Even STEM Wants To Distance Itself From Common Core

When one has a bad program, if one is employed and wishes to remain so, one must suck the hose spewing the money. Recently Ezra Klein felt the necessity as John links to over here.  Further more  on this day, we have Terri Hodges paying the piper here… And to make it a hat trick… from the dark black hole of 901 N. Market Street, a place sucking up just in 2013… $6,231,714.57 of Delaware’s taxpayer’s money, a ringing endorsement dutifully published by  the News Journal without any of the clear quid-pro-quo lines of connection between public dollars and one’s private fortunes that one would expect to find on a real news source, such as here….. 

But at the same time of this pro-Common-Core-coordinated push…., South Carolina is dropping the Smarter Balanced Assessment. Louisiana will be exiting PARCC assessments. Tennessee is leaving the PARCC assessments and Common Core altogether.  Indiana has left Common Core and chose to go solo with their own standards….keeping the best, trashing the worst.

The difference between these two opposite opinions depends solely on whether or not one is sucking the hose.  People who suck, all chorus “we need higher standards now blah, blah, blah”.  The People who got sucked (as in being pegged for suckers, silly, what did you think I was implying?)…  are saying “we’re getting the hell out of this stinking glory hole as fast as we possibly can… ”

Interestingly, all this is being viewed by those in charge of the next wave of reform: which is the implementation of Science and Math standards, or STEM…  This is more serious than Common Core.  Because real science and math, are more important to daily life than ELA and randomly attributed math puzzles.  Society always get along if we hear colorful language…”Yo! Ain’t yet got ‘dem Seasoned Eag’s tiks yet, bro,” ….  We can survive because we are smart enough to know that upon hearing that, we should ask someone else for our season Eagles tickets…   But being on an operating table, half in and out of consciousness and hearing “Ewwwwww… what’s that brown-red thingy, ugh, looks disgusting.””Uhh, Doctor, that is her liver.” “oh, yeah right,  It’s her liver.” does not play well for society overall and and as a whole….

People working on putting the next wave together are saying this in unison:

“DON’T DO IT LIKE COMMON CORE!….”

Instead here is what THEY recommend:

1) Anticipating that schools will not be able to tackle all aspects of the standards at once, and that some kind of staged implementation is called for.

2) Introducing the standards one grade level at a time, allowing each cohort of students to arrive at each grade with the requisite prior knowledge.  For example, start with k; then do k, 1st; then do k,1,2; and then do k,1,2,3; and so on….

3) Begin at the beginning (rather than the middle) and laying a solid foundation for subsequent work, especially important for high-need students.. Science is cumulative, and complicated ideas are built upon constituent concepts taught earlier,,

4) Build upward to give districts the requisite time to adapt the new standards and to offer effective professional development for all science teachers, one grade level at a time… From a district’s perspective, this professional-development challenge becomes more tractable and affordable…

5) The “all in” approach so far taken with the common core  indeed feels more like a tsunami, hitting a district all at once, changing the landscape, and threatening to erode all of the very progress it is trying to make. Such disruption lead to a backlash, followed by efforts to roll back or water down new standards….

 

When you see how much Common Core has failed and fallen on its face, so much that the next wave is calling for it’s abandonment….  it is physically hard to take any cheerleading …. “Rah, Rah, Rah! Sis Boom Bah” for Common Core seriously…

Perhaps we should do them a favor, find the handle on the spigot and shut off the water drowning them, so they can finally catch their breath…. and talk clearly ……

Common Core like the Reconstructionist South… is crawling with Carpet Baggers, each intent on  plying their own brand of self-help for a problem they alone are creating; there was never any overall systemic structure for regulating vendors; it was from the beginning set up like a bazaar…  When one walks in a bazaar, all one hears is noise.  A cacophony.  We need to stop listening to Common Core cheerleading as anything more than the marketing of self-promotion…  For the News Journal to allow this dark black-hole company of only 3 people earning over $6 million of state tax dollars just this past fiscal year…. , WITHOUT disclosing to us, the public, where exactly that opinion is coming …. is doing all of journalism a gigantic injustice….

Doing exactly that should be immoral.