There has been a lot of confusion and controversy over different camps and what they think about Common Core State Standards (CCSS).
While everyone is posturing and arguing who is right and which political group is shaking hands with which other group, or who we shouldn’t shake hands with, students continue to be tested to high heaven and are being taught experimental standards that seem developmentally inappropriate, rigid and undemocratic, and these standards have been created by an elite group of non-educators.
The standards seriously omit or shortchange students on many worthwhile subjects. They focus primarily on math and English language arts. The arts are pretty much shoved aside completely.
CCSS are also one-size-fits-all. Students with disabilities, ELL students, and gifted and talented students are left out of the loop.
Here is my attempt to separate beliefs and associations when it comes to CCSS. I’ve made it all about those who have been invited to dinner, or not, the kind of meal, and who is eating the meal with whom.
I’m on a diet in case you can’t tell.
Which kind of dinner guest are you when it comes to Common Core? How much will you eat? Or are you not willing to sit at the table with certain people?
Most troubling, you might not be invited to sit down to dine in the first place.
Dinner Table 1
This is the all-or-nothing group who hate Common Core with a passion. They hate that it comes from elites and believe it is an all-time threat to democracy.
They will sit down at the table with anyone, even those they disagree with on other matters concerning public schools, but who believe, as they do, about the CCSS. They will poke down the full course dinner to get CC eliminated.
Right now—this moment—it is get rid of the Core! They will worry about other stuff later.
Dinner Table 2
This is the uncomfortable group that looks askance at their neighbor. Some will sit at the dinner table and eat the appetizer, that is to them Common Core, but they know they disagree on the rest of the meal. It includes charter schools for the main course and vouchers for dessert.
If you are conservative and/or Tea Party you will wolf down all the food. But if you are a tried and true liberal, you will politely leave the table as soon as the appetizer is over. You don’t want Common Core, but you darn well don’t want heartburn either.
Dinner Table 3
These are the teachers and administrators who hate Common Core, but they feel they have to sit at the table and eat even if they aren’t hungry and don’t like the food. The meals make them very sick much of the time, but they also must be able to put food on their tables back home—for their families.
Dinner Table 4
These folks accept Common Core, sort of, but they want a Gluten Free diet. They don’t like the way the CC table was set to begin with—the tests (the gluten) or some other part of CCSS.
But they don’t mind that elites were the cooks in the kitchen making up the CCSS recipes for the students.
Maybe, they think, just give CC a chance.
Some in this group believe we all suffer from time to time with indigestion (standards are standards), but sooner or later it goes away or is replaced with something new. For them, there are other things to worry about…like just getting rid of the darn gluten!
Dinner Table 5
These are the people a lot of us forget about, who say, “What the heck is Common Core?” And, “Who cares?” They only eat fast food and never sit down to a real dinner.
There will always be people in this world who don’t give a damn or who just don’t want to spend time thinking about such things. Life should be enjoyed! Probably they are happier people, but who knows what their kids are learning.
Dinner Table 6
These are the teachers and administrators who love Common Core. They will eat everything put in front of them even if it doesn’t taste good.
They especially enjoy the cupcakes they receive to teach the Common Core to others. Often these are the Teach for America types who love the direction they receive through the Core and/or direct instruction.
They like collecting data and believe data is instruction.
They know that even if they start out eating at a Sizzler, if they hang tough for a year or two, they’ll get to dine at Texas de Brazil. They also love their new iPads.
Dinner Table 7
These are all those who believe in Common Core and who created the standards. I don’t really know what they think, or if they think.
I don’t know if it is simply their ideology to do good for children, and they don’t know they are terribly off-base.
Or perhaps they really are profiteers with sinister motives.
They have nothing to discuss with anyone who disagrees with what they are doing, so there is no dinner invitation to their fancy restaurant—no bread to break.
I don’t think they know the others exist.
And they don’t realize that the very children they think they are helping are still intellectually and socially hungry.
Many of these children are just plain hungry for real food too.
Summary
Isn’t it too bad that we can’t all sit down at the same table, partake of the smorgasbord of America’s creativity and enlightenment, and share ideas? Can’t we work through differences and find where we all agree? Shouldn’t there be more debate about public education by everyone?
Wouldn’t think that with that many tables, you still left me out, Nancy, but you did, though I’m not surprised.
I’m in the group of folks who don’t like the way Common Core was constructed, don’t accept the public reasons and rationalizations given for why it HAD to be put into place, loathe the high-stakes testing component, won’t sit still for the push via Race to the Top (an even bigger horror show that seems to get less negative reaction or public commentary) of charter schools, phony value-added evaluation schemes, the attacks on unions, due process, seniority, tenure, etc., the likelihood that part of the endgame involves vouchers, and will not sit still for the wholesale sellout of American public education to corporations and anti-democratic special interest groups from the political and/or religious right.
All that notwithstanding, people at MY table would not share it with anyone harboring those aforementioned political or social views. Our firm belief is that such people want to defeat Common Core for two main reasons: 1) it has Barack Obama’s name affiliated with it; and 2) they didn’t think of it first. The first reason is so glaringly obvious that it’s a waste of time to document just how much absurd baloney and mendacity goes into nearly everything these folks post about the Common Core. When they mention something legitimate, it’s only because they gleaned it from reading what non-crazy critics of CCSSI have been saying for a very long time, well before the Tea Party decided that with Benghazi and Fast-and-Furious and Birth Certificates not getting the traction they’d hoped for, the “Commie Core” and “Obamacore” might be effective. After losing two consecutive national elections rather badly, the scatter-gun approach has become terrifically appealing to the GOP and its loonier allies.
On the other hand, I’ve not heard anything that would lead me to think that the Tea Party or the old guard Republicans are suddenly anti-business, anti-Wall Street, or anti-corporate (except if there are Jews involved, but that’s another story). I will note that in the Teabilly ‘analysis’ of the CCSSI, Bill Ayers wrote them and Bill Gates backed them. Well, the second part is true, but the biscuit we’re expected to wash down with our tea is that . . . Bill Gates is a socialist/communist!. This must come as a shock to Bill, as well as to a hell of a lot of teachers, parents, school administrators, kids, and the boards of Microsoft and lots of other corporations he’s involved with financially or otherwise. A BIG shock, in fact. But then again, some of the ‘theorists’ that inform the Tea Party take on all this (e.g., Charlotte Iserbyte and Beverly Eakman) have long been declaring such fascinating claims as “the Carnegie Foundation made a deal to sell out US education to the Soviet Communists back in the 1920s” – never mind that the Soviet Union in the 1920s was trying to recover from the First World War, the Russian Revolution, various internal fights, the counterrevolutionaries (backed in no small part by the west), and much else. But of course, they were ready to cut deals with gigantic American foundations about infiltrating American education. It’s a FACT!!! If you don’t much need documentation, that is.
Well, the bottom line here is that some of us just can’t hold our noses sufficiently to link arms with the folks who spout that nonsense daily. I really think that if Romney or McCain or Palin or Ryan or any number of Tea Party heroes were in the White House, we would most assuredly NOT be hearing much criticism of Common Core or anything like it from those on the right. Unless, of course, they felt that it wasn’t sufficiently right-wing batty, in which case, well, hell, Joe McCarthy had the stones to accuse Eisenhower and various US Army generals of being either communists or “soft on communism.”
So, please: no Teabillies at our table.
