The Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI), has released its draft standards for public comments. This is the combined effort of 48 states and 2 territories to create a curriculum that will be adopted by many states in the very near future. I want to put that document into context and encourage Kossacks to take advantage of this opportunity to get our voices heard. This may not be a perfect opportunity for us, but we need to start somewhere.
When No Child Left Behind passed in 2002, one of its provisions was that each state would organize its own standards and tests. This is a massive undertaking when you consider that at least seven different grade levels had to be tested each year and that there was never any reason to believe that state governments had any clue how to set standards and write tests. However, that is what we have gotten for the past six years. The costs have been high, and the standards and tests have been all over the place, from bad to worse, but the states have done what has been asked of them.
All of the states except Alaska and Texas soon realized what should have been obvious from the beginning—states don’t want to set standards and write tests, and they are not good at setting standards and writing tests. Furthermore, there is no reason why different states should have different standards. To ease their burden, CCSSI was created when states decided to combine their efforts, and states can voluntarily set aside the standards they wrote themselves in favor of the CCSSI standards. Kentucky has already done so, even though the CCSSI standards are still in rough draft form, and many other states almost certainly will do so in the next few months once the standards are set.
This effort is one step forward and two steps back. On the one hand, the CCSSI standards are more reasonable than most of the state standards. (I’ll say more below. Keep in mind more reasonable is a relative term.) On the other hand, this effort has once again gotten many of the major forces in education to endorse an effort that strengthens NCLB, and thereby weakens our educational system. CCSSI’s supporters include AFT, NEA, PTA, and several professional teaching and education associations.
CCSSI is looking for feedback from now until April 2, which is a very short window. I will use the rest of this diary to explain why this is a harmful document, first explaining why its very existence is harmful, and then pointing out some flaws within the current draft.
The case against standards
Personally, I do not believe that having national standards is any worse than having state standards. Like many of you, I live in a politically dysfunctional state, and so I do not believe significant responsibility should be given to it. Also, I don’t have anything against standards—I am a long-time member of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, and I generally support their standards. In NCLB, however, standards are tied to very crude high-stakes tests, and this does massive amounts of damage. Schools are judged on how well their students perform on those tests, and no concern is given to how long the students have been in the school, what the attendance rate is, how well prepared the students came in from a feeder school, what the poverty rate is, and so forth. When I started my teaching career, I taught students in 11th and 12th grades who entered my class at the 5th grade level. Most of them improved two grade levels within six months, but had NCLB been in existence at the time I would have been considered a failure because those students were still below grade level. (I say this not to show off—it’s actually not that difficult to teach basic math to older students once those students have decided to move their lives in a positive direction, and those were the students in my classes. I say this to point out how ridiculous it is to use crude tests.) Furthermore, being deemed a failure by NCLB would have made it difficult for the school to keep its staff and funding.
The tests that have been used so far are so crude that they only allow for at most three levels of students—very good, acceptable, and unacceptable. In my current job, I teach exceptionally good students, a role that would be a waste of time if my school’s main concern was moving the acceptable students up to very good and moving the unacceptable students up to acceptable. Because the tests are high-stakes, a lot of schools pay a lot of attention to them, which means the students who are very good no matter what happens and the students who are unacceptable no matter what happens are not worthy of those school’s attention. Moving a student from the first percentile to the tenth percentile is a waste of time if the tenth percentile is still graded as a complete failure and your career hinges on the results of these tests.
Furthermore, the standards are so crude that they only consider two subjects: English and math. Forget the whole child, following one’s interests, and <sarcasm>cute little extras like music, art, and gym</sarcasm>, and, while you’re at it, forget science and history and a whole lot of other things as well. If schools want to be successful by these standards, then they need their students focused on English and math. This covers third grade through eleventh.
