The Effect of the Common Core Standards on Teachers and the Teaching Profession

Here are some quotes from teachers on the major problems with the use of and implementation of the Common Core standards and their accompanying high stakes tests:

Over-Emphasis on Testing/Teaching to the Test

“Rather than creating lifelong learners, our new goal is to create good test takers”^[i]

“…scripted cookie-cutter lessons aren’t interested in that; the idea is that they will help students learn enough to raise their standardized test scores. Yet study after study has shown that even intense test preparation does not significantly raise test scores, and often causes stress and boredom in students. Studies have also shown that after a period of time, test scores plateau, and it is useless, even counter-productive educationally, to try to raise test scores beyond that plateau. [ii]

Lack of Flexibility/ Stifling Creativity

“This type of total immersion is what I have always referred to as teaching “heavy,” working hard, spending time, researching, attending to details and never feeling satisfied that I knew enough on any topic. I now find that this approach to my profession is not only devalued, but denigrated and perhaps, in some quarters despised. STEM rules the day and “data driven” education seeks only conformity, standardization, testing and a zombie-like adherence to the shallow and generic Common Core, along with a lockstep of oversimplified so-called Essential Learnings. Creativity, academic freedom, teacher autonomy, experimentation and innovation are being stifled in a misguided effort to fix what is not broken in our system of public education…”[iii]

“Another problem we found relates to the pedagogical method used in the Gettysburg Address exemplar that the Common Core calls ‘cold reading.’  This gives students a text they have never seen and asks them to read it with no preliminary introduction. This mimics the conditions of a standardized test on which students are asked to read material they have never seen and answer multiple choice questions about the passage. Such pedagogy makes school wildly boring. Students are not asked to connect what they read yesterday to what they are reading today, or what they read in English to what they read in science. The exemplar, in fact, forbids teachers from asking students if they have ever been to a funeral because such questions rely ‘on individual experience and opinion,’ and answering them ‘will not move students closer to understanding the Gettysburg Address.’”

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