Legislature Considers Massive Cuts to High School Football

I couldn’t resist that post title, since apparently cuts to instructional programs don’t grab anyone’s attention. But if the legislature adopts the enormously expensive Smarter Balanced standardized tests, the cuts will have to happen somewhere. Last year our district cut seventh grade football, in addition to making cuts in orchestra and foreign language instruction and elsewhere. This year, even more cuts are on the way. Next year, when the Smarter Balanced costs start rolling in, what will be left to cut?

Please, wise legislators, let us know what we should cut for the privilege of having these shiny new tests. Then I can re-title this post accordingly.

Of course, once we’ve replaced all the teachers with online MOOCs, I suppose administrators and coaches will be the only staff left. So maybe there’s nothing to worry about.
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Why is it wrong for a kid to cheat on a test?

This post by Justin McBrayer got me thinking about the moral status of children. The author criticizes the common practice of teaching students that opinions are unprovable “beliefs” while facts are provably “true”—thus, in effect, teaching them that there can be no moral truths. As a result, the author contends, students think a statement such as “It is wrong to cheat on a test” is merely an opinion, and cannot be “true.”

I agree with McBrayer at least to this extent: Whether there are “moral facts” is a philosophical question, open to debate, which means the school should not be teaching any view of it as a settled fact. Under the school’s own definition, the assertion that “value claims cannot be true” is itself an unprovable opinion, a “mere” belief. From the piece, though, it sounds like the author believes that the opposite “fact” should be taught as true. Either one looks like indoctrination to me.

The more interesting question, for me, is why we think it’s wrong for a kid to cheat on a test in school. I’m not saying it isn’t wrong, but I do think it matters how we get to that conclusion. It can’t be simply because the school prohibits it, right? Certainly the school can’t be the final arbiter of what is morally right and wrong. If it were, then the worst practices would become morally right just because a school requires them. (Was it morally wrong for a black child to try to attend a whites-only school?) So how should a child reach the conclusion that cheating is wrong?

Priceless

Two members of our State Board of Education on the enormously expensive Smarter Balanced standardized tests:

Finally, any new state test will come with a higher price tag because state assessments have evolved in technology and in function. However, Iowa will get much more for our money with the Smarter Balanced assessments. The testing process will be more efficient, results will come back faster, and — most important — teaching and learning will be enhanced. The assessments offer incredible precision in identifying skills that students have mastered, as well as those areas where they’re struggling, both for individual students and for groups of students. This kind of information is priceless to the teachers, school administrators, parents and elected school board leaders who are working hard for our students.

That’s the best they can do? “The testing process will be more efficient”—oh, but somehow twice as long. “The results will come back faster”—hooray, but who cares? “Teaching and learning will be enhanced”—didn’t our state board members learn about supporting their assertions with evidence? “Incredible precision”—well, they got the incredible part right. “This kind of information is priceless”—I guess that’s why no one can tell us how much it will cost.

Will someone please explain how these tests will actually be used to improve our kids’ education? Points for being concrete and specific!
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Those are big numbers

We have no idea how much money it will take to implement the Smarter Balanced standardized tests. That’s one of the main objections to going ahead with them. We can estimate how much it will cost to buy the actual tests—and that’s an enormous increase over what we’re currently spending—but we don’t have any estimates of what the necessary tech upgrades and support will cost. Any estimate I try to make here would have to be very rough, because the state has simply not done its homework about the cost.

But I’ll try anyway.

Start with the proposition that every one-percent increase in state school aid in Iowa means about $64 per student. (Derived from the numbers here.) Right now, the Governor is proposing an $80 per student increase for next year.

Then let’s look at what another state has done to prepare for using Smarter Balanced. California is a much bigger state than Iowa, but we can at least try to compare on a per-student basis. California approved $1.6 billion to “help” districts implement the Common Core, including the Smarter Balanced tests. California has about 6.2 million K-12 students. So that’s about $258 per student.

Now school districts in California are taking legal action to obtain an additional $1 billion that the Smarter Balanced tests are costing them. That’s another $161 per student. We’re up to $419 per student (though some portion of that is for other Common-Core-driven costs). And, as the California School Board Association advised the districts, “Remember that while the state has provided some one-time funding for SBA implementation, the expenses of SBA implementation will be ongoing.”

