The Common Core Standards Initiative is in full swing in the United States and the outcry from students, parents, and teachers is deafening. Adoption of the standards is not mandatory. However, while some states have indeed rejected the initiative, this means that they will not be eligible for federal Race to the Top funding, a significant consideration. The No Child Left Behind Act was forced on our schools in the same way. It is important to point out that education, as specified in the U.S. Constitution, is within the purview of the state governments, not the federal government. By bribing educational autonomy away from the states, the federal government denies our families a significant amount of freedom in choosing how their children should be educated.

The Common Core Standards were devised by politicians and business people without any input from those who know the needs of the students: their parents and teachers. The curriculum, which remains a mystery, will be determined by assessments developed by and for the federal government. The standards were unleashed without provision of resources, teacher training, or field-testing. In fact, the 2013 NYSESLAT (New York State English as a Second Language Achievement Test) was changed mid-year to accommodate the new standards. This means that English Language Learners had no materials with which to prepare for the exam and their teachers had no resources with which to help them.

Because the standards have been initiated without a curriculum that takes into consideration the needs of the students, elementary school children are working deep into the night on homework they simply cannot understand because it is not developmentally appropriate for their age. They are developing a real fear of the classroom because it has become a forum for failure. High school students who were already having difficulty are now losing all interest in secondary education. English language learners, whose challenges have never been properly appreciated, will fall even further behind their American-born peers, resulting in an even higher dropout rate. Teachers who realize the futility of what they are being mandated to do to their students are leaving the profession.

The Common Core Standards Initiative is motivated by a reasonable idea: students at the same grade level should be learning the same material throughout the country. In addition, this material should be appropriate for ultimately preparing the students for college and the workplace. However, the development and implementation of the standards have ignored one minor detail: the needs of the students. Demanding that all students learn the same thing in the same way in the same timeframe ignores everything we know about how human beings learn, and it ignores English language learners altogether. Our students are already struggling, failing, and dropping out. Arbitrarily increasing and homogenizing their workload is, to be euphemistic, counter-intuitive. Making it incomprehensible is incomprehensible. At least some thought should be given to how our students can learn what they need to know while still being able to enjoy growing up in America.

by John DePonte

Since the year 2000, students from the United States have been outperformed by students from countries of comparable wealth like Canada, Finland, Germany, Japan, China, Singapore, and South Korea. This time, Ireland and Poland joined the winners’ circle. Even the richest students in America failed to match the results of equally well-off students from other countries.

The idea that American educators and academics should not be concerned because there are already more students graduating from college than can be utilized by the labor market is unacceptable on two counts. First, the implication is that our students are already too successful, and we should slow them down. Is there anyone who doesn’t find this position absurd? Second, education is not just about joining the labor market. Among other things, it is about developing the intellectual tools to create new and inventive niches in the market. Who remembers vinyl records? CDs anyone? How about MP3s? You get the picture.

If we agree that there is a problem and it should be solved, if possible, then we should first look at the solutions that have already been in place for quite a while now and assess them. That’s easy. They haven’t worked. Overburdening teachers with producing “accountability data” keeps them away from their chosen profession at the expense of the students. Insisting that teachers spend the majority of the year preparing their students for standardized tests has taken the students even further from their hope of actually being educated. The proliferation of standardized tests has resulted in the plundering of academic skills across the board and the country.

Basing a teacher’s success on the students’ standardized test scores is as meaningless as it is illogical. Test prep is not teaching, and it is quite possible for a student to learn what is legitimately important in a subject and still do poorly on a standardized test. It would be unfair to assess the student’s ability based on the results of such a standardized test; it would be criminal to assess the teacher.

Improving our public schools, offering more training and “support” for teachers, the federal government “encouraging” states to agree on common education standards, demanding “stronger” math and science education, requiring more “rigor” in the nations high schools, providing additional resources to prepare students for college-level studies, demanding “stronger” math and science education, etc. are all code for, “The teachers are to blame for the failure of our students to compete academically with their international peers.” Why not? Teachers are an easy target and a relatively small voting block.

The idea that we must “cure” poverty in order to set the educational ship aright at least begins to take a look at what just might be the most significant problem in American education today. The problem just might not be in the schools, and if it is, it just may not be the teachers. Instead of mindlessly pointing fingers, why is no one asking the question, “What is going on inside the walls of today’s American household that is affecting the academic performance of our children, both positively and negatively?”

Where are the longitudinal studies that follow students from placenta to PhD that will give us real insight into who succeeds, who fails, and why? There are billions of dollars being spent in this country on studies to determine things like “What really makes men happy?” No kidding! This was recently reported on the nightly news in New York City. It seems we could throw some of that money at trying to find out why so many of our children are not learning, why some are learning, and how can we bring the conditions of the successful students to bear on the lives of those who are not successful. After all, the first step to finding a solution is identifying the problem, not pointing a finger at the easiest target.

by John DePonte

There are only two things that are certain in this life: debt and taxes. I’m sorry: death and taxes. And if you are a student, you will most likely be looking at a lifetime of student loan payments. You will pay taxes. If you need a student loan to go to college, you will pay it back. And you will probably die before your loan is paid off: tough break for the federal student loan program.

