You are right, teachers have gone underground to teach students important concepts, like entrepreneurial skills, not outlined in the CCSS or tested on high-stakes assessments. Thank goodness for teachers like you.

And like you Dawn, it is reasonable to have a set of standards to drive instruction. However, you are correct in saying, when the acquisition of those standards becomes so high-stakes, learning, teaching and everything else becomes fear-based. And anyone, who has studied ANYTHING regarding student learning, knows that students must feel safe to truly learn. When students fear retention, or not being able to graduate, learning is thrown out the window.

Thank you for your detailed and thorough comments. Glad you’re here, Dawn

The thing is, since the standards movement started, we’ve always had some set of standards nationally. Standards should be guides and points of discussion. Common Core, I don’t think, is the devil, it’s the high stakes testing and fear-based climate it promotes that’s the enemy. In my upcoming writing, I’ll be comparing the fear generated by misuse of high-stakes testing to the Soviet Union. When you back good people into a corner, the data somehow gets skewed.

You’ll see this in grade inflation and other unintended consequences, carnage along the way. We’re seeing “transformation schools,” where good teachers and educational leaders get purged because schools testing low must remove a set percentage of staff and leadership. Wipe the slate clean and try again.

There’s also an issue of honesty. Data can be skewed to support anything by a good statistician, not that many teachers are trained statisticians. I’ve seen teachers make up or change soft data to hit the marks. I’ve seen students waste weeks of time on testing. I’ve seen students pulled from “real” classes to take test prep classes to make sure they can graduate. Schools are heroically identifying and intervening with students who need to achieve their numbers or goals to graduate, but is that what I want my son learning? Nope.

I feel that the real teaching has gone underground. The official lessons include things like standardized curricula and test prep, but the good teachers still get the life lessons on the side. Currently, for me, that’s Genius Hour and the fact that my upperclassmen keep stealing my entrepreneurship books.

Common Cores aren’t bad per se. They give us a starting point to converse, and when I read them, I don’t think teaching any one of those standards is unreasonable though on my planet I’d add a few. I struggle with the fact that for all this standardization, the math and literacy standards aren’t even written in the same format, making someone like me who takes pride in integrating curricula have to hunt for what I want. That’s a separate diatribe.

What’s bad isn’t a set of standards–and I’ve lived through several–it’s the standardization and imposition of our values on students. That’s not acceptable. It’s another form of elitism and intellectual neocolonialism. When I started teaching, I wanted to send all my students to Ivy League. I was wrong. I’ve learned so much from them and been completely humbled. All I am is the facilitator. The guide and mentor. Students and families should be able to decide on their life’s course, and we should guide them to their goal. Mentoring is the key, not standardization. Each student has his or her gifts, many buried and not valued by the current system. The standards can help them to reach for the bar, but we don’t need high-stakes fear-based testing to assess this. We have the technology to assess constantly without fear. Problem is, schools don’t receive it.

I don’t mind the national conversation, because it lets us share best practices. I mind the high stakes everything. I’d like to see us assess our kids authentically, formatively, and then help them make their decisions by tuning them into their vision and showing them things they never knew were out there. They’ll learn intrinsically, and the standards won’t matter. They’ll be so far ahead of any standard we put in place, it’ll be a moot point.