Common Core Overviewby Melissa Westbrook May 6, 2014(Seattle Schools Community Forum blog, saveseattleschools.blogspot.com)

To note from the start these are STANDARDS (guidelines), not curriculum.

They are not telling teachers HOW to teach. BUT, to keep in mind, when you have standards on one end and assessments on the other end, the curriculum WILL narrow. What gets tested is what gets taught.

Also to note, the federal government itself did NOT create these standards. (See Issues: Overview for their creation process.) In fact, no government entity has rights to these standards; their copyright is privately held.

There is virtually no one who has come out publicly against the use of standards or testing. I agree with former Deputy Secy of Education and education historian, Diane Ravitch, who says:

It is good to have standards. I believe in standards, but they must not be rigid, inflexible, and prescriptive.

Teachers must have the flexibility to tailor standards to meet the students in their classrooms, the students who cant read English, the students who are two grade levels behind, the students who are homeless, the students who just dont get it and just dont care, the students who frequently miss class.

Standards alone cannot produce a miraculous transformation.

I would add:

There is no statistical or research-based data to show that having new standards will create better outcomes. That fact is worth considering that when spending resources, energy and time to change an entire nations public education system.

Overview

From Gov Beat at the Washington Post:

The roots of Common Core standards grew out of Achieve, a nonprofit reform group founded in the mid-1990s aimed at crafting education standards that would lead to a workforce with the qualifications necessary for business. The initial state standards were a product of two governors Sonny Perdue, Deals Republican predecessor in Georgia, and Delaware Democrat Jack Markell working together at the National Governors Association in the late 2000s.

Then in 2009, there was a push by governors, via the National Governor's Association (NGA), and state school officers, via the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) for national standards. The reasoning was that:

1) The U.S. needed more rigorous standards than most current state standards, 2) The need for clarity in what is being taught as well as more critical thinking and higher-order skills in learning and 3) The existence of a population of students that are mobile and having national standards would help them, no matter where they lived.

Only state boards of education OR state superintendent for public instruction had to okay their use, NOT legislatures (except for five states including Washington State).

(To note: those two groups are non-profit public policy organizations. They do NOT represent the public even though their members are largely elected officials. Because of this, states do NOT own Common Core State Standards these two groups do AND states have to pay to license their use.)

States were not required to adopt Common Core standards but there are considerable carrot/stick funding issues from the Department of Education around Race to the Top funds and School Intervention Grant dollars if states do not sign on.

The standards were released in June 2010. Since then, 45 states, four territories, the District of Columbia, and the Department of Defense Education Activity have adopted the Common Core State Standards. Minnesota only adopted the English language arts standards. Alaska, Nebraska, Texas, and Virginia have refused to adopt the Common Core.

What is troubling is that the standards were alleged to be written to support students in being college and career ready without clearly defining those two areas. In fact, many educators believe the Common Core math standards are really too low for entry to most colleges and universities.

Polling is mixed on Common Core. When the question is phrased blandly like do you approve of high standards for U.S. public school students?, Common Core does well. When it is more specific, the polling tends to find a confused populace.

Diane Ravitch quoted in the Washington Post:

What the advocates ignored is that test scores are heavily influenced by socioeconomic status. Standardized tests are normed on a bell curve. The upper half of the curve has an abundance of those who grew up in favorable circumstances, with educated parents, books in the home, regular medical care, and well-resourced schools. Those who dominate the bottom half of the bell curve are the kids who lack those advantages, whose parents lack basic economic security, whose schools are overcrowded and under-resourced. To expect tougher standards and a renewed emphasis on standardized testing to reduce poverty and inequality is to expect what never was and never will be.

Again, I would add this:

No one, I repeat, no one is saying poor children cannot learn. What many of us are saying is that to ignore poverty (and its effects on educational outcomes) is wrong.

And, if innovation is the new goal for better educational outcomes for more students, including students of color, how does one set of standards create innovation?

Key Issues

Too Much, too fast, too soon with little transparency Who wrote the Standards? Testing concerns Teaching concerns Influence of the Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation Effects on Early Learners Costs to States and Districts Student data privacy

Too Much, too fast, too soon with little transparencyOne of the biggest issues for many parents, educators and administrators is that the rollout of the Common Core State Standards is happening too fast. The effort is to rolling out national standards in nearly all states with assessments and, from creation to implementation, in about six years.

