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Moving past the Common Core

Now that interest in the “wonders” of Common Core is waning, let’s not make the same mistake again, rush out and purchase another canned program like the new reading or math products of the past that were supposed to bring about miracles. They are now relegated to the attics of our schools, and the many thousands of dollars wasted on these fads have long since been forgotten. An autopsy of Common Core is now appropriate to prevent this from happening once again.

Marian Brady recently published in the Washington Post an explanation of what’s wrong with Common Core. He stated, “The core curriculum has major problems. The core subjects are important, but they’re being dumped on kids many years too soon. Their number, specialized vocabularies, differing conceptual organizers, varying levels of abstractness, and their disconnectedness from each other and from life as kids live it, create a confusing mental mish-mash.”

Brady provides an interesting example of the importance of understanding relationships. He provided this hypothetical statement about the possible relationship between buying socks and matters of life and death: “We want a pair of socks. Those available are knitted in Third Word countries. Power to run the knitting machines is supplied by burning fossil fuels. Burning fossil fuels contributes to global warming. Global warming alters weather patterns. Altered weather patterns trigger environmental catastrophes. Environmental catastrophes destroy infrastructure. Money spent for infrastructure replacement isn’t available for health care. Declines in the quality of health care affect mortality rates.”

This paragraph contains nine separate statements of fact that might appear on a standardized test, each of which require personally validated information to be fully understood/conceptualized. Brady urges readers to consider that to isolate the nine statements from each other, or change the order they appear, and sense changes to nonsense. He states that “What makes the paragraph make sense aren’t facts but relationships, relationships between and among aspects of reality.”

The Common Core has been designed to teach facts but fails in promoting “inferences, imagining, hypothesizing, predicting, sequencing, extrapolating, valuing, generalizing, and so on – thought processes too complex and interwoven to be evaluated by standardized tests.” It has failed in developing relationships between “inert” facts, ideas simply taken into the mind and never put into fresh combinations. These inert facts, according to Whitehead, are not only useless; they are harmful.

Brady is right that less than meaningful facts are introduced to students long before they have developed the capacity to understand or conceptualize them. Facts (insert ideas) introduced at developmentally inappropriate times are useless and harmful, but this does not suggest that facts conceptualized are not needed to form relationships.

This reality demands a new approach to assessment and evaluation of learning outcomes. The approach must first recognize that validated developmental sequences, including learning, are understood and available in professional literature that must be applied in every teaching/learning transaction that occurs in the classrooms of our public schools. For instance, Piaget’s developmental sequence focuses on the genetically driven development of the intellectual capacities for logic and logical thought, vitally important in education. Each learner passes through this sequence unless driven off track by inappropriate experiences or some malady that prevents processing of data from experiences.

Individuals are found to be operating at different stages regardless of their age or grade level designation. If they are all expected to function at the same level of intellectual capacity, when they are not all at that level, some will be judged incorrectly as needing remediation when what they need is time to mature, or some will be judged to be exceptional when they have naturally matured to a higher level of development as a result of their unique genetic code.

Teachers must recognize in learners the indicators of where they are in these sequences. Failing to accurately make these judgments will establish unrealistic expectations for learning that will lead to frustrations with negative consequences for learners.

If the facts are conceptualized as a result of developmentally appropriate experiences, preferably hands-on, opportunities for learners to discover the relationships that make sense to them will occur. These facts conceptualized are accumulated over time, and there is a risk of not remembering details when relationships are being considered. What this suggests is a need for a mechanism and process to ensure that the facts are conceptualized at appropriate developmental levels and that a record of the transactions with meaningful facts are placed in storage, made available as relationships are being teased out.

Learners are experiencing real-life situations on a daily basis. These experiences are all important, but some are particularly valuable for finding relationships among conceptualized facts. These ideas must be recorded and stored for future use; otherwise their essence may be lost. This requires a computerized record-keeping system for learners to keep track of their transactions with the world around them. These transactions require simultaneous skills development to help learners create and communicate their understandings.

Today’s electronic inventions can enable learners to record, store and manipulate the after-images of experience and make that information available with a computer command. Each learner’s diary of experiences would include essential understandings about “life in all its manifestations,” what Whitehead understood as the legitimate curriculum for the school.

If any of this seems interesting, check out information about the field-tested Constructive Assessment, Recordkeeping and Evaluation System (CARES) available free of charge from this author at rbrtarnld@aol.com.

Robert L. Arnold lives in Willsboro and is a professor emeritus of education at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh.

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