At the topline, we have seen a story of decline ever since 2013. My fear is that this is not a coincidence. From 2013 onward, the Common Core took firm root in most states and we saw a sea change in school discipline and an apparent explosion of tablets and laptops in the classroom. I’ve grown increasingly concerned that the education reform movement has hurt the students it is trying to help, especially students of color.
Of course, NAEP can’t confirm this hypothesis. It can tell us what is happening but not why.
But I wanted to know more about what was happening, focusing on African American achievement in districts and states from 2013–2019, and what I found, as displayed in table 1, seems well worth ringing an alarm about...
At the state level, the larger sample sizes allowed me to look into African American achievement by gender. I found that, at the national level and in many states, African American males saw greater losses than African American females. Given this alarming pattern—and that, as Fordham’s Erika Sanzi has lamented, boys are often left out of public policy conversations—I decided to display the data in table 2 for African American males from 2013 to 2019...
Folks who claimed that the Common Core, discipline reform, and more tablets and laptops would lead to significant gains for African American students have, at this point, seen their hypotheses fairly well falsified... (boldface mine--Darren)
The ghastly data on African American achievement should have raised major alarm bells. But in a movement ostensibly dedicated to racial equity, it seems to have gone mostly unnoticed.
Monday, November 18, 2019
If We Judged Govt Programs By Their Actual Outcomes Rather Than Their Wish-For Outcomes....
Why does no one seem to care? Is it because Common Core was pushed by Saint Barack's administration? Had any Republican been so instrumental in this, people would (justifiably) be marching with pitchforks:
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From what I've seen, the only thing working is individual software programs, particularly for math. The Title 1 majority AA districts near me report good success...BUT...the successful AA student there is the grandchild of a UAW worker (middle class) and the parents are strong on ed even through they have fallen out of the middle class. Having math on the computer is the only way to get away from disruptors and in some cases the only way to get competent, complete instruction. Students who are running the street are not doing well, and the truant officer is often unsuccessful in getting them to attend or walk away from the 'ed is for sucka's, don't waste your time, it's not gonna get you nothin' belief' while making school a meeting place to conduct cash business. The disengagement is not unique to AA.
As a parent of males in a district focused on '1's and '2's, mho is that anyone not able to tutor their boy is sunk. Wealthy and Title 1 districts are funded, but they are small in number compared to the rest. There simply is triage going on.....core basic only, just enough for the pass. Families are on their own for the rest unless they can get their boy into honors and disparate impact plus the boy unfriendly behavior standard means the chances are small. Even the elementary school pysch here is on public record stating the good behavior cannot be expected from a student who is consistently not receiving instruction at the level of need.
In math in particular, we see Mary Dolciani's ideas have been tossed. There is no visual representation of many concepts, even when developmentally appropriate. There is no symbolic other than rote. In short, teaching is primarily verbal, with multisensory being a 'special need', rather than developmentally appropriate for over half the population. What middle class parents do here is buy an appropriate text, the kid reads it, learns it, and then does the exercises applied in class plus the text exercises. The former gets the credential, the latter gets the knowledge needed for college coursework.
Scroll down this page at Hoover to see the AP AB & BC Calc success rates (>=3) over time, broken down by race. African Americans had the strongest improvements going into 2013/2014, with their pass rates more than double what they were 10 years earlier for AB and more than 5 times more for BC. Then came CC, and after which, much of those gains were lost.
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