Letter to Pasco County School Board & Administration

Dear (School Board, Supt. & Asst. Supt):

There has been a great deal of controversy over the implementation of the Common Core Standards.  Indeed, several of the states that had previously accepted the Standards, along with the federal money that came with them, have been reconsidering.  These Standards were often accepted without having been read by the state-level parties responsible.  Now that they’ve been examined by many more people nation-wide, including Education professionals, psychologists, parents and many groups traditionally concerned about the well-being of children, the level of concern has heightened considerably.

This isn’t just about the cost.  I’m sure most Americans would agree that if the Common Core was believed to be an improvement in our schools’ curriculum and methods of delivery, no amount of money would be too much.  The problems most evident to me and others, however, are that the materials, methods and even sequences of instruction in both the Language Arts and Math Standards would be large steps backward, and sometimes even counter-productive, just as we have been working so hard to bring about improvements in academic achievement for all students.

The number of articles, sites, and blogs, etc. addressing this issue have become very numerous, so I have chosen just a few to send to you that I felt were especially clear in explaining how these Standards could cause problems in the future for our students.  For Language Arts, there are two videos – one showing examples of 1^st Grade Writing and Reading books and assignments, and the 2^nd is a video of a Psychologist explaining why curricula such as this is inappropriate for young children.  I’ve also included an article by an Educator who very clearly explains why an over-reliance on informational text can be damaging to the academic development of students of all ages.  There is much written about the Math Standards as they pertain to the higher grade levels, but the problems with the Math goals begin much earlier than that.  I’ve included a couple posts from my own blog which examine the elementary level of the Common Core Standards.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGph7QHzmo8  Common Core books for first, second and third grades, mainly. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?annotation_id=annotation_652428&feature=iv&src_vid=rGph7QHzmo8&v=DdPz7Eg18jU

A Clinical Mental Health Therapist's opinion about Common Core materials she reviewed from the video, above.

http://educationviews.org/dr-sandra-stotskys-gift-to-america-an-education/

The first post below is an article about what is going wrong with today’s math teaching methods and material.  The second article answers the question, “Is Common Core going to fix this?”

(Blog Reader, please see "Invented Math & Common Core Elementary Math Standards posts))

In light of these and so many other concerns and doubts as to the positive effect of the Common Core Standards on our students, IVBE believes, should any particular schools still decide to implement them, that parents with children in those schools be given the choice as to whether they desire this or some other curriculum.  It would also be in the best interests of the students that should the Common Core be seen to have a detrimental effect on a student’s learning, that the parents of that child be given the option to remove the student from the Common Core classroom.  These conditions would have the added benefit of giving teachers the choice of standards and methods as well.  This way, we would be moving closer to choices for parents, teachers, and schools instead of further away from choice, which is another fly in the Common Core ointment.

Thank-you for you consideration,

Katherine Livermore, Secretary

Independent Voices for Better Education

Drop-Out Prevention Programs - The Family Factors

When schools are in their dumbing down mode, they will be simultaneously shifting the blame for the results to someone or something else.  We were hearing an awful lot about dysfunctional families and at-risk children back when all the Outcome Based changes in the schools were coming down.  These unidentified, horrible families were blamed for everything from why students never had homework to why kids with head lice weren’t sent home.  Students were supposedly not learning to read because the dysfunctional parents weren’t reading to them every night.  The kids were flunking their math tests because the dysfunctional parents weren’t helping them with their homework – this would be the same “homework” that - at that time - few of them were getting.  It became such a pervasive theme that I finally asked a school shrink neighbor of mine for her definition of parents most likely to have at-risk students.  Without a moment’s hesitation, she said, “Two-income families.”

And here I was expecting the answer to be “Heroin addicts” or something.

Many different family structures, however, will have difficulty when schools stop teaching.  Two-income families have two parents getting home around 6 pm and squeezing meals, housework, laundry, activities, and sometimes more work, etc. into the 2-3 hours before their children’s bed time.  It is very hard for these families to also manage to teach their children how to read and how to perform even simple math problems plus basic grammar, as well as sentence, paragraph and essay writing in, at best, one or two hours a night.  If it’s hard for families with two parents present, you can imagine how hard it is for the single parent.  Plus this is assuming that all parents know how to teach even the earliest basic skills.  I spoke with many, many frustrated and desperate parents who had no idea how to teach and couldn’t understand how this could be expected of them.  Many of those who attended college protested that they didn’t study teaching.  (When I told them that a lot of us who got Education degrees didn’t study teaching either, they would give me funny looks.)  I also met many parents who were embarrassed to tell me that they themselves could not read.  They very much wanted their children to have a better chance.  I still meet illiterate adults – all the time – high school graduates plus - many of them are members of the middle class.

Interestingly, two-income families did not make it to Pasco County’s list of the family factors that would put children at risk of failure during the district’s latest paradigm shift.  See Below (pgs. 6-7):

I cannot stress this enough: The problem we have with our public school system is generational.  Because of especially harsh periods over the course of the last several decades, we’ve had large percentages of two or three generations deliberately dumbed down through the withholding of Phonics instruction, through the uselessness of New Math, through the total absence of grammar instruction, through the neglect of History and Science instruction - the list goes on and on.  These periods last around 10 – 15 years.  There are families who have older children able to read but younger children who can’t read, or vice versa, all because the schools chose to switch away from, or back to, effective reading instruction.  There are far too many families who haven’t had a well-educated generation in ages, simply because the timing of their children has coincided with their area schools’ dumbing down periods. 

In between these especially awful seizures which hit all children no matter what their family’s status, we’ve had outright discrimination against minorities, the recently immigrated and the poor of all colors.  All it takes is ineffective teachers using counterproductive teaching methods and weak materials.  I believe that the widening gap between the Haves and the Have-Not’s is caused essentially by the wide differences in educational quality available to America’s children in their public school system.  This inequality has been enabled by the lack of options given to the vast majority of parents.

The list above reflected the Educators’ confident expectation that it would be mostly poorly educated parents who would be providing the system with the subjects for their latest drop-out program research.  The uneducated are primarily clustered in poor, low-income families, many with a history of school drop-outs and dysfunction.   There is a great deal of stress in single parent and/or low-income households, and limited monitoring of student activities can occur when the adults are working two jobs or can’t afford daycare or any number of other circumstances. The poorly educated also will have low expectations for their children’s academic success because they never had any school success themselves and have no idea how to attain such a thing. We have to understand that most people who do poorly in school believe the fault lies within themselves, that there is something wrong with them, and that this wrong thing is genetic.  That’s what they’ve been told all their lives. “I’m dyslexic”, they’ll say, “And it runs in the family.” People who can’t read aren’t going to have books, magazines or newspapers in their houses, let alone “study aids”.  The lack of explicit instruction in the sound/spelling connections and the standard rules of grammar of the English language proves especially devastating to the progress of ESL children.  There was strong protest during the OBE days against fraudulent ESL classes that claimed to boost pride in the children’s diverse cultures, but proved much better at withholding the language skills that would help them succeed in their new American culture.

By improving no further than low-grade mediocrity, which looks so much better when compared to the sheer horror of what went before, the Educators continuously produce a steady supply of poorly educated children who will become the barely functional parents of tomorrow.  In fact, the E’s are just beginning to start the whole process all over again with new mandates and new goals and all kinds of promises – just as the victims of OBE have reached parenthood age.  This continuous loop of mediocrity - and worse - is not going to be corrected by shifting toward and mandating online instruction.  It wasn’t the lack of computers that led to our academic decline.  Nor is it going to improve the state of America’s public schools to have the E’s write yet another set of learning goals – we had goals galore during OBE/Blueprint 2000.  The only thing that is going to get Americans out of this cycle of educational abuse is universal parental choice.  The parents should choose whether or not their children take online courses at all, especially since reading text on a computer is already proving to be less effective than reading from print.  They also should be able to choose which online courses their children take since some of these courses are already getting iffy reviews.  I’ve heard of some students taking online gym classes – the fact that this would even be offered as a way for students to fulfill their online class mandate should disqualify educators from making these decisions.  Lots of decisions the schools have made over the course of the last 100 years or so should disqualify them from ever making choices for other people’s children ever again.  Universal parental choice – until we have that, we’ll continue to sink.

