This week, I’ll be attending a New York City town hall meeting in support of the Common Core standards on behalf of the 5,000 children at the 20 public charter schools in Brooklyn run by Uncommon Schools.
The parents of our students understand that, contrary to the criticisms levied by a small contingent of opponents of the Core, the new academic standards are about establishing and teaching the skills and knowledge our students need to be ready for college-level work – not about high-stakes testing.
First, we, like many others, believe Common Core seeks to address a real and perilous problem that robs too many children of a future with a college degree and a productive place in society. This is not a made-up problem, and it’s not limited to New York. Our country ranks behind too many others in international rankings of math and reading proficiency. Our schools have simply not been preparing children for college well enough, and we all need to do better.
Common Core is part of that solution, most critically for our lowest-income communities. Across New York, an estimated 13% of black students and 16% of Hispanic students are on-track to be college-ready by the time they graduate – if they graduate. Nearly all of our students at Uncommon Schools are black or Hispanic, and they deserve and demand the kind of higher-quality education that will help them achieve their college graduation and life goals.
I expect there will be much vigorous debate at this week’s town halls in Brooklyn, Manhattan and the Bronx. But it’s important to ground the debate in an understanding of what this new, higher bar is exactly – and what it’s not.
It’s not about more rote memorization tests. It’s actually the opposite of that, as Common Core challenges teachers and students to get to the “why” behind how things work. So, it’s not just learning that 3 x 5 = 15, but how and why that is true. It’s a chance for students to become deeper and more critical thinkers. We’re all for that.
How have our organization’s schools adapted to the challenges of teaching our students to be better thinkers? In math, for instance, we used to start each class asking students to work individually on basic procedural problems reviewing the previous day’s work. Now we start each day with a conceptual problem – for example, “Why can you use multiplication to check division problems?” – and ask students to work in pairs to figure it out.
In reading, we’ve dramatically increased the amount of non-fiction our students read because students who know more will be better readers. For example, introducing historical documents about World War II along with reading the novel, “Number the Stars.”
We do this because our scholars will need to read for information in college and beyond; they will need to comprehend, analyze and think critically about increasingly complex texts, so it’s our job to teach them how to do that now. This is what Common Core is about.
What’s wrong with asking a third grader to figure out multiple ways of solving 12 times 8 or 36 divided by 4? What’s wrong with asking a seventh grader to write an essay comparing two similar newspaper articles and how each author approached the same topic? What’s wrong with asking any student to cite the evidence behind their answer?
Given what we know about the demands of the future, and the profound effects of education on a child’s ability to break the cycle of poverty and achieve the American dream, how could we not ask our children to know and do this deeper thinking?
Despite the volume and fervor of the opposition, it seems that most of my colleagues in the classroom agree with me. A recent poll conducted by the National Education Association found that about 75% of teachers favor the new standards. In declaring the organization’s support for Common Core, the head of the NEA said “we all need to work together – parents, education support professionals, teachers, administrators, communities and elected officials – to make sure we get this right.”
We agree. We can understand that raising standards is uncomfortable. We are familiar with this discomfort. At our schools, we’re asking our incredibly talented and hard-working teachers to reinvent lesson plans, and to learn new skills themselves. But, for the sake of our students’ success, we know we have a responsibility to look beyond our own discomfort.
When we don’t, we risk scaring parents and students and sending the message that they should fear something that they should actually embrace.
New York State did a great thing when it aligned the state exams to the new, higher bar of the Common Core. Without a doubt, it’s sad to hear about any students being anxious about state exams, especially when we know that adults set the tone.
At our schools, we inspired our students to “show what you know” on test day. Our students discussed Michael Jordan’s career and how often he failed on his road to success, and that he was never deterred. Our students loved coming to school in Michael Jordan T-shirts during the exams. As the week wore on, one of our third graders wrote in a reflection about the challenging questions: “I just knew I wasn’t going to give up.”
Common Core is harder. But we are taking our cues from our students. We’re not going to give up.
Peiser is CEO of Uncommon Schools.
