The Problem With Definitions
The now infamous Bill Clinton quote “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is,” comes to mind when you look at how changing definitions of formerly well understood words can create chaos. The definition of a high school diploma used to have a fairly common understanding. The definition of a good school used to be well understood, as were special needs and gifted. I doubt you would find agreement about these definitions today. Most recently the New York Times questioned what a high school diploma means (although they are jumping on a band wagon that has been circling for many years.) Then there’s the term career ready which even the titans of industry can’t seem to agree upon.
Fortune magazine related a story about a meeting between Bill Gates and Charles Koch in which they tried to discuss the merits of Common Core. Gates is obviously pro Core while Koch is siding with those who oppose a one size fits all mandatory uniform education. Gates is clear that his definition of what a high school or college diploma means is that graduates are prepared to work for him. They will come out of schools preloaded with a skill set that is desired by the business community which has been seeking better schooled workers for years. He buys into the definition of Common Core as a guarantee that those having a high school diploma will, by definition, be universally career ready because they have all been taught to the same standard. He doesn’t seems to understand that the push for uniformity deforms the education process, creating the poorer trained graduate that some American schools are pushing out.
Fortune writes, “The Common Core standards were drafted by determining the skills that businesses (and colleges) need and then working backward to decide what students should learn.” It is clear that career and college ready are now synonymous. College is merely a more advanced career training facility than high school. The classical liberal arts education that used to qualify one for a Bachelor of Arts degree (future students are going to have no idea why their degree is named that) has been all but erased from the modern college campus. Mizzou’s 207 majors, e.g. Accountancy, Real Estate, Leisure Service Management, Forest Entrepreneurship and Business, Radiology, sound more like business titles than classical arts college majors.
But preparing a K-12 student for more advanced career training in college DOES call into question what the definition, or value, of a high school diploma is. The definition of what a good school currently means a school whose students score high on standardized tests aligned to common standards and who graduate the most students (give out the most diplomas.) This definition causes schools and states to tinker withThe Problem With Definitions » Missouri Education Watchdog: