[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Alright you conspiracy buffs — here’s one for the masses. Are you concerned the government is allowing corporations and other organizations to control our lives? Well, I would like to show you one way in which you are correct. Think back for a moment to your schooling before college, and more specifically to the days in which you had to take standardized tests. Do you feel they were an adequate measure of your education? Did they effectively test what you were being taught in the classroom? Most likely not.

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The United States Constitution does not explicitly grant the federal government power to regulate public education. That is left to the states. But there is a loophole — an organization creating a plan and the federal government making promises, as they are wont to do, to make it almost impossible for states to refuse said plan. One example is Common Core. Common Core is a state education standards initiative designed to supposedly prepare students for college and careers. Common Core Standards are under copyright by the National Governors Association Center for Best Practice and the Council of Chief State School Officers. Now that the Common Core Standards have been accepted by almost all states, they can only be changed by those who have created it. That’s right — you cannot vote to change any part of Common Core and its practices. This is freedom, America.

Our country’s education system has become a political war zone that is being degraded and power-played in many ways. The Common Core Standards introduce a whole new onslaught of standardized testing, such as those we are seeing in Utah. There is great opposition fighting against the standards, including one teacher here in Salt Lake.

Ann Florence, a former honors English teacher at Wasatch Junior High School, was fired by the Granite School District last March. She has been oppositional towards standardized testing for some time and when she refused to grade a portion of the Granite School District’s quarterly tests (which they created in addition to all the other standardized tests and which other teachers also refused to grade portions of), she was let go. She wrote an op-ed for The Salt Lake Tribune in 2013 in which she explains that nearly a month out of her collective days teaching is consumed by standardized testing, which does not affect the grades students receive in school. Furthermore, according to the op-ed, students must take hour-long tests in a 45 minute period and the online system often malfunctions and wastes valuable time.

Now, there should definitely be standards of excellence in our nation’s public schools, as in all institutions of education. The thing is, we already have SATs and ACTs which do an adequate job of setting standards for higher education. The Common Core Standards, however, are below par. They claim to be markers of a student’s progression towards collegiate education, but apparently they have very low expectations for public education. The United States’ public education system has been struggling at the bottom of several international tests, particularly in math and science. Common Core Standards perpetuate this failure by not having a specific Algebra I course until high school. Common Core Standards also take emphasis off classical literature and creative writing and focus more on practical applications of history, social studies and technical studies.

Basically, the standards are saying that public school should weed out education that goes outside their definition of practical education, because it is not practical to focus on calculus when not everyone uses it, nor is it practical to learn about classical literature and creative writing when it is not generally needed in the workplace. Practical to those setting the standards means students can leave high school with a general education degree that typically will meet our country’s working-class expectations. Forget the debate on vocational schooling, we have set a minimal yet practical expectation for generally all vocations. There is little wonder as to why many parents push towards private, specialized and charter schools that offer education that is not so limiting. Common Core Standards keep American public education from the hope of a broadened sense of education and from the possibility of reaching international standards of education.

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