How will the Common Core State Standards influence your professional work?

[Kent Williamson]

The NGA Center and Council of Chief State School Officers released a public draft of their Common Core State Standards for ELA on September 21. After looking them over, considering NCTE President Kylene Beers' letter about their creation and the work ahead, and reading the response by an NCTE Review Panel to a July draft, please share your thoughts here about how they may support or inhibit your best work as a literacy educator.

[Karen V. Packard]

Jennifer,
The Common Core Standards cannot possibly include all the things you value. Those things cannot be assessed with a standardized test. I believe the writers of those standards are rooted in the behavioral psychology of learning which limits their understanding to those aspects of education that can be tested by multiple choice items. Education for profit, i.e., standardized curriculum, standardized test prep materials, standardized tests as well as standardized charter schools will benefit from these standards.
They are not keeping up with the times or our students, because they don't know what teaching and learning are really about. If they did, they would listen to the professionals who represent NCTE and NCTM.

[Daniel Sharkovitz]

Kent,

The fact that people with power (Council of Chief State School Officers) want to extend the range of that power and its ideology of control over others is common in societies without democratic traditions. The fact that local control of public schools is now being usurped in America, apparently without interference or even much indignation, speaks to a profound shift in how citizens of the United States define their own freedoms and liberties.

I find it odd that some in this country would want to recreate such a highly centralized educational testing bureaucracy of the sort that Stalin organized. It is strange that so many would want to take away so much of what makes teaching interesting and exciting for teachers and students alike--the opportunity to locate materials that connect to our individual student needs, and develop lessons based on those materials and student needs.

These national standards, should they become the next Truth and Way, will serve to alienate teachers from some of the deepest joys of the teaching life.

The language of education many teachers came to recognize through the work of educators like Dewey, has become the language of business, Wall Street, the marketplace. And when these tyrants bankrupt the education sector. What then? The stream of bailout money is not endless.

Dan Sharkovitz