Draft common core finally is out
California got its first glimpse Wednesday of draft common-core standards in math and English language arts that, sight-unseen, the Legislature has put the state on a path to adopting this summer.
Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell immediately praised the “rigorous” draft standards as “well organized to give a consistent, clear understanding of what students are expected to learn … to succeed in both college and the workforce.” And a number of national organizations, from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to the American Federation of Teachers, endorsed them.
But others expressed caution and criticism, particularly about some of the math standards and sequence of learning them. Among those was Ze’ev Wurman, a high-tech executive from Palo Alto who helped develop California’s standards and assessments in the mid-1990s.
Wurman said common-core standards would not prepare California students to take Algebra in the eighth grade, as is current state policy, and may not fully prepare them even in ninth grade. After front-loading math in first and second grades, the proposed math standards slow down in middle school, creating gaps between California’s standards and common core. And elements of the state’s Algebra II standards, which the state’s four year colleges require for admission, are missing.
Common core is a product of the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers. They launched the initiative last year out of recognition that many states’ standards are weak, and some states – though not California — had lowered their standards to escape penalties under the No Child Left Behind Law. The idea was to create rigorous standards that would prepare students for college or for the workforce, while making America more economically competitive.
Pressure on states to adopt
State adoption is voluntary, but the Obama administration encouraged states by awarding substantial points in the Race to the Top applications to states that adopt common core. All states but Texas and Alaska agreed to do so.
The California Legislature set an Aug. 1 deadline for an up or down vote by the State Board of Education.
Common core will create the biggest change for California since it adopted state standards in 1997. In all likelihood, the state will have to create new assessments, buy new textbooks and retrain teachers.
Whether this will be worth the huge expense and effort is not yet clear. In coming days, state officials and teachers will be comparing standards by grade to see how closely they match up. After a decade, it was time to update and clarify California standards, and this would have been difficult to do so without reigniting math and reading wars of the ‘90s. Common core could help achieve this.
But while common core will add rigor in many states, it may not do so here, particularly in math. The state must adopt common core in its entirety, although the state can add 15 percent – or more (who’s measuring?) — of its own standards. The evaluation by the California State University and University of California systems will be important, since the final standards should line up with their freshman requirements.
Common core’s challenge has been to prepare students for both the workplace and college. There’s no research saying needs of the two are the same.
Core Knowledge, a national non-profit that campaigns for literature- and content-rich reading curriculums, praised the draft standards’ inclusion of suggested texts – poems, novels, and works of non-fiction – for every grade (Thoreau’s Walden Pond in the 11th grade, or example). But Gary Hoachlander, president of ConnectEd, which advocates career and technical education programs in California, expressed disappointment over the lack of connection between standards and marketplace skills.
Even backers of common core have criticized the compressed time frame for adoption. Organizers are accepting comments on the draft standards only until April 2 – less than a month. And major changes at this point aren’t likely.
The legislation adopting common core also established a curriculum review committee, which can recommend augmenting common core. Half of its members will be teachers.
It also could recommend adopting common core as a pilot program; that might be the best idea.
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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 ..
John,
I have looked at the common core standards and I suggest we approach the analysis from “What would the United States look like if these standards actually were implemented?”
Few college graduate baby boomers today can demonstrate competence in the range of pages 43 to 62 of the proposed high school mathematics standards found at http://www.corestandards.org/ I cast that question to target COLLEGE GRADUATE boomers, not simply high school graduate boomers.
Imagine what this country will be like when almost all adults will have studied quadratic equations and we no longer have a country clogged with opinion leaders who dismiss their own need to be competent in math – compared to international standards.
For example, can today’s average 50-something “Use technology to exhibit the effects of parameter changes on the graphs of linear, power, quadratic, square root, cube root, and polynomial functions, and simple rational, exponential, logarithmic, sine, cosine, absolute value, and step functions”?
The standards put forth that every 12th grader in the U.S. (and thus all adults) would be competent in algebra and geometry. This significantly would change the current snapshot of the average U.S. adult resident.
In 2030, we would expect all retail workers, all construction workers, all preschool aides, all bus drivers, all auto mechanics, all administrative assistants, even all journalists, broadcast anchors and English professors, etc., to have obtained a functional competence in algebra, geometry and basic trigonometry before they finished high school. The new expectation of the average U.S. worker would be tremendous.
The “Mathematics | High School—Functions” section of the standards includes:
“Interpreting Functions;
Building Functions;
Linear, Quadratic, and Exponential Models;
Trigonometric Functions;
Limits and Continuity;
Differential Calculus;
Applications of Derivatives;
Integral Calculus;
Applications of Integration; and
Infinite Series.”
I have encountered way too many professional educators and opinion leaders who shift nervously when asked if they can express functionality in these types of math standards.
If we’re going to stay united as 50 states, rather than devolve into a new era of peacefully negotiated secession, this country has to get off its collective butt and crank up the brain. Could California expect even more than what’s put forth by these standards? Sure. But we don’t yet have consensus that we really, really, really expect every U.S. adult to meet the level of the proposed national standards. Gaining support for these minimum standards is a good place to start.
- Chris Stampolis
Trustee, West Valley/Mission Community College District
Member, Democratic National Committee
stampolis@aol.com
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John writes that “Whether this will be worth the huge expense and effort is not yet clear.” If the switch to federal standards triggers even modest changes to textbook adoptions and teacher training, it will easily dwarf the small amounts of “Race to the Top” funding that California might get–if it can compete more successfully in Round 2 after being rejected from Round 1.
It seems that the main “benefit” from switching to federal standards is to address insecure policy-makers’ “comparison anxiety” when they head into the interstate “locker room” to compare the rigor of their states’ standards. It’s hard to envision how students will benefit.
The whole notion of state and federal standards is quite frightening–Orwellian really. The concept stems from the incorrect assumption that all students need to learn the same things and that their needs in later life are standardized. Nothing could be further from the truth.
It would be hilarious to ask the major backers of the push for federal standards to sit for an aligned test themselves–I’d bet a steak dinner that all would fail miserably and that many broken #2 pencils would litter the floor.
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