Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Common Core

As standards, they are supposed to represent a floor, a *minimum* of what will be taught, but there is nothing keeping a district from treating them as a ceiling instead.

DeeDee

Out here in California, the kids take the STAR test yearly. Next year, that is being phased out in favor of some ill-defined Common Standards Test.
I've been very underwhelmed by our STAR test (and I imagine it will be like this Common Standards). For end of the year second graders, they had a clock and they picked what time it is ("3:00, 2:00, 1:00"). They also would show the back of a quarter and they picked what it was.
I was kind of like, really??? Can we set the bar any lower? My son aced it both years and got "Advanced" on reading and math. I'm happy, although I think I'd be really worried if he didn't!!

Wow!

Did you see those as part of the actual STAR set of questions for last year??

My son took it last year. I didn't ask about what he got on the test (and I wasn't privy to test info), but I helped transfer answers from booklets to scantron sheets when our 2nd graders took their first round of STAR preparation tests (yep, this system is insane, but I guess you can't start preparing them for the SAT early enough, right?) and didn't see anything that easy in there.

Nothing along those lines in the 2nd grade released questions either. They do mention that they have questions at a mix of difficulty levels for each grade, but the released questions are supposed to showcase that too.

http://www.city-journal.org/2012/cjc0914bezw.html
ZE’EV WURMAN AND BILL EVERS
Out of the Equation
California courts educational failure if it does away with eighth-grade algebra.
City Journal
14 September 2012

A bill sitting on Governor Jerry Brown’s desk would upend 15 years of achievement in mathematics by California students. Sponsored by Oakland Democratic senator Loni Hancock, Senate Bill 1200 would consign the Golden State’s eighth-grade students to a weakened, one-size-fits-all, pre-algebra curriculum prescribed by the Common Core national standards. No longer would qualified California eighth-graders have the opportunity to take Algebra I, as do their peers in high-performing countries. SB 1200 is so wrongheaded, in fact, that it would prohibit schools from offering any options in mathematics, even to high school students. The bill insists that only “one set of standards” be offered at “each grade level” across the entire K–12 span.

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Is this true? It sounds wacky even for California.

Is this supposed to save them money somehow?

I think it's not true. I found the bill and it doesn't say anything about putting everyone in lockstep, though it does mention that "One set of standards is adopted at each grade level."

Here's something from an article I found (dated late July):Former State Superintendent Bill Honig chairs the Instructional Quality Commission... and insists that many students will continue to take Algebra, and he points to the guidelines that the State Board passed on Wednesday for the just-appointed framework committee. They direct the Committee to present school districts with options for an “acceleration path” so that students capable of handling Algebra I can progress to it by eighth grade.

"Grade level" hopefully means "8th grade math is THIS," and algebra is 9th grade math and some kids will take 9th grade math in 8th grade. If my interpretation is correct, it's probably a good thing.

This appears to be the bill in question:
http://legiscan.com/gaits/view/404443

The problematic language seems to be the requirements that "One set of standards is adopted at each grade level" and "Redundant mathematics standards are eliminated".

If the bill were passed into law in this form and strictly adhered to, I guess it would then take a grade acceleration or subject pull-out to take algebra before the standard time. One might think that this is really no problem-- if you have enough people in a grade ready to take algebra I, you could lump them together and form a new math class that was nominally a higher grade-level class, even though composed of only the lower-grade students. However, screening students for entry might be problematic in the face of slavishly applied single standards for each grade. Maybe I'm just too nervous, and the bill if implemented wouldn't hinder subject pull-outs at all, or even gifted classrooms with math that happened to adhere to the standard for a higher grade.

I think it's a straightforward bill that was introduced to specify mechanisms for diverging from Common Core standards by committee, but that it was obviously drafted without the needs of accelerated/gifted students in mind. Hopefully it will be tweaked appropriately before any adoption.

There is a lively discussion of this question in the comments section of the article

http://www.edsource.org/today/2012/state-board-now-can-wade-back-into-eighth-grade-math-debate
State Board now can wade back into eighth grade math debate
September 5th, 2012
By John Fensterwald

I've figured out precisely why I'm skeptical about the common core standards. It's because they're vague and therefore susceptible to being gamed by textbook writers, districts, and teachers.

Here's an example. You can read the standards for proofs in geometry on this page. If you click on the links about proofs, you'll see that they just say "Prove theorems about (stuff)." The precise meaning of the word prove is open to interpretation.

As a working example of how vague words can be interpreted, take the California standards: Scroll to page 6 to see what I've copied here:


The standard says WRITE proofs. It doesn't say DEVELOP THEM FROM SCRATCH. Yes, I know: most or all people here will interpret write as "develop from scratch." But the standard has clearly been interpreted differently. The Holt Geometry book my son used last year is a popular book in the state. I don't recall a single exercise in that book (and I looked) that required the kids to write a proof from scratch. Instead, they just had to fill in the blanks. The book typically listed the reasons and students had to copy stuff to a piece of paper and then fill in the appropriate theorem or postulate. Presto! They were writing proofs.


Exactly. The teacher certainly never asked the kids to develop them, either. Her tests were always fill-in-the-blank style when they had proofs, which they often didn't.

Yes-- and that Holt product is not alone in this respect. The Pearson product that my own child used for Geometry similarly required not ONE deductive proof.

My husband and I were:

a) appalled (seriously?? how can this even qualify as basic Geometry without this piece??) and,

b) irked (this was the bit of math education that revealed the sheer beauty of higher mathematics and tethered it to the Socratic method and the ancient Greeks and Arabic traditions of learning... why... why... why...)

in pretty much equal measure.

We had her do a few anyway, just because we personally felt so strongly about the whole thing.

As it turns out, my daughter's school is more "rigorous" (grinding my teeth when I hear this word now... This word... I do not think it means... what you think it means...) than most, since they at least did do some "proofs" under the standard that Val cites above... they FILLED IN THE BLANKS IN A PRECONSTRUCTED PROOF. With memorized theorems. Yup. Fill.in.the.blank. = "writing" evidently.