The testimony Monday before the state Senate Education Committee by a 5th grade student from Kenova Middle School on Common Core was instructive. “I bet if you go ask the people in my math class they would say, ‘yes, this Common Core that you put in West Virginia is confusing.’”
Out of the mouths of children…
Indeed, confusion does reign concerning West Virginia’s participation in the Common Core education reforms that create uniform standards for achievement. The goals are national standards in reading and math that are comparable from state to state and more rigorous learning to make students better prepared for college. West Virginia’s Common Core standards are called Next Generation.
Certainly it would be helpful to know how students here compare with their counterparts in other states, but even that concept is controversial. Some education scholars argue that the standards themselves matter far less than other factors.
“You’ve got states like Massachusetts with high-quality standards and high achievement and states like California with high-quality standards and low achievement,” Russ Whitehurst, education scholar at the Brookings Institution, told the New York Times last month. “The correlation is zero.”
But much of the debate in West Virginia now is not so much about the benefit—or lack thereof—of the standards, but rather how you achieve them. The curricula, including the math instruction the Kenova 5th grader was complaining about, were developed by West Virginia teachers and administrators to help students meet the standards.
“Math worksheets are not the standards, but instead are a curriculum tool,” wrote state School Superintendent Michael Martirano in an op-ed last week. “I am confident this type of confusion can be remedied without repealing the standards.”
Well, maybe.
Last week the House of Delegates gave overwhelming bi-partisan approval to a bill that repeals the Common Core standards. “We need to stop,” House Speaker Tim Armstead said on Metronews Talkline yesterday. “We need to have parental, teacher and principal input into these (standards). That’s what we’ve done with this bill.”
Now the Senate has started work on the bill, but the outcome there is less certain. Also, even if the Legislature does pass a bill opting out of Common Core, as several other states have done, Governor Tomblin may well veto it. The Governor is more likely to side with Martirano and the state Board of Education in support of Common Core.
The debate is also fueled by criticism that Common Core is a federalization of public education, which is traditionally a state and local issue. That provides a link to the Obama Administration, making Common Core kind of like the education version of Obamacare, spawning theories about the federal government data mining information about children based on their test results.
Meanwhile, some West Virginia teachers—even those who support Common Core—complain they have not had enough time or training to properly implement the new standards. But one knowledgeable education official I talked with suggested teachers were simply resistant to change or concerned about having to “teach to the test.”
The intense debate about Common Core shows just how passionate we are in this country about trying to improve public education, but also how complicated and controversial significant change can be.