Do we have any TEACHERS here? I am interested in Common Core and your take
A friend of mine, teacher, is visiting.
She is extremely intelligent and trying to explain to me what Common Core is and why the way it is being implemented is the problem, not that the system itself is a problem.
She says that expecting high school students to all of a sudden take on Common Core approaches to learning makes no sense, that it should be rolled out starting only at the beginning.
But she likes the Common Core method, teaching critical thinking, etc.
I am interested in what teachers who are dealing with this think.
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But there's a big distinction between standards (what should be taught) and implement (when and how do we teach it?).
Standards include a variety of skills: there's knowledge, skills, and processes. What content, what information, needs to be imparted? What kinds of skills? How do they need to approach knowledge and skills to learn them? Standards for a subject ("content area"
also need to be sequenced properly, in ways that make sense both from how they feed into other subjects and how they feed into later grades.
If you need symbolic manipulation of algebraic equations in 9th grade and you don't learn it until 10th, you're screwed. If you study something in 6th grade and plunge right back in 5 years later, that's too long.
Some CC problems: Some of the skills and processes, and even knowledge they expect from elementary school kids is inappropriate. Period. In some cases, a few kids are are up to it, or most are, but some "average" kids still lag developmentally. We're not talking outliers, here, we're talking 20-30% of them, or more. So it introduces energy early on in science. Kids don't know what energy is at that point--they don't have the experience. It's fundamental, to be sure, but they don't get it. High school students may not get it. Same for mass. Good luck explaining to elementary school teachers what mass is. They say "weight": It's not. Some university faculty thing that it's insane trying to get 1st and 2nd grade kids to understand it. They repeat the words, they make mewling sounds, but often they don't "get it." Heck, you teach college freshmen that Newton's law of gravitation has mass in it (the source of gravity) and that F = ma defines mass (related to inertia), and then point out there's no a priori requirement that these be the same and they stare and drool.
CC is outmoded in some ways. It assumes there is a "critical thinking" skill. There isn't. Every discipline has its own take on it. There are some generalities--but critical thinking in English lit doesn't transfer easily to critical thinking in chemistry or geography. PhDs in chemistry often "think critically" at the high school level in history, and brilliant historians often come in at the algebra II level for critical thinking in math. That aside, much of what passes for "critical thinking" is just regurgitating what the teacher's said. It's like a lot of politically precocious and brilliant kids: They parrot their parents, and their parents take it as a sign of giftedness. (If the kids seriously disagreed with the parents, of course, the kids would been deemed to need remedial thumb-sucking.)
CC also has, in some areas, a culture problem. If you want a cohesive society you need a common set of cultural assumptions. CC doesn't. There's no "core" in some fields beyond processes and skills. That's a recipe for cultural fragmentation and abandonment, which is a recipe for cultural incohesion and lack of social trust as kids lose touch with the symbols used by parents, other kids, and what was said and thought 30 or 40 years ago. They become unanchored and easily manipulated. It's not a new phenomenon, but it's now a national one. To be fair, this is a discipline-specific problem, but it's unfair to saddle K-12 education with the schizophrenia and neuroses of graduate student/advocates.
CC is also too big. It has too much content. I can't teach everything required for "my" courses. Texas has a regulation or law (I forget which, it's irrelevant) forbidding teachers from using CC materials. We have "TEKS" (Texas essential knowledge and skills), which are very CC-like in many ways. Beefed up, high-level, demanding standards, and utterly unteachable in their entirety. Either you hit all the topics like a skier bouncing off moguls, or you cover some topics in enough depth to be remotely useful but fail to hit all of the standards. When we had chemistry and physics standardized tests the state even acknowledged this and said that 65% of the test would be on something like 40% of the standards. So you needed to cover those bits of the TEKS and then enough of the remaining ones to get your kids the other 5% (with extra, because nobody scores 100% on what they studied). CC is exactly the same way.
CC is flexible enough for remedial students and for G/T students. What it can't do is vocational/technical. It really assumes a rather high minimum standard and, to be honest, I doubt that a lot of kids can ever get there. The mantra is that every kid can be taught at a high level ... given enough time and effort. Too many leave out the stuff after the suspension points, and as a result more and more time and effort is thrown into teaching a smaller and smaller cohort with fewer and fewer returns to their test scores and, to be honest, to their education. Often what happens is the top 25% aren't taught what they could be in order to make sure that the bottom 20% meet the minimum standards--a standard they're unlikely to need. Meanwhile, that top 25% would find what's being left out to be very handy when they move on to college and, for some, it makes the difference between success and failure in some courses.
CC also very inflexible--and this is partly a testing problem, and not strictly speaking standards related--because insists on certain ways of thinking about things and solving problems. If you don't think that way, you're dead in the water because that way of thinking is part of CC.
CC is also great: If the standards really are implemented more or less as written, it would help student transfers between states and jurisdictions, it would help produce reliable, well-aligned textbooks ("aligned" means what's presented in texts, taught in class, and tested are the same thing), it would make college-bound kids subject to reasonable comparison. It's frustrating to have a junior or senior transfer in mid year from a different state where 3 of his courses don't transfer, he's missing 3 classes, and his science background assumes a completely different set of skills and knowledge so that he's at a disadvantage. (It goes the other way, too.)
I say "help" with transfers, but no more than that. Part of implementation is a scope and sequence--CC often includes scope, how much stuff gets crammed into a course, and what that stuff is. But the sequence is up to the school district or state. "My" school starts physics in the fall with Newtonian kinematics--distance, speed, velocity, acceleration. Another school district I know starts with little free-standing units: electricity and magnetism or modern physics. I've talked to teachers who start with Newtonian dynamics--forces, and then they back into kinematics.
There's a non-CC problem that is often confused with CC. Once you have texts and teaching aligned, there are tests. CC is test neutral. It doesn't call for standardized tests. Pitch them all, and CC stands untouched. Implement a battery of 15 end-of-course exams, Common Core doesn't care. It's not a testing regime, it's not a call for testing, it's unrelated in any logical or meaningful way to testing.
However, many of those calling for CC are also staunch advocates of standardized tests.
CC is not imposed by for-profit businesses. Nor is it imposed by the federal government. It's a state initiative, with a lot of advisors, but still controlled,vetted, appoved by the states. It is a way for the states to pull together in deciding what goes into textbooks; so the Texas science textbooks are mostly Common Core textbooks revised for Texas--sometimes only the cover and preface have been changed, along with standards alignment (pointing out which portions satisfy which standards).
