The Echo

Common Core Curriculum -- Who's on Board? Who's Not?

Mike Klonsky.Educator, Author of "Small Schools: Public School Reform Meets the Ownership Society"

U.S. school reformers have expressed admiration for Finland's educational system, including its common national standards -- often ignoring other factors like their strong, tuition-free teacher preparation programs, strong professional stature of teachers, fully unionized teaching force, or their national health care program. Ironically, Finland, which holds down the number-one spot on international rankings, consciously de-emphasizes standardization and testing, giving ample freedom to teachers when it comes to the most important decisions about teaching and learning.

But for these and many other reasons, a diverse group of politicians, educators, civil rights advocates and corporate reformers have once again coalesced around the common-core idea and the functionalist ideal that there is or ought to be a common culture, expressed through the school curriculum, tying together the whole country's education system. It's proponents argue that the common core curriculum is also a way to better measure how state systems compare with one another.

Absent from the signers' list is national standards nemesis Deborah Meier, co-author of Will Standards Save Public Education?. Also among the missing are many of the sharpest critics of high-stakes standardized testing practices associated with past and current administrations. Diane Ravitch's is among those conspicuously absent. Ravitch, a longtime proponent of national standards, has become an outspoken critic of many top-down reform initiatives emanating from Sec. Arne Duncan's D.O.E. and from the powerhouse philanthropic foundations.

Except for Finn, I don't find any of the big charter school management or pro-voucher organizations represented. I assume that since since they consider themselves immune from any pressure to change what and how they teach, many of them probably couldn't care less. But there are also many progressives who value local autonomy and who don't trust education policies made far from the classroom, nor those policies that are subject to easily changeable political winds. Others are concerned that national standards and curriculum battles are a diversion from real issues of poverty and inequality. What good is a national core curriculum when some schools have the resources to implement it and others do not?

The framers of Common Core, including the National Governors Association and Council of Chief State School Officers, purposefully left things vague and voluntary -- and that's good. But lurking behind the scenes of course is Arne Duncan's test-and-punish, Race To The Top, federal funding reform strategy. Also watching are the omnipresent giant textbook and test publishers like McGraw-Hill and Pearson. Voluntary is never really voluntary these days, is it? And how can you have a national curriculum without national, high-stakes, standardized testing?