over $3,700 in 2002 to about $3,300 in FY 2005 with an additional $200 drop through 2012.
Sonny was NOT an education governor and neither is Nathan.
Eric
July 1st, 2012
6:30 pm
Great post, Maureen. And so well-written, Mr. Arnold. Thank you.
It is disturbing to see these trends. I always ask the same question: who is really served by all the testing? What difference does it make which state is first and last, since there’s only 1-50 slot ranking? Unfortunately, many parents buy in to the testing hysteria so that Johnny can go to the finest university, etc.
BC
July 1st, 2012
6:30 pm
If we provide rigor and relevancy, the rest will take care of itself. As an elementary school administrator, I encourage my teachers to take risks and create a climate of critical independent thinking. Our goal is to empower our students to take ownership for their learning K-5!
Tony
July 1st, 2012
6:35 pm
On the hypothesis that “good tests measure what kids need to know” as proposed by some of the bloggers today, I must strongly disagree. There are several reasons, but I will limit my response to three.
1. Tests, as designed and used today, can only measure a small slice of the knowledge that kids have. They cannot measure the full range of skills that are important in life because it is not possible to design tests to measure all that knowledge. Creativity, for instance, is one of the most valuable traits that a person brings to business/industry. Yet, we design and administer tests that promote the antithesis of this characteristic. Trying to standardize all students into one mold will be absolutely disastrous for our nation.
2. The current testing craze in the US is pushed more by the big publishing houses who have a huge stake in the market. If you follow the money, you will see the trail leading right back to the big companies. They are pushing an agenda of more and more testing in order to line their own corporate pockets with cash that should be used to buy resources for our schools. Check out how much lobbying money comes from the big testing companies.
3. Even within a set of skills that most people agree to be important, our assessments are limited in their abilities to measure what kids know. The biggest limiting factor is reading and understanding the language used to build the assessment. Kids have different experiences based on where they live, how they grow up, and whether they are grossly affected by poverty. Whether you like it or not, these kids are the ones who get the short end of the stick when it comes to the modern day assessments. You can use all the current rhetoric you like, but the reality remains. Poverty has an adverse affect on student achievement.
The idea of “teaching to the test” is morally repulsive on many levels. The Common Core Standards currently being rammed down our throats have the potential of undermining our schools. When you couple that effect with the underfunding of public education in our state (and many others), we have created the ultimate self-fulfilling prophecy that our nation’s schools are failures.
How many private schools are lining up to implement the Common Core Standards?
South Georgia
July 1st, 2012
6:36 pm
Send me standardized kids to teach and I will not complain about “standardized testing” them!
Proud Teacher
July 1st, 2012
6:43 pm
Amen, South Georgia!
have you read them?
July 1st, 2012
6:46 pm
I’m just wondering how many of those who have commented have actually read the Common Core Standards. I can just speak from my familiarity with the K-5 Math Common Core Standards. They are well written and in alignment with what we should demand from math education–true conceptual understanding on the part of students as a result of effective teaching. In regard to testing, it is my understanding that PARCC assessments will be a combination of selected response and free response–very different from the current CRCT.
another comment
July 1st, 2012
6:50 pm
From what I have read the High School college prep is realy based on the New York State Regents curriculum. Being a graduate of that system, in one of its many small school districts, it will serve the country well.
Each of my cousins that have moved out of NY, to Texas, California, Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina or Georgia, all feel that our Children have had the educational short stick. While those that stated in the New York schools are comfortable with the public schools. As are any college friends cousins with children in the Mass, Ohio or Virgina schools.
The biggest problem are these huge districts. The districts should be one high school and their feeder school. Special Schools and Votech schools can be shared by multiple small districts. This is the only sure way that you don’t have “Palace Administrations”, the money goes to the school house.
Common Core is written by the same people who write the NY Regents curriculium. What Georgia and the south from Virginia down, doesn’t work. So you need to try something else. You also need to split up these districts.
