How Common Core Can Work

As I've said in these pages before, I've got a serious love-hate relationship with Common Core. I like the standards, and see them as an improvement on previous ones. I like the tests because they try to test critical thinking and other learning that traditionally has not been tested.

But I hate that more and more time is devoted to testing each year because of these standards.

Yet here is the bottom line for me. This weekend, my family and I went out to get a Christmas Tree. We saw our own down (though I have graduated to a chain saw from a bow saw. It's an electric one, though, so I feel only slightly more manly). During the time we were prepping for the tree's extraction and arrival, my wife asked my fourth grader a bunch of obscure math questions -- non-even division, multiplication, etc. And my son ticked off the answers quickly and off the top of his head.

These weren't 2+2 questions. They were 52 divided by 6 types of questions. In other words, I would have been lost at his age because I didn't memorize those things. But the Common Core standards have him think about these problems in terms of places (10s, 100s, etc.), so he's able to do complex math in his head because he understands what's going on with the problem. It's not just there on a flash card or something.

A few weeks ago, our local school district held a forum about Common Core math. To be honest, I think the people there got really frustrated because they didn't understand why their kids were learning something in such a different way than they did. Hey, they're doing OK, right?

Well, now I know why. It's so my son isn't afraid of complex math in later grades, the way I was. Who knows. Maybe if I had a better understanding of math, I wouldn't have been intimidated by it my whole life?

But I want everyone to understand that if the Common Core standards have my son able to do complex math in his head at age 9, then they can't be all bad.

Whether every state should have the same standards, or we should test more an more frequently, or whether we should develop some more complex standards dealing with creativity, innovation and practicality are whole different policy discussions that we must have as a nation, state and community. But for what Common Core does cover, at least in my son's N=1 sample, seems to be doing him some good.

And for that, I'm proud to have voted for the thing when I did.

Blizzard Bags Prove High-Stakes Testing Impact

Both of my sons had another day off from school today. Now that we've hit our so-called "Calamity Day" limit (meaning that starting today, all snow days must be made up), the schools sent home a thing they call a "Blizzard Bag." No, it doesn't mean everyone gets some DQ. It means every kid gets a big amount of homework.

I was actually curious, from a policy perspective, what my two sons' bags would look like. My third grader is just getting ready to take the state proficiency tests in a couple months. My preschooler is not. What I saw was something very interesting: Guess which bag you would prefer to do? That's right. The preschool bag.

The third-grade bag required little more than practicing for the Ohio proficiency tests.

Meanwhile, my 4-year-old's preschool bag involved exploring his world -- counting how many toys he has (way too many thanks to generous family), how fast it takes to melt snow, drawing pictures of what snow looks like before, during and after it melts. 

The preschool bag looks a lot more like the learning experiences I had as a kid that I loved to do. The third-grade bag looks a lot more like the admissions testing experiences I had that I hated. 

What's the difference? 

Testing. 

In third grade, Ohio starts the march toward testing. In preschool, kids aren't tested. Yes, there is a kindergarten readiness assessment, but it doesn't count toward a school district's Report Card rating. So it's not nearly the high-stakes test that my third grader's test will be in a few months.

As many of you know, I am not one of these "all tests must go away" types. I think testing has its place as an assessment tool for teachers to more carefully craft individualized learning for students and get a general idea of district and building performance. 

When tests become everything, though, learning begins to resemble my third grader's Blizzard Bag. And, by the way, I don't blame teachers or school officials at all for this. Theirs is the responsible response to a test, test, test public policy instituted at the state level.

And, frankly, I get it. If teachers can free up class time for real learning by having kids practice their proficiency tests at home, I would do that too.

But my fear is that as we delve even deeper into higher and higher stakes tests, more and more school days will resemble what my son's learning day -- taking a bunch of tests, painfully counting how many more questions were left, and hating every second. This is not the learning experience our kids need. But it is the one our adult policymakers have thrust upon them.

And as someone who was one of those policymakers for a few years, I would like to apologize for anything I did to further our course down this high-stakes path.

Do not confuse my concern over testing with my full-throated support for standards. I love the fact that my third grader is learning pre-algebraic concepts and thinks the way I solve complex math problems is "old-fashioned." I think Common Core holds a lot more promise to provide meaningful learning than our current regime. Even the Common Core tests try to get at higher levels of thought by having kids think critically and show work.

But a test is a test. I don't know many, if any, kids that like tests. But I know many, including my own, who would love to do the Blizzard Bag my preschool son brought home. We need a lot more of that kind of stuff going on in our schools, and a lot less of the standardized test prep that teaches kids not so much how their world works, but how tests work -- a valuable skill no doubt, but one that does not an education make.

As long as our policymakers put so much stock in tests, though, schools must teach these test taking skills for their own survival. 

But it's so much cooler to watch snow melt.

NY Test Scores (Literally) Unbelievable

The first New York test scores using the Common Core standards were release this week. And I have to say that the results are literally unbelievable. Only 31% of kids throughout the state of New York passed. An amazing 5% of some subsets of children passed.

This reveals my love-hate relationship with Common Core. I love that my son is learning pre-algebraic concepts in second grade. But I hate how the tests make it look like our schools are failing.

Does anyone really, I mean really, believe that more than 2 out of every 3 children in New York State are failing? Or that only 5% of some subsets pass? Or that the schools in New York State (which consistently rank pretty well in EdWeek's rankings) are really that bad?

Some officials in New York State are trying to temper the rhetoric, calling the results "a new baseline". But is it really? We were told months ago that only 30% of kids would pass these new tests. If 30% of the kids passed my wife's exams, or my exams, or we told our deans that we were expecting 69% failure rates, the universities for which we work would say the tests are unfair and must be re-written.

Test distribution generally should follow a bell curve that looks like this:



Most of the grades should cluster around C, with a few failures and a few As. What does it say when your bell curve is basically clustered around F? It means your test isn't fair. Unfortunately, these results will result in serious consequences for kids in New York, as well as their schools.

I have no doubt that eventually the teachers and kids in New York will adjust to the new tests and the distribution will eventually even out. But will it be too late? And what happens when they do? Will these tests be called too easy?

High standards don't mean that more than 2 out of 3 kids have to fail. High standards and normal test scores are perfectly compatible.

What this reveals is a deep-seated belief that's has been around since the infamous A Nation at Risk report -- that our public schools are failing. Any indication they aren't means our measures are "too easy". Maybe. Just maybe, our public schools aren't all that bad.

Maybe, instead, it's the tests that suck.

I'm just saying.