Can We Get There From Here? From Rhetoric to Real Discussion about the Common Core State Standards

(first published at www.catapultlearning.com)

It seems like the Common Core State Standards have devolved into yet another opportunity for the citizens of our great nation to call each other idiots. We have one bloc of people who feel that the standards present a rare, historic chance to bring some cohesion, unity, and rigor to our country’s education system, and another bloc of people who feel that the standards present a dangerous intrusion of federal power into what should be a locally controlled effort. That’s fine; this is an important issue, and a healthy debate is a good thing. Unfortunately, we’re not having a healthy debate.

In the “pro” bloc, opponents are considered paranoid, conspiracy-drenched anti-intellectuals. In the “anti” bloc, the initiative is increasingly referred to as “ObamaCore,” and its supporters are referred to as anti-American socialists or “unaccountable corporate interests,” depending who you talk to. The fiery rhetoric takes on a life of its own, completely detached from the thing it’s referring to, a set of documents which very few of the yakkers on either side have actually read. Predictably, our elected leaders stand firmly and proudly on the banana-peel of public opinion, changing their minds as soon as they sense that their constituents have changed theirs.

I am firmly in the “pro” camp, as anyone who has read my blog posts will know. But I don’t want to be blind or blinkered about it—I want to make sure my good feelings about the standards are justified by the facts, as best I can figure them out. So I’m trying, whenever I can, to engage with opposing arguments, to understand where they come from and what merit they might have. If I wanted to be snarky, I could say that this is exactly the approach to evidence-based argumentation that the Common Core State Standards is trying to encourage. But let’s not go there.

Let’s go here instead.  Valerie Strauss, the education writer for the Washington Post, shares an open letter written to President Obama by a literacy consultant in an urban high school, complaining about the new, Common-Core-aligned tests that her daughter is taking (from which the president’s daughters, who attend a non-public school, are exempt). The woman is from Massachusetts, a state that had, pre-Common-Core, some of the toughest academic standards and strongest test results in the country. If anyone could afford to have a “who needs the Common Core?” attitude, it was the good people from Massachusetts. And yet, they adopted the new standards and are now engaged in implementing the tests.

The author of the letter to Obama has some serious reservations about the test her 7^th grade daughter has had to take, especially after hearing her daughter say things like, ““These are such weird questions,” “this test is crazy,” “this is a stupid, impossible test,” and, “this question just is a stupid awful question. It makes no sense.”

Now, let’s unpack these comments a little bit. Weird and crazy? Absolutely. These tests are radically different from what we endured as students, or even what this 7^th grader was used to taking. Besides being computer-driven, with many technology-enhanced questions that require things like dragging-and-dropping, clicking on objects or pieces of text, and drawing things like lines on graphs, they also include some very challenging, perhaps exhausting, multi-part questions. The author’s daughter calls her test, “really complicated, hard, and unclear,” and I’m willing to take her at her word.

The question here is: does all of that make the test stupid, awful, and impossible? Or is the test simply new and challenging? Let’s say the standards are implemented successfully and peacefully over the next few years. In five or ten years, would a 7^th grader react to this test the way the author’s daughter did? Or would she be used to that level of rigor and those particular academic demands? This is a reading and writing test. The material assessed is not material students learn in a single year. These are skills that develop gradually, incrementally, through all the years of schooling. And that has not been the case, for this year’s crop of 7^th graders. The expectations built into these standards are different from the expectations that were originally set for today’s middle and high school students.

So is the problem the test itself, or the fact that these students were not ready for the test—could not have been ready for the test? I think the real question, which the author does not raise, is this: is it fair to assess students on material that they have not been fully exposed to? Should we only be implementing these new tests with students who have had the full and correct preparation for them? That would mean giving the tests only to students who started Kindergarten under the new regime.

Which is fairer—to excuse older students from the assessments, or to effectively remove any sense of accountability for implementing the standards for students over the age of six…which is what excusing them from the tests will do? The standards have been with us since 2010. Many teachers and administrators chose not to think about them until the tests came on line this year. This should have been Year 5 of implementation. In too many places, it’s actually Year 1. People should rise to a new challenge without having to take a test to measure compliance and performance. Certainly. Unfortunately, we don’t live on Planet Should.

To understand the anger fueling the people opposing the standards, we need to pull a few things apart that are too often mashed together. There is a difference between the standards and the tests. You can be angry about one—and protest against it—without throwing away the other. Perhaps a more thoughtful approach to implementing the assessments could have protected the standards from being attacked. Perhaps. But there is also a difference between the standards and the way they have been rolled out and implemented. You can admire the standards—as I do—and still think the rollout has been poorly planned, poorly communicated, and poorly executed.

Frederick Hess has written a thoughtful history of the writing and implementation of the standards, and manages to separate the Thing Itself from How the Thing Was Done. He is able to show what is good and important about the standards while criticizing the top-down, condescending, and thoughtless way in which the standards were introduced into the world. Writing from a fairly conservative point of view, he is able to distance himself from the extremist fringes of the CCSS-haters while showing why those people feel the way they do, and what real things may have ignited their fear and paranoia. For those of us who support the standards and have trouble understanding the haters, it’s a sobering and important read.

As Hess points out, and former Secretary of Education, Rod Paige, drives home, education policy that is crafted and implemented with little or no participation from front-line practitioners is doomed to failure. When policy and practice don’t talk to each other—when technocrats and administrators (whether at the school level or in Washington) think they know what teachers need to do without ever consulting them—there is little chance that the policy is going to be practicable…or that the practitioners will sign on to support it.

I still support the standards, and I think their adoption—with a committed, thoughtful implementation—would be a good thing for our teachers and our students. But I don’t know if we can get there from here. I honestly don’t. I don’t know whether we’re capable of having the kinds of discussions—and arguments—we need. And it is precisely our inability to argue this issue well that makes me the saddest. To me, the heart and soul of these standards—in literacy and in mathematics—is an acknowledgement that the things of this world are complex and multifaceted, and that real analysis and critical thinking are needed to understand important issues and solve important problems. But that’s not where we seem to be, right now. We seem to be mired in a world of black and white, good vs. evil, a world where received wisdom from charismatic sources exempts us from having to analyze facts on our own.

It would be a shame to think that we’re incapable of having the rational, evidence-based discussion needed to implement these standards precisely because we weren’t raised with the skills embedded in those standards.

Yeah, I went there. I’m sorry.