Is it a perfect comparison? No, because I’m a spare-time blogger Googling figures on the internet, as opposed to, say, a building full of state employees who are paid to figure things like this out.

But those are big numbers. More reason to think that if these tests are adopted, we can say goodbye to any hope of decent supplemental aid.
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Superintendent, school board members want more cuts to school programs

What other conclusion can you reach from their utter silence on the proposal to spend uncounted millions on the Smarter Balanced standardized tests?

They know that the tests will cause cuts. If they didn’t know it already, their experience with the teacher leadership program would make it obvious. When the legislature debated the teacher leadership program last year, our superintendent and board members didn’t object. Then—surprise!—the teacher leadership program cost so much that there wasn’t enough left for supplemental aid. And now the district wants us all to lobby for more aid. Where were they when it mattered?

Now the same thing is happening again. The state wants an enormous increase in the amount spent on standardized testing. This will obviously divert money from supplemental aid; a 4% funding increase will be a pipe dream. You can have the tests or you can have decent supplemental aid; you can’t have both. How can our district ask us to lobby for more aid while not objecting at all to that huge expense, especially when a much cheaper alternative is available?

There’s only one way to interpret it: They want the cuts.

UPDATE 2/8/15: The Press-Citizen has an article this morning about the tests; the ICCSD curriculum director told the reporter that district leaders have “concern” about the tests. See the comments below. Still no indication that that concern is enough to make those leaders oppose adopting the tests, or that they are expressing any of those concerns to the legislators who will decide the issue. Still, it’s something. More please?
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Do our district administrators support spending millions on Smarter Balanced standardized tests?

Parents at at least one elementary school in our district received an email from their Parent-Teacher Organization today designed to encourage them to advocate for the district’s legislative priorities. “This email contains legislative advocacy information to help you stay up to date with what is happening in Des Moines,” it said. “Superintendent Murley requested that this information be shared.”

The packet contained, among other things, two documents summarizing the state task force’s recommendation that the state adopt the very expensive Smarter Balanced standardized tests. Neither document makes any reference to the dissent that accompanied the task force’s report and that raised serious concerns about the substantial and unquantified tech-readiness costs of adopting those tests. It also omitted this memo, written by our own David Dude for the Urban Education Network of Iowa, raising serious questions about tech readiness and cost. Finally, the packet included a statement about assessments, issued by the Iowa Association of School Boards, that sounds like it could have been cut and pasted from a standardized testing industry press release.

The district included all of those materials in the advocacy packet without comment on whether it wants people to support or oppose the new tests. Omitting any information about the dissenting opinion and any contrary views, though, could certainly come across as an endorsement. What are parents supposed to make of this information?

We have no idea whether the ICCSD has adequate technology to administer these tests. Judging from Dude’s memo, there’s a very good chance that it doesn’t and that the technology costs alone (not to mention the cost of the tests themselves) will be, in the dissent’s words, “significant and ongoing.” The Governor’s school funding proposal isn’t even enough to maintain our current level of spending. Where will the money for these tests come from? Where will it come from the next year, and the year after that? What is our district going to cut to pay for these tests?

It’s at moments like this when I wonder who our administrators work for.
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Marilynne Robinson on standardized testing

Novelist and essayist (and Iowa Citian) Marilynne Robinson, in an interview for The Nation:

I hate the whole business about standardized tests, which implies that everyone should have basically the same aspirations and satisfy the same norms, and what could be more destructive, you know, of the sense of individual personality than that? The thing we know—the thing we know is that people are highly individuated, in terms of their gifts and their proclivities and their interests. We tell ourselves this all the time, but we don’t educate people in a way that makes it possible for them to respond to the fact that this is true. We don’t, you know. I mean it’s more and more regimentation. I think this is a terrible choice, and destructive, and I think that we can only do it because we tell ourselves this thing about our comparative failure as educators.

