The Trouble With Common Core
George Will made an incisive and spirited case against the Common Core on Tuesday’s “Special Report With Bret Baier.
Earlier in the broadcast Michelle Rhee, whose efforts in education
have earned her deserved admiration, was invited on to make the case for
Common Core. She reverted to the gobbledygook language that educators
too often use, and failed to make a persuasive case that the Core is
good for public-school students, and will help them, and our country, in
the long run.
My conversations with several Core proponents over the past few weeks leave me with the sense they fell in love with an abstraction and gave barely a thought to implementation. But implementation—how a thing is done day by day in the real world—is everything. There is a problem, for instance, with a thing called “ObamaCare.” That law exists because the people who pushed for it fell in love with an abstract notion and gave not a thought to what the law would actually do and how it would work.
The educationalists wanted to impose (they don’t like that word; they prefer “offer” or “suggest”) more rigorous and realistic standards, and establish higher expectations as to what children can be expected to have learned by the time they leave the public schools. They seem to have thought they could wave a magic wand and make that happen. But life isn’t lived in some abstract universe; it’s lived on the ground, in this case with harried parents trying, to the degree they can or are willing, to help the kids with homework and study for tests. The test questions that have come out are nonsensical and impenetrable, promise to get worse, and for those reasons are demoralizing. Louis CK was right “Late Show With David Letterman,” when he spoofed the math problems offered on his daughters’ tests: “Bill has three goldfish. He buys two more. How many dogs live in London?”
There sure is a lot of money floating around. Who is watching how those who’ve contracted to do Common Core-related work are doing their jobs?
George Will focused on the higher, substantive meaning and implications of the Core, but the effort has also been psychologically and politically inept. Proponents are now talking about problems with the rollout. Well, yes, and where have we heard that before? One gets the impression they didn’t think this through, that they held symposia and declared the need, with charts and bullet points, for something to be done—and something must be done, because American public education is falling behind the world—and then left it to somebody, or 10,000 somebodies, to make it all work.
The people who developed and created Common Core need to look now at themselves. Who is responsible for the nonsensical test questions? Who oversees the test makers? Do the questions themselves reflect the guidance given to teachers—i.e., was the teaching itself nonsensical? How was implementation of the overall scheme supposed to work? Who decided the way to take on critics was to denigrate parents, who supposedly don’t want their little darlings to be revealed as non-geniuses, and children, who supposedly don’t want to learn anything? Who among these serious people chose sarcasm as a strategy? Who decided the high-class pushback against the pushback should be defensive and dismissive? Did anyone bother to get actual parents in on the planning and development? Were women there, and mothers? Maybe parents with kids in the public school system? Who even picked the ugly name—Common Core sounds common, except to the extent to which it sounds Soviet. Maybe it was the people who dreamed up the phrase “homeland security.”
The irony is that Core proponents’ overall objective—to get schools teaching more necessary and important things, and to encourage intellectual coherence in what is taught—is not bad, but good. Why they thought the answer was federal, I mean national, and not local is beyond me. Since patronizing people you disagree with is all the rage, I’ll have a go. The Common Core establishment appears to be largely led by people who are well-educated, well-meaning, accomplished and affluent, and who earnestly desire to help those in less fortunate circumstances, but who simply don’t know enough about normal people—how they live, how they think—to have made a success of it. Also they don’t seem to know that intelligent Americans, exactly the kind who quickly become aware of and respond to new federal schemes—sorry, I meant national ones—have become very, very wary of Washington, and the dreams of its eggheads. How they could have missed that is also beyond me.
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My conversations with several Core proponents over the past few weeks leave me with the sense they fell in love with an abstraction and gave barely a thought to implementation. But implementation—how a thing is done day by day in the real world—is everything. There is a problem, for instance, with a thing called “ObamaCare.” That law exists because the people who pushed for it fell in love with an abstract notion and gave not a thought to what the law would actually do and how it would work.
The educationalists wanted to impose (they don’t like that word; they prefer “offer” or “suggest”) more rigorous and realistic standards, and establish higher expectations as to what children can be expected to have learned by the time they leave the public schools. They seem to have thought they could wave a magic wand and make that happen. But life isn’t lived in some abstract universe; it’s lived on the ground, in this case with harried parents trying, to the degree they can or are willing, to help the kids with homework and study for tests. The test questions that have come out are nonsensical and impenetrable, promise to get worse, and for those reasons are demoralizing. Louis CK was right “Late Show With David Letterman,” when he spoofed the math problems offered on his daughters’ tests: “Bill has three goldfish. He buys two more. How many dogs live in London?”
There sure is a lot of money floating around. Who is watching how those who’ve contracted to do Common Core-related work are doing their jobs?
George Will focused on the higher, substantive meaning and implications of the Core, but the effort has also been psychologically and politically inept. Proponents are now talking about problems with the rollout. Well, yes, and where have we heard that before? One gets the impression they didn’t think this through, that they held symposia and declared the need, with charts and bullet points, for something to be done—and something must be done, because American public education is falling behind the world—and then left it to somebody, or 10,000 somebodies, to make it all work.
The people who developed and created Common Core need to look now at themselves. Who is responsible for the nonsensical test questions? Who oversees the test makers? Do the questions themselves reflect the guidance given to teachers—i.e., was the teaching itself nonsensical? How was implementation of the overall scheme supposed to work? Who decided the way to take on critics was to denigrate parents, who supposedly don’t want their little darlings to be revealed as non-geniuses, and children, who supposedly don’t want to learn anything? Who among these serious people chose sarcasm as a strategy? Who decided the high-class pushback against the pushback should be defensive and dismissive? Did anyone bother to get actual parents in on the planning and development? Were women there, and mothers? Maybe parents with kids in the public school system? Who even picked the ugly name—Common Core sounds common, except to the extent to which it sounds Soviet. Maybe it was the people who dreamed up the phrase “homeland security.”
The irony is that Core proponents’ overall objective—to get schools teaching more necessary and important things, and to encourage intellectual coherence in what is taught—is not bad, but good. Why they thought the answer was federal, I mean national, and not local is beyond me. Since patronizing people you disagree with is all the rage, I’ll have a go. The Common Core establishment appears to be largely led by people who are well-educated, well-meaning, accomplished and affluent, and who earnestly desire to help those in less fortunate circumstances, but who simply don’t know enough about normal people—how they live, how they think—to have made a success of it. Also they don’t seem to know that intelligent Americans, exactly the kind who quickly become aware of and respond to new federal schemes—sorry, I meant national ones—have become very, very wary of Washington, and the dreams of its eggheads. How they could have missed that is also beyond me.
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