Common Core: impressions?

Question for both parents and educators that might be on ILX: what are you perspectives on Common Core now that it's begun rolling out across most of the country?

i'm in texas, we don't believe in it

In the friendly state they believe in the Concealed Core.

interested to see this as the only exposure I have had to it thus far is right-wing blogs sharing examples of "THE LATEST STUPIDITY IN COMMON CORE" which upon closer examination of the activity in question, generally isn't stupid.

would like to hear the pros and cons from someone who doesn't write for The Blaze

pros: (nearly) everybody has a coherent framework of stuff kids should learn across the country; pisses of tea party morons

cons: package deal with NCLB high-stakes assessment means testing testing testin uber alles (kind of an indirect consequence, but was already happening anyway pre-CCSS); i hate arne duncan so anything he does is trash to me automatically; some of the standards appear to be age inappropriate and a on-size-fits-all approach (COLLEGE BOUND 4EVER) and doesn't allow much flexibility for students w disabilities, for example; doesn't require spanish language proficiency (personal hobbyhorse, dont mind me)

ick on the 'testing testing testing'

CCSS will basically streamline the process of developing curricula and products to teach to CCSS-aligned tests. now publishers can make one thing that they can sell to most states over and over again.

m bise otm.

a lot of the critiques in facebook macros are idiotic. not a bad idea to have a shared set of standards.

the PARCC assessment, as far as i can tell, is just a way to make Pearson a lot of money. so yeah, it seems like, in practice what this will do is make private testmaking companies lots of money.

also teacher evaluations are shifting to reflect test scores. the PARCC exam asks students to do very different things than the HSA, Maryland's current test, asks. i'm a little nervous in the short term a lot of teachers are going to get fired. (i mean some days, i'm like, please fire me, but)

Since unfortunately it's implementation is basically inseparable from NCLB and R2TT I'd say it's basically terrible.

one way Common Core has affected English, which affects me: less focus on fiction, more focus on informational text, especially in 11th and 12th grades, which will be what i am teaching next year. cool, but this means, because i have my curricula written for me by the school system in which i teach, that i am straight up teaching early american history to my kids (everything pre-Civil War, basically). and unless they are taking AP US history, they are not being taught the same era by their history teachers. on the one hand, i have an amateur interest in history, on the other, i am not actually certified to teach it! if i were a history teacher, this would concern me. also my kids are so bored by the founding fathers unit that i am required to teach by the county i teach in that by the end of the second quarter they were begging, can we read a story? this has more to do with the way my county has interpreted the common core standards than the standards themselves. chalk it up to growing pains? it's a challenging transition, for sure.

a lot of the teacher complaints i hear about CC are really complaints about NCLB/R2TT, yeah

Even though my wife and I are still two years away from thinking about this, we're currently very torn about sending our son to a public elementary school. She's volunteered at one of the "good" schools in the last semester and she found it all extremely disheartening (unfocused kids, burned out teachers, so much focus on testing). OTOH I can't stand the idea of snooty private schools so we're left with a limited # of coop and free school options.

My son is only in 2nd grade and this was the first year of implementation at our district (in Berkeley). It's been...ok so far, although the math style of teaching was jarring at first (made worse because his teacher isn't very good, frankly; she's really a space cadet and has a particularly challenging set of distracted and disruptive kids). But he still seems to be learning fine. However, they don't start standardized testing until 3rd grade. I did hear rumblings from some of the parents of older kids that things was way too much testing. But there was testing before, which was NCLB, so I don't think that's part of the CC complaint.

I think there need to be standards. Obviously we've been concerned that the US has dropped far below other countries. But then when we adopt other country's styles of math education (the CC math style is adopted from Singapore) everyone complains.

I have a friend who has been teaching CC for a few years in Arizona and she has no complaints and said she has a lot of latitude in what she teaches. So I do think that a lot of the sporadic issues about this are coming more from how districts are implementing it.

"some of the standards appear to be age inappropriate and a on-size-fits-all approach (COLLEGE BOUND 4EVER)"

I don't know, is this bad?

I put this thread up because my sister (who doesn' t have kids, lives in Seattle and is an idiot in a lot of ways) posted some right wing thing trumpeting Indiana's opting out of CC. I asked why that was a good thing and her response (chimed in by my family) was pretty garbled but they quickly got into "not everyone is cut out for college, we need more trade schools, they should teach life skills in school". Ok, sure, that's fine. But if you institutionalize this to the degree they want, then you basically go back to 'college for an intellectual elite and everyone else works in the mine'. And the 'intellectual elite' is quickly going to be just the very rich. I listened to Tom Harkin on the radio the other day and he said that academically unprepared kids of wealthy families still have an 80% chance of going into college while academically prepared kids of poor families only have a 20% chance or something. I may have screwed that up but this is something that is far more disturbing to me. And maybe I'm old fashioned but I think that all people should shoot for a college education, and all kids who graduate from HS should be prepared for college whether they want to go or not. Some CC standards complaints seem to be that it's too challenging for kids. Do we have that little faith in the ability of American students to rise to an academic challenge? I'm in no way saying that all kids are actually prepared to hit those standards right now, but shouldn't we aim at that?

General subjective impression I get from my kids' school is that the teachers are freaking out a little and giving lots of homework, but it's not clear that this homework is actually targeted properly at the new standards or just a case of "we need to do something, anything."

my son's CC math homework is so fucking easy it's ridiculous. I keep wondering when things are going to get hard.

Again I don't think the idea of establishing a standard is really the issue for most folks (well maybe it is for some BIG GUBMENT GONNA TELL US WHAT TO THINK types). I think bigger question is: why are some kids not excelling at school. And the answer is a way way more complicated than "well we need a new standard" (esp. when new standard is mixed with crazy amounts of testing, deeply unequal educational facilities, little to no play/recess and a bunch of teacher intimidation to boot).

In fact I'd say new standards are probably way way way down on my list of things that are deeply wrong with education in this country...

Even though my wife and I are still two years away from thinking about this, we're currently very torn about sending our son to a public elementary school. She's volunteered at one of the "good" schools in the last semester and she found it all extremely disheartening (unfocused kids, burned out teachers, so much focus on testing). OTOH I can't stand the idea of snooty private schools so we're left with a limited # of coop and free school options.

― One bad call from barely losing to (Alex in SF), Sunday, March 30, 2014 1:17 PM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

imo go to the public school and fight like hell for equity and justice #resistthecorporatetakeover

[...]Some CC standards complaints seem to be that it's too challenging for kids. Do we have that little faith in the ability of American students to rise to an academic challenge? I'm in no way saying that all kids are actually prepared to hit those standards right now, but shouldn't we aim at that?

― akm, Sunday, March 30, 2014 3:18 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
ok i have a couple of thoughts:
(1) i absolutely believe more people should be ready to go to college than at present levels, particularly historically underserved groups (black and latino students esp). if education is to be meaningful, it should be more than a socio-economic sorting system which it sounds like what you're describing in that 80% of dumb rich kids quote.
(2) i think a smaller pctage of white ppl should go to college but they p much believe it is their children's birthright to go
(3) i think there needs to be a something-for-everyone approach that will better serve students with more substantial disabilities (but not to the extent of life skills or severe and profound pops) for whom a liberal arts college education would be inappropriate.
(4) all jobs should pay a living wage, so the insistence on college as economic panacea is a smoke-screen to justify meager wages for jobs that don't require higher ed imo

i want to post something coherent about this, but it's sunday night so i'm bullet pointing

• last year i developed a curriculum w/ previous standards, and this year i ported over to cc. overall thoughts? positive.

• i'm in a very (very, very) high-ranking district, and 95-99% of my students meet the standards due largely to income, stable population, language programs,well-funded school system etc. for us the standards are difficult to teach thoroughly, and easy to complete in a compulsory sort of way

• m bise otm throughout thread

• some of my classes tested parcc this year and omg what a dumb show. the test was run on ipads/tablets which even in a tech-savvy wealthy area were a problem. issue #1: scrolling was on the left side of the screen, and you pulled down to move up.

"for us the standards are difficult to teach thoroughly, and easy to complete in a compulsory sort of way"

not sure I follow that

Does that mean you can teach to the test so they can do well on it, but not actually teach the material so that they really understand it.

Yes. And sorry, writing quickly. What I meant to say is that, given the social/economic privilage of my district, and high skills/ background knowledge of the students I see every day, it's very easy to 'cover' the assessed material and mandated Common Core curriculum. It doesn't take much sacrifice/pain to meet the federal minimum requirements, as outlined. Now, to actually teach the ideas/concepts outlined in the Common Core, to do more than just mention them and blaze perfunctorily past ... well, that's an incredibly difficult task. And this is in a district that's, per state metrics, is high performing and well-funded. I can't imagine what that task would look like elsewhere.

To wit: per the common core standards, fourth graders are expected to know the following, and may be tested on them in long-format essays on parcc/standardized common core assessments:

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.4.3
Write narratives to develop real or imagined experiences or events using effective technique, descriptive details, and clear event sequences.

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.4.2
Write informative/explanatory texts to examine a topic and convey ideas and information clearly.

Text Types and Purposes:
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.4.1
Write opinion pieces on topics or texts, supporting a point of view with reasons and information.

To expect nine and ten year old students to differentiate between narrative, informative/explanatory, and opinion writing is a tall order. Further, to expect them to generate 'well-developed' pieces of writing with distinct hallmarks these styles, on demand, in a high-stakes testing environment, is borderline nuts. Developmentally inappropriate. And just plain onerous.

that's a good point. the makers of my county's curricula had to scramble this summer to throw together plans that would meet the common core standards, and for the 11th grade English curriculum, that resulted in a plan that's "a mile wide and an inch deep" per another teacher. I think they were trying to cover all the standards, but in some areas the lessons are pretty superficial.

i'm teaching at a 98% black school that has historically underperformed academically and i think PARCC is going to make these kids feel like failures. Standards should absolutely be raised but the transition is going to be rough.

my son's CC math homework is so fucking easy it's ridiculous. I keep wondering when things are going to get hard.

I work with someone who has a child in 2nd grade, and I hear ALL THE TIME how difficult the math is this year. Then again, she said she spent an hour looking online for an explanation for a homework question, and I found stuff in five minutes, so I don't know.

My wife teaches elementary special ed and has found the standards totally unrealistic and inappropriate for most of her students. Her main problems with the standards are that and the amount of additional bureaucratic work it adds, which I can't really describe in more detail but that's what she tells me.

Another point: since 99% of my students last year passed in the >proficient category on standardized testing last year, I've got to pass 99% at >proficient again, or I'm essentially coded a 'bad' teacher by the metrics fed to district admin. Now, since I have less just less than 90 students, a single student on a bad day (or a student new to the system, with a disability that didn't make it into an IEP, health, psych or language issues, etc.,) will throw off my class/grade average, and I'll be raked over the coals for a perceived decline in school status. (Note: the results of testing, and school rankings are published in the newspaper in my state).

There's apparently a lot of stuff that involves being able to abstract about the lesson you're learning and talk about it in a meta sort of way, meaning the students have to do that. My wife says that many of her students are just miles away developmentally from that kind of thinking.

yes, definitely. and there's this whole 'school reform' obsession with data-driven feedback, with quantifiable itnervention and RTI strategies and collection of scorable data that undermines the relational/humanistic side of teaching, to the detriment of all students... but especially those who benefit from modifications and accomodations.

FYI the standards are published at http://www.corestandards.org/. Math and ELA standards are the most developed, and they're quite rigorous, to be honest. Just a piece of second grade math:

CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.2.NBT.B.5
Fluently add and subtract within 100 using strategies based on place value, properties of operations, and/or the relationship between addition and subtraction.

I think to many (non-education) people this is an easy standard. But to unpack the standard, just a little, is to ask

What is fluency and how is it determined? How can we assess fluency, per se?
What is 'within 100' and does it involve work with zeroes?
What preteaching and conceptual priming are necessary to teach students of the numbers up to 100?
How do we modify the curriculum for students who are expressly concrete in their mathematical processing?
How do we build up their ability to calculate differences when students rely on manipulatives (beans, fingers, number lines)?
What concepts of ordinality are neessary to teach 0-100, anyway?
What are the properties of operation? What does this mean, exactly?
What ways do we have of ascertaining conceptual understanding of addition and subtraction?
What relationship between addition/subtraction, anyway?
How can we teach this idea to concrete learners?
etc., etc.,

but especially those who benefit from modifications and accomodations.
How so?

I see modification/accomodation as occuring, at their best, on the fly –– and based on the kind of, err, organic interaction that can't be quanitified. In effect, I'll help a student who's struggling w/ writing X assignment by providing a graphic organizer that I write, off the cuff, in the margins of their paper at the exact moment they demonstrate the need (or that I recognize said need). Quantifiable, data-driven strategies often occur /after/ the need has arisen. Once I see a first draft, or I've sifted through at a pattern demonstrated in a student's output; once I've vetted, dissected, RTIed, and brought to administrative attention a need for assistence, as is the wont of my overseeers, I've frequently missed the critical window for assistance.

How would it have worked before?

Earlier in my career, I felt that the teacher's interaction with students/daily classroom experience/intuition carried more weight, and the hard numbers carried less. Now, observational evidence/personal practice is ancillary to spreadsheets, when push (often) comes to shove.

I hate it, but I also hated the previous curricula. I work in a Spanish-speaking community. Many of the kids have parents who don't speak English. Many of the parents are illiterate in Spanish as well as English. The homework that the kids get, especially in K and 1st grade, assumes that the parents are going to do it with the kids, or for them. When the parents can't read the homework, this is problematic. The kids come to the library for "homework help" after-school. I think that their writing prompts are ridiculous, as is their math. But this was the case before Common Core. I think that Common Core is trying to introduce analysis at at earlier stage. Thing is, it is not that easy to analyze an Easy Reader story of limited vocabulary. I was working with a second grader who was writing an essay. His teacher told him to replace some of his words with "juicier" words. He doesn't have that vocabulary yet! He is in second grade. I asked him if he wanted to replace with juicier words and thank god he said no. This past week the math homework has involved measuring with paper clips. Why do they have to measure with paper clips? On the publishing side, it's going to mean a lot more non-fiction books, especially for the 1st and 2nd graders. Thing is, it's hard to provide a lot of information using a limited vocabulary, that the 1st and 2nd graders can read. Most of the kids in my community are going to Saturday school to prepare for the upcoming tests. I think it is all so sad and unproductive.

So far, with kids in grades 1 and 4, it seems like more of the usual bullshit, nothing better, nothing worse, albeit with a further sad deemphasis on textbooks in favor of packets and worksheets. I'm lucky that neither of my kids struggle with anything, so maybe if they did the CC would be more offensive, but given how worthlessly easy homework has been for them the past few years, I guess I have no problem with things getting a little harder, or even "harder." Have no idea why they have my younger one measuring things for math with these little cm cubes instead of with a ruler, though. That's just dumb.

I'll have to read up on this to see if we're doing anything similar here--I suspect we are. Right now it's all about open-ended questions, parallel tasks, risk-taking, etc., etc. The curriculum has basically been in place for a decade, although we just revamped Social Studies. Someone I work with asked if I had any suggestions for when he starts interviewing (he wants to move down to a junior grade). Said I wouldn't be of any help--I'm gone in five years, and I don't speak the jargon.

As for Common Core, I can't say whether it is worthwhile or not, because I don't know how it differs from No Child Left Behind.

All I can say is that fundamental problems, such as students not learning how to read or being unable solve math problems seem to me to be worthy of strongly focused attention and the allocation of major resources. Teachers obsessing over how to micromanage test scores seems like an enormous waste of effort on a non-problem, that was defined into existence by people who have no understanding of what a real learning problem looks like or how to solve one.

I can't speak for anybody else, but Common Core itself has affected very little of my practice with regard to assignment/instruction design.

I suspect what Josh sees (deemphasizing textbooks in favor of packets and worksheet) is a temporary byproduct of a curriculum in flux w/o adequate time for teachers to prepare resources and vet materials, or for systems to buy more CC-aligned books. This is a big problem! My state had something like twenty new non-funded initiatives passed on to schools/teachers this year, and no time allocated for initation. Just some:

• New Title I: Requirements
• Crisis Prevention Intervention (CPI) Training
• School Nutrition Reform.
• McKinney-Vento
• Preschool Care Plan
• Emergency Evacuation Plans
• Implementation of Anti-Bullying Law
• Head Injury Law
• New Educator Evaluation System and Classroom Visits.

But what's so upsetting about ALL of this reform is that comes out of the hysterical crisis-in-education malarkey that gets drummed up every so often; and it seems to be driven by private political agenda, the MBAification of administration, and for-profit education groups, not by essential need w/in schools themselves.

^^^^^^

Interesting (maybe) related factoid probably not specific to my kids' school. When the test scores (for whatever they're worth) were tallied and taken into account they found that most of the kids across the various local spectrums of race, income, etc. did very similarly, and pretty well, when it came to math, but the reading scores were a lot broader/lower/problematic. They determined, logically, that for the vast majority of kids, they all learn math at school, the same way at the same pace, so perform on tests similarly. But with reading, the kids reading or getting read to at home are at a huge advantage over the kids who aren't, who also often overlap with those lower income, etc. categories, where parents (for myriad reasons) are either not reading, don't have enough time to read, let the kids sit in front of the TV all afternoon. And then of course the kids already at an advantage get better and better, because they can read, and the kids struggling to read get further and further behind.

Long/short, it becomes a more and more insurmountable problem for teachers to deal with, when a kid can't read well, especially because many schools do not have the fund/budgets/federal support to hire multiple reading specialists. Those that do close the test score gaps pretty quickly. With the CC apparently stressing reading comprehension and analysis at least a little more than usual, I wonder if the reading score disparities will get wider.

Maybe! But teaching phonics would probably be a better start. < / soapbox >

fwiw I talked to my wife more about the standards and she said that no, actually, it's not that the standards are developmentally inappropriate exactly, it's more that the administration is non-understanding and inflexible in applying them in a developmentally appropriate way. In fact, she says the more she learns about common core, the more she likes it.

