Tag Archive for 'Checker Finn'

Grading the Common Core Standards

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 8, 2009 in Assessment and Testing, Curriculum and Education News. 5 Comments

A new report from the Fordham Foundation gives a grade of “B” to the draft of the proposed “Common Core” standards in ELA and Math.

Fordham’s report, Stars by Which to Navigate: Scanning National and International Standards in 2009, asked subject-matter experts to review the “content, rigor, and clarity of the first public drafts of the ‘Common Core’ standards” as well as the reading, writing and mathematics frameworks of NAEP, TIMSS, and PISA.  How’d they do?

Common Core Reading/Writing/Speaking & Listening: B
Common Core Math: B
NAEP Reading/Writing: B
NAEP Math: C
TIMSS Math: A
PISA Reading: D
PISA Math: D

The executive summary (I have not read the full report, which was just released this morning) makes a couple of important points, explaining and justifying the “B” grade for the common standards:

The document properly acknowledges that essential communication skills must be embraced and addressed beyond the English classroom….These skill-centric standards do not, however, suffice to frame a complete English or language arts curriculum. Proper standards for English must also provide enough content guidance to help teachers instill not just useful skills, but also imagination, wonder, and a deep appreciation for our literary heritage. Despite their many virtues, these skills-based competencies cannot serve as a strong framework for the robust liberal arts curricula that will prepare young Americans to thrive as citizens in a free society. States adopting these standards must, therefore, be very careful about how they supplement them so as to achieve that goal.

 Hard to disagree with any of that, and the B grade sounds fair.  “The Common Core standards are off to a good start,” says Fordham’s Checker Finn, “though there’s room for improvement—and a sound English curriculum will require plenty more than the valuable skills set forth here.”

The End of Education Reform

Published by Robert Pondiscio on September 21, 2009 in No category. 11 Comments

A remarkable speech by Chester Finn of the Fordham Institute is all the more remarkable for the lack of chatter it has generated in the edusphere.  Titled “Is It Time to Throw in the Towel on Education Reform?” the September 9 speech at Rice University notes a broad consensus on education reform that has existed for better than two decades is coming apart at the seams.  “The overriding goal of that consensus was to boost America’s academic achievement at the K-12 level,” Finn notes, and it gave rise to “a tsunami of standards-based reform.”

He cites several major developments contributing to the fraying of that consensus.  Among them: unhappiness with NCLB and a palpable backlash against testing that “goes to the heart of standards-based reform.”  On school choice, he points out, far too many charters and schools of choice have been “disappointingly mediocre.”  Then there are the results of the reform era:

Despite all the reforming, U.S. scores have remained essentially flat, graduation rates have remained essentially flat, and our international rankings have remained essentially flat. You can find some upward blips but you can also find downward blips. Big picture, over 25 years, is flat, flat, flat. In other words, all the reforming has yielded little or nothing by way of stronger outcomes.

Finn also cites “principled critiques by serious people” as another crack in the ed reform wall:

E.D. Hirsch’s new book may be its most cogent example, at least until Diane Ravitch’s next book emerges—of both standards-based reform and school choice on grounds that these structural changes neglect crucial issues of content and pedagogy—neglect what actually goes on in classrooms between teacher and learner—while narrowing the curriculum and weakening the common culture. 

 Has the reform consensus “outlived its usefulness?”  Finn compares American education to the situation the nation found itself in when the Articles of Confederation proved insufficient to the needs of the new nation.  “We may be at a similar stage with regard to our public-education system,” he notes. “Further tugging and kicking at it from the banks of the Potomac is not going to modernize it.”

I’m suggesting to you that American education today resembles America itself in 1785. The old arrangement isn’t working well enough and probably cannot be made to. A new constitution is needed. It’s in that sense that we should throw in the towel on education reform and think instead about reinvention.

 Checker briefly lists his ideas for “essential ingredients” of this new constitution including national standards and measures; portable statewide “weighted-student” financing; and the replacement of traditional school districts “with an array of virtual systems and regional or national operators (some of them technology-based).”

