Haven’t We Gone Too Far With Data – A High School Senior's View Of The Common Core

On November 6, 2013, Ethan Young, a Farragut High School senior, delivered a scathing review of the Common Core point by point at the Knox Country School Board meeting in Tennessee. His rebuke of it was powerful and passionate.

This is one amazing kid who values education and, more importantly, supports his teachers with incredible sincerity. For him, “the task of teaching is never quantifiable.” Ethan’s eloquent, poised, and sound address is a testament to what educators read and contribute daily on social media regarding the effects of test-based education on learning.

This articulate young man is standing up for what he believes is ruining education and the way students learn. He is not alone either. Around the country, this fight is continuing to grow as more and more educators, parents, and students speak out against the current education system. It's happening in town meetings about the Common Core, and the Opt Out movement is gaining ground with more parents refusing to let their children participate in standardized tests.

For other resources, please see:

• Is 2012 the Year for an Educational R/Evolution
• Education and E-cology
• Just Three Things: Global Innovation In Education
• Technology & Specialization: How to Cultivate Master Teachers?

Educational Style - The Self-Imagined Space

Source: The New York Times

The New York Times Sunday Styles Weddings / Celebrations page is a brilliant space. It is a coveted, scrutinized, august section that thrives in its own artificiality. The genius of the page's construct lies in its fabrication. It is always the same, week to week. Its readers expect and delight in its self-imposed consistency. The weddings page is a perfectly realized, self-imagined space that surprisingly raises a lot of questions about education.

Most hometown newspapers use their wedding announcements like obituaries, to drum up cash in a column-inch fee schedule. The New York Times is different. It has established a unique information delivery mode -- predictable, with its own set of rules, diction, and syntax. The weddings page especially succeeds in its unvarying photos, with each couple identically framed in size and expression. The NYTimes makes these standards clear, outlining on its "How To Submit A Wedding Announcement" page that, "couples posing for pictures should arrange themselves with their eyebrows on the same level and with their heads fairly close together."

Source: lolololori, ASIDE 2012

The New York Times didn't have to design its page this way. The format was completely open. But the layout has now become entrenched as the self-perpetuating gold-standard for esteemed couples-to-be. This uncontested template is much like some academic molds in our school systems that are only now beginning to be challenged. Fixed classroom designs are now opening to technology access and collaborative learning. Homework worksheets are now being replaced by flipped methods and streaming video.

The design of space and information is integral to learning. The consistency of format at once helps students feel comfortable in familiar environments, but it can also lead to staleness and conservatism. In The New York Times and in the classroom, the medium reinforces the message.

It's important to ask if some educators still rely on rigid routines in their classes. Do they recycle in-class worksheets, matching columns, PE drills, current event reports, and other time-honored but questionably relevant practices? Do some teachers create their own jargon and customs? Do they demand that students conform to their own rules and peccadilloes, and is this a good thing? Structure, or failure to update to meet current learner needs, can be both a student's best friend and worst enemy.

Source: The New York Times

Until recently, The New York Times weddings page carried the air of exclusivity, of elite access granted to a pedigreed few. Prestigious independent schools once embodied this same upper-crust status. Changing admission policies, competition for applicants, and evolving technologies in learning, though, may be refreshing their reputations. For its part, The New York Times made a deliberate policy to throw off the snobbery cloak. To wide approval, the paper began to recognize public service in its pair's resumes, just as schools now promote outreach as essential to citizenship. Even more noteworthy in 2002, it welcomed same-sex couples to its pages, just as many schools today embrace diversity and highlight LBGT affinity groups.

Source: Doug Savage, George Graham

The creation of a public space is a careful, deliberate task. Its culture and its customs must be clearly delineated. For these reasons, we give the newspaper's Style page high marks. For all its cache and mystique, it lists its expectations in black and white. Everyone knows the guidelines and where the bar is set, just like the best schools that demand much of their students, but make those standards unambiguous.

An independent school should not be a night club, with velvet-rope rules at the whim of a doorman. The applicants and attendees should understand the protocol, to live up to the caliber of academics and traditions. Instead of using aristocratic argot or pretentious patois, schools should design information delivery to reach the most and to champion everyone.

Is 2012 the Year for an Educational R/Evolution?

Source: Time

The announcement of Time magazine’s 2011 “Person of the Year” as “The Protester” reminds us of the 2006 issue that declared “You” as its selection for the individual contributions made by user-generated information. Since 2006 a lot has changed in the world of technology and information sharing. The floodgates have opened and anyone, anytime, anywhere can share their ideas. There is no turning back. The amount of content generated for the World Wide Web by individuals now far exceeds the amount produced by experts.

Source: Time

The advances in technology allow for form to be separated from content. In other words, content no longer depends on finite structures within the restrictions of code to create material on the Internet. Instead, individuals create, share, and publish content with incredible ease, allowing us to be the designers and distributors of our own content. In Michael Wesch’s video produced in 2007, Web 2.0…The Machine is Us/ing Us, a line types across the screen that reads, “The Web is linking people…Web 2.0 is linking people…people sharing, trading and collaborating.” For Wesch, media changed the way people interact with each other, and as a result, human relationships changed, too.

This year, the frustration felt by millions nationally and internationally reached breaking points. The Tunisian fruit vendor who set himself on fire had no idea that this would be the beginning of the “Arab Spring,” toppling dictators in major countries in Africa. The protestors who set out to show their frustration and anger in the Occupy Wall Street movement hit a raw nerve in the American public, stemming protests around the country that grew in size and number. So how does this relate to education? Well, for one thing, we are heading into 2012, six years past the recognition of “You” by Time magazine, yet schools still try to block and restrict not only technologies, but teachers as well.

Source: Certification Map

To top it off, we have a growing number of disgruntled youth in America who drop out of an education system that sees them as a number but fails to see the ensuing impact on society as a whole. In hindsight, our growing dropout rate as a nation should have been predictable. Conformity and measurement are used to define students, yet we constantly talk about differentiation, multiple learning styles, and the whole child. The words "motivate" and "engage" appear in countless educational books, articles and conference sessions. At the same time, the daily press reports on holding teachers responsible for poor standardized test results. It seems ironic: on routine assessments in academic classes throughout the year, the student is accountable for his or her success or failure, but not on standardized testing, where a student’s poor performance is blamed on the teacher without regard to class work. This leads us to ask the question, how many teachers will “dropout” from conformity and measurement?

Source: Network movie clip on YouTube

Just think how much more we could engage students if we were not so close to the edge of a cliff. Teachers want change. Just follow the streams of passionate teachers on social networking websites such as Twitter and Facebook. Their frustration can be felt, including the pressure from virtual, for-profit, and charter schools as the panaceas for educational ills. Is there a bright spot at the end of the tunnel?

Well, there are breaks in the ranks. States seek waivers to opt out of NCLB requirements, Long Island principals protest new New York State teacher evaluation based on test scores, and students nullify a standardized test in defiance by writing essays about squirrels. Perhaps it's time for educational leaders, teachers and students to be like the memorable character Howard Beale in the 1976 movie Network and start shouting, "I'M MAD AS HELL AND AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANYMORE."

Technology has altered the learning landscape, and the educational system is reluctant to change with it. The youth of today do not live in a static world. For them, at least outside the classroom, the world is dynamic, interactive, animated, and collaborative. In fact, they know how to collaborate better than the hierarchical systems imposed upon them. Information in their world is fluid. In other words, content is free from the constraints of structural limitations. Students recognize this. Outside the classroom they are free from the restrictions of blocked websites, filters, wired access, and standardized tests. They know there are multiple points of view and access them with ease.

Source: Michael Wesch, Information R/evolution

To them there is “no shelf system” for categorizing or telling them what they need. They generate content at lightning speed, they publish continually on the web, and they design how, when, and what they want to learn, follow or ignore. As educators, we can learn a lot from our students and would do best to stand up for designing content that is pertinent, rich, and connected.

Source: United Opt Out National

Something needed to give, and now it is.  United Opt Out National is a group of parents, educators, students and social activists who are determined to bring about change to end standardized testing that they see as destructive to ALL parties. In addition to protests by New York State principals, the organization Save Our Schools wants to put the public back in public schools and supports the Call for Action that United Opt Out National has declared on January 7, 2012. Let's also not forget the guest post that went viral from the Washington Post's The Answer Sheet about the school board member who took a standardized test and did not fare so well. Perhaps with the new year upon us, the groundswells of revolution will bring about education evolution after all.