Common Core and return on investment

While no one was paying attention some educators and state Governors got together and hammered out a set of national standards for our school systems.  Then they went out and got 45 of our 50 states to accept them.  The nerve of them!  Of course a lot of us never realized that we didn’t have national standards.  We blithely assumed that a 7th grader in Massachusetts knew pretty much what a 7th grader in Louisiana knew.  We were wrong.  Common Core is the first real chance we have at a national standard.

Curriculum, what a student will be taught, has been historically set either locally by district or at it’s most organized level by the State.  This all sounds very homey and comfortable until we realize that a great equalizer awaits all our children who go onto higher education, freshman year in college.  Before that comes the SATs or the ACTs which demand specific knowledge (and the coordination to fill in the right circle for the question being answered).  Yes, there is a test.

There is no escape, both are required to rise through the heights of higher education.  You will have great difficulty getting through either challenge without fully understanding the meaning and uses of mean, median and mode as well being able to craft a solid essay, no matter how beautifully penned or how many “I’s” are dotted with daisies.  The biggest difference between higher education and K - 12 learning is that college professors will let you fail.  They’d much rather you pass, but this is the education you paid for.  If you aren’t prepared, can’t do the work or just don’t show up, there is a big line of other better prepared, more skilled, more interested students waiting to get your seat.

The danger of setting standards at the state level is that most colleges and universities operate with students from a lot of states, not to mention a lot of countries as well.  If you don’t know the decade in which the civil war took place before your college level American history course, it really doesn’t matter that your state senator thinks “Know’in Davey Crockett kilt a bar when he was only three”  is an appropriate understanding of American history.  All states should be shooting at the same educational targets so all those 12th graders have the same shot at Harvard, MIT or any other college or university we can name.

We want all American children starting from the same level playing field of a solid K - 12 education, even if they have no interest in higher education. No one wants our kids trapped by town, district or State standards that fall below an accepted minimum.  That's what Common Core is really all about, what's the least our children should know when the graduate high school.

I’ve heard a lot of complaints about Common core, it’s too expensive, too liberal, too hard to meet as a standard.  I’ve also heard that it means a lot more testing.  It certainly does.  That’s how we all find out what someone knows and understands, we ask them to prove it.  We should, this is our money invested in our children's future, we want the best R O I (Return On Investment) for our money we can get.  Kids from Arkansas should be just as knowledgeable as those from New Jersey, because we put money into  all their educations.  We have the same hopes and dreams for all of them.

If we say it’s too expensive, then consider what our kids will be able to do with a “Bargain” education.  Even better, think about the chances the kids who got the “premium” education will get.  Education is the great equalizer in our society, cheap out and the kids will get “equalized” early on.

As for “too liberal,” ask William F Buckley about that.  There is nothing liberal or conservative or progressionist or recessive about a good education or the opportunities it brings.  A person’s education has little or nothing to do with their political beliefs.  It does have a lot to do with their understanding, knowledge and “worldly-ness” (if that’s a word).

When it comes to hard-to-meet standards, is that the same as lowering the bar so the race is easier?  Who is going to do that in the big world?  All these kids will be facing the same mean, cruel reality when they are done with school.  Would we really want easier standards while we are preparing them for that?

There are a lot of political reasons not to support the common core standards, but very few educational ones.  We can complain that there is not enough fiction in the reading standards, or too many higher math functions in the math standards but the bottom line is that standards are changeable.  However, in order to modify them they have to exist in the first place.  The current Common Core standards have been put together by education professionals, if we think that high school english teachers, State senators or even Glenn Beck knows better, we might want to rethink that position.  Or possibly, read the standards.

http://www.corestandards.org