All posts tagged Common Core State Standards

Astorino Blasts the Common Core: “Our Children Are Not Guinea Pigs!”

Should conservatives embrace the Common Core? As we’ve seen [check out ILYBYGTH coverage here, here, or here, for instance], conservative intellectuals have disagreed about the new standards. New York gubernatorial hopeful and staunch conservative Rob Astorino offered a stinging attack on the new standards last week. His analysis of the good and the bad might give us some insight into the ways conservatives view these new standards. Indeed, Astorino’s comments might offer insight into conservative attitudes about education as a whole.

Astorino is leading the conservative charge against sitting New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. Astorino, a County executive from affluent Westchester County, just north of New York City, has pledged to take the Great State of New York in a more conservative direction. As part of that campaign, Astorino issued a blistering attack on the Common Core Standards.

http://vimeo.com/90498744

Flanked not only by the US flag, the New York flag, and a copy of the US Constitution, but also by a few cheerful children’s drawings, Astorino blasted the CCSS as an “untested experiment” that would lead America in dangerous directions. Indeed, Astorino repeated the word “experiment” or “experimental” a total of four times in the four-minute announcement. He also repeated the phrase “Andrew Cuomo’s Common Core exam” four times. Clearly, Mr. Astorino hopes to label the CCSS as both experimental and part of Governor Cuomo’s program.

Most compelling, Astorino announced last week that his own children will be opting out of the exams. The Opt-Out movement has attracted support from all across the political and ideological spectrum.

For Astorino, opting out is the right choice for conservatives. Why? He offered a laundry list of problems with the standards and with the associated exams.

First, with common standards and exams, Astorino warned, local schools will become “centralized organs of the Federal government.”

Second, these exams and standards will raise property taxes “through the roof.”

Third, these exams are not tested, but are simply the misbegotten brainchildren of people such as Bill Gates. According to Astorino, the exams came from the same political greenhorns who cobbled together the disastrous “Obamacare.” Worst of all, Astorino asserts, these standards and exams represent just the latest effort by distant educational elites to exert their unwanted and poorly conceived influence over all the nation’s schools. As he put it, “We’re risking our children’s futures for a few scraps from Washington.”

As I argue in my upcoming book about conservatism and American education, the notion that a scheming group of educational usurpers has taken—or is taking—control of our nation’s schools has a long and potent history. Astorino appeals to this tradition by taking a firm stand on what he calls this “expensive, experimental, Federal curriculum.”

So what’s a conservative to do? According to presumptive GOP gubernatorial candidate Rob Astorino, conservative parents should run for the hills.

 

 

4 Comments
by Adam Laats on April 7, 2014  •  Permalink
Posted in Child Parent State, In the News
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Posted by Adam Laats on April 7, 2014

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2014/04/07/astorino-blasts-the-common-core-our-children-are-not-guinea-pigs/

Bashing the Common Core

Is there a “conservative” attitude toward the new(ish) Common Core State Standards?  Though as we’ve noted, conservatives disagree, the session at the on-going Conservative Political Action Conference about the standards sounded like a bash-fest.

In the pages of The American Conservative, Gracy Olmstead offered a fly-on-the-wall report.  Conservative luminaries such as Phyllis Schlafly, Lindsey Burke of the Heritage Foundation, Robert Enlow of the Friedman Foundation, and Jim Stergios of the Pioneer Institute took the CCSS to task for centralizing education.

Such centralization, Schlafly warned, does not occur in an ideological vacuum.  With more control from Washington comes more “liberal propaganda,” Schlafly insisted, as she has done before.  Enlow warned that centralization introduced yet another level of government control, blocking parents from their rightful control of their children’s education.  And Stergios insisted that the CCSS claim to be “state-led” was laughable.

Did this CPAC panel define the only “conservative” position on the Common Core?  As Stergios noted, many conservatives like the core.  He thought that opinion was “ludicrous.”  But correspondent Gracy Olmstead disagreed.  She noted that the standards still attracted fans and foes from all political sides.

6 Comments
by Adam Laats on March 8, 2014  •  Permalink
Posted in Freedom & the Free Market, In the News
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Posted by Adam Laats on March 8, 2014

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2014/03/08/bashing-the-common-core/

Conservatives: Shut Up and Love the Common Core

What are conservatives to make of the Common Core State Standards?  As we’ve seen, some conservatives hate them.  Some don’t mind them.  Today we see a plea for conservatives to embrace the new standards as the best hope to fulfill long-held conservative school dreams.

In the Burkean pages of The Imaginative Conservative, Kevin T. Brady and Stephen M. Klugewicz argue that the new standards hold promise.   Forget threats that the new standards are a new federal power grab.  Forget worries that the new standards will water down our cultural heritage.  Forget predictions that school children will be forced to memorize Maoist proverbs.

Take a closer look, Brady and Klugewicz write, and conservatives will see plenty to like about the new standards.  The suggested readings include conservative favorites such as TS Eliot, Patrick Henry, GK Chesterton, and none other than Ronald Reagan.

Though some on the political Right have created a “straw man” out of the new standards, Brady and Klugewicz argue that the standards will actually serve to weaken the power of the political Left.  After all, the authors say, “teachers and educational bureaucracies already tend to lean Left.”  Too many teachers are woefully ignorant of true history and traditional literature.  The new standards will force such ideologically slanted teachers to explore the real cultural heritage of Euro-American civilization.

For instance, in order for a teacher to teach students Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” teachers will need to connect with their heritage.  “In order for [teachers] to understand what King is writing about,” the authors contend,

teachers need to know who the 8thcentury B.C. Hebrew prophets were. They need to know a little about Paul of Tarsus, the Macedonian call, Socrates, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego, Roman persecutions, the Boston Tea Party, Hungarian freedom fighters, Jesus, Elijah Muhammad, Amos, Martin Luther, John Bunyan, Lincoln, Jefferson, and T.S. Eliot to understand King’s meaning. King spoke to an audience of clergymen and to many others who shared a common educated culture. If teachers do not know these references, they cannot teach this landmark document accurately. Moreover, teachers in Catholic schools are free to ignore the exemplars entirely and use Christian/Catholic texts: Thomas á Kempis, Thomas More, even papal encyclicals. Such a text-based approach ought to please conservatives, who have complained about the trend of “deconstructing” texts and promoting the idea that it is how the student “feels” about a text that is important, not what the text actually says.

We must note that one of the authors seems to have more than academic interest in the success of the new standards.  Kevin Brady owns a company that sells Common-Core aligned materials to schools.  The success of the Common Core will help his own wallet.  That said, the notion that all of America’s schoolchildren should learn a common core of knowledge does have long roots among American conservative educational thinkers.  Long before ED Hirsch, prominent conservative reformers such as Max Rafferty insisted that the way to fix American education is to give every student and every teacher a healthy dose of a common core of cultural knowledge.  And a generation before Rafferty’s leadership, curmudgeonly conservative Albert Jay Nock insisted that real learning should include the “Great Tradition” of learning first and foremost.

For almost a century, then, conservative thinkers and activists have yearned for a common core for America’s school children.  Is the Common Core the fulfillment of these conservative dreams?

 

7 Comments
by Adam Laats on February 4, 2014  •  Permalink
Posted in Child Parent State, Tradition in the Classroom
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Posted by Adam Laats on February 4, 2014

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2014/02/04/conservatives-shut-up-and-love-the-common-core/

Common Core Poisons the Well

What’s wrong with the Common Core?  According to one conservative scholar, it threatens to take away the very glue that holds our culture together.

