Lifting the Common Curse

“Americans of all political persuasions tend to get nostalgic about what they think of as the great causes of the past. …The fight against Jim Crow has become a kind of civic fairy tale in which the forces of good triumphed over the forces of evil; the saga has its heroes and villains, its martyrs and shrines….And now, … those who care about civil rights — those who care  about human rights — must dedicate themselves to the cause of public education. It’s the crucial front … access to a good public education is the civil-rights issue of our time. End of debate.”

Anchor Jon Meachem said these words on the PBS news magazine Need to Know exactly two years ago.  He may yet get his wish: as schools in forty-five states prepare to fully implement the Common Core standards, tremors of discontent are quickly surging through the land. Anthony Cody outlined a number of the fault lines last week, noting that the objections to the federal curricula seem to be growing in both number and volume. Teachers and students at Garfield High in Seattle are currently boycotting the district's standardized test, gaining some national coverage and widespread support since the protest began a few weeks ago. The complaints are varied, but the ire seems genuine, and even more shocking: it’s bipartisan.

Will the new standards, set against an already-stale backdrop of standardized testing, prove the lightning rod that ignites the next great social movement? To borrow one of our President’s phrases from his second inaugural address, could we soon see an American school join the civil rights pantheon of Birmingham, Stonewall, and Seneca Falls? Will Garfield High become the next Zuccotti Park?

Many frustrated advocates see the Common Core as the culminating power grab following a decade of federal mandates and sanctions. This has brought a renewed call for greater local control, and Governor Jerry Brown of California (a state that recently fell to 49^th in per-pupil spending and  received an “F” grade for its education policies) made a strong push last month to place more education dollars and spending authority into the hands of school districts. Another swath of the angered masses laments the entire testing-accountability protocol. It’s been likened to the military-industrial complex – a system that benefits only textbook and test publishers with hundred-million-dollar government contracts.  While these companies make their profits, students do not make progress as achievement gaps refuse to narrow and a growing body of research suggests that the disparities along economic lines require the most urgent attention. Fat cat corporations? Lower-income students failing to move up? Sounds a lot like Occupy Wall Street to me.

Just one problem: I don’t see the connection to the Common Core standards.

For starters, any school or district who wishes to create a meaningful curriculum can seize control of their instruction right now. As I’ve mentioned here before, Robert Marzano and Mark W. Haystead write in Making Standards Useful in the Classroom that our current set of standards is way too large. At the time the book was published in 2008, the massive library of learning goals in any one state would require a public education that stretched into 21^st grade.  The Common Core hasn’t improved our lot much at all: Elementary students and their teachers are faced with well over sixty total standards in math and English alone, and that number swells to almost ninety standards as early as sixth grade. Marzano and Haystead recommend ideally about fifteen learning goals per subject each year, so teachers and administrators already need to exert their local control over the curricula. In fact, if they prune the standards collaboratively and decide on a consensus pedagogy that guides instruction across all classrooms, the learning environment becomes much more effective and powerful. The Common Core need not be a federal curse; it can be an opportunity for faculties to refine their instructional focus, and develop the guiding principles that will help them edit the curricula and, more critically, ensure that the test does not become the tyrant that rules the school.

Naturally, it would help if the states and the feds backed off from their limited definitions of what makes schools accountable and effective. Nobody’s fooled by Washington’s requirements for those No Child Left Behind waivers; that waiver literature may use the term “flexibility” a whole lot, but the mandates reek of the status quo. Still, I also see the terms “student growth” and “progress over time”, which can suggest a very different paradigm for measuring a school’s success. From what I’ve seen, the Common Core is pretty well articulated from year-to-year, much more so than many of the prior standards adopted by the states. This should make it easier for a state to shift to more longitudinal assessments, and that change alone may actually undo some of the gridlock we’ve seen in student achievement. That’s why I cannot curse the Common Core: it may actually compel educators to confront the larger flaws in our nation’s approach to assessment and instruction. I hope any plans for capitol marches do not distract us from all the ways we can collectively seize control of our classrooms and transform them locally right now.

When it comes to the testing-industrial complex, though, I’m ready to set up my Occupy tent right alongside everyone else.