Common Core Standards

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

...
The biggest challenge say for kindergarten is for those students who have not been to a pre school or structured day care.

They spend many weeks learning that shoving is not an acceptable way to resolve conflicts.
...

What kind of background do you have in homeschool education to make sweeping statements about them?

Well, lets see, I was homeschooled for many years, while living in Mexico.
I have acquaintances (3), friends (2) and coworkers (3) who have home schooled their children.

David defends theNEA/AFT/AFSCME cartel's schools (the "public schools) on JREF.
David has seen this:...
Roland Meighan
Home-based Education Effectiveness Research and Some of its Implications
Educational Review, Vol. 47, No.3, 1995.

The issue of social skills. One edition of Home School Researcher, Volume 8, Number 3, contains two research reports on the issue of social skills. The first finding of the study by Larry Shyers (1992) was that home-schooled students received significantly lower problem behavior scores than schooled children. His next finding was that home-schooled children are socially well adjusted, but schooled children are not so well adjusted. Shyers concludes that we are asking the wrong question when we ask about the social adjustment of home-schooled children. The real question is why is the social; adjustment of schooled children of such poor quality?

The second study, by Thomas Smedley (1992), used different test instruments but comes to the same conclusion, that home-educated children are more mature and better socialized than those attending school.

So-called 'school phobia' is actually more likely to be a sign of mental health, whereas school dependancy is a largely unrecognized mental health problem.

And this:...
San Francisco Chronicle 2005-Nov.-01

The UC Berkeley-Stanford study found that all children who attended preschool at least 15 hours a week displayed more negative social behaviors such as trouble cooperating or acting up, when compared with their peers. The discrepancies were most pronounced among children from higher-income families.
Children from lower-income families lagged behind their peers who didn't attend preschool an average of 7 percentage points on the measure of social behavioral growth. But children from higher-income families lagged 9 percentage points behind their peers. These wealthier children did even worse when they attended preschool for 30 hours or more: They trailed their peers by 15 percentage points.
"It's not clear why children from higher-income families exhibit more negative behaviors than their stay-at-home peers. Fuller speculated their peers might be in enriching home environments that include things like trips to the library as well as dance and music lessons. Other studies have found childcare centers negatively affect children's social development", said Jay Belsky, director of the Institute for the Study of Children, Families and Social Issues at Birkbeck University of London, in an e-mail interview.
"It is time to come to grips with what all too many have denied for all too long, namely, that all disconcerting news about adverse effects cannot be attributed to low-quality care, which has been more or less the mantra of the field of child development and the child-care advocacy community for decades," Belsky said.

And this:...
Linda Darling-Hammond
American School Board Journal, September 1999

... many well-known adolescent difficulties are not intrinsic to the teenage years but are related to the mismatch between adolescents' developmental needs and the kinds of experiences most junior high and high schools provide. When students need close affiliation, they experience large depersonalized schools; when they need to develop autonomy, they experience few opportunities for choice and punitive approaches to discipline...

And this:...
E. G. West
Carleton University, Department of Economics,
Ottawa, Canada
Schooling and Violence

We conclude that so far there is no evidence to support the 19th century Utilitarian hypothesis that the use of a secular and public school system will reduce crime. Beyond this there is some evidence indeed that suggests the reverse causality: crime actually increases with the increase in the size of the public school sector. Such findings will undoubtedly stimulate further work, and clearly more research would be helpful. But if further investigation confirms the findings of Lott, Fremling, and Coleman,
we must reach the verdict that the cost of public schooling is much higher than was originally believed. Published figures show that the conventional cost of public schools, on average, are already just over twice those of private schools.11 When we add to this the extra social costs of increased delinquency, the full seriousness of the inefficiency of our public school system is more starkly exposed.

And this:...
Clive Harber
"Schooling as Violence"
Educatioinal Review V. 54, #1.

