Common Core

Matthew Lynch published in Matthew Lynch, Policy & Reform, Testing

4 Ways Common Core Teaches Life Skills

One of the loudest arguments against Common Core Standards is that they don’t apply to “real-life” situations and that their methods are too far removed from what actually happens in the workplace. It’s unfortunate that this argument is so prominent, because these standards were developed with the opposite intent.

Connecting the material that kids learn with the real world abilities they need to succeed is a foundational element of the internationally benchmarked standards. At the heart of Common Core is a recognition that students must be able to retain what they learn and that is accomplished by using real-life examples and applications.

Here are just a few of the ways that the transition to the standards and new Core-aligned assessments will teach life skills:

  1. Emphasis on the “how” of things. You can find the answer to anything by typing your question into a search engine box. Think about how often you rely on this technology to find answers to your everyday queries compared to the amount of effort you used to expend as a student before the Internet existed. Common Core puts an emphasis on the journey to finding answers, particularly when it comes to the math standards. It eliminates rote memorization and gives students the freedom to decide their own path to finding a correct answer.
  2. Computer-based test taking. When was the last time you did anything in your professional life that was handwritten? Even if you are in a business where you handwrite invoices, receipts or memos, technology likely comes into play with communications, bookkeeping and other day-to-day functions. We ask our high school students to complete assignments online, take college assessment exams online and even apply to college online. It makes sense to shift to a universal computer-based assessment model for our younger students, too. The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) test aligns with Common Core benchmarks using familiar technology that helps take away some of the test-taking anxiety, allowing students to focus solely on showing what they have learned. These new tests also require more writing and break away from the decades-old “fill in the bubble” multiple-choice format that focused on rote memorization rather than any true critical thinking.
  3. Better feedback. When you are on the job, your superiors do not wait until you’ve been promoted to review your strengths and weaknesses from the previous position. The end goal for tests like PARCC is to return answers to students in the year that the assessment is taken so it can have an impact on what they are learning in the present. Instead of reporting back to students on what they know, PARCC testing informs them about where they still need improvement in a timely way that allows that progress to take place more quickly.
  4. Discipline-specific writing skills. Despite the dominance of digital technology, more than ever, many jobs demand strong writing skills. Common Core standards address this growing need by calling for more rigorous reading, writing and critical thinking across subjects. It is not enough to simply know something—you must be able to communicate that knowledge. Common Core does not supplant or discount language arts instruction, but strengthens it through better connecting the practice of writing with the needs of employers today.

Students, parents and educators are discovering Common Core and hearing a great deal of conflicting information. One truth that should not get lost in the public debate is how the new standards promise to create a generation of K-12 students who are not only prepared for the world stage, but who excel on it.

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Matthew Lynch published in Matthew Lynch, Policy & Reform

The Ultimate Demise of Common Core – Part III: The Logistics

From an idealogical perspective, the differences that divide Americans are also what make the nation unique and great. When it comes to education, however, there seems to be a competing theory that differences should be dismissed in favor of finding a standardized way to teach all K-12 students. Time and again when it comes to national policy on education, stringent sets of benchmarks are consistently put in place that are accompanied with funding incentives. The latest example of this one-size-fits-all approach to education policy is Common Core standards and the testing that goes with them.

This week I’ve already written about the way politics and parents will contribute to the end of days for Common Core and today I’d like to add in exactly how the logistics will too.

American students really are multi-faceted.

It seems everywhere you look, we celebrate diversity in this country. From skin color, to language spoken, to sexual preferences, the national message seems to be “Be you. Whatever that looks like.” Except when it comes to measuring a “good” education. It’s widely accepted that students learn in different ways and customized learning initiatives are a trend fueled by in-classroom technology. HOW students learn is varied, but WHAT they are learning is somehow expected to fall into some neat, standardized package. Laying down countrywide rules of sorts for learning, and attaching those to funding, is an easy way to check off boxes on a spreadsheet but not an effective way to teach each student exactly what he or she needs to know based on career paths, interests and life circumstances.

Regionalisms exist.

It’s true that the world is becoming smaller and that the differences that once divided K-12 students by geography are shrinking. Still, there are some learning standards that just make more sense in one area over another. The benefits of learning a foreign language should be shared on a national level, but the specifics of those benchmarks should be considered. A state like Arizona or Texas, for example, with a high percentage of Spanish-speakers could benefit from more curriculum customized to that population, and in a much more effective way than a state like Iowa or Maine. Common Core is not a curriculum set, of course, but I use the language example as a way to show the difference between students and how where they live really does impact what they really should know. Industry specific learning is also a consideration when it comes to what should be taught more heavily, not as a way to pigeon-hole students but as a way to set them up for the best chance at career success. Considerations for subject areas that have been weak in a particular region should also be thought about and given priority.

There is not one model student.

The idea that all U.S. K-12 students should know exactly the same things, and graduate from high school with the same shared learning experiences is flawed. Of course no one expects any two students to be identical in their learning outcomes, but the implication of Common Core standards are that there should be a cookie-cutter which every district and every teacher uses. Such an educational model goes against every other American ideal – like innovation, creativity and individuality – yet is prevalent throughout the public school system. If there were one leading flaw in Common Core requirements, it would be this: it allows no wiggle room for letting students be the people they were meant to be.

