Stop Common Core (and replace it with what?)

Enough.

The Top Ten things that you need to know about #commoncore. Good reasons to #stopcommoncore. Stop the madness.
— Angela Weinzinger (@angeldwein) October 11, 2014

What utter dreck.

10. Your child is unique? Yeah, no two snowflakes are exactly alike, but they are all basically the same. After 30 years of teaching, I think I can lay this ego-driven, touchy-feely garbage to rest. Your child is special to you but he isn't different enough from the rest of the crowd to warrant special teaching.

9. Yup, CCSS was created by special interests. No, it's not perfect. No, I don't endorse all of it and I probably won't hold my breath and teach every part of it. I'm a math teacher. I have the intelligence to modify it when necessary. It is, however, better than that mess of garbage that it replaced.

8. I really don't want the legislature voting on math standards. They have zero experience in education. I don't want them to ask my opinion on the intricacies of healthcare for the same reason.

7. Does it matter that this is false? Does it matter that districts are spending that money on testing regardless?

6. The CCSS do not collect information.

5. The lack of attention for gifted learners is not the fault of the CCSS. And your child isn't gifted.

4. Again, not by CCSS. And again, this is false in many states. Mine for instance wrote definitively that test scores have not, are not and will not be used to rate teachers because it is inappropriate and wrong to do so.

3. Yup, this is the only thing you got right. We are not forcing them to read as much of the classics. Instead the English teachers are using SOME different works, such as essays and non-fiction. Unfortunately for your rather uninformed little screed, Shakespeare and Edith Hamilton Mythology are still very much in evidence.

2. No one changed who was in control. School Boards are still the only controlling bodies. Homeschoolers are not in any way, shape or form, under the control of any CCSS.

1. You have the power to stop common core but in #2 you didn't have any power? Come on, at least be consistent in your paranoid ramblings. The last people who should be exercising control over their kids schooling are people who can't even make a coherent argument.  Fortunately for me and my job, deluded paranoiacs like you are keeping me employed -- although usually I don't get your kid until after you've messed up his education and nearly ruined his chances at living a good and successful life.

But don't let me stop you. The Internet is free to use.

Should Math Really Be A Required Subject?

I recently got an email:

And as a homeschooling father to a nine-year-old who puts two hours-plus of serious math instruction into each day I find myself in complete agreement with your approach to teaching the subject.  BUT...

I'm curious, do you find anything to agree with in Nicholson Baker's famous critical essay on Algebra II?  I do, and I make up for time that would be spent on the subject with an excess of number theory.  Any opinion greatly appreciated!  Best,

Oooh, boy.

Good evening,

I haven't read it, and it's behind a paywall, but what little I can see of or about it leads me to think "Just another whiny English Major and writer railing against algebra." "I don't DO math. Hee, hee."

I agree with the idea that students who have absolutely no interest in a mathematical major in college should probably be able to take a good statistics course instead of what alg2 has become under CCSS, but I hesitate to let all of them off the hook so quickly. I've found that most students can get SOMETHING out of my algebra class, and I hate to see them quitting on themselves after Geometry. I also believe that many kids vastly overestimate the difficulties they will have.

I think putting an elective as the third year and allowing kids to take alg2 as seniors is often a good compromise.

I guess for me the biggest complaint is this idea that every kid must take it and do well.  Why is A the only acceptable result? Why can't a kid struggle with it, get a D and move on? (And by D, I mean the kinda-gift, 'thanks for trying, but you really don't know this well enough for me to say Alg2 on a transcript') At least then he's been exposed to some things, has a partial idea of what logs are and how they apply to pH, and some pretty functions and so on.

The next time, if there is a next time, he'll do better. If there isn't a next time, well ... there's that small fraction he did understand.

If we look at a common complaint, "I'll never get this in a million years!" and tone down the exaggeration to "I'll never get this in one year!", it should become apparent that some kids may only get parts of alg2 this year. But they can always revisit it later in college or as the parent of student.

It does develop abstract thinking and the concepts are critical in most of the modern world. Yes, I understand that everyone thinks they "didn't use algebra in the RealWorld today" but they are wrong.  Algebra in its pure form never appears ... but the concepts, ideas, and behaviors show up everywhere.

Finally, I ask this one question .... If I said "Your son is too stupid to take algebra." "Your daughter is incapable of such abstract thought; have her take something more girly." "Your black child can't understand that." "Your daughter shouldn't fill her head with difficult math."  What would you do?

Well, I think you'd be calling for my head.

You know your kid best and even you don't think that you can predict his future; neither of you have any idea what he'll need or desire to do. You aren't really sure whether his difficulties are due to bad teaching or a lack of ability. You've read that girls learn their math-phobia from their mothers/ kindergarten teachers/ peers/ MyLittlePony and you do not want to limit her in any way before she's had a chance.

