Paul Thomas: The Problem Isn't Just Common Core, but the Entire Reform Agenda
Guest post by Paul Thomas.
Before the Common Core debate reached the fevered public debates of the past year, I took a stand against standards-based reform represented by Common Core, Why Common Standards Won't Work:
A call for national standards ensures that we continue doing what is most wrong with our bureaucratic schools (establish-prescribe-measure) and that we persist in looking away from the largest cause of low student achievement: childhood poverty.
A call for national standards is a political veneer, a tragic waste of time and energy that would be better spent addressing real needs in the lives of children--safe homes, adequate and plentiful food, essential health care, and neighborhood schools that are not reflections of the neighborhoods where children live through no choice of their own.
Education is in no way short of a knowledge base. And even if it were, tinkering (yet again) at a standard core of knowledge while ignoring the dehumanizing practices in our schools, and the oppressive impact of poverty on the lives of children, is simply more fiddling while the futures of our children smolder over our shoulders and we look the other way.
Recently, Oklahoma and my home state of South Carolina have rejected Common Core, as The Washington Post and Education Week have reported. And while I would like to celebrate, I have been quick to note that these mostly partisan decisions at the state level are, in fact, not the sorts of changes in policy we need.
Instead of celebrating, we must recognize that South Carolina, specifically but as a typical example, is directly rejecting Common Core as a federal and thus flawed set of standards while continuing to develop and implement policy to design (yet again) new SC standards, new SC high-stakes testing, and new SC accountability--all of which are the essential structures that are ineffective.
The problem for education reform, then, is not specifically Common Core, but that the evidencePaul Thomas: The Problem Isn't Just Common Core, but the Entire Reform Agenda - Living in Dialogue - Education Week Teacher: