No shortcuts to learning

Protesters against high-stakes testing and its relationship to Common Core State Standards gathered in Rochester last Wednesday. What was the commotion about?”

Common Core is a set of grade-specific expectations that were funded with $60 million from the Gates and Broad Foundations. A major concern is that opponents of public education are now using high-stakes testing to legitimize the wholesale closure of our urban schools and their replacement by profit-oriented private initiatives.

While raising standards sounds like a good idea for improving achievement, goal-setting only addresses part of the problem. To be truly successful, we need more focus on how learning happens.

Students learn through a combination of habits, discipline and engagement, but they don’t learn just because the bar is suddenly set higher. One common theory of learning describes a “zone of proximal development”: students learn at the edges of their knowledge but need peer and teacher support to stretch toward those edges. If a teacher pitches material beyond a student’s learning zone, then the student becomes frustrated with failure.

Good teaching practices should include giving students regular experiences of success that build confidence for harder material rather than starting with material that is too far beyond students’ capacities. This approach is common with any kind of learning: a good way to learn to play tennis is to be partnered with others at or slightly above one’s level, but never too far beyond that level.

If we want seventh-grade students with fourth-grade reading skills to improve, we build from where they are, going from fourth, fifth, sixth, to seventh, rather than demanding they start with seventh grade materials because Common Core mandates this as a grade-level expectation. We certainly want students to reach grade level expectations, but demanding compliance and labeling students as failures when they don’t meet expectations immediately won’t make that happen.

Common Core should be offered as a set of goals that help teachers better target students’ learning needs and the district should offer support that helps improve teachers’ abilities to stretch their students’ learning edges.

In Rochester, implementation of the Common Core must not simply be the provision of lesson modules that narrow teachers’ options for reaching students “where they’re at.” Strict fidelity to Common Core modules should not trump the main goal of allowing students’ learning needs to drive instruction. The district should help teachers work creatively with the modules, not as stark scripts, but as inspiring guidelines for learning and instruction. Test results should form the basis for improving schools and identifying areas to work on, not for closing them down and vilifying teachers, students and their parents.

Web essay published in Democrat and Chronicle, September 5, 2013
No shortcuts to learning