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.

Comments

Controversial because?

[damn_registrars]

Common Core appears to have become controversial primarily because the conservative media told us it is. Apparently they were hoping that the new standard would also find a way to further reduce teachers' salaries and career opportunities, and as it did not do that it needed to be destroyed at all cost.

Granted Common Core has some faults, for sure, but at least it is an attempt by someone to do something. 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.

Re:Controversial because?

[Njorthbiatr]

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.

Re:Controversial because?

[thaylin]

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.

Re:Controversial because?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Controversial because?

[kaizendojo]

It's controversial because it takes away time from teaching anything but the test, associated implementation and support costs are enormous and the only ones truly benefitting from this are the test manufacturers like Pearson... who also make the books for studying and the certifications for the teachers and even the GED certs so they have you one way or the other. Full disclosure; I am an independant consultant who works in IT a few days a week for a major school district and I am seeing this from the inside. If you'd like another perspective, I suggest going to YouTube and searching on John Olver's take. Funny, but at the same time chilling.

Re:Controversial because?

[NotDrWho]

Common Core appears to have become controversial primarily because the conservative media told us it is.

I love the way the summary frames it as "rich guys pushing crazy agendas vs. the public interest," when in fact this is much more a case of "rich guys pushing crazy agendas vs. another group of rich guys pushing different crazy agendas."

On one side you have Bill Gates pushing Common Core, on the other side you have the Koch Brothers pushing school vouchers so that people like them get a big tax rebate for sending their kids to schools where your commoner kids will never be allowed to go.

Re:Controversial because?

[JWW]

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.

Re:Controversial because?

[king neckbeard]

Granted Common Core has some faults, for sure, but at least it is an attempt by someone to do something.

Perhaps our federal education standards should put emphasis on teaching children about the politician's syllogism so we don't just 'do something' even if doing something makes things worse.

Re:Controversial because?

[Anonymous Coward]

Every time the educational establishment has tried to "improve" education, they've fucked it up even more.

Re:Controversial because?

[thaylin]

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.

Re:Controversial because?

[thaylin]

Common core does not teach to the test, no child left behind does. Common core does not meantion in any way testing, or how a student must learn. Schools in my area do not buy any books, they make the common core lessons themselves.

Re:Controversial because?

[Anonymous Coward]

Already modded so posting AC. When I was in elementary school in the '60's, the "New Math" with early set theory and base 5 arithmetic was all the rage -- we did OK. Actually I ended up with a degree in math and a degree in electrical engineering. I've seen some of the Common Core math -- it is more oriented to real math concepts and less plain old algorithms and arithmetic. The new (CC) stuff seems better for those really interested in math, maybe the old rote memorization of algorithms is better for everyone else?

Re:Controversial because?

[butchersong]

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 can have some states institute a version of common core and other push solutions they feel to be more rational and see which yields the better result.

Re:Controversial because?

[thaylin]

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.

Re:Controversial because?

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

Re:Controversial because?

[sycodon]

Don't forget, it's also a gravy train for legions of educators who (re)write the curriculum, text books, and tests.

It happens every time they change some standard, millions and millions are spent rewriting, repurchasing, etc. teaching materials.

Re:Controversial because?

[Dog-Cow]

What's wrong with polygamy? Just makes sure your wives don't live together, or their periods will synchronise. Talk about living Hell!

Re:Controversial because?

[scamper_22]

I'd like to know why people think there is an education system problem?

I'm in Canada, so maybe the situation in the US is vastly different, but even in Canada we always have people trumping the education crises.

Over the past 30-40 years we've tossed money after money in the education system, reforming this and that, and can anyone say we've done any better that just having a teacher in a classroom doing their thing?

Heck, does anyone find the irony that people trump up Asian/Indian education, when many of these places don't really spend a lot on education or have 'advanced pedagogy'.

For all the gripes about education system, we somehow still manage to raise some brilliant people. We somehow manage to have people keep doing their jobs and life keeps going.

I would humbly suggest that most of the problems people are trying to solve via the 'academic education' system are the wrong place.

We do have a lot of problems with behavior/family... I experienced this when I was a teacher. Really, what do you do with a kid whose parents don't even answer the phone from the school. Is it any surprise the kid doesn't really care about school?

This is much better addressed through social services and policy changes like empowering teachers run their classes with some discipline.

In all honestly, and this is purely anecdotal, the only difference from when I was a student to when I was a teacher is we lowered the class discipline and became paranoid.

The kids aren't any smarter, they don't think more critically, our lesson plans are fancier, but the output is the same, if not worse. I'm being generous here to the current system :P Sure, math is my day was mainly taught via the textbook and problems. Today, they're almost taking the math out of math. But the new way is more 'advanced' and has more 'pedagogy'

Similarly, most of the workplace/industrial issues are much better dealt with outside of k-12. Training of workers, retention of knowledgeable workers, pursuing advanced degrees... all have little to do with k-12 education and more to do with industry issues.

Why we even concerned with bringing more people into STEM, when I've seen very good STEM people leave the field. Some have become lawyers. Others into project management. Ponder that.

Just what is the education crisis? I just don't see it. As I said, I don't think we've advanced more than have a teacher in a classroom.

Re:Controversial because?

[whoever57]

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.

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)?

However, this is not a "throw money at" sort of problem.

Actually, it is. Want better teachers? Increase pay and better teachers will enter the profession.

Re:Controversial because?

[cHiphead]

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. ;)

Re:Controversial because?

[thaylin]

So kids are only awake for 11 hours out of the day? They sleep for 13? Schools also have very limited ability to discipline students. How do you make a group responsible when they have little or no control over what they are responsible for?

Re:Controversial because?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Controversial because?

[damn_registrars]

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.

Re:Controversial because?

[LordLimecat]

Excuse me, Im looking for strawmen and someone told me this thread would be a great place to find them.

Re:Controversial because?

[DigitalPagan]

I would disagree, standards are part of the problem. They don't simply indicate that you need to know addition. They indicate knowing addition via these five different methods. A lot of common core opponents will point out how inefficient/impractical these methods are but if you understand math you will understand why they are presented. They are presented to help children understand place value and how numerical systems actually work. Here's the problem. Instead of making this knowledge part of the implementation, explaining why addition is done the way it is, it is part of the standard. Now the kids have to know each of the addition methods no matter how useless that approach is. A child can perform very well with one method but fail at the others. Often children become confused with the various processes and intermix steps from the various methods. Proponents of common core will argue that children can pick the method which works best for them but that isn't true. Since each method is part of the standard they are tested on each one. So even if they could solve a problem with method X they may get it wrong when tested on method Y. In the mean time they are taught to the standard so they learn the method but not the principles behind it, and the reason those methods were developed in the first place is lost. There are ways to fix this unfortunately I think the hate it has already generated is more likely to get the whole system thrown out the window.

Re:Controversial because?

[Etherwalk]

Excuse me, Im looking for strawmen and someone told me this thread would be a great place to find them.

LordLimeCat, I see you have procured the strawmen, but don't forget the margarita salt.

Re:Controversial because?

[bhcompy]

"Some faults". You obviously don't have a kid in school. The only benefit of Common Core is that it's not the cancer that is Everyday Math

Re:Controversial because?

[bhcompy]

What does "should" mean? In California, curriculum requirements include the history of the state, but that is not part of Common Core. Nationalized standards do not care about locale.

Re:Controversial because?

[jellomizer]

The big issue I think isn't what common core is, but how it was implemented.
New York implemented by stating all grade levels needed to start using common core. Not starting kindergarten and going up. So Highschool students who have been learning the old way needed to change their methodology.

Re:Controversial because?

[sonicmerlin]

Oh please. Charter schools and vouchers are by any objective analysis a means of creating a two tiered school system, one for the rich and one for the poor.

Are you going to ignore the conservative push in states like Texas to teach Intelligent Design instead of evolution? Or the massive anti-intellectualism of the Republican party platform?

I can't believe you were modded +5 informative. So many conservatives who live in cognitive dissonance.

Re:Controversial because?

[thaylin]

Where do you get this from? Can you point a link to said standard?

Re:Controversial because?

[ShanghaiBill]

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.

Re:Controversial because?

[whoever57]

Alot of it is based on union tenure in many districts.

To get rid of tenure, teacher pay would need to be increased.

...there was less..
Alot

Apparently you did not benefit from education as much as you think you did...

Re:Controversial because?

[ShanghaiBill]

I have always been poor at spelling.

Pro-tip: Use a modern browser and look for the little red squiggles under words. That means they are misspelled. Use the right button on your mouse to click and choose the correct spelling. This will not only make your posts more readable, but also give you greater credibility.

Re:Controversial because?

[thaylin]

that makes no sense, especially since the standards to not tell you how to teach things, although it may give examples.

Re:Controversial because?

[satch89450]

Where do you get this from? Can you point a link to said standard?

That's part of the problem. Where ARE the links? I'd like to look at them.

Re:Controversial because?

[butchersong]

What you are saying is true but my nephew for example attends a small private school with less than 40 children. The teachers there create their own curriculum from several sources and the school charges like 2k a year for attendance. I guess I would argue that if Texas wants to push for certain curriculum for their schools other schools should still be able to educate their children in any way they see fit either using other materials or creating their own.

.

I mean the a public school employees dozens to hundreds of people with degrees in education and specialty fields. Why do they need to outsource their curriculum?

Re:Controversial because?

[Jason Levine]

The Common Core opposition isn't just coming from Republicans. My wife and I have been fighting over New York's horrible implementation of Common Core which includes scripts for teachers that they aren't allowed to deviate from, high stakes testing, and most recently tying said testing to teacher jobs. We're definitely not Republicans. Around 300,000 students refused the tests in NY. (Before someone says "well, they're just hard tests", the 6th grade tests had college level reading material on them.) Bill Gates, Pearson, and others are pushing this to make money off students - not to help students succeed.

