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AFT poll: Teachers unprepared for new standards

May 8, 2013 by 12 Comments

Most public school teachers say they’re not prepared to teach math and reading to the new Common Core standards, according to a survey by the American Federation of Teachers. While 75 percent of teachers surveyed by the union support the Common Core, less than one-third said they’d received the training and resources needed to teach to the new standards.

Forty-five states and the District of Columbia have adopted the new standards and many have started implementation.

Two states — Kentucky and New York — have already tested students on the new standards. In New York, teachers, parents and students complained that the tests were poorly designed, covered material that had not been taught and frustrated children to the point of tears. Like many other states, New York intends to use the test results in decisions about student grade promotion, teacher job evaluations and school closings.

AFT President Randi Weingarten has called for a testing moratorium for at least one year. Among teachers surveyed, 83 percent supported the moratorium.

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Should kids learn cursive?

May 6, 2013 by 26 Comments

Should schools require children to learn cursive? asks the New York Times‘ Room for Debate blog. The new common standards don’t call for cursive. Many think the keyboard has made penmanship obsolete.

Handwriting matters, but not cursive, writes Kate Gladstone, founder of Handwriting Repair/Handwriting That Works.

The fastest, clearest handwriters join only some letters: making the easiest joins, skipping others, using print-like forms of letters whose cursive and printed forms disagree.

I do that! I didn’t know it was the in thing.

Children should learn to read cursive, but that “can be taught in just 30 to 60 minutes,” once kids learn to read print, Gladstone writes.

At a 2012 conference hosted by a publisher of cursive textbooks, only 37 percent of  handwriting teachers wrote in cursive, writes Gladstone. Eight percent printed. A majority — 55 percent — combined print and cursive in an efficient hybrid style.

“Mandating cursive to preserve handwriting resembles mandating stovepipe hats and crinolines to preserve the art of tailoring,” she concludes.

Writing in cursive stimulates the brain, argues Suzanne Baruch Asherson, an occupational therapist in Beverly Hills schools and a national presenter for Handwriting Without Tears, an early childhood education company.

. . . learning to write in cursive is shown to improve brain development in the areas of thinking, language and working memory. Cursive handwriting stimulates brain synapses and synchronicity between the left and right hemispheres, something absent from printing and typing.

Let cursive die out, responds Morgan Polikoff, a USC education professor. “There is little compelling research to suggest the teaching of cursive positively affects other student skills enough to merit its teaching.”

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Anti-testing rebellion grows

May 1, 2013 by

Resistance to testing is growing as schools introduce tougher tests linked to Common Core standards, writes Marc Tucker of the National Center on Education and the Economy on Ed Week‘s Top Performers blog. Parents — and sometimes teachers — are opting out of state exams.

Test resistance isn’t seen in high-performing countries, Tucker writes. All, except Finland, have tests that match their standards. But they’re not like U.S. tests.

First, they are designed to match the curriculum, to find out whether and to what degree students have mastered the curriculum the teacher has been teaching. American tests, for many years, have been designed to be curriculum neutral, meaning unrelated to the curriculum.  So American teachers have seen the basic skills tests they are familiar with as their enemy, testing things that they did not necessarily teach, and often don’t believe should be taught.

Common Core State Standards will fix this, if teachers can teach a standards-based curriculum aligned to the tests.

Second, American tests have been designed to be, first and foremost, cheap.  . . .  (Multiple-choice) tests are great at testing the rudiments of the basic skills and not very good at testing complex skills, deep understanding, critical thinking or creativity, the things teachers want most to teach, another reason for them to detest the typical test.  In the top-performing countries, there is very little use of multiple-choice, computer-based testing.  Most tests are essay-based.  They are scored by teachers trained to score them and teachers generally feel that these examinations are testing the things they think really matter.

Our top competitors give statewide or national exams two or three times in a student’s school career, often in 10th grade and the end of high school.  Testing to monitor school quality is done by sampling a few students in a few schools.  They can afford expensive, high-quality tests because they do less testing.

No top-performing country has an accountability system like No Child Left Behind, which mandates annual testing in grades three through eight.  No other country is using test scores to evaluate teachers.

American teachers “see cheap tests, unrelated to what they teach and incapable of measuring the things they really care about, being used to determine their fate and that of their students,” Tucker writes. If Common Core tests are cheap, low-quality tests, “millions of American teachers may rebel.”

Testing could be Common Core’s fatal flaw, writes Peg Tyre in the final part of her four-part series on what Common Core means for American education.

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Too soon for Common Core tests?

April 22, 2013 by

Move ahead with Common Core testing, editorialized the New York Times on Sunday.  Tough new math and English tests “are an essential part of rigorous education reforms” designed to teach reasoning skills.

In Kentucky, the first state to adopt Common Core-aligned tests, the proportion of students rated “proficient” or better in math and reading dropped by about a third, notes the Times, which warns New Yorkers to prepare for a shock.

