Editor’s note: This commentary is by Peter Berger, an English teacher at Weathersfield School, who writes “Poor Elijah’s Almanack.” The column appears in several publications, including the Times Argus, the Rutland Herald and the Stowe Reporter.
Suppose you’re standing on your roof. A bystander below assures you that if you jump off and flap your arms, you’ll flutter gently to the ground. You tell him you’re pretty sure you’ll drop like a stone, but he says not to worry. Your doubts, he explains, are all due to your misconceptions about gravity.
Don’t jump. You will drop like a stone. Calling your valid idea a misconception doesn’t make it a misconception.
This brings us to the Common Core State Standards.
If you’re wondering how we got from the edge of the roof to the Common Core, two polls surveying public opinion about education were released last week. According to a pro-Core education think tank that sponsored one of the polls, “the news is not good for proponents of the Common Core.” The Washington Post reports that these negative results “echo findings from other polls.”
At best 53 percent of Americans now “favor” the Common Core, a decline from nearly two-thirds last year. History teaches that for any national endeavor that hits close to home, like waging war, for example, the declining support of barely half the nation isn’t enough. Education reform is one of those endeavors. That’s why Core supporters are so alarmed.
In even less flattering Gallup results, nearly two-thirds of Americans oppose the Core, with parents more opposed than the general public. Support among teachers plummeted “in only one year from 76% to 46%,” all of which suggests that for most people, “the more they learn about the standards, the less they like them.”
While rejecting No Child Left Behind took Americans roughly a decade, a majority already know enough about the Common Core to conclude they don’t like it, which means there’s a chance we’ll waste fewer students’ lives this time. It might even mean Americans are getting better at recognizing bad education reforms.
The Core’s proponents haven’t given up the fight. In case you’re wondering what Core proponents look like, they’re the experts and officials who five years from now will be telling us why the Core was a bad idea, the same way they’re currently disowning No Child Left Behind, which was also their idea. Of course, by then they’ll be on to their next bad idea.
At present Core advocates counter all the opposition by attributing it to “misconceptions.”
This brings us back to the edge of the roof.
According to a recent NPR report, Americans mistakenly believe that the Core was “initiated by the federal government” and that it will both “result in a national curriculum and national tests,” and “limit what teachers can teach locally.”
The Common Core de facto does “limit what teachers can teach locally.” Any Core supporter who argues otherwise is being disingenuous. If I have to teach what’s on your test, you’re controlling what I teach.
Inconveniently for Core supporters, these aren’t misconceptions. Anyone who argues otherwise is either fooling himself or trying to fool someone else.
It’s true that the Common Core wasn’t legislated by Congress. Its godfather is Bill Gates, not the president. That hasn’t stopped the president from taking credit for “the most meaningful reform of our public schools in a generation.” He was referring to his Core-related Race to the Top initiative, administered by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. Secretary Duncan was less discreet than the president. He explicitly endorsed the Common Core as the “single greatest thing to happen to public education in America since Brown v. Board of Education.”
Race to the Top offered additional billions to states if they adopted “college and career-ready standards” that met federal education department expectations. While the regulations didn’t specifically require a state to adopt the Common Core, states that did sign on to the Core automatically qualified for the additional federal funds. Just so you can crack the code, the phrase “college and career ready standards” is lifted directly from the Common Core itself.
Imposing the Core worked exactly the way most federal education initiatives, including NCLB, do. If you want federal money, and in the middle of the Great Recession, what state didn’t, you accept federal strings. While it’s technically correct to maintain that the Common Core standards weren’t “initiated by the federal government,” even staunch Core supporters concede “there’s no denying that there were federal incentives for adopting the standards.”
In the same way, it’s legalistically correct to claim that the Common Core hasn’t imposed a uniform national test. It has, however, spawned two assessment consortia, Smarter Balanced and the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers. Thirty-four states are currently enrolled in those two Common Core aligned testing programs. Owing to exorbitant costs in money and lost instructional time, several are considering withdrawing from their consortia, and nine others already have. But that still leaves states searching for an assessment that’s “Common Core aligned.”
Education reformers, including Core proponents, are fond of saying, “Assessment drives instruction.” In other words, if you design and impose a test that students must take and pass, teachers have no choice but to teach the material on that test. If that material conforms to the Common Core, then the Common Core is what teachers must teach, especially since, thanks to regulations imposed by Mr. Duncan’s education department, teachers are judged by test results and can lose their jobs if too many of their students fail the test.
The Common Core de facto does “limit what teachers can teach locally.” Any Core supporter who argues otherwise is being disingenuous. If I have to teach what’s on your test, you’re controlling what I teach. Add to that constraint the mandated “shifts in instructional practice required by the Common Core State Standards.” These alleged “best practices” include many discredited reform favorites that Core supporters have yet again resuscitated.
As for being a “national curriculum,” that depends on how you define “curriculum.” Advocates quibble that the Core isn’t technically a curriculum, but if a document details specific skills and knowledge that must be taught and will be tested at each specific grade level, which the Common Core explicitly does, by most people’s definition that’s a curriculum.
There’s no disputing the “national” intent of the Common Core. The Core’s website explicitly states that the standards are intended to replace “the uneven patchwork of academic standards that vary from state to state.”
Whether or not you agree with that objective, the Common Core indisputably intends its standards to be “national.” It likewise indisputably intends to change both what students are taught and how teachers teach it.
These aren’t misconceptions. They’re the avowed purpose of the Common Core.
They’re real. Just like gravity.
The post Poor Elijah’s Almanack: Misconceptions that aren’t appeared first on VTDigger.