The Coming Catastrophe in Education

Thought experiments are employed throughout the academic world, from mathematics and quantum mechanics to philosophy and economics.

But rarely are they used in the world of education. And yet, like a gathering storm whose birth pangs only emit a gentle and benign breeze, there are early signs that American public education is possibly starting down a doomsday path.  This path could culminate in an outcome that would include an outraged public, an enraged national teacher corps, and a vacuum where clear policy making should exist.

How might we arrive at such a dire situation in as little as a few years?

Consider the following thought experiment: as the Common Core descends from the abstract and out of the minds of the educational intelligentsia (with a generous assist from the likes of The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) it is becoming increasingly apparent that teachers feel ill-prepared for the tectonic shift away from Outcome Based Learning to the new modality of the CCSS. This uneasiness has nothing to do with the value or merit of the Common Core per se. Everyone wants higher standards and a focus on critical thinking aptitude. But the reality is proving more difficult and might just culminate in an educational Civil War.

The headlines of the past week are revealing:

The President of the NEA, New York City teachers, and numerous states in the process of getting cold feet (such as Georgia and Kansas), all point to the same essential flaw in the Common Core: there is a profound disconnect between pie-in-the-sky demands and actual student aptitude. Asking first graders to understand the contributions of Ancient Mesopotamia or asking high school juniors to synthesize the work of Alexis De Tocqueville with the Federalist Papers seems about as realistic as asking a group of national bureaucrats to design a one-size-fits-all educational movement that assuages every region, every political sensibility, and every subject matter.

Forty-five states quickly embraced the Common Core with little debate and fanfare. And yet, the real fireworks are not even close to beginning.

Consider what will happen in a year’s time when the first battery of tests begins to be administered to American school children under the auspices of testing “robust and real skills” that will be needed by future American workers. If my second grader can’t explain the nuances of Euclidian geometry or a high school freshman fails to connect the prose of Goethe to 19th Century German Nationalism (I jest with these examples…but not by much) it doesn’t take a genius to conclude that test scores will not just be low, they will be calamitously low (if the state of New York is any indication), reinforcing and propagating the misguided belief that all of American public education is a sham.

Teachers will be quick to blame the test. The public will quickly condemn teachers as caterwauling incompetents who can’t get their students to perform. Who knows who the intelligentsia will blame? The political leaders who deliriously wanted Race to the Top grant money for their state budget coffers will have some explaining to do and the result will be a crisis in educational policy the likes of which this country has never seen.

If Standards-Based Learning has already been abandoned and the Common Core rollout turns out to be an even poorer national rollout than Obamacare, educational policy in this country will be saturated so deeply in primordial ooze that starting from scratch might be the only option.

But here is where things get catastrophically bad.

By this point, who is there to trust? The federal government gave us NCLB, but followed that up with an incompetent rollout of the Common Core. State governments abrogated their curricular responsibilities by taking the easy money from the Obama Administration that spawned the Common Core in the first place. School boards, in the mean time, have been fickle for a generation.

In the midst of this melee one wonders what will become of teachers, parents, and most of all, the students, as this maelstrom gets sorted out. Who knows what practices, pedagogy, and curriculum will become the gold standard and who knows how long it will take to emerge.