Common Core: 1. Getting Started with Standards

Following is the first of eight posts that examine the Common Core State Standards.

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS), despite the word state in the title, define a national curriculum in two subject areas: mathematics and English language arts. The new standards for students in kindergarten through twelfth grade have the potential to profoundly affect education across the United States. Forty-five states, the District of Columbia, four territories, and the Department of Defense Education Activity, which operates schools on American military installations worldwide, have adopted them at this writing. Some states, however, are rethinking whether adoption is a good thing.

CCSS has generated both confusion and controversy. One way to dispel some of the confusion is to look at the origins of these standards. They are, in fact, merely the latest in a long line of attempts to define the purposes of education and to establish guidelines for what student should learn.

A starting point for the modern era is 1892. That year the National Education Association appointed a “Committee of Ten,” composed mainly of college presidents and led by Harvard University’s Charles Eliot. The controversy at the time was whether high school should be seen as an end in itself or as a preparation for higher education. The committee concluded that all schools should maintain a single rigorous academic curriculum and that all students should master it. This is essentially the same philosophical stance as the new CCSS.

A shift from this stance occurred in 1918, when the National Education Association published the “Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education.” These principles endorsed different curricula for different students with a focus on the whole child. They were a reaction to the rigidity of the single-minded academic curriculum promulgated by the Committee of Ten that was seen as detrimental, in particular, to immigrants and a cause of the increasing dropout rate during that era because the one-size-fits-all curriculum failed to consider the effects of students’ socioeconomic status. Poverty disadvantages students, and the rigid curriculum did nothing to address this problem. A more child-centered curriculum could better take into account external issues, such as poverty.

The next landmark occurred in 1940, with the culmination of the “Eight-Year Study” by the Association for the Advancement of Progressive Education, which had taken up the charge laid down by the Cardinal Principles. The study found that students engaged in a progressive education programs fared better than their counterparts in traditional programs. Progressive students attained better grades, demonstrated more intellectual curiosity, and participated in more student groups.

The progressive wave was challenged during the national hysteria following the Soviet launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957, when America saw itself as falling behind in what was emerging as the space race during the Cold War period. In 1958 the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) was passed. This law provided funds to states and local school districts to beef up the teaching of mathematics, the sciences, and foreign languages. NDEA was the first major federal initiative in public education, which was (and remains by law) largely a state and local responsibility.

The 1960s and 1970s saw a resurgence of progressive education with many critics decrying the traditional curriculum as a perpetuation of social inequality. The U.S. Supreme Court in the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 had declared that state laws establishing racially segregated schools were unconstitutional. The decision overturned the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896, which had set in place a “separate but equal” doctrine that proved to be unworkable. The Brown decision was a tipping point for the civil rights movement that played out over the next two decades and added impetus to the revival of progressive education.