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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
I’d like to second this. I’ve TAd for an undergraduate legal history class and I have to say that I despaired at the inability of many supposedly well educated young men and women to compose a coherent sentence. My own view is that the reason for this poor quality writing is that most high school students are not expected to write much. Writing is hard, but the only way to become proficient is to write… a lot.
I’ve been a college prof, an adjunct, and a TA (and I just turned 30, so whohoo me!) and students do not write well because students do not write in school. When they do, it is often touchy feely journaling crap. These kids aren’t Pepys. My course covers 2 years of content (the only course in NY to do so) and covers all continents from the dawn of man to Iraq and Afghanistan. I cannot teach them to write simply out of time constraints. English needs to go back more to composition and less literary criticism/analysis. Hard to talk in depth about a work if you cannot string together a coherent sentence.
Yup. I’ve found that if I cannot write coherently about a topic it’s a good sign that I’m not thinking coherently about it either.
Math is an intimate skill, much like music.
I am all for a culture that produces lots of young Gausses, Newtons, Eulers, and Einsteins, but for that to happen, individualized academic instruction has to become more acceptable again.
In school bands and orchestras, the kids whose parents agree to pay for the group instruction, but not private lessons, are typically the least proficient. No surprise. It takes hugely outstanding talent to become a good musician without private lessons, and if you have that kind of talent, you’ll be an even greater musician if you do take private lessons.
Not that private lessons are the only solution.
Just as people who don’t think they have the money for tailored clothing can approximate tailoring by taking the time to try on a bunch of off-the-rack clothes till something fits, rich diversity in “off the rack” lessons (such as online lectures and books) can approximate private lessons for those who can’t afford a personal tutor but can sample various products.
As long as we’re talking math, one of our own, J Flei, has recorded an album of perfectly silly (but also charming) math songs. He’s a math teacher. If you had somehow forgotten the definition of slope, you will not be able to forget it after listening to his demo.
It is good that common core is so bad, or else we might be stuck with national education policies.
Even with the most benign or beneficial intent by everyone all the time, it would yet be a tragedy if all education in the country were to conform to one central standard. This is how innovation is lost and how bad ideas (even if innocently or benignly intended) get stuck in place with no counter example of why the ideas failed.
Add in that anything with government involvement is rarely benign or innocently intended any more and there is no reason why sane people should support any national standard for education.
“It is in its potential to improve the education of our poorest performing students that I think Common Core has merit.”
In theory.
Here’s are the problems with Common Core as those implementing it would like to implement it:
It imposes national standards which are watered-down by all accounts. One of the key designers of the testing protocols was an opponent of standardized testing. Swaths of testing (especially in mathematics) are eliminated, those that remain are made easier. This has been the trend for decades, but continuing it is hardly good.
The goal is to move funding from the best schools to the worst schools. Local school boards would lose control over their budgets, spending would be done at the regional level. While this might be appealing if the schools receiving more money (the worst performing ones) were restructured, that’s not part of the plan. There are no proposals to raze-and-replace poor performing districts, they’ll simply be given more money. In other words, the approach of subsidize failure and punish success will become national education funding policy.
The curriculum is being restructured to focus kids’ attention on social justice. Federalized socialist indoctrination, in other words. This is not a joke, or hysteria. Don’t believe it? Buy the book, attend the seminar. There are a world of resources available.
Common Core has been carefully crafted to seem appealing and un-objectionable. The underlying reality is deeply radical: it’s an attempt to wrest control of the Nations’ school systems from parents and put it in the hands of an unelected, unaccountable bureaucracy.
Clearly there’s no way that that will increase educational outcomes.
Perhaps we are asking the wrong questions. I spent years in the programming and systems worlds. We had many tools for root cause analysis. The issue I see in education and with this common core is that THE solution is proposed before the problem is really defined and before the roots of the problem have been analyzed. Very much like the scientific method, there are several steps:
Were the first four steps done here? Maybe they are solving a problem that doesn’t exist? Maybe they have the wrong diagnosis.
The other day, my car wouldn’t start. I popped the hood and noticed that the battery seemed to be foaming. I assumed a battery problem. I called for the mobile battery unit. Nope, not battery. Mechanic thought maybe starter, tried some tricks. Then I noticed the security device was loose. We would never fix the problem with battery or starter. I pushed in the security device, and it started right up.
As for the idea that Common Core is going to improve poor/under-preforming schools, think of it this way. We cut funding, impose expensive new tests, often computerized when most schools don’t have enough tech to begin with, and make the tests obtuse and not related to the lives kids are living. These students are already disengaged and feel as if school is not for them, oh and don’t forget, we make every student take them regardless of interest or ability. What could possibly go wrong?
Oh, and lets not forget that we put so much emphasis on these poorly constructed exams that we have kids who just give up. And, as a teacher, if your kids decide that they dont care about the exam and don’t study or don’t even show up for it, thats apparently the teacher’s fault and it is counted against them. Had one kid throw down his pencil during an exam once (not a bad student either) and exclaimed “Jesus, take the wheel!” Had all I could do to not burst out laughing.
Tuck, that’s my fear–a radical agenda.
Like Sal, I’m conflicted on the merits, but as a practical matter I think I’m opposed to CC.
NCLB had testing, standards, common curriculum, accountability, local input, and school choice. Yet here we are.
If NCLB worked, then the reason Common Core exists is to change NCLB -which worked -in which case we should be concerned that changing something that worked is usually not a sign that the people making the changes better.
If NCLB didn’t work, then I see no reason to believe the same factors which gutted NCLB will not in turn gut CC.
In either case, CC would be unwise. The only question is whether we should also repeal NCLB.
Regardless, the Federal Government has no interest in education. It never did. It’s interest is in narrowing educational gaps, employing teachers -especially women and minorities (this was actually a key point in the creation of DoE), and explicit redistribution of resources. Any educational achievement is entirely incidental.
Leave it to states and local governments who actually do care about educational returns.
I don’t think I’d get too worked up in terms of a radical agenda. They’re too incompetent to execute it directly. My students look at all this CC stuff and wonder why they have to do most of it and are quite skeptical of the centralized aspects of it. Most teachers I work with are hardly trying to indoctrinate students and frankly, I think parents if they are that concerned about it, need to better educate their kids at home to think for themselves and to challenge assertions from teachers respectfully. I know I always questioned what I was learning when I was in HS and college. I got through both without turning into a flaming liberal. If you’re concerned about the radical agenda, take a good look at colleges of education for reform. Also, I think conservatives abandoned academia years ago (for a multitude of reasons) and unchallenged thinking is what are are reaping from that harvest.
Plus, the whole EDU thing gives Dems another way to show how much they “care about the kids” since education is one of those issues that moms (and dads) get all worked up over and will work themselves to the bone in order to afford a house in a good district. While I think there should be some level of state standards, I think what is really necessary is to go back to a multiple pathways model where there are a number of different ways to get a high school degree. Not every kid needs a liberal arts approach and its sometimes hard for people of an academic bent of this approach (I’m academic myself, but I very much see the value of vocational training, my dad used to be a high-end carpenter and I’d kill for his skill set)
@Sabrdance. Repeal them both. Both are poorly constructed federal meddling of the worse kind.
@Sal. Sorry to comment so much and hijack this thread. Education means a lot to me and I think there is a lot of confusion about it amongst people.
Sounds like an answer to your other thread, Michael.
Agreed, actually. The moral education you give your kid at home can go a long way toward inoculating her against the sex, violence, Leftism, etc, she’d meet in a public school classroom. But you can’t inoculate your kid against having her time wasted by one-size-fits-all pedagogy. Wasted time is gone forever.
My parents made my life at school a living Hell by constantly fighting the system on what they saw as attempts to expose children prematurely to sex, violence, and messages that undermine parental authority. That I already had the moral framework to not be fooled by stories that included violence or ridiculous advice on sex or defying your parents apparently didn’t occur to them. I was the kid with the crazy SoCon parents (only they weren’t SoCons, just overprotective), and the battles they fought with the school mostly got taken out on me.
Everyone has to pick their battles. You can’t fight everything. Morality is important, but so is good pedagogy and ensuring that your child’s skills are trained rather than frustrated.
“Train up a child in the way HE should go…” In other words, each child is different and those glorious differences in abilities and talents should be understood and encouraged. Not crushed beneath the weight of some program created by some cockeyed jack-leg a thousand miles away with no responsibility or accountability to the parents of said child.
