A lot of hype is surrounding the release of national K-12 education standards in draft form by the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI), an effort under the auspices of the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (NGA Center) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO).
Teacherken has already written two excellent diaries questioning the wisdom of this effort to conceive national standards.
I want to take another angle and sound the alarm about how narrow-minded a vision of the curriculum they promote--and, by extension, how narrow a view they have accepted of the lives our children will go on to lead as human beings and citizens of a democracy.
You see, I read the glowing NYT editorial "National Standards At Last," and I was ready to be impressed by what they'd done, but when I had a look at the draft, I was disappointed.
The absence of foreign language standards is disturbing. The NGA/CCSSO claim they have built in comparability to "other top performing countries," but the fact is that in NONE of those other countries would educational standards without foreign language instruction be taken seriously. Students who fulfill these standards perfectly, but have learned only one language well, will not in fact be "prepared to succeed in our global economy and society."
Likewise, do you notice the absence of standards suggesting any curriculum in music or the arts? We will not be worthy of comparison to countries like Finland without this, either.
Diane Ravitch, in a recent interview with Diane Rehm, said that if she could mandate a single standard for the nation's curriculum, it would be that every child have the opportunity to learn to play a musical instrument. A bit rhetorical, perhaps, but the point seems to have been lost on the committee that conceived the big picture of this initiative.
Ravitch pointed out that rich people in this country to not settle for having their kids learn test-taking math/reading strategies in lieu of a broader curriculum. Why should we settle for anything less for every American child?
In an age where the forces of darkness want to replace Jefferson's influence on modern political institutions with the political ideas of Calvin and Aquinas, we need to realize that as long as our shared definition of K-12 education is "readin', writin', and 'rithmetic," we don't even have a basis from which to contest the skewed teaching of higher subjects and general knowledge.
We should bring in the most reputable organizations representing scholarship and education in every field from geography to mathematics to biology to music, and keep an eye on how it's been done better in places where it has been done better. The disappointing thing about NGA/CCSSO is that they were claiming to do something like this and only reformulated the Walmart/NCLB curriculum.
Many will say that children in our broken schools are not learning basic literacy and numeracy, and that there's no hope of achieving anything grander until we've met those basic needs. There is truth in that, of course, but I think it is a dangerous formula. First of all, we are in danger of forgetting and abandoning any strategy to use these basics as the means of achieving something more impressive for those kids. Corporate America will gladly take on employees who have been taught nothing but utilitarian skills, and who have a big hole in their education where they should have had a vista opened up on everything beautiful and great they might learn from the ongoing history of human artistic expression, of democracy and its institutions, of the cultures and languages of our shrinking world. If this ultimate objective is not kept firmly in view, we lack reason and motivation to raise the standards. (I am so sick of the purely economic justification for everything. If healthcare reform did not reduce the deficit, it would still be the necessary and right thing to do.)
But more importantly, the kids themselves will not be inspired to learn if they are fed the same bland diet of language-arts and math test-prep to meet the "standards." They are human beings, not potential employees, and they will be inspired by the things that inspire human beings qua human beings: the thrill of gaining knowledge about their world, of partaking in something truly greater than themselves, of making connections to the experiences, cultures, and languages of other peoples, of experiencing the arts and music as something other than consumers of entertainment products.
Let's not sell our students so short.
(I realize I may be mixing issues here to some extent. Perhaps it's only fair to say that I'm using the CCSSI document as a launching-off point. But I just can't see how anyone can sketch the shape of the education we're aiming for, when the blind spots are so enormous.)