You are here: Home / Archives for Common Core

A national curriculum?

February 28, 2011 By

Common Core math and English Language Arts standards aren’t rigorous enough to prepare students for college work, writes Sandra Stotsky on Jay Greene’s blog. Yet wording in the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act would force all states to use tests based on the new standards.

States should be able to pick “internationally benchmarked, research-based” tests that satisfy their high school diploma requirements, argues Stotsky, who headed the writing of Massachusetts’ standards. “They may prefer objective end-of-course tests in algebra I, geometry, algebra II, U.S. history, chemistry, physics, and biology instead of ‘performance-based’ subjective tests.”

The two federally funded consortia developing tests for Common Core are creating what amounts to a national curriculum, writes Rick Hess. That will push all schools to teach the same material at the same time to give students a chance to pass the new exams.

The American Federation of Teachers wants a “common, sequential curriculum” to match Common Core standards so teachers “are not making it up every day,” reports Ed Week’s Curriculum Matters, quoting Randi Weingarten, the union president. (More here on what the test-writing consortia are working on.)

Congress banned the use of federal funds to write a national curriculum in 1979, but the consortia argue they’re just writing “curriculum frameworks, model instructional units and such” or a “clearinghouse of curriculum resources,” not a curriculum.

Filed Under: Education, Testing Tagged With: , , , , ,

Teaching skills without content

February 26, 2011 By

“Emma Bryant” (a pseudonym) teaches at a New Tech public high school — one of 62 in 14 states — devoted to “21st-century skills.” Knowledge? Not so much, she writes on the Common Core blog.

We practice project based learning, utilize the latest technology, and hold to a mission of helping our students acquire “21st century skills.”

Innovation, collaboration and critical thinking are stressed, leaving little time for literature, history, poetry, music or theater.  The theory is that “most content, after all, can be Googled.”

Roughly once a month we present students with a new project which must result in a “product.” According to our model the more “real world” the product, the better. Real world, meaning the product mirrors what could reasonably be demanded in a corporate setting — from a redesigned company logo and slogan to a promotional video or a press release.

Students work in small teams to complete projects, with each team member receiving the same grade at the end. After all, it’s not about what individual students learn but the final product. Students are assessed on a handful of learning outcomes — collaboration, communication, innovation, work ethic, technological literacy, information literacy and content. Content usually makes up between 15 and 30 percent of a student’s grade.

In a 21st century classroom, “content is a shopping list of rubric indicators to be applied to the product.”

For example, students might work a quote from a short story into a reworded company slogan. Or perhaps they might work with Photoshop to create a company logo depicting an event from European history. They might write a press release in the style of a founding American document or create a user’s manual for a product using a particular rhetorical device mentioned in our state’s English Language Arts standards.

Teachers don’t teach content directly. Students are supposed to learn in teams or on their own with little or no direction from the teacher.

Dialogue, questions, critical thinking, and debate surrounding content are low on the list of things you will see in a 21st century classroom. And so students end up with convoluted ideas about history, a cursory understanding of and appreciation for literature, and a shaky foundation in math and science.

Also see Critical Thinking: More Than Words? in Ed Week’s Leader Talk.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , , ,

Petrilli and Greene debate the Common Core

January 15, 2011 By

Are Common Core state standards a good idea? Mike Petrilli of Fordham likes the idea; Jay Greene of the University of Arkansas does not.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: ,

Common Core math asks for more

January 13, 2011 By

The proposed Common Core eighth-grade standards ask for math skills two to three years higher than math skills tested by the federal National Assessment for Education Progress (NAEP), concludes a Brookings analysis.

By Common Core standards, NAEP’s number-strand questions are at the fifth-grade level, on average, the report finds, while NAEP algebra questions are at the sixth-grade level.   

Remember that many U.S. students are unable to meet NAEP standards. What will happen when the expectations rise dramatically?

