Thursday, March 21, 2013

The Shape of Things to Come

Charlotte Danielson:

Are there things about the Common Core that you don’t like?

No, not really, not conceptually. But I do worry somewhat about the assessments — I'm concerned that we may be headed for a train wreck there. The test items I've seen that have been released so far are extremely challenging. If I had to take a test that was entirely comprised of items like that, I'm not sure that I would pass it — and I've got a bunch of degrees. So I do worry that in some schools, we’ll have 80 percent or some large number of students failing. That's what I mean by train wreck. But who knows? We just don’t know enough about the assessments right now. But when I have shown some of those released items to groups of educators — to teachers and administrators — the room just goes very quiet. So I can imagine a hostile response on the part of some educators and communities. But I'd like to be wrong about that.

1 comment:

Sean said...

It is astonishing. Look at the DOK of released NECAP items- mostly 1's, some 2's.

The PARCC prototypes are all 3's. RI students struggle with constructed response. Considering that PARCC is constructed response on steroids and on repeat, it will eat us alive.

It's like that post you had a while back. "It's 2015 and Ed Reform Has Failed" or whatever. That's what's happening. I can picture the Commissioner's farewell press conference. "Mistakes were made..."