If you could pinpoint the crux of the problem with Common Core standards and implementation, what would it be?

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Matthew Lynch published in Policy & Reform

Automaticity: How can it be sometimes bad, sometimes good?

**The Edvocate is pleased to publish guest posts as way to fuel important conversations surrounding P-20 education in America. The opinions contained within guest posts are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official opinion of The Edvocate or Dr. Matthew Lynch.**

A guest post by Bruce Deitrick Price

Automaticity means that you recognize something instantly. You see a neighbor’s dog and in a split-second you say, “Bucky!” That’s automaticity.

Curiously enough, the Education Establishment thinks that automaticity is sometimes evil, sometimes ideal. This strange paradox reveals a great deal about the intellectual chaos and corruption in our K-12 system.

This paradox is even more extreme and perverse than you may at first imagine. When automaticity is helpful, our experts say it’s bad. When automaticity is destructive, our experts say it’s good. That’s what ideology and secret agenda have done to the field of education.

Historically, children were expected to learn simple addition problems and the multiplication tables. You knew automatically that 7 times 8 is 56. You knew that 7+12 is 19. With just a small amount of such information, a person can readily solve the common math that we  encounter in everyday situations. Remarkably, all the so-called “reform” programs of the last 60 years specifically crusaded against this capability. New Math, circa 1965, emphasized all sorts of high-falutin activities (Boolean algebra, statistics, algebraic matrices) but denigrated any tendency toward memorizing arithmetic facts so you would have them as standard intellectual equipment.

Reform Math circa 1985, specifically forbade children to learn basic math facts. An early reliance on calculators was encouraged! Then we come to Common Core Math, which  brags that children will engage in higher-level thinking and creative problem-solving but doesn’t want them to know the multiplication tables. The pattern is relentless. Automaticity, with regard to numbers and doing arithmetic, is constantly denigrated.

Clearly, everything that was ordinary and desirable in all cultures for thousands of years has been deemed unacceptable by our Education Establishment. If you look at only this part of the story, you know that these people have a perverse love for whatever is inefficient. Why? Most likely, they are addicted to collectivist thinking. The worst possible outcome for these people (people like Bill Ayers) is that some children master math quickly and sprint ahead of their classmates. So our progressives use any trick to block that possibility. Leveling is the goal. Ergo, no automaticity in math classrooms.

Now let’s look at a situation where automaticity can be destructive.  That’s the process of learning to read. Public schools for 80 years have ordered children to seek automaticity in the memorization of sight-words. The essence of Whole Word reading instruction is that children are told to memorize entire words as graphic units. This  fundamentally absurd approach has a dozen different names (sight-words, high frequency words, Dolch words, look-say; don’t be confused by the interchangeable aliases). The basic idea is that children look at a word (for example xgfh) and they memorize it as a design. You might object that xgfhis not a real word. But a first-grade child would not know that or guess that. All the designs look the same to children (that is, they look bizarre and unfriendly just as xgfh now looks to you).

Children DO need to memorize the smallest units with automaticity, that is, the individual letters. Then they need to memorize the sounds represented by these letters with automaticity. That is the correct way to proceed (it’s known as phonics). But this approach is precisely forbidden in our elementary schools. Instead the children are told to memorize larger, more complex units than the brain can easily handle, i.e., whole words such as xgfh.

Please note, for the brain any memorization is essentially the same task. You look at an airplane in the sky and you say that’s a 757. You look at a  coin and you know it’s a nickel. No big deal, especially in the case of arithmetic  where there are only so many scores of helpful facts. On the other hand, memorizing many hundreds of sight-words is extremely difficult.

The more objects there are and the more similar they are,  the more quickly the project becomes hopeless. Imagine somebody put together a collection of 100 coins from around the world, all of them more or less silvery and all of them the size of our nickel and dime. Naming these coins with automaticity would be very similar to naming English sight-words with automaticity. Now imagine the teacher says you have to move up to 300, and then 500. That’s what learning to read with sight-words is like for  kids in elementary school. A nightmare. Not only is automaticity virtually impossible to achieve, but trying to do so is destructive to the child’s mind. The brain is asked to switch back and forth from phonetic reading to sight-word reading—two completely different mental operations.

The bottom line here is that  our elite educators are social engineers with ideological goals. They want an undifferentiated society. They don’t want educational excellence. So they pick the worst ways to do everything.

If  a child needs automaticity to be good at arithmetic, our commissars will forbid automaticity.

If automaticity with sight-words is the worst thing that could happen to a child,  the same commissars will demand automaticity.

Anybody even a bit fond of common sense has to be appalled by this. Anyone who has a heart has to be appalled by this.

We have millions of high school graduates arriving in college who’ve never been asked to memorize much of anything— arithmetic, science, history, geography, dates, presidents—because memorization is bad. The Education Establishment will tell you that there’s nothing more evil than rote memorization. They will tell you that again and again.

Meanwhile, these same students starting in K will be required to memorize sight-words. So we have a wonderfully screwed up society now where many people don’t know much of anything, and one main thing they don’t know is how to read.

With regard to Common Core, there is a lot of new verbiage and jargon, but this massive retooling of American public schools seems to have accommodated all the worst things from the past. The Education Establishment insists that this is a wonderful new reform. That’s what they always say.

 

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Bruce Deitrick Price explains education theories and methods on his site Improve-Education.org

 

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