Yom says he keeps getting asked if there's some secret recipe for getting students to perform at their highest potential.
"This may sound corny, but you really have to love them," Yom says. "You build this trust, and at that point, whatever you ask them to do, they'll go the extra mile. The recipe is love."
Basically it comes down to soft skills. If people think you care about them they will care about what you want and think and help you achieve things together.
Common Core, in theory, isn't a problem - unifying standards across schools has a lot of benefits (easier to design reusable curriculums, perform scientific inquiries, develop software). The problem is when it gets conflated with high-stakes testing, which is a terrible thing.
High-stakes testing need not be terrible. You just have to be careful:
1. High-stakes testing requires exam security. One must assume that the teachers and administrators, if rated on student performance, will assist cheating.
2. High-stakes testing should be spread out across the year, with the result being a running average that discards the low values. (sickness and other bad luck should not be punished) Instead of a week or two of solid testing, do an hour every other week.
3. Tests should not come from companies that sell textbooks. This is a conflict of interest. It's not good to have an incentive to use non-standard terminology to give an advantage to schools which purchase the matching book.
4. If you can't test something, and you don't mandate hours for it, it will be removed from the schedule. Ideally you'd test for everything, but testing some subjects (band, shop) is difficult. The hours must be mandated to protect the untestable subjects.
5. You get what you test for. (see #4 above) High-quality tests are a must. It shouldn't be practical to cram for a test.
You did not talk about the necessity of unlinking the results of high-stakes testing and the funding for schools/teachers/districts. Or at the very least, to not penalize low-income areas for low test scores by stripping their budget, since that will only make the situation worse. If anything, more resources should flow to areas with lower test scores, even though the opposite happens (or they just flow to charter schools, which are not a great idea either).
Look beyond the mechanical aspects of the problem, and consider the ramifications of testing within the education system as a whole.
Common core is _what_ they should be teaching. Soft skills is _how_ they should be teaching.
I'm fine if you want to hate on the Common Core like so many, but these points are so completely unrelated this argument doesn't make any sense. We aren't min/maxing teachers like we would with our character in an MMORPG, these are human people.
You can get people to do work based on the strength of a personal relationship, sure. I once gave an unexpectedly long assignment to a class of about 30 students, and ended up getting six completed assignments. One was from a student who was just absolutely determined to be "a good student". The other five were clearly done on the basis of my relationship with those five students rather than because they thought it was a reasonable use of their time.
I don't think that approach can scale, though. You can't maintain that kind of relationship with 50 people; you need them to enforce the norm ("do the work!") on each other.
Yom says he keeps getting asked if there's some secret recipe for getting students to perform at their highest potential.
"This may sound corny, but you really have to love them," Yom says. "You build this trust, and at that point, whatever you ask them to do, they'll go the extra mile. The recipe is love."
Basically it comes down to soft skills. If people think you care about them they will care about what you want and think and help you achieve things together.