In Jessica Langford’s kindergarten classroom, all the children are “scholars,” correct answers are rewarded with cotton balls and reading a picture book about a girl’s trip to the ice cream store with her grandfather is a baby step to college.
Sitting intently at a pint-sized table shaped like a half-moon, the 10th-year teacher instructs a half-dozen boys and girls wearing Ashley Elementary School polo shirts to sound out the words, pull meaning from the pictures and, above all else, stay focused.
“You two are not entirely engaged in your book,” Langford says to a pair with wandering eyes. “So that is a check and a check.”
After two “checks,” Langford drops a clothespin bearing the student’s name down a notch on a rainbow-colored yardstick used to track inappropriate behavior, part of a school-wide management system.
Every interaction in Langford’s classroom provides a window into a monumental shift in the way teachers teach and students learn.
Five years ago, Colorado joined other states in an unprecedented united effort to adopt common standards in math and English to define what students should know to get them on track for college or career.
This means rigor and critical thinking. It means careful analysis of “content rich” nonfiction in English and abstract reasoning about math instead of memorization.
These are the Common Core State Standards.
Adopted with bipartisan support and not much notice, Common Core has become a political football, a tarnished brand even to supporters, a muddled and misguided government overreach to critics.
Polls show many Americans are confused — or just plain wrong — about what the Common Core standards are all about. One February survey found a majority of Americans thought Common Core, which covers only math and English language arts, extended to subjects including evolution, global warming and sex education.
This past academic year was supposed to be the year it all came together with the arrival of new computer-based tests designed to gauge where students and schools stand mastering those standards.
In Colorado and 10 other states plus Washington D.C., that means PARCC, or the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers.
To see how teachers and students were faring in this new era, The Denver Post spent time this year visiting classrooms and talking to people at a local elementary, middle and high school.
MORE PHOTOS: Denver students prep for PARCC
We start at Ashley Elementary with Jessica Langford’s 5-year-olds.
Engagement
Take more than a few minutes in the blond-brick two-story building that houses Ashley and you will notice Common Core’s influence on posters, in lesson plans and on the lips of the children.
She hands out those “checks” because staying focused and engaged is necessary to think critically and perform.
She uses repetition because changing things up confuses 5-year-olds.
She uses a reward system because it boosts self-worth and positive relationships.
She gives cotton balls as rewards because they’re cheap.
When Langford was dissecting that picture book back in January, she was tracking this:
Do scholars notice and derive information from the picture to help figure out the text?
Do they turn the pages correctly, identify the front cover, back cover, spine and title page?
Can they explain the plot in the right order?
Can they justify their opinion? Can they rate their level of understanding, or classmates’?
Students work together and nudge each other along.
“They will question each other and support each other in the classroom instead of that syndrome of, ‘Heads down, eyes down, I don’t know,’ ” Langford says. “There is just no opting out in my classroom.”
High expectations and attention to detail were not always part of the program at the high-poverty northeast Denver school, which was forced to reinvent itself in 2013 after years of poor performance.
The school has an ambitious, data-obsessed principal who borrowed from the playbook of high-achieving charter schools, teachers who agree to work extended days and longer academic years, foundation-funded i Pads for every student and a dean of school culture.
Every Ashley classroom embraces a “culture of error” — that learning happens through mistakes.
Langford came to Colorado from Florida, an early adopter of manuals guiding teachers on how to teach to Common Core.
Last summer, Denver Public School teachers were summoned to mandatory standards training. They were promised a literacy curriculum with clear objectives and a schedule.
But DPS didn’t deliver. Some teachers called it “the summer fiasco.”
Alyssa Whitehead-Bust, DPS’s chief academic and innovation officer, says the district’s vetting of curriculum billed as Common Core-ready found it lacking and inadequate for DPS’s large bilingual student population.
District officials set out to develop their own material, but it was too late, she says.
As a stopgap measure, the district purchased higher-level reading materials in Spanish and English for every classroom and provided teachers resources for asking strong questions to steer students toward citing evidence, a tenet of Common Core, Whitehead-Bust says.
So while teachers did not get what they were anticipating, “it wasn’t status quo,” she says. “It was an upgrade.”
Next year, DPS is adopting curriculum called EngageNY for grades four through eight, working with translators to retrofit it for bilingual students, she says. A pilot project is planned for lower grades.
As an “innovation school,” Ashley was able to adopt its own Common Core-minded curriculum.
The designation, allowed under state law, unshackles schools from some state and local policies and collective bargaining with unions, allowing more freedom on budgeting, staffing and setting schedules.
That leeway allowed Ashley to adopt a reading assessment, STEP, that puts a premium on comprehension and a math program through EngageNY with daily lesson plans, worksheets and tests.
Whitehead-Bust says discussions are also underway to give all DPS schools — not just innovation and charter schools — the freedom to choose their own curriculum.
DPS’s broken promise on delivering a curriculum is emblematic of a problem — teachers often feel they are not getting materials or guidance to get Common Core right.
