Federal standards aren’t true reform

Published 9:50 pm Tuesday, September 17, 2013

1. Cruz tells anti-tax group ‘No’ to Common Core in schools
2. 2016 prospect Jeb Bush defends Common Core school standards
3. Common Core testing problems may make DoE withhold money
4. Opt-out movement accelerates amid Common Core testing issues

Federal “Common Core” school standards are coming under increasing fire nationwide, with even the teaching establishment’s stalwart Education Week magazine questioning its effectiveness.

“Could the Common Core Be Bad for Schooling?” asks policy analyst Rick Hess in Education Week’s blog.

To answer his own question, Hess looks at ways the standards seem to be failing the states.

“Keep in mind that standards and assessments are the plumbing that form the backbone of schools and systems,” Hess says. “They’re connected to everything, and altering them creates disruption.”

One way Common Core is currently causing disruption is by its uneven implementation. Texas, for example, bans the Common Core standards in its school systems. Texas officials say our own standards are higher, anyway.

Other states say they’ll accept the standards, but not the assessment tools — in other words, they’ll accept the measures, but not the yardstick.

“I think it’s very possible that in a few years several states will boast paper standards that no longer bear more than a passing relation to anything of import — meaning we’ll have turned the clock back to pre-2001,” Hess warns.

And the deadline set by the feds — 2015 — are causing many states to rush their implementation. Hess notes that at the same time, many states are also enacting other reforms.

“This means that states are changing their assessments, pioneering new systems, and ironing out kinks even as they’ve committed to start using these figures to evaluate educators, influence pay, and make retention decisions,” he says. “What would have been a complicated rollout in any event, is now something much tougher.”

But it’s his third point that hits on the real weakness of the Common Core standards: The problem is in the word “common.” We’ve allowed the federalization of education, and we’ve lost local control. As usual, what we’ve gotten in return is a one-size-fits-all solution (or set of standards) that doesn’t really fit anyone.

“The Common Core has opened the door to the U.S. Department of Education influencing state decisions about standards and assessments,” Hess says. “Especially given the commitments that states have made to win No Child Left Behind waivers, the Department of Education will now insist that those states which opt out … show that their assessments are equally rigorous — giving the Secretary of Education a whole new way to inject himself into state decisions.”

Unfortunately, those who favor school reform are split over Common Core — over whether the standards themselves are too high or not high enough.

“Just two years ago, conservatives were starting to regain their footing on school reform and were looking to build on important state-level victories won by Republican governors in places like Louisiana, Indiana, and Wisconsin,” Hess says. “Now, conservative reformers are deeply split, resigned to spending enormous time and energy in a bitter back-and-forth over the merits of the Common Core.”

But that’s missing the point. Education has always been, and should always remain, a local issue, with state control.

No one in Washington cares more about our children than we do. And that’s Common Core’s real weakness.