The death of the thinking student: Common Core kills creativity
BY ABIGAIL KOVACS
I have spent over a decade in the public school system and am just now coming to the realization that I have been complicit in a massive fraud. While I may appear accomplished in the eyes of college admissions officers, it has not been in the way one might expect. Unfortunately, 10 years of traditional schooling and straight A’s has not made me any more intelligent. Despite what my grades may tell you, I am by no means smarter than any of my peers; I am, perhaps, simply the best at following instructions.
While my story is unique, the experience is all too common for American students everywhere. Now, the newest vogue in national education is one which threatens to surpass all previous educational blunders: Common Core State Standards. Constructed on the belief that students can be broken down into a system of “proficiency indicators,” the program is embedded with a negation of every basic necessity of the critically-thinking student. Whatever potentially positive role these educational standards might play in academic proficiency, it has been repeatedly undermined by bad process, suspect political agendas, and commercial interests — all of which have contributed to the death of individualism and creativity in the American student.
Many of the shortcomings associated with standardized learning can be traced back to the manner in which students are first exposed to, and taught to digest, material. Beginning at the age of six, children are placed in classrooms and expected to sit, often without physical activity, for five to six hours each day. Information is presented linearly, discouraging creativity or critical thought. As education expert Ken Roberson remarks, “Many of the children being diagnosed and treated for ADD are simply suffering from childhood ... If you force children to perform low-grade clerical work for six hours a day, they might fidget.” In fact, according to the Smithsonian, students in Finland have the shortest school days of any country in the western world (approximately two-four hours for students in grades one-five), yet out-perform nearly all other competition. They also have virtually eliminated all standardized testing, and instead place an emphasis on learning deeply and conceptually through mastering a wide variety of non-academic subjects and skills.
In the United States however, the advent of “No Child Left Behind” laws saw high-stakes assessments become a hallmark of modern school reform, with the average student taking over 50 standardized tests in their school career, according to some estimates. The stakes for these exams were increased with President Obama’s $4.3 billion Race to the Top funding competition, in which states could win federal education funding by promising to undertake specific reforms—including evaluating teachers by test scores and adopting the Common Core Standards.
The negative influence of these rigid assessments and unnatural learning settings can be avoided simply by enlightening rather than conditioning students. John Taylor Gatto, a retired school teacher and activist critical of compulsory schooling, asserts that, “We could encourage the best qualities of youthfulness – curiosity, adventure, resilience... simply by being more flexible about time, texts, and tests and by giving each student what autonomy he or she needs. But we don't do that." Today’s model, in addition to being archaic and destructive, is only compounded by the rigidity and impracticality of standards, which encourages students to jump systematically through a series of aimless hoops.
In order to truly engage students, it is essential that we remove the undue emphasis on arbitrary testing guidelines, and instead focus on how each student is best able to absorb and present information. At the lower grade levels teachers should incorporate more elements of conceptual learning while allowing children to naturally explore the world around them. As Gatto emphasizes, “They should be allowed to be critical thinkers and problem-solvers- that’s the whole point of the Common Core, after all.” The American schooling system almost necessitates a dismantling of student’s natural creative abilities, so as to best acclimate them for the uniformity of standardized tests. Educators must see students as more than robotic bookshelves, conditioned to blurt out facts. If given the chance, they are all capable of using their minds for innovation, rather than memorization, for creativity, rather than futile activity, for rumination rather than stagnation.
Increasingly, concerns have been directed at the tendency of Common Core to push difficult academic skills to lower grades, the inappropriateness of early childhood requirements, the disjointed sequencing of math standards, and the mix and type of mandated reading. To arrive at “college- and career-ready standards,” the Common Core developers have defined certain “skills and abilities” they claim are necessary to succeed in a four-year college. One of these consortia, the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, claims that students who earn a “college ready” designation by scoring a level 4 on these still-under-construction tests will have a 75 percent chance of getting a “C” or better in their freshman composition course, according to Sonja Brookins of the Consortia. Yet there is no actual evidence connecting scores on any of these new experimental tests with future college success. Instead, Common Core provides an overhyped, all-state implementation drive that acts more like a marketing campaign than an educational plan.
