Dear America,
The conservative battle for political hegemony has gone from simple sanctimony to militancy, and the consequence is a new war directed at accomplishing the goal. It is a "take-no-prisoners" affair, and the civilian casualties number in the millions. Take for example the controversy over the "common core," which forty three states subscribed to, Oklahoma's revocation of its adoption of the code bringing that total down to forty two. The battle in Oklahoma was not just vicious, it was personal to many people, including many educators, and the fodder for the canons was ignorance and distortion. No one has bothered to explain how the common core works or what it is intended to do, so conservatives could mischaracterize it with impunity the way they did with gun control, the national debt and deficit, abortion...you know, the whole panoply of issues on which the conservatives assume their own righteousness and thus forego the niceties of democratic principles and an informed electorate. It is unscrupulous, and worse, it is relentless. The conservative vision is to turn this country into a nation compelled to live under conservative rules rather than one that is based on individual liberty. And with that in mind, it is hard to see how a movement like the progressive movement can successfully fight the battle for the hearts and minds of the American people. The pitched battle over the common core makes the point.
I had a call from my brother, who is not a particularly educated man, but he loves his children and wants the best for them. When I spoke to him last a couple of weeks ago when I reported to you his conversion to advocate for the Affordable Care Act in light of his first insurance coverage in her lifetime, his report on how his sons are doing was laced with criticisms of the common care and its purported affect on his boys, which he could never quite articulate. It seems that in New York, the educational establishment is having trouble implementing the common core requirements, including the testing platform on which it stands. Albeit, these test batteries seem to be onerous for the kids required to take them, but school is onerous in my recollection, so I doubt that having these tests to take depreciates the quality of their lives. But outside the fact of the burden the testing represents, my brother at least had nothing to say about the common core that was anything but an emotional rant. Somehow, conservatives have managed to conflate vindication of states' rights, as in the gun law debate, with the fight against the common core without being required by their cadre...or more aptly described, their cabala...to explain the relationship, or common core as a principle overall, so let's start there.
The first time I heard about competency based training or testing was during my master's program in the late seventies. It isn't a simple technique to utilize because competency is a relative term and agreement must be reached in that regard for such a program to work, but it is essentially what the federal government is trying to induce the states to undertake. It is, simply put, requiring a student to demonstrate competency in a specific discipline before allowing him to advance to the next level of study in it. I would argue that that is what a grading system of A's, B;s and C's on report cards does on a simple scale, but that scale has failed us. Our schools are deficient when measured against the performances of the other advance industrialize nations, and something must be done or our labor market will no longer be competitive for our own children. That may be a simplification, but I believe it is close enough to make the point. The federal common core doesn't require that schools teach only what it oversees, but it does require that schools have their students master the core requirements in order to get the federal aid attached to hem. In other words, the federal government is trying to make sure that every state school system does its job, and somehow, I think with nothing more than the induced paranoia of threatening a federal takeover of our schools and a national, propagandizing curriculum, conservatives have managed to seduce ordinary parents that they are in jeopardy, and thus, so are their kids. It is demagoguery in its most insidious form--it paints the objective as just the opposite of what it is, and does so relying on nothing but fear and misinformation. And in the final analysis, the conservatives are engaged in a cynical, in fact diabolical, attempt to gain power through the use of unjustifiable fear...which the Democratic Party seems incapable of mounting a campaign against, so I have an idea.
I've said it before, but let me say it again. The mistake the federal government is making is offering the rewards for bringing their standards up to an acceptable level is that the states themselves are the problem now that the Republicans have enjoyed their resurgence of the past six years. The better process would be to appeal directly to the parents, and this is how. In New York when I was a kid we had a Board of Regents, which awarded a special "Regents' Diploma" to those who did well on standardized tests that were analogous to the common core of today. In addition, if you scored high enough, you got a scholarship or a small grant, depending on where on the curve your score wound up being. If the federal government did the same thing, I guarantee that the parents in every state would demand that their school boards prepare their students for the exams, and in so doing, the modicum of general knowledge in math and science that we need for our workforce to be completive for the rest of this century would be provided. And all this baloney about having to "teach to the test" and the teachers losing their autonomy in the class room would just disappear.
I, for one, think that there is no shame in testing our students to see if they have learned at least some acceptable proportion of what we are trying to teach them, and then giving them a credential with which they can tell the world of business and industry that they have done so. It seems like a good thing to me.
Your friend,
Mike
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