During his campaign and into his term, Gov. Doug Ducey has been a vocal opponent of the Common Core set of standards. This week he continued his bashing of Common Core in front of the Arizona Board of Education where he urged the board to “begin by reviewing the English Language Arts and Mathematics standards in their entirety to ensure that our children are well served by the standards you develop.”
Without looking any deeper, it is already clear that Ducey doesn’t really understand what Common Core is or does. Ducey’s speech is indicative of a widely held belief that the set of standards is a federal mandate that is being forced upon the states by the Obama Administration. Ducey continued in his speech, “I think the current Washington administration has hurt K-12 education by involving itself in recent funding and waiver decisions.”
In reality, Common Core is a set of standards that was developed by the states to best serve them and their students. In a fact check done by the Arizona Republic during the 2014 election cycle, it was concluded that “a bipartisan group of each state’s top education officials met in 2007 to begin overhauling the nation’s education guidelines.” The goal of the standards was to develop a benchmark that students across the country could be expected to reach so that students in the U.S. would be learning at a level comparable to students in other countries. By extension, students in the U.S. would be adequately prepared to compete in the global workplace that has rapidly developed over the past 20 years.
Additionally, the Common Core or as it’s more formally known, the Common Core State Standards Initiative, is just that, a set of standards that set goals for schools across the country. It isn’t an attempt to dictate how teachers must teach, but simply a set of topics that students should learn during their time in school.
As is addressed on the Common Core website, “Teachers know best about what works in the classroom. That is why these standards establish what students need to learn but do not dictate how teachers should teach. Instead, schools and teachers will decide how best to help students reach the standards.” There is an obvious benefit to being able to say that a student in Arizona has reached the same benchmarks in their education as a student in Virginia or Illinois.
Under such a system, a student who grew up in one state could easily make the transition to a college or workplace in a different state with the assumption that the education she received would be sufficient for her to thrive in her new state.
The opposition to the Common Core set of standards seems to be based on an unrelated dislike for the federal government. It’s time for state officials to put political issues behind them and do what is best to give students across the country a 21st century education that will prepare them for whatever they want to do in their lives. In Arizona, it starts with giving K-12 school districts the money that the voters chose to issue to the schools, but the money should be followed by cooperation with other states to implement standards that have already been proven to be best practices across the country and internationally.
Reach the columnist at zjosephs@asu.edu or follow @zachjosephson on Twitter.
Editor’s note: The opinions presented in this column are the author’s and do not imply any endorsement from The State Press or its editors.
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