Diane Ravitch lets'er rip:

Are our kids left behind by China, South Korea and Germany? Not really. Maybe not at all. It is true that we get mediocre scores on international tests, but we have been getting mediocre scores on international tests since the first such test was offered in 1964. We were never a world leader on the international tests. Most years, our scores were at the median or even in the bottom quartile. Yet in the intervening fifty years, we have far surpassed all those nations–economically, technologically, and on every other dimension– whose students got higher test scores. Basically, the test scores don’t predict anything about the future of the economy. Should we worry that Estonia might surpass us? The fact is that our international scores reflect the very high proportion of kids who live in poverty, whose scores are lowest. We are No. 1 among the rich nations of the world in child poverty; nearly one-quarter of our children live in poverty. Our kids who live in affluent communities do very well indeed on the international tests. If we reduced the proportion of children living in poverty, our international test scores would go up. But in the end, as I said, the international scores don’t predict anything other than an emphasis on test-taking in the schools or the general socio-economic well-being of the society. We would be far better off investing more money in providing direct services to children–small classes for struggling students, experienced teachers, social workers, counselors, psychologists, and a full curriculum–rather than investing in more test preparation.

Alexander, I frankly do not understand your faith in national standards. There is no evidence that national standards produces higher achievement, nor that they reduce achievement gaps. They certainly do not overcome the burdens of homelessness, hunger, lack of medical care, or overcrowded classrooms. You express contempt for public school educators, so it is hard to understand why you think that they will magically be transformed into great teachers by national standards. This may come as a surprise, but most nations in the world–without regard to their standing on international tests–have national standards. When I visited Finland, which has an excellent school system, I read its national standards, but I also saw well-prepared teachers who shaped the curriculum in their classrooms and schools and who had a wide degree of professional autonomy about how they taught. I did not see or hear anyone express the hostility that you feel towards classroom teachers; teaching is a highly selective and highly respected profession, unlike here, where every legislator and pundit is considered an expert because they went to school.

It's a response to a Newsweek article.

I went to a CC presentation the other night and tbh left very impressed. If not by the goals then by the method and meaning behind it.

The preeminent position of the US in science and tech may not be entirely unconnected to the huge numbers of post-grad students it imports from countries with higher maths and science standards, tbf.

From an international perspective, I have some sympathy with the attempt to introduce common standards that are easier to measure and offer greater transparency when things aren't going well. That should be done in a way that still lets good teachers have a certain degree of autonomy. It also probably requires a much better level of investment in public education - both in terms of material / infrastructure resourcing and in terms of rewarding / incentivising teachers.

Some stats about the US education system came out and it was fucking embarrassing. 40% of the students read at grade level. 40.

it's driving my teaching artist girlfriend bazonkers.
she says the students and the teachers are a mess and everyone is rushing to teach for the test at max speed.

i taught community college students last year who told me in all sincerity that there were lots of words they didn't know in their (quite plainly written) textbook

i wasn't sure what to do with that

that's not abnormal whatsoever

They should pay teachers what bank CEO's make. You got to attract top talent because kids are our future.

lol

Or at least what college coaches make.

Diane Ravitch otm as usual.

They recently announced that a second year of algebra would no longer be a graduation requirement for kids in the state of Texas. This makes me sad.

I remember talking to one of my math profs once about how different education in America is from his native Russia. He talked about how when he first arrived at my university they had him teach College Algebra and he was confused because in Russia he said there was no such thing. College freshmen in Russia were assumed to command literacy in basic algebra (among other more advanced topics) but here this is not so.

OK, here are some of the things I learned (keeping in mind this was a math-only presentation). Something like only 13% of American adults are considered math literate. And something like 50% of American college students need to take remedial (that is, no credit) math courses in college. The way it was presented couched the failure of Americans at math as sort of self-perpetuating, and the Common Core being a last ditch effort to break the cycle, the thought being that by studying the way they teach math in other countries we can better pinpoint what it is we are doing wrong. The most amazing stat I learned is that for whatever those international testing standards are worth, Americans are exposed to around 80-85% of the material covered. And yet we test 11th or 26th or whatever, depending on the standard used. (Sorry for not nailing the exact numbers). And yet, the student in Hong Kong, who came in first on the most recent tests, were exposed to around 50% of the material covered. The lesson learned is not that the students in Hong Kong are learning more, but that they are learning better, and the way they are learning allows them to understand math at a fundamentally deeper level than we (generally) understand math. So the way it was presented, the idea of the CC is to drop early teaching of certain things (ie math through money at the K-1 level, saving money stuff til 2nd grade, I believe) or traditional means of doing math (like how most of us learned), which will be saved until middle school, when we are more psychologically mature enough to not just learn but truly understand it.

One example the woman (a math professor gave) is the notion of, say, carrying numbers, or that we do multiplication from right to left, but division from left to right, simple things like that which can only only be explained by "that's the way we've always done it." But she explained some of the new methods being used, and how the aim is for great math fluency, which I believe is defined as getting the answer in less than 3 seconds (she noted how many high schoolers still count with fingers, which slows them down considerably). The example she gave (I'll try to remember) is the problem 1000-279. Now, if you do that the way learned it, it gets the right answer, but it's relatively messy. The CC method would be (and bear with me):

1000-249= 1 + 50 + 200, which by their method gets you 751. It takes 1 to bring 249 up to 250, 50 to bring it to 300, then 700 to bring it to 1000. The idea being that it is much easier to add 700+50+1 then it is to take 249 from 1000, the way we were all taught. There's a real logic to it that's hard for us already-taught folks to get but kids pick it up fast.

And yet we test 11th or 26th or whatever, depending on the standard used.

36th according to the most recent PISA report, iirc.

so they set

1000 = 249 + …

and increment each unit on the right hand side as needed to bring them up to a thousand? that seems slick.

I think the idea is to round a lot of numbers to the tens place, because that is much easier to work with.

I think the idea is to provide and promote a fundamentally different understanding of numbers and values.

I... don't think that's a fundamentally different understanding of numbers and values.

I fully accept that I have some privilege going on here that is coloring my reaction.

I haven't read up on this very much, got a few more years until our son is ready for this stuff. I'm assuming it's mostly good, if only because my only frame of reference up to now has been my crazy conservative relatives calling it "liberal bullshit" on FB.

dan perhaps you should double-check that privilege

Well, it is different to think of all numbers in terms of units of ten to make things easier. Or to say stop thinking of it as subtraction and think deeper about what it means to say find the difference.

I'll give another example I learned in a bit.

well, the coalition of left and right that opposes Common Core would be stronger if the right flank weren't filed with the usual I-hate-world-government types.

As someone who learned a lot more actually useful math by teaching a few Kaplan courses than I ever did in school, I'm all for coming up with alternate/intuitive/flexible ways of doing computation.

No, I just mean that doesn't strike me as a fundamentally new or different way of doing computation. IIRC, when we went over subtraction in elementary school, it was initially presented as JiC describes and then was consolidated into borrowing as shorthand. This was over 30 years ago.

Just get a Casio with a calculator. Problem solved.

took me a moment to parse Casio as "watch" instead of "keyboard"

Someone actually asked about calculators, and they brought up a good point that you still have to understand math well enough to recognize if the answer the machine gives is totally off-base or not.

OK, here's another example they gave. They give kids a problem like 7+3=[ ] + 5. A lot of kids, some huge percentage, up through 7th grade, simply add up all three numbers and give the answer as 15, which is of course totally wrong. But they've been conditioned to think of the equals sign as simply meaning the end of an equation rather than internalizing the actual meaning of the equals sign. Pretty eye-opening.

The CC also stresses breaking things down into components. So if you have a problem like, say, 253 + 78, that is the same thing as 250 + 80 + 1. Which is super easy to do and involves no carrying and whatnot but does involving altering things to devise an easier equation.

yeah agree that the "they'll just use calculators IRL" line is not very well thought out. And shorthand/off-the-cuff math is pretty much the most useful math in most people's everyday or working lives.

OK, here's another example they gave. They give kids a problem like 7+3=[ ] + 5. A lot of kids, some huge percentage, up through 7th grade, simply add up all three numbers and give the answer as 15, which is of course totally wrong. But they've been conditioned to think of the equals sign as simply meaning the end of an equation rather than internalizing the actual meaning of the equals sign. Pretty eye-opening.

uh what

jesus christ

Yeah, no shit!

xpost Actually, I think the way they would do it is as 250+50 (equals 300) + 30 (equals 330) + 1, equals 331.

That's another reason the CC emphasizes number lines and stuff like that, to actual emphasize the relationship between numbers rather than simply enforce rote memorization.

ha I see you've already addressed my "250 + 80 + 1 DOES involve carrying" retort

http://reason.com/assets/mc/mwelch/2009_11/Daffy_Screwball.gif

Yeah, I learned so much that even I caught that one. Oh, and since I may have been unclear, the equals thing was an example they gave of what we get teaching things the way we teach now. Kids just missing the forest for all the trees.

xpost

i think the value of the alt. subtraction j.i.c. example gave was supposed to be that it didn't require so much in-place alteration of the meaning of the given problem through scratchwork with digits that propagates through the numbers like when using the borrowing method. and it transposes all the subtractions you would still be thinking about into questions about incrementation-by-how-much, generally relative to a 'tens' goal. so, more within the scope of what you would have learned best, found most intuitive, etc.—adding single-digit numbers and numbers less than 20 (before the incrementation of the digit in the next place).

i was never strong at calculation, even though i have a math degree, and i dunno, borrowing was just completely rote to me, zero significance.

Having a math degree puts you in rarefied company as far as this stuff goes!

What they tried to stress a lot with this nerves-calming assembly was, again, an emphasis on going deeper rather than simply advancing. They described the current American education system as a mile wide but an inch deep, which sounds about right. Certainly some of you/us got advanced math instruction, or were better taught or whatever. And there will always be students better or worse at this stuff. The idea is to try to slow, stop and reverse the downward spiral of the majority 90%.

