Why Have Hundreds
of Millions of Dollars Been Spent on Development of
the Common Core Math Standards
the Common Core Math Standards
If The Majority of
Educators Did Not Want Them?
This post is six or seven years old; many of
the themes or parts of it have been used in different posts on the matter,
however, the core message remains relevant, hence I decided to re-post it.
Foreword
The radical reformation of the U.S. system of education started after
the Russian Sputnik orbited the Earth. Since then every President claimed
continuing the reform as the national priority. Hundreds of millions of dollars
have been spent. Every decade (on average) the Congress considers a new bill to
continue the reformation. Naturally, the world does not stay still and
education has to catch up with the changes, but if we single out one parameter
of a success - learning outcomes of students, even after fifty-ish years of
reforms there is still a lot work to do.
According to the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study
(nces.ed.gov/TIMSS; the picture below shows the results for 2011) the U.S.
score is nine points above the world average, but U.S. is still behind Korea,
China, and even Russia (which economy has been in shambles for decades).
Considering the fact that an annual U.S. educational budget is almost
ten times greater than the Russia’s, we have to make a conclusion that the
amount of money invested in education does not matter as much as the way it is
spent (i.e. distributed). If we want to avoid another decade(s) of spending
hundreds of millions of dollars and not seeing a significant improvement in learning
outcomes of students, we need to analyze the reasons for not having a
significant improvement in the past.
I. If we want to improve the results of teaching, we
have to change the way we invest in teacher preparation.
Remember an old joke?
A policeman approaches a drunken guy crawling around the side-road
light and asks, “Sir, what are you doing?”. “I am looking for the keys to my
home”, the guy says. “It should not be too hard to find them at such a bright
place” says the policeman. “I didn’t lose them here, I lost them over there”,
says the guy. “For the God’s sake, why are you looking for your keys here,
then?”. “Because”, says the guy, “it is brighter here.”
Where have we been looking for the keys to the educational reform?
The list is long. Charter schools, early college high schools,
new textbooks, new standards, bringing tablets in classrooms, providing high
speed internet, just to name a few.
Of course, the infrastructure matters a lot. But textbooks, or tablets
do not teach students, teachers do. If the percentage of good teachers does not
increase, nothing will help to increase learning outcomes of students
nationwide. New schools will just affect the distribution of teachers between
schools. New textbooks will not be used effectively by inefficient teachers.
The # 1 investment (maybe not by the volume but by the priority) should not be
an investment into infrastructure but in teacher preparation. This kind of
investment currently is also vast and systematic, no doubt. The quality of
teaching, however, remains to be not as good as everyone wants (report after
report is criticizing the quality of teaching – for decades). Two questions
immediately come to mind: why, and what to do about it?
Let’s use an analogy again (the joke above was an analogy, too).
A space shuttle really looks like an airplane. However, it is
impossible to invent and to construct a space shuttle just by making airplanes
better, and better, and better. Even the very idea of a spacecraft (including a
shuttle) cannot be derived from the ideas which had led to the creation of
airplanes. Scientists and engineers had to find an absolutely new principle to
just start thinking about the possibility of getting off the Earth.
For making a drastic change in improving the quality of teaching we
have to find today a new leading principle to guide the reform.
“The key problem of contemporary education is not an insufficient
teaching, it is an insufficient teacher preparation. Effective, productive,
sufficient teacher preparation will result in effective, productive, sufficient
teaching (assuming the economic issues are resolved)”.
This statement does not require any research. This statement is a
postulate (a.k.a. an axiom).
All people reading this essay are deveined right now into two camps: the
ones who accept this postulate as a postulate, and the other ones. There is
nothing wrong with this divide, this is how any science works; the future will
show who is right (if we accept this postulate and plan our actions on it and
the actions lead to the “better world” the postulate becomes a law, otherwise,
it will be replaced with a different one and eventually will be forgotten by
everyone except historians).
Naturally, as the author of the postulate, I build on it all my future
logic (and my current actions).
The first consequence from this postulate is a statement that the
absence of effective, productive, sufficient teaching is the sign of the
absence of effective, productive, sufficient teacher preparation. Which means,
in turn, that the current system of teacher preparation does not work, or at
least is very much ineffective (otherwise we would not have to have a debate on
why for too many students learning outcomes are not as good as we want).
What should be done about it? How can we make a qualitative change in
teacher preparation? My version of the answer to this questions sounds like
this: “Hey, Teacher, I am the Union, here is money, use it to become better
prepared! (but, please, keep in mind, if you fail, we will have to let you
go)”.
