[Vision2020] War on the Core

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

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August 18, 2013
War on the Core By BILL
KELLER<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/k/bill_keller/index.html>

I respect, really I do, the efforts by political scientists and pundits to
make sense of the current Republican Party. There is intellectual virtue in
the search for historical antecedents and philosophical underpinnings.

I understand the urge to take what looks to a layman like nothing more than
a mean spirit or a mess of contradictions and brand it. (The New
Libertarianism! Burkean Revivalists!) But more and more, I think Gov. Bobby
Jindal, Louisiana’s Republican rising star, had it right when he said his
party was in danger of becoming simply “the stupid party.”

A case in point is the burgeoning movement to kill what is arguably the
most serious educational reform of our lifetime. I’m talking about the
Common Core, a project by a consortium of states to raise public school
standards nationwide.

The Common Core, a grade-by-grade outline of what children should know to
be ready for college and careers, made its debut in 2010, endorsed by 45
states. It is to be followed in the 2014-15 school year by new standardized
tests that seek to measure more than the ability to cram facts or master
test-taking tricks. (Some states, including New York, introduced early
versions of the tougher tests this year.)

This is an ambitious undertaking, and there is plenty of room for debate
about precisely how these standards are translated into classrooms. But the
Common Core was created with a broad, nonpartisan consensus of educators,
convinced that after decades of embarrassing decline in K-12 education, the
country had to come together on a way to hold our public schools
accountable. Come together it did — for a while.

The backlash began with a few of the usual right-wing suspects. Glenn Beck
warned that under “this insidious menace to our children and to our
families” students would be “indoctrinated with extreme leftist ideology.”

(Beck also appears to believe that the plan calls for children to be fitted
with bio-wristbands<http://www.glennbeck.com/2013/04/08/the-whole-story-on-common-core/>and
little cameras so they can be monitored at all times for corporate
exploitation.)

Beck’s soul mate Michelle Malkin warned that the Common Core was “about
top-down control engineered through government-administered tests and
left-wing textbook monopolies.” Before long, FreedomWorks — the love child
of Koch brothers cash and Tea Party passion — and the American Principles
Project, a religious-right lobby, had joined the cause. Opponents have
mobilized Tea Partyers to barnstorm in state capitals and boiled this
complex issue down to an obvious slogan, “ObamaCore!”

There are Common Core
critics<http://dianeravitch.net/category/common-core/>on the left as
well, who argue that the accountability movement makes
teachers scapegoats for problems caused mainly by poverty. As one educator
put it, less than half in jest, “The problem with national testing is that
the conservatives hate national and the liberals hate testing.” Discomfort
with the Core may
grow<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/16/education/new-education-standards-face-growing-opposition.html?ref=us&_r=2&>when
states discover, as New York did this month, that the tougher tests
make their schools look bad. But overwhelmingly the animus against the
standards comes from the right.

Some of this was inevitable. Local control of public schools, including the
sacred right to keep them impoverished and ineffectual, is a fundamental
tenet of the conservative canon. In an earlier day, more thoughtful
Republicans — people who had actually read the Common Core standards and
understood that the notion of a federal usurpation was a boogeyman — would
have held the high ground against the noisy fringe.

Such conservatives still exist. William Bennett, President Reagan’s
secretary of education and now a stalwart of right-wing radio, has
defended<http://www.hughhewitt.com/bill-bennett-on-the-common-core/>the
Common Core. So has Mike
Huckabee<http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/jun/5/huckabee-urges-states-back-common-core/>,
the former Arkansas governor who is a favorite of religious conservatives.
Several Republican governors (including Jindal, though he seems to be
wobbling) have stood by the Common Core. Conservative-leaning think tanks
like the Manhattan Institute and the Fordham Institute have published
sober, sensible
arguments<http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/344519/truth-about-common-core-kathleen-porter-magee>for
the standards.

