When opponents of Common Core criticize math problems such as: “Tell how to make 10 when adding 8 + 5,” they lose credibility. It is a simple question and one that challenges children to work with what they have, look for more, and resolve an issue.
Simple math, but it is lost on the adults who desperately want to look for anything to condemn Common Core. Why look for false reasons, when there are so may legitimate reasons, and those reasons have shifted sentiment away from the lauded national standards?
The truth is, according to a recent Gallup Poll, Common Core is not popular with parents, and educators for both practical and theoretical reasons. For example, when asked to consider their students’ typing and computer skills, “54% of teachers working in states where the Common Core State Standards are being used say their students are not well prepared to take the Common Core assessment tests by computer,” according to Lydia Saad writing for Gallup.
Common Core tests are to be taken on computers. Given the inability of many rural and inner city districts to secure access to even aging computers, and the students’ own inexperience with computers, Common Core is sure to condemn countless kids as failures. As Saad notes, “The issue is particularly concerning for elementary school teachers, as well as teachers who say they work in schools where most of the students are from low-income families. Roughly seven in 10 teachers in both of these categories say their students are not well prepared for the tests from the standpoint of their keyboarding or computer skills. This contrasts with about four in 10 teachers of higher grade levels, or of students mainly from middle- or high-income backgrounds.”
Thanks to John Huppenthal, out-going Superintendent of Public Instruction, Arizona has for the last four years been mandated to take part in the PARCC consortium and even subjected the state’s kids to a PARCC field test. There are two state confederations assembled to create Common Core-aligned tests; PARCC (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers) and Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC). According to Saad, teachers in PARCC confederation are much less likely than those in the SBAC states to believe their schools are technologically prepared.
Saad reports that “forty-eight percent of teachers nationally, including 49% of those in Common Core states, report that their school participated in the field tests held last spring for both exams,” and of those, the majority of teachers said the testing “went very smoothly (10%) or mostly smoothly (51%), while 21% say it did not go smoothly and 11% say it went badly.” Would that 61 percent have the same opinion of they were aware of the security risks to children’s data during this year’s testing? Possibly; it is a nebulous subject for most who focus rightly on the child’s experience.
Still, most teachers guard childrens’ identity and information like grizzlies, due in part to FERPA requirements, and few would be willing to knowingly put their students at risk if they understood the risk.
One teacher, who values his students’ privacy is The Cult of Common Core author Brad McQueen. In June of this year, McQueen revealed the data security issues with PARCC. He wrote, “The Common Core testing company, PARCC , knew it had major data security flaws in its computer-based field tests, administered by Pearson Testing this past spring to over 1 million students in 14 states, but they went ahead with the field test anyway.”
According to McQueen, the over 1 million students who participated in PARCC/Pearson testing group this past spring, may have received a lesson in “good old Common Core deception.” Most teachers, had they known, would have been furious to learn that the PARCC/Pearson and Arizona State Department of Education decided to “stay on schedule with the field test, keep all the security flaws a secret, and updated their test administrator’s field test instructions to include that the administrators must manually disable the Internet Explorer Accelerator feature and all the other possible applications that cause students to be exited from the field test and triggers a breach in student data security,” according to McQueen.
In yet another Gallup poll, when U.S. public school teachers were asked “if they are experiencing each of seven possible emotional reactions to the new curriculum standards initiative, 65% said they are worried and 62% frustrated. Nearly half agreed they feel hopeful, but relatively few said they feel confident (27%) or enthusiastic (20%),” according to an article by Alyssa Brown.
“While teachers’ emotional reactions to Common Core and possibly having to implement it in their classrooms tilt negative, Gallup previously found their reaction to the overall initiative is more evenly split: 41% of all public school teachers view the program positively and 44% negatively,’ writes Brown. “‘About one in four teachers are angry, but the majority of teachers, 57%, say they are resigned to it — perhaps best summing up teachers’ collective mindset.”
Teachers reject any kind of testing that is tied to teacher evaluations. As a result, that may play a part in their reactions to Common Core. “Gallup previously found that 89% of public school teachers agree that linking teacher evaluations to student test scores on the Common Core is unfair to teachers and 78% agree that testing done to monitor student progress takes too much classroom time away from teaching,” reports Brown.
However, parents naturally have a less self-centered reason for their opposition to Common Core and testing.
In an article dated October 28, Justin McCarthy wrote for Gallup, new data suggest that an increase in awareness of Common Core by parents “has led to an increase in negativity, given the seven-percentage-point increase in those viewing the standards negatively and the two-point decrease in those viewing them positively.”
McCarthy cites a Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll on Common Core conducted in May and June: “That survey found 29% of public school parents in favor of “having teachers in your community use the Common Core State Standards to guide what they teach” and 57% opposed to that, with 6% unsure and 8% completely unfamiliar with Common Core. The majority opposition found with that measure could reflect parents’ concern about the standards limiting teachers’ flexibility in the classroom.”
“Support for the curriculum standards and student testing has declined since April,” writes McCarthy, “consistent with the more negative views of the standards overall…. Today, 65% of public school parents view having one set of national educational standards for reading, writing and math positively, but this is down from 73% in April.”
Resounding Books is releasing their latest project, Common Ground on Common Core: Voices from across the Political Spectrum Expose the Realities of the Common Core State Standards, in which an “ideologically diverse array of the nation’s top education activists and experts come together” on Common Core State Standards and related initiatives in education. While so many want the opposition to Common Core to be strictly partisan, as more and more teachers parents, and students experience effects of the nationally mandated standards and the tests that drive the curriculum, the opposition is becoming increasingly bi-partisan.
After all, what ideology supports a educational program that determines whether a child will be a CEO or widget maker by the time they complete third grade? Hopefully not any ideology that gains any ground in the U.S. The fascists in the chambers of commerce, and the socialists in the unions might support a program that limits a kid’s choices in life by the age of 8, but most of us reject it out of hand.
Related articles:
The truth behind Arizona’s sudden withdrawal from PARCC
Common Core’s NSA-like data suctioning secret rears its ugly head
PARCC field tests had major data security flaws and of course they knew all about it