The Education Invasion - Joy Pullmann

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of completing high school) have been aligned with Common Core, these curriculum benchmarks are affecting schools that technically don’t have to follow them — charter schools, private schools, even homeschools — and their influence filters into the handful of states that have not signed on. So almost every school in the country has been scrambling to adjust its curriculum to meet what Common Core demands. It’s fair, then, to say that the Common Core apparatus touches virtually everything about American education.

      Common Core is as big a change in education as Obamacare is in health care, but unlike Obamacare it needed no votes in Congress to become national policy. It garnered practically no notice from the media before the Obama administration, in concert with largely unelected state bureaucrats and a shadow bureaucracy of private organizations, locked it in nationwide. That meant no public debate before the scheme was imposed upon a country supposedly run with the consent of the governed. Reams of substantive criticism have emerged only after the fact, along with data indicating that Common Core has actually set back student achievement.

      Let’s look again at the National Assessment of Educational Progress, where Massachusetts made impressive gains after its curriculum revision in 2001. NAEP results in 2015 showed a small decline in math scores — a reversal of the upward trend. In the interim, Massachusetts had lowered its math standards to match most other states, instead of remaining an exemplar that motivated them to reach higher. Because Massachusetts still ranked ahead of the other states overall, the outgoing education secretary, Arne Duncan, held it up as a national model for education.11 A sensible education policy would have expanded on what Massachusetts had been offering its children when the NAEP scores were climbing. Instead, Duncan spent his tenure in the Obama administration pushing America’s schools in a different direction. That may explain why nearly every other state showed declining student achievement across subjects, especially math, for the first time in twenty-five years — that is, since the NAEP began measuring achievement in every state.

      According to Tom Loveless, an education researcher at the Brookings Institution, many schools have been using the Common Core mandates to justify reducing their math expectations. NAEP data showed that the percentage of schools teaching algebra in the eighth grade had dropped in 2015 for the first time in a decade, from 33 percent to 29 percent nationally.12 Parents throughout the San Francisco Bay Area and elsewhere were complaining because their middle schools had changed algebra from an eighth-grade default to a special class only for advanced students — because of Common Core.

      Michelle Furtado and Heather Crossin were far from the only parents spurred to ask questions about what was happening to her children’s education. As Common Core has unfurled in schools across the country, public opposition has swelled.13 Angry citizens have been pressing their elected representatives to reassess their states’ commitment to the national standards and associated tests. But instead of backing down, Common Core’s advocates are digging in and sneaking their scheme in through the back door whenever it’s sent out the front.

      At its heart, Common Core is about who controls education. With its bureaucratic enforcement structure and centralized, command-and-control model, it accelerates the nationalization of American education, further eroding our tradition of local school governance. And few Americans — parents or teachers — have been given the chance to participate in deciding whether this is something our country really wants.

       CHAPTER 1

       Origins — Nationalizing Education under the Radar

      JAMIE HIGHFILL ENTERED the classroom in 2002 as an eighth-grade English teacher in Fayetteville, Arkansas. A Gulf War veteran, she had no idea that she was stepping onto another battlefield.

      Highfill quickly proved to be an excellent teacher. Her specialty was preparing students for Advanced Placement classes in high school, which can earn students college credit. In 2005, she was selected as codirector of the Northwest Arkansas Writing Project at the University of Arkansas, a local affiliate of an international writing program that attracts some of the world’s best teachers. In 2011, the Arkansas Council of Teachers of English Language Arts named her Middle School English Teacher of the Year. In the 2011–12 school year, 77 percent of her students scored “advanced” on state tests.1 That’s an amazing success rate. Typically, no more than one-quarter of students score “advanced” on state English tests, even the less rigorous ones.

      Highfill’s eighth graders learned about comedy and political satire from James Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” and O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi.” They read Arthurian legends, poems by Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson, and George Orwell’s Animal Farm. They learned about internal dialogue, quest literature, parody, and symbolism. Highfill’s guide for choosing assignments was Henry David Thoreau’s maxim, “Read the best books first, or you might not have a chance to read them at all.”2

      When Arkansas signed on to the Common Core curriculum mandates in 2010 — to be followed later by national tests to enforce them — Highfill joined the committee her school convened to decide how to put the mandates into place. Schools across the country created similar committees.

      In the era of “education accountability,” curriculum mandates spell out the learning requirements that annual tests assess. The national Common Core tests measure only reading and math to fulfill the federal mandates, but Common Core actually asserts authority over the entire curriculum, since its English mandates also apply to “literacy in history/social studies, science, and technical subjects.”3 A series of grant competitions and executive rewrites of federal education law during the first year of the Obama presidency ensured that Common Core would determine far more than what teachers hand to children in the classroom. The administration required schools to use Common Core test results in evaluating, ranking, hiring, firing, and even redistributing teachers, and required states to use the results to judge and rank schools and even to take them over from local authorities.

      Unlike most teachers, Highfill had paid attention to how Common Core became her boss. When she got a look at the mandates, she was dismayed at what they would do to the extraordinarily rich lessons she had been providing her students.

      In language arts, Common Core explicitly requires schools to give “much greater attention to a specific category of informational text — literary nonfiction — than has been traditional.” A graph included in the standards document shows an increasing nonfiction intake through the school years: 50 percent in fourth grade, 55 percent in eighth grade, 70 percent in twelfth grade.4 This requirement alarmed Highfill, who had achieved great success with her students by feeding them a diet replete with poetry and short stories and classic novels.

      “Where is the research that proves more nonfiction is better for students?” she asked. “What about inferencing skills that you only get with fiction and poetry? That was my whole issue: please, tell me where the research says this is better for kids.” Indeed, research indicates that students’ experience with high-quality fiction is a major predictor of their college success, while it finds nothing of the kind for nonfiction.5

      Highfill expressed her concerns to some colleagues. When administrators asked teachers what they thought about Common Core, Highfill and others began pointing out its flaws, but the principal said, “You guys are being too negative.” The administration, said Highfill, “wanted us to accept the document lock, stock, and barrel.”

      She had to toss out six weeks’ worth of poetry lessons and a favorite unit on Arthurian legends to make way for light nonfiction (but not always scientifically accurate) reading, such as a chapter from Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point.6 And she could no longer select her own reading assignments. The school had hired a curriculum consultant who, like all of Common Core’s main authors, had no experience in English teaching or research. This consultant required teachers to reorganize their curriculum around vague nonliterary themes such as “how the world affects our decision to do the right thing.”7

      “We’d

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