Common Core for Young Learners

Volume 30, Number 4 July/August 2014

Common Core for Young Learners

Educators tackle challenges in the early grades

by MAUREEN KELLEHER

PreK students in Boston Public Schools practice

with patterns in preparation for Common Core

math standards.

At Cesar E. Chávez Multicultural Academic Center on Chicago’s Southwest Side, teachers are in the thick of implementing the Common Core State Standards. While it’s a tough task for everyone, the teachers of the youngest students face special challenges.

Kindergarten teacher Samantha Roeth is lucky this year; she has 28 children instead of the usual 30. Many are English-language learners. It is the first year Chávez and many other Chicago schools have offered full-day kindergarten. Chicago is also in its first year of full Common Core implementation, and Chávez is especially committed to raising the bar on literacy. While the school’s overall performance and outstanding math scores put it in the top level of district accountability rankings, getting students up to speed as readers and writers remains a challenge.

As a former fourth-grade teacher, Roeth embraces Common Core’s call for more nonfiction text. She reads her students interesting, complex nonfiction, lets them practice reading with simpler text, and couples their reading with related daily writing prompts. She also wrestles with questions about her pupils’ developmental readiness for the work before them. This year she has two students who might benefit from more time before tackling first grade, but district policy forbids delayed entry. At the same time, she feels pressure to ensure that her charges are ready for the rigors that lie ahead. “I think I’m pushing my kids too hard, but then I go to second grade and I’m amazed at what they’re doing,” she says.

As Common Core standards reach into early elementary classrooms, early childhood teachers and experts are weighing their benefits—clearer, higher expectations for young learners—against the challenges of ensuring they are implemented with respect for natural variation among children and attention to their broader needs. The uneven playing field of kindergarten and the problems with Common Core implementation—a too-quick start and lack of training and curriculum—exacerbate the difficulty.

At the same time, questions are emerging about whether some specific standards—a focus on early decoding in reading and a “spike” in learning demands in third-grade math—will lead to developmentally inappropriate practices.

Bringing the Core to Kindergarten

Bringing Common Core to kindergarten presents a unique set of problems. Academic demands in kindergarten have risen sharply since the late 1990s, and yet only 10 states and the District of Columbia offer and fund full-day kindergarten, which some experts think is needed to attend to children’s development while helping them meet the new standards.

State policies around kindergarten’s length of day, children’s age of entry, and standards for teacher preparation also vary widely. The National Association for the Education of Young Children predicted in a 2012 report that this variability will likely affect states’ and districts’ success in meeting Common Core standards for kindergarten and beyond. “While a common set of achievable, challenging standards is an important component of education, expecting a common set of standards to be reached in the absence of common delivery systems is potentially challenging, and may have unintended, negative effects,” the report says.

Complicating matters, teacher training on Common Core for all grade levels has been spotty. According to a 2013 survey of 40 state deputy superintendents of education or related staff by the Center on Education Policy, most had trained at least half their teachers and principals, but a majority also called the task of providing sufficient high-quality professional development on the Common Core a “major challenge.”

Yet, when primary teachers have had the opportunity to prepare, they are enthusiastic about the results. Three years ago, Florida’s West DeFuniak Elementary began implementing Common Core in kindergarten classrooms while preparing teachers in the next grade up. They did it again when the kindergartners went to first grade, and the second-grade teachers had a year to prepare.

“I feel like we were prepared,” says second-grade teacher Laurie Langford, who has benefited from coaching, model lessons, and working with colleagues to apply the standards to their students. Now, she’s amazed by what her students can do. “Their writing is incredible. If you had told me they could do this before we started, I don’t know if I would have believed you.” For example, her students don’t just tell her the main idea of a passage they read; they explain their understanding using evidence from the text.

Finding aligned curricula is another big headache. A February report from the Fordham Institute looked closely at four early-implementing districts and found that all have delayed at least some purchases until publishers more significantly revise their offerings to align with the new standards.

Without time to assimilate new standards, training in unfamiliar instructional strategies, or materials that build vocabulary and deep content knowledge, teachers are left stranded, argues Susan Neuman, professor of early childhood and literacy education at New York University. “We’re telling teachers to do things they don’t know how to do,” Neuman says. “They’re working literally night and day without guidance.”

An Overemphasis on Text?

As implementation proceeds, some educators are also zeroing in on a few specific standards as causes for concern. In literacy, the Common Core’s expectation that students will begin reading in kindergarten has stirred controversy and fears of inappropriate practice. Although kindergartners can meet most of the Common Core literacy standards by listening to text read aloud, they are expected to recognize “high-frequency sight words” and read the simplest “emergent-reader” texts. For first-graders, the standards expect children to read grade-level text fluently “on successive readings.”