Re:Controversial because?

[Jason Levine]

There were no federal mandates on common core. This is an outright lie by conspiricy theorists.

It doesn't help when state officials claim the Feds are mandating certain tests and when Federal officials say that they might need to take "action" if there are too many test refusals in a state.

As for innnercity schools that seems to be more of an issue with lack of parental ovesight than with school administrators.

That and poverty. When a child is poor - to the degree that he/she is worried about whether they'll be able to eat dinner, whether mom/dad will still have a job tomorrow, whether they'll lose their home next week, etc, that impacts learning. Obviously, there's no easy cure to poverty, but we'd be better off spending money helping the poor kids than giving it to Pearson to implement yet more testing.

Re:Controversial because?

[satch89450]

As for innnercity schools that seems to be more of an issue with lack of parental oversight...

How about just the lack of parents, in the plural? How many of those inner city schools have significant populations of single-parent children? Particularly children without fathers?

Re:Controversial because?

[JWW]

Exactly, the feds aren't "mandating" tests per se, but they are tying actions to funding levels, which is a huge lever with the individual schools.

Re:Controversial because?

[Anonymous Coward]

Look, your response doesn't fit the narrative of it being a republican thing. Please delete.

Re:Controversial because?

[Jason Levine]

There's also no transparency. Pearson makes the test, owns the test, and anyone releasing questions from the test can get in big trouble. The questions that were leaked show that 3rd grade tests had 6th grade reading materials and 6th grade tests had college level materials. This also means that the tests were likely designed to fail the students. (Pearson can sell more to students who fail than to students who pass.)

John Oliver's take was spot on. It was somehow funny and sad at the same time.

Re:Controversial because?

[JustNiz]

You're missing the real point here. I don't think anyone here is seriously against raising standards or having common standards as a principle in itself.
The actual issue is, do you really want to continue with something that even Gates himself has admitted is a failed experiment? ... Or even worse... to put the responsibility for defining the actual content of lessons, and the criteria by which students get lablelled for the rest of their lives, into the hands of a businessman who's priorty is continually proven to be corporate profit and social engineering to that end (regardless of how well he hides it behind a facade of charity)?. I sure as hell don't.

Re:Controversial because?

[Jason Levine]

Just what is the education crisis? I just don't see it. As I said, I don't think we've advanced more than have a teacher in a classroom.

It's an invented crisis so that Pearson can sell more, Charter schools can push out more public schools, and politicians can get more power by blaming teachers and implementing "assessments" that don't really test anything.

Re:Controversial because?

[JWW]

Yes, but if you get rid of tenure first you can start increasing teacher pay for the BEST teachers instead of the ones who have been there the longest.

That said, I have seen instances where the oldest teachers are the best, my son's 2nd grade teacher was IMHO literally worth her weight in gold, but has since retired. However, his pre-calculus teacher in high school was the worst teacher I'd ever seen at any level, and also had the most seniority, thankfully he finally retired too.

Re:Controversial because?

[satch89450]

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.

In my high school in downstate Illinois, several of my classes were taught using locally published material. Oh, we had the standard textbooks, but we were tested on the material in the local material. Chemistry was taught from a locally-written textbook, and my father (a research chemist) thought that home-brew textbook was better than some of the college textbooks on his shelf. This wasn't restricted to just one state: in Oklahoma we had a textbook written by an in-state college professor about the history of the Native Americans, from Columbus through to then-present day. I'm not aware of any Texas textbook that does more than scratch the surface about the "Trail of Tears." And the state didn't publish the textbook.

Re:Controversial because?

[foreverdisillusioned]

Umm, sorry to disturb your "conservatives are evil" rant, but then how do you explain the epically failing schools of many american inner cities?

How deep is your head in the sand? Christ almighty, school funding is based on property taxes. These poor-er schools are filled with poor-er teachers and poor-er students--oh yes, this is all obviously the fault of the liberals! Why, it was obviously the liberals who insisted on the geographic school zoning policies that (while obviously sensible from a busing standpoint) prevent strata mixing and perpetuate the stigma of the decaying schools you speak of, making it harder to attract either decent teachers or "school-choice" parents. It was obviously the liberals who insisted on using decaying structures from the 1950s instead of building attractive new campuses (yes, this is shallow but it is still a huge factor for attracting better teachers and choosy parents.)

I am actually much more pro-standardized testing and pro-accountability than most people around here, but to blame run-down schools on the "liberals" instead of the conservative unwillingness to subsidize an infrastructure similar to what the upper middle class suburban kids have access to is laughable.

"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.

Nonsense. This empowers the middle and upper-middle class, not the parents who do not have the time or money necessary to screw around driving their kids to a different school across town. Accountability is a good thing, but vouchers and school choice is a regressive "solution" that further concentrates and exacerbates the problem among those least able to cope with it.

Now, if you want an actual example of "liberal" (more accurately, "progressive") harm being done, the anti-gentrification and anti-development brigades have plenty of blood on their hands re: inner city decay.

Re:Controversial because?

[JWW]

Of course at this point I should point out how much of a staunch conservative Governor Cuomo is....

As a parent I don't view this (especially at the local level) as a conservative vs. liberal issue. I think that detracts from the issue.

I personally think that charters are an interesting way to set up schools, a friend of mine (quite liberal himself BTW) raves about the charter school that his daughter is going to. Although I agree that we haven't figured out how to best utilize them and arrange them.

I know a key crux of the matter is parental involvement, its a HUGE thing which is why my wife and I have been heavily involved in the PTA from the point our children started school.

Re:Controversial because?

[pnutjam]

The new (CC) stuff seems better for those really interested in math, maybe the old rote memorization of algorithms is better for everyone else?
Bingo!
It's also better for making people develop an interest in math.

Re:Controversial because?

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you seen common core math? I have a first grader and have first hand. I have an engineering degree and have taken more math than I can remember. Yet I cannot figure out my first grader's math homework. When I do google searches for help, I find 5 different ways of doing what is assigned. It is not straight forward not helpful. If we design a teaching method that parents cannot understand, we take parents helping their kids learn out of the equation. Parents supplementing the classroom is one of the things that helps kids excel. Common core really is giving all the power to the teachers as it takes parents out of the loop.

The math is also backwards. Rather than giving the kids a foundation of understanding their addition tables (memorization as we older people were taught) by which kids can discern and recognize the patterns on their own, the teaching is trying to force patterns on kids without understanding what they equate to. Isn't it better to let kids discover and have aha moments rather than force feeding them everything? We should be wanting to find ways to energize brains and encouraging discovery and creativity. What we're teaching now is hard wired paths. There's a reason why American engineers have historically been more inventive than those from other cultures. Our methods of teaching have encouraged creativity and exploration. While other countries like India and China have been more drone like. Yes, they've beaten us on academic standards, but when you work in engineering, you see the difference between those that can think on their own and solve problems versus those that have to be led and given a script.

Our education system was not broken from a how/what to teach. It's been broken by a culture of not respecting education. Popular culture makes fun of the nerd and celebrates the dunce. It's not cool to study or get good grades. We've been racing to the bottom to be popular. No amount of money flowing in to schools can fix that. It has to come from parent involvement and the media (movies, tv, music, etc) changing its portrayals. I'm all for freedom of speech and not in to brain washing, but we need to be more responsible as a society in promoting better values if we want to continue to lead the world in innovation.

Re:Controversial because?

[damn_registrars]

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.

You almost created an argument there, too bad you posted AC which will prevent us from being able to tell if the person who posted it ever returns to see the response.

Nevertheless, it does warrant some exploration. The point I was after is that merely saying something doesn't work is not at all the same as actually doing something about it. Your electrician example is pretty good for this; just about anyone can tell when they have plugged something in to a faulty outlet, but not everyone is capable of fixing the wiring. With the education system, we have a lot of people who recognize that something is wrong, but very few people who are proposing any kind of solution. We also have a few people who want to call in plumbers (educational equivalents of venture capitalists) when we need electricians (people with experience in education), apparently under the notion that wiring is pretty similar to plumbing.

The other problem though is that it is really hard to tell if common core has actually failed. Someone else pointed out there are three main components to common core; they really should be evaluated independently. Another thing is that at the start of the experiment no criteria were laid forth to evaluate success (or failure) which makes it that much more difficult to score. Finally, without having comparable control schools to compare to common core schools, it is that much more difficult to show what kind of "failure" this has brought on. Any time you change the system there will be turbulence.

Re:Controversial because?

[thaylin]

I typically do, but tried grammarly, and it failed to connect so everything seemed ok.

Re:Controversial because?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure
http://www.corestandards.org/Math/Content/1/OA/

The problem, though, is that a rational person looks at that and thinks "that just means that they can add and subtract". However, when you read into it, what it really means is that they have to, just as GP said, they have to be able to write down five different methods of addition, even though two of those five are mental strategies for estimating, which don't translate well to paper (they confuse the hell out of children who can already add) and two are strategies for explaining addition, not for adding numbers, which also, don't translate very well. Only the fifth is how people add numbers on paper, efficiently or precisely. So, instead of four of these being tools to teach and the objective being to add, now all 5 are tested modalities that must be learned by every student, the objectives of "be able to add" and numerical literacy be damned. I've used each of those modalities as a teacher, but said "fuck it" and am now driving for Fed Ex because it pays better and CDOT bullshit is a lot less onerous and more rational than CDE CEA, school administrators and parents, both singularly and in an aggregate jumble of bullshit lies.

Re:Controversial because?

[Comrade Ogilvy]

Nonsense. CC is silent on the manner of grading teachers. That is simply a choice on the part of the state legislature and local school district. If the state legislature decides to enact a Procrustean regime that squashes the ability for teachers in the trenches to enact amendments to the class curriculum, then that itself is a problem regardless of whether CC is endorsed or not. In fact, we are already on that road, unfortunately, and ditching CC is not going to move us in another direction.

