AURORA — Yosef Abuharus is sick of explaining it all.
The ninth-grader at Smoky Hill High School just wants to move on to the next question.
He doesn’t want to construct a math problem, figure out the answer, then be told to destroy what he built and pick through the remains so his teacher can understand how he got there.
“Teachers will tell you, ‘I want to know what you’re thinking,’ ” he says. “Well, when the question is like, ‘Four times four,’ my thinking is, ‘four times four.’ I don’t like the extra work, the extra pressure.”
Yosef’s choice of an example might be extreme, but laments like his are voiced daily in his Algebra 1 classroom, where the demands of the Common Core state academic standards run headlong into teenage rebellion and years of being told getting answers right was enough.
Smoky Hill math teacher Jessica Edwards, in her sixth year of teaching and third at the school, has heard it time and again.
She will recite what has become a mantra: “OK … the claim. The evidence. The reasoning.”
“You can’t just say something and not back it up,” she tells her students. “If you have 8, I don’t know how you got there, how you got 8, whether your neighbor got 8. It’s not just the answer that matters.”
This has proved to be one of the most significant adjustments in classrooms since Colorado in 2010 adopted the Common Core state standards in math and English language arts.
The Common Core — adopted with little fanfare, now a political football — has been advertised as an improved road map to better prepare students for their next step, whether it’s college, a vocational program or the workforce.
Schools have been steadily integrating the standards into classrooms, and this year brought the debut of new tests, Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC), that are supposed to measure students’ mastery of the standards.
High school, however, brings unique challenges. As Edwards explains, many students come in behind not just academically but in knowing the rhythms of the Common Core — and time is running out.
Not all students push back. Many get it, embrace it, relish the opportunity to explain and hash things out with others.
At Smoky Hill, a racially and socioeconomically diverse school in the Cherry Creek School District, you get a little of both.
“In a lot of my classes, we will read a piece of literature, or a nonfiction piece, and you have to make an analysis. You really have to do your own thinking, not just wait for the teacher to tell you what to do.”
— Leah Gibson, 10th-grader
In English, the Common Core means less focus on studying a book for the book’s sake, says Tom Fitzgerald, a veteran Smoky Hill English teacher. Each unit has an anchor text, usually a classic novel.
A ninth-grade unit on justice features “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Students are expected to explore how the issues of fictional 1930s Alabama can compare to 2015 in Aurora and the United States.
At the same time, Fitzgerald says, teachers integrate hard skills — what makes a good paragraph, what makes a good essay.
Literacy in Common Core extends to other classrooms. English teachers at Smoky Hill have worked with science, world language and social studies departments to develop reading and writing strategies.
Alisa Wills-Keely, another English teacher, sees a shift in emphasizing that all texts make an argument. And those anchor texts do not stand alone, but have companions in nonfiction and poetry, she says.
“Literature is at the core of what we do,” Wills-Keely says. “Nothing has been taken away. It’s just that it’s been enriched.”
The logic is similar in math. Yes, there are content standards — what you need to know about ratios or quadratic models.
But Common Core also includes “standards for mathematical practice” that put a premium on making arguments, problem-solving, modeling with math, being precise and looking for structure.
That provides teachers such as Edwards a ready reply when students ask why they need to figure out a square root.
“You are not just learning how to do this, you are learning how to persevere though something that’s hard,” she says. “You are learning how to problem-solve, and that you are going to have to learn no matter where you go and what you do.”
To a large degree, teachers at Smoky Hill feel like Common Core does not represent a huge shift because the district has long stressed many of the same tenets.
Developing curriculum was a different matter. In Cherry Creek high schools, teachers and departments work together to come up with lessons, worksheets and tests.
“With math, it is a blessing and a curse,” Edwards says. “It’s giving us the chance to not just have to pick up a curriculum we are not sure we like. We really have to be intentional about what we create. … It has been a lot of work.”
Adrian Holguin, the Smoky Hill math department head, notes that most ridicule heaped on Common Core — the farcically complicated questions that get shared on Facebook — is poor curriculum, not the standards.
“In the math department, we have put faith in our curriculum,” he says. “We know it’s a good curriculum because the stuff we do in the math department generates 4s and 5s on (Advanced Placement) exams” — the highest scores — “and high graduation rates for the IB (International Baccalaureate) exam.”
“I’ve never been very good at explaining anything. Like for sixth grade, I would put the answer down. Boom, I got an A on it. Now I am just slowly deconstructing my answer and reconstruct-ing it again. It’s just harder.”
— Jacob Valdez, ninth-grader
The Cherry Creek School District is known for academic success, championship sports teams and pockets of enormous wealth. But as the suburbs have been transformed, so have many of the district’s schools.