Lee
July 1st, 2012
6:51 pm
What we have here is the equivalent of a 300 pound, 3-pack-a-day doctor telling me I need to exercise more.
Maybe if some of these school districts would consolidate and do away with multiple layers of overheads and administration, the austerity cuts wouldn’t hurt so much. City of Pelham, pop 4400 or so, has one elementary school, one middle school, and one high school. But Mr. Arnold is making $125,000 per year to preside over that “system”. He’s probably the highest salary person in the whole town. Go figure.
————————
“Sooner or later, even legislators must see it’s not about race, it’s about poverty…”
Category: If you tell a lie long enough and often enough, pretty soon, people will accept it without question. Or, since Mr. Arnold presides over a podunk system with 55% black enrollment, he’s offering this to appease the parents why their system lags behind others in the county.
—————————–
“The United States has, since the 1950’s, been rated in the bottom 25% of every educational rating system imaginable.”
I call BS on that one and Maureen should be ashamed to let it go through without questioning it.
————————————-
The bottom line, there is plenty of blame to go around for the CURRENT dismal state of education in the USA. The reason standards scare educrats so much is they fear that being able to compare apples to apples will expose their poor performance.
Jerry Eads
July 1st, 2012
7:07 pm
GM, you get 2nd place for least informed, I’m afraid (There was one much worse but not worth responding to). If all we want from our public education is the basic “3r’s” at the 6th-15th percentile level (about the pass level difficulties for CRCT and EOCT), then we get a population suitable only for pushing picture buttons on fast food joint sale registers.
Humanist noted that bubble tests CAN measure higher-order skills (I’ll use that label to represent the the gaggle of terms used in that arena). Absolutely true. The PROBLEM is that low-bid minimum competency tests do hardly any of that, and it may well be that the PAARC tests will not either, as it’s ENORMOUSLY expensive to build such questions and then ensure that they ACTUALLY measure higher order skills. They’ve already put their self-imposed deadline back at least once.
Like the dozens of other “reforms” I’ve lived thru (maybe fewer than Bootney
), it seems to me entirely possible that CC will follow all the rest of them – unrealistic promises in the absence of evidence, then a regressive failure back to low-level, low-bid recognition bubble-testing. I DO hope not. I’ll remain as always incurably hopeful, yet not particularly optimistic.
Rockerbabe
July 1st, 2012
7:18 pm
If you want to improve the schools, then get the politicians out of the school system.
Susan
July 1st, 2012
7:28 pm
Agree with the writer from Pelham City, Ga. You can’t ignore the culture of attending school “because you have to until you are old enough to quite and draw a check.”
Susan
July 1st, 2012
7:29 pm
correction “QUIT school”
crankee-yankee
July 1st, 2012
7:35 pm
Good Mother
July 1st, 2012
6:08 pm
Wrong on so many levels.
I am speaking to tactics, not strategy.
Focusing only on the SAT & ACT leaves out too much and as we have found out here in GA, Science & Social Studies will get the short end of the stick in order to boost math & LA scores (notice I did not say skills).
I cannot present material the same way and have every student reach the same level, too many variables. There is no ONE way, otherwise I could present material the same way to my gifted, regular ed & special ed students with NO difference in outcomes between them. Were that the case, we wouldn’t need AP courses nor IEP’s.
Tony
July 1st, 2012
6:35 pm
well said
teacher&mom
July 1st, 2012
8:04 pm
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/28/opinion/collins-a-very-pricey-pineapple.html?_r=1&ref=education
Common Core = more standardized testing….not less.
Think at least 3-4 testing session per year. It’s being sold as “formative assessment” to benchmark student progress. We’re being sold a bill of goods to justify MORE testing. Not to mention the technology investment required to offer all testing online.
A few quotes from the link above:
“This is the part of education reform nobody told you about. You heard about accountability, and choice, and innovation. But when No Child Left Behind was passed 11 years ago, do you recall anybody mentioning that it would provide monster profits for the private business sector?”
“Pearson is just one part of the picture, albeit a part about the size of Mount Rushmore. Its lobbyists include the guy who served as the top White House liaison with Congress on drafting the No Child law. It has its own nonprofit foundation that sends state education commissioners on free trips overseas to contemplate school reform.”
btw…Kathy Cox was the recipient of one of those overseas trips. Ms. Cox and Stephen Pruitt, went on to work for Achieve, Inc. Google Achieve and educate yourself of their role in CC and the Next Generation Science Standards.
“An American child could go to a public school run by Pearson, studying from books produced by Pearson, while his or her progress is evaluated by Pearson standardized tests. The only public participant in the show would be the taxpayer.”
And for those students who don’t graduate high school….Pearson has taken over the GED.
“If all else fails, the kid could always drop out and try to get a diploma via the good old G.E.D. The General Educational Development test program used to be operated by the nonprofit American Council on Education, but last year the Council and Pearson announced that they were going into a partnership to redevelop the G.E.D. — a nationally used near-monopoly — as a profit-making enterprise.”
Let me readjust my prior equation….
Common Core = More testing + Profits for testing conglomerates
madaboutmath
July 1st, 2012
8:25 pm
There are some things you should all know about the CC high school math standards. First, Georgia is trying to be a cutting edge state, and roll out the Common Core before other states. Sounds great, but the reality is that there are no textbooks, no tests yet (in our training meeting, we were told that the EOCT will most likely just be cut and paste questions from old ones), not really even any curriculum for teachers to use (What is on Picasso is a joke as far as I’m concerned.). In other words, our kids will be the guinea pigs of the country. Second, while the elementary school standards have been well planned and will be consistent from state to state as far as what is taught in each grade, the high school standards are not. Each state can choose from the entire list of standards and put together whatever standards they choose for any particular course. So the whole idea of solving the mobility problem is moot with high school math. Third, not surprisingly, Georgia has neglected to consult teachers in choosing what skills to teach in which grade. For the Coordinate Algebra class, there will be 3 units of algebra, followed by a unit of statistics, followed by 2 units of geometry. (Sound familiar to Math 1, 2, 3?) Quadratics (clearly an algebra topic) is introduced the next year in the geometry class. As teachers, we hear from the teachers of juniors and seniors that math students can’t factor, and yet we are not going to introduce them to factoring until 10th grade. All of the teachers were appalled at the training meeting. Georgia’s version of high school CC math is a huge step backwards from what we taught this past year in GPS Algebra. I see huge problems ahead for the students who are the 9th graders this coming school year, just like for the class of 2012, who were the guinea pigs for Math 1, 2, 3.
Tony
July 1st, 2012
8:48 pm
Not directly related to today’s topic: http://www.mikeschmoker.com/pedagogic-fads.html
Nice read.
Mary Elizabeth
July 1st, 2012
9:24 pm
I highly recommend that any reader – who is interested in an in depth discussion of America’s idealism, spirituality, the thinking of our founding fathers as well as Lincoln’s and Frederick Douglass’ – listen to this hour presentation, through interview, with philosopher and professor, Jacob Needleman, as presented, today, on Public Radio. See link, below:
http://www.onbeing.org/program/inward-work-democracy-jacob-needleman/222/extraaudio?embed=1
Once Again
July 1st, 2012
10:14 pm
Central planning doesn’t work. Never has, never will. Just another excuse to prop up a failing federal bureaucracy.
Why do you continue to subject your children to this child abuse? Why are you not working for an end to government run education? Why are your children not important enough to you do change the way they are being raised and educated?
Fled
July 1st, 2012
11:35 pm
@Once: Although we are coming from very different places, I agree that sending children to secondary school in Georgia borders on child abuse. As a former Georgia teacher (it never stops feeling good to write that), I decided long ago that I would never subject my kids to secondary education in that benighted place. I made the multiple sacrifices necessary to get myself into a position where they could have a private education. It hasn’t been easy. When they started school here, they were woefully behind their peers. However, kids always rise to meet the true level of expectations, so after some hard work, they have recovered. Now they are two years (at least) ahead of their friends they left behind.
To anyone who thinks money and class size does not matter in education, I would ask why private schools cost so much and all stress small classes with individual attention. You get what you pay for.
Actually, I find myself in agreement with a national curriculum so long as it is real. The Fulton County School Board serves as the best-ever argument against so-called “local control.” Interested people might find it illuminating to look at how the UK implemented their national curriculum. One key is having external people assess the final portfolios students submit in support of their work. Students do or don’t do the work, and earn rewards or consequences as a result. They also employ a system of school inspectors who do actually make sure that schools are doing what they ought. In the UK everyone knows exactly what must be done and how students will demonstrate that they can do it.
Unfortunately, it does seem clear that products of Colleges of Education (especially Aderhold Hall) are not on the whole prepared to lead students where they need to be. Many teachers are eager and motivated to do the right thing, but COEs are so full of people who are clueless themselves, enjoying a cushy teaching load while producing little of value, that a degree in education is practically an intellectual death certificate. Would we lose anything valuable if we closed down all COEs and established a program whereby students with real degrees learned to teach in an apprenticeship-type program? That is how they approach things in Finland.
Irisheyes
July 1st, 2012
11:37 pm
I teach elementary, so that’s all of the experience I have with CCSS. From what I’ve seen and studied so far, there are both good and bad. Having been a child who moved to four different states during elementary school, standards that are the same from state to state are helpful. There were lots of time I would move into a new school, and there was something I had not learned that my new class had. Sure, I was pretty bright and had parents who were willing and able to help “fill in the gaps”, but it still would have been easier if all the states had been teaching the same thing. Secondly, I love to read blogs written by various teachers across the country, and I’ve already gotten lots of ideas, lessons, activities, etc from those blogs. It’s great that I can get ideas from teachers in Florida, Utah, Massachusetts, and New York, just to name a few. I’m always looking for ideas to make my teaching fresh, new, and interesting. Finally, the math standards especially are written fairly well. (In my opinion) The old standards were “a mile wide and an inch deep” to quote the old saying, and these seem much more focused and narrower. I think that in the younger grades, the focus is on understanding rather than exposure, and I feel that gives the students a good, solid base. There is also a focus on problem solving, which I find is something that my students lack, year after year. I haven’t spent as much time with the language arts standards, because, in my grade, if you can get a child to read a grade level text and be able to talk to you about it in a fairly intelligent way, you’ve succeeded.
I know that as the students move up in grade levels, the focus becomes more and more on informational writing and not as much on fiction, and that is worrisome. I loved the novels that I read in high school, and no high school education is complete without reading the great classics. Hopefully, those won’t be forgotten.
What worries me is how the testing companies have their tentacles throughout the creation of the tests, test prep, textbooks, etc. I’m just afraid that schools will force the materials from the companies on us and not let the teachers teach the standards in the way that works best for their individual classes. What will work for one class (or for one year) may not necessarily work so well for another year. It all depends on the makeup of the class.
Matthew
July 2nd, 2012
6:20 am
Some, “Good Mother”, calls this hogwash?
That is a piece of the puzzle that Dr. Arnold doesn’t
address. That is, uninformed and ignorant parents
who are victims of establishment brainwashing….:)
ScienceTeacher671
July 2nd, 2012
7:41 am
catlady
July 1st, 2012
2:56 pm
That post is almost as good as the original article.
AlreadySheared
July 2nd, 2012
8:10 am
What a bunch of hooey. At least with respect to mathematics, there is no reason on earth NOT to have a national standard curriculum.
I think that what shakes folks up is that once there ARE standardized math tests to go along with a common math curriculum, by definition HALF if the system scores posted will be below the median national score (likely also that half will be below average).