In addition to these poorly apportioned standards, the goal of producing well-developed learners has largely been sacrificed to political interests and uninformed bureaucrats. As former teacher and director of the Secondary Reform Project for New Jersey, Stan Karp, explains, “These standards have never been fully implemented in real schools anywhere. They are essentially abstract descriptions of academic abilities organized into sequences by people who have never taught at all.” Because federal law prohibits the government from creating national standards and tests, the Common Core project was ostensibly designed as a state effort led by the National Governors Association, the Council of Chief State School Officers, and Achieve—a private consulting firm. The standards themselves were drafted by academics and assessment “experts,” with substantial ties to testing companies.
Education Week blogger and science teacher Anthony Cody found that, of the 25 individuals in the work groups charged with creating the assessments, six were associated with the test makers from the College Board, five with the test publishers at ACT, and four with Achieve. According to teacher Nancy Carlsson-Paige: “In all, there were 135 people on the review panels for the Common Core. Not a single one of them was a K–3 classroom teacher or early childhood professional." She notes that K–12 educators were mostly brought in after the fact to tweak and endorse the standards and “lend legitimacy” to the results. These disturbing trends only highlight the role inexperienced, disconnected bureaucrats play in “reforming” education for their own interests. By ignoring the voices of teachers, parents, and students, proponents of Common Core ensure that their motives are placed above all else- even the success of their pupils.
Unsurprisingly, profitizing education has shifted the focus from learning to what most benefits corporations. As former teacher David Perrin indicates, a defining characteristic of Common Core is rampant profiteering. According to web-based news service Politico, “suspicious” profit motives exist between Common Core’s testing programs and Pearson, that could be worth more than $1 billion over the next eight years. They also uncovered a brutal “money war,” reporting on the tens of millions of dollars pouring into the battle over the Common Core. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, for example, has already given more than $160 million to developing and promoting the program, including $10 million within the first two months of implementation. At the same time, there are an array of organizations with multimillion-dollar budgets of their own and extensive experience in mobilizing lawmakers opposing the Common Core. Groups such as the Heritage Foundation, Americans for Prosperity, the Pioneer Institute, FreedomWorks, and the Koch Bros are feeding a growing right-wing opposition to the Common Core that combines hostility to all federal education and anything supported by the Obama administration. The curriculum and assessments schools and students need will not emerge from this adversarial process, however. Instead, the top-down, bureaucratic rollout of the Common Core has put schools in the middle of a political struggle over who will control education policy. It goes without saying that political and corporate conflicts should have no role in education. If policies that truly benefit teachers and students are to emerge, the interests of testing companies and politicians can no longer dominate the educational discussion. In this firestorm, the goal of educating has been unceremoniously swept aside.
Amid this larger political battle, one of the most imminent threats for educators and schools remains the new wave of high-stakes Common Core tests. Reports from the first wave of Common Core testing provide ample evidence to support these fears. In 2014, students, parents, and teachers in New York schools responded to new Common Core tests developed by Pearson with outcries against their length, difficulty, and inappropriate content. Pearson included corporate logos and promotional material in reading passages. Students reported feeling overstressed and underprepared. Administrators requested guidelines for handling tests that students had vomited on. Teachers and principals complained about the disruptive nature of the testing process and many parents encouraged their children to opt out. Once the process was complete, only about 30 percent of students were deemed “proficient” based on arbitrary cut scores designed to create new categories of failure. Disturbingly, the achievement gaps Common Core is purported to narrow grew larger, with a 97 percent failure rate in English-language learners. The number of students identified by the tests for “academic intervention,” however, skyrocketed to 70 percent, far beyond the capacity of districts to meet. These results are only a fraction of the evidence against standardized testing and its inability to accurately measure the abilities of students.
To have any impact, the Common Core State standards must undergo drastic transformations beginning with a careful consideration of the needs and opinions of teachers and students. When their voices are ignored, it is impossible to craft policies that adequately serve the populations most impacted. As a result, influence becomes less equitable and prevents students and teachers from fully participating in their own education.
Common Core is just another part of the corporate reform project now stalking American schools. As educators struggle with its new mandates, we must defend our students, our schools, and ourselves by pushing back against implementation timelines, resisting the stakes and priority attached to the tests, and exposing the truth about the commercial and political interests shaping this false panacea for the problems our schools face. Whether this growing resistance will lead to better, more democratic efforts to sustain and improve public education, or be overwhelmed by the massive testing apparatus that No Child Left Behind established, and that the Common Core seeks to expand, will depend on the organizing and advocacy efforts of those with the most at stake: parents, educators, and students. As usual, organizing and activism are the key to promoting positive change.
