How could a good idea have gone so wrong?

How Could a good idea have gone so wrong?

Long ago and far away there was this pretty good idea.   Education should have a curriculum that specifically laid out the expectations for the kindergarten through twelve grades in school.  This idea came from the various governors of the states.  Great minds in state departments of education and teacher preparation programs got together and developed this k-12 curriculum.  No the feds did not hand it down from on high.  Federal involvement came later.   Every day practicing teachers were notably pretty much excluded from the development group. Once the full curriculum was identified, goals were divided by grade level in math and language. This group was determined to raise standards for each grade level independent of the cognitive development of children.  Some rank and file teachers protested that lots of the kids they taught were not cognitively ready for the grade standard.   Others dared to suggest that not all children marched to the same standard of cognitive development.  What did they know?   They only lived with students, day in and day out.  The standards became known as the Common Core Curriculum and have been adopted and adapted by roughly half of the states.  Initially, more were on board but they have dropped out.

Then things started to go terribly wrong.  

We quickly moved from goals to accountably and from there to enforcement and rewards and punishment.   Pacing guides were created to make sure every child was exposed to the learning that would be tested at the end of the year.  Learning became some kind of bacteria to which kids were exposed instead of ideas that intrigued.  Schools were identified as failing schools.   Failing schools were punished with take overs and staff changes.  Teachers needed to be held accountable as well.   No Child Left Behind and the more recent Every Child Succeeds Act insists on including student test scores in the evaluation of teachers.  Totally ignoring that some teachers teach children with a great deal of baggage such as poverty, cognitive challenges and, frankly, families that don’t give a wit about school achievement, they are contending with survival.   No matter how challenged the learner, every teacher must surmount the challenge and have students with good test scores or be poorly evaluated.

Teachers unions protested.   We uniformly ignored them because we all know one of their prime functions is to protect the weakest among the membership.

We have gone terribly astray.   We are preparing and measuring students for knowledge and skills.  But the world they will enter is far more complicated and nuanced than that.   There is social media to destroy reputations and self-concept.  There are issues we all believe are happening or not- climate change, shifting geopolitical powers, quantum computing and a much more ethnically diverse society for all of us.

The idea of a Common Core of curriculum seemed like such a good idea at the time.   How did we let it go so wrong?