As parent of a 3rd grader and kindergartner, the ending of the Ravitch piece is what struck home for me:

Long ago, educators were able to find out in tests lasting 50 minutes how well a student could read or do math. Why is it now an ordeal that lasts as long as some professional examinations? For heaven’s sake, we are talking about little children, not candidates for college or a profession!

I am agnostic so far on the application of Common Core standards in the curriculum. Some of it seems sensible, some seems unnecessary -- does a 9-year-old really need to memorize all the layers of the atmosphere? Isn't it enough to understand that there are layers? There is some forest-for-trees stuff that bothers me. But I can't deny that the kids come home from school knowing stuff, and talking about it in interesting ways.

But the testing,ugh. My oldest has some long-identified cognitive/developmental issues, and so every test just reaffirms that over and over. I don't need to have the problems repeatedly highlighted every couple of weeks, and in ways that just make him feel bad. I'd prefer more focus on strategies for addressing them. The testing seems like all diagnosis, no prescription.

Yeah the testing is bullshit. Unless there is some crazy algorithm at work, I imagine any test could get the desired results in a fraction of the space and time, especially when kids are only being gauged on comprehension and comprehensiveness.

The more points of data you have to analyse, the more accurate they are and the more granular the results can be. The more granular the results are, in theory, the easier it is to track progress. Tests generally aren't designed to be longer than they need to be to meet the desired outcomes as it makes them proportionately more expensive to deliver. The question is whether that level of detail is necessary. There's an argument for saying that more detail is always best if it shows progression more accurately than C+ to B- or whatever.

There is a good case for saying that an over reliance on testing can be negative and demotivating for some students but it's annoying to hear people say "back in the old days tests lasted 50 minutes and they were fine" without acknowledging that psychometrics is an advancing science and old assessment methods were often deeply flawed.

The problem imo is that the testing methodology is being applied the K-5 kids as well, before they even have grades, per se. My 4th grade daughter has taken a few multi-hour, multi-day tests. At the end of the year, she is essentially still graded on a non-specific scale. She does OK, but there are plenty of kids not built at this young age for epic tests, which in turn must surely further affect the results.

That does sound potentially excessive. I'd suspect that there is quite a lot of data being generated for teachers or schools even if it isn't being formalised into reported grades yet. The theory might be to start them off with testing when the stakes are lowest and get them acclimatised so they don't freak out when it matters more later on.

the stakes are already high in elementary. for schools, they determine accountability ratings which will determine how much (if any) state intervention is prescribed. students are pushed into special education by unscrupulous teachers and administrators looking to put kids on modified assessments that wont show up on those state accountability ratings. principals are hired and fired according to how well they bring campus scores up. teachers are shuffled for the same. some states now have value-added metrics-based performance pay and termination tied to students test scores.

in short, i'm a teacher and high stakes testing is a poison that must be sucked out of schools.

I'm generally an advocate of testing as an aid to tracking individual progress and working out how effective programmes and learning resources are. That said, you're absolutely right that they're only as good as the structure that's using them.

They're a tool to assist the monitoring of student achievement and teacher effectiveness, not a replacement for a system that looks at each learner / classroom in context. There's definitely also a major problem with schools trying to game the rankings by cutting students they don't think will progress out of the mainstream.

I don't think anyone involved in assessment would argue that test scores should be viewed as a bottom line but they're often taken that way by politicians who understand numbers but don't really understand education, which is shame because test data analysis is potentially enormously helpful to teachers.

unfortunately, policymakers in the US have no interest in using testing as a diagnostic tool. these tests are used a tool of punishment by design. the ideology is that in order to improve schools, we must improve the teaching pool, and that in order to improve the teaching pool, we must weed out low performers and reward the high performers. this data-driven accountability doesn't work due to the overwhelming outside factors that affect student achievement.

the end result is campbell's law: "The more any quantitative social indicator (or even some qualitative indicator) is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor."

Out of interest, are teachers targeted on outcomes (for example, 75% of students getting C grades of above) or progress (75% of students going up a grade band during a school year, etc)?

depends on the state, but the federal govt is encouraging states to adopt some amount of teacher evaluation to use some value-added measure (VAM) which is not an empirically supported instrument to improving student achievement, but is a psuedo-scientific, business friendly metric that makes intuitive sense to people who haven't stepped in a school since they were children.

m bison otm throughout thread
t

http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2014/05/19/3439163/state-rep-common-core-gay/

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/06/02/1303820/-Sixth-graders-bill-education-officials-for-time-spent-as-standardized-test-guinea-pigs

like a room fulla bawsses

Thoughts on the PARCC? All the usual suspects are upset: Tea Party out-of-my-school types, entitled my-kid-is-special-and-unique sorts, etc. Right now the biggest issue seems to be that it is a literal waste of time, which I get - 13 hours! - but there is so much BS time wasting in schools already that I don't see this taking a big dent out of my kids educations. Also, while I see the point of these increasing opt-out protests, I am generally wary of anything right wingers and TP types advocate, let alone anti-vax/not-my-kid type parents. I mean, I think the similarly derided Common Core is turning out OK, and while I see why teachers/unions might be worried about PARCC - after all, they often get judged based on the performance of their kids, and anything new or different will at least initially impact that performance - I don't see the harm in giving something a shot. If the test sucks or fails at what it is trying to do, taking the test lets them improve it. Or maybe the results will lead them to downplay/discard it and try something else.

So what's the big deal? I'd love to hear from better informed folks than I. I'm going to hit an angry parents meeting this afternoon, anyway, and will try to report back.

I've seen the argument that it stresses the kids out. Welcome to the real world kid, things are stressful.

welcome to the real world, 8-year-old

^ gets it

Ideally scores would come back with a report showing how far behind the average Chinese five year old they were for full impact.

The worst argument against I've seen has been concerns about the challenge of taking the test on screens. As if most of these kids (mine included) aren't spending a huge percentage of their time on screens, navigating screens or trying to get on screens.

i dunno, i'm teaching a couple online college courses right now, and the screen-nativity of students seems to be… mythical in many instances

We're talking 8-year olds, not college kids, c'mon.

I bet your kids don't know all the words to "Frozen" songs either.

i've been using the internet for more than 20 years. some of my students weren't even born yet when i started. i think they've had plenty of time to live the screen lyfe. when facebook was founded, they were in elementary school.

There is an argument for saying that not all children are computer-enabled at an early stage but that tends to ignore the other social and cultural biases that come with paper-and-pencil testing.

As a neutral observer with no easily googleable links to the assessment-industrial complex I'm obviously still weighing up the pros and cons but the tenor of the debate has been very disappointing. There is a lot of focus on cranks, often bloggers with an axe to grind who are given a mystifyingly elevated platform by HuffPo, Slate, etc, and less on whether PARCC actually does what it says it is meant to (by and large it does, I think) or the political question of what is actually going to be done with the huge amount of data that is going to come out of testing across eleven states.

yes, and lack of computer access is a real problem when computer-based education meets low socioeconomic status.

last year i taught 'urban' community college students (so, a range of backgrounds, races, etc., but primarily NOT RICH) and there was a range from people using tablets in the classroom to take notes, to people who could barely work a computer.

I was joking about the computer stuff.

Anyway, I went to this complaint session and did earn a few things. First and foremost, this PARCC test is fundamentally flawed if not outright fucked up - like, even in terms of how it works, technologically, and is formatted, etc. - and is probably not ready for prime time. This first wave is in a sense the guinea pig stage, with our kids the subjects to hopefully work out the bugs. Second, the company that created it, Pearson, so obv. very much for profit, and also sells/makes textbooks and is probably grading the tests, so they have lots to gain. And even then, there were apparently some test-tests given in maybe New York, and while the rumor is the results were disastrous, they have not been made public.

The real issue this time around, that is, imminently, is that there is no consistency in terms of policy. Some states have opted out entirely, for myriad reasons (red state assholes, but also budget concerns). Other states are giving it, but allowing kids to opt out. In Chicago, kids who opt out are allowed to read and draw. Where I am, right outside the city, kids who opt out are faced with the dreaded sit and stare policy, not even allowed to read a book. Which is fucked up.

So yeah, this whole thing is a mess, but it's probably too late. The gamble is that maybe if it fails they will make it better. Or maybe they will blame the teachers and schools, which will make it worse. I'm on the fence I guess about whether I let my older daughter take it. Most of the grumbling seemed to be pity for the poor kids faced with such monumental stress (oh no!) or faced with exclusion/boredom (oh no!). But the test even more than standardized tests in general seems pretty onerous.

Learn a few things, not earn. I wish!

can't parents just keep their kids home on days when they would otherwise be sitting in silence opting out of an exam?

They said it's so lame/hardcore that if you skip, they will find a way for them to make-up, even if it means being sneaky and not telling you when the make-up test is administered. Which sounds kind of conspiracy-y, but another issue is the pressure the younger kids (say, 9) are under if they are told to take the rest to the take the test, vs. a middle schooler, who might be self-determined enough to say outright "I refuse."

What rubbed me the wrong way about the meeting was a mom who not only took exception to the mention of college in the PARCC acronym, but started rattling off other states that have opted out. Like I give a fuck what Florida decides to do about anything. Our own state, I don't see how they could justify the cost of this thing given the financial problems we're facing. One parent pointed out (correctly) that the money would probably be better spent on field trips to museums.

