for Ukiah Daily Journal
?In 2009, state education chiefs and governors in 48 states launched the new Common Core Standards. Hailed as the next big thing in education, they are a set of college and career-ready standards for K-12 in English Language Arts/literacy and mathematics designed to ensure that students graduating from high school are academically prepared to enter college and the workforce.
Today, with 44 states voluntarily adopting the standards and implementing the tests, there is a flurry of controversy from both sides of the political spectrum and everywhere in between as to whether or not they are truly what they claim to be.
Recent protests at the Capitol in Sacramento are a microcosm of what is occurring throughout the nation. One parent against is quoted as saying, "California had higher standards before Common Core. The curriculum, both math and English, is awful." On the other hand, a fifth-grade teacher claims, "What I like about the new standards is students leave school as human beings who can think on their own, talk on their own and who have ideas about why things are the way they are."
Supporters say the new standards hold American students to much higher expectations, moving away from a bubble-test culture and encouraging deeper learning. Conservative naysayers proclaim they will undermine student individuality and teacher autonomy while liberals against claim they are the ideological stepchild of President Bush's No Child Left Behind Act: another high stakes testing program imposed from Washington.
Indiana and Missouri are in the process of replacing the Common Core standards with those that have greater state oversight and, while individual students and districts are opting out, the greater proportion of the nation's schools are diligently aligning themselves with the new curricula and have most recently completed their yearly testing.
Chez Robinson, eighth-grade Language Arts teacher and part of the leadership team at Pomolita Middle School, says, "It's a process; educators are still learning about it. We have been engaged in weekly meetings, collaborating with other teachers, experimenting with what works. The goal is to significantly raise students' reading levels."
Close reading is one strategy being implemented for teaching students higher level thinking skills, focusing on depth rather than breadth.
"You take a piece of text, fiction or non-fiction, and you and your students examine it closely," she says.
In the classroom, Robinson introduces the overall purpose of the reading assignment and then has students work independently and in partners and groups to share what they have learned. They circle words that are confusing or unknown, write out questions, use exclamation marks for ideas that surprise, underline key points.
It is initially teacher directed with discussions centered on the text, referring back to it, specifically focused on parsing the content.
Robinson uses examples from Langston Hughes' work, especially rich in figurative language, and refers specifically to his poem, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers." Together, she and her students investigate each line, each stanza, piece by piece, leading to deeper levels of understanding. She plays an interview with him, assigns a five-paragraph essay on the Harlem Renaissance.
"It's not that this hasn't been done before," she says, "but Common Core is bringing a new focus to the strategies."
Close reading is particularly helpful when teaching second language learners, allowing the teacher to take the necessary time with a piece of text, the students to listen to the instructions and to be able to dialogue with their peers and build on each other's thoughts and ideas.
"It's exciting to me because of the way the students react to this; I believe they are enjoying the peer discussions and the support and confidence they are gaining from each other in the process," she says.
Students within the Ukiah Unified School District have completed their testing for this year and second- through fifth-graders at Grace Hudson Elementary School spent approximately an hour a day for five days completing the tests.
In addition to the English Language Arts and math test, the new standards provide for a performance task test, a 30-minute lesson presented by the teacher followed by an hour for the students to sit down at computers and write their essays.
"The lesson comes from the state; each school and each grade level are assigned performance tasks," explains Maria Armstrong,?assistant superintendent of Educational Services for UUSD.
For example, the focus for fourth-grade students in Jim Evans' class was uncommon animals. He follows a scripted lesson allowing him to teach the topic and engage their level of understanding with multiple examples leading to their written task that will ultimately be assessed.
Except not this year nor next; these two years are field tests with no grading, with no new API scores. It is an opportunity for the testers to test their test.
"The Smarter Balance Assessment Consortium, the multi-state association working to develop student assessment aligned with Common Core standards, has made great strides toward really capturing what educators have been asking for a long time. They provide varied levels of student understanding versus the old type, the one dimensional fill-in-the-bubble," says Armstrong.
The new tests include multiple choice questions but also have built-in, computer-adjusted scaffolding, based on the answer a student provides, to get at what a student knows. Each next question depends on the student's previous answer, adjusting for different levels of comprehension -- no longer one size fits all.
"It's really asking students to think at a much deeper and higher level, critical thinking, rather than have them regurgitate facts," says Evans. "It takes them through a process of problem solving from beginning to end."
Within the performance task reading there are multiple sources referenced, and it requires students to cite evidence supporting their answers.
When asked the difference between this year's test and last year's, fourth-\ grader Sophia Arenales says, "Last year it was easier and so old-school." She's referring to the fact that last year's tests were taken with paper, pencil and eraser and this year's with computers.
"The paragraph on the performance test was a little bit hard; we had to write what the story was about and you had to take topics from the story and include them in your essay. I think I did a great job," she says.
Her peer, Lucas Koball, says the difference was that last year they did not have any passage comprehension. "This year we had to pull details from the story, put them into our own words and write our own stories. It was very easy, a balance between boring and fun. The boring part was the plain questions, straight out, and did not involve much creativity. I think they should be more difficult, more challenging, make me think harder.
"They test you on how well you have paid attention in class; I felt it was a good assessment of what I had learned. I am not a big fan of the kind of tests where you just fill in the bubbles."
Sophia concurs that although there were questions that she could not answer because the material had not been covered in class, it was kind of boring and she would have liked to have the performance test be more challenging. "I would like to have had more difficult questions to make me think harder."
First-year Principal Kara Mikesell, formerly of Willits, thinks it's a good shift. "I like the idea of depth versus breadth, the idea that we are teaching kids the process of thinking so they are able to solve any problem with which they are presented. The Common Core skills can be utilized across curricula and across environments."
"Our previous method of testing was so one-dimensional," says Armstrong. "This test helps educators determine how to better address students' thinking and problem-solving skills. Are they in need of remediation? Are they in need of being pushed a bit further to keep them involved?
Armstrong is passionate here. "We have to change the way our classrooms look; we need to engage students in talking more with each other, working in groups. There is a lot of teacher planning that is required to deliver this kind of methodology and it has been an absolute joy to witness the development of innovative collaboration throughout the district so necessary for this process."