When I read Ursula Burns’s guest essay last month in the Rochester (N.Y.) Democrat & Chronicle, I didn’t respond. The essay was fluff to me, Ms Burns being the CEO of the behemoth known as the Xerox Corporation, based in Norwalk, Conn. Plus, she supports the Common Core more than I do.
But now, Dan Drmacich, a former principal in the Rochester City School District, has decided to engage her by picking apart each of her points. Let me summarize.
Voluntary or extorted adoption
Where Ms Burns says 45 states have voluntarily adopted the standards, Mr Drmacich argues that the use of the word “voluntary” is inaccurate: “The US Department of Education ‘extorted’ the acceptance of Common Core, as well as more charter schools and rating teachers by test scores from individual states, in exchange for much-needed millions of dollars for their education budgets.”
The truth is somewhere in between extortion and voluntary, in my opinion, but the rhetoric sure is interesting to read. And this would be a great way to sell newspapers—if anybody actually cared about this point.
The cold, hard fact on the ground is that the Common Core standards are now being implemented in almost every K-12 classroom in the country. We can write about how they got there till there’s no more room on our hard disks. We can discuss whether states would have adopted them if they didn’t need the money, whether the federal government held a gun to governors’ heads, and so on. But the fact is, they are in our classrooms right now, today, and teachers know very little about how they got there. I disapprove of the way they were developed, but that’s a story for another day.
Mr Drmacich got his talking points in, as he brings up several other points that are unresponsive to Ms Burns’s current point, revealing a weakness in his argument. It’s best to stay focused. We are talking about the Common Core here, not the use of standardized test data to evaluate teachers, not the promotion of charter schools by US Department of Education officials and the White House, not any of that. Just the Common Core. The remainder of Mr Drmacich’s response is off-topic.
Poor international test ranking
Perfect timing: the PISA results for 2012 will be out in early December, and the US is expected to be right in the middle of pack again. We’ll probably fall below countries like Estonia and certainly below the city of Shanghai, China.
Ms Burns made the point that New York—and I would extrapolate to other states—needs the Common Core because we are falling behind other countries on international tests. Mr Drmacich points out that if student scores from impoverished communities are removed from the US scores, our standing is close to the top of international rankings. He also notes the lack of a connection between low scores on international tests and poor economic performance as a country.
This pointless point-counterpoint, which no actual person actually cares about, reveals an oxymoron. We can’t, on one hand, take the poor students out of the scores in order to show we’re doing well and, at the same time, insist on educating the poor students by addressing the root cause of poverty. It’s having your cake and eating it too. Either we deal with the poor students both in the average score and in our work to ease poverty and its detrimental effects on parenting, raising children, hunger and so on, or we disregard the poor on both ends of the argument.
Anyway, international rankings sound too much like a competition: American students aren’t competing with every Finnish student for college and career; they’re competing with a few of them. Besides, setting the unattainable goal of improving the ranking of US students on international tests means students in other countries have to do worse on those exams. They work just as hard as we do, and we would not wish for them to fail. Such competition is repugnant to the Common Core and has no place in any discussion of the standards.
Instead, we should celebrate our differences and learn from them. What are schools in Finland doing well on? Can any of those ideas be applied to US schools? If so, how can we make that happen, or why isn’t it already happening? We would not wish for Finnish students to do worse on these international exams; rather, we would hope they will learn from us as well, for our schools do so much more than what is measured on the PISA test.
Raise the bar
Ms Burns argues that in order to increase academic performance, we need to set higher expectations. Mr Drmacich retorts that there’s nothing wrong with setting high expectations, as long as adequate funding levels are achieved as well. No argument here.
Critical thinking and problem solving
Ms Burns argues that the tests being developed that align with the Common Core standards will test students’ ability to think critically and solve problems, needed skills for college and career readiness. Mr Drmacich says testing these skills on a standardized test is not possible. Rather, portfolios and more thorough work samples are needed from students in order to assess these skills properly, he argues. And he’s right.
Finally, Mr Drmacich calls for more testing of the standards and fine-tuning as the implementation proceeds. I echo these desires: we are forgetting that as teachers apply their skills of teaching, they will discover ways better than those found in the Common Core to teach those skills. As they share those methods with teachers in other states, it will become clear where and how the standards need to be tweaked.
At the present time, there’s no plan to revisit the standards and consider suggestions for revision. That may be the downfall of these standards, since educator input, after implementation, should have been a requirement from the beginning. Without feedback from the people who are putting the standards to work in US classrooms, all deficiencies will remain, and the standards will lose credibility.