We also take the MAP test here, which seems like a pretty good test, with immediate results. Apparently the law/mandate says you must have *some* test, but does not specify which one. So why PARCC? No doubt something to do with $$$.

It will have been fairly rigorously beta tested but the nature of assessment, and particularly computer-adaptive assessment, is that it's always a work in progress. More students means more data and more data means more accurate assessment. I've not seen anything to suggest it is fundamentally flawed but it is a good ground to move the debate on to, in some senses.

Accurate assessment of what? If it's an assessment of how students are doing, how are teachers incapable of assessing that on their own? I doubt this test is going to show anything except that well-fed middle class kids with access to school libraries and other resources do reasonably well on tests. The methods and means for creating outlier schools and classrooms that can overcome poverty and lack of access to resources are already known to people who care about such things. The impetus of the testing movement isn't school improvement.

Kids can have ample screen time and still struggle with tests like these. The software can be fiddly and unforgiving, and some of them take the tests on mouseless half-screen netbooks, which can make even simple tasks challenging.

Not every issue has to have a right/left dichotomy. Opposing a for-profit testing behemoth seems like a suitable left position to me, and I'm comfortable that some libertarian doofus somewhere happens to agree with me.

And why be so cavalier about stressing out or boring students? Are stress and boredom pedagogically efficacious?

What about, say, team sports? How come that kind of stress is ok, but not the stress of taking a test? what is an appropriate level of stress? What is an appropriate duration for a test? What is the appropriate degree of difficulty for test?

I suspect if my daughter had the choice to opt out of anything, I have a feeling she would opt out of almost everything.

It's an accurate assessment of what the consortium has been asked to calibrate it to assess, but the wider point is the crucial one. Standardised testing across numerous states will highlight gaps and imbalances, it does nothing to solve them. What politicians do with the data is critical. There is an understandable fear that it's going to be used as a stick to beat 'under-performing' teachers irrespective of the contexts they are working in, but it is difficult to envisage any assessment system that couldn't. The drive towards testing isn't really coming from the assessment companies (and the other major player in PARCC is an American not-for-profit) it's from politicians who want to know whether the multi-billion dollar investments they are making in textbooks, learning platforms, etc represent value for money. Without some measure of comparability and the ability to track improvement, that is much harder to do. Opposing standardised testing as a point of principle is entirely valid but, if you have to have it, it makes sense to use something better aligned with the common core than most of the existing options.

Stress is to be avoided to two reasons - it's not very nice and it fucks with the reliability of results. That said, getting kids used to accessible tests early in life where the stakes are lower is probably going to mean they are less nervous when it really counts.

i don't see kids getting the same sense of personal achievement with standardizes tests than with sports or other extracurriculars. besides which playing sports etc. is its own reward -- testing, hardly.

oh don't downplay the glories of your own 99th percentile years amst

I dunno, I don't have terribly sporty kids, but friends who do have all sorts of stresses. Not just of not being as good as other kids, but also simply not making the team. Or for that matter the stress of essentially being forced to pick one sport and that being your sport. I see it all the time, and no, I've got to say, neither the kids nor the parents seem stress-free about this, even the better intentioned ones. So much for sports being its own reward, kids barely have chances to play sports for fun.

My daughter knows we don't take standardized tests seriously, and understand we have no real expectations, which of course poses its own set of problems. As does telling a kid that when they don't like something they can just "opt out." And for that matter, there is a probably not small subset of kids who find going to school, let alone tests, inherently stressful. What about them? Sooner or later a kid is going to have to do something they don't want to do, whether it's clean their room or do their homework or go to practice or whatever. Like, there are probably very few kids that actively want to, say, play piano at age five, or 10. But obviously many parents make their kids do it, because there may be a big benefit. Then again, some may end up turning their kids off it forever.

There seems to be no safe route through or around these philosophical quagmires. Parenting is hard. Life is hard. Etc.

I found this pretty effective: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/12/08/mom-to-common-core-task-force-take-the-4th-grade-parcc-practice-test-i-dare-you-to-tell-me-it-makes-sense/

But then, part of me also kept thinking of OJ trying on the gloves. "Imagine your child reading that word. Now imagine they don't know how to make the screen move, or find letters on the keyboard." Etc. Well, then, they may not do that well. And that's fine. If the test means shit, or is shit, then let it be shit. But I can't imagine it reducing kids to tears, or truly causing undo stress. Boredom, sure, but let's face it, this is school. For a lot of kid the number one thing they learn from school (after the three Rs) is how to manage boredom. Valuable life skill, imo, especially if you use public transportation.

you seem to have a certain amount of contempt for children

I don't think that's fair. But I do have children, and I do feel I am pretty attuned to what is truly damaging to them vs. what makes them unhappy. I have contempt for this test, which is absolutely true, but I kind of want it to play out, because I definitely also have a lot of contempt for the reaction of people, whenever faced with anything new or not perfectly attuned to their specific situation or preference, to "opt out." Basically, I have a lot of contempt. I am truly contemptible.

good god man

josh -- you want kids to suffer for the inanities of their parents?

i think the word is contemptuous, btw

Contemptful? I was heading out the door.

The truth is I am pretty conflicted about the whole thing. I feel bad for the kids, I feel bad for the teachers, I even feel bad for a lot of the parents. But I am not sure what the solution is. No tests? Different tests?

Do you have kids? did they take tests? Did they opt out of tests?

contemptoraneous

that test stresses me out tbf. its really inelegant and there's no excuse for inflicting maya angelou on our children in 2015

I encounter a lot of people who are even less ambivalent about this stuff than Josh, and I wouldn't say they have contempt for kids.

Josh: I'm more concerned about whether school is efficacious (and answering this also requires teachers and administrators to reevaluate what school is for) than whether it's touchy-feely and 100% free of pain. For any good teacher, a statewide or district-wide standardized test is going to be dead weight, taking up time they could spend teaching. The most effective assessments are formative assessments that inform teachers what their students have learned and how to proceed.

Schools can have high standards, challenging work, AND some measure of teacher and student autonomy. If a state or district insists on a standardized test, it should be cheap, easy, and fast, and the results should be taken with a grain of salt. Furthermore, teacher and school evaluations should be multifaceted and testing should account for a relatively small portion of those evaluations.

I am totally am on board with that, but I don't think what you say is terribly controversial. The question is, what power do we as parents have? These standardized testing schemes and things of that nature, they're top down, in this case (PARCC) federal, but otherwise mandates from the states, decisions made by the district/super, etc. By the time they are implemented, or by the time parents learn of them, like them or not they're happening and there's nothing we can do about it. Except, yes, express our displeasure, or opt out, but in many ways that punishes schools and teachers first and foremost, because they are under so much pressure to conform to constantly shifting standards and systems. It's easy to say every kid should have x number hours of instruction, no more than y number of kids in her class, z number of teachers per mass of students, so much money spent on each student each year and a lollipop at the end. But our public education system runs the gamut from shambles to exceptional, and any top down system imposed has the unenviable if not impossible task of finding some universal solution.

So yeah, standardized tests are dead weight and usually pointless and definitely not terribly predictive of future performance, let alone reflective of current achievement. But we seem stuck with them for the foreseeable future. The easiest way to escape is to run off to private schools, but that is neither a practical solution for many nor an equitable solution for most.

Factor in the privatization (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearson_Education) or at least subcontracting of education, and it's just a headache, all around.

Everyone just used Kahn Academy.

Kaaaaaaaaaaaahn!

if we were back in the land o' lincoln this year I'd be happy for my kids to take another standardized test; they don't get homework around those exams so it's comparably chill at la maison d'Euler. over here in frogland my eldest gets to take the brevet this year, a national exam for high school (''lycée") placement that consists of three 2-3 hour written exams in french, math and history/geography, and then an 15 minute oral exam in art history. they are big on national exams over here.

In my position as a North Sea trawlerman I'd only be speculating but I'd be very surprised if the profit per candidate topped a dollar. Adaptive, automatically scored computer assessments are fairly expensive to deliver and $25 or so would be considered close to rock bottom. There is no significant money to be made, as far as I can tell. Assuming this is the testing system the states want to use, there is no prospect of it not being subcontracted. Afaik, the two organisations involved are the only ones in the world that can automatically score written text for meaning and any attempts to replicate the decades of assessment technology they have developed would cost a heck of a lot more. The question of whether you need a fancy pants testing process in the first place remains open.

I can see why people are concerned about the world's 837th most profitable company having a stake in both assessment and content but it's par for the course internationally. I mentioned my belief there is no major money to be made through this specific assessment - that has raised questions throughout the industry, including the two organisations in question, as to why they went to all the bother of pulling together a vast, complicated test to a relatively small budget and silly deadline. Part of the answer is the belief that if you can show through through objective assessment that your content is better than the competitors' in delivering the common core outcomes, you can earn / retain those lucrative contracts. There does need to be a rigorous process for checking content for conflicts of interest, as there is in the UK, but it's not necessarily the nefarious plot it is made out to be.

Also Khan. He's not German.

I was always in the lowest percentile in spelling.

Do kids still take the CAT test? That was the big one when I was in school.

By the time they are implemented, or by the time parents learn of them, like them or not they're happening and there's nothing we can do about it.

You actually can follow what's happening with ed funding/policy for your state & district and take the fight there.

"There is a lot of focus on cranks, often bloggers with an axe to grind who are given a mystifyingly elevated platform"

loo cmon mayne

v interesting thread imo even if I know nothing about american system. Euler otm our localised version of European nationalised exams are the toughest most stressful ive ever sat. by far. but tbf I may be thinking different age group.

