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.

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.