Other educator concerns: There was no piloting of these standards. Do they work for teachers in the classroom? What about feedback and tweaking of the standards? Lack of professional development Lack of resources to implement the standards is a huge issue for districts. It is still unclear how much each state will give to districts to support this initiative.

In addition, many parents had little idea this is coming, either via the federal government or state governments. If this was so important and vital, why wasnt there more media/publicity? Also, many states have changed the name they use for these standards in order to not use the words Common Core. For example in Florida, they have been renamed The Sunshine State Standards.

Who wrote the Standards? Its a complicated story.

There was a 60-person work group that started the creation of the standards. The majority of input did not come from educators. (But, in different states, teachers and other educators were asked for input. Whether that input was realized in the standards is unclear as the working group received about 10,000 public comments but would not release all of them.

The actual WRITING of the standards is really where there were few educators. There were just 29 people on the Validation Committee who wrote them. The majority of the group was affiliated with testing groups like the College Board and education groups like Achieve.

In fact, the two people on the Validation Committee with most background in reading standards and math standards refused to sign off on the final standards. (This would be Sandra Stotsky, EdD for reading and Professor John Milgrem of Stanford. Both have been outspoken in their opposition to Common Core standards.)

Testing

OverviewThere are two testing consortiums that states may belong to for testing PARCC (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers) and Smarter Balanced (Washington State belongs to the latter). PARCC has been testing for the last two years with wide outcry from both parents and teachers. Smarter Balanced is doing pilot testing this school year.

Every child in 3rd-8th grades plus one grade in high school will be tested.

Testing ConcernsFrom a Florida teacher who reviewed the CC standards, As the review unfolded, it became apparent that we were not working with a holistic, integrated application of standards It began to look instead like a checklist forming a platform for standardized testing

From Diane Ravitch in the Washington Post:

In New York state, which gave the Common Core tests last spring, only 30% of students across the state passed the tests.

Only 3% of English language learners passed.

Only 5% of students with disabilities passed.

Fewer than 20% of African American and Hispanic students passed.

By the time the results were reported in August, the students did not have the same teachers; the teachers saw the scores, but did not get any item analysis. They could not use the test results for diagnostic purposes, to help students. Their only value was to rank students.

Huge numbers of parents in NY state, after receiving these dismal results in 2013, opted their children out of Common Core testing in 2014.

Some issues about testing include the time it takes during the school year, brand names and logos being used in test questions, and length, difficulty and content issues. Students taking exams for medical school have shorter tests than current Common Core assessments.

Teaching Concerns

Feedback on Common Core Standards as teachers incorporate them into teachingThere is no way for teachers and administrators those using the standards to give any feedback. For a national rollout of new standards, this is jaw-dropping.

CurriculumAgain, teachers are allowed to use district-approved materials to meet Common Core standards. But districts may be forced to buy new materials and, as well, there are those who believe the curriculum will be narrowed because of the standards.

MathDr. John Milgram, who was lead for validation of math standards, feels that the standards are not really high enough for high school math (as compared to other countries especially Asian ones).

Interestingly, many who are speaking out against the math standards complain that they are too high in the elementary grades and too low in high school.

ReadingIn the past, the reading for high schools has generally been 50-50 for fiction and non-fiction. It will now be about 70% non-fiction and 30% fiction. This is based on the idea that in the workplace, there is more non-fiction reading than fiction and the skill level needs to be there for analysis and comprehension. There is no research-based analysis for this change. The Influence of Bill Gates and the Gates FoundationThe Gates Foundation has spent nearly $200M on Common Core efforts. They spent more than $20M alone in 2013. For example in November 2013, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce received $1,383,041 in November 2013 "to lead the effort to engage and educate state and local chambers to support Common Core State Standards.

Why would the education wing of the Gates Foundation believe it more important to educate the public via a business entity rather than an education route?