ScienceTeacher671
July 2nd, 2012
8:19 am
I really enjoyed the article, and would love to have Jim Arnold as the superintendent in my district. That said, I don’t know that I agreed whole-heartedly with it. I don’t really have a problem with a basic national curriculum, that has everyone learning the same topics in at least reading and math at approximately the same time – but I’d rather they base it on the curriculum in Massachusetts instead of the one in Georgia!
I don’t really have a problem with some standardized testing, but I’d like it to be more meaningful than Georgia’s state tests. Yes, I understand the difference between norm-referenced and criterion-referenced, but the ITBS not only tells me how a given student is performing compared to others across the nation, but if s/he is having trouble in reading or math, it tells me where the areas of weakness are, unlike the CRCT.
My students take an EOCT, and I have no problem with that. We’ve had very few poor teachers in our department, and the EOCT helps weed them out. What I have a problem with: In my class, the students who fail the EOCT are those who failed the reading or math CRCT the year before, and were socially promoted anyway. What I also have a problem with: the student who actually gets 85-95% of the questions correct only scores 2-5 points higher than the student who only got 63% of the questions correct, because of the way the state curves the scores, and a student who only gets 45% of the questions correct will still pass.
Common Core seems to assume that all students are at least on grade level in reading. That’s not the case here in Georgia. That’s going to be a problem.
HoneyFern School
July 2nd, 2012
8:24 am
Common Core is about money (making more for testmakers and textbook publishers) and politics (so each politician can have their name on a significant-sounding change in education).
The standards won’t make education better; it won’t produce more college graduates, kids more prepared to enter a trade or higher test scores. Only solid teaching can do that.
But we don’t want solid teaching. We want factory workers, and we want to keep the social structure in this country exactly in place. Until we change the thought behind what it means to be educated, it doesn’t matter what capitalized name you throw on the movement. You will get the same lackluster results from students marking time in a system that doesn’t care about them.
Jane Robbins
July 2nd, 2012
9:50 am
I don’t know if this gentleman is liberal or conservative, but there’s plenty of reason for conservatives to object to the Common Core standards. For one thing, they’re being imposed on the states by the federal government, working in cooperation with progressive “education reform” interests in Washington. For another, if GA implements Common Core, it must adopt the standards word for word, with no opportunity to change anything and only minor opportunity to add anything. This means the end of local or parental control over or even influence on what their children are taught. And the standards are admittedly designed to prepare students for nonselective community colleges, not 4-year universities. The English standards “dumb down” the study of literature to the point that by grade 12, 70% of the reading curriculum will be “informational texts,” such as technical manuals, rather than creative literature that actually teaches students fundamental truths about life. Goodbye, Hamlet; hello, “How to program your iPhone.”
Mountain Man
July 2nd, 2012
10:07 am
From a parent that has moved around a lot while having school-age children – we ALWAYS checked out the local school district, it was our NUMBER ONE concern about where to buy a house and live. At least once, there was a possibility of living in one state or another. At leats with ITBS or apparently with Common Core, you can compare school systems against each other.
Teachers should not fear testing for evaluation of the SCHOOL SYSTEM. Testing should not be used to evaluate individual teachers.
Dr. John Trotter
July 2nd, 2012
10:07 am
I have been saying it for years. All of the testing, the “common” standards poop, etc., are driving by money. To be able to sell your wares to the different states and school systems, you first have to identify certain systems as “failures.” You will want to keep them as “failures” too in order for your “products” and “services” to be purchased. You really don’t want to see any significant improvements or they will not need your “products” and “services.” Hence, don’t even address an area which could surely improve these systems, viz., improved discipline. No, just observe the “passover” when it comes to this subject. Just pass it on by. Don’t address this. Improving student discipline might actually improve student achievement and then these systems would need your “products” and “services.”
Mountain Man
July 2nd, 2012
10:08 am
“by grade 12, 70% of the reading curriculum will be “informational texts,” such as technical manuals, rather than creative literature that actually teaches students fundamental truths about life. Goodbye, Hamlet; hello, “How to program your iPhone.””
