Earth to Teachers. Come in, Teachers. You Can’t Support Common Core But Oppose Testing.

A
recent Gallup Poll exposed the fact that many teachers have a
Jekyll and Hyde complex when it comes to Common Core: they like the
idea of uniform national standards but vigorously oppose
standardized tests.

According to the poll, 76 percent of teachers reacted positively
to the idea of having “one set of educational standards across the
country for reading, writing, and math.” Good news for Common Core
proponents, right? Unfortunately, the other half of Common Core is
rigorous testing, and 72 percent of teachers reacted negatively to
“standardized computer-based tests to measure all students’
performance and progress.” When the poll suggested “linking teacher
evaluations to their students’ Common Core test scores,” teachers
were horrified: 89 percent didn’t like that idea.

Common Core cannot be stripped of standardized testing and still
survive. Tests were not some incidental byproduct of the national
standards effort; they are an integral part of the package. There
will be no way to tell if the standards are working—or if schools
are implementing them correctly—if the tests are tossed out but the
standards maintained.

Certainly, some teachers merely oppose the tests because they
don’t want to be held responsible for their students’ progress at
all. That’s bad; teacher compensation and evaluation should be
based on something tangible, like student achievement, rather than
something automatic, like tenure or degree attainment.

But I can’t fault teachers who don’t want to be held responsible
for students’ negative test scores when the students
clearly don’t stand a chance of passing. Haphazard
implementation of Common Core means that not all students are
absorbing Core-aligned material at the appropriate grades,
rendering
the tests ill-suited to the task at hand. And how are
kindergartners at struggling, cash-strapped, inner-city schools
going to pass a computerized exam,
no matter how dedicated their teachers are?

One of the main problems of public education is a lack of
accountability. There is no way to excise bad teachers from the
system, and good teachers have little incentive to stay. Better
testing is a perfectly valid solution to deal with that problem.
But this test—a test forced on the states by
large federal and corporate interests—is clearly creating more
problems than it solves.

Incidentally, Common Core tests
are so unpopular that some former supporters of the effort have
been forced to change course in order to avoid alienting teachers.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who is fighting to keep his
governorship, has significantly walked back his pro-Core stances.
His Republican opponent, Rob Astorino, is even more opposed to
Common Core, and will actually appear on the ballot as the nominee
of the “Stop Common Core” party.