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What the Governor’s not talking about

So the Governor announced some pretty paltry supplemental school aid plans (formerly known as “allowable growth”) this afternoon. No reference to any kind of separate funding of expensive new standardized tests or the technology for them. I suppose that could be a sign that shifting to the Smarter Balanced Assessments is not a high priority for his administration. On the other hand, it could just be a sign that standardized tests, like the Common Core, are unpopular, so the Governor doesn’t want to talk about them. (They will be all the more unpopular if there is no designated funding for them.) I couldn’t help but notice that the state Department of Education initially announced the task force’s recommendation of the new tests in the middle of Election Day and then released the actual report on New Years’ Eve—not exactly trying to get people’s attention. If it’s such a great idea, why aren’t they proudly publicizing it?
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Standardized tests and your cat’s body mass index

Someone recently showed me this system for measuring a cat’s body mass index. (Don’t ask why.) The system requires you to measure your cat’s girth and lower hindlimb and then plug those measurements into a formula containing numbers that go to the fourth decimal place. Don’t divide by 0.7063; make sure it’s 0.7062.

Four decimal places! Of course, a measurement is only as precise as its least precise input. Call me crazy, but I think I’m a long way from being able to measure my cat’s “lower hindlimb” with enough accuracy to justify using multipliers that go to the fourth decimal place.

I thought of cat BMI when I read the state task force’s report recommending that Iowa adopt the expensive, computer-based Smarter Balanced Assessments:

Computer-adaptive testing, where the computer selects more or less difficult items based on the student’s answers to prior questions, is better able to pinpoint (more reliably and with fewer items than a fixed-form assessment) the performance of students performing at both high and low levels of performance (e.g., students who are gifted, students with disabilities). This means more precise scores for Iowa students.

Better able to pinpoint the performance of students performing at both high and low levels of performance! Now, maybe you’re different from me, and maybe one of your big worries is that the annual standardized tests aren’t pinpointing your child’s performance precisely enough. Even so, do you really believe that any standardized test, no matter how good, could “pinpoint” your child’s academic “performance”?

Schools are constantly reminding us that kids’ test scores can vary depending on how much they’ve slept and what they ate for breakfast. There’s even evidence that scores are affected by random events like variations in air pollution and whether there’s been a recent violent crime near the school. Then there’s the question of whether a student is really trying to do well on the tests, or just trying to get through them—a question that will only grow larger when the tests take twice as many hours. So how precisely can these tests possibly measure your child’s ability?

And never mind that the whole assessment regimen is built on the assumption that the Iowa Core standards are themselves some kind of precision instrument, and that “performance” will be maximized by preventing even small departures from their supreme wisdom. It must be reassuring for education officials to imagine such a well-oiled machine. But there’s no empirical basis for the assumption that the Common Core is precisely the best way to turn your child into a capable adult.

There’s no point in obsessing over precision at the top of the pyramid, when it’s non-precise assumptions from there on down.

The task force would have you believe that standardized tests are like thermometers, and that more money buys you more decimal places in the temperature reading. If you believe that, I’ve got a Feline Fitbit I’d like to sell you.
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What parent engagement looks like

Guess which task force member was the only one to vote against adopting the Smarter Balanced Assessments (click to enlarge):

Hint: She’s the one with the shortest title.

More on the task force’s charge here..

“Like a meeting, a boring meeting”

Karen W. at Education in Iowa writes about a video intended to help teachers learn to teach “close reading” as part of the Common Core. One of her reactions:

First, if reading logs didn’t already make your child think reading is a tedious chore, close reading just might convince them. My eight year old couldn’t look away from the first video but also commented throughout, “I could not go to that school. It is like a meeting, a boring meeting.”

All I could do as I watched the video was shake my head at what some people think is a good idea to do to children. Hats off to any kids who can sit through years of this stuff without becoming juvenile delinquents.

