The Common Core — the tough, new, nationwide standards to get America’s students back in fighting trim — is here. We’ll look at what it is and the debate it’s fired.
Have you heard of the Common Core? In 45
The Common Core — the tough, new, nationwide standards to get America’s students back in fighting trim — is here. We’ll look at what it is and the debate it’s fired.
Have you heard of the Common Core? In 45 of 50 states, it’s coming. A new — and, for many states, tougher — set of standards and tests for assessing how American students are doing, from kindergarten right on through.
The idea is to standardize and raise the level of American education, aim it to prep for college and career, to compete globally, to put everyone to the same test.
Fans say it’s long overdue. Critics say it’s heavy-handed, it’s window dressing, it’s scary.
Up next On Point: We’re digging into the Common Core and what your kids are going to be expected to know.
– Tom Ashbrook
Andrew Hacker, political scientist and professor emeritus in the Department of Political Science at Queens College in New York. He is the co-author of “Higher Education?: How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money And Failing Our Kids — And What We Can Do About It” and “Two Nations: Black And White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal.”
Andrew Rotherham, co-founder and partner at Bellwether Education, a non-profit organization which works to improve education for low-income students and which has been researching the implementation of Common Core for the last three years. He authored the blog post “7 Common Core Challenges.” (@arotherham)
Gewertz on why Common Core came about:
One of the reasons that the initiative got going was that states began to see that students varied quite a lot from district to district and state to state on what their standards were. In other words, states had created very different levels of expectations for their students and they had set very different cut scores, or passing scores, on their tests. So there were very, very different pass rates and success rates from state to state. And there was increasing awareness that on international tests, the U.S. was a fair to midland — not real great. And we weren’t looking real good.
Gewertz on the challenge of designing curricula:
Of course, between standards and tests lies curricula. And that’s where some of the heat is being generated here — of course, the tests are generating heat too. Many stripes of heat. But the curriculum that goes between the standards and tests — in other words, how do you turn standards into day-to-day instruction. That’s going to vary a lot. But one of the fears and one piece of the backlash is it will sort of create a lockstep kind of instruction. There are people who disagree with that criticism, but it is a fear out there.
Gewertz on testing and the challenge of enough time to teach the standards:
The common assessments, the tests, are due to make their debut in the spring of 2015. But for several years now, states and districts have been phasing the Common standards, writing curriculum for them, et cetera. [TOM ASHBROOK: Because you have to teach it before you can test on it.] One would hope. And that’s actually been one strain of criticism, that teachers and schools have not had enough time with these very complicated standards to really be expected to be evaluated, to have teachers evaluated on them, to have schools rated on them. So that’s one strain of the pushback here.
Rotherham on teachers and the need to support them in developing curricula:
There is a lot of concern on will