Yesterday’s education committee hearing featured Jim Stergios from the Pioneer Institute, and Ted Rebarber CEO of AccountabilityWorks, testifying on issues with Common Core. We are so grateful they were able to come and engage and their testimony was well received. Audio of their testimony can be heard here and their comments last just 20 minutes. The full Common Core discussion was about an hour.
Senator Howard Stephenson commented during the meeting, “If I were the king of Utah, I would do precisely what you recommended.”
Also of tremendous note was Dr. Sandra Stotsky’s generous offer to write for free, ELA standards for Utah that would be the best in the nation. She has credibility too because she did this for Massachusetts and they became the top scoring state in the country.
The Deseret News and SL Tribune both carried articles and both reference this pathetic attempt by the state office of education to show legislators and the public that they actually want feedback on Common Core standards. How’s this for a feedback mechanism on the standards? One long massive page where each grade has a block just like this. Dear USOE, you’re a couple years late.
Here is a copy of the packet that was given to legislators at the meeting.
Common Core state standards have removed (among other things) the teaching of cursive to students. There are many reasons this is a bad idea. First and foremost is that cursive has been shown to be an important developmental skill as this anonymous teacher’s testimony notes.
I am so upset that cursive has been removed from the Core! I had such a successful year last year teaching cursive. When I ask students during the first week of school what they are excited to learn in 3rd grade, at least 10 students say learning to write in cursive! I already had 2nd graders telling me they were so excited to be in 3rd grade so they could learn cursive. I am then supposed to deny them something they want to learn!? That is absurd! Even before the actual cursive instruction began, I had many students trying cursive on their own and asking if they were doing it correctly. My students became better readers because they learned cursive last year, seeing italics or cursive in books did not confuse them any more. Most of my students handwriting improved considerably once they could write in cursive, especially the boys’ handwriting. If I can’t teach cursive, the students will miss out on developing those fine motor skills– many suggest typing, but my students will only get keyboarding once a week, and yet I have set aside 20 minutes each day for them to learn cursive. I think it is also a way of self expression. I write in cursive all of the time; my signature is part of who I am. So, this generation will not be able to create a signature for themselves? Nor will they be able to read any handwriting other than print. It is so much fun for me and my students when I write on the board in cursive and they can read it! How empowering for them! They are all able to write faster in cursive, and even in third grade they realize this. They are learning to concentrate, and focus their attention– which is very helpful for all other areas of learning. They are learning to slow down, and watch what they are doing. They are learning the you have to work hard to get good at something, and yet they improve quickly enough that they are motivated to stick with it, they can see week by week that they are getting better. They are learning that practicing something over and over will help you get better. These skills are, in my opinion, only found in handwriting. There is nothing else that I can teach them that they can see improvement day by day, and that they can see themselves getting better at. Writing, math, science, social studies- none of these can show the student progression, nor help in motivating a student to keep trying. I am hoping that I can change my administrator’s mind about letting me teach cursive, but if they don’t I will certainly make sure the parents of my students know that I feel it is an important skill and I suggest that they teach their students at home.
Secondarily, almost every historical document from the founding of America, as well as many genealogical records are written in cursive. Without this skill these documents become unreadable. We should not favor keyboarding while removing cursive in spite of what special interest groups want.
Here are some resources on why cursive is so important.
There was an educational summit on this issue in January 2012, “Handwriting in the 21st Century?” hosted by Zaner-Bloser and the American Association of School Administrators.
To all the teachers out there who see Common Core for what it is, thank you for paying attention and valuing freedom and a strong education for our children. Please resist Common Core in whatever way you can. Here are a few comments from or about other teachers which may be of benefit to you.
If you are unaware of just how deficient the new standards are, please read these comments by nationally recognized experts Dr. Sandra Stotsky (helped put Massachusetts at the top of the nation’s performance AND just volunteered to give Utah the best ELA standards in the nation for FREE), and Dr. Jim Milgram, international math standards expert who testified to the legislature to help us get our 2007 math standards. You can see what they say about Common Core here:
I just attended the Core Academy for math as an elementary teacher and was told for 4 straight days that the common core does NOT require math facts or the teaching of standard algorithms. I was taught how to teach solely using discovery learning or weird, unusable, at least with larger numbers, fuzzy math algorithms which actually make understanding place value unnecessary to solve problems requiring regrouping. What? I thought the core was supposed to help teachers REMEMBER to teach skills and standard algorithms … I am devastated and do not even know if I can teach in Utah if this is the direction we are going…aligning ourselves with Washington state which is all discovery and has some of the poorest performing math students in the country…where they still believe Terc Investigations is great Curriculum. May the saints preserve us all.
