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Conflicted on Common Core
Recently, Troy Senik suggested that Common Core has the potential to be the sleeper issue in the 2016 Republican presidential primary race. Common Core, which effectively establishes uniform educational standards for English and math on a national level, is deeply unpopular among elements of the Right and it certainly has the potential to be a major factor in the selection of the next Republican presidential candidate.
Honestly, I haven’t paid a great deal of attention to the issue until now. I don’t have children, my own education was largely private, and is, in any case, completed. That said, Common Core is going to be a major issue facing our nation as a matter of both politics and policy. Consequently, I’ve been trying to determine my own position on the matter.
I have to say I’m conflicted. I have serious principled concerns about the extension of federal involvement in the education, but at the same time I have to say that I find it hard to believe that a program which is both opposed by the NEA and supported by education reformers such as Michelle Rhee is an unambiguously bad idea.
As a matter of general principle I’m skeptical Common Core on grounds of both limited government and federalism. I don’t really think the state should be providing education at all, but if it’s going to do so it seems to me to be a matter constitutionally left to the states. Since Reagan, the GOP has fantasized about doing away with the Department of Education and the establishment of a national curriculum via Common Core is certainly a step away from the realization of that goal. On a more practical level I’m concerned the Common Core will lead to less accountability on the part of educators, as it will inevitably entail greater layers of bureaucracy and less responsiveness to the concerns of local constituencies and parents. I also disapprove of the way Common Core is being used as a Trojan horse to achieve a national curriculum when there is no political mandate for one.
As far as the substantive elements of Common Core go, I’m not sure where I stand. Criticism of the Common Core standards has come from both directions. Some critics claim that Common Core standards are not stringent enough and that will lead to a dumbing down of American public education. Others assert, just as strenuously, that the standards are unreasonably high, placing impossible expectations upon already overburdened students. Based upon my own cursory research it seems as though neither criticism is wholly valid or wholly without merit. The expectations set by Common Core appear to be less stringent than those found in our high-performing public schools, but dramatically more demanding than those found in low-performing schools.
This brings me to where I see the potentially positive arguments for Common Core. Setting aside my principled objections to public education in general and and federal involvement in education specifically, there is a very practical question of how we best educate our nation’s children.
America’s public education system is nowhere near as good as it should be, but neither is it the unmitigated disaster that many people claim to be. We don’t stand atop the PISA rankings, but we’re not at the bottom either. Compared to his peers in comparable countries the average American student is mediocre.
However, evaluating American education based on average PISA scores masks the true problem with our educational system. The problem is not that the average American student is mediocre when compared to his peers around the world. It is that our lowest-performing students fare much worse than their international peers. American education isn’t uniformly bad, it’s just that where it is bad it is spectacularly so. It is in its potential to improve the education of our poorest performing students that I think Common Core has merit.
Two of the most frequent criticisms of Common Core which I have encountered are 1) that it eliminates the ability of local school boards to tailor their educational approaches to best fit their students’ needs, forcing them instead to “teach to the test”; and 2) that it diminishes teachers’ accountability to the parents of the students they are educating. I don’t find either of these criticisms particularly compelling.
I simply do not see why locally-established curricula are necessarily preferable to national standards on a practical level. As I see it, the more relevant question is whether the standards applied are appropriate and the curricula effective. One of the major reasons so many of our schools, particularly in the Democratically-controlled inner-cities, perform so poorly is that the standards set in place by the local school boards are simply too low. Imposing the higher standards established by Common Core would seem to me to be an improvement.
I also don’t find much merit in claims that local educational authorities need flexibility to tailor their curricula to their particular student bodies in order to educate them effectively. It’s undeniably true that we live in a vast and diverse country, but the techniques needed to successfully teach children to read, write, and do sums should not vary dramatically based on locality. (There is not a particularly Southern Californian method of long division.) Furthermore, I have genuinely never understood the objection to “teaching to a test.” If the goal is to teach children to read, write, and do sums what is wrong with teaching to a test of a student’s ability to read, write, and do sums?
