
Massachusetts’s Rejection of Common Core Test Signals Shift in U.S - frostmatthew
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/22/us/rejecting-test-massachusetts-shifts-its-model.html
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spicyj
As someone who used to work at Khan Academy…

This is so sad. The Common Core standards are designed very well. They
emphasize understanding over mechanics. They've gotten surprisingly bad press
from parents who don't understand math and don't understand the new methods
which really are designed to build intuition and understanding. But even if
you have to give in and go back to the old way of teaching, why ditch the new,
high-quality test? I don't get it. Maybe the schools are all afraid of looking
ineffective because they know they don't teach proper understanding.

~~~
droopybuns
I'll bite. Here is a sample from my daughter's math homework this week:

Bobby's teacher asked him what the value of the 5 in 582 is.

He answered that it was in the hundreds place. Did he answer the teachers
question? If yes explain why. If no what is the right answer?

Bonus points if you can explain the intention of asking the value of a numeral
in a larger integer.

~~~
MarkMc
This is an excellent question because it allows the student to demonstrate an
understanding that (a) digits have different 'meaning' depending on the
context - the 5 'means 500' and the 8 'means 80'; and (b) there is a
difference between replying with a true statement and answering correctly.

Bobby has made a true statement that is related to the question, but hasn't
completely answered the question. The correct is that the value of 5 in 582 is
500, and an even better answer would be "the value of 5 in 582 is 500 because
the 5 is in the hundreds place".

This distinction is something that many teachers overlook. There is an
excellent handbook for teachers called "Teach Like A Champion" [1] which
emphasises that "Right is Right" \- here is an excerpt:

\---------------------------------

Right Is Right is about the difference between partially right and all-the-way
right—between pretty good and 100 percent. The job of the teacher is to set a
high standard for correctness: 100 percent. The likelihood is strong that
students will stop striving when they hear the word right (or yes or some
other proxy), so there's a real risk to naming as right that which is not
truly and completely right. When you sign off and tell a student she is right,
she must not be betrayed into thinking she can do something that she Cannot.

Many teachers respond to almost-correct answers their students give in class
by rounding up. That is they'll affirm the student's answer and repeat it,
adding some detail of their own to make it fully correct even though the
student didn't provide (and may not recognize) the differentiating factor.
Imagine a student who's asked at the beginning of Romeo and Juliet how the
Capulets and Montagues get along. “They don't like each other,” the student
might say, in an answer that most teachers would, I hope, want some
elaboration on before they called it fully correct. “Right,” the teacher might
reply. “They don't like each other, and they have been feuding for
generations.” But of course the student hadn't included the additional detail.
That's the “rounding up.” Sometimes the teacher will even give the student
credit for the rounding up as if the student said what he did not and what she
merely wished he'd said, as in, “Right, what Kiley said was that they don't
like each other and have been feuding. Good work, Kiley.” Either way, the
teacher has set a low standard for correctness and explicitly told the class
that they can be right even when they are not. Just as important, she has
crowded out students' own thinking, doing cognitive work that students could
do themselves (e.g., “So, is this a recent thing? A temporary thing? Who can
build on Kiley's answer?”).

When answers are almost correct, it's important to tell students that they're
almost there, that you like what they've done so far, that they're closing in
on the right answer, that they've done some good work or made a great start.
You can repeat a student's answer back to him so he can listen for what's
missing and further correct—for example, “You said the Capulets and the
Montagues didn't get along.” Or you can wait or prod or encourage or cajole in
other ways to tell students what still needs doing, ask who can help get the
class all the way there until you get students all the way to a version of
right that's rigorous enough to be college prep: “Kiley, you said the Capulets
and the Montagues didn't get along. Does that really capture their
relationship? Does that sound like what they'd say about each other?”

In holding out for right, you set the expectation that the questions you ask
and their answers truly matter. You show that you believe your students are
capable of getting answers as right as students anywhere else. You show the
difference between the facile and the scholarly. This faith in the quality of
a right answer sends a powerful message to your students that will guide them
long after they have left your classroom.

\----------------------------------------

[1]
[http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1118901851](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1118901851)

~~~
jacobolus
In other words, the student (“Bobby”) understands the subject, understands the
gist of the question, and makes an answer which demonstrates that
understanding, but the question is ambiguously/confusingly worded, such that
“it’s in the hundreds place” doesn’t fully satisfy the teacher’s pedantic
expectation of a “right” answer. Thus the teacher needs to tell the student he
is wrong and ask leading questions until the student guesses his way into
“correctness” and hopefully eventually memorizes the specific pattern desired
by the teacher, like a trained dog going through a list of tricks to get to
the treat (“no I said lie down, and you are merely sitting”).

Spending time on the difference between the phrases “a 5 in the hundreds
place” vs “5 hundred”, when both the student and the teacher understand them
to mean the same thing is a waste of people’s focus. Instead the student could
be doing something much more interesting, such as examining what the digits
would mean in a base twelve system, discussing how a number is transformed
when multiplying/dividing by ten, learning what happens to the digits in
higher places when working with modular arithmetic, learning how to use an
abacus to keep track of the place values, or developing an algorithm to
transform back and forth between explicit counters like pebbles in a dish and
their written decimal representations, etc. etc.

On the other hand, the question asked of droopybuns’s daughter is sort of
interesting from a philosophy/sociology/pedagogy point of view. There’s not
really much math content in it, but getting students to think about the ways
the social context shapes expectations about right answers and effective ways
to navigate a society full of bureaucrats with sticks up their asses is
definitely worthy of discussion.