That will be much more useful in real life than Hamlet. Just sayin”.
Progressive Humanist
July 2nd, 2012
10:13 am
Tony,
Your post is exactly the type thinking I was describing at 1:24. You suggest that current assessment methods are not measuring the most relevant skills (debatable) and that they can’t measure all student traits (true). As an example you discuss creativity. I think it would be a great idea for us to assess creativity. However, first you’ll need to provide us with a strong operational definition. Cognitive psychologists can’t even agree on what intelligence is, much less creativity. Then you’ll need to come up with a means of testing creativity (provided you can come up with the definition first). That measure will have to be something that can be objectively and reliably scored for tens of thousands of students, so you can’t suggest having students do a project and having a group of five teachers score each one according to a rubric. So, as I said, people in assessment are willing and able to reform measurement practices, but you’ve got to come up with a solid way to do it. Pointing out highly abstract constructs that we’re not currently measuring doesn’t mean that the skills we are measuring now are not valid or being measured reliably.
And it is true, as you point out, that poverty has an adverse effect on achievement. But that’s not the fault of the test. If we don’t like the reading on the scale in the bathroom in the morning that doesn’t mean we get rid of the scale. It is simply a fact that some groups of students will have learned more than other groups of students. And tests are designed to figure out who has learned more and who has learned less. The fact that there are differences doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with the test; it actually suggests the test is picking up on real differences in learning. Those differences used to fall more along racial lines, and still do to some extent, but now it appears they are more closely associated with socioeconomic levels. But again, just because the assessment picks up those differences doesn’t suggest the test is faulty.
Suggest a better way to assess tens of thousands of students. I’m all ears.
Jerry Eads,
I think you’re exaggerating the difficulty in creating higher order multiple choice questions somewhat. Most language arts tests now focus almost entirely on higher order questions. You will find almost no items that test discrete knowledge that must be pulled from memory on current LA EOCTs. It’s all reading comprehension, application, analysis, etc. All the information students need to answer a question is on the page, and the items therefore test cognitive processing. Math tests are all problem solving (although I’d like to see them present more real-world formats and scenarios instead of simply presenting numbers and equations). So I’d argue that to a large degree standardized assessments are already testing higher order thinking. We can still improve the tests, but it’s certainly not outside the realm of possibility to practically assess higher order skills.
Jerry Eads
July 2nd, 2012
10:18 am
Unfortunately, Jane has it right, apparently. I have yet to talk to a HS English teacher who’s comfortable with the CC “standards”: they seem intended to produce plumbers and electricians (not a bad thing) but at the expense of preparing students for university.
ST, my guess is that you don’t really understand the difference between NRT and CRT. In the first place, the state tests are NOT “CRTs.” They are MINIMUM COMPETENCY tests whose p/f points were quite arbitrarily selected by the industry standard excuse “modified Angoff” method. Go look things up; I’d wager even a wikipedia article will suffice. And, for the fiftieth time, the state’s mincomp tests ARE NOT SCALED, even though they call the scores “scale scores.” The differnce, say, between 750 to 800 has NO relationship whatsoever to the difference between, say, 800 to 850 (you pick the numbers, matters not). The ONLY points that have any meaning at all are the pass and “pass+” points, and ONLY in terms of “pass” or “fail.” The developers have no requirement whatsoever to have any other score points mean anything.
Finally, yet again, how many questions a student gets correct on a test depends on two things (okay, many more than those but): How much they’ve learned and HOW HARD THE QUESTIONS ARE. The most accurate (4-choice bubble) tests are those in which the median (middle score) student gets about 55% of the questions correct. Tests that are designed so that the average student gets more than 70% of the questions right (like almost all classroom tests) are generally less accurate.
