Speaking at the Republican Leadership Conference in New Orleans, Gov Bobby Jindal of Louisiana described the Common Core as a federal incursion over a parent’s right to make choices regarding their children’s education, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reports. And CNN reported that Florida state Rep Charles E Van Zant, Republican from the 19th District, said the standards in the Common Core “attract [every child] to become as homosexual as they possibly can.”
Mr Jindal likened the standards in the Common Core to a “federal belief” that we Americans are too stupid to make our own educational choices. People in Mr Jindal’s immediate circle may be that stupid, but let me assure you, Mr Jindal’s beliefs do not speak for Americans any more than former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s did when he attempted to impose a limit on the size of soda cups.
“The arrogance here—here’s what’s amazing to me: You got folks who think they know best who aren’t listening to parents,” the Times-Picayune quoted Mr Jindal as saying in a press conference after his speech at the conference Thursday night.
Let me say again, the Common Core is a list of learning standards about what kids should know or be able to do at the end of each grade, from kindergarten through high school. More than 40 states, including Louisiana, adopted them shortly after they were written, which was about 2010.
A brief Common Core example in 3rd-grade math
Just to ease your fears, let me give you one more example of what the Common Core standards actually are, rather than spending too much of your time reading what politicians, who probably haven’t even read them, say they are or are not:
In third grade, students should be able to “represent and solve problems involving multiplication and division.” (3.OA.A.1): This includes the ability to “interpret products of whole numbers, e.g., interpret 5 × 7 as the total number of objects in 5 groups of 7 objects each. For example, describe a context in which a total number of objects can be expressed as 5 × 7.”
Let me illustrate this Common Core standard with a word problem. Jason is the manager of a grocery store. A company ships 56 bread loaves to his store, and he must determine how to arrange the bread loaves on 7 shelves. He must put the same number of bread loaves on each shelf. Describe how Jason could arrange the bread loaves, and show the calculations you used.
The Common Core standards do say students in third grade ought to be able to solve Jason’s problem. They do not say Jason is gay or that parents in Jason’s state don’t have a choice where to send their children to school. All they say is that if the school a child’s parents send her to is using the Common Core, she ought to be able to solve Jason’s problem by the time she finishes third grade.
That’s all the Common Core is, folks: a list of minimal standards that, if implemented properly, which, in many cases, they have not been, should prepare kids by the time they graduate from high school to take first-year college courses or to fill most jobs in today’s world that require no college education. In other words, high school graduates will have achieved certain standards of literacy and numeracy, at least in theory. There are plenty of good arguments that the standards themselves are not setting kids up for this level of achievement or mastery, and we need to turn our attention to those discussions, rather than waste our time talking about homosexuality or who actually runs the schools.
If we in education have to keep addressing these stupid political arguments about the Common Core, though, we will never be able to fix some of the bugs many people see in the standards themselves. For example, many people believe the English language arts standards in kindergarten through second grade are replete with material that is not age-appropriate for young children. If we have to keep answering people like Mr Jindal and Mr Van Zant, we will never be able to get on with the real work of implementing the standards, which will require strengthening the standards that do work and fixing those that don’t.
Or maybe that’s Mr Jindal’s point: if a set of standards can’t be properly implemented, because everyone’s time is being spent responding to silly and uninformed arguments about parent choice or homosexuality, the whole standards movement will never have a chance to succeed and will be seen as a political failure as much as an educational one.
Then the good people of Louisiana can send their tax dollars to schools that teach American citizens about creationism and Jesus. Their kids will grow up working in Chick-Fil-A and Hobby Lobby, which are OK jobs, to be sure, but they will never be able to compete for high-tech jobs in an increasingly high-tech world.
That’s why we need the Common Core State Standards: They keep state governors from running rogue and ensure kids everywhere have an equal opportunity to learn and study how our world works.