Let me just say that my oldest and youngest are 15 years apart in age. The socialization against my values that the youngest got was much worse that what the oldest got. The youngest is in college now. I have to disagree with several of you about socialization. It is very, very important, especially with so many states jumping on the marriage redefinition bandwagon. What does that lead to? Choose your gender and bathroom for one thing, but there’s much more. Professional adults don’t want that. Why force it on children? In Minnesota the legislature just passed “anti-bullying” legislation that is really just a gay agenda. California doesn’t require much in the way of history, but they do require gay history. Nothing against gay people, but right now they have an outsized and unjustified influence.
It’s naive to think you can counter at home what they are getting at school. You’re the parent. Once they reach a certain age, they take about a 10 year hiatus from listening to what you have to say. And trust me, the kind of socialization you don’t want can be subtle and therefore all the more effective.
If you really cannot counter the cultural influences they get at a school, why waste your energy futilely trying? Why not just leave that school?
If the culture of that school is really that dangerous to your children, aren’t you abdicating parental responsibility by not pulling your children out?
This is exactly correct. You (Sal) stated that you were unconvinced that teaching to the test was bad, but you were more sympathetic to the notion that Common Core would reduce parental involvement. Then later you went on to admit that Common Core would have little effect in affluent communities and would be most effective in poorer communities. That strikes me as a contradiction. If anything, Common Core will increase parent involvement in those wealthier communities exactly because it is so unpopular. Parents will become more involved to be sure their kids aren’t being brainwashed. In the poor communities, parents will continue not to care.
Further, I wouldn’t be so quick to abandon your federalist principals. If you can make the case for a nationwide system for education, you can make it for anything. It is clear to me that a single system or standard doesn’t work from one kid to the next, much less one community to the next.
Midge, I would not put my kids in public schools now. When my older kids were in school they were OK. I’m sorry I sent my youngest one to public schools. We didn’t realize how bad things were getting, and I don’t see that improving.
Fair enough. At this point, I think simply leaving is the best choice.
Common Core … hmm, I think I’ve seen this movie before. It was called No Child Left Behind. It promised high standards, teacher accountability, standardized testing, and other smart-sounding words. But what happened was (spoiler alert!) teachers hated it, students stressed over the tests, schools desperately tried to get out of it, and by the time the credits rolled, there were still a bunch of children left behind. I think the people who created Common Core believed NCLB flopped because there wasn’t enough testing, credentialing, standardizing, govermentalizing, and red-taping. If the Common Core sequel is anything like the first movie (which it sure seems to be), don’t expect the ending to be any different.
You’ve nothing to be sorry about. I’ve appreciated your input.
Why is students stressing over tests a bad thing? I would argue that one of the reasons we don’t do particularly well compared to other developed countries is that we don’t place nearly enough pressure on our students to perform. A little more stress may not be the worst thing.
I think it’s far past a fear. It’s a certainty.
Whether stressing over tests is a bad or good thing depends on the individual student. Some people’s problem is overconfidence and laziness, other people’s problem is having their reason unseated by fear.
Either way, more training in performance probably wouldn’t hurt American students. Pressure to perform isn’t exactly the same as useful training in performance, but if people think performance is important enough, they’ll hopefully seek out useful training to improve it.
I’m not a teacher myself, but I’ve heard from several teachers I know personally how they hate that teaching has become “all about the test.” Funding is so closely tied to test scores that the higher-ups put enormous pressure on teachers which inevitably gets passed on to students (too much in my opinion). When millions of dollars are riding on whether little Johnny answers A or B on a test, you betcha he’s going to be pressured.
I see pressure in education like air pressure in a tire. Some is good, but too much and the tire bursts. I’m sure many school districts have found good balance, but where I am, we’ve seen music, art, PE, and all the other things that make a well-rounded learner be shoved out in favor of teaching only what’s on the test. As someone who loves to learn, that makes me sad to watch.
“Common Core is likely to improve the education of students in our lower performing schools…”
Then why not impose Common Core on just the under-performing schools, and leave the rest alone?
Perhaps its because fixing just the broken parts of education is not really the point of Common Core. The point, it sure seems, is to break the whole system so that the “experts” can remake it to their liking. I have teacher friends who are good teachers in good schools who are having to change everything they do to make it Common Core approved and teach to the new tests. Their students were learning, but the “experts” seem to think they know better. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right? Nah, that would be too much common sense for Common Core.