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , ,

A new curriculum map for new standards

August 19, 2010 By

So far, 36 states have adopted Common Core State Standards.  The next step is to figure out how to teach the standards. Common Core (an independent group) has released  curriculum maps for K-12 English Language Arts based on the new standards.

With encouragement from NGA and support from the Gates Foundation we took the standards along with the recommended exemplar texts and used them as the basis for creating new curriculum maps that we believe teachers today will be excited to use.  We even tapped the same expert who worked on the reading standards for the CCSS to create a new pacing guide for the teaching of reading customized to our maps.

Common Core’s curriculum maps were “written by public school teachers for public school teachers.”  Common Core urges teachers to look at the draft maps and comment by Sept. 17.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , ,

Curriculum is the missing link

August 7, 2010 By

Agreeing on Common Core Standards isn’t enough, writes Eugenia Kemble on the Shanker Blog. Curriculum is the missing link.

. . .  implementation requires curriculum – that is, the selection and sequencing of essential content knowledge so that teachers can produce a sensible year’s worth of expected learning in the core domains of math, literature, science, history, civics, the arts, foreign languages, and health and physical education.

More detailed than even the most thorough state standards, but less detailed than textbooks and daily lesson plans, a high-quality common core curriculum would clearly define what teachers should teach and when students should learn it.

Most developed nations align education around a common curriculum, Kemble writes. But it would require major changes in the U.S. education system, which is based on local control.  She argues it’s worth it.

. . .  think about what doing this might actually mean for all the pop solutions currently on the table – good teacher preparation (education schools might have to acknowledge that student curriculum actually matters), good teacher evaluation (we might even consider the fairness of having a consistent set of expectations for what students should know), good research (imagine research not plagued by an inability to truly control for the variation in what students are expected to learn), performance pay, targeting low performing schools, assessments to measure defined accomplishment rather than to differentiate students, and on and on.

Kemble praises E.D. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge Foundation for “aligning its successful curriculum sequence to the new Common Core Standards.”  In addition, the Common Core organization (no relation to the Common Core Standards group) is developing curriculum maps aligned with the new common English language arts standards.

Standards need a curriculum foundation to make a difference, Kemble argues.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , ,

Starting science early

July 30, 2010 By

The sweet spot for science learning is kindergarten through fourth grade, argues an Education Week commentary.

Countries that routinely outperform others in education are teaching science before their students even learn to read and write, by using classroom activities that demonstrate scientific principles. All of these activities take advantage of three fundamental aspects of science: observation, inference, and verification. These concepts can be easily taught in primary school through carefully designed activities and a common language, namely, measurement. Children who understand that measurement is simply a comparison to a known standard have the necessary foundation for learning more-advanced science concepts in later years.

Primary teachers will need training in scientific concepts, the authors add.

“Broad and full of holes” is Common Core’s description of a framework for national science standards released by the National Research Council.

The NRC’s insistence on vague, big-picture thinking about science has created a document that is practically useless. To provide a “broad description” of science knowledge, the writers identify core ideas so general (e.g., “What is energy?”) that it’s possible to imagine any quality of standards, curriculum, and assessments (everything from excellent and clear to shoddy and vague) spinning off of this framework.  When it comes down to it, the NRC document’s just a list of stuff.  And maybe not all of the most important stuff, either.  We’ve caught wind of concern among some of the nation’s most prominent scientists that sections of the framework are not current with the latest science.  And by “latest” we mean knowledge that has already been around for a hundred years or more. 

This is just the first step toward science standards. It’s not part of the common core standards initiative — and Common Core isn’t the group pushing the common core standards.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , ,

Unteachable

July 24, 2010 By

If California adopts common core standards in math with an algebra supplemnt, the result will be unteachable, argue Bill Evers and Ze’ev Wurman, both dissenting members of the standards commission, in the Sacramento Bee.

Because of the distortions the proposed standards will cause, the Algebra I course in eighth grade will be burdened with an unteachable and unlearnable number of topics (about 70 standards in one year). Topics like the Pythagorean theorem and scientific notation (how scientists write large numbers in a simplified form using exponents) will now be taught in Algebra I. Yet these and many other algebra-prep topics have been part of pre-algebra courses both in California traditionally and in high-performing countries.

