Media from the Washington Post to NPR, from Baltimore to the blogosphere, have described findings from the 46th annual PDK/Gallup poll that show Americans aren’t convinced the Common Core and federal involvement in schools will improve education.
The Common Core is a list of learning standards, specifying what children in US schools should know or be able to do in their math and language arts classes by the end of a certain grade. For example, by the end of eighth grade, students should know that “straight lines are widely used to model relationships between two quantitative variables.” Using scatter plots that suggest a linear association, they should be able to “informally fit a straight line, and informally assess the model fit by judging the closeness of the data points to the line.”
But people already know what the Common Core is, right? On a national scale, 47 percent of people surveyed for the poll said they have heard “a great deal” or “a fair amount” about the standards in the Common Core. Well, maybe there’s still a shortage of specific knowledge about the standards in the Common Core.
Anyway, let me shift the time frame by a few years here. When I used to work at the John D and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation in Chicago, Adele Simmons, then the president of the foundation, gathered all the employees in a room one day and explained what she thought the direction of the foundation should be. It must have been 1998, I suppose. “You’re not going to fix the public schools by creating a new math curriculum,” she said very directly.
Her words are just as true today as they were 15 or more years ago.
And the Common Core isn’t even a whole curriculum; it’s a list of standards on which curricula in math and language arts are going to be based. There’s still so much work to do, and nobody who knows what they’re talking about ever believed the standards alone would fix problems in our schools. That’s not why educators design sets of learning standards in math, reading, and writing.
But the Common Core is something tangible politicians and school leaders can point to as an attempt to improve learning. From an educator’s point of view, it’s only the beginning, but politicians have a need for winning elections now. It’s not even the biggest problem in our schools; it’s just something for politicians and pundits to waste a lot of time discussing.
The survey even asked about that: Only 9 percent of people surveyed listed something about learning standards as the “biggest problem” that schools in their communities have to deal with. The most listed problem was school funding. Duh.
Also getting enough mention to be listed in the summary results for the poll, here, were student discipline problems and the need for teachers who are better qualified. These got about the same level of recognition as problems with the learning standards themselves.
My opinion remains that the Common Core has a few bugs, especially in the early elementary years. These need to be worked out as educators implement them and find out which standards work and which ones don’t. A revision is needed, but not yet: they haven’t been tested enough in real classrooms. For example, some of the English language arts standards in high school don’t include enough literature for me to believe they’re really worth teaching, and some of the high school math standards are irrelevant to people going into most fields of study or careers.
Other significant findings
The public supports some testing, including college entrance exams (80%), Advanced Placement tests (91%), high school exit exams (78%), and tests that determine whether students should be promoted from one grade to the next (78%). But about 54 percent of people said standardized testing doesn’t help. “While most Americans (68%) are skeptical that standardized tests help teachers, they support using them to evaluate student achievement or to guide decisions about student placement,” the poll said in its full version.
Among the 33 percent of Americans who said they favor the Common Core, the most common reason given for support was that it will help more students learn what they need to know, regardless of where they go to school. In other words, supporters of the Common Core favor some standardization from state to state. Among the 60 percent who oppose the Common Core, the most common reason was that it will limit the flexibility that teachers have to teach what they think is best. In other words, opponents of the Common Core favor teacher autonomy.
(I believe with good leadership from principals and superintendents, both goals can be achieved. Full teacher autonomy doesn’t exclude standardization between states, but if teachers want more autonomy, they should come together and petition for very strong standards everywhere, for all our students. The Common Core could be a starting point, but the public isn’t there in its debate right now.)
About 70 percent of the survey respondents support the idea of charter schools, but more specific questioning about the operation of charter schools revealed many people don’t understand how charters are established, what they teach, or how they’re governed.
