The following is an excerpt from Kris Nielsen’s new book release, Children of the Core.  The hashtag in the title is a very popular one used on Twitter.  Go check it out sometime.

High schools that have fully implemented the Common Core Network are probably the worst possible institutions for adolescent minds in this era (assuming those kids managed to hold on to their motivation and inspiration all the way to this point).  The speed of technology, and the resulting ready access to information, make just about every day of a standardized curriculum completely obsolete in American high schools.

Kayla is a 10th grader at a middle-of-the-road high school in a suburban area.  She considers herself a high-performing student who always gets good grades and high scores.  She plans to get a terminal degree in neuroscience and run for Congress.  She overcame reading difficulties in elementary school to grow into a top student who loves to read about anything that catches her interest.  Her high school adopted the Common Core State Standards and high-stakes benchmark assessments less than two years ago.  According to Kayla:

From my experience, a normal school day consists of the following: copying notes, listening to lectures, filling out worksheets, reviewing for tests, taking tests, and receiving an overload of homework. Then we do it again the next day, and the next, and the next…

This echoes Line Dalile’s assessment of high school, and you can see that we are killing not only their curiosity, but also their reasons to be in school at all.  Kids know when they aren’t learning, and this isn’t just about school being fun (although I think that it should be–when kids enjoy what they’re doing, they’ll learn).  These kids are smart enough to know they are being strung along in order to make someone’s numbers look good.

Kayla continued, to make the point that she knows she being cheated out of an education:

We are spoonfed unit after unit of information, but we are not taught how to process or use it. Most of it is forgotten. And the students know this, they ask things like “when in my life am I going to use the equation of a hyperbola?” The most honest answer I’ve heard from a teacher is that you’re not. You do math to learn how to memorize and work things out. So why not just teach us how to memorize and work things out? There’s no need for useless formulas and equations were going to forget after we pass the tests. Better yet, why not teach us something useful? Perhaps instead of having us memorize an equation, we are taught why the equation works; if we are taught why, not only math but in any subject, we can then begin to understand things more clearly and apply the things we’ve learned. I don’t just want to learn facts; I want to learn useful life skills.

As a former math teacher, I can tell you that doing math to learn how to memorize is about as counterproductive as you can get.  However, that’s about as far as the curriculum goes.  Interestingly, the Common Core State Standards have the right idea here: students should be able to build equations and understand the information within.  However, looking at the list of standards that must be taught and mastered by the time the standardized tests roll around, you can see how a teacher feels the pressure to front-load equations, make his students memorize them, and know in what situations to use them.  This is the type of practice that leads students to memorize things until the test has passed, after which they dump all of that clutter to make room for new facts and formulas.

Memorizing equations, formulas, and facts in this technological era makes no sense.  Almost every student in a school building has this information within arms reach at all times.  Critics will say, “I had to memorize this stuff, so today’s kids should too.”  Just because we had to suffer, they should too? Why would we purposely stifle our kids’ potential by making them memorize and then forget these tools, when a high school student can easily find them within seconds using technology?  And why do we not allow our teachers to teach the process, the applications, and the synthesis of important ideas, rather than pressuring them with arbitrary, all-or-nothing timelines?  These are questions we need to think about more carefully.

Kayla has more questions, which are important:

Can you imagine a scenario where it doesn’t have to be a legal requirement to go to school; where kids are willing to go because they want to? Many kids enjoy the social aspect of school, but dislike the “learning” part: the grades, the testing, and the lectures. Why is this? Is it by nature that kids just don’t want to learn? Are we born willing to be ignorant? If this were true, there wouldn’t be as many frustrated parents, tired from answering all of their toddlers’ questions. Children always want to know more. We are born with an eagerness to learn and to understand the world around us; so why is there generally an opposing attitude associated with school, a place of learning? There are many reasons for this, and maybe it’s not the kids fault they don’t enjoy going to school.

It’s not their fault.  Kids love going to school, if school has something to offer.  A famous line from Zack Morris, the lead character in the 80s teen show, Saved by the Bell, tells us that kids “love school; it’s too bad classes get in the way.”  This was said on TV to get a laugh, but it’s not funny anymore.  It’s so common that it’s problematic for all of our kids, including the kids who were always seen as gifted or high-performing.

Finally, Kayla offered some thoughts that are reminiscent of what constructivists have been saying for decades:

Another problem with school is that it is not at all personalized. Even though it’s known that people learn at different rates, we are all still put in a grade classified by our age and expected to follow along at the the same pace as the teaching. The pacing of schooling is often too fast or too slow for the majority of the students; very rarely is it just right.

Not only do we learn at different rates, we also learn in different ways. An assignment that requires a student to draw a picture for every vocabulary word might not work for someone who learns by reading. In the same way, an assignment where a student is required to write a definition for every vocabulary word would be a waste of time for someone who learns best visually. Students should have more freedom in the way they learn. Forcing work that doesn’t help a student only wastes their time and causes even more of a disinterest in the class. However, with the current school system, giving more freedom wouldn’t fully fix the problem. students would find a way to get away with doing as little as possible if they designed their own work, and teachers don’t have the time to personally help each student to prevent this.

The Common Core Network has made students’ learning difficult by standardizing their learning.  As Kayla said, everyone learns differently and different students are sparked by different interests.  Secretary Arne Duncan gave great lip service to the ideas of differentiation and personalized learning, but since he’s not a teacher, he had no idea what those terms meant.  Personalized learning, for him and his friends, means tracking individual student test data, planning interventions accordingly, and then tracking the results.  This is not personalized learning, this is norm-referenced data compilation and ranking.  

Personalized learning means that students’ abilities, interests, and ideas lead them and the curricula to goals that have been set by students, teachers, and parents.  The alternative, which is what Secretary Duncan talks about, is a database of test scores that advises which students are ahead of the curve and which students need interventions to catch up–all while being taught and tested out of the same material, using identical methods.

So, why aren’t we using more personalized learning techniques?  As Kayla pointed out, there simply is no time.  I remember a time when the movement to allow students to set the pace for their learning was growing, and teachers and students saw massive improvements in engagement, motivation, knowledge acquisitions, vocabulary building, reading skills, and critical thinking.  Even teachers who weren’t comfortable at first saw the successes and wanted to learn how to be part of it.  Now that standardized testing against a common set of flawed standards has taken over, test preparation and the tests themselves have cut deeply into real learning time.  The fix, according to the Common Core Network?  Longer school days and years and, oddly, larger class sizes.

Kayla is bored and frustrated.  So are her peers.  Our advice to Kayla so far is, “Just deal with it.  It will be over in a few years.”  From toddler to teenager, do we ever feel like we should stop placating our kids and actually do something to help them grow?

Read more about the damage Common Core is doing to our kids. Children of the Core on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Google Play.