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Common Misconceptions Around Common Core

Posted April 24th, 2013 by Bill

There's no getting around it. The Common Core standards bring out the crazy.

Benjamin Reilly does a good job of collecting the crazy in one place, but his "alert" highlights a real issue: the amount of disinformation about Common Core has the potential to derail any rational discussion about the standards.

So, for those following along at home, here is a high level breakdown of the elements of this discussion. At the outset, I want to stress that this is a summary, and that there are certainly things I am missing and/or getting wrong. Please, point out these myriad shortcomings in the comments.

The best place to start is with the Common Core standards - these are learning standards, plain and simple. There are things to like and dislike about them in their own right, but the standards are just that: standards. My preferred starting point for analysis of the standards and their implications is Tom Hoffman.

Of course, new standards require new curriculum aligned to those standards. Thank goodness, some of the people that participated in writing the standards are ready with products to sell that make sure districts meet those standards.

The Federal Race to the Top program (and it's worth noting that there are different strands of Race to the Top) emphasized adoption of Common Core standards and the implementation of student data systems. In Race to the Top, when you see language around "college and career ready standards" that is generally a stand in for Common Core. Whenever you see language around personalized learning, bringing data-driven decisions to the classroom, and/or identifying teachers with a track record of success, the means to achieve these goals are generally understood to include a comprehensive data system.

A representative sample of what this language looks like in the Race to the Top documentation is included below:

Under Proposed Priority 1, applicants must design a personalized learning environment that uses collaborative, data-based strategies and 21st century tools such as online learning platforms, computers, mobile devices, and learning algorithms, to deliver instruction and supports tailored to the needs and goals of each student

The federal data standard is at CEDS; inBloom is implementing the CEDS standard in its datastore.

When the Obama administration allowed states to get waivers for NCLB, the conditions for getting waivers reinforced some of the incentives in Race to the Top, including Common Core adoption and using student test scores as part of teacher evaluations - which, in turn, reinforced the need for a comprehensive data system.

Another facet related to - but separate from - Common Core are the new tests that accompany Common Core adoption. These tests have been referred to as the Next Generation of Assessments, and have been discussed in many places; this speech from Secretary Duncan in 2010 provides a good introduction to the concept. A recent flare-up over some of the new tests - in this case, written by Pearson - sparked an Opt-out movement in New York. Gotham Schools looks at some of the good things in the new tests.

So, a short version - we have:

  • Common Core standards;
  • New curriculum, aligned to the Common Core standards;
  • New standardized tests, aligned to the Common Core;
  • Centralized data systems to collect information on students and teachers;
  • Race to the Top, which gave money to states and districts that prioritized implementing the above components;
  • Waivers for NCLB, which reinforce some of the incentives for Race to the Top.

And, of course, this is happening against a political and social backdrop that includes heated debates about the worth of teachers unions, intense and well funded efforts to privatize public education, the agressive expansion of both for-profit and non-profit charters, cheating scandals, a narrative about how our school system is failing, and an increased reliance on standardized tests as a measure for both teacher effectiveness and school success. All of these elements are related - but ultimately distinct - strands in the conversation.

This web of related-but-separate elements makes it simultaneously honest but disingenuous when advocates for Common Core say things like, "The new standards don't mandate what teachers teach." This is honest because the standards, with some glaring exceptions, attempt to stay out of implemetation. It's a disingenuous statement, though, because the implementation of Common Core is embedded in these other elements that do place constraints on educators.

But, when you have Glenn Beck and Michelle Malkin adding their misshapen four cents to the conversation, one thing is nearly certain: the progressive left will support whatever they argue against. This is a lost opportunity, because the educational system in the entire United States would benefit from a clear discussion of Common Core. The present direction of the conversation makes that increasingly unlikely.

The Common Core and 70 Percent Nonfiction

Posted November 27th, 2012 by Bill

Common Core is getting a lot of buzz of late, but one element that has received scant attention is starting to draw notice: by grade 12, fully 70% of all reading should be nonfiction.

Moreover, the guiding force behind this increased emphasis on nonfiction has a simple origin - the need to prepare students for the NAEP:

The 2009 reading framework of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) requires a high and increasing proportion of informational text on its assessment as students advance through the grades. The (Common Core) Standards aim to align instruction with this framework so that many more students than at present can meet the requirements of college and career readiness.

For those of you playing along, the switch there was impressively fast. The first sentence clearly states, "The 2009 reading framework of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) requires a high and increasing proportion of informational text on its assessment as students advance through the grades."

