QUESTION.
1. Define Common Core State Standards(CCSS) (include the definitionsof curriculum versus standards).
2. State the concern that you chose (written below) andthen decide if the concern is valid or not. Give your rationalesand references for your stance.
The Common Core can't speed up child development
Recent evaluations of the state's preschoolers have determinedthat only 47 percent are ready for kindergarten, compared to 83percent judged ready last year. This drastic drop isn't the resultof an abrupt, catastrophic decline in the cognitive abilities ofour children. Instead, it results from a re-definition ofkindergarten readiness, which now means being able to succeedacademically at a level far beyond anything expected in the past.For example, a child entering kindergarten is now expected to knowthe difference between informative/explanatory writing and opinionwriting. The concern is that preschoolers without that knowledgewill not succeed at meeting the new higher-level Common-Corestandards. However, I think a more pressing concern is: Why do wehave educational standards that are not aligned with even the mostbasic facts of human development? Clearly these test results showthat the problem is with the standards, not the children.
Educational attainment is part of human development, andfundamentally this is a biological process that cannot be sped up.We cannot wish away our biological limitations because we find theminconvenient. Children will learn crawling, walking, listening,talking and toilet training, all in succession at developmentallyappropriate ages. Once in school, for skills that requireperforming a physical task, that are in what Bloom's Taxonomyclassifies as the \"psychomotor domain,\" it is understood thatchildren will only learn when they are physically anddevelopmentally ready. No one expects four-year olds to typefluently on a computer keyboard, play difficult Chopin Etudes onthe piano, prepare elaborate meals in the kitchen or drive acar.
However, for skills in what Bloom calls the \"cognitive domain,\"the school curriculum has become blind not only to the progressionof normal child development but also to natural variations in therate that children develop. It is now expected that pre-schoolchildren should be able to grasp sophisticated concepts inmathematics and written language. In addition, it is expected thatall children should be at the same cognitive level when they enterkindergarten, and proceed through the entire grade-schoolcurriculum in lock step with one another. People, who think thatall children can learn in unison, have obviously never worked withspecial needs children or the gifted and talented.
Demanding that children be taught to developmentallyinappropriate standards for language and math comprehension is nota harmless experiment. This exercise in futility wastes the time ofteachers and students and unethically sets all of them up to fail.It exacerbates the very problems that the new curriculum issupposed to fix. It leaves boys, whose verbal development forbiological reasons already lags behind girls, even further behindand will accelerate the trend of fewer boys going on to college.Even today boys only make up about 40 percent of college studentsnationwide and their numbers will continue to dwindle.
The new curriculum standards and testing regimens are motivatedby a well-intentioned desire to close achievements gaps that existbetween the various socio-economic and ethnic and racial groups.There is a belief that by demanding that all children meet a set ofrigid and arbitrarily high academic standards, achievement gaps canbe closed and economic opportunities increased for all. Theapparent reasoning is that if all children receive the sameeducation and are held to the same academic standards, then allchildren will have equal opportunity to succeed as adults.
However, addressing pervasive economic inequality by pretendingthat in an ideal world all children should be alike isn't asolution. The inequalities that plague our society are inherent inthe structure of our political and economic systems. A newcurriculum will not change the underlying pathologies corruptingthese structures. It is a mistake to conflate unjust economicinequalities that arise from our broken political and economicsystems with normal differences in abilities and dispositions amongpeople that arise from being human. If all barriers to inequalitywere broken down, people would still be different from one anotherand normal human development would still unfold.
Education should be about helping each child, regardless ofbackground or academic readiness, achieve his or her full, uniquepotential as a human being. It should instill not just academicsbut also physical, emotional and social skills, which are alsoessential for making meaningful contributions to the well being ofour families, communities and the economy. Differences betweenpeople that arise across all skill sets and educational domains arean inherent and valued part of the human experience that should becelebrated in school, not erased.
