Common Core: 8. Will the Common Core Help or Hurt American Education?

Forward-thinking author Daniel Pink, in his bestseller A Whole New Mind, suggests that humankind is now in a Conceptual Age. We have moved beyond the Knowledge Age represented by the Common Core, in which success has been determined by “SAT-ocracy,” or a series of tests built around questions with one right answer. Pink believes, along with many others in this country and abroad, that the Common Core approach will not suffice. The Conceptual Age requires flexibility and innovation. Students will need to be encouraged to think creatively, take initiative, and incorporate a global perspective into their learning. None of these attributes is valued or promoted by a corporatized, lockstep curriculum foisted on school in the name of global “competitiveness.”

William Mathis, a researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder, concludes, “The nation’s ‘international economic competitiveness’ is unlikely to be affected by the presence or absence of national standards.” Furthermore he points out, “Children learn when they are provided with high-quality and equitable educational opportunities. Investing in ways that enhance these opportunities shows the greater promise for addressing the nation’s education problems” (http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/options).

Some critics go further. “We know that high-stakes tests are being used to redline the poor and working class out of access to a quality education, and are now being used to get rid of teachers, to deny them tenure,” says Michelle Fine, a professor at CUNY Graduate Center. Fine is quoted by Sarah Jaffe in an article for Truth-Out.org (February 9, 2013).

Jaffe goes on to report, “The tests…don’t serve as a good predictor of students’ performance in college the way, say, grade point average does. Even as more and more tests are being pushed on public school students, [Fine] noted, now a third of elite private universities are not relying on them for admissions. Elite students, in other words, are not being tested the way working-class students, many of them students of color, are, throwing more roadblocks in the way of those students’ access to higher education.”

The inherent bias in a one-size-fits-all Common Core State Standards does not bode well for the common good. Nor, contrary to its stated goals, is the Common Core likely to benefit individual states or our nation by making our graduates more competitive in the global economy. Indeed, the opposite is a more likely outcome.

Common Core: 7. Does the Common Core Serve the Common Good

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) aim to ensure that, according to their developers, “our communities will be best positioned to compete successfully in the global economy.” This is a corporate imperative, not a student-centered one. Many parents and educators and a growing number of states are questioning whether CCSS will best serve all of our children and whether, in fact, CCSS is detrimental to the common good of our republic. There is solid evidence that America already competes very successfully in the global economy, a success presumably attributable to U.S. schools present and past.

The one-size-fits-all curriculum philosophy has already been tried and found wanting at various times over the past century. Three additional, interrelated factors now merit attention as the public becomes increasing informed about the Common Core and how it will affect not only schools and children but also the public at large. These factors are costs, technology, and corporatization.

Regarding cost: In Indiana, for example, according to the IDOE website, the state spends more than $46 million annually on various standardized tests and claims that testing takes only 4.5 to 6.25 hours out of students’ annual learning time. These claims are, at best, misleading because they fail to include local-level direct and indirect costs (staff time, logistical support, and so on) as well as the massive amounts of learning time specifically directed toward teaching the narrow skills that will be assessed.

Multiply the costs in dollars and hours by a factor of 10 or more and a truer picture of CCSS in combination with existing high-stakes standardized testing will likely emerge. The Common Core cookie-cutter curriculum makes no allowance for individual differences, including the effects of students’ socioeconomic status (SES). Consequently CCSS will increase learning disparities rather than level the academic playing field. It’s not really one-size-fits-all, it’s one-size-fits-none—and a wastefully expensive size at that.

Regarding technology: The two organizations designing Common Core assessments, set to begin in 2014-15, recently released the technology requirements that schools will need to meet in order to test students by using computers. Among the requirements are moving from Windows XP (used by more than half of schools today) to Windows 7; upgrading computers to at least one gigabyte of internal memory; making sure screens used for assessment are no smaller than 9.5 inches with at least 1024 x 768 resolution; ensuring that testing sites operate on a secure browser; and providing 5 to 10 kilobytes per second of bandwidth per student. Set aside the techno-speak and the bottom line is that many schools are going to need to make significant investments in technology upgrades and new equipment in order to meet the CCSS assessment requirements.

While schools would benefit from technology upgrades in ways apart from administering new standardized tests, the big questions involve costs. Who pays? How much? A number of states have questioned CCSS participation on this basis. For example, Indiana State Senator Scott Schneider filed Senate Bill 193 in January to withdraw Indiana from the Common Core, citing in part the “veil of secrecy” behind which CCSS was adopted without sound estimates of the costs involved.

At a hearing on the bill in January, former Texas Commissioner of Education Robert Scott also testified before Indiana legislators, “These standards have not been piloted anywhere to show that they lead to better student performance” (in Education Week, February 11, 2013). Texas is among the states that have not adopted the Common Core.

Are American taxpayers really ready to shell out millions to implement an unproven program?

Regarding corporatization: Consider the focus on global competitiveness and the massive amounts of taxpayer money pouring into corporations, from those that develop and administer tests to those that run charter, take-over, and private schools using public money. CCSS fits into an overarching goal by certain policymakers to corporatize American education. It is little wonder that growing numbers of parents, educators, and lawmakers are urging caution or a step back from the edge of this particular precipice.

Common Core: 6. Overuse and Misuse of Standardized Testing

Standardized tests are not bad per se. Some standardized tests are useful—for diagnosis, research, and so on. But the wholesale use of mass standardized testing—essentially every student in every school—and the misuse of test results to judge individual students, teachers, schools, and entire districts is simplistic and simply wrong. Complex qualities such as student achievement, teacher quality, and school and district effectiveness cannot be reduced to a number or a set of numbers. No test score should ever constitute more than a tiny fraction of the information used to evaluate a student’s learning or a teacher’s effectiveness. Too many other factors must be considered. Many of them—such as the effects of poverty—are beyond the scope of the school to control or influence.

The Common Core State Standards eventually will come with matching standardized tests to reinforce the standardization of this national curriculum. Whether CCSS tests will replace state tests, such as ISTEP and IREAD in Indiana, or add yet another layer of testing on top of them is still an open question.

Either way, as standardized tests proliferate, teachers concentrate more time (often required by their supervisors) on direct test preparation, drilling their students on a narrow set of tested concepts and shunting aside richer learning opportunities that may, in fact, be lost forever. Education researcher Qiuyun Lin comments, “Standardized tests create a system of education that reduces student learning to scores on a single test, rules out the possibility of discussing student learning in terms of cognitive and intellectual development, growth, social awareness and social conscience, and social and emotional development” (in “Beyond Standardization: Testing and Assessment in Standards-Based Reform.” Action in Teacher Education 23 (4): 43-49).

Over-testing limits students to acquiring basic knowledge at the expense of skills such as critical and creative thinking. When the goal is to determine answer A, B, C, or none of the above, there is no place left in the curriculum for students to develop higher-level thinking. So-called 21st-century skills don’t make the cut, however much they are touted by pundits and policymakers far away from actual classrooms.

University of Colorado researcher William Mathis comments: “As the absence or presence of rigorous or national standards says nothing about equity, educational quality, or the provision of adequate educational services, there is no reason to expect CCSS or any other standards initiative to be an effective educational reform by itself” (in Research-Based Options for Education Policymaking, http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/options). Indeed, CCSS is likely to require added funds from cash-strapped states and local districts, further reducing resources for programs that increase educational equity and broaden access to learning.

Furthermore, the Common Core has been criticized by some, for example in Indiana, as actually offering less rigor than current state standards in language arts and mathematics. This concern alone should give readers pause. Is lowering standards really school “improvement”?

Ultimately CCSS must be questioned for its very foundation. Phillip Harris, Bruce M. Smith, and Joan Harris, authors of The Myths of Standardized Tests (2011) write concerning the barrage of standardized tests in the United States that NCLB was only its “most recent, and most punishing, incarnation.” The same terms apply to the Common Core. The one-size-fits-all philosophy of standardization says, much as the Committee of Ten did in 1892, that a single academic curriculum is suitable for all students—no exceptions—and will guarantee that every one of them will be prepared “for success in college and careers.” Succeeding generations found the Committee of Ten’s nineteenth-century philosophy seriously deficient, and there is no reason to believe that the same philosophy put forward now as the Common Core will prove to be any more successful in the twenty-first century. On the contrary, CCSS is likely to reduce the quality of education for all students.

Common Core: 5. Standards and Standardization

In developing the Common Core State Standards the idea of standards has been confused with standardization. No one disagrees that standards for teaching and learning are needed. In the modern era American schools have always had standards, and those basic standards have not changed dramatically over the course of the past century. Universally the public wants schools to teach students to read, write, and compute at competent adult levels by the time they graduate.

At various times these 3R’s standards have been broadened to include more subjects, such as the sciences, the arts, social studies, physical education, and in various eras under a variety of labels manual arts/industrial education, cooking and sewing/homemaking, typing/computer science, and others.

When standards cease to be seen as basic goals toward which students and teachers should strive and instead become requirements that all students must meet, then a tipping point has been reached. Standards morph into standardization, which is detrimental because it means that students cease to be individuals with unique needs, interests, capacities, and desires. They become components in a corporatized system that demands conformity and uniformity. All the holes are round in this machine-like system, and students who are square pegs must be reshaped to fit.

The conflation of standards and standardization is reinforced by standardized testing, which has already spread to an unprecedented extent throughout American education. The Common Core promises more of the same.

“High stakes” tests are those that have a direct bearing on a student’s future. For example, in Indiana IREAD-3 is a high-stakes test at third grade because it determines whether a student will be retained in grade or allowed to advance. The Indiana Department of Education should make no claim—though it does—that this test is research based. Holding back students who fail IREAD in fact ignores a large, longstanding body of research on the detrimental effects of grade retention. For modest, short-lived gains in reading achievement, grade retention dramatically increases the probability that a student will drop out before completing high school.

IREAD standardization, like that of many high-stakes tests, is based on faulty logic. In truth, students learn to read at differing rates, some earlier, some later. While reading proficiency by third grade is a reasonable goal, it is not a make-or-break deadline. Treating it like one is foolhardy and dangerous.

Common Core: 4. Aren't We Already "Globally Competitive"?

CCSS leaders want a national curriculum so that all students in the future “will be best positioned to compete successfully in the global economy.” The underlying message is that students—and, by extension, the United States—are not able to do so now, a conclusion that has little foundation. Let’s look at this conclusion from two perspectives.

First, critics of education often point to disparities between the performance of U.S. students and their counterparts in Europe and elsewhere on international achievement tests, such as PISA, which is administered in more than fifty countries. The lower U.S. ranking, say critics, is evidence that American students are not “globally competitive.”

However, there is a strong correlation between student achievement and family background, with socioeconomic status being a key factor in student achievement as measured by standardized tests of all sorts. Students disadvantaged by poverty do predictably poorer, as a group, on measures of academic achievement. Schools universally, not only in the United States, are relatively powerless to change this fundamental dynamic. When PISA results are controlled for SES, the ranking of U.S. students is considerably higher.

Finland, for example, is often cited for ranking far above the United States in student achievement as measured by PISA. However, in Finland only 1 in 25 students lives in poverty compared to 1 in 5 in the United States, according to Duke University professor Helen F. Ladd (in Education and Poverty: Confronting the Evidence, Working Paper Series SAN11-01, November 4, 2011).

The Common Core standards do not take into account the effects of SES on teaching and learning. CCSS is top-down policy, and as Ladd points out, “while education policy makers have direct control over school quality, they have less control over educational outcomes because of the role that context—and particularly the family background of the students—plays in shaping educational outcomes.” Adopting the Common Core is likely not to make any difference in American students’ ability to be “globally competitive” for this reason.

Second, there is little evidence that America is not already globally competitive. Put aside the rhetoric of politicians, pundits, and policy wonks who decry our so-called failing schools, and the cold evidence is that the goal of becoming globally competitive by promoting a top-down, “rigorous” curriculum is largely disingenuous. By the numbers the United States is far from being a poor global competitor. Internationally known scholar Yong Zhou (http://zhaolearning.com) runs the numbers this way, drawing on a variety of authoritative sources:

• Japan, which was expected to overtake the U.S. because of its superior education in the 1980s, has lost its #2 status in terms of size of economy. Its GDP is about 1/3 of America’s. Its per capita GDP is about $10,000 less than that in the U.S.

• The U.S. is the 6th wealthiest country in the world in 2011 in terms of per capita GDP. It is still the largest economy in the world.

• The U.S. ranked 5th out of 142 countries in Global Competitiveness in 2012 and 4th in 2011.

• The U.S. ranked 2nd out 82 countries in Global Creativity, behind only Sweden in 2011.

• The U.S. ranked 1st in the number of patents filed or granted by major international patent offices in 2008, with 14,399 filings, compared to 473 filings from China, which supposedly has a superior education.

Comments Zhao, “Obviously America’s poor education told by the numbers has not ruined its national security and economy.”

The key factor that the Common Core leaders have failed to take into account is poverty and how SES affects teaching and learning. Ladd, cited earlier, suggests that “strategies designed to address the educational needs of low income children will cost money, could be complex and undoubtedly will need to differ from place to place depending on the local context.”

The Common Core State Standards contain no provision for responding to “local context.” Such rigidity will ill serve students everywhere.