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Pretty easy for me to tell you, “What do you think is going to happen? Assuming that you try to adopt a more thoughtful approach to examining Common Core as a powerful lever for school reform, what do you expect?”

I think that we’re going to have better data comparing kids across states.

I think that we will see stronger products from the non-profit (like Achievement Network) and for-profit (textbook companies) than before because there will be 0 time spent on customization or pitching the “fit” of these products to a new state.

I think that we will have great transfer of ideas and structures.

I think that we can begin to build common expectations in higher education.

And I hope that many states will see greater pressure for transformational reform as the test results which are not inflated come back, changing the perspectives of parents and students about how well they’re doing and how well they’re being served.

I also know that your post is made under the generous assumption that everyone is working hard right now and that quantity is a big part of the Common Core.  My belief is that “which” is the question the CC is answering, not “how much”, and I am quite certain that there are many people, students and teachers, not working near their potential right now because they’re being told they’re doing just fine so why work any harder?

I think it’s crazy to think that the CC is just about finding exactly what breakneck speed folks need to travel at– it’s about what roads they should be taking and setting the appropriate speed for the outcome we want.

JB,

1a)I think that you might be confusing common standards with common assessment.

1b) we already have common assessment.

Doesn’t the NEAP give us great data to compare states and districts? What purposes do you think NEAP doesn’t serve?

2) do you think that costumizarion efforts are a a significant drai on resources and significant impediment for text book and curriculum publishers?

3) Do you see the kind of “great transfer of ideas and structure” on the state level that you want to see on the national level? (i.e. In large states?)

4) do you envision a sort of common core for college and graduate school?

1c) Again, I think that you are confusing common standards with common assessment.

So what’s your proposed solution, Mr. Hoffman?

Hey Alex,

Thanks for responding.  You’re right that many of my hopes actually require common curriculum and common assessment.  My belief is that standards are the bottom of a pyramid, the next level is common curriculum, and the level above that is common assessment.  So my hopes for the core is that it makes it easier to do both of those things.

As for the NAEP, I think a combination of a) lack of alignment b) sampling rather than every kid in the US taking it in every school and c) limitation to English and math (still a CC problem) are all problematic for using it to do the kind of analysis I’d like to see teachers and school leaders be capable of doing to inform instruction, PD, and local improvement efforts.

I don’t believe customization is an impediment for textbooks companies, but I do think it can be for large districts.  As I watched folks purchase books in Providence last year, there was always an extra layer of analysis, figuring out what was missing and how texts would be supplemented, during the buying process.  It’s a small streamline, but a good one nonetheless.  I think that we’ll have more opportunities for smaller companies and independent folks to produce quality texts because entrepreneurial, small business ventures are far more likely to view customization as a difficult startup cost/hurdle that will no longer exist.  I hope this will lessen the cost of entry to these folks by increasing their potential market and scalability without increasing their fixed startup costs.

As for seeing this great transfer– its mixed.  I look at a company like Achievement Network, a personal favorite of mine, and I do see some transfer.  They started out providing support to charters in Boston but have been able to expand to quite a few traditional public schools because of demonstrated success with a smart product that fits well into a traditional structure.  Now they are active in 5 cities, I believe, and I’m pretty sure in four of those cities they are offering their services to both TPS and charters.  Right now, they need startup help from venture funds and foundations if they want to move into a new state– but once they do, they are able to expand to many schools and across sectors.  This will only become easier and more likely when the potential market for someone willing to put in the startup funds is much higher.

Common core for college and graduate school– I have a lot of difficulty with this one.  The basic answer is no, certainly not, as one might expect from someone with two degrees from Brown University which distinguishes itself by having no core/general education requirements.  However, my rationale for this is a bit complex and something I struggle with, and it largely stems from my belief about the fundamentally different purposes of college and k-12 education and my lack of enthusiasm for the belief that everyone should be learning college level liberal arts.  However, there is, in many ways, a de-facto core that exists before you get into college.  Tests like the Accuplacer are widely used in our community colleges and entry requirements (in terms of courses taken and success in those courses) are also used to screen prior knowledge that’s expected for college-level work.  I would like to see K-12 curricula that explicit align with these sometimes explicit but often implicit requirements that higher ed has for incoming students.

1a) I don’t think NAEP is sufficient because if one state’s standards are better aligned to the NAEP than that state will have a positive bias in their score relative to states that are poorly aligned and we’ll misinterpret true achievement levels.

1b) They don’t need national standards for that, but the NAEP is insufficient because not all students take it in all years across all subject levels (and I’m aware on the last point, that CC does not yet expand out to all subjects).

2a) Not really.  If the curriculum is the same, then on the district level I suspect there to be little added since the mechanism for doing this at that level is the curriculum and supporting materials.  I expect this to change little for teachers and how they interact with the curriculum, though I hope that teachers will eventually be working off the same curriculum and one which is of the highest caliber quality.

