Common Core Standards Do Not Account for Diversity

April 7, 2014

Catherine Compton-Lilly

A professor considers the Common Core Standards in the context of students she has taught and the historical inequities that have plagued American schools. She asks: How can a “common” and assumedly “core” set of standards address social inequity and ensure that all children become highly literate?

Many students live in poverty. Yet, even if their achievement lags behind that of their classmates, they bring to their schools rich, diverse experiences.

Can a set of common standards address racism and poverty that interfere with student achievement?

Can common standards address and reduce the achievement gap?

Will common standards tap into, and build on, the unique experiences students bring to the classroom?

UW–Madison education professor Catherine Compton-Lilly says, “No.”

In fact, she says, the crisis facing American schools is not a lack of common standards. The real crisis is racism and poverty. Mainstream news accounts of “failed schools” blame teachers and cite declining standards. But the fault lies in schools’ inability to equitably serve the wide range of students coming through the doors.

As written, the Common Core State Standards, a federal initiative to establish consistent education standards in English and math across the states, claim that a single set of expectations will ensure high achievement for all students. However, students bring with them a remarkable range of ways of knowing, valuing, and experiencing. Students have different ways of acting, interacting, and displaying what they know. The historical problem with American schools has been their inability to equitably recognize, value, and build on these different ways as educators plan and implement instruction and assess student progress.

For example, Compton-Lilly points to the “K-5 Reading, College and Career Readiness Anchor Standards for Reading” (Common Core Standards, 2010). These Standards present four reading areas: key ideas and details, craft and structure, integration of knowledge and ideas, and range of reading and text complexity.

The section dedicated to “key ideas and details” highlights the activities recounting, retelling, and summarizing. Compton-Lilly says these are fairly low-level skills. They entail remembering information from the text and reproducing it for an audience. These tasks require neither analysis nor evaluation. Instead they ask for a literal interpretation of what the student read. They require the reader to focus on the text as a stand-alone entity, unconnected to his or her experiences beyond the text.

The Common Core-aligned rubric “craft and structure” focuses on the interior structures of texts and how they are presented. It ignores what students bring to the text. Different cultural groups have different ways of structuring and telling stories that are worthy of consideration. By limiting analysis to what is presented in texts, the Standards silence insights from a diversity of children’s knowledge.

Guidelines under the heading “integration of knowledge and ideas” invite students to “compare and contrast stories,” “draw on multiple print or digital sources,” and “integrate information from several texts.” Students must use teacher-provided texts to construct meaning, rather than drawing on their own experiences and cultural knowledge. Therefore, meaning is situated within texts, rather than within students and communities.

Compton-Lilly asks: What can this mean to a Puerto Rican child who reads an account of the voyage of Columbus that does not acknowledge the impact his visit had on the Táino people? What can this mean to an African-American student who encounters a textbook reference to Malcolm X that omits his role as a human rights activist?

Textual meaning does not reside solely in texts, Compton-Lilly says. Meaning is a human construction that involves multiple ways of being, knowing, and thinking, and human experiences beyond particular texts.

An achievement gap separates White middle-class students from students who bring diverse cultures and social class experiences to classrooms. Compton-Lilly says that gap will not be reduced by a “common” and “core” set of standards, curriculum, or assessments.

By privileging one way of being literate and one way of making sense of texts, she says, the Standards fail to recognize and value those students who embody various “funds of knowledge” reflecting diverse families and neighborhoods. Educators must consciously and consistently work to identify and incorporate this knowledge into the classroom rather than forcing on children a restrictive way of knowing.