MEET OUR ROUNDTABLE PARTICIPANTS
Sen. Peggy Lehner, R-Kettering, chair of the Senate Education Committee.
Mary Baine, retired teacher (Fairborn) who now teaches art education at WSU, also a parent.
Tom Dunn, 36-year educator, now superintendent of the Miami County Educational Services Center, former Troy superintendent, also a parent.
Harvey Tuck, volunteer in Dayton schools, MIT graduate and IBM retiree, originally from Boston.
Rusty Clifford, superintendent of West Carrollton schools.
Rebecca Templeton-Owens, teacher at Kettering Fairmont High School, teacher union president, parent of two elementary students in Valley View Schools.
Moderators: Michael Williams, Ron Rollins
Moderator: Who likes the Common Core? Everyone seems to hate it, all of a sudden.
Peggy Lehner: I absolutely believe in the Common Core and I think most of the educators in Ohio do, too. We've been preparing to implement it for years — it's come from the state governments and school chiefs from around the country. President Obama had nothing to do with it. The whole effort against it seems to have been sparked by an editorial by Glenn Beck that set off a firestorm. I've never seen so much misinformation in my life — stuff about the chairs children will have to use in classrooms, to chemicals. It's crazy. If anyone actually reads the Common Core standards and finds anything subversive in there, let me know. At this point, people are afraid of the uproar and may try to push it back. I've been very careful that my fellow senators have accurate information sent to them. Nothing seems likely to derail it in the Senate at this time.
Moderator: For readers unfamiliar, can you explain it?
Rusty Clifford: It's a curriculum that 46 states put together in language arts and math, common standards to move forward — and it's a brilliant idea long overdue. There's absolutely nothing wrong with the Common Core itself. There will be some implementation issues, sure. It will be online, and multiple times through the year, students will be asked to apply what they have learned, instead of just telling what they know. They'll have to apply knowledge learned in their classes, which is what businesses and colleges want them to be able to do. Think of the assessments students have now — they take them with paper and pencil … and we get the information so late in the school year that we can't use it to help the students. The Common Core will give us an immediate way to assess and use the information during the course of the school year, so that we help the students and work with them to make good educational decisions, using the full school year and building upon what we know of the student's progress. This will be a real opportunity for teachers and parents to have a good conversation.
Rebecca Templeton-Owens: My children go to a small school district, Valley View, where they don't have the money and technology to implement new testing, and that presents a whole different set of challenges from the Common Core. As a high school instructor, I think it's a good thing. I like the idea, as an English teacher, of not just teaching "The Catcher in the Rye" by itself, but teaching it as a unit with poetry, arts, listening skills all combined, to deepen what we do with the book. But I do worry for young children, who may not be ready for it.
Lehner: One of the real concerns until this Glenn Beck thing was the issue of the testing. It will be at a much more rigorous level than our children have been learning, and we know that all school scores are going to drop dramatically at first. But it's not because the schools are failing; it's because it will just take some years to catch up.
Templeton-Owens: We still have some children who don't have regular daily access to computer technology. That's a concern.
Clifford: Right, those are all things that we need to deal with, but they're not a reason to not move forward with the Common Core. It is going to be tough. But if we want to be able to compete with a global economy, we need to get on board.
Moderator: Has that message been communicated to parents?
Clifford: Well, we haven't seen the standards yet, so that's been tough to do.
Templeton-Owens: And the teachers haven't seen the tests yet, either.
Harvey Tuck: As far as I'm concerned, kids still shouldn't have a calculator until fifth or sixth grade. They should be doing it all up in their heads. I've volunteered in the Dayton public schools for 20 years and I'm a fan of public schools, but I think there are things we should do differently. We should recognize that children are different, and that you need to go slower with the third of kids who are below average, and not put them in the same class with the third who are the brightest, because you'll bore those kids to death and they won't learn. Also we need to make the school day longer.
Templeton-Owens: The response to what you're talking about is intervention, and there is a movement under way to implement intervention for children who are above average, and below average. Some parents hear "intervention" and think that it's a dirty word, but we're talking about it for above-average students, too. For students with lower ability, you put them in an intense block of classes so they can get back up to speed. The pendulum is swinging back to recognize student ability. God made them all different, after all.
Lehner: And technology will help children at different levels. There is promise there.
Tom Dunn: I'm not as enthusiastic as you are about this. Theoretically, it makes sense, but in practice in Indiana, it's been a disaster. We're not ready for online testing. We're going down a path where we can't possibly be successful — and I'm not sure why we do that and continue to do it. We had this very same discussion 10, 12 years ago when all the state standards came out, and in the '90s when it was all about standardized tests. …
Clifford: If we wait for everybody to be on board before we push forward, it won't happen. We know some districts in the state will struggle with the assessment because they don't have the right technology. We need to help them get on board; that's an issue at the state level.
Templeton-Owens: A reservation I have is that as a teacher, I'm going to be personally culpable for a test that I have never seen. The idea of online testing and immediate response — if my performance evaluations are tied to that — is very threatening and intimidating.
