LITMIR.BIZ

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Among parents with children in public school, 55 percent had never heard of it.¹²⁵ That might be expected in a closed society where citizens are not involved in governance by design, but our laws and traditions grant the American people the power of self-government through elected representation. To govern their own affairs, however, people have to know what’s being planned for them before it’s done.

      The way Common Core was quietly implemented left many Americans feeling tricked. As Hess and McShane concluded, “the mainstream media dropped the ball on covering the Common Core,” and ultimately this negligence “only fomented opposition to the standards. When parents and taxpayers found out that the standards had already been adopted, they thought the wool had been pulled over their eyes.”¹²⁶ Those parents and taxpayers thought correctly.

      The convoluted and opaque way that Common Core was developed and imposed has deprived parents and taxpayers of the right to know and influence the rules that affect our lives, and to know what is being done with the money we send to the government. The general public had no opportunity to give genuine consent to Common Core and all its baggage. So the average folks paying the bills and supplying the human guinea pigs for this experiment had to wait until it was passed to find out what was in it — to borrow Representative Nancy Pelosi’s immortal words about Obamacare, which at least was put to a vote by duly elected legislators. In that respect, Common Core is a greater affront to democratic governance.

       CHAPTER 2

       Experience — The Common Core Classroom

      IN FALL 2013 it took inquiries at nine schools in various districts across three states to find someone willing to show an outsider what Common Core looks like.

      An English teacher at a classical charter school in Indianapolis initially welcomed a school visit; she had testified before Indiana’s legislature in support of the national curriculum and testing standards. Then she emailed to say she could not invite people into her classroom to see the standards in action. “My principal told me that I am not allowed to engage with you on this,” she wrote. “It is frustrating that something that should not be political is. I apologize that I could not be more helpful.”

      No one that she recommended I talk to would even reply to my repeated inquiries. I got the same brushoff from several districts in nearby states. But staff from the Metropolitan School District of Warren Township, in southeast Indianapolis, were quite willing to have me visit.

      Warren was one of sixteen school districts nationwide to win a federal Race to the Top grant directly, rather than through the state, in 2012. Its application stressed the district’s embrace of Common Core, and in less than a year the resulting $28.5 million had already produced detailed curriculum maps and teacher training programs. The Warren schools’ eagerness to welcome my visit in autumn 2013 suggested I would see a well-organized local rollout of the national initiative, assisted by federal funds.

      Of the roughly twelve thousand students in Warren schools, 58 percent qualify for federal free or reduced-price lunch, a proxy for low-income status, and 59 percent are ethnic minorities. On the National Assessment of Educational Progress, Warren students rank in about the 50th percentile in math and reading.¹ The district’s spending per pupil, $11,600 a year, is close to the state average.² The RTT grant has amounted to about 5.6 percent of Warren’s annual $128 million budget in each of its four years. (When RTT grants go to states as opposed to districts, the funds typically make up 1 to 3 percent of the state’s education spending.) To have a better chance of receiving those funds, again, districts and states committed themselves to Common Core.³

      President Obama did indeed leverage a relatively minuscule amount of money into huge political and educational changes, just as he boasted in his 2012 State of the Union address, saying: “For less than 1 percent of what our nation spends on education each year, we’ve convinced nearly every state in the country to raise their standards for teaching and learning — the first time that’s happened in a generation.”⁴ This line was a rerun from his 2011 State of the Union,⁵ and the 1 percent bargain appeared again in 2013.⁶ By 2014, however, opposition from Americans on all sides of the political spectrum had made Common Core no longer an applause line, so Obama’s speechwriters dropped it.

      When I visited Warren schools, Indiana was one of some sixteen states that were formally reconsidering Common Core. Under public pressure, Governor Mike Pence and legislative leaders had come out in favor of submitting the standards to review, and that spring the legislature had passed a law suspending Common Core implementation during the 2013–14 academic year while the review proceeded. The grassroots furor that was building against Common Core in Indiana and nationwide explained why many teachers and administrators feared to discuss the standards. But not those in Warren Township. They were proud of what they had already done to align their teaching with the new curriculum mandates. Expecting that Common Core would survive the political challenge, they saw no reason to backtrack.

      It was a rainy October afternoon when I spoke with Ryan Russell, the director of teacher effectiveness for the Warren district. He flicked through a series of documents and apps on his iPad in a few smooth motions, displaying some results of the twenty thousand man-hours that forty or so teachers and administrators had put into redesigning staff evaluations. Approximately three-quarters of Indiana districts were using the state template for teacher evaluations, but Warren chose to design its own. Russell then pulled up the curriculum maps that district teachers had written over the summer, a project the federal grant supported.

      The maps would have made many a teacher drool. Teachers everywhere were scrambling to align their classrooms with Common Core. A Scholastic poll of twenty thousand teachers conducted in autumn 2013, around the same time as my Warren visit, found 48 percent saying that integrating Common Core into their classrooms had just begun, three years after their states had signed on to the standards. About three-quarters of teachers polled said they needed more planning time and training.⁷ A follow-up poll a year later found that a full 78 percent of teachers said they still needed more planning time, and over 80 percent said they needed more training and materials.⁸

      The Warren district seemed to be ahead of the game. Its curriculum maps arranged Common Core’s learning goals into an instructional calendar, giving date ranges for teaching specific math and English concepts. For example, second-grade teachers might spend October 16–27 on counting to a hundred by twos, working with triangles, and so on. Each date range in the map contained links to the corresponding sections of the district’s online textbooks from Pearson, the world’s largest education publisher (and a Common Core testing contractor), and to related resources such as explanatory videos and suggested class activities. Teachers could access those resources instantly, as Russell did, by touching the link on their iPad or Chromebook. (The RTT grant also funded a raft of iPads for kindergarteners and Chromebooks for the other students.)

      Asked if other districts were this organized, Russell emitted a little puff of air: “No,” he said emphatically. Warren planned to make its curriculum maps public since they were created with federal funds, he said, though he added an important caveat: “I could give them to a district and they wouldn’t have the same success because it was the work on this and our teachers doing it that made us so prepared.”

      Fuzzy Math Makes a Comeback

      Liberty Park Elementary School is a spacious building erected in 2002 beside a leafy middle school and an aquatics center. With Russell, I visit a classroom where Sarah Latdrik is working with six first graders who scored low on the district tests she gives every three weeks. The children are sitting in front of a smartboard, taking turns jumping up to touch two-digit numbers displayed on melons and strawberries bouncing about the screen. They win points if they match the fruit number to the sum of “ten-sticks” and “one-cubes” displayed in a corner.

      Ten-sticks and one-cubes reappear in the math lesson Latdrik begins when her other sixteen

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