Common Core: National Education Standards and the Threat to Democracy (Johns Hopkins, 2018) crafts a nuanced case against standardization that rests on two threads: that the Common Core is ineffective, and that it is undemocratic. Tampio illustrates that the strict requirements of Common Core pedagogy inhibit creative thinking and intellectual curiosity, traits that are essential for long-term success in the contemporary information economy. The Common Core “does not teach young people how to think; it teaches young people how to follow orders,” said Tampio in an interview.

He bases the second leg of his argument on a reading of seminal thinkers such as James Madison and Alexis de Tocqueville, who argued that instituting top-down educational policy over a pluralistic and diverse society was profoundly undemocratic. The result, they foresaw, would be a damaging collective disillusionment with the very idea of civic involvement.

In his introduction, Tampio writes that the Common Core initially sounded to him “like what the tailors told the emperor when selling him his new robe.” He notes that the book has already begun provoking reactions and conversations since its publication on March 1. Common Core received a Wall Street Journal review by Naomi Schaefer Riley, who called the book “concise and readable.”

Perhaps more important, Tampio reports having received dozens of messages from parents who have been following the rise of Common Core with alarm, and who have expressed support for his rebuttals of the initiative.

Such cross-partisan appeal stems from the book’s stimulating mixture of political perspectives to shape its polemic. On the one hand, Tampio criticizes the Common Core as rigid and intellectually demeaning, objections that one might generally expect to hear from the left. “Local education authorities,” Tampio writes, “should have the option to adopt a progressive education model that encourages self-directed learning in a supportive community.”

On the other, Tampio says that such decisions should devolve to state and local control—a typical conservative stance—going so far as to say that the issues of gender identity and sexual education should not be defined by external ideological forces. The public, Tampio said, “still tends to think of federal involvement in the education wars as if it were still 1954”—an allusion to Brown v. Board of Education and the desegregation of public schools.

Today’s policy landscape, as Tampio’s book reveals, is even more complicated.

—Michael Lindgren

Speaking at Fordham Law School as part of the Education Law Collaborative’s first education law conference, Tampio made the case that, despite ESSA provisions that allow states to opt out of Common Core, as a practical matter it is no different.

“ESSA requires states to remain within the standards, testing, and accountability paradigm . . . if they want Title I funds.”
That means that if a state wants to follow a more original model of educating, such as the John Dewey model, they forfeit federal funding. “John Dewey said standardized tests can only be useful to help us figure out how to help a particular child, but they shouldn’t be used to rank children, because children have all sorts of special gifts, talents, and interests.”

In his talk, “ESSA and the Myth of Return to Local Control,” Tampio traced the evolution of education reform in the United States, including the programs Nation at Risk (1983), Improving America’s Schools Act (1994), No Child Left Behind (2001), and Race to the Top (2009). ESSA, which was signed by President Obama in 2015, ostensibly reversed the trend toward federalizing education, but Tampio said it has not been effective.

That’s important, he said, because. A top-down approach squelches local control, and students should feel like their voices and opinions are valuable.

“Part of a democratic education is to get kids to learn about the world, and feel empowered that they have a voice in it,” he said.

Local control also benefits low income and minority communities, he said. He cited examples from Kitty Kelly Epstein’s A Different View of Urban Schools: Civil Rights, Critical Race Theory, and Unexplored Realities (Counterpoints, 2012).

“All the research confirms that when parents are involved, students do better. And yet, if they don’t have a voice other than what color cupcakes to bring to the PTA, they’re not going to be active in [local]school boards,” he said.

In New York, the Department of Education has renamed Common Core the “Next Generation Learning Standards,” but on issues of standards and accountability, Tampio said, they’re largely the same. Seventy-sevent percent of the existing Common Core standards will have no change whatsoever, and “clarifications” have been issued for just 15.9 percent of them. In order to receive $1.6 billion in federal funds, the state must comply with the changes and submit them to the federal government next month.

ESSA states that there is “no requirement, direction, or mandate to adopt Common Core standards,” but Tampio says that does not help states rid themselves of Common Core standards already in place. ESSA’s language on standards requires states to maintain “challenging academic content standards.”

