Today’s Morning Jolt features another bad poll for Democrats, another Obamacare deadline that won’t be met, and this examination of a topic that gets too little attention in Washington:
An Uncommon Contempt Displayed to Those Objecting to Common Core
Our friend Ramesh on the Common Core debate:
Arne Duncan had to backtrack from [his statement that Common Core critics are mostly “white suburban moms who — all of a sudden — their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought they were”] which also happens to be clearly false. Students aren’t yet being tested to determine whether they meet the standards, so poor test results couldn’t be generating a backlash. The contempt that the remark revealed is real enough, though. Proponents of the Common Core tend to view its critics as an ignorant mob. Support for it is, in certain circles, a sign of one’s seriousness about education reform.
Yet the reform strategy it represents hasn’t been thought through well, and it seems unlikely to work. The debate that surrounds it is an extended exercise in missing the point.
You can see why ‘common core’ would be a seductive idea in theory. Way too many American schools are failing the students who come in through their doors, and so there’s a natural belief that if we could just get those worst-performing schools up to some minimum standard, and establish some sort of universal floor or threshold for quality, everyone’s kids would be better off.
Why, you could use the slogan . . . “Leave no child behind!”
Of course, “No Child Left Behind” is what we tried with a national system of standardized testing back in 2001, with decidedly mixed results. Of course, President Obama granted waivers to 26 states exempting them from the No Child Left Behind requirements, effectively nullifying the law.
Establishing that minimum standard is easier in theory than in practice, and parents have good reason to be wary of an effort to centralize control and authority of education matters. If I’m a concerned parent with a beef with how my local school is teaching my children, I can join the PTA or attend my local school-board meeting. Those school administrators should, at least theoretically, be more attentive and responsive to my concerns, as they’ll see me at the school and around town. My state legislator will run into me much less frequently, and the evidence suggests Secretary of Education Arne Duncan seethes with contempt for parents who disagree with him and avoids interacting with “white suburban moms.”
Local control isn’t perfect, but it is, in theory, the most self-correcting.
And if a school over in some other district wants to change its curriculum, say to emphasize more math, or more history, or more foreign languages, and the local parents are fine with it . . . why should I complain or weigh in? Even if my school finds a formula to improve student performance, it may not work over there and their ideas many not work over here. If there’s anything that frustrating efforts at education reform have taught us, it’s that way too many success stories can’t be replicated elsewhere. Jaime Escalante proved to be an astonishingly successful calculus teacher, but after he and his successor retired, “a very successful program rapidly collapsed, leaving only fragments behind.”
As Ramesh notes, trying to standardize education across the country amounts to strangling experimentation and innovation:
The case for having a “common core” in the first place is weak. High standards may be valuable, but why do they have to be common? It isn’t as though different state standards are a major problem in U.S. education. There’s more variation in achievement within states than between them. Common standards may make life a bit easier for students who move across state lines, but they also mean that we lose a chance for states to experiment.
Finally, which is most remarkable and surprising — that Barack Obama is president of the United States, that Joe Biden is vice president, or that Arne Duncan has been secretary of education for five years and will remain in the job for the foreseeable future? It’s not like Duncan could cite a record of remarkable improvement during his tenure in Chicago:
Soon after Arne Duncan left his job as schools chief here to become one of the most powerful U.S. education secretaries ever, his former students sat for federal achievement tests. This month, the mathematics report card was delivered: Chicago trailed several cities in performance and progress made over six years.
Miami, Houston and New York had higher scores than Chicago on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Boston, San Diego and Atlanta had bigger gains. Even fourth-graders in the much-maligned D.C. schools improved nearly twice as much since 2003.
The federal readout is just one measure of Duncan’s record as chief executive of the nation’s third-largest system. Others show advances on various fronts. But the new math scores signal that Chicago is nowhere near the head of the pack in urban school improvement, even though Duncan often cites the successes of his tenure as he crusades to fix public education . . .
The Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago, which represents business, professional, education and cultural leaders, concluded in June that gains on state test scores were inflated when Illinois relaxed passing standards and that too many students still drop out of high school or graduate unprepared for college. The Consortium on Chicago School Research, a nonpartisan group at the University of Chicago, reported in October that Duncan’s closure of low-performing schools often shuffled students into comparable schools, yielding little or no academic benefit.
Obama picked Duncan because he was “his” guy. Then again, it’s not like President Obama trusted Arne Duncan enough to let his schools teach his daughters; while the Obamas lived in Chicago, Obama’s daughters went to the private University of Chicago Lab School, where the tuition is $25,000 to $28,000 per child per year.