On Common Core and Educational Testing

Common Core has contributed greatly to decline in academic achievement. K-6 teachers use it as a guide, and feel that it is more of a ceiling to reach rather than a basement to stay above. I found that as I continued teaching high school math, I had to gradually make my tests a bit shorter as students seemed not to be able to finish as easily as they did when I first started teaching. I also noticed that students were coming to high school unprepared to do basic arithmetic, relying heavily on calculators. Number sense just wasn’t as strong as it needed to be — e.g. multiples of 12 or 15 were not readily recognized. Junior high math teachers — often K-8 generalists — would argue that students don’t need to simplify radicals — just give ’em a calculator and round to the nearest hundredth (eyeroll…). For example, something like the square root of 12 over 4 simplifies to the square root of 3 over 2, a frequently used trigonometric ratio. If you haven’t taught trigonometry, you probably won’t recognize how important that kind of number could be.

It always felt like the teachers at the K-8 level felt that they should be the teachers who determined what needed to be learned in math and to what level of expertise. I once gave a presentation to a group of K-8 teachers and gave an example of the basic fact 9 x 7 = 63 and how it was used in all high school math classes through AP calculus. I’m sure that many didn’t understand the examples I gave, and it not, I rest my case.

Standardized testing, at least in Iowa, changed a few times during my tenure as a high school teacher. We had ITED (Iowa Tests of Educational Development) for the first several years, followed by Iowa Assessments, supposedly to align better with Common Core, other state assessments, and the Smarter Balanced Assessment exam. Iowa then came up with using ISASP (Iowa State Assessment of Student Progress) over Iowa Assessments, to be more consistent with The ESSA (Every Student Succeeds Act), thus eliminating time constraints. When I was district math coordinator, we used the item analysis of ITED and then Iowa Assessments, to determine areas where we needed to improve instruction. With ISASP, there is no item analysis for teachers to use in future instructional planning, and scale scores are given, rather than percentile rankings, making it tough for parents to gauge where their students perform on the achievement continuum.

This kind of apples and oranges testing makes it difficult to track how Iowa’s students are doing over a span of a few decades.

Grade inflation is a huge problem, and it is rampant in our public schools. I recall being asked, in my last year of teaching, to “modify my curriculum” so that a student who was failing with 10 days left in the trimester, could pass. She had done nothing all trimester, other than one quiz and maybe three homework assignments, no tests, and was absent at least 50% of the time. When I confronted her about her potential failure, her response was, “I didn’t do anything first trimester (she took the class online) and I passed so I figured I’ll pass this time, too.” Well, she didn’t pass my class. Not sure if anyone overwrote my grade, but I wouldn’t put my name on such a poor performance supporting a passing grade. Administrators love to make these kinds of requests of teachers, and then pat themselves on the back for what a great graduation rate they have and isn’t it so nice that we are lessening the achievement gap?