It’s déjà vu all over again.
Peter Schrag
Nearly 20 years ago, after the Clinton administration proposed a program of voluntary national student testing, Chester Finn, then a senior fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute, warned that if it failed it would be because “liberals hate the word ‘testing’ and conservatives hate the word ‘national.’” He was right.
The growing national backlash this spring against theCommon Core State Standards and the testing programs linked to them – in California, the testing program has the clumsy name of Smarter Balanced – fits not only Checker Finn’s diagnosis but belongs in a longer national history of controversies and uncertainties about what and how to teach our children, and who should decide.
In the decades before and right after World War II, the battles centered largely on progressive education, which in the eyes of some on the right during the Cold War was a communist plot.
In 1962 our own Max Rafferty was elected state superintendent of public instruction with his attacks on progressivism and his call for a return to “the fundamentals.” His recipe was phonics, memorization, drill and patriotism.
At nearly the same time schools around the country were buffeted by battles over the “new math,” the “new physics” and the “new biology,” school curricula that were themselves responses to the launching of Sputnik in 1957 and the resulting national panic that the Russians were about to beat our technological brains out.
The new curricula brought their own backlash, some from conservatives, some from parents who couldn’t understand what their kids were being asked to do. All that fancy new stuff, but my child Common Core is latest front in decades-long education wars | EdSource Today: