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.

Common Core: 3. Equity and Equality at Stake

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) are touted as a curriculum that will, according to the official CCSS website (http://www.corestandards.org), “provide a consistent, clear understanding of what students are expected to learn.”

Despite claims that development of the standards has been a “state-led” effort merely coordinated by the National Governors Association (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), they are in fact a national curriculum. CCSS increases federal control of education and does so without, as is true historically, substantially increasing federal funding. The financial burdens of implementing the new standards reside mainly at the state and local levels.

The control and finance issues are worrying but more so is the matter of how the standards will affect teaching and learning. According to the CCSS leaders: “The standards promote equity by ensuring all students, no matter where they live, are well prepared with the skills and knowledge necessary to collaborate and compete with their peers in the United States and abroad.”

This is essentially the same stance taken by the Committee of Ten in 1892, when a single, rigorous academic curriculum was advocated for all students (see Part 1 of this series). This approach was not found to be equitable a century ago, and skepticism about it working this time around is justified. The reason is blindingly simple: all students are not alike. Their backgrounds, goals, aspirations, interests, abilities, and many other traits vary widely, and success for all cannot be guaranteed by a single-minded curriculum. Socioeconomic status (SES)—in particular, poverty—looms large as a factor in school success.

Standards are not at issue. Indeed, education standards are essential as general guides for teaching and learning. Commentators Brooks and Dietz point out in a recent article in Educational Leadership (Dec. 2012/Jan. 2013), “The Common Core standards themselves aren’t the problem.” The problem is that CCSS “conflates standards with standardization.” And standardization tends to ignore human differences, such as socioeconomic status (SES), thereby producing inherent inequity. “Diversity,” say Brooks and Dietz, “is on the verge of extinction—diversity of curriculum, instructional practices, and assessment.”

Common Core: 2. The Myth of Failing Schools

Federal involvement in public education gained ground in 1979 with the establishment of the U.S. Department of Education (ED), which enlarged the federal role in education. Signed into law by President Jimmy Carter, ED was controversial. Critics saw it as an intrusion into state and local affairs, and Ronald Reagan ran for the presidency on a pledge to dismantle the new department. However, he was not able to fulfill that campaign promise as president. Instead, Reagan appointed a National Commission on Excellence in Education, which, in 1984, published A Nation at Risk.

The publication of the commission report was a seminal event. It triggered an avalanche of federal, state, and local “reform” initiatives and fueled a largely erroneous sense that American schools were failing—a belief that persists to the present day despite evidence to the contrary. In fact, in 1990 the Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico was commissioned to document the decline of American education reported in A Nation at Risk. What the scientists found was contradictory data. However, the Sandia Report was suppressed at the time. It eventually found its way into print as “Perspectives on Education in America, An Annotated Briefing, April 1992,” in the May-June 1993 issue of Journal of Educational Research, an academic journal little read by the general public. Thus the myth of failing schools persists.

Meanwhile, in the late 1980s, then president George H.W. Bush had convened an “education summit,” which ironically included no educators, cognitive scientists, or professionals in teaching and learning. The summit was entirely populated by state governors, who met to determine the future course of American education. Out of this and subsequent meetings the “standards-based education reform” movement rooted and grew.

The standards movement gained its next major version in the Goals 2000: Educate America Act, signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1994. During the 1990s national subject-matter associations, such as the National Council of Teachers of English, were commissioned to develop standards for all subject areas and grades. Goals 2000 provided funding to states and communities to develop local curricula based on content and achievement standards set by the various subject-specific organizations. The goals themselves were not intended to be a curriculum.

Authorization for Goals 2000 was withdrawn with the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), signed by President George W. Bush in 2001. Significantly, NCLB required states to develop assessments in basic skills in order to receive federal school funding. This requirement vastly expanded the use of large-scale, high-stakes, standardized tests in public schools across the nation. NCLB thereby also expanded the federal role in public education through testing, annual academic progress reporting, and changes to teacher qualifications and funding.

The Common Core State Standards go a step further toward restricting state and local authority by setting federal standards in place backed by national standardized tests that have yet to be fully developed.

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.

New Title, Broader Focus

Readers who follow this blog are now seeing a new title with the added words, “and Democracy.” As I continue to write this blog, my intention is to focus more on the connectedness of education and democracy. The link is vital, and public education is the surest way to maintain American democracy. This topic requires continued discussion, particularly during the current era when public schools are being attacked on multiple fronts. These attacks constitute a danger to the foundations of our democracy—a danger that can be confronted only through knowledge and understanding about the issues facing public education today and about the lessons of history that can be drawn from our national commitment to democratic governance since the Revolution.

A recent “civic education research tour” took me and my family to Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., to renew our acquaintance with the beginnings of the “American experiment.” As we progressed from Independence Hall to Capitol Hill, my interest in making the connection between education and democracy more explicit in this blog was invigorated. Coming out of Washington, we stopped to visit Thomas Jefferson’s home, Monticello. Jefferson’s commitment to public education has been a lifelong inspiration. “An educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people,” he said. It is a sentiment that a free people must never forget nor allow to languish. The challenges that face public education today imperil the education of our citizens and thus put at risk our freedom. I hope readers will continue on this journey of contemplation, discovery, and discussion with me through the posts to come.