"College and Career Ready" is the Wrong Goal

Anyone having anything to do with education has been bombarded lately with information about how the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) are going to fix what's wrong with American Education.  This national curriculum is supposed to ensure that every student who graduates from an American high school will leave prepared for either college or a career.  On the CCSS website, this idea is clearly written into the mission statement for the standards:

The Common Core State Standards provide a consistent, clear understanding of what students are expected to learn, so teachers and parents know what they need to do to help them. The standards are designed to be robust and relevant to the real world, reflecting the knowledge and skills that our young people need for success in college and careers. With American students fully prepared for the future, our communities will be best positioned to compete successfully in the global economy.

The problem is that focusing on "college and career readiness" is the wrong goal.  Worse, it's a goal that will ensure that less students are prepared for college and/or careers. 

Let's break down that mission statement.

• The Common Core State Standards provide a consistent, clear understanding of what students are expected to learn, so teachers and parents know what they need to do to help them. The standards are designed to be robust and relevant to the real world, reflecting the knowledge and skills that our young people need for success in college and careers.

This sounds great, but it's founded in a false belief that anybody can predict what stuff kids will need to learn to do the jobs of the future.  We don't know that.  Nobody does.  Our current elementary students will graduate seven to thirteen years from now in the years 2020 through 2026.  Think about this.  Seven years ago, smartphones like the iPhone and tablets like the iPad didn't exist.  Could anyone back in early 2007 have envisioned how mobile technology would change the workplaces we have today?  What makes us think that we can predict what the workplace of 2020 will look like? 

In December of 2012 Forbes Magazine came out with a list of the top 10 skills that 2013 employers were looking for in employees.  Almost all of these qualities were not content based.  They were not skills that could be neatly written into standards.  These are traits like "critical thinking" and "complex problem solving" that require experience with solving real world problems.

And proponents of CCSS will tell you that those standards are designed to do just that.  But they aren't.  They can't do that.  Because CCSS are designed to be used to judge children, schools, and teachers on standardized tests.

So, here's what's really happening instead of that experience with solving real problems.  School districts are rushing to buy textbooks that are aligned to CCSS so that students can pass those tests.  Teachers are being told not to stray from teaching the lessons in those textbook programs so that students pass those tests.  Students are being taught how to pass those tests.  Nobody ever solved a real problem in their community by working out of a textbook or workbook. 

Here's the truth:  Focusing and measuring what students know will always prevent you from focusing on what students can do.  And they can do amazing things if we'll let them.

• With American students fully prepared for the future, our communities will be best positioned to compete successfully in the global economy.

I don't think anyone can argue with this.  I just don't believe that CCSS is the best way to prepare students for the future.  And I certainly don't agree that this is should be the end-goal of education.

Instead of focusing on preparing students for "college and career", we should be preparing them for life.  Heaven knows, there are plenty of people who were successful in college and/or are successful in their careers that are miserable.  How many times have we heard about wildly "successful" people who, when we define success as more than "how much money you make", aren't? 

We're missing the forest by focusing on the trees.

So, instead of preparing students for college and career, I propose that we prepare students for life.  Teach them how to think for themselves.  Teach them how to solve real problems in society.  Teach them to come up with creative solutions, to make a difference, to experience the joy of being kind to others, to leave their communities better, and to advocate for the things they feel passionate about. 

Instead of discussing a list of things our students need to know that was lobbied for and developed with money from large profit-driven corporations (that may or may not have our children's best interests at heart), imagine if teachers all across the country spent professional development time discussing project, inquiry, problem, and service based learning projects that allow our students to learn content while also learning the very things that will help them succeed in an unknown future.  Imagine if our focus was on student learning instead of "standards implementation".   

The beauty of this goal is that, along with leaving students prepared for life in ways that our increasingly narrowed curriculum cannot, it will also prepare our students for their futures in every way possible.