Rotten to the Core

The transformation occurs in the second sentence. An accurate sentence would read: "The (Common Core) Standards aim to align instruction with this framework so that many more students than at present can earn higher scores on the NAEP." That sentence, however, would be too honest. The actual phrasing used on the Common Core web site attempts to create an equivalency between success on the NAEP and college and career readiness. However, that claim is not supported by the NAEP, who state clearly:

The achievement levels should continue to be interpreted and used with caution.

In other words, the Common Core Standards require that fiction be de-emphasized in an effort to align with a standardized test whose results should be interpreted and used with caution. Or: we are cutting fiction from the curriculum as part of an unproven thought experiment.

David Coleman, a key player in the development of the Common Core standards (and now the head of the College Board), is more blunt about it. At a presentation titled Bringing the Common Core to Life he weighs in on the personal narrative, fiction's ugly cousin:

(A)s you grow up in this world you realize people really don't give a shit about what you feel or what you think. What they instead care about is can you make an argument with evidence, is there something verifiable behind what you're saying or what you think or feel that you can demonstrate to me. It is rare in a working environment that someone says, "Johnson, I need a market analysis by Friday but before that I need a compelling account of your childhood."

Watch the video here, and read a transcription with some commentary. Comments quoted above start at around 7:45.

Taking things through to their logical conclusion, we need to de-emphasize literature because the bosses supervising the jobs of the future probably won't ask students to write about how they feel.

There is a lot to be said about the shaky foundation used to launch a de-emphasis on literature in our schools, but it's also worth taking a step back and looking at what is happening around the country. In Montana, it looks like we'll be seeing a bill that requires public schools to teach intelligent design alongside evolution. In Tennessee, teachers can now address intelligent design in their classrooms. In Louisiana, schools that get public money study creationism alongside evolution.

Given the developments that are transpiring on local level, it looks like the line between fiction and nonfiction is becoming increasingly blurred. Fortunately, I'm pretty confident that some of the large companies invited to help create the the Common Core Standards have some products that will help.

But all kidding aside, people who make the incorrect assumption that the requisite critical thinking skills can't be taught or acquired through literature are missing the point. Education isn't linear. The pace of education isn't even, not for a class, and certainly not for individual people. Literature, taught well, lays the foundation for people asking hard questions, and for people uncovering difficult truths. And for those who have the hubris to declare that they have the knowledge and the foresight to identify the knowledge needed for the careers of the future, when many of those careers don't exist yet, I ask you: what were the must-read nonfiction texts of Shakespeare's time? How have they held up? Around the same time that Fitzgerald was writing Gatsby, Hesse was writing Siddhartha, and Joyce was writing Ulysses, what nonfiction works were being written that have even close to a comparable impact in the present day? I say this not to belittle nonfiction, as nonfiction is an essential piece of our literary world. However, the reason that some fiction and poetry stands up over time more than nonfiction is because literature exposes truths that have proven useful over time and across cultures. The idea that college and career readiness requires us to abandon this foundation shows a lack of understanding of both the lessons available through literature and the skills required to excel as a professional.

Image Credit: "Rotten to the Core" taken by Don Shall, published under an Attribution NonCommercial No Derivatives license.

NOTE on January 26, 2013: someone left a great comment about the comparison of fiction and non-fiction. While doing spam cleanup, I accidentally deleted it. Ugh. My apologies to the person who took the time to comment. END NOTE

If We Outsource Standards, Curriculum, and Assessment, What's Left?

Posted October 15th, 2012 by Bill

In the NY Times this weekend, they ran a story about parents in New York City schools boycotting field tests, or standardized tests written by Pearson that test what questions should go on the actual test.

The standardized test review and update is needed because the current standardized tests don't align with the Common Core standards.

From the article, a couple details emerge:

  • Pearson charges the city to give sample tests that will then help them write the test; in other words, the school district is paying for kids to act as free labor and lose instructional time so that Pearson can write a test that the district can buy;
  • The current tests aren't accurate enough to reliably indicate progress, and Pearson doesn't have enough information to make them accurate without using kids as subjects. From the article:
    The existing standardized tests no longer reflect what New York’s children are learning and do not accurately assess instruction, according to Adina Lopatin, deputy chief academic officer in the New York City Education Department.
  • The new tests that are in the process of being written (the ones that don't have final form yet) will supplant the old tests (the one's that aren't accurate enough) as a means used to measure a school's progress. In other words, the means to measure progress isn't anchored to anything real, as comparing the old to the new is a rotten apples to unripe oranges comparison.

