I became convinced that in order to be successful at defeating the CCSS initiative we must do three things, 1) we must set aside those points of opposition that are highly partisan, 2) we must create a clear and succinct message of common opposition and stop haggling over the details, and 3) appeal to the universal desire that all parents have for their children’s education, not just to be “career-ready”, but more importantly to become mature thinkers who are highly-motivated, self-disciplined, hard-working, creative, ambitious, happy individuals who know their own minds and who are prepared to thrive in any life path they choose.
What we are doing to answer the assertions of CCSS supporters is important work, but we are too often pulled away from the central point by engaging them in long drawn out debates about whether the content standards themselves are good or bad, whether the standards will push a curriculum of political indoctrination, or whether the whole public school system is the enemy. What’s lost in these debates is the bigger picture which is that each successive effort to standardize education around a workforce development vision has failed, and Common Core will make those failures look small in comparison.
With CCSS advertising their mission in a clear and consistent way, and grassroots opposition fractured between political poles and decentralized by voluminous websites, bloggers, and local groups, I am not surprised that parents around me are latching onto the one message that consistently breaks through. It is very difficult for most parents, who can't devote so much time to sifting through the arguments, to discover the central point of opposition to the Common Core.
CCSS has this simple message under its logo, “Preparing America’s Students for College & Career.” What parent doesn’t want their child to go to college and have a career? What parent doesn’t want a “consistent, clear understanding” of what their child is expected to learn? What parent doesn’t want a child “fully prepared for the future?” We all do. But what parents wants a “career ready” child who is a simple cog in a managed workforce? What parent wants their child to have a “consistent, clear understanding” of how to navigate the technocratic corporate world or manage the layers of bureaucratic paperwork and rubrics of compliance? What parent would believe that workforce preparation as the central goal of education is going to “fully” prepare their child for the future? What parent isn’t concerned that their child’s education is devastating their innate love of learning?
Instead of sifting through the dozens of complex arguments for and against Common Core, parents need to understand two basic concepts in order to discover the central point: that the Common Core deconstructs the traditional liberal arts education which most contributes to the development of mature, creative thinkers who are prepared to thrive in life. First, they must understand that the CCSS initiative cannot solve the problems inherent in the successive efforts to standardize education because it will mandate standardization on a vast scale. Second, they must understand that by shifting the purpose of education away from the liberal arts in favor of a servile education for the so-called “real world,” the education of their child will be materially damaged.
We oppose the CCSS initiative because it continues the failed education reforms of the past by mandating minimum, common, and quantifiable standards and high-stakes testing which leads to the hyper-focus on quantifiable skills at the expense of the greater characteristics of sound education.
When asked about the standards themselves, The Hillsdale lecturer, Dr. Daniel B. Coupland, said he had found that for the most part they are solid standards. But then he went on to explain the limitations of standards. Common Core standards are just what standards always have been. Standards represent coalescence at the middle, whether that middle is nation-wide or state-wide; they represent minimum standards of quantifiable skills. Even good rigorous standards when combined with high-stakes accountability measures will usually result in the hyper-focus on those quantifiable skills that will be tested, upon which school funding and teacher progress will be measured. Inevitably this focus will squeeze out those portions of education that most contribute to the development of mature thinkers who are prepared to thrive in any chosen life path.
This has been the universal criticism of the last federal effort to standardize education, NCLB. Award-winning reporter Peg Tyre, in her series on the Common Core, started by reviewing the failures of NCLB, highlighting that the failures of NCLB center on high-stakes testing rather than standards:
“Testing kids was a good way of coming up with data on how kids did on the… test, but it didn’t… actually improve what happened in the classroom. In fact, to accommodate NCLB, schools began teaching—and children began learning—less. Under No Child Left Behind, school administrators and district leaders quickly figured out the ugly consequences for schools when they failed to improve their students’ test scores... So in response, many schools demanded that their teachers dumb down instruction… teachers were made to teach to the test in the most direct and simplistic way possible so more kids would do better on the tests. This made school pretty boring… [And was particularly] a profound setback for poor kids. The unintended consequence of NCLB was that it created a “bottom” level of acceptable instruction, but that geared the whole education system toward that low level.”
