Reforming the Core

Teachers in NY heard some news today that may give them some relief. I say “may” because this is NY and, in spite of what we have heard, the best we can hope for is “may.”

According to a task force assigned with reviewing the Common Core Standards and the overall goal of improving education in NY, the standards and all the testing are failing to achieve the desired goal – which is the privatization of public education. Earlier this year a great deal of backlash occurred over all the testing, with some districts having nearly 70% of the students opting out of the Federal Government mandated exams.

An interesting factoid: The higher levels of students opting out of the exams were correlated to one thing – Wealth. Income. Good old green. The families and districts that were better off were more likely to opt out of the exams than poorer families and districts. I guess that would have to do with a family's ability to use vacation time and sick days to cover the exam days. Or being knowledgeable enough to know that all they had to do was write a note to the school saying that they did not want their child(ren) taking the tests.

Some of the flaws:

1. Poor roll out: Teachers were not properly trained on the standards. They did not have the time to “unpack” the standards for their own grade level, let alone see what the grade before them was doing or had done. Zero on the collaboration. Right there is a recipe for failure.

2. Materials not ready: A “model unit” for elementary grades (I believe it was 5^th) involved the book Esperanza Rising. Problem – the book was out of print, so when NY posted it as an “exemplar unit” that teachers could use or model a unit after, nobody could get the book. This happened more than once from what I hear.

3. The tests: Developmentally inappropriate (the standards were too, but that's another story). Students were tested on materials and skills that they had just learned or were not even taught yet. In a math test from 2 years ago, there was a question on it that (literally) was the next unit that the students were going to be taught. Seriously? For these tests to have any meaning at all, they should have been given at the end of the school year after the students were taught the content. Not in the middle of the year.

4. The Tests Part II: The use of the tests in teacher evaluation was a joke. I was in professional development being taught by Kim Marshall and he showed our group the equation being used by the NYC school system. It was a calculus nightmare with a statistical margin of error of (sit down for this) 40%. This means that all the information tells us nothing about effective a teacher is.

5. The “standards:” According to The Progressive magazine, the basis of the Common Core standards comes from a lawyer in Massachusetts. Not an educator or someone trained in education. A lawyer who was working as a tutor. The finalized standards had very little teacher input and were found to be “developmentally inappropriate.” This means that students are being taught information and skills that they are just not ready to be taught. That is just setting up someone for failure.

But then again, that was the whole point of the process – to show that public education is failing to achieve what it says it can do. Prepare students for the future. The solution, of course, is privatized schooling, where private companies receive a charter from the state to educate students. As long as they (the students) are scoring well on the tests, the private school receives taxpayer money. If the test scores are too low, then the charter is revoked and the company walks off with taxpayer dollars and we are stuck holding the bill.

What I have heard from my union leaders: We'll believe it when we see it.

Teachers, parents, and taxpayers that have paid the price for this failed experiment need to know exactly what steps the state is going to take to fix this mess that it jumped headfirst into. (By the looks of it, it was the shallow end of the pool too.)

As socialists, we demand:

1. An end to endless testing. No more tests – use end of the year portfolios instead.

2. Reforming the Standards: Have the standards edited and fixed by professional educations form public schools and teachers colleges. Let the people who know about teaching write the standards.

3. Fair Evaluations: Teachers should be evaluated by other teachers and professors from teaching colleges. They are the people that know how to teach and how to best evaluate teaching. Let them do it.

4. Better teacher training: It takes time to learn how to teach and how to implement the standards. One year of college education is not enough to prepare a person to be a teacher. It takes more. Colleges need to revamp their teacher training programs. Current teachers need more time to work with the standards in order to learn what they are going to be held accountable to teach. They also need to learn what the appropriate standards are for the previous grade level so that they know what the students know and are capable of.

The teachers and students have suffered many years of bad education policy with the Common Core standards and testing.

It appears that students, teachers, and parents in NY have a victory of sorts in the war on education.

Let this not be a Pyrrhic victory.