I have spent over a decade in the public school system and am just now coming to the realization that I have been complicit in a massive fraud. While I may appear accomplished in the eyes of college admissions officers, it has not been in the way one might expect. Unfortunately, 10 years of traditional schooling and straight A’s has not made me any more intelligent. Despite what my grades may tell you, I am by no means smarter than any of my peers; I am, perhaps, simply the best at following instructions.
While my story is unique, the experience is all too common for American students everywhere. Now, the newest vogue in national education is one which threatens to surpass all previous educational blunders: Common Core State Standards. Constructed on the belief that students can be broken down into a system of “proficiency indicators,” the program is embedded with a negation of every basic necessity of the critically-thinking student. Whatever potentially positive role these educational standards might play in academic proficiency, it has been repeatedly undermined by bad process, suspect political agendas, and commercial interests — all of which have contributed to the death of individualism and creativity in the American student.
Many of the shortcomings associated with standardized learning can be traced back to the manner in which students are first exposed to, and taught to digest, material. Beginning at the age of six, children are placed in classrooms and expected to sit, often without physical activity, for five to six hours each day. Information is presented linearly, discouraging creativity or critical thought. As education expert Ken Roberson remarks, “Many of the children being diagnosed and treated for ADD are simply suffering from childhood ... If you force children to perform low-grade clerical work for six hours a day, they might fidget.” In fact, according to the Smithsonian, students in Finland have the shortest school days of any country in the western world (approximately two-four hours for students in grades one-five), yet out-perform nearly all other competition. They also have virtually eliminated all standardized testing, and instead place an emphasis on learning deeply and conceptually through mastering a wide variety of non-academic subjects and skills.
In the United States however, the advent of “No Child Left Behind” laws saw high-stakes assessments become a hallmark of modern school reform, with the average student taking over 50 standardized tests in their school career, according to some estimates. The stakes for these exams were increased with President Obama’s $4.3 billion Race to the Top funding competition, in which states could win federal education funding by promising to undertake specific reforms—including evaluating teachers by test scores and adopting the Common Core Standards.
The negative influence of these rigid assessments and unnatural learning settings can be avoided simply by enlightening rather than conditioning students. John Taylor Gatto, a retired school teacher and activist critical of compulsory schooling, asserts that, “We could encourage the best qualities of youthfulness – curiosity, adventure, resilience... simply by being more flexible about time, texts, and tests and by giving each student what autonomy he or she needs. But we don't do that." Today’s model, in addition to being archaic and destructive, is only compounded by the rigidity and impracticality of standards, which encourages students to jump systematically through a series of aimless hoops.
In order to truly engage students, it is essential that we remove the undue emphasis on arbitrary testing guidelines, and instead focus on how each student is best able to absorb and present information. At the lower grade levels teachers should incorporate more elements of conceptual learning while allowing children to naturally explore the world around them. As Gatto emphasizes, “They should be allowed to be critical thinkers and problem-solvers- that’s the whole point of the Common Core, after all.” The American schooling system almost necessitates a dismantling of student’s natural creative abilities, so as to best acclimate them for the uniformity of standardized tests. Educators must see students as more than robotic bookshelves, conditioned to blurt out facts. If given the chance, they are all capable of using their minds for innovation, rather than memorization, for creativity, rather than futile activity, for rumination rather than stagnation.
Increasingly, concerns have been directed at the tendency of Common Core to push difficult academic skills to lower grades, the inappropriateness of early childhood requirements, the disjointed sequencing of math standards, and the mix and type of mandated reading. To arrive at “college- and career-ready standards,” the Common Core developers have defined certain “skills and abilities” they claim are necessary to succeed in a four-year college. One of these consortia, the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, claims that students who earn a “college ready” designation by scoring a level 4 on these still-under-construction tests will have a 75 percent chance of getting a “C” or better in their freshman composition course, according to Sonja Brookins of the Consortia. Yet there is no actual evidence connecting scores on any of these new experimental tests with future college success. Instead, Common Core provides an overhyped, all-state implementation drive that acts more like a marketing campaign than an educational plan.
