Such a big cost, so little benefit: Why, Governor, persist with Common Core?
Somehow in preparing to run against Republican Meg Whitman, California Gov. Jerry Brown managed to shed his old persona of Shaman/Management Theorist, an easy target of ridicule and one that Whitman would surely have relished had she been able to resurrect it. This showed impressive image control, but I’m looking for the old Jerry Brown – the spiritualist, the philosopher – because that’s the Jerry Brown I want to address my question to.
Here is my question, complete with background:
In your recent negotiations with Secretary of Education Arne Duncan regarding waivers from the more impossible requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act, you have sought extra time for the trickier of the waiver’s own requirements, like reaching labor agreements on use of student test scores in teacher evaluation (or using them without labor agreements), and maybe that is wise of you. The $353 million in Title I funds that you ask the DOE to permit California to use as a down payment on the new national standards is not the liquid capital it would take to buy the political muscle for challenging the California Teachers Association anyway, so I support your efforts to give us the time we need for this important task.
On the other hand, you can hardly consider yourself to be engaged in tough negotiations with Duncan. The projected cost in California of the Common Core standards, agreed to (though not in contractual form that has ever been reported) by the Schwarzenegger-appointed State Board of Education, is $2 billion and change (per the March, 2012 agenda before the State Board of Education). Such a deal you’re getting us! California transfers $353 million in Title I funds from education to the Textbook Publishers’ Bailout, the benefit to us being a partial payment on the Common Core $2 billion, leaving us in debt to the tune of a billion plus. How is this tough negotiating?
What will the reapplication of Title I funds in California mean? TOP-Ed writer John Fensterwald explains in his recent post: “Districts with Title I schools – about 60 percent of the state’s 10,000 schools – would still have to spend the money on low-income students, but could use it, say, for preparing teachers for Common Core standards or for their own school improvement plans outside of NCLB’s limited models.” So you can spend the money on low-income students as long as, instead of actually spending it on the low-income students, you funnel it to the Publisher’s Bailout. (See details in a waiver request that Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson’s staff at the state Department of Education is recommending.)
My question then, is, “Why do you think we need these standards?” “But wait!” you say, “If you’re asking Brown a policy question, why do you want him to assume his former role as shaman? Do you want a policy answer or a horoscope?”
Fair enough. Yes, I want a policy answer, but Brown, in his spiritual moods, is disarmingly honest. It’s a skill and it’s also a good thing. I’d like to see him channel that honesty in discussing his education policy.
So then, Governor, we already have world-class standards in Californian, for which we paid several billion a decade ago. Those standards, which were written and maintained by experts and people in the field (including yours truly), raised the bar for all children in California. Nevertheless, they did not do much to raise student achievement. And that’s because standards do not in themselves do much. The companies and consultants waiting for the Common Core gravy train are telling you that the standards didn’t work because they were faulty, and we need new standards. Governor, it’s not true. Standards are no panacea in the best of times, and they are really not very important at all right now. If you disagree, let’s hear why. Assume the lotus position if necessary.
Doug Lasken is a retired LA Unified teacher, consultant, and debate coach. Read his blog at http://laskenlog.blogspot.com/.
I have no issue with moving to Common Core over the long term, as we adopt new materials. But rushing into it, especially in a time of such low resources, will only hurt kids. Every time we transition, we distract the teachers and potentially create gaps as the kids move from one education timeline to another. Artificially forcing a transition in the next two years has no benefit.
Teachers always take a year or two to come up to speed on the new material, even the best teachers with the best material. The kids are already losing school days and school minutes. Adding another concrete block to teacher ankles hardly seems a good idea when we’re already asking them to do so much more with so much less.
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You seem to be saying that we’re too busy mopping the floor to turn off the faucet.
In California in grades K-5, 67% of students score advanced or proficient on their math CST, but by the 11th grade that falls to 24%. It is difficult to blame that on scale setting, on teachers, or on students. Mastery of the standards that were supposed to set the foundation for future success in mathematics apparently does not prepare students to succeed in high school. I do not believe that this is the best that California can afford to do for its children.
