Core (and Not Necessarily Common) Values

            I was hired in the Fall of 1999 and charged with shepherding my three periods of seniors through the school’s first-ever, year-long Senior Project consisting of a research paper, a fieldwork project, and a multimedia presentation all centered around a single topic. The Senior Project epitomized our department’s instructional values at the time: embrace any topic the students choose; develop his/her academic perspective on the topic; showcase that perspective in the student’s writing and speech, and ensure it has a practical application outside of academia. This grand, culminating assessment became the common core of our English curricula; all our reform efforts in 11^th-, 10^th-, and 9^th-grade courses would later be founded on these same principles. Even as the state’s new curricular standards were rolled out, I never felt overwhelmed by them because I already had such a clear image of the kind of student that my English team wanted to see at graduation. Truth be told, I may have started by designing my lessons around the standards, but in short order, we all tailored the standards to our vision.

            I’ve now been in education long enough to see the onset of yet another brand new set of standards. The Common Core has garnered some wild reactions, I’ve noticed. Educators of all kinds seem to be anticipating it like a tsunami – some are frantically scrambling to make sure all the provisions and precautions are in place, while others are holed up in their safe little bunker, conducting business as usual with one eye over their shoulder, bracing for impact. There are those who warn of our utter destruction, while others stand on their rooftops with surfboards in hand, anxious to ride the new curricula to the crest of some unprecedented paradise. For the principals of this burgeoning era, a blind allegiance to the Common Core is just as foolhardy as turning a blind eye. In 2010, the Fordham Institute assessed that the newly introduced federal standards would be a curricular upgrade for all but a half dozen states in both English and math. However, Fordham’s own rubric reserved the highest scores to standards that “do not overemphasize the importance of students’ life experiences or ‘real-world’ problems.”  In sum, they measured the Common Core’s rigor by how well it abandoned any relationship to student relevance.  For all the strengths and improvements in the Core, it is still critical that principals give the new standards their proper context and illustrate their relevance to the school’s educational mission and its community at large. The most effective leaders will customize the Common Core to the values that already make their school’s heart beat.

Sadly, too many schools haven’t really found their heart, yet. A quick survey of school and district mission statements reveals a cluttered cacophony of innocuously vague tenets like “optimizing student learning”, creating “positive, contributing citizens”,  and “preparing (them) for success.” Perhaps this is why we see so many leaders scrambling by the shoreline: they know the awesome rigor of the Common Core, they acknowledge that the learning landscape will change, but few seem to believe that they can control how that change occurs in their schools. This is a critical time for staffs to re-discover the values that make their pedagogy unique and effective. Their collective vision of the graduating student must be clear and consistent. Only then can educators see the contours of the landscape where the Common Core’s tide can pour into canals and rush through rivers, lick the levies and fill the fields, enriching the soil where their students’ talent and epiphanies may be harvested. Principals cannot stay fixed on the horizon as the new standards surge towards our schools; they’d do well to look inward and ask their staff, their students, and their families: what lies at our common core?