I just submitted this piece for the January issue of The Lincoln Eagle in Kingston, NY.
Another Brick in
the Wall: Why the Common Core Won't Give No Education
Mitchell Langbert,
Ph.D.
In the early 2000s the Bush administration adopted the No Child
Left behind Act (NCLBA), which established state-and-standards-based
testing. The approach failed, and for years educators, especially in
inner cities, complained about teaching to the test.
The National Governors Association's Center for Best Practices
(NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), two private,
not-for-profit organizations, have, with Bill Gates's $147 million and
President Obama's multibillion dollar grant support, introduced a solution to
NCLBA's failure: a more standardized and more centralized testing system
with higher-level standards. It is called the Common Core State Standards
Initiative.
Libertarian
conservatives are suspicious of the common core's increased
centralization. Dean Kalahar of the conservative American Thinker
blog, for example, claims that the common core will encourage textbook
manufacturers to introduce Bill Ayer's ideology about race, class, and
gender.
It was, however, President George Bush who encouraged standardization of curricula and testing through his NCLBA. As Diane Ravitch wrote in her 2004 book The Language Police, political correctness began decades ago; textbooks have been politically correct and watered down for years.
There are three common core debates. The first is
educational. It pits advocates of higher-level standards against
advocates of easier and more specific ones. Mothers in the Hudson Valley
have vehemently complained about the difficulty of the new standards. In
contrast, neoconservative City Journal columnist Sol Stern and liberal
former New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein hail the more difficult
common core standards.
The second is the political debate between advocates of
decentralization and centralization. Stern and Klein claim that the
common core results from healthy federalism because 46 states have adopted it
voluntarily (four have not adopted it), but many are skeptical that $4 billion
in federal grant money amounts to a true division of powers. The Tenth
Amendment does not say that powers that the United States can buy are delegated
to it by the Constitution.
The third debate concerns Bill Gates's economic power.
Blogger Mercedes Schneider notes that in addition to $147 million that the
Gates Foundation paid to the NGA, CCSSO, and the Student Achievement Partners
(SAP) consulting firm that led the drafting of the common core, his foundation
has paid more than $10 million to education think tanks. The common core
reflects one of the most expensive exercises of lobbying influence in the
nation's history.
Moreover, textbook firms that produce both the
standards-linked textbooks and the tests that the states will administer will
benefit financially. The lead authors, David Coleman and Jason Zimba, are
linked to McGraw Hill through their sale of their business, Grow Network.
Their SAP seeks paid consulting work with schools that aim to implement the
common core. That is on top of grant money it has already received from
the Gates Foundation.
Despite Bill Gates's fascination with testing, there is
little evidence that it works. In offering rationales for the common
core, NGA, CCSSO, and SAP claim that national competitiveness depends on
students' test performance. For instance, Jason Zimba claims that the
common core offers a way to improve American students' scores on the Programme
for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests.
Two professors, Christopher Tienken of Seton Hall and
Michael Apple of the University of Wisconsin, question testing. In their views
it will not improve outcomes.
Professor Tienken notes that economic well-being and poverty have
stronger correlations with student performance than does any other
variable. Moreover, there are biases that invalidate international tests.
In America virtually all students take the tests, but in other countries only
select students do. For instance, "Switzerland included only
students in 15 of 26 cantons, representing their highest performing regions."
Tienken adds that in spite of these biases, taken alone, American white
students ranked 2nd out of 29 countries in reading, 7th out of 30 in math, and
4th out of 30 in science.
Gates, Zimba, and other centralizers claim that
centralization of control will increase objective test scores, resulting in
increased national competitiveness. Tienken shows that their claim is
false. There is no link between having centralized educational standards
and having a competitive economy.
Professor Michael Apple of the University of Wisconsin has
written a book, Democratic Schools, in which he argues for
decentralization and local control. In an interview, Professor Apple
pointed out that the common core is a response to the NCLBA. He says that
on paper the common core encourages a more creative curriculum and establishes
higher-level testing standards than did the NCLBA. In practice, it
falters for the same reasons the NCLBA did: The test tail wags the
teacher dog. Because poorer children have less preparation, their teachers will
continue to spend more time teaching to the test than will teachers of affluent
children. Their writing will suffer, and they will suffer on the job market.
Professor Apple advocates empowering teachers and
encouraging their creativity. The opposite is occurring now: "The
job of teaching has gotten worse. The average teacher's work week is 58 hours.
The common core could have offered a better curriculum, but the teachers don't
have the time to put it into practice. The result is a focus on
accountability and a lack of focus on higher-level skills like writing.
Although the states do not say that the teachers' performance will be appraised
by test scores, the administrators don't have time to handle performance
appraisal any other way."
If Professor Tienken is right, the arguments for both the
NCLBA and the common core are unfounded. The ideals of education and democracy
have been sacrificed for a pseudoscientific testing system that happens to
tickle Bill Gates's fancy. The end result is a betrayal
of what education should be.
Conservatives, libertarians, liberals, and social
democrats should question the claims of standardizers and centralizers.
The best education requires on-the-spot imagination that cannot be captured with
a test.