Currently 60 percent of California students take algebra in eighth grade.  Under the new stndards, only the best students will be prepared to pass eighth-grade algebra, they write.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , ,

Fordham: Common core raises standards

July 21, 2010 By

The Common Core State Standards are “clearer and more rigorous” than English Language Arts standards in 37 states and math standards in 39 states, concludes the Fordham Institute’s newest study.

Yet California, Indiana and the District of Columbia have ELA standards that are clearly superior to those of the Common Core. And nearly a dozen states have ELA or math standards in the same league as Common Core.

Mike Petrilli adds on Flypaper:

But what’s heartening is this: as you can see from our nifty maps, most of the 28 or so states that have already adopted the Common Core are moving from “clearly inferior” standards to something much better. As a result, the national average for state standards has already gone from a “C” for both math and English (pre-Common Core adoption) to a B-plus for math and a B for English, now that these states have switched standards. In just the last month or so, America has raised the bar by at least a letter grade, from mediocre to very good standards.

Of course, as everyone knows, standards alone don’t change anything. They are just aspirations. But if combined with rigorous assessments, high “cut scores,” meaningful accountability, and strong implementation, they can move mountains, as we’ve learned from Massachusetts over the past decade.

Yes, that’s a huge “if,” but still, the country is raising its expectations, and for that we should be glad.

Massachusetts Board of Education voted unanimously to adopt the common standards today. The new standards are better than Massachusetts’ acclaimed standards, said two former education commissioners of the state. But former Massachusetts Gov. William F. Weld called for sticking with the state’s standards, adding,  “It would be madness to eliminate the MCAS test.”

In California, another state with rigorous standards, a state commission endorsed the common core standards “with modifications  that will set up students for taking a complete Algebra I course in eighth grade,” reports Educated Guess.

The common core standards split algebra between eighth and ninth grades, so California, where 60 percent of students already take Algebra I in seventh or eighth grade,  would continue to be out of sync with much of the nation – though in concert with some high-achieving nations in math, like Singapore.

The State Board of Education must vote yes or no on the recommendations by Aug. 2.

The common core initiative’s sponsors, the National Governors Assn. and the Council of Chief State School Officers, permit states to add up to 15 percent more standards.  California’s commission used that authority liberally, grafting on sections of the state’s generally acclaimed rigorous standards.  It added standards for penmanship, formal presentations and oral recitations to the common core English language arts standards, and significant numbers of math standards in algebra and advanced subjects.

National standards will be watered down or ignored, predicts Cato’s Neal McCluskey.

. . . the same political forces that have smushed centralized standards and accountability in almost every state — the teacher unions, administrator associations, self-serving politicians, etc. — will just do their dirty work at the federal rather than state level. Indeed, those groups will still be the most motivated and effectively organized to control education politics, but they will have the added benefit of one-stop shopping!

Washington, D.C. is expected to approve the common standards today. By the Aug. 2 deadline for Race to the Top eligibility, three-fourths of the states are expected to be on board.

Will national standards improve education? The New York  Times hosts a debate.

Update: There’s no evidence national standards improve economic competitiveness or raise achievement, argues an EPIC paper.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , ,

Academic standards are all over the map

June 11, 2010 By

Academic standards are all over the map, writes Sarah Butrymowicz on The Hechinger Report.

South Dakota’s second-graders are supposed to learn how to tell time to the minute. In Alaska, students might be forgiven for being late – they aren’t required to learn how to tell time to the minute until fifth grade.

As many as 15 states are expected to adopt common standards for reading, writing and math by the end of June, she writes. “Another 15 states are expected to come on board by the end of August and 10 more by year’s end.”

Check out the interactive map showing when students have to know who the president is, how to tell time and how to use an adverb is in different states.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: ,
« Older Posts
Newer Posts »