“Most teachers are open to the concepts of Common Core and believe in them,” says Pam Shamburg, executive director of the Denver Classroom Teachers Association. “They’re just a little lost.”
Teachers were left scrambling at the start of the year, says Ashley fifth-grade teacher Margarita Rodriguez-Corriere.
“The standards have greatly increased the workload on teachers to the point of being almost unmanageable,” she says.
In a January report, a task force of DPS teachers found that an unsustainable workload, leadership shortcomings and too much testing are driving teacher turnover in high-poverty schools.
More than one in five new DPS teachers left their positions between 2010-11 and 2011-12, and half of all new teachers left the district within three years, according to a report prepared for the district by the Harvard University Center for Education Policy Research.
DPS retains 85 percent to 88 percent of all teachers typically, data shows.
Shayne Spalten, DPS’s chief human resources officer, says retaining teachers is a top district priority and cites steps taken to improve the numbers, including more principal observations and feedback, mentorship and cultivating teachers who want to take on leadership roles while continuing to teach.
Some Ashley teachers say they put in 70-hour weeks to keep up.
“You have to, at this school,” Langford says.
Adds Rodriguez-Corriere: “If you care.”
Critical thinking skills
Up the stairwell from Jessica Langford’s kindergarten class, two fifth-grade boys in blue hoodies stand in front of a white board staring at a number line, trying to figure out where to plot a fraction.
The fraction is two-sevenths.
Their teacher, Rodriguez-Corriere, has thrown them a curve by marking one-half on the line.
An odd fraction — two-sevenths — is harder to see when the line has been pre-divided into two even parts.
The lesson was rooted in a fifth-grade Common Core math standard that expects students to solve word problems involving addition and subtraction of fractions referring to the same whole by using visual models — in this case, the number line.
Rodriguez-Corriere spends a lot of time poring through “exit tickets,” short problems or questions that test students on lessons they’ve just been taught. She found that a majority of her students had never been exposed to reasoning the size of a fraction by using benchmarks and didn’t know the terms associated with it.
“It is unbelievably challenging to teach critical thinking skills when students have no experience in thinking due to old curriculum emphasizing rote memory and old-school teacher habits of telling students answers when incorrect,” she explains.
Hence, the number line — part of a lesson she says took her two hours to write, plan and adapt for four different student levels.
Teaching is a second career for Rodriguez-Corriere, a Cuban-American who worked in product management for 17 years, lost her job in the economic downturn, earned a graduate degree and chose to teach in the district that educated her children.
The boys working on fractions were not thrown together by chance. Rodriguez-Corriere — “Mrs. RC” to her students — paired a gifted math student with a “bubble” student who didn’t get consistent teaching in the past but has shown grit and a desire to learn.
She has taught the gifted student to coach his classmate but not give away the answer, letting thinking and reasoning flower.
Nine of 10 students in class passed their exit tickets that afternoon — including the boy who correctly plotted two-sevenths on the line.
Rah-rah assemblies
To keep things loose in a school driven by system and structure, the entire Ashley community gathers in the gym on Friday mornings for rah-rah assemblies that feel like tent revivals with a sense of humor.
Students making strides earn shout-outs and whoop-whoops. A girl races the clock playing a memory game and as her prize, Mr. White gets a pie in the face. “Scholars of the week” receive white Ashley polo shirts.
Principal Zachary Rahn leads a chant.
“One school!”
Clap-clap.
“One vision!”
Clap-clap.
“To-gether!”
Clap-clap.
“We’re on a mission!”
The assemblies are part of what Rahn calls the school’s “j-factor,” or joy factor.
Rahn, 30, grew up in a New England town with cobblestone streets. His father was a lobsterman who taught P.E. His mother was the high school business manager and led the secretarial union.
Rahn was a decent student with a stubborn streak. After a teacher told him he would never speak Spanish, he went off to college, enrolled in study abroad and returned home to tell his former teacher — in Spanish — “Never tell children they can’t do something.”
He came to Denver in 2007 through Teach for America, which places standout college graduates in low-income schools for at least two years.
After teaching in two troubled schools, Rahn joined a DPS principal training program and won a fellowship that put him under the wing of STRIVE Preparatory Schools, a charter network that serves low-income minority students.
In 2013, DPS officials had seen enough at Ashley Elementary and didn’t renew the contract of the longtime principal . Chronic poor performance had landed the school on the lowest rung of the district’s school performance framework, “accredited on probation.”
There was talk of requiring all teachers to reapply for their jobs, which is allowed under collective bargaining when a school is designated as being in “redesign” mode, Whitehead-Bust says. But staff and teachers, instead, were invited to join the process that led to Rahn’s hiring.
That summer, a plan came into focus — extended school days, extra literacy training, two teachers per classroom (a lead teacher and an associate), the iPad initiative and time for art, music, P.E., dance and foreign languages. The heaviest focus remains on math and English.