Re:Controversial because?

[pseudorand]

Doing "something" just for the sake of doing something is in no way good. The education system is broken, but I'd rather my kids breeze their way through a far-too-easy education system than fight to stay afloat in a stupid one that teach useless and sometimes outright wrong things. At least in the former case they can spend all the free time they have from not doing homework and test prep to play with legos, robotics kits, computers and doing other things that will actually prepare them to survive in the 21st century economy. If the school system is crappy, I'd much rather it just stay out of the way than have a bunch of incompetent idiots frustrate everyone with their useless attempt to fix things.

Re:Controversial because?

[thaylin]

. Or even worse... to put the responsibility for defining the actual content of lessons, and the criteria by which students get lablelled for the rest of their lives, into the hands of a businessman who's priorty is continually proven to be corporate profit and social engineering to that end (regardless of how well he hides it behind a facade of charity)

Common core does not do that.

Re:Controversial because?

[penix1]

The schools have the children for more hours a day than the parents do in most cases and some of that time has to go toward athletic activities, eating, bathing, and other activities. 7 hours in school 4 or 5 hours before bed. The schools are the ones who should be held directly accountable.

You need to readjust your math there bud...

School is in session from 8:00 AM to 2:00 PM 5 days a week with 180 education days a year in my state. That is 1080 hours they are in school. Compare that to the time they are home...

365 days a year = 8760 hours - 1080 hours spent in school = 7680 hours (320 full days) at home. Granted, some of that time is spent doing the activities you describe but the majority of the time is spent pursuing leisure activity (holidays, vacations, etc...)

Re:Controversial because?

[thaylin]

No, these are parents with a tentative, at best grasp on the subjects themselves and lashing out. The biggest one I have seen

http://www.ijreview.com/2014/0...

Of course this dad, who apparently has an EE degree, and the vast majority of the readers fail to actually READ the assignment. The math does not work, and that was the point of the assignment, to find the error in how the student did the work, not try and solve it in the incorrect way the student used. BTW, the student did not separate the 1s and the 10s, and had to many 1.

Re:Controversial because?

[JWW]

Inner city schools do have access to federal and state funding to address this.

See here: http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyo...

Agree with you completely on the anti-gentrification and anti-development comments those activities are not helping.

Re:Controversial because?

[butchersong]

We are in rural Kentucky so that is part of it. Even then I personally don't understand why the teachers put in the effort they do there for the pay they receive but... they do. They are really pretty selfless in their dedication to the children. The school itself just uses a local church for class space and calls itself a "homeschool academy". The kids all test very well and are very tight knit and supportive of one another -not at all my experience from public school. My nephew in third grade tested on a middle school to high school level in whatever categories the state tests measure.

Re:Controversial because?

[Jhon]

"To get rid of tenure, teacher pay would need to be increased."

When you toss in the value of their benefits, many are incredibly well paid. Want them to have more pay? Have them pay for some of their health insurance. Have them contribute to their own pensions.

"Apparently you did not benefit from education as much as you think you did..."

Aren't you cute. Can't or wont really address anything I said so you pick out two minor errors (a typo and a failure to fully edit a sentence I had changed mid way). I bet you feel grand.

Re:Controversial because?

[Archangel Michael]

And on the third side, you have Liberals beholden to Teacher Unions wanting to keep the status quo at failing schools.

See, it is really easy to paint in broad strokes to make the other guys look bad. The real issues with CC are

1) Common Core doesn't serve the kids, it serves those in power
2) Much of the problem with "Common Core" is from mandates, be it from city, county, state or federal levels, not directly Common Core itself. (Conflating)
3) Other aspects of Common Core are the methods prescribed by mandates (see #2) that try to avoid long standing approaches to instruction. (also Conflating)

If we stopped for just a second, and took a big step back, and simply asked "How does this help Johnny or Sue". The best person to know about Johnny or Sue is their parent(s), not some bureaucrat who has never met Johnny or Sue. The problem we have is that is the one person who should have a choice, but doesn't. We can spend all the money in the world, and not change the result. But until we start empowering those closest to the problem to change the conditions, nothing is going to change. Common Core doesn't actually address how to get Johnny or Sue educated. It only addresses how schools are failing (or not), but never addresses WHY those schools are failing. And we really can't ask that question can we?

Re:Controversial because?

[penix1]

It's only a huge lever because they allow it to be a huge lever. Taking federal funds in any program always comes with minimum standards. If you don't meet the standards in most federal funding the usual remedy is refunding the federal dollars you took. Just ask anyone who got funding from SSI or FEMA when they didn't meet the standard for those funds to find out just how vicious the feds can be in this area.

So, to sum it up don't take the money if you don't want to live up to the grant agreement.

Re:Controversial because?

[SuricouRaven]

"Something must be done, this is something, therefore this must be done."

Re:Controversial because?

[Archangel Michael]

Strawman arguments aren't rational either, but here you are making them.

Re:Controversial because?

[Oligonicella]

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.

Re:Controversial because?

[JustNiz]

Yes it does.
It defnes both what to teach and the testing that ensures it was done. The only thing it doesn't speicify is how to teach that stuff, which is basically irrelevant compared to the what.

http://www.corestandards.org/a...
>> Teachers know best about what works in the classroom. That is why these standards establish what students need to learn, but do not dictate how teachers should teach.

Re:Controversial because?

[Archangel Michael]

Right up there with people crying "there ought to be a law"

Nobody ever stops and asks if the premise is even correct.

Re:Controversial because?

[thaylin]

I HAVE read it and you are 100% incorrect. That does not dictate how to lean addition.

CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.1.OA.A.1

You are asked to solve word problems using addition and subtraciton under 20.

CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.1.OA.B.3

You are asked to learn the commutative and associative properties of addition

CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.1.OA.C.5
You compare adding to counting

CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.1.OA.C.6

You are taught to start using grouping

CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.1.OA.D.7

You are taught to use equalities

CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.1.OA.D.8

You are taught to use equalities to solve unknown variables.

None of these standards talk about a way to teach addition, they are all how to use addition, or comparing it to something else. It is a step by step approach to what is needed to learn addition, and covers what most 1st graders learn.

Re:Controversial because?

[thaylin]

Again CC does not push a technique, at best it gives examples. You do not have to use copyrighted materials, you can make your own, and the standards themselves follow this license:

The NGA Center for Best Practices (NGA Center) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) hereby grant a limited, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to copy, publish, distribute, and display the Common Core State Standards for purposes that support the Common Core State Standards Initiative. These uses may involve the Common Core State Standards as a whole or selected excerpts or portions.

Re:Controversial because?

[Oligonicella]

Pro-tip: Being a pedant or supporting one decreases your credibility in a discussion as well. Ignoring typos and addressing the points made does.

Re:Controversial because?

[LifesABeach]

You know, it sounds like Bill Gates knows what he's talking about. Common Core develops the student to think a little bit deeper than chosing, "C" as the answer to a question. Maybe he can get off his lard ass and live stream his teaching a full school year at a Title 1 school? I'm certain everybody, and I do mean EVERYBODY will be more educated after it.

Re:Controversial because?

[Oligonicella]

May we then not pay in said money? We're where it came from in the first place.

Re:Controversial because?

[LifesABeach]

It almost sounds like a conservative rush for America to rise to a third world status.

Re:Controversial because?

[thaylin]

Actually, as outlined in your link, creation of the assessment is done by 3rd parties, not the common core initiative:

Will common assessments be developed?
Two state-led consortia, Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) and the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (Smarter Balanced), are currently working to develop assessments that aim to provide meaningful feedback to ensure that students are progressing toward attaining the necessary skills to succeed in college, career, and life. These assessments are expected to be available in the 2014-2015 school year. Most states have chosen to participate in one of the two consortia. For more information, visit the website of your state’s assessment consortium. Two additional consortia, working through the National Center and State Collaborative Partnership and the Dynamic Learning Maps Alternative Assessment System Consortium, are developing a new generation of assessments for students with the most significant cognitive disabilities.

Re:Controversial because?

[whoever57]

Can't or wont really address anything I said

Exaggeration much? What about my comment about teacher pay?

When you toss in the value of their benefits, many are incredibly well paid. Want them to have more pay? Have them pay for some of their health insurance. Have them contribute to their own pensions.

I can't comment about other states, but in California, teachers do contribute to heath insurance, teachers contribute a lot to their own pensions. A new teacher in California has a bachelor's degree, plus half the credits that would be required for a Master's, yet cannot afford to rent an apartment without sharing and run a car. In what other profession is this true?

The rest of your comments amount to victim blaming ("then they shouldn't have kids"). As for your comment about it not being so bad in the past: 1. Wasn't it? Do you have any stats on that? and 2: Could this be related to increasing wealth disparity? Perhaps those parents did not have to work 2 or 3 jobs just to put food on the table.

Re:Controversial because?

[thaylin]

That does not tell you to teach addition in different ways, here is a breakdown of the rules
CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.1.OA.A.1

You are asked to solve word problems using addition and subtraciton under 20.

CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.1.OA.B.3

You are asked to learn the commutative and associative properties of addition

CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.1.OA.C.5
You compare adding to counting

CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.1.OA.C.6

You are taught to start using grouping

CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.1.OA.D.7

You are taught to use equalities

CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.1.OA.D.8

You are taught to use equalities to solve unknown variables

You can also test multiples of these with one question.

Re:Controversial because?

[Oligonicella]

I don't. Explain it more thoroughly. Please include in your definition the differences between companies and school systems, which you neglected in your snark.

Re:Controversial because?

[Oligonicella]

As opposed to the crystal-rubbing, holistic believing, anti-vaccine touting liberal Democrats? Both parties have dumbasses and display cognitive dissonance.

Re:Controversial because?

[whoever57]

Yes, but if you get rid of tenure first you can start increasing teacher pay for the BEST teachers instead of the ones who have been there the longest.

