State with the most Common Core experience grants waiver from the standards

“The US needs a single curriculum so highly mobile students won’t be behind when they move to a new school.”

“Students need to take more advanced material in the lower elementary grades if they are going to be ready later for college and careers.” Americans have heard these sorts of arguments over and over during the past few years as supporters of the Common Core State Standards pushed to convince us that their new standards offer a great – if not the only – answer for the nation’s obviously under-performing schools. Stick to Common Core, we’ve been confidently told, and everything is going to get better.

Nowhere were such claims more frequently heard than in Kentucky. In fact, the Bluegrass State was the first to adopt the new standards under the title “Kentucky Core Academic Standards.” Kentucky was the first to realign its state testing system to the Common Core, as well.

Since the adoption in 2010, the Kentucky Board of Education has been out in front in support of Common Core, staunchly defending the standards as critical to improving the state’s schools. It was essential for every Kentucky school to comply – no exceptions!

Except now that is changing.

On June 3, 2015 the Kentucky Board of Education excused the Jefferson County Public School District’s Maupin Elementary School from having to follow the required sequence of topic presentation found in the Common Core. All of a sudden, the state with the most Common Core experience in the nation is now saying that maybe that Common Core sequence isn’t the best. Suddenly, Kentucky’s board is willing to look at something else, something that creates less stress in the early elementary school grades.

This is a sea state change for a state board that previously has gone to the hilt to protect Common Core. It will be interesting to see what happens and how children actually fare in this experiment.

There are definite risks for students who enter the Maupin school experiment next fall.

Under the waiver the Kentucky Board of Education approved on June 3rd, which is briefly discussed in a Staff Note prepared for that meeting, Maupin, which is part of the Louisville area school system, will be recast next year as a Waldorf-inspired Catalpa model magnet school. As such, the school’s subject matter sequencing will vary notably from that found in Common Core. Apparently, a notable amount of material will be presented in later grades than those called for in Common Core.

This entails risks, and families will be required to acknowledge those risks in advance. The staff note says:

"Families will complete forms upon the enrollment of their students in Maupin Elementary School. First, a family will acknowledge, in writing, understanding that the child will take state summative assessments on the state assessment cycle and may not have received instruction in some content at the time of assessment. Second, a family will acknowledge, in writing, the understanding that if the child enters Maupin Elementary School and then chooses to transfer to another district school or another school district in Kentucky, the child is likely to have missed specific pieces of the Kentucky Core Academic Standards because those standards will not have been taught at the grade level specified within the Kentucky Core Academic Standards document."

This discussion makes it clear that Maupin is going to teach less material in lower grades compared to what Common Core outlines. That can create problems for students.

First, it is obviously anticipated that students in Maupin’s lower grades won’t perform as well as they should on the state’s Common Core aligned tests because the students won’t be taught everything those state tests require in lower grades. Those low scores will go on report cards.

Supposedly, Maupin’s students will eventually catch up to the Common Core’s subject matter sequencing, but the experiment will have to run for a number of years before students reach those catch up points in the fifth and eighth grades. Whether this slowed-down, then sped-up approach for Maupin’s students will really work is clearly an unknown at this time.

With state test scores rendered more or less invalid for lower grades, Maupin’s parents might not get adequate warning for many years if their student is falling behind.

Second, as clearly stipulated in the discussion of the agreement Maupin parents will have to sign, if a child has to transfer to another school – even a school located in the same school district – that child may be behind. This serves to trap students in Maupin’s special Catalpa program, which might not turn out to be a good thing for some students even if their parents don’t move somewhere else.

It seems odd that the Staff Note mentions no alternative assessment program to fill the obvious information void this waiver will create.

Whether they realized it or not, the Kentucky Board of Education sent some interesting messages with their action:

• Education managers in the state with most Common Core experience are now saying that maybe Common Core really isn’t sequenced properly, so we are going to pilot something rather different.

• The board apparently thinks running pilots without valid measures to judge performance is acceptable.

• Testing kids with tests they are not prepared to take is OK just because the federal government mandates those tests.

• In the name of noble experiments it’s just fine to allow parents to enroll kids in a school where a transfer elsewhere will guarantee those children will be behind, even if that school is in the very same school district, and no program to help transition those students needs to be made available to such parents.

To close, I want to make it clear that I favor examination of alternatives to the Common Core. That would include well-crafted pilot programs with adequate protections and supports for students and parents.

However, a pilot like the one coming to Maupin Elementary School needs to be better planned, including at a minimum offering a suitable means of evaluating performance and provision of supports for students if the experiment does not work out. Perhaps the full waiver request from the Jefferson County Public School District includes that, but the waiver request was not posted online with other materials for this board meeting, and no discussion of such provisions was entertained during the board’s deliberations, either.

But, it is clear that the state board with the most experience with Common Core is now becoming open to the idea that maybe Common Core isn’t the best answer and it’s time to look at other options.