Fires Around Common Core

The villagers are up in arms. The target of their anger is tied to the stake and they are piling up the kindling, ready to ignite the fire and burn the villain to a crisp. But as in too many monster hunts, the villain in this case is not the one to blame. So, let's put down the pitchforks and torches for a moment.

Who (or what) is everybody so angry about? Common Core, of course. Haven't you heard? In this world filled with Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD), yet another dreaded scourge has emerged from which we need to protect our children.

Now, do I like the Common Core State Standards (CCSS)? They're okay, but I'm not overly thrilled about them. Do I think it's the root of all our educational problems? Not even close. Do I think CCSS needs a champion? Not a bit. Do I think CCSS needs defending at all? Well, maybe a little, but only because they can be useful if implemented properly.

So, what do I really think? I think we are once again focused on the wrong villain. Standards are not the bad guys, implementers of Standards are the bad guys. Ready to pick up that pitchfork yet?

It comes down to this: Using Standards to determine if teachers are "doing their jobs" is wrong. Using Standards to say that a child MUST learn x,y,z THIS YEAR before that child can move on to the next level is wrong. Using Standards as anything but SUGGESTIONS for learning sequences is wrong.

The Standards, therefore, are not the problem. The problems come when those Standards are used as a weapon against our children and their teachers by Society and its governors. The problems come when Teaching becomes more important a focus than Learning. The problems come when we forget that children learn many things in their own ways, and in their own times.

And, of course, the problems come when we satisfy ourselves by putting a label on everything and congratulate ourselves for summing it all up so neatly. And then putting a pretty bow on it.

Our problems mean one thing: something's gotta give. We can no longer say that a 6-year-old must do only what is prescribed for them in First Grade. Current answer: if the child handles the content easily, call her gifted and find something for her to do to keep busy until the rest of the class catches up; if struggling, get her a ton of extra help because she's "underperforming". Both labels are wrong. Better answer: give her the time to learn it in her own time, in her own way. And if she's already mastered it, let her move on to something more challenging now, not next year.

So, how would a teacher manage such a class? Ah, more FUD! Obviously, such a "class" would look completely different from what we all envision when someone nowadays says "classroom." That image in our heads of neat rows of desks filled with attentive students all listening eagerly to a wise old teacher at the front comes from a concept adapted for a different time, when education represented something scarce that needed to be acquired in a place far different from someone's home on the farm or in a tenement.

The world today is far more agile than it once was. The complacency of learning enough to get an entry-level job in a company in which you can work your way to the top simply doesn't get anybody anywhere anymore. First off, few companies in the U.S. still organize themselves around building from within (even though the most successful and creative are often the ones that still do). Secondly, companies don't stay around as often as they used to. Management often feels the need to shake things up in the lower ranks when things aren't going well, even if those levels of the business are not the problem. Couple that with businesses that sell themselves off either whole or in part to larger conglomerates, and one can see a very fluid working world that requires a different set of skills and knowledge in order to find success.

But schools are still teaching to the older world that has slipped away. Why aren't they adapting? It comes back to those implementers who emphasize teaching over learning, structure over customization, and testing as a summative act instead of a formative act.

We do what we do because it's comfortable, familiar, and we invested all that time and energy in mastering things THIS WAY, and the world said, "Good for you!" Then the world says, "help my kids get to be as masterful as you are." So we say, "Sure! I know exactly what to do!" and perhaps, for a time, we do know what to do. But the world keeps changing, and what was true once is maybe not so true now. For example, I remember when suddenly the world didn't want kids to learn programming in schools; when some of my parents railed about wasting time learning Logo instead of Office. I responded that they weren't really learning Logo so much as they were learning to think algorithmically, logically, solve problems that gave them immediate feedback and so on. And in recent years, what was true then is true again. Programming is once again a popular pursuit in schools.

But what was going on in those Dark Age years when programming was no longer encouraged as a school activity? Society was trying to break its ties with its earlier thinking. A lot of my colleagues had replaced or forgotten why they were teaching programming to kids with complacently teaching programming to kids minus the larger context. This is what goes on all the time in our world, not just in education, but in everything we do as humans.

Complacency is death.

Those who promote and implement policies minus their appropriate context are the Villains of Society, and have always been so. Ask anybody on any topic the simple question of "why?" things are the way they see them, and see what I mean. Most people will answer with their fallback position on the topic which bespeaks complacency: "We've always done it that way" and "That's how I learned it" and "Big ____ is to blame" and "Those people are the cause" and so on. FUD lives just as happily in a complacent world as in a topsy-turvy one.

