It could be argued that a common core curriculum which was the de facto case if not nationally codified, in the days of the American Common School movement would be a positive development. Perhaps the biggest benefit of a content-rich common core would be in grades K-6 where today’s patchwork quilt of local content-free standards is particularly harmful to students who change schools frequently and the economically disadvantaged. Thus currently, in the early grades students have no coherent process to build and enhance the foundational knowledge they will need to be successful in their higher level schooling.
When you look objectively at the newly proposed standards, it is obvious that the current effort is anything but positive. As is common practice in our education system this new initiative is an effort to justify throwing more good money after bad into the schools and the greedy support activities that depend on them. The process is to initiate a “new” program and wrap it with positive marketing and media to a credulous and/or distracted public. The standards are not new in their approach at all but an effort to cast in concrete the current extremely harmful, content-free approach which has not worked and as E.D. Hirsch states cannot work. It is just another of a long line of efforts to increasingly reward the adults associated with education at the expense of serving the kids well. This comes at taxpayer expense and starved out alternative priorities.
I think a couple of comments on the new standards from knowledgeable and involved people in the process would help to clarify the reality here. Jim Milgram, math professor at Stanford comments on the standards related to math at http://concernedabouteducation.posterous.com/review-of-common-core-math-standards
Professor Milgram states in his final remarks, “Overall, only the very best of current state standards, those of California, Massachusetts, Indiana and Minnesota are as strong or stronger than these standards. Most states would be far better off adopting the Core Math Standards than keeping their current standards. However, California and the other states with top standards would be almost certainly better off keeping their current standards. …[M]any of my objections were not addressed … before the final version was publically released.”
Another reviewer of the proposed standards, Bert Fristedt, a mathematician at the University of Minnesota, has critiqued the math portion of the CCSSI proposed standards. He is troubled by their diffuseness. He says the standards include way too many particular items and often scramble them in illogical ways. Seventh graders, for example, are asked to examine cubed numbers but aren’t taught integer exponents until high school. The standards also contain much vague language about having young students “understand” mathematical concepts before they have any practical grasp of them. Learning math is like learning to ride a bicycle. You have to be able to do it before you can theorize it. Fristedt sees problems with the progression from grade to grade in these standards and takes that as an indication that they are not “well-thought-out.”
Sandra Stotsky was appointed to the validation committee that reviewed the Common Core State Standards, a new set of K-12 standards produced by the National Governors Association's Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI).
As she examined the standards for English and Language Arts, Stotsky found that they were “culture-free and content-empty.” One of Stotsky’s strongest criticisms is that standards such as these don’t progress in difficulty from year to year. She was outspoken and meticulous in her objections, and when the validation committee approved the standards in June, she declined to endorse them. That same month, her term of service on the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education expired - and Governor Deval Patrick did not reappoint her to her position (he also did not reappoint Thomas Fortmann, another critic of the new standards).
Susan Wolfson, Professor of English at Princeton in written testimony to the New Jersey Board of Education commented, “We cannot endorse the absence of content-rich literary standards in “college readiness” any more than we can endorse just a sporadic and infrequent inclusion in the grade-level standards. This absence in this public-comment draft reflects what seems to us to have been a nearly systematic exclusion of those with expertise in literary study in the development of the standards. No one with expertise in the study of literature as a subject in itself was appointed to the standards development committees, and those who attended the open forum last December, and then again in February, reported that they were given no way to argue a case that had seemed to have been pre-decided. [emphasis added] We are surprised and concerned that the media have failed to note the exclusion of literary study from what are deemed “college readiness” standards. Without graduated, substantive content, adequate preparation for college study in any subject would be seriously compromised.
Do you smell the political taint that underlies this new standards effort? You should have your nose checked if you don’t. In short, these standards do not address the problems that are causing our education performance to be so poor when compared to the best global competitors. They do further solidify the harmful stranglehold that the education establishment’s status-quo-at-all-costs adults who continue to sacrifice our kids’ futures use so effectively to gain material benefit for themselves.
Thus, while common core standards could seemingly, based on the history or the American Common School experience be beneficial, these new standards are beneficial in name only and if adopted will prevent new quality efforts from being pursued anytime soon. The “we just updated standards to the best possible” excuse will prevail, continuing to harm kids and their futures.
Paul Richardson 2010
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment