Trump’s Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, in what Chalkbeat calls “some of her most expansive public remarks since taking over the department last year,” slammed the Common Core State Standards during a speech at the American Enterprise Institute. The Common Core is a set of state-led course objectives created by educators under the auspices of the National Governors Association.
Said DeVos,
“Federally mandated assessments. Federal money. Federal standards. All originated in Washington, and none solved the problem. Too many of America’s students are still unprepared.” She added, according to Chalkbeat,
Common Core is a disaster,” DeVos said, echoing her boss, President Trump. “And at the U.S. Department of Education, Common Core is dead.
Really? What does the U.S. Department of Education have to do with the Common Core, which were created by states, adapted by states, and adopted by state legislatures? In what way is this set of standards aligned with college and career readiness a “disaster”? And how can the Common Core be “dead” when just about every state is using some version of it?
I don’t need to answer. We’ll let Noah Mackert, an alumnus of the Harvard Graduate School of Education and supervisor at one of New York City’s Democracy Prep Charter Schools, a CMO in Camden, New York, D.C., Baton Rouge, and Las Vegas, correct DeVos’s ignorant remarks.
First, we updated our internal standards. Like many CMOs, we start with the state standards but revise them. We make them more concrete, easier to make into objectives, and we add standards from previous grades that our incoming students often lack.
— Noah Mackert (@mrmackert) January 16, 2018
Some schools responded by doing more test prep and further narrowing curriculum. We did not.
— Noah Mackert (@mrmackert) January 16, 2018
And we scaled back attempts to teach isolated reading skills. Rather, we focused our reading curriculum entirely around novels, which we fleshed out with supplementary readings. Each novel unit became a study of a set of ideas.
— Noah Mackert (@mrmackert) January 16, 2018
In a real way, the Common Core tests were so difficult that they forced us to stop trying to prepare for them so directly. It was terrifying, at first. Then liberating.
— Noah Mackert (@mrmackert) January 16, 2018
And the same thing happened in our math department. Our best teachers pioneered a shift toward discussion. I loved hearing students talk about one complex problem for fifteen minutes at a time.
— Noah Mackert (@mrmackert) January 16, 2018
In short, the Common Core forced us to make our teaching deeper.
— Noah Mackert (@mrmackert) January 16, 2018
This is just my experience, at one charter network in New York City. Our students began doing much better on the tests, I should add.
— Noah Mackert (@mrmackert) January 16, 2018