In addition to these poorly apportioned standards, the goal of producing well-developed learners has largely been sacrificed to political interests and uninformed bureaucrats. As former teacher and director of the Secondary Reform Project for New Jersey, Stan Karp, explains, “These standards have never been fully implemented in real schools anywhere. They are essentially abstract descriptions of academic abilities organized into sequences by people who have never taught at all.” Because federal law prohibits the government from creating national standards and tests, the Common Core project was ostensibly designed as a state effort led by the National Governors Association, the Council of Chief State School Officers, and Achieve—a private consulting firm. The standards themselves were drafted by academics and assessment “experts,” with substantial ties to testing companies.
Education Week blogger and science teacher Anthony Cody found that, of the 25 individuals in the work groups charged with creating the assessments, six were associated with the test makers from the College Board, five with the test publishers at ACT, and four with Achieve. According to teacher Nancy Carlsson-Paige: “In all, there were 135 people on the review panels for the Common Core. Not a single one of them was a K–3 classroom teacher or early childhood professional." She notes that K–12 educators were mostly brought in after the fact to tweak and endorse the standards and “lend legitimacy” to the results. These disturbing trends only highlight the role inexperienced, disconnected bureaucrats play in “reforming” education for their own interests. By ignoring the voices of teachers, parents, and students, proponents of Common Core ensure that their motives are placed above all else- even the success of their pupils.
Unsurprisingly, profitizing education has shifted the focus from learning to what most benefits corporations. As former teacher David Perrin indicates, a defining characteristic of Common Core is rampant profiteering. According to web-based news service Politico, “suspicious” profit motives exist between Common Core’s testing programs and Pearson, that could be worth more than $1 billion over the next eight years. They also uncovered a brutal “money war,” reporting on the tens of millions of dollars pouring into the battle over the Common Core. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, for example, has already given more than $160 million to developing and promoting the program, including $10 million within the first two months of implementation. At the same time, there are an array of organizations with multimillion-dollar budgets of their own and extensive experience in mobilizing lawmakers opposing the Common Core. Groups such as the Heritage Foundation, Americans for Prosperity, the Pioneer Institute, FreedomWorks, and the Koch Bros are feeding a growing right-wing opposition to the Common Core that combines hostility to all federal education and anything supported by the Obama administration. The curriculum and assessments schools and students need will not emerge from this adversarial process, however. Instead, the top-down, bureaucratic rollout of the Common Core has put schools in the middle of a political struggle over who will control education policy. It goes without saying that political and corporate conflicts should have no role in education. If policies that truly benefit teachers and students are to emerge, the interests of testing companies and politicians can no longer dominate the educational discussion. In this firestorm, the goal of educating has been unceremoniously swept aside.
Amid this larger political battle, one of the most imminent threats for educators and schools remains the new wave of high-stakes Common Core tests. Reports from the first wave of Common Core testing provide ample evidence to support these fears. In 2014, students, parents, and teachers in New York schools responded to new Common Core tests developed by Pearson with outcries against their length, difficulty, and inappropriate content. Pearson included corporate logos and promotional material in reading passages. Students reported feeling overstressed and underprepared. Administrators requested guidelines for handling tests that students had vomited on. Teachers and principals complained about the disruptive nature of the testing process and many parents encouraged their children to opt out. Once the process was complete, only about 30 percent of students were deemed “proficient” based on arbitrary cut scores designed to create new categories of failure. Disturbingly, the achievement gaps Common Core is purported to narrow grew larger, with a 97 percent failure rate in English-language learners. The number of students identified by the tests for “academic intervention,” however, skyrocketed to 70 percent, far beyond the capacity of districts to meet. These results are only a fraction of the evidence against standardized testing and its inability to accurately measure the abilities of students.
To have any impact, the Common Core State standards must undergo drastic transformations beginning with a careful consideration of the needs and opinions of teachers and students. When their voices are ignored, it is impossible to craft policies that adequately serve the populations most impacted. As a result, influence becomes less equitable and prevents students and teachers from fully participating in their own education.
Common Core is just another part of the corporate reform project now stalking American schools. As educators struggle with its new mandates, we must defend our students, our schools, and ourselves by pushing back against implementation timelines, resisting the stakes and priority attached to the tests, and exposing the truth about the commercial and political interests shaping this false panacea for the problems our schools face. Whether this growing resistance will lead to better, more democratic efforts to sustain and improve public education, or be overwhelmed by the massive testing apparatus that No Child Left Behind established, and that the Common Core seeks to expand, will depend on the organizing and advocacy efforts of those with the most at stake: parents, educators, and students. As usual, organizing and activism are the key to promoting positive change.