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Bill Gates Still Trying To Buy Some Common Core Testing Love
theodp writes: "Bill Gates famously spent hundreds of millions of dollars to develop, implement and promote the now controversial Common Core State Standards," reports the Washington Post's Valerie Strauss. "He hasn't stopped giving." In the last seven months, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has poured more than $10 million into implementation and parent support for the Core. Strauss adds: "Gates is the leader of education philanthropy in the United States, spending a few billion dollars over more than a decade to promote school reforms that he championed, including the Common Core, a small-schools initiative in New York City that he abandoned after deciding it wasn't working, and efforts to create new teacher evaluation systems that in part use a controversial method of assessment that uses student standardized test scores to determine the 'effectiveness' of educators. Such philanthropy has sparked a debate about whether American democracy is well-served by wealthy people who pour part of their fortunes into their pet projects — regardless of whether they are grounded in research — to such a degree that public policy and funding follow." If you're still on the fence about Common Core after viewing it, the Onion just came out with a nice list of the pros and cons of standardized testing that may help you decide.
Mr. Gates is still trying to buy his way into history remembering him in a good light.
Thinking about standardized testing reminds me of the Churchill quote: "Democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others.". Standardized testing has its problems but these are no where near as significant as the problems with everything else which has been tried.
They do have a fix. It's called privatization.
In other words they want the system to keep failing so they can push private schools.
Exactly, the media, particularly the conservative media, has a hard time seperating that there are 3 independant things to common core, the standards, the implimentation and the testing.
Common core is just a set of standards that says you need to know X before you move to the next grade.
Implimentaiton is how the teachers do it, however the books used, if any, while designed to teach that standard are not required. Teachers can use the books, develop their own lessons or any combiniation of the two. This is what people seem to have issues with, and seem to want to attribute it to the standards themselves, however without the standards this is still the same implimentaiton that would be used.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
Granted Common Core has some faults, for sure, but at least it is an attempt by someone to do something.
That's not a particularly convincing argument.
So far we have seen lots of lip service on the education system in this country and very little action. I'd be more impressed with the arguments of those calling it "controversial" if they actually proposed a meaningful fix instead of just attacking the fix that we have.
So when your electrician screws up and your breakers trips every time you run the toaster nobody is qualified to judge the work faulty unless they also fix the problem? The point being that it doesn't take an expert, nor does it require the ability to devise a solution to know when something's been done incorrectly.
Umm, sorry to disturb your "conservatives are evil" rant, but then how do you explain the epically failing schools of many american inner cities? Cities that have been run top to bottom, city council to school district by liberals.
"Conservatives" are also for school choice, charter schools, school vouchers, all of which are designed to empower parents in those failing inner city districts some hope.
Now, I've kinda lambasted the liberal city government here, but their intentions aren't all bad. However, this is not a "throw money at" sort of problem.
I'll agree that Common Core has been combined with other items in order to criticize it. Common Standards are a "good thing", in fact we need to pull the standards back up from the constant lowering of them that has happened over time. I completely support this at the state level, from whence Common Core originated.
However, certain entrenched forces in the education community, and federal regulators glommed on to Common Core with the intent to have it drive curriculum and content. This was, and is, a mistake. The KISS principle should have driven the Common Standards, but they complicated it with federal mandates and absurd curriculum.
The "new" math they are trying to teach under the banner of Common Core makes me fear that we will end up with an upcoming generation that does't have the math skills to undertake a College Education in Engineering and Science.
Standards and levels of understanding are good. Demanding that everyone teach via the same methods (unproven ones at that) is not.
The biggest outrages in Common Core I've seen is from the parents of students who've been thrust into the system. They're not watching Fox News, they're trying to help their kids with their math homework and wondering WTF people were thinking. Then they're watching their kids spend 2-3 solid weeks doing testing after being promised less testing. As I understand it, a lot of the fault is in the materials rather than the standards, but that's like receiving a copy of Windows ME and arguing it's okay because they wrote the requirements well.
Every time the educational establishment has tried to "improve" education, they've fucked it up even more.
There were no federal mandates on common core. This is an outright lie by conspiricy theorists.
The curriculum is developed at the state/local/school level, with most of it at the school level. My bother, who teaches math2, helped develop them for his school and the surrounding schools. There is nothing that mandates a curreculum in common core or at the federal level, again out right lies.