Teacher 2
I teach in the ________ district. Our district is adopting the core and is very involved in training their teachers. I will be attending meetings at my school to receive training. What can I do, if anything to keep my job, but not be chained to teaching the core? Last year, we implemented the writing portion of the core. I followed the core. My students did not accomplish as much with the core, as with the program I had been using. This year, I am quietly going back to the writing program I used before. This year we will be implementing the core math curriculum, I think I will quietly take ideas that I like, but keep teaching what I know works. Any advice?
Teacher 3
Last Tuesday, Rep. Kraig Powell hosted a forum in Heber on Common Core. In attendance at this meeting were a number of teachers and administrators including Wasatch Superintendent Shoemaker. At lunch, a teacher who is involved with trying to get Utah off Common Core, was speaking with Sup. Shoemaker and another long time teacher’s name came up that this teacher had student-taught under. The Superintendent told this teacher how fortunate it was that she student-taught under her because she was a master teacher. She told the Superintendent that this long time teacher told her she wasn’t thrilled with Common Core and the Superintendent replied, “I’m not surprised, a teacher like her wouldn’t be.” The exact note this master teacher had sent her was “too bad districts aren’t questioning [common core] instead of parents. As a teacher, I am having common core shoved down my throat. We’re back to the 70’s. Way to go on your endeavors. :)”
Teacher 4
I am a 3rd grade teacher at a Charter School in Utah. I am becoming very frustrated with Common Core, and I am starting to feel helpless, and feel that I am failing my students, which will one day affect me as they grow up and enter the workforce.
I attended the Math CORE Academy this summer and was told that Utah is not going to suggest a math book that will meet the new standards, instead I have to use whatever math book my school is using to create work for the students. It is incredibly difficult to teach the Common Core using Tasks with the math book we have, and I imagine it is just as difficult with any math book. First of all, it takes 2-3 hours to create a Task using a math book, I had to help create 2 at Core Academy. Secondly, the instructors encouraged us to leave out key pieces of information so that the students could construct their own knowledge. I cannot imagine elementary students doing well in Algebra or Calculus after spending years learning that whatever number they come up with is correct. I am frustrated that students are required to make a guess to solve the problem, and of course, they are correct, because any number they choose would work. They would then see that their classmates all chose different numbers, and yet all of the answers are correct? How confusing for an elementary student! I have decided to send these Tasks home as extra credit so that the parents in my class can see what to expect in the next school year. I am sure I will get many complaints that the problems are unsolvable, because important information has been left out! I believe that math has right and wrong answers, and that teaching students that any answer can be correct is foolish.
I am so upset that cursive has been removed from the Core! I had such a successful year last year teaching cursive. When I ask students during the first week of school what they are excited to learn in 3rd grade, at least 10 students say learning to write in cursive! I already had 2nd graders telling me they were so excited to be in 3rd grade so they could learn cursive. I am then supposed to deny them something they want to learn!? That is absurd! Even before the actual cursive instruction began, I had many students trying cursive on their own and asking if they were doing it correctly. My students became better readers because they learned cursive last year, seeing italics or cursive in books did not confuse them any more. Most of my students handwriting improved considerably once they could write in cursive, especially the boys’ handwriting. If I can’t teach cursive, the students will miss out on developing those fine motor skills– many suggest typing, but my students will only get keyboarding once a week, and yet I have set aside 20 minutes each day for them to learn cursive. I think it is also a way of self expression. I write in cursive all of the time; my signature is part of who I am. So, this generation will not be able to create a signature for themselves? Nor will they be able to read any handwriting other than print. It is so much fun for me and my students when I write on the board in cursive and they can read it! How empowering for them! They are all able to write faster in cursive, and even in third grade they realize this. They are learning to concentrate, and focus their attention– which is very helpful for all other areas of learning. They are learning to slow down, and watch what they are doing. They are learning the you have to work hard to get good at something, and yet they improve quickly enough that they are motivated to stick with it, they can see week by week that they are getting better. They are learning that practicing something over and over will help you get better. These skills are, in my opinion, only found in handwriting. There is nothing else that I can teach them that they can see improvement day by day, and that they can see themselves getting better at. Writing, math, science, social studies- none of these can show the student progression, nor help in motivating a student to keep trying. I am hoping that I can change my administrator’s mind about letting me teach cursive, but if they don’t I will certainly make sure the parents of my students know that I feel it is an important skill and I suggest that they teach their students at home.
