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The Common Core Costs Billions and Hurts Students

nytimes.com

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Re: The Common Core Costs Billions and Hurts Students

#61

Post by dalke »

tzs wrote: post #22
dalke wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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."

Re: The Common Core Costs Billions and Hurts Students

#62

Post by dalke »

brianwawok wrote: post #6
jcbeard wrote: post #2

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 s…

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 bann…

> "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.

Re: The Common Core Costs Billions and Hurts Students

#63

Post by dalke »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #10
jcbeard wrote: post #2

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 s…

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…

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.

Re: The Common Core Costs Billions and Hurts Students

#64

Post by dang »

gvd wrote: post #37

No you idiot. This is a sign you need to make it harder to pass the test, not abolish it. It's nobodies right to operate a killing machine. Today the test is a joke.

Personal attacks are not allowed on Hacker News. We ban accounts that do this, so please don't do it again. Instead, please (re)-read the site guidelines and post civilly and substantively, or not at all:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12154150 and marked it off-topic.

Re: The Common Core Costs Billions and Hurts Students

#65

Post by JakeAl »

dmoy wrote: post #23
rayiner wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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.

Re: The Common Core Costs Billions and Hurts Students

#66

Post by bind »

dang wrote: post #64
gvd wrote: post #37

No you idiot. This is a sign you need to make it harder to pass the test, not abolish it. It's nobodies right to operate a killing machine. Today the test is a joke.

Personal attacks are not allowed on Hacker News. We ban accounts that do this, so please don't do it again. Instead, please (re)-read the site guidelines and post civilly and substantively, or not at all: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12154150 and marked it off-topic.

I doubt you'll notice this but blacklisting new users like me -- so that my comments are always shown at the bottom of a thread and never publicly -- has the opposite effect of what you're intending. It pushes good people away.

Good people won't keep creating new hackernews accounts to figure out which combination of HN activity won't blacklist them. They'll leave. Possibly taking HN's users with them when they create the next HN.

Re: The Common Core Costs Billions and Hurts Students

#67

Post by brianwawok »

jcbeard wrote: post #53
macspoofing wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 o…

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

Re: The Common Core Costs Billions and Hurts Students

#68

Post by macspoofing »

jcbeard wrote: post #53
macspoofing wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 o…

>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.

Re: The Common Core Costs Billions and Hurts Students

#69

Post by dang »

bind wrote: post #66
dang wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personal attacks are not allowed on Hacker News. We ban accounts that do this, so please don't do it again. Instead, please (re)-read the site guidelines and post civilly and substantively, or not at all: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12154150 and marked it off-topic.

I doubt you'll notice this but blacklisting new users like me -- so that my comments are always shown at the bottom of a thread and never publicly -- has the opposite effect of what you're intending. It pushes good people away. Good people won't keep creating new hackernews accounts to figure out which combination of HN activity won't blacklist them. They'll leave. Possibly taking HN's users with them when they creat…

We don't do that in general. Your comments were getting caught by a software filter—there are a few of those that apply to new accounts, mostly because of past abuse by trolls. I've marked your account legit so this won't happen to it again.

Re: The Common Core Costs Billions and Hurts Students

#70

Post by seanp2k2 »

pikzen wrote: post #36
justin_vanw wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lice…

...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).
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