Becoming a true teacher takes time and effort. Everyone who wants to
become a good teacher has the right to demand the best available training.
Everyone who wants to become a good teacher becomes a consumer of the teacher
professional development system. I believe that individual teachers should be
granted money which they can use on their own professional development. Money
should not go directly to an individual teacher but offered through a teacher
association (I think a union would be a good candidate for that). That
association should be placing orders for various teacher preparation
activities, keeping track of their effectiveness, but also keeping teachers
accountable for the results. To advance the preparation of the current and
future teachers we all need to start trusting them with the way they improve
their work (trust, of course, should be balanced by verifying that the results
of their work show an improvement). Instead of experimenting on teachers (will
they learn something or not if we make them to do this and that?) universities
(and other providers) should reach out to teachers and ask them what do
teachers need to be developed (in exchange for the money the teachers have from
the Union, which gets the money from the NSF or other sources), or market to
teachers already developed solutions. Don’t we usually say that the best way to
teach someone to take responsibilities is making that someone to be in charge?
It is time for teachers to say: “Let us make in charge for our own professional
growth”.
No doubts, a math teacher should take a course about teaching math, and
a math course. But the math course for a math teacher has to be
multi-dimensional; while learning math a teacher also should exercise in
reflecting on how he or she learned it, so a teacher would know how the new
math knowledge had been developed (produced, internalized, trained) in his or
her own brain. This is the kind of a professional development course teachers
should demand.
Keep in mind that until teachers
become true customers on the teacher professional development market, they will
be fed by many “professional development” activities which will not help them
becoming better teachers (but will help the authors of the activities with
publishing new results of their study on how to teach teachers).
Let's carry out a mental experiment. Let us assume, hypothetically,
that we put together a group of the best in the world designers of car wheels
and gave them everything they had asked for to do their job. Then we had
separately formed a group of the best designers of car engines. And we had
independently formed a group of the best car body designers. Etc., etc. All the
groups finally had developed the best car wheels in the world, the best car
engine in the world, the best auto body in the world, etc. Now, ask yourself,
what would had happened if we tried to put all these best auto parts together?
The obvious answer is - nothing! They would not match each other, they would
not fit with each other.
The absolutely same situation is happening now within research in
education. Someone writes a fine textbook for middle school students. Another
person independently writes a collection of problems for high school students.
A third person creates an electronic encyclopedia for students at the college
level, etc., etc. Each didactic tool can be helpful for a certain group of
students, but they do not match each other! Hence, they will not make a visible
change in the overall results of teaching.
Why?
Learning is a long and complicated process. As any process it has
stages and phases, which are based on sequences of learning actions like
“reading a text of the problem”, “making a sketch”, “listening to a teacher”,
“writing a question”, “observing data”, and many others. Each learning action
takes a certain period of time (different for different types of students, by
the way). An effective/efficient learning process obeys the certain timing.
This means that an effective/efficient teaching process must obey the same
timing. However, if you read papers on education, you will not find one which
would discuss the timeframe of using a newly invented learning tool. Maybe this
textbook or that collection of assignments is good on its own, but a teacher is
just unable to fit those teaching tools in the existing timeframe of teaching.
If a teacher would try to use all newly developed learning tools in his/her
lessons, the whole learning process would be just broken. But using just a single
new element will not make a big effect on learning outcomes of students
(another postulate, a.k.a. a common sense observation).
Instead of trying to decompose the learning process into individual
“learning atoms” and time each of them to unveil the exact structure of a
learning process, the main research effort is concentrated on creating more and
more new but functionally disconnected teaching tools.
The main reason for this “crisis of variety” of educational instruments
is that to this day there is no social force which main goal would have been
“forcing” researches into cooperation; nowadays funds go to almost anyone who
offers a new and existing initiative, but there is no one who tries to connect
them together and direct toward a mutual goal.
Ask yourself, what factor united all scientists, engineers, generals
and all the staff of Manhattan Project? If you said “The mutual goal”, it would
not help much, because it would not be specific (too general). And such a goal
as “Making a new highly destructive weapon” could pretty much separate people
because people may have different ideas of “highly destructive weapon”. But,
the goal “Making a U-bomb” made people united because this goal had an
absolutely specific outcome – an atomic bomb - which “everybody” could see,
touch, use - the measurable outcome.
Analogically, “Making a good education” or “Improving education” is not
a uniting goal. But “Making a certain/specific educational environment” could
be the one. The measure of achieving the goal would depend on the specificity
of the goal, i.e. on the learning environment chosen to be created. A goal like
that, when achieved, should lead to a visible impact on the system of
education. It also should be replicable. It should be related to a learning
process of a large entity of the system (my view is that the “specific learning
environment” should be composed of a set of classes “vertical” within one
school – for example, one class for each elementary/middle/high school level).