Meanwhile, a friend happened to remind me of this passage from To Kill a Mockingbird:

The remainder of my school days were no more auspicious than the first. Indeed, they were an endless Project that slowly evolved into a Unit, in which miles of construction paper and wax crayon were expended by the State of Alabama in its well-meaning but fruitless efforts to teach me Group Dynamics. What Jem called the Dewey Decimal System was school-wide by the end of my first year, so I had no chance to compare it with other teaching techniques. I could only look around me: Atticus and my uncle, who went to school at home, knew everything—at least, what one didn’t know the other did. Furthermore, I couldn’t help noticing that my father had served for years in the state legislature, elected each time without opposition, innocent of the adjustments my teachers thought essential to the development of Good Citizenship. Jem, educated on a half-Decimal half-Duncecap basis, seemed to function effectively alone or in a group, but Jem was a poor example: no tutorial system devised by man could have stopped him from getting at books. As for me, I knew nothing except what I gathered from Time magazine and reading everything I could lay hands on at home, but as I inched sluggishly along the treadmill of the Maycomb County school system, I could not help receiving the impression that I was being cheated out of something. Out of what I knew not, yet I did not believe that twelve years of unrelieved boredom was exactly what the state had in mind for me.

It’s amazing, given all time and energy and money devoted to educational research, how little anyone talks about boredom. It’s as if we’re all supposed to pretend it’s not there, or that it doesn’t matter, or that the concept has no bearing on what kids learn. You’d almost think that the people who are paid to develop the latest educational “improvements” had never been children themselves.
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School budget cuts are only the beginning

This is an extended version of my guest opinion in the Press-Citizen today.

Families in the Iowa City area were disappointed to learn of the school district’s planned cuts to band, orchestra, foreign language and other programming because of a $3.6 million budget shortfall. Many have contacted state officials to urge them to increase funding for K-12 education. But the state is on the verge of making matters worse, not better—and causing more cuts—if it moves forward with its plan to adopt an expensive new regime of standardized tests.

When Iowa adopted its version of the Common Core standards, it also became part of a consortium of states that have pledged to adopt new Core-aligned standardized tests, called the Smarter Balanced Assessments. The legislature has not yet approved the Smarter Balanced tests, but it has required that Core-aligned tests be implemented by 2016 and has tripled the number of grades in which the tests would have to be given. These changes were adopted with bipartisan support.

The tests currently in use, the Iowa Assessments, cost about $3.50 per student to administer and are required in three grades. By conservative estimate, the new tests will cost at least $22.50 per student and will be required in nine grades. That means that the state is about to make districts spend at least nineteen times more than they are currently required to spend on standardized testing. (Because our district already tests in nine grades, it would have to spend over six times as much as it currently spends.)

And that’s just the cost of the tests themselves. Because the new tests are designed to be administered by computer, they would also require a substantial investment in new technology. They would also almost certainly require an ongoing increase in tech support staff.

The legislature also decided to require a science assessment in nine grades. The Smarter Balanced Assessments do not include a science component, so districts would have to pay for additional standardized tests to meet that requirement. Those tests could cost another $10 per student.

Where will all the money come from? If the state spends that much more on standardized testing—at the same time that the Governor is pushing tax relief—the funding can only come at the expense of other educational needs. To pay for all this gold-plated testing, the schools will have to make even more cuts like the ones we’re seeing now. Will French go the way of German? Will band and orchestra be cut from elementary school entirely? Will class sizes increase? Will teachers be laid off? What else will we have to sacrifice for the sake of all this testing?

So yes, people should contact their legislators and the Governor. But it’s not enough to ask for more education funding. We should demand that the state let us fund the kind of education we value, instead of imposing its own idea of test-driven education on our schools.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve heard protest after protest about the cuts to music, foreign language, and other programs. If the state chose not to implement expensive new standardized tests, would there be even a single complaint? How did our schools end up so far from what our community values?

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Here’s some additional information that I couldn’t fit into the guest opinion:

There are several reasons to think that the Smarter Balanced Assessments will cost more than the $22.50 per student estimated by the consortium. First, that figure includes only the year-end “summative assessments,” not the optional additional tests the consortium offers, which could add another $5 per student. Second, the cost figures are only estimates; some of the administration and scoring services will have to be purchased from private vendors, who may well charge more than the consortium estimates. Third, paper-and-pencil versions of the test, which could be necessary if the technology is not ready, will cost an additional $10-12 per student.

One reason the Iowa Assessments are relatively inexpensive is that they are produced by the University of Iowa, which provides them to Iowa school districts at cost. Other states pay as much as $15 per student to use Iowa-created tests, but that’s still a significant savings over the cost of the Smarter Balanced tests.

