Common Core as Government Platform
If you’re anything like me, you’ve long been confused about the differences between words like curriculum, assessment, pedagogy, standards, and all sorts of other teacher jargon. Which terms mean the same thing, I’ve wondered? What are their relationships with one another? Do clear definitions even exist?
In my experience, every teacher has a slightly different definition of each term. But even though the vocabulary may be imprecise, the concepts are actually quite distinct. When we are precise about the exact meanings of each of these terms — standards, curriculum, pedagogy, and assessments — it becomes clear not only that they are distinct, but that they can be arranged into a “stack,” with each successive layer acting as a platform for the layers above it. Thinking about it this way helps to illuminate why the public debate over Common Core State Standards was so contentious, and also why it was also so important.
In the metaphorical “stack” of good teaching, standards (as in Common Core State Standards) sit at the bottom. In my language, “standards” define the skills that students are expected to know (for instance, Common Core asserts that by the end of 3rd grade all students should be able to “Use place value understanding and properties of operations to perform multi-digit arithmetic”). The application layer that sits on top of standards is the curriculum, which includes all the different tools and materials that students use to master standards (for instance, all the different worksheets and textbooks that a teacher might use to teach place value). Pedagogy, which refers to the teaching style for delivering the curriculum, forms the third layer of this stack. Finally, assessments (whether written by the teacher or somebody else) sit on the top of the stack. In other words, standards are the platform on which all other elements of good teaching sit.
Around the world, governments have very different approaches to managing this stack, and many different ideas about where standardization is best. For instance, France was historically known for its nationalized curriculum, in which it was joked that the Minister of Education could at any point identify the page of the textbook that all 3rd grade students should be reading. The higher in the stack one moves, the greater the transaction costs of standardizing, but technology has enabled some providers (such as Kahn Academy or Coursera) to begin standardizing even pedagogy.
Historically, the US has not standardized anywhere in the stack, effectively ignoring platform thinking. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act explicitly banned the federal government from establishing a national curriculum, and states (or sometimes even individual school districts) have generally been on their own when it comes to defining standards.
This is where the Common Core story begins. Launched in the early 2000s by a coalition of state governors, Common Core was an attempt to establish consistent standards for what each student should know by the time they graduate from high school. A coalition of experts, teachers, and others developed standards for each grade, and 42 states initially volunteered to adopt them. In other words, Common Core was an attempt to embed platform thinking into teaching in the US.
However, adopting Common Core has not been without controversy. Perhaps nowhere are the power dynamics of creating platforms more evident than in the debate that ensued over Common Core standards. As with any platform, standardization raised questions of “standardization how? And by whom?” No sooner were Common Core standards adopted than politicians began to wonder whether they were an infringement on states’ rights. As journalist Alfie Kohn put it, “If there has ever been a more profoundly undemocratic school reform movement in U.S. educational history than what is currently taking place in the name of standards, I haven’t heard of it.” Teachers, too, worried that the new standards would be too difficult for their students, and that they would lose control over their classrooms. And everybody wondered who would pay for the massive amount of updated textbooks, teacher retraining, and new tests that would be required to comply with the new standards. The difficult politics of establishing common standards is perhaps nowhere more clearly demonstrated than in Ohio, where “Common Core” standards were ultimately repealed — only to be replaced by a new set of standards, nearly identical in every way except for the name. Ohio’s new standards share their content with Common Core, but are more palatably called “The Ohio Core,” as if to suggest that they were tailored specifically for Ohio.
Considering Common Core as a platform doesn’t just help us to understand the controversy that surrounded their adoption, but it also helps us to explain why they are so important. The truth is that setting common standards may unlock significant value for the US educational system by reducing costs and enabling innovation in the “application layer” of curriculum that sits above. For instance, a common set of standards makes developing curriculum materials much cheaper, because textbook companies need to create only one set of materials rather than a different set for every state. (Some have even wondered whether Common Core amounts to “crony capitalism” for textbook and computer companies.) Perhaps even more importantly, a common set of standards enables innovation from much smaller players who are disrupting the textbook companies altogether. According to Scott Hartl, CEO of Expeditionary Learning, “We’re going from the dominant paradigm of the publishing industry to a much more nimble, often electronically distributed, more Silicon Valley-like lifting up of content from lots of sources, often from teachers themselves for other teachers and leaders, with new distribution platforms that go directly to users with a much broader base of content developers.” Ultimately, the possibilities may be broader still: as Common Core makes it easier to compare results between students from different states, the need for college entrance exams and the difficulty for companies to identify good hires may seriously diminish.
No doubt, embedding platform thinking into US public education can unlock significant value. However, it also raises thorny questions related to politics and control. Who gets to say what students should know? How should we balance local (teacher) knowledge with outside (expert) opinion? Who should pay for transition costs? And ultimately, will the value unlocked by standardization flow to students and lead to better learning outcomes, or will that value flow to textbook publishers and others, enriching only their bottom line?
