The Common Core Costs Billions and Hurts Students | Hacker News Reader

The Common Core Costs Billions and Hurts Students

nytimes.com

41 pointslxm70 comments

You know, as a parent I'd heard many things about "Common Core" from the media, other parents, and even family members. When my son got to kindergarten I was a bit worried about overbearing tests and the lack of a tried and true teaching method. Well, what we got were concepts. In kindergarten, my son learned things that I recognized as basic number theory...almost as if it came straight out of Andrew's book of the same title. Nothing advanced, but the concepts were covered quite well. What he missed though was the ability to calculate quickly...this I had to get him to do at home, and it came in time. That being said, I think we need to divorce the common core from the testing standards. Pulling out of the teaching space, any good manager can tell you that applying a one size fits all approach to every person results in a lot of miss-match. Lets stop vilifying the common core, but rethink the way we're forcing teachers to apply it and the tests that states mandate to go with it.

One wonderful point that the author makes is something I've been saying for years (as have many people):

What is called “the achievement gap” is actually an “opportunity gap.”

The opportunity gap is many things. It's lack of a safe, low-stress home environment. It's a lack of time from overworked parents. It's lack of an environment that promotes kids social skills. Things like the boys & girls club provide some help in neighborhoods that have them, but there needs to be much more. I'm extremely pessimistic on this point. I don't think the willpower exists within our current generation of political power brokers (although I do have some hope) to do anything about the common core to all of our problems. Likely spending $1.59m per cruise missile is part of it, and the other part what we seem to value in society....locking people up vs. fixing the core issues (http://money.cnn.com/infographic/economy/education-vs-prison...). We should not have to eat war to exist (almost quoted disturbed vs. bad religion...but BR fit better).

> Likely spending $1.59m per cruise missile is part of it, and the other part what we seem to value in society....locking people up vs. fixing the core issues

Cruise missles have nothing to do with it. We spend more on education per capita than any other developed country besides Switzerland. And our best performing school districts often spend a fraction of what our worst school districts spend per student.

We don't have an educational problem in the US. We have social problems we're trying (and failing) to fix by throwing money at schools. Our urban and poor-rural teachers are trying to teach kids in places where the bottom has fallen out of the social order. Changing how we do testing, etc., is rearranging deck chairs on the titanic.

We only need to ask teachers that have worked with students in these underperforming schools and you'll see a pattern emerge - students that are not having their needs at home met are oftentimes not able to come prepared to learn at school. Furthermore, children in impoverished families tend to have to move frequently (parents have unstable incomes and unstable rent) and this disrupts social bonds as well as continuous learning.

Trying to spend more money on education when children don't have basic needs like clean running water and food at home is complete nonsense and our expensive, ineffective programs are reflective of this double standard and a form of siloized, segregated government policies and departments that cannot tackle widespread, complex problems. This isn't to say that private sector would do any better though.

Yea this is key. You can't teach a kid who is hungry, or worried about more pressing issues.

What you describe as 'more pressing issues' can be defined as stressors and it's a person's defense mechanisms or active coping skills for dealing with them that determine their success in life. It's why kids are on psychotropic medicines and can be triggered as adult-aged college students. Teaching people how to actively deal with reality in a healthy productive manner is what we need in common core.

Per capita spending is a little misleading here, is it not? Ceteris paribus, http://www.novinite.com/articles/143867/Bulgarian+Teachers+w... suggests Romania gets Bulgaria's educational results at nine tenths the cost, and Bulgaria achieves Luxembourg's results at a[n adjusted] seventh of the cost. I have no doubt that adjusting for teacher salaries leaves the rest of your analysis in tact, but I imagine the process would be educational in itself.

> Well, what we got were concepts. In kindergarten, my son learned things that I recognized as basic number theory...almost as if it came straight out of Andrew's book of the same title. Nothing advanced, but the concepts were covered quite well. What he missed though was the ability to calculate quickly...this I had to get him to do at home, and it came in time.

Did you look ahead to see if that was covered later? Common Core covers much of the same computational arithmetic stuff that was usually covered before, but often covers it at a later grade.

Descriptions of what is covered at what grade level are here: http://www.corestandards.org/Math/

So my lovely state bailed out of common core a 2 years ago.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2014/03/25/i...

