COMMON CORE (The Latest 'Thing')

OK,  let's look at the bottom line, for that's where much of the problem comes from.  There's really no agreement on what the student we want should be like. This is where the implications of movements like the Common Core get scary. The Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) and the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (NGA Center) defines the Common Core as "quantifiable benchmarks in English-language arts and mathematics at each grade level from kindergarten through high school."

Some years ago when in the capacity of Consultant for the Texas Higher Education Board I spent time training faculty at a number of the state's community colleges. I was teaching them about writing course objectives. (Oh yes...I rode that pony for all it was worth until it fizzled out and was replaced by the 'next big thing.' So I know something about how this consulting business works.)

Teachers would express lofty goals about what they hoped to achieve with regard to what their students would learn from them and I would then ask to see copies of whatever system they used to calculate grades. Invariably, they produced tests that required the recall of details from their subject area or essays that were supposed to demonstrate an understanding of some related concept. And I would point to the tests and tell the teachers Here's what you think is important.

So I say the same for the Common Core. If you look at the "principles" underlying these "benchmarks"[See http://www.corestandards.org/about-the-standards] you can get a sense of what this illustrious group of educators considers important.

The standards say things like this: "Students will learn to use cogent reasoning and evidence collection skills that are essential for success in college, career, and life." Really? Do you suppose that the one-percenters want students who can collect evidence and use "cogent reasoning" to draw valid conclusions based on that evidence? Listen. Here's what George Carlin says about that:

The standards also say that they lay out "a vision of what it means to be a literate person who is prepared for success in the 21^st century." Oh? Does that include learning how to deal with the 21st century climate when the earth is a nifty 140 degrees?

But that ain't all. What about math? The standards are supposed to develop "mathematical understanding." Teachers, they say, can do that by asking the student "to justify, in a way that is appropriate to the student’s mathematical maturity, why a particular mathematical statement is true or where a mathematical rule comes from." Well, here's a little history that deals with that notion of mathematical maturity.

When I was a kid we had cash registers with buttons you pushed down to ring up the amount of a sale. The result showed up in a little window at the top of the register and the cash drawer slid open.

You took the customer's money and gave them whatever change was due. But the advent of things like fast food drive-thru shone a light on how kids weren't too good at that simple math process and rather than bother to fix the education system, National Cash Register (NCR) came to the rescue with a new kind of cash register that once an amount was rung up automatically made change.

But the businesses still lost money, so NCR replaced the dollars and cents buttons with words--FRIES, BURGER, CH-BURGER, LG- COKE, SM-COKE.

But you know what? The kids can't read all that well either. So the next iteration of cash registers had pictures:

So maybe we just need to forget about the Common Core for schools and institute a Common Core for businesses. I mean, the Ancient Egyptians did pretty well with with pictures instead of words and numbers; they built the pyramids didn't they?


But I digress. One more quick note before I go. As I read about the Common Core I learned that there are actually three levels: Standards, Clusters, and Domains. "Domains are larger groups of related Standards and Standards from different domains may sometimes be closely related." And that further suggests that the fine points of grammar don't count for much.

Can I get an 'Amen'?

FACTORS IN THE TEACHING/LEARNING CONUNDRUM

Before I go any further here, I want to present a framework for my posts. It's very broad and I can't say that there's a specific goal, but my sense of order tells me that something useful might come out of it.

I want to look at each of the factors that affect teaching and learning. What I know of the history of education in America is that it has been a series of popular approaches. One method catches on for a while and then is supplanted by another which is then replaced by whatever strikes the fancy of the politicos and school administrators: Learning Objectives, Learning Styles, Multiple Intelligences, Cultural Literacy, Writing Across the Curriculum, Experiential Learning, etc. etc. and now the Common Core.

It's as if you were to walk into a room with the goal of identifying what's in there and focus on a chair and declare. It's the chair! But after a few minutes you see a bookcase and say Wait! No! It's the bookcase! Only to turn and see a window and shout "The window! That's it! The room is a window!" But of course, it's none of those and it's all of those.

So I'm looking into the room we call education and I'm asking, as a scientist might when studying any phenomena, What are the variables? And then we can take it a step further and ask To what extent do they affect the outcome? And finally: Which ones can I control? In other words (to wring more from my analogy), when a student enters that room, what can we do to get the student we want when he or she walks out?

