Studer Community Institute

Shannon's Window: Is Tallahassee smarter than a fifth-grader?

February 4, 2014
/ Shannon Nickinson
/ education

Is anyone in Tallahassee smarter than a fifth-grader? Anyone? It sure doesn’t seem so and the announcement last week by the Florida Department of Education about the Florida version of Common Core doesn’t help. Common Core is unpopular with conservative activists -- Gov. Rick Scott’s base -- who view it as federal intrusion into the state education system. Presumably they cared a little more for it when standards and benchmarks were a Republican ideal incubated in Florida by Gov. Jeb Bush. Its implementation in Florida (and elsewhere) has been roundly criticized by teachers, administrator and parents as well. The standards are meant to be a benchmark for gauging a school system’s effectiveness and they are meant to set academic standards that will bring our younguns into the future. The new math instructional methods have confounded me when my second-grader has brought them home, though after a couple of Google sessions on doubles facts and base 10 math theory, we’ve been able to get through most of the homework. I was able to figure it out because I knew what the standard was supposed to be. Which apparently puts me one up on the state. State education officials, besieged by complaints last year about the test they were going to use to evaluate students -- and schools, teachers and districts -- dumped Partnership for Assessment of College and Career Readiness, (aka PARCC), the test set up to match Common Core. But they had no other test ready to use in PARCC’s place. They sent out bids in October and five companies are competing for the contract. In the meantime, for this school year, state Education Commissioner Pam Stewart announced Florida would come up with its own standards. That was on Jan. 21; the state Board of Education is supposed to sign off on the idea at its Feb.18 meeting in Orlando. So we will be measuring students against standards that haven’t been in place for the entire school year. We will be gauging the effectiveness of classroom teachers with a test we won’t choose until it’s nearly time for spring break. Replacing a test, by the way, that we thought was too time-consuming and complex to implement on a rushed timeline. We will try to implement new standards that feature, according to Associated Press reports, 99 proposed changes, including 37 clarifications to existing standards and at least 60 new ones. So while the folks in suits insist that standards and accountability are the only to put public education on a steady course for success, they continue to change their tune when the going gets rough. They change the standards in dozens of ways, then be surprised that so many changes are too much for systems to grasp and change the benchmarks so schools don’t fall too far. They will say that teachers need to be evaluated at least in part on how effectively their students perform on those tests, but put them on crash-course schedule of training that not even Annie Sullivan could keep pace with. You don’t need base 10 math theory to know that this is no way to run a railroad. It sure isn’t any way to run an education system, lurching from benchmark to benchmark like the fishing vessel Andrea Gail out in the Atlantic trying to weather the Perfect Storm. In fact if we aren’t careful, the ship of our public education system is going to end up in equally rough waters. And at risk of facing a similar outcome.

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Shannon's Window: Is Tallahassee smarter than a fifth-grader?

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