How Common Core Standards kill creative teaching

The problem with this standardization epidemic that has swept across the nation and brought with it Common Core Standards is that it is forcing an overemphasis on standardized tests and is rapidly eliminating the creativity of classroom teachers, something that has always been a key element in learning.

That subject is addressed in an article in U. S. News and World Report:

To try to live up to the new demands and ensure better test scores, states, districts and schools have purchased resources, materials and scripted curricular modules solely developed for test success. Being lost is the practical wisdom and planned spontaneity necessary to work with 20 to 35 individuals in a classroom. Academic creativity has been drained from degraded and overworked experienced teachers. Uniformity has sucked the life out of teaching and learning.

Good and great teachers leave and are replaced by new and cheap workers more willing to follow fool-proof, factory-like, prescribed lesson plans. In fact, the average teaching tenure has dropped from approximately 15 years of service in 1990 to less than five in 2013.

Imagine your brain surgeon having to "follow the book" while operating on you or lose his job. While you are on the table, he discovers an unforeseen problem that, because of his experience and practical wisdom, calls for a spontaneous change of plan, yet he can't do what he knows will work. You die on the table. So have students. He retires early, frustrated with conditions. So have the best teachers.

DESE: New assessment plan offers more time for instruction, costs less money

(From the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education)

The Department and a coalition of education partners have developed a revised assessment plan for the 2014-15 school year designed to reduce the amount of time spent on state testing and the overall cost.

The new plan would allow more classroom instruction time by implementing 30-minute survey assessments in English language arts and mathematics rather than a full seven hours of testing for grades 3, 4, 6, and 7. Students in grades 5 and 8 - the transition grades - would continue to take the full tests in English language arts and math, as well as the current science assessment.

Districts would have unlimited access to interim and formative assessment resources for English language arts and mathematics for grades 3-8. Districts can use those resources at their own discretion to help personalize learning for children during the school year.

End-of-course exams will be maintained in Algebra I, Algebra II (for students taking Algebra I at the middle level), English II, Biology, Government and Personal Finance.

For the first time, the state will provide a one-time administration of the ACT(r) for all high school juniors. This will allow students, teachers and parents to see whether or not students are academically prepared for college courses and will save families the testing fee.

Assessments will be administered online, further equipping students with the 21st Century technology skills they need and providing valid, reliable and quick results. Scores will be returned to districts within 10 business days for grade-level assessments and five business days for end-of-course assessments. Department research shows most districts will be able to meet the technology and device requirements for online administration of the new tests. The revised assessment plan reduces the Department's assessment funding request by $3.5 million to just under $27 million.

"We are committed to raising expectations for students and improving our assessment system to ensure our students graduate ready for college and career," said Assistant Commissioner Sharon Helwig, head of the Department's Office of College and Career Readiness. "This plan represents collaboration between the Department and several key stakeholders, including organizations representing teachers and administrators."

Making sure Missouri students graduate college and career ready is the number one goal of Missouri's Top 10 by 20 plan, which is aimed at placing student achievement among the top 10 states in education by 2020.

I would have an easier time buying this if DESE hadn't spent millions to buy a series of practice standardized tests from McGraw-Hill. This is just a reaction to criticism of Common Core Standards and the ever-growing testing emphasis.

National education blogger takes aim at Rex Sinquefield

In Missouri, we have become used to retired billionaire Rex Sinquefield as a fact of life.

We know he buys politicians, who all then say piously that no one can buy them, but that Sinquefield agrees with their way of thinking. It would be interesting to see if they still said that if his contributions were five dollars.

We also know that Sinquefield, like anyone else who is trying to sway public opinion to the side of something that is drastically wrong, follows the old Julie Andrews credo- A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down.

Common Core Standards are just for our schools; elite schools won't touch them

In a society where the middle class is rapidly being eliminated as more and more wealth is concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer people, it should come as no surprise that there is a double standard when it comes to education.

The people who are pushing Common Core Standards the hardest would not dream of having their children attend schools that follow Common Core. Let's face it- the standards are set up to enrich those in the technology, testing, and textbook companies...and to provide training for people to work at lower level jobs, when those jobs are not being outsourced.


An article in Good Magazine explores how far the curriculum is at the elite private schools that are attended by the children of most of those who are the most vocal about advocating Common Core Standards.

The article concludes in this fashion:

The problem is the public is force-fed these ideas of standardized curriculum, teaching, and assessment as the best tactics education science has to offer. They tell us that this is how we must educate our children. Wait, whose children are we talking about? Not the kids at Trinity School on Manhattan’s Upper West Side—41 percent are in that Ivy/MIT/Stanford pipeline—or Philips Exeter in New Hampshire, which educated Mark Zuckerberg. As someone with more experience in education than those whose voices are most prominent, I can also assure you that mainstream reform ideologies are not the best anyone has to offer. In fact, they are the cheapest and easiest to control. That's it.

I can already anticipate the devil’s advocate argument: Parents pay a hefty sum to send their children to Roxbury Latin, so they get what they've paid for. And on that point I would agree with you—if we were talking about, say, automobiles. Yes, the financier who pays extra for the package with the mahogany inlays and heated seats certainly deserves his or her mahogany inlays and heated seats. The one who mops the financier’s office floor, well, he or she might manage to eek out a full-sized spare, maybe some nice floor mats or something.

