Much of our current educational system stems from an old idea, that each state and school district should set it's own standards, curriculum and by doing so leave both accountability for said standards, and ability to change them with the states. Some states did very well, others did not. Low education rates over decades have shown that decrease in education leads to an increase in drugs, violence and crime. Those who have less than a high school education are three times more likely to go to jail than those who receive their diploma and
63 times more likely than those who get a college degree. Right now the unemployment rate is triple for those without a high school diploma than those with a four year
college degree.
It is clear from these stats that education is crucial to upper movement for the lower classes, and that the need for education is crucial to our country's continued success and increased prosperity. We have established in the U.S. and throughout most of the world that education is one of the basic responsibilities for each government.
Over the years congress and various presidents have tried to fight against poverty and low education in the U.S.. In 1965 as part of his "War on Poverty" the "
Elementary and Secondary Education Act" was passed by congress, emphasizing fair and equal opportunities for all students to achieve academic excellence. It was designed to do this by disbursing funding to schools with children from low income families. It was equally focused on improving low functioning schools as well; however, it has also brought focus for improving funding to these schools to be based upon whether low functioning schools are improving. For most schools nationwide, most federal funding comes from grants have been allotted to schools based upon fulfilling requirements by the Department of Education. Overall most funding for schools come from property taxes, but often that alone often does not fulfill all of the needs of school districts, and so they often rely heavily on these federal grants.
The question became how to continue to encourage poor functioning schools. Dropout rates had increased and it became clear that evaluating students would be a key component in developing methods to know how to encourage poor functioning schools. In the 1990's most states incorporated standardized testing into their curriculum. These tests were set by each state in order to give accountability to teachers and administrators and to gauge the efficacy of the teaching being conducted. In 2001 ESEA was reauthorized with an additional provision, which was called "
No Child Left Behind."
No Child Left Behind has been heavily criticized because of it's focus on testing as the primary way to determine where to disperse grants. It failed to take into account student's previous growth and other factors, and overall has left behind more kids than it has helped.
More recently the National Governor's association in coordination with other national groups decided that there needed to be simpler across the board basic standards that should be met. The need for these standards was to try to ensure that all students would at least be taught up to a minimum standard. This does not mean that students can not be past these standards, achieve higher, get into better classes that have extra expectations, etc. It does, however, mean that a student from California moving to Ohio in 8th grade should be around the same level of education and not several steps behind.
The response has been mixed - many teachers who I have interviewed have been overwhelming in support of the common core curriculum. Their reasons for this seems to be the focus on mastery of concepts and the focus on fewer concepts, allowing teachers to ensure students get a more in-depth understanding of the most important concepts.An additional benefit to these standards is that by having the same standards, we are more easily able to measure how our students are doing compared with students across the world. Having 50 sets of standards made it incredibly difficult to compare our educational performance with other countries. This difference has been thought to be one of the causes for our country being rated lower in education than several other countries.
The concern with common core seems to be centered around a few ideas: the first being that this change has been facilitated through the department of education through the "Race to the Top" program. The concern over a federal takeover of education seems unfounded, however, as each state still sets their own standards based on the core curriculum. These standards are not mystery standards. They are available and are not hidden to parents or teachers once the states have decided on them.
Another major concern is involved in the lack of testing involved with these standards and the lack of involvement by teachers and parents in directly setting the standards. Also there is concern that there has not been a trial run of these standards. I feel that these concerns at this point are valid, but with the amount of states involved in these standards, the secondary concern will be confirmed or denied within 5 years or so. The last concern seems to be the overall cost of implementation, including retraining and curriculum materials.
I understand and support common core's main focus, and I believe that having equal standards among the states is a necessity. However I also understand that there is a lot that we do not understand about it yet.