So far the variables include the student's peers (friends, classmates, acquaintances), the class materials (textbook, syllabus, computer, graphics, etc., white/blackboard), the classroom (age, size, physical appearance, comfort control, etc.), the teacher, the student's background (home life, interests, physical limitations, etc.). And there's lots more, of course.

It's a crap shoot, isn't it? And given the conflicting forces trying to control the whole thing, it's a wonder anyone emerges from it with any sort of education. When I try to assemble it into something coherent, I'm tempted to say just teach them to read and write and turn them loose. We'd likely still end up with an Adam Lanza at one end and Neil deGrasse Tyson at the other.

So pick one of those elements and roll the dice. In the meantime, as other related matters come up we can conduct some autopsies and try to fit them into the mix.

An old college friend who went on from SUNY Geneseo to earn a Masters in Economics at Harvard and for a while was a high ranking economist in New York State government (though that may not be much of a recommendation) and a Professor of Economics at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) pointed out to me many years ago that the goal of educating everyone meant there were bound to be some teachers who just aren't very good. I believe that's part of our problem. 

An article in the October 24, 2013 Wall Street Journal (Why Teacher Colleges Get a Flunking Grade)  by Barbara Nemko and Harold Kwalwasser stated that “entrance requirements to most colleges of education are too lax, and the requirements for graduation are too low.” A subsequent piece in Forbes magazine (http://www.forbes.com/sites/georgeleef/2013/10/24/a-key-reason-why-american-students-do-poorly/) went on to explain that "the trouble with colleges of education, where most American teachers receive their training (although that’s hardly an apt description) has been known for a long time. Back in 1991, Rita Kramer’s book Ed School Follies: The Miseducation of America’s Teachers showed that our ed schools were giving the country a steady stream of intellectually mediocre teachers who had been steeped in dubious educational theories, but often knew little about the subject matter they were to teach."

The focus for the past twenty years has been on testing student and inferring the quality of education on the basis of the results of that testing. And when teachers are tested, the focus is on the pedagogy of education (which changes every thirty days or so) and not on the teacher's competence.

A few years ago my wife and I went to my father-in-laws hunting camp in upstate New York and we were joined by her family's friends. One of them was an elementary school teacher and during that afternoon we played a game (can't recall what it was) where one person gave clues and another had to come up with the answer. One of the items concerned the three branches of government. (She didn't know the answer. It's an answer that any immigrant taking the test to be a U.S. citizen can tell you in a heartbeat: Executive, Legislative, and Judiciary).

Can anything be done to improve the quality of teachers? Do we need to introduce more stringent requirements for teacher certification? And if we did, would we simply lose more teachers and have to replace them with even less qualified people? It's just one piece of the education puzzle and there doesn't seem to be any solution for it.

Education? Mark Twain defined it as "the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty." Hence the title for this blog.


Having never blogged before, it's likely to take me a while to get the hang of it, so bear with me. This blog will be about education at all levels and so I feel obliged to provide some details of my own.

I attended St. Agnes elementary school in Rockville Center (on Long Island in NY) and Bishop Laughlin High School in Brooklyn. (Yes...Catholic schools, so bear with me even further.) From the middle of my sophomore year I 'til graduation I went to Oceanside High School and worked a year before going to college. The only one that would have me was SUNY Geneseo, where I got a Bachelors degree in English, then went to Syracuse University for my Masters in English, and finally to the University of Texas in Austin where I got a Doctorate in higher education--specifically in their Community College Education program.


I taught one year of Seventh Grade in Letchworth NY and one year of Eleventh Grade in Cortland, NY.  I taught for a year and then was named Department Chair of Humanities at John Tyler Community College in Chester Virginia. After I got my Ph.D. I was named Dean of Instruction at Austin Community College in Texas. I produced the first academic online program in English while I was there and went on to teach college online for a number of schools--some for profit and some not. And I still do that for Southern New Hampshire University.

But enough about me. :-)

"You can always teach," my mother said when she encouraged me to go to college, and so I have always taught. That's probably close to forty years worth. And I've seen a lot of 'movements' come and go during that time with the only result that education in the U.S has been declining. Why? I feel like I have only gotten better at it. So why is it that:

• The United States ranks fourteenth out of forty countries in the area of cognitive skills and educational attainment
• We're 23rd in science, 30th in math, and 36th overall.

That's what I want to explore here.