Is common core good for California?
Draft common-core standards got a boost this week when the respected Thomas B. Fordham Institute gave it a solid thumbs-up. Fordham’s evaluators called the standards “a clear, ambitious, and actionable depiction of the essential skills, competencies, and knowledge that our young people should acquire in school and possess by the time they graduate.”
Fordham will be encouraging states to adopt the math and English language arts standards. But interestingly for California was a sentence inserted in a draft of the report earlier this month: “Still, it’s likely that a handful of states—Massachusetts and California come to mind—will decide they’re better off with the standards they’ve got today.”
So now that Fordham has brought the question out into the open — or almost did (the specific references to California and Massachusetts were actually cut from the report’s final version) – it’s time that California’s education community addressed it: Should California go ahead and adopt common core later this summer? A good argument can be made that it shouldn’t. The answer, however, is inextricably tied to decisions related to Race To The Top.
Common core is an effort by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers. The Obama administration views it as a chance to unify and upgrade individual states’ standards and has pushed hard for it by awarding substantial points in Race to the Top applications to states that pledge to adopt the full common-core standards by Aug. 2.
The Legislature went for the bait in January when it paved the way for common core, as an act of faith, by including it in Race to the Top legislation.
A standards commission, with a large representation of teachers, will make recommendations to the State Board of Education, which must vote common core up or down. But now that California has lost the first round of Race to the Top, may not stand a good chance of winning the second round and perhaps shouldn’t even try, it’s appropriate to begin discussing, Is common-core is worth adopting?
California’s K-12 standards have long been admired for their comprehensiveness and rigor. Fordham has consistently given it an A grade, which is why its evaluators suggested the state may not need to adopt common core.
The state’s standards aren’t perfect by any means, however, and could benefit from common core’s clarity and tight priorities, and, in English language arts, its attention to listening and speaking skills as well as to writing and reading. However, as Fordham noted, the conceptual categories in high school math don’t directly line up with traditional courses, and there are organizational problems.
It’s a matter of trade-offs. Adopting common-core standards will require new textbooks, new curriculums and intensive training for teachers, as well as new assessments, the combined costing hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars and years of work. The process may also renew rounds of highly charged, ideological battles over math and reading.
Will the marginal improvements be worth the expense and the fighting?
The alternative is to focus attention and energy on what’s really needed: a richer array of assessments, replacing the current state standardized tests, that better measure knowledge in a range of subjects as well as career/college readiness. The Obama administration is ready to award hundreds of millions of dollars to consortia of states. California and Massachusetts may form one partnership.
The state’s community colleges and universities were not involved in the creation of the state’s STAR tests. The high rates of students who graduate unprepared for college-level work are one consequence. Now is the opportunity to bring the University of California, California State University and community colleges into the process of aligning curriculums and creating better assessments.
The problem in California has never been standards – it’s been their implementation.
So why mess with a good thing for points on Race to the Top?
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Thanks, John, for a clear summary of the issues. It is disappointing to me that while such public discussion has been going on in Massachusetts for weeks, it has been strangely quiet in California. John is right — it is time to have a real discussion on the question whether it is worthwhile to abandon years of investment in system alignment for what would be at best (in my opinion, not at all) marginal improvement in standards quality but will require many more years, and billions, to realign the system anew.
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A provocative post on an extremely critical strategic issue, John. Two points: (1) CA RTTT legislation calls for a 21-member curriculum committee to make a recommendation to the State Board by July 15 this year. That’s warp speed for such a foundational task. When CA’s content standards were developed 12-14 years ago, it took 2 years with major help from national experts like Shelia Byrd and Sue Pimintel. I haven’t heard a squeak yet on whether the committee has even been named. (2) Re your suggestion that an alternative is to focus attention on a new richer array of assessments, I have yet to hear what that visonary rhetoric may mean in the real world of designing and administering a large scale K-12 assessment system. Our current system (mainly the STAR CSTs) is only 8 years old, which is young adolescence for an assessment system. It is by no means perfect, especially given the pressures of high stakes accountability usage, but it would be responsible to develop a much more concrete conceptualization for what “a new richer array of assessments” may mean before throwing out the current system and jumping on a “new richer array” bandwagon. Perhaps another way of saying this might be “Killing the messenger doesn’t do much to change the reality of the underlying message.” Doug McRae, Retired Test Publisher, Monterey
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How about this for “core”:
K-6: Written and spoken English skills, Math skills.
