Suck it up, soccer moms. Arne Duncan is right.
Duncan is US secretary of education, and on Friday he tossed a lit cherry-bomb:
“It’s fascinating to me that some of the pushback is coming from, sort of, white suburban moms who — all of a sudden — their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were, ” he said. Ka-Boom!
Duncan’s “pushback” reference was to Washington’s new Common Core public-school curricula and its accompanying performance criteria — now being implemented in 45 states, including New York, to something less than enthusiastic reviews.
Indeed, the “pushback” might more accurately be described as spittle-flecked howls of outrage from three interested parties.
- There is ideological opposition: Those who fret largely about a federalized, homogenized public-education system of a left-leaning sort. This is no small concern, but the whining would be easier to take if the federalism horse hadn’t long since been out of the barn (Hello, ObamaCare!).
- There is rice-bowl opposition: Those who now make comfortable livings as teachers and administrators, but who are terrified by the prospect of quantifiable standards that could be used to judge not only student performance, but their own as well. They bitterly oppose job-threatening public-school reform of any sort, while demanding billions more in school spending every year — not for salary or benefits, of course, but “for the children.”
- And there is emotive opposition: Those who hate the testing regimens necessary to make performance standards work, most of them on the grounds that their own children are so special that they shouldn’t have to suffer such burdens. These last have influence.
“A few days ago. . . I used some clumsy phrasing that I regret — particularly because it distracted from an important conversation about how to better prepare all of America’s students for success,” Duncan said Monday. So — yay, soccer moms!
Still, he didn’t apologize. And that’s a good thing — because somebody has to speak truth to self-righteous indignation.
Public education’s problems are legion, but few are more corrosive to student accomplishment — and to public confidence — than grade inflation. That was Duncan’s point.
For example: Former New York state Education Commissioner Richard Mills and the willful destruction of one of the nation’s strongest, and most trusted, performance benchmarks — the state Regent’s examinations.
A generation ago, nobody got an academic high-school diploma in New York without demonstrating — via the Regent’s tests — competence in a variety of subjects.
Then came Mills, and the decline began. The goal: Improve graduation rates. The means: Dumbing down the Regents’ tests.
Soon a lot more students were getting diplomas, but they were near to worthless; in New York City, a scant 31.4 percent of high-school grads in 2013 were ready for college work.
And then came Common Core, and the end of illusions: In New York in 2013 — the first year of the program’s more rigorous new benchmarks — reading, writing and arithmetic scores dropped an eye-popping 30 percentage points from 2012. What to do? Kill the messenger, of course.
Or at least abuse him shamefully, as current state Education Commissioner John King is discovering during a series of public meetings on Common Core now under way around the state.
King, in fact, is a text-book example of why people avoid true public service these days. He deserves better than punching-bag status, but he’s not going to get it because everybody hates Common Core.
Again, the federalists hate it because of federalism; the teachers hate it because it threatens their circumstances, and the soccer moms hate it because it’s hurtful to discover that one’s child is not so smart after all. And, yes, pity the children.
Adults let standards go all to hell, for reasons of their own, but now reform is all on the kids. They must do the heavy lifting to make things right: Take the benchmark tests; suffer the uncertainties of new policies and practices, and so on.
Unless the opponents carry the day. For while they have no reasonable alternatives to Common Core, they do have clout. And if they win — if they kill Common Core — what can the kids look forward to?
In New York City, a 31.4-percent ready-for-college graduation rate, and not much else.
Pitiful, but those are the stakes.