SAT Down and Cried Today

Published by Robert Pondiscio on August 26, 2009 in Assessment and Testing and Education News. 3 Comments

The Class of 2009, who were in 5th grade when No Child Left Behind became the law of the land, and were not yet born when A Nation at Risk ushered in the era of education reform, have posted SAT scores that summon to mind a flatlined EKG.  Math unchanged at 515.  Writing down a point to 493.  Critical reading, down a point to 494.  The results are of a piece with last week’s ACT scores, which showed only one of four high school graduates are prepared to do C level college work in English, math, reading and science.

“Completing a core curriculum remains strongly related to SAT scores,” the College Board notes in a news release.  ”Students in the class of 2009 who took core curricula scored an average of 46 points higher on the critical reading section, 44 points higher on the mathematics section, and 45 points higher on the writing section than those who did not.”

“The College Board, as always, hung a smiley face on it, but the latest SAT results are a real bummer,” writes Checker Finn at Fordham’s Flypaper blog.  Looking at years of stagnant NAEP results, last week’s dispiriting ACT scores and flat high school graduation rates, Finn says “please sing out if you’ve spotted any good news regarding the readiness of American adolescents to face successfully the challenges of higher education, the workforce, adulthood and citizenship. I can’t find it.”

Let me add a few verses to Checker’s refrain:  Please sing out if you see elementary schools creating a path to college readiness by favoring a rich, robust curriculum over of the deadening pabulum of test prep and ineffective reading strategies.  Please sing out too, if you can explain how changing the operative definition of well educated to “reads on or near grade level” has done anything other than cement in place this march of mediocrity.  

There’s no guarantee that a patient buildup of knowledge and language proficiency that pays dividends over time will show up in a single year’s standardized testing snapshot, so please explain too how any school or teacher can afford  to take the necessary long view, when we have essentially declared that a little bit of success every year is more important–and measurable–than great success over time. 

Please sing out if you see something–anything–that is going to change this dispiriting trend in the foreseeable future.  I can’t find it.

A Place at the Standards Table for Content?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on July 2, 2009 in Curriculum and Educational Policy. 18 Comments

One of the early criticisms of the emerging “Common Core standards” initiative has been the question of who is writing them–and who isn’t.  The groups behind the multi-state effort, the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, have set up a website that includes a list of the individuals working on math and English standards. As Edweek notes the list is “dominated by three organizations:” Achieve Inc., the College Board, and ACT Inc.

What’s new and interesting is the announcement of a pair of “Feedback Groups,” to offer expert input on the draft standards, which are due at the end of this month.  “Final decisions regarding the common core standards document will be made by the Standards Development Work Group,” notes the NGA announcement. “The Feedback Group will play an advisory role, not a decision-making role in the process.”

If you believe that content matters as much as process in crafting standards–that any attempt to write national standards should outline the specific material to be covered, not just describe the skills children should master–then the inclusion of Emory University’s Mark Bauerlein is a welcome name among the members of the English-language Arts Feedback Group, along with Fordham’s Checker Finn.  Bauerlein, author of the best-seller The Dumbest Generation, has been a consistent voice in favor of cultural literacy and teaching broad background knowledge.  Ironically, he may have presaged the debate he’ll find himself drawn into when he wrote recently about the difficulty of reaching consensus in college curriculum meetings.  Traditionalists, he observed, ”want to identify core texts, events, figures, and ideas….Progressivists want to enlarge the canon and contexts, to give representation to other cultures and identities, and explode the reigning ‘normativities,’ and they resist a core knowledge of any kind being set down as official.”

There doesn’t seem to be any way out of the impasse, however, which I think partly explains the rise of the “skills” movement in education circles. What the skills emphasis does is neutralize the culture-wars conflicts inherent in any knowledge selections in a curriculum. It speaks about abstract cognitive abilities such as “critical thinking,” “higher-order thinking skills,” and “problem solving.” No disturbing questions about representation of female authors on a syllabus or about Thomas Jefferson’s racial attitudes. Instead, the skills approach promises to empower students to handle those questions better later on — not here in the classroom, but after they have graduated from the skills curriculum.

Whether the feedback process is genuine or merely a way to blunt criticism remains to be seen, of course.  For now, the entire enterprise can be viewed with guarded optimism–the willing suspension of disbelief that anything of use will emerge.

