Following Common Core money: Where are millions of dollars going?

[Michele]

In this post, award-winning Principal Carol Burris of South Side High School in New York raises some new questions about the Common Core State Standards and curriculum being developed around them.

Burris has for more than a year chronicled on this blog the many problems with the test-driven reform in New York (here, and here and here and here, for example). She was named New York’s 2013 High School Principal of the Year by the School Administrators Association of New York and the National Association of Secondary School Principals, and in 2010, tapped as the 2010 New York State Outstanding Educator by the School Administrators Association of New York State. She is the co-author of the New York Principals letter of concern regarding the evaluation of teachers by student test scores. It has been signed by more than 1,535 New York principals and more than 6,500 teachers, parents, professors, administrators and citizens. You can read the letter by clicking here. And she is a co-author of a new open letter to parents from superintendents concerned with Common Core testing, which you can read about here.

By Carol Burris

My music teacher, Doreen, brought me her second-grade daughter’s math homework. She was already fuming over Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s remark about why “white suburban moms” oppose the Common Core, and the homework added fuel to the fire. The problem that disturbed her the most was the following:

3. Sally did some counting. Look at her work. Explain why you think Sally counted this way.

177, 178,179,180, 190,200, 210, 211,212,213,214.

It was on a homework sheet from the New York State Common Core Mathematics Curriculum for Grade 2, which you can find here.

Doreen’s daughter had no idea how to answer this odd question. The only response that made sense to her was, “Because she wanted to.” My assistant principal and math specialist, Don Chung, found the question to be indefensible.

The teachers in her daughter’s school are also concerned. They are startled to find that the curriculum is often a script. Here is an excerpt to teach students to add using beads from the first-grade module.

T: How many tens do you see?
S:1
T: How many ones?
S: 6
T: Say the number the Say Ten way.
S: Ten 6

Scripts like this are commonplace throughout the curriculum.

Similar headaches exist at the secondary level as well. A relative, who is required to teach Common Core Algebra from the modules, shared her worries about the curriculum’s conceptual gaps, disjointed and illogical concept progressions, and insufficient time to complete lessons.

The Origins of the New York State Mathematics Curriculum

Teaching from modules is a new experience. Suburban teachers are used to working with a curriculum that they themselves develop based on state standards. However, because of the rushed Core rollout in New York, along with the dramatic shift in standards, many schools did not have the time nor funds to develop a thoughtful local curriculum, making the state curriculum modules their only real alternative.

Where did this unprecedented scripted curriculum come from?

The New York State mathematics curriculum was developed by an organization located in Washington D.C. known as Common Core, Inc. According to reporter Jessica Bakeman of Capital New York, Common Core Inc. was awarded three large contracts from the New York State Education Department: $3,323,732 for K-2 curriculum, $2,715,958 for grades 3-5, and $8,108,919 for grades 6-12.

That is a total of $14,148,609 — or more than $1 million per grade level project. Bakeman broke the story about the high costs of the New York State modules, which you can read here. To put this expenditure in perspective, my school district, Rockville Centre, generally pays less than $1,000 for a grade level curriculum project.

According to the story, New York Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch bragged that New York State is the only state using its federal Race to the Top dollars to develop curriculum; it has spent in excess of $28 million on curriculum in English and mathematics. That begs the question, “Why”?

Why would New York State spend such a large sum of money on an optional curriculum, when district curriculum designed to meet local needs could be developed, given a state-provided Common Core course scope and sequence and sufficient time?

Common Core Inc. and Gates Foundation

To understand the answer, one needs to go back to 2007. That is the year that Common Core Inc. was founded, three years before the standards were made public. In 2009, it received over a half million dollars in the form of a grant from the Gates Foundation to write curriculum for standards that had not yet been released nor adopted by states.

Last week, Catholic Education Daily reported on the connection between Common Core Inc. and the Gates Foundation in a story entitled “Common Core is Curriculum, Contrary to Advocates’ Claims.”


