The Chicago Teachers Union voted on May 7 to oppose the Common Core State Standards, the Chicago Sun-Times reports.
The union’s House of Delegates will urge the city’s teachers to join what they called a “growing national opposition to the Common Core State Standards, saying the assessments disrupt student learning and consume tremendous amounts of time and resources for test preparation and administration,” according to a press release.
“I agree with educators and parents from across the country, the Common Core mandate represents an overreach of federal power into personal privacy as well as into state educational autonomy,” CTU President Karen Lewis was quoted as saying in a statement. “Common Core eliminates creativity in the classroom and impedes collaboration. We also know that high-stakes standardized testing is designed to rank and sort our children and it contributes significantly to racial discrimination and the achievement gap among students in America’s schools.”
Editorial
I object to the word eliminate when Ms Lewis says the Common Core “eliminates creativity,” as the standards themselves do nothing of the sort. However, she is correct in attributing an increase in competition among students, among teachers, and among schools to the standardized tests that will be used by schools in Illinois to determine how well teachers are teaching the standards in the Common Core.
I will say again: Competition is repugnant to the Common Core. High-stakes tests promote competition, not collaboration, and everybody seems to have forgotten that collaboration was one of the main reasons people in the US developed the Common Core in the first place. It would allow teachers in Montana to work with and share ideas with teachers in Ohio, and so on. You can argue about whether that’s a good or a bad idea, but it doesn’t seem to matter anymore, since collaboration is nowhere near the Common Core these days, mainly because of the tests that have been attached to the standards.
If the Common Core’s only reason for being is to serve as a minimal set of standards for which test publishers can write standardized test items, then yes, it’s a waste.
However, it doesn’t seem to me that’s the only purpose of the standards in the Common Core. We are trying to guarantee high school graduates in the US will have at least a certain minimal set of literacy and numeracy skills so they are better able to compete in a post-high school world and better able to participate in their communities. But as soon as high-stakes tests introduce competition into standards-based learning before students graduate from high school—you know, that “school” part of their lives where they’re supposed to be able to make mistakes and learn from them because the consequences aren’t high-stakes—we ruin everything.
