Published this week were the first set of test results from the new California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress (CAASPP). These tests assess students’ performance in California’s public schools. Because they are markedly more difficult than previously administered school tests, low scores were expected. School critics were not disappointed.
Students attending some schools in the Anaheim City School District recorded very low scores. For example, at 7 elementary schools, 80% or more of the students are regarded as not proficient in the English language arts, and at 13 elementary schools, 80% or more of the students are regarded as not proficient in mathematics. These figures, however, reveal little useful information for teachers or students.
The results of future state tests will undoubtedly be higher—which supporters of Common Core will assert evidences more effective classroom instruction and improved students’ progress, a spurious conclusion. Many scores are so low on the initial administration of the new tests that future scores can only increase. (To understand why tests scores will likely improve, regardless of the quality of instruction, Google “regression to the mean.”)
When reviewing the new test results, parents and teachers must be careful to avoid a serious error: Students’ scores based upon Common Core Standards have nothing to do with the scores recorded on previous school tests—a fact addressed by the Editorial Board of the Los Angeles Times on September 8.
Everything about this process has been new and different: a different set of academic expectations in English and math, a different curriculum based on those expectations, and a different style of teaching that aims to guide students toward better thinking, problem-solving and writing rather than regurgitation of information. . . . It would be a mistake to compare these new results with the old ones; that would be like comparing apples and porcupines. And it’ll be years before it becomes clear whether the new tests and the new curriculum live up to their promise.
Yet on September 9 in the same newspaper, Howard Blume blundered, comparing apples and porcupines:
Under the Common Core-linked test, 40% of California third-graders scored at grade level or better in math. That compares to 66% who did so on the former test. And in English, 38% of third-graders met expectations or better on the new test, compared to 45% previously. . . . An 11th-grader who scores below expectations, for example, would be considered unprepared for college. Younger students scoring below grade-level goals would be classified as not on track for college.. . . Still, the just-released results could prove disheartening to parents and school district officials who had thought, based on previous tests, that their students were doing better.
Blume’s conclusions were nonsense, as was this inconsequential reaction from Ramon Cortines, superintendent of Los Angeles public schools: “As we all expected, the overall results of these more rigorous assessments show that we still have more work to do.”
Somehow, John Dewey’s seminal ideas about education have been lost, replaced by a reductionist model of education, which also serves as the foundation of many reading programs. Many years ago Kenneth Goodman noted that our schools treat language like a piece of salami. Reading is comprehension, he argued. No other goal matters. Any lesson or instruction that helps a reader comprehend is worthwhile, but any lesson that does not help a reader comprehend is meaningless. Reading instruction infrequently focuses on comprehension, the reason why so many reading programs are ineffective. Teachers are too busy teaching purported reading skills such as short vowels, consonant digraphs, phonological awareness, syllabication, prefixes and suffices, and a myriad of other insignificant word-based rules. As a result, readers learn to pass standards’ tests but do not comprehend written language.
The most troubling factor to this writer about a curricula tied to Common Core Standards is the effect of this focus: to equate education with high test scores, achieved by treating every subject as a piece of salami, slicing and dicing concepts and skills until the essence of a subject or discipline becomes transformed into thousands of unrecognizable and useless pieces. I favor replacing Common Core Standards with the quintessence of John Dewey’s model of education: “If I were asked to name the most needed of all reforms in the spirit of education, I should say: ‘Cease conceiving of education as mere preparation for later life, and make it the full meaning of the present life.’”
Dewey’s vision of education is entirely at odds with the basic Common Core Standards, the latter factor centered on college readiness and high test scores for all:
Today’s students are preparing to enter a world in which colleges and businesses are demanding more than ever before. To ensure all students are ready for success after high school, the Common Core State Standards establish clear, consistent guidelines for what every student should know and be able to do in math and English language arts from kindergarten through 12th grade.
To assess the extent to which California’s students fulfill the Common Core Standards constitutes an extremely limited and inadequate vision of education. John Dewey, where are you now that schools really need you? Who will teach federal officials that education took the wrong turn on its Race to the Top of a mountain constructed of hundreds of bite-sized, discrete, tasteless, and unfulfilling standards? The new whole of public education falls far short of being the sum of its parts.
