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Richard Nixon, in a moment of wisdom many will find incongruous, is reported to have observed, “When you’ve said something so many times you can’t stand the sound of your own voice saying it, that’s when people hear you for the first time.” We’ve come to that point with President Obama’s Common Core Standards (CCS), which I and many others have been criticizing for several years to an uninterested bipartisan audience. The criticism may make an impression now, however, because the you-know-what is hitting the fan in every California school district, and the story is the same in the other 44 states that bought into CSS. The implications for the California GOP become clear when the facts are reviewed.
Doug Lasken
The Common Core Academic Standards were forced on the states (arguably in violation of the Tenth Amendment) when money was promised via Obama’s signature education initiative, Race to the Top (RTTT), if the states purchased the standards. One fly in the ointment (the first of many) is that the RTTT money doesn’t begin to cover the cost of the standards, and is not supposed to be used for that purpose anyway. That cost is $10 billion nationwide. The cost in California is $2 billion- the first installment being $1 billion from Prop. 30- meaning we’ve taxed ourselves to pay for the standards. On top of this, California is not getting a dime from RTTT (because the Brown administration refused to buck unions on teacher accountability). Especially galling for California is that, unlike some other states, we don’t need new standards because we paid a few $ billion in 1990 for what everyone in the field (except publishing and testing interests) considers world class standards.
None of this dreary news has excited public opinion, but that will change now with the calamity unfolding in California. Per the recently passed SB 247, California has cancelled, beginning this spring, all standardized testing, with the rationale that the current test, the California Standards Test (CST), is based on the previous standards. Sounds logical, except that we are at least two years away from implementation of the new standards. This means that for at least the next two years, and probably much longer, California public schools will have no standardized testing and no approved curriculum or textbooks, an unprecedented calamity in terms of student accountability and teacher guidance, the exact opposite of what we were supposed to be purchasing with our $2 billion.
This is not the end of the unfolding mess. Obama’s Department of Education, under Arne Duncan, is waging a silly fight against SB 247, claiming that it is robbing children of several years of accountability as required by the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). Never mind that the Dept. of Ed., using RTTT and CCS, pushed us into this situation, and never mind that NCLB is universally judged as badly written and impractical, requiring that by 2014 all students be proficient in reading (making you wonder what planet its authors were from). Now states are made to grovel in fear of the universal proficiency requirement and beg the Dept. of Education for waivers from the harsh financial penalties for NCLB non-compliance. Astoundingly, the Los Angeles Unified School District- with 650,000 students the second largest in the nation- has accepted culpability in this charade and announced that it will show accountability to the Dept. of Ed., not with the cancelled CST, but with progress shown on tests given to English Language Learners (ELL’s), primarily native Spanish speakers who are learning English. The district announced this week, the 8th week of school, that it will rearrange classes on a mass scale, reassigning thousands of students to new teachers, so that non-English speaking students will be grouped together for the purpose of assessing them, a policy so ill-informed and destructive that 17 principals have joined hundreds of teachers and parents in opposing the policy, on the grounds that only one group of students will be assessed. There will be no accountability for gifted students, or Special Ed. students, or the hundreds of thousands of English speaking students, but who cares, when the only thing that matters is that our state show proper obeisance to the Obama administration and its half-baked programs.
Does the catastrophic rollout of Common Core (mirroring that of Obamacare) sound like an ideal issue for the state and national GOP to embrace? You would think so, though Mitt Romney wouldn’t touch the Common Core Standards in his presidential campaign. He only mentioned them once, and got the facts wrong, saying that the feds were paying for the standards. As noted, the feds pay nothing; the states tax themselves to pay for it. Maybe if Romney were campaigning now, when the implosion of this ill thought-out pork monster is unfolding, he would jump on the issue (hopefully better informed than last time).
It was heartening to see an anti-Common Core resolution pass at the recent CA GOP convention (largely through the efforts of state Executive Committee member William Evers), but there was zero publicity for the resolution. I saw not one media account of it.
A worthy goal for the March state convention would be to make a forceful, unified statement attacking Obama’s education initiatives, RTTT and CCS. Since those initiatives are now causing havoc before everyone’s eyes, this should be a no-brainer. Most rank and file Republicans these days are wondering if the party will save itself from what appears its imminent demise, the cause of death being “meaninglessness.” A forceful expression against CCS at the March convention, along with a skillfully formulated and presented press release, would go a long way toward reassuring the rank and file that, unlike the Democrats, the GOP is not run by special interests. To put the choice in stark terms: the party can side either with the spectacle of federal bureaucrats and special interest money running local schools (the apparent route for Romney and, currently, most GOP state legislators), or it can distinguish itself from the Democrats and Obama, and continue its existence as a viable opposition party.
Doug Lasken is a retired LA Unified teacher, recently returned to coach debate, freelancer and education consultant. Reach him at doug.lasken@gmail.com.