“When ESSA was signed in 2015, most states already adopted Common Core. The question [should be]what is the federal government going to do to help facilitate states trying to exit the Common Core?” he said.

“[It] is an incredible burden for any state to choose an alternative, and I don’t think we’re going to see any.

“I’d be delighted if they did, because it would be a road map for every other state on how to do it,” he said.

Tampio, an education activist, claims that Common Core standards, with its test-based model, do little to develop creativity and independent thinking in developing children.

Nicholas Tampio, Ph.D., an associate professor of political science, is  currently writing a book on democracy and national education standards. Education is more than just a research interest though; as the father of children in elementary school, Tampio gets to see up close the changing face of American education. In a recent OpEd in the Journal News, “Corporate Science Standards Not Best for Schools,” Tampio expressed deep skepticism of New York State’s newly approved P-12 Science Learning Standards, noting that they’re similar to Common Core standards.

To understand why that similarity is bad, we chatted with Tampio about what Common Core gets wrong, and sometimes right, in the classroom.

Full transcript below:

Patrick Verel: How would you describe Common Core for the folks who aren’t already familiar with it and why is it, in your view, bad for education?

Nicholas Tampio: So the Common Core dates standards in math and English language arts. Say that by the end of third grade students should be able to do this when they write or read, or they should be able to do this when they do arithmetic. But, what that means in practice is that schools are cutting out all sorts of things that aren’t math or English so my child is barely going on field trips. He hasn’t had any hands on science or very little. He’s not learning about American History. And so I would say one of the reasons that a lot of parents and educators are very upset about the common core is that it narrows the curriculum in a way that parents or private school would never accept.

Patrick Verel: If New York schools continue to embrace Common Core standards it stands to reason that in time students who have been raised on them will eventually show up in your classroom at Fordham. What challenges do you foresee that presenting?

Nicholas Tampio: The math standards, the way that they progress it becomes very hard for children to major in calculus in high school. If students don’t take calculus in high school it’s going to be very hard from them to major in a science, technology, engineering or mathematics discipline when they get to college. Regarding the English standards, one of the practices of the Common Core is to give students short informational text and have them answer questions about that informational text, and so the Common Core provides students very little opportunity to do self directed, self initiated research projects.

My students have all come up under no student left behind and now they’re starting to come through with the Common Core. When I assigned them a 10 page research at the beginning of the school year as freshmen, they have never written anything that long before. They look at me in shock.

Patrick Verel: Are there any aspects of Common Core that you actually like?

Nicholas Tampio: There are a lot of good aspects to the Common Core that are sort of contaminated because they’re baked together with the bad aspects. So, for example one of the anchor standards, and these are the basic parts of the English language arts standards is that students should be able to determine or clarify the meaning of unknown in multiple meaning words and phrases by using context clues. That’s a good skill. The bad part is, is that students are not allowed to write bringing in outside material to explain what words mean, right? They have to interpret the Gettysburg Address without talking about the Civil War, and so I think that’s where the problem results and the Common Core does not prepare students to recognize fake news.

When they go through their K through 12 education they have to do close reading of text and they aren’t allowed to criticize the text or say that the text are providing false information so there is this concern that it is not training readers to be careful about sources.

I became interested in this topic because I have young children and I am watching what the Common Core and the next generation science standards are doing and can do to their education. I am talking with parents all around the country who see similar things and part of what we’re trying to do is alert people that listen, don’t just go to the Common Core webpage. Don’t just go to the next generation science standards webpage to figure out what it is, talk to people in the classroom who sees what it means in practice and then maybe we should all rethink whether it’s a good investment of time and money.

FORDHAM magazine checked in with some alumni of the University’s Graduate School of Education—professionals who work with students ranging in age from preschool to high school—to ask them for some guidance. Here’s what they had to say.

Be involved. In order to help your child thrive in the classroom, it’s important to be involved from the get-go. Angela Kang, Ph.D., GSE ’09, runs the mental health clinic at P.S. 8 in the Bronx—part of Montefiore’s School Health Program. Clinic staff evaluate students and see them for behavioral issues, mood disorders, and other concerns.