~~~
droopybuns
Best response yet :)

Finaly spoke with the teacher:

Bobby is wrong.

The "value" of the 5 is 500. They are learning number placement right now: 582
= 500 + 80 + 2

So the thing she is supposed to say is that the 5 is in the hundreds place, so
it should be equal to 500.

I loathe that they assign the word "value" when the concept is contextual. The
value of 5 is axiomatic, as is the value 582. When I explained this, the
teacher's only response was to argue that this standard is almost verbatim
outlined by the school district. <s> It must be right then! </s>

This teaching risks proving that 5=500.

Markmcc has an excellent counterpoint to my frustration, and I plan to use it
to explain the objective of the question to my daughter.

~~~
jacobolus
A better wording for the question the teacher was really trying to ask might
be:

“What quantity does the symbol ‘5’ in the decimal number ‘582’ represent?”

Then the answer is unambiguously ‘five hundreds’.

~~~
droopybuns
Much better. Thank you for expressing the crux of the confusion & proposing a
better solution.

------
bitwize
Ada was rejected as an implementation language for DoD projects by developers,
so much so that the DoD reversed its Ada requirement.

Ada the language is awesome. In particular it requires you to be VERY specific
about types, as well as things like pointer aliasing, but it also gave you
enough flexibility to manage this complexity, in the form of generics and
parameterized types akin to Standard ML's but in an imperative language. So
why was it so universally loathed and detested?

Part of the reason is resistance to change. But another part -- a BIG part --
is shitty compilers. Before GNAT came along, Ada tooling was expensive and
sucked balls. All vendors had to do was _conform to the standard_ and they had
the possibility of winning DoD contracts without having to compete on ease of
use, performance, or non-bugginess.

So it is with Common Core. Common Core is a standard only and it may be a good
one, but it's not going to solve the problem of curriculum authors shitting
out bad curricula and passing it off in the school board simply because it
"meets the standards". That's a structural problem and requires fundamental
changes in how education is procured, distributed, and administered in the
USA.

~~~
vonmoltke
> So it is with Common Core. Common Core is a standard only and it may be a
> good one, but it's not going to solve the problem of curriculum authors
> shitting out bad curricula and passing it off in the school board simply
> because it "meets the standards". That's a structural problem and requires
> fundamental changes in how education is procured, distributed, and
> administered in the USA.

People who conflate the standards and the curricula are abundant in
discussions on Common Core, and it bugs the crap out of me.

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dsfyu404ed
In MA you've got a (rotating) chunk of schools that are always on the ropes
because of their test numbers. I'd be surprised if the teacher's union didn't
disregard the merits (good or bad) throw their weight behind this simply to
get more stability for those schools that are in danger of being shut down or
reorganized. FWIW common core is somewhat redundant as well since they already
have to play the numbers game with MCAS.

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thefastlane
No discussion about the Common Core is complete without pointing out how it's
allowed the for-profit entity Pearson to monopolize k-12 education in this
country.

You want to talk about the Common Core? Keep the for-profit sector out of it,
and then we'll talk.

It's a little silly to point fingers at unions and parents whilst ignoring
Pearson in all of this -- unless you work for Pearson, I guess.

~~~
mcphage
You can drop common core, but you're not going to get rid of Pearson. They
were heaving involved in the curricula that came before common core, and
they'll be heavily involved with whatever comes next.

~~~
jacobolus
Yes, but when you have a centralized high-level mandate attached to the money
schools spend on books and other materials there’s no room for individual
teachers, schools, school districts, or states to experiment or adapt for
their own local conditions, because only a small handful of publishers have
the resources to get their publications certified by the centralized vetting
committee.

As an example, my elementary school in the mid-1990s was required by
California to buy new math textbooks, and even though the school didn’t want
any of the ones that qualified, thinking the books they already had to be
better and the mandated books to be complete crap, they had no choice but to
buy the new books because otherwise the school would lose the entire yearly
book budget from the state (there was a bit more diversity in the allowed
books for other subjects, so they did want those). As a bunch of dedicated,
opinionated teachers, they refused to use the new inferior math books, but
mandates are mandates so they bought them and put them in a box in a closet in
the library. Great for the publisher, huge waste for everyone else.

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chokolad
Interesting, they are dropping out because they actually want a harder test,
according to the article.

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snowwrestler
What We Talk About When We Talk About the Common Core

[http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/what-we-talk-about-
when-w...](http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-
about-the-common-core)

