Everything You Need To Know About Common Core

I've been writing a lot lately about the scourge of high stakes standardized testing in our public schools, and specifically about these tests being used in kindergarten. Standardized testing has been with us for far too long, but the most recent source of these tests has been those attached to the Obama administration's Race To The Top Common Core State Standards (CCSS). I get asked questions about CCSS, but the truth is that I have no direct experience with it: everything I know comes second hand, either directly from teachers or from what I read, so I must rely on others.

Although I did not specifically write about CCSS, over the past week, I received a handful of similarly worded comments of support for the national curricula standards, all of which tried to frame it as merely an "update," nothing to get worked up about. This makes me suspect that there is something of an orchestrated pushback against critics, and it made me want to really write about CCSS. As I did my research over the weekend, I landed on the text of a speech given last month by education historian Diane Ravitch as it appeared in the Washington Post. For those who don't know, Ms. Ravitch is one of the leaders in the fight against corporate-style education "reform," and most recently appeared on these pages as the author of the bestselling Reign of Error, which I discussed in three posts (here, here, and here) when it was first published. In both her book and in this speech, she, in well-documented detail, lays out why CCSS is not a mere "update" as proponents would have it, but rather a poorly designed, poorly executed Trojan horse of a program intended to create wholesale, corporate-sponsored changes to public education in America.

Instead of writing my own post, I urge you to read the speech for yourself. It is a devastating, thoughtful, blood-boiling analysis of what is wrong with CCSS, why it got so wrong, and who is to blame, all from a person who started out not only supporting the idea, but working with the US Department of Education to create it.

After providing a brief history and description of the signature education initiatives, No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Race to the Top (RTTT), of our two most recent presidential administrations, Ms. Ravitch catalogs the damage done:

These two federal programs, which both rely heavily on standardized testing, has produced a massive demoralization of educators; an unprecedented exodus of experienced educators, who were replaced in many districts by young, inexperienced, low-wage teachers; the closure of many public schools, especially in poor and minority districts; the opening of thousands of privately managed charters; an increase in low-quality for-profit charter schools and low-quality online charter schools; a widespread attack on teachers' due process rights and collective bargaining rights; the near-collapse of public education in urban districts like Detroit and Philadelphia, as public schools are replaced by privately managed charter schools; a burgeoning educational-industrial complex of testing corporations, charter chains, and technology companies that view public education as an emerging market. Hedge funds, entrepreneurs, and real estate investment corporations invest enthusiastically in this emerging market, encouraged by federal tax credits, lavish fees, and the prospect of huge profits from taxpayer dollars.

This is the context in which CCSS was introduced five years ago, created almost exclusively from funds provided by the Gates Foundation:

The writing group of 27 contained few educators, but a significant number of representatives of the testing industry. From the outset, the Common Core standards were marked by the absence of public participation, transparency, or educator participation. In a democracy, transparency is crucial, because transparency and openness builds trust. Those crucial ingredients were lacking.

Ms. Ravitch admits to having supported the idea of national standards and was consulted by the White House. Her main advice to them was that whatever emerged would need to be rigorously field tested by actual teachers in actual classroom settings. She warned them about this more than once, yet CCSS has never been tested, anywhere, by anyone. It has been introduced, disastrously, wholesale, with no mechanism for change, adjustment, flexibility or teacher input.

Early childhood educators are nearly unanimous in saying that no one who wrote the standards had any expertise in the education of very young children. More than 500 early childhood educators signed a joint statement complaining that the standards were developmentally inappropriate for children in the early grades. The standards, they said, emphasized academic skills and leave inadequate time for imaginative play. They also objected to the likelihood that young children would be subjected to standardized testing. And yet the proponents of the Common Core insist that children as young as 5 or 6 or 7 should be on track to be college-and-career ready, even though children this age are not likely to think about college, and most think of careers as cowboys, astronauts, or firefighters.

Not only that, but the tests, upon which children's and teacher's futures rest were intentionally designed so that a full 70 percent fail. What a crushing, cruel thing to do to young learners, especially those who do not come from the socio-economic classes that tend to do well on standardized tests.

I fear that the Common Core plan of standards and testing will establish a test-based meritocracy that will harm our democracy by parceling out opportunity, by ranking and rating every student in relation to their test scores . . . We cannot have a decent democracy unless we begin with the supposition that every human life is of equal value. Our society already has far too much inequality of wealth and income. We should do nothing to stigmatize those who already get the least of society's advantages. We should bend our efforts to change our society so that each and every one of us has the opportunity to learn, the resources needed to learn, and the chance to have a good and decent life, regardless of one's test scores.

Please take the time to read the full speech. It is worth it. 

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