You say that we have world-class standards. Some believe that because the Fordham Foundation studied them and declared them to be the best. Now however there is evidence from the Brookings Institution that the Fordham Foundations ratings of state standards don’t yield a positive correlation with state achievement.
I realize that standards are just a part of the system, and that our testing and accountability systems are in need of improvement. Much of what is wrong in assessment is a result of weaknesses in the standards we’ve had for nearly 15 years now, and testing apparently cannot be extricated from its rut without making improvements in our standards.
Without Common Core, there is little hope for improving our standards or our assessment system. With Common Core, we get standards that transcend the one-dimensional perspective that standards are good only to the extent that they raise the bar (which also doesn’t correlate with state achievement). We get the high bar that you value, and we get a focus on student understanding. Instead of trying to teach everything at once, we get a coherent and focused progression that was devised by careful examination of how it is done in more successful countries.
You haven’t provided much support for your conclusion that there is little benefit to the Common Core. You also haven’t said anything about the ultimate cost of our current cheap and superficial assessment system with standards that fail to adequately prepare students. You seem sure that the best we can do is to keep on mopping. I don’t understand why it is such a mystery that some people prefer a different approach.
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As an engineer and physical scientist who has looked at Math Common Core, I can say that several essential areas of math missing from current curriculum are in the the Math Common Core. The one must obviously missing is fractional exponentiation. Exponentiation is the fifth most used function used in the real world and fractional exponentiation needs to be taught. Examples include SPL in decibels, the Richter Scale, radioactive decay and compound interest.
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BTW, aren’t the Common Core assessments supposed to be administered via a cutting edge computer system in 2014? Has anyone been working on getting bandwidth and computers into California schools adequate to the task such that *every* school has high speed internet by then? (Hint: if we haven’t started by now, it won’t be done in time.)
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@Russ: Really? Did you actually bother to read both set of standards?
Fractional exponents are included in the current California standards in Algebra 1 (std. 2.0), our grade 8 expectations. They are explored in greater depth in Algebra 2 (std. 7.0, 12.0) and their relations to logarithms (std. 11.0, 15.0).
In the common core they appear only in the high school.
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Interesting thing is: We have the California Standards, but I can attest to the fact that with four children (10 – 22) who have been educated in/are currently in California schools, they have not consistently been taught within the California Standards framework, AND have often been provided with textbooks and curricular materials that are not aligned with the Standards. As a teacher, I used the California Standards as my minimal framework and developed materials to improve upon them as needed. Since CALPADS never “happened” we don’t even know what worked/didn’t work. As if CTA will allow evaluations under Common Core!
I have my kids’ scores, and when they were consistently taught in alignment with Standards – and usually with additional material to deepen their understanding – they did well! That “did well” for the oldest took him to UCSD as a junior in high school for his Calculus course, and later to Stanford. However, where he had weaker teachers (English, Spanish, etc.,) in high school, he did much more poorly, but at home I consistently supplemented his reading, etc. As for Spanish …
Remember, that Standards were brought in because there was such inconsistency in California K-12 education. If the “house had been in order”- would education have become such a political tool?
As someone educated elsewhere, I think the math and science standards in K-8 lack elements that one would find internationally, however, if ALL teachers did actually implement differentiated, developmentally appropriate best practices (as some do) what a difference they make.I think Governor Brown should start by requiring that 6-8 teachers are single subject specialists, and require K-5 teachers to have taken a core of science and math courses in college. No courses (good grades of course) – no admittance to credential courses. We might then even end up, one day, with principals who understand math and science teaching.
I have even more problems with the high school math and science. But those concerns are centered around the failure to require additional science and foreign language courses.
What I would have liked in Common Core:
Three years of a foreign language in 6-8
Mandated Music and Art education K-8. Currently, without testing, the arts are considered disposable!
I think the Industrial Arts should be returned to the school curriculum … but I know that would be to return us to the 1960s and the US wouldn’t have to import highly qualified “hands on” workers. Those students who learn the abstract through the concrete might then have more of a chance!
Finally … I rarely used textbooks to teach. I wrote my own material, in alignment with the Standards. As an English teacher, that was pretty straightforwards, but I was trained in curriculum development and writing elsewhere! I don’t think we need new textbooks for Common Core, just need materials that meet the content areas.
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Sue,
I enjoyed your response, and I agree with everything you said there … except when you came to the Common Core (smile).
Accepting all you said, how does the Common Core fit in? Seems to me it will provide precisely the same kind of framework, where much depends on the textbooks, teachers, adaptation, and alignment. Common Core says nothing about foreign language, arts, voced, or even science and history. So it is, effectively, a change for the sake of change.
I argue Common Core is somewhat below what we have now; others argue it is slightly above; nobody (other than ignorants, I am sorry to say) argues there is a major difference in expectations*. So why spend the money? And spend we will. Even if you are correct that one does not truly need new textbooks and training, we will buy them on accelerated schedule anyway. Otherwise unions will argue — and win in court — that teachers cannot be held accountable for anything until they are provided with aligned curriculum, aligned materials, and aligned training.
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* I think it is inarguable that Common Core imposes changes in pedagogy and organization. Teaching geometry in an untested experimental way, as required by the Common Core, or teaching history & science embedded with teaching English (or vice versa) are key examples that may have potentially a huge impact on school organization, teacher training, and costs, but have little to do with the level of final expectations.
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The one point Ze’ev doesn’t deal with is just what has been accomplished with the old standards?
Prior to the imposition of standards, accountability, and testing in the mid 1990s at least the middle class kids scored fairly well on the NAEP. Now “equity” has been brought to the system and everyone scores poorly. Note that Ed Week’s Quality Counts annual reports routinely give CA fairly high marks for “equity” in funding and very low marks for actual funding per student (47th of 50). The conclusion? CA pretty equitably underfunds almost all of its students.
All sub-groups have improved on the CSTs. The lowest scoring subgroups now perform where the middle groups performed at the start of testing. But what, exactly, does that correlate with? Life? Surely not. And isn’t the real and ultimate goal of education to prepare people to be able to maximize their own personal potential? That may well be in the arts, or philosophy, or poetry, or plumbing, or auto repair, or whatever and not just to become a polished cog in the industrial machine. Some how we’ve lost sight of this.
One of the real lessons we can learn from a place like Finland is that their “highly performing schools,” as well as their high international test scores, are a reflection of children’s well being. They are a product of a society intent on social equity. The scores are not driven by innumerable standards, testing, and the misplaced accountability measures focused on the people who have the least decision making power in the system.
Mr. Farrand observes that CA students’ performance on the CSTs falls off the table in high schools. This is one of the saddest of consequences of our “accountability” system. It is about at the 10th grade that kids realize that state tests are (except for some who move on to four year higher ed institutions) of little meaning to them personally. Kids have to worry about teacher’s class tests because that is what grades are mostly based on. The CAHSEE? Good for graduation. Kids try in the AP because that means something in college. Honors classes can boost their GPAs. SATs and ACTs can affect college admission. But CSTs? Nada. There are well known stories of kids filling in the bubbles to make faces, abstract patterns or obscenities.
The kids finally realize the adults have been lying to them. The scores are important for administrators, boards, testing companies and, of course, generating acres of writing on editorial pages (and now blogs). There are also the continued efforts to bludgeon teachers and students into towing the test score line with various threats and bribes. This in the face of the National Research Council’s conclusions that our tests do a poor job of measuring student learning and it is impossible to fairly and accurately evaluate teachers performance with the tests. The NRC also concludes that the focus on tests is narrowing the curriculum to the extent it is actually harming learning. The US is actually undermining its “international competitiveness” with the fetish about testing. So, how can we know how well our students are doing if we don’t bow to the test score shibboleths? Do it the way “high performing” systems like Finland and Singapore do it. Ask the teachers.
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The drop in student scores I described is not so easily attributed to the lack of student motivation to do well on the CSTs. If that were the case, one would expect a similar drop in ELA scores, but the ELA scores are not similar to the Math scores. Between the middle school grades (6-8) and the high school grades (9-11) on the CST, the percentage scoring advanced or proficient on the English CSTs drops from 56% to 49%, while for math the drop is from 50% to 28%. Not at all similar.