The school district is paying Pearson to have kids lose instructional time and act as unpaid market research subjects so that Pearson knows enough to write the test that will then be used to determine whether the schools are doing their job teaching the new curriculum that aligns to the new standards.

Taking a step back: Pearson was part of a small group of textbook companies, pharmacuetical companies, for-profit educational companies, and technology firms that were the original endorsing partners for Common Core. This information is no longer readily available on the current Common Core web site, but it is still accessible via the Internet Archive of the Common Core web site. Pearson also lobbies at the state and national level around education bills, and actively courts educational decision makers with junkets and other perks.

To put it more succinctly, Pearson helped write the standards. Pearson paid lobbyists to help shape the laws. Pearson sells curriculum and assessments designed to help schools meet the new needs that they helped create, while actively courting educational decision makers with "fact-finding" trips. The fact that a school can use a Pearson-written to prepare for a Pearson-written exam, and that the results of that exam determine how successful or unsuccessful that school is doing, is troublesome.

And in fairness, other textbook, media, and technology companies are in the education space are doing similar things. Pearson, however, is one of the biggest, and they also provide a good example of how companies can inject themselves into multiple points of the supply chain to meet a demand that they helped create.

New standards require new curriculum - this curriculum must be bought or developed.

New curriculum requires new assessments - these assessments must be bought or developed.

New laws tying school and teacher performance to scores on tests raises the perceived importance of standards-aligned curriculum and assessments - schools ignore the standardized approach to instruction at their peril. Or, like so many others, when faced with mounting external pressures in a system that measures test scores as opposed to learning, they cheat.

And, coincidentally, companies like Pearson who were at the table when the standards were written just happen to offer curriculum aligned to those standards, and assessments aligned to the new curriculum. Given the number of states who have adopted Common Core, we are talking about a lot of money that schools and districts now need to spend - or, in other words, given the timeline of Common Core standards adoption and the penalties for "falling behind," many school districts now have a large incentive to play it safe and just buy the curriculum. The fact that this is also a way of funneling huge amounts of public money into private companies? Meh. You can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs, right?

So, to the parents in New York keeping their kids home: kudos. Keep it up.

National Standards and Local Communities

Posted November 27th, 2011 by Bill

The goal of state and national standards is laudable: ensure that every kid, anywhere in the States, gets an education of comparable content and quality. However, that idealism and good intent can get lost in a variety of ways; Tom Hoffman breaks down the various shortcomings of Commmon Core pretty effectively.

But, another side effect of national standards like Common Core is that it stimulates a need for curriculum and assessments aligned to these standards. To meet this new requirement at the state level, a service provider would need, in very general terms:

Taj's broken arm
  • a content team available to align content to the new standards;
  • a team to design and write new assessments, or to adapt existing assessments;
  • in-house expertise to align the new/adapted assessments to the standards;
  • marketing copy and sales teams to push these materials to decision makers at both the state and district level.

Obviously, the details required to get this done go beyond this general list. Equally obviously, the organizations best positioned to move into this new space are the ones who have been selling to education prior to the existence of the Common Core standards, and/or organizations who played a role in creating the Common Core standards.

As of March 31, 2010, there were 65 original Endorsing partners; currently (late November, 2011) the list has swelled to 154 partners. It's also interesting to look at the number of organizations that are Common Core Endorsing Partners, and also actively lobby at the national level around Education.

It's not surprising that companies and organizations that were selling to education, and who were active in developing the Common Core standards, would also be active in paying lobbyists to help influence the legislation that would tilt the balance toward the infrastructure they were developing to service the need they were helping to create. It's also perfectly legal, but it points out a consequence of national-level standards that have gained widespread adoption within the states: Now that states have adopted these standards, schools and districts within these states now need to adopt them. In this way, national standards streamline a process where local communities send money outside their local economy by buying products manufactured by national or multinational corporations.

Leaving the influence of lobbying on our educational system aside, I would love to see an educational system where local schools could partner with local independent booksellers to buy texts, and local libraries to assemble reading lists that could be accessed by students. Setting up a system that encouraged and supported schools to work with businesses and institutions within their local communities would actually enrich the communities. When a school district sends money to Pearson, or Scholastic, or McGraw Hill, or any other multinational textbook and assessment company, that money is gone from the community, forever. An equivalent investment in the local economy would both create work and provide a needed boost to local institutions within communities - this would have an immediate benefit to these communities. It's also difficult to argue with tying schools, students, and communities together within a strong public library system.