But today’s Republican Party lives in terror of its so-called base, the
very loud, often paranoid,
if-that-Kenyan-socialist-in-the-White-House-is-for-it-I’m-against-it crowd.
In April the Republican National Committee surrendered to the fringe and
urged states to renounce Common Core. The presidential aspirant Marco
Rubio, trying to appease conservatives angry at his moderate stance on
immigration, last month
abandoned<http://shark-tank.net/2013/07/25/marco-rubio-opposes-common-core-education-standards/>his
support for the standards. And state by red state, the effort to
disavow or defund is under way. Indiana has put the Common Core on hold.
Michigan’s legislature cut off money for implementing the standards and is
now contemplating pulling out altogether. Last month, Georgia withdrew from
a 22-state consortium, one of two groups designing tests pegged to the new
standards, ostensibly because of the costs. (The new tests are expected to
cost about $29 per student; grading them is more labor-intensive because in
addition to multiple-choice questions they include written essays and
show-your-work math problems that will be graded by actual humans. “You’re
talking about 30 bucks a kid, in an education system that now spends
upwards of $9,000 or $10,000 per student per year,” said Michael Petrilli
of the Fordham Institute.)

The Common Core is imperiled in Oklahoma, Utah, Alabama and Pennsylvania.
All of the retreat, you will notice, has been in Republican-controlled
states.

“The experts in education have been wrong before and have forced all kinds
of bad ideas on local schools,” Petrilli concedes. “So I have some sympathy
for people who say, Uh-oh, here we go again. But I think in this case the
standards happen to be very good.”

“Even conservatives, evangelicals,” he said. “when they look at the
standards, they tend to come away impressed.”

So let’s take a look at this fiendish federal plot to brainwash our
children.

First, it is not federal. President Obama has used Race to the Top money to
encourage states to embrace higher standards, but the Common Core was
written under the auspices of the National Governors Association and the
Council of Chief State School Officers, an effort that began in 2007,
before Obama was elected. Some advocates of Common Core have actually
implored Obama and his education secretary, Arne Duncan, just to stop
talking about it, because their endorsement feeds the myth that this is a
federal takeover.

Second, there is no national curriculum. The standards, which you can read
here <http://www.corestandards.org/the-standards>, describe a reasonable
progression of learning from grade to grade, but leave it to state and
local school officials to get there. The Common

Core is not an attempt to pack kids’ heads with an officially sanctioned
list of facts, but to assure that they are able to read a complicated text
and understand it, to recognize a problem and know how to solve it.

So, to pick an example at random, the Common Core says a third grader
should be able to “describe characters in a story (e.g., their traits,
motivations or feelings) and explain how their actions contribute to the
sequence of events.” By eighth grade the student should be able to “analyze
how particular lines of dialogue or incidents in a story or drama propel
the action, reveal aspects of a character or provoke a decision.”

The Common Core does not dictate what stories these kids will be reading or
what textbooks schools should use and does not prescribe reading lists,
except for a few obvious essentials, including America’s founding documents
and a bit of Shakespeare.

Third, the Common Core is not some new and untried pedagogical experiment.
Much of it leans on traditional methods that have proved themselves over
time. Kids are taught phonics in the early grades. They learn times tables
and memorize the formulas for areas and volumes.

The standards encourage more use of informational texts and literary
nonfiction to build background knowledge and vocabulary that will be useful
in the real world. But the Common Core does not stint on literature. By the
end of high school, nonfiction would account for 70 percent of the total
reading material in all subjects. That still leaves a lot of room for the
classics.

The Core does call for schools across the states to deliver their lessons
in the same sequence. Does it really matter if children in Alabama and New
Jersey start algebra in the same grade? It matters a lot to a kid who moves
from Alabama to New Jersey. According to the National Center for Education
Statistics, about 13 percent of children under 18 move each year, and the
numbers are much higher for low-income, military and immigrant families.

Many of them lose their place in the educational order and never recover.

There is, in fact, an important national discussion to be had as the Common
Core takes effect and schools begin reckoning with the results of tougher
tests. What’s the right cutoff score for a passing grade? Do schools get
credit for progress, even if they are performing below grade level? Should
there be an opt-out provision for schools that are more experimental or
that already have high college placement rates? How do the test results
figure in evaluating individual teachers?

E. D. Hirsch, an advocate of the Common Core whose Core Knowledge
Foundation distributes a widely used curriculum, warned in an interview
that if the standards were not carefully implemented, schools could still
end up emphasizing “mindless test prep” over substance.

“The Tea Party’s worried about the federal government,” he told me. “What
they should be worried about is theeducation school professors and the
so-called experts.”

But — as with that other demonic federal plot, Obamacare — the Republicans
aren’t interested in making reform work. They just want it dead.

“Conservatives used to be in favor of holding students to high standards
and an academic curriculum based on great works of Western civilization and
the American republic,” two education scholars, Kathleen Porter-Magee and
Sol Stern, wrote in National Review Online. “Aren’t they still?”

Good question.




-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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