These are K12 - so kindergarten up to 17 or 18.

I have a strong preference for the essay-based A-Level / Bacc / Matura stuff you get in Europe. Multiple choice tests at 17 seem strange.

this PARCC exam is being given to kids ages 6ish-18ish iiuc, in each grade, and there's nothing at stake for the students: it won't determine where you get placed in further education, unlike the european exams. as ShariVari says these exams are just for politicians to gauge...something.

xp otm

there's probably a happy medium where a really rigourous series of tests in a month in 11 subjects at 15 and 7 subjects at 17 doesnt decide the next decade or more of yr life but once you've been through it you'd begrudge the skinny little bastards coming into the jobs ladder having it any easier maybe

I'm not actually sure what these tests decide for the students tbh? Like I don't think anyone is saying if you don't score highly at 5 you'll have to be a drugstore stocker for life. A huge deleterious effect of over-testing is the time & space lost for actual teaching/learning because school is just test prep.

But I'm worried about various tests being used against schools & teachers. Esp considering what tests can't measure.

in a couple of years the tests at the high school level are to be linked to graduation. and the 11th grade PARCC will also be used for tracking purposes, at least in English. students who score at a certain level will be considered "college-ready" and will take a rigorous English course their senior year. students who score below that level will take a more mixed senior year English class, which attempts remediation through writing workshops, but also, i think, some life skills?

this is the current plan as far as I know. My 11th and 12th graders don't have to take this test at all, as they have taken the old test, the state test that was tied to graduation.

as a teacher my biggest objection to PARCC so far is how much time it takes. March and May the library and computer lab at my school are completely unavailable due to testing.

my second-biggest objection is to the way my county has chosen to align the curriculum with the test. all teachers are to teach this curriculum like we're fucking zombies, and the aligned-to-PARCC-assessments that were centrally designed for us that we have to implement are a disaster--the kids are confused, not engaged, not interested.

io is right that this will probably negatively impact teachers because most states have implemented evaluation systems that consider test scores in how a teacher is evaluated. i feel like they're going to have to relax that standard when all the kids fail the first couple of years though.

i lied; my biggest objection to PARCC is that it was created by a private company. i am highly suspicious of standardized testing that creates a cash cow for companies like Pearson; why is every public school teacher now marching to Pearson's drumbeat? (Not the Common Core standards, in my experience; the test.)

My understanding of how the tendering process went is that the education authorities gave an extremely specific set of content and tech requirements and contracted the two organisations that could deliver a test that met them. One was a private company, the other an American not-for-profit (albeit one that acts like a private company in all meaningful respects). In this specific case, it looks to me like the education authorities rather than the service providers are laying down the drumbeat.

ya we did that with our tech partners at startup time a few years back guess what

That Pearson doesn't stand to profit significantly from PARCC is just speculation. Their own press releases suggest they implicitly want to take on the College Board's SAT and AP properties, and they explicitly want to participate in standards setting. The more they can align the test to college performance, the more they can sell Pearson programs and products (their products are terrible btw). To the imminent detriment of public schools, Pearson would love to have the symbiotic relationship that the College Board has with colleges and universities.

Just because Pearson's machine scoring correlates highly with human scoring doesn't mean what and why they're scoring are worthwhile; it doesn't even mean that Pearson will be saving states and districts money; it just means that Pearson stands to make more money by employing far fewer human scorers.

So be it if states court Pearson et al., believing, almost superstitiously, that US schools are falling behind, are producing fewer employable graduates, etc. (this is old "Nation at Risk" rhetoric and long past its sell-by date), but I don't see the need for the that's-just-the-way-things-are cynicism towards those teachers, parents, students, and possibly even administrators who want to opt out, who want to "decentralize" and give as much local authority to education as possible.

There isn't much of a direct profit - its the potential for indirect profit that matters, demonstrating that learning resources are effective and good value for money. That's where the greatest scrutiny should be. I do get the impression that the assessment companies are catering to the agenda rather than setting it, though. The corporatisation of the American education system runs far deeper than partnership with particular companies - the problem is the application of top-down business theory that views the microanalysis of data and the paring back of costs as the only paths to an efficient and effective machine. The U.S. probably is falling behind in a lot of respects, not least readiness for college, but even if the common core does what it's meant to it's unlikely to significantly change that without broader structural changes or the engagement and empowerment of teachers.

I have no stake, or great interest tbh, in PARCC or the U.S. education system but I can tell you that computer assessment, done properly, isn't cheaper than human marking. The cheapest possible option is the multiple choice and optical mark recognition system typically used for SATs, which Europeans find so mystifying. Automated scoring has the benefit of being able to assess answers in more depth than multiple choice papers while maintaining speed and a measure of objectivity.

I think the issue is that Pearson sells not just the tests, but also the textbooks and also does the scoring, etc. It's one of those eggs in one basket situations, especially since I've heard a lot of people have problems with their textbooks. And hey, maybe they're not making much money, but the PARCC is costing the state something like $50 million. Which sure, per student, may not be much, but given IL is something like a trillion in debt ...

Also, the test is something like 10 hours long, which is pretty silly for 8-year olds. Plus, yes, I have taken some of the sample test questions, and yes, they are pretty intense.

It's the link between the test content and the prep content that needs to have the most attention paid to it. In the UK, where the main exam boards (Oxford, Cambridge, the aforementioned international educational services provider, etc) also produce learning resources, the qualifications regulator has a lot of control over monitoring whether students are being taught for the test or getting an unfair advantage by using certain books. Afaik, nobody who works on books can see live exam items, nobody who creates tests can train teachers, etc. The same safeguards would be useful in the US.

You actually can follow what's happening with ed funding/policy for your state & district and take the fight there.

This is true, to an extent, but playing the long game is basically a full time job, and state politics are a mess of defensiveness, recrimination, corruption, et al. Regardless, there is an astounding lack of transparency behind a lot of school policies. Just hitting meetings I suspect would not be enough to get the information needed to muster a good argument, let alone a grassroots movement, pro/con. I feel a lot of parents are flailing because by the time changes in policy are introduced and implemented, then it's an uphill battle against something that is already entrenched. Even the protests have an air of desperation to them. Are we anti-standardized test? Are we anti this specific standardized test? Are we anti Pearson? Are we anti "sit and stare" policy? Every parent at the angry parent meeting I went to had a different concern, including one parent, mentioned earlier, whose biggest issue was the PARCC name, arguing that the "college and careers" part of Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers put too much pressure on kids still many years away from college and career.

And speaking for Illinois alone, I believe the PARCC specifically is the fourth new test introduced in four years. That's just nuts, considering each new test requires new training, new programs, new standards, etc. It's just a big waste of time and money to no apparent concrete purpose. And certainly virtually no recourse.

For the record, the lack of transparency cuts through all layers of education. As a teacher, I've taken (and am expected to take) licks from parents about policies in which I have little or no formal understanding.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2015/03/07/a-16-year-old-takes-the-new-parcc-exam-heres-her-disturbing-report/

The comments are much better and more balanced than the article.

May be the first time I've ever written that.

It's the first time anyone has ever written that, about anything.

I had the same feeling. Article is like a loss leader.

This has been going on all week in Florida.

Pearson, man.

Florida's tests are provided by a company called AIR that promised to undercut either of the PARCC providers, in case that wasn't clear.

I don't see what's special about the comments. A lot of them are people saying she doesn't write well (for a 16 year old? How much writing by 16 year olds do they read?) or people responding with, "Remember, she's just a kid." It's all standard comments section fodder for an education article: unions bad, corporations bad, schools are in the gutter, same as it always was, stray racist comment, etc.

In spite of Common Core emphasizing critical thinking, multiple methods, multiple solutions, problem solving, etc., the CC test items I've seen at my school all seem very traditional. I looked at one of the PARCC 11th grade English sample tests and the questions are all variations on main idea, context, theme, and vocabulary, and they're very time consuming. How are these test results supposed to inform districts, schools, and teachers how to improve teaching these concepts, or how to improve teaching at all? How much can these skills be explicitly taught? They're all elementary and middle school concepts, but executed in a more sophisticated way, and I think rather than learning to interpret the test author's reasoning about what context provided the main idea behind a single phrase in the lesser of Nella Larsen's two novels, 11th graders would get more out of writing for publication, learning advanced writing frames, and learning the reading and writing skills and terminology associated with certain fields: law, medicine, journalism, technical writing, and literary criticism.

States should only test for basic skills if at all; tests should be leaner and have as little contentious ambiguity as possible. The warrants, contingencies, and uncertainties necessary in the discussion of literature all belong in the classroom, but not in standardized tests.

I like the Common Core, but this PARCC test in particular is pretty challenging. I really do suggest folks at all interested try at least a couple of questions. I definitely agree that schools should focus fully on basic skills, and mastery of basic skills. That I think is one goal of the CC, basically abandoning past practices of moving rapidly through the curriculum too fast rather than focusing on mastering what's at hand first, which clearly many/most kids do not do. But I also think that one of the more foolhardy aspects of PARCC and many standardized test in general is the idea that everyone needs to go to college, or that getting into college is a success in and of itself. That's certainly one major way the US differs from Europe, which iirc does track kids out pretty ruthlessly (by yeah, tests, among other things), though I know that has changed a bit in recent years, as the big business of higher education increasingly takes over from the former system. Tuitions have been creeping up pretty quickly in the UK, I think, though nowhere near as high as they are here.

