Op-ed: Education is not a business
Another school year is almost over. Instead of celebrating a move forward in educational success, our schools have been fundamentally transformed into rigid testing centers where our youngest children's imaginations have been stifled. Budget time is coming and districts have a lot to worry about. Common Core is changing what more than 200 years of education in our country stands for. It is dismantling our public school system piece by piece. It is diminishing the rights of every student to learn and excel in the best way -- through discovery, interaction, exploration, questioning and problem-solving. It is creating an environment that is not conducive to individual learning. Common Core's dependence on a one-sided, dictated, computer data-based approach is locking our students into an inferior education, and has handed over control of curriculum by local districts to the federal government. The unreasonable amount of testing, retesting, redoing, recording, desire for uniformity, and the link of all this to teacher evaluation and student outcomes are punishing our once outstanding high-performing school districts, and not addressing the needs in districts with an achievement gap. Parents and legislators are beginning to connect the dots as to how bad this is for their children. The talking points of Common Core's rigorous standards and evidence-based results are false and untested.
Education is not a business. The forced, federal Common Core standards, rushed implementation, evaluation tools, computer formats and heavy-handed federal tests, are a single model that does not work in Connecticut schools. Having a one-size fits all national computer-generated task system from kindergarten through high school defies the purpose of public schools which must educate diversified learners. We taxpayers have to pay increased costs for publishing company materials and technology in towns that already had high performing schools before Common Core was jammed in. Districts now must hire more administrators, assistant principals, and coaches for testing and evaluating teachers to insure uniformity of instruction. The teachers are overwhelmed with unnecessary, constant data-recording and block-scheduling which limits classroom flexibility. Parents and students are experiencing the impact. Schools are being reduced to nothing but collectors of a mandated, national data spreadsheet system. It is a waste of taxpayer money, and will not achieve the desired goal for higher scores in low-performing districts and their students to make them competitive in the global world. Common Core is an attempt to level the playing field across districts and dismantle school systems' local control.
We see in the classrooms, an early childhood education that is developmentally inappropriate, with no flexibility in its structure. Common Core content testing puts students who are minors Op-ed: Education is not a business - StamfordAdvocate: