Slashdot Mirror
Is K-12 CS Education the Next Common Core?
theodp (442580) writes In an interview with The Washington Post's Lyndsey Layton that accompanied her report on How Bill Gates Pulled Off the Swift Common Core Revolution (the Gates Foundation doled out $233 million in grants to git-r-done), Gates denied that he has too much influence in K-12 education. Despite Gates' best efforts, however, there's been more and more pushback recently from both teachers and politicians on the standards, GeekWire's Taylor Soper reports, including a protest Friday by the Badass Teacher Association, who say Gates is ruining education. "We want to get corporations out of teaching," explained one protester. If that's the case, the "Badasses" probably won't be too pleased to see how the K-12 CS education revolution is shaping up, fueled by a deep-pocketed alliance of Gates, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and others. Google alone has already committed $90 million to influence CS education. And well-connected Code.org, which has struck partnerships with school districts reaching over 2M U.S. students and is advising NSF-funded research related to the nation's CS 10K Project, will be conducting required professional development sessions for K-12 CS teachers out of Google, Microsoft, and Amazon offices this summer in Chicago, New York City, Boston, and Seattle. So, could K-12 CS Education ("Common Code"?) become the next Common Core?
It doesn't teach about the American Civil War, it devotes 36 pages to Islam but doesn't mention Christianity, etc. This is a takeover of the minds of the next generation of Americans.
http://patriotupdate.com/articles/common-core-blotting-civil-war/
http://genfringe.com/2013/07/high-school-text-book-literally-re-writes-history/
Nokia had ridicilously large impact on the Finnish universities during the 90s and the early 2000. They stated their needs and the politicians and the heads of the universities complied.
Now the Finnish society is struggling with a huge amount of unemployed computer scientist, engineers and signal processing folk. Not to mention the thousand of women who were tricked into studying HR and such just to get a high salary position at Nokia. The Finns almost ruined everything for the sake of one company. Beware!
it's not 'free' (as in fear) there? DAVID BROOKS The Spiritual Recession http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06... they must be short of original stuff?
It doesn't seem like it though. As far as I can tell, they exist to try to shift the blame to someone else. Nothing badass about shifting blame.
(Here is what they said, so you can read it and develop your own interpretation of their goal, that's how I understand it):
"This association is for every teacher who refuses to be blamed for the failure of our society to erase poverty and inequality, and refuses to accept assessments, tests and evaluations imposed by those who have contempt for real teaching and learning"
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I have a soon to be 6th grader.
Common core is a disaster. The homework is riddled with errors (found 3 on one page) and the instruction methodology is terrible.
Case in point: My son brought home an assignment where he was graded poorly, and one of the short answers was marked wrong. I know the material they were reading, the book Wrinkle in Time.
When I asked the teacher about it, this is what I was told:
His "team" (they are in 6 kid groups) decided the antagonists name "IT" should be pronounced "I.T.".
Under common core standards, the group can decide what the "right" answer is, as an interpretation of the fact, not the fact itself.
I can give a little under a "tomato" vrs "tah-mato", but...
I asked her if the group decided "IT" was a giant mouse instead of a giant brain, would that make the person saying it was a giant brain wrong.
She replied under the grading rules, it would.
Fuck me dead, we are raising an army of Project Managers!
No wonder public support for Common Core is about 35%
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
Any thing that makes a teacher look like the truly lazy and pathetic adult that most them are will anger them and cause a push back. I can honestly say that with over 20 years of schooling under my belt and more then 30 teachers, I honestly respected maybe 4 of them, the rest were lazy, non caring idiots who only became teachers to not give a damn and to get summers off. Of course teachers will push back against common core, any thing that exposes the true nature of the "common" teacher, that being laziness, will cause a push back.
... seeing as science is requires in public K-12 education. It does importantly incorporate technology and math into science standards, and CS will be strengthened by that. So CS won't be "next" standards set but there's the potential for mandating it.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
... is to make everything included in the basics, so you can get workers for next to nothing. This is why corporations are involved in 'education'.
