Climbing the Common Core Staircase

The CCSSO and NGA clearly have high hopes and great expectations for their Common Core State Standards…

"The Common Core is a set of high-quality academic standards in mathematics and English language arts/literacy (ELA). These learning goals outline what a student should know and be able to do at the end of each grade. The standards were created to ensure that all students graduate from high school with the skills and knowledge necessary to succeed in college, career, and life, regardless of where they live."

~About the Common Core State Standards

The narrator in the video below explains how the standards are like a K- 12 staircase that every student must climb starting from the bottom step...

"Each step is a skill your child needs to learn before stepping up to the next one. Think of Kindergarten through 12th grade as a great staircase."

The Common Core is a standardized staircase designed to challenge the climbing skills of “standard” students. All students are expected to "climb" these stairs in a synchronized way, regardless of individual ability level or disability.

Unfortunately the Common Core implementation kit does not appear to include contingency plans and directions for assembling and installing the stairs for use by students who do not "climb" and learn in a standardized way.

Since the CCSS are a cumulative K-12 program that functions like a staircase of learning, they must be taught in sequence as acquisition of each new skill is dependent on mastery of skills learned on a lower "step" during the previous school year. 

If students are to climb the Common Core staircase successfully, they must spend a sufficient amount of time on each step, and begin their climb at the bottom, starting with the first step.

That is why education leaders in New York State confidently predicted that student scores in grades 3 through 8 would drop 30% or more the first year the Common Core ELA and Math assessments were administered because these students began climbing the Common Core staircase at the “higher steps”.

Common Core assessments cannot properly measure student proficiency or reliably predict student readiness if they are measuring standards and skills that were never taught and learned.

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan does not seem to understand how to properly implement and assess Common Core, as he commented just last week about the significantly lower student scores on standardized tests aligned to Common Core...

"In far too many states, including Pennsylvania, politicians dummied down standards to make themselves look good...

The secretary said children and parents 'were lied to and told they were on the track to be successful' when they weren’t. He called that 'one of the most insidious things that happened in education.'...

'To me, we have to tell the truth. We have to set a new baseline and we will see progress as a nation moving forward. It’s going to be a rocky couple of years,' the secretary said."

Many students will not be able to successfully climb the Common Core stairs by starting in the “middle”, and it is not fair to expect them to do so.

The new PARCC and Smarter Balanced assessments will not provide accurate and reliable student data regarding “college readiness” at every grade level, unless they are phased in one year at a time beginning with the bottom step.

Accordingly, all state assessments that are aligned to the Common Core should become “operational” beginning with the lowest elementary grade level and not starting at the middle or high school level.

The narrator in the video above also explains...

"Standards aren't learning. That's why we need teachers, parents, and students to help make that happen by working together to help kids meet these standards."

Back in 2003, Educational Testing Service (ETS) released a report that identified factors in and out of school related to student achievement.

According to the report, parental involvement and the home environment is just as important as what goes on in the school.

"Nothing about the impediments to learning that accumulate in a child’s environment should be a basis for lowering expectations for what can be done for them by teachers and schools, or for not making teachers and schools accountable for doing those things.

And denying the role of these outside happenings – or the impact of a student’s home circumstances – will not help to endow teachers and schools with the capacity to reduce achievement gaps.

Also, insistence that it can all be done in the school may be taken to provide excuses for public policy, ignoring what is necessary to prevent learning gaps from opening. Schools are where we institutionalize learning; they are also places where we tend to institutionalize blame."

Fast forward to 2011 and just as states around the country are reviewing and adopting the Common Core State Learning Standards, the U.S. Department of Education discontinued funding for Parental Information And Resource Centers. According to the PIRC web site…

"Parental Information and Resource Centers (PIRCs) help implement successful and effective parental involvement policies, programs, and activities that lead to improvements in student academic achievement and that strengthen partnerships among parents, teachers, principals, administrators, and other school personnel in meeting the education needs of children."

What a great parental involvement program and resource to help students and families transition to the higher standards and academic expectations of the Common Core. Yet the notice posted on the web site explains…

"Funding for the PIRC program as a whole has been discontinued by the US Department of Education. Therefore, most PIRC programs are no longer in operation although several are continuing with funding from other sources. You may contact PIRCs directly to determine their status."

Could it be that all the money the Federal government expended on developing national standards and tests to measure student outcomes, they could no longer afford to fund programs that actually supported and improved student learning?

Back in 2011, The Answer Sheet posted a guest commentary by Arnold F. Fege and Edwin C. Darden regarding the poor timing and negative impact of this decision…

"For 16 years PIRCs have helped low-income families, school districts and state governments nurture high-quality parent involvement programs….We aren’t losing a bureaucracy here; rather, we are enduring a real loss that will reverberate across all 50 states and several U.S. territories.

What makes this cut a shame is that PIRCs demonstrate a commitment of taxpayer dollars to ensure that the home-school partnership remains strong.The investment is not just good public relations. Decades of research prove that family involvement and academic success go hand-in-hand, especially for kids in poverty…

Indeed, the PIRCs have had amazing results. According a recent survey conducted by the National Coalition of PIRCs: *Eighty-eight percent of families said that because of the information and services received from PIRC, they were better able to support their children’s learning at home…

The impact of living without the PIRCs will be immediate and dramatic — a major blow for kids in high-poverty communities, the parents who love them, the school districts who teach them, the communities who care for them, and a nation that relies on them."

Hard to understand why the U.S. Department of Education would discontinue such an important parent involvement program at the same time states were rolling out the Common Core State Standards and increasing academic demands on students across the country?

Even more perplexing is the fact that this decision was made during the tenure of U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan who commented in 2012 on the critical importance and role of parents, and more specifically involvement of dads, in supporting student achievement.

"Somewhere during the course of our national dialogue, our expectations for parents have lowered, particularly for fathers. Today, I want to challenge every father to step up.

If we want strong schools and strong communities, we need more dads involved…Everyone is trying to do their part, but when dad is not around, we are all playing a man down on the team.

We know that increasing parent involvement, particularly the involvement of fathers, is key to improving schools and communities across the country.

As we work to drive down drop-out rates and increase graduation and college completion rates, fathers have an important role to play…"

It is dishonest for the Department of Education to claim they have supported efforts to raise student achievement when our taxpayer dollars were devoted to the creation of national standards and administration of national assessments at the same time funding was eliminated for existing parental involvement programs that have helped to increase student learning.

How quickly each student “climbs” the Common Core staircase is not as important as making sure that every student has an equal opportunity and proper supports to do so.

If we implement and assess the Common Core in a careful and thoughtful way, “one step at a time”, we may well learn that a number of students will need to use a modified staircase that includes additional “steps” and not as steep a slope as the standard staircase.

Disabled and delayed students will not be able to “climb” the Common Core staircase without using all the “steps” starting from the bottom and some students may even need to use two handrails.

Students will most surely not climb these stairs at the same rate of speed, as many students may need to “rest” at certain steps along the way while others may even need the assistance of a stairlift to reach the top.

It is foolish to claim that once we have installed a uniform set of academic “stairs” across this country, that all students will be able to learn and climb these stairs in a synchronized way.

Seems like the Secretary of Education could take a lesson from Michael Jordan and perhaps he would understand that athletes and students are continually learning even though the level of  individual performance may vary and fluctuate from day to day.

That is why it is foolish and dishonest to claim a single standardized test can  reliably measure the skill level and readiness of students, especially when many started learning in the middle of the Common Core staircase and had to practice most of the school year, one or even two players down.