I know some of you are wondering what corner of the earth I dropped off of (or took refuge in). I’m equally sure there are plenty of people who are glad they don’t have to hear any more from me – and are probably hoping this is a permanent situation. I hate to disappoint, but I’m still watching and observing – from a sane distance.
I noticed after the recent BESE and Governor’s elections that the anti-reform camps were devolving. This seemed to be happening along party lines, and I wanted no part of that. I worked hard to build a coalition of voices and I was sad to see it fracturing in the aftermath of John Bel Edward’s election and his subsequent BESE selections that left many in the crossover conservative/Republican/Libertarian/Independent/Anti-CC camps feeling betrayed and those in the Liberal, Democrat, pro-union, CC indifferent camps overly-aggressive and defensive. With my style of writing, and proclivity for writing passionately (maybe even a tad hot-headed), I felt it best to take some time off and simply observe interactions and outcomes and watch where people chose to align themselves. I chose to disengage and cultivate my detachment. Being intensely involved with groups with objectives and their own points of view would have colored my opinions and hindered this process for me. Additionally, there was that whole 3 billion dollar budget deficit thing some of you might have heard of over the past few months. I could see that was sucking all the air out of the room (as well it should have.) That is/was a serious problem for our state with significant implications for k-12 and postsecondary education.
In this off time I have been working on some neglected aspects of my life that needed more attention than I was able to give while I was trying to run a political campaign and support a growing movement. I still had a finite amount of time to do everything in my life, so some things just did not get done. Without going into details, this caused a few personal problems I’ve had to clean up, and am still cleaning up. I’m hoping a significant portion of that “cleanup” will be complete in the next month – which should free up some more time for me and other pursuits like blogging and activism because it seems like there are still many people without a voice or champion for their problems.
Yesterday some of the security folks and a receptionist at my office asked me a few questions about Common Core and the new LEAP tests. They had seen my signs around town and seen me in suits over the past year and knew I had some knowledge of things in the education arena. They have kids in public schools in various parishes so they have Common Core and PARCC tests too, and they hate them. I don’t like to tell people my stand on those things until I hear their opinions. (I try to gather opinions from folks without imparting my biases on them first. I keep tabs on issues and how people from different backgrounds are feeling about different education policies. Sometimes they have unique perspectives, and sometimes they tell me about new problems, benefits, or implications that are subtler and which I hadn’t heard about or considered before. They asked me if it was true that Common Core was being replaced with something much better, like they had read in the newspaper. They asked me about the new L.E.A.P. tests that the state was administering and if those would be an improvement from PARCC, or from whatever we had last year. Sadly I had to tell them that those were simply name changes and that the content was likely to be 99% the same.
There’s still a lot of people that don’t really know what’s really going on. I read about different aspects of the situation but I rarely see a cohesive whole discussed anywhere, or if I do it’s the slanted company line. I have seen some pretty good summaries on Michael Deshotels’ blog, http://www.louisianaeducator.blogspot.com (I strongly recommend it for keeping with the play by play education situation), but nothing in more traditional sources.
For instance, many people think Common Core is going away, but nothing could be further from the truth. Common Core is more than a set of standards now. Now CC is an important part of the national Educational Industrial Complex. Without something very drastic happening we are stuck with it and the silly garbage and explosive costs that go along with it.
Take for example this Common Core, Eureka Math worksheet below.
This was one of the assignments given to my first grader from the only LDOE Tier One approved mathematics curriculum vendors (Eureka/Engage NY/Greatminds – they keep changing their name to outrun all the bad reviews on their product). It has complicated instructions I would imagine most first graders would have trouble understanding. If they asked their parents about this worksheet (like mine did) they have no idea what these jargon laden strategies mean listed in the top right box (except for the helpful “I just knew”) answer. What’s even more frustrating to both parents and children is that the examples are solved incorrectly. The first one shows an equation of 13-6 = 4 and then provides work to back up the answer. I tried several times to explain to my son that the first one was wrong, and to explain he was supposed to document this and show the correct answer, but he was confused by the whole process and examples and we both gave up after some frustrating back and forth.
I understand what the CC folks are trying to accomplish, but I don’t believe this is the right way to do it. . . Unless their intent is to make math more frustrating and thereby dissuading future generations from going into fields heavy in mathematics. My son’s favorite subject used to be math, and instead of reading at night before bed he used to discuss mathematical concepts with me and try to practice doing problems in his head. He especially liked discussing the concept of infinity. We don’t do math anymore at bedtime – or any other time during the day. His new favorite subject is reading. On the one side that’s great, because he was lagging behind in his reading skills and needed to practice them more, but on the other, that seems like the exact opposite of what pro-CC folks are trying to accomplish. However I guess I have them to thank my kids’ love of reading. Unfortunately I have them to thank for their hatred of math as well.
Yes, both my kids hate math now.
My daughter is in third grade now and much of her math revolves around multiplication. Unfortunately Common Core did away with the memorization of multiplication tables and introduced putting hundreds of dots on pages to represent multiplication – through addition. 8 x 9 equals 8 rows of 9 dots instead of 72. Fun, right?
Now try checking someone’s multiplication (or addition work) with those types of strategies using dots, or pictures like the ones shown above. Or in this case, require kids to check problems using the strategies I’ve shown or discussed. Watching paint dry is waaaaaay more interesting than that. I do hear stories about kids that finally understand math the CC way, and love it. I have to wonder though, are those the kids (like Olivia in the example above) that we really want designing the bridges, skyscrapers, and airplanes of the future?
This summer we will have to teach my daughter her multiplication tables, and probably cursive writing, ourselves. Those are subjects that were removed by Common Core and not replaced by the revision committee. Very little was changed by the revision committee. The Louisiana committee that was created and assigned the task of reviewing Common Core standards and developing Louisiana standards from them was more than 90% composed of staunch Common Core supporters who simply wanted to provide the Louisiana seal of approval. Of the few unbiased folks that were on the committee, many resigned in frustration, rather than continue to participate in a Kangaroo review committee created to solve political impasses, not curriculum flaws.
Eureka and Engage New York are not going away. The tests used to evaluate students and teachers on how well student’s have mastered these “strategies” are not going away either.
President Eisenhower referred to a growing fascist flaw in our system of government he described as the military-industrial complex in his farewell address January 17, 1961. (It’s also sometimes called the military-industrial-congressional complex to be more precise in a US context.) The idea behind the MICC is a three-sided “Iron triangle” around which government policy is really determined outside of the influence of ordinary citizens. Industry provides money to political candidates, who in turn approve policies and spending that support and enrich industry. To provide industry and congress with cover a government funded bureaucracy is created and charged with “overseeing” and distributing the spending (this bureaucracy is led by political appointees who have the political goal of preventing others from interfering with this arrangement.)
Today we have an Educational Industrial Complex but unlike the military industrial one, it is not limited to Congress. In Louisiana this lobby invests in state representatives and senators, as well as State and local school board representatives. In many states, like Louisiana, the EIC has seized control of state departments of education and over the course of the last two presidential terms the EIC has entirely co-opted the US Department of Education.
No single election or committee can stop this perversion of government and industry, and their bastard children of, USED, Common Core, PARCC, Eureka, and Smarter Balanced. Until people start to understand just how deep and complex this problem is the EIC can’t be stopped, at best we can get a brief reprieve by diverting their flow of corruption.
Crazy Crawfish 