I am more sympathetic to concerns that Common Core will reduce accountability to parents. Parental involvement is crucial to the successful education of children. That said one of the main problems with our low-performing schools is that they are in impoverished communities where the level of parental involvement is low and teachers face little accountability in practice. In such cases, federal accountability, though by no means ideal, is preferable to no accountability at all.
As you may have noticed, most of my analysis of Common Core has been focused on its effects on low-performing schools. This is because I think the practical effects of Common Core will largely be on low-performing schools. In middle-class and affluent communities with comparatively high quality public schools I do not think the effect of Common Core will be particularly significant.
It’s true that the standards established by Common Core will often be lower than those currently in practice at quality public schools, but that will not necessarily lead to a lowering of the caliber of the education those schools provide. As things currently stand, high-performing schools provide an education which exceeds the standards established by state and local authorities. I think it likely that where Common Core standards fall below those currently in place they will have little effect, much the way the minimum wage has little effect on the income of doctors or lawyers.
Similarly, I think Common Core will have little effect on teacher accountability to parents in high-performing schools. Accountability is largely a factor of parental involvement and I don’t think parents who currently taking an active role in their children’s education will cease to do so as a result of Common Core.
So here’s where I’m at:
I think the Common Core is likely to improve the education of students in our lower performing schools while not having much effect on their peers in better performing schools. I’m rather ambivalent about the practical merits of local control of education, but I have a strong principled inclination to favor it and I strongly disapprove of the extra-democratic means by which Common Core is being implemented. I’m still not sure where I ultimately come down on the issue.
Can anyone on Ricochet help me out?
Published in General
Common Core is clearly adversely affecting the curriculum via the new “standards”. Maybe a bad teacher is contributing to the problem, but my daughter told me that she learned more and read more books three years ago in her freshman year. The only change is the new standards.
In an AP class the standards are AP standards. They are not influenced by Common Core. That your daughter’s AP English class is insipid is a serious problem, but it is not the result of Common Core. The AP standards which she is supposed to being taught are substantially higher than those found in Common Core. What you’ve described is not a result of low Common Core standards. It is a failure on the part of the teacher to teach to any standard, much less the AP one. Three books a year wouldn’t even come close to meeting Common Core.
I do have to wonder about standards generally. In any given class a teacher will have a broad range of abilities and levels achieved. I’ve had teacher friends tell me that the CC standards are wildly unrealistic for some students while others can go way beyond them. Simply setting the standards does not change this. Standardized testing is already done in most if not all schools in the country. Teachers, students and schools administrators figure out wherein they are lacking based on the results of those. How is setting these standards going to help with any of this?
I am suspicious that they started with math and English because these are less controversial subjects than science and history, which cover sex ed, evolution or intelligent design and the interpretation of the past, particularly American history. People care very much about how these things are taught. They want to establish themselves with the less controversial topics and move on to control the others. There is no reason to trust the busybody feds on any of this.
Where in the standards do you find this? My son is in the third grade and I’ve seen nothing in the materials that would indicate this was an emphasis.
Mainly I’m suspicious of Common Core because I sense it’s a distraction. A non-solution.
Mention anarcho-capitalism even once favorably, and people suspect you of being a closet nihilist. That’s not actually how I feel about most things, but when it comes to our current school system, yeah, I’d probably get pleasure from seeing it annihilated. Burn, baby, burn.
Salvatore, I’m with you: this is a symptom of sloth and incompetence in an “AP” class.
Everything from the common cold to hangnails have been attributed to Common Core. It is the boogeyman.
The problem with Common Core is that it limits choice and will ultimately promote to the lowest common denominator. If every school is required to follow Common Core, how can you send a child to a “better” school. The underlying problem with Common Core is that it is “common”.
Please don’t tell me that this is not what Common Core is supposed to embody. It is what it will become. We have a track record beginning October 19, 1979 showing that federal oversight of Education is detrimental to the student in so many ways.
