1500 Word, Level 1 Position Paper on Common Core

Several of my friends on Facebook asked to read the 1500 word position paper I had to write for my Level I certification from the Tennessee Center for Self Governance about Common Core when I was done writing it.  Initially, I said that I'd just post it as a note on Facebook.  However, I changed my mind.  I changed my mind because 1500 words wasn't nearly enough for me to convey to anyone else why Common Core is so evil and must be eradicated.  I knew, whether I needed to for further levels of certification from the Tennessee Center for Self Governance or not, I would end up sharing what I learned while I did hours of research into Common Core.  Since I will take this issue through all five levels of classes, although I'm not sure yet what I will be tasked to do with it, I know I will want to be able to share this journey with others.  A blog seemed the perfect place.  Without further ado, here is my position paper!

It’s unconstitutional….and therefore, illegal.  That’s where the debate in this country about Common Core, and every other educational program originating in or receiving support from the federal government – beginning with the creation of the federal Department of Education and continued in the years since by administrations of both parties – should end.  Unfortunately, far too many Americans, including those who have sworn an oath to support and defend the constitution, either don’t know what they ought to know about enumerated powers or they simply don’t care about the supreme law of our land.  While I think I should be able to write, “Common Core is an unconstitutional encroachment by the federal government into what is supposed to be a state issue” enough times to equal the 1500 words I am supposed to write about the issue and call that good, the law apparently isn’t compelling enough to convince every citizen and every local, state, and federal politician to pay attention and do the right thing.  Instead, we need a little pizzazz, some slogan-worthy rhetoric, or some shock-and-awe to motivate people to action.  So, here it is, in unambiguous, unapologetic terms: Common Core is bad for our children, bad for the quality of education in America, bad for our free society, and must be eradicated from our nation’s schools.  Since I can’t do it all in 1500 words, I’ll start with an emotional appeal, and I’ll save all of the truly scary stuff for another time.  Common Core is bad for our children.

It’s a heartbreaking photo, taken in black and white.  A very little girl is sitting by herself at what appears to be a dining room table.  A textbook is open in front of her.  Her head rests dejectedly in the palm of her hand.  Her face is frozen for an eternity in utter misery, tears captured right where they were as they rolled down her cheeks at the moment the photo was snapped.  Her mother, the photographer, laments that this picture is the first one taken of her daughter that she has ever hated.  The anecdotal evidence, like this photo, that Common Core is destroying the spirits of our school-children, has flooded social media.  Common Core is bad for our children for more reasons than I could write about in this paper.  Let’s look at the two most compelling: the standards themselves are impossible, and the standards are not developmentally appropriate.

The most obvious and significant reason to eradicate Common Core from our nation’s schools is that the Common Core standards are impossible for our children to achieve.  These are not standards for schools; they are standards for our children that they learn exactly the same things at exactly the same time to exactly the same degree.  The federal government is demanding that your child comply, ignoring the inconvenient fact that children do not grow, learn, or develop at the same time or rate.  What will happen when that inconvenient fact is ignored is that either the “lowest performing pupils” will be pushed far beyond their capabilities and will fail, the “highest performing pupils” will be restrained and subjected to dumbed down standards, or more likely, some combination of the two.  Standards-based education has been a colossal failure in the United States because no matter how much money is thrown at it, it doesn’t change the inevitable.  There are no other options.  How are any of those options good for our children?  Even assuming that the goal of standardized education was realistic, do we really want to live in a society where everyone is only allowed to learn the same things as everyone else does, at the same time as everyone else learns it, to the same degree that everyone else accomplishes?  Think, for a moment, about the far-reaching implications of that for society as a whole.  Then, what will that do to the spirits of our children who are being herded through the institution of “education”?

 

The next reason, closely tied to the first, to eradicate Common Core from our nation’s schools is that the Common Core standards are developmentally inappropriate, especially for our youngest students.  The chief architect of Common Core, David Coleman, is a businessman who is making a fortune via Common Core, not a teacher.  Of the 135 member committee who wrote the K-3 standards, not a single one was a K-3 classroom teacher or an early childhood development specialist.  The Joint Statement of Early Childhood Health and Education Professionals on the Common Core Standards Initiative (can be viewed in its entirety here: http://www.edweek.org/media/joint_statement_on_core_standards.pdf) opens with, “We have grave concerns about the core standards for young children now being written by the National Governors Association (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSC).”  The complete statement outlines their concerns, and yet has been summarily dismissed by proponents of Common Core.  What happens when children are asked to do something that is developmentally inappropriate?  Do they succeed?  Now how about when they are mandated to comply with developmentally inappropriate standards?  When the stakes are that high, what will become of tiny children who are ill-equipped to deal with such pressure?  Is Common Core something we are doing for our children, or is it actually something we are doing to our children? 

It requires, in the famous words of Hillary Clinton as she responded to General Petraeus’s testimony about the war in Iraq, “a willing suspension of disbelief” to accept that Common Core will improve the quality of education in America.  When standards that child development experts have grave concerns about are being foisted on our youth, we must at least question whether or not Common Core will do what its proponents are insisting that it will do: improve the quality of education our children receive in our nation’s schools.  How can something that experts are condemning as harmful improve education?  Will mandating student achievement, especially when some expectations are developmentally inappropriate to begin with, somehow magically make kids smarter and make test scores rise?  Let’s say, though, for the sake of argument, that all of those early childhood education experts are wrong.  The standards set forth by Common Core are not harmful to young children.  Are opponents dead in the water then?

Not quite.  We have to go no further than the very forces behind Common Core State Standards for more proof that Common Core is not going to improve the quality of education in America.  “With the exception of a few standards in trigonometry, the math standards end after Algebra II,” said Dr. James Milgram, a professor emeritus at Stanford University and one of only two teachers to sit on the validation committee for Common Core.  Milgram refused to sign off on the standards, because “….they did not match up to international expectations.  They are at least two years behind the practices of high achieving countries by 7^th grade, and, as a number of people have observed, only require a partial understanding of what would be the content of a normal, solid course in Algebra I or Geometry.  Moreover, they cover very little content of Algebra II, and none of any higher level course….They will not help our children match up to students in the top foreign countries when it comes to being hired to top level jobs.”  The College Board’s own Senior Vice President, Trevor Packer, concurs.  “…Calculus sits outside of the Common Core…and in fact, the Common Core asks that educators slow down the progression through math (emphasis mine) so that students learn college-ready math very well,” Packer stated.

(Scroll to the 1:10 mark for his remarks about math: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbgEo52DEqs)

Wait.  What?  The Common Core is going to improve the quality of education by slowing down the instruction of math and removing calculus, which at the last time I checked, was a requirement for admission into many state universities and all of the military academies, from its standards?  So how exactly is that supposed to work?

Apparently, I am not the only one confused by that.  Dr. Sandra Stotsky, who is a professor emeritus at Arkansas State University and also served on the validation committee for Common Core (she too refused to sign off on the standards, by the way), expressed a similar sentiment.  “It’s astonishing that 46 boards and departments of education adopted Common Core’s ‘college and career ready standards’ without asking the faculty who teach math at their own higher education institutions to do an analysis of Common Core’s definition of college readiness,” she said.  In a scathing critique of the Common Core English standards (of which the full text can be found at: http://www.uaedreform.org/wp-content/uploads/2000/01/Stotsky_Testimony_for_Colorado.pdf), Stotsky calls these Common Core standards for English language arts and reading, “empty skill sets”, and cites the Fordham Institute’s own review of them for further evidence of their inadquecy. 

Do we even need to go into the multitude of other ways Common Core will damage the quality of education in American schools, or can we allow the words of people in the inner-circle of Common Core development to run with red ink all over the snappy slogans and empty rhetoric about academic rigor offered by proponents?