Teachers in the WW-P school district spent the summer preparing for the new school year, including the state-mandated full implementation of the Common Core State Standards methodology and its accompanying assessments. Although components of Common Core have been in place in New Jersey for the past four years. But now, for the first time, the new testing component, Partnership for Assessment of Readiness of College and Careers, or PARCC, will be required of all students in grades 3 to 11. Naturally, this change is causing confusion, concern, and even consternation for parents, and students.
Educators across the state have been attempting to explain the Common Core and PARCC concepts to parents, teachers, and even legislators. For example, Vincent R. de Lucia, the New Jersey School Board Association’s (NJSBA) Educator in Residence, gave a presentation to state-wide school board and PTA/PTSA representatives at the NJSBA’s annual legislative day.
According to de Lucia, “Common Core and the PARCC are initiatives developed in response to the learning and organizational challenges schools across our state and nation confront on a daily basis. These initiatives are examples of the type of education reform that is sometimes seen as an initiative of one political party or the other. But ensuring that our public schools are fulfilling their responsibilities and preparing all students for successful futures is a universal belief that no political organization can claim as its own.”
De Lucia explained that the Common Core standards provide “clarity and consistency” in student learning and instruction across the country. Common Core helps provide all students with equal educational opportunities, regardless of where they live, and will ensure more consistent exposure to materials and learning experiences through curriculum, instruction, and teacher preparation.
Said de Lucia: “New Jersey’s students are well-positioned to transition to the Common Core standards and the PARCC assessments because New Jersey, unlike some states, had already been in a continuous cycle of reviewing and revising its educational standards to incorporate increased rigor and understanding. Due to the existing rigor of state standards and the associated assessments, we believe that, although there will be a slight decline in the initial year’s PARCC scores, the students of New Jersey will fare better than students from states where standards were not as rigorous and assessments did not require an in-depth understanding of concepts,” he added. (For a full explanation of Common Core and PARCC, see sidebar.)
Despite this, some district parents, like many parents across the state and indeed the country, are unhappy that their children are being taught according to the Common Core methodology, and that they will be subjected to the PARCC testing in the spring of 2015.
Karen Sue, a 16-year West Windsor resident and mother of children in fifth and seventh grades, said that “as a parent, I understand that the original impetus behind Common Core was to ensure that a minimum curriculum standard existed across the United States; that all students were going to cover the same material so that there is no cherry picking of information to teach. However, the state of New Jersey actually has curriculum standards that are way above the current Common Core standards, so it doesn’t make sense for us to switch.”
“Unfortunately,” Sue continued, “as I’ve researched the issue, it turns out that private organizations are behind promoting Common Core, without much input from educational experts, teachers, parents, or students. Why? Any time curriculum and testing changes, the book publishers and testing companies all benefit, rather than the students. Every time curriculum standards change, textbooks and tests change, which means new books and tests need to be purchased.”
Said Sue: “What I appreciate about Common Core is the idea of making sure all kids in the U.S. are held to some minimum informational. The U.S. is lagging behind in science, technology, and innovation. We need to ensure our kids are science literate in order to be functional in the future. And the idea behind the PARCC testing is that it is a way monitor and test what kids are really learning; the test can be a diagnostic tool to help teachers flag where kids are having trouble and to address the problems. It’s good to have an external measure of student performance to identify deficits whether it is from the students’ end or from the teachers’.”
But, Sue noted that the Common Core/PARCC methodology has many shortfalls. Among them:
1.) The questions are not created by educators who are testing for the information taught. The educational panel that was supposed to oversee the testing questions had no input; one expert quit the panel because it was a sham. There has been no internal or external validation studies on the tests.
2.) The tests are administered via computer. This is impractical for all intents and purposes, Sue maintained. How is a school with one computer lab of 25 spots supposed to handle testing for a school of 800+? This doesn’t make sense except to get the school districts to spend more money on infrastructure; we’d have to build more computer rooms and buy more computers. There are also technical questions — what if the computers freeze or crash in the middle of the testing?
3.) Teaching to the tests — with any and all evaluation tools, there is a concern that our teachers would end up doing nothing but doing test preparation in the classrooms. This would be a nightmare for the kids and the parents. If the Common Core testing is used as the exclusive evaluation tool to assess teacher performance, human nature indicates that the teachers would work more on test prep to keep their jobs. In addition, teachers with a mixed level class of ESL, special needs, or remedial learners may not have children who can pass the test at all. “The skill set required for teaching the way we parents want for our kids is not testable with a standardized test,” said Sue.
Sue is also specifically concerned about the effectiveness of Common Core in the WW-P district. “Our school district teaches kids multiple strategies they can use to solve a given problem. Usually there are multiple approaches possible, which teaches flexibility of the mind. I’m not sure I agree with forcing kids to all learn to do math ‘the Common Core way.’ It seems a step backwards to how we’re doing it in WW-P.”
“My daughter just finished sixth grade last year. She came home really confused about certain math units, especially long division/factoring. They are using a new ladder method which is unfamiliar to me and seems to be causing confusion not just for my daughter, but for many of our students.”
Added Sue: “Many parents are unaware of the Common Core standards. The parents who are aware are very concerned and are active in trying to stop Common Core and PARCC from being enacted before we know whether they are actually useful. As parents, we’re busy and we believe we do a lot for our kids and their education. I would just ask parents to take a look for themselves and find out more. At least attend a PTA meeting so they can be in touch with what is going on in our district.”
Sue, who has earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley and a master’s degree in physical therapy from UMDNJ/Rutgers, is active in the PTAs at Village School and Grover Middle School, as well as the Special Education PTSA; and the First Lego Robotics League.
Virginia Manzari is another West Windsor resident and parent who has strong views about Common Core and PARCC. Manzari, a West Windsor resident for 15 years who has a sixth grader and a high school freshman, said that “people like the idea of a program like Common Core because it promises to raise standards and bring children’s learning up to a new level. But Common Core woefully fails at this. First, a one-size fits all approach is fatally flawed. Students are unique individuals and they learn and process information differently. By the same token, teachers have varied talents, and the best ones play to their individual strengths to communicate with kids and help them learn. Eliminating that will automatically lower the effectiveness of the best teachers and will take away the ability of all teachers to use unique methods to get through to their students. A standardized process for learning will never bring all children up. The best case scenario is that it will bring some kids up and some down. In high-achieving districts like West Windsor-Plainsboro, it will undoubtedly lower performance.”
Manzari, who holds a BS in education and an MBA from Cornell, had worked as a teacher before switching to a career in marketing at firms such as P&G, Pfizer, and Johnson & Johnson. She has also been an active PTA member and volunteer at Maurice Hawk, Millstone, and Grover Middle schools. She currently serves on the West Windsor Zoning Board of Adjustment.
Manzari is not just expressing her views locally. She attended a meeting of the Assembly Education Committee on May 15 to express her views about Common Core and PARCC.
“When I learned that the committee would be discussing a delay in Common Core implementation, I decided to go to the meeting to encourage them to revoke the Common Core standards altogether. The NJ Assembly meeting that I attended on May 15 was packed with educators (administrators, school board members, teachers, principals), parents, and student advocacy groups. It was standing room only. Most of the public comment was devoted to testing methodology and implementation, graduation requirements, and teacher evaluations, as that was what the proposed bill addressed. However, I spoke about curriculum content, and it was clear to me that the members of the committee (although they claimed to be supporters of Common Core) were shocked at some of the curriculum examples I gave. It was obvious to me that they aren’t actually aware of what they are supporting.”
Manzari added that “one administrator at the meeting estimated that PARCC testing will take twice as much time to implement in the classroom as did NJASK, which it replaces, which most parents and teachers think takes too much time already. Another administrator thought the amount of time was closer to three months.”
Why is Manzari so concerned about the common core methodology? “A key problem with Common Core: the answer is wrong if you don’t solve it ‘the Common Core way.’ So if you know how to solve the problem using a different, more efficient way and you get the correct answer, it’s still marked wrong. Conversely, Common Core places a greater emphasis on ‘the process,’ so if you say 3 x 4 = 11 but you explain yourself using ‘the Common Core way’ then that’s an acceptable answer.”
She continued: “One of the most striking examples of the poor content is a video of a parent at an Arkansas Board of Ed meeting who asked the board the same question her child had to answer: If there are 18 students in a class, and the class counts itself by a number and ends with 90, what number did they count by? One of the board members correctly answered “five,” explaining that 90 divided by 18 equals 5. However the Common Core solution requires a page full of notes and drawings and a whopping 108 steps to solve the problem. And it’s wrong if you don’t solve it that way.
“I have a friend who is an elementary school teacher in another district in New Jersey. She mentioned that some of the processes for teaching math are so convoluted that the teachers don’t even understand it.”
“Unfortunately when they take the PARCC test, they’ll inevitably run into problems because they won’t know how to do them ‘the Common Core way.’ I’m not sure how they are supposed to know how to do that when the teachers can’t even figure it out. Interestingly, at the meeting I attended, a member of a New Jersey Board of Education made the suggestion of opting out of the PARCC, telling the Assembly Education Committee that parents in his district (who have been struggling with Common Core all year) are ‘extremely angry and at a breaking point’ and they are ready to opt out of testing in droves. He suggested to the committee that unless they fix this problem — and in a big way — there might not be anyone left taking the test.”
“I’ll close with a quote by another friend about her Common Core experience thus far,” Manzari said. “She is a New Jersey mother of three, who is also a former teacher: ‘Common Core — because no kid should be able to understand math. And because listening to your kids break down and cry for hours over homework while you try to help them understand something that doesn’t even make sense to you is the greatest family time ever: A true measure of the success of our public education system. This is ridiculous.’”
Some states have already opted out. Although originally 46 states and the District of Columbia had adopted the Common Core standards, as of this writing, nine states have either never adopted Common Core, or have voted to repeal the mandate to use them, and other states continue to follow suit.
In New Jersey a coalition of parents, teachers, and legislators of both parties sought to repeal Common Core this summer. Though the initiative passed the state assembly, Governor Chris Christie vetoed the measure, instead issuing an executive order to create a study commission that will review the effectiveness of all K-12 student assessments administered in New Jersey. The commission is charged with reviewing and providing appropriate recommendations about the effectiveness of the volume, frequency, and impact of student testing occurring throughout New Jersey school districts, as well as the Common Core State Standards, and the PARCC assessments. According to the executive order, the commission will need to present an initial report to the Governor by no later than December 31, with a final report to be issued by July 31, 2015.
In the meantime, in the district and the state, Common Core and PARCC will be moving forward as scheduled.
