Can the Common Core be Anything but a Bad Apple?

The Almighty Arm, Architect of the Common Core:  The Hand with a Brain to Make Standards For All!

The AFT stopped far short of a full condemnation of the Common Core at its conference.  I kept going.

I ask myself, who wants the Common Core?  

Some answer, people who want standards.  But don't they know, we have standards.  New York State, in my opinion, has had some pretty fine standards in its history.  The problem is that many people cannot meet them.  Raising the standards will not make the task any easier.  I have seen standards lowered for political purposes.  I now see them raised for political purposes.  I want to teach children, as I have done for twenty years, and not primarily cater to the current needs of politicians.

Some politicians crave the Core.   I ask myself, why?  Perhaps it is much easier to blame teachers for poverty, then to understand how poverty presents huge obstacles to a child's success in school.  Perhaps it is much easier to use teachers as scapegoats than to examine why more and more people cannot find jobs with paychecks to pay their bills.   

Ed. Companies love the Core.  Do you see the dollar signs in their eyes?  If you can market the same set of materials nationwide, profits will skyrocket.  One textbook and one test for all!  In our federal system of democracy, states are supposed to be laboratories for experimentation.  Education is a reserved power.  Schooling should grow out of community needs.  States should write their own standards.  To anyone who asks, what are you going to do when someone moves from California to NY, I will say most of my transfers come from other countries, not other states.  I will teach a kid from California, just as I will teach a student from China, the standards of my state.  

Some data miners love the Core.  InBloom has been defeated, but we all know that some incarnation lurks in the shadows, waiting for a moment of weakness to strike again and exploit the data of little children.  I don't want Big Brother, with a few items to market, tracking my children or anyone else's children and storing the data for all time.  

The Core can be used to strike at educators under the name of test-based accountability.  Teachers and schools will be held accountable for the scores of their students.  Teachers will be blamed for low Common-Core test scores.  Public schools will be closed and charters will be opened, as per the policy of Secretary Arne Duncan.  Some charters pursue profits.  Others just have directors who earn more than the President of the United States.  

People who don't mind more test prep may welcome the Core.   Instead of growing up experiencing by doing and learning the joys of socialization through play, little children are learning how to sit for hours under the pressure of testing conditions, lost in a sea of endless bubbles.  Even at the Success Academy, I read teachers are handed materials to clean up vomit during the big tests.

I know a lot of people who got nifty grants from Bill Gates probably love the Core.  I'm sure they'd love to write some more grant proposals as they sign away the future of other people's kids.

It seems a short a trip from U.S. Common Core to World Core, academic imperialism based on the enforcement of one set of P.I.S.A.-based standards, again, worshiping at the altar of the almighty test.  The U.S. can offer fantastic grants, thanks to the funding of Bill Gates, to promulgate international standards.   Then, we'll blame teachers in countries with the lowest per capita income for the scores of their students!  We can just close their countries down and send in profiteering charter companies to take over.  Oh, how the ed. companies will wallop us and win big!  

In my mind, there are many reasons why I do not want the Core.  It is an abstraction written by people with little experience in education or child psychology.  Students will be told early and often that they are failures.  Our 2013 NY State tests are a testament to that.  Cut scores were set to fail seventy percent of students taking the test.  The Core is a distraction from the real problems of our society, another gladiatorial game in which teachers, this time, are the ones being thrown to the lions.  I am not without my own standards, but they are not those of the politically charged Common Core.