The drop in math scores is pretty steady, starting at the 6th grade and contuinuing through the 11th grade. The steepest drop is not “about at the 10th grade”, but between grades 7 and 9. Something about not being prepared for algebra, I believe.
I was serious when I suggested that it is not easy to dismiss the drop in math CST scores that occurs starting in the 6th grade. I am ready to hear alternative explanations, but so far the only one I have that can account for the tremendous drop in math CST scores is that the standards do not actually prepare students for what is coming.
I am not denying the progress that has been made under our old standards. However, if you extrapolate that success it still doesn’t make much of a dent in the problem I am pointing out, and the problem I am pointing out is a catastrophe, a failure of our educational system to support our children. Sticking with the old standards will not turn this around.
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Certainly the material gets more difficult as the years go by, and math in particular is designed to build on previous knowledge. Thus, any hole in the K-6 math learning will show in the high school results. When we have this rigorous you-must-follow-our-curriculum-to-the-minute expectation imposed on teachers, that naturally implies that there is little time for answering unpredicted questions (the nerve of some children!) or the holes one might encounter working with them.
I think you might also ask how many times the curriculum changed on the kids by the time they got to 9th grade. It seems that given the textbook adoption process, that every student will have at least one curriculum package change by the time high school rolls around. Each one varies a bit on when and how concepts are introduced, and that’s a key way to create holes right there. That alone is a good reason to introduce a new Common Core curriculum deliberately and at the school’s pace – because even if the change is 100% positive for next year’s kindergarteners, it will almost certainly create difficulties for older students.
Our high school experimented last year with allowing proficient CST results, when applicable, to raise the letter grade for that class by one grade. The kids seemed to like it and my sense was that it made the whole dynamic of those exams more positive, that this was an extra credit opportunity rather than a waste of everyone’s time. It gave them a reason to fill in correct answers without it being a punitive situation.
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Mr. Farrand:
I think we’re talking passed each other a bit. If you look at API (based primarily on CSTs and CAHSEE at HS) I think you’ll find the gap between the 8oo base more than doubles between grades 9-10 and 7-8 as it does between 7-8 and 2-6.
The below basic/basic/proficient/etc rating system adopted by the SBE is a crude measure. The SBE was informed of this when it adopted it by CDE staff. They were also told that doing so, purportedly to be in “alignment” with NAEP classifications, would contribute to CA’s schools being inappropriately labeled PI (failing) over time. The SBE went ahead and adopted the classifications. Their motivations can only be subject to speculation. My recollection is the Newt Flicks guy (Reed Hastings), not a fan of regular public schools, was SBE president at the time. A matter of coincidence is just about every professional organization and the GAO told the USDE the same ting about their use of the labels. Scholars have suggested cross correlating NAEP and international tests, that only a few Nordic nations would ever approach 100% proficiency. Note approach, not achieve.
I think we are in general agreement on the efficacy of standards. Finland does just fine with a relative few pages and we have weighty tomes. To what end?
You may suggest the API is about as crude as the basic/proficient categories. No argument here. The student motivation aspect is, I admit, both anecdotal and based on my experience.
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@El – about the technology: The CDE-adopted plan shows that an inventory of LEA’s technology capacity should be taking place now (March 2012) with a report to the legislature in November 2012 addressing what investments are needed to begin pilot online assessments in Spring 2013.
Won’t it be fun for the legislature to find out that we need a billion or so in technology improvements just as the polls close…Could be an unpleasant perfect storm: failed tax initiatives forcing deep not even mid-year cuts, new legislators in newly drawn districts with uncertain mandates and oh! lo! a bill for a million or so new computers and broadband access.
In the meantime our schools will be stranded with half-implemented standards, incomplete PD, no means to assess and no CalPADS to analyze.
Good times ahead, my friends.
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Ze’ev: I must have been unclear in my comments at the end of my entry. Those were what I wanted – they aren’t there. So, not sure that makes me a Common Core supporter.
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