Please, answer the following question (and be honest to yourself):
“Which social group has “improving learning outcomes of students” as the goal #
1 for every member of the group?”.
The goal # 1 for a politician is to be reelected. The goal # 1 for a
school or district official is to have the contract resubmitted. The goal # 1
for a parent is to have a healthy child. The goal # 1 for a teacher is to keep
his/her job.
Whether we like it or not, we all are governed by the instinct to
survive – at first as a biological entity, and when this task is achieved as a
social entity (check for example the “Maslow's pyramid”). Every biological
system, including human beings, functions in such a way, which allows it to be
alive as long as possible (exemptions are rare and do not represent a healthy
subject). To be alive a biological system must utilize some resources like
food, for example. Where can a biological system get food? Only from the
outside of itself (it cannot eat itself and keep a long life). In the social
world “outside” means from other people. But instead of taking an actual food
or something else, we take money as the universal equivalent for goods.
When other people give us money, usually it is not a gift, usually they
want something in exchange. So, the logical sequence is simple; to support our
life we need resources; to get those resources we need money; to get money we
need to give away to other people something they need from us.
In short: to support our life we need to be needed – we may agree or disagree
on how strong is the influence that need has on our motives, but the existence
of this need is undeniable (it makes us “social animals”).
To be needed is the strongest subconscious motive of our activities,
which is imprinted deeply inside of our human nature. This motive governs 90 %
of brain activities hidden from our consciences. Our brain (but not us) can
“feel” if there is a risk of becoming “not needed” any more, and starts looking
for any way to escape that kind of a risk – even if consciously we do not have
any suspicions about what might be happening and what can it lead to. As the
result (one of many) of this subconscious work, we prioritize doing what we are
getting paid for placing it above doing something else (that is why a developed
society must provide to majority of people time to do something not related to
their survival, so an individual could use that time for helping his or her
self-actualization).
In short: we do what we are getting paid for; and I mean - not
what we are told we are paid for, but literally, what we are paid for by
people who want something from us - as our brain sees it.
I understand that I described a very primitive model of human behavior.
But this model is pretty much sufficient for our discussion of what should we
do to reform the reform.
The first conclusion we should make is that people involved in
education should be paid for the results of their work as educators; as well as
people responsible for reforming education should be paid for the results of
reforming it, i.e. when it gets reformed.
We - the people - want from our teachers, school principals, district
and state officials high learning outcomes for our students. Hence, we have to
pay them only for high results the students achieve (“the merit pay” comes to
mind). Hence, in the first place, we need to know the results as accurate as
possible. Hence, we have to talk about measurability of the learning outcomes.
This is a very hot topic. The biggest problem – as I see it – is that
almost everyone who is involved in the discussion has a strong opinion
(different from others’) what and how should be measured. We have again a huge
variety of tools used in different states, districts, at different levels.
Teachers, students, parents are overwhelmed just by the sheer volume of the
tests. As the result, we see a strong resistance to even the idea of testing.
The solution is not getting rid of testing, but making testing
reasonable. The very first and the hardest thing to do is to change the
approach to the development of testing materials.
I am certain that a tool and a procedure used to measure learning
outcomes of students (taking any STEM course) must satisfy the following
conditions:
(a) Every aspect of the development and the use of the
tool has to be open to public and be able to be examined by anyone.
(b) The use of the tool must lead to gradable
information on student’s skills and knowledge.
(c) The use of the tool must lead to gradable
information on student’s skills and knowledge AND must not depend on any
specific features of teaching or learning process.
(d) The use of the tool must lead to gradable
information on student’s skills and knowledge and must not depend on any
specific features of teaching or learning process AND must allow to compare on
a uniform basis the learning outcomes of any and all students using the tool.
(e) Any institution adopting the tool becomes an
active member of the community and can propose possible alternations to the
tool to accommodate changes in the understanding of what students should know
and be able to do.
It might seem impossible to develop measuring tool, which satisfy these
conditions. But it actually can be done (follow http://www.cognisity.how/2018/04/MOCC.html for more on this topic).
Officials at the federal or state or even district level should not use
their own measuring tools, but should rely on the same system of collecting
data on learning outcomes of students used by a school. Quizzes, tests,
exams a teacher uses during a year and at the end of a year should be
sufficient to make a conclusion on the quality of teaching. Development of
such a system should be an immediate goal of the Government.
