Common Core

It has been around twenty years since Niel Postman declared that Economic Utility was, “the preeminent reason for schooling” (Postman 27).  However time has not changed the goal of the American education system, though it has impacted some of its mechanisms.  In the early twenty first century the United States have become increasingly dominated by the new idea of standardized testing.  Though to be totally clear the SAT and AP classes have been around for quite some time, the sheer number of tests has reached a peak in the twenty first century.  The cause behind the swing towards standardized testing was spurred on by legislation commonly referred to as Common Core.  The legislation and resulting tests were well intended, with members of both parties hoping to increase the standards for achievement for all states in the United States by making sure that a student in the Bronx, and one from Topeka, Kansas would learn the same exact things.

The attempts to regulate a national standard for learning is, however, reliant on a system to compare students nationwide, the chosen, and likely only reasonable method, was standardized testing.  In states that take part in common core, or those that wish to have statewide tests, standardized testing is commonplace, with multiple standardized tests per class per year.  The emphasis on tests as well as the monetary importance placed on them has resulted in the phenomena of teaching to the test.  This would be fine as long as the standardized tests could test everything that was taught in a subject, however that is sadly not currently the state.   As a result some teachers and schools focus only on subject matter in the tests themselves, excluding the material that is a part of the required learning but not tested at the end of the year.  This is in many cases not too harmful, but in some subjects that require an intimate knowledge of the previous class in order to achieve in the next one, it results in students being woefully under prepared, effectively harming their ability to complete future courses, therefore serving to create more disparities in education rather than fix them.

Postman, Niel. The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School. New York, Random House, 1996. Print.