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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?
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 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
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.
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
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."
Bite me. I came to teaching after 7 years in the private sector. I work harder now, including the summers.
This is what's known as "BS".
That's what Common Core should be first and foremost. Teaching people who think Common Core history books don't mention the Civil War to be able to discern truth from the bullshit that they would read on right wing nut job websites or left wing nut job websites. Or conspiracy websites. Or anywhere, Slashdot included. But of course, if you try to teach critical thinking, it sends the right wing nut jobs into a tizzy, because they want to use the Bible as a science text.
The first article, on the "patriot update" site, claims that Common Core stops teachers from teaching the civil war, because there are instructions to teachers when teaching the Gettysburg Address to not give any specific historical background. What they fail to mention is that the textbook and materials involved are not from a history class, but from an English unit on rhetoric and speech. They're trying to get the students to focus entirely on the text itself without relying on historical reference. It also leaves out that it's an English textbook for juniors and seniors. If you check the history textbooks that Common Core uses from the same company. You will find that they make an extensive study of the Civil War in both freshman and sophomore level texts. Forcing students to analyze texts in this way is a common tool for promoting critical understanding of language. Should those students make it to college, they will find this skill immensely valuable.
Oh, and the "genfringe" article, on the website geared toward "conservative millennials" is made up out of whole cloth. Follow the links to see for yourself.
There is a lot to not like about the Common Core curriculum that was implemented during the Bush Administration as part of No Child Left Behind and how it continues to be used today. But not because of any perceived anti-American or anti-Christian bias.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Actually Common Core was an initiative started by States, not the Federal Government. http://www.usnews.com/news/spe....
But absolutely agree with the rest of your post.
Wow. You are an idiot getting information from other idiots. There's a reason the Common Core standards don't mention Christianity or the Civil War. Common Core is a set of English/Language Arts and mathematics standards. They AREN'T history standards. They don't address history because they aren't history standards!
The second link is about a history textbook. It's not a common-core aligned history textbook because there are no history standards.
The closest they come is talking about what reading and literacy skills kids should have in the context of reading historical works, for example, they say students should "Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including analyzing how an author uses and refines the meaning of a key term over the course of a text (e.g., how Madison defines faction in Federalist No. 10)."
Do yourself a favor and actually go read the standards instead of reading right-wing hit pieces that have to lie because they don't have any legitimate arguments.
Your kid doesn't bring home the standards. Your kid brings home crappy worksheets and crappy books. These are made by companies trying to take over education. The Common Core standards themselves are overall better than what they replaced. We need more freely shared teacher-created lessons, units, books and projects so we can ditch the for profit companies making garbage resources.
The problem is due to a system that encourages rote memorization, teaching to the test, and generally mindlessly obeying orders (zero tolerance policies, oversensitivity, etc.). It is difficult for most individuals to understand what education truly is when they've never experienced it to begin with.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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.