Let’s assume the new system to measure learning outcomes of students is
in place.
Should we start using it to differentiate teachers’ pay?
No! (I know that perilously it sounded like I would say “Yes”, but it
just to trick you into thinking it :)
The survival instinct is so strong that the most expected outcomes of a
direct connection between the teacher's wage and the learning outcomes of
students are (a) none – if a teacher is sufficient and cares about students and
work on his or her professional growth independent of the external factors
(teachers who are already good might get some raise, but that will not increase
the number of good teachers); (b) increasing numbers of teachers leaving
schools (either because they are not good, or because they do not want to be
the object of tight scrutiny, especially if the officials are not very good at
managing teachers) ; (c) faking good results to cover poor ones (just recall
all the movies where a bad guy from the CIA wants to blow up civilians
pretending terrorists would did it only because the government wants to cut the
budget – the similar idea of faking things to keep to be needed).
In short: the merit pay will not affect weak teachers the way we want.
The idea of the merit pay is based on the assumption that the strongest
motive to do a good work is the fear of being fired. But this assumption is
wrong. Hence, the statement I made above that “we have to pay them only for
high results they achieve” is wrong (the word “only” makes it wrong; and I did
it on purpose). Yes: “we need to be needed”. We want to be needed. But humans
are social beings, and “to be needed” for us is more than just “being paid”, it
is “being accepted as a professional”, it is “being respected as a teacher”.
Let’s assume the new system to measure learning outcomes of students is
in place.
The next step is making all the results open and available to anyone.
“I am a teacher, and anyone in the world can see how my students
performed last year, and how my students perform now. But I should be paid the
same wage as another teacher who teaches the same subject, at the same level,
the same amount of hours, to the same number of students. I also know, though,
that if another person can do my job better than I, I can be easily replaced.
That is why I always want to learn how to do my job better. That is why I need
extra money so I could buy for myself a good professional development course”.
A teacher has to become the central force for reforming the reform.
Researchers, officials, politicians are not really interested in
significant improvement of the system of education (at least, directly). “We
need to be needed” – remember? Imagine unimaginable; every school is perfect,
every teacher is a top notch professional. In this scenario many people would
not be needed any more. Subconsciously we know that for many of us constant
reformation is much more “profitable” than the finished reform (“profit”, of
course, means more than just money, it is also a respect, fame,
recognizability, power, …).
That is one of many possible reasons for us to see new standards
written every several years.
The latest incarnation of the standards is “The Common Core Standards”
(CCS) developed by “The Common Core State Standard Initiative” (http://www.corestandards.org/).
I make a claim that the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on the
development of CCS for mathematics is mostly a waste of money. That part of
math we want our students to know has not changed for at least decades (if not
for centuries). The stages of learning math also have been known for decades
and cannot be changed more than by a little: you cannot teach quadratic
equations right after finishing teaching addition within a hundred – it would
be waste of time. Hence, if you place on a table the new common core standards
and the one they replace, and compare them side-by-side, the difference in the
content of math students have to learn will not be more than several
percent (I think no more than 7-8 %). A closer look could show some
rearrangement in topics or their goals; some of the rearrangements do not make
much of a difference, some of the rearrangements do not make much of a sense
(for thousands of years the natural way of science discover has been from less
abstract to more abstract, from less visual to more visual, from less complex,
to more complex, but – for different reasons – curricula developers do not
always follow this path). Developers claim that new standards will develop
students' thinking abilities. This claim has no scientific evidence to be based
on, and more importantly, no one can and so far event wants to measure
“thinking abilities” of students.
I am confident that if any math common core curriculum proponent would
challenge me for a “duel” and listed all specific differences the math
common core standards show comparing with the replaced standards, I would be
able to demonstrate that those specifics are not really differences and
will not influence learning outcomes of students. But let us assume for a
moment I am wrong and CCS are very much different from the old ones. That would
not make any difference because standards themselves are not important. What
important is how states measure learning outcomes of students. And this part is
absolutely up to states, especially now- after ESSA had been adopted by the
Congresses and signed by the President.
If the content prescribed by the new standards is not much different
from the content prescribed by the old ones, what was the point of spending
millions?
The supporters of the CCS say, that the new standards provide a better
structuring of the material and focusing on developing critical thinking
skills. The latter statement is a wishful thinking (at best) because no one can
reliably and on a large scale measure such skills.
Better structuring of a material means using a different language for
describing the same knowledge and skills. It makes some difference for
researches – they can claim a novel way for describing math. But it does not
make much difference for teachers and – by the transitive property – to
students. Teachers still have to teach basically the same content.