From Diane Ravitch in the Washington Post:

The U.S. Department of Education is legally prohibited from exercising any influence or control over curriculum or instruction in the schools, so it could not contribute any funding to the expensive task of creating national standards. The Gates Foundation stepped in and assumed that responsibility. It gave millions to the National Governors Association, to the Council of Chief School Officers, to Achieve and to Student Achievement Partners. Once the standards were written, Gates gave millions more to almost every think tank and education advocacy group in Washington to evaluate the standardseven to some that had no experience evaluating standardsand to promote and help to implement the standards. Even the two major teachers unions accepted millions of dollars to help advance the Common Core standards.(The Gates Foundation also poured $100M into a data cloud called inBloom that was created to store multi-state data records for students. Initially nine states signed up for the service but now all have dropped out and inBloom recently announced it was ending its existence.)

Common Core and early learnersA huge concern for many early childhood educators is whether Common Core State Standards are developmentally appropriate for K-2. There was not one K-3 classroom teacher or early childhood professional who was on the committees that wrote/reviewed standards for those ages.

From Diane Ravitch:

The Joint Statement of Early Childhood Health and Education Professionals on the Common Core Standards Initiative was signed by educators, pediatricians, developmental psychologists, and researchers, including many of the most prominent members of those fields.

More than 500 early childhood educators signed a joint statement complaining that the standards were developmentally inappropriate for children in the early grades. The standards, they said, emphasize academic skills and leave inadequate time for imaginative play.Their statement reads in part:We have grave concerns about the core standards for young children. The proposed standards conflict with compelling new research in cognitive science, neuroscience, child development, and early childhood education about how young children learn, what they need to learn, and how best to teach them in kindergarten and the early grades.Costs to States and School DistrictsCosts include items like classroom materials, assessments, and professional development. The biggest cost is technology infrastructure.

All the assessments must be done by computer. That means that districts all schools must have the necessary infrastructure to do this testing. It also means the loss of use of computer labs or library spaces for a number of weeks during the school year.

There will be one-time costs as well as ongoing costs and investments.

It is estimated that California costs would go over $1.6B, in Texas upwards of $3B, and Virginia costs are estimated at $250M.

Student Data PrivacyFor the last ten years, all 50 states have had to create statewide longitudinal databases to track their students scores on assessments. This was, in part, to collect Race to the Top funding. But it is clear that Common Core will increase the collection of student dataincluding demographics and postsecondary education performancefrom preschool into the workforce Additionally, states that are members of the assessment consortia have committed to expanding their data collection.In 2011, the Department of Education changed the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) so that any government or private entity that a district or state education department says is evaluating an education program has access to student data without parental notification.As well, in 2012, the Department of Labor announced $12 million in grants for states to build longitudinal databases linking workforce and education data.

Supporters and Opponents of Common CoreSupporters States that are now heavily invested in Common Core. Secretary Arne Duncan of the DOE who has been very aggressive in his push AND his criticism of anyone who raises concerns. He even went so far as to tell an audience of state superintendents that the pushback was coming from:

white suburban moms who all of a sudden their child isnt as brilliant as they thought they were, and their school isnt quite as good as they thought they were.

He later apologized but when you have the highest public education official in the country bad-mouthing mothers, you have to wonder. Education reformers like Michelle Rhee and DFER (Democrats for Education Reform)

Companies like Pearson who stand to make billions of dollars off of Common Core teaching materials and assessments.

Others include the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable and the National PTA.

Opponents Conservatives, especially Tea Partiers, who believe that public education should be local control and view CC as the first step to a national curriculum and testing. (To note, this is becoming a political issue for Republicans looking towards the presidential election of 2016 as well as the mid-term elections.) Network for Public Education and its head, Diane Ravitch The National Education Association (who initially endorsed but then backed away calling the rollout completely botched.) Parents and Educators against Common Core Standards, a national group Parents who have experienced frustration with both Common Core homework and testing with their own children. Teachers who have experienced frustration with both Common Core guidelines and testing. Principals who have experienced frustration with both Common Core guidelines and testing. Elected officials nationwide like legislators and school board/state board members. Some PTAs

Where do we go from here?Some have said there should be a minimum of three years of a moratorium on Common Core assessments until states (and districts) have fully prepared their curriculums to meet these standards.

Others want Common Core standards to be abandoned altogether but supporters say it is to late and states have gone too far down the road to pause or stop.