Imagine a whole generation being tested like lab rats. Imagine that their futures are fully reliant on faith placed in an ill-prepared system, and imagine that few people would listen when they rejected this system. It sounds pretty dystopian, but that idea is right in front of us, and it’s in our schools. “Common Core” is a buzzword that bestows a feeling of bright futures upon hopeful teachers, but contrarily spells certain doom for students.
In an attempt to integrate a more consistent and successful educational system, states all across the country have begun setting new standards for students. These standards, titled “Common Core State Standards,” offer a new rigorous system of learning with the promise that the students will walk away with a deeper understanding of the subjects. Students have had to pick up more complex material in less time. It’s a program to encourage a stronger education and better prepare students for college and their careers beyond.
Math and English classes have been “upgraded” through Common Core to include “rigorous content” for students to apply “knowledge through higher-order thinking skills,” according to the Common Core Standards website.
Of course, words aren’t always the reality. The question among parents and teachers is whether or not it actually works. The standards are supposed to make students have a more complex idea of the subjects and realize why the material is what it is so they can better apply it in their lives. However, it seems that a lot of students are coming home confused with problems and methods that make no sense to them. Some people argue that it’s the problem with the school, or the standardized testing. While parents and teachers that haven’t been forced to learn under these standards bicker about, allow me to say my input in this whole situation. Because, as a student that’s actually had to learn under Common Core, I have quite a bit to say that may be a little more valuable than blind speculation.
In eighth grade, I was put into an algebra class with Common Core standards. The entire year was quite the experience, and most of it was not for good reason. Instead of returning home understanding exactly how to do what I needed to do in order to pass, I came home knowing that I’d have to teach myself all the material. While our teacher was busy trying to show us trivial ways to apply the math to real life, class time would whittle away and the students would be left increasingly confused. The textbook became the real teacher, but the new textbook was vague and uninformative. Simply put, the learning conditions were not ideal.
All of my other math classes prior had never been as confusing as that one, and it wasn’t the material. I can understand algebra, and while the teacher wasn’t amazing she certainly got the material through to her other classes. However, where our textbooks before had the formulas and concepts explained in organized sections throughout the chapter, the textbook with “Common Core” stamped on the cover would have a title and practice problems for each section. No formulas, no definitions (except for the glossary in the back), just problems. Students just can’t learn anything if the teacher uses class time to give practice problems expecting us to learn from the textbook, but the textbook is unhelpful and demands we already know the formulas. It was a lose-lose situation.
I was not the only unfortunate student to have to learn under the standards. Several classrooms had adopted Common Core that year, and many other seventh and eighth graders had to face the challenges that came with it. Liza Panfilova, a sophomore Trojan and Common Core veteran, described it as, “…one of the worst, traumatizing experiences I have ever had. So in our class, which was math Common Core for Algebra, basically what happened was we’d break up into groups and we’d have like one or two big problems to work on, but nobody knew how to solve the problems because we were never taught any formulas. We were just like, ‘Hey, play around with it, maybe you’ll figure it out, then do this other problem.’”
When students aren’t really taught the material at all but then expected to work with it, the system works a little less smoothly. But then the argument comes along that it’s the fault of the teachers. However, it’s important to consider that these standards also dictate the teaching style. Great teachers are forced to alter their methods to make way for the learning. In doing this, teachers trained to share knowledge conventionally are thrown a curveball under the standards, leaving them reworking their practice to teach as well.
“I don’t know that any educational standards can fail on their own. It mostly has to do with teachers taking risks and trying new things and being able to reflect the evolving needs of students and society,” David Tow, a teacher at Terra Linda, speculates. “That being said, if teachers are either hesitant to refocus on skills and the Common Core standards or even reject them out right, then we will not see the types of outcomes and emphases that we hope to have.”
So perhaps it is the teachers that don’t know how to teach it taking too long to adapt to the system. Or, maybe it’s the system itself. Panfilova continued to say, “I do not support Common Core. Personally, I learned absolutely nothing through it, and I know that a lot of people are frustrated with it. I feel like, honestly, you learn less because of Common Core, and you learn less of the things that are actually going to help you in life and you just waste time on doing pointless busy work that seems to have a greater purpose, but it doesn’t.” Students don’t see it as a way to enhance their knowledge, but instead they see it as a more convoluted way to learn the same simple concepts. Whether the teacher is good at conveying the ideas or not, most students just don’t have the need to know these deeper concepts. When in life will the average student need to know how to jump number lines? Why teach kids, some of which aren’t even in middle school yet, how to tear apart numbers in order to subtract when the standard method of lining up the numbers and subtracting down works faster and more easily? The standards are convoluted and arbitrary to the point that they may actually make students have a lesser understanding of the ideas, completely nullifying the need for Common Core in the first place.
Before releasing video games, movies, novels, or anything, companies test and balance the rough product to smooth it out before it’s thrown out into the public. There was no hot iron to push out the wrinkles in Common Core. No controlled experiments were held to test its benefits. There was evidence to support the need for Common Core, sure. But there is minimal evidence to support that Common Core has actually fixed anything. Since its implementation, there has been no proof of improvement. It just hasn’t worked, but 42 states across the nation have implemented it anyways. Why? Because people just accepted the harmonious-sounding practice believing that the execution would be as perfect as the ideas sounded. It was put into place around the country without any prior testing. Believe it or not, perfect systems on paper may not exactly work as expected when applied to the real world (think about the dawn of the Soviet Union).
Using the children of America as experimentees for a trial-and-error attempt at reworking the education system isn’t a reliable or future-proofed idea. It’s expecting a generation to take the fall for the future and treat them throughout the rest of their lives as if they didn’t have to walk on the broken leg they have as a result. We shouldn’t be handicapped because the ones in authority made a poor insight.
That being said, I don’t think that educational standards should just never be changed. What I do think is that maybe reworking these standards while there are millions of students going through the only years of school they’ll have in their lives isn’t the best idea. If the standards don’t work, then those students have wasted their academic career working for unreachable standards. What I’m saying is that there needs to be some more research done to these standards before we implement them.
Common Core is bad. Not in a humorous way, where its effects are unpleasant but not lasting, but in a dire “we need to fix this now” way. Its very principles are too good to be true, and so far it’s been exactly that. It directly affects students, teachers, and parents, and if we put too much trust in it we’ll be left with hundreds of thousands of kids dazed and confused. Kids will have a hatred for learning and teachers will have anger in the fact that their hands are tied and they’re forced to teach in ways they don’t believe in. We aren’t variables in an experiment, we’re the future of America pleading for this system to be put to an end. And if Common Core doesn’t end, the scholarships of America just might.