It is both logical and sensible to evaluate how well
students have mastered the material that they are being taught. It is righteous
and illuminating to disaggregate the data from those evaluations by racial groups, economic status, and the
learning disabled as well. It is also important to have short term and long
term goals for student achievement. Consequences for failure and/or
non-compliance are necessary too, because all educators know that rules and
expectations without consequences are not rules or consequences at all. All of
these things were a part of NCLB, and
all of these things are good.
However, NCLB had
a fatal, obvious flaw. Bowing to “States Rights”, the law allowed the states to
devise their own tests, set their own standards, and by so doing, devise their
own definition of success. The result, was 50 different sets of standards. A
successful student in Mississippi could move to Maryland and find him or
herself hopelessly behind. A successful school in Louisiana might be a failing
school in Massachusetts.
Meanwhile, business leaders were complaining that high
school graduates did not have the skills to do the work that their companies
needed their employees to do. State superintendents of education, corporate
leaders and Governors were looking at results from the NAEP, (National Assessment of Educational Progress) which is
considered by many to be the “nation’s
report card”. The NAEP asks the
same questions and is administered in the same way in every state. It allows
you to compare one state to another, one state to the nation at large, and the
pace of improvement for a particular state and the nation. It was obvious to
these state-level policy-makers that the country needed to have the same educational goals, the same standards.
Not necessarily the same curriculums, not the same tactics or strategies, but as in
football, the field needs to be 100 yards for everybody, or in basketball, the
goal has to be ten feet from the floor for all. The nation needed common
standards, not for every subject, just the core subjects of English and Math,
Common Core Standards. The overall rationale was not only educational, but
economic as well.
By 2010, forty-four of the fifty states had agreed to adopt and
implement the Common Core Standards. The only states that refused to
participate were Oklahoma, Indiana, Texas, Virginia, Alaska, and Nebraska. The
standards had been conceived and developed by the states themselves. The effort
was funded by the states, with additional funding provided by the private
sector, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Somehow, between 2010 and today, this remarkable cooperation
and near consensus among the states and corporate America to do the right thing
for the education of America’s children began to fall apart.
The genesis of the politicization
of the Common Core occurred in July 2009, when the Obama administration
announced a competition among the states to receive “Race to The Top” funding. As an incentive for states to initiate
educational reform, States were awarded additional competitive points to adopt “internationally benchmarked standards and
assessments that prepare students for success in college and the work place”.
This additional educational funding for cash-strapped states became a powerful
incentive to adopt the Common Core Standards.
As a result, the Common
Core Standards became “President Obama’s program”. Republican Governors
such as Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Nikki Haley of South Carolina began to
back away from the program. National think tanks like the Brookings Institution and the Heritage
Foundation criticized it as well. Conservative talk radio hosts weighed in,
as well as Fox News. It has been
described as a “federal top-down takeover of state and local education systems”.
The persistent attacks from the political right have been
effective. By the end of 2014, four states had repealed the legislation that
adopted the Common Core Standards. Seventeen additional states had introduced
legislation to repeal or delay implementation.
Hatred is debilitating. It affects our ability to think and
act rationally. We are all given reasons to hate others. When we submit to the
temptation, we do more damage to ourselves than we do to those we allow
ourselves to hate. I will not go into the reasons they feel the way they do,
but the hatred that so many conservatives have for President Obama is sad to
see. It is an intense, blinding, hatred that is debilitating not only to them
but to the nation as well. It is a hatred that is debilitating to the nation’s
uninsured. It is a hatred that is debilitating to the nation’s economy. It is a
hatred that is debilitating to the nation’s children, for what is more important
than their education?
I have never known anyone that I disagreed with on
everything. I have never known anyone that I wanted to destroy at all costs, by
any means necessary.
I pray to God, that I never do.