As we’ve seen, no one is quite sure what to make of the new Common Core State Standards.  In addition to debates over the efficacy of these new curriculum and assessment tools, progressives and conservatives all argue about whether or not these standards are ideologically dangerous.  Some conservatives say the standards are anti-Catholic.  Others blast them as a “progressive beer bong.”  Still other conservatives defend the Common Core standards as the least bad approach to public schooling.

In a recent speech, historian Terrence O. Moore of Hillsdale College revived another accusation: The Common Core is taking away our great stories.  According to the Christian Post, Moore blamed the new standards for culture-cide.  The standards, Moore insisted, “attempt to take away the great stories of the American people and replace them with the stories that fit the progressive, liberal narrative of the world.”

Too often, Moore concluded, the new standards encourage teachers and students to read about our culture’s great narratives, rather than spending time with the narratives themselves.  As a result, Moore said, the real aim of education is thwarted.  Instead of pushing the Common Core’s goal of “college and career readiness,” real education should push young people to become more human.

In his new book on the subject, Moore spells out his argument in fuller depth.  I admit, I haven’t read the book.  But I wonder if Moore is aware of his ideological genealogy.  In his book, Moore blames “The Story-Killers” of the Common Core standards for turning students away from their rich intellectual heritage.  He offers a “common-sense” solution to the problem.  With the general argument and even the offer of a new common-sense conservative approach to schooling, Moore is reviving the 1960s-era talk of Max Rafferty.

Max Rafferty isn’t a name we hear much in conservative talk about schooling and education, but it should be.  As California’s State Superintendent of Education in the 1960s and as a popular syndicated columnist, Rafferty spelled out many of the ideas that Moore seems to revive.

For example, in a 1963 collection of his newspaper columns, Rafferty complained of the mindless watering down of curriculum.  Students used to read our culture’s great stories, but since the 1930s more and more of them had been brutalized with intellectual pablum.  If you doubted it, Rafferty wrote, just try this experiment: Take any class of students.

suddenly, as though opening an enchanted window upon a radiant pageant, give them the story of the wrath of Achilles. . . .

Watch their faces. . . .

This is teaching.  This is what you trained to do. . . .

Let us say to these diluters of curricula, these emasculators of texts, these mutilators of our past, ‘We have had enough of you.  The world is weary of you. . . . With your jargon of behaviorism and Gestalt and topological vectors and maturation levels, you have muddied the clear waters of childhood long enough.  You have told us to teach the whole child, but you have made it impossible to teach him anything worth learning.  Little by little you have picked the meat from the bones of Education and replaced it with Pablum.  You have done your best to produce a race of barely literate savages.

Just as Moore apparently does in his recent book, Rafferty insisted that the solution for this “utilitarian” nonsense was simple “common sense.”  In a 1964 book, Rafferty laid out his vision of the power of common sense.  “Common sense,” Rafferty insisted,

                told us that the schools are built and equipped and staffed largely to pass on from generation to generation the cultural heritage of the race.

Common  sense took for granted that children could memorize certain meaningful and important things in early life and remember them better in later years than they could things that they had not memorized.

Common sense in recent years believed that putting children of like abilities together for at least a part of their school experience would help them to find their own rate of achievement and advance accordingly.

Common sense, since anyone could remember, had always held that children who did their homework covered more ground in school and learned more than children who didn’t.

Common sense told us that discipline, like good manners, had to be taught to a child over a period of years.

Does Professor Moore know about Rafferty’s arguments?  Or do these ideas just cycle back around for conservative intellectuals?

Max Rafferty’s books used to be widely read.  Not so much anymore.  I wonder if more conservatives would be interested in digging into their own intellectual heritage.

1 Comment
by Adam Laats on January 14, 2014  •  Permalink
Posted in Tradition in the Classroom
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Posted by Adam Laats on January 14, 2014

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2014/01/14/common-core-poisons-the-well/

Is the Common Core Un-American? Professor Deneen Says Yes

What should conservatives do with the new Common Core Learning Standards?