Mary Baine: The problem I see is a lack of consensus and commitment all the way across the board. If the adults all agree, they can really make a lot of amazing help for students. But with standards, let's agree on what a child should be able to do. OK, that's fine. But then you get into the details. With science teaching, for instance, teachers get into trouble — evolution, climate change, things some people consider controversial. It's not just about implementation; it's this fear of the Common Core and what it may contain and whether it will be contrary to some students' home culture. … If we could just make up our minds and do it, we'd be great.
Lehner: I agree with that. It's scary the way this is happening. One of our problems is that we won't have a really good process for making these very serious decisions and sticking with them. You can see how we get derailed very easily. It's also the reason that Ohio is only adopting the English and math standards to avoid those objections you're talking about. It's why the standards for science and social studies were not adopted, because there are some political problems there.
Dunn: The politicization of education has been to the detriment of education. You can't run a successful organization by changing the direction you're headed every few years. Gov. Kasich says one thing, Gov. Strickland said another. When politics become the driving force, you have a tough time being successful. Besides, the academic side is only one reason a student is successful. Soft skills drive success as much as academics, and we just aren't teaching those anymore. And we're doing students a real disservice.
Moderator: A criticism we hear a lot is the whole idea of “teaching to the test.”
Clifford: We shouldn't be; we should be teaching to the standard. This is supposed to be a chance for students to apply what they know. We can't continue to teach English as just English; we need to pull in the fine arts, science and social sciences, pulling all these in so it feels like the world these kids will be living in.
Tuck: This discussion is related to what I said before about the differences between kids. Some kids are challenged, I know, but some kids are brilliant. Algebra II may be fine for the top third, but isn't needed by the others. When I was in school, if you wanted to go into carpentry, as opposed to geometry or algebra, that was fine. This was during World War II, but we needed engineers as much as we needed people who could work in factories.
Lehner: But the world and the job market have changed since then — and now nobody can just go to school until 10th grade and then drop out and get a great, high-paying job in a factory. Today you have to have computer skills to work in manufacturing, and that takes algebra. …
Dunn: I saw a documentary on JFK recently where he said, in 1959, that we'd be destroyed if we did not fix education and health care, if we didn't improve math and science. Well, we beat the Russians to the moon and the Soviet Union no longer exists, but we're still talking about fixing education and health care. How have we stayed on top of the world, then?
Lehner: We aren't. We're at the bottom in math and science, statistically.
Dunn: That's not true. If you're going to use statistics to disparage what we do, at least use accurate statistics. If you look at the entire world education system, we're not at the bottom — and we're competing quite well.
Templeton-Owens: When we throw schools under the bus as the reason for all these social ills, we really need to take into account family, socio-economic status. It's easy to blame education for all these woes in our nation, but you need to look at the whole picture.
Moderator: What about the third-grade reading guarantee. Are we ready?
Templeton-Owens: It's fine on paper, but the devil is in the details. My child will be fine because I read to her, put her in preschool and know as a mom that I need to speak X amount of words to her from the time she's born. Parents have to be passionate about education and learning for their children for education to work.
Lehner: It will only be successful if we invest in it. If we don't start funding early childhood education for kids in poverty who are not getting read to and talked to that way, though, we're going to fail. We'll have children arriving at school two years behind their peers and we can intervene all we want, and it won't work. … There's no easy fix.
Dunn: Peggy's right, but we're actually losing five years for these kids. Literacy skills have to start at birth. We ignore the first five years of children's education and then say we're going to fix it? We need to have the courage of our convictions to say that parents and parenting do play a part in education, and that parents have to invest in their child, and not just let them watch TV all the time, and never talk to them.
Baine: That's soft skills, again, and they don't receive enough attention.
Lehner: It's very important that we focus on preschool and early childhood education. Before third grade, you're learning to read, and after third grade, you're reading to learn. It's absolutely right, too, that we have to have space in our education system for arts and music. … Everyone recognizes that the world is changing, children are changing, and the Common Core is designed to bring that home. It won't be successful if legislators don't listen to you in the field, be flexible and allow enough time for the changes to be put in place.
Templeton-Owens: You hear a lot of horror stories about the baggage kids bring in to us these days. My kids are blessed with a mom and dad who are together, travel, pets, books, enough food. But I may have a student who comes into school one morning without having been able to sleep in a real bed because her mom broke up with her boyfriend and he took all the furniture — and then, I expect her to be engaged with "Romeo and Juliet" in my class.
Lehner: But we can't use poverty as a reason not to move forward in education.
Dunn: The Glenn Becks of the world get traction because we aren't trusted as educators. Because it's been pushed down to us through politics that this is what we have to do, and people must feel we don't have the ability to do it.
Lehner: Or maybe you haven't done it, Tom. Nearly 40 percent of children graduate with no proficiency in math or English. If the education system was doing its job, we wouldn't have to do this.
Dunn: We can't keep ignoring that too many parents don't do what's needed in the first five years of children's lives and then just say we're going to create a government program to fix all these problems. We have to be honest with parents that your responsibility for your child does not stop at birth. … I disagree we have not done our job. The graduation rate in the U.S. is at a 40-year high. We have hundreds of thousands of kids who have gone on to great success after leaving school. Historically, our country did what we set out to do when Kennedy put out those challenges to us. We have not been unsuccessful. It's insulting to me as an educator that I don't have the ability to make the right decisions for kids. I don't need people who have never set foot in my community tell me how to run things in my schools. That's just coming from the political side. That's my problem with it.
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