Five weeks after mocking me for my willingness to reach across the aisle and assist South Dakota Tea Partiers in their crusade against Common Core, Pat Powers again addresses the political opposition to the newest wave of education policy busywork reform. You'll note that Powers still seems to be playing to the powers that be. The Daugaard Administration's Department of Education fully supports Common Core, and GOP-funded Powers isn't about to buck their agenda.
How can you tell that South Dakota's GOP blog mouthpiece will run interference for the top-down ALECky corporatization of Common Core?
- He refers to protest of Common Core as "static," meaning random, unstructured noise.
- His "primer" on Common Core consists of labeling opponents as far-left liberals and Agenda-21-obsessed conservatives. He doesn't really process or evaluate the arguments offered.
- He predicts the Legislature will spend an "inordinate" amount of time discussing education standards, pre-emptively deeming the discussion a waste of time.
Powers could be wavering. It will be hard for him to reject Common Core, since it fits the Republican paradigm of seeking better school results by whipping teachers instead of fighting poverty. But as he notes that "other fairly involved politicos and legislators who are against the standards" could succeed in a legislative fight to rein in Common Core, Powers may be hedging his bets to stay on the good side of those in his paying party who may prevail in fighting bad education policy.
I'm both a proponent and opponent of various parts of Common Core. I think blanket condemnation of Common Core is just goofy. I suspect most folks are interested in better schools, and updating standards that will guide curriculum changes is a first step in getting there. After that, I think there are questions about which way to proceed.
Too many educrats think all this can be done in a year or two, because they've gone to conferences where corporate shills are selling magical cures for all that ails education. This is just situation normal for the corporate shills, who glom onto any reform effort to sell the next education fad.
What sells is a lot of bogus curriculum and standardized testing, because it's highly profitable. It's not profitable to depend on your teachers to guide the reform effort. Rather, the corporate educrats need a scapegoat for why their corporatized reforms never work (and they never do), and that scapegoat is always going to be the teachers.
Anyone expecting instant change from Common Core is going to be disappointed. You can't change the curriculum in math overnight. You've got students coming through grades that have been learning under the old system. You can't immediately switch, and expect anything but failure.
There is nothing saying a state can't implement the good stuff (updated standards) and reject the bad stuff (corporatizing and increased standardized testing). They can design a system where teachers are more in control of the changes, so you take advantage of the expertise you have and you get a buy in from the people who have to do the real work in the classroom.
I sort of agree that a lot of the opposition is just "noise" by people, mostly on the right, but some on the left, who don't have a clue about what Common Core is. There is good in Common Core, but there are some who want to turn it into a corporate profit center. It's up to teachers and parents and local districts to take the good parts and reject the bad.
Like so many "education reforms," Common Core is something touted by people who have never been in a classroom or had no success when they were there. The language of the measure is basically good, but, like so many things in society, it panders to the Lowest Common Denominators. Of course there are things in Common Core to agree with, but those are the things good teachers have always done. The LCDs in education don't stay in education long. Good, experienced teachers now have to waste time explaining how things they have done for years fit the Common Core standards. Good, or even mediocre, teachers know what to do to make better students. As for the others, the powers that be could do much more by putting their mandates on what the colleges teach to help make better teachers. During 21 years as a teacher, the only people I ever came across who said their ed block classes were "helpful" were people who only taught for one or two years and then got out of the profession or went back to school and became administrators (Lord help us all).
So much of CC appears to ignore the 800 lb gorilla in the room: The Normal Curve. It is an immutable fact of nature and no amount of blithering, administrating or dim-witted statist intervention is going to change that! You can throw all the money you want at "education" (Current Federal fraud costs about $70B a year) but at the end of the day you will always have a Bell Curve to show for it.