Los Angeles Times editors get it – Philanthropies don’t have all the answers about education
The Los Angeles Times just ran a very good article concerning the failure of a number of education programs that have received massive funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
The title says a lot:
This is a solidly thought out article that is worth consideration. In fact, there is only one area of this editorial that I would question. That section talks about the Common Core State Standards, saying:
“When the standards are implemented well, which isn’t easy, they ought to develop better reading, writing and thinking skills.”
The Times makes some big assumptions with this, ignoring a growing trend of data from Kentucky that says the practical potential of Common Core remains largely unproved, at best.
There are several problems with the Times’ assumption that Common Core will work better.
First, no research really shows that massive implementation of the Common Core State Standards really will improve reading, writing and thinking skills. The standards simply have not been previously implemented in large, state-sized education organizations before. Common Core remains an experiment.
Common Core also includes math standards. The Times is curiously silent about whether those math standards are of any value what-so-ever.
Certainly, Kentucky, which has by far the most experience with Common Core of any state, provides at best a cautionary tale about the possible potential of these new standards. Especially for the state’s various special student groups such as racial minorities and students with learning disabilities, this blog and The Hechinger Report – to name just two very recent sources – make it clear that Kentucky’s academic performance is faltering, at best, under the new standards (see for example: here, here and here for just a very few of the most recent articles in this area. Search this blog with terms like “EXPLORE,” “PLAN,” “NAEP,” “KPREP” and “Effective High School Graduation Rate” to find a lot more disturbing information)..
Second, implementing Common Core might not just be difficult – it might not actually be possible or at least practical given the large numbers of teachers who clearly don’t understand how to do this. I blogged just two days ago about the fact that in Kentucky, which has more Common Core experience than any other state in the nation, the latest TELL Survey reports that in 2015 a whopping 61 percent of Kentucky’s teachers said they needed more Professional Development (i.e. on-the-job training) about how to effectively teach Common Core. That percentage GREW from 50 percent saying they needed such help two years earlier in the 2013 TELL Survey.
So, five years after Kentucky adopted Common Core, which happened in February 2010, massive and increasing numbers of the state’s teachers – by their own admission – still needed more help to improve their classroom delivery.
The Gates crowd says they are now focusing on ways to get more teachers trained to do Common Core well. But, there already are a ton of media programs available in places like You Tube that try to do precisely that. So far, these media-based approaches haven’t worked. Maybe Gates can do this better – maybe not.
Meanwhile, how many more year groups of students should we expose to Common Core while Gates and others try to fix these huge and obvious problems?
A poor African-American child in Louisville needs answers for his or her school now – not promises that might or might not be kept sometime in the future. To date, five years of Common Core in Kentucky provide no real indication that this poor child is being helped. In fact, the story of Common Core based education in Louisville for that minority child, as both the Bluegrass Institute and Hechinger Report agree, is getting worse.