The "new" math skills being taught are in general the most efficiant way to do math, particularly when a calculator, or paper is not handy.
As for innnercity schools that seems to be more of an issue with lack of parental ovesight than with school administrators. When parents are so busy working making minimum wage in a single family situation it becomes impossible to keep track of your kids regularly over time, and the kids wander. Schools are not baby sitters, but in innercity schools particularly they are treated as such.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
My state (New York) which had semi-decent education standards to begin with, recently switched to the Common Core curriculum and it's really stirring up a mess. Partially, it's the mandatory testing that parents are opting their children out of, but it's also being tied to a bunch of other things. For example, teachers now have to deal with the same BS performance evaluations that corporate employees do, and a huge chunk of their rating is based on these test scores. They were evaluated in the past, but it was understood that there was no objective way to evaluate teacher performance with variable student performance. Now, new teachers will lose their jobs if their classes don't do well on these tests, with no regard for whether the teacher has a bunch of losers or geniuses in their class. I'm not a teacher, but I'm definitely on the teachers' side in this case. I would hate to spend the time to get a teacher certification (not impossible, but harder in NY than many states) and have my job be at risk due to factors I can't control. For example, most new teachers can't get jobs in the nice affluent school districts because there are tons more qualified applicants who want to work there, so they usually have to start off teaching in a crappy school district. Crappy districts tend to have kids who have crappy parents. (And yes, affluent districts have helicopter parents that make teachers' lives miserable, but that's another story.) If you have a class full of students who have bad home lives, parents who don't care, or have been socially promoted for years, they're going to do badly on these standardized tests and your performance rate will suffer through no fault of your own.
The other thing I've seen is that the material used to teach the common core curriculum is really different from stuff we saw in earlier times. I think that's another big thing -- parents feel they can't help their kids with homework. However, it's the material, not the curriculum itself. Blame the educational publishers for that, not the standards.
One thing I definitely don't agree with Bill Gates on is his love of charter schools. These just suck more money away from the public system and funnel it into corporate interests' pockets, making the public system weaker. What Gates or anyone doesn't understand is that education won't improve until it's valued by everyone. The reason China, India, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, etc. are ahead of us in test performance isn't the curriculum -- they push their students like crazy from both directions (teachers and parents.) Kids in these countries spend many more hours in school than US kids, and have information drilled into their heads. That's what needs to happen if we want to compete with these countries in the future. In the case of India and China, school performance is basically some kids' only ticket to a better life given the population and structure of society. Things might be a little different if students in the US who didn't excel in school were permanently doomed to a life of poverty...I think the parents might care a little more.
I am 39, way too old for common core, however I have always been poor at spelling. Math and logic great, spelling poor. However you were able to read it just fine I am sure, and this is the best argument you could come up with.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
And if Alabama thinks that enslaving other human beings is more rational for their state, would that be okay too? Or if Utah thinks polygamy is more rational for their state, cool with that too, bro? Maybe Mississippi doesn't like women having the vote--no prob, bob!
Just leave everything up to the states and they'll make all the right moves, right? They'll always make the rational decision.
Read these articles, written by one of the CC authors, designed to help teachers teach the common core standards, and then re-think your claim that "Common Core makes me fear that we will end up with an upcoming generation that doesn't have the math skills to undertake a College Education in Engineering and Science":
https://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/CCSS-Geometry_1.pdf
https://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/CCSS-Fractions_1.pdf
More here: https://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/
As a math teacher, I have learned more about what I teach since CC was implemented in my state than ever did before (including a M.Ed. in secondary math teaching). Common Core math is certainly more rigorous than the math education I received through high school (in Texas and Florida).
Explaining that is so simple:
1. Parents either don't have the skills or the time to assist their kids in succeeding.
2. Less resources in inner-city schools.
3. Poor attitudes towards learning amongst the kids (see item 1).
4. Poor teachers: Because teachers in these inner-city areas do not get paid more than their colleagues in good districts, only the worst teachers will teach there. Also, as a teacher, where pay is determined by test results, would you work in an area where the dice are stacked against you (see items 1, 2 and 3 above)?
