Ethan Heitner
I hear this a lot these days: The Common Core State
Standards (CCSS) are, in and of themselves, fine. If we could just
uncouple them from the testing and implementation regimens, all would be
well. The standards themselves are an improvement, so let’s build on
that opportunity, and not stand in the way just because their ugly
testing step-cousin is trying to sneak through the door with them. We
just need to get rid of the high-stakes tests.
I can remember thinking like that. I can remember looking at the
standards and thinking, “Many of these are actually fine.” In fact, one
of my earliest complaints about the CCSS was that they were one more
example of folks telling us to do things that we already did. And I
don’t think there are teachers alive who don’t relish the promise of
freedom to pursue standards in any way they deem most effective.
“You know,” I thought at one point. “If it were possible to just use
these standards as a rough guide to follow as we thought best, and we
got the government to stop testing, I could live with this.”
That was the same moment when I realized that, no, the CCSS were not pure of heart, and I would never learn to love them.
Because what would decoupling look like? What incantation would
exorcise the testing demons? Could teachers go to the government and
say: “Thank you for these guidelines. Trust us—we will use our best
professional judgment and produce the best-educated generation of
students ever. Just step back and watch us work.” No, that would never
work, and it would never work because the CCSS are not for us. They
never were.
Teachers who like the standards look at them as a guide, as that
helpful assurance that we are on the right page. We think of standards
as a tool to help us find our way. To us standards say: “Here’s a map.
We trust you to find your way.”
Not the Common Core. The primary purpose of the CCSS is to call
teachers out. It says: “Here’s what you are supposed to be doing, or
else. And we’ll be checking up on you every step of the way.” It is not a
tool to be used by teachers; it’s a tool to be used on them.
The CCSS say: “Here’s what you must prove you’re accomplishing.” If
you tell your students that you expect them to study and learn the
chapter about Torquemada and 15th-century Spain, they know there’s a
test coming. Everyone expects the Spanish Inquisition. The CCSS are not
about helping us teach; they are about holding us accountable, so they
are meaningless without testing (and some parts are meaningless with
it).
Since they were designed to hold teachers accountable, they were
designed to be tested. Let’s look at the Reading Literature Strand for
11–12 grade: RL.11–12.1, 2, and 3 deal with key ideas and details, and
all three standards have one thing in common—they focus always and only
on the text. For example, RL.11–12.3 tells us to analyze the impact of
the author’s choices, but not the intent or context of them. So a
CCSS-style study of
The Sun Also Rises would not include
the impact of the Great War on Hemingway’s generation, Hemingway’s own
background, the rise of postmodernism, or the emerging literary
techniques of the period. Nor would we look at how prevalent themes of
the generation find expression in the novel.
We would study
The Awakening without applying an
understanding of women’s roles in the fin de siècle American South. We
would study the impact of sarcasm on “A Modest Proposal” without
studying what prompted Swift to write it.
Animal Farm would
be a curious fairy tale about talking animals. I cannot even imagine
how to unlock the riches of “Dream Deferred” or “I, Too, Sing America”
without noting that Langston Hughes was Black, or considering what it
meant then to be African American.
Why would we strip all this literature of its richness, depth, and
complexity, the very human qualities that make it worth reading in the
first place? Because measuring students’ grasp of such ideas would be
hard. Because the test could not be standardized, because we could not
control for the depth and breadth of background information that
individual students brought to the table. Because the only serious
answers to the only important questions would have to be in the form of
essays instead of bubbles. And real essays (not the standardized faux
essays) are not cost effective to score.
A standardized test cannot measure how a student understands
Hemingway’s novel as an expression of a generation’s confusion and
alienation after World War I. But a standardized test can ask a student
to read a paragraph from the novel and pick the most important sentence.
These are not standards designed to foster a richer and deeper
understanding of literature. They are designed to produce easily
testable results.
You may reply: “You can teach all that other nifty stuff if you want.
Go ahead and enrich your lessons above and beyond the CCSS.”
Well, if I am enriching above and beyond the CCSS, what do I need the
CCSS for? If the CCSS is not laying out a path for a full, quality
education, what path is it marking?
It’s laying out the path to the test. The CCSS are just the largest
scale test-prep guide ever created. The CCSS tell us what we need to
cover for the test, and the test tells us how well we covered it. If
there were no test, the CCSS would not matter.
The CCSS are also, of course, about making money. No Child Left
Behind (NCLB) also wanted to bust into the big piggy bank that is public
school funding, but NCLB was a big, blunt hammer; CCSS is a more
sophisticated machine with many interlocking parts.
In fact, the biggest reason that CCSS cannot be rescued is directly
related to the difficulties those of us who write about education have
had in explaining the problems with CCSS. And it is probably the
biggest lesson that the powers that be learned from NCLB.
The mistake those powers that be made with NCLB is that they gave the
whole thing a name. The testing, the state standards, the punishing
evaluations, the funding pressures—everything was gathered under the No
Child Left Behind banner. Oh, how we loathed it. We called it funny,
mocking names. Even when we couldn’t see the full picture, we knew its
name. We knew its name.
This thing that’s happening now? The contempt for teachers, the drive
to privatize, the evaluation-based punishment, the dismantling of our
profession, the destruction of public education, the redirection of
billions of tax dollars, the secrecy, the ill-conceived standards—we can
see all its pieces, but the great, chewing mechanism does not have a
name. The lack of a shorthand title for the galumphing monstrosity
allows its creators, our so-called leaders, to pretend that all these
are separate elements, when, in fact, they are all one well-coordinated
machine.
If these were all separate and discrete pieces, they could not be
parts of a giant machine chewing apart the entire U.S. institution of
schooling. And that leads to the belief that some of these separate
pieces can be rescued—that we can accept some and leave the rest behind.
But the CCSS are part of a coordinated, interlocking machine, and its
creators will never let you take only a piece of it home. The testing
regimen is not its own separate thing that can be just thrown out, any
more than it was its own thing when it was the engine of NCLB. If you
want only one cog, you can’t extract it from the machine.
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