Folks on both sides of the Common Core fight are getting increasingly serious. Common Core supporters are warning each other about the dangers of dismissing their opponents as “crazies.” And on the other side, at a recent Glenn-Beck-sponsored event, militant Common Core opponents suggested that Common Core skeptics should quit trying to link the standards to a “communist takeover” or “brainwashing” (to be fair, this came on a night where Common Core were attacked for trying to “cash in your children”).
Even if both sides are trying to sober their attacks a bit, we shouldn’t confuse that for a cessation in hostilities. The end of the most cartoonish rhetoric is a sign that what was until pretty recently just a “fight” (mostly conducted out in fringe territory) is fast becoming a full-on political “war.” That means that both sides need to reach out to the large group of Americans heretofore uninvolved with the Common Core trenches. These are folks who aren’t necessarily inclined to embrace the standards at first blush, but who aren’t likely to be convinced by wild-eyed charges that the standards are part of an extensive neo-Hitlerian plot (complete with iris scans).
And honestly, even if everyone involved takes it down a notch, we’re not going to get a serious discussion of the Common Core’s actual merits. This is political rhetoric, after all, and a certain amount of exaggeration comes with the territory.
But it’s time for all partisans involved to admit it: the Common Core is actually not that big of a deal.
Really.
Skeptics: not only is the Common Core not a nefarious U.N. plot or a national curriculum — it’s not even a particularly new sort of reform of American public education. It’s just a bunch of standards that replace the old standards that states were using. Standards are not new. These are just higher than most states’ old ones. Same goes for the assessments being developed in connection with them. Anyone who — like me — went through public education in the United States over the last few decades knows that we’ve had (terrible, exceedingly boring, pretty rote) standardized assessments for years.
These are just newer, tougher, and — yes — generally better exams that replace states’ old tests. Same goes for the standards’ and assessments’ role in states’ new teacher evaluation systems. Those aren’t the fault of Common Core; they’re largely a function of the Obama Administration’s No Child Left Behind waivers and its Race to the Top grants competition. If the Common Core disappeared tomorrow, the new teacher evaluation systems would still exist.
Supporters: by the same token, the Common Core really isn’t really an especially powerful lever for addressing the dramatic inequities and underperformance endemic to American public education. After all, if our schools were largely falling short of the (generally lower) standards we’ve been setting, is there any reason to expect that raising standards alone will somehow significantly improve their abilities? If an athlete can’t clear a four foot high jump, is there any reason to believe that raising the bar to six feet will improve her performance? Hardly. It’s going to take more resources and plenty of training for her — or our schools — to clear the new standards we’re setting.
Common Core standards are neither a curse nor a cure-all. Neither pox nor panacea. But we should still stick with them. Why? Here’s something that most Americans don’t realize about our education system: we rarely have a good idea about what’s going on. We spend billions each year on a system without any serious commitment to collecting good data. And the Common Core would considerably help fix that situation.
Consider the fact that we have almost no national data on what American students know or can do until they reach 4th grade. Until then, our national education picture is pretty much a black box. Our state data is little better. While No Child Left Behind, passed in 2002, required states to collect and release more data on their schools’ performance, it allowed them to define most of the relevant variables. That is, math proficiency in Massachusetts had no connection to math proficiency in South Carolina, Hawaii, or Maine.
Does it matter that we can’t compare states’ educational performance? If we care about learning from those vaunted “laboratories of democracy,” then yes, it does. For instance, recent enthusiasm for expanding access to and improving the quality of early education programs has inspired a number of states red, blue, and purple to invest resources there. Given that there are ongoing efforts to expand federal early education investments, surely we have an interest in knowing whether these new state programs work. But if Michigan expands its pre-K program and Indiana doesn’t, the differences in what they teach and assess in their K–12 systems will make it harder to get serious comparative data on whether Michigan’s investment was comparatively worth it.
We often wistfully suggest that the American government should run more like American businesses. Would any CEO agree to have her managers evaluate their divisions against a wide variety of mission statements and inconsistent accounting standards? Of course not. But this is essentially what we do with American public education today.
All of this confusion, by the way, adds to the polarization of American education debates. The absence of reliable data makes it easier for all parties involved to pick and choose between partial, incommensurable data sets.
So take it easy: the Common Core isn’t likely to meaningfully change kids’ public school experiences in the coming years. And sorry, but it can’t solve many of our myriad educational problems. However, it can help us build a baseline of data reliability that will help organize what has traditionally been a stubbornly opaque system. That may not be rhetoric to stir the soul, but it’s probably closer to the truth than anything else you’ll hear about the Common Core in the coming months.
Conor P. Williams, PhD is a Senior Researcher in New America’s Early Education Initiative. Follow him on Twitter: @conorpwilliams. Follow him on Facebook.
