What does a Corporate Ed Reform shill look like anyway?

At our last staff meeting the principal's chipper announcement was that we had a grand opportunity coming up in two weeks to hear a speaker who has taken a special interest in our school in conjunction with two other "poverty" middle schools. She is someone he heard speak at a conference and found her very inspiring and was eager to share and learn more about her way of serving students like ours in the public schools of Baltimore. 

She is Sonja Brookins Santelises and I'd never heard of her so, being the curious librarian type, I started doing some research. One of the first articles I found by her was Abandoning the Common Core Is Taking the Easy Way Out and it was written in her current professional capacity as Vice president for K-12 policy and practice of the Education Trust. 

Further research followed.

OK, so she's a Common Core apologist but what does that have to do with her coming to speak to our schools? I'm going to chase down just one idea at first and it has to do with the issue of the college readiness gap. Santelises seems to be peddling the idea that the Common Core will help close the gap by leveling the playing field at a much higher standard for all. But this idea is a product of magical thinking. It is also anti-diversity. Any standard imposed on a community from outside that community has the effect of imposing conformity, uniformity, interchangeability, assimilation and other psychologically intimidating pressures. This creates a complex stratification in society with a dramatic sort of thermocline between those who can conform to corporate culture and those who cannot.

Those who can conform are rewarded with access to corporate payrolls, even those from lower socio-economic origins. Those who can't are relegated to non-unionized service industry jobs. What the Common Core ideologues are peddling is that college is the key unlocking access to those plush corporate jobs. And here's where it gets interesting. It is worth going into debt to get the keys. Once you are in debt you need to keep those jobs to make payments and become even more willing to conform to the corporate vision for society, which is dangled in front of the eyes of those who don't conform in the first place unless they are willing to indenture themselves as well. 

Now there's a good reason for learning about integers!

I'm backing up a little bit because I made the claim that belief in the Common Core as a cure for our equity ills is the product of magical thinking. That needs a little clarification. I make this claim based on the fully fleshed out ideas of Stephen Jay Gould in The Mis-measure of Man. Human intelligence is not quantifiable. The most we can expect from our attempts to measure student achievement is our own confirmation bias. Other information gleaned may be interesting, mildly helpful at times, should never be prescriptive but is certainly in some way quantifiable. We have the ability to measure certain cognitive functions like memory or number sense. That does not mean we know how any individual will respond in any situation. Intelligence is demonstrated in an individual's response to an unknown situation. The Common Core standards are corporate standards for a corporate agenda and do not address individual accomplishment. Believing any of this will advance social equity is indeed magical thought.

I also claim that Common Core standards are anti-diversity. Standards are standards, how can they limit diversity? Yes, of course, it's not the standards themselves, it is the context in which the standards are used and everything that has been excluded from the standards. Differentiation plays no part in the Common Core standards. No information on student interests, talents, personality types, learning style, multiple intelligence or other preferences is gathered under the Common Core tent. Nothing of Civics or Ethics. Narrow standards.

Perhaps I'm getting ahead of myself. After all I haven't met Santelises yet. She has a positive track record in Baltimore. It's just that I can't ignore the red flags with the Common Core and Education Trust. 

College readiness, college debt, corporate servitude, ed reform. 

There's lots of work for progressive educators trying to maintain a balance and make those needed checks too.