The DOEnut of the Week!

The moniker, doenut is 'intended to reflect anything that is crazy and silly about the  comings and goings of the New York City Department of Education'. I've been meaning to call out one  for exceptional nuttiness each week and name it the DOEnut of the Week for some time now. I've been patiently waiting for a news story or developing that I felt was good enough to start the whole thing off. This week, I found my first. 

I don't mean to digress, but it was a pretty busy week in the Ed world!! That Cathy Black story came pretty close to be my first. But the revelation of her emails (which really just highlighted the DOE's usual obsession with perception over substance more than anything else)  isn't actually a doenut; it's more like a rare moment of sanity. Look, we all kind of knew what the DOEs priorities were. The emails just proved it.

Mayor Bloomberg's budget address  (where he took no responsibility at all for the past four years of misery) came very close as well. But there isn't anything new about that story. In fact, it's kind of old and tired by now, isn't it? Besides, when a guy as dumb as me is able to call something like that out with a simple tweet: 

Mayor: "say hello to my little friend!", then proceeds to blame everyone else for everything gothamschools.org/2013/05/02/blo… via @gothamschools
— nycdoenuts (@nycdoenuts) May 3, 2013

it's a pretty good sign that I shouldn't write about it here.

So the one I chose for the week may actually have missed your radar. On Friday morning, the Daily News reported that they had gotten hold of a copy of a top secret Common Core test and had had a chance to review it. That lead to several pieces in Friday's edition about how hard the 5th grade ELA exam was (see here and here ).

The News' attention included this editorial piece, which said that the difficulty of the test was actually a good thing. As the they noted, tougher tests show that there are now higher standards and higher standards (from the Common Core) is something that we all want.

"most of the state’s children are ill prepared for this level of exam. The reason? They’ve never been asked to perform at this level"

I'm all for higher standards in the classroom and, although I have to admit to having a fairly deep ambivalence to the Common Core, I'm not yet prepared to say that the standards are unreasonably high. We need to give children a few years with the Common Core to see whether or not the CCSS help or hurt them (my daughter's Kindergarten curriculum is CC aligned and she seems to be liking it and doing well).

But let's at least be clear about what the CC Standards are: A set of formalized academic skills (representing a higher standard from what we now have) which increase with difficulty and challenge over the time of students' twelve-year public school career. And let's all be sane for just a moment, shall we?  Skills -I mean any skills- are inherently things that are built upon other skills which have already been learned. Think of the truisms about how you can't write until you learn to hold a pencil or how you have to crawl before you walk. Acquiring academic skills work a lot like that. After all, you can't write a 200 page thesis until you learn the alphabet, right? In this light, it may be better to understand the new 5th grade ELA exam as a test that assesses five full years of formalized learning along the Common Core Standards. Six if you count Kindergarten, which is CC aligned as well.

Here's the problem: These children have just started to learn to the Common Core this very year. They haven't had the five years that are required to build the skills which were necessary to actually succeed on this exam. So how is making them sit and take it anyway a good thing?

Imagine being asked to climb a ladder, only the first four rungs had been taken out and you had to begin on the fifth -and that fifth rung was really high. How would you pull yourself up to that level? What steps would you take in order to overcome the difficulty? Would it be fair to insist that you climb the ladder in the first place? Would you be confused?  Well, that's what students, and parents, and teachers, of fifth graders had to face last week. It's not like they were given a chance to climb the first four rungs and the fifth rung was just more challenging to get it. It's more like they had to start from the ground and find a way to get to the fifth rung of the ladder.

This reality -that students hadn't learned to Common Core standards in their previous years of school, but must now shift  right into them is something that has, in the past, been called the Common Core Gap. It refers to how the CC standards are going to implemented for students who will be asked to shift to their higher level mid-education. Overcoming this gap is probably a bit easier for, say, a third graders (who would only have to figure out how to traverse three rungs on the ladder)  than it would for students of higher grades. Imagine being a sixth grader -who had been learning the old fifth grade math last year, but are now, under the new Common Core, expected to jump straight to the level of pre-Alegbra (check out 6.NS.7.a on Kahn Academy). That's the Common Core Gap. In fact, students like my daughter who are now in Kindergarten, will be among the first group of students to have learned the Common Core skills from the beginning and will be the first ones who will not be facing any sort of Common Core Gap.

Those are the students who we should look to and say 'suck it up it's more challenging'. Not these children who, half way through their education, were expected to somehow jump up to the fifth rung of the Common Core ladder and succeed on a test which Aaron Pallas described as being on a sixth grade level and Diane Ravitch described as being on an eighth. That's not fair to them.

I mean forget the principals and forget the teachers and parents for a just a quick second; giving this test to fifth graders just wasn't fair to children.


So, while making students suddenly switch to the much higher Common Core standards at the start of fifth grade is a doenut, and while making them take a test that pretends they have been learning these incremental skills for several years when they have not is definitely a doenut , the DOEnut of the Week goes to the Daily News: For taking the position that being unfair to this group of children by having them take a test they were never given a chance to prepare for is somehow a good thing. Sorry guys. A step in the right direction doesn't automatically make it a good step

But Congratulations!! You just won a box of Entenmanns' Donuts! Let me me know where I can send them.