... Furthermore, according to a report for UNESCO, cited in Esteve (2000), the increasing level of pupil-teacher and pupil-pupil violence in classrooms is directly connected with compulsory schooling. The report argues that institutional violence against pupils who are obliged to attend daily at an educational centre until 16 or 18 years of age increases the frustration of these students to a level where they externalise it.
...
"... It is almost certainly more damaging for children to be in school than to out of it. Children whose days are spent herding animals rather than sitting in a classroom at least develop skills of problem solving and independence while the supposedly luckier ones in school are stunted in their mental, physical, and emotional development by being rendered passive, and by having to spend hours each day in a crowded classroom under the control of an adult who punishes them for any normal level of activity such as moving or speaking."

 

[Dancing David]

And that was random in response...

 

[Minoosh]

lol. minoosh - a very feeble attempt at evasion and diversion.

Do you stand by your claim that the statement "kids new to a structured school environment must learn not to shove" *equals* "home-schooled parents are violent"? Because you equated those two statements through rubbish logic, and used that straw man to demean another poster. You're asking me to defend a claim no one ever made, yet I'm fairly certain you sincerely believe that claim was made.

The tone of your later posts (though not the earlier ones) makes me wonder about the manner in which you "tried to share your success with others." You're a longtime professor, elected official, standout coach, yet trying to share your success resulted in persecution by child-welfare authorities. It makes me wonder if something else was going on.

... the public school parents are on average much less informed than the homeschool parents, who simply leave things up to the system ...

You are saying homeschool parents simply leave things up to the system?

 

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

I have semi-seriously considered homeschooling, which is weird, because I've always associated the practice with religious and separatist nutjobbery (present company most certainly excluded).

That's the effect of relentless pro-system propaganda.

But the main problem is that I honestly don't think I would be very good at it.

Please reconsider. Humans are social creatures. Children, especially very young children, will work for love, which parents will more reliably supply than will strangers in a rule-bound bureaucracy.

My children are all very smart; I don't have any doubts about their ability to learn the stuff they need to know. And I think everyone learns it eventually anyway. My bigest fear is not that they will not learn, but that they will become frustrated and bored, and generally develop anxiety of learning and hatred of learning institutions, becoming slackers like their old man.

There's an internal contradiction here. The problems you indicate inhibit learning.

Aside from that, I do care about school success for all children. The rationale behind compulsory and free education is that it is an absolutely necessary basis for a democratic government by the people, not to mention a prosperous economy.

The US State-monopoly school system originated in theocratic indoctrination and anti-Catholic bigotry. In abstract, the education is an unlikely candidate for State (government, generally) operation.

I live in that economy, and am subject to that government, so I cannot regard the academic success of others with distant curiosity.

Thomas Jefferson never attended a government-operated school, pre-college. George Washington never attended a government-operated school. Ben Franklin attended Boston Latin for two years, between age 10 and 12. Cyrus McCormick was homeschooled. Thomas Edison was homeschooled.
I recommend:...
Sheldon Richman, Separating School & State: How to Liberate America's Families
Andrew Coulson, Market Education: The Unknown History
James Tooley, The Beautiful Tree: A Personal Journey Into How the World's Poorest People Are Educating Themselves

 

[Minoosh]

This thread has become a generalized attack on compulsory education, and discussion of the pros/cons (if any) of homeschooling. I'm interested in those topics also, but I was hoping for insights into Common Core standards vs. what is already in place - what it will look like in the classroom, how it will affect lesson planning, etc. Data if any on results of implementing new standards.

I looked in some detail at the math standards, and saw areas of concern. However I am having a hard time finding samples of high-school Common Core problems. Its website sounds like it would delve deeper in trig, but I'd like to see how that will translate to a high-stakes test. So far I haven't had a lot of luck so if anyone can point me in the right direction I'd appreciate it.

 

[kellyb]

I'm a homeschooler, and I LOVE Common Core for math and language. The curriculums I find most logical, challenging, but also realistic are the ones that follow those standards.

