Is Common Core losing the public perception test?

I would say it’s been lost almost from the beginning, but when has that stopped the Obama administration. The government currently has no discernable concept of representative government or popular sovereignty.

From Wikipedia:

“The Common Core State Standards Initiative is an educational initiative in the United States that details what K-12 students should know in English language arts and mathematics at the end of each grade. The initiative is sponsored by the National Governors Association (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) and seeks to establish consistent educational standards across the states as well as ensure that students graduating from high school are prepared to enter credit-bearing courses at two- or four-year college programs or to enter the workforce…Forty-four of the fifty U.S. states and the District of Columbia are members of the Common Core State Standards Initiative.”

In light of the above, I don’t understand how this has become Obama’s fault. It was developed by the states, and now that it has had an unpopular reception the very states that developed it are running away from it.

Jonathan,

I don’t have time now to write more, so I will just encourage you to do some research. One place you could start would be at Town Hall magazine online, www.townhall.com. Just type “Common Core” into their search window and peruse the articles and op eds that come up. If that doesn’t interest you, you can always just google Common Core. It wasn’t actually developed by the states, it was developed by Washington who then strong-armed the states with promises of huge grants if they accepted and warning of cut off educational funding if they rejected (the same kind of tactic used with highway money to enforce a national speed limit).

When you start out with a backroom scheme, don’t complain when you have no credibility.

Because federal law prohibits the federal government from creating national standards and tests, the Common Core project was ostensibly designed as a state effort led by the National Governors Association, the Council of Chief State School Officers, and Achieve, a private consulting firm. The Gates Foundation provided more than $160 million in funding, without which Common Core would not exist.

The standards were drafted largely behind closed doors by academics and assessment “experts,” many with ties to testing companies. Education Week blogger and science teacher Anthony Cody found that, of the 25 individuals in the work groups charged with drafting the standards, six were associated with the test makers from the College Board, five with the test publishers at ACT, and four with Achieve. Zero teachers were in the work groups. The feedback groups had 35 participants, almost all of whom were university professors. Cody found one classroom teacher involved in the entire process. According to teacher educator Nancy Carlsson-Paige: “In all, there were 135 people on the review panels for the Common Core. Not a single one of them was a K–3 classroom teacher or early childhood professional.” Parents were entirely missing. K–12 educators were mostly brought in after the fact to tweak and endorse the standards—and lend legitimacy to the results. http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/28_02/28_02_karp.shtml

To expand on Susan’s post, there were only tow actual content specialists on the core team that created Common Core, one math and one English. Neither of them would sign off on the final product, so their names were expunged from the committee in order to maintain the lie that the core group was unanimous in their support of Common Core. Only the politicians actually wanted this garbage.

In my opinion, the hand-wringing about Common Core is pretty much a lot of nothing. From what I have seen on Common Core, I am impressed. I know that it is implemented different in every state but again, what I have seen has impressed me. Multiple public school teachers have told me it is an improvement, not a step back. Once you cheapen the debate to politics, all sense of reason gets lost. “Obama supports and therefore it is bad” is the mantra.

As a public school teacher watching it being implemented, it is a train wreck for education. You have the mantra wrong GregH. “It’s bad and Obama supports it” is the real mantra.

My opinion from the outside is that what I see Common Core teaching what matters. Let the traditionalists teach obsolete skills like handwriting and how to add stacks of numbers in a world where those skills are not necessary. I will pass. I want my children to know how to think and what I see in Common Core supports that. For example, the math feels like Singapore Math and that is a great perspective.

Common Core is copyrighted by the NGA Center and CCSSO, and they reserve the right to make changes at any time. “NGA Center/CCSSO shall be acknowledged as the sole owners and developers of the Common Core State Standards, and no claims to the contrary shall be made.” Then the DoE comes along and says that states cannot delete anything from the Common Core, and are limited in how much they can add (15%). The DoE will only fund grants and offer waivers if states sign on to CCS. This sounds a lot like coercion. According to federal law, the DoE should not be involved in directing, supervising, or controlling elementary and secondary school curriculum, programs of instruction, or instructional materials.

“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.”

The DoE is guilty of violating

• The General Education Provisions Act
• The Department of Education Organization Act
• The Elementary and Secondary Education Act

Then the CCSSO created CEDS (Common Education Data Standards), and the DoE altered FERPA so they could legally grant access to and gather data that includes personally identifiable student information like biological and behavioral data. Now. instead of requiring parental consent to share personal student information, it has been reduced to a “best practice”, and personal information now includes fingerprints, voice printing, iris and retina scans, DNA, facial features, and handwriting.

Somehow I don’t think CCS is just about teaching kids how to think.

People believe what they want to believe. I am not a conspiracy theorist so I just don’t relate to some of the hyperbole being tossed around by those who feel the need to politicize everything. My belief is that Common Core is indeed about raising the standards of education in this country, which we desperately need to do.

Not entirely related, but when comparing public schools to Christian private schools in my area, it is pretty clear that the bar has indeed been raised over the past decade (starting before Common Core) in public schools and in fact, public schools are way ahead in areas that matter. The Christian private schools are producing children that have pretty handwriting though.

The information I posted is fact - the interpretation is obviously a personal one. But if one’s church leadership were up to these kinds of shenanigans, I think many folks would hightail it out of there.
I’ve read the CCS, and it’s like, “Duh”. What’s so new and amazing about teaching kids how to read and write and communicate, learn basic math skills, read about history and science and do experiments… it doesn’t actually cost millions (or even thousands) of dollars to educate children. I’m not impressed with the constant reinvention of the education wheel.

I’d like to see Laura Ingalls Wilder and Anne Shirley in charge - they’d take care of business for a fraction of the cost in half the time.

I read this article today in HuffPo about the “revolutionary” concept of competency based education:

Currently, education is measured by completing a specified number of classes, in person or online, and a set of uniform assignments. Generally, such programs have a defined duration: one year, two years, four years, etc. Competency-based education does away with the defined duration and credit hours, replacing time with mastery. Not all students study at the same rate—and some have already acquired a range of knowledge and skills—so competency-based education offers an “each to their own” model for degree completion.

Homeschoolers have been doing this for the last 30 years. It’s nice to see public education finally begin to catch up.

[GregH]

Let the traditionalists teach obsolete skills like handwriting and how to add stacks of numbers in a world where those skills are not necessary.

This statement blows my mind. Are you seriously suggesting that basic math skills are no longer necessary in the modern world? Or how to write without a keyboard? I just finished an engineering degree, and you know what? Fancy calculator or not, if you don’t know how to do some math by hand you will fail. That calculator will slow you down and you will have a really bad time. I’m not saying everybody needs to know calculus, but basic math is pretty, well, basic. And knowing how to write by hand is pretty important too. For instance, in most math and science classes you can’t take notes on a computer because it’s just not possible. You need to be able to write, and write fast or you will never keep up with the teacher. Maybe the Common Core is good in some ways, and maybe schools still teach some things that aren’t really important today, but math and handwriting are not two of them.

[SimonV]

GregH wrote:

Let the traditionalists teach obsolete skills like handwriting and how to add stacks of numbers in a world where those skills are not necessary.

This statement blows my mind. Are you seriously suggesting that basic math skills are no longer necessary in the modern world? Or how to write without a keyboard? I just finished an engineering degree, and you know what? Fancy calculator or not, if you don’t know how to do some math by hand you will fail. That calculator will slow you down and you will have a really bad time. I’m not saying everybody needs to know calculus, but basic math is pretty, well, basic. And knowing how to write by hand is pretty important too. For instance, in most math and science classes you can’t take notes on a computer because it’s just not possible. You need to be able to write, and write fast or you will never keep up with the teacher. Maybe the Common Core is good in some ways, and maybe schools still teach some things that aren’t really important today, but math and handwriting are not two of them.

