By Mary Grabar | June 13, 2013
This originally appeared here and I wish to thank Mary
for allowing me to publish her work. There are three parts to this series and all three are posted here. Please take the time to read these articles thoroughly. RK
It took the sleeping giant a while to figure out what was
going on with the Common Core (so-called) State Standards. Put together largely
by a well-connected Washington, D.C., non-profit called Achieve, these
education “standards” were attached to the Race-to-the-Top contest in 2009 for
$4.35 billion in stimulus funds. Forty-eight states entered the contest. Today,
promoters claim 45 states plus the District of Columbia are still signed up,
but a bipartisan grassroots effort is changing this.
While Alaska, Nebraska, Virginia and Texas refused to
adopt Common Core standards, the Michigan governor signed legislation passed by
both houses that defunds Common Core. In Indiana and Pennsylvania, lawmakers
have voted to pause on implementation. Seven other states are presenting
serious challenges, and the Republican National Committee recently adopted a
resolution rejecting the standards.
Common Core defenders seem to be a bit surprised that the
public should even notice. They have been pushing back with op-eds in the Wall
Street Journal and other places.
The New Math
In the May 6 Wall Street Journal, UCLA mathematics
professors Edward Frenkel and Hung-His Wu began their attack on the RNC’s
resolution—“Republicans Should Love ‘Common Core’”—with claims that could have
come from a sales brochure. Common Core standards, they insisted, are “rigorous
academic standards in mathematics and English language arts” that are the
“culmination of a meticulous, 20-year process initiated by the states and
involving teachers, educators, business leaders and policy makers from across
the country and both sides of the aisle.”
The Common Core standards are needed, they warned, to
halt a “deep crisis” in math education, which is coming from a
“fraction-phobia,” which in turn arises from “incomprehensible and irrelevant
textbooks” that explain fractions by using pizza slices or “ill-defined notions
like ratio.” Their own presumably superior explanations involve ratios “defined
geometrically as points on a number line,” with multiplication then being “the
area of the rectangle formed by the two line segments.”
My Ph.D. is in English but I understood the “concept of
ratios” in sixth grade, as well as the formula for multiplying numerators and
denominators. I do not follow their explanation.
Common Core also confuses students and their parents by
stressing word problems and explanations over understanding concepts and
formulas. Students who do not come up with the correct answers can acquire
partial credit for explanations—offering a ready means of closing the
“achievement gap,” the overriding goal of the Obama Department of Education.
Parents across the country are alarmed, though, when their children who do the
math correctly only get partial credit when they do not provide explanations
using the educators’ jargon and charts. For example, one school boy had points
taken off even though he correctly identified one bridge as being longer than
another. The reason? He did not “explain” why through the elaborate codes and
byzantine drawings that Common Core demands.
Earlier this year, educator James Shuls, in his article
for
Education News, “
Why We Need School Choice,”
explained why he had to withdraw his children from their public school:
administrators refused to consider his pleas to return to the simpler
pre-Common Core math. (He reproduces some of their homework assignments in his
article.)
Barry Garelick, who is credentialed to teach middle
school and high school math, in his article, “
The Pedagogical Agenda of Common
Core Math Standards,” in the same publication, reported that at
seminars on implementation “process” still trumps “content.” He concludes that
adoption of the math standards “will be a mandate for reform math—a method of
teaching math that eschews memorization, favors group work and student-centered
learning, puts the teacher in the role of ‘guide’ rather than ‘teacher’ and
insists on students being able to explain the reasons why procedures and
methods work for procedures and methods that they may not be able to perform.”
Professors Frenkel and Wu ignore such issues, as well as
cost and constitutionality. They instead use a small problem (explanation of
fractions) as an excuse to revamp an entire system. Even if their explanations
proved to be better than the old ones (giving them the benefit of the doubt)
they could simply suggest changes to textbooks or publish new ones. No doubt,
in a free marketplace, their superior ideas would prevail.