Perhaps no other high school in the district embodies the greater diversity like the 2,100-student Smoky Hill. About half the students are minorities, and 36 percent qualify for free or reduced priced lunches.
The school’s calling card is its long-standing International Baccalaureate program, a rigorous set of courses with a global focus.
The vast range of where Smoky Hill students are at — in life and in learning — is on display daily in Fitzgerald’s English classroom.
On one recent April morning, Fitzgerald was teaching a classroom of students in the IB “middle years program” for 10th-graders.
For a lesson that centered on standards for speech and presentation, the anchor text revolved around a character who gains voice and the ability to stand up and speak and achieve power.
Fitzgerald’s students delivered multimedia presentations on topics of their choosing. One student, Leah Gibson, spoke with poise about her determination in realizing her dream to teach horsemanship.
Later that afternoon, Fitzgerald co-teaches a much different ninth-grade college-prep English class alongside a special education teacher who works with at-risk students on individualized education plans.
Some kids are above grade level and others are behind. The same is true in Edwards’ Algebra 1 class.
Test scores dipped at Smoky Hill amid demographic shifts and the economic downturn — the school’s ZIP code had one of the state’s highest foreclosure rates. Graduation rates have since rebounded.
At an established school with plenty of veteran teachers, reaction to the shift to the standards was mixed, teachers say.
“Teachers by and large are conservative by nature — not by politics, but I mean with change,” Fitzgerald says. “Part of it is some teachers at this point are just numb to change because every year — every year — seems to bring a new initiative or two or three or four. After a while, some teachers adopt the idea of, ‘This too shall pass.’ “
“That said,” he adds, “I think people understand the new standards are here to stay.”
“I went into the test already not in a good mood about it, and that was pretty much because of peer opinion around me. Everyone else was opting out. Even some teachers were suggesting, ‘If you are going to take it, make sure you try on it.’ It just made it sound like, is this test even worth trying on? I am showing up for it, but I don’t know.”
— Devin Pomerleau, ninth-grader
Devin worried when he arrived for the first round of PARCC math and English tests in March.
Where was everyone?
More students trickled in, but it was far from full.
He was also confused. Rumors were flying. Would the school face consequences if too many students opted out, or not? He heard both.
The test itself frustrated Devin. Half the content, he didn’t know.
He’d scratch his head for 10 minutes on one question and take a few seconds on the next. Most students were done in 20 minutes and spent the rest of the allotted hour with their heads on their desks.
Cherry Creek School District is one of the epicenters of the opt-out movement. Numbers vary greatly by school, however.
District officials say preliminary figures show 42 percent of students at Smoky Hill refused the PARCC tests, putting the school close to the district’s opt-out average of 45 percent at its high schools.
The timing of the testing interruptions was “viciously, viciously brutal” as students in the IB program faced internal assessments, graduation essays were assigned and the curriculum grew more challenging, says Holguin, the math department head.
Some of that pressure will be alleviated starting next year. Testing reduction legislation signed into law last week will pare down PARCC English and math testing to ninth grade in high school — an admission that many older students were putting little to no stock in the tests.
Other changes approved last week by PARCC’s governing board will shave more than an hour from about 11 hours of ninth-grade testing.
It’s unclear whether Smoky Hill or the district will suffer any consequences from the federal government after falling short of mandatory 95 percent participation on this spring’s tests.
Smoky Hill parent Donna Dickey, an aerospace engineer, worries that Common Core is limiting opportunities for students in higher-level classes.
Getting ready to watch her valedictorian daughter, Robin, graduate Friday at the school’s ceremony at the University of Denver’s Ritchie Center, Dickey noted a problem others have acknowledged — the standards have been conflated with tests aligned at a time when backlash against testing is high.
“It’s so connected with the standardized tests, it’s got the bad taste of the standardized tests going with it,” she says.
Despite the political noise around Common Core, few states have abandoned it. In Colorado, Republican-led efforts to repeal the standards were political nonstarters this legislative session.
Holguin and his fellow teachers at Smoky Hill don’t like the idea of starting all over developing curriculum and getting students used to a new philosophy after working to win them over.
Said Holguin: “We need the powers that be — and not necessarily in this district, but at the state and national level — to give us some time now.”
Eric Gorski: 303-954-1971, email@example.com or twitter.com/egorski
Smoky Hill High School
Number of students: 2,100
Student demographics: 48 percent White; 19 percent Latino; 17 percent Black; 8 percent Asian.
Graduation rate for class of 2014: 86.5 percent (state average is 77.3 percent)