The Juggernaut of Common Core State Standards

We are relieved that within the past several weeks something similar to a loud boom has gone off regarding CCSS.  Almost all of the news items and opinions that have passed through here are negative, as more people begin to connect the dots and realize just what this ill-conceived (at best) plan means to all of us.

Do you remember or have you heard of “new math”?  After the scare the Ruskies gave us with their Sputnik back in the ’60s, someone decided we needed a way to leap ahead in the sciences.  Since math is basic to all science, this meant we needed a way to accelerate our kid’s understanding of it. The result was “new math”.  What then happened?  A sizeable portion of the youthful victims of this nightmare were handicapped forever, resulting very probably in yet another expensive dead end for America’s scientific and engineering endeavours.   I’ve never quite understood the attraction of new math, probably because it never made sense to me.  For a quick primer look at this:

Another dose of progressive brain crepitation gave us the “whole language” method of teaching reading, something we here at Alpha-Phonics are particularly aware of.  Only God knows how many children’s lives were wrecked because of this misbegotten idea.  Fortunately, it appears that Phonics has triumphed and is again recognized as the best way to teach English.

Which brings me back to Common Core State Standards, or “here we go again”, only this time with many more zeros on the price tag.  Last week, Peter Berger, in his blog Poor Elijah’s Almanack, bit into CCSS in a way that quite sums up our sentiments.  So well does it do this in fact, that we have decided to present it here as well as provide a link to it.  Read ’em and weep:

The Common Core Juggernaut

By  Peter Berger

Back in the days of the transcontinental railroad, Union Pacific entered into a contract with a construction company, Credit Mobilier. Credit Mobilier presented its bills to Union Pacific, and the railroad forwarded them to the federal government for payment. The neat part of the arrangement was the owners of Union Pacific also owned Credit Mobilier, and the bills they presented themselves were grossly inflated. The result was a fifty-three million dollar railroad that cost the government seventy-two million dollars, and that was when a million dollars was a lot of money.

For some of us a million dollars still is a lot of money, but it’s nothing compared to the billions the Common Core State Standards are costing us. One pro-Core think tank estimates the start-up total for textbooks, assessments, and professional development at twelve billion dollars. Other projections range closer to sixteen billion.

Doing everything online would allegedly lower costs, provided we don’t count all the laptop computers we’d have to buy, maintain, and replace periodically for every student in the country. The managing consortia representing Common Core states have hired Pearson to determine what each state will require in online bandwidth, computer hardware, and software. Pearson should know. It’s the world’s largest publisher of print and online textbooks, educational software, and assessments.

By the way, when Pearson isn’t overseeing every state’s compliance with Common Core specifications, it’s marketing an online Common Core curriculum in partnership with the Gates Foundation. Also by the way, the Gates Foundation initiated and paid for the Common Core. The Common Core’s “architect,” David Coleman, neither is nor ever was an educator of any kind, which explains why Mr. Gates empowered him to determine what every child in the country will learn and when schools will teach it. Mr. Coleman is now CEO of the Educational Testing Service, which along with Pearson has already secured a number of sizable Common Core assessment contracts.

See how cozy the education world can be. The Common Core is the latest high profile, expensive crusade to reform public education. Proponents adamantly deny it’s a national curriculum, despite the fact that it explicitly specifies what students will be taught and when schools will teach it, which is what a curriculum does. Since forty-five budget-strapped states have been induced by substantial federal subsidies and private grants to adopt the Common Core for all their schools, it’s fair to describe it as a national curriculum, or at least an almost national curriculum.

The Common Core usurps the right of local schools, school boards, parents, and communities to determine what their children will learn. Consider yourself entirely disempowered. This is being handled by the experts.

These are the same experts who’ve been superintending education reform since their expertise sent schools off the rails in the 1970s. They’re the same authorities who wouldn’t know a real classroom if they tripped into one, and their theories and initiatives are dressed in the same slogans and familiar promise that this time what they’ve dreamed up will truly prepare America’s students for the twenty-first century.

Some of the Common Core’s standards and expectations are reasonable and appropriate, which is why they’ve long been included in existing good curricula, of which there are plenty. Many of the standards, however, have been broadly and justifiably condemned as developmentally inappropriate for the grade levels at which they’re imposed. Reflecting Mr. Coleman’s preferences, they also drastically reduce the amount of fiction English teachers are permitted to teach.

Consistent with the “college for all” rhetoric broadcast by President Obama and Bill Gates, the standards are for many students excessively rigorous. For example, the Core demands mastery of Algebra II for every student, a diploma requirement several states have recently rejected as inappropriate for every student.

The Common Core’s standards and expectations typically exceed what teachers can realistically cover in a year, and what many actual students can realistically master in that time. Nonetheless, students, teachers, and schools will be held accountable for their failure to achieve the Core’s specific grade level standards.

Success and failure will be determined by mandated, time-devouring, unproven online assessments that are the Common Core’s expensively beating heart, assessments requiring the purchase of boatloads of new computer hardware and software. This new testing torrent will make No Child Left Behind’s burdensome, obsessive assessment regime seem like no burden at all. Initial Common Core assessments have proven more problematic and no less plagued by inaccuracy and unreliability than the tests that failed to accurately determine success, failure, and adequate yearly progress under NCLB.

The Common Core imposes ever more testing and paperwork compliance while it consumes time and diverts teachers’ efforts from teaching the students in their classrooms. It offers nothing more than all the other imperfectly written education blueprints that have failed to make a difference in student achievement. In return for this harm and this nothing, it hijacks billions in public treasure to private interests. Even worse, it steals our rightful sovereignty over our children’s education.

A juggernaut is an engine of destruction. The common core is a juggernaut rolling over our schools and our children. Before we lose another ten years to another bad idea, we need to stop it.

We recommend you follow Poor Elijah’s Almanack, he is obviously on the side of American children and parents!