Old Research – I

I prefer calling education reform “parental choice” instead of “school choice” because it’s the schools that have been making all the decisions for many decades now while shunting aside the concerns of parents, often ruthlessly.  Parents receive very little respect, even while the schools insist that they welcome parental involvement.  One of the most ridiculous contradictions of OBE/ Blueprint 2000 was the Educators’ moaning and groaning over the lack of parental involvement and how dysfunctional so many of the parents were – when there we were, hundreds strong, screaming bloody murder against all these horrible “reforms” being shoved down our children’s throats.  The E’s didn’t want our involvement in the form of opinions; they wanted us involved in taking all the blame for our children’s failures. 

If there had been universal parental choice during those dark days of the 90’s when that latest onslaught of “dumbnation” started coming down, we would have been able to nip it in the bud.  When the schools didn’t respond to our concerns, we could’ve taken our kids elsewhere.  (Many of us did, but the alternatives back then were extremely expensive).  And, in fact, if earlier generations of parents hadn’t gradually lost their voices and their choices, they would have been able to prevent the wholesale decline of the American public school system by refusing to have children used as guinea pigs for decades worth of often pointless, repetitive education research.

Research such as the following on student motivation:

“Specified Comment students, regardless of teacher or student differences, all received comments designated in advance for each letter grade, as follows:

                 A. Excellent!  Keep it up.

                 B. Good work.  Keep it up.

                 C. Perhaps try to do still better?

                 D. Let’s bring this up.

                 F.  Let’s raise this grade!

Teachers were instructed to administer the comments ‘rapidly and automatically, trying not even to notice who the students are.” (Foundations of Behavioral Research, pg.46-47).  There were also “Free Comment” and “No Comment” categories included in this experiment which involved 74 different classrooms.  The above was a quote from a paper published in 1958 in the Journal of Educational Psychology.

So an A student who suddenly gets an F gets a robotic response from a teacher who is ignoring who the student is, or no comment at all, in two-thirds of the classes.  How many of these students’ parents were informed that this was going to be happening to their children?  I’m guessing none of them.

Educational researchers will often have an idea (hypothesis) of the results of various experiments to the point of knowing which methods will probably have a positive, neutral or a negative effect on achievement.  They will go ahead and implement the negatively effective method anyway.  In fact, the bigger the difference in the quality of teaching methods the better, because that way they get more significant “experimental variances” – which is how these folks get their jollies. 

“Suppose an investigator tests the relative efficacies of three different methods of teaching a physical education skill.  After teaching three groups of children, each group being taught by a different method, he compares the means of the groups. ….. (bunch of math) … In the methods experiment just described, presumably the methods tend to ‘bias’ the achievement scores one way or another.  This is, of course, the experimenter’s purpose: he wants Method A, say, to increase all the achievement scores of an experimental group.  He may believe that Method B will have no effect of achievement, and that Method C will have a depressing effect.”  (Kerlinger, FBR, 1964, pg. 98)

Mom and Dad tell the gym teacher he/she is teaching the skill incorrectly.  And nothing changes.

Quote from R. Koenker, “Arithmetic Readiness at the Kindergarten Level,” Journal of Educational Psychology, XLII (1948)

“….in an interesting little experiment on arithmetic readiness in the kindergarten child, Koenker manipulated experimental groups by giving them an enriched-numbers and arithmetic-concepts program.  He held his control groups constant or at the same level by not giving them a readiness program, by letting them have the regular kindergarten program ‘without enrichment’.  Statistically speaking, he was trying to increase the between-groups variance.  (He succeeded.)” (FBR, pg 99)

Were parents given the option of having their children participate in the arithmetic readiness program?  Since the readiness program was obviously successful, why don’t all kindergartens have it available?  Even almost ten years after the results of this experiment were published, when I was in kindergarten, we played and learned rules and how to button our coats.  My parents would’ve definitely opted for arithmetic readiness.

