Rotten To The Common Core - II

Protest in San Francisco

‘I was naïve about Common Core.’

- Carol Burris, principal of South Side High School in New York. She was named the 2010 New York State Outstanding Educator by the School Administrators Association of New York State.

Here’s a powerful piece about how an award-winning principal went from being a Common Core supporter to an opponent. This was written by Carol Burris, principal of South Side High School in New York. She was named the 2010 New York State Outstanding Educator by the School Administrators Association of New York State. 

She is one of the co-authors of the principals’ letter against evaluating teachers by student test scores, which has been signed by 1,535 New York principals.

By Carol Burris

When I first read about the Common Core State Standards, I cheered.  I believe that our schools should teach all students (except for those who have severe learning disabilities), the skills, habits and knowledge that they need to be successful in post secondary education. That doesn’t mean that every teenager must be prepared to enter Harvard, but it does mean that every young adult, with few exceptions, should at least be prepared to enter their local community college. That is how we give students a real choice.

I even co-authored a book, “Opening the Common Core,” on how to help schools meet that goal.  It is a book about rich curriculum and equitable teaching practices, not about testing and sanctions. We wrote it because we thought that the Common Core would be a student-centered reform based on principles of equity.

I confess that I was naïve. I should have known in an age in which standardized tests direct teaching and learning, that the standards themselves would quickly become operationalized by tests. Testing, coupled with the evaluation of teachers by scores, is driving its implementation. The promise of the Common Core is dying and teaching and learning are being distorted.  The well that should sustain the Core has been poisoned.

I hear about those distortions every day.  Many of the teachers in my high school are also the parents of young children.  They come into my office with horror stories regarding the incessant pre-testing, testing and test prep that is taking place in their own children’s classrooms.  Last month, a colleague gave me a multiple-choice quiz taken by his seven-year old son during music.  Here is a question:

 Kings and queens COMMISSIONED Mozart to write symphonies for celebrations and ceremonies. What does COMMISSION mean?

1. to force someone to do work against his or her will

2. to divide a piece of music into different movements

3. to perform a long song accompanied by an orchestra

4. to pay someone to create artwork or a piece of music
   

Whether or not learning the word ‘commission’ is appropriate for second graders could be debated—I personally think it is a bit over the top.  What is of deeper concern, however, is that during a time when 7 year olds should be listening to and making music, they are instead taking a vocabulary quiz.

I think that the reason for the quiz is evident to anyone who has been following the reform debate.  The Common Core places an extraordinary emphasis on vocabulary development. Probably, the music teacher believes she must do her part in test prep. More than likely she is being evaluated in part by the English Language Arts test scores of the building. Teachers are engaged in practices like these because they are pressured and afraid, not because they think the assessments are educationally sound. Their principals are pressured and nervous about their own scores and the school’s scores. Guaranteed, every child in the class feels that pressure and trepidation as well.

An English teacher in my building came to me with a ‘reading test’ that her third grader took. Her daughter did poorly on the test.  As both a mother and an English teacher she knew that the difficulty of the passage and the questions were way over grade level.  Her daughter, who is an excellent reader, was crushed.  She and I looked on the side of the copy of the quiz and found the word “Pearson.” The school, responding to pressure from New York State, had purchased test prep materials from the company that makes the exam for the state.

I am troubled that a company that has a multi-million dollar contract to create tests for the state should also be able to profit from producing test prep materials. I am even more deeply troubled that this wonderful little girl, whom I have known since she was born, is being subject to this distortion of what her primary education should be.

There are so many stories that I could tell–the story of my guidance counselor’s sixth-grade, learning disabled child who feels like a failure due to constant testing, a principal of an elementary school who is furious with having to use to use a book he deems inappropriate for third graders because his district bought the State Education Department approved common core curriculum, and the frustration of math teachers due to the ever-changing rules regarding the use of calculators on the tests.  And all of this is mixed with the toxic fear that comes from knowing you will be evaluated by test results and that “your score” will be known to any of your parents who ask.

When state education officials chide, “Don’t drill for the test, it does not work”, teachers laugh. Of course test prep works. Every parent who has ever paid hundreds of dollars for SAT prep knows it works —but no parent is foolish enough to think that the average 56 point ‘coaching’ jump in an SAT score means that their child is more “college ready.” 

Test scores are a rough proxy for learning. Tests imperfectly examine selected domains of skills, so that we can infer what students know. Real learning occurs in the mind of the learner when she makes connections with prior learning, makes meaning, and retains that knowledge in order to create additional meaning from new information.  In short, with tests we see traces of learning, not learning itself.

What occurs in a “data driven”, high-stakes learning environment is that the full domain of what should be learned narrows to those items tested.  The Common Core, for example, wants students to grow in five skill areas in English Language Arts — reading, writing, speaking, listening and collaboration. But the Common Core tests will only measure reading and writing.  Parents can expect that the other three will be neglected as teachers frantically try to prepare students for the difficult and high-stakes tests.  What gets measured gets done, and make no mistake: “reformers” understand that full well.  In fact, they count on it. They see data, not children.  For the corporate reformers, test data constitute the bottom-line profits that they watch.