First we dumb down the curriculum with "no idiot left behind" to ensure that even the dumbest dud can get a degree, then we add stuff to it which requires not only to dumb down what's inside already but probably reduce "CS" to "copy the code from page 18 and get it to compile (the latter of course meaning that you should make sure you don't have any typos, the code of course doesn't contain errors, no thinking required)".
Yeah, that's what the US needs. More people with more useless degrees that pretty much amounts to "He managed to come around often enough (or at least not get caught during truancy) and keep the chair from flying away".
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
"Badasses" probably won't be too pleased to see how the K-12 CS education revolution is shaping up, fueled by a deep-pocketed alliance of Gates, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and others"
So a group of rich nerds who freely admit their companies consist almost solely of overworked white males with no life and have absolutely no background in education are going to pay their way to changing the education system they don't understand?
What could possibly go wrong?
If they did this to congress we'd call it special interest group lobbying, or bribery, and would be printing stories about how money buys everything and how bad that is.
But when it comes to education, we happily accept this bribery because we all have an astonishingly low opinion of the school system, which, it should be obvious, created the country that made these people rich in the first place.
K-12 CS is wreckless and ignorant. a 12 atom potassium bonded to a single Cesium? what are you doing? I mean sure you'll often find Cesium in reactor cores but I have no clue what you hope to achieve with the potassium. You're certainly right about the education part because im fairly certain most nuclear chemists have no clue what K12CS would hope to do in the real world, let alone the average college student.
Good people go to bed earlier.
While I see it as one of the more important things to be learning it should be left to the individual to decide. Forcing shit on kids will do nothing but build hate among those who dream of something different. Make it optional, if they want it they'll take it, I had the option to take shop, home ec "I'm Italian, like I need help with cooking.", or lab I took shop and lab. Taking both ruined my short days since I had to leave then come back 2 hours later, but trust me I wouldn't have done it if I did not enjoy it.
So don't anyone try to mess with us b/c we bad.
What a great example for our kids.
Maybe they should try to meet the Reading Writing Arithmetic goals first before pushing a bunch of functional illiterates into CS...
I think that there should be more exposure to CS, CE, EE, CE, ME, etc. But not full on long term courses for any but a few faithful. It takes a certain mindset to enjoy computers and engineering; many people don't have this mindset so foisting it upon them is probably bad news. But for those who like it they like it a lot. I would have loved way more time in the computer lab during my youth.
What I would have much preferred instead of a rigorous course that actually might have put me off CS; especially if taught by a bad teacher or two; Would have been a computer club/technology lab where we would be given the tools and tutorials to better understand what we liked and could do.
Then when kids go to university and are learning fairly abstract concepts they would be able to regularly have "ah ha" moments where they could realize that this abstract knowledge could have solved problems they had back in the lab.
Now I would like to see a bit more tech ed as (hard to understand for slashdotters) but there is a huge percentage of the population that simply has no idea what happens to make a light switch turn the lights on and off; let alone how the hell a 3 way light switch works.
For instance in my children's schools they have chemistry labs that look like they were awesome 30 years ago. But now they are art rooms because of the great sinks and the fume hood is good for stinky art. So again nothing outside of a textbook(other than me) has ever shown my daughters how soap works.
So before schools should make some foolish large attempt to impose their interpretation of CS they should look at the entire sci-tech teaching issue.
Since Common Core relies on a narrow conception of the purpose of K-12 education; that is, "career and college readiness", then a CC CS curriculum will certainly fulfill the Gates-ian ideal of producing an army of unquestioning and near-Aspberger-like programming drones. If you read the official rationale for the Common Core there is little question about a blind, utilitarian philosophy at work. US kids must be prepared to "compete in the global economy." Yet, anyone with a knowledge of the history of education knows that this runs against the grain of the fundamental purpose of public education—to prepare citizens for democracy, with the knowledge and skills to live fruitful lives and improve US society. The CC standards are a farce.