I have fairly mixed feelings. In theory, why would a state need to create their own education curriculum? Should a student in New York learn different stuff than a student in Ohio? And I do feel that letting states pick in matters like this means you will have fun things like certain states banning evolution, and other states mandating some form of creationism. And surely there are economies of scale if we need 1 history textbook for the entire country, vs 50.

On the other hand, I see how much my daughters school enforces testing. Tests tests tests. Parent teacher conferences aren't about how to make my daughter more successful in life, it is what to do to raise her future test scores.

As a comp sci person, you can't improve what you don't measure. Tests are how you measure. So I get it. But if I decided to measure the page load time of my server to ultimately improve server performance, no one is really hurt by that. I just write some code that runs in the background - and then I can make things better. Subjecting kids to a year round test or test-study cycle, that totally has an impact. Less time for Gym and Art class, because those aren't on the test. And I would claim that if we had to give up 1-2% of our math test scores for people who will never do math in exchange for a lifetime of healthy exercise habits gained from Gym and sports, I suspect that would be a big net win.

> "Should a student in New York learn different stuff than a student in Ohio?"

As someone who grew up in Miami, I can say that readings about "the colors of fall" and "snow" made little sense. It wasn't until college that I saw what people mean by "autumn colors". I went up north for graduate school, and commented that when I saw snow out of the corner of my eye my first thought was that the sand had blown in and I needed to sweep it away. My housemates looked at me funny - "sand is yellow."

We of course learned about hurricane safety, and how sinkholes form. We also read local authors, like Zora Neale Hurston. In part because doing so also helps understand the history and culture of where we live.

How does a New Mexican understand state politics without knowing something about the 400+ years of interactions between Native American, Spanish, and US peoples?

Hawaiian is an official language of Hawaii. Several public schools in Hawaii offer immersion teaching. That makes no sense to do in New York.

So, yes, I think different regions should teach different things.

> "and other states mandating some form of creationism"

That's not a good example because we know a state can't do that because it's not constitutional. Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District.

Perhaps a better example is that some states may offer sex positive sex education, and others may teach abstinence-only? But then, what if the option you want is the opposite of what the federal curriculum requires?

> "you can't improve what you don't measure"

The problem is, you need to know that what you measure is important. Otherwise, you may optimize what you measure at the expensive of what you want.

Grades are a form of test: grades for homework, and grades for tests created by the teacher. These new, additional tests seem to be worse than the older, except for the purpose of sucking money out of the public schools and putting it into the testing companies.

> As a comp sci person, you can't improve what you don't measure. Tests are how you measure. So I get it. But if I decided to measure the page load time of my server to ultimately improve server performance, no one is really hurt by that.

The problem is when you write something to measure that and then ask someone else to solve the problem. Systems like this almost always lead to optimizing for the measurement, not the end goal.

I mean, sure, at first I'm going to optimize code and work to increase efficiency to get the latency down because I actually care about my work. If that doesn't get me to the goal you've set and you keep hounding me and eventually tell me that if I want to have a job next year I'm going to get the page load time down...

I'm probably going to start stripping less-used features, maybe having the server occasionally serve a nearly blank "Click here to Refresh" page to game the average, see if I can't specifically serve less content to your measurement application... All of this results in a worse experience, but a better metric.

> I have fairly mixed feelings. In theory, why would a state need to create their own education curriculum?

The issue of who should create a curriculum is orthogonal to Common Core, because Common Core does not provide a curriculum. It is essentially just a list of goals and a schedule for when students should meet those goals.

For instance the standards for the "Measurement and Data" part of mathematics say that Kindergarten students should be able to describe measurable attributes of objects, such as length or weight, directly compare two objects with a common measurable attribute and state which has more of or less of that attribute, and group objects by a measurable attribute.

First graders should be able to order three objects by length and compare two objects the length of two objects indirectly by using a third object, use a simple ruler to measure objects that are an integral multiple of the ruler size, tell and write time in hours and half hours using analog and digital clocks, and do some simple organization and interpretation of data with up to three categories.

How a state gets to those goals is up to it. It can develop its own curriculum if it wishes, or adopt one developed by a national publisher, so something in between. The arguments for and against these possibilities remain largely unchanged with Common Core from what they were before Common Core.

This is good info, thanks.