And yeah, many of the WaPo comments were "she can't write" or "yeah, it's hard, but you've been coddled into thinking you're special." But others do go into the nuts and bolts of these tests and trends, irrc.

I have no idea who grades the PARCC and how, btw. Pearson, too, right? Including the written stuff, the answers that are not multiple choice and machine graded? How long will it take to even get results back? And how useful will those results be months down the line?

spose they're gonna do that w/ computers or pros or desperate grad students locked in a warehouse somewhere

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/05/science/new-test-for-computers-grading-essays-at-college-level.html?_r=0

Xps, the comments (and there are about 1000 of them) aren't necessarily all well informed or fair but it's positive to see people on both sides arguing passionately about whether tests are needed, what the benefits of the common core might be, what assessment should be looking for, the failings and benefits of current models, etc. Unlike on the SATs, there are no black and white answers in this debate. When I talk about the tenor of the press coverage being disappointing, I am referring to articles like that where all the nuances have been stripped out because it has been left to people with one particular slant on whether standardised tests are the devil's tools. Strauss has written about eight articles over the last week railing against assessment - including one about a celebration of Dr Seuss' birthday being shifted to allow kids to test. How does that help parents understand this better?

I haven't seen enough of PARCC in action to go to bat for all the content, and as mentioned, I don't get involved in K12 or the U.S. at all, but I do come from a country where standardised testing is mandatory and the basis for most university entrance. Those tests are primarily essay based and are explicitly geared towards demonstrating critical thinking and the ability to extend an argument. I can't personally see how you can do anything useful with multiple choice tests of world history, etc. That model is also much more sophisticated than PARCC is but it seems like a step in the right direction. There are always valid criticisms of A-Levels, Baccalaureate systems, the Matura, Irish highers, etc but they do more closely mirror what is expected of learners at university.

Including the written stuff, the answers that are not multiple choice and machine graded? How long will it take to even get results back? And how useful will those results be months down the line

My understanding is that its hybrid scored at the moment with a view to it moving to full machine scoring when the states have been convinced it's as reliable as it needs to be. Machine scoring is the future, tbh. It's complicated, difficult to explain and difficult to take on board but machines can be trained to assess extended writing, within certain parameters.

How I think it probably works is that each item in the first phase of the test will be beta tested by hundreds or thousands of people with a range of abilities (which is where you get indignant parents complaining that their children are being exploited). Those responses will be graded by large numbers of human examiners and the results fed back into the machine. This gives you thousands of sample learner responses the marking systems can compare new learner responses to, along with the aggregated wisdom of dozens of examiners on what those responses should score. The computers can apply scores automatically but are also trained to know when responses fall outside of their window of confidence and kick it back to another human for checking.

When candidates like the one in the article complain about tests being different to the ones their friends are taking that is done for one obvious reason ( to stop cheating) and one less obvious reason. Speculating, naturally, but I would think that the extra essay question she complained about getting might not have contributed to her grade. New items can be seeded in live tests before being released as scored questions.

The idea is that, at some point in the future, you can have lots of scope to get really in-depth responses from candidates without waiting weeks for humans to mark them or running the risk that comes with using the subjective opinions of examiners. None of this is ever explained well.

unscored 'test' test questions are plenty familiar to anyone who takes college entrance style exams in the us, they only it explain it to you like a million tedious times

I can see how a computer can be consistent in grading written responses, but I don't see how it can be objective (or subjective). I don't think subjectivity is as much an issue in human grading as much as variability. Regarding these Pearson computer graders, it seems there's more variability between humans than between a computer and a human mean, which isn't at all surprising considering there's only one computer and many humans. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the math.

These A/B or "test" test questions can be pretty insidious. The College Board runs point-biserial correlations to ensure that the demographic breakdown of test scores remains static, e.g., that black people won't answer a question better than white people; they do this not to prevent bias, but to ensure that their test's present bias remains intact. I don't know if Pearson intends to use similar means to project infallibility and respectability, but by measuring these tests against college performance, it looks like they're already on the factor analysis fallacy train IQ testing has taken. In other words, they want to appear to be measuring something valuable and definite, because they probably wouldn't get the contract if the test asked the only four questions that actually matter:

1. How much money do your parents make?
2. What level of education did your parents achieve?
3. How much test preparation did you receive?
4. About how many books are in your household?

Schools shouldn't act with such deference to the College Board, to Pearson, or to colleges themselves. These tests aren't for improving students' education, and school isn't simply about going to college. Although the U.S. is heavily over-credentialed, I'll admit I want the students I work with to go to college if only to be able to make a living, but I don't think that schools should help colleges pre-sort their applications.

explicitly geared towards demonstrating critical thinking and the ability to extend an argument.

I'm not being facetious when I say that a great deal of ed "reform" and development efforts in the US are led by shadowy moneyed conservatives who also happen to be staunchly Christian and explicitly want more curriculum control to stop students from learning the "wrong" things. So they are literally never going to drive testing toward critical thinking and the ability to extend an argument, and would hamstring any efforts by any other group to do so.

It is interesting which states either dropped out of the PARCC plan or never signed up in the first place. It's not even a red/blue, conservative/liberal divide, it's something more complex and shifting, sometimes political, sometimes practical, sometimes pressure, etc. Even within each state it's a mess. There are some superintendents and districts in Illinois who are staunchly anti test. Chicago tried to get out of it, but was pushed to keep the PARCC, but I'm sure has found many ways to circumvent the more onerous aspects of it. But other districts/cities/towns/villages/municipalities are totally pro. It's kind of fascinating and chaotic. I wonder if anyone's attempted an analysis yet.

Certain traits can be scored objectively but, yes, the key thing is depersonalisation (vs teacher marking) and reduced variability (vs examiner-marked standardised tests). Most human markers I've encountered are basically fine but they get as tired or irritable as anyone else and that can impact upon scores, in addition to any inherent variability in how good they perceive work to be.

Idk whether there is going to demographic analysis built in or whether that is something that school boards would do at their end.

Perhaps my thinking is shaped by the fact that, in most of the world, tertiary education is a relatively natural extension of the school system. Although there are numerous caveats and the deck is still massively weighted towards the affluent and those with highly educated parents, standardised national tests do give learners an opportunity to show they are ready for higher education and also a certain amount of academic currency that can be spent at any university. At least to some extent, it makes the process of applying to university more transparent if you are being measured against the same national benchmark as everyone else. You don't really have the same corporate beast waiting at the end in Europe, though.

Not much more than half of people who start a college programme in the US finish it. The figure in the UK is probably closer to 90% and that is reasonably consistent across Europe. I think the Common Core and PARCC can have a positive impact on viewing college preparation as more than the rote learning of an academic English lexis (which the SAT essentially boils down to, IMO) but it's still going to be a drop in the ocean without a completely unrealistic set of wider reforms. US universities are egregiously expensive and many are terrible as learning institutions. i can't see much appetite or scope for changing that. Where the U.S. and the UK are united in failing is in providing for learners who don't want to go down the academic route.

What is the reasoning behind administering the PARCC to pre-teen kids in grades 3-5? That's largely what seems to have ticked parents off. College prep really isn't and shouldn't be on their radar.

Partly to check that they are individually meeting the expected common core standards for their age, partly the bigger piece about harvesting data to measure the effectiveness of programmes, learning resources, etc, I guess.

It all scans as basically a collective take one for the team, both in terms of students as test subjects as well as takers and also through the next few years of transition, as previously high scoring students start to fall off due to the challenges of administering and taking the new test(s), and previously low scoring students continue to do poorly or worse. I suppose in a few years it will all stabilize, but by then we'll probably all be dead, anyway.

I don't think you can implement any academic reforms without those kinds of difficult transition periods but, as far as I can tell, the test validity is less of a problem than the wider issue of teachers getting up to speed with the common core itself and not feeling adequately supported in being able to do that.

I guess we will know soon enough how the students are going to fare on the assessments. I'd be surprised if it's as badly as most people seem to think.

Seriously, peruse the sample tests for a bit. I'm prepare to be pleasantly surprised, but I think these kids are going to get walloped.

http://parcc.pearson.com/practice-tests/

Idk, we'll see. I would say that current testing theory does generally suggest some content should be above the level you are expecting candidates to reach so parts that might seem particularly hard for an age group could be intentionally so. I'd also say that testing companies have a habit of sticking their duff items in practice versions. Again, I'm not an expert on K12 but I do get the impression that a lot of this could be better explained to parents - not just sample questions but a primer on what the item types are designed to test and why they are formulated in the way that they are.

I don't mind testing a little bit above grade level as long as questions aren't abstruse and open to interpretation, but Pearson, et al., don't need or deserve 6 days (out of 180, not including make-up days) from the school schedule and students' lives.

No test is going to improve college graduation rates. No test will drive effective reform. They're capable of little besides providing information.

I'll go further and say that standards can only influence the explicit content that teachers teach, and, regardless of its advertised philosophy, Common Core basically duplicates the standards that most states already had in place. That's not a criticism: I'm mostly indifferent to the CC standards. That said, effective teachers who were capable, before Common Core, of helping students develop critical thinking skills have changed little of what they do after Common Core. Likewise, teachers who floundered before Common Core will flounder after Common Core. Without explicit lesson plans to follow, less talented teachers are confused about how to teach something as nebulous as critical thinking or problem solving.

bamcquern so otm throughout

as a teacher it always weirds me out how much time and energy gets put into standards. people always ask ® what i think of this standard or that standard, and i always tell them asking teachers to worry about standards is like asking a track coach to worry about where the hurdles are placed and how many, rather than just focusing on producing better hurdlers.

