Common Core is an issue of Change Management.
Reading opinions about common core, I am struck by the fact that America has an educational change management problem.
The Oklahoma state legislature recently voted to repeal the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) teaching standards in the state and allow Oklahomans to create new English and Math standards. Oklahoma will be using their old standards as a “stop-gap” until new standards can be drawn up by the State Board of Education.
Now, Oklahoma is serving as the beacon for other states that may repeal common core. Articles report that in Missouri, the governor has signed a bill that will “replace national Common Core education mandates with Missouri’s own set of educational criteria.” Common Core standards will be abolished by the 2016-2017 school year, and new state standards will be established with a built-in process for revision.
Similarly, additional states Indiana, North and South Carolina, have similarly voted to repeal the adoption of the Common Core.
And the general public has similarly changed its opinion of common core, with a new national poll revealing that teachers’ approval of Common Core dropped from 76 percent to 46 percent in the last year, while overall support dropped from 65% to 53%. As general manager of an education consultancy, I get a lot more emails from family members with cartoon jokes about the common core math approaches.
A number of reasons for Common Core State Standards retaliation have been raised:
Common Core is too jargon-y
Common Core symbolizes over-testing in schools
The adoption of Common Core violated personal and local freedoms
The Common Core will limit the teaching of literature
Common Core is not developmentally appropriate for younger children
But these issues are cited as secondary to the overarching issue of who was involved during Common Core adoption.
But the interesting thing is that Indiana is said to have “dropped the common core and then quietly replaced it with something like the Common Core.” Similarly, Floridians quietly tell me that we don’t have the Common Core; we have the Florida Sunshine Standards (AKA Common Core). This reveals a very prevalent truth in American educational transformation – our problems are primarily caused by our approach to implementing a given change. Our present issue is not largely about the standards, themselves; it’s about the process by which they were adopted/rolled out.
Many feel that the public was excluded from the processes that led states to adoption, as the Common Core was in many cases simply adopted by agreement among the governor, chief state school officer, and state board of education–not involving the full legislature and general public.
Thus, there is a lot of misunderstanding about the intent and function of Common Core. Moreover, the fast adoption of these standards was bungled by many states during roll-out. Without much formal training, the entire education community scrambled to get aligned with the new federal direction. Many Common Core professional trainings were developed by consultants who had little additional exposure than the average classroom teacher. In effect, America had a case of non-experts masquerading as experts on a very pivotal educational topic. While some states phased Common Core rollout, breaking it into ELA in the first year, Math in the second year, they were still forced to implement for a broad set of grade levels all at once. That’s 13 grade levels, impacting approximately 3.3 million teachers over 74 million American Children across 51 states.
Change management experts teach that to ensure a successful transition, there are three phases to consider: Preparation, Implementation, and Reinforcement. Stakeholder engagement is one of the key aspects of enacting any educational transformation.
From the beginning, if the general public was not involved in the conversation when the Common Core was designed and instated, people were not prepared for the change. Teachers, although lightly informed of CCSS, were not involved to the extent that they could reasonably prepare for the impact to their classrooms – Common Core training took place within the mix of other topics covered in teacher professional development.
Simply saying “here’s a set of standards” and setting a date for delivery on those standards is not a great way to implement a very cerebral and complex initiative. This was not about asking America to wear seatbelts. This was about getting 3.4 million educators to fundamentally alter the way they deliver instruction to 74 million students. We asked America to think differently about educational priorities–focusing on conceptual understanding vs. procedural knowledge, and deep explanation over option, thoughtful application over rote memory.
In doing so we asked teachers to adapt to entirely new textbooks and resources, rewrite the lesson plans and tools that they’ve been working with for years, and we asked classrooms to rearrange their configurations to support college and career ready skills.
But we didn’t ask for this to happen in Kindergarten, and then maybe gradually have new approaches spread throughout the classroom. We asked for everything all at once! Big changes like that get teachers and principals overwhelmed with the technical side to the extent that they can fail to have the important conversations about the change underway.
In fact, we asked for teachers to make significant changes to their practices before we even had the tools to assess whether this new approach was working. In Florida, for example, teachers are compensated based on student test performance. At present, the state mandates that instruction be based on Common Core standards, but students continue to be assessed on the FCAT exam, which is aligned with the old Florida standards. In effect, teachers are teaching one thing, but they are getting compensated based on a measure that they are no longer allowed to teach to. In what other industry is this possible?
Thus the chaos of the classroom and at home was not created by Common Core in its integrity; rather, it was created via the botched and poorly-planned implementation of Common Core. Making this critical shift in the way educators do business demands a clean, systemic roll-out… a big, well-communicated goal, a clear plan of action to get us there, and reinforcements to keep us motivated.
What we need now is a thoughtful plan of action as we map the way ahead, one that appropriately includes and honors stakeholders, clearly communicates the big vision, and empowers parents and teachers to digest this very important transition towards solid instructional standards.