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The legislature may well appropriate funds to pay for new standardized tests, though it’s unlikely to cover all the associated expenses. But even if it does, that’s money that it could have used for other (more compelling) educational needs. If the state won’t give us the allowable growth that we need to pay for things like music and language classes, it will be because it has already spent the money on standardized tests.

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There has been an interesting back-and-forth between the state Department of Education and the legislature on the Smarter Balanced tests. Under both Governors Culver and Branstad, the Department made a commitment to the Smarter Balanced consortium to adopt the tests. Meanwhile, though, the legislature decided that schools would have to continue using the Iowa Assessments until it decides otherwise. That put the Department in an awkward spot. The Department continued to push for the Smarter Balanced tests, but the legislature decided only that it would settle on some set of Core-aligned tests by 2016-17, and it created a task force to make a recommendation. The task force has not yet issued its report—but its members were all chosen by the Department.

The legislature did decide to triple the number of grades in which tests would be required, starting in 2016-17. The bill to create the assessment task force and to require testing in nine grades received bipartisan support, including the support of every legislator from Johnson County, including Senators Joe Bolkcom, Bob Dvorsky, and Sandra Greiner, and Representatives Dave Jacoby, Bobby Kaufmann, Vicki Lensing, Mary Mascher, and Sally Stutsman.

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The federal government, including the Obama Administration, also bears responsibility for this increase in testing. Iowa’s push for increased standardized testing was part of its attempt to receive federal Race to the Top funding, which incentivized exactly that approach. Alas, even though we adopted the Common Core standards and joined the Smarter Balanced consortium, we didn’t get the money.

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Education in Iowa recently had a terrific post on just how little we know about Iowa’s readiness to shift to computer-based testing, including a discussion of testing debacles in other states that “ought to be keeping Iowa proponents of Smarter Balanced Assessments up at night.” An excerpt:

[The Department of Education] can’t ask the Iowa Legislature to appropriate funds for tech readiness if they don’t know what is needed, leaving schools to fund needed tech readiness upgrades out of existing school budgets that are already stretched thin. This might be much less of a concern for schools ahead of the curve tech wise, but ought to be a concern nonetheless. Diverting local funds from the classroom or needed facility maintenance or upgrades will hardly make the Common Core and the accompanying standardized assessments more popular.

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Of course, there are also non-fiscal objections to the role standardized tests now play in our schools. Here are FairTest’s concerns about the Smarter Balanced Assessments.

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Where does the money go? It’s hard to say exactly, because each state will do its own contracting with vendors for Smarter Balanced test administration and scoring.  But you can bet that Pearson stands a good chance of getting those contracts in Iowa.

Needless to say, standardized testing, together with all its associated “educational services,” is a major industry. Pearson’s North American Education division, for example, reported £536 million in operating profit in 2012—the equivalent of about $900 million.

Does anyone think that the Smarter Balanced Assessments—or for that matter, the Common Core standards—would have been adopted on such a wide scale if there weren’t millions of dollars to be made by for-profit testing companies like Pearson?

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The same bill that increased the required testing also established a “teacher leadership” program that will take experienced teachers out of the classroom to spend more time mentoring junior teachers; it will begin in 2015. We have yet to see how this program will affect local budgeting decisions: will more programs become expendable, or will class sizes grow, when the most experienced teachers start mentoring other teachers instead of teaching kids? (The legislature did appropriate funds, but again, that could only make less money available for other needs.)

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Notice that our district is already using the Iowa Assessments in three times more grades than it’s required to (not to mention all the other standardized tests it gives). Apparently that category of expense didn’t come up when the administration was making budget cuts.

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The single best place to go for information about the status of standardized testing in Iowa, and of the Smarter Balanced Assessments in particular, is the Education in Iowa blog. Its posts on Smarter Balanced Assessments are here.

