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.