Reclaiming the Conversation on Education

The publication of A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform (ANAR) in 1983 (Gardner et al.) reinforced an emerging paradigm shiftin U.S. education that clearly tied our national economic prowess to the success of American public schools, which were described as substantially underperforming and in need of extensive reform (Mehta). Despite the fact that ANAR has been largely discredited in the 30 years since its publication and the dire condition of American schools has been greatly exaggerated for the purposes of perpetuating a crisis mentality in education, the rhetoric of reform in the United States continues to hold up economic success as the sole purpose of a K-12 education (Tienken and Orlich). Self-proclaimed educational reformers have convinced the American public that corporate-style (i.e., market based) educational reform is the best way to achieve educational success for economic purposes.Underlying the rhetoric of this flavor of reform are the fallacious assumptions that government coercion is necessary to accelerate student achievement and that big business values will improve education. Nowhere is this more apparent than the coalescence of No Child LeftBehind (NCLB), Race to the Top (RttT), and the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). NCLB and RttT have ratcheted up the federal government's ability to apply pressure to schools and teachers, while the CCSS and their impending national assessments represent a clear example of how big business values have actually infiltrated the curriculum in almost every public school classroom across 45 states. We challenge the reader to consider the creation of CCSS and what they envision as a K-12 education outcome. Are we complicit in allowing the purpose of an American education to be shifted away from anything other than how much money one will make in the future? What, if anything, can we do about it?Let's be clear that corporations, not educators, created the CCSS (Ravitch). The two primary writing teams included 25 members, including six test-makers from the College Board, five from test publisher ACT, and four from Achieve Inc., but did not include any classroom teachers (Cody). Teachers' organizations, including the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), organized groups of educators to provide feedback, but only after the standards were already written. After receiving more than 10,000 suggestions for improvement from educators and other interested stakeholders, the CCSS authors managed to revise and release the standards in only two months. Meanwhile, a significant amount of private money, especially funds originating from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, was greasing the CCSS wheels (Ohanian). Gates had no problem declaring on the nightly news that any form of teaching and knowledge that cannot be measured is "useless," making it perfectly clear that "democratic goals and public values no longer have any merit for a reform movement in love with the logic of measurement, profit, and privatization" (Giroux 18). The Gates Foundation awarded millions of dollars to organizations directly involved in the creation of the CCSS, including Achieve Inc., the Council of Chief State School Officers, and the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (Ohanian; Strauss, "Gates"). Meanwhile, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan provided incentive to adopt CCSS by limiting eligibility for RttT awards and NCLB waivers to states that adopted a common set of "college and career ready standards" (Mathis 2). States faced the forced choice of either adopting the CCSS or losing millions of federal dollars in grants during the worst economic recession in 80 years.It should come as no surprise given the process of corporate-led CCSS creation and adoption that the standards themselves represent the values and interests of big business, thereby empowering "softdomination" (Giroux 17), or the controlling of masses by government and/or large corporations. …