If you get rid of tenure, then you start firing teachers, how are you going to replace them? Do you imagine that there is a large pool of excellent and qualified teachers just waiting for the opportunity of a teaching job? You need to attract better people into the profession and for that, you need higher pay.

Re:Controversial because?

[Jason Levine]

Not just producing horrible tests, but grading horribly. They employ near-minimum wage people to grade the exams and then tell them just how many of each grade they should get. Too many high scoring tests? You've just got to "see" that 5 out of 5 test as a 4 and that 4 out of 5 test as a 3.

Re:Controversial because?

[jfdavis668]

How is the "new" math they are trying to teach different from the "New Math" I learned. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N... My parents were ranting and raving with the rest of the parents that they changed everything and they can't help with it and kids won't be able to succeed in college. This was during the 60's and 70's. It's the same math, just a different way of looking at it. In many ways, the current "new" math is closer to how math really works. When Pythagoras squared a number, he literally drew a square, not multiplied it by itself to raise it to the power of two.

Re:Controversial because?

[Ichijo]

(Before someone says "well, they're just hard tests", the 6th grade tests had college level reading material on them.

To play the devil's advocate, if you get a perfect score on a test, you don't really know how good you are, you only know that you were good enough to pass the test. Getting an answer wrong reveals an upper limit of your ability, if knowing that is worth anything.

Re:Controversial because?

[Jason Levine]

These tests aren't meant to spot the brightest students. They are (supposedly) meant to evaluate how much a child has learned that year. If that's the case, what child will be learning college level materials in 6th grade? If it's not the case, then people have been misled as to the purpose behind the exam. At best, the tests are just badly designed. At worst, Pearson is rigging the test to get the results that they want. Namely, that students are failing so that they can sell solutions to this "problem" to school districts.

Re:Controversial because?

[jfdavis668]

Yea, we need some really good liberals, like Stalin.

Re:Controversial because?

[Toshito]

Oh! I saw him in the "Religious Affiliation Shrinking In the US" thread, I'm afraid he's lost and can't find his way out.

Re:Controversial because?

[random coward]

The AC was right, and knows what he's talking about. You aren't actually listing the complete standards, just the summary. Here are some of the complete standards:

CCSS.Math.Content.1.OA.A.1 Use addition and subtraction within 20 to solve word problems involving situations of adding to, taking from, putting together, taking apart, and comparing, with unknowns in all positions, e.g., by using objects, drawings, and equations with a symbol for the unknown number to represent the problem.1 CCSS.Math.Content.1.OA.A.2 Solve word problems that call for addition of three whole numbers whose sum is less than or equal to 20, e.g., by using objects, drawings, and equations with a symbol for the unknown number to represent the problem.

Jason Zimba and William McCallum may be a competent mathematicians, but they do no't know how to write requirements, alternately if they do know how to write requirements and this is what they intended, then they are evil.

Re:Controversial because?

[Bengie]

Exactly. I work with Common Core related stuff all the time. It is not the primary thing that I work with, but as an evaluation platform, it's great. One of the biggest issues with education is the fragmentation in how testing is done. Common Core sets a target on how to measure children's growth. In my uses, it's one of the most accurate. Even if not the best, it is a great step forward and is much better than some of the testing some of the states have.

Re:Controversial because?

[thaylin]

That summary does not support your argument. It does not mention anything about ways of performing addition, it talks about using addition in different ways, exactly what I stated, and the complete opposite of what the AC was arguing. In fact the summary was just a scaled down version of exactly what I said.

Re:Controversial because?

[HiThere]

I'll agree that he's trying to do "something". I'm just not certain what. And I'm quite suspicios that if I found out that "philanthropy" would not be among the words I would use to describe it.

I'll agree that the schools are in terrible shape. This doesn't mean that no matter what you'll do you'll make things better. And it doesn't mean that I'm going to trust someone who has a long history of pushing MSWind into inappropriate and damaging environments. I don't understand the rationaile behind "common core" well enough to criticize it in detail, but it doesn't seem to be "successful" in any case that I've heard of, so I suspect it's something else like "leave no child behind" that tries to cram everybody into the same mould, but use an name that sounds good. Everyone clearly understands that there is the need for a common core of educational materials...except the teachers who must deal with those who don't fit in.

Re:Controversial because?

[spire3661]

When in the forseeable future is a calculator NOT going to be at hand?

Re:Controversial because?

[HiThere]

Not every time, but frequently enough to cause one to wonder about their goals.

OTOH, if the parents don't respect education, there isn't going to be much that a teacher can do. But it should be possible for the teacher to get them out of class if they are disruptive as well as invincibly ignorant (which doesn't mean stupid, it means believing that education isn't worth the bother).

Re:Controversial because?

[Man On Pink Corner]

What would be an example of college-level material on a 6th-grade test?

Re:Controversial because?

[foreverdisillusioned]

This doesn't hold nationwide.

Also, I think there is a hard-to-quantify currency of "bad school / bad teachers / bad students." involved here that ensures failure even in cases where the dollars and cents are equalized. Schools get bad reps, well-off parents with (on average) kids doing well in school do their best to avoid them, poor parents can't and parents of hooligans don't care so the reputation continues to spiral downward, teachers prefer not to work with the students because of the stress (exacerbated by standardized testing, which is fine in principle but the accountability of teachers bit is often not set up correctly) and lack of job satisfaction so the teachers that do end up there are the apathetic or incompetent, performance deteriorates even further, etc. This process can operate even if the salaries of teachers remains constant. The annual operating budget also presumably neglects static assets like the value of the buildings (which are usually MUCH shittier, although the location of the land within city limits might offset this a bit.)

I don't necessarily say I have a good solution for this (the "magnet school" program was good in theory but laughable in practice), but 1. I don't blame the liberals. and 2. It could indeed be solved by an extremely (likely prohibitively) large outlay of money to make the buildings themselves attractive and to bring in higher quality teachers.

Re:Controversial because?

[Jason Levine]

From http://badassteachers.blogspot.com/2015/04/ny-testing-horror-stories-ela-tests-day.html:

NYS ELA Grade 6 Day 1 had a passage, written by a British author in the 1800s, with a readability/ text complexity range from Grade 9-College!

Note: That this blog can't provide the exact text because doing so could result in a lawsuit from Pearson. Teachers or students merely talking about the tests - even after the tests are given - isn't allowed either. Any teacher who says what was on the test - especially online somewhere - is risking their job.

There's also this post:

The third-grade ELA test contained a passage from "Drag Racer," which had a grade level difficulty of 5.9 and an interest level of grades 9–12, as well as an allusion to the Aurora Borealis. Teachers anonymously reported one question appeared on both the third-grade test and fifth-grade test.
Fourth-graders, generally 10 years old, were required to write about the architectural designs of roller coasters and why cables are used instead of chains.

Re:Controversial because?

[JustNiz]

Well I would argue that whoever specifies the curriculum as a side-effect also determines what testing happens, since even independents can't test for anything other than what's in the curriculum.

Re:Controversial because?

[steelfood]

Pearson subcontracts their test-writing out to other companies who hire people on what's barely above minimum wage to write their tests questions.

What I don't understand is, if Common Core is a federal thing, why doesn't the Federal Government put together a panel of educators to write the curriculum and test questions? Why leave it to a contractor and subcontractors? How are they more qualified?

Actually, I do understand, though I don't understand why Gates thinks it's a good idea and is backing it if he's serious about philanthropy. The answer, obviously, is money. Common Core isn't about teaching or standardizing education. It's about giving Pearson and other test-writing and test-prep businesses their handouts. The car companies got theirs. Airlines get it all the time. Testing companies want their cut of the taxpayer jackpot too.

But a Federal panel would fail. The reasons why is simple: to be put on the panel is an increased burden on the educators who partake in the panel, with no reward. So nobody will want to be a part of it except people who have something else to gain. Mainly, those who cannot actually effectively teach would want to bolster their career by being a part of this. Or those who want an in into industry or perhaps even politics. And the reason there's no reward is because teachers have no prestige in this country. Teaching, education, these are not highly-valued professions and activities. Most adults (save for certain cultures and levels of affluence) don't value education, and pass this onto their children. They'd rather have that fancy 60" TV or new car than send their kids to afterschool test prep. They treat teachers as government-paid babysitters or worse, substitute parents, expecting teachers to do things that they themselves are supposed to be doing for their children.

How do we change this attitude? Birth control is a start. That eliminates a whole class of would-be parents who are both unqualified and ambivalent on parenting. But popular media is the real key, the goal to this. Only they can affect people's perception of education, both fictional media (yes, we know it's all fake Hollywood B.S., but there are subconscious effects) and non-fiction like the news. And popular media is not going to do anything about this because there's no money in it (Look at the latest Muppet series and compare with the original, which funny enough, media considers a "children's show"; Jim Henson is rolling in his grave right now).

If Bill Gates is serious about fixing education, he needs to first fix culture. Maybe buy Disney, whose holding the keys to American culture right now (which is sitting both in and outside their vault). Good luck with that one.

/rant

Re:Controversial because?

[steelfood]

It's also more dangerous teaching in inner city schools. Dealing with gangs, drugs, weapons, etc. are all a part of the daily routine of both teachers and students. That's why a lot of inner city teachers were originally from the inner city. They go back to give other inner city kids a chance to get out and lead better lives, despite the increases in risk to their own safety and well-being.

Re:Controversial because?

[Anonymous Coward]

Except funding has gone nowhere but up. Oops.

Re:Controversial because?

[thaylin]

However again CC does not specify the curriculum, the state/local/school does.

Re:Controversial because?