So then should all states require the same standards of their students? I do not see why not. But not sure how to agree on a non-stupid set of standards.

Why do we focus so much on the educational method, and whether or not teachers can tackle it? Here's the key line in your comment:

    What he missed though was the ability to calculate quickly...this I had to get him to do at home...

I think the biggest problem in U.S. education today, and why us throwing money at it isn't working, is that parents do not take a "leadership" role in their child's education. Common Core was fine because you eliminated the weak points. But I think it's far more common for parents to abdicate responsibility for educating their children to schools and teachers. And society basically reinforces this idea. Many of my successful, educated friends are barely involved in their kids' educations, only making sure homework gets done, yet they don't realize they could do so much more! Schools and teachers don't (and can't) care more about your children than you do, so I think we need to see a re-centering of responsibility back onto parents.

And yes, I know the common response is that many parents simply do not have time to be more involved. But the average American watches >2 hours of TV daily (never-mind Facebook usage), so I think parents would be more involved if the "system" incentivized and encouraged it.

That being said, I think we need to divorce the common core from the testing standards.

I think we need to divorce the metric system from ways of making standardized length measurements.

Instead, I think people in washington should measure distance in rods, in virginia they should measure in yards, in NY feet should be used, and we should never ensure a way of converting rods to feet.

The entire purpose of the common core is to define a uniform set of standards. Without this, we have no way of even measuring the fact that students in school X are performing badly relative to students in school Y. (This is, of course, exactly what Diane Ravitch wants.)

Except, of course, we don't need Common Core for that goal.

I grew up in Florida. Florida had state-wide testing starting in the 1970s. http://www.fldoe.org/accountability/assessments/k-12-student... .

Why wasn't that good enough to compare schools X and Y, and what does Common Core-based testing add to that? All I can think of is it adds a way to compare schools between states.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is suppose to give some idea of how different regions of the US compare, and NAEP started in 1969. Why isn't that enough?

Suppose we know that a school in Miami is "performing badly relative to students" in Anchorage?

I don't see how that will help make policy decisions. Will we use the result of the test take money that would have gone to Alaska and send it to Florida? Does it mean that people will move to Alaska to be in a better school district?

And lastly, what method is used to interpret those test results, and can they be understood by the people (like parents) who need to make decisions? After all, grades depends on more than just the quality of the school. A school in a poor region with many new immigrants who don't speak English well (I'm thinking of parts of Miami in the early 1980s, after the Cuban emigration from Mariel) will likely have low marks. Does that means it's a poor school?

The methods I've seen so far, like VAM, are shaky at best. At worst? The NY Supreme Court calls it "arbitrary and capricious", at least as way to set someone's salary.

We had curriculum standards well before Common Core. What specifically from Common Core enabled what you saw, in way which wasn't done before?

> "we need to divorce the common core from the testing standards"

The only reason Common Core exists is to have testing standards.

Otherwise, without tests, a teacher is free to pick and choose. Which is what we had before this era of high stakes testing.

Also, Common Core was designed to be easy to test at a mass level. Surely not all of the things students learn should be limited to the topics which are easy to test.

I don't see anything in Common Core that would make a curriculum following the Common Core standards easier to teach than a curriculum that does not follow it.

Here is the English Language Arts standard: http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/

Here is the Mathematics standard: http://www.corestandards.org/Math/

I think you meant to write "easier to test", not "easier to teach"?

The English Language Arts standard you pointed to, at p.35 of http://www.corestandards.org/wp-content/uploads/ELA_Standard... , emphasizes close reading.

Close reading is an example of something which is much cheaper to test at a mass scale. See http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2014/01/close-reading-20.... for a longer description of what that means.

My short version is that close reading, as meant by the Common Core Standard means that a student is given a short piece of difficult text and asked questions about it, without giving any context about what it means.

This is certainly easy to test. But mostly worthless as a skill since most works are much longer and contain much more context. As that Curmuducation link points out, "Twilight may be a work of light fluff, but a close reading of it unpacks how many truly indefensible and odious subtexts are lurking in its gooey pages".

That sort of close reading is much more important in teaching how to really read, but it's not easy to test, so not emphasized in Common Core.