Common Core for Common Knowledge
Another thin argument for Common Core came a week after
Frenkel and Wu’s column. On May 13 the
Wall Street Journal published a
column by Sol Stern, of the Manhattan Institute, and Joel Klein, former
chancellor of New York public schools and currently vice president of News
Corp. (parent company of the
Wall Street Journal) and CEO of Amplify,
the News Corp.’s education division that offers a plethora of Common-Core
aligned digital curriculum materials
for sale. They wrote that Common Core
presents an alternative to “progressive education philosophy,” which “opposes
any set curriculum for the schools.”
“Progressives,” they explained, “tend to favor
pedagogical approaches in the classroom such as ‘child-centered’ instruction
and ‘teaching for social justice,’ rather than rigorous academic content.”
Stern has been a long-time opponent of progressive
education and a promoter of E.D. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge curriculum program.
Hirsch is an old-style liberal whose idea of
Cultural Literacy, also the
title of his 1987 bestseller, is aptly described by
Wikipedia as “the idea that reading
comprehension requires not just formal decoding skills but also wide-ranging
cultural background knowledge.” Hirsch found that a common knowledge in the
sciences and humanities was necessary for cultural cohesion and academic
achievement. For this, of course, he was reviled by progressives.
Stern believes Common Core (as “standards”) can be used
to adopt the Core Knowledge program that has proven beneficial in the ten
schools in which it was implemented in New York City (under the direction of
Klein). In the Summer 2012 issue of City Journal, Stern wrote that the
“standards” are “creating a historic opportunity to introduce Hirsch’s
curriculum to many more schools and classrooms.”
Furthermore, according to Stern, “the standards
themselves make clear that they do not constitute a curriculum; they merely
state what children should know at the end of each grade level and the skills
they must acquire to stay on course toward college or career readiness. Each
school system still needs to find a curriculum—that is, the particular academic
content taught by teachers from lesson to lesson and from grade to grade—that
will help its students achieve the standards.” Common Core, presumably leaves
the “content-rich curriculum” up to the districts, while at the same time it
refers (quoting from the standards themselves) to “some particular forms of
content, including mythology, foundational U.S. documents, and Shakespeare.”
Stern seems to be reassured by both the vague references to the classics and
promises of freedom allowed to the districts.
But that is not the way the authors of the report
evaluating Common Core national tests see it (“On the Road to Assessing Deeper
Learning: The Status of Smarter Balanced and PARCC Assessment Consortia,”
produced by the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards &
Student Testing (CRESST)). The UCLA professors concluded that the new
assessments will send “powerful signals to schools about the meaning of the
CCSS [Common Core State Standards] and what students know and are able to do.
If history is a guide, educators will align curriculum and teaching to what is
tested, and what is not assessed largely will be ignored.”
This and what other Common Core testing enthusiasts have
said should have injected a jolt of reality into Stern’s and Klein’s wishful
thinking. Oddly, as we shall see in the next installment,
Part II, they are the very same progressive
educators that Stern has opposed in the past. What these progressives mean by
tests/assessments is very different from what most of us think.
Common Core: Teaching to the New Test – PART II
Characteristics of “teacher-centered” education include a
“core curriculum based on the traditional disciplines,” emphasis on learning
content and skills, and letter and/or percentage grades based on tests that
determine the student’s aptitude and mastery of the subject matter. Yet, Common
Core ignores such research.
The New Testing Converts
Although scores have slipped and classroom discipline has
deteriorated, progressive teachers insist that the classroom of old, with its
discipline and tests, was repressive. But with Common Core, suddenly, testing
opponents become advocates.
Among the converts is Columbia Teachers College professor
Lucy Calkins, whose progressive ideas and programs have been the object of Sol
Stern’s attacks. Ironically, last summer, Stern blasted Calkins’s progressive
“child-centered”
reading and writing program “that
disdained content knowledge and any prescribed curriculum.”
Calkins is co-author of the popular Pathways to the
Common Core: Accelerating Achievement. This teacher’s guide decries the
“skill and drill” of the previous administration’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB)
program in favor of “deep reading” and “higher-level thinking.”
The publisher, Heinemann, also produces ready-to-go
curricular material and offers workshops on Common Core by Calkins and her
colleagues.
Another convert to testing is Stanford education
professor
Linda Darling-Hammond, Obama’s
education director on his presidential transition team, and
Bill Ayers’s choice for
Education Secretary, as he campaigned in the
Huffington Post in January
2009. She, of course, did not get that job, but was instead put in charge of
$176 million of stimulus funds to develop tests under one of two consortia (to
bypass the questions of constitutionality that would arise by administering one
test).
Darling-Hammond has been promoting Common Core widely. In
a 2009 Harvard Educational Review article, she announced that Common
Core would eclipse “the narrow views of the last eight years” by encouraging
“deep understanding,” employing “multiple measures of learning and
performance,” and “developing creativity, critical thinking skills, and the
capacity to innovate.” In 2010, in Education Week, she again asserted
that her assessment system would go “beyond the recall of facts” (of
NCLB testing). These new assessments would show “students’ abilities to
evaluate evidence, problem solve and understand context,” she promised.
Preview from Sample Test Questions
Testing will not get underway until the 2014/2015 school
year, although at least one state, Arizona, is preparing by incorporating
Common Core test questions into its own tests.
But we have a preview of what test questions will be like
in Joan Herman and Robert Linn’s previously cited CRESST report. The authors
give four examples of test questions offered by the two consortia, PARCC
(Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers) and Smarter
Balanced (Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium), the latter Darling-Hammond’s
group.
The first Smarter Balanced Sample Performance Assessment
Task for 11th grade English Language Arts uses the topic, “Nuclear Power:
Friend or Foe?” This complex and highly contentious (and non-literary) issue is
thrust upon teenagers in a 20-minute discussion where the teacher is
instructed: “Using stimuli such as a chart and photos, the teacher prepares
students for Part 1 of the assessment by leading students in a discussion of
the use of nuclear power.” The discussion should entail having students “share
prior knowledge about nuclear power” and discuss “the use and controversies
involving nuclear power.” Afterwards, for 50 minutes, students are to complete
“reading and pre-writing activities,” in which they “read and take notes on a
series of Internet sources about the pros and cons of nuclear power.” They then
“respond to two constructed response questions” that ask students to evaluate
the credibility of the arguments discussed.
The writing assignment directs students to behave as
activists as they use 70 minutes to “compose a full-length, argumentative
report for their congressperson in which they use textual evidence” to justify
their pro or con positions.
The report authors look for DOK, or Norman Webb’s Depth
of Knowledge criteria, a favorite measurement tool of progressive educators.
DOK distinguishes presumed levels of knowledge, from 1 to 4, broken down as 1)
recall, skill/concept, 2) application of concepts, 3) applications requiring
abstract thinking, and 4) extended analysis that requires “synthesis and
analysis across multiple contexts and non-routine applications. “ Level 1 is
the lowly disparaged “skill and drill,” the ability to recall facts. “Deep” and
its cognates pepper the Common Core academic, promotional, and sales
literature.
Open-ended questions and group projects that test for
such high DOK levels, however, open the door to subjective analysis. How does
one assess “creativity” and the “capacity to innovate”? The nuclear power
assignment allows for only the shallowest kind of analysis when it comes to
understanding the science, but records a high level on DOK.
On May 29, the Smarter Balanced consortium also released
sample questions. For eleventh grade ELA (English/Language Arts), the questions
similarly concerned ideological and trivial questions about public art,
meditation, and “sustainable fashion.” The other questions concerned anonymous
passages written in a pedestrian prose style or spoken by a
computer-generated voice about
Ferris wheels, a volcanic island, arachnids, and fluoridation. These questions
did not even approach the complexity of content and style associated with
classic works of literature.
For sixth-grade math, the CRESST report showcased another
activity-based assignment that involved group discussions on “Taking a Field
Trip.” The teacher is to introduce students to the topic and “activate prior
knowledge of planning field trips” by leading students in a “whole class
discussion” about previous field trips and “creating a chart” of the top
choices determined by a class vote, “followed by a whole class discussion on
the top two or three choices.”
