The New York State PTA had worked with NY State Education Commissioner John King to set-up forums around the state to discuss the new Common Core Standards.
However, he didn’t like what he heard at the one in Poughkeepsie.
So he canceled the rest of them.
Here are how some parents are responding.
Nothing like have a good role model demonstrating how to react well to criticism….
What gets lost in the often knee-jerk rhetoric surrounding Common Core are three things—
1. There is nothing wrong with standards, assuming they are the right standards and applied productively and effectively—and with measurable goals;
2. The visceral push-back throws the concept of standards away, like the proverbial baby with the bathwater, and offers no learner-centric solution;
3. Teachers who rail against “factory schools” won’t acknowledge they already participate in and perpetuate factory education.
Just about every teacher who clicks LIKE on a Facebook image-(wannabe)meme skewering Common Core fails to address the important issue that a child’s education should have goals and, for those goals to be authentic, progress toward them must have some way of being measured. Teachers, by their silence or lack of examination, effectively dismiss and avoid this key concept.
Due to the diverse needs and goals of every learner in this country, the primary fault and problem with “Common Core” is the word “Common”: our one-size-fits-all approach to education and learning is morally and practically flawed. And the irony is that while many teachers seem to align with this position in their war against Common Core—citing the bête noire of “factory schools”—they conveniently ignore the obvious fact that they already participate in “factory schools.”
Try to deny that above the lowest granularity of any level of teacher autonomy in the classrooms, the 130,000+ classrooms in this country pretty much look the same, sharing little coordination of pedagogy and quality standards: an overhead view would show heads lined up in columns and rows facing in one direction like crops in a field while the dot against one wall shows the Sir Ken Robinson video Changing Education Paradigms, completely oblivious to the tragic irony (situational, not dramatic, since the latter requires an audience).
I am against Common Core, but I can’t say this puts me in agreement with other educators because their reasons for opposition are limited to diffuse, memic statements that “state bureaucrats are ignorant of classroom reality” or narrow criticism of specific elements.
And, most important, the plaintive plea that superficially represents their alternative solution—”Just leave me alone and let me teach!”—is not the answer, since replacing a “common” set of standards with 3,000,000 sets of dissonant standards again ignores the student in favor of the system—which includes the teachers.