In Collier's War over Common Core is there Common Ground?

By Gina Edwards

Swept into office by a grassroots parents movement last year, Collier School Board members Erika Donalds and Kelly Lichter have been fighting Florida’s copycat version of the Common Core State Standards and the high-stakes testing and curriculum tied to it.

Their message has resonated with parents who’ve questioned the major shifts in the way that math is taught in the elementary grades under the New Math or discovery-style math curriculum the Collier School district purchased to align to the Common Core Standards. And their message has resonated with teachers and students who’ve been whipsawed by a barrage of new tests tied to the Common Core standards.

Nationally, Common Core has become a topsy-turvy partisan imbroglio: GOP presidential hopeful Jeb Bush is widely considered the father of standards-based education reform that tests students and grades schools and teachers to measure performance of the standards. But Republican governors and presidential candidates have flip-flopped on Common Core in the face of conservative opposition and cries of a federal takeover. Liberals rushed to support Common Core once opponents started name-calling it “Obama-Core” even though accountability standards tied to teacher performance evaluations have long been the bane of a key Democratic constituency: Teachers unions.

“You’ll hear people on both sides say Common Core is just a set of standards and we all want standards,” Lichter says. “But the standards are dictating the curriculum and the tests.” Lichter says low quality curriculums purchased by the district that move away from traditional math and phonics, are hurting students.

Ironically, Lichter and Donalds have used a signature Bush era reform to rebel against Common Core: Lichter founded the free-tuition public charter school Mason Classical Academy which offers a rigorous, high-discipline, back to basics classical liberal arts curriculum where students are taught Latin. Donalds’ husband, Byron, is on the Mason board of directors.

In Collier, Donalds and Lichter say their Common Core reform agenda has faced procedural lock-downs by Superintendent Kamela Patton and the three incumbent board members who hired her. Donalds laments that she is not allowed to add any items to the School Board meeting agendas unless they are approved by the Superintendent.

Lichter says a curriculum review effort she launched was unfairly dubbed by partisan “noisemakers” as a censorship effort. Now a curriculum review committee won’t answer to the School Board and won’t meet in the sunshine, Donalds says.

Board Chairwoman Kathleen Curatolo’s repeated cut-off of parents in a public meeting about curriculum issues — in which she prevented them from criticizing the superintendent by name — sparked a First Amendment lawsuit and viral video by the parents group “Better Collier County Public Schools” on YouTube that now has more than 40,000 hits.

In May, a group called “Coalition for Quality Public Education” formed to counter what they call “far right-wing” views on Common Core by Lichter and Donalds. Critics say talk by Lichter of rooting out political bias in history textbooks smacks of a partisan censorship agenda. Lichter calls such criticisms a scare tactic to side track the more fundamental debates she wants to have about curriculum she says is not academically rigorous enough.

Since spring, the conversation has started to change.

Widespread state computer failures that occurred when Florida students took the first Common Core-tied tests caused frustration — from students, parents, teachers and administrators — to boil over. Students won’t receive individual scores, including on the critical Algebra 1 exam, until fall. School administrators like Patton are in limbo and face high-stress, high-stakes uncertainty rolling down from Tallahassee.

“It’s a mess,” Curatolo says. “With the computerized testing — school boards, superintendents, teachers, and parents — all said: We’re not ready for this. When you have major disasters, that’s when people tend to take a step back.”

Still, she says Common Core supporters should stay the course on the standards. “We’re kind of in the midst of this thunderstorm but I think some good can come of it,” Curatolo says.

School Superintendent Patton declined to be interviewed for this story and answer questions about the details of implementation of Common Core and say whether she will recommend reducing the number of District-created standardized final exams that students take.

Lawmakers in Tallahassee, under House Bill 7069, gave a victory to those like Donalds and Lichter pushing for local control when they tossed out a mandate that school districts give district-created standardized final exams for all classes.  

The legislation, signed into law by Gov. Rick Scott in April, gives districts more flexibility to determine what goes into student performance measures that are used to grade teachers and administrators. And the law reduced the proportion of student test scores that are used to grade teachers from half to one third.

Donalds, the founder of the grassroots Parents Rock group which has more than 800 members on its mailing list, says her top priority is expanding local control where parents can have a voice.

“I think local control scares people on both sides,” Donalds says.

We asked Collier School Board members about their views on Common Core and what’s next to see if there is common ground on Common Core.

High Stakes, High Stress

Around the country, a grassroots movement of parents and students have rebelled against the Common Core-tied standardized tests this spring: An estimated 200,000 students in New York opted out of testing this spring, according to the Washington Post. Half of all high school juniors in New Jersey, more than 40,000, are estimated to have opted out of Common Core tests there. Opt-out movements and student protests have ignited in New Mexico, Washington State, Colorado and California.

Nowhere in the nation are the stakes higher for Common Core than in Florida. This hit home for School Board member Julie Sprague during a summer reunion in New York where she talked to friends involved in school districts in New York and Seattle.  

According to a survey from the Hechinger Report, a non-profit journalism site that covers education, Florida is only one of three states of the 44 that have adopted Common Core and use Common Core-tied tests for student retention purposes and high school graduation.  

The tests in Florida are also used to evaluate teachers, determine teachers’ pay, grade schools and districts, and pass out punishments and funding. For the first time this year, standardized district mid-term and final exam tests for every class for middle and high school students appeared as separate grades on students’ report cards.

It’s these high stakes, coupled with rapid change from Tallahassee, that have caused the uproar, says Sprague.

“They went from point A to point B too quickly without taking the time to get buy-in and make sure the test was validated,” Sprague says of state tests. “We didn’t even get some courses with sample questions until after the school year had begun. I think that’s where a lot of the uproar and stress and anger have come from.”

