The complicated politics of national standards: Even more sources of opposition (Part 2 of 3)
In a previous post, I detailed several different sources of discontentment that various coalitions have cited as reason to oppose the Common Core State Standards. In this post, I will identify and discuss even more sources of opposition to the standards.
Curriculum and culture wars
The crafting of new national standards also has reignited long-standing ideological debates about multiculturalism — how American literature and history should be taught, and whether the science curriculum should include reservations about evolution and global warning. Opponents of the Core cast it as a national curriculum that is ill-suited for a country with such religious, political, ethnic, and cultural diversity. Some conservatives are concerned that progressive educators are using the public schools to indoctrinate children with liberal social and economic values on such hot-button issues as homosexuality, abortion, sex education, and socialism.
In reality, the standards outline the essential skills and information that students should know in math and language arts but do not mandate a particular curriculum for delivering instruction. Core advocates have endeavored in vain to communicate that standards are not curriculum, but the general public has neither understood nor embraced the concept. In addition, Core opponents say the standards mandate particular textbooks or pieces of literature. They do not. But the authors of the standards have recommended a list of materials that have been judged to satisfy the Core. Nonetheless, this is another area where public misperception is driving down support for the Core, as only half of Americans who have heard of it understand that states and local school districts retain the ability to choose their own educational materials.
Anti-testing backlash
Other opposition to the Core—particularly among parents—is related to a broader backlash against the amount of testing and teaching to the test that students are perceived to be facing in the wake of NCLB. While the Core standards are separate from the new assessments—states can and have adopted one but not the other—they have become conflated in the public mind; concerns about testing have spilled over into the push for common academic expectations. While proponents argue that the Common Core standards and assessments are designed to be an improvement on NCLB that addresses many of its failings, many have come to see the Common Core as simply NCLB 2.0.
Meeting the higher bar
The debate over the Common Core has also become entangled with long-standing concerns that governments are not doing enough to address poverty, safety, health, and other out-of-school factors affecting student achievement as well as concerns that teachers are not being given sufficient training and resources to effectively instruct disadvantaged students. These views have been prominently articulated by Diane Ravitch, Linda Darling-Hammond, and The complicated politics of national standards: Even more sources of opposition (Part 2 of 3) | Brookings Institution:
