Posted on 06/24/2019 5:05:22 PM PDT by Twotone
Almost nine years after Idaho adopted Common Core, state officials still can’t say whether the supposedly-more-rigorous education standards have made a positive difference. Worse, mounting evidence from across the country shows the standards are nothing short of a disaster.
I asked both Superintendent of Public Instruction Sherry Ybarra’s office and the State Board of Education (SBOE) to supply proof that the standards have worked. Ybarra spokesman Kris Rodine said ISAT test results are one measure that “Idaho students are making progress toward proficiency on higher standards of knowledge and demonstration of skills.” She stopped short of saying the standards, adopted by the SBOE in 2010 and ratified by the Legislature’s education committees in 2011, are working.
But results seem to contradict what Ybarra’s office is saying, at least for recent years. The new ISAT-SBAC testing that began in 2014-15 has several years of data that reveal Idaho’s sixth-graders taking the ISAT in 2017-18 are less proficient in math, but slightly more proficient in English from when they were tested as third graders in 2014-15. Similarly, seventh graders tested last year showed a drop in their ISAT science scores from when they took the test in fifth grade. A deeper dive on ISAT results is needed to review different student subpopulations to better understand these trends.
For its part, the State Board of Education acknowledges that it doesn’t have the data to quantify student performance resulting from Common Core. The SBOE did note that scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress show Idaho fourth and eighth-grade students aren’t doing any better on reading or math. Their scores are either stagnant or slightly declining.
(Excerpt) Read more at idahofreedom.org ...
Only the victims of Common Core education would consider it to be more ‘rigorous’ given that they’ve never learned what ‘rigorous’ really means.
Commies successfully create an entire generation of retards.
Thanks Twotone.
My nephew graduated this year. He doesn’t know how to use long division and tried to reach for a calculator every time my other nephew, an engineering student tried to show him how to use long division.
My brother and his wife and I were beating my first mentioned nephew at solving the problems present.
I’m sure its just because the right people didn’t implement common core. /s
CC students can’t do math without drawing pictures. Crazy. Many American school children have never had to memorize the multiplication tables. This is not the education that got us to the moon.
How many blacks are there in Idaho? That’s the real question as most folks there have most things in common.
I have freshmen college students that cannot divide a whole number by 10 unless they use a calculator.
Most kids (college educated, even STEM, mind you). Perceive me as some kind of rain man god freak, simply because I can remember (and do) all the math and science I learned in high school, and college. Any kind of mathy problem that appears at work is met with a gaggle of blank stares, even when it only requires the simplest of math to solve.
That’s sad. A college degree means less for them than for earlier college graduates who know how to so math with out a calculator.
I saw that example of common core at a Bureau of Indian Education summer conference where students had to diagram circle a group of numbers to get an answer that only required knowing the multiplication table.
It was in a word: stupid.
Mississippi’s educational system was bad but Common Core and the grossly overpaid administration made it worse.
A school district near us dropped common core. They’re having to do remedial math with a lot of kids, teaching 6th grades 3rd grade multiplication and division.
AP students were coming to me unable to correctly calculate percentages, and typical mid-level biology students had reading proficiency that severely impaired their ability to extract meaning from any written materials. This isn't a poor inner-city school. It's a middle to upper-middle class parochial school setting. These kids are being failed by our current educational process, and it isn't just a Common Core problem.
Talking to veteran teachers, many have told me that this decay in basic skills became evident to them as students began carrying smart phones. Students spend very little time reading more complex text, and their sustained attention to reading or other tasks has dropped dramatically. There is also a lot of cheating in this digital world. Homework is photographed and sent around, answer keys for all published material is at students' fingertips, and essays on just about any topic can be found online. We are compelled by our system to give all of our students a minimum quarterly grade. This masks much of the deterioration in basic skills. We 'old-timers' are appalled and very concerned for these young people. The strongest among them are still very good, but the average and below average students are learning very little in their 13 years of schooling.
Returning to the McGuffy Readers would help.
But the real problem lies in the fact that the teachers really don’t understand their subject matter but do know how to write a lesson plan.
Most high school and many college graduates can not pass the 8th grade Nebraska final exam.
Eliminating federal & state control over education would help.
I used to interview students applying to Harvard and Cal Tech and was amazed to see the deterioration of basic communication skills in the talented studies over the years.
When teachers really don’t know their subject ... it does not help.
But the teachers are accredited by the state ...
I find it exasperating that tried and true methods of learning and skill building have been so discredited. Those of us who went to school when there was more repetition and lecture were not limited by those methods. We learned underlying facts and skills that permitted us to build upon them. Today's administrators and schools of education are very much against direct instruction and drill, on the apparent assumption that it is the end point rather than a phase of learning.
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