THE COMMON CORE
August 25, 2014
Forty-five states in the US have
adopted one of two versions of testing for the Common Core of competence in
English and math arts language and concepts. Here in Ohio, repeal of the CC is pending in
the House, but even when repealed, to obtain “race to the top” federal funds,
they must substitute another standardized test of mastery of content.
Today I ran a search for validation
of test scores. The closest I came to
finding validation data was a state study using the Delphi method—consulting “experts”
to see whether they ranked questions in order of complexity as testmakers had done,
citing another expert theorist on hierarchy of cognitive complexity. I presume the validation data the two private
enterprises constructing the CC tests are proprietary.
Apparently, the tests are scored
by how well students conform to what adults presume children born knowing
nothing have come to know the world in the same order and configuration the
testmakers exalt in themselves. It
assumes adults already need to know what every child needs to know when s/he
has finished a certain grade, beginning the third grade. It assumes a lock-step order of
learning. Perhaps because I went to an
ungraded high school, I never felt comfortable grading in 39 years of full-time
teaching. Increasingly, educators are
recognizing that conceptual learning takes fastest when students are allowed to
fail and create their own ways out. I am
supposing that what goes for my learning, including the three R’s, goes for all
of us to some degree: Learning what I think I know of statistics and writing
has been a unique journey of “aha” moments, from when I first learned to spell
and count. The order in which my
abilities to read, write and count evolved, the ways in which I have developed
an appreciation of the organic unity of the home in which I live, has recently added
new dimensions to my understanding of geometry.
I see it too in my grandchildren, ages 6 and 4.
Experts and paradigms of
education come and go. The world
changes. From birth, each of us learns
on unique paths. Species that
accommodate environment change from generation to generation adapt more
readily, survive longer, than species that all behave or “know” the same things
about their environment. By CC
standards, diversity of learning sequences is error.
The other fallacy of CC
standards is that a nation of child learning grows the higher students rise
relative to others. By definition,
standardization assumes that below a certain confidence level, there’s a
statistically small chance that any child in that group scores above average,
somewhere between just below average and lower down. As policy, far enough below average for all
test-takers to be “left behind,” and so to be held back a year as early as the
third grade. Grading by standard score
may show that some schools and school systems score better over time, and as in
the US economy, inequality of relative child, school, teacher success and
failure provides the ammunition for privatized elimination of neighborhood
schools and privatization of public education.
In Garrison Keillor’s terms, the promise that all our children can be
above average is methodologically ludicrous, and distracts our children from
learning change. Love and peace, hal
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