There’s a lot more evidence of our school system having lost its bearings because of the influence of research dollars that have been pouring into our schools for many decades now.  They don’t seem to realize that what they’ve been doing is wrong, so their work is in full view in publications and papers and books – work paid for by the American taxpayers.  It’s ours, and we need to start using it to make our own choices for our children.

The Meaningless OBE Grading System

Parents should be able to choose grading systems for their children that are clear, understandable and accurately reflect their children’s achievements.

During all the protesting and petition gathering back in the 1990’s, I mentioned to one of Pasco County’s public school administrators, in a social setting, that my children had been negatively affected by the new grading system.  She nodded her head and said she could see how my daughter could be hurt by the change.  I told her it was hurting my son much more, and she seemed very surprised.  She wasn’t surprised that the new report cards were hurting students, just taken aback by which students were being harmed.  This was the first indication I had that the people in charge of my children’s education found it acceptable to cause harm to some children.  Somehow, school personnel had come to believe that some children would be helped by the harming of other children.  This must be how the Educators were able to justify implementing methods and curricula that were proven to not work, at least not work to the benefit of their students.  It didn’t matter that they themselves were the reason the kids from the poorer, and more poorly educated, families were suffering mightily.  And they had nothing but scorn for the middle-class, better educated families who led the charge against the new report cards because of the negative affect it was having on their kids.  They were, after all, calling this paradigm shift “school improvement”, not “student improvement”, and improving the schools meant bringing in more money.

This Educrat’s opinion that it would be my daughter more harmed confirmed what many parents had already begun to observe – it was especially the higher achievers who were losing motivation and the willingness to work hard to do their best.  My daughter, Faith, was a “99er”, meaning she scored in the 99^th percentile on her SAT’s (this was before the FCAT), and received all A’s all the time in everything.  She didn’t receive much homework, but she had more assigned to her than her brother who was two years older.  Each of her teachers assured me at the end of every year that they were going to “take very good care” of her, which I took to mean that she would be placed with the best teacher available at the next grade level.  Faith was in 3^rd grade when the new report card was adopted and received all E’s.  The 1^st marking period of 4^th grade, she brought home all S’s.  She wondered what she had done wrong and insisted that she had worked very hard to do her best – which her dad and I already knew.  I set up an appointment with her teacher – with Faith coming as well.

I really liked my daughter’s 4^th grade teacher.  He told us that the only reason she received all S’s was because of a new rule stating that E’s could not be given in the first marking period.  There was some vague explanation that it would be “impossible” for a student to do so well after a whole summer off from school.  Talk about low expectations!  I asked did Faith “extend and apply all knowledge new and old”?  He answered “Always.”  I then turned to Faith and made sure she understood that the S’s were because of a new rule and that her teacher knew she deserved E’s on all her work.  Was that OK?  Was it enough for her to know that?  She said yes.  It was this understanding that helped her overcome the damage of the new system, but I’m not sure how much longer her strength of will would have held up – remember, she was 8 years old.

I’m very aware that there are excellent schools, especially at the college level, that have abandoned the ABC grading system for a system more reliant on portfolios of students’ work and projects and written commentary by their professors.  These assessments seem to work best for students who have tested into the schools and who have proven that they have all the foundational knowledge necessary to do well with a very rigorous curriculum.  For the most part, however, when schools do away with marking and grading using the traditional 92%-100 = A, etc., it’s because they are withholding skills and knowledge and are trying to hide the fact that more and more of their students cannot read, have no idea where to place commas, and can’t add even small numbers without using their fingers.  With the second-year change, E no longer meant “Extends and applies all knowledge…”, and with S meaning anything from A to C (and even plunging from A to C!), this was essentially a non-grade system in disguise.  This meaningless report card, in conjunction with OBE/Blueprint 2000’s disdain for direct, explicit instruction, caused a great deal of harm, indeed.

The Meaningless OBE Grading System

I believe that parents should be able to choose their children’s grading system.

The grading system put into place before the full onslaught of Blueprint 2000/OBE curricula was almost immediately effective at changing many students’ attitudes toward academic achievement.  The schools removed the familiar ABCDF grades on report cards and replaced them with: E (Extends and applies any knowledge, new or old), S (Satisfactory progress), P (In the process of learning) and U (Unsatisfactory).  This was implemented in the elementary schools with plans to move it up into the higher grades - according the state level E’s own written plans - although the middle school administrators I spoke with denied it.  And, as it turned out, the parents were able to at least stop it from going any farther.  People across the state poured into the schools to protest, and when that had no effect, they started passing out petitions and showing up at school board meetings.  Articles appeared in the newspapers – the internet wasn’t very widely used back then.  The Pasco County School Board decided to take a survey of the teachers since there were protests from many of them as well.  The following is a close copy of a letter I wrote to School Board members at the time of that survey.  I have shortened it, but the description of the effect the new system had on my son and many others remains intact.  The sad thing is that grading systems similar to this one have been tried many times in the past – and always bring about the same results for many students.

“May 21, 1993

Dear School Board Members,

One of the things you may hear from the teachers as part of the survey will be that students lost their motivation or will to achieve.  This was not covered as well as I’d hoped at the school board meeting, mostly because the speakers were so focused on the effect of the E S P U grading system on a student’s chances at higher education.  The story of what happened at my house might help illustrate what ‘loss of motivation’ looks like on the home front.

When the new grading system came about, my first ‘gut’ reaction was that this was not a good idea, but I, like many other parents, gave it a year to see how it worked.  It did not take a full year to see that something was seriously wrong.  My son was in fifth grade and, as always, seemed content and genuinely interested in many of the new things he was learning.  He earned mostly S’s, with an occasional E in Art and Spelling.  I did not become alarmed until one day I tackled the chore of cleaning out his back pack, which was such a mess I knew there had to be plenty of papers I hadn’t seen yet.  I found three Science test papers that had half the answers marked as incorrect.  The number grades were in the 70’s; they were C’s.  These tests were on topics that Douglas had discussed at the dinner table with some enthusiasm, so I was quite surprised to see he had done so poorly on the tests.  I called his teacher.

This is how I found out that ‘S’ had a range of anywhere from A work to C work, and my reaction was extremely negative.  I had a wonderful talk with his teacher which gave me a much better idea of what I was going to be dealing with for the rest of the school year.  When he got home, I showed him the test papers and asked him if he was having trouble with any of the material covered on them.  He said no, he wasn’t.  Then he told me it was okay, it was still an ‘S’.  The bottom line of the rest of the conversation was that he had simply started goofing off.  He wasn’t paying as close attention during class, and never bothered reviewing the material before a test.  … I explained that his job in school was to do the best work that he could, and that I was sure he could do much better than those tests reflected.  The rest of the year, Douglas would fluctuate from good work to lackadaisical work, with us constantly propping him back up.  Finally, one day, I got fed up, and I found myself telling him that I didn’t care what his school said; our family did its best no matter what we set out to do.  That appeared to do the trick – it became a matter of family pride and accomplishment.  But I don’t think I could ever express to you how thoroughly disgusted I was that that is what I had to tell him.”

As a result of all the ruckus, each school took a vote on either going back to the old grading system or continuing with the new.  Some schools continued with the ESPU system despite how the parents felt about it, and despite what it was doing to so many students.  For the large majority of parents, this is how things still stand on all too many issues concerning education.   Let me emphasize – the grading system was not the experiment.  The effect of the new grading system was known in advance.