I have fairly mixed feelings. In theory, why would a state need to create their own education curriculum? Should a student in New York learn different stuff than a student in Ohio? And I do feel that letting states pick in matters like this means you will have fun things like certain states banning evolution, and other states mandating some form of creationism. And surely there are economies of scale if we need 1 history textbook for the entire country, vs 50.
On the other hand, I see how much my daughters school enforces testing. Tests tests tests. Parent teacher conferences aren't about how to make my daughter more successful in life, it is what to do to raise her future test scores.
As a comp sci person, you can't improve what you don't measure. Tests are how you measure. So I get it. But if I decided to measure the page load time of my server to ultimately improve server performance, no one is really hurt by that. I just write some code that runs in the background - and then I can make things better. Subjecting kids to a year round test or test-study cycle, that totally has an impact. Less time for Gym and Art class, because those aren't on the test. And I would claim that if we had to give up 1-2% of our math test scores for people who will never do math in exchange for a lifetime of healthy exercise habits gained from Gym and sports, I suspect that would be a big net win.
> "Should a student in New York learn different stuff than a student in Ohio?"
As someone who grew up in Miami, I can say that readings about "the colors of fall" and "snow" made little sense. It wasn't until college that I saw what people mean by "autumn colors". I went up north for graduate school, and commented that when I saw snow out of the corner of my eye my first thought was that the sand had blown in and I needed to sweep it away. My housemates looked at me funny - "sand is yellow."
We of course learned about hurricane safety, and how sinkholes form. We also read local authors, like Zora Neale Hurston. In part because doing so also helps understand the history and culture of where we live.
How does a New Mexican understand state politics without knowing something about the 400+ years of interactions between Native American, Spanish, and US peoples?
Hawaiian is an official language of Hawaii. Several public schools in Hawaii offer immersion teaching. That makes no sense to do in New York.
So, yes, I think different regions should teach different things.
> "and other states mandating some form of creationism"
That's not a good example because we know a state can't do that because it's not constitutional. Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District.
Perhaps a better example is that some states may offer sex positive sex education, and others may teach abstinence-only? But then, what if the option you want is the opposite of what the federal curriculum requires?
> "you can't improve what you don't measure"
The problem is, you need to know that what you measure is important. Otherwise, you may optimize what you measure at the expensive of what you want.
Grades are a form of test: grades for homework, and grades for tests created by the teacher. These new, additional tests seem to be worse than the older, except for the purpose of sucking money out of the public schools and putting it into the testing companies.
> As a comp sci person, you can't improve what you don't measure. Tests are how you measure. So I get it. But if I decided to measure the page load time of my server to ultimately improve server performance, no one is really hurt by that.
The problem is when you write something to measure that and then ask someone else to solve the problem. Systems like this almost always lead to optimizing for the measurement, not the end goal.
I mean, sure, at first I'm going to optimize code and work to increase efficiency to get the latency down because I actually care about my work. If that doesn't get me to the goal you've set and you keep hounding me and eventually tell me that if I want to have a job next year I'm going to get the page load time down...
I'm probably going to start stripping less-used features, maybe having the server occasionally serve a nearly blank "Click here to Refresh" page to game the average, see if I can't specifically serve less content to your measurement application... All of this results in a worse experience, but a better metric.
> I have fairly mixed feelings. In theory, why would a state need to create their own education curriculum?
The issue of who should create a curriculum is orthogonal to Common Core, because Common Core does not provide a curriculum. It is essentially just a list of goals and a schedule for when students should meet those goals.
For instance the standards for the "Measurement and Data" part of mathematics say that Kindergarten students should be able to describe measurable attributes of objects, such as length or weight, directly compare two objects with a common measurable attribute and state which has more of or less of that attribute, and group objects by a measurable attribute.
First graders should be able to order three objects by length and compare two objects the length of two objects indirectly by using a third object, use a simple ruler to measure objects that are an integral multiple of the ruler size, tell and write time in hours and half hours using analog and digital clocks, and do some simple organization and interpretation of data with up to three categories.
How a state gets to those goals is up to it. It can develop its own curriculum if it wishes, or adopt one developed by a national publisher, so something in between. The arguments for and against these possibilities remain largely unchanged with Common Core from what they were before Common Core.
So then should all states require the same standards of their students? I do not see why not. But not sure how to agree on a non-stupid set of standards.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2014/03/25/i...
I have fairly mixed feelings. In theory, why would a state need to create their own education curriculum? Should a student in New York learn different stuff than a student in Ohio? And I do feel that letting states pick in matters like this means you will have fun things like certain states banning evolution, and other states mandating some form of creationism. And surely there are economies of scale if we need 1 history textbook for the entire country, vs 50.
On the other hand, I see how much my daughters school enforces testing. Tests tests tests. Parent teacher conferences aren't about how to make my daughter more successful in life, it is what to do to raise her future test scores.
As a comp sci person, you can't improve what you don't measure. Tests are how you measure. So I get it. But if I decided to measure the page load time of my server to ultimately improve server performance, no one is really hurt by that. I just write some code that runs in the background - and then I can make things better. Subjecting kids to a year round test or test-study cycle, that totally has an impact. Less time for Gym and Art class, because those aren't on the test. And I would claim that if we had to give up 1-2% of our math test scores for people who will never do math in exchange for a lifetime of healthy exercise habits gained from Gym and sports, I suspect that would be a big net win.