I was primarily educated at a pretty "elite" private school that "taught to the ACT" from 3rd grade on, and boasted fantastic ACT scores, and the Common Core standards/curriculums seem to be similar. I switched to public school in grade 11, and they were doing was what "we" were doing in grade 6. My limited perspective has made me a huge fan of Common Core.

Dancing David, I'm really skeptical of your claim that kids who aren't in preschool are more prone to aggression. I can see there being a certain subset of kids who have aggressive siblings/cousins who might turn up in K not knowing to not shove, etc, but there would be another subset who learned to be more aggressive in daycare/preschool (assuming we're talking about non-Montessori preschools with excellent creds...the very best Montessori preschools do seem to be the very best possible.).
And there seem to be some kids who will be more aggressive (while very young) no matter what, and others who will be very mellow no matter what.

I'd be interested to see stats backing your claim, though. In my neighborhood, kids who go to preschool (even the fairly good preschools) seem to be more aggressive than the ones who don't and have a parent/guardian who supervises daily play with other neighborhood kids. The kids who are the most aggressive either go to preschool or are "babysat" by a (apparently resentful) grandmother or 16+ year old sibling or cousin who's in charge of 4-8 + kids and assigned the role in an "unpaid labor" capacity.

 

[kellyb]

I haven't found anything that explains what "common core" is in a lucid, compact manner. We're homeschooling, so we don't care other than curiosity.

We're thrilled. In our state there's no registration/notification requirement for homeschool, no tests, no curriculum needing approval, nothing. So this common core has no relevance to us.

You are ONE major life event away from your children being in public school.
It's (and I say this gently) kind of irresponsible to not know what the true academic expectations would be for your kids, should life hit the fan and you find yourself needing to put your kids in regular school out of the blue.

I do NOT think you're an irresponsible, negligent person/parent for not caring, but I think if you think about this more, you'll start caring and find it highly relevant.

You can find the Common Core expectations listed at corestandards.org.

For example, grade 2 math:
http://www.corestandards.org/Math/Content/2/OA/

It's concrete, not esoteric.

 

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

You are ONE major life event away from your children being in public school.
It's (and I say this gently) kind of irresponsible to not know what the true academic expectations would be for your kids, should life hit the fan and you find yourself needing to put your kids in regular school out of the blue.

Common Core advocates wildly exaggerate the benefits of standardization. Brains vary more than feet and no one recommends that all 14-year-olds wear the same size and style of shoes. Common Core opponents exaggerate the threat. Government schools will accommodate people of any grade level who arrive, or else compulsory attendance statutes must exempt immigrant children. Just pretend "homeschool" is a foreign country.

Common Core standardization does less than advocates hope and opponents fear. Does anyone suppose that US colleges will no longer enroll foreign students (who will not have experienced a Common Core curriculum)?

 

[kellyb]

Government schools will accommodate people of any grade level who arrive, or else compulsory attendance statutes must exempt immigrant children. Just pretend "homeschool" is a foreign country.

Homeschooled children have a private tutor all day, every day. The idea that they should be on par with recent immigrant children (who don't speak English fluently?) when put in "regular" school is bizarre.
The common core standards are excellent, and really, there's no reason why homeschooled kids shouldn't stay 1-2 grades ahead of age/grade-level Common Core standards, at least after 2nd grade or so.

 

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

Homeschooled children have a private tutor all day, every day. The idea that they should be on par with recent immigrant children (who don't speak English fluently?) when put in "regular" school is bizarre.

Dunno what you mean by "on par". Sure, homeschoolers routinely outperform conventionally schooled children and will outperform immigrant children who left school in their home country after second grade to work in the fields. My point was that US schools will accommodate immigrant children, so there's obviously a way to accommodate homeschoolers.

The common core standards are excellent, and really, there's no reason why homeschooled kids shouldn't stay 1-2 grades ahead of age/grade-level Common Core standards, at least after 2nd grade or so.

Children are NOT standard. Uniform curricula destroy information about best practice. Society would benefit if governments dealt with the education industry the way they deal with the kitchen utensil industry or the lawn care industry: an original assignment of title, enforcement of mutually-agreed-upon contracts, and otherwise with indifference.

