As the arguments over the Common Core State Standards continue to rage in Georgia, it is worth taking a step back and noting its origins. Reforms like the Common Core have been around for centuries of education, but Georgians should be more interested in how the United States has gotten to a place where each new reform is accepted if it just promises to undo the work of the last.
The beginning of our national thirst for reinvented schools is the same place as the apparent end: Soviet Russia.
On Oct. 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched the satellite Sputnik into Earth orbit and triggered what has come to be known as the Space Race. It was a well-known (and incorrect) fact that the U.S.S.R. had beaten the U.S. to space because of the failure of American schools to produce high-level scientists and engineers.
The solution, it was proposed, was for public schools to take on more difficult mathematics and sciences. Regardless that the reforms that followed failed by any measure, Americans now had a scapegoat for all of its ills: the public school.
In the years since, politicians and reformers have asked American schools to swing from reform to reform so much that a pendulum would be jealous. It was always helpful to tell citizens that our schools were the cause of large societal problems (drugs, illiteracy, recession) and that a certain new tactic would change everything. That formula (schools plus BLANK equals utopia) helped build to large legislation, like No Child Left Behind, that would have been unthinkable even five years earlier.
The Common Core State Standards have been made possible by a half-century of panic. The reform deals with standards and benchmarks in English and math that each grade should meet before moving on to the next. Ideally, a student could leave a class in Connecticut and arrive in Georgia to find a particular class very similar to what the student had just left. The same student could then graduate from any high school in the U.S. “college and career ready.”
I do not mean to challenge the quality of the standards — indeed, some in English Language Arts especially are quite excellent — but rather, the reform itself.
Throw away the obvious questions (like, where are science and history?), and you can still have problems with a reform that at its … ahem … core standardizes the education of an entire country. It might come as a surprise that in our fear of losing the Space Race to the Soviets, we have come close to adopting their education system.
Schools in the U.S.S.R. were notoriously similar, with standards coming directly from the central government to manage any possible dissent. Is this the best model for U.S. education to follow? It is in our best interest to avoid any reforms that even smell like distrust of our schools’ greatest commodity: the teacher.
Give the Common Core standards to our teachers, by all means, but stop short of mandating them. Georgia has pressing educational concerns the Common Core cannot address. Instead of begging for the (relatively) small amount of federal dollars attached to this reform, perhaps we can address issues like school funding inequality and hiring teachers who are qualified to teach our children.
The time and energy of our teachers should not be spent indulging in our cries for yet another reform. We cannot afford to force our schools to fail (even recent) history.