So what if you must pay back your student loan? You used the money, now you should pay it back. Fair enough. However, situations change. The American economy reflects this truth. The European economy suffers from this truth. The Asian economy experiences this truth. All the individuals who live and work in all the economies in the world are bound by this truth. The American bankruptcy laws exist because of this truth.

An American who experiences overwhelming economic hardship can get a fresh start by filing for bankruptcy. Of course, this means that the person will have to change some habits moving forward, but this is a good thing. You really can live without credit cards. Trust me. The debt can be restructured to make repayment possible or, under extreme circumstances, the debt can be dismissed. Not so with student loans. You will pay your student loan back, in full, or die trying. Period.

There was a time when this was not the case. As a result, students took advantage and abused the system by not repaying their student loans at all. The federal government over-reacted and now we all suffer. How is it that we all suffer, and not just the students? We hear a lot of lip service from every level of government about how education is essential for a stable, productive society. Our students are our future. We hear this as we watch our public schools churn out graduates who are not prepared for college level work. We hear it as most college freshmen must take remedial courses in English and math in order to have even a shot at understanding college coursework. We hear it as college tuitions exceed all reason.

So, the average college student must borrow an enormous sum of money that will be paid back come hell or global depression. Affordable education can now only be found online, but not through college or university online courses. These too are exorbitant. As far as our government is concerned, online college courses are just another income stream for their student loan programs.

If our government really believes that education is the key to the stability and productivity of our society (a big “if” by the way), there is only one course it can take: The federal government must make education affordable for everyone. If shackling our college students with a debt that most of them will spend their entire lives trying (and failing) to pay off is serving anyone, it is not the students. Nor is it our society. Indiscriminately lending money to students without giving any consideration to whether or not they will be able to pay it back is not responsible.

When our banks misbehave, our federal government bails them out with our tax money. When big businesses misbehave, our federal government bails them out with our tax money. And the federal government never refers to these institutions as “our future.” When college graduates find themselves in a position that makes it impossible for them to repay their student loans, they’re on their own.

Forcing students to pay back what they will never have is not reasonable. Our college graduates don’t even have to misbehave in order to find themselves in this position. Things change. Economies change. Family situations change. Students’ lives change. Student loan laws have only changed once in this lifetime, of course to serve the lenders, not the borrowers, nor our society. In this case, the borrowers are our future, where three things are certain: death, taxes, and student loan payments.

by John DePonte

As I peruse the positions offered by the New York State and New Jersey Departments of Education, I see in almost every ad one of the reasons I resigned from public education: data-driven instruction. What was the first thing your professor said to your class of aspiring power brokers in Statistics 101: “There are lies, there are damn lies, and then there are statistics.”

Instruction is always driven by two things and two things only: the students’ needs and the students’ capacities. That’s it. We can all go home now. But let’s look at what data-driven instruction could possibly mean. Ostensibly, it means that educators and administrators can use student performance, i.e. grades, as the criterion for what should be taught in the classroom and how it should be taught. This seems reasonable. The operative word here is “seems.”

The quintessential example of why this does not work is the vaunted Common Core Standards Initiative. The students were underperforming. So naturally, it only made sense to require only higher order thinking tasks (i.e. no memorization of times tables or learning how to spell, etc.), increase the workload, and make the exams more difficult (only testing higher order thinking skills). Now our streets are teeming with geniuses. Not quite.

The Common Core is doomed to failure because, as is always the case with everything our educational leaders do, it ignores the students. If a student doesn’t understand a math problem, you break it down into digestible components and explain it in terms that the student can understand. You don’t give him/her ten more problems that are even more difficult, assign more homework, and administer exams that he/she has no chance of understanding, let alone passing. The situation requires less work and more time, not more work and less time. I understand this. I know that you understand it. How can it be that educators, administrators, and politicians always get this wrong? They would almost have to be trying to fail.

An even easier example of the disingenuous intentions behind data-driven instruction is the graduation rate. The powers that be love to cite rising graduation rates as an indication that we have turned some kind of educational corner. What these rates actually measure is the plummeting standards for graduation. Our students simply do not have to know or do anything anymore.

So why are our educational leaders insisting on data-driven instruction? The answer is obvious. Producing numbers is a much easier way to justify a salary than producing an educated student. After all, someone had to be doing something in order to produce all those pages upon pages of data. Let’s not kid ourselves. There are no more teachers in our public schools. They have all been coerced into becoming data entry technicians for their administrators. And our students…

by John DePonte