CURMUDGUCATION: Because It's On the Test

CURMUDGUCATION: Because It's On the Test:

Because It's On the Test

Peter DeWitt wrote a response spun from Marc Tucker's most excellent posting about testing cultureand its effects on American education. Tucker's piece scathingly but accurately marks the harmful effects of test-driven education without actually attacking CCSS at all. In his response, DeWitt writes, "It makes me question whether the Common Core is guilty by association, or just plain guilty."

It's one of the most thoughtful versions I've read of the question, "Can CCSS be decoupled from testing? And once decoupled, could CCSS actually turn out to be a force for good?"

Even as recently as a year ago, we might have only guessed what the answer to that question might be. Today, we have a pretty good idea.

With the more widescale implementation of CCSS, we see the same scene repeated in classroom after classroom. A teacher (maybe elementary math, maybe high school reading, maybe some other affected teacher) contemplates a lesson from their CCSS-aligned Pearson-produced materials. "This lesson is terrible. Terribly paced and inappropriate for my students, and the explanation will not make any sense to them," the teacher says, or thinks. "But I have to do this material anyway