[Vision2020] The Common Core and the Common Good

[Art Deco]

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

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August 21, 2013
The Common Core and the Common Good By CHARLES M.
BLOW<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/charles_m_blow/index.html>

America, we have a problem.

Our educational system is not keeping up with that of many other
industrialized countries, even as the job market becomes more global and
international competition for jobs becomes steeper.

We have gone from the leader to a laggard.

According to the Broad
Foundation<http://broadeducation.org/about/crisis_stats.html>,
an educational reform group, “American students rank 25th in math, 17th in
science and 14th in reading compared to students in 27 industrialized
countries.”

And we have gone from No. 1 in high school graduation to 22nd among
industrialized countries, according to a
report<http://www.oecd.org/edu/highlights.pdf>last year by the
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

That same report found that fewer than half of our students finished
college. This ranked us 14th among O.E.C.D. countries, below the O.E.C.D.
average. In 1995 we were among the Top 5.

Some rightly point to the high levels of poverty in our public schools to
adjust for our lagging performance, but poverty — and affluence — can’t
explain all the results away.

As Amanda Ripley, an investigative journalist, explains in her new
book<http://www.amazon.com/The-Smartest-Kids-World-ebook/dp/B0061NT61Y#reader_B0061NT61Y>,
“The Smartest Kids in the World and How They Got That Way,” American
students are not performing at the same level of their peers
internationally.

She writes: “American kids are better off, on average, than the typical
child in Japan, New Zealand, or South Korea, yet they knew far less math
than those children. Our most privileged teenagers had highly educated
parents and attended the richest school in the world, yet they ranked 18th
in math compared to their privileged peers around the world, scoring well
below affluent kinds in New Zealand, Belgium, France and Korea, among other
places. The typical child in Beverly Hills performed below average,
compared to all kids in Canada.”

A report this month by the company that administers ACT, the college
admissions test, found that only a fourth of those tested were ready for
college. And that was among motivated students who want to go to college,
from all sorts of schools, not just public school students.

Any way you slice it, we’re not where we want or need to be.

One strategy of changing our direction as a nation is the adoption of
Common Core State Standards, meant to teach children the skills they need
to be successful in college and careers — skills like critical thinking and
deep analysis.

These are things that Americans recognize that our schools need to teach.
According to a Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup
poll<http://www.gallup.com/poll/164060/americans-say-schools-teach-soft-skills.aspx>released
Wednesday, 80 percent of Americans strongly agree that schools
should teach critical thinking skills, 78 percent agree that they should
teach communication skills, 57 percent agree that they should teach
students how to collaborate and 51 percent believe that they should help
build student’s character.

The Obama administration strongly supports the Common Core, and the
American Federation of Teachers endorses
it<http://www.uft.org/op-eds/common-core-wake-call>.
The president of the United Federation of Teachers says that most teachers
agree it should be implemented. And, according to CoreStandands.org, “45
states, the District of Columbia, four territories and the Department of
Defense Education Activities have adopted the Common Core State Standards.”

This seemed like a sure thing. The problem is that, in some states, Common
Core testing has been implemented before teachers, or the public for that
matter, have been instructed in how to teach students using the new
standards.

This means that, when students score poorly on the more rigorous Common
Core-based tests, it threatens to cause a backlash among parents, who
increasingly see testing as the problem, not the solution.

That Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll also found that most Americans had not
heard of the Common Core. Only 22 percent thought increased testing helped
school performance, and most rejected the use of student test scores to
evaluate teachers.

Because we insist on prioritizing testing over teaching — punishments over
preparation — we run the risk of turning Americans off one of the few
educational strategies in recent memory that most people say we need.

That’s so American.

We have to decide as a country — politicians and parents, corporations and
communities — that high-performance education is not only valuable to our
sense of self, but essential to our future prosperity. Today’s students are
tomorrow’s workers and leaders and innovators and entrepreneurs.

In all the discussions I have with educational leaders and reformers on
improving our educational outcomes, there seems to be some level of
agreement — though obviously not full agreement — on strategies that work:
attracting, supporting and keeping the best teachers and investing in their
development; providing “wrap-around” services for poor and struggling
students; making schools safe, welcoming, fun places with recess and art
and music and nutritious food; and strongly promoting parental engagement.

And we need a national standard for what the kind of education that we want
our children to receive. Our educational system has become so tangled in
experiments and exams and excuses that we’ve drifted away from the basis of
what makes education great: learning to think critically and solve
problems.

We have drifted away from the fundamentals of what makes a great teacher:
the ability to light a fire in a child, to develop in him or her a level of
intellectual curiosity, the grit to persevere and the capacity to expand.
Great teachers help to activate a small thing that breeds great minds:
thirst.

The Common Core is meant to help bolster those forms of learning and
teaching.

The Common Core is for the common good, if only we can get our act together
and properly implement it.

•

I invite you to join me on Facebook
<http://www.facebook.com/CharlesMBlow>and follow me on
Twitter <http://twitter.com/CharlesMBlow>, or e-mail me at
chblow at nytimes.com.




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