Kipp Dawson invites others to answer her question:
A question for each of you, and anyone else. In its Winter 2011 issue, the American Federation of Teachers magazine, “American Educator” carried several articles and an editorial touting the benefits of Common Core. One argument in particular grabbed my attention and made sense, at least on the surface. The point was, if we are concerned about children in underfunded schools and in isolated (rural) settings, should we not embrace Common Core national standards and curriculum (by whatever name) to ensure that these children’s education gets taken as seriously as those in more well endowed schools? Without Common Core, won’t some children necessarily be faced with lower expectations from teachers and communities? How would you answer this? (although I think you’ve already shed some light on the implementation side of things)
The “American Educator” editorial in this issue (http://www.aft.org/pdfs/americaneducator/winter1011/Editors.pdf) is so glowing re Common Core. Would any of you be willing to take it on in its specifics?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I have to say if the AFT were using this argument to sell CCSS, I would be concerned. My question would be how would creating quasi-national standards help those in rural areas when states already have state standards and are testing all students. If the rural students are not receiving a decent education under the state standards already in place, I fail to see how creating new standards will solve the problem. This argument would be solving the correct problem with the wrong solution. The theory behind the CCSS, as I see it, is to take the state standards we have now and move them over into quadrant D learning. Teachers are generally doing well with working through Bloom’s and having students working in quadrants A and C. If teachers have low expectations of their students, there students are going to be working only in quadrant A. To ask them to move up to C and then over to D is not going to happen. The thought that changing standards to make them tougher will suddenly give teachers the attitude that all students can learn now is troubling. I feel that something good can sell itself. Making these kinds of arguments about CCSS certainly gives me concern over how much the AFT really feels the CCSS will improve education.
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First off, I have to say that the point Jim makes above is really spot on. Whether standards are aligned at a state or national level should really not change the impact on students in under performing areas.
If the concern is how do we make strides in education in which we see improvement among schools in lower socioeconomic areas, I think our thought process needs an adjustment. The question I would bring to the table is how do we bridge the gap? CCSS is not going to bridge the gap of a 4th grade student on a 2nd grade reading level.
I am not against what the core standards put in place. Yet the belief that this will create an even playing field seems illogical.
I am looking forward to what others have to say on this topic. As a new teacher, I have much to learn from others experience.
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Laura,
“I am not against what the core standards put in place.” Methinks you should be!
What is the difference between educational “standards” and the curriculum?
Answer that and maybe you will see the problem with CCSS.
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Hi Duane,
I’ll be happy to clarify what I meant when I said that I am not against what the core standards put in place .. I don’t see whats wrong with having standards across the nation that align what schools are working towards. These standards are not the curriculum, they are a guideline. I do not believe they are the answer to Kipp’s question in regards to higher expectations among all schools or in driving achievement.
Perhaps you could expand more on your position.
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No standards will work successfully unless teachers do. If teachers in rural areas aren’t given sufficient PD, have no one as an instructional leader, and no accountability outside yearly test scores on national sta dares, NO standards will be a panacea.
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“NO standards will be a panacea.”
Exactly! Actually standards are a chimera, vain and illusory. See Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” for a complete takedown of standards, standardized testing and grades/grading practices. Follow along with me this year as I review and discuss his study on my blog “Promoting Just Education for All” at: revivingwilson.org .
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To answer this question, I would first need to understand the meaning of having one’s “education taken seriously”. Does “taken seriously” refer to the value students and teachers place on what is taught? Or does it refer to the value artificially bestowed upon concepts that are tested? The author defines curriculum as the “knowledge and skill our children need to grow into economically productive and socially responsible citizens”. Identifying one of the benefits of a common curriculum, the author then says that “Teachers need not guess what will be on assessments; if they teach the curriculum, their students will be prepared”. Prepared for what? To be productive and socially responsible citizens? I never knew there was a test to measure such constructs. Does passing “the test” lead to socially and economically responsible behavior? Maybe we should refer to the “experiments” performed at Enron to test this hypothesis.
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CCSS has little to do with learning. It’s about having a common vocabulary developed for interagency-interstate operability of databases. These data are used to develop curricula & assessments. The vocabulary needs to be ‘common’ (CEDS) so meta-tagging (see LRMI link below) maximizes searches on yahoo, bing, google & yandex. Traffic (because of metatagging) is directed to these newly developed CCSS driven education businesses (LRMI calls them resources.)