Student tasks then are to: Recommend the place for the
field trip, based on the class vote; determine the per-student cost for various
choices; evaluate a student’s recommendation about going to the zoo based on a
given cost chart; and write a short note to the teacher arguing for a
destination.
The next assessment, for PARCC seventh-grade ELA, is
based on using textual evidence from books and articles about Amelia Earhart.
It seemed to be directed in a feminist direction, i.e., involving discussions
about Earhart’s “heroism” as a woman.
The last sample question is a PARCC Performance-Based
Mathematics Task Prototype for High School, “Golf Balls in Water,” which,
according to the report, “exemplified DOK4 through a multipart investigation of
linear relationships using an experiment involving the effect on the water
level of adding golf balls to a glass of water.” It is not clear if students
are to do this as a group.
The authors of the CRESST report conclude, “the increased
intellectual rigor—DOK level—that both consortia’s assessments are intended to
embody is both a tremendous strength and a potential challenge to
implementation.” While praising the new assessments’ abilities to “address much
deeper levels of knowledge, application, communication, and problem solving
than do current state assessments,” they note that the “availability of
resources” will make a difference in how well they are accepted.
The vendors are standing at the ready to accept
“resources” from taxpayers.
The Failure of Constructivist Learning and DOK
As Barry Garelick pointed out
(see Part I) in his
article criticizing Common Core math, “[students] are called upon to think
critically before acquiring the analytic tools with which to do so.” In the
nuclear power assignment students are asked to make quick judgments and then
act as advocates. Such pedagogy opens the door to indoctrination.
This kind of pedagogy also fails to improve student
learning as Paul A. Kirschner, John Sweller, and Richard E. Clark reveal in
their 2006 Educational Psychologist article, “Why Minimal Guidance
During Instruction Does Not Work: An Analysis of the Failure of Constructivist,
Discovery, Problem-Based, Experiential, and Inquiry-Based Teaching.” They
conclude, “After a half-century associated with instruction using minimal
guidance, it appears that there is no body of research supporting the
technique. In so far as there is any evidence from controlled studies, it
almost uniformly supports direct, strong instructional guidance rather than
constructivist-based minimal guidance during the instruction of novice to
intermediate learners.”
One of the cited studies found that medical students who
used problem-based learning (PBL) made more errors than those who were taught
the traditional way. The problem with such minimal guidance pedagogy is that
mental energy is wasted as the brain is asked to simultaneously search for knowledge,
pull together data, and apply it.
Such studies back up what common sense and hundreds of
years of education tell us: that one needs a base of knowledge first in order
to know what to look for when conducting research, doing problem-solving, and
even reading. This is precisely what E.D. Hirsch found when he first analyzed
reading skills: those students who did not have a base of knowledge had
difficulty in reading comprehension. E.D. Hirsch’s observations have been borne
out by an analysis of studies conducted by the late Harvard education professor
Jeanne Chall in her book, The Academic Achievement Challenge. Chall
found that the traditional mode of teaching, “teacher-centered,” was more
effective in academic achievement than the progressive “student-centered”
mode—especially for low-and-middle-income students. Characteristics of
“teacher-centered” education include a “core curriculum based on the
traditional disciplines,” emphasis on learning content and skills, and letter
and/or percentage grades based on tests that determine the student’s aptitude
and mastery of the subject matter.
Yet, Common Core ignores such research. In almost every
way it follows failed methods of “student-centered” learning by whatever name
it goes by—constructivist, discovery, problem-based, experiential, or
inquiry-based.
So we need to wonder: do the bureaucrats have a different
idea of education in mind? Do they not believe that the purpose of schools is
to produce independent, civically engaged adults knowledgeable about science,
history and literature, and prepared to employ their skills in writing and
math?
The words of the most prominent test developer, the
Secretary of Education, and our president, as we shall see, suggest a radically
different view. The new “assessments” seem to be intended to eliminate
excellence, promote collective thinking, and track “non-cognitive skills.”
We’ll take a look at what they have said about such brave new world
“assessments” in
Part III.
