Tag Archives: Common Core

The Road to 65, Mile 265: Pesky Testing

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Posted by on in distraction issues, Education, Social

August 20, 2015, Chino Valley- I stood outside Mingus Springs Charter School, this morning, and again at lunch recess, and marveled at how sweeping a view there is, in three directions.  Bill Williams Mountain is visible to the north, and Granite Mountain, to the south.  Eastward, the brown hills of the St. Matthews Range are interspersed with the greenery spreading out from the Verde River watershed.   The kids get to see this, four days a week, and, like a child who experienced the green hills and riverbanks of Saugus, MA, some fifty-five to sixty years ago, they probably feel comforted with the scenes, while taking them pretty much for granted.mandatory

My primary task, today, was to oversee another thing that people have come to take for granted, in today’s schools:  Mandatory testing.  This round of tests, for the latest educational fad:  Common Core, is to determine students’ present level of competence, relative to The New Standards.  It’s a pre-test, in other words, and has two parts, reading and math.  There will be a post-test, in April and May, and the two will, of course, be used to determine a student’s progress, and the school’s efficacy.

I’ve seen a lot of arcane material, and circumlocution, in the presentations of some Common Core advocates.  Like any educational flavour-of-the-year, or decade, it has its good points and its drawbacks.  Some claim it is pushing a socialist agenda.  Others see it more as fascism, a brazen move by the Feds to implement mind control.  I wouldn’t go anywhere near that far:  It’s a fad, much like No Child Left Behind, and before that, The First Days of School, and before that, A Nation at Risk.  Core Learning, Discovery Learning, New Math, Character Counts, Responsible Thinking, Immersion Learning- all have had their time in the sun, and some have managed to stick around, here and there, and do a measure of good.

When I first started working as a school counselor, in the 1980’s, my job partly entailed supporting the Principal’s pet project:  Score High on CAT (California Achievement Tests).  In the early 2000’s, the heyday of Harry Wong’s “The First Days of School”, there were no fewer than FOUR standardized tests being thrown at the students, in April alone, as part of the build-up to No Child Left Behind.

I was left behind, after that, and fortuitously, as I would spend 2005-11 as Penny’s primary caretaker.  More insidiously, though, I feel the children were, and are, being left behind, as their natural curiosity and sense of self- worth are getting squished by the pell-mell Race to The Top (Oops, that is so 2010!)  Try as the Big Boys and Girls might, they don’t get it.  I had to come down hard on the normally co-operative students, just to get this Assigned Task accomplished.  It’s a money game, and we all know it.  Without the testing, Federal dollars are withheld.  Without the testing, the students would focus on more intensive study of things that actually interest them, and which could be more practical in their lives.

So, how will the trade-off settle? It’ll be another fascinating year, no matter which school(s) in which I find myself.

The Road to 65, Mile 84: Arcaneness

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Posted by on in Personal goals, Social

February 20, 2015, Prescott-

There has come out of Phoenix, over the past several months, a concern with Common Core- the Federally-initiated set of loose education standards, which are intended to be tweaked to the needs of states and localities.  Because the Federal guidelines are so general, Common Core has appeared, to the average person, as a mishmash of convoluted lesson plans and circumlocution.

In most instances, Common Core has been fit to the state levels by panels of local educators.  The overriding concern, however, has been the mere fact that it is a byproduct of FEDERAL initiative.  There has been a fair amount of obfuscation and deliberate taking things out of context, so as to change education back to- “Heck, I don’t know.  Just make it something patriotic, adulatory of the Founding Fathers, pro-sports, useful for getting minimum-wage jobs, keeping the riff-raff in their place, and making Might the Master of Right.”

The only move the critics of Common Core have made thus far, here in the Grand Canyon State, is to institute a mandatory Civics Test, for those wanting to graduate high school.  That’s fair enough.  People who master Civics are less likely to be bamboozled.  All the same, there is nothing in Common Core that forbids or discourages mastery of Civics, or of any other subject.  We had a few years ago, in the Dysart Unified School District, in Surprise, AZ, west of Phoenix, something called Core Learning.  There were, in the social studies classes in which I taught, off and on, specific units on which it was felt everyone should focus:  The War for Independence, Slavery, the Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Great Depression.  I filled in the gaps, though it was discouraged by the administrators.  Several students, though, were more than glad to examine the Industrial Revolution, Gilded Age, the Spanish-American War and the Dust Bowl.

My point is that Common Core is a basic framework, not United Nations mandated indoctrination.  There are frivolous, off-center lesson plans being advanced in its name, but these have occurred in the names of any of its predecessors, from “A Nation At Risk” to “The First Days of School”, as well as “No Child Left Behind”.  Arcaneness is a peculiarly American aspect of education, more reflective of our freedom of expression, than of any Globo-stomp, Monolithic control of what kids learn.

I had these thoughts as I supervised groups of middle school students, who were working on learning somewhat arcane computer design applications, during the course of today.