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Source note: The current requirement that the Iowa Assessments be given in fourth, eighth, and eleventh grade is in Iowa Code section 256.7(21)(b) and (b)(1). The requirement that testing be given in third through eleventh grades as of 2016 appears in section 256.7(21)(b)(2), which also requires the science assessment.
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“He will be a good employee for the job”

Iowa City parent Scott Samuelson has a great opinion piece in today’s Wall Street Journal on the real value of teaching the humanities. He cites research showing that undergraduate humanities majors earn more than those who major in professional or pre-professional fields, but argues:

Thinking of the value of the humanities predominately in terms of earnings and employment is to miss the point. America should strive to be a society of free people deeply engaged in “the pursuit of happiness,” not simply one of decently compensated and well-behaved employees.

Scott’s book, “The Deepest Human Life: An Introduction to Philosophy for Everyone,” comes out next week.

Meanwhile, our school district’s “Guidance” program had fourth- and sixth-graders learning job interview skills this week. In some classes, the kids played the parts of employer and job applicant and then evaluated the applicant’s interview skills. Was the applicant “clean, neat and well-groomed”? Did he have “Hands relaxed (not clenched)”? Did he “honor the end of the interview”? The interviewers then wrote overall comments, such as “He seems like a good employee.” Here’s an example:

(Click to enlarge.)

The Iowa Core, after all, has twenty-five pages of mandatory standards devoted to “employability skills.” See if you can find the Iowa Core sections devoted to philosophy or the arts.
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The not so Iowan core of the Iowa Core

Although our governor is trying to downplay the uniform, national aspect of the Common Core and assert that the Iowa Core is a home-grown approach, it turns out that in 2011 he wrote to the Smarter Balanced Assessments Consortium—the designers of the standardized tests geared to the Common Core—asking to be promoted from an “advisory state” to a “governing state” and saying:

We have also adopted the Common Core standards which are now known as our Iowa Core standards. Our new Governor, State Board Chairperson, and State Director of Education believe this is the right time for Iowa to be involved in building a system of formative, interim, and summative assessments, organized around the Common Core standards.

At that point, the previous governor and his education officials had already signed a memorandum of understanding agreeing to adopt the Smarter Balanced Consortium’s summative assessment by the 2014-15 school year. None of that sounds very home-grown to me.

Now the governor is facing a legislature that wouldn’t be rushed into approving the Smarter Balanced tests and a task force, created by the legislature, that could recommend different choices about assessments instead. I don’t know why our governors have been so sure that the legislature would willingly sit on the sidelines while Iowa jumped on the Common Core bandwagon.

Karen W. recently pointed out that the Iowa Core’s “21st Century Skills” standards on “civic literacy” pay scant attention to constitutional rights. The standards do (somewhat opaquely) touch on federalism, though, declaring that students must “understand the differences among the complex levels of local, state and national government and their inherent, expressed, and implied powers,” “understand the design and features of the Constitution prevent the abuse of power by aggregating power at the national, state, and local levels and using a system of checks and balances,” and “understand issues concerning the relationship between state and local governments and the national government.” I can’t say that these are the people I would put in charge of making sure my kids learn those topics. But maybe my age is showing: constitutional rights and federalism are so Twentieth Century.

Well, I’m out of hours. If I had more stamina, I’d want to look more closely at people’s objections to the standards themselves. Even if you like the idea of nationwide uniform standards, you might not like these. Some have argued, for example, that the standards for grades K-2 are developmentally inappropriate; others have argued that the high school math standards are hopelessly inadequate to prepare kids for college. Here’s a good article expressing other objections (largely from a liberal point of view) to the Common Core. But I’ll leave the further Googling to you.

Thus endeth the micro-blogathon. Not sure I’ll be signing up for another one of these any time soon.
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Defer to your betters

One reason many liberals (and others) are skeptical of the Common Core is that they have concluded that the federal government has been captured by the wealthy—especially on the issue of education—and that the imposition of the Common Core on local school districts is effectively the rich deciding that they know what’s best for everyone else.

One way that cities and towns differ from states and the nation is that a good number of them are populated largely by relatively poor people and by minorities. Supporters of the Common Core are determined to take policy-making power away from local governments. Maybe that’s a coincidence, but the effect is the same regardless.

