One of the most debated topics in education is how to best prepare students with the skills to succeed in life beyond 12th grade. In 2009, state school chiefs and governors worked to find a solution to ensure students graduated high school fully prepared for college and their careers. Their solution was the development of the Common Core State Standards, a set of high-quality academic standards in mathematics and English language arts/literacy (ELA) that outline what students should know and have the ability to do at the end of each grade.
The development of the Common Core State Standards led to the creation of national tests based off of these standards. Nearly every state adopted the Common Core standards in hopes of better preparing their students with the skills they need to succeed in life after graduation.
However, almost seven years later, many states are beginning to change their views on the Common Core. As reported in an article by Kate Zernike of the New York Times, the State Board of Education decided last week that Massachusetts would abandon the multi-state test and instead develop a test meant just for the state. Zernike reported that the move will cost an extra year and unknown millions of dollars.
Why, you might ask, would Massachusetts, a state that has adopted uniform standards and tests with consequences for decades, so drastically change its view on the Common Core and a multi-state test?
Zernike reports that “conservatives complained of federal overreach into local schooling, while the union objected to tying the tests to teacher evaluations.” Furthermore, many Massachusetts parents found it difficult to understand what the Common Core actually was, or argued that the nation’s public students took too many tests.
Zernike further reports that Massachusetts will adopt a new test that will use content from the Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (Parcc), a group that develops assessments aligned with the Common Core, but the state will be able to change or add material without having to go through a committee of multiple states.
Massachusetts’s adoption of a new test may influence even more states to pull away from Common Core testing, and could cause a drastic change in educational programs and polices across the nation.
The biggest question that is yet to be answered is how to prepare all students with the skills they need for life beyond high school. It seems that the nation continues to try to develop new programs and reforms such as the No Child Left Behind Act and the Common Core State Standards, but these reforms have not proven to be successful in preparing each and every student with the skills they need to succeed in life.
One thing we do know is that the structure of the classroom is changing significantly. We’ve learned just how much technology has impacted the way teachers teach and the way students learn. With online tools and mobile technology providing students with personalized learning opportunities, students now have the ability to learn at their own pace and focus on their own individual learning challenges.
Standardized tests are still largely based on the expectation that students have learned certain skills by a certain grade level. They do not take into consideration that students learn in different ways and at different paces. While learning in the classroom has become more personalized, it seems that standardized tests have not.
What does personalized learning mean for the future of education? Perhaps the structure of schools will change, where students are grouped together not by age but instead by what they have accomplished and learned in the classroom. Maybe we will see students graduating from high school at various ages as a result of learning at different paces. Standardized testing may eventually be thrown out the window, or perhaps we will find new ways to test individual students in a way that will reflect what they want to do in their careers, rather than reflecting national, common standards.
It’s impossible to predict the future of education, however we can look to new ways to evaluate how students are learning and what learning processes are preparing each individual student for future success.
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