When Ashley opened its doors in 2013, it was a completely different school.
Most teachers and staff found it wasn’t for them. Seventy-five percent left after the 2013-14 school year, and some positions were eliminated, Rahn says.
Being a school reborn put Ashley in a better position than others to adapt in the Common Core era. The slate was blank, in a sense. The many new hires — and those who stuck around — bought into the program.
The iPads for every student — paid for by a grant from the Walton Family Foundation — gave students who may not have devices at home experience with the digital dragging and dropping of PARCC tests.
“The bar is just so different now,” Rahn says. “It’s higher, and it’s about going deeper and not surface-level. It’s fundamentally changing how and what we teach, and it’s good for kids at the end of the day.”
Rahn has been encouraged by early results. On the last generation of state tests — TCAP — 37 percent of students scored proficient and advanced in 2014, up two percentage points from 2013.
In 2013-14, Ashley had one of the highest nonattend rates in the district — 33 percent of kids in the neighborhood went elsewhere. A year later, the rate had been whittled down to 25 percent, Rahn says. Data show English learners at Ashley are making some of the largest gains in DPS, and more than 85 percent of kindergartners were meeting reading goals with three weeks to go in the school year, Rahn says.
Donna Sims, the grandmother of two Ashley students, walks the school hallways and is taken aback at how different it is post-reinvention — so much quieter, more relaxed and less chaotic.
She does not claim expertise in the tenets of Common Core, but she says she knows enough to see a difference at the elementary school.
“To me, the Common Core means having the same understandings, the same mission,” said Sims, who worked on the school’s innovation plan. “That means everyone. Community, teachers, staff, students.”
Rahn says he doesn’t think PARCC testing anxiety grips his school.
“We very much say, ‘This test is just like any other tests. Show what you know,’ ” Rahn says. “Take it, and we’ll have a better idea of knowing how you are doing, and it will help us help you.”
Testing
The two best friends step into the hallway, having just finished lunch.
It is mid-May, and fifth-graders Eduardo Barraza and Fernando Villasenor are about to end their Ashley careers.
These are the boys who worked together on that problem Mrs. RC devised back in January. Eduardo, an aspiring mathematician, was helping the quieter Fernando, who would rather be reading.
The 11-year-olds have been together at Ashley since kindergarten and have witnessed the school’s transformation, their only constant being playing soccer at recess.
Eduardo has noticed a change in the teachers. Rodriguez-Corriere is challenging and encouraging at the same time. She’s showed him how math can be used for things like building a house, he says.
Back in the classroom, Rodriguez-Corriere takes a moment to reflect on the school year drawing to a close. Never before, she says, has she seen such impressive academic growth from fifth-graders.
She credits the higher standards and the school for not junking up the schedule with hearing tests during reading or needless assemblies.
The tests … well, the tests are a different matter.
Her kids are fried, she says.
“Another test?” they moaned that morning.
It was more PARCC, this time a short-answer English exam that closed out the second of two PARCC testing windows.
The focus and effort that was there when the tests began in March had been overcome by fatigue.
“I’d rather be doing math,” Eduardo says.
“I’d rather be doing reading,” Fernando says.
“It’s pretty frustrating,” Eduardo said. “I don’t like taking tests. But you have to do it in order to know how you are doing, how the school is doing and stuff. You can help make the school better.”
The next period begins. Eduardo joins a group of gifted and talented math students off to the side, and Fernando stays with the class reading aloud from one of his beloved books.
Next up — middle school.
Eric Gorski: 303-954-1971, egorski@denverpost.com or twitter.com/egorski
Ashley Elementary School
Number of students: 345
Student demographics: 66 percent Latino 23 percent black 11 percent white
Staff size: 27 teachers (full and part time), 12 associate educators, 4 paraprofessionals, 7 office staff/administration
About the Common Core academic standards
The idea behind the Common Core academic standards and tests aligned with them is to set rigorous, consistent standards and then compare how students are doing across states, something not previously possible.
The National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers were the driving force behind the development of Common Core.
In 2010, Colorado adopted Common Core math and English language arts standards, integrating them with Colorado-developed standards in eight other subject areas.
Although the Common Core standards were developed by states, the federal government played a role in their spread. The U.S. Education Department, for example, made adopting common standards an incentive for states competing in its Race to the Top grant sweepstakes.
That has led some to characterize the initiative as federal meddling. In Colorado, state officials hold the authority to adopt standards, but school districts and schools set curriculum. Critics of Common Core say there is little distinction and the standards usurp local control.
Supporters of Common Core say the standards better reflect 21st-century skills and are a vast improvement over the patchwork that left children in some states better off than others. Criticisms of Common Core are many — that private foundations played an outsized role in their emergence, public input was lacking and appreciation for literature is devalued. Some question the definition of the skills required for college and career-readiness.
Two consortia of states using about $360 million in federal aid developed tests that are supposed to assess mastery of the standards. Colorado joined PARCC, the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, which debuted its tests this spring.
