The march to standardize and uniform the curriculum is a dangerous movement in a democratic society, and especially in one that is so diverse in cultures, languages, and geography as America.  How can we really think that one set of statements of science objectives written by non-practitioners can be truly be valid for all learners, all schools, and all teachers?

In today’s Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Wayne Washington and Nancy Badertscher report that “Sweeping Changes to hit schools.”  Beginning next year, Georgia schools, along with 46 other states will try and implement the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in mathematics and reading/language arts.  The Department of Education thinks the Common Core is the best thing since sliced bread.  Once again, the schools of Georgia will be up against an authoritarian movement to “standardize” education in the United States.  And the state department couches the CCSS in helping the nation get stronger.  If you believe that, then I’ll have a bridge that is for sale.

The common standards movement, and now, the the writing of a new generation of science standards rests in part on the opinion that state standards are inferior and inconsistent, and there is the need to increase student achievement, especially in science and mathematics, in order to remain competitive in the global economic environment. It’s had to argue with this. However, it is not true.  America is one of the most competitive countries in the world, indeed, number 4 in the world.

The drive to develop the common standards has also been “adopted” by the U.S. Department of Education, and in its Race to the Top Fund ($4.5 billion), states that did not adopt the common standards lost 70 points on the 500 point scale for doing so. Why do these organizations want to develop a single set of standards, and will they be any better than the standards that exist in the 50 states today?  The fact is state departments of education around the country have in one sense been coerced into accepting the common core standards in order to apply for very large Federal grants, and there is the assumption that a national set of standards will be superior to standards developed at the state level.  Oh, and by the way, Georgia was one of the Race to the Top winners.

There is an other movement that the Common Core is facing, and that is push-back from some state-level policy makers.  Anthony Cody over at Living in Dialog wrote an important piece recently entitled The Common Core: The Technocrats Re-Engineer Learning.  Anthony Cody explains that we need to look at the Common Core as the way technocrats are making it possible to “nationalize” achievement levels, and then allow “reward and punishments to be fairly distributed.”  He then cautions us that the Common Core and High-Stakes testing are joined at the hip, and we should take heed:

I think that while many people at this point favor an abstract concept like “high standards,” there is a growing discomfort with “standardization.” We should remember that in the not-too-distant past Bill Clinton’s attempt to get national standards in place was soundly rejected on political grounds. In fact, the rules that govern the Department of Education explicitly forbid the establishment of national standards — that is why there is this constant effort to insist this is a voluntary state initiative, and this pretense that Dept of Ed grant requirements have nothing to do with it.

One argument I have heard in their defense is that we ought to have a system that prevents states from deciding that students need not be taught that the theory of evolution explains how life on earth has changed over time. As a science teacher, I too would appreciate it if there was a national mandate to teach evolution and overcome creationist illusions like Intelligent Design. However, I do not think this is a good enough reason to standardize instruction from top to bottom in every classroom across the country.

The idea that we can separate the Common Core from high stakes testing is mistaken. The Common Core exists for no other reason than to make such tests possible on a national scale. The Common Core is also closely associated with two big shifts in testing. First, there will be a significant expansion in the number and frequency of tests. There will be more tests, in more subjects, at more grade levels.

The fact that there will be common tests across the nation will make it easier to place even greater pressure on teachers and students to attend to test scores. Second, we will have the introduction of computer-based assessments, with the marvelous machines designed to grade tests, like the Pearson Intelligent Essay Analyzer, or other robo-grading systems.

The Georgia Department of Education, like many other state department of education have fully embraced the Common Core State Standards.  The disruption to school districts around the state will be excessive.  There is virtually no criticism of the movement to establish the Common Core Standards as the goals of education in Georgia.  Why is that?

Anthony Cody answers that question:

People may be unaware that this is connected to a vast new system of student data, which, in the state of New York, will be managed by a collaboration between the Gates Foundation and Rupert Murdoch’s Wireless Generation. The technocrat’s vision is that every student’s data will be tracked from kindergarten onward, and teacher performance can then be carefully monitored. And the whole system depends on a common set of national standards and tests.

Over the years, making academic proficiency the purpose of American education has shifted the benefits of learning away from students and families, onto schools, colleges, businesses, and the education industry itself.   We’ve been convinced that student test scores are a barometer of school success or failure, when in fact, academic scores are not.  There is ample evidence that student test scores are not a barometer of U.S. economic growth, or depression.  U.S. test scores did not cause or contribute to the Great Recession, any more than they caused the Economic Boom of the 1990s.

State department technocrats are chomping at the bit.  They know that nirvana is a just a few years away when they will be able to collect, analyze, punish and reward schools and teachers with the massive amount of data that will be at their fingertips.  Achievement test scores will be the data of choice, and the data will be used to not only determine the progress of the students, but the data will be used to evaluate the performance of teachers and schools, with idea being that this data will enable states to fire the bad teachers, replace them with non-certified teachers from groups like Teach for America.

The Common Core Standards, like any other set of standards are brick walls in the face of teaching and learning.  Research by Carolyn Wallace and others has shown that accountability standards are barriers to teaching and learning.

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.”

1. The tightly specified nature of successful learning performances precludes classroom teachers from modifying the standards to fits the needs of their students.

2. 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.

Common Core State Standards will implemented over the next few years.  Do you agree that this will be good for education?  Or do you think this is a mistake, and the local schools and districts should be the leaders and innovators in curriculum and instruction?