The process by which the Common Core standards were developed and adopted was undemocratic. Of the 27 people who designed them, there was only one classroom teacher involved—and they were on the committee to simply review the math standards. The Common Core State Standards are the complete opposite about what we know about how children intellectually and emotionally develop and grow. The Common Core is inspired by a vision of market-driven innovation enabled by standardization of curriculum, tests, and ultimately, the children themselves. That's utter BS ... this idea that innovation and creative change in education will only come from entrepreneurs selling technologically based "learning systems." In the real world, the most inspiring and effective innovations were generated by teachers collaborating with one another, motivated not by the desire to get wealthy, but by their dedication to their students. What else?
The Common Core creates a rigid set of performance expectations for every grade level, and results in tightly controlled instructional timelines and curriculum. Every student, without exception, is expected to reach the same benchmarks at every grade level. Too bad that children develop at different rates, and we do far more harm than good when we begin labeling them "behind" at an early age. CC emphasizes measurement of every aspect of learning, leading to absurdities such as the ranking of the "complexity" of novels according to an arcane index called the Lexile score. This number is derived from an algorithm that looks at sentence length and vocabulary. Publishers submit works of literature to be scored, and we discover that Mr. Popper's Penguins is more "rigorous" than Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath. Uh huh.
And here's a question for NY State five year olds ... Which is a related subtraction sentence? Math standards for grade one kids were simply "back mapped" from grade 12 curriculum ... no early childhood math experts were consulted to ensure that the standards were appropriate for young learners. Great idea. The Common Core was designed to be implemented through an expanding regime of high-stakes tests, which will consume an unhealthy amount of time and money. $16,000,000,000 annually in fact. Proficiency rates on the new Common Core tests have been dramatically lower—by design. 30% of English students now fail the standardized tests and can not get a high school diploma.
And what is this for again? The Common Core is associated with an attempt to collect more student and teacher data than ever before. Gates' inBloom system will collect and data mine every student score in the US. Fortunately, states are withdrawing from this one at a rapid rate under siege from privacy lawsuits.
But perhaps worse of all ... The Common Core is not based on any external evidence, has no research to support it, has never been tested, and has no mechanism for correction. There is no process available to revise the standards. They must be adopted as written. As William Mathis (2012) points out, "As the absence or presence of rigorous or national standards says nothing about equity, educational quality, or the provision of adequate educ
DaveyJJ
it's becomes tech the test and even cheat the test like how it is in parts of asia
I had heard that there was controversy surrounding Common Core. So I began to investigate how CC performed during testing. What I discovered is that it was completely untested. "It was designed by experts so no testing was required."
Ever thumb through the series of books like "What Your Sixth Grader Needs to Know" by now-retired E. D. Hirsch, Jr. to see if your kids were missing anything "big"? With schools in NYC and Chicago rolling out K-12 CS programs starting next Fall, has anyone seen a grade-by-grade proposed syllabus or checklist along these lines showing what's going to be covered at each grade level?. BTW, Hirsch unsurprisingly supports giving Common Core the old college try, although he conceded, "Not even most prescient among us can know whether the Common Core standards will end in triumph or tragedy."
Most of what they do is a commodity; open source software, electronics from Asia, undergrad programmers, etc. (ok maybe I am a bit overboard about programmers). What makes them successful is a focus on design, fit and finish, usability, and re-arranging existing components in new and innovative ways; e.g. taking a cell phone, a UI, wireless, a UI and creating the smart phone. This is mostly creative and artistic. A focus on CS will not save American innovation. MS actually has some smart people, but the lack of focus, vision, quality, and imagination is what is killing them
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
I wish I had read this before posting. I think my post http://news.slashdot.org/comme... meshes well with your statement. If we want a working educational system that helps the American Economy a strictly "utilitarian" educational system is not the way to do it.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Democratic elections, healthcare, gun control, education.... Name one thing that the US goverment does as well or better than most of the first wold contries.
racist.