Call me crazy, but I tend to be skeptical about proposals to disempower people for their own good.
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Opportunity cost

The Common Core mandates, in elaborate detail, exactly what we want kids to learn and when. It gives no attention whatsoever to the question of how kids learn. Worse, it assumes that how kids learn is entirely unrelated to the question of what we make them learn—that the decision to march kids through a prescribed regimen of skills and topics on a prescribed schedule, no matter what any given kid might be ready for or interested in, will have no effect on how well those kids will learn, or on their long-term attitude toward learning.

None of that strikes me as very wise. If policy-makers should be thinking hard about anything today, it’s about how kids learn, about how to cultivate intrinsic motivation and intellectual curiosity, and about how create a school experience that kids see as engaging rather than as an alienating chore. They should also be thinking hard about what values schools are teaching and modeling by how they treat the kids in their care. Instead, their idea of how to improve education is by making a long list of goals and ordering schools everywhere to meet them (or to go through the motions of meeting them).

Speaking of opportunity cost: Check out Karen W.’s posts (e.g., here, here, and here) on how much more we’ll be spending on standardized testing if we adopt the tests that are designed to along with the Common Core—the so-called Smarter Balanced Assessments. Long story short: we could be going from our current assessments, which cost about $3.50 per student, to a cost per student of $20 or more. Is that what we should be pouring our scarce education dollars into? Also check out how much more time the students will spend taking tests. For full coverage of the Smarter Balanced Assessment, there’s no substitute for Karen’s blog.
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Buyer beware

One thing that’s frustrating about so much of the discussion of the Common Core is that so many of the participants are either outright self-interested or constrained by their situations from expressing their honest thoughts about the matter. The administrators in our district, for example, have been putting on sessions for the parent-teacher organizations extolling the virtues of the Iowa Core. Our schools have to follow them; therefore they must be good! In a few years, if the prevailing education fad is the exact opposite of what they’re now doing, they’ll be there to tell us how great that policy is, too. What’s the point of trying to debate the merits of a policy with people in that situation? (Upton Sinclair was on the mark.)

My co-panelists on the KCRG discussion of the Common Core were a Cedar Rapids schoolteacher and her employer, the Cedar Rapids superintendent. They both spoke in favor of the Core. But would a teacher who was critical of the Core have felt as free to appear on the show and contradict her boss?

The effect is to generate an enormous noise machine in favor of whatever fad currently has the institutional momentum. How does this phenomenon serve the goal of providing kids with a good education?
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How to drive good people from the teaching profession

Supporters of the Common Core are always reassuring us that it preserves “flexibility” and does not impose any particular curriculum, but it’s plainly designed to decrease teacher autonomy. Yes, many of the standards are so broad and general that you could arguably satisfy them in any number of ways (which at some point, after all, undermines the rationale for them). But open up, say, the literacy standards and read through them for a while.

If you’re a school district, you could let teachers develop their own ways of satisfying these sometimes very abstract but always very extensive standards, and allow them to demonstrate that their lesson plans meet the goals. That would be quite a bit of work to impose on teachers and those who supervise them, who are busy enough as it is. Or you can find someone else who has already done all the work for you—a national textbook publisher—and who has provided you with expert-certified assurances that their product meets the Common Core standards. Even then the teacher will probably have to demonstrate that he or she is teaching the text in a way that satisfies the standards. If you think “checking all the boxes in the Core standards” exactly equals “teaching literacy well,” then you won’t be bothered by funneling teachers’ time and effort into this system. If you don’t, then you’d worry about diverting energy from the latter to the former.

In other words, the Core is a recipe for making teachers into functionaries. That process had already begun before the Core came along, and the Core will only accelerate it. The sheer volume of standards will push districts and teachers toward adopting someone else’s ideas of how to satisfy them, rather than allowing teachers to use their own experience and judgment in deciding how to teach. Just let the national curriculum voluntarily-chosen Core-compliant textbook make all the decisions. All you have to do is read the script. What a great class! What a fulfilling job!

Add to that all the efforts to decrease teachers’ job security and measure their performance by the test scores of the kids who happen to be in their classes. It’s a miracle that anyone with any other options chooses to go into K-12 teaching today. Personally, I’d run screaming in the other direction, and I’m not alone. (Read this teacher’s take, as just one recent example.) There will always be some talented and capable people who are drawn to teaching, but how will the Core’s vision of education do anything but decrease that pool of people?
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Is uniformity worth it? Is it even real?