[jumbomojo]

Good point. In all of this it seems like there are several discreet issues tangled up in one discussion. My impression (as someone twenty years out of parenthood and forty years out of school) is that we mix up:

a.) common core - the idea that there is a base body of knowledge to which all students should be exposed, whether schooled in California, Massachusetts, North Dakota or Florida
b.) standardized testing - the idea that there should be one method, consistently designed, delivered and evaluated, for measuring students mastery of a.)
c.) teacher/school evaluation - the idea that there should be some objective scale by which communities can determine if teachers are doing their jobs well or poorly

For the record, I endorse a.) but wonder about b.) and c.), mainly because I believe there are many non-academic, social conditions that affect their outcomes.

Re:Controversial because?

[JustNiz]

Not true. It speciifes what each student should know at each grade level. Therefore, that determines the curriculum.

Re:Controversial because?

[DigitalPagan]

Your right the standard itself doesn't fully define the exact method in which the problem should be solved but it leads to that eventual implementation. For example, the standard above states "by using objects, drawings, and equations." Well it's part of the standard so you need to ensure the child can 1) solve a problem with objects, 2) solve the same problems with drawings, and 3) solve with an equation. How do you confirm that? You write a problem on the test and specify that you MUST use drawings in your work to see if they can in fact do it that way. Hence you get questions, all specifying exactly how they want you to solve it, instead of leaving it to the student to pick the best method which works for them. These are the different "methods" I was referring to in my original post. If you have to teach kids how to use pictures then you do eventually end up with a specific process and method to solve problems, which just happens to use pictures.

Re:Controversial because?

[imidan]

I'm so glad to see your comment. I don't have a strong opinion about Common Core, being neither a teacher or a parent (though I am favorably disposed toward it). But I do believe that we should argue the merits of CC on their own, without complicating the discussion with standardized testing and teacher evaluation. Those two are important issues, but they are not Common Core. It's frustrating to me that CC has somehow become a partisan issue, and that there is so much wildly manipulative misinformation swirling around the topic.

I am also generally in favor of reducing the number of standardized tests that students take. And I believe that teacher and school evaluation is an issue that must be taken on, but I don't know what the best approach would be (though I'm fairly certain that NCLB and the like is not it).

Re:Controversial because?

[digsbo]

There are lots of young unemployed people with education degrees, looking for an opportunity to teach. They just don't want to work in schools where they'll be shot by students or parents with a negative attitude towards education.

Re:Controversial because?

[seffala]

My kids' school is upper-middle class.

School starts at 7:30 (30 minutes earlier than you represent). School ends at 2:45 (45 minutes later than you represent).

Before-school care begins at 6:30am. After-school care ends at 5:30pm.
That's 11 hours/day, times 178 instructional days/year = 1958 hours.

Add in 30 instructional days for summer school, is roughly 2288 hours/year away from home.

I can't imagine what it would be for a family holding down two minimum wage jobs at irregular hours. I suspect the time away from "home" would be even higher, since I've left out 11 weeks with no school activity, 17 if you don't have summer school.

Re:Controversial because?

[Anguirel]

Your lack of understanding comes from a flawed premise. Common Core is not a Federal thing. It is being run by a coalition of states. They had educators create guidelines for what students should know at various grade levels. Educators (good ones, even) joined in on this effort (which contradicts your point) -- most teachers, since there's no recognition as you noted, genuinely care about teaching kids, and give a ton of their time freely in pursuit of that goal. This was just another place they could do that.

Common Core does not directly stipulate curriculum or implementation. The vast majority of problems with "Common Core" are not with the Common Core itself, but the poor implementation of Common Core guidelines by For-Profit companies like Pearson, or how those guidelines were adopted by state legislatures (which generally consisted of "We'll buy this company's books and curricula and tests, and then have every school use them and if students don't do well we punish the teachers").

Re:Controversial because?

[Kaptain Kruton]

Some readers may fail to actually read the assignment. But whether you read exactly what the assignment requests or not, the parent is right in his statement that the problem used an overly complex method to teach students.

I had never even heard of a "number line" until a saw the problem shown in your link. After taking a moment, I can see how it could be used to determine an answer. However it is overly complex and takes the students in a direction that shouldn't be used because number lines cannot be used when the student moves beyond basic arithmetic. While the assignment wasn't to create a number line, it was still asking a student to realize what was incorrect with one that was given to them. This means actual students are taught to use number lines when solving basic arithmetic problems, like 427- 316 = 111. Basic arithmetic is a foundation and can typically be carried out in a very simple manner by writing one number over the other and performing the correct action on each column of digits. It is simple and can be used in their future endeavors and studies. Drawing lines with many nodes for 1's, 10's, and 100's cannot be used beyond basic arithmetic problems. Why confuse the students by adding an overly complex method of doing things when they can be taught to write two numbers and calculated the difference in a simple and easy to understand manner?

Second, when children are young and still learning a concept, they should not be shown problems that are incorrect when learning about the concept. Searching for an error and explaining it may allow a person's understanding of a topic to grow if they already understand the subject matter. However, when students are still learning the basic principles of something, they should not be shown incorrect ways of doing things. Lets say a child knows that a problem has one flaw in it, but everything else in the problem is right... just like in this homework assignment. If the child is incorrect in determining which part is flawed and which parts are correct, then the problem could actually reinforce the incorrect way of doing things.

The parent was correct in his rant. If the assignment insists on having a student determine what "Jack" did wrong when solving a math problem with an overly complex method, then the answer is that Jack should just subtract 316 from 427 and should not draw a diagram .

Re:Controversial because?

[whoever57]

There are lots of young unemployed people with education degrees, looking for an opportunity to teach.

Bullsh*t. Show me some reliable numbers. And not just of people who want to be teachers, but people who are qualified.

At least, here in California, to be a qualified teacher, you need a "Credential" in addition to a bachelor's degree, not an "education degree". From the experience of family members, I can tell you that there is no large pool of *good*, qualified teachers available.

You, like others, want to claim that there are good teachers available because you don't want to deal with the alternative -- admitting that teachers are underpaid.

Re:Controversial because?

[Rakarra]

Granted Common Core has some faults, for sure, but at least it is an attempt by someone to do something.

Very frequently, doing the wrong thing is much worse than doing nothing.
They might be doing something, but doing something is not in itself a praise-worthy goal.

Re:Controversial because?

[towermac]

Teaching kids has never paid that well. It's a calling.

I don't want that job. Do you? Fucking kids, are you kidding me? Is your kid a bigger brat than mine? Unlikely, but possible.
If it paid, $120K say, (I'm Rich money where I live) then I might take the job, and just hate life at work. I've done it before for a lot less. But how good of a teacher would I be?

It's an academic question, because we can't afford very many K at all per teacher. Can't afford anything really, but we must provide a living wage to people willing to take the job. Pad it with perks that give good bang for the employer buck; like healthcare, lots of time off, union, etc. That's your wage.

And it's going to be somewhat less than a fireman or a cop, who are also called to serve; that's just the way it is. When they do the job, they are priceless. Can''t pay them what they are worth if we really really wanted to.

These people take the job as a lifetime calling, and all we need to do, is to let that happen. They don't pad their resumes and move around; they would do the job for free, but they have to make a living like everybody else. And there is necessarily limited room for advancement; a school full of teachers only needs a couple of bosses.

So there is an implicit promise of retirement. We can't then, also have some sort of competitive employment environment, where a grade has to be made or else. It must be, that you have to actually be bad, to get fired as a public servant. The mediocre and average guy, who shows up on time for work everyday and does the job, is not bad. He's got no resume; he's not qualified for anything else; he deserves his retirement.

Bad teachers got fired before. Standout teachers got recognition and bonuses before, but most; they got cost of living raises for showing up year after year. That's the job. (Last thing I ever want to do is fuck with the teachers)

And I'll tell you what else we already had before, and that was a standardized test in the 8th and 12 grade, that you needed to pass to move on.

I call BS on common core, and Bill Gates is just buying his damned legacy. Andrew Carnegie he ain't.

Re:Controversial because?

[khallow]

admitting that teachers are underpaid.

One would also need to admit that the US spends more per pupil than all but a small handful of countries. And that one could improve the underpaid situation by spending more on teachers and improving their work environment and less on stuff that doesn't do that.

Re:Controversial because?

[whoever57]

One would also need to admit that the US spends more per pupil than all but a small handful of countries

... and then compare the cost of living between those countries. Also (as you acknowledge), spending per pupil isn't the same as teacher salaries. Perhaps the overhead involved at the district, county and state levels needs to be looked at very carefully. Ask yourself, where are the nicest premises that any school district has? Probably it's the district offices.

Re:Controversial because?

[Man On Pink Corner]

Not only that, but an excerpt for discussion purposes would certainly qualify as fair use. This whole "copyrighted test" complaint sounds like a giant smokescreen.

Re:Controversial because?

[khallow]

... and then compare the cost of living between those countries.

Why don't you do that then? And be prepared to apologize when you return?

Perhaps the overhead involved at the district, county and state levels needs to be looked at very carefully. Ask yourself, where are the nicest premises that any school district has? Probably it's the district offices.

My point here is that we already have ample evidence that we need to drain the swamp, not merely throw more money at it.

Re:Controversial because?

[digsbo]

Sure, no problem. Here's just one easily found Google result:

"New York state’s bureau of labor statistics anticipated the need for 2,800 elementary teachers in 2011-12. The state prepared more than twice that many, or about 6,500 “childhood education” specialists in 2009-10, the state’s most recent Title II data show."

http://hechingerreport.org/colleges-producing-too-many-elementary-teachers-data-says/

Re:Controversial because?

[digsbo]

Another: http://www.usatoday.com/story/...

Re:Controversial because?

[digsbo]

My point here is that we already have ample evidence that we need to drain the swamp, not merely throw more money at it.

To start that, we need to get the grab-bag of tax money away from the educational publishing companies, who seem to drive a great deal of waste.

Re:Controversial because?

[Bengie]

Common Core is just a bunch of milestones. By grade X, students should be able to multiply. By grade Y, they should be able to read this well. That's all it is, goals. Obviously curriculum is being made around meeting these goals, but Common Core does not define curriculum, just the goals.

