But therein lies your trouble: the powers-that-be don’t want a golden age of enlightenment.
They want profitable drones.
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Well, ain’t that uplifting. My LA public high school was force fed Common Core textbooks for English and math two years ago. I cannot think of a SINGLE student or teacher who can stand them. I did just fine teaching English for two decades before Common Core came around and sucked the joy out of teaching and learning. Not to mention all of our money to blow on testing and inferior textbooks. But I guess you and your team don’t have time for that side of the story, do you?
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I’m sure you know that the standards aren’t a curriculum and that whoever
sold your school those textbooks and those textbooks themselves do not
represent the standards.
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The science of math? When did math become a “Science”?
It’s the other way around. You need mathematics for sciences.
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“cruelty to children is in inverse ratio to the degree of civilization.” --Evelyn E. Smith, The Ignoble Savages
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Was curious about this, whether Mathematics is considered a science or not. There are reasonable arguments for and against, and from what i can tell one can say that it is not a science. However one can make the distinction of pure mathematics vs applied mathematics, or abstract concepts vs testable concepts. In this case one can sort of dance around the idea of parts of it being a science.
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Of course, i would concur with the idea of changing how it is taught and how students should approach and think about their process. I was merely discussing if math itself would be considered a science or not, related to your comment though is i think teachers can and should do more to make it less abstract though the farther along you get into more advanced principles that can become more difficult.
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Whether or not the effort is effective or even worthwhile is, I think, important. Certainly that’s what students are told by teachers. There are many educators who like Common Core and many who do not, all for what appear to be thoughtful reasons.
For my own part, I think the one thing we know for certain is that different kids learn different things in different ways at different times. So the effort to make all third graders in the country temporarily memorize the same arbitrarily chosen information for the purposes of testing them (while giving adults credit for possibly raising nearly meaningless test scores) is precisely the wrong way to go about the incredibly complex and difficult task of helping kids to learn.
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Absolutely agree that rote memorization of facts and figures is precisely what kills passion among students (and their teachers). But, that’s also exactly what the standards are trying to work against. That’s why the math standards place so much emphasis on numeracy as opposed to the time tables that I experienced, and why the ELA standards focus on textual analysis as opposed to learning about “theme” and “metaphor” as abstract ideas.
You are right: let’s have a debate about the effectiveness of the standards and entertain all “thoughtful reasons”. But, let’s be very clear with what we are debating. We’re not debating textbooks produced by Pearson, which are marketed as “Common Core-aligned”. We’re also not debating the worksheets you see on Facebook about your local third-grade teacher’s interpretation of the math standards in a confusing worksheet. The standards are listed on this website – that’s what we should be debating.
I’m not convinced with your comment:
I think the one thing we know for certain is that different kids learn different things in different ways at different times.
Yes, certainly there are third graders that aren’t ready for third grade math, and the reason we know that is because we’ve been able to assess them against commonly agreed upon benchmarks of what a third grader should be able to understand. But, the notion that developmentally third graders aren’t able to grasp the standards set out in the Common Core is not “certain” and does not comport with development science and the science of learning. Neither does “learning styles”, which I think you suggest with your comment about “different ways”. That’s largely been debunked – even by their original proponent.
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I agree with this completely, and about smaller classes, as well. But I would also go a step further and say in an ideal teaching implementation, especially in primary school, there wouldn’t really be “standards” as we understand them. Collaborating with students (as opposed to the conventional methods of coercion) and using their own individual interests as the fuel for their learning, is, from my perspective, the clearest path to making school a positive experience for the majority of students.
Joe, we’re talking about education, here. You have GOT to stop being so reasonable!
That said, I have to disagree strongly with your confidence in “the science of learning,” which is in its infancy and simply doesn’t produce anything like the same kinds of repeatable results one finds in biology or physics, for example.
I understand your point about “learning styles,” but I really wasn’t talking about that. The debunking of learning styles was inevitable because the theory was ultimately simplistic. That said, there is no evidence to suggest that the majority of children are equally able to learn the same things at the same times in the same ways.
“Commonly agreed upon benchmarks” in education have always been highly mobile. They have never been established scientifically the way that things like evolution or climate change have been established. Outside of certain professional education circles, there is no scientific consensus on the kinds of math a third grader should be able to understand.
