This is a follow-up to the previous post, which you may be able to read by scrolling down. If that doesn't work for you, check the blog archive in the right-hand column.
In the last post, I wrote about problems with the Common
Core Standards. I argued that trying to
brush off criticism by saying that parents are responding to other fears – fear
that my child isn’t smart enough, fear that my child won’t grow up to be like
me, fear that my child’s standard of living won’t be as good as mine – fails to
address very real issues in today’s classrooms.
Today let’s look at a specific example.
I am a professional tutor.
I work with some students in math, and I help others to prepare for
college entrance exams. Most of my
students attend elite private schools in the Research Triangle area of North
Carolina. I expected the second week of
March to be very quiet. I planned to do
some extra housecleaning and some curriculum preparation for an upcoming
evening class. On Monday evening the
phone rang.
Could I help a student enrolled in a course titled “Common
Core Math 2?” Probably. This is the first year that this course has
been taught, and I wasn’t sure what was in it, but I’m familiar with most high
school-level math, so I figured I could help.
Word got out, and I am currently working with a number of students all
from the same class.
Common Core Math 2 is currently taught to students who,
under the “old” system, would have been taking geometry. If you will recall, I had been hopeful that
certain geometry topics would be pushed to a later course, that there would be
fewer topics overall, and that the topics included would be covered in greater
depth.
Typically, when I get a new math student, my first question
is, “Who is your teacher?” Often that
tells me all I need to know. A handful
of individuals have accounted for the bulk of my tutoring clientele. However, the teacher this time is a veteran
and a star. She knows her stuff, both
mathematical and pedagogical, so if there’s an issue, it probably doesn’t lie
with her. The reason for the sudden
increase in business was apparent as soon as I looked at the homework packets.
This veteran teacher is incredibly well organized. You can get online and see what students will
be responsible for each day of the semester.
A few clicks, and the entire course was laid out before me. I’ve never seen such a mess. First, there are too many topics to be
covered. The list for the students to
review for their midterm listed 47 topics.
FORTY-SEVEN. Forty-seven topics
had been covered in forty class periods. Some are topics that I would have
voted to leave out altogether. (Which is
the incenter and which is the orthocenter?
I don’t remember from one day to the next and I teach this stuff! Seriously, is there anyone who actually needs
to know?) Some are topics that have been
pulled in from pre-calculus (Common Core 4 will replace this), and given the
brain maturity required to understand them, should have been left there. The topics don’t flow. They don’t relate well to one another. While I can see some of the basic principles
that lessons are trying to address, it might be better to use different topics
to address them. In short, it is no
wonder that students are floundering.
What went wrong? The
overall process has been remarkably opaque.
Stakeholders who should have been pulled in at certain levels of the
process clearly weren’t, and it is difficult to figure out exactly what
happened or where the whole thing broke down.
However, I have been paying attention to this story from the
beginning. I’ve done some poking around,
and I have pieced together a story that seems plausible. Here it is:
The setting: For
those of you who may not live here, the North Carolina educational system is
fairly centralized. Teachers are state
employees and in addition to funding teacher salaries, the state gives local
school systems money for busses and other expenses. Local governments are responsible for
building and maintaining school property, but the bulk of the money comes from
the state. In addition, the state jumped
on the high stakes testing bandwagon before it became popular and has written
and administered it’s own standardized exams since sometime in the 1980’s. This effectively means that the state has
been in charge of local curriculum for decades.
In 2009, when the Race for the Top grant was announced, we
were in a recession and the state was broke.
The powers that be were scrambling for revenue sources that wouldn’t
involve raising taxes, and the grant money looked awfully juicy. Sure they had to agree to adopt some
standards and then test to see if they were meeting them, but weren’t they
pretty much doing that already? Count us
in!
We were awarded the grant in 2010. Now, keep in mind that
the state was looking for money for everyday operating expenses. So having spent the money on teacher’s
salaries, there wasn’t much left for implementing the standards. Best I can tell, the National Common Core
Standards lump all of the high school math standards in “high school.” It is up to the states to design the sequence
of the high school curriculum. So the state wrote lists of what would be tested
at the end of each year and pushed the work of curriculum design to the
districts.
Since the late 1980’s the state had developed a rich bank of
curriculum resources that districts could use.
The scope and sequence of each course were spelled out with suggested
pacing. There were sample worksheets,
examples of activities, and banks of test questions. All of this was now obsolete. In the summer of 2012 local districts were
faced with having to design math courses based on lists from the state of what
would be tested as early as January of 2013 (for block schedule high school courses.) They
didn’t have any money for curriculum design, either, so they dumped the work on
the teachers who scrambled to write each piece in time to use it in the
classroom.
As you can see, at every step there were ample opportunities
for the process to break down. Where can
we pin the blame for this particular fiasco?
Again, because the process has been so opaque it’s hard to say. I do believe that the teachers at the
district level have done the best they can, given the mandate from the state
and the time constraints. I actually
think the state Department of Instruction did the best it could, given the
tight deadline and lack of money. Where
did the deadline come from? Who said we
had to have everything in place and the first tests administered by winter
2013? (And whose bone-headed idea was it to promise that we would adopt the
standards without spending enough money on the task??) We don’t know. Parents see “Common Core” in the title of the
course and so it’s the Common Core Standards they rail against in letters to
the editor and at school board meetings.
Regardless of who is to blame, the situation is this: The North Carolina Common Core high school
math curriculum is broken. The scope and
sequence of the topics do not reflect what we know of how students learn or of
when concepts should be introduced.
Topics and concepts in each course are so numerous, that it is
impossible for concepts to be studied in depth, but they will be tested as if
they were.
Arne Duncan would have you believe that the resulting poor
scores mean that our little darlings just aren’t as smart as we thought they
were. Ms. Boylan would have you believe
that we aren’t really upset over our little darlings’ failure to learn anything
in math class, but rather that our little darlings might learn something we
didn’t, while some editors in Long Island think that we are really upset over
the general state of the economy. How
insulting! North Carolina parents can
recognize a mess when we see one, and this is a mess. We can’t be faulted for misplacing the blame
when the mess was made behind closed doors.
The fact remains that someone needs to clean it up.
