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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 have little to no control over my curriculum as it is all state dictated and I have students who feel as if school isn’t important and students who have been passed on for years without acquiring the necessary literacy skills, whose parents pull them out of school for extra vacation times, over 50% of my school is on free and reduced lunch. I have kids who have dirt floors in their houses and live in a culture that glorifies ignorance, but yeah, I am the one who is responsible to people who cannot even be bothered to pay the remotest interest to the one thing that will ensure their children will have a better life.
Teachers at this point have been turned into cogs in an incredibly poorly designed machine. Those who are responsible for this are insulated from any judgement, and it falls to teachers in the classroom to implement a nonsense system forced upon us by “the experts” who sent their kids to schools that wouldn’t touch this stuff.
In other words, its hard to sell bathing suits and sunblock in winter, which is about what we are being asked to do.
And students do have a responsibility to come to school with at least some desire to learn and parents do have some responsibility to ensure their children come to school prepared. Schools cannot create that all on their own. Society and the community have a responsibility to instill value in education instead of glorifying the antithesis.
I welcome observations and evaluations, but they need to be valid and they need to take into account the fact that we are not all teaching in the suburbs of NYC with huge budgets and stable home lives with parents and students who value education and know its value. Education is something that needs to almost be a local issue in that the conditions in one town versus the next can be staggering and large bureaucracies are too inefficient and removed from the situation to really know what is going on on the ground.
@ Sal.
As per the tenure thing, I am of two minds about it. Try teaching in a small town school and have a board member’s child not do well in your class and see what happens. It can protect incompetence, but tenure is not a lifetime guarantee, it merely means there has to be a 3020a hearing and there has to be justification for removal. If admins do a better job of observing/mentoring talent, tenure would not really be much of an issue. In NY, you have 3 years (and sometimes a 4th year) where you can dismiss any teacher at any time without cause. Rare is the teacher who works hard for 3 years and then just stops.
I don’t doubt that that is the case, but the original purpose of tenure was to protect university level academics who published controversial things. One of the roles of institutions of higher education is to expand the frontiers of human knowledge through innovative research and original thought. Originality and innovation can be unpopular and in order to incentivize and protect them we provide those academics from whom we expect originality or innovation with tenure. It is not about their teaching. We don’t expect groundbreaking or original academic work from primary and secondary school teachers. Indeed, I would argue that a high school or elementary school teacher who is engaged in the sort of controversial work tenure is designed to protect is doing his or her students a disservice. Everybody would prefer to have job security, but there is nothing about teaching which makes it particularly in need of the protections of tenure.
Too many words. There is no “almost” about it. It is and has to be a local issue.
Michael,
No one has complete control over their work environment. Salesmen do not have any say over the production quality of the product they sell and they have to deal with customers who do not value what they are selling, doctors have to operate within confines set by the state, insurance companies, hospitals, etc… Teachers are not unique in this.
I disagree Sal. People are irrational sometimes when it comes to their own children and without tenure, there is a very good chance of schools becoming another hotbed of cronyism with high teacher turn over with boards pressuring hiring/firing decisions. What about places in the south that would willingly fire teachers who dare teach evolution? How about here in the liberal northeast where uttering support for traditional marriage could lead to termination? How about firing people who have been around too long and make too much money in the opinion of some? What about communities like mine where if I disciplined or failed a kid playing basketball, I could lose my job because of idiotic public outrage?
I have seen it attempted. Years ago, probably in the early 1970’s, there was a kindergarten teacher who was approaching retirement. The principal decided that she could save the district money by trumping up charges to fire the teacher before that retirement happened. I believe that the teacher did have tenure, although I don’t really know what the contract was at the time. So, the principal had to trump up charges that she was abusing the children.
Another woman who was a labor relations representative for management at a local factory heard about it and championed the kindergarten teacher’s cause. By the end of it, the school district had to hire the kindergarten teacher back, compensate her for lost time, and she only had to work one day before receiving her retirement.
@Klaatu.
