Diane Ravitch and the Common Core

Diane Ravitch gave a speech criticizing the Common Core State Standards.  This isn't a surprise; it's sort of been her schtick since they started talking about them.  And the more I learn about them, the more I agree with her criticisms.

First, a starting position.  Writ large, I believe that all students can learn, and that a teacher's job is to help them do it.  All students can think at profound levels, they can analyze new information and evaluate arguments and all of those things.  At least at higher levels, they can think abstractly enough about their learning in order to realize that it doesn't matter what novel (or article or whatever) you're reading, the higher-order thinking skills can be applied equally well to anything.  Teachers can almost categorically up their game and encourage these skills.  A long checklist of standards does not lend itself to this sort of depth of knowledge, and so a shorter list of better standards would at least in theory be more helpful.

And for a long long time, we've written off as lost causes those students who can best benefit from really high-quality instruction techniques.  Students with learning disabilities can almost universally learn more stuff than what schools have historically taught them.  When school special ed support systems focus on what students CAN do, rather than what they can't, they can make huge progress.  This is not to suggest that high standards cure autism, but rather to suggest that autism doesn't make you incapable of learning.  The earlier high-stakes regime has meant that schools are no longer able to forget about its neediest students--ELLs, students with learning disabilities, students with behavioral problems, the gamut, are now held to the same standard as everyone else.  This should help focus intervention resources where they're most needed.

As Ravitch notes, though, there are real consequences to giving a test to a student when everybody knows that the student is going to "fail" it, particularly when the fault lies not in the students nor in the teacher but in the test.  The people who developed the standards were mostly not educators, and didnt' have a lot of experience in writing educational standards of this kind.  None of them were early-elementary educators, which seems like an utter miscarriage of common sense.  PreK through second grade is the time when schools can have the biggest positive (or negative) impact on a student's education.  To exclude those educators is to ignore the reality of the profession utterly.

Most damning of all, though, from an education view, is that there is no way to change these standards.  Our state standards were clunky, but it was possible to change them.  (In the case of the World Language standards, they were also written by a small committee of world-class teacher leaders, and even they managed to muck it up some.)  The English standards went through three drafts that I'm aware of between the time state-level standards began and the time the state adopted the Common Core.  But these--when we find out that there is no way to instruct first-graders on the deeper meaning of Stelaluna and the symbolism of the trees, to whom do we write to change them? 

The next 10 years is going to be an interesting time in education.  Watch this space for occasional not-particularly-insightful missives from the field.

A couple of stubs, possibly for futher consideration

1.)  Last night at the State of the State address, Gov. Snyder talked about expanding access to Pre-K.  Good.  Can we just make it universal in Michigan already?  He also talked about expanding the length of the school year.  Good.  I'll have some thoughts on what that might look like later.

2.)  They did an interview on NPR's "All Things Considered" today with an education reporter from New Orleans.  After Hurricane Katrina, 7500 teachers were fired en masse from the New Orleans Public School district.  They sued the district for wrongful termination and won, and were awarded in the process 2-3 years in back pay.  The numeric total was estimated at $1.5 billion, which would clearly bankrupt the school district and everyone attached to it.  90% of New Orleans's student population now attends a charter school, so who would pay this 1.5 bn is unclear.  This story is fascinating to me.

3.) To follow more closely: the International Journal for the Teaching of Foreign Languages.  Although I'm a little concerned that it's little more than a vanity project for TPRS teachers, it still has some of the biggest names in language acquisition theory publishing articles in it.  Those two facts together lend credence to TPRS.

Article dump

These three pieces have been in my tab for a while now, because there's a lot to think about in them.  During break, I didn't want to think about them, and now that shool's back on, I don't have time.

Applied linguistics: Carol Gaab, one of the pillars of the TPRS community, explains what it's all about in Language Magazine.  (h/t moretprs Yahoo! group)

Tech: Bring Your Own Tech by somebody who was doing it before it had a name. 

The Game of School: It's never a good idea to take teaching philosophy from stuff somebody's re-pinned.  But this was clever, and I thought bore deeper consideration. 



Source: http://themetapicture.com/now-this-is-how-education-should-be-done/