As the tide turns against the
national Common Core education standards, its backers are desperate
to recruit new supporters and keep the momentum on their side.
Enter the Core-supportive New America Foundation, which has just
released a report urging colleges to get on board with the
standards and their related testing requirements.
Lindsey Tepe, a program associate at NEA,
authored the report, which gives a detailed history of the
development of Common Core. Tepe is particularly concerned that
colleges are just going to ignore the standards, even though
everyone who passes a Core-aligned test is supposed to be “college
and career ready.” From the report:
Arkansas is not even considering integrating its high
school assessments with its admissions criteria. If that
remains the case, the state’s college-ready assessments will
have no bearing upon a student’s actual ability to attend one
of the state’s four-year universities.This approach will not make sense moving forward. A
college-ready designation on the state-adopted, Common Core
standards-aligned PARCC assessment should be sufficient to
meet state minimum eligibility criteria for unconditional
admission to the state’s public universities. While students
may always choose to take additional assessments—as many
currently do by taking both the ACT and SAT—they should not be
required to jump through multiple hoops of assessment just to
meet minimum standards.
Core backers are essentially saying that public universities
should trust that Core-aligned standardized tests are sufficient to
demonstrate student preparedness for a state university. They are
getting ahead of themselves, however. Shouldn’t the universities be
the ones determining whether new K-12 standards are good enough to
render a student college-ready?
The reality is that universities may be hesitant to put blind
faith in Core-certified students, since teachers played almost no
role in the development of the standards—a
criticism made by Margaret Ferguson, a UC-Davis English
professor and president of the Modern Language Association:
One of the troubling components of the [Common Core State
Standards Initiative] is the stipulation that, once adopted, the
wording of the standards cannot be amended, although states are
allowed to add 15% more text. Major revision seems not to be
envisioned by the framers of the document. In 2010, the MLA and the
NCTE were invited to comment on a draft of the literacy standards
as these were formulated both for specific grades and for students
graduating from high school. A joint committee urged that revisions
give more attention to the aesthetic dimensions of literature, the
rhetorical aspects of writing, the advantages of knowing more than
one language, and the ways in which new media shape literacy
practices in the twenty-first century. The authors of the standards
failed to incorporate most of the committee’s suggestions. But the
CCSSI, as teachers and students now encounter it on the Web, is a
complex and generically hybrid text, open to interpretation and
translation. Members of the MLA have been interpreting the CCSSI
document since its initial rollout and have arrived at strikingly
different conclusions…
To say nothing of the fact that the Core-aligned tests have
a long way to go before they could be rightly viewed as fair
assessors of college and career readiness. Students can’t even pass
them yet.
Common Core was designed at the behest of government bureaucrats
by a small and secretive group of supposed education experts and
then vigorously pushed by the federal government, which handed out
bribes in the form of Race to the Top money to compliant states.
Formulators and supporters shouldn’t be surprised that their
top-down approach to education reform has thus far failed to
convince colleges—and teachers, parents, and students—of how they
brilliant their fancy new standards are.
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