Its how its SUPPOSED to work. But it should be a specific to an issue. Now theres usually its the same two groups of people on all issues. The same haphazardly application of what should be a good solution on paper. And the same knee-jerk from the other side.
Personally I’m conservatively progressive. Make changes, yes. But if you make too many sweeping changes at once, even with a net positive, you’re still screwing over a lot of people. There was no reason to apply Common Core curriculums until they were developed properly. There was no reason to rush implementation. There was no reason to force untested techniques simultaneously in 40 different states. Its like progressives want their own ideas to fail.
Common Core, like any standard, will work well for some kids and fail other kids miserably. That’s because any standard necessarily ignores the fact that different kids learn in different ways.
So, this year, as in every year for the last 150 years or so, there will be millions of kids who are miserable in school and not learning much besides how to hate history and/or math and/or literature and/or science because only a fraction of the kids will respond well to any standard.
Yes, I mean seeing how different curriculum and paradigms work. I’m talking high level, not individual students or individual teachers. I’m talking about trying different things and seeing what works best for students in general. It needs to be quantified somehow.
I don’t necesarily want those tests to be used at all as feedback about individuals.
One reason for the concentration on math in the criticisms is that it is the least subjective topic. Right answers are usually not hard to determine.
For an example of how difficult it might be to discuss English Language Arts standards, have a look at the following link regarding Critical Reasoning Inference. The website is Knewton, creators of the tools for developing CC aligned curriculum.
The tl;dnr version from the article: “The weaker a statement, the more likely it is to be true. Thus, the right answer on CR inference questions will almost always be carefully worded, guarded, and lame.”
Just one of many comments on this thread acknowledging that Common Core is a travesty, but blaming it on “the Feds,” “big guvmint bureaucracy” and so on, without acknowledging the corporate money behind these government efforts.
I mean, what a coup we have going on in the U.S., right? So many people now believe the corporate-funded propaganda that “government is bad, inefficient, wasteful,” and so on. And so, when corporate lobbyists and campaign contributors basically buy government officials and then get those politicians to do their bidding (even writing legislation for them, as ALEC does), if that results in programs that people don’t like, “big government” again gets the blame, instead of big business!
Big government is not the problem–if it’s actually working on behalf of ordinary people, it’s far more efficient and inexpensive than private interests.
The real problem is the takeover of big government by big money.
I agree that we are looking like government as a business. But, I think that is a good thing. Huge amounts of money go into government, emphasizing people’s roles as taxpayers emphasizes that the government must be accountable to its taxpayers. I disagree that this disenfranchises people who don’t pay taxes. Everybody pays taxes, even if only sales tax, and most everybody pays taxes and fees of some kind, even if very very little.
I don’t think that education is a magical nebulous thing whose results can’t be accurately measured. I do agree that it should be measures in the long term not the short term.
Teachers Unions exist to protect the interest of the teachers. They are very good at that. These interests are not always the same as the interests of the children, the parents, nor society (the taxpayers/citizens). We need to make sure that teachers are notr abused by the system. But, their power should be reduced. The needs of society come first.
No. I just didn’t do homework and was bored out of my mind most of the time. The only real challenge I ever had was tests that I didn’t prepare for (to keep things interesting).
You may have missed the part where I noted I was not criticizing the “area model” or any other mechanic.
The issue is that if the CC standard does not require a particular technique to be taught (e.g, “area model”) but a CC test creator includes it on the test, then is that a fair test? If you answer no, then understand that all I am doing is labeling those parts of the CC test that are not part of the CC standard “idiosyncratic”.
Hopefully you see that there is a financial incentive for a curriculum seller, worried about their disrupted business model and losing their billion dollar curriculum sales, to create idiosyncratic parts of the Common Core test that happily align with their idiosyncratic curriculum, thus helping ensure future sales of their curriculum.
Area model is fine to teach as one among many means to learning about multiplication and division. It does not belong on a standardized test unless you want to verify the student was exposed to the mechanic (which CC does not require).
You may or may not be disturbed by the following. Note to solve the problem, a student does not have to actually solve the quotient, but only know how the diagram relates to the area model. Substitute letters for numbers and the correct answer can still be deduced.
Question:
How do you know how much “the system” (the company you work for, your customer who supports you or the society that needs you) values your work? How do you know how important you are to the organization?
Answer:
Look at your paycheck.
I’m saying that while you ARE correct, in that the job teachers do is important, it clearly isn’t as important as being a pro football player. So no, not really that important.