You pointed me to the Common Core definition. However, a close reading ;) of Common Core is not enough to tell you how it's meant to be used or interpreted. That's why you have to look at, say, how people are being trained to teach in a Common Core system, like http://k12newsnetwork.com/blog/2014/01/14/a-closer-look-at-c... .

Quoting from the Curmuducation link: "Close Reading 2.0 is proof (piece of evidence #2,098,387) that CCSS was built to feed the testing beast."

The fundamental problem is the US habit of funding schools out of property taxes. Then being actually surprised when schools in rich areas are good and schools in poor areas are terrible. Gosh! How could this have happened?

This is not a problem that more tests are going to solve.

It's not that simple. In some areas I have lived the spending per student was higher at the inner city school vs the rich school 2 miles away. Where the money came from didn't matter.

What mattered is the parents of the poor school worked 2 jobs and had no time for the kids. The parents of the rich kids had stay at home moms and tutors.

Depending on your belief system there would also be very different genetics between the two groups.

>What mattered is the parents of the poor school worked 2 jobs and had no time for the kids. The parents of the rich kids had stay at home moms and tutors.

Or single-parent vs. two-parent households. Controlling for everything else, that fact seems to be the biggest culprit in the future success of a child. Working two jobs is a symptom of a single-parent household

Working two jobs is the symptom of not making enough money to survive on. My mom (a teacher) worked multiple jobs (and yes, single parent household). She had friends when I was growing up and we had neighbors who had multiple jobs with both parents. Service jobs often don't pay enough to live, however, these are increasingly the bulk of the employment opportunities. So back to my original post, we spend $1+ million on each cruise missile. That could send dozens to college. We can't get back manufacturing jobs. Even if they're in the U.S., they'll be automated. What we need is more innovation. We can't get back coal either, but we can figure out what the next big energy source will be. Who knows, maybe we can get coal back....perhaps there's a super efficient way to do carbon capture that we haven't developed. The point is we have a huge technical debt in our society. Education is just one bit of it.

>She had friends when I was growing up and we had neighbors who had multiple jobs with both parents.

Again, a kid coming out of single-parent household will always be disadvantaged in aggregate compared to the kid who comes out of a two-parent household. Two parents having multiple jobs is still better than one parent having multiple jobs. The government can't fix that.

And I don't think either presidential candidate will cut back military or increase college spending. It's not the popular thing to do.

Have you actualy checked the school funding differences in your local city? The city wide funds around here go into one school system. I thought that was common?

I've looked through the budget spreadsheets for the Charlotte, NC school system. Schools in areas with more welfare recipents receive an even higher funding level and more teachers. These schools still may still be terrible, but relative funding between schools is not the problem.

I don't know the specifics of e.g. North Carolina, but note that higher average student funding != higher median student funding.

This is because often low-income schools have very high amounts of students with disabilities. Students with very harsh disabilities can require one-on-one or few-on-one supervision. This means that they can eat up a substantial portion of a school's budget, leaving most students with significantly less, even if the school receives nominally more funding.

Again, not sure if that's the story in NC-- just that the story of funding is a bit more complex than the average amount per student.

Only half of school spending comes from local property taxes. The other half comes from state and federal grants to poorer school districts. In almost every state, students in poorer districts get more money per student once you account for federal and state money: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2015/03/12/in-2...

The article does not support your claim. In fact, quoting from the second paragraph:

[I]n 23 states, state and local governments are together spending less per pupil in the poorest school districts than they are in the most affluent school districts.

As the graphic farther down shows, only in about half the states do students in poorer districts get more money; only in 7 states do they get more by more than 5%, and only in two states is the difference more than 10%. Those numbers strike me as piddling, frankly; 50% would be more like it, and 100% might not be too much.

You gotta flip the button on the graphic to account for local, state, and federal spending. In all but four states, poorer school districts receive more money.

As for your second point: that's a different argument than the one I was responding to, which was that lower educational spending in poor districts causes the achievement gap. Now, you can make a different argument, which is that poorer school districts should receive more money than rich ones. That implicitly concedes that the achievement gap is not due to a lack of funding, but due to external factors.

So the question is, how to overcome those external factors? Why do we assume spending more money on teachers and facilities will do that? If kids in poor schools are at a disadvantage because their parents are working two jobs, why not just write those families a check? I'm highly skeptical of this whole idea that the way to help poor people is to funnel more money to middle class teachers and administrators. I think that's ass-backward actually.