If it comes down to being on the principle’s good side or doing what’s best for my 28 students, I’m going to do what’s best for my students. If I get fired, then I’ll look for another job and hope I can find one.
From the Heritage Foundation, Rachel Sheffield writes:
At a Tea Party gathering last month, Indiana Schools Superintendent Tony Bennett expressed his concern with the growing federal overreach of Common Core education standards. “This administration has an insatiable appetite for federal overreach,” he said. “The federal government’s involvement in these standards is wrong.”
“Bennett pointed out that the Common Core’s standards originated with the National Governors Association, and were intended for voluntary adoption by states. Then, according to Bennett, Obama nationalized the standards and has tried to use federal clout to force the Common Core on the states.”
“…If the federal government didn’t create Common Core, how is this a federal takeover? Simple– the Department of Education is funding the development of the national tests aligned with Common Core. Even Common Core proponents admit that whoever controls the test will, for all practical purposes, control what must be taught in the classroom. And once Common Core is implemented, no one in this state will have the power to change any standard… The Legislature never had a chance to review Common Core because the feds timed their deadlines for adopting them to fall when the Legislature wasn’t in session. So, to qualify for a shot at Race to the Top money in 2010, the (previous) state superintendent and the (previous) governor had to agree to adopt Common Core– standards that had not even been published yet… By the way, South Carolina wasn’t awarded Race to the Top money, so we sold our education birthright without even getting the mess of pottage.”
Many of you have probably seen the news that yesterday the state board voted to exit their affiliation with the SBAC (Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium). This action by the state board vote of 12-3 is wonderful news and a victory for our cause when just a few months ago the board voted 4-10 to NOT leave the SBAC. Thank you Utah State School Board.
Now we just have to follow several steps including getting permission from the federal government to leave this consortium and it’s a done deal. Glad the feds aren’t trying to control the states or anything…
After the board vote, mathematician Ze’ev Wurman wrote:
“Congratulations to Utah!!! The first domino to fall from the Common Core bandwagon! Not only will Utah be able to offer extra 15%, but it can shift content across grades. It can even — perish the thought — offer authentic algebra in eighth grade!”
I believe Ze’ev is correct and we could reform and raise the standards to our own desire if there was the desire within the state to actually adopt the very best in standards. This has always been our goal.
However, not all is well with this decision. It turns out that the Utah State Office of Education signaled board members that it was OK for them to leave SBAC because their work with SBAC is essentially done. They are now writing a very narrow RFP (request for proposal to get bids) that only an SBAC affiliated vendor would be able to fully satisfy. This information comes from within the USOE where someone has informed us that the move to drop SBAC was just a ruse to settle things down. USOE has no desire to work with other vendors since they had a hand in the SBAC work. There is no purpose in other vendors submitting a proposal under these circumstances because USOE will award it to the SBAC vendor. If you know of other assessment vendors, please let them know they should protest to the USOE that it is patently unfair to stack the deck in favor of the SBAC. This is not the first time USOE has played favorites with vendors or grants.
Seems pretty clear that the goal is to have the data collected by the federal government. Here’s 3 disturbing quotes.
1) Oxymoron alert:
“This is one of the significant problems of NCLB. It let every state set its own bar and we now have 50 states, 50 different states all measuring success differently, and that’s starting to change. We want to flip that. We want to set a high bar for the entire country against states’ and districts’ ability to create and hit that higher bar, give them the chance to innovate and hold them accountable for results.”
