This week the Montana Board of Education voted to become the 45th state to adopt the national Common Core standards. Standards, of course, don’t matter at all if they just sit on shelves. If they’re serious about ensuring that more students graduate from high school ready to succeed in college or postsecondary training programs, states and school districts have to see them, and the curriculum associated with them, as the organizing principle of public education. Decisions about accountability, teacher preparation, professional development, instructional materials, technology, teacher evaluations, class size, how to use time and even how money is spent have to be made with the standards in mind. They aren’t a program. They are the program.
Except, apparently, in California. There the standards, which the state board of education voted to adopt in August of 2010, are being treated as an add-on, an unfunded mandate, an optional program.
I draw that conclusion because of how California education leaders are talking about the Obama administration’s proffer of waivers from most of strict accountability provisions of NCLB, which is now referred to as the Elementary and Secondary Education act. You can read a lot more about that in this post from John Fensterwald at the very smart Educated Guess blog. One of the conditions for receiving the waiver is that states must have career and college ready standards and are moving forward with implementing them. State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson says the administration’s conditions make the waiver “a substitution for a new set of requirements and a new set of challenges.” Satisfying those conditions, he contends, will cost the state between $2.4 and $3.1 billion. So, the state has decided to not apply for a waiver, at least until next June.
Torlakson estimates that training teachers to adjust their lessons and expectations to align with the Common Core and buying related instructional materials would cost $475 million. Helping English language learners master the standards, intervening to help the lowest performing schools, evaluating teachers and principals partly based on student achievement, and developing a new accountability system would cost billions more. Torlakson apparently doesn’t want to do any of that in order to secure the waiver. He thinks that California should just keep getting $1.6 billion in Title I money for disadvantaged students and $145 million for teacher professional development each year free and clear, without promising anything in particular in return.
There’s no doubt that implementing standards well will cost a lot of money. But every aspect of schooling—paying salaries, figuring out how to allocate time, providing effective professional development and so on—costs money. Spending patterns might have to change. Perhaps, God forbid, revenues will have to increase. What Torlakson is really saying is that it’s an unfunded and unreasonable mandate to ask the state to actually educate kids so that they will have a shot at postsecondary success. Others might argue that the cost of not educating students well far exceeds the cost of doing so.