Common Core

The argument over something called "Common Core" has been boiling out there for some time.  But I've been mostly oblivious.  All I really knew was that it was a sort of National set of standards for education.  I knew that there are lots of folks at the Indiana Statehouse who are in favor of the program, and that our previous leader at the Indiana Department of Education may have lost re-election because of his advocacy for Common Core.

What I didn't know was pretty much everything else.  I didn't have any idea what Common Core was, or what specific arguments for and against were being made in the debate over its adoption.

That changed somewhat when I heard Greg Garrison's radio program this morning.  He invited a proponent of the program to come on and explain why it's going to be a good thing for education.  He then brought on opponents to explain why they oppose it and prefer to stay with the ISTEP.  I thought Garrison was exceptionally fair with both sides, simply asking them questions and allowing them to say what they wanted to say without arguing or promoting either side over the other.  In fact, he admitted that he has not yet taken a position on the issue and is still trying to gather more information himself.  That's the best way to present an issue on any media forum, as far as I am concerned.

I learned a lot about the arguments, if not about the actual standards.  My initial reaction leans toward the anti side, mainly because the proponent took too much of his time trashing the Right-Wing kooks from the Tea Party who were mischaracterizing Common Core.  That turned me off, as I think it did Garrison, who rebuked him a bit for straying away from making his case to engage in mudslinging.

The bottom line seems to be that Common Core is an attempt to set national standards and testing for English and Math.  Other subjects are being developed, but are not yet adopted.  The reason it's needed, according to proponents, is so different states don't certify their students as having met core standards when each state uses different standards. 

The argument against Common Core is fundamentally based on the mistrust many have against anything created and managed by the Federal Bureaucracy.  The proponent used this mistrust against the other side, accusing them of harboring paranoid fantasies about terrible government misbehavior in forcing anti-American or anti-Christian lessons into the curricula.  And they also fear the Big Brother type tyranny of capturing performance data and even biometric data for monitoring and control of our children.

When the anti-side came on, they calmly explained that although they know such federal overreach is not present in the current version of the program, they can produce a document from a Department of Education staffer that expresses those "paranoid fantasies" as future goals of the Common Core program.

The anti-side also noted that Common Core has lower standards than ISTEP.  Why would Indiana adopt a new national standards program that lowers the bar for our children and hands the whole program over to Washington, DC to be administered at an exhorbitant cost?

So at this point I question the need for a national standard.  Colleges can already evaluate students from the various states with testing from the SAT and ACT, and they'll learn how well each state actually educates the students they send out to those colleges.  So what's the overwhelming need to nationalize this?

I have long been in favor of dissolving the Federal Education Department.  Education is the responsibility of the community and the state, and the Feds have no business getting their fingers into it.  The only role I could consider supporting in Washington would be a small organization that researches educational programs in the various states and helps share information about those programs that produce the best results.  The only way such a national organization can be helpful is by helping find and distribute methods and practices that work well. Even so, states don't need a Federal agency to do that, they could more easily and cheaply collaborate among themselves.

Absent more information that convinces me there's a compelling argument in favor of national education standards, I'm going to line up on the "No" side.