There’s a new punching bag in education policy. Known as the Common Core, the new standards adopted across the country and in New York City classrooms this year have become a platform for opponents of school reform to sound off on everything else they dislike about the current education landscape, from teacher evaluation to testing.
This week’s town halls on the Common Core with State Education Commissioner John King and Regents Chancellor Merryl Tish, which I attended, did little to calm the circus-like atmosphere that has surrounded the implementation of the standards from Day One.
And that’s simply a shame.
By lumping these new standards in with other hot-button issues, we dilute the conversation our schools need to have about the best ways to help students reach this higher bar.
So let’s settle this and be clear about what Common Core is — and is not.
The Common Core is a coherent set of standards that links what’s taught across grades so that students can build new understandings onto foundations built in previous years. The new standards are more rigorous and promote the very skills teachers and parents have been calling for — critical thinking and problem-solving — skills that colleges and jobs will require.
When I taught sixth grade, I used to have to teach 127 unique math standards or topics. Now I’d be able to focus on 27 standards, giving me the time needed to make sure all of my students understood the underlying concepts.
For example, I used to teach the equation for the area of a square in a 50-minute lesson, simply memorizing the equation and applying it to problems. Now I could teach real-world mathematical problems involving area over the course of a week, allowing my students to uncover multiple ways to solve for the answer and truly understand the concept.
This is a fundamental shift in the way we approach teaching and learning and it will be a challenge to get students up to speed and for teachers to adjust their practice. But parents send their children to school to prepare them for the real world, and we haven’t been doing as well as we can.
As The Post pointed out recently, just a third of New York City public-school students graduate high school ready for college, thus denying many students the opportunity to succeed. The Common Core is a first step in setting a standard so that parents, teachers and students know where they are and what they need to learn to be ready for college.
Here is what the Common Core is not:
It’s not a curriculum. It doesn’t tell teachers how to teach. In fact, the new standards have spawned so much new curricular content that teachers have more flexibility than ever before to create lessons that meet the needs of their individual students.
The Common Core is not a prescription for more testing nor does it raise the stakes of testing. Yes, students are experiencing more assessments this year — but that’s the result of a new teacher-evaluation system that aims to track the progress educators are making with their students. Many teachers are eager to discuss the role of evaluations in supporting their work, and the appropriate uses of assessments, but those are entirely separate debates. They shouldn’t be confused with the Common Core.
Finally, the Common Core doesn’t stifle teacher creativity — it does the opposite. Because the standards shy away from rote memorization and other mind-numbing approaches our schools have employed for decades, teachers have the opportunity to dig deep into a subject with their students. For example, in focus groups we have conducted all around the city, Educators for Excellence is hearing positive feedback from reading and writing teachers, many of whom are praising the focus on both fiction and nonfiction reading, as well as the new emphasis on text-based evidence.
In a recent poll, the National Education Association found nearly 75 percent of teachers said they support the Common Core. When so many educators can agree on something, then it must be worth pursuing.
But schools in New York and across the country are at a crossroads. We can retreat in the face of this challenge and start over from scratch . . . or we can work together to implement effectively what most agree are a pretty good set of standards.
Will it be messy, bumpy and noisy for a little while? You bet. But our students are worth the ride.
Evan Stone is co-founder of Educators for Excellence and a former elementary school teacher in The Bronx.