Common Core: Teaching to the New Test- Part III
Common Core replaces individual excellence with
collectivism. The rigorous debates between two individuals or two teams are
replaced by consensus-building in “democratic” discussions in groups. Short
in-class Internet research projects of less than two hours replace the in-depth
research papers written individually, and over many days. There is barely time
to form one’s own thoughts.
Common Core’s Promotion of Collectivism and Infantile
Tasks
Common Core basically is the “student-centered” learning
based on the ideas of progressive education theorist John Dewey, and disproven
by the numerous studies analyzed by Jeanne Chall.
As Chall showed in her book, The Academic Achievement
Challenge, progressive ideas have not raised academic achievement levels,
especially when it comes to the lower and middle classes, where they are used
most often. Private schools have consistently produced better results and have
relied on a “teacher-centered” model. Now the Obama administration wants to
impose standards that produce lower academic achievement on everyone. Call it
the great new leveling.
As indication of lower standards, the education
bureaucrats are adding a new component to ELA (English/Language Arts)
assessments: “Speaking and Listening.”
Teaching “Speaking and Listening” skills is now deemed to
be necessary even for eleventh- and twelfth-graders because of supposedly new
demands of a 21st century technological age. These speaking and listening skills,
however, do not entail public speaking or debate. Rather, they promote the
basic behaviors once taught in kindergarten. They infantilize students, while
pressuring them to conform to group consensus.
Under Common Core “Speaking and Listening” standards,
students are rated under “Comprehension and Collaboration” through three steps.
The first is to “initiate and participate effectively in a range of
collaborative discussions . . . with diverse partners on grades 11-12 topics.”
Under this criterion are four components: a) preparation for discussion by
reading and researching; b) “work with peers to promote civil, democratic
discussions and decision-making, set clear goals and deadlines, and establish
individual roles; c) propel conversations through posing and responding to
questions;” and, d) “respond thoughtfully to diverse perspectives.”
The second criterion calls for presenting data in diverse
formats and multimedia, evaluating a speaker’s point of view, and then making a
clear presentation, with strategic use of digital media. Students are evaluated
on how well they adapt “to a variety of contexts and tasks, demonstrating a
command of formal English, when indicated or appropriate.”
Note that this is not debate, as traditionally
understood, in which debaters prove the superiority of their positions with
evidence and delivery. Instead, there is mushy collaboration and uncritical
openness to “diverse” perspectives.
Similarly, the writing tasks under Common Core slightly
resemble research and writing of yore, but when looked at closely we see that
students will be asked to uncritically gather and compile “evidence.” There is
no assurance that students will have the needed knowledge to discern among all
the information, like Internet sources and random isolated “primary texts,” to
be able to make judgments, whether in writing or speaking. Behavioral
modification is clearly an intent with the speaking and listening standards,
however.
Common Core replaces individual excellence with
collectivism. The rigorous debates between two individuals or two teams are
replaced by consensus-building in “democratic” discussions in groups. Short
in-class Internet research projects of less than two hours replace the in-depth
research papers written individually, and over many days. There is barely time
to form one’s own thoughts.
The Real Goals of the Test Maker: Closing the
“Achievement Gap”
In many ways, Common Core is an attempt to fulfill the
Obama administration’s overriding goal of closing the “achievement gap.”
President Obama described this goal to parents and students at a townhall in
Washington in March 2011, when he said, “’Too often what we have been doing is
using [standardized] tests to punish students or to, in some cases, punish
schools.’” The March 29, 2011, Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported
that “Obama said Monday that students should take fewer standardized tests and
school performance should be measured in other ways than just exam results.”
Common Core is designed to do that precisely. Short
reading assignments in groups ensure that lagging readers keep up. Group
projects and projects that presumably test for “creativity” and DOK levels
allow for grade redistribution and extra points. (To iterate from
Part II, DOK or
Norman Webb’s Depth of Knowledge criteria is a favorite measurement tool of
progressive educators.)
