In a commentary/op-ed at Ed Week, Alice Johnson Cain makes this case for the Common Core State Standards: "The common core defines critical, real-world understandings that students need for success in college and career, broken down by grade level. Until the development of the common standards in English/language arts and mathematics, teachers have been expected to cover a surfeit of material. The common core reduces this load, but in return demands that teaching be pursued with increased rigor, depth, and relevance. This call for excellence has been met with great enthusiasm from teachers and students alike. Best of all, all students will benefit from this standards push, and the increased rigor across the board has the potential to catapult our schools—particularly schools in states that do not currently offer a rigorous curriculum to all students—to levels of quality and equality of opportunity that have not yet been reached."
Since the CCSS have yet to be implemented, taught, assessed and made sense of in practice, these claims are hopeful only. Consider this, though. Teachers have not really needed assistance in leading students to 'critical, real-world understandings.' Almost any curricular reform since the post-War period has made a similar claim. A litany of education philosophy traced back to John Dewey, at least, has also documented just that approach to schooling. What has usually stood in teachers' way has been politicians who are reluctant to allow students to grasp critical, real-world understandings. Think of what would happen if our students actually do start to perceive their society with greater acuity, fluency and understandings of the social context to policy. As for "success in college and career," these are more of the rhetoric business interests use to justify co-opting the education process in order to serve their institutional aims. Of course, that history does not mean the CCSS will fail in its mission. Rather, the point is that such abstract claims are immune to critique. The reformers adopt performance measures that demonstrate how, no matter what the current system provides, it fails on their terms.
Having worked in schools since 1996, I do not remember a time when teachers were not pursuing "... increased rigor, depth and relevance." Nor has there ever been a "call for excellence" not met "with great enthusiasm from teachers and students alike." The idea that "increased rigor across the board has the potential to catapult our schools ... to levels of quality and equality of opportunity that have not yet been reached"is conjecture, wish-fulfillment and blindness to the work educators have made over the past 30+ years (since a similar tone of cheer-leading and dire warning emanated from A Nation at Risk, in 1983)
Johnson Cain serves as a VP for TeachPlus, a non-profit for urban ed advocacy, funded, it seems, within the Gates constellation of organizations, most of advocate strongly for the Common Core. She has a background working for the good of schools and in defense of under-served students. I have no reason to doubt her veracity, just her proximity to an ideological mission to privatize public services.
Let's look at what else she writes. After the above statement, she claims that the CCSS has sparked a revolution in education. The result? "Thanks to the common core, for the first time in history, teachers across the United States are united in a way that opens the door for the use of massive online open courses, or MOOCs, as professional-development tools." The leaders of this revolution are tech companies, like Microsoft and Pearson, who see vast wealth in education, not the teachers and committed leaders intent on teaching students in excellence.
Johnson Cain calls for the creation of a hybrid teacher-leader: "... districts should find ways to empower and invest in teacher-leaders, who would make ideal trainers for their colleagues. This would enable teachers to learn about the standards from in-the-classroom experts they trust, instead of outsiders. Hybrid roles for teacher-leaders, so that they can teach part time while also coaching colleagues, is one way we can invest in teachers as experts to make the common-core rollout a success without wasting time." A great idea, one that has needed not a CCSS but funding from schools. Teachers she works with are "enthusiastic about the standards because they offer opportunities for cross-country collaboration on best practices and for high expectations for students' critical-thinking skills—the learning that matters most." Teacher currently have this opportunity (through acronymic vessels like PLCs), though are often bogged down by district mandates and a lack of planning/meeting time. No reason that a CCSS is needed, except to create opportunities for professional development through products neatly aligned with the CCSS and its assessment apparatus.
Thus, near the end, comes the lede: "The federal government sends states $2.5 billion each year for professional development for teachers and gives great latitude to states and districts on how they spend those dollars. Rather than delays or moratoriums, there is an opportunity for leaders like Weingarten to help states figure out how to squeeze every possible dollar to fully prepare teachers and schools for the common core and to ensure that the transition to new standards-based assessments, currently slated to begin in September 2014, goes well." Moving forward on the CCSS and its assessments creates a massive need for entrepreneurial organizations to create products to tap that spending. Obstacles that interferes with that potential market, like delays to consider the long-term comprehensive complexities of the CCSS, must be removed.
Were Johnson Cain not funded by Gates, I would still be skeptical of her claims. Nothing prevents teachers and schools from creating exactly the reforms now that she sees as burgeoning with the CCSS. The scope and sweep of education philosophy for the past 30 years has argued for these forms of teacher mastery, autonomy and purpose. Clothed in arguments about excellence, revolutionary potential and un-before-seen potential, they mask an aggressive encroachment by those staking gains for their private interests, not the public good.
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