Yes you need to know basic math skills. But you do not need years of just adding stacks of numbers and long division. That is what the most popular Christian math textbooks focus on and at the expense of word and logic problems which are far more relevant to real life. It is old thinking and it is bad thinking for today’s world in which believe it or not, people just don’t do that stuff any more. They use calculators and Excel and QuickBooks.

Ditto for handwriting. Sure, people need to know how to write. But do they need five or six years of a teacher telling them how to make perfect curls in the capital E’s? In 2014 when most people can get through months without writing anything long than a short note or their signature with a pen and paper? It is absurd.
Yes, we do need new ideas in education because the world has changed. Some traditionalists can put their head in the sand if they want but what worked in 1900 is not appropriate for today. The bar is raised.

GregH,

Please forgive me if this is too blunt, but you simply don’t have any idea what you re talking about. Shorty after Common Core was first released, it was reviewed for rigor by a number of universities including Penn State and Stanford. They concluded that it fell right about in the middle of the previous state standards for rigor, which meant that for about half of the states, it was a step backwards from what they had been using prior to Common Core. Keep in mind that we are talking about the education system that was already failing now moving backwards.

I am primarily a history teacher with and English concentration as well. The so-called history standards are actually not content specific. They wrote history standards that are all English Language Arts (ELA) standards. Consequently, districts are replacing history teachers with English teachers in the history classrooms and replacing history content with with reading and writing content in the history classrooms. This is because the education system largely stopped testing history content 20-25 years ago. In my last district, 2 years ago, I was moved to make room for an English teacher in history class. The first year after I was replaced, 30% of the history content was not even touched, and what was “covered” was hardly more than a glance so kids could focus their time on ELA standards.

Speaking of Language Arts, Common Core entirely removes all fiction from the course work.

The math you seem enthralled with is actually almost exactly the same as the “New Math” that was trotted out by public educators in the 70s to fix our country’s deficiencies. It was a failure then, and it is an abject failure now. Instead of solving math problems, students draw pictures and write about how they solved a problem. Instead of being taught to borrow and carry, they are taught to break numbers down and round them off to create multi-step solutions for simple problems. If that sounds confusing, it it’s actually far worse than it sounds. Here are some examples of common core math.

Now the college board is re-writing AP classes to accommodate common core.

And I haven’t even touched the government over-reach and invasion aspect that Susan only scratched the surface on. I’m only talking about the actual content of the standards here.

If you actually take some time to look at what is being reported, the information is everywhere. To blow it off as conspiracy theory is weak-minded and simplistic. You are certainly welcome to your opinions, just like every other low-information voter is, but citizens refusing to take the time to actually investigate and dig out facts while rejecting out-of-hand the facts produced by others is a primary reason why our country has become the disaster it is today.

[SimonV]

GregH wrote:

Let the traditionalists teach obsolete skills like handwriting and how to add stacks of numbers in a world where those skills are not necessary.

This statement blows my mind. Are you seriously suggesting that basic math skills are no longer necessary in the modern world? Or how to write without a keyboard? I just finished an engineering degree, and you know what? Fancy calculator or not, if you don’t know how to do some math by hand you will fail. That calculator will slow you down and you will have a really bad time. I’m not saying everybody needs to know calculus, but basic math is pretty, well, basic. And knowing how to write by hand is pretty important too. For instance, in most math and science classes you can’t take notes on a computer because it’s just not possible. You need to be able to write, and write fast or you will never keep up with the teacher. Maybe the Common Core is good in some ways, and maybe schools still teach some things that aren’t really important today, but math and handwriting are not two of them.

i am not sure where you finished your degree, but I am in the middle of a masters, and I haven’t taken a single not on paper and neither have my classmates. My son is in high school and he takes no notes on paper, writes nothing on paper and does all of his work on his Surface Pro.

i paid a lot of money for my kids to attend one of the largest Christian Schools in the nation, and it was disappointed in the quality of education. I agree with Greg. The world is changing big time. Why my kid needs to suck up so much time over a number of years to learn cursive, is beyond me. This is not needed in today’s society. We need to learn how to work in teams and how to critically think.