So, to avoid sounding like either an apologist or a complainer, I'm going to do what everyone who is one of those should do: I'm going to suggest where we should be looking for answers. This allows my apologist side to push people in the direction I think they need to go, and my complainer side to expand beyond just pointing out what's wrong by offering reasoned solutions to what I'm seeing.

Of course, nothing can be done when the implementers (at every level) will not consider changing their ways. Complacency makes us very rigid in our thinking because FUD keeps us stuck in our ruts.

So, where do we go? Everywhere, of course:

• We stop pretending that our model of school is still valid by abolishing age-based groupings of children. We give them as much time as they need to learn as much as they can.
• We throw out A-F grades and replace them with more appropriate reflections on whether a child has mastered something, is on his way toward mastery, or still needs a lot of help (and time) to get ready to master it. Furthermore, if a child must receive some sort of final grade, it is not based on worksheets, fill-in tests, or something that can be totted up in a gradebook, but rather on the child's ability to produce something of their own that demonstrates their learning AND their independence from needing a teacher.
• We bring back "hands on" learning, such as shop classes and what used to be called "Home Ec," but modernizing them for a modern world, especially in terms of the old sexism that separated access to those skills, and the old class-ism that relegated some of these classes to the low-achievers.
• We embrace the Maker Movement and adopt the open-ended pedagogy proposed in Invent To Learn of Think-Make-Improve: Figure out (Think) what you'll need to make something [and to keep from injuring yourself], then get to Making it, and then examine it and figure out how to Improve it, then Think about what you'll need next to make it, then Make it again with your improvements, and then examine it for ways to Improve it. And so on. The process can continue until someone is satisfied with the result, which means we give them the time they need.This is the essence of the creative process, of Scientific Method, of R&D, and it's at the heart of what Americans used to be known for: Yankee Ingenuity.
• We create learning environments that are geared toward producing artifacts of a child's progress, which are then collected into a portfolio of learning instead of a hidden-away cum file or a one-page summary transcript.
• We encourage the business community to change the way it searches and screens its potential employees, away from resumes that are filled with fluff and toward a focus that looks for authentic proof of needed competencies (that a student can demonstrate from the artifacts collected in his or her portfolio of learning). 
• We empower teachers to create authentic projects with their students that satisfy myriad standards all at once for their students, instead of breaking things into bite-sized (i.e. context-free) modules to satisfy only a few standards at a time (that are easy to teach, of course).
  
• We recognize that not everything needs to be written to be valid. Children still must learn to listen, and to speak intelligibly, as well as write clearly. Add other means of expression to our short list of "proof of understanding" beyond writing, to include modern technologies that are abundant in many children's lives, such as photography, audio recording, video recording, website development, videogames, music composition, drawing, dance, and so on.
• We recognize that not knowing everything at a given moment is a good thing instead of a mark of failure, whether it be a student or a teacher, because it can then become the stepping off point for further learning. The Internet can assist us all in learning new things that we need right now. It's the most disruptive element of this new process, and one that is only working still on the periphery of the education establishment.
• We keep the focus always on learning, even if it becomes more challenging to teach. Complacency is at the heart of continuing to do things in the classroom simply because they're easy to teach and/or easy to grade. Textbook publishers love to sell things based on being easy to teach, but the world doesn't work that way, and neither should our schools. Complacency is also at the heart of somebody saying they deserve an A because they did precisely no more and no less than what the teacher asked of them.
• We must embrace Elbert Hubbard's view:

  “The object of teaching a child is to enable him to get along without a teacher.”

• We abolish standardized tests as indicators of successful learning or teaching, or even as a way to "group" our students in school, or as indicators of potential. If they must be used at all, they must return to the more justifiable idea that they are merely a snapshot of students on a given day at a given time in their lives, because testing has a long history of failing its purpose. Nevertheless, we must continue to study what our students are doing in every way possible so that we can learn more about the complex process of learning, but not as summative assessments.
• We tell the textbook publishers that we don't want scripts anymore, unless they're How-To's. We want to get out of books as quickly as we can and get our students doing things on their own. We want collections of projects that align with many standards at once and the resources to help students make them. We want transformative experiences in our classrooms and we want them to help us make the connections between diverse activities by providing myriad jumping off points. Build things that aren't merely closed subsets of the Internet, but know how to act like the Internet on a smaller scale.

Still want to burn Common Core at the stake? Then, before you do, try proposing your own answers to what is needed now in our schools to help our kids contend with their current world and the world it will change into as they grow older. I'm listening.  But watch out - others will start picking up their pitchforks and torches as soon as you offer your own suggestions. FUD is still our comfort zone these days. And change of any kind, even going "back to the way we used to do it," is the monster that activates people's fears more than anything else in this world.