So why do we all have this mindset to "Let them admit defeat so early"? Me, I'd rather have them try again.

I tell kids "You have no idea what you'll do tomorrow. How can you predict what you'll be good at in ten years?  Algebra is difficult, but lots of things are difficult -- besides, you're 16 ... what else do you have in mind to take? What else can you do while the education is FREE? Do you want to put this off until college and pay $1200 per credit for it?

I was good at math and physics in HS, but I really hated history (BOOOOOORING). I got my degree in engineering and I spend hours during my vacations solving math puzzles .... but my passion is medieval reenactment. I can hold my own with the history department on anything older than 1600, pre-Renaissance. I have complete sets of armor that I wear in full-combat martial arts ... and the people I fight against are teaching me techniques they've researched from centuries old fechtbuch (in the original German). Last summer, we were camped around the fire, period canvas pavilions in a big circle, and we spent spent hours discussing the accuracy of the story of Bayeaux Tapestry as compared to and checked by contemporary sources.  Who would have predicted that?

Should every child take history? Yes. Math? Yes, including all the algebra they can stand, and then some. Art? Science? Languages? English? Yes.

No, I don't when you'll use it.

But I do know you'll do very little without it.

I've gotta get back to work. Thanks for reading.

If it doesn't turn you on ...

After my childish little rant yesterday about kids and the multiplication tables playing hard-to-get, Sue left a comment on the post:

If it doesn't turn you on, why would you focus on it? I just read The Book of Learning and Forgetting, by Frank Smith. He makes a sharp distinction between memorizing and learning. I think knowing those multiplication facts is vital to doing lots of interesting mathematical work, but students will only know them if they felt engaged by the ideas at some point. 

If it hadn't been written by SueVH, I'd have been tempted to toss it into the Idiot Pile and shrug my shoulders muttering "What the ... " under my breath.  Sue's right, of course, but I shudder at what a parent or new teacher or student might take away from this.

Here's the problem.  Statements like "If it doesn't turn you on, why would you focus on it?" and "students will only know them if they felt engaged by the ideas" can lead to a dangerous impasse in the classroom.

Students in elementary school, more than at any other level, are influenced by the attitudes of their teachers. They can be convinced or even be taught (or manipulated, or brainwashed, if you want to be cynical and stupid) that math is fun and easy. They can memorize so many things at this age - they're memorizing words, symbols, mores and morals, culture, ethics (to the point they can understand them) - they're a mental sponge. They will absorb everything just because someone said so.

If the teacher takes the approach that the students need to be engaged before they can learn math, then she has lost another generation because she doesn't get turned on my math, won't focus on it, and will teach the children that it's not for their pretty little selves. Her biases and fears and trials and troubles with math become their biases and fears and trial and troubles.

If we are constantly offering the excuse of "They're not engaged" as a reason to blame the teacher instead of the students, why should anyone wonder at the poor results we get?

Motivation is the responsibility of the student.

Nice to have money to spend.

A teacher in a neighboring district tells of a contracted consultant. She will come in 16 days, spend a time watching each math teacher, then will return on later days to tell them how to teach. The teachers who are being taught to teach will be given "release time" to meet with the consultant, meaning their classes will have a substitute.

This is not where the teacher needs help
and standing there with her is counter-productive.
You could hire her for 30 days for the salary that teacher's getting.

Why? Because they didn't meet their AYP quota ...not enough students were "proficient".

Which sounds like a system in need of some help until you realize what's going on. Over the five states that are part of this consortium, only 33% of the high school students are proficient. I find it hard to believe that all of those teachers across New England are all crappy teachers. Only 33% of 11th grade students, year after year, are able to reach proficiency while the same students as 8th graders ... somehow 75% or more scored proficient.

Did they suddenly get stupid? Maybe ... but doubtful that this would be a region-wide trend. Are the teachers lousy at this school or that one? Again, it's a region-wide trend. Also, the same students are doing much better on the reading and grammar tests.


If I gave a test that, year after year, only 30% could pass, what would your response be?

Could it be that the math tests are testing material the kids haven't taken yet? Welcome to the Common Core. Welcome to Pearson.

Get ready to fight for your public school, since the unspoken goal of all this testing is to find an excuse to shut down public schools and allow all that public money to shore up for-profit charters and to go to the very greedy pockets of the education industry's dank side: consultants.

And that consultant I told you about at the beginning? She's getting nearly $20,000.00 to come in 16 days and to tell experienced faculty how to teach.

How to Create A Monopoly

Laying some groundwork: The Common Core Initiative has been gaining steam in the U.S. for some time.  They've been adopted in 45 of the 50 states. The CCI is fine as it now stands. One could argue with some of the standards or with some of the timelines, but overall they are remarkably similar to most states standards.