“We do a lot of family work. The parents have to be involved,” she says. “The more information a parent can give me, even anecdotally, that’s really helpful in terms of formulating what’s going on.” Kang likes to see prior report cards and any other evaluations a child may have received.

Talking to your child, Kang says, is crucial. “Sometimes parents assume that a child will tell them when something is wrong,” but this is not always the case. “And things that go undetected for a while show up as other problematic behaviors.”

Develop trust in your school. A critical component of parental involvement, says Shirly Ulfan, GSE ’14, is getting to know and appreciate the learning environment at your child’s school. Ulfan is the founder of Aleph Bet Academy, a small preschool in Briarwood, Queens, that opened last year.

“It’s always astonishing to me how different parents are in their concerns,” she says. “Some parents want to be sure their child is really clean all the time. Some are obsessed with what their child eats.” Parents, especially those with little ones, need to know that everything will not be “the way it is at your house.”

“I always tell parents that everything that happens in our school happens with forethought.” While she welcomes parents’ involvement, she says it’s crucial that they “begin with the basic idea that I trust the teacher and the school, and that whatever comes up will be handled correctly.”

This applies to discipline as well. “Every parent should ask ahead of time how a school deals with conflict and discipline,” says Ulfan, and be sure that they are comfortable with the school’s approach.

Be collaborative. Parents and teachers share the same goal—you both want what’s best for your child. Approaching discussions in a collaborative fashion will likely yield the best results for everyone.

Noelle Beale, Ph.D., FCRH ’97, GSE ’12, is regional superintendent for Catholic Schools of Central Westchester, responsible for 25 schools. She’s also served as a principal and a classroom teacher. “It’s important for the parent to go into the conversation as a partner, and to really work with the teacher on strengths and weaknesses.”

Collaboration should also involve the student, says Beale, who is an adjunct professor at the Graduate School of Education. When schedules permit, she suggests having the student present with the teacher during discussions, to “really walk through what the challenges were.” Or, if the situation is more serious, such as a significant behavioral issue or possible academic failure, parents and teachers can talk alone “to come with strategies ahead of time,” she says, “then sit down with the student and talk about expectations.”

Madison Payton, GSE ’13, teaches English at the Eagle Academy for Young Men II in Brownsville, Brooklyn, where he founded a writing center. He says in order for collaboration to happen comfortably, parents should take the time to “understand who we are as educators.”

As a writing teacher, he puts less of an emphasis on grades than some teachers do. This can be confusing to parents of his students, many of whom are Caribbean and come from a more rigid education system. They’ll say, “How did this essay change three times?” But for him, the revision process is more important. He says he tells students, “This is your place to make lots of mistakes. You can do that here because I love you.” So it’s key, he says, that parents ask teachers about their teaching philosophy in the beginning of the year.

Be realistic. What parent doesn’t think their child is brilliant? But Beale cautions that your child may not have all the strengths you want them to have. “As a parent myself, I really try to go in realistically and say, ‘My child may have challenges. How can I best support them at home, and what can I do to best support the teacher?’”

By the same token, she says, teachers are not perfect either. “Education is changing. Look at the Common Core. Teachers themselves are evolving with their knowledge, because there are new things that they’re teaching.”

In his school in a tough Brooklyn neighborhood, Payton sees parents—often single moms—comparing their kids to themselves at that age. They might say, “Well, I had less, and I was able to do it.” But times have changed, he says, and every child develops differently. “Remove yourself from the equation and try to figure out why the child is making certain decisions.”

Trust your instincts. As much as it’s critical to develop trust in your child’s school and teachers, Ulfan says, it’s also important to remember that you know your child better than anyone else in the world.

“Parents have very strong instincts,” she says. “Often professionals will fail a child in a way where a parent would not.” Ulfan works with parents who are learning their children have special needs, and says it will be critical that they fight to receive all the evaluations and services their child requires. “If you have concerns and they’re not going away—in whatever setting—you really have to fight. Stomp your foot on the floor and pound your fist on the table and be the loudest, squeakiest wheel you can be.”