LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

suggesting things” and resigned themselves to following the consultant’s “suggestions.”

      Hold it — what on earth is a “Lexile level”? Well, Common Core requires that students read books at or slightly above their grade level, and it recommends using algorithms to determine those levels. The Lexile Framework is a computer program that runs such algorithms. The Common Core document even shows which Lexile levels correspond to which Common Core grade levels.⁸ The problem with these computerized measurements of readability is that they routinely make silly mistakes. The Lexile Framework rates The Grapes of Wrath, for instance, as a second-grade book.⁹ Computers can judge things like vocabulary and sentence length, but not the more abstract qualities of literature such as irony, syntax, and metaphor.

      Highfill began expressing her frustrations on the widely read blog of Diane Ravitch, a historian of education. She also talked to a Washington Post reporter, Lyndsey Layton, in December 2012. “With informational text, there isn’t that human connection that you get with literature,” she told Layton. “And the kids are shutting down. They’re getting bored. I’m seeing more behavior problems in my classroom than I’ve ever seen.”¹⁰

      That Post article was one of the first in a mainstream publication to include criticism of Common Core. It went viral.

      Within weeks, Highfill found herself in the principal’s office. The ostensible complaint was that her students’ writing on Common Core practice tests was “too good.” Yes, really. The testing machines could not rate their essays because the writing was too complex — like the high-quality literature Highfill gave her students. Apparently, eliciting excellent student work was now “professional insubordination.” Highfill said the principal told her, “This cannot happen again,” then required her to complete an “improvement plan,” which included a ban on talking to the media. This plan also brought in a district administrator to sit in the back of her class every week and to review every lesson plan from that point forward.

      When I contacted Highfill for an interview soon after her remarks appeared in the Washington Post, she wanted first to review with her union representative whether she had any speech protections in her contract that would allow her to give the interview without imperiling her job. After a few weeks, she decided it didn’t matter. She was quitting.

      “It’s not just happening to me, it’s happening everywhere,” Highfill said, speaking in a rush of heartfelt frustration, “and it’s happening to good teachers. They’re being given ultimatums to stop talking, stop becoming activists.”

      She’s right. This is happening across the country, and it means that millions of American children are losing out on some world-class instruction, even as pundits once again raise alarms about the nation’s academic mediocrity. The teachers who stick it out are being forced to feed their students mental junk food, according to some of the country’s top academics and researchers. Since the mandates were published in 2010, scholars in psychology, child development, education, mathematics, and literature have come out with a variety of substantive criticisms, most prominently in dozens of studies published by Boston’s Pioneer Institute. Another report, published in 2015, concluded that “Common Core reading requirements for kindergarten are inappropriate and not well-grounded in research,” and are likely to set children back academically.¹¹ It recommended immediately yanking Common Core’s kindergarten standards.

      A literacy researcher who helped write Common Core, Dr. Louisa Moats, sharply criticized the final product in 2014, saying, “We drafted sections on Language and Writing Foundations that were not incorporated into the document as originally drafted.” She continued:

      Classroom teachers are confused, lacking in training and skills to implement the standards, overstressed, and the victims of misinformed directives from administrators who are not well grounded in reading research. I’m beginning to get messages from very frustrated educators who threw out what was working in favor of a new “CCSS aligned” program, and now find that they don’t have the tools to teach kids how to read and write.¹²

      Why didn’t the critics speak out earlier, when their input could have improved the final product, or deep-sixed it? Because there was no public discussion of Common Core before the education-industrial complex pushed states into this ill-considered scheme. Teachers are now left to deal with the mess that credentialed “experts” with no classroom experience have made — unless they decide that dealing with it is not worth the trouble.

      Highfill had an easier out than some: she got married in the summer of 2013 and moved to Virginia. So a top-notch teacher and Navy veteran left the field after eleven years. “I miss being in the classroom,” she said a few weeks before her wedding. “I miss watching their eyes glow when they get excited about learning. So I don’t think I’m going to be out of the classroom for a long time. But after last year I felt like a break was in order. I’m hoping that by the time I go back all of this Common Core nonsense will be gone. This is a behemoth.”

      Unfortunately, if Highfill waits until Common Core disappears, she will have to wait a long time. Despite swelling opposition from parents and teachers across the country, it remains embedded in almost every classroom in America. It even affects the four states that didn’t adopt the mandates when Common Core steamrolled the country in 2010 — Virginia, Nebraska, Texas, and Alaska. It sounds like a national curriculum, doesn’t it? But that’s illegal. So how did it come about?

      The “State-Led” Façade

      In the “Myths and Facts” section of the initiative’s website, we read that “Common Core is a state-led effort that is not part of No Child Left Behind or any other federal initiative. The federal government played no role in the development of the Common Core.”¹³ The U.S. secretary of education, Arne Duncan, used the “state-led” argument in various public statements, including a major speech defending Common Core before a convention of journalists in 2013.¹⁴ It was crucial for Common Core’s creators that it not technically be a federal project, although the federal government has been funding curriculum models and overseeing state tests for decades.¹⁵ Yes, it has, even though the U.S. Constitution gives no powers over education to the federal government, and even though the three major federal education laws that define the currently existing, extraconstitutional federal role in education explicitly prohibit federal meddling in curriculum or test content.¹⁶

      The laws are this way because Americans have consistently objected to federal control over what children learn. According to the 2014 PDK/Gallup poll on public attitudes about education, 84 percent of Americans say that states or local school boards, not the federal government, “should have the greatest influence in deciding what is taught” in local schools.¹⁷ The poll questions changed slightly in a 2015 follow-up, which still showed that “Only one in five Americans believe the federal government should play a role” in K–12 testing, curriculum, accountability, or funding.¹⁸ Common Core effectively means the opposite, which is a reason the 2015 poll found twice as many Americans against it as in favor. Opposition included majorities of whites, Hispanics, public-school parents, Republicans, and independents.¹⁹

      Aware of Americans’ strong preference for local control of education, Common Core’s originators ran it through a series of private nonprofit organizations, trying at the same time to make the project appear “stateled.” In so doing, they followed the nationalization strategy a Brookings Institution paper recommended in 2000.²⁰ The paper describes attempts by big government and big business to nationalize and standardize American education during the 1980s and 1990s, particularly with the Goals 2000: Educate America Act of 1994. The law provided for a national council to review and approve state curriculum guidelines in all grades and subjects, but the specter of a “national school board” became a political issue in the 1994 election season. A set of federally sponsored history standards drew widespread public criticism, leading to a 99–1 Senate resolution opposing their certification. Consequently, the council to approve state standards never materialized.

      To get around those pesky American rubes and their antiquated ideas about individual liberty and local authority, the Brookings paper

Скачать книгу