News Brief
Common Core Standards: Arguments Against — and For
University of Oregon's College of Education Presidential Chair and Associate Dean for Global Education Yong Zhao says the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) are "working to perfect an outdated paradigm," and National Center on Education and the Economy President Marc Tucker agrees. He and Zhao say that if the labor markets are increasingly populated by workers with similar skill levels, those who will work for less are those that will be hired, forcing those with higher wage expectations to lower them and their standard of living. Additionally, as more jobs are automated or exported to low cost nations, workers in high-labor-cost countries must add some value that their competitors cannot. To that end, Zhao suggests that the future workforce is one that creates and innovates and that education must foster workers that have entrepreneurial abilities and who can create future niche markets, which means that CCSS is too narrow and rigid. However, Tucker disagrees, noting that creative people typically know a lot about unrelated things and that creativity comes out of that knowledge. He says, "Learning almost anything really well depends on mastering the conceptual structure of the underlying disciplines, because, without that scaffolding, we are not able to put new information and skills to work." Tucker and Zhao agree that producing a nation of good test takers is not the solution, but Tucker says educators must determine what all students need to know to be competitive in the global market. He also notes, "We suffer from lack of agreement on any standards that could define what all students must know and be able to do before they go their separate ways. We suffer in a great many schools from implicit standards that translate into abysmally low expectations for far too many students. Without broad agreement on a well designed and internationally benchmarked system of standards, we have no hope of producing a nation of students who have the kind of skills, knowledge, and creative capacities the nation so desperately needs."
This news brief was summarized for Chiefline, CCSSO's weekly newsletter. Click here to receive Chiefline in your inbox weekly. Newsbrief Copyright 2012 INFORMATION, INC.