Teaching is not sales. Teaching is not a business venture. I do not think you and I will ever see eye to eye on this. I think teaching is a special case when it comes to employment, perhaps that is my own bias, but I firmly believe that the current impulse to run schools like a business will result in disaster, especially for students who will be deemed “too expensive” to teach or students who will be deemed to have a low ROI, so why bother?
People are not uniquely irrational when it comes to education. The arguments for tenure in primary and secondary education are not really different than those in any other profession. Why should teachers have more protection from (even idiotic) public outrage than everyone else? Now it could be argued that all workers should have greater job security akin to that possessed by tenured teachers, but I think that would be disastrous for our economy and a serious infringement on personal liberty.
I think schools should teach evolution, but I think a teacher who takes it upon himself to teach evolution (or creationism if the situation was reversed) when it has been purposefully excluded from the curriculum should be fired. I can’t imagine why a primary or secondary school teacher should be advocating his personal position on marriage (either way) in class. Laying off more costly employees first happens in many other industries. What makes teachers different so as to justify a unique exemption for them? Even without tenure, if you were fired for properly failing a basketball star you would have an excellent wrongful termination suit.
OK, lets just say that tomorrow, we eliminate tenure for all k-12 teachers. On top of everything else that goes with this job, who in their right mind would EVER set foot in a classroom? One utterance from a kid saying “he touched me” and you’d be out the door with no defense since the school would never want the hassle of defending you. I’m sure no kid would ever make that up to get back at a teacher “who doesn’t like me” or “was like totally unfair and failed me”. I didn’t sign up for the job because of tenure (I have some issues with it) but I sure as hell wouldn’t stick around without it. Putting my professional reputation in the hands of 15 year olds is already risky.
Who said any of those opinions had to be in a classroom? As a teacher, you are a very public face in a community and the smaller the community, the more it seems to know your every step. I have a girlfriend who I’ll be living with soon before we get married, perhaps that is a violation of a new “morality clause” and I could be dismissed for it. If I were to attend a rally or have a yard sign on my lawn, I could be punished for that speech. Curriculum is sometimes very vague and can be interpreted in a number of ways. What happens if an English teacher wants to teach The Giver but it is a “banned book”?
I guess all I am saying is, with the denigration of teachers that is prevalent nowadays, and with the elimination of tenure, you’d see a collapse in good, competent teachers and it would become a temp job. I just do not think that eliminating tenure is going to create this panacea of good schools now that all those “bad teachers” are gone. Which brings me to another point, how does one define a bad teacher? Perhaps my teaching style does not match with a particular kid, does that mean that I am a bad teacher or just not the right teacher for that student at that time? Are there bad teachers? Yes. Does tenure protect some bad ones? Yes. But I wager you’d have a larger problem keeping talented people without it. The pay and conditions are already terrible in many places and if you had to go in there every day with the fear that someone could come in and fire you at any moment, why would you? Why would any talented young person set foot in a classroom? The problems we face are not caused by schools, but by the society in which those schools exist.
“Sometimes a sword is just a sword, a lance is just a lance, and a spear is just a spear.” — James Branch Cabell
I’m not trying to denigrate teachers and I agree with you that retaining good teachers is difficult. I’d be perfectly happy to trade increased teacher pay (preferably with a strong performance component) for the elimination of tenure. Making good teaching a more financially rewarding career while eliminating protections for poor teachers seems to me to be a no-brainer. I don’t think eliminating tenure is a panacea. I do think tenure does more harm than good.
Sal,
I know you are not denigrating teachers, I was speaking of a larger cultural trend “those who can’t, teach” etc. As for performance pay, its generally too low to be of motivating value and can vary from year to year based on the group of kids you have each year. Last year my pass rate dropped like 15 pts because its a particularly unmotivated class and its small (70 or so kids) so instead of the high 80 to low 90% pass rate on the state exam, I had like 73%. So, 3-5 kids can make a huge difference. Did I suddenly become bad? Who would ever want to teach students with special needs or behavioral issues? Should I be paid less for that year? What if there is pressure from admin to just pass them along so everyone gets their bonus or so that everyone doesn’t get punished. I do not think “throw more money at us” is the solution, I am not a union shill, but I have yet to see a decent eval metric that takes into account the incredibly varied conditions even within a school, let alone across a district or state.
Michael- All of the situations you have described where in the absence of tenure you could potentially be fired are ways in which the vast majority of people in other employment situations already can be fired. What your argument seems to come down to is that you think people who choose to make their living as teachers should enjoy far greater degrees of job security than those in virtually every other profession. I just don’t see why that should be the case.
Tenure is merely a guarantee of a hearing. You can still be dismissed for cause. It is not a lifetime guarantee of a job. The fact that the legal system is expensive is hardly my fault. If admin did a better job of screening people (and frankly teachers did a better job of self-policing/mentoring), we’d have less issues. I hardly think that having due process before being fired is the giant hurdle some seem to think it is to educational progress. Most people are pretty happy with their schools, but “others seem to be bad”. The real problem we have is in urban education where I do not profess to have the answers by any means.
And I wonder sometimes if teachers unions did not give so heavily to the Dems if there would be the uproar about them on the right.
Would you support changing the current default of at will employment to one of universal tenure?
I agree with you on this.
I think it’s more of a principled opposition to public sector unions generally.
I think if you really boil all this down, you see a clear dividing line that illustrates the difference between thinking on the right, and thinking on the left. If you think like the left, then you see a problem, poor performing schools, and you want to create a system to fix that. You think that the system you create should be mandated from the highest authority, to ensure kids everywhere have an equal chance to succeed. If you think like the right, you see a problem and you want the people closest to that problem to fix it. You don’t want a system that is mandated from the top down. If a school in Sandusky, Ohio is under-performing compared to some national average, you want the parents and school board in Sandusky, Ohio to evaluate and fix. And if they choose not to, you say “Well, that’s their problem.”
These are fundamentally opposing views, and it’s easy to see the dividing line if we are talking about economic policy or welfare. But somehow it gets blurry when we start talking about education.
Michael,
I’m not suggesting teaching is sales, just that it is not unique in having to operate in and be accountable for things not completely within your control.
Teachers (in general) are unique in their insistence that these variables prevent them from being held accountable for the quality of their work.
I may sound like an uncaring jerk, but if the good people of Sandusky, Ohio, choose to not take action with a failing school, I’m ok with that. I’m not willing to throw out my small government principles because some poor child will not learn the skills they need to make it in life. Do I want for that to happen? No. But I’m not willing to allow the federal government and the national teacher’s union any more involvement in my kids’ day to day lives than they already have, because someone thinks that a national set of standards is going to fix that poor kids problem. Even if I believed it would fix the kid’s problem, which I don’t, I wouldn’t change my view. That is precisely because I see the education of my children as being my sole responsibility. It’s helpful there are schools that take on the burden of doing the education, but it my job to ensure it get’s done. And just because some jake of a parent somewhere doesn’t do their job, doesn’t mean I’m not doing mine.
There is certainly a degree of truth to the point you make about the distinction between local and national solutions and I agree with you that as a matter of sound federalist principle the federal government should not be involved in education. That said, I actually think that the local/national distinction is substantially less important than is the distinction between private and state action. As long as we’re talking about principles I think that placing education in the hands of the government of Sandusky, Ohio is conceding the majority of the ground.
Look at a Common Core teacher-evaluation instrument. The one I saw was five pages, font-size 8. The more focus on the complex evaluation instrument and its concomitant paperwork, the less focus on the living, breathing individual student whose individual needs won’t wait until after the teacher has performed indicator 54. Like most tenets of socialism, it sounds good on paper, until the human element is applied. The ever-deepening gap between the individual teacher and student is the one we should be concerned about, more than gaps in collective scores.
Hey, I was just at a meeting to review Common Core high school math curricula for our district. A question in one of the textbooks was plotting carbon emissions from 1750 to the present day. The ‘new math’ is basically a lot of group work and word problems, and it will be politicized, I’m sure.