2) “Hopefully, some day, we can track children from preschool to high school and from high school to college and college to career. We must track high growth children in classrooms to their great teachers and great teachers to their schools of education.”(this was Marc Tucker’s plan in the early 90’s to nationalize education with a cradle to grave database)
3) “Hopefully, one day we can look a child in the eye at the age of eight or nine or 10 and say, “You are on track to be accepted and to succeed in a competitive university and, if you keep working hard, you will absolutely get there.” (What are they going to say to the other kids? “Sorry you’re not cutting it”?)
As I read through this speech, there were a few things in particular that I have reservations with, besides the fact that our Sec. of Ed praises UNESCO and wants to work directly with them in our education efforts in America. In our meeting with the governor last month, Lt. Gov. Bell stated, “if Common Core has Obama’s name on it, we want to run the other way.” Well, it seems that it has Obama’s name all over it.
I want to highlight a few excerpts from his speech that were of particular interest to me as a citizen, teacher, and parent.
“The President’s aims are far more ambitious. He wants to improve teacher evaluation in order to dramatically elevate the status of the teaching profession itself;” (Sounds like the President thinks it’s part of his executive role to be involved in the evaluation process for teachers. Is this even constitutional? This is offensive to me as a teacher and a parent. What business does the federal government have evaluating teachers, unless of course they are employed by them. Is that the direction we are heading? Doesn’t sound like local control and we don’t have to study history too much to know the danger in having centralized control and the power of decisions resting in the hands of a few.)
“The North Star guiding the alignment of our cradle-to-career education agenda is President Obama’s goal that America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.” (This is the Outcome Based Education nonsense that has been done in the past. Common Core is the center piece of bringing this together)
“Traditionally, the federal government in the U.S. has had a limited role in education policy.The Obama administration has sought to fundamentally shift the federal role, so that the Department is doing much more to support reform and innovation in states, districts, and local communities.“(Sounds like a federal take-over of education in America!)
“In March of 2009, President Obama called on the nation’s governors and state school chiefs to “develop standards and assessments that don’t simply measure whether students can fill in a bubble on a test, but whether they possess 21st century skills like problem-solving and critical thinking and entrepreneurship and creativity.” (So, was this really state-led or was the President involved in orchestrating the meeting in Apr. 2009 in Chicago? Would that mean that the federal government did play a role in the development of the standards?)
“Virtually everyone thought the President was dreaming.
But today, 37 states and the District of Columbia have already chosen to adopt the new state-crafted Common Core standards in math and English. Not studying it, not thinking about it, not issuing white paper, they have actually done it. (Why is it that people keep denying the feds are using Common Core to take over education? It’s all out in plain sight.)
Over three-fourths of all U.S. public school students now reside in states that have voluntarily adopted higher, common college-ready standards that are internationally benchmarked. That is an absolute game-changer in a system which until now set 50 different goalposts for success.” (FYI, Common Core standards were never internationally benchmarked.)
The second game-changer is that states have banded together in large consortia to develop a new generation of assessments aligned with the states’ Common Core standards.
In September I announced the results of the department’s $350 million [dollar] Race to the Top assessment completion to design this next generation of assessments. (So Mr. Duncan admits the feds are funding the assessments but in the prior sentence says the states banded together to develop them. 100% false. They were federally funded.)
Two state consortiums, which together cover 44 states and the District of Columbia, won awards. These new assessments will have much in common with the first-rate assessments now used in many high-performing countries outside the U.S.”
Stunning breakthroughs of the past decade have shown great promise in dealing with underperforming school age children. Now the Fates Foundation is transforming those breakthroughs into reality.
Founder Bill Fates said, “We looked at everything that was wrong with education and knew we had the technology to improve everything about the user experience opening up new Vistas for students everywhere.”
Fates continued, “We’ve been studying performance measurement books that conclude what gets measured gets improved and so we’re sort of on this kick of measuring everything. It’s important for us to know your child’s medical lab results, what time he gets on the bus, what blood type he has, and so on. You just don’t know how useful this information is until we start examining longitudinal data studies to determine what might be a factor in the educational process.”
The Fates Foundation doesn’t just get involved with performance data, but we have now invested in hi-tech solutions to monitor students and teachers. We have developed Galvanic Skin Response bracelets that perform the equivalent of an MRI on students while they are in the classroom in order to measure teacher effectiveness. Ideal for performance pay calculations. We are also performing functional MRI’s for school children to make sure their brains are fully engaged in their educational experience. These tools help ensure teachers are keeping student attention levels high. After our push to create Common Core standards to bring about a global education system, it’s important we keep things on track.