Re:Controversial because?

[cavebison]

> Want better teachers? Increase pay and better teachers will enter the profession.

Funny how some people claim that, when it comes to CEOs, high salaries are necessary to attract the best talent, but refuse to apply the same rationale to other professions like nurses, teachers, etc. Oh yes, doctors' and lawyers' salaries must also be high enough to attract the best people, but teachers - no, no, their profession doesn't work that way for some reason.

Re: Controversial because?

[t1oracle]

Birth control? You mean federally mandated sterilization? What a brilliant, new idea, that will go over wonderfully...

Re:Controversial because?

[strikethree]

Pro-tip: Use a modern browser and look for the little red squiggles under words. That means they are misspelled.

Pro-tip: Not all squiggles indicate misspelled words.

If you are bored someday, go back through my comments and you will see me constantly wondering why a word I am spelling has squiggles under it when it is in the dictionary.

I am unsure if browser makers merely have incomplete spell-checking or if they are trying to control language.

The Onion?

[wheeda]

Let me be the first to point out... the Onion?

Re:The Onion?

[Nidi62]

Let me be the first to point out... the Onion?

It actually has some good points to it. For example, one of the Cons is "There are easier ways to measure parents’ income". Students of wealthier families tend to do better due to a number of factors such as access to tutors, parents home more often(dont work 2 jobs/work normal business hours/etc), and just generally more stable family life. A "Pro" is the exact mirror of this: "Only biased against kids who couldn’t afford college anyway". Poorer kids (who would be less likely to afford to go to college) are more likely to not do as well as the wealthier kids. One of the more tongue in cheek Cons is that it fails to measure attractiveness, which unfortunately is a factor in how successful one can be and studies have shown more attractive people are percieved to be smarter or more qualified than they really are. People are jsut wired to be more trustful and drawn to attractive people.

Remember, the Onion is satire, and satire is always built on a foundation of truth.

Re:The Onion?

[jfdavis668]

The best sarcasm requires good research. The Onion actually did a good job of presenting the major issues, even if its intent is to entertain.

Re:The Onion?

[king neckbeard]

Sadly enough, satirical news is generally better than mainstream news.

Re:The Onion?

[Amouth]

Because other news outlets are less bias?

Re:The Onion?

[smooth wombat]

Which is why studies have shown people who watched The Daily Show and Colbert Report were, on the whole, more informed about world events than those who watched Fox.

Re:The Onion?

[itzly]

Students of wealthier families tend to do better

Also, and perhaps more important, families who do better in school tend to end up wealthier.

Re:The Onion?

[Ichijo]

If a student starts the year at the 30th percentile and ends the year at the 40th percentile, then the teacher was probably pretty effective, even though the student is still under-performing.

If students from wealthy families score better than students from poor families, then that will be reflected in the evaluation at the beginning of the year, so this "value-added" methodology corrects for family backgrounds.

So we can glean some useful information about teacher effectiveness from student test scores.

Re:The Onion?

[Nidi62]

If a student starts the year at the 30th percentile and ends the year at the 40th percentile, then the teacher was probably pretty effective, even though the student is still under-performing.

If students from wealthy families score better than students from poor families, then that will be reflected in the evaluation at the beginning of the year, so this "value-added" methodology corrects for family backgrounds.

So we can glean some useful information about teacher effectiveness from student test scores.

But how to you discern whether that 10% improvement is due to the work of the teacher or due to the work of a paid tutor outside the class? The poor kid might be stuck at home by himself watching tv and eating a McDonalds value meal while his single mom is working her 2nd shift job; meanwhile the rich kid is getting facts crammed into his head for 3 hours a day after school while his parents' personal chef is cooking a scientifically designed, nutritionally balanced dinner. It is pointless to base teacher performance on these standardized tests simply because there is no way to narrow it down solely to what the teacher actually taught them. And evaluating based on the difference between beginning and end year testing doesn't work either because (at least theoretically) both kids are being exposed to new material throughout the year, so the disparity only increases.

Re:The Onion?

[Ichijo]

But how to you discern whether that 10% improvement is due to the work of the teacher or due to the work of a paid tutor outside the class?

If one student improves by 10% due to the addition of a paid tutor, and another student regresses by 10% by dropping a paid tutor, they cancel each other out. If all students got paid tutors, then their percentiles would not change.

The poor kid might be stuck at home by himself watching tv and eating a McDonalds value meal while his single mom is working her 2nd shift job...

And chances are that these circumstances were reflected in the test scores at the beginning of the year. I already explained this.

And evaluating based on the difference between beginning and end year testing doesn't work either because (at least theoretically) both kids are being exposed to new material throughout the year, so the disparity only increases.

Do you understand how percentiles work?

Re:The Onion?

[Archangel Michael]

Also and perhaps more Important are the poor kids who do better in school, because their parents are willing to sacrifice in order to provide extra help and encouragement to the students.

From my experience it the parents (more so than $$) that make the biggest difference.

Re:The Onion?

[Archangel Michael]

Citation needed.

"He hasn't stopped giving."

[QuietLagoon]

Mr. Gates is still trying to buy his way into history remembering him in a good light.

Re: "He hasn't stopped giving."

[wheeda]

In common core, is a failing grade called a BSOD?

Re: "He hasn't stopped giving."

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, fuck him and his charitable pursuits of providing accessible healthcare, education and reducing poverty for millions!

Re: "He hasn't stopped giving."

[Anonymous Coward]

charitable pursuits of providing accessible healthcare, education and reducing poverty for millions!

Prove any one of these to actually have been first successful and then validate that it was charitable.

Re: "He hasn't stopped giving."

[cablepokerface]

Here you go: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...

Re: "He hasn't stopped giving."

[Nidi62]

I bet Gates has read dozens of biographies on John D Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and the like. That explains how he built up Microsoft in the '80s and '90s. Many of those men became philanthropists and used their fortunes for public benefit, and incidentally, to perpetuate their names in a good light.

The only immortality man is likely to see any time soon is by putting your name on history or great things. You can fight for it like Lee, Washington, Napoleon, Ghengis Khan, etc. You can earn it through infamy: Hitler, Stalin, Louis XIV and Marie Antoinette. You can earn it through government like countless monarch, Churchill, Roosevelt. Or you can buy it like Carnegie, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, or anyone elected to a US national goverment office since the year 2000.

Re: "He hasn't stopped giving."

[StikyPad]

There are worse things he could be doing with his money than philanthropy. Standardized testing may (or may not) be counterproductive, but I'm not going to fault someone for making a good faith effort, and the Gates Foundation has done a lot of other great work. It's more than can be said for Jeff Bezos, Rupert Murdoch, or the late Steve Jobs. There are plenty of billionaires who don't do shit except hoard huge piles of cash. There are plenty of things not to like about Bill Gates, but philanthropy is not one of them.

Re: "He hasn't stopped giving."

[king neckbeard]

I will fault someone for making a good faith effort if that effort ultimately proves to be a net harm. After all, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Re: "He hasn't stopped giving."

[SuricouRaven]

Those infamies are too hard to achieve. You need real political skill and connections. You'd achieve more success trying to be a Osama or a Guy: Try to blow up something really important and full of people.

Re: "He hasn't stopped giving."

[interkin3tic]

I realize you and all your linux-using friends might know him as a heartless bastard, but if you think "history" will remember the greedy things he did to computing, I think you're being naive.

I'm wondering if most people today even remember that he started MS. "Bill Gates? He's that rich guy who runs a charity. Can't quite remember how he got his money. Did he invent computers?"

Standardized Testing

[Roger W Moore]

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.

Re:Standardized Testing

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Nah, it's actually likely the worst thing that has ever been tried. Standardized testing is quite recent. Think of any great idea, any great civilization, any great thinker; none is steeped in standardized testing.

Re:Standardized Testing

[AqD]

Standardized testing has been implemented in all East Asian countries for decades. You could check the result of our education systems.

They're complete failures, only good at producing mediocre engineers and doctors. We're actually trying hard to revert it now but it's very difficult once parents get used to the system.

Re:Standardized Testing

[Roger W Moore]

Standardized testing is quite recent. Think of any great idea, any great civilization, any great thinker; none is steeped in standardized testing.

Standardized testing arose about the same times as public, compulsory education. The problem it addresses is the need for measuring students against a fixed, known standard. Before there were schools everywhere the reputation of the educational establishment or individual was used to judge the standard because there were few enough institutes/people that you could know the standards of a good fraction of institutes.

Today you are likely unaware the reputation and standards of schools beyond the boundaries of your local town and probably not even all of them if you live in a city. What standardized testing provides is a fixed, known standard that you can know and be aware of regardless of where a student went to school. Without a known standard - however you achieve it - grades are worthless as a certification of knowledge.

Re:Standardized Testing

[Roger W Moore]

Standardized testing has been implemented in all East Asian countries for decades. You could check the result of our education systems. They're complete failures...

Standardized testing has been used in the UK since at least the 1950's and yet I would argue that it has been a great success there although there has been a problem of dropping standards in the past 10-20 years. As someone who has taught students from Asia the problem, as I see it, is far more to do with the style of education - rote learning - than with standardized testing. This does not prepare people well for science at the university level where you have to be curious, ask questions and think around problems. You cannot succeed by memorizing facts.

Re:Standardized Testing

[king neckbeard]

Given the limited practical social mobility in the US, it's hard to say that we are that far from feudalism, and an apprenticeship would probably be preferable to an internship. But it's good to know that we shouldn't complain until we are literally back in the middle ages.

Why won't he just die already?

[Anonymous Coward]

This monopolist has contributed absolutely nothing of value to the world.

Re:Why won't he just die already?

[halivar]

Hey now, I give him credit for QBasic. It was my first exposure to programming, pre-internet, using nothing but its superlative help file.