The architects of the Common Core said this quasi-federal initiative was set apart from NCLB because “They had a vision of creating a high goal for schools to strive for, instead of a bottom set of standards that would ultimately doom them.” But how was their vision different from NCLB in real terms? They didn't create a set of voluntary goals for schools to “strive for”. The CCSS did nothing to address the negative effects of NCLB high-stake testing and the standards are described differently by almost every supporter of the initiative. The architects called them something to "strive for" like an ideal, some repeatedly describe the standards as a "solid baseline", and multiple reports have indicated that the CCSS are set somewhere in the middle when they are compared with state standards prior to the initiative. So which is it, an ideal, a middle, or a baseline?
The idea the the CCSS initiative is designed to correct what is wrong in education, to set high standards and give schools the tools to excel is certainly suspect when schools whose standards were stronger before CCSS are told not only that they can't alter the standards but they can add no more than 15% in any content area. Sound more like their placing limits on achievement that setting high goals to strive for. It's a speed limit in education. Some Schools will inevitably fall well short of their limit (as the farm tractors you get stuck behind on the road) but anyone caught trying to get ahead will be penalized.
We oppose the core vision of the CCSS initiative to build a system for centrally managed student training with the purpose of fitting the future generation as cogs in a managed workforce for the “Global Economy.” This central goal will dismantle liberal arts education which most contributes to the development of mature thinkers who are prepared to thrive in any chosen life path.
CCSS has built its mission around a central idea that exposes how they see the core purpose of education in the “21st Century.” That core purpose is to train kids to be “Career-Ready” to compete in a “Global Economy.” Thier core purpose is to turn education in America into job preparation. Dr. Coupland said that this was the central concern he has about the Common Core. The architects set this as the “goal” for all students to “strive for.” Coupland said that the pre-modern educational models made a clear distinction between the liberal arts and servile arts. James Daniels, a proponent of classical liberal arts education described it this way, “The two models are different in regard to the goals that they pursued. The goal of the liberal arts was to cultivate a wise and virtuous man. The goal of the servile arts was to cultivate skills for a given trade.” The CCSS initiative has made a choice to pursue the servile arts as more “relevant to the real world” and more competitive in the “global economy.”
C.S. Lewis described the purpose of servile schooling this way :it “aims at making not a good man but a good banker, a good electrician… or a good surgeon.” There’s nothing wrong with having good electricians or surgeons, but to pursue “training” at the expense of development of human character comes with a stern warning from Lewis.Hhe writes, “If education is beaten by training, civilization dies… the lesson of history is that civilization is a rarity, attained with difficulty and easily lost.” Dr. Coupland further explained how these two purposes should be applied in education. He said, “To support one’s self is only one part of a good education.” In order for us to be truly free we must have so much more. A broad liberal education is an imperative for the development of “mature” free-thinking people who know “who they are, why they are here, and understand their relationship to others and the world around them.” Coupland said that the CCSS initiative contains in it a “cavalier contempt for the great works of art” and approaches education as though building human beings is like “programming machines.”
The education reforms of the past three decades have incrementally dismantled our liberal arts education in favor of workforce development on the conveyor belt of standardized outcome-based schooling. There is no evidence that this has been good for our children, that it has made them more intelligent, more capable workers, or more moral human beings. In fact, it is apparent that our society has taken a change for the worse and that our kids are being “dumbed down” despite the best efforts of their parents. Parents are sick of their children being deluged in test-taking skills and assignment rubrics that leave no room for creativity. We instinctively know that this has been devastating to the development of our children's minds and character. We know that our children are born with the light and love of learning in abundance, and then we send them to school where within a few short years that love is replaced by boredom or utter frustration, and for some settles in as hatred of and failure in school.