CSTA K-12 CS Standards: Mapped to Common Core State Standards. BTW, Google recently hired the Executive Director of CSTA as a Computer Science Education Program Manager.
When I was in college several millenia ago, everyone and their mother was in CS. Why?
Dotcom Bubble.
Three thirds of the people I knew went into IT merely because "money". Half of them are probably on Slashdot right now complaining about H1Bs. Because they're terrible.
Repeat after me:
- You cannot force people to be competent.
- You cannot force people to do jobs they have no interest in (hi women, minorities!)
- You can get anybody to fill a seat for enough cash.
If you needed 20 years of 'schooling', perhaps you are the problem.
That's 8 years of hand-holding beyond high school. Grow the fuck up, and stop blaming others for the fact you're a perpetual student who lacks the self-discipline to act like an adult.
Not saying it's you in particular, but plenty of parents with similar complaints will be the first to complain about taxes - while they're complaining about the lack of funding in schools.
I'm not a student or parent, but what I've seen from Common Core is that it's like the 21st century version of the 19th century school. The 19th century school was designed to break people to work in factories with regimentation and strict supervision. The 21st century school is designed to churn out functionally educated people who have no ability to reflect or think critically. The whole CC thing seems to emphasize being able to read and write functional documents (contracts, government documents, corporate paperwork, etc) but completely ignores the creative, imaginative, reflective, wondering side of people. It's like today's robber barons want functionally skilled people who are nothing but drones capable of completing tasks, but never reflecting upon their condition.
No wonder they want all books wrapped in DRM - they probably want to push a big red delete button and get rid of any philosophical or reflective work in human history so people won't accidentally read one of them.
Because you felt that nothing was down to you. Work, understanding, actually valuing the learning of stuff, they probably mean nothing to you.
Now, taking is as an obvious given that that is a popular if not prevailing attitude among students and their parents, perhaps you and your ilk are the problem. Particularly in the creation of teachers who see you coming and realise that nothing they can or want to do will have one blind bit of difference as their efforts will be rejected.
Even if CS for everyone was a laudable goal, all these initiatives are aimed at going off to college, and in case the universe has changed in the last 24 hours people will get a rude shock when they find the universities care less about what you did in CS at K12, especially if you want to CS or CS/EE.
Vast amounts of cash thrown at a solution to a problem that doesn't care. Epic American knowhow baby.
PopeRatzo *claims* to have been an English professor & yet can't write for shit -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
Why're you running from answering 2 simple questions, troll? http://linux.slashdot.org/comm...
Education is in a bind. In order to educate properly young people must deal with facts. Facts are often stress inducing and belief challenging. And it really doesn't matter much which nation we are in. For example American history and American heroes are glorified in traditional schools. Yet a fair description of the US could well point to a corrupt, violent and almost psychotic nation. Some topics are really off limits as violent reactions from the communities or ethnic groups would be almost certain to occur. If a teacher were to give a lesson that included that the US could never have survived without various forms of slavery in the past it would not be calmly considered as information but be taken more as a call to arms by several groups. Then a teacher could point out that the Americas were a sudden opening of a huge group of natural resources and that the ability of the people had little to do with the initial wealth of the nation. And it is not just the history class that could be seen as alienating youth from their heritage. Simply by stating that Carl Marx was the creator of progressive income tax so that to a degree the US is Marxist in nature would shock the heck out of many people. So how does a teacher teach? If the kids read Romeo and Juliet there is a line that says Juliet would have dome better if she had learned to fall back a bit. That line means she should have had sex with more people. Parents get upset if they are bright enough to know Shakespeare's language. And one of Joseph Conrad's classic novels can no longer be mentioned as the title contains the N word. The word niggardly is kept out of classrooms as many black folks think it has something to do with race. We need to insulate teachers from the public, the politicians and the corporations as well.
