How Common Core Advocates Ignored Early Childhood Experts

[elleng]

'Carol Burris, Principal of South Side High School in New York, last week wrote about four “flimflams” in Common Core at The Washington Post’s Answer Sheet blog run by Valarie Strauss. Flimflam #1 was this – “The Common Core standards are internationally benchmarked and grounded in research.”

The fact that the Common Core is dataless reform and lacks evidence is a point I hammer a lot. Burris did a masterful job debunking this particular claim made by advocates. She brought up a statement from 500 early childhood experts in 2010 who found the early childhood Common Core standards developmentally inappropriate and urged that the standards for grades K-3 be suspended.

If I have encountered this statement before I don’t remember it. Think about this… 500 pediatricians, researchers and psychologists said these standards were bad for early childhood in a statement in March 2, 2010 and state boards of education still adopted them.

Were board members even aware of this statement?

We know that most were not aware of five members of the Common Core validation committee not signing off, and I’m sure their dissent was glossed over. How do you ignore this?

The fact that Common Core advocates were warned about the developmental inappropriateness of the early childhood standards by experts in this field and they did nothing.'>>>

(a few years old, written by then principal of my high school in Rockville Center, NY.)

http://truthinamericaneducation.com/common-core-state-standards/how-common-core-advocates-ignored-early-childhood-experts/

[scscholar]

1. Ted Kennedy scrwed us with this

I have quite a few friends that are teachers that will never forgive him for this.

[yeoman6987]

2. Try helping kids in 2nd grade math with homework. WTF????

[Nay]

3. Again, like many other 'improvements,' Common Core's stated intent was

different from its actual intent. It's actual intent was to harass teachers and staff, break unions, force many schools to "fail" and prep those schools for takeover by private corporations who were supposed to improve them. Common Core is just a way to allow privateers to suck school tax money out of the taxpayer and funnel it to investors. Since many states use lottery money to fund schools, there is actually quite a bit of money that is siphoned off from that fund.

[Igel]

4. I hate arguments like this. Really.

One's held in Urdu and everything goes through a filter that removes all the frequencies above 250 Hz, the other is in Quechua and all the frequencies under 300 Hz are filtered out.

No one on a given side is even aware the other is even speaking. When one side is quiet, there's silence.

The EC folk sometimes veer into advocacy, but use only their data. Kids aren't good for things below a certain age. This varies by topic, by background, and by child because this is on a nice Bell-curve-like distribution.

The CC folk sometimes vere into advocacy, but use only their data. You want to have hands on, empirically tested methodologies. You want to spiral, review, reteach. You want hard things early so that students can master it by the end, because you're looking at the end goals, career and college readiness.

Now, to be honest both sides are big into activist science. Both have this horrible tendency to have a sample size of 5 with no controls done on a monolingual, monocultural group and generalize the possible conclusions based on faulty statistics and design study to all children everywhere. This doesn't hold for every study, but when you see these overarching designs and you find that a sweeping statement is based on uncontrolled research on impoverished Muslim 2nd gen students in Leicester, England in 1986 and then apply precisely those conclusions to upper-class anglo students in 2015 you think, "Hmmm..." When a decent study is dismissed because maybe there's an alternative conclusion because of a possible confound, but the same study was repeated with a cohort of 30k students that completely lacks that confound but had the same conclusions, you know it's activist research.

Some CC good. Some EC results good. Many bad.