The Common Core State Standards Initiative is a program developed by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, and rolled out by the Arizona State Board of Education. These new standards are a good start for standardizing the expectations of students, teachers, parents and administrators.
This initiative came to be during the fallout of the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind program. The Obama administration gave waivers to most states to get rid of the penalties for not reaching 100 percent proficiency by next year, as the law requires.
In Arizona, the CCSI was adopted in 2010 and are beginning to be implemented during the current school year, albeit under a different name — Arizona retitled them it the College and Career Ready Standards. Truly, the future is now for Arizona schools.
Although we should continually be improving access to quality education in this country, we seem to have halting and inappropriate means to solve this crisis.
CCSI, I hope, will fix this superficial approach to solving the education crisis in this country that NCLB only furthered. The irony of this situation, however, is that CCSI was instituted as a “patch” for NCLB and not meant to be an entirely new program.
The best to come of the old law, and the most applicable lesson that I think we have learned, is that success cannot be mandated from Washington. It must come from the communities that education serves. Success and by extension, education, must be a priority culturally and not just bureaucratically.
In a recent address to state superintendents of education, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan made some controversial remarks about the idea of community-based education policy.
“Some of the pushback is coming from, sort of, white suburban moms. … Their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were, and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought they were,” Duncan said.
The main reason for those controversial remarks is the American aversion to focus or control. The three tenets of the CCSI include “focus, coherence and rigor.”
There’s a focus here that allows for goals to be set and achieved without direct control from Washington.
The CCSI for Arizona recognizes that “by emphasizing required achievements, the Standards leave room for teachers, curriculum developers and states to determine how those goals should be reached and what additional topics should be addressed.”
Our education needs these things, mostly because there must be expectations for teachers and students. There should be a goal of, at least, being able to put together a cogent, coherent argument by the time you graduate high school.
Opposition to the CCSI exists, for the most part, because it seems like just another Washington mandate. Here in Arizona, a group appropriately called “Arizonans Against Common Core” articulates the revolt against mandates.
A document produced by the group attempts to liken CCSI to an international conspiracy. The group draws connections to the Obama administration, Intel and, most terrifying, the U.N.
The group’s claims are absolute malarkey and could use some common core itself. What this group does not understand, unfortunately, is that we need leadership in education policy today.
If the federal government did not create an inclusive goal for this nation’s education, who would step up and give us a vision?
Reach the columnist at pnorthfe@asu.edu or follow him on Twitter @peternorthfelt.
Editor's note: Due to a reporting error, the original draft of this column mistakenly identified the U.S. Department of Education as the entity responsible for adopting the Common Core State Standards Initiative, rather than the Arizona State Board of Education. The column has since been corrected.
