Common Core Guidelines, not Common Core Tests

The testing culture that drives so much of what happens in our schools impoverishes them in many important ways, and our reading shows that unfortunately that culture has now successfully begun to co-opt the Common Core. Standards that were meant to be guides for educators have now become the basis of a whole new panoply of tests and test preparation materials.

Most people probably have no idea that the Common Core standards were simply meant as useful guidelines for teachers developing curriculum so that students in all parts of the country could expect to graduate high school having met a shared set of standards . Yet an entire educational publishing industry stood to profit greatly from the assumption that testing materials would accompany the new standards, so it wasted no time developing those tests. It seems that when profit-making is involved in education, inevitably the student experience eventually suffers. Incentives will now be tied to strong performance by schools on these new tests aligned with the Common Core and the standards will become a tool used to punish and control teachers and schools. 

Wrong Answer, by Rachel Aviv, an exposé of the Atlanta school system's widespread public school cheating scandal in the July 21 New Yorker,  describes one of the terribly serious possible outcomes of an overly stressed testing culture. The article describes a culture of cheating that developed as a response to a district's data-driven performance demands as measured by standardized tests. The cheating scandal was widespread during the No Child Left Behind era and will only be replicated as states add high-stakes testing aligned with Common Core.

We should resist the impulse to look for solutions to large problems in small places. We will not find the answer to how to help all students in a complex country like the US get a good education in  spreadsheets. Data gained from testing can be a tool - one of many - but it is not a panacea. A culture of standardized testing will not produce lasting improvement. We should insist that the Common Core remain a set of guidelines for schools to use, and we should separate education from profit-making. Education should not be allowed to be treated as a business.