> You gotta flip the button on the graphic to account for local, state, and federal spending.

Gack, sorry, missed that.

> That implicitly concedes that the achievement gap is not due to a lack of funding, but due to external factors.

Yes, I think that's well established.

> So the question is, how to overcome those external factors? Why do we assume spending more money on teachers and facilities will do that?

I don't assume that spending more money will be sufficient; I agree it probably won't be. However, I think it is probably necessary.

What else will be required? Breaking the power of the teachers' unions, for one. Sounds like we agree on that.

How to do both of these things at the same time is a problem I have no solution for.

Would we buy "Government Software"? What about "Government computers"? Any of you tried to go to the California DMV's in the Bay Area lately? How is Government single-payer health care (the VA) working out for veterans?

Given this sentiment why do we feel like single-payer Government schools are the answer to educating our children?

I just don't see how we can get incentives inside of a government system to align with our goals of efficiently educating our children.

So 'single payer government schools' work fine in areas where the adults are themselves educated. They work poorly in areas where the adults are not well educated. No variable you can change will make a dramatic impact.

If the parents aren't educated, they can't tell whether the school is good or bad. In that case, they are going to be conned by charlatans, it's just a question of government charlatans or private charlatans.

If the parents are educated, they won't send their kids to a crappy school, and will either use money saved by living in a worse school district to help pay for private school, or will move. Either way, educated parents who care will not send their kids to garbage schools.

The net of all that is that dumber, less educated people will end up with dumber, less educated children because they don't know how to get their children a good education, or even how to tell the difference between good and bad schools. How you pay the bill or how you organize it will not matter, and studies have shown this over and over.

The problem isn't government, the problem is US government.

I've seen plenty of examples in other countries of government working well. Roads free of potholes. Trains that penetrate every part of the country, are well maintained, and run on time. Public school education that provides literacy rates in the 90%+ range. Single payer national health care systems that are cost effective and beloved by the people under those systems' care.

Our US government failures are an extension of our public's lack of commitment to the funding and policy needed for good government service.

The problem is us.

Care to give actual examples? Sounds like you are living in a different world than I am... And the "trains run on time" argument... Hmm... where have we heard that before?

I lived overseas for a great while, so some of this is first hand observation. I hold the equivalent of a US green card in a foreign country and worked extensively through Asia followed then by Europe.

Roads without potholes : Germany, Japan https://seattletransitblog.com/2009/04/17/japans-highways/ http://bridgemi.com/2014/04/why-are-germanys-roads-better-or... (after a more detailed read, this article doesn't support my point, but it's still interesting. And the roads in Germany were nice when I drove on them.)

Trains running on time : Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea (I heard horror stories about the UK system, but it worked well enough for me when I've gone there) http://kotaku.com/ever-wonder-why-japanese-trains-arent-late...

Countries by literacy rate : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_literacy_... (You have to go down to Syria to for the equivalent US literacy rate. We don't report our figures, but a quick Google search puts it about 86%)

Beloved national Health systems: Canada, France, even the UK's NHS

http://www.gallup.com/poll/8056/healthcare-system-ratings-us...

http://healthcare-economist.com/2008/04/14/health-care-aroun...

Hope this helps~

Why does the DMV even exist? If we didn't have driving tests, would it really matter at all? Do we need all this paperwork to own a car?

What if we didn't have any of it at all? Does anyone think that some 16 year old who barely passes the driving test is any better of a driver than that same 16 year old who didn't have to take the test?

The DMV just shouldn't exist. We could abolish it tomorrow, fire all the employees, and spend the money on useful things. Literally nothing would happen, nothing would change.

You'd have children trying to drive on the road before they are ready and crashing into things with great frequency.

So again, how is that different from now?

Greater frequency.

And let's not forget that driving tests are not standardised in the US amongst states. So depending on where you live, your test could either have been something that really checks if you know how your car works, how to safely do maneuvers, how to react to emergencies and how to drive with other cars on the road, or it might have just checked that you can drive around a block. Fix your driving licence tests at a national level, then maybe you'll see how the DMV is useful.