Sprague says she believes teacher pay should not be tied to these high-stakes test results. “It puts a tremendous amount of stress and competitiveness in the classroom,” says Sprague, who believes that this competitiveness undermines cooperation among teachers. “There’s a single pot of money.”  

The amount of district final exam testing is an out-growth of an effort to correct what was perceived as unfair teacher performance grading under the old FCAT system. For example, Sprague, a retired PE teacher, says under the old system her performance grade as a PE teacher was tied to state standardized reading and math scores for students she didn’t even teach. The district tests allow teachers to be evaluated on the individual subjects that they teach because there is a standard district test for every subject.   

Superintendent Patton agrees that students are now tested too much. “The pendulum has swung too far,” Patton told School Board members at a December workshop on high-stakes testing when she urged a grassroots effort to lobby Tallahassee to ease up on testing requirements.

That’s exactly what Donalds did.

Donalds, a CPA, testified before a Senate committee in Tallahassee in March and released a 30-page white paper she co-authored that estimated that over-testing is costing the state $2 billion in lost instructional time.

Freedom to teach  

In a workshop on testing in December, Patton’s curriculum chief, Luis Solano, told board members that quarterly benchmark testing of students is done to help teachers make sure students are on track for the state assessments and end of course exams that measure how well students are meeting Common Core state standards.

Solano told School Board members that Collier teachers are given scripted lessons and pacing guides to make sure teachers stay on track to meet the standards that students will be tested on. On a scale of zero to 7, with 7 representing a fully scripted teaching day, Collier teachers are at about a 6.

“We’re just below 180 days of scripted lesson plans,” Donalds says. “Why don’t we trust our teachers?”

Curatolo, who is in her third term on the Collier School Board, says there needs to be a balance: “It is not a free for all … There needs to be a structure and a systematic approach. That’s why standardization is important.”

Lichter, a former high school history and economics teacher, says the scripting devalues teachers as professionals. The scripts and timelines make teachers feel very rushed.

She says it’s symptomatic of a district that needs a cultural change that doesn’t place so much emphasis on the Common Core tied tests. But Patton, in the December meeting, countered that teachers’ careers are impacted by students’ standardized test scores and teachers themselves want to score well on their own state report cards, called VAM scores in education lingo.

“They’re human beings and they want to do well,” Patton said of teachers.

Common Core advocates say the standards call for “instructional shifts” that move away from lectures and make teachers more facilitators.

“Why would you need knowledgeable instructors? They’re asking teachers to not be the sage on the stage. They’re asking them to be facilitators and tutors,” Lichter says. 

Donalds says she believes in accountability, but she says school grades — the A through F report card grades given to each public Collier school by the state based on the standardized tests — are idolized in the district to the detriment of students.

Lichter, goes further: She says the data and curving formulas that now go into the school grades are making them a sham. She points to Immokalee High School as a prime example: Immokalee High School is a B grade school even though only 29 percent of students are deemed proficient in reading and math.

“How can you say it’s a B school?” Lichter says. “That, to me, is not a B.”

Innovations or Education fads

Donalds became interested in education politics when her son was in third grade and she had concerns about the Collier school district’s math curriculum. Her son had learned to do elementary math the old way, Donalds said.

The district’s elementary math curriculum “Investigations in Numbers, Data and Space,” touted as aligning to Common Core and rolled out in 2010, encourages students to discover strategies to solve problems and moves away from teaching the standard algorithms learned by generations. (For example, students aren’t taught to stack digits and carry when adding). There’s less emphasis on traditional memorization and less time spent on memorizing the multiplication tables. Parent critics say it’s convoluted and it’s such a departure from the way they were taught, they don’t know how to help kids with homework. Proponents say it’s designed to give students deeper understanding of conceptual math.

Lichter says the “Investigations” math curriculum, by publishing giant Pearson, is horrible. She points to California where it was used and dumped when they saw major drops in math.

Donalds says when she went to the principal, she was told the Investigations math curriculum was a district decision. But District officials told her Collier had to pick curriculum from a set of state mandated options from certain textbook publishers and the state options were being driven by the national Common Core.

Local control activists like Donalds successfully challenged Tallahassee to allow districts to select their own curriculums, a change that began in 2014.

“They keep changing the curriculums,” Donalds says in response to changing standards. “There are all these educational fads. If there’s no new education fad, you don’t need new books. If you have a brand new way of doing math, you have to buy new software, new stuff.”

Large textbook publishers and testing companies are profiteering off education reform and curriculum changes and testing, she says. Curriculums are sold as meeting the standards.

“Classic education doesn’t require you to buy new stuff,” Donalds says.

Curatolo, however, says she sees a dogmatic allegiance to traditionalism.

“People say it’s not the traditional approach so we should throw it out,” Curatolo says. “We should be open to research… The art form of teaching is an evolution and we should look at research to improve the art of teaching.”

Sprague says she doesn’t view it as her role as a School Board member to get involved with curriculum details. But she says she has heard from teachers that the Common Core standards are difficult for students who aren’t yet fluent English speakers, called English language learners.

Donalds says parents and teachers are worn-out by the Common Core testing machine. She says she has a broad base of support from both sides of the political spectrum.

Lichter points to another indicator that parents want more from schools.

“I founded a school where teachers are free to teach,” Lichter says.

Mason Classical Academy now has 800 students on its waiting list, she says.

Date: August 10, 2015

Story by Gina Edwards. This story first appeared in Business Currents magazine, the magazine of the Greater Naples Chamber of Commerce.

.