Yes- it is important to bring the rhetoric down. But as someone who opposes the common core and does not fit into the crazy lot, I will say that my objections are not actually addressed by these arguments. Common core is poorly conceived and not adequately tested- it is mandated across the country without adequate attempts to develop it. (There should have been laboratory states/districts etc to test it before a full scale roll out) Teachers are being asked to teach to standards for which no material has been developed. They are then being tested and evaluated based on this incomplete system. Additionally- common core as it is implemented (in a desire to get the data cited here) doubles down on testing which is a terrible way to educate. My kids are tested for state data, teacher evaluations and school evaluations- they spend more time prepping for tests than learning. Great- there is data- but it also sucks the joy our of learning. Common core in its conception is about teaching critical thinking, but its implementation is the antithesis of this.
The analogy to business is telling- because the educational reformers come from business- and fundamentally do not understand that education is not run like a traditional business. Children need nurturing, down time and space for creativity - the arts etc are essential to developing complete human beings and citizens. But those things that cannot be quantified don’t count in common core. They don’s show up on the business spreadsheet because they cannot be quantified. So they are squeezed out. As a life long supporter of public education, I find myself looking for private schools for my kids to escape this mechanistic way of teaching and learning. In attempt to compete globally- the US has decided to import the Korean/Indian modes of education- ones that do not actually help nurture creativity and out of the box thinking (they come to the US for college for that!) . We should model our education after the Finnish system which ranks number one or two in the world, avoids standardized testing nearly altogether and teaches its students in an effort to help them become full citizens and not merely cogs in the machine.
“We often wistfully suggest that the American government should run more like American businesses.”
I think you left out a word. Surely this should read, “We Republicans often wistfully suggest that the American government should run more like American businesses.” And the rest of us react in horror at you Republicans for suggesting such an abhorrent notion.
We are a dumb nation and getting dumber. There is a move afoot to do away with public education and replace it with a two tiered system where the rich attend private schools of high quality and everyone else’s kids hang around deteriorating buildings being taught by uncertified energetic kids or retired brick layers as they wait for their dismal futures to begin in retail. Pushing kids to learn more basics faster is not a crime. Learning Algebra and Geometry and Biology and Reading and Writing are good ideas. Testing can easily be overdone or underdone. The real difference between a public school that will make productive use of something like Common Core (yes the roll out was hasty and incompetent) is number one the leadership of the school system and two money. In structuring educational programs the rule “money talks and bullshit walks” is relevant and many of the “creative” attempts at things like charter schools are nothing more than attempts to steal money from education. I don’t think Common Core is the problem, I think greed by the wealthy and laziness of school administrators are.
Declaration up-front here - I create middle and high school math textbooks for a living. This includes Common Core books back to 2009.
Common Core was not poorly developed, the folks who developed it generally have decades of experience, both in classrooms, and testing theories and approaches at the university level. Yes, they completed this surprisingly fast, but you are discounting the history they brought to bear in developing the standards. The team who developed the standards and their results are the strongest part of this project.
Teacher support is definitely a question since, like the prior, widely divergent state standards, teacher quality is also widely divergent. Often where teachers are sub-par, the teacher support by states and districts are often complicit in their failure. Holding these teachers/districts/states to a common standard merely points out these low points in our national education landscape. Compounding this, and this also applies in many “better” performing districts, standards are approached only as something to test against (teaching to the test). The idea behind CC is that you are not teaching to a test, the test is supposed to measure learning progress. In way too many schools this bipolar approach is par for the course - we have our class to teach, and now here’s something you need to do to pass the test. And that is why so many of the test questions appear bizarre to parents, because it isn’t a list of give me the answer problems, they are also looking at how students think through and get to an answer.
And finally, Where we probably agree is in the total BS of high-stakes testing. Unfortunately there are too many corporatist assholes who think business metrics to what is not an engineering task. There is too much fantasy about what education can accomplish for all students. Yes the CC standards are high, but they are designed to ensure that if you leave school competent by these standards, you are prepared to meet your future, and an asset to our national enterprise. Here’s the part nobody talks about, and all parents deny - somebody still needs to ask me if I want to super-size my meal. Not everyone can be a rocket scientist. And this becomes all to clear when you see the results of teaching to the CC.
It’s a shame the so-called public school “reformers” ripped off the term “Common Core” from the College of the University of Chicago, where, I can assure you, it was anything but boring. The REAL Common Core was a series of fascinating courses that provided every student in the College with a foundation in Social Science, the Humanities, and the Physical Sciences, regardless of what they would ultimately major in. It was the greatest learning experience of my life. But the “Common Core” Arnie Duncan, et al, are peddling is the exact opposite of this, stressing rote learning over critical thinking, and is, apparently, boring to boot! If I were the UofC, I would sue!