...but that's not how it is now, so I agree that right now, the DMV mostly exists to collect tax on vehicle registrations, license fees, title transfers, and other annoying paperwork-heavy things. The smog test industry is pretty scammy (you can find "a guy who knows a guy" who can get your unable-to-pass vehicle's paperwork done with little effort) and the license stuff could be handled online in conjunction with drivers Ed schools (since IIRC you have to take classes before you can take the test anyway).

From the article: "it seems clear that the pursuit of a national curriculum is yet another excuse to avoid making serious efforts to reduce the main causes of low student achievement: poverty and racial segregation"

There seems to be a common strain of thought that says we cannot close the achievement gap unless we tackle poverty. Yet there is considerable evidence to support the opposite view. Here is a summary of a few studies as reported in Teaching as Leadership [1]:

"The schools that are highly effective produce results that almost entirely overcome the effects of student background" [2]

"Having a top-quartile teacher rather than a bottom-quartile teacher four years in a row would be enough to close the black-white test score gap" [3]

"Differences in this magnitude -- 50 percentile points in just three years -- are stunning. For an individual child, it means the difference between a 'remedial' label and placement in the accelerated or even gifted track. And the difference between entry into a selective college and a lifetime of low-paying, menial work". [4]

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Teaching-As-Leadership-Effective-Achie...

[2] Marzano, R. J. What Works in Schools: Translating Research into Action. Alexandria, Va.: ASCD, 2003, p. 7

[3] Kane, T., Gordon, R. and Staiger, D. Identifying Effective Teachers Useing Performance on the Job Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 2004, p. 8

[4] Peske, H. and Haycock, K. Teaching Inequality: How Poor and Minority Students Are Short-Changed on Teacher Quality: A Report and Recommendations by the Education Trust. Washington, D.C.: Education Trust, 2006, p. 11

Testing may be overrated, needed but over emphasized.

Finland has a project based education system, turns out it is one of the best in the world. The term is Phenomenon Based Learning [1] but really it is just project based learning which matches the real world more. The tests aren't multiple choice in Finland, you have to find the answer.

My favorite classes were project based classes, if they are fun and intriguing, maybe education will sink in more. Learning math through programming a game for instance over just worksheets and tests, show how you can use trig/linear algebra to move things around a screen rather than just getting an answer correct.

Financial and critical thinking courses are also lacking in most education programs.

[1] https://www.noodle.com/articles/phenomenon-based-learning-wh...

Yep; US education has now become a game of "teach the kids how to pass the tests, so we can get more money, so we can teach more kids how to pass the tests, repeat". Kids come out of highschool with no idea what they want to do or what reality is like. Schools run like prisons with crazy administrators who would struggle to hold jobs in the world outside of school.

No Child Left Behind started when I was in 6th or 7th grade.

On a day where we all had to do one of those standard tests, all of the students would get a small breakfast for free, usually juice and granola bars. That part of the test I liked. Whenever I'd get one of the tests, though, the material that they tested me on was always a couple of years behind where I was currently at, so for me it was mostly a waste of time.

The only classes that were worthwhile in high school where the ones that were taught at a college level. In the US there's one program called "AP" where you take a class, then at the end of the semester you can pay something like $70 to take a comprehensive exam on the material. If you get a high enough score on the exam, most universities will allow you to transfer the AP course in as credit. This program allowed me to rack up some college credits while I was still in high school, and by the time I reached college I was able to jump right into math classes at the second year level (not that big of a jump, but still saved some time).

There are some problems with the AP system, for example after you've taken an exam you aren't allowed to discuss the exam with anyone until a few days have passed (which, if you've ever taken a hard exam, is agony), however I think programs like these are where the real effort ought to be applied.

> The only classes that were worthwhile in high school where the ones that were taught at a college level.

This is not true. It's more of a humblebrag. High-school level classes are relevant and often difficult for high-school level students.

You were ahead of your peers, it doesn't mean the classes were worthless (except perhaps to you and others at your level).

"Common Core" as a curriculum may or may not be good or bad, I don't know. But so long as schools build their entire year around high-stakes standardized testing, the students in our public schools are suffering. It's bizarre to me that many (most?) states in the US require their teachers to get graduate degrees, yet give them little if any control over the curriculum they use. Are they highly trained professionals or just robots?