However, national-level standards require a national-level distribution system, and local booksellers do not have the time of the expertise to align their merchandise with standards. While schools and districts have the expertise to develop assessments that align with standards, most are not funded to do this work at scale at the local level (FWIW, I'm sure that there are some schools that are doing this, and are doing a great job - please let me know about them in the comments). In this way, state and national level standards help ensure that local money leaves communities and flows to multinational corporations. The fact that these same multinational companies get increased access to lawmakers via their lobbying efforts doesn't help.

Image Credit: "Taj's broken arm" taken by Craig Allen, published under an Attribution license.

Assessment

Posted August 15th, 2010 by Bill

One way of changing education is to change how we assess learning.

This isn't going to be a post about standards, but we need to start with them to get into the center of the discussion (this is not to say that standards are not a subject worthy of close consideration; rather, they are just not the main focus here, today).

  • Standards define curricular goals and objectives.
  • Textbook companies prepare packaged materials that are "aligned to the standards." These textbooks, in theory, are designed to address the curricular goals and objectives as defined by the standards (and for fun, ask a textbook rep to demonstrate how their texts "align to the standards." Ask them to define the process by which the texts are "aligned to standards." Then, get out the boots, and enjoy the hijinks that will ensue).
  • Student learning is measured by a standardized test that claims to assess a student's base of knowledge as measured against the standard.
  • The "quality" of a school is determined (in part or in whole) by how students have done on the test. Test results can be a key factor in closing down schools.
  • The "quality" of a teacher is determined (and in many of the merit pay schemes, teachers are rewarded or punished) based on student scores on these tests.

So, let's take an enormous, completely unjustifiable leap of faith and assume that the standards actually define something meaningful, for one reason and one reason only: this post is not about standards, it's about assessment.

When a curriculum is defined by a pre-packaged text, teachers and students are relegated to content consumers. Teachers get the text; they deliver the text; they test on the text, and teacher effectiveness is tied to how students perform on the test that purportedly measures how well students "know" the content that has been delivered to them. Any process used to "learn" the material is overshadowed by the means of assessment that defines the experience, and defines one's success or failure within that experience.

It's also worth noting that in lower performing schools, there is more motivation to stick with the "proven" or "traditional" route of using a standards-aligned text, as this provides a level of cover and plausible deniability should a school not meet growth goals. In an environment where sanctions accompany low test scores, using alternative means of working with kids is equated with gambling with kid's futures - unless, of course it's happening under the auspices of TFA, KIPP, or a charter school. Higher performing schools - where socioeconomic level appears to play a role - tend to have more freedom to experiment, largely because the threat of sanctions for "failure" is missing.

This is why serious discussions about assessment are a necessary part of the dialogue around improving education. What would an educational environment look like where, in addition to or instead of a standardized test, students had the opportunity to show their mastery via two portfolios: one defined by the school, and the second defined by the student?

The process of building a portfolio (ie, of crafting the assessment) is also a learning process. Selecting and justifying elements in a portfolio requires a level of critical, reflective thought that is not present in either preparing for or taking current standardized tests. It's a more efficient means of mastering both material and life skills than the assessments that currently claim to measure those skills.

What would teacher professional development look like if a teacher was assessed on how they provided feedback on student work? What if teachers developed professional portfolios that included curriculum they developed, modified, collaborated on, and/or shared? Most teachers create curriculum on a regular basis as workarounds for sections of the text that are weak or not suited for their classroom; what if creating and sharing these units was made an explicit requirement for growth and development as a teacher? What if this ongoing creativity and collaboration was a factor in assessing an educator's professional growth?

These shifts are possible now; they require a change in how we look at assessment, which potentially could inform changes in what and how we teach.

Changing assessment is hard. Generally, more individualized assessment takes more time. From a business place, it's hard to plan a "disruptive" business around this because you can't really streamline the time required for good feedback. The challenge (and therefore the opportunity here) is to make tools that simplify and streamline creating portfolios of work that demonstrate learning. The benefit - especially when compared to other forms of evaluation, and certainly to standardized testing - is that the process of creating and justifying the artifacts that demonstrate learning is also a process that supports and reinforces learning.

But this is a subtle point, and one that is often buried beneath the time required to assess portfolio-based projects versus the time required to process a standardized test. Ironically, the quest for efficiency in assessment has occurred at the expense of efficiency in learning.

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