Last week, Louis CK tweeted about the low
quality Common Core worksheets assigned to his daughters for test prep. A parent on Facebook identified them as
iReady workbooks, produced by Curriculum Associates, widely used
in NYC public schools.
Curriculum Associates is an educational company in which none
of their top executives have had any training as
educators – a phenomenon all too common in the testing industrial complex.
The CEO,
Rob Waldron, is a graduate of Harvard Business School and was just selected as a Pahara-Aspen
Education Fellow – along
with many other prominent edu-entrepreneurs and corporate reformers.
Here are the comments of Eugenia Zakharov, a Bronx
parent, whose 5th graders were assigned workbooks from the same
company. She wanted readers to know that her twins love school outside of the test prep season,
which sadly consumes significant part of the school year.
_____________________________________________________
Our school bought the iReady math books and an online
access.
Each topic/lesson is
divided into sections (introduction, modeled instruction, guided instruction,
practice etc.).
Explanations, or
so-called modeled or guided instructions, are so convoluted that both my
husband and I, one with an advanced math degree and the other a designated
actuary, had to read them over several times.
The sad part is that you
can't just tell your child to solve the problem using any method as long as the
thinking is clearly shown, is logical and gets the correct answer.
Some of the questions
require you to show mastery of a particular method, and some of those methods
achieve nothing but profound confusion and frustration.
I wanted to take photos of the "guided instructions" for
you, but they go on for several pages.
I saved one math book before my twins shredded both of them.
English is just as
disheartening - poor quality of text passages, ambiguous questions and multiple
choice answers, etc.
Most disheartening is
the amount of time the kids spend on test prep, both during school hours and
for homework, instead of learning.
That's what we do from
January-February until after the tests are over. My kids used to love school
too. Now it's half a year consumed in drudgery of test prep.
