Talk to teachers as I do every day and they will tell you that Common Core is a disaster. This is true whether you ask a teacher in an urban, suburban or rural district.
But the leaders of both the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association have stayed the course in supporting this mess. More or less.
Last year they began to admit that the testing component was problematic. In fact, last year’s NEA Representative Assembly in Atlanta passed several motions saying as much.
Little by little AFT President Randi Weingarten and NEA President Dennis Van Roekel have been pressed to say more. They’re still not willing to challenge Common Core’s basic assumptions.
Today Dennis Van Roekel said he was not listening to the critics.
It would be simpler just to listen to the detractors from the left and the right who oppose the standards. But scuttling these standards will simply return us to the failed days of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), where rote memorization and bubble tests drove teaching and learning. NEA members don’t want to go backward; we know that won’t help students. Instead, we want states to make a strong course correction and move forward.
Ah. A course correction.
1. Governors and chief state school officers should set up a process to work with NEA and our state education associations to review the appropriateness of the standards and recommend any improvements that might be needed.
2. Common Core implementation plans at the state and local levels must be collaboratively developed, adequately resourced, and overseen by community advisory committees that include the voices of students, parents, and educators.
3. States and local school districts must place teachers at the center of efforts to develop aligned curriculum, assessments, and professional development that are relevant to their students and local communities.
4. States must eliminate outdated NCLB-mandated tests that are not aligned with the new standards and not based on what is being taught to students in the classroom.
5. States must actively engage educators in the field-testing of the new assessments and the process for improving them.
6. In any state that is field-testing and validating new assessments, there must be a moratorium on using the results of the new assessments for accountability purposes until at least the 2015-2016 school year. In the meantime, states still have other ways to measure student learning during this transition period—other assessments, report cards, and student portfolios.
7. Stakeholders must develop complete assessment and accountability systems. It takes more than one piece of evidence to paint a picture of what students are learning. Testing should be one way to inform effective teaching and learning—not a way to drive it.
All along, DVR has been claiming that all this was what Common Core Standards already represented.
But education members of NEA have been screaming bloody murder.
A course correction was needed.
Like the Titanic needed a course correction.
Fred Klonsky 