Unfortunately, the talk is about CCSS & LMRI is still below the radar screen:
http://www.lrmi.net/learning-in-the-age-of-information-overload
http://www.lrmi.net/about/faq
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So big brother is going to steer us to the resources they feel are worthy of our attention. I’m sure all the corporations who have something to sell in the education market will make sure they are tagged appropriately. Just fill in the CCSS blanks and your set. My brain is going to explode with all of this categorizing and measuring of “learning.” Do I have to write a self reflection on it, too?
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It already is exploding. I am getting so wired that I can’t write anything without errors: “and you’re set.”
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Big brother or Gates? However you’re correct about steering us to CCSS aligned resources that are tagged using CCSS vocabulary.
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Our local school is rural and Title I. We already have high standards – the California state standards. Whether they are the best possible standards or whether our school has the best possible curriculum is of course open to discussion, but we don’t lack for high standards or even high expectations.
I also happen to think our school is wonderful, probably better than the one in the urban area where we once lived. What makes it so is a great professional staff that works together as a team and that is dedicated to the kids and their long term success.
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The main point of e editorial is that we need a common core curriculum–and that the standards are a step in that direction. From the editorial:
“The reason we have fallen behind so many of our international peers is that we have been pursuing the peripheral while they have been pursuing the fundamental. While we have been dabbling in pedagogical, management, and accountability fads, they have written common core curricula—and that has made all the difference.”
Now, I agree heartily with the above quote. However, It is difficult (to out it mildly) to reach agreement over the contents of a curriculum–even if the common content is just a subset of schools’ individual curricula. (That’s the sort of common curriculum I favor–where the common portion is small but substantial, and schools and teachers may teach and supplement it as they see best.)
But no discussion of content really makes sense unless the participants immerse themselves in it. (You can’t determine the place of Shakespeare’s Henry IV in a curriculum if you haven’t read it recently or at all.) Yet many education discussions keep their hands clean of literary works and other specifics as though the very titles had the flu.
So we resort to generic language, which in turn gives full rein to peripherals–“text complexity,” “informational text,” and so forth. These generic terms are the ones that the textbook, assessment, and software companies seize, so they are doubly and triply convenient and slithery.
Indeed, we should turn our attention to fundamentals (that is, the substance of education), but it will take some doing.
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“Now, I agree heartily with the above quote.”
Sorry, Diane, but I have to disagree with that quote. We haven’t “fallen behind”-that’s the smoke and mirrors quote used by educational deformers.
What are the definitions of “peripheral” and “fundamental”? What do those two words entail? Can we even agree on what is “fundamental”? Without tight definitions these words serve to obfuscate what the “real” problems of public education are.
Where is the proof that having “written common core curricula” (and now all of a sudden it’s curricula and not standards????) “has made all the difference”? What difference? How has this supposed “core curricula” made the “difference”?
Where is the room for diversity and local flavor in national standards? How did we get to be the supposedly greatest empire in the history of the world without said “common core standards”?
Standards = Central Command and Control
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Nothing to apologize for. You disagree with the quote; I agree with it. But I have my own interpretation of it and my own take on the matter.
I see peripherals as “reading strategies,” “workshop model,” “text complexity,” test scors, and other things that aren’t about the subject matter. I see the fundamentals as actual literary works, mathematical theorems, and so forth–and the lessons that bring them to students, and the students’ own grappling with them.
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The bottom line question on Common Core is very simple – Does it actually help close the achievement gap? Where is the research and evidence that Common Core is indeed effective? It is impossible to claim that any program promotes equity that cannot be shown to close the gap. For a union to tout an unproven program as equitable is irresponsible at the least.
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Research? There is none. How can there be? States are just beginning to implement them.
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And, obviously, from this discussion, no one is sure what the implementation should look like, what it is supposed to accomplish, or how.. If we stay on this path, we are going to be pushing the boulder up the hill and watching it roll down again until it rolls over us, which might be a blessing.
