Common Core Learning Standards is a phrase that sounds reasonable. Who could be against benchmarks?

By first grade, children should be able to do simple addition and subtraction, by second grade, more complicated problems and so on up to your senior year in high school. Ideally you will leave school a competent person intellectually equipped to cope with the world. It’s important to our whole society that the next generation be ready to take control.

The “Learning Standards” part of the phrase makes it seem like it’s about benchmarks. In reality the “Learning Standards” are a very tight lesson plan broken down to five minute intervals. There is no room for a teacher to employ the teaching skills they learned when they worked on their master’s degree. There is no room for an individual approach to problem solving. Children are like anyone else they have different learning styles. Some children learn best in a group. Some children need to work alone. Some children need to move objects around to do math, others can visualize the problem. A teacher can see what the students need and tailor each lesson to the child’s learning style.

The curriculum leaves no room for different learning styles or for creative teaching. I feel very sure that not many people outside the schools have read an actual lesson plan. It is a very tight piece of work. It breaks the lesson down to the finest detail. “Students will spend five minutes reading the materials, five minutes for class discussion, ten minutes working on the problem and so on.” I hope that this newspaper will print a mathematics lesson just so that we can get a taste. Find one with looping arrows all over it. Have you seen what kids are bringing home?

If you have a child, you know what I’m talking about. The math papers are covered in curves and arrows. They are almost unintelligible. It is no wonder that this year the United States math and science scores declined for the first time in many years. What program takes away a teacher’s ability to tailor a class to their students? What program presents material in a confusing way? What program has been implemented all across the country since 2011? The Common Core Learning Standards. They look like they were devised to KEEP children from learning. As I said, find a child and look at their homework.

If society’s goal is to produce intelligent competent adults why would we push a style of problem solving that is difficult and confusing? It’s as though they wanted to make it harder to learn. This makes no sense until you realize that these “standards” are used to evaluate teachers.

Why would politicians want to make a teachers’ job more difficult and the students’ job almost impossible? Teachers are rewarded or punished by how well their students do on the tests. Whole schools are given more money or less money based on the tests. If you are struggling school district your aid will be cut. There are two reasons the 1 percent want this: 1) an educated work force makes poor slaves, and 2) they want to break the teachers union. Without unions there would be no minimum wage, no 40-hour work week, no health and safety standards, no overtime and no organized opposition. We have to stand up for teachers and other public sector workers. We can’t allow these people to use our children, our future, to kill organized labor.

Why are we spending so much time and money on these tests? It has been estimated that an American child will take over 100 standardized tests in the 13 years between kindergarten and graduation. Millions of dollars are spent designing and implementing these tests. Billions of hours of class time is spent “teaching to the test.” Do children need tests in the same way they need art, music and exercise? It’s been proven over and over that music and art improve test scores. Children need to go outside and play. They have an easier time focusing on school work after they have run around for a while.

If we really wanted to raise test scores we would spend our money on music, art and science. We can bring all three of these disciplines together in nature study. Something as simple as growing peas or observing a bird feeder can lead to a deeper understanding of interrelationships. A very simple experiment that can be done in a very small space is to choose a spot 3 by 3 feet then, notice: What is living in this spot now?, What kind of plants are growing there? What kind of insects live or visit there? Each child will make and keep a journal. They will take notes and draw pictures of the site and keep a record as the experiment progresses. This will give them practice in writing and drawing something that matters, something they will want to keep.

Plant that spot with milkweed and watch what happens. To do a really thorough job integrating the experiment into the classroom we need someone who specializes in doing just that. We need a natural science teacher in every school, just as we do art and music now. Someone whose job will be to teach science using the natural world as a laboratory. Someone who records the progress of the experiments and keeps good records. Actually touching, measuring and recording things fosters a better learning environment than teaching to the test.

When we choose to depend on test scores we cheat our children of the joy of learning. We cheat them of the opportunity to experience things for themselves. We cheat them of an education that will prepare them for life. We cheat ourselves of knowledgeable competent adults. We depend on them to run things when we get old. We all have a stake in preparing children for the future.

Marie Tomlinson is a Fredonia resident.