The idea of national standards is a very hazy idea because it is impossible to set standards for students you know nothing about. If I came up to you today and asked you what standards I should set for myself, you would question my sanity because it does not make sense to have strangers set standards for you. The people on this committee, however, and the groups that support them, don’t see that problem. I am giving one of my regular tests in the morning, and some of my students will be disappointed with an A-, while others will be happy with a C. The people writing these standards, however, think all of my students need to know that a nonzero rational number multiplied by an irrational number gives an irrational number. For many of my gifted students, that’s a fact that they would find interesting, and for a student studying Linear Algebra as a high school senior or in college, that could provide a useful example of some of the concepts they are trying to understand. For most students, however, I just don’t see why anybody would consider it important that they know that. If you think sets and fields are interesting, it’s a fact you’ll probably find interesting. If you don’t think sets and fields are interesting, your life will be fine without knowing the rules that apply to irrational numbers. You might think that it would be useful if the committee set minimal standards for students, but they have not attempted to do so—they have set high standards.
The case against these particular standards
When I look at the actual draft standards, some of them, like the one I just cited, seem bizarre. I have only read the high school math standards so far, since that’s my field. I don’t believe the standards are bizarre because the people writing them were stupid—I believe the standards are bizarre because there is no significant overriding vision for them and because committees generally come up with uneven products. CCSSI wanted standards that are fewer, clearer, and higher, but their list is long, it is very difficult to figure out what some of their standards truly mean, and nobody has explained how schools that could not meet the old standards are going to meet higher standards. It will be interesting to see how well the draft holds up under the revision process.
Some of the standards are an effort to involve the thinking process in mathematics. Of course, this is a great goal to have and is a goal I remind myself of every day. However, standards backed up by high-stakes tests are a horrible way to encourage the thinking process. One of the standards is, "For a pyramid or cone, give a heuristic argument to show why its volume is one-third of its height times the area of its base." Frankly, I have no idea what this means. I understand the formula they are talking about, and I understand that you can test the formula by filling containers with water, but is that really what they want to make sure that schools are teaching and students are understanding? How so? I’m just not exactly sure what it means for a student to understand this idea. If this is attached to high-stakes tests, though, then it becomes my job to somehow figure out what they are talking about and make sure my students can handle it. If I decided that there are better examples of heuristic arguments, better ways to understand this concept, or more important ways for my students to spend their time, then I would need to keep that opinion to myself.
Other goals would reshape current curricula. For example, one of the goals is to use the mean and standard deviation of a data set to fit it to a normal distribution and to estimate population percentages, using calculators, spreadsheets, and tables to estimate the areas under the normal curve. Personally, I am glad that more students are going to gain an understanding of this concept. Whether or not all students should learn it, however, is not a simple decision, and currently a large percentage do not. For most students, this lesson would take several days. If you want students to understand it on a conceptual level and have an opportunity to apply it to a realistic application, then you are talking a few weeks. So, a standard like this puts a large strain on a school curriculum, taking control away from local schools, and many schools are already trying with mixed success to meet many of the other standards listed in the document. Furthermore, using a calculator to solve this can mean many different things. This calculation can be done on a new calculator by knowing where that function is found on the menu. To do it on an older calculator or spreadsheet, the calculation requires using an unfriendly menu or using calculus notation. I’m not sure whether the committee wants students to have one of the current generation calculators (which cost about $140), since there are very few other places in the document where such a calculator, or any technology for that matter, would be useful.
Now is the time to contact leaders
As I said at the beginning of this document, I think now is a good time to let your voice be heard on these issues. Liberal viewpoints generally have not had a role in NCLB, which was based on a bipartisan consensus that we should do whatever Bush II says, whether or not it made any sense. Obama and Education Secretary Duncan have not questioned NCLB at all. As people see the effects of NCLB, though, there is an opening for an alternative point of view. Diane Ravitch, who served in the Bush I Administration, recently wrote a book explaining why the current fascination with standards and testing does not help students or schools. Now is a good time to contact CCSSI and your state and national government representatives and to tell them that you want schools to receive support and not harassment. Title I, which was created to support programs that teach students in poverty, is now spending much of its budget on testing and punishing schools. Now is the time to explain that setting high standards takes control away from our schools and sets them up for failure. Also, if you belong to an educational association, including NEA or AFT, now is a good time to ask them why they are supporting more NCLB when they should instead be supporting teachers and their students. To comment on the actual standards, follow the link at the top of the diary—the deadline is April 2.