This isn’t me saying it, its the paycheck talking.
I’m saying this because it must be clear, if you think about it for a bit, that the reason nobody can agree on a clear course of action is because nobody really thinks its important enough to reach a compromise.
This is after all how you can make sense of you saying that protecting all teachers inevitably leads to more bad teachers.
You know, I originally thought there was some solid underlying beefs with Common Core, but the more examples I see posted from haters the more I’m convinced they’re just dumb or have some other agenda.
That question is just asking if the students understand the method being used. There is absolutely nothing wrong with it. It’s just long division visualized differently.
Now it would be a jerk move to introduce a student to this way of visualizing a problem on the test, but once a kid knows long division, this is something you could cover in an hour if you absolutely have no power into what goes on the test.
Could you back this up with evidence? In my experience, the unions tend to represent the teachers who, outliers or no, tend to care very much about the interests of the kids.
Edit: And yes, the unions are obligated to defend teachers accused of sexual harassment and assault because:
The union is contractually and therefore legally obligated to do so according to the terms under which teachers join unions.
Sometimes such accusations are false and the teacher in question really does deserve and need representation provided by the union.
It seems to me that there would be less problem with “treating education like a business” if we hadn’t already perverted business into something it shouldn’t be.
In theory, “business” is a way to keep people productively busy, so that they are adding to the sum happiness of the world, rather than rioting in the street and breaking things. Its main purpose is to administrate optimal sharing and distribution of resources, through mechanisms like markets and co-operative artisanship, in a way that rewards participants in proportion to how they benefit their cow-orkers.
But somehow we’ve transitioned from trying to build economic systems that recognise the reality of greed and compensate for the existence of bad actors, to systems focused on rewarding the most vicious, sociopathic greed. We are no longer interested in well-regulated markets because they distribute happiness to the people more efficiently, we’re interested in them because they can be used to separate wages from the masses to be squirrelled away in Scrooge McDuck’s vault.
Similarly, in education we’ve gone from a goal of assisting each child to reach their highest intellectual and physical potential, to one of forcing legions of children to conform to a common arbitrary standard, with those incapable of reaching said standard labeled inferior or defective. Is it any wonder teachers will “teach to the test”, which shifts the harm from the least capable students to those most capable?
It seems to me that the global business environment and the American educational system are both increasingly inhumane and broken. At some point you have to ask what the goals are, and how they may best be reached. To my mind business does not exist to make a profit; that’s a goal of individual business owners, and not of the society that creates the conditions allowing businesses to exist. Similarly schools do not exist so that students can pass written tests, Common Core or otherwise. We need to look to what we’re trying to accomplish and get that straight before we design the metrics to see if we’re accomplishing anything.
Exactly my point, no math is needed, so let me clarify (again).
The problem is an “area model” styled problem and is from a CC preparation “worksheet”–the thing the students are given to work on just before the testing week. Area model is not explicitly part of common core. It is an optional thing as seen here.
CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.4.NBT.B.6
Find whole-number quotients and remainders with up to four-digit dividends and one-digit divisors, using strategies based on place value, the properties of operations, and/or the relationship between multiplication and division. Illustrate and explain the calculation by using equations, rectangular arrays, and/or area models.
(http://www.corestandards.org/Math/Content/4/NBT/)
Is “area model” important or isn’t it? By my reading, area models fall under “and/or”. So what is it doing on the test? Isn’t the point to learn to find the quotient and not whether your school system purchased Pearson’s curriculum? Because if you are taught Pearson-brand curriculum, you will be guaranteed to have seen it, so no big deal, right?. But what if your school system didn’t buy Pearson-brand curriculum? Maybe this slows down those fourth graders from that rogue school district just enough…
Has it been mentioned that Pearson was involved in creating the Common Core standards? Oh yeah. That.
Ohio is trying to lead the nation in the creation of publicly-funded private schools aka charters. By all accounts the results are dismal. For students and society, that is. For the politicians and the owners of the charters things are going AWESOME. Mostly. Except for the ones that take the public funding and then go belly-up due to poor management. This article shows how lucrative a racket charters can become: http://www.plunderbund.com/2013/12/08/ohios-largest-taxpayer-funded-charter-school-ecot-receives-bonus-check/
Except, that’s not how businesses tend to work. They are accountable to their shareholders, to maximize profits, not to cater to their customers, take care of their employees, or protect the environment, say. The goal of the government is not to make a profit for a small number of shareholders - it is to enact a particular kind of social contract.