This is the most reasonable criticism of Common Core. There is little that is objectively wrong with the standards. However, the standards have little to do with whom will succeed.
Case in point: who are the only two kids in my son’s 3rd grade class who have memorized addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division through 10? My son — the adopted son of a IT guy and recovering bond portfolio manager — and the boy from India. Almost everyone else is hopelessly behind. And you can imagine why: he does his drills every morning before school (just imagine what the Indian kid does).
If the parents don’t care — or can’t/won’t comprehend the instructions — nothing will work.
I’m skeptical that the feds would actually de-fund a failing inner-city school. The standards will be fudged and the teacher unions will block any serious reform, as they do now. It appears to me that Common Core is directed more at instilling government-approved “values” into education. The SAT is already preparing to adapt to the Common Core curriculum, which has the potential of magnifying the importance of these “values,” not only to public school students, but to anyone who aspires to a college education. Private school students won’t be spared.
It is my understanding that the AP courses are being realigned to accommodate CC standards. Yes, they are also changing the SAT and the ACT For CC as well.
I’m less concerned about the influence of Common Core on the SAT and ACT. The purposes of those tests is more to differentiate the students taking them from one another than it is to objectively assess their knowledge. Clever and hardworking students do better on pretty much any standardized test than do their slow or lazy peers.
I’ve two thoughts about this. The first is that since Common Core standards are higher than those found in most locales it should involve an increase in the rigor of AP courses which had previously been based on the lower standards. AP standards will remain more demanding than the standards applied to normal classes.
The second is that this realignment has not yet taken place, so you cannot blame Common Core for your daughter’s AP class. I hate to harp on this, but it really sounds as though the teacher in question has abdicated his or her responsibility to educate your daughter to the AP (or really any) standard. As I wrote in the original piece, parental involvement is crucial to children’s education. Have you considered raising your concerns with your daughter’s teacher or the school administration?
Likewise, confident students will do better than nervous ones. Of course, confidence is also something of interest to colleges, since, all else being equal, the more confident you are, the better you’ll do in college. (Sheer arrogance is worth a letter grade was the way some people at my college chose to put it.)
That’s how I made it through school.
Wow, I have never had it suggested that I am an uninterested parent.
That was not my meaning. I was suggesting that you had misdiagnosed the reason that your daughter’s AP class lacks intellectual rigor. If the reason was Common Core, there would be nothing you could do. Since it can’t be Common Core there might be something which can be done to change the situation.
Indeed, “If the reason was Common Core, there would be nothing you could do.” I think this points to a problem inherent in having too many centralized standards. When parents believe that they can’t do much to influence their child’s education because they perceive the bulk of their child’s education as occurring under the aegis of some centralized standard, they have less incentive to try, even when it might matter.
If, more often than not, what goes on in school seems out of parents’ control, then even active, engaged parents may miss the problems that are under their control, since even good parents can’t be omniscient and are better off going with the assumption that generally works.
The result is more passive, disengaged parents.
Centralization tends to impede people’s sense of efficacy, and insufficient self-efficacy really screws you up.
That’s a valid point, but I’m not sure that it’s hugely at play in the case of Common Core. Common Core sets standards for achievement. It does not set curricula. Parents retain their influence when it comes to curricula, which are still set locally. Does it matter whether the parents’ perception of inefficacy is inaccurate?
If you are a student aspiring to a top-tier school you are not competeing against slow or lazy peers. Your test score might be just slightly inferior to that of a very clever and hardworking student thoroughly immersed in Common Core-inspired “values.”
Where are you getting the idea that Common Core is about “values?” If you could provide some evidence of this it would go a long way to persuading me that Common Core is a bad thing. Based on everything I’ve been able to find out about it, Common Core is about setting proficiency standards for Math and Language Arts and that those standards are rigorous and reasonable. If that is the case (and I’m open to evidence that it isn’t), it shouldn’t handicap students from non-CC schools as long as they understand Math and Language Arts.
