The Common Core State Standards

The Common Core State Standards are arriving like a train on a long journey.  And it is a journey we will not be joining.

What is the Common Core State Standards?  It is an initiative pushed by two groups made up of leaders from the states, the Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association.  The two groups brought together education experts to set standards to ensure American students would be well prepared for college and careers.  Those standards in mathematics and the language arts are to be implemented beginning the 2014-2015 school year for schools across the nation.  While well intentioned, they are unfortunately misguided and poorly constructed and will have a negative impact on education.  We will discuss this a little more in a bit.

The good news is that as it stands now, Common Core State Standards, or the common core, will have very little effect, if any, on our school.  There will be no adoption of these new national standards for kindergarten through twelfth grades here on our humble little campus.  From everything I can get my hands on about it, accepting the common core would be a major step backwards in the education of our students.

The common core is designed to make students ready to tackle college and their future vocations and fix the problems of the current education system, but Bios is clearly in a different boat than most of the nation’s schools, both public and private, as far as preparing our students for the future.

First, a review of the present successes of our school.  Our school SAT and ACT scores are already well above state and national averages.  You can find those comparisons on our website.  Also on our website is a list of the writing contests in which the students have been recognized.  Just recently, the director of one of the contests called Bios the “Alabama of essay writing.”  For those of you who do not follow college football where Alabama is a dominant powerhouse, this is quite a compliment.  In academics, we strive towards all of our students excelling. 

In addition, one hundred percent of our students graduate from high school.  Of our graduates, all but two have gone on to college the year following their graduation.  And of those two, one is planning to begin college next semester.  Of those going to college, 84% went to college with over 80% of their tuition paid for through scholarships and grants.  And of our current graduating class of thirteen, twelve out of thirteen have already been accepted to the college of their choice.  As of now, eight of those twelve going off to college have at least eighty percent of their tuition covered through scholarships.  There are few schools in the country which can present such numbers.

But we offer more than just academics.  Parents arrive at our doorstep not only because they want their children to learn, but also for the character values we teach and reinforce based on the wisdom of God through his Word and his Spirit.  And though the skills we teach are very important in the subjects of math, English, science, history, and the arts, it is worth little towards their future without the wisdom that only comes from God.  All the math, science, and other knowledge is fairly worthless without this training of character.

And so we return to the common core – the newest government solution to the issue of schools nationwide that are failing to prepare students for the future.  This idea of failing schools, is supported by an article in the Wall Street Journal on February 21 which stated that an estimated 40 million American adults have not even earned a high school diploma.  In response to this failing system, there are many, many public and private schools who are adapting these common core standards.  According to the Common Core website, forty-five states, the District of Columbia, and four territories will be using Common Core to guide their government schools.  More than 100 Roman Catholic dioceses will be using these same standards.  Many Lutheran schools are adopting the standards also.  But not everyone is sure of the changes.

As reported in Education Week, there is growing criticism.  The concerns focus on the increased control of the federal government in national goals and curriculum, the radical change in the focus of the language arts, as well as broad, unspecific goals for math.  I would share in those concerns.

In an article written for Education Week back in February 2012, Joanne Yatvin, former president of the National Council of Teachers of English, was critical of the lack of recognition that background and experiences play in reading from the new standards, as well as the new emphasis on informational text, which ignores the limited experiences of young students.  She completed her concerns with this comment:

“While I want to believe the authors of the standards and the publishers’ criteria did not intend to be as constrictive and authoritarian as their words indicate, I am aghast at the vision of the dreariness and harshness of the classrooms they aim to create.  Taken together, the standards and the criteria project an aura of arrogance and ignorance in their assumptions about how and why children learn, what is actually needed to succeed in college or the workforce, and the extent of teachers’ knowledge and expertise.”

Criticism is national.  In a recent opinion piece in the New York Times, noted American mathematician Sol Garfunkel and emeritus professor of mathematics at Brown University David Mumford wrote:  “This highly abstracted curriculum is simply not the best way to prepare the vast majority of high school students for life.”

Two recent studies released by the Brookings Institute stated that the connection between standards and student achievement is not there, based on scores from the NAEP.  Scores were examined from 2003-2009 with no correlation between scores and state standards.  Standards only support, but do not create good educational institutions.

Adopting these standards would be a giant step backwards for Bios.  This is evident in something as basic as choosing curriculum.  Essentially, if a goal or outcome is not working as we planned, we come together over time discussing what needs to change, we then change it.  For example, right now we are not satisfied with the results we are seeing in the grammar program for our juniors and seniors.  Not horrible results, just not up to the standard with which we want to send our students off to college.  So we, the English teacher and I, search until we find a text or program we think will support us in the grammar goals we have set for the soon to be graduates.  No waiting for a district committee, or a school board, or the federal government to perform a study.  And conversely, if something is working for our school, no need to change it.  We can use it for thirty years or more if the curriculum meets our needs.

In this short essay I cannot begin to give a decent and thorough accounting of where the common core standards fall short for us in reading and math, but I will pick on two points.  In reading, the goals do not support us where we have been very successful:  Our students are able to read and comprehend materials in a variety of contexts including both literary and informational.  One particular passage from the standards reads, “In reading primary sources, students must learn to set aside their own prior knowledge to focus on the text itself.”  Our school is successful in part because of the learning built on previous experiences in life.  That is true all the way through graduation.  And this is made possible by having a large variety of materials available for our students to read because sometimes the tools that are usually successful for some students do not meet the needs of all.

With math, it is the highly skilled and well trained instructors who provide an excellent education.  Standards can only support that fact, not make up for it.  And as stated by one reviewer, Grant Wiggins in Education Week, “the incoherent nature of the standards” do not help.

With good intentions the Common Core State Standards were developed, but the standards do not assist or support Bios Christian Academy in our goal of serving our families.  So to continue our mission of educating students, teaching them God’s ways, and preparing them for the future, we will not be adopting the Common Core State Standards.

Bios "Alabama" is Recognized

At a recent breakfast honoring essay writers, the man that organized the event mentioned when he saw the first of the many Bios winners that morning, "Here is the first student from Bios Christian Academy, the Alabama of essay writing." Alabama being the university that won the first college championship this past year. Well, for a larger essay contest, one of the largest in the country, Grand Canyon State Games, we did even better, enjoying over twenty-five percent of the first through twelfth grade winners.

Out of 4,264 essays submitted, our teachers and students captured four of twelve gold medals, three of thirteen silver, two bronze, and five honorable mention awards.

While it is a lot of fun to win so many awards, one of the main reasons for writing the essays is to write for different audiences. Those different audiences are of course the judges. The people who so generously give of their time are from all walks of life. Engineers, school teachers, retired English teachers, city officials such as mayors and police chiefs, cowboys, college students and their professors, and librarians are some of the different audiences we write for.

A problem with writing instruction I would observe over the years is the inclination of teachers to favor the writing styles of students which wrote in a manner they liked. I would do the same thing. When instructing my own children, many years ago, I would definitely favor the writing of my older son over the younger. We shared a similar sense of humor. But because both of their essays were sent in to the contests, the younger son won a few contests too.  Writing for different audiences provided different writing purposes as well as different writing likes.

Congratulations to all the teachers, students, and parents for a job well done.