But I’m going to go one better, and this might get me kicked off that tiny little table and placed on a stool in the kitchen (if I’m lucky): despite my contempt for the attacks from the educational deformers and “Standaridstas, I have lots of criticism to dole out about what actually does go on in many public schools (and what doesn’t). I don’t think we give children what they need or what interests (indeed, fascinates) them in schools. For the most part, US schooling is a mind-numbing, soul-killing experience from K to 12. We teach kids how to behave according to what the elite have determined is acceptable for the children of the masses, coupled with an obsession with grades and grade-grubbing, contempt for real thinking and learning for its own sake, and a wagon-load of extrinsic motives that have nothing to do with what matters. Few parents seem to explicitly recognize now or 100 years ago that school has little to do with anything but getting kids to sit down, shut up, working hard, and being nice; as well as sorting kids for universities and industry on the public’s dime. Nice little racket. The culture of US education is such that teachers for the most part never question the value of the work they assign, no matter how glaringly, obviously vapid and dull it is. Kids either knuckle under, become good little grade grubbers, and sell themselves out to this system, or they get in BIG trouble. It all DOES, after all, go on our permanent records these days.
When I post comments critical of bad teaching, it’s not out of love for the deformers, but out of love for children, for things I am passionate about like mathematics, science, literature, philosophy, social justice, etc., concern for human creativity and imagination, and my belief in the possibilities of democracy. What I generally succeed in doing is getting myself called a union-busting, teacher-hating, corporate shill. Oh, well. I guess I’ll take that stool in the kitchen if it’s still available.
Michael, I would put you in Dinner Group 2 at the head of the table! There you could argue your points and turn everyone around.
Seriously, I agree with you about the crazy attacks on the President and outlandish statements about Common Core (like claims it will make you gay etc.). There is no room in any conversation for that stuff.
I even agree that public schools have never been perfect, or even decent in some cases. I worked in a poor school and a wealthier school. Big difference. And they would benefit from many changes—but not Common Core.
It could be different. For-profit charters, or charters run to take over traditional public schools are not the way to go. We agree here I think. But you and I know they are not asking educators these days for their ideas about how schools could improve and that includes both Rep. and Dem. Parties.
I am disappointed in both parties. I supported President Obama at first but he lost my support when he chose Arne Duncan over Linda Darling-Hammond. It seemed like such a no-brainer at the time.
And now, frankly, I am puzzled by her too. Her recent HuffPost article with Randi Weingarten was practically an endorsement of Common Core.
I also think that while you and I both complain about sitting at the same table with those who are really different, Sen. Ted Kennedy didn’t seem to think twice about standing next to Pres. George W. Bush as he signed off on one of the worst laws ever in education. As you know NCLB went a long way to doom public schools.
I will also add, as a teacher who worked with students with reading disabilities, to say every child would be reading, by a certain year, always seemed a step away from being tinfoil cap worthy in my opinion.
One certainly can’t only blame Republicans about the problems we now have with public schools, Dems., as you must know, have pretty much the same agenda. Michelle Rhee, if I’m not mistaken, was Democrat for a long time. Democrats for Education Reform want nothing better than to privatize schools.
Make no mistake I’m not a Tea Party fan either. It just seems to me that when it comes to Common Core it is a bit refreshing for the right and left to meet in the middle like a Venn diagram.
I attended a Bat Tennessee meeting several months ago and met some Tea Party folks and they seemed to want good schools like all the other parents. They also seemed to find common ground with some real liberals in the group and union reps. were there too. It seemed like Democracy in action to me.
I am also not in any way a fan of Beck, but I tuned in to hear him interview Kathleen Jasper from EdConversation several weeks ago who I think is a Dem. The pre-interview babbling that went on was difficult to listen to, but I have to say he treated Jasper respectfully and had lovely things to say about teachers in general. Is there a way to turn the guy around about other ed. issues? Probably not.
If we don’t try to find some common ground and quit painting everyone with the same broad stroke I’m afraid none of us will have much say when it comes to schools in the future.
Probably you will disagree with me. But thanks so much for your post. You always make everyone think. I always appreciate your information and clarity on math and Common Core. And I appreciate your thoughtful passionate words.
I want to be at Michael’s table!
I would too, Kara. But I might argue some points. ( :