Trash them, demands Notre Dame political theorist Patrick Deneen.  In doing so, Deneen makes some fishy assertions about the educational imaginations of our Founding Fathers.

As ILYBYGTH readers are well aware, there is no unified “conservative” position on the Common Core.  Some smart conservatives hate them.  Other smart conservatives hold their noses and endorse them.

Professor Deneen signed on to the recent letter against the standards to the US Catholic Bishops.  Deneen and other prominent Catholic intellectuals voiced their dismay at the intellectual, political, and spiritual implications of the new standards.

In his recent essay in The American Conservative, Deneen spells out in more detail his objections.

The standards, Deneen warns, represent a monstrous over-emphasis on only two of the five main purposes of education.  The standards push schools to focus only on basic facts and logic. They ignore the formation of good citizens with character and a sense of wonder.

In this case, according to Professor Deneen, two-fifths of a loaf is worse than none at all. These standards, he argues, are not simply a good attempt at a difficult task.  Rather, they are fundamentally flawed, since they are based on a “dessicated and debased conception of what a human being is.”

So far, so good.  But Professor Deneen argues that this sort of common educational standard violates the best American traditions, and this doesn’t seem to fit the historical record.

The good professor is a mighty smart guy, well versed in the political thought of our founders.  So I have a hard time sussing out what he means by the following:

Because humans in their social and political communities are various, it was understood by our Founders that the way that these educational purposes to be achieved would be various, and so the commitment to local control of education was not born of a resignation in the absence of a strong central government, but a positive embrace of variety and multiplicity.

I’m no expert in early America, but that just ain’t so.  Prominent founders such as Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Benjamin Rush all pushed for greater systematization and centralization of schooling.  Each of them hoped to organize a chaotic network of educational opportunities into a more coherent centralized system of schooling.

Perhaps none of these founders would have wanted a single system for all of the states, as the Common Core standards hope for.  But each of these founders, at least, would have applauded the attempt to make education less happenstance and more predictable.

I understand Professor Deneen’s disgust at the lopsided nature of the Common Core State Standards, even if I don’t agree with it.  But I don’t see the basis for his claims that this sort of effort violates the spirits of the Founders.  On the contrary, this sort of rationalization and systematization is just the kind of thing those big-idea men would have drooled over.

 

2 Comments
by Adam Laats on November 21, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Freedom & the Free Market, What is school?
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Posted by Adam Laats on November 21, 2013

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2013/11/21/is-the-common-core-un-american-professor-deneen-says-yes/

Obamacore = Ku Klux Klan

We’ve seen this before, warns Robert Morrison of the Family Research Council.

The Common Core State Standards, which Morrison calls “Obamacore,” represent just another misguided and dangerous attempt to centralize America’s schools.

Centralization has long been a goal of education reformers.  Morrison correctly points out that the Ku Klux Klan successfully banned all private education in Oregon during the 1920s.  Though the Oregon law was blocked by the US Supreme Court, the goal was clear.  The Klan wanted to centralize school, to force all children to go through a government-directed educational program.

Back then, Morrison writes, the US Supreme Court had a better sense of the dangers of educational centralization.  These days, the bureaucratizers and centralizers have a freer hand.  It is up to religious conservatives such as those at the Family Research Council to resist.

“Under ObamaCore,” Morrison warns,

the elites in Washington shall direct the destinies of our children.

This is unwarranted. It will ultimately fail, just as the fifty-year record of federal usurpation of state and local authority in education has failed.

It necessarily involves indoctrination of all our children in federally-mandated curricula. We know what this means.

Strong stuff.  As we’ve noted before, conservatives as a whole are not united in their opposition to the Common Core State Standards.  Perhaps potent rhetoric like this will tip the scales.

 

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by Adam Laats on November 12, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Child Parent State, Freedom & the Free Market
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Posted by Adam Laats on November 12, 2013

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2013/11/12/obamacore-ku-klux-klan/

Libertarians and the Common Core

What’s a libertarian to do?

