Opinions

Criticisms of Common Core education standards ring hollow

Alaska has opted out of several national initiatives recently. Medicaid expansion has the limelight just now, but there's also protection of same-sex marriage. And there are the Common Core education standards. Because so many students across the nation are leaving school without adequate training to perform well in the workforce, without much knowledge of how public policy is made and how it affects them, or without being college ready, the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers seek to raise the level of preparedness-for-life of the nation's youth by raising the level of knowledge students should master before graduating. They hope uniformity across states will facilitate employment opportunities.

NGA and CCSSO are not government agencies; they're bipartisan non-governmental organizations. Adoption is voluntary. They've crafted standards in two areas only: math and English/language arts, though the latter aims for literacy in history/social studies, science, and technical subjects. Forty-four states have adopted the standards; four states have since rethought and opted back out.

There are several reasons a few states have rejected the Common Core standards. The most prevalent one is anti-statism, the fear that the standards will become government policy, and then be made mandatory. That would violate the tradition of local control of education through independent school boards. A second reason is the cost of new materials and teacher preparation.

The Anchorage School District has adopted the standards. Since the state has not, the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development has established its own in a number of areas, not just English and math.

Some critics think Alaska's standards are too much like Common Core, though it's unclear what the alternative would be, or how to build a consensus for any significant change. The complaint that Alaska's standards mimic the national ones suggests the complainers don't like what's in the core. Extreme critics have charged that the Core is communist. Bill Gates was behind the early movement to develop the Core, and some say he has a "one world, socialist education vision," informed by UNESCO. On the other end of the spectrum, some argue that too much standardization of the curriculum stifles creativity in teaching and learning.

As presently written, the standards are heavy on method and definition: What do we mean by "critical thinking," and "textual analysis," for example. They're pretty slim on examples, and there's no mandated content. It's a matter of "students should know how to ... , " rather than "students should know specifically" this or that.

In the area of history and social studies, the standards manifest an urgency that students should know the American system of government, that we're a democratic republic, for example, and what that means, and the separation of powers and how it works, and even the relationship between the federal government and the states.

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The emphasis is on knowing what it means to be a good citizen. There's nothing suggested about the history of the displacement of indigenous people, or the protection of slavery in the U.S. Constitution or the denial of property to newly freed slaves in 1865, or the rapacious suppression of the rights of labor, nothing about how the income gap and destruction of the middle class today compares with earlier periods of our history. Nor is there anything about Andrew Carnegie's warnings about the danger of inherited wealth, or even the philanthropy of John D. Rockefeller and Leland Stanford.

The standards are silent, too, on the huge wave of reform in the Progressive period that gave us federal pure food and drug legislation and women's rights, and on the over-speculation by investment firms and the over-production in manufacturing and agriculture that led to the Great Depression, and also quiet on the high tax rates during the Eisenhower years that helped produce a healthy and prosperous America. Such things are left to the discretion of the teacher.

What they do suggest is that students be familiar with the meaning of the Declaration of Independence, some of the Federalist Papers, the Gettysburg Address, and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s letter from the Birmingham jail, among others. It's hard to determine what's wrong with that. Even conservative commentator David Brooks and conservative think tanks like the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and Manhattan Institute for Policy, have applauded the Common Core.

Steve Haycox is professor emeritus of history at the University of Alaska Anchorage.

The views expressed here are the writer's own and are not necessarily endorsed by Alaska Dispatch News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary(at)alaskadispatch.com.

Steve Haycox

Steve Haycox is professor emeritus of history at the University of Alaska Anchorage.

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