In the end, educational policies are not dusty words on paper or complicated Power-Point presentations – they are the forces that shape children’s everyday lives. In this post-NCLB time of Common Core standards, various state boards of education are now discussing new standards to replace the Core Standards. But costs and fatigue (so much work was required to jettison the LAST set of standards) favor current acceptance or only the lightest rewrites of many Core standards.

Even as we add new standards, then new tests and possible new testing consortiums, and then revamped tests to correct the problems from the previous new consortium tests, government officials demand accountability. We keep changing the landing coordinates, but our astronauts are expected to touchdown where expected. Except “expected” changes. That first year of the PARCC test? Results took about half the year to get back in some locales. Then Part Two was eliminated, regrettably leaving Part One behind. Teachers do not know what to expect from year to year. Neither do the kids in their classes. 

The extraordinary waste of time and money from our latest educational experiments only began with the ideas behind PARCC and the Common Core. That demand led to days and nights calculating, charting and sharing data. Data, data, data. More tests. Yet more tests. More talk of old/new/revamped/Core/other standards. More numbers. 

I am pretty sure data has begun to leak out the ears of some educators, men and women who are spending their evenings preparing spreadsheets while trying NOT to nostalgically remember a distant time when they had time to prepare lessons instead. Teachers who are not obliged to teach exactly what is on the common lesson plan then go out to buy the next day’s activity from TeachersPayTeachers.*

We must understand the not-exactly-defunct Common Core is only one of a stream of experiments that have been perpetrated on our children in the recent past, all in the name of educational reform and closing the achievement gap. When did our children become lab rats? Today’s educational landscape is pocked with bizarre twists and turns that often result in children using inappropriate materials to prepare for inappropriate tests. Why?

Eduhonesty: We keep tweaking or even rewriting content requirements. Was content the problem? Who says? How do they know? And why should we believe those reformers — a group of people who so thoroughly reformed the Common Core math that many parents found it impossible to help their children with their homework.

*Don’t get me wrong, I don’t begrudge TeachersPayTeachers a dime. But those lessons have become one more expense on top of markers, pencils, paper, Kleenex and all the other supplies many teachers are paying for in order to do their jobs. One year, I purchased my own ink cartridges, as well as boxes of my own printer paper, and I remember the days of buying overhead projector bulbs. Hundreds of dollars, sometimes thousands of dollars, are spent by teachers in a single year, especially in economically disadvantaged districts.

Ummmm. Hello out there? All that whining about teacher quality? I actually think overall teacher quality is fine — much better than many outsiders seem to appreciate — but if I wanted to improve my work force, I probably would not try a strategy where I made people pay for many or most of their own work supplies.