Will new Common Core State Standards exert a deadly centralizing impulse on all types of school?  Will independent options winnow down as private schools seek to prepare their students for new standardized tests?

That’s the worry articulated recently by JD Tuccille in the pages of libertarian flagship Reason Magazine.

Tuccille pointedly refutes the canard that the new standards are some sort of sinister conspiracy to agglomerate educational power in the hands of distant federal agents.  The problem, he writes, is more banal.  New tests aligned with the standards will likely exert pressure on independent schools to match their curricula to those of the public schools.  As he concludes,

Under the circumstances, “Waldorf,” Montessori,” “traditional academy” and “IB” risk becoming Coke vs. Pepsi brand names peddling similar products—assuming they can even survive the transition costs.

Private and religious schools, while mostly exempt from legal mandates to adopt Common Core, are also under pressure to toe the line. Some that accept tax-funded vouchers are required to adopt the standards to continue in such programs. Others find that non-Common Core-compliant textbooks are becoming difficult to find. And the biggest motivation might be the move by college entrance exams to test for mastery of Common Core standards.

Of course, as Tuccille notes, parents can always exempt themselves and their children from this pressure by opting out of institutional schooling entirely.  But for those folks who value free choices in education, it does seem palpably evident that any success for standardization will represent a narrowing of those choices.

 

2 Comments
by Adam Laats on October 6, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Freedom & the Free Market
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Posted by Adam Laats on October 6, 2013

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2013/10/06/libertarians-and-the-common-core/

War for the Core: Conservatives vs. Conservatives

Do conservatives like the new Common Core State Standards?

Yes and no.

And that tension has caused some consternation among conservative educational thinkers recently.

Writing in the Christian Post, Napp Nazworth has taken “several large international corporations” and “many Republican governors” to task for supporting the new educational standards.  At a panel discussion hosted by the Family Research Council, religious conservatives blasted GOP stalwarts such as Governors Chris Christie (NJ), Bill Haslam (TN), Rick Scott (FL), and others for “aligning their interests with those of international corporations.”

The article describes the lament of another faction of conservatives.  The Common Core Standards, conservative Glenn Jacobs worries, focus too much on “churn[ing] out young people who will be educated enough to work, consume, and pay taxes, but who are not encouraged to be creative, or to use critical thinking, or to develop anything remotely characteristic of those who possess superior minds and the ability to achieve great things.”

So what is a conservative to do?  Big-business types might embrace the promise of the new standards.  Traditionalists and religious conservatives, on the other hand, might lead the opposition.

Could inter-conservative squabbling lead to a real division in the decades-old conservative alliance?

 

5 Comments
by Adam Laats on September 27, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in In the News, Tradition in the Classroom
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Posted by Adam Laats on September 27, 2013

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2013/09/27/war-for-the-core-conservatives-vs-conservatives/

Common Core = Christian Core

What is an evangelical Christian to do?

The prolific Karen Swallow Prior recently argued that evangelicals ought to embrace the emerging Common Core State Standards (CCSS).

The CCSS have been attacked and defended by both progressives and conservatives.  They have been called both totalitarian and liberating, intrusive and effective.

Conservatives are divided.  Some say the Common Core is the least-bad plan.  Others warn of “control by Obama administration left-wing bureaucrats.”

Not so fast, Prior wrote. She attended a workshop with Core Mastermind David Coleman, and came away convinced that the standards have promise to improve literacy skills in the USA.  Especially as Bible-centered Christians, Prior argues, evangelicals need to get behind this effort.

After all, Prior insisted, “no one more than evangelicals can appreciate the importance to a people and a culture of the ability to read, and read well—or the devastating effects of being unable to do so.”

 

3 Comments
by Adam Laats on June 26, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Bible and Prayer in the Classroom, In the News
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Posted by Adam Laats on June 26, 2013

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2013/06/26/common-core-christian-core/

A Conservative Plea for the Common Core

Don’t throw the conservative baby out with the Common Core bathwater. That’s the plea this morning from two leading conservative intellectuals.

