Common Core: A Standard-Based Wave of Reform to Drown Children, Schools and Society?

At Commoncoreworks.org, you can find a lovely pro-Core propaganda video.  According to the bill, "This three-minute video explains how the Common Core State Standards will help students achieve at high levels and help them learn what they need to know to get to graduation and beyond."  Let's take a closer look.

The video opens with the following pronouncement:  "Like it or not, life is full of measuring sticks."  Someone has an unhealthy obsession with measuring sticks.  Many things in life cannot be accurately measured, including the depth of my distaste for the Common Core.  

Will we measure the ballerina in the center of the cartoon?  If so, she is standing en pointe.  If anything, the picture proves measurements may be unreliable for one reason or another.  Will we measure the art and music pictured?  Who will set the ultimate criteria?

The video states that the Common Core will tell us "how well kids are competing in school."  I hate to say it, but I value cooperation more than competition.  Society will not survive without people like me. 

This unhealthy obsession with measurement seems to grow even worse.  What a nightmare!  A world in which people are closing in upon you, measuring sticks in hand and giant question marks looming over their heads like threatening clouds.  I find nothing appealing in this world.

Just when I think I've seen it all, someone rushes in to help measure the intelligence of an Einstein-like figure who wraps a measuring tape around his head, reminding me of the pseudoscience of phrenology, perhaps a modern metaphor for the grossly inaccurate and one-dimensional measurements associated with the Common Core.  


I hate to say it, but Einstein did not take particularly well to many of the regimens of his formal schooling.  I'm betting he wouldn't do too well with the Core either or all the test prep associated therewith! 


In these cartoons, the measuring tape appears to be more like a weapon than a teacher's tool.  Some may be strangled by it and some may think to hang themselves with it.  If I was a third grader, I'd probably prefer to skip rope with it, but, alas, that would not make me college and career ready by the standards of the Standards!

The proponents of the CCSS wish to impose their standards upon the whole country. They obviously use money as their most potent measurement of success.  They sure throw around enough of it to try to win support.  For me, money is necessary for survival, but it is far from the meaning of life. Money is not my measuring stick.  It is not the ultimate measurement of my career success or the value of my life, nor do I apply that stick to others.  If this was the case, we should just dispose of epitaphs and add dollar signs signaling our net worth to our headstones.   

If our national government was using the Core's measurement of success, it would be the biggest loser of all time given its debt. Shanghai appears as the big winners in the cartoon above.  Is it because they selectively administer the PISA tests, largely excluding migrant populations, to achieve the highest international numbers?

According to the Common Core, all countries should work towards the same standards.  We all must climb the same set of stairs.  I disagree.  I think if I climbed those steps and got to the top, I would look around, then ask myself, what the heck am I doing up here?  Somebody get me down!

I save the most reprehensible for the last.  

The video indicates that our current educational system needs to be obliterated.  Children are drowned by a Common Core wave, engulfing them, as the narrator stated, like a "total sea of change in education."  The wave reminds me of so much devastation around the world and at home.  I thought of Katrina; Arne Duncan called Katrina the best thing to happen to education in New Orleans.  I thought of the recent devastation of Sandy. And, I remember that some people advocate for "creative disruption" at the cost of human happiness, no matter what the toll on life.

And, as easy as that, the Common Core has drowned everything of beauty that we have come to know and love in our diverse country.  How will we measure the devastation?  The answer is, sadly, we cannot.  The guy riding the wave sure looks happy, but what about the rest of us?