jblad

When you are talking about the "program's implementation," are you talking about how the CCSS were developed? The authors were informed by the best existing state standards, teacher feedback, and public input, and they aimed for the standards to be research and evidence-based more than any other standards document I've read. Every change of standards must face the charge of "untested", though I think the authors of the Common Core mitigate this by basing their work on research and work that is tested.

I am unfamiliar with any large-scale failures of the CCSS with struggling students, but I have seen struggler excel with an approach that emphasizes understanding. Of course, anecdotes are not data, and I'm open to hearing how the Common Core fails our weakest students. I don't think it is perfect, but I do think it is better than any of the alternatives I've taught with.

If we're being honest, in many places in the US, the emphasis on misusing standardized test scores to shut down schools and fire teachers was well under way long before the CCSS. And to be clear, I don't think this makes any sense. But I don't think it's reasonable to pin this on the Common Core, it's just that it provides an enemy that people from around the country can hate on.

PARC and SBAC are indeed tests intended to measure students against the Common Core State Standards. They are not from, or a part of, the CCSSI. People definitely do want to misuse these tests to punish schools and teachers, but none of this invalidates the Common Core. And while people will teach to the sample tests, that's on people who want to use these to destroy schools, not on the Common Core itself.

I'm wondering what your pedagogical objections are to the CCSS math standards. From my reading of the CCSS and supporting documents, it sure seems like the designers were research-informed. What did they get wrong, and what would you do differently? It really isn't a rehashing of New Math. They think very carefully about the pedagogical starting point, in fact.

Please don't assume that people who think the CCSS are on balance a good thing are people who are inexperienced in the classroom. There is room to disagree about aspects of the CCSS, but the discussion will be more productive if our assertions are supported by evidence, rather than name-calling.

Kahn Academy's stated mission is to "providing a free world-class education for anyone anywhere." They claim to have content aligned to every standard of the Common Core. This is exactly how Meyer represents their position. I don't see how that is a straw man.

It sounds like your argument is that KA doesn't actually claim these things and that it is not reasonable to evaluate it on those grounds. I don't think that finding that Kahn Academy doesn't do what it claims in these regards qualifies as attacking it, unless critique = attack. Further, finding KA lacking in the types of questions it asks students doesn't require offering a better alternative in order for the critique to be valid.

The rest of your comment is probably not that controversial, but these aspects of KA are not what Meyer was evaluating. Special pleading doesn't give Kahn Academy credit for the claims they make. I'm sure they will continue to improve--as the 800lb gorilla in the room, they have plenty of attention from people who can offer suggestions. The Common Core requires students to think more deeply about the mathematics than most of the state standards that came before it, and the types of questions that KA asks its students are too superficial.

What do you oppose in the Common Core? Sure, they might make it easier to develop widely used standardized tests, but the assessment of the Common Core is not the Common Core. Teaching students to be successful with Common Core mathematics doesn't necessarily mean teaching them to pass tests. But the Common Core does ask students to engage with math at a higher level of thinking than did most of the state standards that preceded it. Common Core is actually pretty well thought out--at least the K-8 portion is.

Designing a curriculum around a set of standards does not have to be "teaching to the test" and a cursory reading of the CCSS makes it clear that the answer to questions like "Why is this important?" or "Why should we do it this way?" should never be "Because the test says so." Students should "construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others." How does this kill independent thought?

If a curriculum, like KA, is "aligned" to a set of standards, like the Common Core standards, it means that the standards accurately describe what the curriculum teaches. Often, as is the case with the Common Core State Standards, the standards do not address how the items of a particular content standard is taught, preferring to leave such things up to the professional judgement of the curriculum designers. So the Common Core doesn't mandate a "style, tone, or technique." And defining "alignment" as talking about a topic at the same time as other teachers in a certain order is perfectly reasonable. You can even assess a student on that topic any way you want. But don't forget that the ways we assess students also teach them what we care about and what "doing mathematics" means.

One thing that is a big change from most states' previous standard, is that the Common Core includes 8 Mathematical Practice standards--ways that we want students to think about and do mathematics. These are things like: don't give up when solving problems, know and use the right mathematical tools for the right job, be precise, make and critique arguments, and pay attention to patterns. As with everything we learn, students learn to engage in these behaviors by practicing them, and they get practice by engaging in tasks and interactions that require them to draw conclusions, cite evidence, and apply concepts to solve non-routine problems. In a traditional classroom, these standards of mathematical practices should be woven in with all of the lessons that we teach, and we should assess students on their learning on these standards as well as the content standards.

While the Common Core might facilitate an expansion of standardized testing by giving a common set of expectations to assess, many people erroneously conflate the standards with the assessment of the standards. This is understandable --Meyer does not seem to spend any time on drawing the distinction. The CCSS doesn't mandate or recommend any particular test. And while it makes sense to speak of assessment of the Common Core, it doesn't make sense to speak of the Common Core assessment.

Having said that, any tool that claims to assess the Common Core should also assess these mathematical practices. One such tool is the Smarter Balance Assessment Consortium's test. Meyer claims that KA doesn't prepare students to be successful on the SBAC test, because students spend most of their interactions with Kahn Academy doing exercises and problems that do not require the depth that the Common Core calls for. This assertion seems supported by his data.

You may be right that KA represents the current local maximum for computerized delivery of mathematics, but Meyer is evaluating KA as a curriculum, not as a resource for kids who need extra help. In this role, Meyer's data indicates that KA's interactions with students falls short of depth of knowledge required by other assessments of the Common Core. His hypothesis that KA focuses on these types of questions because they are easier to be scored by a computer seems pretty reasonable to me. I don't think it is trash talking KA to evaluate the product it delivers against the claims they make for that product.

Finally, suppose KA found a great way to have students engage in higher order thinking skills: maybe require students to explain their thinking or make conjectures or solve multi-step problems that require them to apply concepts in non-standard ways. I don't think this would make it useless for kids who use it for extra help, do you?