“At the Fates foundation we also want to live up to our name. We’ve been watching ACT develop kindergarten and 3rd grade career assessments, but we really want to go back a step further and do in-utero DNA testing and brain analysis, and possibly biometric parental assessments to determine what careers are most likely for offspring of potential couples. Marrying the right person is such an important decision in life,” said Fates, “you should really know in advance what type of child your potential spouse is most likely to produce with you.”
Fates’ wife Melinda has been an ardent lifelong supporter of the need to ensure the right children are born to families. She recently shared that “this effort will lead to greater insights about what types of babies should be born that will be the best contributors to society. There’s no reason not to embrace a full eugenics program with this kind of information available. Bill’s father was president of Planned Parenthood and really inspired us to make family planning choices part of our funding endeavors.”
The Fates Foundation is now pleased to announce grant money awards for schools if they are willing to comply with a few rules that will meet new federal regulations paving the way for sharing of pertinent research-only data among interested stakeholders. These stakeholders include, but are not limited to, the Federal government, private businesses, the federal health care registry, and a website secured by your neighbor’s teenager.
In the name of quality research, we call on parents everywhere to trust us with your child’s information. What’s the worst that could happen?
The above article is satire and completely false except where noted with hyperlinks to real documents.
The Heritage Foundation is pointing out that President Obama’s new proposal to create a “Master Teacher Corp” by giving $1 billion to some of the best STEM teachers has one new twist…the feds will pay this money directly to teachers instead of teachers receiving the money locally. I’m sure nothing can go wrong with this proposal.
Indiana parents Erin Tuttle and Heather Crossin were distraught over the low quality textbook their school was using for Common Core implementation. It was of the “fuzzy math” constructivist variety. They contacted their local legislator and complained about it and began a dialog into the Common Core standards. This legislator had a few questions and they pointed them to Dr. Jim Milgram at Stanford, the professional mathematician on the review committee and one of our nation’s leading authorities on math standards writing. The Q&A below further illustrate the low level the Common Core standards were written to.
1. Why would we want to adopt Common Core Math Standards over Indiana Math Standards?
Mathematically, there is no good reason to adopt Common Core Math Standards over the Indiana Standards. Indeed, the Indiana standards were/are? one of the top 4 or 5 state standards in the country, and are approximately at the level of the top international standards. The Common Core standards claim to be “benchmarked against international standards” but this phrase is meaningless. They are actually two or more years behind international expectations by eighth grade, and only fall further behind as they talk about grades 8 – 12. Indeed, they don’t even fully cover the material in a solid geometry course, or in the second year algebra course.
2. What are the differences between Common Core Math Standards and Indiana Standards?
Basically, the differences are described above. Both standards were authored with the help of the professional mathematics community as distinguished from the mathematical education community. But — as someone who was at the middle of overseeing the writing process – my main duty on the CCSSO Validation Committee — it became clear that the professional math community input to CCSSI was often ignored, which seemed not to be the case with the Indiana Standards. A particularly egregious example of this occurred in the sixth and seventh grade standards and commentary on ratios, rates, proportion and percents, where there are a number of serious errors and questionable examples.But the same issues are also present in the development of the basic algorithms for whole number arithmetic – the most important topic in grades 1 – 5.
It was argued by some people on the Validation Committee that we should ignore such errors and misunderstandings as they will be cleared up in later versions, but I didn’t buy into this argument, and currently there is no movement at all towards any revisions.
3. How do they compare with international standards?
As I indicated above, they are more than two years behind international expectations by eighth grade. The top countries are starting algebra in seventh grade and geometry in eighth or ninth. By the end of ninth grade the students will have learned all of the material in a standard geometry course, all the material in a standard algebra I course, and some of the most important material in a standard algebra II course. This allows a huge percentage of them to finish calculus before graduating high school. (In a number of the high achieving countries, calculus is actually a high school graduation requirement, but where it is not, typically, half or more of the high school graduates will have had calculus. Also, it is worth noting that in these countries the high school graduation rate is typically 90% or higher for their entire populations.)