 

[AlaskaBushPilot]

Do you stand by your claim that the statement "kids new to a structured school environment must learn not to shove" *equals* "home-schooled parents are violent"? Because you equated those two statements through rubbish logic, and used that straw man to demean another poster. You're asking me to defend a claim no one ever made, yet I'm fairly certain you sincerely believe that claim was made.

lol. His implication is actually WORSE because it pretends that "structured school environments" (which is now a pretty elastic definition, apparently) are the thing that eliminates violence in children. It is absurd. Parents are the primary role models for children and the primary disciplinarians.

Malcolm Kirpatrick just did an outstanding job of literature citation for what I saw as a long time professor: that it is the public school kids who have more behavioral problems.

The tone of your later posts (though not the earlier ones) makes me wonder about the manner in which you "tried to share your success with others." You're a longtime professor, elected official, standout coach, yet trying to share your success resulted in persecution by child-welfare authorities. It makes me wonder if something else was going on.

I was corresponding with Dr. Phil Zelazo at the time, and he showed me how he was savaged by people after doing his early infant learning experiments for Walking in the Newborn. Karen Adolph's work confirmed this with experimental study. They interviewed parents from the norm in a culture who were shown infant teaching very different from theirs and the shock/horror they expressed was an important research result.

People react with extreme negativity to parenting that is different from their own. We were running a blog at the time, with videos of what we were doing and citations of the early infant learning literature we were following. The calls to child protective services came from out of state. But even people we knew casually made stupid remarks about "taking childhood away" and "forcing" our child to learn "before he was ready" etc.

You are saying homeschool parents simply leave things up to the system?

No. I meant the opposite. I wondered if that would be misunderstood, so sorry I did not word it clearly enough.

 

[AlaskaBushPilot]

You are ONE major life event away from your children being in public school.

lol. No I am not. I am semi-retired and could fully retire if I felt like it. My wife is fixed for life. (She is only 25) Should I die, my brother and sister-in-law are taking on the kids to homeschool them just as they did their own. My brother was a dissertation away from getting his PhD in electrical engineering but was making so much money he quit. His wife has a master's degree in molecular biology. They have a fricking castle for a house and are swimming in money. That is where my wife will live, with the kids, if something happens to me. They live in rural Wisconsin with more land than we have. They homeschooled their kids, both on scholarship in Universities.

How arrogant of you to think we have not even CONSIDERED this. But see how this proves exactly what I have been saying. Look here:

It's (and I say this gently) kind of irresponsible...

hahahaha! You "gently" call us irresponsible, then say you aren't calling us irresponsible:

I do NOT think you're an irresponsible, negligent person/parent

Don't piss on me and then say my eyes are deceiving me. You just called us irresponsible, when our FOUR YEAR OLD is doing high school chemistry.

It's incredible, really, to look at parents this dedicated and then say something so ridiculous. But we're used to it. You did exactly what purple-dude above did: pretend that we are so stupid we haven't even THOUGHT about socializing our children when that is a primary REASON we are home schooling.

Your attack makes no sense at all. It's as if you think our kids are space aliens, incapable of adjusting to public school, were they to enter. That's incredible, completely without foundation and contrary to common sense.

 

[marplots]

I would like to see an example of the high school chemistry the four year old is doing - partly curiosity, partly doubt.

 

[geni]

Common Core advocates wildly exaggerate the benefits of standardization. Brains vary more than feet and no one recommends that all 14-year-olds wear the same size and style of shoes.

Your position is closer to objecting to ISO 20345:2011.

 

[kellyb]

If your oldest child is 4, you're not even "homeschooling" yet. The "major life event" could also be anything that makes you decide you don't want to homeschool any more, as well.

But don't feel bad. I didn't understand the need to care about stuff like Common Core standards until I had homeschooled for a while, too.

I really expected to take issue with them, by the way. Just 10 years ago there was some strange anti-phoenics push in a lot of schools that has been abandoned since then. I haven't found any "education woo" in Common Core.