Yikes, it’s seven o’clock and there are whole categories of objection to the Common Core that I haven’t even touched on yet. But first, what about the argument that we need a uniform set of standards to make it easier for kids to adjust when they move from one school to another? This concern is especially important, the argument goes, for addressing the “achievement gap” between poor kids (whose families may be less likely to remain in one school district for long stretches) and kids who aren’t poor.

This argument is clearly the best one Common Core supporters have to offer, and really the only one that gives a substantive reason for sacrificing state and local preferences for the sake of signing on to a uniform federally-driven project. How powerful is the argument, though? And does it outweigh the cons of centralization?

First of all, it’s important to notice (despite the assertions of Core supporters) that this argument is completely inconsistent with local or even state control of education. The way to ensure that kids can move freely between school districts without a hitch is to have to have a national curriculum. If this is really the concern underlying the Common Core, why do its supporters hasten to assure us that they find the idea of a national curriculum abhorrent? (Answer: PR.)

But I don’t doubt that kids who move from one place to another are burdened and disadvantaged by the disruption to their schooling. This would have to be a particular problem in a subject like math, where the ability to master some concepts depends on prior mastery of other concepts. (Even then, a much less detailed list of coverage goals would achieve about as much.) As for some of the other subjects, well, I’m less convinced. Has any teacher ever complained that the new kid can’t handle this year’s social studies class because he didn’t learn to “understand the rights and responsibilities of each citizen and demonstrate the value of lifelong civic action” in the previous year? Has any sixth grader ever struggled because she missed the fifth grade class on how to “understand the changing nature of society”?

But again, either the standards are specific and meaningful, in which case they are tantamount to a top-down national curriculum, or they are broad generalities that are likely to be applied in ways that vary greatly from one district to another. Suppose you teach fourth grade in a Common Core state, and you determine that your lesson plan teaches the kids to “Explain events, procedures, ideas, or concepts in a historical, scientific, or technical text, including what happened and why, based on specific information in the text.” How confident are you that your fourth-graders are coming away with the same abilities and skills as those of your colleague in a different Common Core state?

Moreover, when a kid shows up at a new school (and maybe it’s his third or fourth new school) and is not at “grade level” in his classes, how often is that because his previous schools weren’t teaching the same skills? Isn’t it quite possible that the student was struggling in his previous school, too? How much will adopting the Core really address the causes of why disadvantaged kids struggle in school?

When I think of all the ways poor kids are disadvantaged in their lives, educationally and otherwise, I don’t come away thinking, “What those kids need is uniform standards.” What I actually think is: What those kids need is some money. While Iowa is spending time and money on developing and pushing the Core, which will require even more spending on standardized tests and on the fancy technology that the new tests require, it has fallen into the bottom half of states in per-pupil spending. Why not give those kids who move from school to school more actual services, more individualized attention, more small class sizes, to help them get to where they need to be? But no, apparently the way to help those kids is by imposing uniform standards and expensive standardized testing schemes on their school districts.

So sure, considered in isolation, it would be great if students could move seamlessly between one school and another, anywhere in America. But Common Core supporters are offering a chimerical vision of that ideal to get us to trade away our ability to have any meaningful say over what goes on in our kids’ schools and what kind of approach to education we want our schools to follow. The Common Core supporters want you to think that the Core is just an objectively correct, expert-driven approach that no one could possibly quibble about. Just like No Child Left Behind was. Who could possibly choose anything other than top-down, standardized-test-driven education for their kids?
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How about this federal education policy?

Again, there are many good reasons to think that the federal government is poorly suited to the task of determining K-12 education policy. But do you know what the federal government is actually very well-suited for, what it’s particularly competent to do? Stimulating the economy, lowering unemployment, alleviating poverty, and mitigating the increasingly unequal distribution of wealth. The federal government is perfect for that job! But on those issues, it sits on its hands, while telling us that “the only way to end poverty is through education.” Give me a break.

See Matt Bruenig here and Freddie deBoer here. Also me here.
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