First, it is not federal. President Obama has used Race to the Top money to encourage states to embrace higher standards, but the Common Core was written under the auspices of the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, an effort that began in 2007, before Obama was elected. Some advocates of Common Core have actually implored Obama and his education secretary, Arne Duncan, just to stop talking about it, because their endorsement feeds the myth that this is a federal takeover. Second, there is no national curriculum. The standards, which you can read here, describe a reasonable progression of learning from grade to grade, but leave it to state and local school officials to get there. The Common Core is not an attempt to pack kids’ heads with an officially sanctioned list of facts, but to assure that they are able to read a complicated text and understand it, to recognize a problem and know how to solve it. So, to pick an example at random, the Common Core says a third grader should be able to “describe characters in a story (e.g., their traits, motivations or feelings) and explain how their actions contribute to the sequence of events.” By eighth grade the student should be able to “analyze how particular lines of dialogue or incidents in a story or drama propel the action, reveal aspects of a character or provoke a decision.” The Common Core does not dictate what stories these kids will be reading or what textbooks schools should use and does not prescribe reading lists, except for a few obvious essentials, including America’s founding documents and a bit of Shakespeare. Third, the Common Core is not some new and untried pedagogical experiment. Much of it leans on traditional methods that have proved themselves over time. Kids are taught phonics in the early grades. They learn times tables and memorize the formulas for areas and volumes. The standards encourage more use of informational texts and literary nonfiction to build background knowledge and vocabulary that will be useful in the real world. But the Common Core does not stint on literature. By the end of high school, nonfiction would account for 70 percent of the total reading material in all subjects. That still leaves a lot of room for the classics. The Core does call for schools across the states to deliver their lessons in the same sequence. Does it really matter if children in Alabama and New Jersey start algebra in the same grade? It matters a lot to a kid who moves from Alabama to New Jersey. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, about 13 percent of children under 18 move each year, and the numbers are much higher for low-income, military and immigrant families. Many of them lose their place in the educational order and never recover. There is, in fact, an important national discussion to be had as the Common Core takes effect and schools begin reckoning with the results of tougher tests. What’s the right cutoff score for a passing grade? Do schools get credit for progress, even if they are performing below grade level? Should there be an opt-out provision for schools that are more experimental or that already have high college placement rates? How do the test results figure in evaluating individual teachers? E. D. Hirsch, an advocate of the Common Core whose Core Knowledge Foundation distributes a widely used curriculum, warned in an interview that if the standards were not carefully implemented, schools could still end up emphasizing “mindless test prep” over substance. “The Tea Party’s worried about the federal government,” he told me. “What they should be worried about is the education school professors and the so-called experts.” But — as with that other demonic federal plot, Obamacare — the Republicans aren’t interested in making reform work. They just want it dead. “Conservatives used to be in favor of holding students to high standards and an academic curriculum based on great works of Western civilization and the American republic,” two education scholars, Kathleen Porter-Magee and Sol Stern, wrote in National Review Online. “Aren’t they still?” Good question.
Posted on: Tue, 20 Aug 2013 18:45:57 +0000