Common Core makes me queasy. Some conservative friends on Facebook feed my quease by forwarding a link to a study that says Common Core will cost $12.1 billion to implement. Holy cow! $12.1 billion?! For that price, you could just hire a quarter million new teachers to reduce class sizes, give kids more individual attention, and almost guarantee improvements in student learning and school safety.
But hold your horses: the Thomas B. Fordham Institute analysis from May 2012 cites $12.1 billion as the "business as usual" gross cost of implementing Common Core over several years. When Fordham figures existing spending for instructional materials, assessment, and professional development, they calculate that by reallocating some current spending, schools nationwide could implement Common Core for $1.2 billion to $8.3 billion. If they make optimal use of technology (open-source teaching materials, online tests and training seminars), schools could even implement Common Core at a savings of $927 million. Fordham assumes implementation time would be one to three years, so we're not talking about ongoing funding that could support more staff.
Even so, let's look at Fordham's numbers for South Dakota. Under their midway estimate, South Dakota's net new spending to implement Common Core would be $7 million. Spread that out over three years, and you could hire 58 new teachers at $40K a year. That's about a third of the teachers we lost in 2011 due to Governor Dennis Daugaard's draconian budget cuts.
And I'm willing to assert that more competent professionals in our schools offering students their help will do more concrete good for our kids than any regime of standards and testing.
Related:
- Common Core legislation didn't get much traction nationwide in 2013, but Governing's Dylan Scott notes Common Core is another battle between mainstream (crony-capitalist?) Republicans and their cranky Tea-Flavored compatriots. Will this issue figure prominently in the primary between Mike Rounds, Larry Rhoden, and any other true conservative challengers?
- The data collection that makes some Common Core opponents freak out is arguably just a system to allow school databases to talk to each other so when kids move from state to state, they don't get stuck repeating American Literature or missing Algebra 1.
I have my doubts about Common Core as well (I'm in education). If educational theorists are enthusiastic about something, you can bank on disastrous results from it in coming years.
It goes beyond the "for someone with a hammer, everything looks like a nail" delusion that's just common human folly. This is worse. It's everything looks like a nail, and also "hammering this one nail in all the way will solve all our problems." It's a double delusion.
I'm in I.T., and I constantly check myself. My specialty is delivering reliable services in a very, very narrow slice of the pedagogical spectrum. And yet because it constitutes my entire professional world, it would be easy to think of what I offer as a sufficient solution to teachers' and admins' problems. And that's insanely not true.
So likewise, educational theorists tend to miss the forest for the trees. Or even just the one tree they happen to be obsessed with.