Historically, U.S. schools have formally taught reading in first grade, when a typical student enters at age 6 and leaves at age 7. However, “children can start reading anywhere between age 4 and 8,” says Michelle Gunderson, chair of the Chicago Teachers Union’s early childhood committee and an architect of the union’s recent resolution against the Common Core. “The push to read early makes no sense in terms of research.”

Teachers worry that some children who cannot read independently by the end of first grade will suffer unfair consequences in school when their developmental timeline doesn’t meet the new standards’ expectations. “The pressure in kindergarten and first grade to become a reader early on—I feel like some kids are just not there,” says Susan Chua, a first-grade teacher at Seattle’s Stevens Elementary, a diverse K–5 school where 38 percent of the students are low income. “We’re giving kids grades and saying they don’t meet standards when maybe they just need more time.”

“There are definitely kids who, given a few more months, will figure it out,” says Catherine Snow, a professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education and an expert in children’s language and literacy development. “There are other kids who need to be exposed to excellent instruction.” Snow says the challenge is to find “the middle route—pushing kids more but not identifying them as failures prematurely.”

Other knotty problems with the early literacy standards focus on striking the right balance between new demands to read text independently and long-standing practices known to support young learners, like read-alouds and providing background knowledge before reading new text. Snow sees the push to have students read text closely without providing background knowledge as problematic, “especially for young children whose oral language skills are much stronger than their reading skills. This could be withdrawing resources they need.”

In general, Snow worries that Common Core’s heavy emphasis on decoding and analyzing text narrows the field too soon for young learners. “I think reading is important, but learning and language are important too, so this is potentially dangerous.”

While American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten continues to support the Common Core, concerns from parents and teachers about a too-early focus on written language have caught her attention. She shares Snow’s concern about the potential to overemphasize formal reading at the expense of oral language development. “This is a place where we need a course correction, and the expertise of early childhood educators should be taken seriously,” Weingarten says.

Such a course correction “is more about the implementation than the standards,” says William Teale, director of the Center for Literacy at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a recent International Reading Association board member. Creating more time and space for thoughtfully designed instructional play experiences for young children would help, he adds. “There’s a dichotomy of play versus instruction prevailing in policy, in teacher education, in the general public. That’s what we have to get rid of.”

Back at Chávez, Roeth’s strategy of reading complex text aloud with her kindergartners while having them attempt simple text on their own strikes the right balance, experts say, since it gives young children exposure to complex text while ensuring they practice enough with simple text to develop fluency. Primary students need to engage with complex text, but not by reading it independently, says Teale. “Make the complex text equally important through read-alouds.”

Third-Grade Math

The Common Core math standards for children in kindergarten through grade 2 center on understanding numbers, especially by breaking apart numbers 1–10 and putting them back together. Though children engage with other topics—fractions, time, the idea of multiplication, measurement, and use of data—Common Core promotes a deep focus on numbers, addition, and subtraction. “It’s a welcome change from what we had before,” says Jeanine Brownell, assistant director of programming for the Early Math Collaborative at Erikson Institute, a Chicago-based graduate school of child development. Previously, “the curriculum got bloated—anything that would sell to a national market had to meet every state’s requirement. This represents a tamping down of some of those widely varying state standards.”

But Common Core’s demands jump steeply in third grade. While continuing to build fluent addition and subtraction skills with numbers up to four digits, students must also master the times tables through nine, learn to divide, and delve more deeply into fractions. They learn to measure mass, volume, and perimeter and to apply their new knowledge of multiplication to measure area. “There’s a huge increase in conceptual expectations,” says Lisa Ginet, assistant director of instruction for the Erikson Institute’s Early Math Collaborative, who fears that some of the third-grade curriculum will be pushed down to lower grades prematurely in order to prepare students for high-stakes tests.

“I think that’s a valid concern,” concurs Douglas Clements, executive director of the Marsico Institute for Early Learning and Literacy at the University of Denver. An early mathematics expert, Clements served on the Common Core mathematics work team that wrote the standards and is now involved in updating the “progressions documents” that explain the how and why of the standards’ sequence. He argues that a strong sequence of instruction from preschool through the early elementary grades would solve the problem. “If you start it appropriately with parents and child care workers in preK and develop those ideas really well up to grade 2, they can be prepared for the grade 3 stuff” (see sidebar, “Preparing Students for Third-Grade Math”).