Today's standardized tests, given on computers, require typing skills the students aren't taught. The computer systems fail or links are wrong, and schools have so few computers that the testing process can take days, during which time the entire school is disrupted. Spending a day or two a year on a standardized test used for statistical purposes is a reasonable investment of time and money. But spending weeks multiple times a year on tests that determine the fate of teachers and schools is a massive failure.

It was obvious when NCLB was proposed that it was an end-run attempt to gut support for struggling schools. That's played out as was easily predictable, but now we seem to be doubling down. At some point, we have to learn as a society that just because someone puts data into a computer and a number pops out doesn't mean that number _actually_ has meaning.

I used to rail against "Common Core" - but then realized the main issue I have is with the use of Reform Math [1], which has been around longer than that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_mathematics

Everyone has an opinion, very few know what they're talking about. Even fewer have experience.

> Children starting in the third grade may spend more than 10 hours a year taking state tests — and weeks preparing for them.

I don't really understand the issue there. There's about 900 hours/year of instruction, and 10 hours of that being tests doesn't seem like a large burden.

Secondly, "preparing for the tests" sounds like "learning", what is supposed to be happening.

The article also complains about the inept implementation of online test taking. How hard can that be? It's just a form being filled out. I don't see why the tests can't be administered on paper and have the teachers grade them.

It has been some time since I've been in school, but I still remember that horribleness of the standardized test. You spend weeks hearing how important it is, and we spent days sitting there still, in silence, filling in the correct multiple choice answer on a sheet with a #2 pencil, hoping the teacher didn't think we were cheating if we were stretching. For hours and hours at a time. The tests took a few days. They told us (perhaps wrongly) that we couldn't miss school during that time. Sometimes we were told we'd be deducted for having a wrong answer, sometimes not. I'd rather do college finals each year or split the stuff up over the course of the school year so it is less of a burden.

The reason teachers can't grade them is because the schools use them to grade the school and the teacher - some states, it determines funding for the schools. Too low of a grade and you lose funding, meet the goals and you gain.

> For hours and hours at a time. The tests took a few days.

This is inconsistent with it being 10 hours total for the year.

This is from a child's point of view, as my memories were from being a child, so a few hours a day was a really long time. The actual math works out, however. They did these over 3-4 days. 4 days is 2.5 hours a day: 3 days is 3 hours 22 minutes, approximately.

A day of testing, the SAT for example, wasn't quite that rough at a much older age. 2 months ago I took official language exams here (immigrant). The main portion was about 4 hours. I had a couple hour break, then the last portion took about half an hour. The main part of the test was somewhat tiring for me as an adult - I very highly doubt the testing week is less tiring for children.

Sure, but 10 hours over 900 hours in the school year, this is not a major part of it.

I remember taking standardized fill-in-the-bubble tests in the 60's and 70's. They were mailed off to some central location to be graded by computer. It just wasn't a stress filled, onerous thing, even though they were used to assess school performance.

I was in school in until the mid-90's. They used them as placement tests when I took them. Do well, and it meant you were smart enough for the 'advanced' stuff. Do poorly, and you have to take summer school and/or redo the grade. Do poorly on the test, regardless of how well you do the rest of the year, and it affects your opportunities. I remember hours of boredom, only compounded by the fact that I tend to work quickly and was stuck sitting there quietly waiting. My sister, however, always did poorly taking tests and they never reflected what she knew. Some teachers gave some accommodations which improved her regular scores, but the state test did not. Even then the curriculum was changed to reflect tests, and the testing has only increased in importance since we've been in school, to the point that the amount of help you get from your teacher in some areas depends on how your test scores were last year.

>I don't see why the tests can't be administered on paper and have the teachers grade them.

Standardized tests are used to evaluate teachers and schools. Given the chance, teachers and school administrators will cheat on them.

By the way, teacher's union desires that their performance not be evaluated is a source of motivated reasoning on this topic, so be skeptical.

> Given the chance, teachers and school administrators will cheat on them.

I know. This can be mitigated by swapping the anonymized test sheets with other schools to be graded.

> "preparing for the tests" sounds like "learning"

That's the problem: it sounds like learning. I think it's the least useful kind of learning, though, and the most likely to be forgotten quickly.

The best kind of learning is learning for the sheer joy of it. A totally test-driven education leaves no room for that; indeed, it beats all joy out of the students, teaching them that learning is a dry chore.