More at Link

[Michele]

More states delay Common Core testing as concerns grow

Massachusetts and Louisiana, both seen as important in the world of school reform, have decided to delay the implementation of high-stakes standardized tests aligned to the Common Core State Standards in the face of growing concern about the initiative. The two states follow nearly 10 others — including Florida, the pioneer of corporate-influenced school reform — to slow or rethink Core implementation, actions coming amid a growing movement led by educators and parents who have become skeptical of the standards and the new related standardized tests.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan has been defending the Core — a set of common standards adopted by 45 states and the District of Columbia designed to raise student achievement —for months before various audiences, most recent recently getting himself in trouble with remarks about “white suburban moms” becoming Core critics because the new, harder exams have shown suddenly that “their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were.” (He apologized, blaming “clumsy phrasing.”)

But the opposition has grown, from the left, the right and the middle, expressing different concerns about the Core and its implementation. Though Duncan has said repeatedly that the Core is a state-led, voluntary initiative, the Obama administration has supported the standards, and critics on the right charge that the federal government has used it to develop a national curriculum. Critics on the left and the middle have argued that the Core standards are not based on substantive research, that they ignore what is known about early childhood development and/or that reformers have rushed implementation before teachers have had time to absorb them and create materials to teach them. One prominent Core supporter, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, recently blasted the implementation, saying:

You think the Obamacare implementation is bad? The implementation of the Common Core is far worse.

The moves by Louisiana and Massachusetts matter because both states have big profiles in the school reform world.

Louisiana, whose governor, Bobby Jindal, has been a leader in standardized-test based school reform, announced late last week that it would delay the way students, teachers and schools are held accountable under the standards, the Times-Picayune reported. The high stakes for students that were supposed to be linked to the test scores of new tests designed to assess student progress under Core standards will not take effect in 2015 as previously planned, meaning that younger students won’t be held back based solely on a score and high school students won’t take the tests in 2015. Furthermore, until at least 2016, students in third and fourth graders will no longer be required to take Core-aligned tests on a computer.

Massachusetts has long been at or near the top of rankings of states with excellent public schools and high curriculum standards, so its adoption in 2010 of the Common Core State Standards and its agreement to use Core-aligned standardized tests were seen as boosting the Core initiative’s credibility. Now, a decision by state officials to slow down implementation of the new tests and assess whether they should be used at all could have a different effect on the Core.

The state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education last week approved a motion (see below) to use 2015, when Massachusetts had agreed to start using the new exams in schools around the state, as a pilot year and to assess whether the current standardized tests should be abandoned and replaced after all. Mitchell Chester, commissioner of education who came up with the idea to slow down the testing implementation, told Catherine Gewertz of Education Week:

Our system isn’t ready to deliver a college-ready education to all our students off the bat. I don’t want to get there by having students punished by not meeting that bar.

If Massachusetts, which has been known for having the most rigorous education standards of any state, doesn’t feel like it is ready to hold students — and teachers — accountable by Core-aligned test scores, it raises questions about what other states can reasonably do.
Massachusetts was an enthusiastic supporter of the Core, becoming a founding “governing state” in the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, one of two multi-state consortia that — with some $350 million in federal funds — promised to develop standardized tests aligned with the Core that were supposed to go beyond current exams and more deeply assess what students have learned. (As it turns out, the new Common Core exams from PARCC and the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium won’t be the “game-changing” exams that Duncan has repeatedly said they would be because of a lack of enough development time and money, which you can read about here.)

[daveman]

It looks like once again the Obama Administration used their usual tactic: Ready, Fire, Aim.

I'm no math whiz, but I get by -- and I have no idea why the hell Sally counted like this:

3. Sally did some counting. Look at her work. Explain why you think Sally counted this way.

177, 178,179,180, 190,200, 210, 211,212,213,214.

Sally has a brilliant future in government accounting.

[phillygirl]

I haven't followed this topic at all, and I don't understand the examples given. Very strange.

[Frostbit]

I don't have kids so I don't have to learn "new Math" but the Anchorage school district has classes for parents to learn math so they can help their kids with math at home. Apparently, and I have not bothered to research further because I can add, subtract, multiply, and divide in my head, the new math is based on some principal that does away with multiplication and division as we know it. Also memorizing times tables is forbidden.