IHS Teachers Weigh In On Common Core Revamp

Back in September, the New York State Education Department (SED) released a draft of the state’s new math and English learning standards and opened comments and suggestions to the public until mid-November. The draft recommended changes to about 60 percent of the English Language Arts (ELA) standards and 55 percent of the math. It was the culmination of a year-long effort to gather feedback from teachers and parents after Governor Andrew Cuomo’s overhaul of the Common Core standards and pausing of test-based teacher evaluations in December 2015, due to a public outcry.

In the fall of 2015, the SED sent out an online survey of the standards at the time. According to the SED, more than 10,000 people responded to the survey and provided over 700,000 pieces of feedback. The next phase of revising the 2015 standards started in the spring of 2016, when the SED assembled ELA and Mathematics Standards Review Committees. Over 1,700 educators and 300 parents applied for committee spots and a total of 138 parents and teachers were selected.

For many educators, however, these numbers seem too good to be true. The new draft and its proposed changes raise many issues that leave the effectiveness of the Common Core in question. Teachers at IHS weighed in on these issues.

Teachers feel that they lacked a voice.

A public update from the SED claimed that the committees reviewed each standard for every grade level and the feedback from the online survey. But not all NYS teachers feel that their voices were being heard.

Steve Weissburg, a math teacher from IHS, said, “Even though [the SED makes] a big deal about inviting teacher comment, I’ve never met a teacher who participated in a panel and felt that anyone listened to what they said. And every now and then, I’ll meet someone who has volunteered and ask them, well, what did you do? And they’d say that it was a total waste of time; that he or she made suggestions and the committee totally ignored them.”

Along similar lines, Benjamin Kirk, also a math teacher from IHS who submitted comments about the new draft of the standards, said, “I’m not entirely optimistic that we’re going to hear anything…. However, I always try to caution myself from assuming that that’s the case because although it feels like it, I also think it can’t possibly be true.”

Clearly, there is uncertainty among teachers concerning the extent to which their comments are heard and taken into consideration by those actively involved in developing the Common Core standards. “I feel that, yes, you have a voice; it doesn’t mean anyone’s going to listen,” Weissburg said.

The changes in the new draft were mostly positive and undramatic.

“In Algebra I, the changes are minimal. There are not any substantial changes to the curriculum. There are a couple of topics that are either being moved to different levels or removed completely. But beyond that, most of the standards are just changes to language,” Kirk said. In some cases, wording was tweaked and in others, an existing standard was made more specific.

Lorraine Tino, an English teacher at IHS, saw a similar trend in the high school ELA curricula: “When the English teachers [at IHS] looked at the standards as they first came out, we said: ‘Oh, well, that’s what we do.’ There were no surprises.”

On the other hand, Kirk, who teaches Algebra I, was pleasantly surprised by some of the proposed changes. “They’ve now completely gotten rid of residuals in any math level. And the exact language, which I kind of appreciated, for the justification of the change, was ‘the analysis of residuals is a skill not needed for Algebra I and is a topic that deserves to developed more appropriately in a statistics class,’ which I totally agree with. There was very little reason to cover topics like that, except for the fact that it was on the Regents exam. And that’s not a good enough reason to have something as a part of a curriculum.”

But that is not to say that there weren’t flaws with the new standards. One of the major changes to the Algebra II curriculum was that it didn’t include the law of sines and the law of cosines, concepts that Weissburg said were “a huge chunk of the course.” Weissburg added, “It makes it very hard for precalculus teachers now, because students will come in with very little background. And when it comes to understanding these concepts, I think it’s nice to have two years to be exposed to the idea, so that one year, you can get introduced to the idea and do basic problems in the next, therefore revisiting it and understanding the concepts a little better.”

Bill Asklar, an English teacher at IHS, also observed flaws with the new standards. “I feel like the mods [modules] used in some schools—Ithaca does not use mods for ELA instruction, thankfully—need to be thrown out. The mods were too analytical,” Asklar said. “The new standards did not address the larger problem; our students are not reading enough and the mods make reading seem intolerable for many students. The decision makers need to think of more ways to promote literacy and encourage students to read.”

Teachers are torn on whether the new Common Core would help teachers design curricula. Kirk said, “There are still places where I don’t think there’s enough clarity, but for the most part, it’s improvement. I think it’ll be easier for teachers to know what examples to use for instruction in order to best prepare their students for the tests.” Still, the extent to which the Common Core is effective is not clear-cut. “I’ve heard that in struggling districts, teachers and administration did feel that the Common Core did help them improve instruction because it did give teachers concrete, tangible goals,” Tino said. “But teachers may not have the professional confidence to know how to bring students to the learning objectives. If the goal for the Common Core is to improve instruction, which it is, there’s a giant hole that needs to be mended.”

Most teachers like the Common Core, just not the way it is implemented and the way standards are tested.

Most teacher complaints arose not from the Common Core standards themselves, but the way they were implemented. “I actually think the standards are pretty reasonable. I like most of the Common Core,” Weissburg said. “But there are some small standards that are totally misplaced. And I think that in 2005, [the SED] was trying to raise the bar and all of the new standards were implemented in the state simultaneously. And I think that’s not a good way to bring new standards to schools, because it creates gaps all over the place.” Weissburg said that students learning the new standards for the first time were not prepared for new courses because in previous years, they had not built up the foundational skills and knowledge that the Common Core required. “That’s what happens when you phase it in like that.”

Teachers are also unhappy about the way Common Core standards are tested, and a lot of that sentiment can be attributed to the grading rubrics. “Teachers go crazy when grading, because the rubrics penalize kids for the wrong things,” Weissburg said. “There was a two-point geometry question in which students had to model something mathematically by coming up with a function f(x). Kids who got the equation completely right except that they wrote ‘y’ instead of ‘f(x)’ lost one of the two points: a 50 percent loss for something totally trivial. I would never take points off for that even in Precalculus.” It is the same case for English tests as well. “A lot of the rubric was totally unexplained,” Tino said.

There is also the frequent complaint among teachers that standardized tests remove a lot of freedom: “the whole point of a standardized curriculum is that it lays out more or less what the entire course looks like, which means that there isn’t as much time to teach other things that aren’t in the standardized curriculum,” Kirk said. As a result, Tino observed, “You end up being a test coach in many ways.” And Kirk emphasized that this can be “hard for teachers because they can feel that they don’t have the ability to decide what to teach.”

And the problem is exacerbated in math tests because teachers have different methods of teaching different skills or concepts. Weissburg said, “The questions should be framed such that a student who learned any single method well should be able to get all of the points. But instead, you get questions where students are in good shape only if they were lucky enough to have a teacher who did things one way.”

But that does not necessarily mean that teachers are entirely against having standardized state tests. They believe that there needs to be a way to track student performance. “It’s really important to know how students are progressing and to be able to compare them across the spectrum,” Weissburg said. Besides, standardized tests can also help students. “It makes movement from school to school easier. If a student needs to transfer within a state, the student can be sure that the Algebra I in one school will be the same in another,” Kirk said.

Setting the Common Core standards alone are insufficient in effectively guiding teachers in the curriculum-building process.

“The Common Core just helps [teachers] understand what they should be doing, but [does] not give good guidelines for how they could help students reach the learning standards. Fortunately, many districts provide teacher training. There are professional development and mentorship programs, while in many other districts, I’m sure, there aren’t,” Tino said. “Having mentors or professional development can effectively guide teachers in creating curricula and in finding ways to help students with different needs. That’s what we need more of.”

Teachers also believe that the SED should do more in making sure NYS teachers have the appropriate supports they need. “Certainly, the State Department should have a role, although it’s hard to say exactly what role that should be. It does have to be locally based, because we’re the ones who are going to plan curricula according to the specific circumstances of the students we’re dealing with. The needs that students in Ithaca have may be different from those students in Rochester might have, for example. But that’s not to say that there doesn’t need to be state oversight or regulation,” Tino said.

Kirk agrees that NYS teachers should have accessible professional development. “A lot of the standards [in 2014] were dumped onto teachers’ laps and there was little time devoted or attention paid to helping teachers learn what the new standards were. Being able to have had some professional development with the Common Core transition would have been very helpful.”