I've had a different experience with the standards, late great. I work in a district in which CC alignment is a big, big deal. Constantly. In addition to the de facto RTI practice of identifying and posting standards on the whiteboard per lesson, I'm expected to align with other teachers in the district on a weekly/monthly basis, to design shared assessments with CC-based rubrii and to track standards through lessons, units, and the year as a whole. There's a huge push toward data-collecting/standard (e.g. let's see how Sally does on RL 9.9.2 on date X, Y, Z, and how this is essentially integrated and addressed in the overall unit design, and how we're moving to target it for intervention/enrichment). The discussion around this alignment/consistency of design, data-collection and the CC are rigorous and ongoing. It's impossible to attend to the standards in a perfunctory way, which I sometimes resent. However, I think the curriculum /is/ improving, even if it's at a heavy cost to sanity.

For the record, my 5th grader said the first day of testing was fine, even easy. That's my girl!

i get what you're saying soda, i was more speaking to the question of "what do you think of the common core standards (vis a vis the old state standards)" rather than "what do you think of 'standards-based' educational practices"

Gotcha. My reading comprehension is dodgy tonight. Yr point taken too – CC is a marginal improvement over the state standards, but nothing too grand or different.

http://blogs.denverpost.com/coloradoclassroom/2015/03/12/put-test-cus-derek-briggs-parcc-expectations/4567/

decent overview of the pro-PARCC side, echoes a lot of what sharivari was saying upthread

it's been a few days since i've read the thread, but re: the issue of pearson's profit-seeking...in spite of whatever cost this may take to develop and grade, i don't see how pearson does this without generating some substantial profit. theyre not a charitable organization, theyre only the biggest baddest education publishing firm in the world. my guess is developing PARCC and CCSS aligned curricular resources is where the money is down the line. if pearson can continue holding onto near-monopoly power of the testing game, theyll win the lion's share of the publishing game that goes with it.

also i p much categorically reject the college-bound-for-all focus of education policy elites rn if only because higher ed is still a zero-sum meritocratic sorting mechanism that is prohibitively expensive and may have unintended consequences of increasing dropouts. pair that with the fact the the GED is now CCSS aligned and we have the possibility of some very well educated at the top and the same problems at the bottom possibly exacerbated.

The testing isn't a cash cow but there are definitely political advantages to helping the states out of a jam by delivering a good product to an unreasonable deadline and it is likely to position the company well with the publishing contracts. It's a risk, though. The atmosphere has been so poisonous, there is a danger of it backfiring reputationally through no real fault of their own.

There is an ongoing obsession with proving the academic bona fides of the company and all its services, with an eye on being able to show a track record of positive learner impact when new entrants to the market, like Microsoft and Murdoch's Amplify, start knocking for state contracts. Assessment fits into that strategy.

Away from HE, I've been really impressed with the German and Austrian model of vocational education over the last few years and (notwithstanding the shift away from the U.S. as a manufacturing base) it's something that could potentially have a positive impact over there if it was tried out.

I really don't see how it can't be a cash cow. If you make the books, make the tests, grade the tests, and then not only get gov money to do so but get them to make the aforementioned mandatory, how can it not be making money hand over fist? Last I saw, the company earns maybe $4 billion a year just from North America. Don't know how much of that is profit these days, but a quick search I think revealed maybe $1.2 billion in profit back in 2012.

Publishing deals are potentially lucrative, computer-graded testing less so. Combining the two would be profitable but we are not talking vast numbers.

Overall profit was about $1.1bn but a lot of that is coming from Brazil, China, etc now. The U.S. has been very tough for every education company over the last few years as budgets have been tight and enrolments down.

Though the strengthening dollar does mean the U.S. is more lucrative in overall terms than it has been in a while now.

shari, i know youre bringing some psychometric realness but i kinda feel like defending the motives of pearson is misplaced. they are dominating this corner of the industry, i dont care if the computerized grading is just a loss leader. how much profit they are wresting from states is kinda beside the point if they squeeze out the competition. the point is they have a lot of folks whose jobs are tied to the continued expansion of the testing regime and i think we should be wary of that.

Does that mean I think it’s a great, perfect test right off the bat? I don’t know.

Is Briggs saying that there might be some outside chance that it's a perfect test? That's nuts.

He says he wants the test to be integrated into the curriculum, but how does he propose that? The PARCC will not be formative and it is by design separate from the curriculum. He says that PARCC is better than district tests and tests that came before but he doesn't say which ones or how.

In reference to the Nella Larsen passage, Briggs wants to accuse kids of not having enough grit or whatever to do something challenging or something they don't want to do, but the problem with the passage isn't that Quicksand isn't interesting; it's that the PARCC questions are abstruse, incredibly time-consuming versions of standard comprehension tasks. They have little to do with "critical thinking" or whatever, and the idea that you can measure critical thinking is dubious. It's a claim a few degrees away from the pseudoscientific claim that you can measure "intelligence."

There will be a lot of students that struggle on this test. You will see more of a floor effect – more students scoring at the same level as if they had guessed at random. For those students, can you get a good measure of what they can know and do? Probably not. So for those students, the test may not be reliable.

Here Briggs basically says that the test "may" not be reliable for "a lot" of students. If AP students struggle with the test, can we revise that "a lot" to "most"?

I still think that your claim that Pearson doesn't stand to profit greatly from testing is speculative, even without considering the long game of aligning their terrible educational media with the test. If I'm going to speculate, I'm going to lean toward believing the noncontroversial idea that a for-profit billion dollar company is doing everything with big profits in mind.

I absolutely get why people are sceptical about the motives. It's a profit making company and this is definitely part of a strategy that is aiming to secure a profitable position in the medium and long term, even if there isn't a short term cash grab. There does seem to be a genuine belief that the only way they will secure long term contracts and out-manoeuvre the tech heavy hitters like Microsoft, and potentially Google in the future, is to demonstrate that they are actually doing something positive for learners though. It has never struck me as cynical (or organised) enough to be the vampire squid it's painted as. In some areas that push for academic rigour has been quite commercially self-sabotaging. It's good that people are scrutinising their actions and the interconnection between various interests but I do think the (perfectly valid) objection to profit and education mixing does occasionally lead to a lack of fairness in that analysis.

Xp

i will fully own up to not being fair to pearson. i hope they will accept my sincerest of apologies.

*bends over and points butt in pearson's face* owned

Not that it helps but many of the companies that are officially not for profit, like ETS, Cambridge, Michigan, etc are just as commercially aggressive in their own way. There is a huge crossover of staff and philosophy. Other than states and schools creating their own content idk that there is any pure option.

there isn't unless we ditch capitalism. i can only hope to subvert from within the classroom.

I sincerely wish you the best of luck.

me too.

http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2015/03/pearson-is-big-brother.html

pearson been combing twitter for student discussion of parcc

It's not discussion of PARCC, it's the leaking of live test items. Idk why the blog post doesn't make that clear. That is standard practice for any exam board that has items that are reused.

http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/04/what-happens-when-students-boycott-a-standardized-test/390087/

i loved taking standardized tests

it always felt like a big event, like the school was on lockdown. no hurrying through the regular class schedule. just sitting in a quiet room filling in bubbles with a no 2 pencil. i loved it.

cookie during break

This seems pretty ridic:

https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/04/09/cheaters-never-prosper

I was listening to Buffalo talk radio on the way home, and they were discussing Common Core--specifically, the testing that I take it has just been implemented. It was amazing, because the caller’s frustration matched exactly what’s been going on here since 1997. You either took the testing from our model, or, more likely, we both took it from the same place, Australia or somewhere. (We seem to take a lot of stuff from Australia--they’re at the forefront of making clemenza’s life difficult.)

The caller’s daughter, in grade 4 now, in grade 3 when she wrote the test, was assessed as a 1 in language arts. The caller looked at the breakdown, and saw that the daughter was given 3/20 on the essay component. So she went to the teacher and:

1) Asked to see her daughter’s work. Can’t see it, no. (Same here--the booklets never come back, just a summary of results.)

2) Asked if the teacher could look and the work and make some suggestions. Teachers can’t look at the work, no. (Same here--once the teacher sends the work in to be assessed over the summer by someone else, that’s the last he/she ever sees of it.)

Getting another teacher to mark the work, a teacher who knows nothing about the student, that I agree with (for the purposes of a standardized test only). The rest of that is very messed up, and impossible to explain rationally to parents. We want you to improve, you’ll just have guess as to how and where.

'improvement' means 'more diligent completion of the tasks we assign in order to improve you'

Getting another teacher to mark the work, a teacher who knows nothing about the student, that I agree with (for the purposes of a standardized test only). The rest of that is very messed up, and impossible to explain rationally to parents. We want you to improve, you’ll just have guess as to how and where.

Yeah, this is a difficult area. Some countries require children / parents to have supervised access to exam scripts. The challenge is that you get much more accurate marking if you can re-use elements of assessments multiple times. The solution that is often used in the UK is practice exams that are marked professionally and can be accessed, with feedback, by teachers and students but it adds another layer of administration / cost in. It's easier with languages as you can give specific scores for things like grammar and vocab that can be used to guide improvement but for humanities it's harder to see a positive washback effect.