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Students in nearly 1,000 school districts across California will log in this spring to take part in the state’s first Common Core assessment tests. Though it’s been more than four years since the state adopted the new standards, local teachers are still working overtime to adjust their curriculum, and it’s hard to say if students will be ready.
The new tests will be aligned to Common Core State Standards, which focus more on critical thinking and understanding concepts than on rote memorization, and will be done entirely on computers — no written exams. Common Core also requires teachers to adopt new curricula to meet revised standards set for students at each grade level. Students in grades three through eight will be tested this April.
Common Core marks a “huge shift” for Kathy Patterson, a first-grade teacher at Bubb Elementary who said she works 60 hours a week and spends hours every day reading, learning and planning how to teach lessons rooted in the new standards. She said it’s not unusual to see eight teachers staked out in the staff room at Bubb on a Sunday afternoon preparing for class.
“Sometimes I feel like my head is going to burst with all the new knowledge,” Patterson said.
Patterson is optimistic about the new standards and said it’s an important step in the right direction for students, calling it one of the biggest changes in education she’s seen in her 35 years of teaching.
“A couple of years ago I was thinking about retiring, but kids are making huge progress with the new curriculum,” she said.
The downside is that it’s taken an enormous amount of preparation time. Testing starts this year, but Patterson said teachers could still use staff development time going into next year to reassess their curriculum and meet with fellow teachers on how to best teach to the new standards.
Because Common Core is so radically different from old state standards, teachers are finding implementation difficult and “complicated by the broader ambiguities and uncertainties associated with (Common Core),” according to a report by Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE).
The report says that many teachers compared the first year of teaching Common Core to building a plane while flying it, or taking a hike without a map or compass — problems the report attributed to shortfalls in materials, capacity and preparation by schools and districts.
Patterson said all the teachers at Bubb have been using EngageNY, a free online resource designed to prepare teachers for Common Core, to help guide them through the new standards. The website spells out everything students are expected to know, and has thousands of pages of information for each grade. Patterson said the new Bubb principal, Cyndee Nguyen, has also done a lot to help teachers prepare.
“She is a rare talent among principals who really understands Common Core curriculum and how to help kids become independent, successful learners,” Patterson said.
Other schools’ efforts haven’t been as coordinated. Jonathan Pharazyn, a fifth-grade teacher at Monta Loma, said for some teachers it feels like “every man for himself” as they pull from online resources and other teachers to figure out how to teach to the new standards.
“We’re behind compared to other teachers in the district,” Pharazyn said.
According to a poll last year by the Public Policy Institute of California, 75 percent of respondents believe teachers are not “adequately prepared to implement Common Core.” That number jumps to 80 percent among public school parents.
The California Teachers Association recommends that teachers negotiate with their local school district and bargain to make sure they have the resources they need to successfully transition into the new curriculum. According to the CTA website, some teachers’ unions have bargained for special teacher-run committees that advise the district on priorities, expenditures and communication with teaching staff related to Common Core. No such deal has been reached at the Mountain View Whisman School District.
At the Jan. 8 school board meeting, Interim Superintendent Kevin Skelly said he felt the district is on the right track based on what he’s seen since he joined the district at the beginning of the month. He said the district has done a good job preparing for Common Core despite statewide sentiment among teachers is that they don’t know enough about the new standards and lack the professional development they need.
“I’ve been really impressed so far with the commitment of staff on this topic and the amount of work folks are doing,” Skelly said.
Still, Skelly acknowledged that teachers may be missing the instructional materials they need, as some teachers have expressed at past board meetings. During this fall’s standoff between district administrators and teachers over salaries, fifth-grade Monta Loma teacher Margie Wysocki said at the Sept. 4 board meeting that she received the new Common Core-aligned textbooks well into the school year and only as an e-textbook. On top of that, she said, teachers didn’t receive any training from the district on how to teach to the new curriculum.
Patterson said Bubb had only one copy of the teacher’s guide for each grade level, which forced teachers to sink a lot of time into copying pages instead of preparing for lessons.
“It was a bummer. We spent less time planning and more time copying,” Patterson said.
Skelly also made it a districtwide goal to make a Common Core “blueprint” for continued implementation, including finding ways to prioritize professional development, prep time and collaboration — all issues that were brought up during the debate last year over teacher pay.
“It’s a great opportunity for us to make our curriculum even more relevant to the experiences and the future of our students,” Skelly said.
High school district at the ready
At the high school district, 11th-grade students will be tested this year on Common Core math as well as English and language arts, according to Barry Groves, superintendent of the Mountain View-Los Altos High School District. Groves said the test results will serve as a baseline and give the district a good idea of “where we are and where to go from there.”
Madeline Miraglia, vice president of the District Teachers Association, said teachers have been kept up to speed on the new standards by high school administrators and the Common Core coaches hired for professional development on the new state standards.
The district spent about $750,000 on the implementation of Common Core standards and assessments, mostly on instructional coaching. The figure is only a “small portion of the total expenditures designated for professional development, instructional materials and technology needed for successful transition to the Common Core,” according to a report by the district.
During the school board election, the District Teachers Association held a candidate forum and asked how each candidate would respond to the Common Core test results. Several candidates said the results might be frightening at first, and that the district needs to use the scores as a starting point for improvements.
The usefulness of the baseline test results remains to be seen, however. Right now the test is designed to return a only numeric score for each student. Although that scores reveals the areas in which the student performed well or poorly, the district can’t look over questions or answers on the tests.
“There might be some trepidation that it might not be very useful,” Groves said. “Getting any kind of metric with these subjective types of responses is difficult.”
Tech-savvy schools
Part of Common Core readiness is contingent on whether schools have the technology they need for hundreds of students to each log onto a computer and take the test, which is designed to be “adaptive” and adjust questions based on student performance from one problem to the next.
Teachers and students got a first look at the new testing style during a pilot Common Core test last spring. Schools in 21 states participated in a field test, which acted as a “practice run” of the new test system and gave teachers a rough idea of student readiness, according to the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium.
Pharazyn, the Monta Loma teacher, said there were a few technical glitches when his students took the test in the computer lab, but overall the school seemed ready and able to handle the real thing.
Groves said 400 to 500 students at both high schools will be taking the test this year, and will do “interim” tests this month to try out testing on the computers at school. While the technology hurdle for Common Core posed a problem for schools that lacked computers and Internet access, Groves said it shouldn’t be a problem for the high school district. At Los Altos High School, for example, students are already required to bring their own laptop computer to school every day.
“As far as preparedness and technology, I think we’re in good shape,” Groves said.
Can I just say Bubb teachers are the best?
Yes you can! Our district and it’s teachers are best! Undaunted by the failure in New York, our fearless teachers give up precious planning time to stand in line at the Xerox machine, make copies, and hand out the wonderfully scripted lessons to our children. I mean, why plan and think when someone has done all the work? Just because it’s a mess in NY, doesn’t mean it won’t here, right? Did someone say free? How delightful!
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/01/11/common-core-chaos-ny-state-website-sends-kids-to-offensive-test-prep/
I’ve read the common core math standards. I really don’t see what all the fuss is about. If you read the standards, it is nothing more than a fairly accurate description of grade appropriate math.
It is certainly much better than the old California standards that asked elementary kids to explain mean, median, and mode, but had no standard for multiplication speed or accuracy.
Greg, the Common Core math standards are AWFUL.
First off, they are SLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOWWWWW. I mean, kids don’t need to master the standard algorithm for addition until the 4th(!) grade. 8th grade Algebra is essentially pushed back to 9th, and when you get into the older grades, the standards jump all over the place.
Second, over the last fifty years, there’s been a math war going on in the United States and all over the world. I read the standards after I had researched the math wars, and I could see that they have “dog whistles” all throughout that push schools across the United States towards reform math.
What does reform math mean? Student-centered group projects with the teacher as a facilitator asking questions instead of a direct teacher explaining how to do things. Learning multiple ways to solve problems, sometimes learning very inefficient algorithms that only work in precise cases and won’t work in all situations like the more traditional algorithms. Spending time writing essays about how you solve problems, taking away time from doing the actual math itself (and causing problems for kids with language difficulties).
http://www.educationnews.org/education-policy-and-politics/the-pedagogical-agenda-of-common-core-math-standards/
As I said, the math wars have been going on for a long time. The particular pedagogy that they are using to teach math in my children’s school (student-centered, group learning, with the teacher as a facilitator) has been used in Canada over the last decade and resulted in innumeracy doubling and the rate of children being prepared for STEM degrees decreasing by 1/3. You should read about Canada. Really. Because this is exactly what we are starting to do because of Common Core in America. (By the way, this pedagogy has also been used in pockets of the USA and in Australia, with very spotty results.)
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/malkin-dare/ontario-math-curriculum-_b_4586019.html
These teaching techniques that schools are gravitating towards because of Common Core, they’ve been done before. And in many, many, many, many cases, they’ve failed. Common Core is encouraging schools all across America to take old teaching methods, brush them off, and put them back in the classrooms. Sure, you could argue that Common Core are a set of standards – and they don’t dictate pedagogy or the curriculum. But lots of schools are listening to education leaders stand up and talk about how Common Core is supposed to revolutionize the way that they teach. Lots of schools are hearing those “dog whistles.”
You want to know what the fuss is about, Greg? The fuss is about our kids not learning math anymore. Common Core is a disaster.