California won’t be ready for Common Core testing, which is scheduled to start in the 2014-15 school year, editorializes the Los Angeles Times. The state “hasn’t figured out how to go about training teachers, and won’t begin to adopt new textbooks — a slow and politically rancorous process — for at least two years.”

What’s more, common core is expensive, requiring extensive new training for teachers, new textbooks and computers on which the new tests must be taken. It’s unclear where the state will find the money.

At the rate the state is going, teachers will end up being trained before the English curriculum is even in place, and instruction would start before the new textbooks are in anyone’s hands. Yet if the school reform movement has its way, teachers will be evaluated in part based on how well their students do on the very different standardized tests that go with the new curriculum. Reflecting the concern that teachers throughout the state have been expressing, one California teacher recently tweeted that within a couple of years, “we start testing on standards we’re not teaching with curriculum we don’t have on computers that don’t exist.”

Teachers believe they’re being “set up for failure,” the editorial warns. Common Core will be “yet another education flash in the pan” unless it’s “carefully implemented with meaningful tests that are aligned with what the students are supposed to learn.”

Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, wants to cut off federal money to implement Common Core State Standards, but his proposal probably isn’t going anywhere.

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School apologizes for ‘evil Jews’ assignment

April 13, 2013 by

“You must argue that Jews are evil” in a five-paragraph essay, using Nazi propaganda and personal experience “to convince me of your loyalty to the Third Reich!”  Hoping to teach persuasive writing, critical reading of propaganda and  history, an English teacher at Albany High School (New York) told students to pretend the teacher was a Nazi official who needed to be convinced of their loyalty.

A third of students refused to write the paper. Superintendent Marguerite Vanden Wyngaard said the assignment should have been worded differently and apologized. ”I don’t believe there was malice or intent to cause any insensitivities to our families of Jewish faith,” she said.

Vanden Wyngaard said the exercise reflects the type of writing expected of students under the new Common Core curriculum, the tough new academic standards that require more sophisticated writing. Such assignments attempt to connect English with history and social studies.

I’m quite sure the teacher doesn’t believe Jews are evil. But the assignment was unwise. Plenty of people still think Jews are evil. Anti-Semitic trolls lurk in the comments section of most blogs. It’s current events, not history.

If the teacher had come up with a uncontroversial assignment, would it have taught critical thinking as effectively? asks Ann Althouse.

Why not ask students to write an essay urging Germans to vote for Hitler in 1933? (Advanced students could pretend to be American communists defending the Hitler-Stalin pact.)

Integrating history with other subjects requires forethought. A New York City math teacher raised hackles earlier this year with slavery story problems that seemed to trivialize slave ship deaths and whippings.

Update: The Albany teacher has been placed on leave, reports AP. That’s an over-reaction. Meanwhile, her classes are about to begin reading Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust memoir, Night. 

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Why there’s a Common Core backlash

April 11, 2013 by

In response to a conservative defense of Common Core Standards, Heritage fellow Lindsey M. Burke describes the conservative backlash on National Review Online.

The federal government has spent billions to move Common Core forward, and it has put billions more on the line. Unfortunately, parents, teachers, tea-party activists, and governors have every reason to believe Common Core represents major, unprecedented federal intervention into education.

In theory, Common Core is a state initiative. But the Obama administration has pushed states to adopt the new standards, Burke writes.

Washington is financing the two national testing consortia that are creating the Common Core assessments. Lawmakers have tied $4.35 billion in Race to the Top grants to the adoption of standards similar to those found in a significant number of states, and they’ve made the adoption of Common Core a major factor in securing a No Child Left Behind waiver. And now, they have established a technical-review panel to work with the testing consortia on item design and validation.

For an undertaking that claims to be largely free of federal involvement, Common Core has quite a few federal fingerprints on it.

Many parents and teachers share an “understandable fear” that “the federal government is on the brink of dictating the content taught in every school,” Burke concludes.

I wish the feds had allowed Common Core to remain a state effort.

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Superintendent: Don’t test for 3 years

February 9, 2013 by

Schools need time to implement Common Core standards, so declare a three-year moratorium on federally required testing, proposes Joshua P. Starr, superintendent of Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland, in a Washington Post op-ed.

If we are serious about realizing the promise of the Common Core, we must allow our school districts to focus on the important work of curriculum and assessment development, implementation and professional development.

Most U.S. public school systems are attempting to implement at least three things at once right now: revamped accountability measures, reforms as part of the federal Race to the Top program and the Common Core State Standards. This is simply too much at one time.

“School districts are not investing in new curricula, assessments, professional development or data systems” because they’re so distracted by testing, Starr argues.

I think his real concern is to derail value-added teacher evaluation plans.

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Can’t read a watch? Blame algebra

August 7, 2012 by

Common Core‘s Lynne Munson bought watches for her preschoolers — a dinosaur wristband for her son, a Rapunzel watch with pink and purple hands for her daughter — on her way home from a math conference. The Swatch salesman was surprised she didn’t go digital, she writes in I Can’t Read My Watch! Algebra Is to Blame.

