Over at The Weekly Standard, Andy Ferguson’s evaluation of Common Core is on an ACE inhibitor, fair and free of the high-blood pressure hyperbole that’s comprised debate of the standards. His piece is plenty critical, to be sure, but it’s clinical, not harsh — and best yet, it has a historical context that demonstrates why it’s so gosh-darned difficult to trust the Department of Education and its principals and friends who scream “reform!”
Bear in mind that states are supposed to implement the standards by 2015 when reading this, a roughly 35-year timeline of government suckage, from Ferguson:
Common Core was announced only eight years after President George W. Bush and Sen. Edward Kennedy introduced another revolutionary approach to learning in public schools, an expensive and ambitious program called No Child Left Behind. NCLB, as it’s referred to in the acronym-crazed world of education reform, forced states to raise their academic standards, which were considered too low, and to improve scores on standardized tests, which ditto.
NCLB itself came eight years after President Clinton thought up Goals 2000, a nationwide school reform program to enact “standards-based reforms” and thereby improve test scores. Goals 2000 was a reworking of a school reform plan called America 2000 that President George H.W. Bush launched in 1990 as a way of raising standards and getting better test scores out of America’s public schools. He wanted to be called “the education president,” President Bush did, and his approach, he said, was revolutionary.
And in 1983, only seven years before the ambitious launch of President Bush’s America 2000, the nation received an alarming report commissioned by President Reagan, who was troubled that test scores, along with standards, were too low among public school students. The report was called “A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform.” It concluded that higher standards were necessary to raise test scores.
See a pattern? Every several years, it’s time for a new reform to create “higher standards” and foster “higher test scores.” Dammit if the last one didn’t work. Ever since President Jimmy Carter created the Department of Education, it’s been education reform in perpetuity. Sure, federal programs require “tweaks” and “updates” such as Washington sees fit and when the time comes for “reauthorization” and such, but wholesale reform? It’s like the Yankees blowing $200 million to remake its roster each year and never cracking 70 wins. (If only education reform were so inexpensive.)
While Common Core isn’t an amendment to No Child Left Behind, per se, it’s the latest reform effort trying to accomplish the same goals where previous reforms have failed. They’re all just part of a riff in the same key — top-down, “higher” this, “higher” that.
As Ferguson writes, “The logic of education reform always points to more education reform.” And so the cycle will continue to the point at which Common Core will fall out of favor, just as No Child Left Behind did (it’s already in the process of doing so, even among its left-leaning adherents), and along will come our expert saviors to devise a new plan, because Santayana was full of it, y’know?
Imagining what failure will follow the failed follow-up to the failed No Child Left Behind is exciting!
Ferguson and Reason’s Nick Gillespie have a good discussion about the piece and the topic (with a natural conclusion) below.
