Image

Nearly 5,000 teachers responded to the State Education Department’s invitation this past fall to weigh in on the Common Core Learning Standards. The standards, first rolled out in 2012, have provoked fierce controversy and the governor’s Common Core Task Force has now called for a thorough rewrite.

So what do educators want changed?

Much of the criticism of the Common Core Learning Standards has focused on the early grades. The complaints were not so much about the standards themselves — of course, teachers want students to be able to marshal arguments based on evidence and understand number concepts — but rather the pacing and timing. Early-grade teachers found the Common Core too rigid, with young children being forced to master skills before they were ready.

Purpose and understanding

The “foundational skills” that the standards ask kindergartners to exhibit include reading “with purpose and understanding” and writing numbers from 0 to 20. Experts disagree.

In kindergarten, students should: “associate the long and short sounds with common spellings (graphemes) for the five major vowels; read common high-frequency words by sight: distinguish between similarly spelled words by identifying the sounds of the letters that differ”; and “read emergent-reader texts with purpose and understanding.”

In math, they should “count to 100 by ones and tens” and “write numbers from 0 to 20.”

“I don’t think children need to be reading by the time they leave kindergarten,” said Sherry Cleary, the executive director of the New York Early Childhood Professional Development Institute and an adviser to the task force. “There is no rush. Children who are wired to read at 4 or 5 will, but that doesn’t mean we should be insisting on it.”

Similarly, she said, 4- and 5-year-olds can understand addition and subtraction but they are not yet good at writing numbers. Forcing them to write numbers before they are ready introduces a fear of math. “We alienate children who take risks,” she said.

Lynn Bernstein, a 3rd-grade teacher at PS 39 in Brooklyn, shared Cleary’s concerns. “Write numbers from 0 to 20? That’s nuts,” she said. Instead of drilling it, Bernstein said, kindergartners should be getting a foundation in “number sense,” with visual and tactile play such as grouping or separating.

The 1st-grade writing standards also drew criticism.

First-grade writing standard: “Write narratives in which they recount two or more appropriately sequenced events, include some details regarding what happened, use temporal words to signal event order, and provide some sense of closure.”

“A sense of closure?” Bernstein asked. “A lot of 1st-graders are still struggling to put together a sentence. You may carefully plot what you want children to understand, but developmentally it’s not always appropriate.”

A developmental curve

Kindergarten, 1st- and 2nd-grade children vary tremendously in their progress, educators say, and it is entirely normal for children at these ages to reach developmental milestones at different times.

So one revision to the early-grades standards the Common Core Task Force proposed is “banding,” where standards are written for two grades — pre-K and kindergarten, then 1st and 2nd — allowing for a broad developmental curve. Grouping pre-K and kindergarten would also extend the pre-K social and emotional learning standards into kindergarten, where educators say they also belong.

And it is not just in the early grades that this revision makes sense. Upper-grade elementary teachers and special education teachers also have profound concerns about what is developmentally appropriate for their students.

“It’s baffling when they rolled these standards out that they didn’t think of special education and English language learners at all,” said Elizabeth McGovern, a 3rd-grade special education teacher at PS 119 in the Bronx. Students should be reading in 3rd grade, she said, but the reading standards emphasize harder texts, nonfiction and analytical thinking. Her students just “weren’t there yet.” Reading fiction and developing vocabulary was a better fit, she said.

McGovern said she believes in pushing students to their limits, but also in ensuring that the standards recognize that some students need additional support and time to reach mastery. “What happens if the child doesn’t meet a standard?” she asked. “There has to be room somewhere to spiral back.”

What about children who fall behind?

Naisha Baidy, who teaches 6th grade at MS 582 in Brooklyn, said she has students who come in at a 3rd-grade reading level. “That’s more common than the Common Core,” she jokes. Teachers want to move children to the next level, but for someone at a 3rd-grade level, that would be a 4th- not a 6th-grade level.

Judging student learning using only the grade-level standards as they are means “you cannot accurately measure students who are behind,” she said. “You are leaving out a large population, and not only special education students.”

The repairs to the standards, then, may not require new standards but a new approach, one that adjusts to individual students and works in real classrooms.

“We don’t need to start from scratch,” said Annette Brown, a UFT Teacher Center math specialist, but we do need to give teachers time to “unpack” the standards and make them work. “It’s only as good as how it’s utilized and integrated by the teacher,” she said.