Comments about ‘My view: Utah should adopt the Common Core’

Big turn off from this article is the snobbish talking point of the teachers' unions that Wiley is echoing very strongly: parents and elected officials are not qualified to know what's best for their child's education.

Parents required teachers to be preperly certified so that we can trust them to spend most of the day with our children. Now, the "educators," as they like to be called of late, seem to look down on the opinions of parents like we're shmoes. We've created a monster.

Another turn off is that he calls us "Utahans." Anyone who has spent a significant amount of time in this state knows that we are Utahns. I doubt Wiley is qualified to know what's best for Utahns.

The fear of the common core is that it is replacement for NCLB. So, in order for Utah to get our tax funds for education back we'll need to follow common core. It's still teaching to the test. And everyone knows that education has gone downhill since Dept of Education has taken over.

Get fed. gov't and teachers' unions out of education and it will improve.

When education is no longer controlled and overseen by local communities, it creates an environment where parents simply check the children at the door and hope for the best. Without local control, what else can they do? Replacing NCLB with Common Core does not improve education.

Children are not the same as electrical outlets. Every child is unique and should be seen as such. Heavy handed, top-down approaches, attempt to treat children as common cogs in a machine instead of gifted, unique, individuals deserving of our best effort.

I reject the notion that only experts can know how best to educate my children. I would think people associated with BYU might see the problem with such a concept. I guess David Wiley's article proves otherwise.

@Heidi71 - There's nothing snobbish about respecting expertise and hoping others will do the same. You probably wouldn't stand over a doctor's shoulder and criticize her surgical work or argue whether or not she knows what's best for your child's health. Why does society refuse to recognize and respect professional educator's expertise?

If we are going to continue to deny that specially educated, certified teachers have any more expertise than the average man-on-the-street, why bother educating and certifying them at all? Why should we have schools at all at that point?

@UADJ Our local education leadership are the people who - voluntarily - adopted the Common Core. Adopting the best set of standards available is not giving up local control. Retaining inferior standards in the name of "local control" is failing to do our best for our children.

Nothing in my metaphor suggests that children are like power outlets. I said we need common *standards*, like the power outlet, in order to enable the radical improvements in education we're all hoping to achieve.

Standards aren't heavy-handed and standards don't treat children in any way. Standards don't teach children, teachers teach children. While the Common Core sets extremely high expectations for children, it is teachers who will make appropriate, LOCAL pedagogical choices that help each unique child find their way to achieving the standards.

Do you reject the idea that trained engineers can design bridges better than untrained people? Or that trained doctors can operate on a person more effectively than untrained people? Or that trained airplane pilots can fly a plane more safely than untrained people? I accept the notion that people with deep, specific training are better at what they do than people without that training.

David ignores - and/or works to refute - "experts" when he disagrees with them. He has taken on the textbook publishers and the educational establishment with his Open High School. It is hypocritical - and, yes, snobbish - for him to tell the rest of us to fall in line with the "experts" when *he* agrees with them. In short, he sets himself up as the uber-expert with the right to choose which experts are to be heeded.

David has trouble imagining the issues that could result from trans-state standards, I believe, because he has never worked "boots-on-the-ground" in another state. He's not to blame for that (because few educators move between states), but I wonder if his view would change had he more diverse experience.

Finally, if CC is really superior to the status-quo, then David's Open High School (and other districts) could adopt CC without worry. Schools have done such with the IB curriculum for a decade. Why is it that CC must be forced on every local agency even those who judge it to be inferior for their students?

I think one thing that is concerning is that sure we can "always leave the CC standards if we want to in the future", but will we? How often do states adopt federal programs and then ever leave them? If you look at the actual paperwork, it is very hard to leave the consortium if you want to later, particularly when you've become attached to the federal money linked to it. I have no problem taking the CC standards and if we think they are better than what we have now, adapting them as the "Utah standards." But I want them to be Utah's standards, not the consortium's. That way we aren't tied to the consortium's future decisions in any way, and still control our own destiny. I just don't believe we need one consortium making common denominator decisions for all school districts in the country. I would prefer that in Utah we look around at ALL the ideas about standards, including CC, and then make our own. If they end up looking a lot like CC, then what a coincidence. But we'll still have our ability to change them later.

@cvd6262 Not sure what you're driving at with the Open High School of Utah example. Yes, I founded it. Yes, it has been super successful. Yes, the OHSU is adopting Common Core. And yes, it is a PUBLIC school established in accordance with Utah charter school law. What am I missing?

And yes, I'm taking on textbook publishers. But again, this work is happening within established education frameworks. Who is it I'm disagreeing with? I hear only agreement from educators who see the same results from textbooks that cost $4 compared to publisher textbooks that cost $80. I suppose I'm disagreeing with textbook publishers. And yes, I'm directly supporting open textbook initiatives in multiple states in the Western US outside of Utah.

