The Math Myth by Andrew Hacker

Author:Andrew Hacker
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781620970690
Publisher: The New Press
Published: 2016-01-26T05:00:00+00:00

WHEN MISSISSIPPI SURPASSES MINNESOTA

Coincidentally, during this time another low-profile body called the council of Chief State School Officers was working on a project of its own. The group has an eclectic membership. Some state education chiefs are elected, but most are career educators who began as classroom teachers, moved over to administration, and ascended the ladder. They saw themselves as professionals and used the council to coordinate with colleagues in other states.

Back in 2007, members of the council agreed they had a problem. For some years, their states had been using “exit” or “end of course” tests to decide whether to deem students “proficient” in one subject or another. But the states’ tests varied widely in content and how they were graded. In 2011, for example, 91 percent of Idaho’s students were scored “proficient” in mathematics, as were 85 percent in Mississippi, compared with 54 percent in Nevada and 58 percent in Minnesota. Results like these said little about actual achievement, and their inconsistencies were embarrassing, at least to the school chiefs. So council members began talking about uniform tests and scoring methods, viewing this as a task for administrators, with no political agendas. Indeed, it’s not clear how many even checked in with their governors or legislative leaders.

So part of the push for what was to become the Common Core had a simple purpose: to provide consistent statistics. States and schools and students could be ranked and compared, without getting mired in apples-versus-oranges issues. In its first incarnation, the initiative didn’t involve a particular curriculum or syllabus, or even general criteria for what should be taught. Rather, as Harvard’s Edward Glaeser put it, what was intended was a “common national test.”

Thus all public school tenth-graders, from Savannah to Seattle, would take basically the same geometry test, which would be scored according to an agreed-upon template. As the test makers memorably put it, grades would be “norm referenced,” to excise subjective judgments. The implication was that grades given for classwork were only teachers’ opinions. With uniformity in place, the scores of Seattle pupils could be compared with those of their agemates in Savannah, as if they were in the same classroom and had studied identical lessons during the term.

While national testing may have been an administrative idea, schooling in America has long been regarded as a local province, notably managed by elected boards. Anything uniform in education tends to be regarded with suspicion. Thus an unusual kind of energy would be needed to install a national system. That helps to explain why the Council of Chief State School Officers joined with Achieve, Inc. and the National Governors Association to push through the Common Core. Together, they formed a powerful triumvirate: a corporate lobby, an association of administrators, and an association nominally composed of elected officials.

Ultimately, the Common Core morphed into a full set of K–12 lesson plans, spelling out what every teacher was expected to impart and every student to learn. The “exit” examinations would be retained, but now in a national guise.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.