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Every child born today is the product of 3.8 billions years of evolution. Between his or her ears, is the most complex system known to us, and that system, the brain consists of highly interconnected subsystems of neural mechanisms for carrying out particular tasks. Years ago, some Japanese researchers won the Nobel Prize for mapping the neural system in fruit flies that functions ONLY to detect movement from left to right in the visual field. Marvin Minsky calls this complex of interconnected systems a “society of mind.”
Early in the twentieth century, a psychologist named Charles Spearman posited a single intelligence factor, “G.” A couple decades ago, Howard Gardner made a name for himself by positing seven (later eight) “multiple intelligences.” But that’s all hocus pocus. The truth is that there are, quite literally, billions of intelligences in the brain–mechanisms that carry out very particular tasks more or less well, many of them sharing parts of the same machinery to carry out subroutines.
Over that 3.8 billion years of evolution, these many intelligences were refined to a high degree. Creatures, like us, who reproduce sexually and mix up our genes, are born with different unique sets of mechanisms, and these are pruned and refined based on our experiences, for the neural machinery is extraordinarily plastic. In other words,
1. People are extraordinarily variable, and
2. All have propensities to become very good at some things and not at others
In EVERY child some of these subsystems are extraordinary and some are merely adequate.
In other words, there are no standardized children. Almost every new parent is surprised, even shocked, to learn that kids come into the world extraordinarily unique. They bring a lot of highly particular potential to the ball game. And every one of those children is capable, highly capable, in some ways and not in others.
What if, instead of schools having as their purpose turning out identically machined parts, they, instead, existed to find out what a given child is going to be good at doing? What if children were carefully, systematically, given opportunities to try out the enormous range of purposeful human activity until we identified each child’s GENIUS? What if we said to ourselves, presented with a particular child, “I know that this little person is the product of 3.8 billion years of evolution, that he or she has gifts conferred by that history of fitness trials, and it is my responsibility to discover what those are?”
I heard an Indian elder, whose name, unfortunately, I forget, speak about this once. He said, “Look at the kids. Really look at them. You can see who the leaders are and who the followers.” This insight can and should be generalized.
Now, before you dismiss this as a preposterous idea, consider this fact: A child can be born with, say, perfect pitch and go through our entire K-12 education system without anyone ever discovering this about that child.
A society, to be a society, needs SOME shared common culture, and it’s valuable, for that reason, to have some common, shared set of knowledge and skills transmitted from one generation to the next. But a pluralistic society also needs the astonishing variety of attributes that people are born with or are capable of developing.
No list, however well vetted, will represent the natural variety of ability and potential that exists in children. Nor will it represent the variety of abilities that the society actually needs in order to function well. It’s bad for kids and it’s bad for society as a whole when someone has the hubris to come up with THE LIST of what everyone needs to know.
Let me be clear about what I am NOT saying: I am NOT saying that school should be a place where kids “do their own thing.” What I am saying is that it should be a place that enables kids and their teachers to discover what kids, given their particular endowments, can do. I believe, strongly, that every child has some genius among those TRULY multiple intelligences.
It would take a lot of re-envisioning to come up with a workable model of schooling that would do that properly and rigorously. And it wouldn’t look anything like what we are now doing.
Finally, to get to the specific question. The revolutionaries who founded the United States recognized that any system that awards people based upon the accidents of their birth rather than based upon their talents, whatever their birth, wastes a lot of human potential. They were committed to the idea that everyone deserved a chance to follow his or her genius, whatever the conditions of his or her birth. That’s why many of them were also committed to the idea universal education and why it is in the interest of all of us to end disparity of educational opportunity. The founders had this crazy idea that no one was disposable, that everyone had gifts to bestow on his or her fellows that would flower in the right circumstances. Any rigidly enforced system of standards treated as a curriculum is not going to enable the achievement of the founders’ vision because while everyone else’s children are toiling through the checklist of standardized skills attainment, the children of the elite will be having extraordinarily varied experiences enabling them to find and follow their bliss (what they care about and have the potential to do well).
If that’s the society that we want, the Morlochs and the Eloi, then uniform national standards treated as curricula, the same in every school, for every student, is the way to go.
That works for folks who think that there are the few gifted who are destined to rule and the great mass of interchangeable worker bees who need to be as identical and predictable as possible. It doesn’t work for people who believe in pluralistic democracy.
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