To the core- The Common Core Standard

Originally written Nov. 21, 2014

To the core

By Milt Higgins

From Nirvana- "Smells Like Teen Spirit" video

A concrete eagle with its wings spread sits proudly displayed outside the burnt-orange brick building. Parents walked past it, with little notice to buzz in by pressing a button next to the glass doors, as if they’re entering a top secret business entrance site.  Inside the glass doors, a carpeted waiting area with fluffy couches sit in front of a wall to wall hexagon front desk with a few clipboards laying on top.  Two staff workers manned the desk.  In the short distance behind them, the carpet ends, giving way to a shiny hallway, lined with lockers on both sides. The hallway branches out into other hallways. Overhead, the voice of the principal blared out of the speakers and bided the students a safe weekend. His voice is followed-up by students Justin and Julie, who remind everyone Monday is “Madagascar” day and to wear their animal print.  It sounded like just another week’s end at a regular public middle school, but outside this building, starting its ascent through the local neighborhoods, to the next town, to Columbia, S.C., soaring to the major highways and small routes which lead to other states, cities, towns and capitols in the north, east, west and south, winding over every laid fiber optic cable and spiraling onto social media pages, descending through television screens and into student’s backpacks before fluttering out into the living rooms of parents, activists, politicians, and any opinionated person. It nestles upon their couch.  It is Common Core State Standards. 

Common Core is a state-led education effort developed in 2009 to teach students real-world learning goals and afford all public school students, regardless of where they live, an education where they are ready for college, career, and life, according to core standards website. Colleges helped set the standards by providing expectations of a student upon graduation from high school.  

The U.S. pushed the need for Common Core based on the continuous drop in education rankings with other industrialized nations in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM).  The U.S. fell to 25 in mathematics and 17 in science according to the U.S. Department of Education.  Those results prompted President Barack Obama to make STEM a clear priority.

The Department of Education projected the following percentage increases for STEM jobs from 2010-2020 :

• Biomedical Engineers, 62 percent
• Medical Scientists, 36 percent
• Systems Software Developers, 32 percent
• Computer Systems Analysts, 22 percent
• Mathematics, 16 percent
• All others, 14 percent

Currently 43 states and the District of Columbia adopted Common Core, including the top three ranked states in education; Massachusetts, New Jersey and Vermont,  according to the American Legislative Exchange Council annual report card.  South Carolina, ranked 51, repealed Common Core after one year of implementation and plans to adopt its own state’s standards for the 2015-16 school year.  Other states may follow the same path as them.

The critics of Common Core argue, one size does not fit all students or they don’t like the idea of the federal government dipping their hands into education.  They prefer that local and state communities develop their own plan.

“We (teachers) can’t concern ourselves with politics,” said Sharon Arruda, a seventh grade math teacher at St. James Middle School in Myrtle Beach. “We need to worry about the kids.  That’s my main concern.”

Arruda has taught for 18 years in South Carolina.  She is on the education front line.  She received the new South Carolina Core Curriculum framework four days ago.  She lit up and spoke with a smile and said teaching now has become exhausting and repetitive and it’s hard not to give in, referencing the socratic teaching method she uses in conjunction with Common Core.  She says Common Core forced teachers and students into problem solving mode and critical thinking skills.  She said it’s coaching and facilitating hard and hearing other people’s ideas is what makes it engaging.

“It’s not just skill and drill,” she said.

She said people want the answer to the problem, but with Common Core it’s not always about the answer, it's how did they get to the answers.  

Students learn like they are in a company meeting or a working group in Arruda’s classroom.  She opened a document on her laptop and showed examples of how her classroom operates.  On the computer monitor appeared a rubric with student’s names and their paragraphs and sentences underneath each explaining how they came to an answer for a math problem.  It is then projected onto a big screen for all to see during class time.  Each student reads the different strategies and comment about each other’s ideas to get to the same goal.  While she is teaching math, she is assessing their critical thinking skills, public speaking and interactions in a group setting, all while building student’s confidence throughout the school year.

She said school can be a little anxiety ridden, but views a little anxiety as good.  Sometimes the anxiety comes from home, because parents are more concerned with grades.

Pam Blackington’s eighth grade daughter attends St. James.  Her daughter used to be a math honors student in sixth and half of seventh grade, before being pulled out of the honors class and placed into the regular seventh grade math class.

“I couldn’t help her if I wanted,” she said, “they should just leave things alone.  It worked for us.”

