COMMON CORE (The Latest 'Thing')

OK,  let's look at the bottom line, for that's where much of the problem comes from.  There's really no agreement on what the student we want should be like. This is where the implications of movements like the Common Core get scary. The Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) and the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (NGA Center) defines the Common Core as "quantifiable benchmarks in English-language arts and mathematics at each grade level from kindergarten through high school."

Some years ago when in the capacity of Consultant for the Texas Higher Education Board I spent time training faculty at a number of the state's community colleges. I was teaching them about writing course objectives. (Oh yes...I rode that pony for all it was worth until it fizzled out and was replaced by the 'next big thing.' So I know something about how this consulting business works.)

Teachers would express lofty goals about what they hoped to achieve with regard to what their students would learn from them and I would then ask to see copies of whatever system they used to calculate grades. Invariably, they produced tests that required the recall of details from their subject area or essays that were supposed to demonstrate an understanding of some related concept. And I would point to the tests and tell the teachers Here's what you think is important.

So I say the same for the Common Core. If you look at the "principles" underlying these "benchmarks"[See http://www.corestandards.org/about-the-standards] you can get a sense of what this illustrious group of educators considers important.

The standards say things like this: "Students will learn to use cogent reasoning and evidence collection skills that are essential for success in college, career, and life." Really? Do you suppose that the one-percenters want students who can collect evidence and use "cogent reasoning" to draw valid conclusions based on that evidence? Listen. Here's what George Carlin says about that:

The standards also say that they lay out "a vision of what it means to be a literate person who is prepared for success in the 21^st century." Oh? Does that include learning how to deal with the 21st century climate when the earth is a nifty 140 degrees?

But that ain't all. What about math? The standards are supposed to develop "mathematical understanding." Teachers, they say, can do that by asking the student "to justify, in a way that is appropriate to the student’s mathematical maturity, why a particular mathematical statement is true or where a mathematical rule comes from." Well, here's a little history that deals with that notion of mathematical maturity.

When I was a kid we had cash registers with buttons you pushed down to ring up the amount of a sale. The result showed up in a little window at the top of the register and the cash drawer slid open.

You took the customer's money and gave them whatever change was due. But the advent of things like fast food drive-thru shone a light on how kids weren't too good at that simple math process and rather than bother to fix the education system, National Cash Register (NCR) came to the rescue with a new kind of cash register that once an amount was rung up automatically made change.

But the businesses still lost money, so NCR replaced the dollars and cents buttons with words--FRIES, BURGER, CH-BURGER, LG- COKE, SM-COKE.

But you know what? The kids can't read all that well either. So the next iteration of cash registers had pictures:

So maybe we just need to forget about the Common Core for schools and institute a Common Core for businesses. I mean, the Ancient Egyptians did pretty well with with pictures instead of words and numbers; they built the pyramids didn't they?


But I digress. One more quick note before I go. As I read about the Common Core I learned that there are actually three levels: Standards, Clusters, and Domains. "Domains are larger groups of related Standards and Standards from different domains may sometimes be closely related." And that further suggests that the fine points of grammar don't count for much.

Can I get an 'Amen'?