Race to the Top: The Common Core Dilemma

4 years after the start of the Race to the Top initiative, we as a country have reached a point in which we should see the fruits of the insurgence of resources schools have received. However, the benefits have yet to be reaped. This is due to a variety of reasons. 

With the money that schools received, there were stipulations put into place that forced schools to implement certain strategies. This would work if schools across the nation that were receiving this money had the same type of needs. Working in an inner city school, the students I serve need different things than students at higher performing schools even in the same state, let alone the country. Whereas the implementation of common core standards are great in theory in raising the bar of the education in this country, they are lofty and inappropriate to be implemented in every county. The common core standards that each and every school that accepted race to the top money are held to were not released until this past year. The assessment that students will be evaluated with are still not yet released with definite detail. Therefore, it would be highly irregular for success to be met at any which level in the first couple of years of the testing cycles. Would it have been a more effective way if the common core standards were released, then funding be provided and finally then hold our students accountable to testing measures? Probably, however we are now still "catching up" to meet standards that were promising for our educational system. 

It will be interesting to see what the next few years bring in terms of actual implementation of assessments that focus on common core standards and to see how students do on them, especially for those students who are still unprepared, not due to a lack of trying, but only due to a lack of not enough preparation time with resources. 

Teacher Certification

In my humble opinion, we will not have an effective public education system in the U.S until we, as a country, take some pride in the teaching profession. The phrase that I heard over and over after telling people that I was goign to teach in Baltimore was "Those who can, do and those who can't, teach!" The funny thing is that if I told them I was joining Teach For America the reaction was quite the opposite. I would hear soemthing along the lines of "wow, I hear that is a really selective program, congratulations."

It shouldn't matter if I became a teacher through traditional means or an alternative certification program like TFA, ultimately I had signed up for the same job as every other teacher in Baltimore. Why then was the reaction so different?

Because, as a society, we value competition and accomplishment. People are proud to say that they are a doctor or a lawyer or a neuroscientist because we accept that those fields are competitive and only the most competent individuals succeed in them. This is simply not the case for teaching. The perception throughout our society is that the most capable people stay away from teaching, and the only way it is acceptable to become a teacher if you have other options is to join a program like TFA. TFA essentially provides a stamp of approval that says, "this candidate has succeeded in school and could be doing a lot of different things, they chose to teach for at least two years as part of their growth as an individual and in hopes of helping our country's youth." Without this stamp, would TFA get the level of highly competent corps members that it is so proud to hire?

So teacher certification and training and everything else that accompanies the current practice of preparing a teacher does not matter until we make being a teacher more prestigious than being a doctor or a lawyer or a neuroscientist.