“Republican strategist” Rich Galen takes to the
pages of Politico to make perhaps the weakest argument for
Common Core education
standards yet put into words. Targeting his fellow conservatives,
he warns them against shoehorning students into vocational tracks
when the future is so bright for kids with the “college-prep set of
skills” offered by Common Core that they gotta wear tinted contact
lenses. But, while there may be vocational track advocates among
Common Core critics, that’s hardly the heart of the opposition. And
whether or not Common Core actually provides kids with improved
education is at the…well…core of the debate over the
standards.
Under the headline, “Why
the Right Should Love the Common Core,” Galen scribbles:
Common Core is the shorthand for a requirement that, beginning
as early as possible in elementary school and continuing throughout
high school, students be exposed to, and become comfortable with, a
college-prep set of skills. These skills—especially in mathematics
and English—will provide a foundation for students to go in any
career direction.This is so transparently a good thing that it’s hard to figure
out why anyone would be opposed. That’s especially true for
conservatives, who have long believed our education system is
underperforming; that student progress needs to be measured; and
that teachers and school superintendents should be accountable for
better outcomes in the classroom.Conservatives are instinctively pro-standard. And yet the latest
round of opposition to Common Core comes primarily from the right.
What gives?…Not every high-school student needs to go to a traditional
four-year college. But, those who claim we are wasting the time of
students who are likely to get on a vocational instead of an
academic track are settling for low expectations at a time when we
should be setting high expectations.
This isn’t just a leap of logic—it’s the triple lindy of
intellectuall gymnastics.
First of all, Common Core is a set of education standards
intended to “provide a consistent, clear understanding of what
students are expected to learn, so teachers and parents know what
they need to do to help them,” according to the official mission
statement. The
criticisms of Common Core (because
there are several), aren’t over whether it’s a good idea to
give kids a decent education; they’re over Common Core’s ability to
meet that goal as a uniform standard imposed across the country on
kids of varying skills, interests, and developmental levels.
Some critics advocate the idea that some education approaches
are right for certain kids, but not for others. They support the
goal of well-educate kids, but don’t believe that cookie cutter
standards are the right approach. At Montessori Madman,
Aidan McAuley asks:
The first question I have is whether a government should create
or even suggest what types of content curriculum should include.
When a government determines curriculum it is inherently placing
more value on some types of content and less on other types. There
are two problems with this: 1) It assumes government somehow knows
which content will provide the most return to its economic engine
in the future (this is impossible to know) and 2) it creates an
impersonal culture of education derived from logistics and
efficiencies built on the false premise that all children learn in
the same way and should know the same things by a certain age. A
child is not a product to be manufactured by a government and
should not be commoditized as such.
Other critics look at the high, but also rigid, standards set by
Common Core, and worry that it treats children as if they’re an
army of clones, all ready to learn the same lessons at the same
rate. My wife, a pediatrician, looked at the math standards our
third grader is expected to meet, and remarked, “I’m not sure
third-graders are developmentally ready for this. Their brains may
not be able to handle it yet.”
That’s been a common concern. A Washington Post
article on just this issue quoted Stephanie Feeney, professor
emerita of education at the University of Hawaii, noting, “The
people who wrote these standards do not appear to have any
background in child development or early childhood education.”
Admittedly, the critics quoted above aren’t necessarily
conservative, but the Pioneer Institute is. That
organization’s concerns, outlined in
A Republic of Republics: How Common Core Undermines State and
Local Autonomy over K-12 Education, prefaced by U.S.
Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), focus on the loss of local
control and narrowed diversity of educational approaches inherent
in the standards.
the CommonCore State Standards will extensively define what
students should know and be able to do in each grade. They are not
a curriculum—local curricula will still be defined at the school
and district levels—but they do dictate the first component any
curriculum content. The standards also drive how local curricula
are sequenced and, by virtue of these first two things, will
constrain some of the materials teachers use.
These aren’t the only critiques of Common Core, but they’re much
more typical than complaints that the standards won’t let schools
convert students into a generation of Brave New
World-style Epsilons—grunt workers victimized by low
expectations.
It’s nice that Common Core supporters are now engaging with
their critics rather than
dismissing them, as Secretary of Education Arne Duncan did with
his snark about “white suburban moms.” Soon, they may start
engaging with real opponents rather than ones from their
imagination.
from Hit & Run http://ift.tt/MJwaxk
via IFTTT