OK, so Louis C.K. is a comedian, not an educator. But his mother was a math teacher (Fun facts: his parents met at Harvard. His mother has a background in software engineering, his father is an economist, and he grew up in Mexico City from age one to seven. His first language was Spanish). And he’s a very perceptive social commentator. He’s also got two young daughters. So, sprinkle a few grains of salt on his comments if you wish, but his statements on testing are worth a listen (especially if, like me, you tend to agree with them).
His concern about high stakes testing went public when he wrote a string of tweets, including:
My kids used to love math. Now it makes them cry. Thanks standardized testing and common core!
— Louis C.K. (@louisck) April 28, 2014Sorry. I sit with my kids as they so their HW they devour knowledge. When it’s hard they step up. Their teachers are great
— Louis C.K. (@louisck) April 28, 2014But it’s changed in recent years. It’s all about these tests. It feels like a dark time. And nothing is going in anymore.
— Louis C.K. (@louisck) April 28, 2014It’s this massive stressball that hangs over the whole school. The kids teachers trying to adapt to these badly written notions.
— Louis C.K. (@louisck) April 28, 2014
He’s gotten a fair amount of media coverage for this statements. On Letterman, he said, tongue slightly in cheek:
Well, the way I understand it, if a school’s kids don’t test well, they burn the school down. It’s pretty high-pressure.
Educator Diane Ravitch chimed in about Louis C.K.’s comments, at length, ending with a neutral statement about Common Core itself but a damning indictment of our current obsession with high stakes testing.
The Common Core has some good ideas in it; I doubt that it will do harm, although I believe that subjecting little children to 6-8 hours of testing to see if they can read and do math is harmful, physically and mentally, to them. Long ago, educators were able to find out in tests lasting 50 minutes how well a student could read or do math. Why is it now an ordeal that lasts as long as some professional examinations? For heaven’s sake, we are talking about little children, not candidates for college or a profession!
Louis C.K. isn’t the first and won’t be the last to chime in on the testing issue, and he’s certainly not the most knowledgable commentator on the subject, but he’s among the highest profile. After all, how many people get to bring up the subject to an audience of the size or the diversity of Letterman’s?
This article appears in Jan 22-28, 2015.
What are the main bones of contention with Common Core? I hear a lot of opposition and it makes me wonder who developed it and why.
Its the edu-biz my friend, a few select lobbyists get their tests adopted by crony polls then its pushed out on the public.
The US public education system, flawed though it maybe,still produces more doctors,lawyers,scientists,engineers and generals then any other country in the world.
The powers that be would much rather have you focused on “failed schools” then a failed economic system, failed foreign policy and the transfer of wealth from Main Street to Wall Street.
Who developed it and why is pretty well covered by the last paragraph of NJYD’s comment—who DIDN’T develop it is more important. Although it is oft-repeated that it was a group of governors who developed it, thats not the case. A battery of business and education testing people developed it, none of them classroom teachers. (I actually agree with this point raised by Diane Douglas, which is pretty scary in and of itself). (For the list see http://dianeravitch.net/2014/04/23/who-wro… ) This is not to say that they haven’t looked at it since it was developed, but it was a group of business people, including David Coleman, who extolls the virtues of reading without context (“close” reading) such as the incredibly importance of reading Kings’ Letter from Birmingham Jail without bothering to know anything about the Civil Rights struggle. As I understand it, the requirements to enter college were the goal, and they were simply rolled out in reverse all the way to Kinder children. For Common Core worksheets go tohttp://www.commoncoresheets.com and test yourself.
IF you look at the battery of standardized tests as being all about the importance of FAILING you will understand them and their motivation. They are there to measure the failure of our schools and our kids, to reach arbitrary benchmarks. They do not measure success, they measure the ability to take tests. Some education philosophy…..but oh boy, every once in awhile the economic analysts get all riled up about how much money there is to be made out of education these days, and I guess that is the REAL education philosophy. Our kids are just the guinea pigs and its not about learning at all.