George Rebane
[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 4 November 2015.]
America’s K-12 education has suffered hard times for over forty years. Tons of money have been blown into the winds, and all kinds of state and federal programs have been tried to improve the amount our kids learn and then retain after high school. The results have been disappointing to say the least, and an unmitigated disaster when we look at our standing in the competitive global marketplace.
The latest fix for getting our young people educated is Common Core, a new educational program that everyone has heard about yet few people understand. Common Core is supposed to be a set of teaching, knowledge achievement, and testing standards that is going to elevate educational performance to a new uniform and high level across the country. These standards were not designed to define the details of curriculum. But they turned out to be so confusing that most school districts trying to implement them had so many problems developing curriculum, that they started copying from those few districts which looked like they had cracked the curriculum code. But developing compliant curricula was just the beginning of what has now turned into a trail of tears in the attempt to get all 50 states on the same educational page with uniformly executed standards and tests.
When the federal government promised to fund some start-up costs, 45 states initially decided to adopt the new standard. And when Washington started giving money to districts they thought were correctly implementing Common Core, it quickly promised to become a de facto federal standard. A number of states did not like this, especially as it became clear that implementing Common Core would require a large effort to train teachers to teach the new curriculum, then to test the students with tests that were expensive and still not uniform, and finally to establish a new layer of liaison with other districts and the federal bureaucracy to make sure that your school district was doing it right.
The response to date has been that many states have withdrawn from Common Core in ways ranging from complete abandonment, through drafting their own revisions, to opting out of specific components such as the uniform testing program. In short, Common Core has delivered anything but its intended basis for a common curriculum and testing standards that span the K-12 grades. And more states continue to declare that they are rejecting additional features of Common Core. In some states the very name ‘Common Core’ has become such a toxic political issue that its use is officially banned, with people referring to it simply as “higher standards”. (more here)
But the real bombshell is yet to come as the bumpy introduction of Common Core continues. This administration has decided to join with progressive activists to change even more radically the face of education. According to the new thinking, it turns out that all modern education has been based on a wrong premise – simply too much emphasis has been placed on merit, and too much effort has been expended to test and determine levels of our students’ meritorious achievement.
Last month President Obama led the way when he ‘recommended limiting the amount of time students spend on testing, stating that excessive testing “takes the joy out of teaching and learning.”’ So what kind of encouragement does this give to school districts still attempting to come up with tests that uniformly measure coast-to-coast student performance?
Taking up the president’s challenge, today progressive activists like lawyer Erica Etelson present a much more radical argument that describes ‘How the Myth of Meritocracy ruins students’ and society. According to this theory, the very notion of merit leads to all the social ills of discrimination and resulting inequality in everything from wealth, income, jobs, self-esteem, social standing, …, you get the idea. And for that reason and that alone, schools should no longer test and differentiate on the basis of learning achievement and intellectual merit.
In this new post-Common Core world, schools would be redesigned to remove discomfiting challenges, and return education to some bygone era filled with the joy of teaching and learning of which President Obama spoke. The result, according to Ms Etelson would be a society in which wealth and achievement is distributed equally to everyone according to their need. Now where have we heard that before?
My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively. However my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR. Thank you for listening.
rebanesruminations.com 
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