It may not be hugely in play, but I sense it’s always an issue with centralization. Moreover, because teaching to the test is so effective, the way a test measures achievement does have some influence over curriculum: people tend to choose curricula that get better test results.
Minor example: AP science labs have no practical lab portion. My AP Chem teacher noticed that the more time he spent on labs, the worse his students’ AP scores were, so he assigned minimal labwork in AP Chem.
I agree with you on this, but I think it’s an argument for making the test good. If you want students to be able read, write, and do sums, test their ability to read, write, and do sums. This is my understanding of what Common Core seeks to achieve.
It’s the Federal government’s nose into the public education tent. In the past week I read Obama threatening to revoke the No Child Left Behind waiver of any state that bailed from Common Core.
Maybe it even does seem reasonable, now. It won’t after the Left and it’s handmaidens in the teacher’s unions have several decades to tweak it to their satisfaction.
Ultimately however it is just rearranging the deck chairs on the SS Government School Empire. The only real remedy is true school choice in the form of vouchers (which would be a state matter). Until then it’s all mouth music and Kabuki theater.
Well, in general, having an approximately accurate perception of your own efficacy is important for success in life. Approximately accurate – if you’re off a little, it’s better to overestimate your efficacy than underestimate it (which might explain why sheer arrogance is worth a letter grade).
Being really off in estimating your efficacy is trouble, whether you over- or under-estimate. Working really hard at a task that’s ultimately futile (overestimation) rips away the time and energy you have for other, less-futile things. Having near-zero confidence in your ability to improve what’s actually under your control (underestimation) likewise tends to squander your resources.
In other words, perhaps, grossly mis-estimating your own efficacy in a matter has the usual problems associated with gross misperception of reality. (Including insanity, if it’s bad enough.)
Your prior beliefs and experiences influence your sense of efficacy, and if you’re unlucky enough, your priors may make mis-estimating your own efficacy look like the most reasonable choice. I could give some concrete examples of this, but am sort of out of space.
But isn’t legal monopoly usually associated with decreased product quality?
Tests are a product like anything else, and their accuracy in measuring prior achievement, future likelihood of success (which is something else), etc, etc, can presumably be improved much like any product.
There is a natural demand for tests that effectively measure achievement in the 3 R’s. What are the chances that testing standards imposed from on high by some government committee would be better than testing standards that evolved freely to satisfy this demand?
I think that’s the best argument against Common Core.
I think it’s less a question of imposition versus market based standards than it is one of who is imposing the standards. As a result, I don’t necessarily think that locally imposed standards are inherently superior to federally imposed standards. They often aren’t. While I share your skepticism of centralization I think that when it comes down to particular instances the more important question is which set of standards is better.
I think you are underestimating the potential impact [from WaPo]:
There are clear signs that the tests will not be limited to language arts and math. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, in his 2010 presentation “Beyond the Bubble Tests” states that “the study of science, history, foreign languages, civics and the arts” should be considered part of the “vital core” and deserve to be assessed.
I am not confident that curricula for any of these subjects will emerge free from a thorough drenching in progressive values.
Right now, yes. But I hope one day it won’t be.
It’s still easier to move to another village than it is to move to another country.
Of course, even moving to another village is a much bigger pain in the butt than switching to another local provider if one exists, and can be prohibitive. (As my parents found out. Living in an expensive “good” school district meant no extra money for private tuition if public school failed.)
Possibly. There’s not always an obvious balance between case-by-case merits and general principle.
Some weeks ago, one of the Ricochetti linked to a video clip of a recent in-service for math teachers that suggested using a 5-step process of approximations using “friendly numbers” to solve “32-12= x”. It almost caused flashbacks to so-called “New Math” of the 1960s. It seems to me that there’s a great deal of room for idiosyncrasy and/or ‘dumbing-down’ in a situation such as this.