Jerry Eads
July 2nd, 2012
10:36 am
Hi PH. Well done. I suspect our agreement to disagree may well be on the level of processing required by an item, and the degree to which a given test actually includes higher-order items. Certainly the SAT and ACT include some higher order items and they are arguably some of the best-made tests in the world. My concern is that low-bid tests having to be developed on very tight schedules with very limited (still very expensive) resources – like state minimum-competency tests – generally include little more than simple recognition or at best very poorly done and “not very high” higher-order items.
I DO have some hope (in spite of concerns about national – and worse, “teacher-proof” – curriculum) that the PAARC tests purportedly being developed to measure CC will be an improvement.
Oh, PH, I spent fifteen years running state testing programs for another state, several of those running the whole thing (rather, it ran me). From that experience I chose never to darken a test development door again so I’d never again be a part of the damage we do. From that experience I do indeed get a bit testy about the subject, bad pun intended.
I enjoy your contributions, PH. Please keep it up.
Concerned DeKalb Mom
July 2nd, 2012
11:18 am
Maureen, has there been any investigation into how the different districts are preparing to roll out the Common Core? Thinking of DeKalb, in particular, where teacher work days are now a thing of the past…I’m wondering where the time is to be found to get these teachers up-to-speed with the new requirements? I had heard other systems were doing work last year to get ready; shockingly (sarcastic), I don’t think DeKalb has done anything to this point. Anyone looking into that at the AJC?
Mountain Man
July 2nd, 2012
12:44 pm
“CC “standards”: they seem intended to produce plumbers and electricians (not a bad thing) but at the expense of preparing students for university.”
The “common core” should not be for preparing students for college, it should be the basis of getting a High school diploma. College students will, of couse, add much more to the CC. But when a business sees a diploma that says – “mastered the CC”, it will actually MEAN something. Not like today’s “attended school and not necessarily that often” diploma. It would be nice to know that a high school diploma actually meant a student could read, write, and do simple math.
Mountain Man
July 2nd, 2012
12:47 pm
I will say it again for all you “teach to the test” types. If a test is measuring basic knowledge like simple reding, writing, and arithmetic, then if a student doesn’t know these thing, He** yes, I want the teachers to be “teaching to the test”. For the college student types, you don’t have to worry, they just take the test and ace it.
Mountain Man
July 2nd, 2012
12:48 pm
reading
Progressive Humanist
July 2nd, 2012
1:09 pm
Jerry Eads,
I helped to create the current version of the GED. When we were writing items we never mentioned Bloom’s taxonomy or went out of our way to list the ways we were assessing higher order thinking, but all the questions were application, analysis, etc., at least on the portion I worked on. But that test was upwards of six years in the making and was not cheap to create, so it may speak to your point about the low-bid tests that are not as well constructed. But the LA EOCTs I’ve seen here in Georgia appear to have the same type of questions as the ones I wrote. Of course, history assessments will contain a greater number of knowledge-based questions, but that’s the nature of the content area- they’ve got to know the facts. My point is that we can and are assessing higher order thinking on high stakes tests. And as you know, it’s educators who generally decide on the content and constructs to be tested, so I am skeptical of the idea that the assessments don’t measure relevant information.
I see that you have had a change of heart based on your years of experience in the field, and sometimes that happens. But my question is what do you propose instead? Certainly there have to be assessments to determine whether students are acquiring basic skills in reading and math, just as there need to be assessments that can evaluate if students have acquired the prerequisite skills for college. So what should the structure of educational assessment look like, in your opinion? Ed assessment isn’t going to disappear, so how should it be done more productively?
William Casey
July 2nd, 2012
4:29 pm
National Standards and “big stakes testing aren’t ALL bad. However, why (except for somebody getting rich) reinvent the wheel? In my subject, American History, such a system has been in place FOR YEARS. It’s called the Princeton Advanced Placement Course and Test. It includes a lot of higher order thinking and yet allows for individual teacher judgement and freedom. I taught this course from 1982 until my retirement in 2006 at St. Pius and Fulton County’s Crestwood, Chattahoochee and Northview high schools. Why not simply implement this program for ALL students? The teacher-training system is already in place and “aligned” textbooks already exist.