And finally, standards do not measure learning outcomes. Hence,
even having the same standards states and districts can use absolutely
incomparable measuring procedures – exactly as they have done it for decades
before.
Some people say, the key word in “CCS” is “common”. Finally, the states
will have a common ground to promote and assess education.
Firstly – again – the standards do not measure the learning outcomes
(see above).
And secondly – there is no need for spending hundreds of millions of
dollars for having a common math standard. Since all current math standards are
essentially the same, the governors could have just taken 50 pieces of paper, write
on each the name of a state, put them all in a hat, shake the hat, and pull one
piece out. Done.
So, why have hundreds of millions of dollars been spent to achieve
almost nothing (in terms of improving learning outcomes of student on a large
scale; there are many collateral achievements, though, like tighter interstate
cooperation)?
Problem?
Let's pour money on it. Let's splash money around, some of it will
stick to a right person at a right time.
However, the picture is a little bit more complicated. In reality there
had been only a handful number of billionaires pushing for CCS. This article
tells a full story of a rise and fall of CCS: http://fortune.com/common-core-standards/
P.S. I used to teach Physics at a small for-profit college. My students
were smart and hardworking, but 99 % of them had serious problems with simple
Arithmetic, and even more serious problems with Algebra. The only reason for
that is that my students were taught in a wrong way (so, I had to re-teach
them). When I read a publication on how to improve education, I see the huge
gap between what researchers are talking about and the everyday needs of
teachers. It seems to me that the vast part of money spent on research in
education does not really help teachers to teach better.
P.P.S. There is The Theory of Multiple Intelligences, which is becoming
more and more popular among educators. One of the reasons for the growing popularity
of the theory is the interpretation which sounds like “You can’t think? Relax,
you can run pretty fast”. This approach implies that a poor teacher has a good
excuse for the poor teaching job done in a class. It is a huge trivialization
of the fact that human beings are capable of solving complicated problems in
different fields including sport, music, design, art etc. But the fact that a
person likes to dance more than anything else and can do it better than
anything else does not mean that the person cannot or does not have to learn
the multiplication table. The only reason that a good sportsman does not know
basic Algebra (if it happens) is the poor performance of the Math teacher (who
in this case has to be responsible for the intellectual damage done to the
student by the poor teaching work). There is a definition of “a good physical
health” and if a doctor has some damage done to the physical health of a
patient, the doctor gets punished very hard. It is a time to define “a good
intellectual health” and to start worry about intellectual health of the
Nation.
P.P.P.S. Personally, I think that the most effective tool/environment
for reforming the system is an On-Line Open Public School (at least a high
school). The School has to be the combination of Internet, TV and in-paper
teaching instruments. Anyone (at least potentially, as “a horizon”) should be
able to get an education from a scratch to the level enough to pass SAT-I (at
least). Focusing the efforts on that kind of a goal gives us - as the outcome -
a logically and technologically connected grade-to-grade sequence of
educational instruments.
P.P.P.P.S. There is a reason why politicians are suspicious to the role
teachers might play in the reform. Teachers are conservative by the nature of
their job (the subject they teach has not changed much over long periods of
time). Hence, the Government turns to researches: “Dear professors, please,
tell us what do we need to do to teachers to make them teach better?”. I would
not say that this approach is working. The Government’s job should be making
teachers to want to grow but still feel safe, making teachers to want to demand
from researchers new good teaching tools and providing financial support for
that. The hardest, the most important, and the most promising job of the
Government is creating the system in which a teacher would be constantly
motivated for a continuous improvement of the results of his or her work.
P.P.P.P.P.S. “Be careful what you wish for, it might actual happen”.
President Obama wants that every high school graduate could get into a college
and get a degree. The fastest way to achieve this goal is to accept into any
college anyone who wants to enter and to print out a diploma for anyone who
asks – done. Naturally, a lot of money would have been spent to promote and
realize this approach. But would the result be the one he wants? Of course not.
What he really wants is having everyone to have the high level of knowledge and
skills. Let’s say one more time: “the high level of knowledge and skills”.
Without having a tool to measure the desired level this goal is unachievable.
And even more importantly, until the most of high school graduates have the
knowledge and skills, which allow them to succeed in a college, there is no
much sense to talk about college education at all (except its economics).
P.P.P.P.P.P.S I worked at a college, which had accreditation but
accepted students who could not solve a simple 8th-grade math
problem. Since then I do not trust the current accreditation system any more.
And so should people who reform education, and reassess and reform the
accreditation system.
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