As I have been examining the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), I do so from a private school perspective. That means I am not addressing the bureaucracy, regulations, funding questions, etc. that those of you in public schools have to deal with. Those are very real concerns for you, and I don't want to minimize them at all. But they are not the issues that I want to examine.
As I said in my previous post, there seem to be three main criticisms of the CCSS which would be relevant to private schools. Let me address those.
The CCSS nationalizes school curriculum, which should remain under local/state control. For private schools, our curriculum is under our control anyway - we don't follow any particular local, state, or national curriculum, but choose what we believe is best in each subject area. But there are other observations here.
If the concern is about the federal government specifying this particular set of standards, that's a different question than calling it a "nationalized curriculum." We'll look at that issue, along with the other two concerns, in the next post.
The CCSS nationalizes school curriculum, which should remain under local/state control. For private schools, our curriculum is under our control anyway - we don't follow any particular local, state, or national curriculum, but choose what we believe is best in each subject area. But there are other observations here.
- The CCSS is not a curriculum at all. The official Common Core website has no specified curriculum, textbooks, or lesson plans. It is purely what the name says: a set of standards. For example, here is one of the standards from 4th grade math: Use the four operations to solve word problems involving distances, intervals of time, liquid volumes, masses of objects, and money, including problems involving simple fractions or decimals, and problems that require expressing measurements given in a larger unit in terms of a smaller unit. Represent measurement quantities using diagrams such as number line diagrams that feature a measurement scale.That standard, like the others, says nothing about how students are to learn it. There are many ways fourth graders can be taught how to solve these word problems. CCSS does not spell out anywhere what textbooks should be used to teach this, nor does it outline the yearly approach to teaching. As long as fourth graders can do this by the end of the year, they have met this standard.
- Textbooks are advertised as being "aligned" with the CCSS. This does not mean those textbooks are approved by CCSS. It simply means that students who progress through the given textbook series will meet the standards specified by CCSS. One textbook can be organized differently than another and both can be "aligned" with CCSS. One set of curricular materials might be based on traditional instructional methods, while another might be based on constructivist approaches, and both can still be "aligned" with CCSS.
- We already have a de facto "national" curriculum. Think about this: almost all public schools across the country use textbooks from one of a very few publishers (Pearson, Harcourt, McGraw-Hill, etc.). For all intents and purposes, their curriculum has already been nationalized by the textbook publishers. And private schools are in the same boat. For example, many Christian schools use books published by Bob Jones University Press, so it can be said that we are all using a "national" Christian school curriculum. You really don't have individual states drawing up their own curricula; they select from a limited number of curriculum offerings.
- The federal government is actually not specifying a curriculum. I suspect this is what is really meant by the concern about "nationalizing" the curriculum - that the federal Department of Education will be telling all schools what curriculum they must teach. But they are not doing so with the CCSS. Even if the "Race To The Top" program requires compliance with CCSS, there still is no requirement for the curriculum to be mandated by the federal government.
If the concern is about the federal government specifying this particular set of standards, that's a different question than calling it a "nationalized curriculum." We'll look at that issue, along with the other two concerns, in the next post.