The Fabled Pushme-Pullyou

                                               

saltairealpacas.com

Like the mythical pushme-pullyou of the Doctor Dolittle tale, the Common Core is sending educators scurrying; at times in opposite directions. Arne Duncan has stated that the Federal government won’t stipulate even a “single semicolon” of Common Core curricula. In doing so, he is obliging each state, district, school, and teacher to seek compatible curricula from revenue producing “big curricula”. These unvetted programs are being sold by publishers, test developers, alliances, and others who seek financial gain. Alternatively, it means that 100,000 schools, with over 3 million teachers, prepare to meet the testing needs of 55 million students in the U.S. (www.census.gov/) (http://nces.ed.gov/) by writing their own curriculum. This isn’t exactly raising the bar and leveling the playing field as promised. It seems like another pushme-pullyou; of using limited instructional resources or taking time away from teaching to support Common Core implementation.

State and local governments are pulling for their constitutionally granted local control of education. The push-back is the result of a set of explicit across-the-board standards that all teachers will teach to and all students will be tested on. The education sector has traditionally been led by educators who know and understand their students, recognize best practices in teaching and learning, and have the leeway to be responsive at the local level. The Common Core is pushing towards uniformity and conformity.

Another remarkable aspect of the pushme-pullyou is that both liberal (www.brookings.edu) and conservative groups (www.cato.org) are criticizing the Common Core, but for divergent reasons. It’s not that the core is inherently good or bad but as with any implementation, from cooking to curing diseases, the devil is in the details. At a cost of tens of millions of dollars to implement, isn’t it worth closer scrutiny of the design details of the fabled pushme-pullyou?