The CCSS initiative threatens to sink the future generation into a system where they are fitted as cogs in a managed economy. The results of this federal initiative will not turn us around and get our society back on track, rather this federal initiative will be the worst of them all. It will bring about the total deconstruction of our children’s intellects and moral character by cutting our children adrift from self-discovery accomplished through learning the sound ethics and morals which are found in the pages of the great literary works, the discoveries of the great scientists, the thoughts of the great historians and mathematicians, and all the other elements of a broad liberal arts education. What will CCSS prepare them for? They will be prepared to navigate the regulated technocratic corporate world, to manage the layers of bureaucratic paperwork and rubrics of compliance, and to be adept at storing factual information and regurgitating it upon request. It won't matter that they don’t know their own minds because no one will care to ask what they think. Just ask David Coleman, the director of the CCSS development process and now president of the College Board, who said “As you grow up in this world, you realize people really don’t give a s--t about what you feel or what you think,” and “It is rare in a working environment that someone says, ‘Johnson, I need a market analysis by Friday, but before that, I need a compelling account of your childhood.’”
This construct is seriously damaging to our children and to the future of our civilization. We should not set as education’s central goal “career readiness” at the early age of 3, 5, or even 10. We should focus on providing a strong, quality liberal arts education first, and then when our children are moral, mature, highly-motivated, self-disciplined, hard-working, creative, ambitious, happy individuals, they will not only be prepared for the rigorous study and application of excelling in any career path of their choice, but they will be capable of governing their own lives and sustaining a free society.
Why we oppose the Common Core:
We oppose the CCSS initiative because it aims to operate a system of centrally-managed student work training, while discarding the vital qualities of a sound education that contribute to the development of mature thinkers who are prepared to thrive in any chosen life path.
Three Points of Opposition:
1. We oppose the core vision of the CCSS initiative: to build a system for centrally-managed student training with the purpose of fitting the future generation as cogs in a managed workforce for the “Global Economy.” This central goal will dismantle liberal arts education, which most contributes to the development of mature thinkers who are prepared to thrive in any chosen life path and sustain a free civilization.
2. We oppose the CCSS initiative because it continues the failed education reforms of the past by mandating minimum, common, and quantifiable standards and high-stakes testing which leads to the hyper-focus on quantifiable skills at the expense of the vital characteristics of sound education.
3. We oppose the CCSS initiative’s use of highly predictive computerized testing for the tracking of students. There are serious concerns that CCSS violates our children’s privacy rights as these tests can be manipulated to measure physiological, behavioral, and attitudes, which data will be collected along with extensive intimate data in the P-20 database available across stateliness, by the US DOE, and special interests.
We oppose the CCSS initiative because it aims to operate a system of centrally-managed student work training, while discarding the vital qualities of a sound education that contribute to the development of mature thinkers who are prepared to thrive in any chosen life path.
Three Points of Opposition:
1. We oppose the core vision of the CCSS initiative: to build a system for centrally-managed student training with the purpose of fitting the future generation as cogs in a managed workforce for the “Global Economy.” This central goal will dismantle liberal arts education, which most contributes to the development of mature thinkers who are prepared to thrive in any chosen life path and sustain a free civilization.
2. We oppose the CCSS initiative because it continues the failed education reforms of the past by mandating minimum, common, and quantifiable standards and high-stakes testing which leads to the hyper-focus on quantifiable skills at the expense of the vital characteristics of sound education.
3. We oppose the CCSS initiative’s use of highly predictive computerized testing for the tracking of students. There are serious concerns that CCSS violates our children’s privacy rights as these tests can be manipulated to measure physiological, behavioral, and attitudes, which data will be collected along with extensive intimate data in the P-20 database available across stateliness, by the US DOE, and special interests.
