Common Core is Not a Government Takeover (original) (raw)
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Common Core as Policy Rather than Pedagogy
Governmentality and profiteering has led to Common Core devolving from, potentially, one of the most useful tools for improving K-12 classroom instruction into something so tainted by public perception that its academic usefulness expired before it was fully implemented. The following paper is a critical review of the education reform movement over the past two decades, from the adoption of No Child Left Behind 2001 to today's culture of standardized assessments and accountability.
Untried and Untrue: Common Core’s Mechanization of Education
Abstract In 2013, according to National Public Radio, two-thirds of Americans had not heard of the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI). A year later, 80% knew about it, and 60% were opposed. The confluence between Big Business and Big Government support for CCSSI has fed growing opposition from parents and teachers across the political spectrum. While much debate concerns the standards’ contents, this paper focuses on the mendacity used to justify CCSSI and the cronies pushing it. Supporters claim CCSSI is state-led, internationally benchmarked, and based on the latest research, but it is not. In July 2009, $4.35 billion in federal funding was made available to recession-shocked states through the Race to the Top program. States had to adopt CCSSI and join one of two approved testing consortia to participate. Before standards had even been written, 46 states and Washington, D.C. agreed to join. As of May 2014, only 26 states and D.C. remained in the program. Advocates say CCSSI is state-led and voluntary; critics say federal funding is bribery and intimidation. Additionally, opponents worry about centralization and the collection of real-time data on students and teachers. Mandatory curriculum, textbooks, lesson plans, and Core-aligned tests remove teachers from heretofore-key elements of education. To many, the use of cameras and biofeedback devices on students to obtain fine-grained data is Orwellian. Critics fear such monitoring of classrooms will transform education from an art into an exercise in industrial-style Taylorism. We can do better.
The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) have anchored an education policy apparatus that seeks to reconstruct much of the work of curriculum, teaching, and teacher education. However, teachers and teacher education faculty have often struggled to recognize the specific ideas and practices that education policies mobilize to steer their actions, institutions, and professions toward particular values and outcomes. This Forum essay adopts a governmentality perspective on the CCSS to draw attention to its political rationalities and the work that standards do to govern educators at a distance and to influence how they govern their own conduct. This is not a critique of the Common Core, but a brief reading of CCSS publications in their own terms to highlight their neoliberal governmentality and the ways they have positioned the Standards to steer curriculum , teaching, and teacher education through high-stakes testing, outcomes-based performance management, and the privatization, automation, and outsourcing of core educational processes.
Democracy education, 2018
The Common Core does not advance democratic education. Far from it, the opening section of the language standards argues that the goal of public K– 12 education is “college and career readiness.” Only at the end of their introductory section do the Common Core’s authors suggest that K– 12 education has any goals beyond the economic: learning to read and write well has “wide applicability outside the classroom and work place,” including preparing people for “private deliberation and responsible citizenship in a republic.” The democratic purposes of K– 12 education are not goals but, in the Common Core’s words, a “natural outgrowth” of work force preparation. This article is in response to Bindewald, B. J., Tannebaum, R. P., & Womac, P. (2016). The Common Core and Democratic Education: Examining Potential Costs and Benefits to Public and Private Autonomy. Democracy and Education, 24(2), Article 4. Available at https://democracyeducationjournal.org/home/vol24/iss2/4/. In their essay “T...
Liberating Education from Common Ground On Common Core
What could education be like in a fully free society? This paper reviews the history and issues of education, public and private, in the U.S. since before its founding. It questions the entire project of public education, examining its founding, goals, and the inherent reasons for its results. It also pictures in specifics the way a fully free education market would operate in a laissez-faire society to optimally serve children. [Originally published in Common Ground On Common Core, ed. Kirsten Lombard, 2015, http://www.resoundingbooks.org/books/commonground/
The Uncommon Failure of the Common Core: A Case Study on American Education Policy
This paper is an analytical essay which explores the failure of the American education policy, Common Core State Standards Initiative, from the perspective of systems traps as discussed by Donatella Meadows in her book Thinking in Systems. It is an example of what can go wrong at the crossroads of policy and real-world implementation. Almost all of the original goals of the Common Core State Standards Initiative have failed as a result of flaws in the system’s structure which led to archetypal traps, particularly policy resistance, drift to low performance, rule-beating, and seeking the wrong goal. Policy makers can learn from the case study of the Common Core’s failure to set up more successful systems in the future to solve the most pressing global problems of today without negative unintended consequences. The intersection of policy making and policy implementation always carries the risk of failure. To mitigate these risks, policy makers must create a more robust and carefully thought-out system that will not fall victim to the same traps as the Common Core State Standards Initiative.