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EDITORIAL
The death of the thinking student

By Abigail Kovacs
Eagle Times Editor
​June 2018

    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 a negation of every basic necessity of the critically-thinking student. Whatever potentially positive role these standards might play in academic proficiency, it has been repeatedly undermined by bad process, suspect political agendas, and commercial interests, contributing to the death of individualism and creativity in the American student. 
      In the United States, 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. 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. 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.   
         Increasingly, concerns have also 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 abstract descriptions of academic abilities organized into sequences by people who have never taught at all.”  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.
          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 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.
      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. 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.
As these blunders prove, Common Core is just another part of the corporate reform project now stalking American schools. While 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. Only then can we create institutions that


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