Core Standards - Sound Bites and Standardization

[Tom Hoffman has been carrying the water for the ed-tech crew on this issue for the past few weeks -- if you haven't been reading him lately, do.]

The Common Core State Standards Initiative has released its English standards, and the standards are open for comment until October 21st. I strongly encourage you to look at the standards and make comment - I find them hard to read, because I think they are poorly written, but standards often are.

The National Standards movement obviously has its seeds in No Child Left Behind, but not just in the obvious ways. National Standards is an idea that sounds great on paper. It, like NCLB, sounds like a great idea, but of course, like NCLB, it's a better sound bite than it is policy.

There are plenty of reasons to question this movement, but here's the scariest part for me. This Core Standards movement should scare everyone who believes that meaning and learning is still most powerfully made in the spaces that students and teachers share. More than teachers, students, state administrators, the group that stands most to gain from national standards and a national test is the education-industrial complex.

What has kept many of the major players in that industry to commit completely to the on-line education / "content delivery" game is that with 50 different state tests and standards, there is a reasonably high barrier to entry to the market. Once there is a national curriculum and a national test, we will see a further blurring of the line between "education" and "training" where kids are given online instruction and online assessment that can be delivered to any student, regardless of geography.

When I was at the FCC this summer, Jim Shelton of the Department of Education expressed a vision of education where we could find the best math lecturer in the country and deliver that lecture online to all students everywhere. That is the vision of educational technology that is behind these standards. It has the risk of the ultimate deprofessionalization of teachers and depersonalization of education.

There are billions of dollars at stake on these standards and the money and the access to power is on the side of the folks who want to create the standards and the tests that assess them, and the avenues available to teachers and parents (unions, PTAs, etc...) have largely been asleep at the switch. This is a movement that will profoundly change how schools are run and governed and profoundly change the way students will learn. This isn't about whether or not people think that all students should be able to write a thesis statement. This is about how students are taught that information, how they are assessed on that information, and on the role of big business in teaching and assessing them.

If we want a say in the future of school -- the time is now... if it is not already too late.