Blackington’s frustrations can be heard from parents across the country.  Christine Allen, a former teacher and now the owner of Reading Escapades and Math Explorers for home schoolers  now provides a free hour-long webinar for Common Core titled “How to Survive Common Core.”  She stressed that her course could help parents raise a confident independent child, that’s self-motivated and eager to learn, despite Common Core.  The maximum 100 parents logged in to listen to Allen talk and teach from Pennsylvania about the basic math portion of Common Core from an elementary school-level point of view. 

Allen not only offered her expertise during the webinar, but she acknowledged the country’s latest math deficiencies and offered her unsolicited views of Common Core.  She said she understood Common Core isn’t for everyone.

“We may have to piece together what is perfect for every child,” she said.  “They are different.”

While she empathized with teachers for the pressure they are under to teach Common Core on stringent timelines, she also seemed to take a jab at high school teachers when she said teachers were incentivized to make sure every child goes to the next grade, sort of like an athlete.

Teachers are now teaching math and english, starting as early as sixth grade for the American College Testing (ACT) Compass exam.  The Compass exam is a un-timed test for student placement in math and english courses in college. If students don’t fair as well, they’re placed into a lower level college course when their first semester begins.

Coastal Carolina University currently has 410 students enrolled into MAT129L, Introduction to College Algebra Lab classes. The course is mainly for students who are not quite at the college algebra level.  It’s worth one credit towards a student’s degree, but meets three hours a week.  It costs $407 for South Carolina residents and $920 for out of state residents. The number of students enrolled into this course during 2013’s fall semester wasn't available for this story, according to Steven Manz, a statistician for the university. 

During the 2013 fall semester, 2,874 new freshmen and transfers enrolled at Coastal Carolina. If the number of students currently enrolled to MAT129L was anywhere near its current enrollment in 2013, it would equal 14 percent. This is for a university, whose acceptance for new freshmen out of high school had an ACT average score (22). A full two points higher than the national college acceptance average (20), according to the university’s 2013 Fact Book.

Most of the concerns about Common Core seems to be math, but english courses incurred a complete facelift too.  Clorinda Mason is in her fifteenth year of teaching, her first year at St. James Middle School.  She teaches seventh grade english, after being a literacy coach in New Jersey.  She is thrilled to talk, but considers herself more facilitator than teacher in the classroom these days.  

“What happened to books,” she passionately said, in her northeastern accent. “There are no more novels.”

The new Common Core standards requires teachers to shift more to informational text and non-fiction literary text for English and Language Arts beginning in sixth grade.  Mason said  she’s concerned the joys of reading are diminishing for students.  She said she feels like everything in the classroom is scripted, because of the strict timelines she must meet with Common Core. She’s also concerned with the people who established the standards and timelines  because they haven’t been in the classroom in years. She feels those people need to recognize not everyone is at the same level and children differ with learning times of those set by the Common Core standards.  She said, rushing kids with shorter time restraints could negatively affect how they perform on standardized test, which Mason and her peer’s job evaluations are based.

The outrage of Common Core spread across social media, and someone would need to take a closer look to see if it’s mainly parents who are sincere about understanding their child’s schoolwork, if parents actually understand how Common Core is supposed to work, or is it a parent who has a hidden agenda and their evaluation of the President Obama administration isn't too great.   A post on Facebook from a retired Texas mother of an only-child read, “Get the government out of our schools. Obama is ruining our kids.”  Her son graduated from high school nine years ago and currently supports himself with full-time employment.  Social media post like this fuels the critics of Common Core who may be fearful of change, their own personal feelings of inadequacy because they don’t exactly know how it works, or just using it as another way to criticize the current administration.

Hidden agenda or not, Sharon Arruda wanted to remind people the U.S. industrialized STEM ranking may be a little skewed.

“In the U.S. everyone is afforded the opportunity to go to school,” she said. “It’s not like that in China.”

It may take approximately 4-6 years before the U.S. knows if the Common Core plan served its purpose. Until then, that eagle has landed. How long it remains perched is up in the air.

NOTE THIS STORY WAS ORIGINALLY WRITTEN BY ME PRIOR TO THANKSGIVING 2014. SINCE THAT TIME: Dec. 24, 2014- For all the hoopla, just a handful of states have proposed significant changes to Common Core, and none of them has written higher standards. South Carolina’s new draft standards have been widely panned, and they will probably need to go back to the drawing board.  FULL STORY HERE http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/common-core-state-standards-arent-so-easy-to-replace/2014/12/24/e285d72c-89f1-11e4-a085-34e9b9f09a58_story.html

ALSO: Jan.14, 2015 - Florida schools (Common Core implementation 2013) are talking about ending recess due to common core, although there are other states with the same implementation date not considering ending recess. STORY HERE:  http://www.today.com/parents/should-elementary-schools-have-recess-some-florida-parents-fight-break-1D80423842