Standards as a flag to lead us forth contrasts for me with standards as a way of standardizing our minds” Deborah Meier
The Common Core State Standards have been adopted by 47 states, and school districts around the country are gearing up by spending millions of dollars on meager staff development training to indoctrinate teachers in the use of the Common Core Standards.
Standards represent the dogmatism of a particular group that actually writes and finally publishes the standards documents. A very small group of people in the education community are involved in this process. To assume that one set of standards in mathematics and English/language arts will be appropriate to every school, each community, and every student seems very undemocratic. The medical profession doesn’t even come close to agree what it means by “standard of care.”
But in education, we hire non-public and private school professionals, many of whom have never had any experience working with students or teachers in the K-12 environment, and this group writes the standards for the millions of professional teachers, none of whom are really involved in the process. Do you see a problem here?
The march to standardize and uniform the curriculum is a dangerous movement in a democratic society, and one that is so diverse in cultures, languages, and geography as America. How can we really think that one set of statements of mathematics and English/language art objectives written by non-practitioners can be truly be valid for all learners, all schools, and all teachers.
But that is only one-half of the problem. The other half of this equation is the corporate led “high-stakes testing” monolith that has taken hold in every school district in America since the passing of the NCLB act of 2001.
The concoction of authoritarian standards and high-stakes testing has created schools and districts that are now entered into a national competition to see which districts are near the top of the heap, but more pressingly, which schools are at the bottom. More a third of a billion dollars is being spent on techno-based testing systems. The PARCC Assessment system, being developed by Achieve, will result in national tests that will “measure” the full range of the Common Core State Standards.
Within a year or so, the U.S. will not only have a national curriculum in math and English/language arts, but will have national tests that will be used in every district throughout the country.
There are many reasons to question the wisdom of the Common Core State Standards. Here are five reasons that I think should lead us to question their use in our schools.
1. Standards are like brick walls
In the face of teaching and learning, standards are like brick walls. According to research published by Dr. Carolyn S. Wallace, a professor at the Center for Science Education, Indiana State University, science standards are barriers to teaching and learning in science. She makes this claim in her 2011 study, published in the journal Science Education, entitled Authoritarian Science Curriculum Standards as Barriers to Teaching and Learning: An Interpretation of Personal Experience.
One of the key aspects of her study is her suggestion “that there are two characteristics of the current generation of accountability standards that pose barriers to meaningful teaching and learning in science.”
- The tightly specified nature of successful learning performances precludes classroom teachers from modifying the standards to fits the needs of their students.
- The standards are removed from the thinking and reasoning processes needed to achieve them.
And then she adds that these two barriers are reinforced by the use of high-stakes testing in the present accountability model of education.
Dr. Wallace’s suggestions are significant in that nearly every state has adopted the Common Core State Standards, bringing America very close to having a national set of common standards and possibly a national curriculum, at least in English language arts and mathematics, with science next in line to be adopted by each state.
2. The Social-Emotional Consequences
Anxious teachers, sobbing children was the title of an opinion article published in the Atlanta newspaper last Sunday. The article, written by Stephanie Jones, professor of education at the University of Georgia, asks “What’s the low morale and crying about in education these days? Mandatory dehumanization and emotional policy-making — that’s what.”
Policy makers, acting on emotion and little to no data, have dehumanized schooling by implementing authoritarian standards in a one-size-fits-all system of education. We’ve enabled a layer of the educational system (U.S. Department of Education and the state departments of education) to implement the NCLB act, and high-stakes tests, and use data from these tests to determine the fate of school districts, teachers and students. One of the outcomes of this policy is the debilitating effects on the mental and physical health of students, teachers and administrators.
The emotional and behavioral disorders that youth experience have only been amplified by the NCLB act.
In research by Ginicola and Saccoccio, entitled Good Intentions, Unintended Consequences: The Impact of NCLB on Children’s Mental Health, they report that NCLB is indirectly damaging children by disproportionately stressing childhood education and blatantly disregarding other areas of child development. Their research on NCLB is enlightening and also disturbing. According to these researchers, NCLB in its current form:
- Fails to recognize the importance of social and emotional functioning in children
- Contributes to increased stress for children
- Causes stress in teachers that ultimately produces negative effects on children
- Impairs the teacher – student relationship
- Damages school climate
- Counter productively causes specific children to be left behind
- Takes time, energy, and money away from programs that promote positive mental health development in children.
3. Dehumanization of Students and Teachers
In 2001, the U.S. Congress enacted the No Child Left Behind (NCLB). NCLB requires that each state develop assessments in basic skills, mathematics and reading, at first, but it has now expanded to other areas. The “testing games” are an annual event making every boy and girl participate (starting at grade 3) to ensure that their state and school continue to receive federal funding. The testing games that children and youth are annually required to participate in are used to identify winners and losers. Unlike the Hunger Games, children are used to determine winning schools, teachers and districts. No one dies. However, we are testing the life out of our children and youth.
