Higher Ed for Higher Standards is a relatively new group funded in part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (of course) to advertise the importance of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS).
They have another similar group, Complete College America, where they also point to poor student performance of beginning college students. Bill Gates and Complete College America…does the irony ever go away?
But this new group is hell-bent on pushing the Common Core State Standards.
The other day they began touting college presidents or state higher ed. administrators who are spreading the message that we need the Common Core State Standards to save our young people. Really. Check out the website here.
They talk as if nothing else will do. If the Common Core State Standards don’t fly, our children, we are warned, will watch Shanghai students eat their lunch. If you visit their website you will find a perky video to show you how that will happen.
America’s kids don’t seem to much like their lunches lately, and Shanghai kids probably wouldn’t want them either…but that’s another story. And don’t get mad at me! I like Michelle Obama’s healthy eating ideas!
Here are a few of the higher (much higher) ups’ statements yaking away about the wonders of CCSS:
“The Common Core leads to urgently needed outcomes: higher standards for students; improved coordination between high school and college.”
Richard Freeland
Commissioner, Massachusetts Board of Higher Education
“Implementation of Common Core will increase college completion rates and reduce time to degree, especially for underserved populations.”
James Applegate
Executive Director, Illinois Board of Higher Education
“New K-12 standards, including the Common Core standards, can help reduce remediation rates and improve student success.”
John Morgan
Chancellor, Tennessee Board of Regents
It’s baffling. The blue outlined words are unproven assertions.
University leaders don’t have any proof that Common Core State Standards will make a difference in what young people bring to college from high school. The Common Core hasn’t been around long enough. How do they know if it works or not?
Even Vicki Phillips of the Gates Foundation recently said “The standards need time to work.” And they also just came out stating the CCSS tests should not be tied to a teacher’s evaluation—another sign they aren’t confident with what they are doing. See here.
This is the problem you run into when you promote a program so quickly without considering repercussions. Any new reform, especially one where the stakes are going to be this high, should be field tested first which would have taken several years if it had been done right.
Common Core, if it were that good, wouldn’t need so many endorsements. Parents and teachers would automatically like it and feel comfortable with it.
But states are dropping it like a hot potato. And the controversy surrounding the CCSS has even reached the mainstream media, which hardly ever even speaks the word “education.”
The Higher Ed for Higher Standards webpage emphasizes how much remediation students require upon entering college. They claim it costs $7 billion. Of course they are trying to justify the use of Common Core in K-12.
We are told that nothing from the past, nor anything in the future, will work like the Common Core State Standards. Isn’t this really a disease called close-mindedness?
Even though I question the claim that students really do require so much remediation, here are some reasons students might have trouble after entering college. I think this elite group might want to think about the following problems instead of jumping on the Common Core bandwagon:
- In general, America’s young people are doing great, but when you push everyone to attend college you will find some who never wanted to attend college in the first place. Many colleges have few entrance requirements. They are more worried about their bottom line and how much profit they will make. Pushing everyone into college means some students will naturally have difficulties.
- Most students drop out of college because of the cost of college. In fact, back in 2009, the Gates Foundation itself found that students drop out of college because they have trouble juggling family commitments and work with their studies. In other words, students are struggling to pay for the high cost of attending college. Here is the report.
- The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to their credit, provide full scholarships to 1,000 chosen students every year in their Gates Millennium Scholars Program. I wish they would focus more on positive programs like this and try to figure out solutions to the outrageous student debt problem facing young people. But this is really a great thing that they are doing.
- While salaries might be higher with a college degree, jobs are not always prevalent. Many job openings are for skilled trades or jobs that don’t require college. See here.
- Students entering college have been through a volatile time of changes that reflect No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top policy. This tells me those laws failed and continue to fail many. We should revisit the years schooling worked and build on those practices slowly, careful not to disrupt student learning.
- Charter schools have been around for a long time now. How many students failing college come from charter schools? It would seem prudent to have one dynamic education system that focuses on all children.
- School budget cuts since the ’80s have been insidious. It is just not true that America spends more money on its education system than other countries. We must invest in public school for all our children.
- Online programs have been around for a long time too. What has been the effect of the kind of technology that excludes other forms of teaching on students entering college?
- Last, standards have been a prominent feature of K-12 for many years. Common Core State Standards are still standards. They expect all children to reach the same goals. Students are different. They require individualization not standards. We should investigate how standards are used in general. This includes the unnecessary draconian use of high-stakes testing.
So higher education leaders should ask themselves more in-depth questions about why students struggle upon entering college, and they should not pin their hopes on a new group of unproven standards. They need to increase support of students, or better yet, work at finding ways to address the current high cost of college and the college debt crisis facing young people.
Less yakety yak and more real research on a variety of issues is what’s called for.
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