Actually, it is. Want better teachers? Increase pay and better teachers will enter the profession.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Umm, sorry to disturb your "conservatives are evil" rant, but then how do you explain the epically failing schools of many american inner cities?
All of these epically failing schools are the result of underfunded school districts. Even the privatized programs pushed inside the public school system end up more expensive that just allowing the school system to handle it with public employees, furthering the funding issues. Every single GOP sponsored 'conservative' program seems to be detrimental for public schools. Privatization is all I've seen from the conservative politicians that isn't from the religious part of the conservative education policy making. Why do you think schools are underfunded in the first place? Conservative policy makers.
Outside of your nonsense that depicts this is a political issue and blames liberals while ignoring the larger, actual issues of funding, I do somewhat agree with you on the common core view related to new math, but I also understand that it has an intentional design. I have a 6 and a 13 year old in the midst of this new strategy which, if you were to actually experience the flow of it, seems more functionally useful and builds on particular logic, instead of just memorization and acceptance of formulas without a particular basis of understanding built from other pieces. That said, not teaching kids about long division still drives me crazy. I feel a lot like this is a test being performed on my children's generation and it could really go either way, so I encourage learning outside of school provided methods to keep their minds open.
To summarize, conservatives aren't evil, just more full of shit, and even a broken clock is right twice a day. ;)
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Umm, sorry to disturb your "conservatives are evil" rant, but then how do you explain the epically failing schools of many american inner cities? Cities that have been run top to bottom, city council to school district by liberals.
"Conservatives" are also for school choice, charter schools, school vouchers, all of which are designed to empower parents in those failing inner city districts some hope.
Wow, I am impressed by the doublespeak there! I can't speak for all charter school programs, but the one in Milwaukee I am familiar with. In that city, Charter schools have the ability to refuse students with special needs or with behavioral problems. It shouldn't be a big surprise, then, that they fill up with very teachable students, leaving the difficult cases to the public school system. The public school system then has to spend more of their budget on children who are more expensive. This makes their numbers look bad, which causes any parent of a problem-free child to jump ship to the charter schools. It's a death spiral caused by the charter schools and the rules they are allowed to run under. Conservatives love it because they get proof that the charter schools perform "better". But the student population is not at all comparable.
If I was allowed to shift the most troublesome 25% of my job to someone else, I would appear to be a better employee. But that would have everything to do with the situation and nothing to do with my own personal performance.
The nice thing about the US is that the states should be independent of one another when it comes to education and most other things.
We've tried that, and it turns out that it doesn't really lead to independent states in education. Look at all the textbook debacles that start in Texas, for example. Why would textbooks in Texas matter if you live in a different state? They matter because the companies that publish textbooks don't want to publish different versions for each state, they want to publish for the largest states (population wise) first and then try to sell the same texts to other states.
This results in textbooks going in to non-nutter states that include discussions on intelligent design and other rampant bullshit. The states only have the flexibility to get textbooks of their own choosing if they exist (as few states have the time and money to go about preparing their own textbooks) so they end up with what the boards in Texas approve.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
The opposition to Common Core is easy to understand. Basically, the Republicans wanted testing to be controlled by the states, not the federal government. So they designed a system to do just that. The Democrats didn't like it at first, preferring something more centralized and bloated, but figured it was the best they could get, so they were eventually won over. Then the Republicans noticed that the Democrats no longer opposed their program, so they switched sides and decided if the Dems were for it, they needed to be against it. Rabid opposition to Common Core is now considered a rigorous requirement for Republican presidential candidates. Only Jeb has stood by it.
For another splendid example of "Republicans opposing their own ideas" see {Romney|Obama}care.
Actually, you should have bolded Pearson Those people produce horrid tests.
About a decade ago I wrote science essay tests for them. I quit because they kept asking for dumbing down. Example: They insisted that an essay on hot air balloons tell the reader what a basket was and what it was for on the balloon. The what it was for was already described functionally in the text. They wanted an explicit, dictionary type description. It was very much worse on the non-technical essay tests. Enough so that so many writers stopped, Pearson used their own editors to write the essays.
Short of it is, those are the people producing the bulk of the terrible test examples you'll find in complaints; 'Indicate the box that is correctly shaded.' with none of the boxes shaded, 'Lincoln was a Democrat.' , etc.