Linda Darling-Hammond, the Obama education transition
team leader, now directing the development of one of the two tests, has been a
long-time advocate of closing the achievement gap through such progressive
educational strategies.
She discussed it in her November 2009 speech to the Grow
Your Own organization in Chicago. The speech was then published in a 2011
collection titled Grow Your Own Teachers. Significantly, this is a title
under the Columbia Teachers College “Teaching for Social Justice” series edited
by Bill Ayers, the terrorist Weatherman-turned-education-professor, and close
Chicago associate of Obama. Echoing her editor’s exaggerated claims and style,
Darling-Hammond rejected “the imaginary model classroom where every student is
learning in the same way at the same pace at the same time,” for a classroom
culture of “revision and redemption.” She insisted, “Students can learn at high
levels if they have the opportunity to undertake a challenging task with clear
guidance and scaffolding, and if they receive feedback from peers with a rubric
so that they can see what the standards are, and then attempt it again. . . .”
In Darling-Hammond’s estimation, the opportunities for revision, with the
additional help of “scaffolding,” should replace objective testing. Frequent
assessment should be aligned to the student’s previous level and should be used
only as a guide for future learning–and not to place the student in competition
to others. Her vision of academic equity in assessment outcomes aligns with the
idea of redistributing funds to poorer school districts, as the Department
outlined in the February 27 report, For Each and Every Child—A Strategy for
Education Equity and Excellence.
Arne Duncan’s Promises
Darling-Hammond was praised by Education Secretary Arne
Duncan in his keynote speech to the American Educational Research Association
(AERA) conference this year on April 30. Duncan promised conference goers
holding signs
protesting against testing that the new Common Core
assessments being produced by Darling-Hammond would be to their liking. He
mollified them by criticizing the “almost obsessive culture around testing”
that hurts the “most vulnerable learners and narrows the curriculum.” He said
it was “heartbreaking to hear a child identify himself as ‘below basic’ or ‘I’m
a one out of four.’”
Nothing was said about efforts to help such children
improve their scores and reach “‘above basic.’” Nor was anything said about
high achievers, many of whom have left public schools because of the longtime
emphasis on not leaving any child behind.
What was proposed were
new assessments, assessments that would test students’
“soft skills” and “non-cognitive skills.” Duncan cited Paul Tough’s
“outstanding recent book,”
How Children Succeed, as well as “a multitude
of studies, and James Heckman’s analysis of the Perry Preschool Project.”
Duncan declared that “the development of skills like grit, resilience, and
self-regulation early in life are essential to success later in life”—a direct
reference to the Education Department’s report, “Promoting Grit, Tenacity, and
Perseverance: Critical Factors for Success in the 21st Century” that promotes
the disturbing ideas of behavioral psychologists interviewed in Tough’s book.
A “sea-change” is underway, Duncan said, thanks to
educators’ favorite progressive:
“As Linda Darling-Hammond noted recently, ‘The question
for policymakers has shifted down from, “Can we afford assessments of deeper
learning” to “Can the United States afford not to have such high-quality
assessments?”’”
Duncan’s stated hope in this speech, that a “richer
curriculum” would follow these assessments, gives the lie to the idea that
Common Core has nothing to do with curriculum.
Darling-Hammond was listed in the program at this AERA
conference. Her colleague and collaborator Bill Ayers, who
characterized Arne Duncan as “Obama’s ideological soul
mate,” was listed on the program as participating in eight different events,
including a tribute to Hugo Chavez. They were likely in the audience, nodding
in approval to Duncan’s words, and not at all worried that our schools would
abandon progressivism for a traditional pedagogy, like E.D. Hirsch’s.
Mary Grabar, Ph.D., has taught college English for over
twenty years. She is the founder of the Dissident Prof Education Project, Inc., an education
reform initiative that offers information and resources for students, parents,
and citizens. The motto, "Resisting the Re-Education of America,"
arose in part from her perspective as a very young immigrant from the former
Communist Yugoslavia (Slovenia specifically). She writes extensively and is the
editor of EXILED.
Ms. Grabar is also a contributor to SFPPR News
& Analysis.