But let’s say there is. Let’s say that 98% of child cognitive development scientists said that we know exactly the kinds of math we should be forcing elementary school kids to perform (again, simply not the case), the fact that a student should be able to understand something in no way creates a moral imperative for the student to demonstrate that understanding, or to do the work the adults insist upon so that they can convince themselves that the student understands the math they’re forcing them to do.
This is because individual personalities are never taken into consideration when adults decide what they are going to force kids to do. So a kid who is uninterested in performing the tasks adults are forcing on them is made to feel less intelligent, less considerate (teachers are often obviously frustrated by students who aren’t performing the way the adults expect them to), less worthwhile, than the kids for whom doing the things adults want them to do feels like the right thing to do.
Sorry, I’m rambling and sounding like a crank, I’m sure. I just think the talk of standards and common core misses the fundamental truth that there are lots and lots of perfectly intelligent, curious kids in school who are miserably unhappy because they can’t be the people the adults need them to be in order for the system to work well for the adults.
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You bring up a very good point. But I think it’s less relevant before one gets to college or trade school, where skills are focused upon.
That said, because you and Joe are thinkin’ types about the learnin’ thing, and I find the subject endlessly fascinating, I’d love to get your feedback on this essay by Alfie Kohn.
The field of education bubbles over with controversies. It’s not unusual for intelligent people of good will to disagree passionately about what should happen in schools. But there are certain precepts that aren’t debatable, that just about anyone would have to acknowledge are true.
While many such statements are banal, some are worth noticing because in our school practices and policies we tend to ignore the implications that follow from them. It’s both intellectually interesting and practically important to explore such contradictions: If we all agree that a given principle is true, then why in the world do our schools still function as if it weren’t?
Here are 10 examples…
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Vert, the standards, beyond a “list of skills” include instructional shifts for teachers, here for ELA and here for math.
yes, beautiful, more of this please!
Common ground we can all stand on.
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Grades are also sort of BS. Not necessarily always, but i think they do more harm at times. All it proves is that a given student can test well, which doesn’t answer the question of if a person is actually getting it. I had many tests that i utterly bombed just because the stress had made me forget everything.
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@Vert, @Grey_Devil, @aikimo, There’s a great local private school called the Newark Center for Creative Learning. Instead of report cards or grades, thrice a year parents receive a detailed report from the teaching staff (the only non-teaching staff position is the school secretary) that explains their child’s state of social, academic, emotional and physical development as that relates to their peer group and the educational process. Everything is individualized for the student.
In Delaware, as part of the New Jim Crow economic resegregation, we have Magnet, Charter, and private schools that require a high middle school grade point average and, in some cases, a high score on an preliminary exam. All of these schools, without exception, will accept kids from NCCL - despite their complete lack of any grade point average or other standardized metrics - because those kids consistently match or exceed their high academic performance requirements.
The single most important key to this success is small class sizes. It would not be possible to use the old-school, individualized teaching methods that NCCL employs if there were more than a dozen kids per teacher.
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I used to volunteer at the Burbank library for an Adult Literacy program… Quite a few of the students were LAUSD graduates.
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I do think we live in pretty exciting times in education. There are so many new approaches happening now, it’s easy to forget that innovation in education was, for most of the 20th century, practically non-existent.
And smaller class sizes make the essential flexibility easier. I think there will come a time when smaller classes will be made more possible by recognizing the kids who do better outside of the classroom dynamic and letting them opt out of classrooms for the most part and pursue independent paths of learning.
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It seems to me that all the political candidates constantly preach education, and then once elected they sabotage it. Of course I’m just across the river from Chris Christie so perhaps my view is jaundiced.
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There’s just not enough money. I think it’s possible to cheaply make meaningful changes to education, but you’d have to properly think things out. Politicians aren’t known for rational decisions, and they don’t know how to fix problems without throwing money at it.
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Yet they can spend trillions slaughtering foreigners without raising taxes to cover the expenditures, they can afford the most comprehensive multi-year educational testing regime in history, &etc. It’s always OK to print money for everything else 
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