Many students challenged to meet the new Common Core standards will feel stressed and stupid. Better teachers can help control for this, but I will keep hammering one nail: Kids are smart enough to see when other kids can do work more quickly and easily. Especially if the range in performance is great, the kids at the bottom are likely to conclude that the other kids are smarter than they are.
I don’t see how harder, Common Core-based tests will help our students more than earlier state standardized tests did. Before results came back from the first PARCC administration, a test derived from the Common Core, rumors were running around among educators that no school in Illinois had passed the secondary school math tests. I doubted those rumors were true (they were not), but what interested me was the fact that not a single educator I knew, when confronted with this rumor, denied the possibility.
The actual Illinois PARCC results showed better than a complete failure, but the majority of kids in the state did not meet or exceed expectations on this test. The majority of kids “failed.” The Illinois state report card site provides PARCC results for various grades and subgroups. For more, interactive information see: https://www.illinoisreportcard.com/State.aspx?source=Trends&source2=Parcc&Stateid=IL,
The graph below displays the overall percentage of students who achieved scores in the following PARCC performance level categories for the year 2014 – 2015:
- Level 1 Dark Orange – did not yet meet expectations
- Level 2 Light Orange – partially met expectations
- Level 3 Yellow – approached expectations
- Level 4 Light Green – met expectations
- Level 5 Dark Green – exceeded expectations
(Click on pic for better view.)
The first group gives an overall composite, the second shows 3rd grade and the last group shows high school. Only students in the green areas passed. In high school, almost no students as a percentage of the total exceeded expectations. On some bars, if those students even exist, they cannot be detected. No dark green line can be seen.
Frankly, despite the enormous costs in the Core’s creation and implementation, I suspect America would benefit from scrapping the Common Core. We could try to fix the Core, but I am afraid that might be putting frosting on burned brownies. In business school terms, continuing with the Common Core seems to be a pure example of a Sunk Cost Fallacy. Yes, we have spent billions to bake these brownies. But all the frosting and extra billions in the world won’t fix this batch.
The batch is burnt. And all the King’s horses and all the King’s men may not put education back together again, not if we keep bolding tossing a wrong recipe into the oven.
(My apologies to readers for a truly convoluted and fractured metaphor, but I like it and I could not resist. I kind of like using a mummified banana to represent the Common Core, too.)