Until Sunday night “common core” was for me just two more words in the abstruse lexicon of pedagogy. But then at the tail end of a party at my house a young couple began to debate it.
“Everybody I know hates it,” asserted a teacher in a Los Lunas public school.
“But my instructor says it’s wonderful,” replied a student teacher in Albuquerque.
What added a piquant note to the debate was that this pair of teachers is engaged to be married.
The same debate that is dividing this young couple is splitting the state and the nation. It is part of the subtext that has so tied the Legislature in knots that it has been unable even to approve a state budget for next year. It is a key part of the emotional battles that have brought hundreds of teachers and parents to Santa Fe to demonstrate at the Roundhouse in recent days. And it surely will play a part in the gubernatorial election later this year in which Republican Gov. Susana Martinez will be in the odd position of defending “common core” against a still-to-be-nominated Democratic opponent.
Her position is in some respects odd because until recently most of the opposition to common core came from Republicans who denounced it as a federal takeover of education, while Democrats supported it as a way of reducing the yawning education chasm between white and minority students and between prosperous and poor school districts.
Of late, however, liberals in states as diverse as Colorado and New York are starting to criticize common core along with many New Mexico liberals, including a large number of teachers.
Contrary to popular misunderstanding (including my own) common core is not a curriculum but a set of standards. And contrary to many Republicans, it was not developed or implemented by the federal government. It was created by two committees of governors and state educators, and implemented by each individual state. The federal government, however, did provide financial incentives for reform as part of another program called Race to the Top.
So far, 45 states and the District of Columbia have signed up for the full panoply of English and math standards; Minnesota has only agreed to the English standards; Texas, Nebraska, Virginia and Alaska have rejected the standards and opted to develop their own. The standards will not take full effect until 2015, when nationwide testing modules will be available for the first time, but New Mexico and most other states have already begun the process of implementing them.
Hand in hand with that implementation, however, has gone controversy. A Denver Post article last week noted the national controversy is gaining momentum. And the New York Times in an article published Monday described how even many liberals in New York are souring on a program they once touted.
The Common Core Math and English Language Arts Standards are an effort to develop a set of uniform guidelines for what teachers should teach and students should learn in each grade from elementary school through high school. It has been a unique example of a major program enjoying bipartisan congressional support in the Obama era. Both the president and his secretary of education, Arne Duncan, are strong supporters, although they have steered clear of specific controversies in individual states.
Duncan has in fact pulled off a feat that would do credit to an Olympic acrobat. He has remained extremely close to his president, both personally and politically, while winning the votes of congressional Republicans for new programs and increased budgets.
Common Core grew out of the manifest failure of No Child Left Behind. The latter program stemmed from initiatives taken by several states, notably Texas under Gov. George W. Bush. When Bush became President, he took over a Democratic congressional initiative and made it his own. Unfortunately, he never demanded that Congress provide the funds that had been originally authorized and that were necessary to enable school districts to make radical changes. In the absence of such major funding, the deadlines imposed by the law became increasingly unrealistic and a majority of children failed to pass the tests.
Stating in 2009, the common core was developed as an alternative way of both improving overall education and raising the level of students in the worst schools. Surveys had shown that the top bracket of American students did work comparable to their peers in other developed countries while the majority of students were receiving a grossly inferior education.
Although the common core focuses only on English language arts and math standards, a follow-on program called Next Generation Science Standards is being developed to address science and social studies.
Controversy surrounding the common core stems from many aspects of the program. Some teachers criticize the content. A New York special ed teacher said she was required to ask her class to draw a picture of the word “nobody.” She added, “It made no sense.”
Others say the standards require accelerated learning by the youngest students that is too much for them to handle.
But the major objections to common core involve not so much its content as its linkage and implications.
The way the common core is to be evaluated is through testing. Teachers will be judged—and either rewarded or penalized—on the basis of this student testing. Because the testing will be so supremely important, teachers will teach to the test. Thus what officially are only “standards” will be converted into a curriculum.
Despite all these objections, the fact still stands that nearly all the states are adopting the new standards, and they are doing so because they recognize their educational systems have failed and are desperately seeking another—almost any other—alternative.
It seems to me, however, that this newest pedagogical miracle worker will prove no more successful than its predecessors because of the flawed way we perceive education in the United States.
We tend to see schools as an entirely separate division of a kid’s life rather than a seamless part of the whole. We tend to dump problems on the schools that can’t be solved by schools because they don’t originate in the schools. It is typical of American education that when society finally decided in the 1950s that segregation was intolerable we tackled it by simply integrating the schools. It took another decade (or more) for us to come to grips with racial discrimination in voting, housing and public accommodations.
If you compare the American education system with more successful ones in Europe and Asia, you see several differences.
There, teachers are authoritative mentors, respected by students, parents and society as a whole.
The teacher’s responsibility does stop when the class bell rings in the afternoon. If there is a problem in the family, she calls in relatives and, if necessary, goes to see them. Families understand that they have a social and legal obligation to be involved with children’s education.
A teacher tries to find out why a lagging student is not learning and then does something about it.
It is not assumed that all students learn alike. Those who would be better off learning trades rather than attending college do so without feeling humiliated.
A German teacher told me many years ago, “You throw away a third of your students as hopeless. We don’t think we can afford that kind of human waste.”
February 18, 2014