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> 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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

> "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.

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.

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

>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.

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.