Same mistakes on a larger scale
Steven Jonathan Rummelsburg taught in California public schools for 23 years, where he was extensively trained on Common Core, and recently began teaching at a private school in Atlanta.
The Common Core is the synthesis of all modern educational errors since the 1970s. The only difference is that it is being imposed on a much grander scale.
The collective element that is marbled throughout all educational programs from four decades ago and through the central premises of the Common Core is the constructivist model of education known as “Outcomes Based Education.”
Outcomes based education is a list of desired outcomes, taking the form of benchmark standards measured by assessments and grounded in the false theory that certain skills must be acquired to achieve the educational ends. But the truth about an education is that it is not a matter of amassing information and skills in order to take and pass an arbitrary test.
As the poet William Butler Yeats pointed out, “education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” The Common Core intends to fill a pail. An authentic education is not the science of filling a bucket, but it is an art of cultivation where the fields of the inner landscape are tilled, weeded and prepared for sowing the seeds of truth in order that we might yield an abundant crop at the end of a season of study.
Education is not about skills, but about developing the human person to recognize truth. This is diametrically opposed by the methods and techniques of the Common Core.
To begin with, considering the Common Core claims to be a data-driven agenda, it violates its own principles — because there is no supportable evidence that it will be effective. I encourage you to ask Common Core proponents to show you the research that supports what they’re doing. You won’t get much.
The state of modern education is dreadful and in dire need of proper reform. And while we are right in desiring that our public schools help our students to become excellent citizens and to be prepared for college and career, the Common Core will not lead to these desired ends. It is the three liberal arts of grammar, logic and rhetoric that are the perennial arts necessary to acquire an authentic education.
This authentic education is not only the only path to a truly educated citizenry, it is expressly and diametrically opposed of the methods and techniques of the Common Core, which proposes to harvest fruit from nonexistent trees. I warn you today Common Core has already failed. I have seen its development, I understand its philosophical and pedagogical roots, I have developed curriculum based on it and seen it implemented as the national directors would have it done — and it fails our teachers and students alike.
We must return the authority to develop standards and curriculum to local entities who know their students, their geography and their particular culture well enough to meet individual needs without destroying diversity, character and culture. National standards that inevitably lead to a national curriculum are incapable of considering these factors.
If we persist on this path and wait 13 years to witness the assured devastation that the Common Core will wreak on our Georgia public schools, it may be too late then for a recovery.
