And not so long

While I was polishing up the other one, I received a call asking me to focus more on the Common Core, so I rewrote it like this (with some help from my friends Therese and Isabella Pacheco).

Hello. My name is Carol Singletary and I am a National Board Certified teacher with 25 years’ experience teaching high school English and journalism in New Mexico. Last year, I left Clovis high school to teach English at a university. Many of my teacher friends, including my husband, would love to be here today, but if they used one of their leave days, they would be penalized by the new teacher evaluation plan.

So, you have me. And I have never done anything like this before. I hope you don't mind if I read this to you. As an English teacher, reading is my comfort zone..

When I began teaching in 1986 my principal gave me some textbooks, a key to my classroom and the professional autonomy to teach what was best for each group of students.  

Then NCLB, and Race to the Top, and finally, the Common Core State Standards happened. And it all changed.

The Common Core, designed by non-educators and adopted by most states BEFORE they were even written, are a national set of standards for K-12 in English and math meant to ensure all students are college and career ready. Hardwired into these standards, are new tests designed to measure schools’ compliance with the standards.

Do we really want standards designed to ensure kindergartners are “college and career ready”? Because that is the goal of the Core.

They took some arbitrary endpoint desired by business --because as Allan Golston said,   Businesses are the primary consumers of the output of our schools.   outputs?  Our kids are outputs? --They took this endpoint and worked backwards to kindergarten, creating tests all along the way to judge the students' readiness.

Supporters of the Core promote it as a way to more efficiently produce education. As one proponent said “When you have common standards, the result is you can develop all kinds of appliances, materials, that plug into it [just like 110 electricity]… Productivity should increase.”

Just like assembly line manufacturing did for the auto industry in the last century.

But no one seems to be asking why it is a good thing to treat our children like widgets on an assembly line.

Supporters of the Common Core say they are not a curriculum, and they do not dictate how or what schools must teach.    That's not entirely accurate.

Schools may technically be allowed to create their own curriculum, but since our students must be able to pass the newly designed, all-important PARRC tests, the curriculum must align with what will be on the test.

For years I set aside Fridays in my sophomore English classes for self-selected, independent reading. Students read what they cared about, then talked with me about the books they read.

Parents told me it was the best thing for their kids.

Students told me it was their favorite day of the week.

Then my principal told me I was wasting time doing this, and I needed to start teaching close reading of excerpts, because that was what would be on the Common Core tests.

Did you hear that? Reading books in an English class was a waste of time.

Instead, Common Core instructs us to teach Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail without discussing the civil rights movement at all.

Now, more and more days are spent on more and more tests made by outside, for-profit companies. If students do poorly on these tests, the teachers and schools are labeled as failing. The result, of course, is that schools demand their teachers focus only on what is tested.    Last year my school spent forty days on these tests and test prep.

Forty days. . . Eight weeks.. . One quarter of the school year.

And because the Core only covers English and Math, electives are forced to teach to those standards as well, creating literacy based lessons in art, PE and welding classes.

So don't tell me The Common Core does not dictate curriculum.

I can hear Ms Skandera’s reply to my concerns now. She will say, as she says over and over, that I am clinging to the failed status quo.

She keeps using that term but I don't think it means what she thinks it means.

The “status quo” is continuing to use standardized tests, which date back to the Industrial Revolution, to measure students, teachers and schools.

The “status quo” is ignoring the poverty which has plagued our students in New Mexico for decades. Study after study show the only thing standardized tests accurately measure is the socio economic level of the parents. And New Mexico ranks at the bottom of the nation for child welfare.

The “status quo”, at least under this administration, is spending millions of our education dollars on out of state corporations. Heck, out of country corporations like London-based Pearson. And treating our students as outputs for business.

Let me leave with you with one last thought. It is rather ironic that I was asked to come and speak with you about my personal thoughts regarding the Common Core and educational reform. Because when David Coleman, the non-educator and lead “Architect” of the Common Core was promoting the “rigorous objectivity” of the Core he said, “As you grow up in this world you realize people really don’t give a shit about what you feel or what you think.”

Thanks for listening.