The state adopts educational standards to be used statewide, and the state has selected Common Core. This is the way things work in Utah. If you think statewide standards are a bad idea, you should pursue an appropriate remedy.

@R2D2 States that adopt the Common Core can also create and use additional, locally owned standards on top of the Common Core. The Common Core standards are only that - a core of standards common to the states who have chosen to adopt them. Every state is empowered to extend the core to meet local needs.

One of the big movements in medicine these days is that patients are "consumers" and need to take an active part in their healthcare. Patients are supposed to learn about their own medical conditions and be knowledgeable about treatments. If a doctor gives you a prognosis or recommends a procedure you are uncomfortable with, you can, if you wish, get a second opinion or see a different doctor. Yes, I suspect that many patients figuratively look over a surgeon's shoulder before they ever go in for surgery. Why should parents, consumers of public education, treat educational professionals any differently than they do physicians? I think that someone who has slogged his or her way through legal documents or technical manuals or medical journals or history textbooks is capable of figuring out how to slog through educational documents, including the rhetoric surrounding Common Core. I think many people who are not educational professionals are capable of reading about, understanding, and making meaningful contributions to a discussion of Common Core.

I suppose it's possible that the Common Core standards and the hundreds of pages discussing them have been written in such a way that they are unintelligible. When I was getting my PhD in American Lit, many professors stressed that it was the author's responsibility to make sure that his or her work was accessible to the reader. Maybe education professionals shouldn't write important documents, but leave it to those of us who have spent years learning, practicing, and teaching the creation, interpretation, and decoding of texts.

" created by professional educators and others with relevant expertise"!

Blah! Blah! Blah!
Look at the past thirty years of education, and see what these so-called experts have done. Their research based strategies have been a disaster.

The answer is less, and not more. Less funding and time in school. It's like quicksand. The harder you try to get out, the faster you sink.

How much classroom time and school funding did Thomas Edison or the Wright Brothers need? Education during the 1800's is the model we should follow. Children need time building creativity, and less with standardized testing. It's just that simple.

@worf, just how disastrous have the past thirty years of education been? When I compare my children's educational experience to my own, it's clear that great strides have been made in math, reading, and writing education. The fact that Thomas Edison and the Wright Brothers were brilliant is hardly proof that school is bad. Speaking of research-based strategies, Edison and the Wrights clearly understood their importance.

@Amalthea, there's an easy way to find out whether the Common Core standards are intelligible or not. They're available online for all to review. Rather than adding more conjecture to the conversation on Common Core, be that education consumer you spoke of and inform yourself.

So if other countries have standards (a common core), are investing more money into their schools, providing health care for their citizens, and basically doing everything they can to improve their standards of living, it makes perfect seance for us here in the United States (maybe I should say just us in Utah) to do everything we can to make sure we do the opposite.

The common core will actually save our educational system money. Because it's standards, it will give use more flexibility to enrich our curriculum (remember standards are very different from curriculum) to meet individual student needs. It will provide a goal for schools to strive to attain but will allow them their own autonomy to get their results.

I'm in favor of the common core just like I'm in favor of standards in electrical, computing, plumbing, transportation, etc. Standards make things better for all of us. They make things less expensive. They make things stronger.

The problem with a common set of standards, is the larger your pool of participants, the lower the standards typically are. You can argue this won't happen, but it does. Powerful groups will make sure they are not excluded or discriminated against by standards that they can't meet.

Also, a focus on standards puts the focus back on age-based progression through school, which I'm not sure is the best approach. With standards, you either meet the standard or you don't, and nobody really cares how much above or below the bar you are. "You are at grade level." So what? Instead of age-standards, I would favor an approach to articulate the progression of skills in a subject, and then see where individual kids are, regardless of their year in school. So instead of reporting 70% of 5th graders met grade-standards, have some idea of where they are at on a progressing system of skills to be learned. And maybe instead of grades and a single bar to pass, we qualify them on specific concepts and skills. Kind of like Khan Academy.

On the other hand,

In yesterdays news, there was an article about one of two college graduates finding jobs requiring college degrees. There was also an article about companies not finding enough talented graduates to fill their jobs.

There are many places struggling to find shilled workers, so they bring in bring people from India, China, The Philippines, South Korea, etc. I've talked to many veteran engineers, and all complain of unprepared American graduates. Edison New Jersey is one example. Sixty percent of their population come from India, China, and South Korea. They fill the many technical jobs in the area.

Many Chinese, and people from India are taking the technical jobs in the Irving, Houston, and Dallas, Texas area, as well as other locations found in California. Philippine people are in the medical field jobs.

I've talked to an engineer for Motorola, and he says, they can't find an American worker capable of doing the job. This supports yesterdays article.

Our local hospital staff is seventy percent foreigners from South America, The Philippines, and India.

Utah schools are unique and don't reflect the whole country.