Are Common Core Standards More Focused?

For anyone stumbling onto this blog, I am currently working on an analysis of the Common Core advocates that the old standards were too broad and not focused.  I will put my fnding up here as I get them and update this page as I go.  For starters, just initially in looking numerically at the standards, it appears that CCSS advocates are again overstating the case. For example, in Oregon I have counted the number of standards at each Grade Level in the "old" Standards and compared those figures to the number of CCSS at each level.  In each case, there are more CCSS standards than old Oregon standards.  And again, initially just looking, the old standards are more concise than the Common Core.  I will provide examples.  For now here are the counts:

Will Common Core Standards Improve Education?

Advocates for the Common Core and Smarter Balanced educational initiatives are right to be concerned that the parent Opt Out movement could influence the policy’s chances for success.  On the other hand, parents have warrant to be concerned about educational policies that are as consequential, on the one hand, and poorly supported by research, on the other.  As a parent, I have decided to opt my children out of SBAC testing, both because I feel the tests are harmful to them individually, but in the broader picture, harmful to education as a whole.  As a doctoral student in educational leadership, I belatedly started to review the foundational research underlying Common Core/SBAC and have been startled to find that wherever I dig, I find huge holes in the claims made by Common Core proponents.

Standardized Testing is not Teaching

Trying to Hit a Moving Target

Notice in this exchange how Merryl Tisch keeps moving the goalposts, first claiming the purpose of testing is to provide teachers and parents with information.  When that didn't work, she moved on to a new argument.  This is what I have observed repeatedly from supporters of testing.  The same failed arguments recycled again and again. Click read more to view video.

Misleading Parents and Gagging Teachers

One of the more pernicious aspects of the Common Core/Smarter Balanced roll-out is the marketing strategy employed to mislead parents.  State departments of education and school districts have become marketers for test-makers, spouting talking points fed to them by the same company, Pearson, that stands to profit from test-based accountability systems.  Teachers are threatened with disciplinary action if they criticize the tests or point parents and students to information about their rights.  This has led to critics of testing to go underground, surreptitiously distributing information, sometimes at great personal risk.  There is something wrong with an educational policy that causes the promulgation of information to be dangerous.

Debunking SBAC Rationales

1.  Smarter Balanced Tests are Better than old OAKS.

You've probably heard it: the old standards and OAKS test relied on rote memorization but the Common Core and SBAC encourage "deeper" thinking.  Interestingly, this latter claim is based on the observation that there are fewer Common Core standards than before.  Some critics have pointed out that in many cases, multiple standards have just been condensed into one.  But even if we accept that the Common Core itself might encourage deeper thinking, the idea that the SBAC remedies past problems with the OAKS because it does not rely solely on multiple choice questions is deeply flawed.  First, SBAC still has a substantial multiple choice portion, so that problem has not been eliminated.  Second, the written portion of the SBAC introduces new levels of complication.  For example, who will grade the written sections?  It will take thousands of people to score these items and each person will have different ways of scoring.  Inter-rater reliability is difficult to establish and requires levels of quality control to verify.  In fact, not relying on multiple choice items lessens our ability to compare scores, a major justification for imposing interstate testing in the first place.