I remember when I first heard about the movement to develop a national common core for K-12 public school curricula, I thought, "Why not?" Why not set standards that will give a high school diploma some meaning? Why not set up a national curriculum that insures that every kid has a solid grounding in history, arts, math, and the sciences? Since then I've learned a lot about what's really going on, and my opinion about it has reversed.
First of all it's way too top down, one-size-fits-all. Although there are some situations where centralization is desirable and necessary, this is not one of them. A centralized core is too easily coopted by powerful players, and the more you learn about the Common Core State Standards, the clearer it becomes that it is a child of neoliberal establishment elites foisting its ideas about reform on public education.
Reform for neoliberal education reformers is akin to what reform means for the IMF when it seeks to impose the bipartisan neoliberal program known as the Washington Consensus on countries that are in debt crisis. There is a 'Washington Consensus" concerning education as well. We see it in the neoliberal reforms promoted by No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. Neoliberal education reformers want you to believe that our public schools are in an analogous crisis–the educational equivalent of Argentina in the eighties or Greece now–so they need drastic intervention to reform the schools on neoliberal principles. But as I said in a post earlier this month, our schools are not the problem, poverty is. And while schools have a role to play in any efforts our society makes to deliver children out of it, any strategy that believes that schools should carry the full burden of that effort is doomed to failure.
The Common Core is not going to solve this problem, not even a little. Here's Diane Ravitch on this subject:
The most reliable predictor of test scores is family income.
The Common Core will have no impact whatever in changing the scandalous proportion of children who live in poverty in this nation. Nearly a quarter of our children are living in poverty, as compared to far smaller proportions in other societies. If we were to make a dent on that number, bring it down to, say, 15%, that would have a bigger impact on test scores than Common Core. But that is just my guess.
The common wisdom, repeatedly predicted by state superintendents, is that test scores will drop by 30% or so when the Common Core standards are assessed because the tests are “harder.” This will feed the corporate reform narrative that “our schools are failing.” They will use the new stats to attack public education and demand more vouchers and more charters and more privatization. The entrepreneurs are eagerly awaiting the moment when the bad scores are announced, as it will give them new opportunities to sell their edu-schlock.
The fact that David Coleman, the architect of the Common Core standards, was an original member of the board of Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst–the corporate reformers’ attack machine against public education–is no comfort. The other members of her original board were Jason Zemba, who wrote the Common Core math standards, and a third person, who worked for Coleman’s Student Achievement Partners. In other words, Rhee’s board was the same as the Common Core leadership.
Do you see how this game is played? There are so many different tactics that are being deployed in the neoliberal education reform agenda, and any one of them–charter schools and vouchers, common core, teacher accountability, Teach for America–when taken in isolation seem innocuous enough, but taken together are designed to destroy a system that whatever its flaws should be community controlled, not corporate controlled.
For more on this read how principal Carol Burris's opinion changed too. She even co-authored a book promoting the idea of the common core, but she says the well has been poisoned. See here and here. Interesting grafs:
The best way that I can explain my trepidation is with the following analogy.
Hurricane Sandy hit the shores of New York and New Jersey at high tide when there was a full moon, a time when tides were 20% higher. It was a Category One hurricane of no great fury—its winds were “only” about 74 miles per hour. However, Sandy became a super storm due to a Canadian cold front, which wrapped around the hurricane, making the storm larger and more ferocious.
Think of the Common Core standards as the high tide—the tide intended to lift all boats. Testing is the hurricane—a strong storm that blows through each year and affects our every action as educators. Now add the cold front, the ever-increasing high stakes, wrapping around the tests. Those high stakes—school closings, grade level retentions, and the evaluation of teachers by student scores—have given the hurricane additional fury and strength. High tide, which in and of itself is benign, now becomes a destructive force.
As a New Yorker who saw the tide of a nearby bay fill four feet of our home, I have new respect for what occurs when strong forces converge.
Neoliberal reforms are the factors that make something that seems benign into something terribly destructive.
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