common core

A Letter About My View on the Common Core Learning Standards [Because "Shut Up" Isn't Clear Enough]

by Jose Vilson on July 23, 2012

Dear Reader,

Frankly, this post shouldn’t matter.

I’m a classroom teacher first and foremost, and am often in situations where I can readily embody what most of my colleagues believe about education and the teachers’ role in education reform. It’s a privilege at times to rub elbows with union leaders, well-known activists, and other thought leaders and sharpen those elbows when their ideas go astray from my personal beliefs. I have enough integrity that I can sit in the same room with someone with an opposing view without jumping across the table and threatening to choke the other person out. Or at least threatening to occupy their spaces on first breath.

All this to say that I don’t actually have an opinion on the Common Core Learning Standards, yet.

A year or two ago, I posted a couple of crosswalk documents from the New York State Math Standards to the Common Core Learning Standards (prematurely since I understand lots more about it now than I did back then). For the last couple of years, I’ve also attended a couple of conferences concerning the dissemination and execution of the CCLS as well. In New York City, the discussion has come to a point where, if you’re not using the words “Common Core” in a PD session or a faculty meeting, the moderator might get a frown stamp from our central offices.

On the same end, my friend JD and I had a conversation about the CC and realized that the assessment will make the standards whatever they are. The assessment will decide whether the “cool” pieces will matter. Who cares if we have less standards from K – 8 if students still get tested to death? Who cares if we have more coherent, fluid sequences for what students learn if 20-40 days out of the year get dedicated to interim and state tests for various subjects? Who cares if we as teachers have to think harder about the sorts of questions they ask of students if we constantly have to consider whether the material we teach has a high probability of ending up on the test?

Thus, I concluded with my own intuition (thinking for myself matters) that it doesn’t matter what standards lay in front of me. Pedagogy matters. Curriculum matters. Questioning matters. Coalition and collaboration matter, too. For the average teacher, these things should matter, if they don’t already. When I lay out the 180 days I have to teach, I get a good sense of the curriculum maps and pacing calendars we’ve created, and think about how I’ll deliver the lesson. I’m not thinking about Jason Zimba or David Coleman reminding me about the three shifts in their vision. I’m thinking about where my kids are in their learning, where they need to go, and how I’m going to get them there.

Yet, if you ask some people who vocalize their disagreements with the Common Core, you wonder if they’ve actually taught for more than a couple of years. Their answers sound foreign, but catchy because of its pseudo-populist tones. “I’m against the Common Core!” Great. So the average person not into education would ask: what does that mean? Now we’re getting somewhere. You’re pro-whole child education? Me too. You would like to dwindle our dependence on standardized testing and focus instead on more well-rounded assessments? I’m on that team. You’re for better integration of science, technology, engineering, and math with the arts and humanities? Awesome, because I am too.

You won’t hear that, though. You’ll harp instead on Randi Weingarten and the AFT’s (cautious) support of the Common Core. You’ll hang on Diane Ravitch’s non-vote on the Core as a clear sign you’re on the right track. You’ll follow some random tweeter capitalizing every other words in their tweets or interrupting your online conversations with a standard “Common Core will do that because it’s bad.” You’re well within your rights to do so. If you’re going to disagree with me, you can, too.

I’m just saying we can do better.

Whether or not you believe it, we do need a better curriculum, a better pedagogy, a better way to address education in this country, and it’s not going to come from whatever we believe about any policy or papers that come across our desks. It will come from the day-to-day interactions we have with our students, our schools, and our colleagues, professionally and politically.

If the Common Core doesn’t support the things I believe about good schools, then indeed I am not for the Common Core. Punto.

Jose

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Creativity Is Almost Dead … and Non-Educators Want To Kill It

by Jose Vilson on January 18, 2011

c/o bite.ca

Double Reading Rainbow

After posting a few crosswalk documents between the New York State math standards and The Common Core Standards on this site and at my place of employ, I’ve been very involved in understanding how these mandated national standards will transform our way of teaching students, and how we need to get parents and students involved in the education ecology. By all accounts, the new standards are pretty good; light on how much we need to cover, deeper in the things we should cover.

Yet, this transition phase, like most other reforms, can often feel like it’s being done unto teachers and not with teachers. Under the premise that the eventual assessment will look like a series of tasks given to students, the overhead view on this assessment veers in the direction of the exams we have now. In other words, so long as a certain group of people use these assessments as a tool for extreme accountability and not a means of true support for our schools, we might as well not have the new standards.

We can’t discuss, for example, creative writing and voice recognition in poetry if there’s still that big scary test looming at the end of the year. We can’t expect many teachers to implement new technologies in our classrooms if we’re constantly balancing efficiency and depth in content. We can’t trust that teachers will want to visit other classrooms in their spare time when they have to use the waning amounts of time in their pocket to sift through hundreds of papers and give consistent critical feedback and analyze all those papers into pretty spreadsheets that demonstrates our understanding of data.

Why get creative and try something new when the old thing just works. Even if it’s only for 60% of the students, 60% of the time?

By the formulas teachers are now being judged by, that’s really all you need. The pressure isn’t to improve pedagogy on an imaginative level; it’s to standardize to the point where the outliers get forced into the mainstream of complacency. Policies like No Child Left Behind and Race To The Top kill creativity. Even a well-intended set of pedagogical mandates like the Common Core Standards gets out there on behalf of the federal government, they mess it up by allowing layers upon layers of middle people to twist these innovations into their own framework for success.