And reducing time spent on the arts is an especially tragic mistake. In the 21st century economy, with so much less that we need people to do, there's a lot more room for people to create value in individual ways, and I think the arts are likely to be a big part of that. We need to be expanding funding for them, not reducing it!

"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." -- William Butler Yeats

I do not understand how anyone could tell if the kids are learning anything if they are not tested.

> it beats all joy out

Would you also say that scoring a football game beats all joy out of it? I would posit that an un-scored football game has little joy in it. It's just meaninglessly running around holding a ball.

I remember tests from grammar school, and enjoyed it much as I enjoyed working puzzles. A couple of the other kids and I would compete for bragging rights.

> I do not understand how anyone could tell if the kids are learning anything if they are not tested.

So, we have no evidence that you know anything about programming language design and implementation, because you've never taken a test on it?

There are various ways of demonstrating mastery. Tests are one -- and I never suggested that there shouldn't be any; only that they shouldn't be the sole factor guiding the curriculum. Papers and other kinds of projects are also very important. They're somewhat out of favor, because they're more difficult to grade, and especially more difficult to grade uniformly on a large scale.

But I think the most common way that people demonstrate mastery is by simply getting interested in material at the next level of difficulty. Kids, if they read at all, will naturally read at a level that challenges them at least a little, because anything less is boring. Look at what level the kid gravitates to, and you have a pretty good idea where they're at. (Some will push themselves harder than others, of course.)

> So, we have no evidence that you know anything about programming language design and implementation, because you've never taken a test on it?

I wouldn't be offended if I applied for a compiler job and I was asked questions about compilers. In fact I was, when I applied for a job at Microsoft a long time ago.

I don't understand how someone can master a subject and yet be unable to answer questions about it.

"If we awarded driver’s licenses based on standardized tests, half the adults in this country might never receive one."

This is an intersting quote, because I had to take a test to get my license.

But a standardized test assumes that a certain percentage will fail. Its the same reason why aberrations like "Stack Ranking" are just as evil.

"What? All my people are excellent on my team, yet I have to rank a number of them as 1's (a number of 1-bad, 2-neutral, and 3-awesome). I have no choice..." - Stack ranking in a nutshell.

You could be an a school that 99% have the intelligence to pass. But yet, some bureaucrat says that a certain number has to fail, no matter what.

Compare that to a Drivers License test, where we test on if you know that material to drive. There is no required minimum number of people who fail, nor is there a comparison to others. It's you and a minimum test passing rate.

The system works as its designed to. It produces standardized young adults that are compliant to authority. Standardized tests don't really tell us a whole lot about how functional these kids are, outside of how compliant they are. The two (yes two) professionals that helped produce common core, now lecture against it.

I've been around long enough to see many waves of reform run through the schools, followed by ridicule and abandonment.

Common Core has attracted some rather far out criticism. I have not been able to decide whether this is amusing or appalling.

It "will promote double-mindedness in state education and attract every one of your children to become as homosexual as they possibly can", according to Florida State Rep. Charles Van Zant (R) [1].

Similar criticism from the American Family Association [2]. If it is not stopped, the only way for Christians to survive will be to form a parallel society with its own jobs and economy [3].

According to Glenn Beck, "that's why I think common core is here, because it will train us to be a serf state, it will train us and it will keep us in order to answer to the Chinese or whoever it is". (He thinks we'll be ruled by an American technocrat under the control of China, with China employing Muslims as enforcers to keep us in line). Video of Beck covering this here [4]. Summary here [5].

According to Dr. Karen Effrem, president of Education Liberty Watch, creates "a womb-to-tomb dossier on kids and families" that includes between 300 and 400 different data points, such as parents’ voting status, religious affiliation, medical data, newborn screening and genetic data [6].

[1] http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2014/05/19/3439163/state-rep-c...

[2] http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/rios-schools-no-longer...

[3] http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/sandy-rios-fears-child...

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUIGMhgN1Iw&feature=youtu.be

[5] http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/beck-common-core-desig...

[6] http://www.wnd.com/2014/01/nsa-ops-walk-in-park-next-to-plan...

At least the people who think their kids will be brainwashed into homosexuality are clear about what they think the problem is. I've read quite a few things on the supposed problems of common core and been left with no information whatsoever. Generally I'm not even sure the person knows what common core actually is. complajning

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