Here is how the testing games work. Student scores determine whether a school has done a good or bad job. Schools which receive Federal ESEA funding must make progress (known as Adequate Yearly Progress) on test scores. Schools compare scores from one year to the next, and use the difference to determine how well or poorly the children and youth did.
Students are not televised when they take these tests. However, the results are published in the local newspapers, and using the students’ test scores, schools that didn’t make AYP are labeled and their names published in the papers. And one more thing. Policy makers are hunting for bad teachers. To do this, they have required states to begin using VAM (Value Added Modeling) to rate teachers, and to then humiliate the teachers by publishing VAM scores in the local papers. Check Los Angeles. Check New York City.
In each of the scenarios described above, The Hunger Games and The Testing Games, youth are dehumanized and used as gladiators, or in the case of The Testing Games pawns, in which their moves are used to punish or reward states, districts, schools and teachers. On Valerie Strauss’ blog, there was a recent post that gets to the heart of the tragedy of The Testing Games, and how it is not only a dehumanizing event, but has nothing to do with helping students find out about their own learning. The post, written by Carol Corbett Burris, identifies with a ten year old neighbor who asks why she has to take test after test right after spring vacation. Ms. Burris, a New York school principal, realizes that she didn’t give her neighbor a good answer. But she used this encounter to delve into testing, especially the New York state exams. One of the things that Ms. Burris said that is significant here is that testing is now hardly about students at all. She puts it this way:
When my 10-year-old neighbor picks up her pencil on April 17, she will determine, in part, the evaluation of her teacher, principal, school and perhaps even the school of education that her teacher attended, as suggested by a recent New York proposal for testing. As a matter of measurement, this is nonsense. And it applies awful pressure on teachers and schools to become test-prep factories. But it’s also an unfair and unnecessary burden to put on the shoulders of a child.
It is also the reason that the tests now have to last six hours. No longer are they designed to determine if the student is achieving at grade level or needs extra help. The new tests now include below-grade-level, above-grade-level and field-test questions. If the state is going to use the student tests to evaluate teachers, those tests must be able to show yearly student growth for students who are below- or above-grade-level in skills. The tests must also be able to evaluate the validity and reliability of future questions because if the state is going to mandate the dismissal of teachers and principals based on student test results, or ruin their reputation by posting their scores in the newspaper, then it must also require that the tests be designed to stand up in court (whether or not they ultimate do stand up is still an open question). The needs of the lawyer, not the child, are now front and center.
4. There is No Evidence a Common Core will Help Students Learn
The Common Core Standards, and their associated summative high-stakes tests have little meaning in the process of teaching and learning. There is zero evidence that increased high-stakes testing linked to Common Standards will do any good. Over at Anthony Cody’s blog, Living in Dialog, guest blogger Stephen Krashen points out that authoritarian standards coupled with high-stakes tests will only get worse.
But, in spite of the lack of research to support authoritarian standards and high-stakes testing as a way to improve teaching and learning, the US Department of Education recently announced plans for:
- Extensive pre-kindergarten screening tests, a race to the top for tots.
- Adding interim tests and maybe pretests in the fall: The plan includes interim testing during the year, also, of course, linked to the standards, and may include pre-testing in the fall to be able to measure growth during the year.
- More subjects to be tested: In addition, the US Department of Education is encouraging standards and testing not only in reading and math, but in other subjects as well as well, including science, social studies, foreign languages, and even “performance” measures for the arts.
5. Injustice
The authoritarian standards and high-stakes testing movement conjure up for me the use of power and privilege to create injustices for not only schools and teachers, but for students and their parents. Using invalid test scores, the government has cast a net around schools that have high poverty rates resulting in many of them being labeled as failures with teachers and administrators fired, and replaced by teachers, many of whom are un-certified, and lack the teaching experience needed for these schools.
And all of this is done with data that is not only invalid, but is not reliable. As Dr. Michael Marder says, “the masses of nationwide data do point to the primary cause of school failure, but it is poverty, not teacher quality.” So what do we do? We create a system in which life changing decisions are made about teachers and students based on data that is not examined in the context of power, privilege, and income. This leads to a corrupt system in which we predicate schools’ and teachers’ performance on false data, and use this data to embarrass and destroy careers of highly educated teachers, and bring havoc to families. Why are we doing this?
We’ve enabled a layer of the educational system (U.S. Department of Education and the state departments of education) to implement the NCLB act, and high-stakes tests, and use data from these tests to determine the fate of school districts, teachers and students. Collaborating with this layer of education are private family foundations, such as the Walton Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Broad Foundations, private networks of schools such as KIPP, alternative teacher education organizations such as Teach for America, funded organizations such as Achieve, Inc. This collaboration promotes school choice and the privatization of schooling. Using the bluff that America’s schools are failing, and using data from international tests, the collaborators have conjured up a formula of reform that bases student progress on low level, bubble type “achievement” tests as the single factor in determining not only student success or failure in subject matter courses, but they also have figured out a way to use the invalidVAM modeling to penalize teachers, under the guise of getting rid of ”bad” teachers.
There you have it.
Next Steps
What do you think about these reasons that the Common Core State Standards and High-Stakes testing are not good for teaching and learning?
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