After four decades of eating apples, I learned how to eat my “red delicious” correctly; that is from the bottom-up. Eating an apple from the bottom-up eliminates waste because you eat the core (click here to see video) and, according to one of my students, the apple tastes better. The Common Core in education is similar: it comes from the bottom-up, it tries to eliminate the waste of ignorance and it is adaptable to each school district’s academic ‘tastes.’
From the highly publicized February 4th debate between a scientist and a creationist (Bill Nye and Ken Ham) to the newly released biennial National Science Foundation (NSF) report on the state of science in the United States and world, we are presented with weekly reminders of why we need the Common Core State Standards (CCSS): too many basic concepts and facts are not commonly known. “Many Americans,” according to the NSF report, “provide multiple incorrect answers to basic questions about scientific facts.” For example, when asked to provide a “true” or “false” answer to “Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals” only 48 percent of Americans responded “true.” When asked whether “The universe began with a huge explosion” less than 40 percent of Americans correctly answered “true” while nearly 70 percent of South Koreans did. The Common Core tries to address the ignorance of facts that appears to be spreading throughout society.
The origin of the Common Core is more aptly described as bottom-up rather than top-down. The nickname of Obamacore for the Common Core by its critics misrepresents it as a federal program. The reality regarding its origin is that researchers, educators and state representatives from throughout the country, including the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief of State School Officials, constructed CCSS. The Common Core is not a federal program either in its origin or in its practice.
The CCSS is made so that each school district can assign texts it deems appropriate for its students in their quest to achieve the standards. One of the best examples of local ‘tastes’ being used to achieve the CCSS has occurred in the Pueblo of Jemez school district in New Mexico. The Pueblo of Jemez is a Native community in north-central New Mexico that has created and instituted a curriculum “rooted” in the Jemez culture “and aligned to the common core.” CCSS mandates a set of skills and knowledge that students are expected to master each year but does not mandate what is taught in any school. For instance, while all third graders are required to “Refer to parts of stories, dramas, and poems when writing or speaking about a text…[and] describe how each successive part builds on earlier sections,” CCSS leaves the decision about any texts to be used to the local school districts. An explicit purpose of the Common Core is to develop student skills that help them with “college and career readiness” and not to indoctrinate.
I started out as a skeptic of the Common Core and have, through research and practice, become an advocate of CCSS. I began as a skeptic because I did not want my three young boys to suffer through another No Child Left Behind program. I became an advocate because CCSS requires that all American students learn important educational skills while providing the freedom to localities to choose the books they want to use for achieving the Common Core objectives. High standards applied to all and the freedom to choose how to reach those standards; that is as American as apple pie.
America’s obsession with testing our children every year on the national or state levels brings Einstein’s words on insanity to life: “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” The United States has been hyper-testing our children for twelve years (the start of No Child Left Behind was in 2002) and we keep getting the same results in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA): steady average in reading and science and below average in math. Although our scores have remained stagnant, “our ranking,” according to the National Center for Education Statistics, “is slipping because a lot of these other countries are improving.”
What do the top scorers such as Finland do with respect to testing? They test a child only once during their K-12 experience. The Finnish have a word for our testing obsession: hullu (insane or crazy). I argue that we have subscribed to “hullu-plus” over the last twelve years.
While other countries have increased their PISA results, the only results with any significant increase that the United States is experiencing are in cheating scandals. Simply pick up any reputable American newspaper during the past week and you will see headlines stating “Cheating Probe Roils Philadelphia School System” and “Ohio School District Hit by Cheating Allegations.” With the jobs of teachers and administrators increasingly being tied to testing scores, do you think that instances of cheating will go up or down?
A main reason we keep testing is not for of any educational, logical or sane reason but for the power of certain lobbies. In my state of Connecticut, for instance, the number one spender on lobbying is a corporate education reform group called A Better Connecticut. While A Better Connecticut spent $2.3 million in 2013, the combined total spent by all the lobbying groups on both sides of the gun policy debate was $556,149 (the year immediately following the Sandy Hook tragedy). Follow the money and an understanding of why we keep testing our children “over and over again and expecting different results” becomes perversely clear. While I believe that the Common Core State Standards are necessary in the United States for many reasons (i.e., spend one afternoon in a suburban classroom and the next in an urban schoolroom and you will see at least 18-40 reasons sitting in the seats), the hyper-testing that began with No Child Left Behind should be abandoned because it is at its best “stagnating” the education of our children while inflating the bottom lines of corporate educators (i.e., businesses that make money off of testing and charter schools, which are privately run but publicly funded).
I recommend a middle ground between what we are doing now with testing and what Finland does. My suggestion is to test only in 5th, 8th and 12th grades. These are key transition years in educational development and our emphasis should be on testing how well the system of education works for our children and not how well our children work for the system. In other words, by testing every year we have placed the pressure of evaluating our educational system on our children and not on the system we created. Our country’s educators are focused on teaching to their respective yearly test (something they do not want to do but have to because of our hyper-testing obsession) and not to any broader or deeper educational goals. Somewhere over the last two decades in the United States we conflated testing with educating to the point where we have promoted teaching (to the test) over learning in our classrooms.
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