We Are NOT a Common Core Country

I have never liked just the mere title Common Core. We aren’t a nation that values common. We like differences, uniqueness, individuality, independence, eccentricity, distinctiveness, and originality. Since when do we enforce conformity? Pro common forces, including Stand for Children, are out in full armor, with pretty YouTube commercials, attempting to impress us as to how all children need the same basic curriculum, making it sound like the civil rights issue of our time. Let’s dispense with that quickly shall we?

In the name of civil rights, students deserve good, clean, safe, school facilities, wonderfully stocked libraries, decent technology, and a varied curriculum. Far too many schools have lacked these basics for years. Students also require credentialed, professional teachers that choose to make teaching a career and who are provided support. By support I mean reasonable class sizes, and backing by the local school board, school administrators, counselors, librarians, school psychologists etc. because atypical problems will arise no matter how good you are as a teacher.

More importantly, in talking about civil rights, children also need adults to instill in them tolerance for their fellow classmates. We should be working more on how to bring diversity into our schools to help children learn to work with and care for one another. How will their world look when they graduate from college if they haven’t learned to get along in K-12? There is far too little attention paid to social interaction when it comes to civil rights.       

Students deserve a curriculum that teaches to their strengths, shores up weaknesses or, sometimes, teaches how to compensate for weakness. It does a student no good to say all weaknesses can be overcome. In fact, some weaknesses can teach students persistence and how to become strong despite the weakness. It is ill-conceived to believe everyone must attain one narrow level of learning.

I understand it is compelling to think that poor children and all children will be helped by being pushed to work harder and by making the same basic curriculum that all children must master. But a common curriculum that involves scripted-like learning and draconian enforcement is helpful to no one.  I have seen pictures of worksheets, like the old dittoes teachers would scoff at, or use only for drill, being timed and used to bring children to tears. Parents are rattled. How sad time and energy are wasted on such concerns.        

We should applaud and value the differences that make students unique. Common Core Standards don’t do that. And they provide no way to save face when you display any uncommon traits. When you are a student and veer away from common, if you mess up the answers on a math ditto or don’t master 60 wpm on a keyboard (a noted requirement—someone please tell me that’s a mistake) you learn to believe, inaccurately, that you are a failure. CCS advocates think common means everyone will get an equal chance. They confuse sameness with the conditions I noted in the 2^nd and 3^rd paragraphs above.

Children deserve better in school than anything called Common can ever provide. No child is common, no school is common, no family is common, no teacher is common, and certainly, we shouldn’t accept a country that pushes all of us to be common either.