By Steven T. Corneliussen
'The Common Core State Standards Initiative,' says its website, 'is a state-led effort that established a single set of clear educational standards for kindergarten through 12th grade in English language arts and mathematics that states voluntarily adopt.'
The standards, say two University of California, Berkeley, math professors in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, 'are the culmination of a meticulous, 20-year process initiated by the states and involving teachers, educators, business leaders and policy makers from across the country and both sides of the aisle.'
'The Common Core State Standards,' says a letter to the editor of the WSJ, 'are a thinly veiled, unconstitutional effort to implement a national curriculum ... written by left-leaning educational experts.'
And as the two Berkeley professors, Edward Frenkel and Hung-Hsi Wu, point out in their WSJ op-ed, the Republican National Committee has called the standards a 'nationwide straitjacket on academic freedom and achievement.'
That committee opposes the standards on grounds of state and local curriculum prerogative. 'But this argument,' the two mathematicians say, 'ignores the fact that mathematics represents objective, timeless and necessary truths. These truths apply uniformly and equally to any citizen, regardless of geographic location. Fractions mean the same thing in Iowa and Alabama as they do in California and Texas.'
The standards have been adopted by 45 states and the District of Columbia. Frenkel and Wu condemn efforts to repeal them, arguing that US math education 'is in deep crisis,' with the World Economic Forum ranking US math and science education 'a dismal 48th.' They add, 'This is one of the reasons the 2010 report 'Rising Above the Gathering Storm' by the National Academies warned that America's ability to compete effectively with other nations is fading.'
It did not take long before the WSJ received a barrage of letters to the editor. Seven WSJ readers responded mostly negatively to the op-ed advocating the Common Core State Standards. The letter writers argue the following:
* Any standards are meaningless until teachers, parents and administrators are held responsible for students' failures.
* What's really needed is freedom and competition.
* We had things right 50 years ago.
* Washington interference in local education causes educational decline.
* By focusing only on math and language arts, the standards are 'perfect for breeding the low-information citizen.'
* The authors accuse Republicans, but they should instead 'speak with the New York teachers union.'
* The 'simplistic' authors 'have a typical progressive answer to an educational problem that progressives have created,' when what's really needed is to choose better educated teachers and to stop giving disruptive students 'free range in classrooms in the name of social equality.'
A challenge on standards
In a second Wall Street Journal op-ed on the topic a few days later, two prominent conservatives, energetically claiming conservative grounding, have now challenged fellow conservatives—in particular the Republican National Committee—for opposing the Common Core State Standards.
Sol Stern is a contributing editor at the Manhattan Institute's City Journal. Joel Klein is an executive vice president at News Corp, which owns the WSJ, and directs the company's education division. They never mention the Berkeley mathematicians' earlier WSJ op-ed advocating the standards. But they call the standards 'one of the most promising education initiatives of the past half-century' and declare that 'all Americans, including conservatives, should applaud [the] standards, which celebrate the country's foundational documents and enable students to share the heritage of Americans.'
Stern and Klein reach confidently for conservative affirmation, in part by criticizing progressives:
Unsurprisingly, the adoption of common educational standards is opposed by some hard-liners on the educational left. The Common Core's call for coherent, content-based math and literacy standards threatens to undo the watered-down version of progressive education thinking that has dominated the public schools over the past half-century. Indeed, progressive education philosophy opposes any set curriculum for the schools. They tend to favor pedagogical approaches in the classroom such as 'child-centered' instruction and 'teaching for social justice,' rather than rigorous academic content.
The coauthors emphasize that the standards come from states' combined efforts—'constitutional federalism at its best,' they call it—and involve no federal mandate. They say little about math, but they press the issue of civics:
Conservative critics ignore how the Common Core Standards support teaching all students about the nation's rich heritage of constitutional government, which is often overlooked in K–12 schools. For example, one of the Common Core's reading standards for grades 9–10 calls for students to analyze and understand the arguments in 'seminal U.S. texts, including the application of constitutional principles and use of legal reasoning.' How many American public schools do that today?
Stern and Klein close by charging that 'some conservatives want to continue trying to bring down the whole edifice of the Common Core, thereby returning public education to the curricular wasteland that has prevailed up to now.' They propose that it would be 'more constructive to participate in the conversation about how to make the standards and the academic content taught in American classrooms even better.'
The conservative op-ed piece drew further conservative objections. Within days two letters turned up attacking the authors' premise.
The second of those letters charges that the standards' originators worked in secret to supplant local prerogatives. Curiously, the first letter bases its argument on a starkly plain error of fact, uncorrected by the WSJ's editors. 'One of the unfortunate aspects of the lack of trust in virtually anything federal these days,' writes a man from Florida, 'is the tendency for many conservatives to fear hidden malware embedded somewhere within the software, so to speak, that will allow some sort of hanky-panky down the road that cannot be discerned on initial review.'
'Anything federal'? The two conservative coauthors of the op-ed being challenged had emphasized that the standards 'were not written by the federal government, but by a committee selected by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers. The committee's efforts were backed financially by several private foundations.' They had also stipulated, 'All decision-making about standards remains with the states.' In the original op-ed, the two Berkeley mathematicians had introduced the subject by describing a state-initiated process that included teachers, educators, policy makers, and business leaders from across the US and the political spectrum.
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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA's history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.