Teach them to think for themselves, to love learning, to problem solve, to innovate, and to connect with others, and there will be nothing they cannot accomplish.

They'll even be prepared to be successful in college or their future career.

Student Learning vs. Student Evaluation

Image: Paul Gooddy / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Is it more important for us as educators to foster learning, or to evaluate our students?  I would bet that the majority of teachers would agree that our primary purpose is to promote learning.  I would hope that teachers prioritize teaching and learning over judging and evaluating, even if our current educational system doesn't.

For this reason, I am often perplexed by the push back on the idea of re-testing students.  I'd love to not give tests and focus on simply assessing student learning without grades, but that's not possible in our current system.  If a student doesn't learn something or tests poorly, isn't it my job to do what I can to remedy that?  Shouldn't I make sure that student learns?  Shouldn't I see this as a sign that I should give them more assistance, re-teach them, or get them some other sort of help?  Wouldn't it be beneficial to that student to have someone demand they actually learn instead of letting them go through school without doing so?

I've heard the arguments against re-testing, and I am yet to hear one that makes sense to me.

Re-testing allows kids to be lazy.  If they failed it's because they didn't study.

Perhaps the student's poor initial grade was due to lack of studying.  I refuse to use their laziness as an excuse to not fullfil my mission as a teacher.  It is my job to help them learn, not to punish them for laziness.  Then again, maybe they weren't lazy.  Maybe they didn't study because they were wondering where their next meal was coming from.  Or whether Mom would come home drunk that night.  Or whether their Dad's parole hearing was going to go well.  Or whatever.  It is not my job to judge.  It is my job to promote learning.

There's no re-testing in the "real world"

Really?  You don't think that doctors learn from their mistakes?  Or that teachers don't have lessons that fail miserably?  Or that artists never create works that are less than their best?  Or that those who work in sales never have days where they don't close a deal?  Or that lawyers never lose a case?  Life is full of failure.  Learning from one's mistakes is much more important than avoiding failure.

If you allow a kid to re-test and they get a higher grade than one who doesn't, that's not fair.

As I said above, assessing learning is much more important to me than assigning a grade.  "Assessment" and "grading" are not interchangeable terms.  When we use them as such, we are implying to students that assigning a score to them is more important than what they've learned.  They start to jump through hoops to get praise and good grades instead of making connections because that's what we are training them to do. Sure, the practice of re-testing might make it harder for kids (or their parents) to feel superior to others because they are a "straight A student", but is that really a bad thing?  Maybe the school can save some money on the "My kid is an honor student and yours is dumb" bumper stickers.

There's no time to re-test.  I've got to cover X, Y and Z.  Plus, what would I do with all the other kids?

There's no doubt that having a classroom where you are meeting the needs of all the students is difficult. It can be done, though.  I've had many classes where I'm sitting with a small group of kids who need more help while other groups of kids who already have proven they understand the topic are recording a podcast about it, developing a narrated slide show, using web 2.0 apps to produce content for our wiki, or sharing their learning in other ways.  The best part is that the content being created by the groups who already understand can be used as a way to study for the kids in the group who need more help that night.  Had I not taken the extra time to re-teach and allow for re-testing, some of my students would have never learned what they needed to, and others would have never had the opportunity to teach it, which deepened their understanding.  To me, not doing this in order to "cover" other topics that my students may or may not learn before moving on to "cover" something else seems destined to leave gaps in understanding for most kids.  

I guess it all comes down to how you view teaching.  If we are the deliverers of instruction, and it is the students' responsibility to learn, then there is no reason to re-test kids.  It's a nice, convenient way to look at things because it takes all the responsibility for failing students and places it upon students and their parents.  

Of course, if my job is to teach students and make sure they learn, not re-teaching and re-testing doesn't make sense.  Sure, there will still be students who struggle.  Maybe there are factors outside of my control that are preventing them from learning.  But taking this point of view ensures that their struggles won't be because of me.