What does it mean? Well, if you’re in a school where people don’t stress out too often about exams, then this means next to nothing. However, there are far too many schools right now where these high-stakes exams can literally destroy whole communities. In places where we could use creativity for socio-cultural uplift, it’s amazing that we haven’t let schools become places to help those places become self-empowered and even answer the hard questions about their communities.

As any good teacher can tell you, though, it also means that students will also get to ask questions. And the answers could be all the above.

Jose, who has postponed the redesign of his blog for a month or so.

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To Pretend Perfection, Sinful; To Aspire Towards It, Divine

by Jose Vilson on November 22, 2010

Banksy Art, "Wall Art Swept Under The Rug"

Today, I sat with some fellow math teachers across the district to further investigate the new Common Core Standards. We’re looking through the new standards, creating questions and analyzing tasks (while I intermittently joke about my CoCoLoCo theory). We’re churning up great ideas while the moderator’s doing his best to moderate a bunch of rowdy NYC math teachers and coaches. At some point during lunch, the people at my table invited one of the people who is developing high performing tasks that may make it into the body of work for the Common Core assessments. What a novelty. The three of us working on those tasks are such great resources for the room in that we’re already getting trained, and we’re working towards making things happen.

It’s a departure from the current culture of NYC education, really.

When the guy sits down with us, he keeps it relatively real: “These tasks work well with my kids, and after a while they get used to looking at the rubric to assess themselves.” When asked whether he uses Everyday Math, the textbook of choice for elementary school teachers in NYC: “No, not really. I’ve stepped away from it a lot, and I pretty much do whatever I want. It’s nice when you don’t have someone looking over you all the time trying to find things out about you.” I wore a tight expression on my face, waiting for the other to finish their points about the otherwise excellent assignments. “What’s wrong Jose?”

“What’s wrong? Well …” I thought it out and slowly let out, “I’ll tell you that I’m mostly in agreement with you. I agree that teachers need autonomy. Unfortunately, some people in this very room don’t want to hear all of that. Actually, for your school’s purposes, you might have stopped at just the discussion about rubrics.” He saw what I meant, and the rest of the table nodded. One person wondered why we have to censor ourselves when everything the first gentleman was exactly right, and I thought the same thing.

After all, shouldn’t we be trying to look perfect for our students, and not for the stalwarts? It’s also why I have a soft spot for principals; when you’re the head of a school in NYC these days, you’re held far more accountable to people than others give you credit for. Network leaders, community politicians, people from “downtown,” and parents who just want to sue at the slightest irregularity can unnerve anyone trying to run their schools effectively. Oftentimes, that leads to principals trying to get their teachers and other staff members to speak in a certain code or language, and CYA is the operative acronym in this business.

Another part of Joel Klein’s legacy is ensuring that, upon telling principals that they’re the CEOs of their companies, they get all of the blame and none of the acclaim for their own initiatives. Furthermore, this relationship gets juxtaposed into the relationship between the principal and the teacher, so principal looks to be an overseer of education instead of guide and vision-keeper.

For those working within any given system, it’s about the look of perfection and not actually striving towards it. We can’t admit we don’t know; rather, we have to say we have it and we just need to augment it. It’s absurd, but this is what accountability does. It reminds me of the game Tag, where people are trying so hard to avoid that they’re passing it along to someone else as long as they get it. Thus, they’re ignored.

Now, if only people realized that everyone at some point in the game of life, they’ve been It, then they’d know how to cure this “It” so people can get away from playing their mind games.

Jose, who just don’t know how we keep getting wrapped up in the conversation of “ed reform” …

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CoCoLoCo for Common Core Standards [A Conversation in Earnest]

by Jose Vilson on November 8, 2010

Sonny Coco

Let me say it straight up: I’m tired of the Common Core standards talk. No, I’m not tired of the Common Core itself, but the talk. It’s easily ran by the word like “differentiation,” whizzed all over the phrase “workshop model,” and is about to stomp all over the word “collaborative” to boot. Everyone’s talking about it the way one might yell into an echo chamber: yeah, it sounds awesome, but after a while, there’s no purpose for the echo besides the echo itself. As you’re reading this and didn’t click the link above, or haven’t been a fan of this blog longer than a month, you probably don’t know what the hell I’m talking about.

There’s now a 30% chance that I don’t either. It’s why the first two letters in the words “Common” and “Core” are CoCo. As in CoCoLoco.

One thing I do know that the Common Core that I’ve looked at takes after other countries, moving down some standards to lower grades and simplifying the quantity of standards to get deeper into them. You can’t just skim over the paragraphs in the front, read the list of standards and think you get what the think tank who created this are trying to convey. You actually have to play with it and know it. Some administrators and network leaders have already taken to their usual tactics of saying something louder to act like they know something.

Thank goodness your favorite blogger learned long ago how to defend against that. There are two simple things teachers across the nation can do to prevent others from insisting what you should think about (especially about the Common Core Standards):

1. Read them.

2. Make them real for you.

(Bonus: Feel free to read what others are saying about it, too. Just found out about this.)

If not, you’re going to get stuck in meetings where people throw it at you with no regard for how to make them effective in the classroom or why they’re so much better than what we have currently. (They are, but I’ll let you decide that.) Some of the people I’ve worked with in this work have been rather instrumental in my engagement with the material, but I’ve also been part of discussions where, despite the insistence of content specialists in the room, administrators and district leaders felt it was their right to defend the Common Core, even when they haven’t read any substantial piece of the standards.

If you don’t follow my advice on this stuff, because I’m still learning it too, then you’re gonna be CoCoLoco. And we still have a good four more years until we actually start assessing this way. Good luck.

Jose, who doesn’t want people to get things mistaken: Coco Loco is neither Coco Rico or Cocoa Puffs. Promise.

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