Munson wants to teach her kids to tell time. That’s a skill many watch buyers lack, said the salesman, who said he’s rarely successful in teaching customers to tell time. They just buy a digital watch.

Telling time is not doing math, but it requires knowledge of math fundamentals, Munson writes.

 You cannot tell time on a traditional clock without knowing that numbers are symbols that represent units, or without some basic grasp of estimation and ratios.  In other words, if you cannot tell time, it most likely means that you would still struggle with third and fourth-grade math concepts.

Munson thought of political scientist Andrew Hacker’s New York Times op-ed, Is Algebra Necessary?, which argued against requiring algebra because some students find it difficult. She disagrees:

With regard to mathematics, the problem is not that we are teaching too much of it—but that we are teaching math ineffectively.  The expectations and architecture of the new Common Core State Standards in Mathematics can help to remedy this.  Faithful implementation of those standards will support districts that want to adopt curricula that unfurl mathematics in a rational, coherent program and that jettison approaches that are illogically sequenced and that overuse and abuse manipulatives.

Common Core, which has created a curriculum map for English Language Arts and is working on map for math, will create New York state’s math curriculum from pre-K through 12th grade.

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New standards, new tests — and new schools

May 12, 2012 by

“The standards-and-testing model of school reform is far from dead,” writes Paul Glastris in the kick-off to Washington Monthly’s look at  The Next Wave of School Reform.  Common standards and far more sophisticated testing will transform what happens in the nation’s classrooms, he predicts.

Transcontinental Education by Robert Rothman argues for the powerful effect of common standards.

Teaching to a well-designed test that requires students to analyze and interpret is fine, writes Susan Headden in A Test Worth Teaching To. The problem is that schools rely heavily on cheap, multiple-choice tests of basic skills that cause “shallow learning to crowd out the deep.”

In America, high-caliber tests like AP exams are usually the province of elite, high-achieving students on the college track. And so you might think that this two-tier assessment system is an inevitable result of inequality—that underprivileged kids wouldn’t have a prayer on these more demanding tests. Yet the industrialized nations that consistently outshine the United States on measures of educational achievement—countries like Singapore and Australia—have used such assessments for students across the educational and socioeconomic spectrum for years. Although some are multiple-choice tests, most are made up of open-ended questions that demand extensive writing, analysis, and demonstration of sound reasoning—like AP tests.

In Grand Test Auto, Bill Tucker writes about “stealth assessments” that “are embedded directly into learning experiences and enable a deeper level of learning at the same time.”

In this vision, students would spend their time in the classroom solving problems, mastering complex projects, or even conducting experiments, as many of them do now. But they ’d do much of it through a technological interface: via interactive lessons and simulations, digital instruments, and, above all, games. Information about an individual student’s approach, persistence, and problem-solving strategies, in addition to their record of right and wrong answers, would be collected over time, generating much more detailed and valid evidence about a student’s skills and knowledge than a one-shot test. And all the while, these sophisticated systems would adapt, constantly updating to keep the student challenged, supported, and engaged.

We’re not there yet, Tucker writes, but we will be.

Read the whole thing.

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Core Standards start pre-reading debate

May 2, 2012 by

Common Core Standards have ignited a debate over pre-reading, writes Catherine Gewertz in Education Week. A guide for publishers discourages teachers from preparing students for what they’re about to read.

Teachers “should not pre-empt or replace the text by translating its contents for students or telling students what they are going to learn in advance of reading the text,” says David Coleman, one of the writers.

While some teachers believe students need background information to understand what they read, others say teachers are going overboard.

“There is some really bad prereading going on out there,” says Tim Shanahan, an University of Illinois at Chicago education professor who served on a Common Core Standards panel.

As part of his current research, Mr. Shanahan has been viewing scores of videotaped K-3 reading lessons, and a startling portion of them are “atrocious,” he said. In one kindergarten example, the teacher spends 20 minutes preparing children for a six-minute reading.

By the time they actually read the book, “there wasn’t a single shred of an idea in there that the kids didn’t already know,” he said. “What they were learning was that reading [the text] wasn’t really necessary.”

Doug Lemov, author of Teach Like a Champion, has been trying “embedded nonfiction” as a middle-school literacy coach at Uncommon Schools. In essence, teachers use mid-reading.

Recently, when reading Lily’s Crossing, a novel set in World War II-era New York City, students stopped after a couple of chapters to read an article on the rationing of supplies during that time, he said. They gained additional perspective on events in the novel with other such articles as they went through it.

“Now, the novel makes more sense because you understand about rationing, and the nonfiction article has meaning because you have come to care about Lily and seen it through her experience,” Mr. Lemov said.

Common Core’s controversial publishers’ guide has been revised. Some sections — but not all — are less specific. Critics, who think the standards writers strayed too far into telling teachers how to teach, aren’t likely to be appeased.

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