Common Standards, Uncommonly Shortsighted, Part One

I have been following the progress of the Common Core rollout for several months, and have been increasingly dismayed by the obviously poor standards, the threat of data mining by the Department of Education, and the increasing frustration experienced by my grandchildren as they struggle with nonsense math. Here is one of the things I've been pondering.

"National standards are good. Children can move from one district to another and have the same curriculum." I have seen comments like this posted to news stories about CC. It sounds good; seamless transitions for children's education no matter where their parents move, no trying to figure out what class to put them in, no having to "catch up" to a more advanced curriculum. I did my share of moving from one school to another as a kid. I went to a regular public elementary school in California until the 3rd grade. For 4-5th grades, my sister and I went to a small private school run by a retired teacher. I was back in public school for 6-8th grades, and then we moved from California to Michigan, where I graduated from high school. They were all big transitions for a kid, but the biggest for me was the move from a private school back into a public middle school. I had enough education to be put into the 8th grade, rather than the 6th, but my parents wanted me to be with my age group. So I was very bored with public schooling until I decided to teach myself. I wasn't considered "gifted", so those programs were out. I guess I was just "over qualified". I coasted through high school, practically living in the library. I read everything I could get my hands on, took tests when I had to, graduated with a B average, and went on with my life.

Transitions are never easy, but looking back on the experience, it wasn't the moves themselves that caused problems, nor was it the disconnect between what I already knew and where my classmates were. The problem was that I wasn't aware that I had any control over the different expectations for success in each school, different cultures, and different teaching philosophies. The private school (which was not an "elite" place in any form; Mrs. Covey's idea for uniforms was everyone in blue jeans, a white shirt and a navy blue sweater) was heavily invested in all their students learning all the material and being successful thinkers, with a narrow but very deep curriculum. The public schools were more broad in their outlook, with an emphasis on covering much material rather shallowly. I learned in both, but preferred the Covey method; it was the deep studying I had done that made it possible to for me to succeed. I don't see CC improving on any of that. What I do see is a poorly-thought-out curriculum that was never tested in a real school district, using untested pedagogical methods, and an insistence on a Rube Goldberg-style vague and complicated decoding of the simplest concepts and exercises.

But a much bigger problem I see looming on the horizon is similar to what I call the Monsanto model of agriculture. Over the past 60 years, the genetic diversity of our food crops has been gradually diminishing (another battle for another time). But this lack of diversity leaves us vulnerable to an entire worldwide crop devastation if a super bacterium or other pest burns through a non-resistant cultivar. There is little resilience in uniformity.

Our greatest strength as a people is our diversity, not of race or culture, but of knowledge. The seeds of knowledge children acquire in one area of the country are not the same as what are learned in a different area. When people move from one area to another, they bring their acquired knowledge with them, enriching and expanding the horizons of the people in their new locality. They all learn math, reading, etc. But they learn them with different emphases, with different styles, and with diverse outcomes. There are many proven ways to teach math concepts, writing styles, and reading strategies. Trying to enforce the "one best way" destroys that diversity, and discounts the very real differences between learning styles in children. This is a consideration that I have not seen in any discussion of CC.

What do we lose by having only one curriculum, one way to teach, one "best" of anything? What is lost (or could possibly be gained) by removing time to study great literature, history or the arts in order to study government pamphlets? How can one set of standards possibly cover all the different ways of knowing? Mrs. Covey's way of teaching and emphasis on certain knowledge structures was very different than the structure I encountered in the public schools. The different PS districts also varied in emphasis and style. For example, I learned about the Catholic mission system in California and its influence on the local history by reading, writing and studying. Aside from being a very good beginning to my interest in anthropology and religious thought, it helped me understand other parts of the society I lived in. Are children in California learning that now? Or are they busy reading the latest publication from the EPA on carbon emissions? Any national standard, even a very good one, cannot help but lessen that knowledge base and impoverish the experience of being an American. It weakens each one of us and leaves us, as a nation, with little resilience.