7-8: U.S. Constitution and history
9-12: College or Employment Prep
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John,
Thanks for bringing this issue into central
focus. Given how important BOTH college
AND career readiness are to the Obama administration
(and in this tough economy, career & job
prospects are now a top priority for students
arttending college), one would think there
would be a much higher emphasis on STEM
subjects now–especially science–in the
Core Common Standards, in addition to
reading, writing & math. NCLB made this
mistake for many years–no attention to science
at all until 2005-2006, and our low levels
of science literacy show the results.
The new core needs to address the real world
connections between these subjects, which
is something far too students see until much
too late in the game. Job opportunities at
the global scale are increasingly STEAM
centered (visual arts & design being the added
“A”), and also in CA’s large entertainment
Industry (especially “T” “E” & “A”). Just look
at the credits on “Avatar” as an example.
Kids and teachers can –and should–read and write about
science and future (yes, science fiction)
just as much as they can about other topics.
Ted Kahn
Science Literacy levels sho
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Given the budget mess we’re in it seems to make sense to at least defer the standards and associated expenses to the future. I haven’t heard anything about the future costs of not being an early adopter of common core. So at the moment I’m assuming those costs would not be significant.
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“Now is the opportunity to bring the University of California, California State University and community colleges into the process of aligning curriculums and creating better assessments.”
Then, perhaps, we could just have ONE assessment. As a high school English teacher, it irks me that I am supposed to prepare students for the SAT, EAP, CST, and Accuplacer. It is no wonder that we feel so fragmented when it comes to preparing students for college.
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John yea on really thinking about this stuff and its costs and or benefits. With respect to who was involved in the creation of STAR tests you are dead wrong. Community Colleges were invited even begged to be involved they declined. Consequently they have 50 different placement tests few of which have validity or reliability research. There were quite a few UC and CSU professors involved in all of the test developments. CSU and the State Board of Education did create a modified 11th Grade STAR test in Math and English that was suppose to predict passage of the CSU placement tests. UC was begged to participate and declined. Neither CSU or UC has serious validity or reliablity research on its placement tests and in fact fewer than 1/3 of all students entering CSU ever have to pass them. This is a very good subject for you to investigate cause is smells to high heavem john
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In my view, the benefits are mostly in reducing or eliminating opportunity costs, broadening resources and expanding the power of the “consumer base” though I suspect consumers won’t utilize the power. As it stands, any content provider spends untold hours mapping resources to state standards and most often, they are not well-aligned. Coming to some understanding of content at a grade or course COULD save untold hours of teacher and professional developer time aligning resources. Think if History Channel, Discovery, themathforum, and multitude of other content providers could tag the appropriate grade or course how much time a teacher could save, let alone a professional developer, principal, etc. Similarly, teachers should use this power and refuse to use or purchase content that is not well-aligned, therefore wasting their time. Although a good teacher is very capable of selecting aligned materials, a higher and better use of the teachers time would be actually working with a student or collaborating with other teachers about the materials. Another aspect of consumer power is that all parents can have a guide as to the minimum of what their children should be learning when and for parents/communities less able to advocate for themselves, common standards would allow economies of scale to the grassroots, professional organizations and others that can take action with and for them….so not an opportunity cost savings, but an increase in another non-calculable aspect of high quality education….contribution to the public good.
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A decade ago, California spent untold millions of dollars and thousands of hours of the most respected education experts’ time to craft our own “common core” of standards. They were adopted only after years of contentious debate about the best way to teach reading (phonics-based or “whole language”) and math (traditional versus “constructivist”). Our common core is written in plain, understandable English (as opposed to vague edu-speak), with clearly defined content, objectives, and benchmarks. Not only do we have such a common core, we have curriculum frameworks, instructional materials, and assessments that are all aligned to our common core. It is for these reasons that the Fordham Institute assigned an “A” rating to California’s standards. Why toss all of this thoroughly considered and painfully debated work out the window in the name of consistency — and allow ourselves to be bullied into doing so in the matter of a couple months?
It has already been reported that the national core’s philosophy on teaching math (constructivist) is diametrically opposed to that embodied in California’s standards (traditional). This is a MAJOR issue. Who knows how many more significant conflicts lurk between the national common core vis a vis California’s? It will take at least a couple of months simply to prepare an
adequate side-by-side comparison of the two. To think that a decision to adopt or reject the national common core should be made without even such rudimentary analysis is ludicrous.
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Anything think the removal of that sentence from the draft that Mr. Fensterwald references–”Still, it’s likely that a handful of states—Massachusetts and California come to mind—will decide they’re better off with the standards they’ve got today”–is interrelated with the fact that the Gates Foundation (which is also funding the Common Core effort) gave Fordham $959,116 “to review the common core standards and develop supportive materials”? Their searchable grants database is quite interesting. http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Grants-2009/Pages/Thomas-B-Fordham-Institute-OPP1005845.aspx
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