From my first two blogs, Part One, the Standards and Part Two, Who Wrote the Standards?, you can see that the standards, by themselves, are not a major obstacle. Teachers have been given vague, poorly written, or objectionable standards in the past. In spite of poor quality of standards, teachers know how to continue doing what is best for their students. Teachers continue to teach and students continue to learn.
A excellent Huffington Post blog by Alan Singer rightly equates Common Core with testing. According to President Bush, testing is a form of accountability. On this point, I completely disagree with President Bush. Who is being held accountable- teachers, parents, or students- and who should be held accountable? It takes all three, plus administration, to provide and maintain a successful educational environment. If any one of these elements (teachers, parents, students, and administration) fails in their responsibility the education of the student suffers. So, one element- testing- is going to measure accountability? Testing is one of many methods that educators use to measure the progress of their students. Most teachers don't even need test results to tell you which students are struggling and the area in which they are struggling.
Teachers have never been fond of administering a large number of assessments. However, when assessments are linked to a teacher's ability to teach and can effectively ruin a career in education the line is drawn. No one wants to be held accountable for something they have little control over. Just because I teach doesn't make me responsible for the home life, prior schooling, and ability of each of my students - Just because you put gas in a car it doesn't guarantee that the car will run.
In hopes of learning more about the CCSS assessments that students would be seeing, I went to the Smarter Balance Assessment Consortium. My first stop on the site was to look at field test results. Technology is the first topic listed in the survey results. In fact, three of the six topics had to do with technology or the test delivery system. Bandwidth was also addressed. This explains why The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is so vested in CCSS, but it does little to explain what type of assessments our students will be given and how the assessments will benefit our students. To learn more about CCSS assessments you can visit the Smarter Balance Assessment Consortium.
Next, I took two of the ELA assessments- one for 6th grade and one for 12th grade. I could not detect a great difference between the difficulty level of the tests. In fact, both were very similar in type of questions being asked and content of reading resources. I did not get any results. I wondered who, if anyone, would view my practice tests and score the responses.
Speaking of reading test results and scoring assessments, members of a New York state teacher's union have filed a law suit in October against the state education department. Teachers who scored portions of the Common Core based tests were placed under a gag order. The union argued that this was unconstitutional. Teachers who read questions that are inappropriate or poorly written should have the right to say so without fear of retaliation. Apparently, this problem isn't limited to teachers in New York. This problem will continue to sweep our nation as CCSS gains ground.
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