Phase Two:  Someone has to test these standards. For 26 states, that would be Smarter Balanced, which is pushing hard on computer-adaptive testing. This is testing that is given on computers or tablet, and using a difficulty rating and some math, delivers questions based on how correctly the student answered previous questions ... answer correctly, it gives you a harder question, answer incorrectly and it tones it down a bit.  Add that to a massive databank of questions (all rated and sorted) and you get a perfect assessment of that students and his abilities.

Like this one.

Every student will have to have access to a desktop running a browser and some lock-down software or to a tablet running a specialty app ... and strangely, the tablet are going to be required for the 11th grade math. N.B.: I am not sure on this last but the presenter (Sue Gendron) said that schools would be required to have at least 25% of the students tested by tablet and then mentioned math questions, so I think that's right.

If all goes well. If they finish in time. If they do their work well. If they finish at all. If the questions are rated correctly. If they're testing the right things.

Here's where the market manipulation comes in.

They are NOT DONE YET; in fact, they've barely started and they probably won't be done completely in time for the rollout in 2014.

So which tablet operating system do you think they starting with, Android or iPad?

With a lot of development money donated by Apple in the form of thousands of iPad IIs that are only costing the states $240 each (per Sue Gendron, ex-Commissioner of Education, Maine), is it surprising that Smarter Balanced is not going to get to the Android app until much later?

Slick, right?

Think about how school buy tech.

iPad money tree.

• Once the IT buys iPads for the first round, will they really want to introduce a second operating system and purchase the more expensive Androids? No.
• What if the Android makers bring the price down to a competitive level? Too late. The schools and the teachers and the states are all in the Apple pipeline - that's really hard to break.
• Isn't the iPad priced below market value to the point of anti-competitive pricing? Yup.
• Isn't that illegal? Yup.
• Are states pushing this? Yes, this monopolizing is being done at the behest of the Government.
• Republican or Democrat, they're both doing this.  Don't get started with that. 

Ramifications?

•  Doesn't iPad have to be linked to iTunes, and come with a ton of EULA restrictions and bullshit that so many people hate about Apple and all of it's products? You Betcha.
• Every school in all the 26 states, buying iPads ... as soon as the schools get hooked, the price goes up to it's normal point of three times what you're paying now and twice what a normal-priced Android tablet would cost.And since there aren't any schools with Androids now, who wants to bother developing the app for them? 

But that's okay, isn't that the only ...

• Don't you want to use those shiny new tablets for eTextbooks? Yes, purchaseable ONLY through iTunes, naturally. 40%, please.
• Don't you want the kids to read on those shiny new iPads? Yes, but all books are 40% to Apple.
• If the kids write something good on an iPad, they are required by the EULA to sell it through iTunes and Apple gets a cut.

Congratulations, you've just witnessed the beginning of a monopoly.

Updated for those with 21st Century Learning Skills

Common core and computer adaptive testing.

The common core update happened today at our school, with the kindly old lady telling us how much the scores are going to rise when we raise the reading level and the difficulty level of all the questions. (Yeah, I know, but let's play along.)

She described the computer adaptive questions and how the program would be able to deliver a different next question based on whether the student got the previous one right.  I'm good with that concept, actually.  With a suitable scoring system (like the one for Olympic divers), it should work out quite well. 

Then we got to the "performance tasks" which were much more extensive, taking 2 hours each for high school students to complete. The students will be responding with text, handwritten (onto a tablet - the goal is for 25% of tests to be taken on tablet), voice over documents, video, and anything else the test creators could dream up.

Here's the kicker.

None of this is past alpha development stage. The iPad apps are still in development. The Android apps, laptop programs, desktop programs, Mac, PC, ... all were still in development. Everything is computer-based but they can't figure out how to block the student from getting on Google. They don't know how the schools will supply themselves with all the tech ... "When I was Commissioner in Maine, I just put it in the budget. We're talking to your state about it."

The math framework and examples will be ready ... in a few months.  The digital clearinghouse ... maybe by June 2013. The funding for technology ... "we're working on that".  The assessment engine ... that'll be ready soon.  The suitable scoring system I mentioned earlier ... "I'm not sure exactly how that'll work".

I point out that the questions they're displaying are problematic, but her response was to remind me that the exemplars had been posted for some time and teachers had been able to make comments. Oh, my bad.

Not inspiring confidence, here.

She put up a reading example about a science topic that was similarly flawed - if you knew the science already, you'd have a huge advantage and your "reading score" would be much higher. Fair enough, you might say, but the elementary teachers in the auditorium didn't know most of the words either.  "Turbidity", for example.

8th grade - they'll guess and check.
I'm not sure how that's supposed to
measure algebra, though.

Scoring will be a pain, too.  Questions like this one will be scored by ... someone. This will be a source for error right there.  Portfolios had this problem, too.  You'd think it would be easy to get all the scorers to come up with a consistent grade since they all had a page-long rubric to follow.  You might think that, but you'd be wrong.

I love education.