The Rise and Fall of The Common Core

I was on a plane, cruising at 35,000 feet. There were several Principals on the flight. We were returning to the east coast from the annual NASSP (National Association of Secondary School Principals) convention when the conversation turned to NCLB (No Child Left Behind) and how our students were doing on our State’s annual exams. I was talking to a Principal from Mississippi, and when I asked him how his kids were doing I was left speechless by his response. According to him, his students were passing his State exams at a rate of more than 90%. That is when I knew that something was really wrong with American education in general, and NCLB in particular.

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.