But these aren't cars; they're kids. These are kids who've had the temerity to be born and this is how we’ve resigned ourselves to discuss their education. We give all to those who can afford better and the rest get, well, they get what they get—and no one is supposed to get upset about it.

This is nonsense. If the reforms mandated by Departments of Education and fawned over by upstart think-tankers were as fantastic as advised again and again, then you can bet that every single one of the country's best prep schools would be implementing them as rapidly as possible. They're not, and you shouldn't accept them either.

The author is right on all points. Common Core Standards and the unholy emphasis on testing are going to do nothing except provide a workforce that will never know enough to be able to take a role in the leadership of their society (that will be left to those whose children are not in the schools that use Common Core Standards) and will be prepared for the workforce when they get out of high school, if those who are making the decisions have any jobs for them.

The major point of the article and is one that few people are addressing- If Common Core Standards were the best way to provide an education, then the so-called best schools in America would be lining up to use them.

Ravitch: "Reformers" want to dismantle public education, teaching profession

In a blog post today, top education blogger Diane Ravitch, a former official in the Department of Education under President George H. W. Bush, offers her year-in-review, including some positive things that have happened in education in 2013.

However, she opens her post with this spot-on assessment of what has been occurring across the United States:

More and more parents and teachers are awakening to the realization that the word “reform” has been hijacked by people who want to dismantle public education and the teaching profession. Those who have boldly named themselves the “reformers” are all too often working on behalf of turning public dollars over to private interests and to strip teachers of any due process, any collective-bargaining rights, any salary increment linked to their experience or their education. These so-called “reformers” reify test scores, making them the be-all and end-all of education and are eager to fire teachers and principals whose students don’t get the test scores that the computer says they should, and equally eager to close public schools with low scores and replace them with privately managed schools that all too often escape the same scrutiny as the public schools they replaced. The “reformers” care not at all about class size, indeed, they say they would prefer larger classes with “better teachers,” even though teachers say they can be better teachers with smaller classes, especially given the diversity of students in most public schools today, some of whom have disabilities, some of whom are learning English.

Our educators and schools now live under a Sword of Damocles fashioned by No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. Those who cannot produce higher scores are doomed. This is madness. This is a game rigged to harm public schools, which is a fundamental institution of our democracy.
Check out her post to find out the successes people are starting to have fighting against the "reformers."

How standardized testing destroys creativity, love of learning

I have been writing for years about the negative effect poorly written standardized tests is having on our educational system.

Colorado English teacher Don Batt, writing a guest post on Diane Ravitch's blog today addresses the issue:

Our political leaders–surprise–have bent under the pressure of businessmen wearing the masks of “rigor” and “accountability.” They have sacrificed our children’s joy of learning on the altar of expediency.

Here’s what should happen: teachers in their own classrooms, using multiple performance assessments where children apply their knowledge in the context of a given task, determine what their students know and what they need to learn, based on standards developed by that school, district, or possibly, state. Teachers should take students where they are and help them progress at their own developmental rates. And good teachers are doing that every day. Not because of standardized tests, but in spite of them.

Students’ abilities can be evaluated in many, creative ways. The idea that every student take the same test at the same time is nothing more than the warmed-over factory model of education used in the 1950’s, now, laughingly called “education reform.” As Oscar Wilde has observed, “Conformity is the last refuge of the unimaginative.”

I would only disagree with Batt on one point- when he says good teachers are providing that kind of teaching any way- that is happening less and less, thanks to micromanaging administrators who not only want all teachers to teach the same things in the same way but who also are buying all kinds of practice standardized tests to further take away from the time when actual learning can take place.

2013 in Review: A Warning to Young People; Don't Become Teachers

This post became my most popular on Huffington Post, with more than a quarter of a million Facebook likes at last count. Ironically, I submitted this to Huffington Post one day before I was removed from my classroom and escorted out of East Middle School by a police officer.

(The following is my latest Huffington Post blog.)

Nothing I have ever done has brought me as much joy as I have received from teaching children how to write the past 14 years. Helping young writers grow and mature has been richly rewarding and I would not trade my experiences for anything.

That being said, if I were 18 years old and deciding how I want to spend my adult years, the last thing I would want to become is a classroom teacher.

Classroom teachers, especially those who are just out of college and entering the profession, are more stressed and less valued than at any previous time in our history.

Bill would force students who do poorly on state tests to attend summer school

Rep. Steve Cookson, R-Poplar Bluff, has filed a bill that would make summer school mandatory for Missouri students who make low grades on standardized tests.

In the accompanying video clip, some oppose Cookson's bill, HB 1139, because of the financial burden it would place on school districts. A better reason to oppose the idea is because students should not have to attend summer school based on their scores on poorly written standardized tests.

Cookson would also require that all students who do not receive either advanced or proficient on the tests have to go to summer school.

Cookson's bill would also not allow schools to start until September and would require them to finish by the end of May.