Month: August 2013

Criticizing Common Core Coverage

John Merrow 2013 Blogs, Common Core

In the business of journalism, criticism is part of the deal. We are taken to task for leaving out important parts of the story or for getting the facts wrong, and sometimes we get criticized for not doing the story that the viewer wanted to see. That’s the preface to the question of this piece: “Was our 2-part report on the Common Core national standards an infomercial,” as one viewer charges? That was the harshest criticism leveled at us (as far as I am aware), but two other viewers wrote to say that we missed important parts of the story. The harshest critique came from Jamie Gass of the Pioneer Institute, a Massachusetts-based, right-leaning think tank that opposes the Common Core.

This piece really seems like an infomercial for Common Core that doesn’t provide any opposing view or criticism of either the academic quality of the Common Core, the legal issues (three federal law explicitly prohibit the federal govt from funding, validating, or directing national standards, tests or curricula), or the costs to states/districts. For three years, Pioneer Institute has done nationally recognized research on all these topics.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324659404578503561386927962.html
http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2012-03-09/opinions/35449136_1_unesco-laws-national-curriculum

This is an interesting segment, John, I’m just not sure this is actually what I would call journalism.

(Mr. Gass to the contrary, the Common Core was not developed by the federal government and is not curriculum. Washington has played and is playing a major role, of course. We reported all of that.)

I responded to Mr. Gass as follows:

I respectfully disagree but take your point. The politics of the Common Core deserves its own segment, and it’s one we are planning. As you are aware, it’s a moving target, with some strong opposition from left and right.
My own personal view, which won’t be in any piece, is that the CC may calcify age-grading–ironically and perhaps tragically at the very time when technology allows true individualization.
The cooler aspects of the CC such as collaboration, speaking persuasively and the like, cannot be tested by machines, meaning the system will have to trust teachers. But it’s designed to be in part a “gotcha” system (as we pointed out), which is beyond paradox. A genuine contradiction.
We trust the intelligence of our audience to recognize, for example, the strong hand of Washington in the CC.
Thanks for writing and for all the good work Pioneer does. It’s solid and interesting and very often invaluable.

The civilized back-and-forth continued, in Mr. Gass’ response:

As you may know, our opposition has turned on the lower academic quality of Common Core, as well as cost and legality.
I’m not sure I’d characterize our opposition to Common Core as “political,” but primarily educational and legal. After all, there are three federal laws that explicitly forbids the federal government from funding, directing, or validating national standards, tests or curricula. Two of these three laws were signed into law by LBJ and President Carter. These are federal laws, not a list of political recommendations to be obeyed or disobeyed based on whim or convenience.
And we’ve done the first, most thorough, and only non-Gates funded evaluations of Common Core’s standards lower academic quality against high standard states, including MA, IN, TX, MN, and CA. Merely giving Common Core proponents unchecked and unanswered air time for their views doesn’t really serve the public interest or a robust public exchange of ideas.

It seems to me that Mr. Gass wanted us to produce a very different piece, one that debated the wisdom of the path that public education is on. (For his view.) Our view is that the debate, while important, is a different level of the story. That’s the upper atmosphere, but our intention was to give the audience a picture of what Common Core teaching can look like at ground level, in classrooms. You cannot get that in the Wall Street Journal or anywhere else in print, and I don’t think you will see it on other television news programs. And we wanted you to hear from teachers and students, not policy makers and their critics.

In Part Two we dug deep into testing issues, exposing how the federal government’s own stipulation may well doom the enterprise to failure, because the ‘new’ skills the Common Core emphasizes–like speaking persuasively and working collaboratively–simply cannot be assessed by machines. And the Feds want data that can be used to evaluate (and perhaps fire) adults, because, deep down, the folks at the top apparently don’t trust teachers.

We obviously did not produce the report that Mr. Gass wants to see, about the politics of the Common Core. At some point, I am sure we will.

Two other critics, one an economist and the other a lawyer, clearly thought we should have explored the new standards in more depth, instead of focusing on the ‘new’ skills like working collaboratively. The lawyer focused on the English Language Arts standards: “If you look at the first grade curriculum, it is ridiculous. Someone thinks they are PhDs.”

I agree with her, for what it’s worth. They are cumbersome and, to this former English teacher, horribly overwritten. Read them yourself and let me know if you can get through them without nodding off.

The economist took us to task, gently, for not exploring the complexity, not to say pomposity, of the new national Mathematics standards. He wrote: “Enjoyed your piece on the Common core on the PBS NewsHour last night and will watch tonight’s show. You might find it interesting to look at the standards themselves.”

(We did look at them, honest.)

He then provided a sample 3-part problem which he said is for 11th graders and was taken from an official document explaining the Common Core (.pdf).{{1}}

“Give me 8 sheep and then we will have an equal number” said one shepherd to another.
“No, you give me 8 sheep, and then I will have twice as many as you” replied another shepherd.

First the student must solve the problem: 1) How many sheep did each shepherd have to start with?
And then: 2) Write an equation or inequality that has (a) no real solutions; (b) infinite numbers of real solutions; and (c) exactly one real solution.
Finally: 3) Solve an equation of the form f(x) = c for a simple function f that has an inverse and write an expression for the inverse. For example, f(x) =2 x3 for x > 0 or f(x) = (x+1)/(x–1) for x ≠ 1.

The economist added wryly, “Being able to solve these problems would, undoubtedly, be nice. Unfortunately, facing this kind of problem encourages a great many college freshman to enquire about how little math they can take and still graduate and many graduates to state that they hated the subject.”

The criticism notwithstanding, I believe that our pieces were balanced and fair. Our reporting about the effort to develop tests broke new ground. But our coverage was not thorough because we did not air the debate about the complexity of the standards or the legal challenges, and we did not give airtime to those on the left and right who oppose the Common Core.

Frankly, that’s asking too much of two reports of perhaps 13 minutes in total air time.

My personal concern–which you should not expect to see or hear from me on the NewsHour–is that these national standards, even if higher and deeper, may be a step in the wrong direction because they may make it harder to individualize learning opportunities. Today’s technologies allow kids to soar–or fly lower and slower where that’s appropriate, but a rigid interpretation of the national standards–”This is where you are supposed to be”–will merely repeat education’s common failing of mindlessly aiming at the middle. That would be a tragedy.

_____

[[1]]I could not find the problem at this link. In a subsequent email he wrote, ‘they seem to have eliminated the sample problems.’[[1]]

“What Kind of Fool Am I?” Tony Bennett

John Merrow 2013 Blogs

It was the other Tony Bennett who sang that song, of course. But former Indiana and Florida state superintendent Tony Bennett probably ought to be asking himself that question.  As Tom LoBianco of the Associated Press reported, Mr. Bennett manipulated his own school grading system so that a favorite charter school–run by a major financial supporter of his–got a grade of A instead of the C that it deserved.

“They need to understand that anything less than an A for Christel House compromises all of our accountability work,” Bennett emailed his Chief of Staff (who now is Indiana Governor Mike Pence’s chief lobbyist).  All this went down less than a year ago, just before Bennett was voted out of office.  He was immediately hired to head Florida’s public schools, a position he just vacated after LoBianco reported his secret manipulations.

The blogosphere has been going wild, and those on the left are positively salivating. Mr. Bennett is the driving force behind Chiefs for Change, the right-leaning group of state superintendents of education.  That group’s name has morphed into “Cheats for Change,” “Chiefs for (Grade) Change,” “Cheating Chiefs for Change,” and on and on.  They see this as another skirmish in the on-going battle being waged over/against public education and are hoping that this fiasco will help more people see the folly of demonizing teachers and traditional public schools.  That’s their ‘big picture,’ and they may be seeing things correctly, but let’s look more closely at what happened in Indiana.

Mr. Bennett screwed up on several fronts.  He changed the rules for a charter school but did not act to help some traditional public schools in essentially the same situation.  He did everything in secret, apparently forgetting that, as an elected public servant, his official business was neither secret nor private.  And, judging from his language, he was motivated by ego (he had promised the school’s founder, Christel DeHaan, an A!) and his fervently-held privatization ideology.

It’s not a stretch to call this behavior hypocritical.  Mr. Bennett was happy to be known as Mr. Accountability–until his own accountability system turned around and bit him in the butt.  Then, rather than eating a helping of crow and facing up to possibility that he might have created a lousy system, Mr. Accountability cheated.  Pride goeth before a fall.

But what about Mr. Bennett’s ‘accountability work’?  How trustworthy was it?  Matt DiCarlo of the Shanker Institute examined Mr. Bennett’s school grading system and found out that poverty, not quality, was the chief determinant of a school’s grade. “Almost 85 percent of the schools with the lowest poverty rates receive an A or B, and virtually none gets a D or F,” he wrote.  More than half of the schools with the highest percentages of kids living in poverty received “an F or D, compared with about 22 percent across all schools.”

I am reminded of George Orwell’s “Animal Farm,” particularly its Seventh Commandment. That final commandment originally read ‘All Animals Are Equal.” However, by the end of the allegory it has morphed into “All Animals Are Equal, But Some Are More Equal Than Others.”  Rules are for other people, Mr. Bennett?

It’s unclear whether what happened in Indiana amounts to a “Paying for Grades” scandal.  Ms. DeHaan, a major supporter of Republican causes, donated $130,000 to Mr. Bennett’s campaigns, and apparently an additional $15,000 after the grade change.

(By the way, how about a shout-out for the Freedom of Information Act, a tool which allows reporters like LoBianco access to documents. Where would we be without FOIA?  Where would our democracy be?)

Another intrepid reporter, Scott Elliott of the Indianapolis Star, has written extensively about the charter school in question, Christel House. After visiting it, he reported that it is in fact a darn good school.  Elliott writes about how educators there have gone the extra mile to see that students have transportation–a huge issue in poor communities.

So to summarize: A good school gets a bad grade, as do some traditional public schools. In response, the state superintendent bends the rules in secret, rather than air out the problems inherent in his own approach to grading schools.  Mr. Bennett is a flawed human being, but so are we all. And so let’s not keep the focus on him.  Let’s look instead at the idea of grading schools.

We need an accountability system, but it must measure quality and effort, not poverty or some characteristics than an ideologue might love or hate.  It’s probably too much to insist on a single letter grade; students get marks in English, Social Studies, Algebra and so forth–why shouldn’t a school get multiple grades?

Now ask yourself what a school should be graded on. How important are scores on bubble tests?  How much should graduation rates count?  Attendance and truancy?

What else counts? How about ‘hours of recess per week’ and ‘hours of art and music’ and ‘time devoted to project-based learning’ (more is better)?  How about counting ‘hours spent on test-prep” and ‘teacher turnover,’ where less is better?

We need to measure what we value when it comes to public education.  In public, Mr. Bennett, in public.

And what kind of fools are we if we fail to see what happened in Indiana as a wake-up call?