There is no one more knowledgeable about school change and systemic reforms than Michael Fullan.  He is a renowned international authority on school reform, having been actively engaged in both its implementation as well in the analysis of reform results.  I had the pleasure of listening to him this week at the Long Island ASCD spring conference.

Fullan told us that the present reforms are led by the wrong drivers of change — individual accountability of teachers, linked to test scores and punishment, cannot be successful in transforming schools.  He told us that the Common Core standards will fall of their own weight because standards and assessments, rather than curriculum and instruction are driving the Common Core.  He explained that the right driver of school change is capacity building.  Data should be used as a strategy for improvement, not for accountability purposes.  The Common Core is a powerful tool, but it is being implemented using the wrong drivers.

Fullan helped to successfully lead the transformation of schools in Ontario, Canada, and he has tried to influence our national conversation, but his advice has been shunned.  I will close with a final quote from Fullan and let readers draw their own conclusions:

Business Execs: Fight for Common Core Before It's Too Late

By Sean Cavanagh

Washington

Representatives of major corporations today urged their peers in the business community to take up the fight to defend the Common Core State Standards—and warned them to steel themselves for opposition from some quarters, and apathy from others.

At an education forum held by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce at its headquarters, leaders from Intel Corp., Cisco Systems, and the ExxonMobil Foundation described their efforts to promote the standards through different strategies, including coast-to-coast advertising campaigns and outreach to company employees and parents in the overall community. That salesmanship will continue over the coming months, they said.

Still, so far it has not been easy.

That was evident in the reaction to a particularly high-profile effort to sell the common core by ExxonMobil, which has paid for a series of nationwide, televised ads promoting the standards.

For every 100 emails the company has received in response to the ads, a staggering number of them, about 99, were negative, estimated Patrick McCarthy, the executive director of the ExxonMobil Foundation.

"There's a lot of them that say, 'How could you do this? How could you support the common core?'" McCarthy told the chamber audience. "There's just all these myths out there."

Among those myths: that the standards were designed by federal officials, and that the common core creates a detailed curriculum that schools will be forced to follow, McCarthy and other speakers on a panel said.

ExxonMobil is not backing away, he said. The company has plans to continue to run TV ads promoting the common core, to write op-eds in newspapers supporting it, and to aggressively lobby state legislators not to back away from commitments to the standards, he said.

"These policymakers are hearing from tea-party activists, from anti-common-core activists," McCarthy said. "All they're hearing is why the common core is bad. ... Policymakers are eager to hear from [the business community]. They want to hear the other side of the story."

Carlos Contreras, the director of U.S. education for tech giant Intel, said his company has been discussing the importance of the common core at forums for its employees, with the idea that those workers will become ambassadors for the standards.

But those efforts have also offered reminders of the tough road ahead. Surveys of Intel employees showed that roughly 50 percent of them were not familiar with the common core. And a small but substantial portion of those workers appear to be adamantly against them, Contreras said.

Contreras advised the business leaders in attendance to make sure their representatives in states and cities are familiar with the standards, and then ask those community voices to stand up for the common core.

"It has to be delivered locally," Contreras said, adding: "When there's a vacuum, [bad information] comes in."

Handling Community Objections

Cisco Systems is trying to educate its sales force and its business partners about the common core, said Renee Patton, the director of education for the company. The goal, she said, is to help them sort through, "How do they handle objections when they hear them in the community?"

One of the biggest fears Patton hears does not focus on the standards themselves, but on the tests aligned to them, and the costs of implementing online tests scheduled to begin during the 20140-2015 academic year. Concerns about school districts' ability to pull off the online tests have grown louder in recent months.

Another speaker at the event, Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam, acknowledged that he and other backers of the standards face "a real battle" in standing up for them.

That fight is likely to play out in public this week, when Tennessee state legislators are expected to hold a hearing focused on criticism of the standards, he noted. Opposition to the standards has risen from both the far right and far left, creating a "fairly unique push from both ends," said the Republican governor, who supports the common core.

"The way we address it is we keep talking about what it is," Haslam said, "and what it's not."

[UPDATE (Sept. 18): Another major business organization met this week in Washington with education on the agenda: the Business Roundtable, a group representing more than 200 CEOs, which supports the common core.

President Obama spoke to the roundtable on Wednesday, asking them to back his efforts to reign in college costs and thanking them for getting behind the standards.

The common core will ensure "that every young person in America has the opportunity to get prepared for the kinds of jobs that are going to exist in the 21st century," Obama said, according to a transcript.

Secretary Arne Duncan addressed the roundtable the same day, touching on the administration's college affordability and early education efforts, as well as "the importance of our children needing to be held to high educational standards," spokesman Cameron French said in an e-mail.]

FEEL THE FEAR!!!



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