Getting to the Core of the Problem

I am standing on the outside looking in, but it seems to me, from what I have read and heard, that Common Core has a number of reasons for being brought into existence.

A) New is always better – the Progressive spirit still dominates education, as it has for over a century now. Though its jettisoning of tried and true methods and ideas has killed education, it still declaims that the latest idea will fix the problems its ideology has made for itself.

B) Confusion of Science and Art – I won’t rehash the article linked in the title to this point, but Common Core wants to solve the issues caused by leaving the Liberal Arts (which focus on word and number) behind and making everything into a discrete set of information (a science, by definition). In its own literature, this compulsion is clear: they don’t want kids learning about math, they want them to become mathematicians.

C) Catching up means running differently – this is an old fallacy, but a persistent one. If US students are behind in math, we need to teach math (or English) differently. And this means reinventing, never going back to earlier ideas (even though I will contend that the goals of CC are very similar to older goals from the past).

D) Control is necessary for real reform – if there is a problem with education, the post modern mind says that centralization is the only way to fix it. At its core, CC is about control of American education. Show where I am wrong, but that is clear from its behavior.  The desire these days to bring everything to some global standard is misguided and wrong.  It can’t be done.  It hurt the very students it is trying help.

If the above is true, then what am I to make of Common Core?  Again, I am outside looking in, but more and more I feel the pressure to adopt, conform, get with the program.  Every aspect of professional education is applying this pressure: textbooks, journals, teacher training, the marketing of education, etc.

I don’t have a lot of specific answers, but I think seeing American educational theory as divided into three parts, rather than two, might help.  Typically when I talk about US ed history we talk about traditional vs new, or pre-progressive and post.  But I don’t think that is true any longer. Here is how I am seeing it now:

Pre-1850 America only educated about 10% of its youth formally outside the home.  That highly aristocratic education was almost purely the European model, handed down from the Greek, Roman, Medieval form of Western education.  I would call it Classical.

As the Enlightenment birthed a new mind and America became industrialized, Progressivism came to the forefront of educational ideals, and this was molded along Prussian practice.  The German model has held sway up until recent times, maybe the early 1980’s.

The current model is another major paradigm shift.  It no longer pulls from what other nations are doing directly, but rather seeks to approach the art of teaching scientifically.  It is the Data model.  Common Core is its biggest baby yet.  There will be larger ones before it falls apart.  In the end, data does not offer solutions, it only offers numbers to be manipulated.

If we are trying to get students to become better thinkers, better users of language and number, than we need to bring them to the unity and harmony of thought best cultivated by the Liberal Arts.  Making every kid a mathematician, or author, or anything is not an education that liberates.  Rather it molds them into what the system wants them to be.  To keep America “on top” is not a good enough goal.  To be able to control what goes on in every school is great for those who make money through the control, but lousy for students seeking to become free and educated people.  We should move toward robust generalizations not data driven specifics.

Other thoughts on Common Core from my blog can be found here, and here, and here.

Core Meltdown

News on Common Core response and rhetoric continues to fill my RSS inbox.  I have clipped close to 70 articles on it by now.  I keep trying to wrap my mind around it to the point of making it a book, but I get stuck on Pt. 3 below.

1. What is it?
2. What is wrong with it?
3. What can be done?

At the heart of it’s issues is in many ways all that is wrong with modern thought:

A. You can fix anything if you centralize and governmentize it.

B. More money always helps.

C. All answers are found statistically and in the middle somewhere.

D. Experts trump everyone else.

I know those are all very general, but that is why I am struggling with the outline.  Points 1 and 2 are easy in our day of information overload.  But #3 has no one answer, and the answer is not the same “everywhere” but demands local answers, and thereby eschews most of the CC answer.  But the angst in the media is interesting.  And there is hope when there is a rejection of easy answers.  Maybe real answers can be found in the mess…

Is There a Common Core?

I have been doing a lot of research and thinking about the Common Core standards that has so many up in arms these days.  That has led to much more general thinking about “standards” and standardization, and thus testing, which means I come back to the old bugaboo: assessment.

It’s a bugaboo (would never have guessed that SpellCheck would know how to spell bugaboo!) because much of what seems to be at issue in our current discussions on education is how to assess education.  The following are the disjointed but related thoughts I have had on this issue (chime in as you like):

As I understand them, “standards” in an educational manner refer to a set benchmark or “spot” in learning that can be in some ascertained to have been accomplished.  I have already discussed the modern confusion of arts and sciences and what that means to this issue: you can’t assess actions and facts in the same way.

So if we are going to have a common set of standards, it would seem that a number of things must be in place: an agreed upon goal for education (or everyone will have differing standards), some manner of ensuring that the standards are achievable by those they are set upon (can any student or only some students achieve this standard?), and finally a clear and standard means of determining (assessing) that the standard has been obtained.

As to goal, this seems very difficult above the local level – at the heart of the Common Core movement is the notion that a kid in 9th grade Algebra in Massachusetts and one in Louisiana would be aiming at the same standard because all kids everywhere should be called to the same standard.  I am not convinced that you can say this honestly, and then if you do succeed in arguing the theory of it, that you can actually pull it off in reality.  It seems to suffer from our modern fallacy of equality – that we can actually ensure that everyone is exactly the same and should be that way.

As to ensuring that all kids can achieve the same standard, that also seems to suffer from some delusional thinking based on the idea that a central “committee” can somehow know enough about “all kids” as to make such a standard and know that they have successfully addressed this issue.  There is a dangerous notion hidden in this idea of “democratized” learning.  Can any committee reach agreement without compromise, and when it is a compromised agreement, is it faithful to any real standard or has it been reduced to a lesser standard to achieve agreement?

And the last point, the big point, is very difficult in my mind at the national or “common” level:  who is going to determine the standards have been achieved and by what means?  Again, the committee aspect addressed above is staring us in the face.  And further, there is no way around the subjective aspects of any standard.  Who says what the standard is?  Who says what “percentage” of mastery is “passing”?  I am all for a discussion of mastery, but what constitutes such?

In the end I applaud an effort to articulate standards.  I believe highly in such.  But I am not convinced by the paltry discussion I have seen on the above issues.  I think the belief has been “let’s state the standards and then find a means to ensure that everyone meets them and we will be fine.”  I am not finding much in the way of robust discussion of these difficulties, or the many others that surround the topic of assessment.  There needs to be more discussion of assessment, including but limited to, standards.  And by the way, once we articulate a set of standards (either locally or nationally) we then have to discuss how to teach our students to those.