Saving Catholic Schools

Published by Robert Pondiscio on April 21, 2009 in Educational Policy. 3 Comments

The disappearance of Catholic schools from America’s inner cities is ”a national education crisis that needs a national response,” argue Checker Finn and Andy Smarick in a Washington Post op-ed.  To their credit, Finn’s Fordham Foundation has been a long-time, loud and too often lonely voice urging action to save Catholic schools.  They write:

Most urban Catholic schools were originally built to educate the children of European immigrants; today, they mostly serve poor African American and Latino students. With their long track record of successfully educating ill-served populations, these schools can play a central role in the nation’s effort to expand educational opportunity and reduce the achievement gap. But not if they disappear.

Reformers love scale, so try this comparison:  KIPP runs 66 public schools in 19 states and the District of Columbia serving just over 16,000 students.   Catholic schools serving 25 times that number of  children closed down from 2000 to 2006–nearly 1,200 faith-based urban schools closed, serving 425,000 students.  And these are schools that produce results.  Diane Ravitch recently noted that in New York City, the four-year graduation rate at Catholic high schools is 99.5%, with 98% of high school graduates enrolling in college.  Finn and Smarick want the Obama administration to “help turn this fatal tide” of Catholic school closings.

Stimulus funds could be used to shore up schools on the brink, provide assistance to their teachers and administrators, or expand and replicate promising local strategies. The president could support education tax credits or scholarships, which would help needy students and stabilize school enrollments. By simply underscoring his support and concern for these schools, he would indicate the bipartisan nature of this issue, thereby providing cover to others eager to act but wary of the political implications.

It’s fashionable (and facile) for antagonists in ed policy debates to frame arguments in terms of who’s on the side of children vs. who’s concerned about adults.  Here are schools successfully serving two million kids.  Who’s on their side?  And before one argues that there are church/state issues here, and that public dollars must not go to religious schools, remember that’s exactly what happens every time a Pell Grant pays a student’s tuition at Georgetown, BC, or Notre Dame.

This just in:  Eduwonk likes Catholic schools “but remains unpersuaded on the need for a public bailout of Catholic schools absent a lot of reciprocal accountability and transparency.”

Patriotism in the Age of Obama

Published by Robert Pondiscio on April 16, 2009 in No category. 5 Comments

Barack and Michele Obama seem to be exemplary parents, writes Checker Finn in the latest Gadfly.  But (and you knew there was a but coming) he wonders how the Obamas see the value of patriotism. ”How are their daughters being taught to view the United States?” he asks. ”More important, what examples are the Obamas setting for fifty million other American kids and their teachers and parents?”

Is America, in their eyes, ‘the last best hope’? A place that doesn’t always live up to its ideals but comes closer than anyplace else? A place worth defending from all enemies, foreign and domestic? And is that something they believe is important for grownups to impart to children? Or do they think it’s the proper role of parents and teachers to emphasize the country’s shortcomings?

Finn is not questioning Obama’s patriotism, but wondering aloud about where the post-Vietnam generation of leaders places patriotism in the pantheon of civic virtues.  It’s a provocative question with lingering resonance.

“When the country chose Barack Obama over John McCain, it opted for a member of that crowd and for the youth and change and energy that come with it,” Finn concludes.  “Well and good. The President certainly has his hands full on many fronts and one can only wish him well. Nobody expects him to be the national K-12 curriculum director, too. But he and his wife are inevitable role models. How he views America matters in a thousand ways, including–though surely not limited to–how our children and teachers will view it.”

A Sobering Assessment of National Standards

Published by Robert Pondiscio on March 6, 2009 in Curriculum and Educational Policy. 12 Comments

The Fordham Foundation’s Checker Finn is a longtime proponent of national standards, but he sounds a strong cautionary note in the latest Education Gadfly.  “Evidence is mounting that those who take curricular content seriously may not like what we find at the end of this road,” Finn writes, ”and I worry that America could be headed toward another painful bout of curriculum warfare.” 

Checker details seven worries. He’s suspicious that unions, especially the NEA, are getting on board the bandwagon and the conflation of academic standards with “21st Century Skills.”  He also frets that if common standards is limited to English and math, “it may further narrow what’s seriously taught in school–with a malign effect on states that have a decently rounded curriculum that gives due weight to science, history, even art.” His biggest concern is what he calls institutional instability.

