Common Core

I wrote a year ago about the Common Core: One More Year; that's the Common Core described as

The Common Core State Standards Initiative is an education initiative in the United States that details what K-12 students should know in English language arts and mathematics at the end of each grade. The initiative is sponsored by the National Governors Association (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) and seeks to establish consistent education standards across the states as well as ensure that students graduating from high school are prepared to enter two- or four-year college programs or enter the workforce.

My concern has basically been that well-intentioned centralization tends to have consistent results -- as Larry Cuban (teacher/superintendent/blogger) puts it in giving what I think of as a Common Core context, On Centralization

Teachers have felt pressured to drop student-centered activities such as small group work, discussions, learning centers, and writing portfolios because such activities take away precious classroom time from standards-based curriculum and test preparation.

That was in October; I didn't even realize that in October, our own Superintendent Bowers was testifying that with Common Core prep, We are heading into the storm. Interesting. The terminology she's using is from Tuckman's stages of group development:

The Forming – Storming – Norming – Performing model of group development was first proposed by Bruce Tuckman in 1965, who maintained that these phases are all necessary and inevitable in order for the team to grow, to face up to challenges, to tackle problems, to find solutions, to plan work, and to deliver results. This model has become the basis for subsequent models.

Some of the fuss is simply the awkwardness of a big new set of mandates that will take time and lots of money to work out in detail; I doubt their value, I think the money (including the continuing expense of "performing") will be mostly wasted, but I wouldn't put too much stress on articles like Bizarrely complex Common Core math for America's children | The Daily Caller

Still, I do think Diana's phrasing showed prescience, and not just about the fact that we really don't know what we're doing (specifically we don't understand the world that we're educating our kids to live in): the storm has arrived, in more than Tuckman's terms. Common Core Curriculum Now Has Critics on the Left - NYTimes.com

Carol Burris, an acclaimed high school principal on Long Island, calls the Common Core a “disaster.”

“We see kids,” she said, “they don’t want to go to school anymore.”

Leaders of both parties in the New York Legislature want to rethink how the state uses the Common Core.

The statewide teachers’ union withdrew its support for the standards last month until “major course corrections” took place.

Centralized decision making might be great if the center had access to the necessary information. Perhaps someday it will, but I don't think we're there yet -- if we were, we'd probably be trying to develop something entrepreneur-oriented, something far from the Common Core as it now stands. For now, I'd just say that Hayek was right.

Adult Incentives and School Reform

This morning I saw Eugene Robinson: The racket with standardized test scores - The Washington Post

It is time to acknowledge that the fashionable theory of school reform — requiring that pay and job security for teachers, principals and administrators depend on their students’ standardized test scores — is at best a well-intentioned mistake, and at worst nothing but a racket.
I mean that literally. Beverly Hall, the former superintendent of the Atlanta public schools, was indicted on racketeering charges Friday...

and the problem seems to be that administrators, teachers, and students are all rewarded for doing well on measurements -- measurements which can be faked, so those who are disposed to fake them will do well. Business Insider reports on Atlanta Cheating Indictment Beverly Hall

Former 'Superintendent Of The Year' Could Go To Prison For 45 Years
Thirty-five Atlanta educators were indicted last week for allegedly participating in a cheating conspiracy involving one of America's most storied school superintendents.

and similarly Daily Kos discusses, saying

Robinson writes

Our schools desperately need to be fixed. But creating a situation in which teachers are more likely than students to cheat cannot be the right path.

....the vast majority of teachers do NOT cheat. The statement has the effect of smearing the profession. It is more than unfortunate that Robinson offered those words. For all the cheating scandals he can identify, even where teachers were involved, in some cases they were directed by their superiors to do things that are illegal and unethical....

I don't see that as a correction to Robinson, but as an explanation of part of the mechanism by which some teachers were led to cheat. Sure. Creating a situation in which [administrators and] teachers are [more] likely [than students] to cheat, whether because they are directly ordered to do so or simply because their evaluations depend on it, cannot be the right path. For some reason I am reminded of Twain's The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg, found as a Gutenberg text here.

Or then again....

update: I see a better write-up at Cheating in schools: There are no good guys here | The Economist, but not a basically different point of view.

Head Start Research

A week or so back I encountered a Science Daily report with Happy News about Academic gains, improved teacher relationships found among high risk kids in Head Start

A new study by Oregon State University researchers finds that Head Start can make a positive impact in the lives of some of its highest risk children, both academically and behaviorally.

That startled me; it sounded great, but I had already seen Timothy Taylor, the Conversable Economist, saying (I think about the same study) that Head Start is Failing Its Test

I am predisposed to favor programs that would help disadvantaged children early in life. Thus, I was delighted when Head Start announced some years back that it was going to carry out a randomized control trial--that is, to assign some preschool children randomly to Head Start and others not--so that it would be possible to do a statistically meaningful test of how well Head Start worked. I presumed that the test would provide ammunition for my pre-existing views.
But as the evidence has built up, Head Start is failing its test. The latest evidence appears in the "Third Grade Follow-up to the Head Start Impact Study: Final Report," which was released in December... Basically, the report shows that Head Start provides short-term gains to preschool children, but those gains have faded to essentially nothing by third grade.
To appreciate how depressing this conclusion is, you need to appreciate the high quality of the study....

So I went down the Science Daily report, and five paragraphs inwards found in summary that:

Analyzing the data on 253 children in non-parental care, they found the program had short-term positive impacts on school readiness, particularly in regards to early academic skills, positive teacher-child relationships, and a reduction in behavior problems.... "The impact we saw was modest, not huge, but statistically significant...

Okay, so there were modest short-term gains to preschool children, and that's that. The way I'll remember this is simple and doubly depressing: Head Start is failing its test, and Science Daily was minimally honest in presenting that.


Or then again, maybe not.

Parents as problem v. School as problem?

National education policy -- oh, how it's changed

"Poor students were framed as trapped in failing schools, and needing parents to rescue them, in 2001. This is a reverse of the framing in 1965, when they were portrayed as trapped in culturally impoverished families and needing schools to rescue them,"

"Won't Back Down"

Teachers on the Defensive - NYTimes.com

“Our very best teachers ought to be treated much, much better than they are today,” said Joe Williams, the executive director of Democrats for Education Reform. “But in order to get there, we need to be able to say out loud that some teachers are better than others.”
That’s precisely what “Won’t Back Down” says. Although the movie is bound, in this politically charged climate, to be analyzed solely in terms of the position it seems to take on parent trigger or its qualms with union behavior, it’s ultimately about the impact of superior teaching, the need to foster more of it and the importance of school accountability. Who could quibble with any of that?