Point/Counterpoint: Common core

Paige Backman
pbackman@uwyo.edu

When someone says “Common Core” out loud, the reaction of a Wyoming audience is fairly predictable. People suddenly become like Pap from Big River ranting and raving about the “dag gum guv’ment” saying that the education standards don’t take individuals into account or don’t let the teachers have the freedom to teach. Before we dust off our pitchforks and ride Common Core out on a rail, we should give the standards another try.
First, lets make sure we are calling them what they are. Common Core is a set of educational standards. Not a curriculum requirement. This actually works to the advantage of those people to believe the federal government should have a “hands off” approach to education. Local communities and educators still plan their day-to-day teaching styles and lesson plans. Common Core is not telling educators how to teach but it is creating a baseline for what K-12 students need to understand, just as other educational standards introduced in the past have done.
It’s worth mentioning that teachers and educators created Common Core. While the government probably didn’t call Ms. Dayton, your favorite teacher from the first grade to consult with her on what standards the students of American should be meeting, they did take the time to consult the American Federation of Teachers, National Education Association and both the National Councils of Teachers of Mathematics and English. Wyoming adopted the Common Core standards in 2012 and while some parties have been persistently voicing their opinion against them, other states like West Virginia have seen success with them. In 2010, West Virginia adopted Common Core voluntarily but is very vocal about the fact that their teachers must decide what serves their classroom best. So even though the name Common Core makes us think of white walled classrooms of brainwashed socialists’ children, there is still room for individuality. We still can raise our standards.
The aim of Common Core is to better prepare students for secondary education, whether that is college or career training. The approach we have chosen to take is to review test scores and see what is working the public education system and what isn’t. A common criticism I hear about this approach is that “teachers teach to the test” instead of teaching the concepts and curriculum. When we are talking about “the test” we are talking about a standardized test. The misconception here is that this standardized test is designed to turn our children into fact regurgitating robots when really it is just a measurement of how the students are doing.
Standardized tests are defined as a test that 1) requires all test takers to answer the same questions, or a selection of questions from a common bank of questions and 2) is scored in a “standard” or consistent manner, which makes it possible to compare the relative performance of individual. These tests produce reliable and valid data. Within standardized tests there are two types, achievement based tests and aptitude tests. Aptitude tests measure how well the subject will perform and achievement tests measure what concepts the students have internalized. The testing that Common Core uses is a type of achievement-standardized test, not an aptitude test like the ACT or SAT. It is simply a way to measure how well we are preparing the children for their own futures. Teaching the concepts is the best way to prepare students for this and if they aren’t getting those concepts then the tests will show that and the approach can be re-evaluated.
There is at least one more thing that should be addressed when talking about Common Core. Some of those who oppose Common Core make the point that Common Core doesn’t allow the student who needs extra help to have their needs met. To me, this argument seems like it comes from the same people who won’t get their kids vaccinated because one study claimed it would give their child Autism. We have all heard horror stories of those children who struggle in school because they had special circumstances and I’m not denying the validity of those stories. Some children genuinely struggle through school at no fault of their own and sometimes school just isn’t somewhere where they have natural talent. Claiming that local educators and state governments have voluntarily adopted a set of standards that knowingly and blatantly leaves students behind is ludicrous.
These people have dedicated their careers and even personal time to the cultivation of students. I can’t tell you how many times I watched my mother pour all of her energy into her lesson plans, hoping it would finally click for just one of her students. Or how many times I have witnessed my father spend endless hours reviewing an Individualized Education Plan for just one of his thousands of students. Or how many hours I spent with teachers who agreed to meet with me on their extremely brief lunch break to make sure that I am getting it. These are the people who have the students’ best interest at heart. Common Core is not required but for the educators and legislators of 42 states and District of Columbia it has been the means by which they have chosen to help their students. They would not make that decision without considering the child who does struggle. In fact, they chose this path with that particular student in mind. They would do whatever it takes to get their students to the standard and send them to college. Common Core isn’t the enemy. Misconceptions about Common Core are the problem.

Andrew Server
aserver@uwyo.edu

Up until halfway through this past summer, I was a student in the College of Education majoring in Secondary Education/History. As Common Core was proposed by the Obama administration, I cringed at the prospect of having more federal government involvement in the public education sector. Among my comrades in the college, Common Core was similarly distrusted. Furthermore, I can’t recall a single professor that I had during my time in the College of Education who expressed anything but discontent regarding the policy and what is to be required of teachers under the Common Core system. Similarly to the No Child Left Behind plan set in place by President George W. Bush, the Common Core system would allow the federal government to further its inept conduct in the department of public education. It’s funny how some individuals are proponents of federal government involvement in other departments, until government becomes involved in their own department. They see how clumsy the system is, how inefficient government makes things and more importantly- they see why a one-size-fits-all approach is undesirable and unrealistic.

First, let us accept the undeniable: Common Core makes coursework convoluted. Regarding mathematics, I encourage you to Google search any of a multitude of examples where Common Core has made simple math equations like 120 plus 120 so tortuous. Compared to the “old fashioned” method of solving such equations, people across the country are perplexed as to why such functions as mere addition or subtraction have been made so absurdly unrecognizable. Although the math equations themselves might not be overbearingly difficult, they are inarguably negatively elaborate.

With risk of sounding concerned of conspiracy, I must also declare to you, the reader, that Common Core’s standards have injected bias and ideology into such topics as history and English. According to Valerie Strauss’s piece “8th grade assignment: Write essay about whether Holocaust was real or made up” from washingtonpost.com, one school in the Rialto school district in California posed a history prompt that encouraged the students to question the occurrence of the Holocaust and whether or not it was merely a political ploy used to inspire action. The action was defended as Common Core standards are seen as encouraging students towards critical thought. Critical thought is fine and necessary in an education atmosphere. However, Common Core opens the door for such preposterousness as the situation described above.

In addition to the outright ridiculous standards that Common Core introduces to every public classroom in the nation, it disregards a state’s ability to educate its own citizenry better than bureaucrats in D.C. can legislate. The more localized education becomes, the better the education becomes. That is not to say that there ought not be a general level of standards that states or smaller municipalities should be required to offer, but a large majority of power should be held by states in the process of educating their citizens. Local governments are closer to their constituents, after all. A combination of allowing citizens more open and less penalized choices when choosing between charter, private and public schools and allowing states to have more control over how individuals within their boundaries learn will do a better job in bettering education compared to injecting more federal government requirements into the process. Keep more of the outright power in the hands of local education leaders, for they are closer to the education process than a bureaucrat in D.C.

One argument offered in favor for Common Core is that it would allow for students to move between state boundaries without change in standards. It is argued that teachers would have an easier time transitioning students from other states into their classrooms. To this, I would encourage you consider that this same standardization of criteria becomes a race to the easiest common standards possible. Shall we seek to have super easy nationalized set of standards that is easy to transfer from state to state with? Or shall we have states aspire to more strenuous individualized standards that, while are slightly more difficult to transition out-of-state students in to, encourage competition and bettered education.

No Child Left Behind fell on its face and I predict Common Core to do the same. Furthered government involvement in education is not going to solve the problem- individual’s school choice and local state-controlled education is more likely to do any good for the status of public schools in the United States. Six states did not adopt the Common Core standards. Forty-four states ought to join them.