Finally Makes Sense

[Anonymous Coward]

Common Core is the MS Windows of education. No wonder everyone hates it.

Re:the question is

[uncqual]

The rich and poor alike get exactly one vote each. That is the cornerstone of a democracy. Of course, almost all political matters in the US are decided not via a democracy but via a representative democracy (most notable exceptions being initiatives in those jurisdictions that have them).

If the poor choose not to vote or understand who/what they are voting for, that's hardly the fault of successful people.

If a voter is swayed by political advertising (which, generally, does cost money, some of which comes from the "super rich"), they are an uninformed voter. Would they be more informed if the U.S. could figure out how to ban all political advertising? I don't think so since no one is forced to view, listen to, or read political ads any more than they are forced to view, listen to, or read ads for iPhones (and, in the case of TV and radio, the political ads seem to simply replace ads for consumer bling during "high season") - thus, political ads don't take away the opportunity for voters to inform themselves.

Interesting Fact

[Guy From V]

The Common Core Standards Initiative method has been copyrighted.

BillG Look-Alike Kid in Pro-Common Core Ad

[theodp]

The presence of a BillG look-alike kid in the pro-Common Core ad made by recent $3.7M Gates Foundation awardee the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation is a nice touch!

High School Math teacher

[Anonymous Coward]

I can say that at the high school level, what I teach has not changed dramatically (Algebra 1, Geometry, Algebra 2). I cannot speak for the younger grades, but it has been suggested that it is pretty different.

The order of things has moved around quite a bit, but mostly in order to accommodate the testing window. This is where the real problem lies: the testing. The PARCC tests are an absolute logistic nightmare. I work in an affluent district with a 1:3 computer:student ratio (3500 students) and we have basically shut down the building to test. WIth 6 days of testing, another week of make-ups, and then another round of testing, we have been in test mode since the end of Februrary. This means that as the year winds down, it is impossible for teachers to use any sort of tech.

Let them take the ACT, get a "remedial" composite of like 18 and use that as their test credit. That sounds like a low score (it is), but it is about all they have to have to currently pass a state graduation test, and the PARCC tests will have similar benchmarks despite the ridiculous amount of stress they cause on the students.

The only real advantage of Common Core

[Slim_Jack]

The only advantage of common core is that when your government throws money at a school, there is no way to determine whether the money was completely wasted or not so completely wasted. When you compare different schools in different districts with the same test you at least have some, however flawed and pointless, benchmark for comparison, so when you as a taxpayer and parent deal with the politicians you have something to complain about (if you care).

Lots of other stuff swirling around Common Core

[ErichTheRed]

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.

Re:Lots of other stuff swirling around Common Core

[jfdavis668]

Parents can't help with homework? I took trig, calculus, physics, chemistry and biology in high school. My parents couldn't help me with any of it. You can't limit teaching to what your parents know. The world won't progress.

Re:Lots of other stuff swirling around Common Core

[Etherwalk]

Parents can't help with homework? I took trig, calculus, physics, chemistry and biology in high school. My parents couldn't help me with any of it. You can't limit teaching to what your parents know. The world won't progress.

I am assuming the problem is the one you ALWAYS have--that they change the terms and it's pretty ridiculous. Back in the 80s every math book for grade school made up lots of terms that no parents would know, so you had to learn a whole new language if you wanted to teach your kids. But at the end of the day it's just math and those definitions usually hurt more than they help. They could easily pick one set of definitions and stick with them--ideally a set that is empirically verified as the one that students have the least trouble learning or remembering, for example.

Re:Lots of other stuff swirling around Common Core

[ErichTheRed]

From what I've seen, especially with math, the terms have changed but the entire way it's presented has also changed. For example, I have always been a poor math student unless what I'm learning can be applied to something real-world -- I have more of an engineer's brain than a mathematician's. All the algebra, trig, etc. that was force-fed into my brain in high school only started making sense when I started struggling through my college chemistry curriculum and finding out that it was actually useful for something.

My memories of elementary school math consist of endless repetition of arithmetic facts and simply memorizing procedures for things like solving ratio problems, working with fractions, etc. And every high school graduate instinctively remembers "x = (-b +/- sqrt(b^2 - 4ac))/2a" whether or not it made any sense at the time. It seems like the new curriculum acknowledges that computers exist and focuses more on developing the reasoning/estimating skills than the old-school math we were taught. I think parents are really confused by this.

Re:Lots of other stuff swirling around Common Core

[silas_moeckel]

An issue with CC was they took the opportunity to go in a new direction. Having a 5th grader I can tell you math is not about getting it right anymore but the process in the CC that my sons school uses. They use some very dubious methods lots of guess and check that they teach and are pushed to grade to. Problem is that process looks nothing like what we remember.

Re:Lots of other stuff swirling around Common Core

[Jason Levine]

I'm from NY too and agree with you on all of this. We've refused the tests for our oldest for three years now. Our youngest will have his first refusal next year. Meanwhile, Cuomo has come out saying that the tests mean nothing for the kids but will be used to evaluate teachers. Do you really think kids are going to try hard on difficult exams that "mean nothing" to them?!!! Just because their teachers' jobs might be at stake?

Re:Lots of other stuff swirling around Common Core

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that's another big thing -- parents feel they can't help their kids with homework.

If a parent is having difficulty with a 3rd-grader's math homework, perhaps they aren't the best judge of what constitutes a quality education, having clearly never had one themselves.

Re:Lots of other stuff swirling around Common Core

[Overzeetop]

"parents feel they can't help their kids with homework."

That's true, but also a bit by design from what I've seen. The cc methods tend to take multiple approaches, realizing that not every child learns the same way and, in a way, shotgunning the approach in hopes of finding a method for everyone. Some of the math - the stuff which has be severely ridiculed by (mostly) politically conservative groups - happens to be exactly the way I do math very quickly in my head. It's not any method that's typically taught to students, but is more physical rather than theoretical in nature. If you learned (and still only know how) to do the theoretical versions, the practical ones will throw you. And that *should* be okay, but only if the teachers understand it. And many of the teachers are old and set in their ways, too, which results in teachers who can't teach it and parents who aren't in the loop. And that will always lead to friction.

Re:Lots of other stuff swirling around Common Core

[jimbolauski]

The common core teacher evaluation works just fine, the way it works is simple the students all had to take the tests the year prior and can be given a percentile rank. If the majority go down the teacher is not performing, the variations in performance from class to class are normalized with the prior year's performance it's not as big an issue as the teachers unions make it out to be.

Charter schools are the way to go for one simple reason, if they perform poorly they can be shut down, when a public school performs poorly they are generally given more money to fix the problem. The cost per student is much higher at public schools then private/charter schools. Public schools spend $13,041 per student per year while nonreligious private spends $8,549, charter $8,001, and Catholic $6,018. On top of that charter schools outperform their neighboring public schools even though there is not a difference in demographics. I still don't understand why people think poor performing over funded public schools are the answer.

Standards of Learning/CORE

[Anonymous Coward]

The SOLs in Virginia, a collection of facts believed necessary to be known for one to be considered "educated", has failed in Virginia. The resultant standardized tests and overloaded, politicized curriculum have led to pervasive faculty cheating, wasted resources and dumber kids.

Countless valid studies over the years have shown how to better run our schools, but the system is broken and only supports Skinnerian, top-down, continuously failing approaches. We never learn. And our children suffer for it.

Re:the question is

[king neckbeard]

You are assigning humans far greater agency than they actually have, and is divorced from the realities of the lives of basically everyone on the planet. And yes, I think we would be more informed if we could block political ads (although I would prefer a technical solution that accurately treats political ads as spam), as you could pick a random person off the street and get better results than most candidates, simply by virtue of not engaging in active sabotage of the general public.

Common Core as failed SW project.

[random coward]

The main problems with common core aren't the standardized testing, though that is a problem.

Put on your developer hats and think about it like a software project:
The problem with common core is the requirements were written by people who have no idea about requirements development. Not only didn't they know how to write the requirements that had no input from any stakeholders, or users.
These fatally flawed requirements were then implemented by publishers of curriculum that do not know how to do a requirements traceability, nor how to fulfill requirements.
These massively fatally flawed curriculums are being implemented on the students by teachers who cannot follow the badly written code that is the curriculum.

Everyone who was involved in this massive failure to develop a working product should be fired and barred from working on anything similar ever again.

If you don't believe me go and read the math requirements for the what is to be taught. The guys who developed the requirements were complaining to a journalist a while back that it wasn't their fault, and that the publishers just didn't correctly meet the requirements. But upon reading the requirements anyone who's done requirement based development will see that they were a soup sandwich.

Re:Common Core as failed SW project.

[BradleyUffner]

If you don't believe me go and read the math requirements for the what is to be taught.

Let's go right to the source http://www.corestandards.org/M...
That all sounds sane and logical to me. What conspiracy theory website did you read the requirements from?

Re:Common Core as failed SW project.

[random coward]

Here is the interview with the two guys who wrote the common core math requirements/standards.

From it we see this quote:

"“Like it or not, the standards allow a lot of freedom. People think the Common Core is a curriculum, and it’s not. The curriculum authors are going to interpret the standards in different ways,” Zimba said."

If you admit that the standard/requirement you wrote can be interpreted in many different ways, and I'll add in ways you don't agree with, you've just admitted your requirements were badly written.

Here let me give you an example:
Develop a high school math problem that will demonstrate that a "Mathematically proficient students start by explaining to themselves the meaning of a problem and looking for entry points to its solution."

Or from grade 4:

CCSS.Math.Content.4.MD.A.2 Use the four operations to solve word problems involving distances, intervals of time, liquid volumes, masses of objects, and money, including problems involving simple fractions or decimals, and problems that require expressing measurements given in a larger unit in terms of a smaller unit. Represent measurement quantities using diagrams such as number line diagrams that feature a measurement scale.

