Common Core State Standards: The Equity Dimension

“The achievement gap in public education, unfortunately, is in no small part an expectations gap,” says Thomas Toch (Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching) in this important Education Week article. For many African-American, Hispanic, and economically disadvantaged students, he argues, the new Common Core State Standards “represent a path to the demanding subjects that many local educators have long doubted they could or should study.” The new standards ask all students to read more significant and challenging non-fiction and write coherently and persuasively. They eliminate fluff and redundancy from the K-12 curriculum and create a level playing field for all students. 

But Toch worries that once again, demanding curriculum standards are going to be watered down. The reform movement of the 1980s produced more-rigorous standards, but many disadvantaged students were tracked into low-level courses, earning English credits for typing, science credits for auto body repair, and math credits for commercial food preparation. No Child Left Behind raised the bar again, but many states lowered their standards to avoid penalties for not meeting AYP. And now, seeing discouraging results from the first round of Common Core-aligned tests, people are complaining that the standards are too demanding. Diane Ravitch was quoted recently saying the new standards are “way too high” and, “Maybe [many students] don’t need to go to college.” 

“But who decides which students are tracked toward college,” asks Toch, “and at what point are those decisions made? Third grade? Ninth grade? Supporting lower standards today amounts to capitulating to the race- and class-based stereotypes of the past, half a century after the passage of federal civil-rights laws and just as the nation is transitioning to a minority-majority school population.” In fact, American students often say they aren’t asked to work very hard. “Importantly,” says Toch, “most of the international high-fliers are built on the conviction that hard work is more important to student success than innate ability, that there should be high common standards because they’re within most students’ grasp and thus all students should have access to them.” 

Empower teachers! Let states decide curriculum standards! say opponents of the Common Core. But this will only widen the achievement gap, says Toch. Teachers and local school districts should decide how to implement standards, not what the standards should be. “At this point, we need to focus on the hard work of implementing the new standards,” concludes Toch, “not on whether we should have them.”

“Common Core’s Power for Disadvantaged Students” by Thomas Toch in Education Week, Oct. 23, 2013 (Vol. 33, #9, p. 24, 20), www.edweek.org 

From the Marshall Memo #508