 

[Hlafordlaes]

Double post. Newer is below.

 

[Hlafordlaes]

Malcolm Kirpatrick just did an outstanding job of literature citation for what I saw as a long time professor: that it is the public school kids who have more behavioral problems.

Fair enough, as far as it goes. It is not discriminatory as to cause, and remains open to the conclusions one wishes to assign.

For those conclusions to not be self-serving for a political position, taken a priori as proof willy-nilly, one needs to establish the mechanisms at work and measure them directly. Statistical and mathematical proofs can show correlations, and be highly discriminatory if the variables are isolated properly. Most of the time, however, something more direct is required.

In this instance, measures of self-esteem, perceived threat of others, and historical treatment as the main and not secondary focus of attention, in possibly more adult terms, and other factors that occur to none of us for the moment, can be in play.

Correlation is not causation, anyone who knows about the high correlation between stork populations and baby births in some rural areas of the world can tell you. What, storks bring babies? It's true?

Not.

(Finally, of course, one might say the public school kids are realists, who know first-hand that homo lupus hominem, and are perfecting their chops.)

 

[marplots]

Storks bring stork babies, so there's that.

 

[AlaskaBushPilot]

If your oldest child is 4, you're not even "homeschooling" yet. The "major life event" could also be anything that makes you decide you don't want to homeschool any more, as well.

lol. Waste of time interacting with you, obviously.

But don't feel bad. I didn't understand the need to care about stuff like Common Core standards until I had homeschooled for a while, too.

Hilarious. You've assumed a power over me you don't have. But I think, and I say this in the kindest way possible, you have the maturity of a six year old. But I was a six year old once too, and grew out of it, so there is some possibility that you could too.

Obviously I am mocking your condescension. Welcome to ignore.

 

[AlaskaBushPilot]

Fair enough, as far as it goes..)

lol.

I've been a practicing statistician for almost 30 years. Econometrician. I think I can handle both the publications and my own experience as a University prof.

Since I have been called a liar by Marplots I'll see if I can post a video I took a while ago when we first began the Periodic Table of Elements. Edit: I don't see how I can do this without our names being public information.

My thinking on this was to start both great questions - small particle physics and large interplanetary body physics right off the bat. The sun is the most visible object in our environment, dictating so much of our lives, so that's where it started. With the sun.

So the sun is made of hydrogen and helium, and although not "burning" in the same sense a fire burns, it is sufficient at this level of introduction to use that description. The earth orbits the sun in a similar fashion to electrons orbiting a proton/neutron mass so it helps to exploit that parallel. But anyway, since hydrogen and helium are the first two elements in the periodic table - off we went. He called helium balloons "up" balloons and the ones you blow air into "down" balloons, so it was really easy to understand the lightest elements are first, with the lowest atomic numbers, and heavier elements are later with larger numbers. Oxygen 8 vs. Helium 2 for example. Down vs. up balloons.

We don't do Christmas with Santa Clause or Jesus, other than telling them that other people tell fairy tales. For us it is all about the solstice, a very dramatic thing in the polar regions with darkness and savage cold. So these are very powerful explanations that a child can understand, by holding up our globe facing a light bulb with a little toy soldier standing on Alaska and the "sun" being below the horizon for the toy soldier. Since they have done so much travel, national and international, by airplane they have an excellent grasp on the globe. The four year old is very handy with google earth.

Of course, I just learned I am not doing home school every day with this material. I hope I can be instructed soon on what it really is.

At bedtime we do Cat in the Hat, the Little Train that Could, etc. but the four year old can read the books himself. School time is random. They have to be ready. And the primary thing about school is taking things relevant to our lives that interest them, and making lessons out of it. But we speak to all subjects as if we were talking to an adult. They may not grasp things now the same way an adult does with such breadth of experience/knowledge, but it is impressive how much they actually do understand.

Kids are different so we play to their different strengths and interests. The older boy is also pretty vital in teaching to the younger boy.