None of this would be necessary if parents were empowered with vouchers to send their children to the accredited schools of their choice, whether public or private. Vouchers work but like common core there are powerful interests aligned against them. The irony is that the children who would benefit relatively the most from vouchers, poor minority children from inner cities, are the ones least likely to receive them. Meanwhile, the wealthier white families who live in the suburbs can afford to send their children to high quality private schools where they receive an education that's substantially superior to that available in many public schools. This advantage of persists right on through college and into adult life where those who were better educated in their youth have better outcomes in health, wealth, longevity and quality of life. Anyone who claims to care about poor minority children while at the same time demonizing vouchers needs to take a hard look at their priorities because their methods are at odds with their stated goals.
"You cannot force people to be competent."
Every single human being are good at something. It may be in some other fields. Underutilized workers are usually a result of incompetent managers. I once supervised/trained a ADHD student working in our IT lab that has 1.) borderline 2.0 GPA and 2.) consistently harassed by my boss because the boss accused him that he just sit on the screen and reading reddit / running full screen 3D applications (a.k.a. games) all day, and guess what.... when he graduated he landed a software consulting job for above-median wages in the geographical area.
Managing ADHD people requires a different approach to fully unlock their potential. But most managers will just write them off as "incompetent".
------
"You cannot force people to do jobs they have no interest in (hi women, minorities!)"
"You can get anybody to fill a seat for enough cash."
The above two sentences can be combined:
You can get anybody to do jobs they have no interested in provided that it pays enough cash.
New Economic Perspectives
"You cannot force people to do jobs they have no interest in"
Really? Most people, given the choice (e.g. won the lottery) would not do what their day job is. While you can't force people to do jobs you can provide a strong incentive with money. This is why desirable jobs tend to be badly paid (e.g. working with animals---many people want to do it and would do it for fun) and non desirable jobs are well paid.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Dumbing down of merica.
Vouchers have turned into a blatant corporate cash grab. The private school system does not have the capacity for a huge influx of students so charter schools are setup and either run by clueless parent groups who are underfunded and end up folding unexpectedly, or they are run by corporate groups whose only interest is that fat voucher cash. Schools are a community resource. The problems we need to fix are community problems. I don't think that strong central oversite is a bad thing, communities need to communicate with other communities or they stagnate.
Cheap storage VM.
Vouchers have turned into a blatant corporate cash grab.
Would you say that the supermarket or the gas station or any other businesses that provide goods and services to millions every day are a "blatant cash grab"? Of course not. The very notion is absurd. Money is simply the medium of exchange in any advanced economy, nothing more and nothing less. Are the various tutoring centers or cram schools or other businesses that supply the education market a "blatant cash grab" or could it be that the people paying for those services, frequently out of their own pockets, are satisfied with what they have received in exchange for their money?
The private school system does not have the capacity for a huge influx of students
When there is demand, you will see how fast the market responds. Unlike government, which hems and haws and drags its feet, the private sector rolls up its sleeves and gets to work earning a profit and profit can be a powerful motivator. I'll bet it got you out of bed this morning. But as any businessman will tell you, profit is never guaranteed. It must be earned by satisfying the customer and in the case of vouchers the customer is the parent.
so charter schools are setup and either run by clueless parent groups who are underfunded and end up folding unexpectedly
If you don't think that parents can be demanding or care about what their children are or aren't learning, just ask any teacher. Parents have high expectations and they're hard to satisfy. How many times have teachers heard an exasperated parent exclaim, "My taxes pay your salary!" Clearly parents want value for their education dollar, whether that dollar comes indirectly from taxes or directly out of their own pockets, and they're vocal when they feel that they aren't receiving it. However, even if we accept that not every last parent is like this, why should we prevent a solid majority of involved and interested parents from being advocates for the best interests of their children? Who cares more about it than them? The government run schools and the teachers unions they serve have set themselves up in opposition to the real customers, the parents, and instead made themselves the customers of the politicians who control the purse strings. The best way to solve that is to put the education purse back into the hands of the parents, where it belongs, and not those of the corrupt politicians and their teachers union clients.
