Since college preparedness exams became standard, education has become woefully uninspired. Students graduate with the basics of reading and writing under their belt but have engaged little with some of the most crucial aspects of education. Students read too little of the conversations and works that have informed some of the most impactful intellectual and social developments in history.Read the whole thing. What do you think?
That’s because most states now abide by Common Core, a set of K-12 educational standards in math and English incentivized by federal grants. It’s a boxed-in method of teaching that requires teachers, by 8th grade, to prioritize functional texts in exposition over works of literature. By the twelfth grade, 70 percent of texts read in English classes must be informational in nature. So, then, the literary works that require deep reading and the development of abstract thought fall to the wayside in favor of the simplistic and mundane. This is just one example of Common Core’s overall emphasis of skills training over meaningful content—a system that discourages creativity and hampers student desire to be a life-long learner.
The SAT and Common Core standards have the same pedigree: David Coleman, president of the College Board, re-vamped the SAT in an effort to align the test with Common Core, telling the Institute for Learning that “teachers will teach towards the test. There is no force strong enough on this earth to prevent that.” Of course, these tests, like the curriculum they reflect, facilitate neither genuine academic growth nor the understanding of human virtue. The organization behind the ACT also publicly supported Common Core standards when the initiative began. But this testing/standards relationship really only stunts student learning.
Education, politics, and anything else that catches my attention.
Tuesday, November 19, 2019
College Entrance Exams
In general I support objective tests, but the devil is in the details. I don't really like AP, for example, because I believe AP content is too narrow in the classes about which I know. If this article is right about the ACT and SAT, I'll support their use even less, too:
My kid is a senior at a school that doesn't offer APs at all. That has allowed them to offer some interesting English and History classes. This year he's taking two good ones:
ReplyDeleteSci Fi, where they're reading lots of short stories with big ideas. They've read some solid classics by Bradbury, Asimov, and Octavia Butler, among others.
And Ethics, where they're also engaging in big ideas. Considering the school is in uber-liberal Santa Monica, and a poll of students in 2016 had 97% of them wanting Bernie Sanders to be president, the class is remarkably balanced. Today they read a favorite of conservatives: "Harrison Bergeron". They've debated the ethics of taxation, among other things. How often do kids today get exposed to the idea that taxation=theft?
Add in Calc, Physics, Latin, and Ceramics I, and he's having a year I wish I were doing!
-- Ann in L.A.
That *does* sound great!
ReplyDeleteI teach AP English Lit and Lang, and in this case, I don’t mind teaching to the test. The skills students have to master in both classes are authentic and useful, especially in Lang, where they study rhetoric, logical fallacies, and the art of effective persuasive argument. Sadly, though, many teachers use the classes as a vehicle to push a specific political agenda.
ReplyDeleteSandy in KY
The modern problems aren't about Common Core per se. They are a reflection of the changing decision of our environment.
ReplyDeleteWhat the author describe is an old focus on educating the smart/elite kids, for whom the returns will be greater. This is a social decision (not necessarily the right one.) We used to go that route, but now we have made a deliberate choice to spend our education investments primarily on the most needy kids, which means we're getting about the lowest possible return on investment. Quelle surprise!
"The literary works that require deep reading and the development of abstract thought fall to the wayside in favor of the simplistic and mundane."
Of course they do.
Advanced curricula can only be understood if you have considerable base knowledge either of facts or processes. You need to build a mental file cabinet, big enough to hold all your knowledge, and that takes time. So you either need an extremely limited (but advanced) curriculum, or you need elite students.
You can teach kids Greek and Plato *OR* you can teach them Vietnam and the Krebs cycle, but you can't really do both in the same session unless you have infinite time or a double-speed elite class. And you can't do it at all unless you also have highly educated and excellent teachers, which are frankly few and far between outside of elite schools.
In the old days that was resolved to some degree by
a) Tracking the smart kids;
b) Providing basic services to the regular ones;
c) encouraging the stupider kids to go do something else;
d) pretty much leaving the disabled kids to go at it solo; and
e) trying to assign the best teachers to the best kids.
But everyone is killing gifted education now. And tracking is passe.
Colleges are still too academic, and too Ivory Tower, that they do not know the real world. It's hard to find a job.
ReplyDelete