Last week, Louis C.K. became the most high-profile critic of the Common Core, setting off a Twitter firestorm in the process. Alexander Nazaryan slams the comedian for “malign[ing] an earnest effort at education reform, one that is far too young to be judged so harshly”:
The [Common Core] tests are thus far imperfect, as is how we prepare for them. With that I agree. But staging scenes from Of Mice and Men isn’t going to catch us up to China anytime soon. Nor are art projects or iPads. It was dismaying to hear the new New York City schools chancellor, Carmen Fariña, recently complain that our students are deprived of “joy” in the classroom. Joy, our twerking young ones know. Trigonometry, not so much. Louis C.K.’s frustration doesn’t pass muster as a critique of educational reform. Yes, the problems his daughter was given are tough. That’s as it should be.
But Rebecca Mead finds herself agreeing with him:
[T]he issue identified by Louis C.K., and by other less well-known but equally furious parents, is not that the material children are expected to learn is too hard. It isn’t unreasonable to expect kids to have learned to multiply and divide numbers up to a hundred by the time they leave third grade—and in all likelihood, Louis C.K.’s child will have done so by June, if she hasn’t already, and be the better for it. The greater problem lies with the ways in which the achievement of those standards is measured. An emphasis on a certain kind of testing has become a blight upon the city’s classrooms. “The teachers are great,” C.K. tweeted. “But it’s changed in recent years. It’s all about these tests. It feels like a dark time.” Plenty of parents and educators agree with him.
Libby Nelson argues that Louis C.K. should be blaming NCLB, not Common Core:
No Child Left Behind, the 2002 federal education law, required all states to develop academic standards. It also mandated standardized testing every year from third grade through eighth grade to see if they meet those standards. The idea was to hold schools accountable for whether their students were learning. So students started taking a lot more tests: when No Child Left Behind was passed, 19 states had annual standardized testing in reading and math, according to the Center for Education Policy. By 2006, every state was testing its students every year from third through eighth grade.
No Child Left Behind is still the law. And the Common Core state standards don’t change those testing requirements. They just change the exam that students are already required to take.
Meanwhile, one of our readers – who happens to be one of the lead writers of the Common Core State Standards for mathematics – sends in a response to the parent who wrote, “The Common Core math instruction is truly insane. Parents can’t even help their child with homework half the time because getting the right answer is not enough”:
I agree wholeheartedly that parents should be able to help their children with their homework. My own daughter’s kindergarten teacher handled this well. The teacher gave the children workbooks for practicing the nuts and bolts of math. My daughter was responsible for completing a minimum number of pages each week, and that was where my wife and I came in. We took it as our job to enforce the minimum, assist our daughter if she got stuck, and ensure that every answer was correct. The problems in that workbook were in the nature of exercises – nothing my wife and I would have to scratch our heads over. That approach made sense to us. If a curriculum series is expecting too much of parents, then I’m not sure schools should be buying it.
The curriculum market is in a state of flux right now. At the risk of overgeneralizing, in the time since the standards were developed, some textbook publishers have rushed out with half-baked materials, while some others have basically slapped a “Common Core” sticker on the same books they had been selling for years. The situation won’t last, but quality takes time. Generally speaking, US math textbooks have been terrible for decades – just not in ways that tend to go viral on Facebook.
Another reader objects to the idea that getting the “right answer” is enough:
In fact, learning math is not about just getting the right answer. It is about understanding the math behind the answer, which is why doing it the right way is important to developing good math skills. That many have gotten by just memorizing formulas that produce the right answer is part of the reason they aren’t good at math, don’t understand math, don’t like math, and are unable to extend their math knowledge to anything beyond memorized formulas in stock quiz problems.
And an educator wonders how well schools will put the standards into practice:
I’m a high school science teacher and my colleagues and I are wrestling with implementing the new Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). In California, they’ve designated $1 billion to implement the standards. Many states are not making this type of commitment. Therefore, you have veteran teachers who have often placed emphasis on the content of a course having to now focus on the process and skills within the material. I’m personally a fan of the new standards in both the Common Core and the NGSS, but the implementation and professional development for our teachers has been severely lacking.
As alluded to by other writers, test scores will dip drastically as well. I was just explaining to my class that next year’s sophomores will take the new PARCC assessment, yet have only had a year of instruction in the Common Core methodology. While some schools and students may be able to adapt in this short time and perform well on the tests, schools that haven’t had the funds to train teachers and purchase instructional materials that reflect the new emphasis on skills and process will lag behind.
The full thread on the Common Core is here.
The Dish 