The rush to common-core standards
Of all the reforms that legislators are on the verge of passing to enhance its Race to the Top application, the most consequential also has been the least discussed.
California is about to commit to junk its decade-old, much ballyhooed system of K-12 academic standards by Aug. 2. Doing so will the require writing new assessments and curriculum frameworks and adopting new textbooks over the next few years– at a cost that easily run in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
What’s amazing is not the state’s consideration of the Obama administration’s push for “common core” standards. The concept of internationally benchmarked academic standards to which students in all states can be measured and compared is certainly sound.
But, in the hopes of scoring extra points in the Race to the Top contest the state is saying it will adopt common core standards as article of faith, essentially sight unseen.
California’s standards aren’t perfect; there appear to be too many of them in many grades in many subjects. But they are tough. Skeptics have raised legitimate worries that common core standards may be flabby, especially in math.
The National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and the Council of Chief State School Officers are leading the common core effort, with help from a slew of experts and organizations, including Achieve. The first pass on grade by grade standards is due out next month.
So far, there has been only a draft of career and college readiness standards for high school graduates. And it has been sharply criticized by Palo Alto engineer Ze’ev Wurman, who helped develop California’s math standards, and Bill Evers of the Hoover Institution, among others, for leaving out large portions of the Algebra II curriculum – as required for admission to UC and CSU, California’s four-year state colleges.
The debate mixes politics and philosophy. Many states’ academic standards lack rigor – and, in some cases, intentionally have been made weaker, in order to escape penalties under No Child Left Behind. Designing standards to meet the average state would undermine California’s standards.
But there is also the argument that the majority of high school graduates, who don’t go on to a four-year college, shouldn’t be held to a college prep curriculum. In testifying on common core, Stanford emeritus professor of education Michael Kirst said that the committee creating the draft standards presented no evidence to support its assumption that students heading to college and those going straight to the workplace need the same set of math skills.
Fear of dumbed-down curriculum
Wurman argues that a dumbed-down curriculum would send more students unprepared for college, particularly in critically needed majors of science, math and engineering. As Wurman wrote, “Which is better for higher education institutions and the United States? Placing mathematically unqualified freshmen in credit courses in colleges and universities, or strengthening high school coursework to prepare more mathematically qualified freshmen for them? In a more rational world, the question wouldn’t even be asked.”
Under Race to the Top, California has the option of banding together with other states with rigorous standards, like Massachusetts, to create their own standards, instead of adopting the national set.
That might happen. But either option doesn’t leave much time or latitude. The state must adopt 85 percent of the standards of whichever group it chooses, and, under the compromise bill before the Legislature, must do so by Aug. 2. A 21-member state commission, half of whose members will be teachers, will review the standards before sending them for an up or down vote by the state Board of Education.
California, however, will have a big say in the final common core standards. Six of the 25 reviewers are Californians: three Stanford professors (Linda Darling-Hammond and Kenji Hakuta of the School of Education, and emeritus math professor James Milgram, architect and staunch defender of California’s math standards); Longbeach Unified Superintendent Christopher Steinhauser; WestEd’s director of assessment and standards Stanley Rabinowitz; and David Pearson, dean of UC-Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education.
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SVEF is the education foundation advocating for the needs of school districts across Silicon Valley. SVEF seeks to improve public education through establishing partnerships with the private sector and the education community ..
Dr. Kirst’s concern is well founded. It is important to dispel the myth that “ready for college is the same as ready for work.” Entry-level skills do not necessarily include Algebra/Trig, and yet too many districts are requiring every kid to take/pass Algebra II in order to get a high school diploma. We are redefining failure (in a way unconnected to the real world) and introducing more kids to it.
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Is “common core” a standard or a program? If it is a standard and CA’s standards are already “tougher” than “common core”, then why does anything have to change?
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“Common Core” are a set of standards in English Language Arts and in Math defined by a collaborative started by NGA and CCSSO. The standards were started by defining what the consortium called “work and college-readiness” standards, and now the consortium works on “back-mapping” those work and college-readiness standards into grade-by-grade K-12 standards.
The reason California is being pushed to accept them is that states that join “a consortium of states” that works towards defining common standards (Common Core is currently the only such that exists) get extra up to 40 points, out of 500 possible total, for their application for the Race to the Top $4B federal grant program. If California gets one of those, it will receive between $400M and $700M as its share, and Sacramento is currently tripping over itself in racing to changing the laws to qualify for the grant competition.
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Does that mean once the “back-mapping” is done it might turn out that CA has nothing to change?
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In theory, yes. In practice, this is quite improbable especially given where the consortium effectively put its “end of high-school” stake, and the leaks about the backmapping process.
Perhaps it is worth mentioning that the issue is not simply a minor modifications of the standards. Last time we went through the process it required few additional billions(!) of dollars to align the textbooks and have school districts purchase them on accelerated schedule, put the aligned teacher training, and the assessment, in place. It also took about 5-7 years before school districts stopped using “our textboooks are still unaligned” or “we did not yet get/provide teacher training about the standards” as an excuse for their failing to teach most of their students to meet the standards. The maximum we can ever see from the Race to the Top money is $700M, even less then just the Schiff-Bustamante $1B Calif. added in late 1990s for accelerated textbook adoption. And California doesn’t have extra few billions in the foreseeable future…
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Ze’ev: One advantage of a consortium of states is spreading the costs. And the feds are setting aside $350 million to create new assessments. Isn’t it time that California abandon the fill-in-the-bubble measurements anyway? I also would expect dramatic changes in textbooks anyway in the next three or four years, as CK-12 and other free, online publishers force districts to approach materials differently. The timing might be fortuitous.
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John,
You may be right in that the publishers will not need to adapt their textbooks to Calif., although there is a possible catch there too–states have the right to tack on up to 15% (however measured) of their own standards, so there may be “Calif. editions” in our future anyway. In any case Calif. never paid the publishers for the adaptation. It is the purchasing of new books that is typically done on a 7-10 year cycle that will need to be accelerated, and the feds will not pay for that.
As to digital texts the jury is still out, and it will take a long time until them make a significant impact on textbook purchase costs in most districts, and particularly in poorer ones. Did you ever stop to ask yourself what is the true cost of a laptop per child, when you include the cost of maintenance, loss/theft insurance, software purchase and software support, and replacement every 3-5 years? You may discover that textbooks are not so expensive.
As to assessment, it deserves a discussion of its own due to its complexity, and the amount of misinformation and misconceptions on the issue. Just to touch on it, $350M may be sufficient to develop something “common” but then (a) you still have the 15% that is “custom” for every (or every other) state, and (b) if indeed that assessment will have much more than what you seem to dismiss as “fill-in-the-bubbles”, we may anyway need to spend much more on them. Today California spends perhaps $10/student/year on testing. With a mostly constructed-response items on a test start thinking perhaps 10X more per student. For a test that, incidentally, doesn’t really test any better, and probably less reliably, than what we already do today. Just some food for thought.
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The problem I see with that argument is that decisions made concerning content affect the later “educated” decision the student is prepared to make concerning work or college pursuits.
If AUTHENTIC Algebra II is not a high school expectation/requirement, so-called “reformists” will soon after diminish the mathematics content taught at EVERY LEVEL leading up to it. Children with latent ability in mathematics could be forever cut-off from discovering their passion and reaching their fullest potential because they lack the necessary content to proceed with success.
It’s time to be honest and acknowledge that even our current “college entrance” expectations are considered low level in some countries – you know, the ones that are out-producing us at an ever-increasing rate!
Our children deserve the opportunity to reach their fullest potential!
Thank you Ze’ev for your honesty and committment to providing opportunities for our children.
Happy New Year!
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