Kiersten Greene, PhD, is an assistant professor of literacy education at SUNY New Paltz. She was born in the Hudson Valley, and recently returned to the region after living in New York City for 15 years, where she taught 5th grade. When she’s not reading, writing, or teaching, you can find her knitting.
Dear Kiersten, Does the Common Core benefit my children at all?
The benefits of the Common Core are still up in the air, as
I suspect they will be for quite a while. As with any large-scale education
reform, we won’t know the actual impact of the Common Core State Standards
(CCSS) until years from now. In the meantime, your question is an important one
to ask!
There has been a lot of talk about the CCSS this past
school year, but there’s still a lack of clarity about what they are, exactly how
they affect classroom instruction, and how they’ll benefit our kids (if at
all).
As I see it, the main problem with the CCSS is not that
they exist, but how they’re being implemented and used.
Implementation
As a former 5th-grade teacher and current
teacher educator, I don’t have a problem with having some sort of standards to
guide instruction. In fact, I think you’d be hard-pressed to find any educator out there who doesn’t
welcome having a set of guidelines to refer to for planning and teaching.
However, when those guidelines are developmentally
inappropriate; provide a gateway for mandated, scripted curricula; and become
the driving force behind high-stakes testing, we have to take a step back and
wonder: What, exactly, are the standards really about?
School reforms
My mentor, the late Dr. Jean Anyon, once wrote that
changing school reforms without addressing the economic needs of the schools
and communities in which those reforms are being enacted “is like trying to
clean the air on one side of a screen door.”
While much of her work was in the context of urban school
reform, Dr. Anyon’s ideas can teach us about reforms in just about any setting
from urban to rural: we can’t expect higher achievement — in school or in life —
if all we do is raise the bar.
Long-term
benefits?
It seems to me that in a society where the economy is
still recovering from a prolonged downturn and the majority of people are
struggling to make ends meet, education alone can’t (and won’t) magically
prepare anyone to be college- and career-ready.
As long as the cost of college continues to grow
unchecked and the number of available, decent-paying jobs lags behind the
number of people who need them, it would take a miracle for the CCSS to have
long-term benefits on our society as a whole — or on our kids as individuals.
College years
The
average student graduating from college this year will face tens of thousands
of dollars in student debt — and won’t be able to pay it off anytime soon.
Maybe it’s just me, but it’s hard to imagine that the CCSS will do much for our
kids unless policymakers seriously (and perhaps, more thoughtfully) consider
the context(s) in which they are being implemented.
Read more answers to Common Core questions