Just give all the chalk to me, and don't let anyone else touch the board.
While the Comon Core is a shredded shadow of its ambitious former self, the standards movement that birthed it is still out there, still mulling over how their attempt to implement national academic standards came up so very short. A recent webinar suggests that they still have no idea.
The webinar was hosted by FutureEd, a think tank at Georgetown established almost six years ago that has backed charter schools, high-stakes testing, and the Common Core. For its webinar about the “unfinished agenda” of the “standards-based reform movement” (a less damaged and more open-ended brand than “common core’) included, it included Michael Cohen (former president of Achieve, a business instrumental in pushing Common Core), Chester Finn (president emeritus of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and Foundation, organizations that both pushed the Core and sponsor charter schools), John B. King (who as ed chief in New York created wide outrage by his support of Common Core), Lauren Slover (former head of PARCC, one of the two Big Standardized Tests linked to the Common Core), and Lauren Weisskirk (CSO of EdReports, a group that evaluates how well materials align with the Common Core standards). All part of the vast web that inflicted Common Core on U.S. education.
The Core were standards, an attempt to lay out what the end point of education should be (in math and reading only). But it didn’t say how to get there. And it did not result in vast improvements in student achievement (aka test scores).
The panelists suggested that the missing piece may be curriculum and a more detailed and specific directing of teachers. “In some sense, it’s striking that we left this off the table in any way from the outset,” Cohen said.
Not really. Common Core supporters were, at the time, extremely sensitive to charges that the Core was a curriculum and extremely vocal in declaring that it was no such thing, perhaps because the federal government is specifically prohibited from pushing any curriculum.
Sarah Schwartz at Education Week also cites as a “curriculum roadblock” the “ long tradition of local control.” Tom Loveless, in his book-length autopsy of Common Core, pointed at the many layers between the state, where standards are concocted and legislated, and the classroom, where teachers have to decide what to actually do with the young humans in front of them. The core of his explanation:
Despite the theory’s intuitive appeal, standards-based reform does not work very well in reality. One key reason is that coordinating key aspects of education at the top of the system hamstrings discretion at the bottom. The illusion of a coherent, well-coordinated system is gained at the expense of teachers’ flexibility in tailoring instruction to serve their students.
Top-down education reform, dictated from above and pushed down to the education professionals who do the work (and, notably, without consulting those professionals for their insight or expertise) is a recipe for failure. As Loveless pointed out, top-down programs are “unpredictable, subject to political and ideological pressures, and vulnerable to the pendulum effect as new reforms emerge in response to previous ones.” In other words, it’s hard to stamp out chaos at the bottom when there will always be chaos at the top.
But this panel of standards architects somehow concludes that what is needed is more top-down dictation, that teachers must be more tightly controlled and trained to implement the materials as required. Teachers have already learned that the phrase “implement with integrity” means “turn off your brain and follow instructions.” This is not an approach guaranteed to make the profession more appealing.
Common Core in particular and the standards movement in general suffer from several built-in flaws. One is the notion that education can be standardized at all, that we can say with certainty that if the teacher stands up, follows this script, and uses the required activity, every single student will learn exactly what we want them to.
The other is the notion that by imposing (either through incentives, punishments, or just brute force) order and system from above will somehow cancel all the chaos inherent in a system composed of living, breathing humans, many of whom are not at all grown up.
The standards movement argument for forty years has been, “We don’t have enough control of the system yet, because all these humans keep messing it up. We promise—if we had just a little more control, we could make this work beautifully.” It hasn’t been true for the last forty years, and it won’t be any more true in the future.