2b) I use textbook makers as one example.  I also used Achievement Network– they design interim assessments and provide data analysis and job-embedded professional development to help teachers use the data to differentiate instruction.

3) Nope, not really referring to CMOs though they do fall under this heading.  I’m talking about any service provider that deals with what happens in a classroom on any level.  See the ANet example.  Wireless Generation has some really cool tech that would fall under this as well.

4a) I’m talking about a minimum standard, which across the country, seems to have settled into our community colleges for whatever reason.  Certainly this minimum threshold is still required by URI and Brown though they both supplement it to different levels.

4b) No, I don’t believe there is disagreement.  That’s precisely why national standards and curriculum makes sense.  What’s required in MA, VA, NY, and RI is all essentially the same and agreed upon.  Only right now, in the K-12 system, those requirements are more implicit than explicit and the alignment is not there across state and districts at the same level.

4c) Meet?  Unsure.  Is all alignment equal?  I would doubt it.  I know from my own experience meeting folks from different states that my high school chemistry class was drastically different in breadth than theres.  That the math I learned was quite different than what they learned.  Being at Brown, most of us were adept enough to adjust and catch up to some of the assumed gaps each of us had.  But I do wish that the Chemistry Regents covered the same material as folks in other parts in the country because not having molecular bonding orbital theory made college a tad harder for me, and maybe much more difficult for others looking to study science.

It’s not about textbooks and CMOs– those are just two examples of folks who deliver education services across state lines.  If you can’t think of any other service provider that would be helped by one set of standards (and eventually curriculum), then I think you’re missing on a whole set of folks who are dying to help do the kind of capacity building you’re calling for that are not necessarily principals.

Maybe you missed the part where I wrote that I view standards as the stepping stone to a curriculum and eventually assessments.

Not necessarily my goal, but it is something which I see as having some value.

National works for a couple of reasons– relatively high mobility (not necessarily interstate while in school, but certainly in the work place and for higher education), the existence already of an implicit set of knowledge that we expect fidelity to which is different across different states, different schools/districts in states, and the whole scalability of services providers to all schools.

Force of law– simply because if it doesn’t have the force of law it essentially doesn’t exist.  The benefit of this whole model is that it’s “common”.

Generally, I’m in the E.D. Hirsch camp when it comes to curriculum– that is, I think we need to understand that, “there’s no such thing as a reading test” and content is a necessary precondition for nearly everything we want kids to do (and I’m thinking mainly K-8 there).  I don’t want to rehash in poor fashion arguments he and others have made in the comment section of this post, because I’m quite sure we’ll just be rehashing a rather common and fundamental debate where we’ve both heard both sides of the arguments before.

To be a bit more clear on some of the earlier stuff, though it seems we understand each other now, I don’t see standards alone as doing much of anything except offer the promise and pathway to a new paradigm where there could be many benefits.

I would also say that despite my personally being largely persuaded by the “core knowledge” concept, I am still not certain that I am 100% behind national curriculum and national assessments.  I just am relatively certain that there are some potential benefits that may be worth the trade offs that would be made to some folks. 

In our middle school, students come in far behind functioning level. For four years I have seen administrators quantify ultra-expectations even ‘Superman’ couldn’t meet, exactly as this author describes.

But the waste of time and money that disruptive student behavior saps from schools is also considerable. I hesitate to call some of these kids students because some have no intention to learn whether you call it a disability or inability, they don’t come to school with a basic work ethic ingrained into their value system. When these kids do learn, it’s because of extremely adaptive teaching. Though they are few in number, they require exponentially disproportionate resources – and induce followers. Why should anyone do any work if one kid won’t? Why should other students have to sit quietly and wait as teachers deal with the unruly ones?

We are also seeing this escalating recently as budgets cuts have been so severe. We have an entire grade in which 12:1 special ed just ‘disappeared’, absorbed by regular ed classes. Not just out of compliance with IEPs, this is a lose-lose for all kids, the teachers, and the exact opposite of catching up more quickly – falling further behind.

There is a lot more to the problem of low performing schools than just the children or teachers. A major obstacle to helping the average kid catch up in my school is having them witness the product of family dysfunction every single day. Despite best intentions, “inclusion” hurts the many by distributing behavioral kids into every class. We should instead send intrusive counselors into homes to prepare children for learning in school because parents clearly cannot. Avoid this by better parenting. 

‘Standardized’ standards boil down learning so teachers teach to test. As widely noted, they miss the idea of learning fundamentally being holistic and not a production-line process that is supposed to miraculously transform kids just because they are in a school building from 8 to 3. Even well-behaved kids rebel against that idea today as they see grown-ups flounder in our own economy and as they see the information superhighway, an educational miracle tool if ever there was one, bypass their school experience.