Writing in the Weekly Standard, Chester Finn Jr. and Michael Petrilli rally conservative support for the new standards.

As we’ve noted in these pages, all sorts of conservative activists, from Phyllis Schlafly to the Heritage Foundation to the Tea Party, have denounced the centralizing tendencies of the Common Core.

The conservative credentials of Finn and Petrilli are difficult to dispute.  Both have long been leading voices for the movement to introduce market choices into public education and reduce the influence of unions and left-leaning schools of education.  Both have worked in conservative think tanks and conservative political administrations to fight for such measures.

They want conservatives to embrace the Common Core as the best available program to heal public education.  As they argue,

the fact that Obama thinks well of it doesn’t means there’s anything (else) wrong with it. This is understood by the many respected conservatives who back the Common Core, including such scarred veterans of the education-reform wars as Jeb Bush, Bill Bennett, John Engler, Chris Christie, Mike Huckabee, Sonny Perdue, Bobby Jindal, Rod Paige, and Mitch Daniels. They realize that academic standards are only the beginning, setting out a destination but not how to get there. They understand, however, that a destination worth reaching beats aimless wandering—and a big modern country is better off if it knows how all its kids and schools are doing against a rigorous set of shared expectations for the three R’s.

Finn and Petrilli offer three specific ways to use the Common Core to best conservative advantage.  Conservatives, they insist,

should maximize the good it can do and minimize its potential harm. Here are three useful steps:

  • Draw a bright line between the standards and the federal government. (Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley is onto one approach with his proposal to ban any further federal spending related to the Common Core.)

  • Overhaul No Child Left Behind as proposed by Senator Lamar Alexander and House education committee chairman John Kline, in effect rolling back the regulatory regime that has turned results-based school accountability into Uncle Sam’s business. (The tighten-the-screws alternative advanced by Senate Democrats would entangle Washington even further with states’ standards and accountability systems—as well as much more mischief.)

  • Continue to push aggressively in dozens of states for more school choice, both public and private—and allow voucher schools (and maybe charters, too) to opt out of their states’ standards and tests (Common Core or otherwise) if they can present alternatives that are just as rigorous. (Disclosure: the co-authors of this piece are still tussling over this one!)

Finn and Petrilli base their argument on a conservative vision of the recent history of American education.  As I’ve argued in the pages of Teachers College Record, conservative school reform proposals, no less than progressive ones, depend on their own interpretations of American history.

In this case, Finn and Petrilli remind their fellow conservatives that the fundamental ideas embraced by the Common Core, including elevated academic standards as well as rigorous standardized testing, began as conservative responses to a public education system that had strayed from its true mission. In the 1970s, they recount, control over public education had been seized by well-meaning but short-sighted leftists who emphasized equity at the expense of rigor.  After 1983’s Nation at Risk report, bold conservative reformers such as Ronald Reagan, Lamar Alexander, and William J. Bennett took steps to reverse that curse.

The solutions back then included increased public money for private education as well as ambitious new standards.  To lend heft to such standards, iron-clad standardized tests hoped to limit the ways educational bureaucrats could game the system.

The Common Core, Finn and Petrilli insist, represent an imperfect attempt to impose those higher standards.  In the end, by providing better information about school performance to parents and policy makers, the standards will fuel the conservative drive for greater privatization of public education.

So what is a conservative to do?  According to these scholars, the real conservative choice is to back the Common Core.  As they conclude, conservatives who take time to read the standards themselves “will be impressed by their rigor, thoroughness, solidity, and ambition—even their ‘conservative’ nature.”

 

 

8 Comments
by Adam Laats on June 12, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Child Parent State, Freedom & the Free Market
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Posted by Adam Laats on June 12, 2013

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2013/06/12/a-conservative-plea-for-the-common-core/

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