Now write a problem that demonstrates a fourth grade student's mastery of that.
Any fourth grade math problem that would show a students full mastery of that is a bad problem. There is too much there. Adding that requirement into a traceability matrix gives you the bullshit we see in common core math problems. These guys seem to know and understand math, and what a student should know, but they don't know how to write requirements.

Re:Common Core as failed SW project.

[Radical Moderate]

I think you don't know how to read the standards. MD.A.2 doesn't require that teachers write a single problem that includes all those elements. It suggests that they cover a number of problems that incorporate those features. Perfectly reasonable. Yes, that's too vague if you're defining requirements for a software project, but that's not what they're doing. "Standards" and "requirements" are not interchangeable, requirements are narrow and quantifiable, standards are broader and more open to interpretation. Note that in the article you cite "requirement" appears only once, and in a very specific context.

Re:Common Core as failed SW project.

[random coward]

Which goes into my point number two. The curriculum creators don't know how to track back to the requirements. Thus we see crap like this common core math problem

Re:Common Core as failed SW project.

[Radical Moderate]

Granted that's an idiotic problem, but in fairness I remember being annoyed by the stupidity(but not THAT stupid) of number-line exercises over 40 years ago. Yes, the standards are loose enough to allow educators to make crappy problems and exercises. They should be.

Common Core isn't a curriculum, it's a set of standards: At this grade, students should learn how to do these things. How you teach them to do it is not mandated, so educators are free to try different approaches. Some of those suck, but that's nothing new, parents have been complaining about "New Math" for as long as I've been alive.

Supply and Demand

[Etherwalk]

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.

Supply and demand. We would probably be better making the public schools open to all certified teachers to teach their subject--more of a community learning center. But charter schools are another market-based solution that makes more sense than the current system. Subsidizing a supplier is just a bad idea from an economics perspective and prevents *choice* from shaping better education. The public schools are so terrified of lawsuits anyway that they really don't bring a lot more to the table, it's just that the teacher's union has very effectively made any threat to them seem like it's hate or an attack on family values or the like rather than what it is--a concern that the single most important role in our society is being terribly mismanaged.

Validate that it was charitable

[Etherwalk]

charitable pursuits of providing accessible healthcare, education and reducing poverty for millions!

Prove any one of these to actually have been first successful and then validate that it was charitable.

With great respect for the place of civil debate and mutual respect in our society, I ask, "What the flying fuck is wrong with you?"

I mean, maybe you just rolled out of bed, but the next time someone drops tens of billions trying to fix some of the biggest and most complicated problems in the world, please don't act like they're a first-year coder who forgot to run a test suite on strcmp().

Re:Validate that it was charitable

[king neckbeard]

The problem is that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Most of the bad things that happen in this world are due primarily to incompetence, not malice. So, merely having well-meaning intentions doesn't make you a positive force.

Re:Validate that it was charitable

[king neckbeard]

No, I'm saying that you can do bad things even if you intend to do good things, and that throwing time and labor at a problem doesn't change this fact. I'll give you an easy example. Jenny McCarthy ostensibly wanted to improve healthcare when she spoke about vaccines and autism, but because she was ignorant of the facts, she has caused harm to the health of many children, and further entrenched the stigma towards autism. Even thought her intentions were noble, she has caused a lot of harm, and her actions should not be praised, but rather, criticized.

Re:Validate that it was charitable

[king neckbeard]

It's not an inherently positive force. However, rationally questioning an assumption tends to have a fairly low cost and potential for high gains. Questioning assumptions is a big part of how scientific advances occur. The assumption is that because Bill Gates has given a lot of money for a charitable cause, that the effects of his efforts are positive. If, however, the only people that ultimately benefited from this were Pearson employees and other businesses, then it's hard to say that his actions should be seen as a good act, regardless of the Gates' motive.

Re:Common Core

[Guy From V]

Indeed, this is like a modern day Rockefeller/Dewey socialist indoctrination agenda to homogenize worker bees on the playground while only allowing just enough actual individual education as possible so as to arouse the notice of those who might question the motives. If anyone thinks this sounds too tinfoil hatty...look into the background and ideology of these two pathetic social tyrants, especially John Dewey.

The curriculum is crap

[TomR teh Pirate]

My son in 6th grade is doing the math work and it's just atrocious how badly basic multiplication has been mangled. For decades American kids learned math fundamentals by rote and we came out of those classes knowing exactly how to do it. Now the math problems are infrequently used such that there is no "drilling and killing" of any fundamental concepts. The whole thing sucks.

ROFLCOPTER ALERT!

[Anonymous Coward]

"The rich and poor alike get exactly one vote each." BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAA!!!! Really? Do you think I'd get as much face time with the senate as Bill Gates would?

And if my voting only results in choices from ones Bill likes, what is the "equality" of our unitary count of vote worth?

Ripping children from their homes? Seriously?

[sjbe]

Bluntly, then they shouldn't have kids -- but I don't think that's the issue.

Whether they should or should not have children is irrelevant. The fact is that they do and that child needs to be educated.

It's very difficult for a diligent single parent to 'assist their kids in succeeding', never mind one who's more apathetic.

The difficulty or lack thereof is again irrelevant. The child needs to be educated and simply dismissing the problem because of some apathetic parents is dodging the issue. Yes parental involvement matters but sometimes it doesn't happen so what do we do about that? It takes a pretty cold person to just dismiss the problem as unsolvable and blame the parents for everything.

Schools have become "food" programs where kids get 2 of their meals a day. Many are open over the summer just to provide food.

Did it occur to you that there is a good reason for that? Children need to be fed and schools for better or worse are well positioned to be a part of the solution for that. A lot of people struggle financially and getting food on the table isn't a trivial thing sometimes. Schools sometimes need to be more than just a place to learn about math and reading.

Maybe we need discuss taking kids away from parents who cant or wont provide for their kids vs. the alternative of raising an ever increasing population of people who cannot or will not take care of themselves and bring in to the world children whom they are not equipped to provide adequate care.

Sigh... Taking a child away from a parent merely because they are struggling financially is about the most heartless and brutal thing I can think of. My parents were poor at one point in their lives and you think I should have been taken away from them for that? Wow... If you think putting tens of thousands of children in foster care because they have poor parent is any kind of a sane solution then you are an imbecile.

Re:Common Core

[Guy From V]

Copyrighted material, such as this teaching methodology, really is quite inflexible in it's implementation and the granting and withholding of federal funding will hinge on a rather stringent standard of baseline commonality.

Just look at other countries

[loufoque]

The US is the country with the widest education gap. A few (usually rich) people are very well educated, most of the masses are below the lowest of standards of any other developed country.

Everyone in the world is using standardized tests and degrees. It's a rite a passage and a guarantee that people that have passed them have at least a basic level.
Sure, it's a got a lot of limitations and it is a rigid mold, but that's what you expect of basic core stuff. It is not useful in evaluating truly smart people, but it is really useful to have a better education on average and in particular for the disadvantaged, as it levels the playing field.

And How Many Billions

[wisnoskij]

And how many Billions will he make if he convinces the government to go with his set of proprietary products (aka common core)? It is a $632 billion dollar per year industry. If it only costs him a few billion it will be well worth it.

Re:the question is

[uncqual]

In the large state I live in, anyone can vote by mail permanently (I filed for "permanent vote by mail" status once, many years ago, and have never set foot in a polling place since) or in person on at least one weekend before the election (albeit at a few locations only). Our voter turnout sucks anyway - which is okay with me, anyone who can't be bothered to vote isn't going to be an informed voter anyway.

Re:the question is

[uncqual]

If "humans" are that incompetent (I assume you are referring to the "average" humans rather than particularly well informed humans?), then they are not suited for democracy. In that case, perhaps we should give up on this "democracy" thing and be ruled by the most effective gang/dictator.

Perhaps I have greater faith in humans than you do.

Standard US democratic process

[just another AC]

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.

BIll Gates: pours billions of his money directly to a cause to get something done (even if that something is against current research/ common good)

Others: pour billions into paying politicians so that the politicians will then pour billions of taxpayer dollars into a cause to get something done (even if that something is against the common good).

This is just standard US "democracy" at work. He is just removing the middleman.

Re:Ripping children from their homes? Seriously?

[towermac]

"tens of thousands of children in foster care"

Well no, it wouldn't be foster homes, would it? We're talking orphanages at that point.

You made me wonder, how bad would that be? It's got a gym and a basketball court and nobody can pick on me and there's no guns here and I can be a part of something...

When we had those, we didn't have these problems. Correlation or causation?

You sort of brought it up, and it's supposed to be a thinking website...

260 posts and not one mention of "Eugenics"??

[Anonanonaon]

How is it possible that Bill Gates, (the guy we turned into a Borg icon), gets a free pass on Slashdot?

Bill Gates, at some point in his career, decided that the way forward was to reduce our numbers, dumb us down through poison food and drugs, and prepare for the apocalypse with seed banks.

He's not a dummy. He knew exactly what Common Core would do. It was designed from the get-go to create stupid, compliant people and to crush the opposition. (The "opposition" being every other system which might compete with an alternative system of social control including our own, ie., Free Will. He's always been about the meta-game, the subversion and control of reality through sneaky, system-wide hacks and manipulations.

So now he's graduated from the engineering of software to the engineering of social order.

Sorry, but I don't want Bill Gates thinking of me and my family and friends as part of some armchair theory he feels compelled to tinker with.

Re:the question is

[king neckbeard]

No, I'm referring to basically everybody who has ever lived, from Hitler to Hawking. However, I didn't say that they were incompetent, I said that they don't have anywhere nearly as much agency as we claim to have. Our idea of what a human is capable of is wrong to an extent that would be hilarious if it wasn't so often depressing. That's why all that 'bootstraps'-type talk, such as your post, is so misguided.

People are not standardised components

[Martin Spamer]

People, neither teachers nor pupils are not standardised components. This is blatantly ridiculous plan.