How America Is Failing Its Kids

Change is hard. As someone who’s pushed to overhaul failing schools and battled entrenched defenders of an unacceptable status quo, I’m no stranger to controversy when it comes to education reform.

So it’s hardly surprising that Common Core, the tough set of academic standards embraced by 45 states plus the District of Columbia, has been met with disparate pockets of resistance—from the understandable concerns of some parents and teachers to the false narrative of a federal takeover.

Last week, the United States got a painful reminder that making student achievement a higher priority couldn’t be more urgent when a major global study ranked American kids just 17th in reading, 21st in science, and 26th in math—behind countries such as Estonia, Poland and Vietnam.

The rankings, compiled by the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, ought to be a wakeup call. The United States made no improvement from previous years, while other countries leapfrogged us by dramatically improving their students’ proficiency levels.

We simply can’t afford to remain stagnant. American children are just as capable as those around the world, and every child regardless of color or class is capable of achieving at high levels.

That’s where Common Core comes in. Inside those PISA results was another sobering reminder of our need to set high standards for the set of skills and knowledge we aim to teach our kids. Even within our own country, students’ performance varies wildly.

Consider Massachusetts, America’s top performing-state according to national assessments. On their own, Massachusetts’s 15-year-olds would rank 6th in the world in reading. In math, 19 percent of Massachusetts students achieved PISA’s “level 5” proficiency (out of six levels) compared with just 9 percent of all American students—more than twice as many. In science, the difference was 14 percent compared with 7 percent. There’s a clear discrepancy in the quality of education being offered in public schools from state to state.

If we zoom in closer still, we even see a troubling picture within Massachusetts’ overall scores: student performance continues to vary greatly from city to city, district to district, and school to school. Even in Massachusetts there remains an unacceptably wide achievement gap between white students and children of color.

Correcting for that inequity among schoolchildren is exactly what Common Core seeks to do. A student in Wyoming might have done all of her homework and even earned straight As in math but could transfer to a school in Georgia and find herself a year behind her peers in terms of what she’s expected to know. Worse still, she might graduate high school and enroll in college unprepared for the demanding coursework. The result is that too many of our children are not being adequately prepared to compete in an increasingly global economy.

That’s why, contrary to the wild claims of the critics, so many states have voluntarily adopted the Common Core standards. In fact, it was at the state level—led by governors and chief state school officers—where the standards were developed. They were thoughtfully put together over several years — not by the federal government, but by a nationwide coalition of expert teachers, parents and community leaders. What’s more, states have the ability to tweak the standards to better fit their students’ unique needs. That’s a bottom-up approach that’s best for kids.

Rank-and-file educators agree. A recent survey of more than 20,000 teachers shows that 75 percent believe Common Core will improve students’ abilities to reason and think critically. That’s because, according to a 2010 Fordham Institute assessment, Common Core standards are clearer and more rigorous than existing standards in 39 states when it comes to math and 37 states in English-language arts.

Setting high standards for our schools is exactly what we should be doing. Our teachers are among the best in the world and deserve both our confidence and a public education system that allows them to excel rather than ties their hands.

Some critics of Common Core argue that we should slow down, that we are asking students and teachers to do too much, too quickly. But we’ve already seen proof that if the standards are implemented thoughtfully and correctly, our kids and educators can rise to the challenge.

Tennessee and Washington, D.C., for example, were among the earliest adopters of Common Core, and they followed through with heavy investments in materials and training to help teachers and students prepare for the more rigorous standards. How are they doing? 

The 2013 Nation's Report Card, published last month, showed D.C. and Tennessee making historic gains in student achievement.

Properly implementing Common Core is how state officials and lobbying organizations such as the national teacher unions can now show their support for our kids. Raising expectations and delivering better results is never going to be easy.

To retreat from the implementation of Common Core standards would be to accept mediocrity from our public schools and inequity among our children based on nothing more than the ZIP code in which they live. In this intensely competitive world, that’s just not acceptable.

Michelle Rhee is founder of StudentsFirst, a national education advocacy organization. She previously served as chancellor of the Washington, D.C. Public School System.

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2013/12/michelle-rhee-on-the-common-core-101041_Page2.html#ixzz2nPLi8F3t