The United States of America in 2009 lacks a suitable place to house national standards and tests over the long haul. Who will “own” them? Who will be responsible for revising them? Correcting their errors? Ensuring that assessment results are reported in timely fashion? Nobody wants the Education Department to do this. There’s reason to keep it separate from the National Assessment of Educational Progress and its governing board. Yet the awkward ad hoc “partnership” now assembling to pursue this process could fall apart tomorrow if key individuals retire, die or defect, if election results change the make up of participating organizations, if the money runs out, or if their working draft runs into political headwinds like the “voluntary national standards” of the early 90s. This is no way to run something as important as national academic standards for a big modern country.

Can this idea be salvaged?  Yes, if we can figure out how.  “Use available tools and models to simplify and expedite this process,” Finn argues.  “The U.S. doesn’t need to start from scratch. Several states have fine standards.But don’t pretend to prescribe the whole curriculum….A common standard is the skeleton of learning, not all the flesh. It outlines the core skills and knowledge that young Americans need to acquire and should be accompanied by a reasonable assessment system to determine, at various grade levels, how well they’ve learned those things.”

Red Ink Blues

Published by Robert Pondiscio on January 8, 2009 in Educational Policy. 6 Comments

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to shorten the school year by 5 days to save money.  Georgia is proposing larger class sizes for next year.  One Detroit elementary school is even asking for donations of toilet paper and light bulbs to continue operating.

Things are tough all over, but with drumbeats for a bailout of state budgets growing louder, Mike Petrilli, Checker Finn and Rick Hess argue at National Review that a stimulus package may retard education reform.  “There’s scant evidence that an extra dollar invested in today’s schools delivers an extra dollar in value,” the trio note.  “And ample evidence that this kind of bail-out will spare school administrators from making hard-but-overdue choices about how to make their enterprise more efficient and effective.”

Over at Flypaper, Petrilli writes with eyes wide open, “Yes, we’re ready for the hate mail.”

Reasons To Be Cheerful

Published by Robert Pondiscio on November 6, 2008 in Educational Policy. 1 Comment

Checker Finn and Mike Petrilli at Fordham survey the new education landscape under Obama and find reasons to cheer.  “In a year when the Democratic nominee was practically guaranteed to win the White House, the most reform-minded Democratic candidate won,” they note.  “Barack Obama’s positions on charter schools, merit pay, and even No Child Left Behind point toward a thoughtfulness and willingness to buck the status quo that were strikingly different from the postures of his closest competitors.”  They also note that the unions were not major players in the victory, so in theory he’s not beholden to them and can pursue programs they may not support.

As the first African-American president, Obama will be uniquely positioned to use his bully pulpit to exhort parents, particularly minority parents, to uphold their responsibilities to foster their children’s moral and intellectual development. Done right, this could be a powerful complement to whatever formal policies he puts forward.

On the hand, given what else is going on in the world, “education is likely to loom no higher on Washington’s agenda than it did during the presidential campaign,” say Finn and Petrilli.  Meanwhile tout le monde has a take on who is going to be the next ed secretary.  Lots of interesting names, but this strikes me as a lot of anxiety looking for a place to affix itself, as folks with various agendas look for proof that the new President is on their side.

Checker Finn Buries the Lead

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 31, 2008 in Education Practice. 3 Comments

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

The Fordham Foundation’s Checker Finn looks at the budget austerity facing U.S. schools in the new Education Gadfly, and the conventional wisdom that any reductions are bound to damage the quality of schooling. He lays out and skewers a half dozen arguments typically used to combat cuts:

We see signs of the “Washington Monument gambit,” i.e., the threat by the National Park Service that, if it doesn’t get more money, it won’t be able to keep one of the Capital’s foremost tourist attractions open for visitors. Its counterpart in public education is to say that, if we have to cut our budget, we’ll have to (take your pick) eliminate sports, increase class size, abbreviate the school year, scrap gifted education, end after-school programs, curb college counseling, close the school library, etc., etc. That’s how school systems think about budgets: in terms of “programs” and “services,” not efficiencies, productivity, or such tradeoffs as personnel versus technology.

The kicker comes at the end, when it’s revealed that Finn’s essay is a barely updated version of a previous piece he wrote five years ago–the last time there were widespread budget cuts.