or they are run by corporate groups whose only interest is that fat voucher cash
And how best to get that cash? By satisfying the customers of course. It's called competition. Look it up. If one corporation pleases the parents more by providing a better quality education to their children at a lower price, where do you think the parents will send their children to school? Free enterprise and competition ensure high quality at the best possible price. The competent operators are rewarded with large enrollments and lots of voucher cash while the incompetent are driven out of the business. Thus the market rewards virtue and punishes failure, unlike the teachers unions which reward failure and punish virtue.
Schools are a community resource
One that's often underutilized and producing poor returns for the owners, aka the people who live in the community and whose taxes funded the creation of the school in the first place. These people are right to demand accountability, transparency and better results when they aren't receiving them, as indeed they aren't in many places here in the United States.
The problems we need to fix are community problems.
In my opinion, the problems that exist are best solved by submitting the schools and the people who work there to the discipline of the marketplace, just like what the rest of us. We please our customers every day or we're out of business. Why should it be
Education is not like gas. I can stop at the station by my house if I forget to fill up after work. You do damage to a kid if you constantly pull them out of one school and put them into another.
There are community barriers, if your kid goes to a school across town he won't have opportunities to socialize after school and will miss out on alot (voice of experience).
There are social barriers, kids make friends and uprooting them can be difficult. This inertia can allow bad schools to hold onto kids, it's happening now.
There are time barriers. How often do you by gas vs. how often do you change schools years. The logical time to change schools is in the summer. It would take at least one semester to evaluate a school. After a semester or school year in a bad school, your kid might be hopelessly behind. There are plenty of charter and public schools that can do alot of damage in one year. You basically have 12 to 24 segments of schooling to "purchase" for your kid. This is a far cry from any other free market commodity.
and, yes... Super markets and gas stations are blatant cash grabs... Free market is the idea that the worst kind of people will do good for the worst kind of reason.
Cheap storage VM.
Education is not like gas
It's a commodity service and in no way exempt from the laws of economics. Your attempts to carve out an exception for education as "too important to be handled by the market" amounts to little more than lame excuses for wasteful allocation of resources to the current broken system. Education is ripe for disruption and like health care is in desperate need of it to make progress. The teachers and others who stand in the way of this process are, to use a phrase loved by the left, standing on the wrong side of history.
Free market is the idea that the worst kind of people will do good for the worst kind of reason.
And yet it works far better than any of the alternatives. There was a time, not so long ago in the grand scheme of things, when most people living on this planet, with the exception of a small group of rulers, nobles, warriors and priests, were subsistence dirt farmers. Then, towards the close of the middle ages, something happened. That something was sustained economic growth. It was modest at first, but over time societies which achieved and sustained it diverged greatly in wealth, power and standards of living from those that did not. Fast forward to today and the average American is thousands of times more wealthy and better off than the subsistence dirt farmers living in the poorest parts of the world. How did this happen? Free enterprise, private entrepreneurship and free markets. So go ahead and be as offended as you like by the free market, but ask yourself this. Where did the clothes on your back come from? Who produced the food that you're eating today? How is it that you have a relatively nice place to live, as compared to the subsistence dirt farmer? Perhaps the free market isn't such a bad thing after all, eh?
Most of my point was that as a consumer it takes time to get educated and it takes time for a market response. You don't have much time for a child's education. You fail to address that, but keep cheering for your side.
Cheap storage VM.
You don't have much time for a child's education.
You speak as if the children in our public schools aren't already the unwitting subjects of failed experiments by teachers, administrators and others pushing the fad of the month in education. Remember the "New Math"? Yeah, that worked out well for us. Your argument might hold water if our kids were already receiving an outstanding education in our public schools but you know what? They're not. Our tax dollars are paying for Cadillac and we're getting Yugo. It's time to hit the reset button on education and vouchers are the best way to do that.